The Psychology of The 10 Commandments| Jamie Metzl

We have our Ten Commandments, and we should value them. But when you read them literally, it's like, well, don't covet your neighbor's ox or manservant or wife. It's like, well, I live in an apartment in New York City. My neighbor has a wife, doesn't have an ox or a manservant. 8 out of 10 are really hard to justify. How about it?

You and Moses dueling. Are the Ten Commandments gonna hold up in the age of AI? And are we brave enough to ask and explore and challenge this moral code?

I deeply, deeply value I value the 10 Commandments as I value the 5 Pillars of Islam and the Fivefold Path and the 8 Noble Truths. I think every tradition has these core principles. But my question was, is there a way to seat all of our traditions together?

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. Today's guest is Dr. Jamie Metzl, technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, and one of the leading voices understand the future of AI, genetics, biotechnology, medicine, and human values. Jamie has served in the US National Security Council and is the author of Hacking Darwin, Superconvergence, and his latest book, The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity.

This is a story about ethics and values, and then the logical next question is, well, where do the ethics and values come from?

And my answer was, With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dr. Jamie Metzl. Jamie, it's been a while since we last saw each other, and this is the first time we've had a conversation in person. So welcome back to Finding Mastery.

Well, thanks. I'm really thrilled about it. We've had such nice conversations virtually, but there's something nice about being with somebody physically. I feel like You don't have these long conversations every day in your life with every person. So I already had felt like we had this connection, but humans are physical beings, so it's nice to meet.

And it's perfectly or eloquently timed because of what you're writing about, AI and the future of AI. And so before we get into kind of the guts of what you've come to understand, let's just kind of Get a big picture first. You capture your profession as a futurist. First and foremost, very cool. What does it mean?

Well, futurist, it's kind of this funny title. If somebody is a dentist, you go to their office and say, oh, you're a dentist, and they have a little degree on the wall. If somebody is a futurist, I mean, I was the opening keynote speaker at the Dubai Future Forum, which was the largest gathering of futurists in history held in Dubai. So I guess I must be a futurist, but I have no clue what a futurist actually is. As a matter of fact, so I've been speaking and writing for many, many decades, and I didn't used to call myself a futurist, but I'd be speaking about the future. And then, you know, somebody would speak after me and they would say, they'd say, oh, here's a futurist. And I'd say, oh, what's a futurist? And nobody could answer the question. And then one day I decided, well, I must be a futurist. Because, so as a futurist, whatever that means, what I try to do is look at the world around me and around us and say, well, if this is true now, where is it going and what does it mean? And what will it mean for technology? But more importantly, what will it mean for us as humans? And I try to be as methodological as possible and analytical as possible, but it's impossible to be perfect. And so it's— I write, as you know, fiction and nonfiction. And the reason I do that is because thinking about the future, it can't just be nonfiction. We are telling a story about what the future might look like. And in a way, it's not dissimilar from the work that you do with these athletes. And you're saying, well, here's where you are now. Tell a story of where you would like to be and tell that story to yourself. And can you occupy that story? And so for me, As a futurist, it's not just about saying, here's what the future might look like. It's to say and talk with other people about, here's what the future could look like. And if we want to occupy that future, what are the things that we're going to have to do now? Not so that we can perfectly predict that future, so that we can be ready for what's coming and prepared and as thoughtful as possible about how to build the kind of world we'd like to inhabit.

Okay, so as a futurist, there's another powerful futurist that's shaped the world that you have decided to go toe-to-toe with. And this titan futurist has been labeled a prophet. And he came down from Mount Sinai.

Yeah.

And he says, I got 10 Commandments.

Right.

And guess what? I put them on a technology that's pretty radical.

Right.

I chiseled these things. Yep. And people said, you did what? Look at these tablets.

Yeah.

Chiseled. And I've got, I've got an actual tablet where tablets were not a thing.

Incredible technology.

That was the technology of the time. And he possessed, he went away for a while. He came back with a radical expression of the technology. And he said, I got them from the source.

Yep.

These are them. And people said, well, if you've got that technology and you've got that type of commitment, and you said you were tapped straight into God, these must be right. And so they have shaped behavior and thought patterns for thousands of years. Right? And you decided to go toe-to-toe with them. How about it? You and Moses dueling.

Yeah.

So you're not like, what would be the word, blasphemous in the approach that those 10 Commandments are in error. You are pointing out though that those 10 Commandments are not, while richly thoughtful, are not being adhered to at a global scale that anybody would have hoped. Right? And you said, okay, I'm going to go with my technology. We're going to call this thing Chatty. You used ChatGPT-5 and said, all right, well, let's kind of workshop this a little bit. What are the 10 Commandments for the 2000s?

Yeah.

So can you walk me through— that's how I'm conceptualizing the origin story of your book. And I don't know if you said, I'm going to go duel with Moses. I don't know if you actually did that or I'm embellishing here. So can you walk through why you wanted to do this, why you wanted to write this book. I'm curious if you're getting pushback from religious communities, if they're saying, oh, this is cute, but who do you think you are? Or they're saying, oh, these are actually pretty— I'm wondering what that narrative is. But first, let's get on the table the origin story and what they actually are and why you went to do this.

Great. So the origin story is 2 summers ago, I was invited to this very magical place called the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, where it's like Brigadoon. It's a city Whole city that comes to life for 10 weeks in the summer. And it's got all these homes and it's on a lake and there's a music school and a theater and an opera house. And there's lectures all day and lots of religious communities. And they have an amphitheater that seats 6,000 people. 6 presidents have spoken there. Sadly, it's where Salman Rushdie was attacked 5 years ago that was in the news. So I was invited 2 summers ago to speak about the future of AI. And what it means for all of our lives. And it was great. I got a 6,000-person standing ovation and they invited me to come back the next summer. And they—

Why would you get a standing ovation? Because of the clarity of thought or the optimistic?

You know, it's both of those things. I think that people are so afraid of this technology. And when I explained it to them, and my message is always, this is not a technology that's just happening to you. It's a technology and it's a cultural shift that must happen with you. And you need to understand it, and you need to be part of the process. And if we get it right, here's what a positive vision could look like. And if we get it wrong, here's what a negative vision— and I always talk about that, and I've been, maybe not for another day, but was deeply involved in the issue of COVID-19 origins, which I think is connected to the misuse of technology. So I just think a part of it was the optimism, but part of it was empowerment.

Yeah.

