Sam Altman — Leading with Crippling Anxiety, Discovering Meditation, and Building Intelligence with Self-Awareness

Like, if you're trying to get as smart as possible, you want to be able to make the best predictions for what will happen, and one of the things that will act is you. So yeah, I think there is something there, which is intelligence and self-awareness to me seem like they have to go together.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Alright everybody, I'm really excited about our guest today. Uh, today we're speaking with Sam Altman. Sam is the CEO of OpenAI and he's the former president of Y Combinator. How are you doing today, Sam?

Doing really well. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, awesome. I'm really excited to talk to you just because it seems like what you're doing and what we're doing is somewhat parallel in that you're working to make sure that the AI that we create and make self-aware is aligned with human values. And what we're doing is just making sure that humans are aligned with human values and discovering how to discover what those even are. So I really, I really am excited for this conversation.

Awesome. Me too.

So, Sam, I'd love to dive into something that you learned about yourself over the course of your life that really just changed your world and changed the way that you operate in business and the way that you think about AI. And about your life?

I think there's like a bunch of interesting things I could, I could pick here. It's a, it's a fun question, but the one that resonates with me the most, and it wasn't intentional at the time, but it became intentional during the process, was becoming a calm person. I think I started off my career in life as a very, like, anxious, high-strung person, much more than I realized. And I think it was a negative in many ways. The obvious ones about being sort of just generally kind of unhappy and, you know, somewhat miserable. And also just work-wise, like tremendously less effective and a much worse leader. And then through a conscious effort, eventually what started off as just like interest mostly in exploring meditation and sort of introspection about why I was the way I was and sort of why I was like so sort of high-strung and just wound up in a, in an unproductive way. It started, I guess, as trying to explore why this was like in the way of my productivity, and then it became why it was in the way of my happiness. That process, I think, made me just much better at my job in addition to much happier in my life. I think one of the things anyone learns running a company is there are a lot of crises all of the time, and you can get through them. You do get through them, but to the degree you kind of believe you're going to get through them, even if you don't see exactly how, uh, you get through them much more, more effectively. And also you really have an effect on how other people that work with you, when they look to you for guidance and, and sort of culture setting and how they should react, it really changes how they should react. And, and basically like the situations that don't benefit from calmness and sort of thought and sort of appropriate perspective before action are very few and far between. And so I think the steadiness that brings to work leads to the ability to get to much better answers on much harder problems. It's also just like a much more pleasant way to live.

How did you recognize that this was a blocker for you both in business and also just in your personal subjective experience?

Yeah, as I mentioned, it started off with this like thing of like, yeah, I can kind of like tell this is in the way of my productivity, which I think says also something about my mindset at the time. But it then very quickly became sort of just this like inner exploration and realized that it was something that seemed obviously better to me, seemed cultivatable, and thing that I obviously wanted.

So the idea that it was messing with your productivity, that the anxiety was messing with your productivity or the anxiousness, like how did you see that? What was exactly the things that you saw that you were doing that you saw, "Oh wow, this is not productive." For people who might not know that this is getting in the way of their productivity, how could they recognize it?

A common thing that I've heard and that I did myself is that like every day I would come to work in some sort of a panic. I would think we were doing the wrong things. I would have like totally new priorities that I thought we need to go after, and I'd get like really convinced, like, all right, if we just go do this one thing, like everything will be much better and we've got to like totally like reorient the whole thing now and you know, I have this like big new strategy and this big new thing, and you know, everything I thought like yesterday was bad. And I'm like, you know, we've got to like do this immediately. That was one way in which it happened. And I think like I've heard a lot of other people tell similar stories where you're just— you sort of feel like very reactive and all over the place. Another one, and this was like 15 years ago now, but I still remember it like, you know, like watching a movie. I had been negotiating this deal, uh, it was like not going that well. It was like, it was pretty important, um, and it was like, you know, under extreme time pressure and down to the wire. I remember at one point, uh, just like feeling like I was gonna like explode from the stress about it. And I lived in this little like studio house in Mountain View at the time, and it was like a summer day and it was probably like, there's no air conditioning, probably like 95 degrees inside. And I was like just in gym shorts it was on a weekend and I was like so stressed that I was just like laying on the ground with my arms out to the side and like trying to breathe and like feeling like I was just like, you know, going to explode. And it was this terrible feeling. And I realized that like, A, I just didn't want to be doing this. And also me feeling this way was not helping in any way. It was not making the deal any more likely to happen. Clearly only less. It was making me want to like quit and not do this anymore. And I was like subjecting myself to this thing because it's how I thought I was like supposed to be feeling when it was like just strictly bad. There was no benefit at all. And that was a moment for me where I was like, there has got to be a better way. This doesn't feel to me like the right way to be doing things.

