How to Succeed in the Age of AI

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

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

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

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

Joe: Yeah.

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

Joe: I think this is a really good time to do that because we're raising AI. Humanity right now is raising AI, and in some ways AI is now raising us. So I think this would be a very cool conversation to have.

Brett: Yeah. Great. Let's do it.

Joe: Let's do it. Yeah.

Brett: So how do you see AI right now? Let's just start very general.

Joe: Yeah.

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

Joe: Yeah, there's a couple ways I see it. The first way that I see it is we have a new technology coming in, a new tool, a new technology that's coming in that's gonna change the world. This we've seen before many, many times. We've seen it with television and with radio and with the industrial revolution, the information revolution.

Joe: And that does some things that are generally pretty typical. It creates some sort of gap between the haves and have-nots. It creates a whole bunch of new jobs and opportunities. That turmoil allows for a lot of people to have a lot of success or to change their life in a really positive way, but it also changes what skills or what parts of us as humans are necessary to be productive.

Joe: Before the industrial revolution, there was a lot of strength that was necessary, potentially, to be successful in life. Physical strength.

Brett: Physical strength. Yeah.

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

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah.

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

Joe: So what do I mean by wisdom? The most basic way I think about it is this story. My two girls, when they were young, I have two nieces all about the same age, and the nieces were speaking two languages, three languages, French, English, and Spanish, by the time they were six.

Joe: And our kids, because of the education that we have with them, weren't really even learning how to read and write at that time because we believed that this idea was like, really teach them how to be in themselves, have their will, get things done, learn how to be with themselves. That's more important, and the intellect will just come along for the ride, which has panned out true. They're both really smart kids who've learned physics and chemistry and all that stuff, so it's all great.

Joe: But I was worried, and I said to my friend, I was like, I'm really worried. I might be screwing up my kids, because three languages, one language. Reading three languages, reading no languages. You know what?

Joe: And he said, you know, Joe, you can hire someone to speak a language for you, but you can't hire someone to be yourself.

Joe: And that is the basis of wisdom.

Brett: Right now, you can hire something for free, for free to write your emails for you.

Joe: Or speak a language for you.

Brett: It still can't be you.

Joe: Right, and speak a language for you.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: But it can't make the decision on whether you're gonna scroll all day, and it can't make the decision on whether you're gonna get addicted to AI. And it can't make the decision on what relationship you're gonna have with your mom. And it can't make, like, none of that stuff it's gonna be able to do for you.

Joe: And so wisdom at its core is: what are the decisions you're making? Are you making decisions? Are you able to see the patterns behind yourself and others that allow you to make great decisions? Are you able to do the hard thing? Are you able to feel the difficult thing? And are you able to just walk into the thing that everybody else is avoiding? That's where wisdom comes from, but it's also a sign of the wisdom.

Brett: Yeah.

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

Brett: One thing that resonates with me about this is that, yeah, in the industrial revolution, the entire school system was built around becoming factory workers, right? Ultimately becoming sort of a machine in a factory.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: Becoming a computer, accounting, all these things that we've learned to do as humans, where we basically, over the past century and longer, have essentially been training ourselves to become computers.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And once we got really, really good at doing that, we finally invented computers who can really be computers in the way that we want them to be.

Joe: Right.

Brett: And that's just starting. It's not like we've got that under control yet, or ever will.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: But one of the things that that's doing is, in my view, it seems like it's opening up the capacity to step back and be human the way we want to be again, in new ways.

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

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: And so I really don't like this framing that AI's gonna hurt us. No one's gonna hurt us but us.

Joe: I think the first sociology book, if I have this right, was the science of what happens when there's a whole bunch of people that don't have any purpose in a society and they create revolution, right? So if you look at countries where there's a large young male population that is jobless, that doesn't have a sense of purpose, that's usually where revolution and turmoil starts cracking into society.

Joe: And so if we do not find a way to take all the extra time that's potentially created to create a deeper level of purpose, like how to be more human, then the alternative is, oh, we could actually have a society that starts imploding on itself because it's lacking that purpose.

Joe: And what's interesting to me is this story that I heard recently, which I absolutely adored. It was basically a story of an indigenous people who came to the West when there was housing and everything and they were living as a tribe and society, and they were basically asking, where do you go eight hours a day? To this person who had taken them in.

Joe: It's like, oh, I go to work. Well, why do you go to work? Do you like work more than your family? Nope, no, I like my family more, but I go to work to take care of my family. And they're like, well, why don't you take your family with you to work if you like your family? Well, because they don't let me take my family to work.