That people wanted to feel and should feel that they're part of this story. And they invited me back to come back this last summer, and they said, give a talk on anything you want. And so I thought a lot about it, and I thought, what's the next step? And I wanted to connect this future of AI with the tradition of religious pluralism of Chautauqua over the last 150 years, which started as a place for Methodist Sunday school teachers, and it's grown a lot. And so like I do with any book, I started out in metaphorical Walden Pond. Like put away all the technology, would go for a walk or go for runs or go to Central Park in New York and just think, well, what's my message? What is the thing that I wanted to say? And I talked about the relationship between our religious and spiritual traditions and our technologies, because controlling fire, then we get animism and agriculture, and then we get our world religions, which are all agrarian religions, and the printing press, creates in many ways Protestantism. And so I said, these technologies, our new technologies, are going to have profound implications for our religious and spiritual life.

Really interesting link between the printing press and Protestantism.

Yeah. Well, no, it's the exact same time because they're—

That's how people spread these ideas like, hey, I'm not believing what the church is saying. Yeah.

It's double. So the printing press comes out. The first thing that happens is the Catholic Church at that time had this process of selling indulgences. So basically, if you've, quote unquote, sinned, you can pay and you get a certificate in exchange for your money saying, now you are forgiven for your sins. And so they're building all of these cathedrals by selling these indulgences. And then the printing press comes out and the Catholic Church says, oh, this is so great. We can print. We don't have to handwrite these. We can print them. We can sell even more of these. And so Martin Luther, he was saying, well, this feels like it's really corrupt. This isn't what the— Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism.

Not to be confused with Dr. Martin King Jr.

Yes, but they're connected in their name. And so then he nails his 95 Theses to the wall of the church and, you know, nail anything to a wall, you know, the people who are going to see it—

Wait, he nailed the 95 Theses?

Yeah, it was like his critique of the Catholic Church. He wrote it up and he nailed it to the door of the church in 1525.

What's the 95?

It's just, it's the foundations of Protestantism.

It's like, here's my— There's 95 ideas?

Yes. It's, here's my critique of Catholicism. And, you know, you can nail something to the door here and a few people are going to walk by and see it. It was the printing press that allowed this one idea To very, very quickly go to scale. Just like now with with the internet and social media, you can have an idea that goes viral. The printing press was the first time where something could really go viral at scale because it could travel at the speed of these trade routes. So ideas that maybe would have taken decades to pass now could pass in somewhat uniform manner just in in weeks or days. And so that was a real. Transformation. So in my talk at Chautauqua, I said, we're going to have a massive transformation. That's the history of our traditions. And then I wanted to give one example of what that might look like. And I wanted to do something referencing something that was very familiar to people and foundational, and that's the Ten Commandments.

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So first I said we have our 10 Commandments and we should value them, and they've been an essential foundation of our moral and ethical, uh, traditions, certainly, uh, in the, in the West, but, but more broadly for 3,500 years. But let's go through them one by one and see what they actually say. And when you read the 10 Commandments and read them literally, it's like, well, don't covet your neighbor's ox or manservant or wife. It's like, well, I live in an apartment in New York City. My neighbor has a wife, doesn't have an ox or a manservant. I mean, maybe I should have a fancier apartment. And you kind of read them and it's like 8 out of 10 are really hard to justify. The 2 that I thought were most justifiable were—

Murder.

honor your parents and don't bear false witness. But every other one, like, there's a debate of whether it's don't kill or don't murder. You know, we had our heroes landing in Normandy, and the instructions for them was, you must kill, you must murder. That is your way of doing good.

For the greater good.

For the greater good in the world. And even in the biblical story, I mean, you summarized it pretty well, but the story is, so the Israelites, They leave Egypt and they're traveling around in the desert, and then they get to Mount Sinai and Moses goes up to the top of Mount Sinai. And according to the story, then God appears to him, the God who I defied in 4th grade, appears to him and says, I have, you know, 10 principles for everybody to obey. And God writes them in his own hand. And God, I guess, does the Masonry, because he gets these, and then he comes down and he's been there for a while. And while he's up there, the Israelites at the bottom of the mountain, they have lost faith and they have melted all their gold and now they're praying to the golden calf. And so the first thing, very conveniently, that happens, and people have seen Charlton Heston also do this, he throws these tablets down at the Israelites. Very conveniently, They crumble into a million pieces, but apparently they were the originals written by God. Then this God who has just instructed Moses, thou shalt not kill or murder or whatever, instructs Moses and his brother to murder 3,000 of these people who are worshipping the golden calf. So they do that as part of the purification. Then Moses goes back up on Mount Sinai, and then God says, well, I wrote it myself the first time. You've got to write it yourself this time. And so he then comes back with these 10 rules written in his own hand, and that becomes the foundation of the 10 Commandments. And then the Israelites are going on their way to what's now Israel, and then they encounter these different groups like the Amalekites, and then they're given the instruction, well, you need to wipe out these guys along the way. So if that's the instruction, it's a little bit unclear historically. And I'm not, I deeply, deeply value the 10 Commandments as I value the 5 Pillars of Islam and the Fivefold Path and the 8 Noble Truths. I think every tradition has these core principles and I really love and respect and value all of them. But my question was, is there a way to see all of our traditions together. Because whatever you can say about Moses on the top of Mount Sinai, he had no clue that there were incredible civilizations where we are now in the Americas that had their own mythologies, their own ethical and moral systems, that were asking and exploring the exact same questions. What does it mean to live an ethical life? What does it mean to build a sustainable community that supports your family and your community and your environment. So everybody has these great traditions. And so the question that I was exploring was, is it possible to fully value our own traditions while we look at ourselves from this broader perspective? I talked about looking down at the ant colony or the Artemis II astronauts, but now we have this miraculous technology that can allow us to see ourselves collectively in a way that would be impossible. For any human to do individually and any even group of humans to do collectively. And so that was the thing. And then I described my process of asking GPT-5 this question: based on your comprehensive analysis of all of human digitized recorded history, including an assessment of all of our different religious, spiritual, moral, and ethical traditions, what are 10 principles that, if followed by everybody, would lead to the greatest amounts of peace, happiness, and human flourishing? And the response that came back was so beautiful. And then in thousands of back and forth dialogue with GPT-5, I, I, we dove deeper and I said, where's this coming from? And it was just incredible because it was drawing on all of our traditions, the ones that I knew about. But there were these really obscure traditions, like some African indigenous traditions that I frankly, I'd never even heard of. And I had to do a lot of research, like, what is this thing? And just to give one example, There's a tribe in Africa that has this practice called insulting the meat. And if you're like a hunter and you come back with like a huge gazelle that you have killed, the second you step into the village, the insults start coming. Like, you call that a gazelle? That's not going to feed anybody. Like, what have you been doing? It's like memento mori in Roman times. And the idea is equality is so important that even somebody who does something great needs to be reminded that you're part of this collective with strengths and—

You got to humble the hunter.

Humble the hunter. And I thought it was just really beautiful. And so then when I was walking around, I stayed for a week at Chautauqua and I was walking around and it's older people who tend to go there. The old guys at Chautauqua were mobbing me and they were saying, give us those AI Ten Commandments. We want them. And I said, you know, I'm going to write a book. And that was the inspiration for this book.