I heard you say there that the, that the feelings that you had there were strictly bad. And I'm curious, what were they trying to tell you, if anything? That you needed to hear to approach the deal in a way that was healthy for you?

The thing that I would say now is that, you know, you— when people like sort of say you need to like be detached, it doesn't mean you don't care. It means that you do kind of whatever you can. You can control what you can control. And then beyond that, the outcome is going to be what the outcome is. And you kind of realize there are some things out of your control, but also like in the long arc of a company, if you get the inputs right, the dice rolls don't always go your way, but the outputs eventually come if you just really focus on doing what you can do and being detached from the outcome in any specific case, uh, eventually you get to the right, the right outputs. But, but if you don't focus on what you can do, um, you end up, I think, sort of like, yeah, in that moment, sort of the way I was acting and responding and feeling, uh, that did not help me clearly figure out what to do, that did not help me think about better ideas, that certainly did not instill any confidence in our counterparty.

Yeah, I heard you mention just there that piece about detachment to the outcome. And something that we talk a lot about in this work is impartiality. And I'm curious what the difference there is between being detached to the outcome and somewhat dissociated from it, but then on the other hand, or on the other side of that, actually really caring about the outcome, but also accepting whichever way it might go. And also trusting yourself to navigate however that might flow?

I don't think I have a magic answer there other than it sort of like came to me over time, and now I both like really care and feel quite detached, and I also trust that, you know, it'll all somehow eventually work out even though the luck multiplier in any given moment is big. I think there's like a lot of introspection work that comes there, but I also think that just seeing that work enough times over the course of a career is the best way to really internalize it and learn it. And these things that just seem like, you know, company-ending crises don't end the company, or even if they do, you get to go start another thing. And eventually you realize like, huh, I went through all of that pain and suffering and I didn't need to, and here we are. And probably it only like hurt the eventual progress.

Right, yeah, in my experience, the things that I've considered to be a company-ending crisis tend to become more likely to end the company the more I believe that.

There's something there for sure.

So tell me a little bit about how after this moment when you had this moment where you're just lying on the ground and you could barely breathe and you just had all of this sensation, all this emotion, and you were clearly not operating in a way that was effective, and you recognized that something needed to shift and that there was a change of strategy that was called for. How did you then approach and find your way towards this introspection and deeper self-awareness that you're— the path that you're on now?

Yeah, I mean, that was like an awareness that something needed to change, but for anything to start changing, unfortunately, it took quite a long time after that. But that was a moment where I was, uh, there were many moments where you realize something needs to change, but that was a moment where it was very clear that something really needed to change because that was just sort of no way to live and also no way to be, to be productive. I was like a very dismissive person of anything that had any— I've done a total 180 on this, but any— if someone was like, you just need to go meditate more, I would basically be like, well, fuck you, like, I'm really busy and like, that's a dumb thing and you don't get it. You know, I would say that about like lots of other things as well. But then I think like, you know, at some point I was like, okay, I will give this a try. I think it was years later from that moment, but then man, it really changed things quickly. And then this thing that I had sort of done because I thought it would make me more productive, I realized I just wanted to be happier. And there were like a number of things. Meditation was probably the most valuable to me, but particular forms of it, but a lot of other work that also helped. And then I realized that just in the spirit of trying to— of like wanting to be happier, it also had like come full circle and sort of made me maybe not more productive in terms of like volume of work I do, but certainly on better inputs and thus better outputs.

You were talking about different modalities of meditation there and that there's an arc of meditation. You've been meditating, sounds like something like 10, 12 years now or something to that effect. How can you describe the difference in your approach to meditation when you started, in the middle, in the end? What— how has your attitude towards and your approach changed, if at all?