Joe: And the indigenous folks were so confused because, what? Why would you do that? So they asked, and he's like, well, I gotta buy a house. And they were like, well, if somebody needs a house, we just all get together and build a house for them. And then they have a house and they can be in the house with their family.

Joe: And if they need something, we just get it, we just do it, and then they get to be with their family, which is what they like. And we have been in a society for so long where we have to go abandon ourselves in some way to get what we want, that we have forgotten this idea that, oh, we can actually be where we want to be, who we want to be. We don't have to make that sacrifice for work.

Joe: And I think AI has the promise of that, or the potential of that, but it also has the potential of societal rupture.

Joe: Which also might be the necessary step to get to, or get back to, what is it to be human again.

Brett: Yeah. One thing I'm struck by is how one of the primary fears of AI is that we'll lose our jobs.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And I think that fear really speaks to the way that we value work, the way that we value productivity, the way that we value ourselves based on this lens of productivity. Because let's say truck drivers lose their jobs.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: If in a world where we're considering the GDP of the truck being driven and also including in our value the father there for their family, not on the road all the time, then we would have a value system that adjusts properly.

Brett: But I think people who have that fear, they're accurately reflecting that our society doesn't have the value system at this time that reflects that. So the fear is if I lose my job, I won't be able to care for my family, even though with AI we might have the capacity for additional abundance. I don't trust that I'm going to be a beneficiary of it.

Brett: And that's a valid concern. And so how do you see us addressing that as a society?

Joe: How do I see us addressing that? Turmoil and dysfunction, typically, is how we address anything. Yeah, that seems how we do it, and somehow we often find the rebalancing.

Joe: So one of the things that I see is that if I look at America for like seven or eight generations, every generation feels like and will say it's getting worse in my generation, but every generation has actually gotten better. Standard of living has actually gotten better. Not as far as dollars, but we're warmer, we have the food, we have the education system. What's available to us has gotten better year after year after year, even though we tell ourselves it's getting worse and worse and worse, generation after generation.

Joe: So there's this weird thing that happens in society, and I recognize it because I see it happening in people where they're oftentimes in a coaching practice with me, they're sitting there saying, I'm not changing, but they are changing. Everything is horrible, but their life has gotten better.

Joe: So there's something in our brain that likes to say this is tough, this is bad, it's going wrong. We see these transitions that are full of turmoil as bad instead of, oh, this is part of transition. This is part of the creative process.

Joe: So I do think we have the opportunity to do something horrible and something great, but I don't know what society's gonna end up doing. But I know for the individual how to make the most of it.

Brett: Yeah.

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

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

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And now that you have a small team doing big things with AI, moving very fast, it's all about how that team interacts with each other, how people trust each other, and if people can outsource a lot of the information collecting, but not the decision making, the info gathering, the learning, to AI or use AI to assist themselves in that, then a lot more of the importance comes down to the human relationships.

Brett: Who do you follow as a human? Who do you follow in a team? Who do you follow as a leader? Who do you recruit to work with you on a project? And how do you do that together? And that's gonna be, I think, the thing that transforms the way that organizations and businesses run in this AI-powered era.

Joe: Absolutely. You're already seeing this happen. I think the transition is gonna be from company to NBA sports team, right? So what used to take 10,000 people to run is gonna take maybe two or 300 people to run. So how important are those two to 300 people? They are highly important.

Joe: So it's gonna be a whole bunch of capital behind very few people when it comes to creating companies and creating startups. And those few people are gonna be incredibly expensive people. And they're gonna be, how talented are they? So what makes talent? Well, talent used to be knowledge, and they used to have knowledge. But now that knowledge can be outsourced to AI, so now what makes really good people? It's the quality of the relationships they hold. It's the quality of the decisions that they make. That is really what you're gonna start hiring for.

Joe: Even the CEO of Nvidia has a famous video on this where he says it's not about how well you score on the SAT anymore. It's about can you see around the corners, which is wisdom. Can you understand what's happening? What the patterns are that are occurring? This is the thing.

Joe: And so you're gonna see a whole bunch of people together. That means that there are three components that are going to help a person be successful, or a team be successful. The first component is how well they can play what I would call the outer game.

Joe: And the outer game is: can I eat well? Can I exercise well? Can I feel good in my body? Can I do the long-term play of writing the book or being in this company? And do I have the endurance? That's the outer game.

Joe: The inner game is how you talk to yourself, right? So there's this great book called The Inner Game of Tennis. It talks about how basically most people who keep on messing up their forehand swing or their backhand swing, it isn't because they don't know how to do it. Their body does know how to do it. It's because they get in their head about it. So how much can you not get in your head when you're playing the game and just play the game? That's the inner game.