And the first one that you listed is awesome. Treat every being with compassion and dignity. It's a good one now.

Every one of them is good. And every one of them is broad enough to incorporate our different Traditions. And so treating everybody with dignity and compassion, and the 10th one is to live life with reverence and awe. I mean, they're all really good things. And coming back to your question of my relationship with existing traditions, I was a little nervous about that. I try to be super clear in the book that I really respect existing traditions.

Yeah, you did an excellent job.

And I'm talking about, is there another layer of collectivism that's not at odds with these, but on But I was nervous about it, and I was so pleased that I got a beautiful response from the Vatican. And so there's a blurb on the back of the book from the Vatican in support of the book. Angela Buchdahl, who's the, in my view, maybe the lead Reform rabbi in the United States, she gave a really beautiful and supportive blurb. And just yesterday, I did a training for 100 rabbis about this and how they might think about these AI Ten Commandments. Not at odds with, in this case, the Jewish tradition, but in support of it. I was invited a month ago to be the guest pastor at the Unitarian Church in New York City. I'd never given a sermon like this before. And I said, well, can I rejigger the service? And they said yes. And so when people came in for the service, they heard the liturgical music playing, and you had to really listen carefully to realize it was the Star Trek theme song. And we did a sacred cacao ceremony. We had readings from the Bhagavad Gita and Mary Oliver, who's a poet who I love. So the reception has been really nice, but I've said over and over, I don't want to be at odds with any tradition other than traditions that say we are absolutely right and everybody else is absolutely wrong. But I think that makes it very, very difficult because I think we have to—

Yeah.

Coming back to what we said in the beginning, to have respect for everybody, we have to have enough oxygen in the room to think that, well, maybe they're more right than me. If we start out with, my thing is the absolute truth and the other thing is absolutely untrue, I think that's a very hard starting place.

You go after some of the complexities of adhering to the original 10 Commandments, like not lying, however, or not killing, or not stealing. And I think you did the German code crackers.

The Enigma machine, yeah.

Right, the Enigma machine. And so what you're going after there is that, okay, well, there's these people that actually stole and they did it in a world-class way and they ended up saving a lot of lives. So is this an absolute or can you bend and break it? Okay, now there's a lot of complexity in that philosophical positioning. Are they absolutes or are they relative? And one of yours is do no harm.

Okay.

This is number 2. Nice, beautiful, right? Now, when you are going to eat an animal, you have just harmed an animal. So how do you square— I wanna pick apart a few of them and just kind of—

Yeah, it's great. And it's a great question. And I actually did an interview, a podcast interview with Peter Singer. And Peter Singer is this very famous philosopher and famously vegetarian and vegan for exactly This reason. And he said, this is a contradiction because if you're doing no harm, life is doing harm. I mean, everything that we do is a choice. And so I didn't want to edit the 10 Commandments that came back, but if I was editing that, I would say, try to do as little harm as possible. And one of the principles that came up in the analysis of where all of this is coming from is a principle that I really value that comes from Jainism. And so Jainism is an offshoot of Hinduism, and their thing is do no harm. And that's why the Jains, they wear these coverings on their mouth so they don't accidentally swallow bugs. When they walk around, they keep an eye on the ground to make sure you're not stepping on an ant. Sweep the floor. And it's not possible to do no harm. Just by breathing. I mean, just by anything, you're doing harm to something and not harm to other things. But there's this principle in Jainism called ahimsa, which is that aspiration. So they would say, do no harm, but it means do as little harm as possible. I mean, it's funny, I'm pretty active on Twitter, and if I have some expression of outrage, then you get millions of views and likes and things like that. A couple of weeks ago, part of it is a test. I said, nobody has ever blown up a building in the name of Jainism. Maybe we can learn something from these people. I mean, of course I got 8 likes and one of them was my mother. But so I just think that it's more aspirational. But that one, of all of the commandments, that's the one that I've gotten the most pushback on. And they've said—

That's the easy one to— I'm not pushing back on it. I just want to understand your position. And so your position is Yeah, I think aspirationally, I'm behind it. I see it. There is a complexity. I'll use the word again, to live in modern life and think that you're not causing harm. But if you can have that in the center of your heart, in the front of your mind, that you're going to do a little bit better in this world than if that is not on the list.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that aspirationally, like even if there's a destiny, like I talked about navigating by the North Star. You're never going to get to the North Star. It's not like that's the goal is just like, oh, I made it. I'm at the North Star. It's like a navigational guide.

It's a question you've never had.

Yeah, of course.

That's really funny.

I've never—

because we use that. I've used that a lot. Like, what's your North Star? Well, you're never going to get there.

Right.

Okay, good. I'm clocking that one. Thank you for that. That's really good. Yeah. So just pull out of the AI Ten Commandments for a minute. What is your North Star? The thing that you're aspirationally pursuing, but not knowing that you'll never get there?

It'll sound like pablum and probably more general. It's not like I'm going to do this one thing, but I just feel like, I mean, I talked about my family history, so I'm very mindful of just the accident and the beneficence of just being here. But my North Star is to say, well, at the end of this life, have I used the time? Have I had the greatest possible impact that I could have had? Have I loved the people? Have I supported the people in my world? And it's kind of general. It's not specific. And I talked about this balance. I mean, I said my 8th book is coming out in February. I don't know the answer of whether it will be more meaningful to write a 9th and 10th and 11th book Or to do some other thing, like have a child or do some other thing. And so it comes back to what we were discussing about process. And so my North Star isn't necessarily exact destination, as we discussed, but it's trying to be as thoughtful and honest about process and what am I trying to do and to align my actions as much as possible with that North Star.

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By the way, I loved your book. I loved your latest book. I say this a lot and it's almost In my head, I had this thought that it might sound like a platitude because I say it so often to folks that are here, but the reason you're here is because I like how you think. I like how you've organized your life. And when I say like, it's not like an approval. It's just, I, I'm really interested in it. And I am attracted to people who can think clearly, who have a systems approach, and then also can slide right down into the intimacy of the human experience.

Right.

And you have captured that. You even just did it. In the way you described being a futurist. You talked about where it came from. You talked about the system of what you're trying to organize. And then you said, it's just like you, Mike. And then you made it personal. And then you came back up to a, uh, like a mesolayer systems approach to explain it. Like, so as I was listening, the most immediate thought is, where did you prepare yourself? And what were the experiences that led to you to want to think about the future so richly?

Yeah, well, I'll start super early and then I will jump ahead. I was, I imagine, like you, one of those really annoying kids who kept asking why, why, why. And from an early—

I got made fun of. Did you get made fun of?