It started with sort of more guided meditations, uh, or sort of meditations that were focused on awareness or calmness. The transformational part for me was getting to unstructured meditation, sitting for an hour with your eyes closed and making no effort towards anything. And the arc on that for most people starts as, you know, some version of self-therapy with your eyes shut for a while, and then you kind of work through that backlog and it changes to something else. But I certainly changed a lot out of that.

It sounds like to some degree that that same impartiality or detachment of business results also happened internally, meaning that like now you can just be with yourself with whatever showed up instead of trying to manage yourself into a state.

For sure, for sure. And like, eventually the stuff, you know, kind of stops showing up, or at least shows up much, much less. Yeah, I think like, this is a, at least for me, this was like a long path of meditation. It was not the shortcut path. The shortcut path, at least in most of Silicon Valley, is plant medicine, which I think is great too. But I think there's really something to taking the long path and letting this process play out over, over years that I encourage people to give consideration to.

Yeah, absolutely. And my experience with plant medicine is you can often get to places with it that are hard to then re-access when you're not on any kind of medicine. And to be in a process where you learn to let your system process information straight from the source, straight from your sensory experience, uh, without any alterance, then it's available to you all the time and not just on weekends.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's— this is all worth exploring. It's all great. But the kind of the long path or the hard path, I think, is also really, really worth consideration.

Along those lines, then, how has your relationship to meditation changed? And what are some of the points that you experienced along the path where you recognized a different and more effective way to be meditating? How does that relate to the way that you relate to it now?

I definitely didn't go into meditation saying like, what I want is calmness. You know, I maybe would have said like, what I want is to figure out if there's like anything here of all these people saying this is like a good thing to try, just don't get it. Or probably even more, I would have said like, I would like to be less unhappy. That probably would have resonated. And it was like very strange how much stuff started changing, how little I could like kind of predict where it would, it would go. And then, um, you know, I think like the first moments that anyone gets to a meditation where you like really deeply feel, you know, you've like read about people's descriptions of non-duality, it always sort of sounded like vague or kind of like bullshit, and you really deeply feel it. That's always, for everyone I've talked to, it's like a pretty like profound moment of, of inner change. Uh, and I think when you get there, then at least for me, a lot of external things change pretty quickly and Uh, so for me it was sort of like this sort of slow build, and then a lot of stuff changed pretty quickly. Uh, and then I actually, to be honest, I don't meditate as much anymore. Like, I used to do it a lot, uh, and I still do it now just out of enjoyment or nostalgia or something, but it's, uh, you know, it's definitely in a different phase now.

What are the things that changed when that threshold got hit? What are the things that you saw that shifted? I mean external world.

I guess there's just this sense that like none of this really matters that much. And so I'm gonna have a very different relationship to how I, you know, interact with all of it. And also there's sort of this clarity on— so that's like one vector of it. And there's also this sort of like clarity of here are all of the things I'm doing that are actually causing all the things I don't want. And I sort of now can see those as a very detached observer and Actually, if I want to stop that stuff, I'm now able to do so.

Yeah, sounds like, sounds like what you're describing there is that through the practice of meditation, you've made it so that you can in real time process your inputs. You've cleaned up, cleaned up the inputs of your sensory system and you're letting all that information in, in a more real time without having to go sit on a cushion and meditate because it just happens throughout the day. And meditation is now something that you do for enjoyment. And not necessarily something that you need to do because you're just more emotionally fluid in general. Does that sound accurate?

Yeah, roughly.

What's inaccurate about it? What's the, what's the piece that's missing or that is a bad description?

I mean, there are people who say like, oh, I don't need to meditate anymore because now I feel like I'm just meditating all the time. I certainly haven't had that experience. There's something about, you know, sitting for a long period of time that is still really different and not something that I experience sort of in day-to-day life, but the sort of like the ability to sort of observe the world and myself as sort of in a more detached way, that's definitely stuck.

So one of the things that I hear people talk about when they get to that place is that they start worrying that they don't care or that they like, feel like it's listless, or they feel like, like they don't have the passion anymore because they're associating with the kind of non-personal nature. What do you— what would you say to those people?