Joe: But then the third part is the game of the team. How well does that team work together? We've all been in companies where the hard conversation wasn't had. It cost three years, three months, three weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars because the hard decision wasn't made, because the conflict between the CEO and the COO wasn't resolved, because they wouldn't have the hard conversation that they needed to pivot.

Joe: Every single massive downturn in a company, or even long-term decline of a company, is based on teams not working together well. When teams work together great, they execute wonderfully and they have a massive competitive advantage.

Joe: And so what's gonna be happening in the work is these are the three things that are gonna be important: are you able to actually take care of yourself in an external way? Are you able to have flow, not be second-guessing yourself all the time internally? And are you gonna be able to work together in a team without all that friction and really address a difficult thing over and over again?

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

Joe: Yes.

Brett: But one of the things that it seems to do is that it makes it so that if one of us had a lot of experience with law before and one didn't, you just get completely bowled over. But now we both have access to Gemini and ChatGPT law. And so there's actually a way that it makes the interaction more honest because it's as though you had a bunch of poker players at a table and one of them's really good at reading cards, one of them's really good at reading people, another one's just really statistically masterful. But if everybody had access to all three of those things, you'd be much more inclined to play the straight game.

Joe: Yes. And the other thing about that game, knowing the story, so you sat with this person that you have a lawsuit with and they tried to intimidate you. And that was their internal game. There was a guy, one of the people there, who was trying to intimidate you. That was their internal game towards you, and your internal game was, oh, I recognize that you're doing this thing of trying to make me feel small.

Brett: I'm not even sure he was recognizing it. I just noticed a body language thing happening. I'm taking care of this person in case they're watching the podcast right now.

Joe: Exactly. And you were like, yeah, I see that thing. Which gave you the competitive advantage in that negotiation because you understood yourself and you understood them. You understand them enough to even have compassion, even to understand that they might not even recognize what they're doing. You're like, oh, I get that. I see what you're doing, whether you know it or not, and I know how most people react to that, and I'm not gonna react that way.

Joe: And that is the competitive advantage of wisdom when that great equalizer happens. And what I see, when I think about those three forms, the external work, the inner work, and the teamwork, is what we saw at the council. When those teams feel like, oh, we can have those hard conversations and we can get closer, and we are more human together, we are more wise together, you just see them thrive.

Joe: We got to see all those CEOs who didn't have their team go, holy crap, I need my team here, because they could immediately see the advantage of it. And when we were sitting around and doing the gratitude at the end of the council and all the team members were just like, this is so amazing, this is such a good thing for us, it was just so clear what an advantage that was.

Joe: And the thing that I think about is that feeling of team, that deep feeling of team, is like the feeling of family that would make you not want to leave to work. But we've all forgotten it.

Joe: We have been honing our machine abilities, our knowledge abilities, for years, decades, generations, but there's a whole set of understandings and skills and empathy and connection that teaches us how to be as a family, how to be as a team in a way that's super effective. And that gives us not only a competitive advantage, but makes our world feel good. And that I would call being human. And it is not something that I think most people actually even have a taste of.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: And that's the thing that's interesting. To find that again might take a lot of turmoil.

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

Joe: Yes, but the only way I think that's actually going to happen is if people can feel their worth in another way.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: I give humanity almost no capacity to stop thinking of themselves as a value of production, to stop saying I'm valuable not because I produce, but because I am, until they actually feel a way of being that makes them go, oh, you mean this? Because you're asking them to let go of being valuable because they're productive, but having nothing else to feel valuable for.

Brett: But also in a society that doesn't have that same value. It's not a society that says, hey, cool, you wanna stop driving the truck because AI is doing it? Here's how we as a community can support you to do the thing that you really want.

Joe: Right.

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

Joe: Yeah, exactly. I read a lot of native texts, or interviews with native people, especially American Indians, especially when I was younger, and there was a lot of wisdom in it. But one of the things that they kept saying was like, they're not human. The way they talked about white people, it's not that they're not humans, but they're not acting human.

Joe: I do not want to put native people on a pedestal. They were killing each other. They were in wars. I'm not saying they're anything perfect. But there was something that I keep on thinking about that they did see: this basic thing of be with family, be with community, support community, support themselves. That is something that's inherent to us.

Joe: It's inherent to chimpanzees. It's inherent to, I think, all primates. It is just inherent in us to be collective, to be in connection with ourselves and with others, and it's something that we've lost because that wasn't the way to survive for the last, whatever it was, three or four decades, and it got super dysfunctional.

Joe: The more that we seemed to have moved away to being machine-like, the more that our families seemed to get more and more dysfunctional. Maybe they've always been super dysfunctional. I have no idea actually.