I didn't really get made fun of, but it was just a different way of being than most people, I think, are just kind of— they're thinking the why, but most people and even kids, don't have the space to articulate it. And there's a lot of pressure to conform. And I come from— my parents and my family were kind of rule breakers. And I remember growing up and kind of breaking every rule and driving to the Kansas City Chiefs game. And there was like a 2-mile pileup on the highway for the exit and driving on the shoulder for 2 miles. So I come from rule breakers. But I was always asking these questions of why, why, why. And particularly my mother always indulged it, which was, I think that was really a great way to do this.

How did she do that?

She just entertained the questions. She didn't say, oh, why are you asking? She said, oh, that's a great question. Let's explore it together. And I really benefited from that. And then when I was a kid, I went to a Hebrew day school, which I absolutely hated. Because it was very doctrinaire. And I remember in 4th grade, I was growing up in Kansas City and I was at this school and I raised my hand one day and I said, you've been talking about all this stuff. I've considered what you've said. And I've decided I don't really believe it. And I don't believe in God. And this was like, and I, it was like the fire alarm went off and they came and they, and the principal pulled me out of class by my ear and I just rebelled. And I said, no, I just don't believe this. And that's kind of my whole life. That's the way I've been just thinking of, like, I get information, and sometimes you get information that comes from some other place and you think, wow, that really rings true to me. And when that happens, how wonderful. You can incorporate that and then you grow. And sometimes you get information and you think, well, that doesn't make sense. And even if everybody is saying it makes sense, if it doesn't make sense to you, there's a level of— maybe confidence is the right word. To say, well, if it doesn't make sense to me, then I need to either figure out why it does make sense and maybe I'm wrong, or challenge this perception and maybe I'm right. And then jumping forward, 30 years ago, I was on the National Security Council working for President Clinton. And my boss at the time, and now still close friend, Richard Clarke, who later became famous after 9/11 because he was the one who had— he was like the Cassandra of 9/11. He predicted it. but wasn't able, as hard as he tried, wasn't able to prevent it. And he always, Dick always used to say that if everyone in Washington is trying to solve one problem, you should not solve that problem because the efficacy comes from thinking about and trying to solve problems that other people can't see. And I really took that to heart. And when I was looking around at that time, 30 years ago, I came to feel that this intersection of, it had different names then, but of AI, biotechnology and genetics was going to have massively profound implications for all of us, but nobody was really talking about it. And so that really pushed me to start learning, to start writing, and that led to decades of work and multiple books and all sorts of things, working with the World Health Organization and others. And as I explored all of that, as I had written about genetically modified humans, before the Chinese CRISPR babies were born. And I kept saying, these things are coming.

What was that book?

That book was Hacking Darwin. And we tell you, that was our first conversation, was just after Hacking Darwin was released. As a matter of fact, when Hacking Darwin, when in November of 2018, it was announced that the first Chinese CRISPR babies had already been born.

For folks that don't know what that is, just give them a brief tour.

Okay, so genome editing is the capability that has— it's been around for a while, but our ability to do it has gotten much better over time. And it's the ability to go into the genome of a cell. And so lots of all living creatures have genetics, which is the recipe for life, and to go in and make small numbers of changes, which can have profound implications. And so we humans have been making genetic modifications in one way or another for 12,000 years, because agriculture is an aggressive form of genetic modification, but we haven't been doing it with the tools of biotechnology. So that's more recent, our ability to do that. But at least since the 1940s and 1950s, we've been doing that. And if you go to Whole Foods and you go to the organic section of Whole Foods, you are eating genetically modified crops, because those, almost all of those crops come from bombarding the seeds with radiation, and then you have different mutations, and then you say, well, these seedless grapes, that's the genetic modification that we prefer or not. But now we're getting so good at it that we're genetically modifying different animals. And when I wrote this book, Hacking Darwin, I said genetic modification of humans is coming very, very quickly and very soon. And in the book, I said, it's coming, it's coming in China. And I had a list of 5 Genes. And I said the first genetic modifications will happen in China, and it will happen most likely with one of these 5 genes. And then it happened after the book was written. It did happen in China. It was one of these genes. So that's good fortune as a futurist. And then with my next book, Superconvergence, when I was going out, and I'm always speaking and I never use notes and I never get behind a podium, And I never give the same talk twice because I just feel like it's kind of a jazz performance. Yeah, that's my same approach. Yeah. And I just feel like, and there's energy coming from the people who are there, and maybe you'll have a conversation with somebody before you go up on the stage and you think, oh, that's a really interesting perspective. Maybe I want to incorporate that into the talk. But the talks got bigger and bigger. Like I would say, well, this book, Hacking Darwin, it's about human genetic modification. But that's just a little piece of this bigger story. And the big story of this moment of human habitation on Earth, and maybe life on Earth, is this is the moment when after nearly 4 billion years of evolution, our one species among the billions that have ever lived suddenly has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. And the big question, that will determine whether this is a wonderful story or a terrible story is whether we can learn to wield these godlike powers wisely. And that was the foundation of my book, Superconvergence. And you and I had also had a conversation after Superconvergence.

Another hit.

Well, thank you so much. But then the last part of what I just said of wisely. So what does wisely mean? And I kept saying, this isn't a story about technology. This is a story about ethics and values. And then the logical next question is, well, where do the ethics and values come from? And my answer, it was a glib answer at first, but I felt like, well, I needed to populate the answer with meaning, was it's got to come from all of us.

Yeah.

This is a societal, a species-wide transformation. This is a story about all of us, just like the story of domesticating fire a million years ago was a story about all of us controlling fire. The story about domesticating plants and animals 12,000 years ago, that was a story about all of us because it changed all of our lives. This is that kind of story. But if we say, oh, this is just up to experts and technologists and maybe a few government regulators, we're going to get it wrong.

And a few billionaires.

And a few billionaires who are kind of out of control. And so for us to feel like we're part of this story, well, how does that happen? And then if we need to have our values guiding this transformation, how do we decide what values they are? And so we all come from our different values traditions. And then with the new book, what I was trying to ask, well, is there a way of seeing ourselves collectively. It's kind of like we can see an ant colony when looking down from above. We can see the collective of the ant colony in a way that the ants in the colony, they don't really, aren't able to see themselves, or the Artemis II astronauts looking back at Earth. They had a perspective on us that we just can't have here. And so—

They all do, right? All of the astronauts do.

Yeah, yeah.

Real quick, before you take it one step further, do you feel like an outsider? Or do you feel like you're part of the pack?

I definitely feel like I'm part of the pack because, like, what is the pack?

You're different though.

Well, everybody's different in their own special way, but I just feel like within the pack, that doesn't mean everybody has to be exactly the same.

As a kid, did you feel like an outsider or were you part of the pack?

Kind of both. I mean, I've always felt like I was looking at things a little bit And mom helps you build the confidence to keep asking. Yeah. Oh my God, yes.