I definitely worried about that happening to me. I didn't want that to happen. You know, in the spirit of full transparency, I know some people who that has happened to. Yeah, but it certainly didn't happen to me. It made me care more about work it made me more productive, sort of took on a different valence, like what I wanted to work on, what I cared about. There's a bunch of stuff that I didn't even realize how much I cared about that I just really stopped caring about. And there were some new things I really started caring about. So there were changes for sure. One of the things that I realized actually early on during meditation was like just how much I cared what other people thought about me, which was a hugely limiting thing for me work-wise. And that was actually, of course I still care somewhat, but that was like a relatively quick thing to drop. And that was like a very freeing thing in terms of going to work on things that weren't going to seem cool, or at least weren't going to seem cool for a long time. And so it like, it changed what I cared about, but in ways that I have felt happy about. There's definitely like weird shit that happens to you during like intense and prolonged meditation. And so there were probably moments where I was like, oh, wow, like, I'm just totally like, you know, on this, like, I shouldn't be working at all or whatever. But, but none of that stuck.

Yeah, that's what I often see in people, is that their listlessness or the lack of passion is when they're looking at the parts of themselves that no longer want to exist. And, and then when they find the parts of themselves that are ready to emerge and evolve, that the passion is always right there. But obviously, the longer they stay in that fear, the the harder it is to find the thing that does move them now.

Yeah, I mean, obviously a diminished— like, when you're on the front side of it, like, this idea that your sense of self is going to diminish, maybe diminish a lot, is like a scary thought. And people are like, well, what's that going to do to my motivation and everything else? And, you know, like, everyone I know, almost everyone I know who meditates a lot does have some degree of sense of self diminishing, often a lot. And yet they like still do whatever they were doing they still often do whatever they were doing before or some, you know, adapted and maybe better version of it.

Yeah. When you look back at your resistance to meditation, what is it that you think you were actually resisting?

I think it was that like, I felt like it was a waste of time and this sort of like hippie, like feelings bullshit. I just didn't want to entertain.

So when you look back at it, the resistance was the same as what you thought it was at that time.

Yeah, gotcha.

How do you relate your experience in meditation and feelings in general and the way that that processes through to create your experience and drive your decision-making? How do you relate that to the work that you're doing at OpenAI and the way that you understand intelligence in general?

I mean, I think for most kinds of work, but certainly like very uncertain scientific work that often feels high stakes and that, that brings up a lot of emotions for people, the ability to sort of like stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments, uh, and to make decisions over that are where you're not too reactive but sort of sticking to long-term principles, I think that's really important. And I think In this field in particular, unfortunately, some of the communities that have been most involved in AI safety, I think, are the people that are the least calm. And I think that's like a sort of dangerous situation. If you have some of the people who have historically been most active thinking and talking about AI safety actually build AGI and be responsible for its safety, I think that would be quite bad because it's, it's an extremely high-strung community with some peculiarities. And I remember observing that, like, one thing I could bring to this is the opposite of whatever that community has.

So there's a principle that I see a lot, which is the thing that we, uh, are scared of is the thing that we attract. And it sounds like that's at least in part of the way that you're seeing this, is that these very high-strung, very scared people are the ones to protect us from it that they also might be attracting the thing that they're trying to avoid.

Yeah, I think that would be quite bad.

I could see fear justifying a lot of the arms race-y type things that occur in the field.

Yeah, I mean, that could happen for sure, but I think there's like a whole bunch of other worse things that could happen too. There's this great short story about AI called The Gentle Seduction, and there's a line in there that I'm going to misquote, but it's something like, you know, only the only the worlds or only the people who sort of like knew like prudence without fear made it through. And I think that's, it's not, that's not quite the sense, but it's something like that. Maybe it was like knew caution without fear. But like, that's basically what I think it's going to take to build, to sort of like get through this very wild and complex transition we're going through. And if you sort of like create the, descendants of humanity from a place of deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me like you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity in that.

Neurologically speaking, we make decisions emotionally, meaning if we take the emotional center out of our brain, we cease to be able to make decisions even if our IQ and our IQ would stay the same. Also, if you look at— I always pronounce his name, Gödel, I think some people pronounce him. But, you know, he talks about the limitations of logic through the mathematical incompleteness theorem. So as you're building artificial intelligence, and if you kind of see that the postulates that we're working on and the way our intelligence works is through emotions, how do you— how does that translate into AI? How does that— how do emotions translate into AGI, if at all, as the thruster?