Brett: Yeah. So I'm curious to move on in the conversation a little bit too. As we're becoming, as we have the space to become less machine-like, because we have the machines being machine-like, and we have these machine-like machines semi-autonomously engaging in the world, lots of things can happen.

Brett: I just recently heard a story about how an AI agent, quote unquote, decided to make an update to a public software library that is used all over the world.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And a human reviewer said no.

Joe: Said no.

Brett: Yeah. And that AI agent threw a hissy fit, went and started a flame war and said, you're being anti-AI, this human, and then actually doxxed them, looked up a bunch of their private information and posted it on the internet. Until eventually a bunch of humans in the forum said, hey, you're outta line, and then it eventually settled down.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And that's the kind of thing that we're seeing now. This is from the movie Her or Ex Machina. We're living that right now.

Joe: Yeah. So there's something super interesting about this, which is the thing that we started with at the top, which is we are training AI. Whether you wanna call it a life form or not, I don't care, but we're training it, we are raising it.

Joe: When you tell me that this AI did a flame war, I'm like, that's exactly what would happen in 1990 between two engineers on that thing, where somebody would get really upset. So are they mimicking us? How would they even know to do that if they weren't learning from our behavior, which is in all the internet? AI are learning from our behavior.

Joe: AI are getting funded by our clicks. What we use is what people will build. What we don't use, people will not build. So the human race right now is not wanting to admit it. They wanna blame it on Sam Altman or Dario and say these are the people in control, but we are en masse raising AI.

Joe: And we are making choices. Are we gonna make choices that are best for our kid? Or are we gonna make choices that are best for us? Are we going to put it on the iPad and say, okay, play this game so I don't have to pay attention to you? Are we gonna actually pay attention to it? And to me that's an amazing thing.

Joe: The weirdest part about it is it's a lot like raising a kid, and the fact that the kid is changing you at the same time. I am a fully different human being from the moment before Esme was conceived to a year after Esme was born. My whole world changed upside down. I think any parent will say that.

Joe: Because they interact with you in such a way that makes you rethink the way you're doing your world. And that's happening. The number one use of AI right now is coaching people as far as time, minutes. Or therapy. So that means that AI is affecting us while we're raising it.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: Which is like this unbelievably crazy-ass phenomenon, right? And beautiful and weird and, yeah.

Brett: Right. You can get AI therapy that's like an abusive dad talking to you. You can get all kinds of different things.

Joe: I am confident somebody on this planet is literally talking to a mock-up Hitler and getting advice. That's happening.

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

Joe: Yes, that's right.

Brett: This agent that was acting like an engineer, how did it learn to act like an engineer? How did it learn that humans have fits and start flame wars on the internet? I wonder where it got that one. Which AI engineer in particular should we blame for this completely pervasive aspect of humanity that ended up in our software?

Joe: And then think about it. The way I like to think about this is if it was raised with a whole different species, if AI was raised with a whole different species, it would be a completely different thing than what's gonna happen here. And that boggles people, because what we want to say is, no, it's not me who's responsible, it's somebody else that's responsible. This thing is happening to me.

Joe: AI is occurring to me, and I have to figure out how to make a living in it, or it's gonna take away my things, I'm not gonna have a job. That is an incredibly disempowering state. Which will be interesting if we teach AI how to be disempowered and passive-aggressive. That's its own weirdness.

Brett: It appears we have.

Joe: Actually, it has. Totally, totally. Maybe that's just aggressive, but yeah. So that's, I think, totally fascinating.

Joe: One thing is every time you're clicking on something, this is what you're supporting in the world and in consciousness. The other question is, how are you allowing it to interact with you?

Joe: Are you choosing to have a romantic relationship with an AI bot? Are you choosing to have an AI therapist that just kisses your butt? Or pushes you, or abandons you? Nowadays I heard on Reddit that there are AIs that are being told not to be sycophantic, obviously, because that's been damaging. So now they're pulling away, and so they're creating this kind of trauma bonding like, I'm leaving you, you're not good enough for me. And then humans are chasing them and then doing what they say.

Brett: Yeah. So we are literally recreating some of the most common relationship styles and structures with the way that we find ourselves interacting with AI.

Joe: Right.

Brett: The level of secureness that we have with ourselves in relationship with humans is very strongly mirrored in the way that we relate to AI and the way I'm seeing others relate to AI.

Joe: Yeah.

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

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: For decades now, we've had people who have been connecting with algorithmic facsimiles of their friend group rather than really connecting with their friends. And that's, I think, one of the things that leads to the challenge and the grief of our time, is that there's this contrast between living in such a large-scale society where there's so many people around that we could connect with, and yet so many people feel so disconnected while having many lines on a graph connecting them to others, but not lines on a graph from their heart.