Because you didn't understand something.

Yeah.

And, you know, you would explore, explore, explore. So you're naturally an explorer.

Yeah.

A lot of people would prefer to fit in and look smart as opposed to raise their hand and ask the question.

Yeah.

Hey, I'm sorry, I don't understand. So at some level, you know, you're smart.

Well, you're sweet to say. I mean, yes. I would be lying if I—

Yeah, you know that. And so for you, how does your intelligence work? Is it speed and/or horizontal ability to hold many frames together and/or both?

Yeah, so I do think it's both and other things, but it's breadth. I think my thing is breadth. It's having— That's what I think it is.

That's what I meant by the horizontal, but you can drill underneath.

Yeah, which is like a lot of, so I just feel like, My brain, since I was a little kid, I feel like I'm pretty good at making connections between a lot of disparate things of how do all these pieces fit together? And I talked about when I'm just about to go on stage for a talk and somebody will say one thing, and it's not just that I'll reference that. It's like you're at the airport and something happens with the weather and then all the flights change at once. So for me, I'll get one piece of information, And then it's like that all of the flights are changing because it'll go through my brain. I'll think, well, if this is true, then how does it touch all of these other things? It's not that just one piece of information shows up on itself. It shows up in context. And I think that is something that I feel like I can do pretty well.

So that's actually not intelligence. That's a framework that you are smart, of course. Right. But that's a framework underneath the surface that you apply to information. So when a new piece of information comes in and you say, if that is the case, you don't accept it fully, but then you entertain if it was accurate or true or honest or whatever, then you run it through a filter, which is like, how would that impact A, B, C, and D? And now we're in that horizontal experience. And then you drop down 2, 3, maybe 6 levels on some of them. Okay.

If I can just add to that. And so that requires a level of openness because if you're holding on so tight to something, and you get some new piece of information that challenges that, if your energy goes into holding onto that old thing, you're not going to be able to do that. So I really try to cultivate to the best of my ability a fluidity and openness, even in the things that I feel like I believe the most. If something I really believe and then I start to get data and I think, well, maybe this thing that I thought was a core belief isn't right, My aspiration for myself is that I will challenge that thing. It doesn't mean I'll change right away, but I'll think maybe I need to learn something more to test whether I still believe this thing that I thought I believed.

How do you map that with a sense of anxiousness or a sense of groundedness? And I'll tell you that the Zen teacher shares with the student, good news, bad news. And the student says, up to you. And the Zen teacher says, all right, bad news. Life is like falling through the sky with nothing to grasp or hold onto. And good news, there's no bottom. Okay, so you apply both of those. You can free flow through life, nothing to grasp onto, meaning there's no absolute truths that you're working from. It's an assumption I'm making right now, but a radical openness to explore, which can feel very almost amorphous on what you're resting on. So how do you manage that internally? Because the need to cling to something is the desire for certainty.

Yeah.

And it feels like if I can Hold wood. That's what sailors would say, stay true and hold fast and stay true. Hold fast is like hold on to something that you can trust. And you've got this ability to just keep it fluid. How do you do that?

Yeah. So my answer will be aspirational because everybody has to have some kind of anchors that we hold onto in life and whether it's relationships or aspects of identity. But I feel like for me, it's a sense of appreciation of the process of the journey. The thing is that exploration. I get a lot of joy and meaning from the process of exploration. I talked about getting— I was pulled out of class in 4th grade of Hebrew day school, and then eventually I was kicked out of that school, which was one of the better things that's ever happened to me in life. But one of the things, even though—

Because you said, I don't believe in God.

And I was a troublemaker and I challenged everything every single day. And I got kicked out of class, of all the religious classes every single day. And eventually, I don't know why I didn't leave that school earlier, but eventually they said, this is not a place for you. And they were 1,000% right. But what I will say, one of the things that I valued from that part of my education, even though I was a I was a feral child when I went to my next school. I didn't know anything about English grammar or anything, and I had to learn it all very quickly. But in the Jewish tradition, there's the sacred book, which is the Torah, the Old Testament. And then there's thousands of years of books about debates on what does it actually mean, the Talmud. And the books of debate, are also sacred books. And so it's not that you can anchor yourself on the original text, because if you only do that, you're missing the sacredness of the exploration. And because in that exploration, there are no right or wrong answers, because the debate itself is the sacred thing. And Buddhism has that. I've spent a lot of time in Dharamsala with a lot of the Tibetan Buddhist monks. And you see that they have this system of structured debate. And the idea is don't get stuck in one thing because the process of exploration is the sacred thing. And that's what I really try to aspire to. And that doesn't mean that I have no beliefs. I have actually very strong beliefs.

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But for me, part of having a strong belief is allowing enough oxygen So that they can be challenged so we don't become doctrinary or holding on too tight. But also an answer to your question is there's a bit of life structuring that goes into that. Every time when I've had these very tempting offers in life, like I was given an offer to join a big law firm after I graduated from law school, and I was really tempted because I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. And here was this Very lucrative, very secure thing. And I looked at it and I thought, well, what am I going to do? Be a lawyer in a law firm my whole life? And then later, after I ran for Congress 23 years ago, I had an offer from McKinsey. And it was very tempting because it was all these really smart people and the kinds of people who I'd been in my various college and grad schools with. And I was so tempted because it's like, Well, I'm a smart guy, I think. Here's a place where you can get a little badge of honor for being a smart guy, and they send you to do little jobs, and it's like smart guy jobs. And I really looked at it and it was so tempting, but at the same thing, I thought, well, I'm going to do their thing for my whole life? So I love your analogy because it requires— there's a little bit of faith of not doing the thing. which is, in a way, I mean, it's a hard path, but an easier path where you get that security. There's an insecurity that is necessary for a life of continuous growth.

You have eloquently described in your own language the defining characteristic of mastery, which is a love affair with the process. And you used different words like allowing oxygen Right. To be able to explore and the sacredness of debate and the sacredness of really discernment and getting in there to better understand. When people think about, I get this question all the time and they're like, what's the difference between mastery and high performance? And another maybe artsy way without pinning us down to an actual definition yet, which is not hard to do, but to use more of a symbol of it. High performance is a bit more metallic and it has right angles to it.

Right.

There's a podium, there's a medal, there's associated with high performance. Mastery has different contouring and it is more about the commitment to the path than it is about the end state. And you are far more committed to the path of exploration, which is so unsettling for so many because the destination is not interesting. And it's a little bit of a distraction to the artistry of really trying to become artistic in said, you know, craft. Yeah.