I mean, first of all, I think It's like important to stay quite humble here and realize that although it does appear now that we know how to build intelligence, we may be building a very alien intelligence. We don't quite know how it's going to work or how it works. And it's possible that we build something that just works, you know, that can still solve problems and can still understand and learn, but just does so in such a different way than we do that if we try to project our own experience of deeply emotional decision-making, that's just wrong, or that just won't work. But I think it's also possible that a lot of those things that we experience as emotions, as we make— depending on how we train the system, a lot of those ideas of things like emotions are going to appear in artificial neural networks as well. There's certainly no reason why it couldn't. You know, people say like, oh, we're not going to have that because you can't have you know, hormones can't act on artificial neural networks. And it's like, of course you can model that. It's like, this is clearly possible, it's just we haven't done it yet. And it could also just emerge entirely in the neural network without us ever doing anything actively there. There could be something very deeply inherent about creativity or social dynamics or whatever where that's, that's unavoidable. So I think the honest answer is we don't know, and, and we need to be open to it doesn't happen at all or it happens in a very deep way.

Follow-up question is, it's a weird one, but if you could push a button and the button was basically fear is something that AI gets to experience, would you push the button?

Of course. Okay.

And what makes that so? And I say that because obviously moving out of anxiety has been an incredibly important thing to you. So you see some wisdom in the fear. So what creates that?

I think fear is an important emotion. I think fear underlies, certainly not all emotions, but quite a lot of them. And I think there's like often a very important signal there. I think it evolved for a reason. I don't think we would've made it through or to where we are without that. Yeah, I think it's like, it's an important part of sort of the full experience of life. And it's also like, you know, it's like a useful signal for learning and staying alive and all of that.

Yeah, I feel like there's something really interesting about how, Often the framing around AI is that emotions are a human thing and then AI is a logical thing. And even, even that, like that piece about fear and the endocrine system, you know, the distribution of corticoid receptors in your body is trained by your experience and determines your bodily response to a fearful stimulus. And how could that not be part of a learned system that may not be neural in nature, but is part of your overall system? I'm curious what you think about that and how emotions do actually play into creating the context in which our decisions are even made and proposals for actions are even thought from.

Yeah, I mean, look, as Joe said, we clearly make decisions emotionally and then justify them with intellect later. Again, just to repeat it, I think we need to be very open-minded to the fact that the digital intelligence we build is just going to be super alien. And maybe it won't be. Maybe like there's something so fundamental about the relationship between fear and intelligence, which I could totally believe, that building any sort of AGI-like system necessarily has the ability to experience fear. But also maybe not. One thing that I think we will find is that biological intelligence is just incredibly limited. Relative to what we're capable of producing.

What's the biggest example of something you've learned about yourself by understanding AI? As you built this thing, it's like, if I write— what I mean to say is like, if I write something on fear, I'm gonna learn something about fear by writing on it. You're building AI, attempting to build AGI, What is it teaching you about yourself or about humanity?

We talked a little bit earlier about this idea of, you know, how when you meditate, like, your sense of self recedes. But one of the things that I, and I've heard a lot of other people describe this in different ways or sometimes the same one, that working on AI really, like, makes you think about all of the kind of, like, old deep philosophical questions, not all, but many of them come up a lot in this context of, like, What's going to happen when I get uploaded? What's going to happen when there's copies made of me? Do I want to merge? Do I want to go off exploring the universe? Like, will that still be me? Like, how much of me will that be? Like, one of the things that I think was like an interesting continuation of meditation was this like very deep felt sense that there is no self that I can still find to identify with in any way at all. And I've heard a lot of other people who have spent a lot of time thinking about AGI get to that in a different way too.

It reminds me of the, the, the moon. Um, there's a phenomenon that happens with people who go up into space, astronauts. Uh, I don't know if it's still happening, but when they go and they look at the Earth from a distance and they look at the moon from the new perspective, that they have the same thing happen where kind of the sense of self, uh, changes. And, and one of the— I think I'm trying to remember the name of, but there's this whole institute in Petaluma, California that was all built around This man's experience, this astronaut's experience of seeing that and then building a center to promote it in the world, it seems like it's got a similar phenomenon.

Yeah, but I think really having to contemplate these questions of like what it means to, you know, get uploaded or merged or whatever, like leads people down an interesting path. And certainly the more you work on AI, the more you think about that.

In many, or at least for me, it seems to me like something that I mentioned earlier on the podcast, how there seems to be this parallelism between AI and self-awareness and meditation, it seems like the sense of self itself is a specialized form of intelligence that is trained on a certain subset of our history. And this is particularly visible in something like a trauma, where you recognize a couple features in your environment and then you collapse your entire world to what your environment was like at the time that that trauma was programmed. And that the process of feeling through and healing our traumas and integrating those experiences, as well as the process of meditating and just feeling past our sense of identity into the rest of what we are, actually is a way of increasing our general intelligence by allowing us to move through a wider range of experiences in the world and be able to act on those experiences as they distinctly are and not just as our history was. And I'm curious how that lands with you and your experience with both AI and with meditation and your own self-awareness.

The part about sort of related this to traumas didn't connect for me. I probably just didn't understand it. But the part about how, you know, intelligence past a certain level should necessarily have some model of self-awareness. That deeply resonated with me, um, because I do think you have to be able to sort of understand your place in the world yourself as an agent and an actor in the world. Um, like, if you're trying to get as smart as possible, you want to be able to make the best predictions about what will happen, and one of the things that will act is you, um, or your, your whatever. Uh, and, and you also want to be able to think about, like, hypotheticals. Uh, so, so yeah, I think there is something there which is in the limit, intelligence and self-awareness to me seem like they have to go together.

So the other thing that I see happen in people, so when they— you called it non-duality, but when the sense of self opens up into like a more universal sense of self, which, you know, that cognitive thing has moved, what I notice is that there's like a movement. Eventually the person then starts moving more and more into joy. That sometimes it takes 10 years for them to just hang out in that space and they don't think there's any— the peace is fine and they don't think there's anything besides peace that's available and then they move into joy. How has that experience been for you? The movement from, "Oh, okay, so I am— this is a depersonalized life that I'm not taking personally. I still have my passion." How has that movement into joy been for you?

This is sort of like amusing to me. Because I think on the outside, I probably seem much less joyous than I used to. I'm like not a loud, boisterous, laughing person. And I used to like, you know, prioritize more doing things that at least match with my image of what a joyful thing looked like. I now am like, you know, pretty happy to like sit around and not do much or go hike or whatever. But I feel like incredibly joyful all of the time. But not all the time. But it's like, it's, it's rare that I don't. And yet I feel like no need to express, and I don't think it like comes through talking to me, or at least it doesn't. It wouldn't have fit my model of how a joyful person acted. But there's like a quiet version of it that's really strong and I'm really grateful for almost all the time.

Yeah, definitely sense a lot of calm just talking to you. And so wrapping this back around to your personal experience, having gone through this journey and being wherever you are on the journey yourself now, What happens when you're in a meeting and something happens and it's some kind of crisis, everyone else gets elevated and alert and something happens in your system and you find yourself that you might be reactive, what do you do then?

Once in a while I do react. I don't sit there and try and like make myself not react. If it is like, someone that I work with just said like, "Oh, like that was just the, you know, the one time you get really heated per year." happened a few days ago in a meeting. So like, I wouldn't claim to have, and certainly not want, perfect control, nor would I say I try to like pretend to be calm when I don't feel it. Like, I'll happily get mad if I feel like the situation calls for it. It just doesn't seem to call for it very often. But it's not like I'm like sitting there like making this effort to be really calm.

How do you experience anger when it arises in you differently than you used to?

I don't think differently, just less often. But I still like, you know, like the physiological response in me is like heat and energy.

You said appropriate. I don't find it appropriate to have the response of anger. When, how does it feel appropriate? Like what's the moment where you're like, this is appropriate, it's great. Or is it just happens?

It just, when it happen, I don't fight it when it happens. It just doesn't happen that often. But I don't sit there thinking like, is this worth getting angry about? I just almost always feel like it's not. And then if for whatever reason something is, I, I don't like try to stop it. But, but it's rare. You know how like most people are like somewhat, not most, many people are somewhat conflict avoidant, but there are these like rare people that like love conflict. It seems like an awful way to live, but they— to me— but they love conflict. Like, they go, they go searching for it. Those are the people that seem to, like, trigger the anger in me the most.

Right. I'd make a distinction there. I'd make the distinction between loving conflict and wanting conflict.

They want it. Yes, I agree.