And the destination is unknown because it's like sailing in the direction of the North Star. You can't go straight at the North Star. You have to tack. And just in this interaction that we've had, I mean, I said something. But you were very actively listening. And then you had your very wise philosophy about mastery, but you restated it to me, incorporating the things that I had said. And my feeling is, in a conversation, if it's a meaningful, deep conversation, that's what's happening over and over. I mean, we're sitting here in the same room. We each have our microbiome that reflects our lives up to this point. But by being in the same room and we're sharing the same air, our microbiomes are jumping back and forth between us. So I'm going to leave this room on a biological level, I'm going to be Jamie plus a little bit of Mike. A little bit of Mike. And Mike is going to be Mike plus a little bit of Jamie. And if we have a meaningful conversation, that's also going to be the case intellectually. And it's not like I'm going to— I mean, maybe I will, but it's not like I need to At the end of this think, all right, here's how I'm changing as a result of my conversation with Mike and vice versa. It's that we had this conversation and we came to it with open minds and open hearts, and then we heard each other and then we kind of become each other. And that's something that's very wonderful and very beautiful. And that's why you talked about the question of being inside the pack or outside the pack. We are humans, and we're kind of like ants in the ant colony. We are a collective species. We're speaking the English language, which neither you nor I invented. We have a set of cultural norms and expectations which come from thousands, tens of thousands of years of history and cultural evolution. So we're part of the pack, and that pack is continually growing. And there are people, you know, there are people who have just different kinds of lives. You and I both We both have the luxury, which comes from, I think, who we are and how we've lived our lives, but to live these lives of exploration. And there are some people who are exploring in different ways or have minds who work differently. So I think we're all part of the pack, but we have different roles.

You have an uncanny ability to, again, work from principles, clearly articulate them, And just about every filter does explore a future state. Almost everything you've said is exploring that way. And I think your filter is fundamentally optimistic.

Since I was a little kid. I mean, people ask me this, Chris, like, why are you always smiling? It's like, well, I don't know. I've been doing it since I was a little kid. But before we went live, you and I were talking about my late father. And my late father, who passed away a year ago, if you had met him, he was a pediatrician in Kansas City. And if people who met him, they'd say, well, he's a great guy, but my big critique is why is he so positive? What's he so happy about? And if you would tell people who didn't know him well, well, actually, he came to the United States as a refugee after the war. Most of the family was killed. They came on the bottom of a ship. Like you see in the movies, where there was no air and everybody was vomiting. They came out in the in in New York. Nobody spoke a word of English, and everybody was completely bewildered. And he was thirteen. So that's the starting point. Somebody from that starting point.

His parents come.

Him and his parents came, and a lot the most of the of the rest of the family unfortunately didn't make it tragically. And and. But he was so grateful to be here, and he was so grateful for this life. And somebody who would've had that starting point at 13, you could say, why is this person so miserable? And you could say, well, look at what they've been through. And I'm not saying that everybody can be or should be an optimist, but it seems to me an easier way to go through life.

Why would you pull that back? What would the world be like if we all fundamentally had a filter that the future could work out as long as we make it so?

Exactly as you said, as long as we make it so. How are we imagining making it so? If we have a positive image of what we can make, that's so inspiring. We talked about the work that you do with athletes of kind of imagining a future state. If the thing that you're imagining is a positive thing, That's really inspiring.

I haven't worked with the world's best that is not fundamentally optimistic. And we know people hear this all the time, like, oh, athletes do mental imagery. Well, that is actually available to all of us. Mental imagery is about casting your imagination forward and seeing the most beautiful movie you can imagine, and then seeing it and playing it, and then being honest with yourself. Like, whoa, when I put myself in that shape, I'm being an athlete in my mind right now. When I put myself in that shape, I actually don't know how to link it to the next shape with speed and accuracy in my own mind. So then that gives a really rich set of clues, like where to go work. And it also plays a movie that lays neurological pathways.

Yep.

We know that from research, it's quite clear, so that you're more familiar with that expert-grooved movement than unfamiliar with that expert-grooved movement. Optimism is a learned behavior, as you know, and it sounds like your dad by default learned it, and then you learned it from mom and dad.

Yeah, I learned it from them, and it's innate. I mean, I have 3 brothers, and so I'm one of 4, and we're not all exactly the same in our levels of optimism. So I think there's some of it that's innate, and some of it is learned, and some of it is self-cultivated. I mean, I think that that's exactly as you were saying, is everybody can say, well, I mean, there are people who are just born pessimistic. There are people—

I don't think so. I mean, I'm always going to give room for the genetic coding. Like, you and I must give that room. I just think it's so culturally and individually, and when I say culture, I mean writ large culture and also family culture and neighborhood culture influence that either way, whether it's genetic coding, culturally influenced, or individually developed, you still have a choice on how you want to see the future. Even if you came from the most hardened, the most cynical, Yes. Family and da da da, and some genetic predisposition for it. As an adult, I think we have to make a decision. How am I going to see the future? Now, if you've been through some traumas and you still don't quite feel safe in your ability to navigate future states, you probably ought to stay cynical because that will keep you safe. It will keep you away from the edge. My challenge though, because you're a living emblem of it, is that you can come from families that have faced the worst of the worst and then still develop this idea that if I develop a set of psychological, physical, technical skills to navigate the future artistically or in a high-performance way, let alone masterfully, that I could go anywhere.

I can go explore. That's the word. I mean, it's on the bottom of these microphones, the name of your podcast. That's the finding.

Mm-hmm.

The finding is the practice of becoming. And yes, people may have a satori experience where you get hit on the head with a stick and you have sudden enlightenment. But for most people, it's saying, well, I want to get to this place, and I don't really know how I'm going to get there, but I know if I make little steps and look at my behavior and my options and start moving in that direction, I can find mastery. And finding is the active process of directionally living.

What is the dark side of the counter-rotation to what we've been talking about? Yes, optimism. Yes, think about abundance. Yes, think about what could be and work your way to it and have a love affair with the unknown and don't cling too much because you'll be stuck in some sort of old way of thinking when there's a whole new world to explore. Da da da. Okay, great. What is the dark side, and can you make it about you?

Yeah.

Like where do you struggle?

Yes.

In this approach to life.

Yeah. And so I'll say general and then and then specific.

I want to know your heart.

Yes. Okay, good. No, you're so good. You're you're so good. But Buddhism, the reason why I I love Buddhism but I'm not a Buddhist, is this idea of non-attachment because. I just think that's hard. For me, it doesn't fully ring true that we should be non-attached, because I just feel like there are things in life and people in life we don't want to cling to obsessively, but we want to have that level of attachment. And I think that it's healthy. Somebody has a child or a partner or whatever. I think it's a healthy thing to have. The downside for me is that in pursuit of everything that we've been discussing, It's all great and it sounds great on a podcast, but there's a cost of every choice that we make. And so I have led this life of exploration since I was 19 years old when I went and worked in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. I've continuously pushed myself to say, well, I need to go to the hardest place, the most challenging place. I need to— I want to live a life of exploration. But I'm 58 years old. I've been with the same girlfriend for 13 years, and we live together in New York. We don't have kids, and I've kind of lived this life. And there's an element, this sounds negative, but I'll say it, self-indulgence.