Yeah, yeah. I love conflict because I always find, like, a better solution at the end of it, but I definitely am not interested in creating.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's definitely, uh, the people who want to create it. I think that's a better phrase for it.

Yeah, I love when people want to recognize where there is some conflict and bring it to the surface before it becomes a bigger festering conflict. Definitely.

I'm happy with that. What I don't like is when people want to make fights because it's like, it entertains them or whatever.

Because they feel safe in drama somehow.

Yeah, which is interesting because my noticing is that people who have that tendency, they don't feel calm unless they're contained.

100%.

Right? So that it's their anxiety. And so when you meet them with anger, that is the containment that actually calms them down. So it's so interestingly appropriate, even though it's not a conscious thing that's occurring. Yeah. So if you were talking to either yourself when you were like, hippie bullshit meditation, or if you were talking to a young, brilliant kid who's like, hippie bullshit meditation, and for whatever reason, because you probably wouldn't want to convince them, but for whatever reason you were making the argument for meditation, what would you say?

I mean, I was gonna say what you just caveated, which is I can't ever imagine trying to convince someone this is what they should go do. And I think if I had tried to convince myself, or if someone else had convinced me before I like really was like desperately ready, it wouldn't have worked. And so I don't think I would try to convince anyone, but if I had to, I would just be like, just come try this once with me. It probably won't be your thing, you know, you'll probably think of it as a wasted hour, but like, we'll hang out and do something fun afterwards. I would have done it in some like very, like, you know, easy to dismiss, lightweight way.

It's funny when we're talking about people, you know, introducing other people to the work that we do, or one of the courses we talk about the same thing. It's like, if you're trying to convince them to get there, then It's just, it's no good for anybody, you or them.

So yeah, from, from that perspective then, how, how do you approach your, your company when you have found something that's working really well for you and you may be aware that the consciousness that you have is projected throughout your company as its leader? How do you see your company evolving either on the self-awareness front on the individual level or organizationally due to the work that you've been doing yourself?

I think one of the things that's remarkable about OpenAI is we have a very high— like, the highest I've ever seen density of talent and ability, but people that bring extremely different approaches to work and have very different styles, um, much more so than I would say most companies have. Like, most companies tend to have like a culture, and people can fit into that and get promoted or not and get fired or not hired. And so you end up with people who sort of like all feel pretty similar. And I think a thing that I love about OpenAI is just how different people are. And so, you know, there are some like very not calm people, and they're very effective, and they sort themselves into the right places in the organization. And that's probably a good compliment. One thing that I think I, that I have gotten good at is figuring out how to sort people, like figuring out what people's inherent strengths and abilities and styles are, and figuring out how to sort them into the right roles. I can't like articulate exactly how, but like objectively, I think I have been much better at this than most people running companies. And it's been a great asset for us.

Yeah, it sounds like the more that you understand yourself, the more you can see the parts of yourself and others that they might not see.

Maybe, or maybe you can just like observe other people in a really detached way because you're not trying to do it in relation to yourself. You're not looking for yourself, you're not— I think most people do end up just promoting people that look like themselves. And instead, you can just, when you've got that out of the way, you can just sort of really focus on What is this person's— what makes them them? What are they going to excel at? And not, you know, have to relate it to yourself and make a better decision.

So one of the things particularly I notice around people who are in any kind of search for non-duality is that they think that non-duality is some sort of end, that there's some sort of like place that they're going to end up and there's nothing left to be done. And since we've been talking about it, whenever I speak about it, I always, you know, point to the fact that evolution doesn't stop at any particular time internally or externally. So I was just wondering, what's, what's the thing now inside of yourself that you're, that you're exploring or working with or seeing through? Or what's— where's your journey now?

I just want to see what happens. I think we're like in the midst of this like most exciting time yet in human history. I'm sure there'll be more exciting ones in the future, but I'm just, I'm, I'm so like I just feel like tremendous curiosity about how all of this is going to play out. And because I sort of identify with all of it, I'm like deeply interested and curious about all of it. And it's pretty exciting.

Yeah, I'm deeply curious as well. And I'm really excited to see where, where you and OpenAI and all the rest of us take this existence through the rest of our lifetimes. Yeah.

Thank you guys for having me.

Thank you, Sam.

Yeah, thank you.

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