Yeah.

That is, it has some very, very nice upsides. And I love writing books. I love sharing ideas. I love having conversations with with people like you and because both you and I have dedicated our lives to this process of growth. But I'm going back to Kansas City in a couple of months for my 40th high school reunion. And some of my high school friends are grandparents. And I look at that and even now just walking around, just when I see people, when I was younger and I would see people on planes with these little kids, I thought, oh my God, there but the grace of whomever go I. I'm so fortunate I'm living this life. But now I look at it and I think, God, that looks really meaningful. And I don't want to miss that. So it's not that everybody should become whatever the thing is of living a life of constant exploration. If you have a kid, as you know, you have to have a level of constancy. There has to be a level of stability. And while I certainly value what I do and how I live, I'm acutely aware—

Yeah.

of the costs of this life.

I so appreciate that. I mean, I think it's one of my great fears is how am I doing for the people that have, and I have promised to be grateful for? Because I love the pursuit of understanding deeply, and it requires me to explore and go and be on the frontier and understand and muse about it, think about it, wrestle with it, get afraid of what I'm understanding and not understanding. And that is a full-time commitment. And it's the great fear I have is that, how am I doing in the eyes and hearts of the ones that gave me the promise to be great partners to each other? My wife, my son, my family members. And I think it's the great dark side of the full commitment required to go to the edge, to really understand. How do you wrestle with that in your heart? Because I don't think you and I are alone in anything that we're wrestling with. So obviously you're honest with it.

Yeah.

When you feel the pit in your stomach, how do you manage that?

Yeah, again, there's the aspirational answer and there's the real answer, and I'll try to give both. The aspirational answer is I try to entertain both sides, and I have a lot of energy. I mean, I love having these conversations with you, conversations with you connected to books that I've written, bringing ideas into the world. And every day I get these wonderful messages from readers, and that's really reassuring. But I'm also, like we just said, just acutely aware that there are costs. And I'm always asking myself, am I making the right decision? And like I said, I'm 58. If I'm ever going to do things like have a child, I got to get rolling here. I don't want to be 1,000 years old. And so what I try to do is to translate these abstract ideas over time into actually real-world choices. Because if it's just philosophical musings about trade-offs, that really doesn't do anything. So it's starting with those abstract ideas and then saying, well, what does it actually mean in life? And you said it exactly right, that we all have relationships and people who are relying on us. And there's a balance between having big ideas and writing books and having conversations like this. And exactly as you said, just showing up in really practical ways. If you have a little kid, your little kid wants you just to be there. And the kid doesn't know that you're living this life of philosophical exploration.

Does not know what happens once you leave the family, but they do know what happens In your own mind when you're with them.

Yeah. Yes. I think that's really, really important, which is a total other topic, which is why everybody with little kids should not have their phones with them because your kids know when you're focusing on them, when your energy is focused. So I don't have any easy answers to that question. It's a struggle and it's a process. I'm not at all convinced I'm getting it right. And there's a tendency for me and maybe for other people just to go with the thing I'm good at. So I feel like I'm pretty good at exploring ideas, and then when I get to a certain point, being able to articulate those ideas, I'm pretty good at listening to other people and incorporating their things. And so there's a tendency to just go with that because I'm getting a huge amount of positive reinforcement from the world. But our greatest capabilities can also be a trap. And I think that's the struggle. I don't have a good answer other than to try to honor the process and not get carried away and not become too enamored with the voice that I've so cultivated that it crowds out other voices that maybe are within me and trying to be heard.

Well said. Obviously, if there's a cartoon character, I would want to see for you this big, oversized brain, let's say, okay, cognitive abilities are in check. And then, like, wouldn't it be rad to also, if somebody could pick up, like, this huge heart, that both are connected, you know, and not just one overdeveloped and one, you know, underdeveloped, like, that would be a great cartoon image.

So I tried it, but I think there's a third angle, because there's the head, and then there's the heart, and then there's just, like, the living of life. And so I feel like my head and my heart, are both aligned in this kind of what feels like an idealistic mission for the world. And then there's just the day-to-day things of life. And where I feel like I try, and I think I'm pretty good at treating everybody around me with a great deal of love and respect, but there's just the day-to-day of our own life choices. And I think that's the thing. Everybody lives on this kind matrix and you can kind of plot yourself maybe where you are on this matrix. But for me, I would have in this cartoon, which is a wonderful idea, like a third thing, which is like, am I making the right choices? While I follow my head and my heart, is there another thing? I mean, I use the idea possibility of having a child as another narrative, but there are lots of different narratives.

Yeah.

Italo Calvino has a great short story in his Yeah. In his book Invisible Cities, that a city is a bunch of possib— and you think of every person living their life, that's one realization of their opportunity set. But every person has many different possible lives that they could have led had they made different choices. And that if you think of each person as a thread of there's their actual life, and then there's the thread of the different lives they could have led had they made different choices. And then there's a whole city of people the same way. You see a community as a weaving of all of these real and possible lives. And so I have this blessing and curse of living my actual life and imagining all the different alternative lives. I think that your cartoon, it would get very busy with all of these different— Thought circles.

I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind, to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sports, Business and the arts are using. And the best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to findingmastery.com/morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.com/morning to get your morning mindset routine. Let's just stay on purpose for a minute. Do you have clarity of your purpose? Like what you're, what you're doing here?

I, I do. But it's not specific. It's not like, it's not, I want to do this one thing because I want to give space for growth and change. But it's definitely, as I said, it's connected to my impact in the world. I mean, different people see their lives at different scales and no judgment at all.

Yeah.

I mean, my youngest brother is a wonderful, wonderful man and he's a physician and he has 2 great kids and he really, sees his life in the context of this circle of his wife and his children and the smaller community that he's in. My aspirations for myself are big, and sometimes I feel like they're too big. I had a line in one of my novels, if you try to grab the entire universe, you may end up with nothing in your arms. And so I always have that fear. But the way I kind of see my world is actually in a really big way. And so my judge for myself is, have I had a positive impact? But as we've been discussing, I'm not at all certain that that's the right goal. And I think that it may be— I asked my late father before he passed away, I asked both of my parents, in the pie chart Of your life, of meaning in your life at this later stage, how big are the different slices for family and work and kids? And my dad looked at me and he said, you don't understand. Family is the pie. And that meant a lot to me. And again, I'm not saying that I'm exactly that because I kind of feel like, well, The world is the pie, but that's a really big pie. Maybe that's a world that's too big for one person.

I don't know. One of the most difficult questions that my mentor asked me, he said, okay, Mike, and it was a concrete kind of throwaway question. Are you committing your life to go deep with few or shallow with many? And I thought, oh, Oh, God, I never thought about that. Am I going to go deep with a few to make a real meaningful difference with a handful of people, or am I going to kind of skim along the surface for 100,000, a million, whatever?

But you found— I mean, what a nice combination. We're having this meaningful dialogue here and you're doing it so much, and yet we're bringing— you are bringing other people into this conversation. So I Maybe there's a combination. The foundation of everything that you're doing is about going deep, at least as I see it, going deep with a few, starting with yourself.

Yeah.

And then what are the ways of sharing that? And I imagine there are lots of people who are listening to this podcast. I mean, like me, we talked again before going live how I've listened to some of your conversations and I've gotten a lot out of it. And I've seen you in these different modes. Sometimes it's more like, helping somebody tell their story. And sometimes it's like a therapy session and just kind of listening in. It's like, wow, there's a lot of unanswered questions here. I don't know the answer to that, but I think that people leave you and me out of this. But there are people who've gone deep individually and have created these beautiful, transcendent works of art that have allowed other people, and even the 10 Commandments themselves. I mean, I'm a non-believer in that traditional way, But somebody created these things, or some small group of people created these things, and it's given guidance to a whole lot of people for thousands of years. So for me, at least, I don't see the choice as being as binary as your mentor suggested. And it just seems that your work is a representation of that.

Beautifully said. Thank you. Let's take us home with, I think, is a seemingly simple question, but a little bit more Complex, certainly as it runs through your filter. Let's go 10 years out just because it's an easy number. Let's put on your optimistic filter and let's strip down to one or two things that humans need to do to be able to flex into co-creating a positive, better 10 years from now than we have currently. What do the humans need to do?

Yeah. So as I said in the beginning of our conversation, people are acting like this is a conversation about Technology is what gets us to the conversation, but the conversation is about values, and it's about values that need to be translated into systems. If people feel that there is these overwhelming technological revolutions and they're bigger than we are and we are just bystanders, it's going to be a terrible outcome. There's going to be a small number of corporations, But these technologies are just going to do a huge amount of harm. The reason why we have societies, why we've come together, why we have all of these faith traditions and spiritual traditions and ethical traditions and legal traditions is because as communities, we've come together and said, here's what we would like the future to look like, and here's how we're going to realize our principles in the real world. And so if that doesn't happen now, given the speed and the acceleration of these technologies, given the power, given the intimacy of these technologies, the world is going to feel very unfamiliar and very dangerous. So while I do think I'm not one for saying we should pull the plug on any of this, even if we could, humans and human values need to be the drivers of this. And if that happens, I think we can do all these wonderful, magical things. It won't be perfect. There'll be ups and downs. But if that doesn't happen and it doesn't happen relatively quickly, there are a whole lot of dystopian models that we can easily imagine.

I'm going to put some wood behind that arrow, is that values, yes, first principles and values, and you've put them in your AI Ten Commandments or— You and Chatty did it. Moses did it in his way. And okay, so I think the values are quite clear universally for most people. I think that, that over the thousands of years that we've been thinking and writing things down and transforming from thoughts to words to actions, that I think we could collectively get pretty close. And you did a really nice job on it. Now, if you do not have, and I'll speak about you and me in this conversation, Yeah. the requisite, the required psychological skills to manage yourself in a high-stress, consequential environment, you will default to something other than those aspirational set of values, principles, and behaviors. We are required right now, in my mind, my best estimate is we are required to invest in our ability to be aware of our psychology, to be aware of our feelings and emotions, And have the skills to navigate those so that we can be honest. This is AI commandment number 3.

Yeah.

Tell the truth so that we can be honest in those environments and line up against the values. Most people sign off on the values and they're like, those are great. And then you put them in a really dangerous, seemingly or actually dangerous environment, and they will bend 8 out of 10 of those commandments. to survive. I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but that's not the design. The designer, here's the values. Now train yourself, whether I'm saying psychologically, train yourself to be about those. This is why I was so attracted to the Zen traditions and the samurai warriors, is that was their fundamental approach to life.

Yeah. So I completely agree. And that has to happen in a context that that everybody could do those things and should do those things. And I think it's essential, but I like to think of it as an inverted pyramid. And the individual is the bottom and making sure that we're doing it for ourselves and we're helping other people doing it. I mean, just like you with this podcast.

Exactly.

I mean, that's the mission of this is to share these skills and capabilities. But then those individual sensibilities need to filter upward. Into communities, and whether it's businesses or faith communities, into governments, into international, global. And all of these pieces need to be connected. The individual is the base of the point, I guess, of the inverted pyramid. And the unsexy word for all of this is governance. And it starts with the individual. So it's governance of the self. But if we don't have this systemic framework, we'll have these increasingly enlightened individuals needing to operate in increasingly dangerous and hostile environments, and that's going to be really difficult. And so that's why, in addition to translating these principles individually, we all need to think about, well, what are the systems that will make it easier for everybody to live these lives, for everybody to feel—

Yeah.

that we have an opportunity to, like we talked about before, to imagine a better future and to get from here to there individually, but with the societal and other supports that will make it easier and more possible.

Jamie, I love this conversation. I love how you're showing up in the world. Keep leading from the front. And thank you for the discerning, the honest, the thoughtful conversation evidenced by your body of work and the commitment you've made to be honest in your approach to life. So I love how you help me feel and think, and I think our community's going to eat up your book.

Well, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure and honor to be with you again. It's our 3rd time, but I'm an active listener to your podcast, and I always feel like I'm learning and I'm growing. And the reason why that is, is that you have this wonderful ability I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this conversation. It's like, God, Mike is my best friend. But I was just thinking, you're such a great listener. Oh, thank you. And you're adaptive. And I think that's, it's like, again, finding mastery. It's not mastery and it's not found mastery. It's the process of finding, and every person Yeah. Is trying to find it. And just like you said, if you're the greatest athlete in the world, the second you break the world record in the 100 meters, you're thinking, I wonder if I could go a little faster. And I think that's the great work that you're doing is that everybody doing everything, certainly ourselves included, has the ability to learn to say, well, what can I do more? What can I do better? How can I think about what I'm trying to do and best align my my life in pursuit of that.

Well said. Thank you. Thank you again. Thank you.

Next time on Finding Mastery, we examine what makes us motivated to act and why can that drive sometimes disappear? Dr. Mike sits down with Oxford neurologist and neuroscientist Dr. Masoud Husseini, author of Our Brains, Ourselves, to explore the surprising science of motivation. attention and dopamine, and what changes in the brain as we age, experience memory loss, or develop dementia that can teach us about who we really are. So join us Wednesday, September 16th at 9:00 AM Pacific, only on Finding Mastery.

All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com/newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors, and we take our recommendations seriously, and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com/sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore their potential.

Thanks, Dave.

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