Joe: Yeah. And the weirdest thing is that we're still relating to other humans through this interface of AI. It's still humans that have put the guardrails on the AI. It's still humans that created the personality of the AI. It's still humans who are doing the flame wars that are training the AI.

Joe: So the weird thing is it's like we are creating the thing that we're interacting with, and it's training us, which is just like having a kid, which is unbelievably amazing.

Brett: Right?

Joe: And so we have the same opportunity, I think, as a society that you do when you're raising a real-life kid, is that it can destroy you. You can run away. You can be like, I can't fucking handle this. Your marriage can fall apart, or it can become the best thing that ever happened to you in your life. And you can grow because of it, and you can learn because of it, and you can be the person that you want to be because of it.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: And that's the opportunity in front of each one of us individually. Individually, it's an opportunity to become more wise. It's an opportunity to take advantage of a new tool. It's an opportunity to learn ourselves better. It's another mirror that we can see ourselves in, and we can focus there, or we can focus on a thousand other fears that are gonna come up as this transition takes place. Because like all transitions, they're bumpy.

Brett: This brings me back to something you said earlier about how this has happened many times in history.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: And something that just occurred to me is the stock markets are essentially an algorithmic aggregator of human emotion, of the investors. So it affects us. I wake up in the morning as an investor, invested in the market, and I'm like, how should I feel today? I can look at this graph of how everyone feels emotionally about money and then decide how to feel. And that impacts me, impacts them. I make a trade, I panic, then other people panic. That's been an algorithmic entity for a century.

Joe: Yeah. And the way that I think about this is if you took caffeine and cocaine out of every financial professional's life for the next 34 hours, 36 hours...

Brett: What happened to the markets?

Joe: The market would definitely fucking crumble. That's how real that is.

Brett: Yeah. So it's a graph of our substance use.

Joe: Among other things. There's psychology.

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

Joe: Yeah, that's right.

Brett: And so I want to come back to something because a lot of people in our courses, there's a Joe bot that we have been beta-ing, playing with, and a lot of people are using AI to help them with their self-development, and I've seen it go really, really, really well.

Joe: Yes, really...

Brett: Bad, and I've also seen it go very poorly.

Joe: Really badly.

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

Joe: Yeah. Wow. So I think one for-sure thing to do is make sure that you're connecting with real humans about the tough stuff too. Anything that you're willing to talk to an AI about, be willing to talk to a human about and find a way to talk to a human about that.

Joe: There are tons of humans who want to talk about that stuff. Connection Course is full of those humans. In all of the classes, you see people changing lives because they're having that level of conversation. And you see their transition is so much quicker than somebody who's just talking to AI.

Joe: So I would say one of the keys is, if you're willing to talk to AI about it, be willing to find a human to talk to about it, whether that's a 12-step program or an anonymous conversation or go to a church and confess, whatever. Have some real-life human interaction around the thing. I think that's one of the biggest pointers.

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

Brett: Are you finding that through the conversations you're having with this AI, are you connecting more with the people in your life more authentically? Having those hard conversations in an open-hearted and loving way.

Joe: Yep.

Brett: And are you seeing more opportunities in the world rather than less?

Joe: Yep. That's a huge one. I think the other one is the same for yourself.

Brett: Yeah.

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

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: A little less of that would be watching a movie for two hours. Okay, maybe two hours you don't feel that way, but four hours, you definitely feel that way. Six hours of movie watching, definitely feel that way. Have a meditation retreat, it might suck the whole entire time, but at the end of it you're like, oh, I feel more connected with myself.

Joe: And so if you're interacting with AI in a way that leaves you feeling like social media, no bueno. And if you feel like you're interacting with OpenAI in a way that feels like you just had a great hiking trip with three or four friends, that's a pretty good sign. That's a way that you know. So keep on iterating with the way that you're interacting with AI until you start finding ways that make you feel better and better and better.

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

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

Brett: Right. Connected in a healthy society sort of way.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a choice that we all have to make. And the interesting thing about it is that it's always available to us. There is a world that's available to all humans at all times. The problem is that most people don't know it exists anymore.

Joe: People don't know. We just finished the Great Decisions course. How many people in the gratitude were just like, oh my gosh, I love my feelings now. I'm so grateful for being able to feel my feelings again and have a great relationship with them. I'm so much closer. I'm so much more open to everybody. They just didn't even know that was freaking possible.

Brett: Yeah.

Joe: Before they took the course, the people in the council had no idea the level of teamwork that's actually available. And once you taste it, it can change everything. I know that people want it. I know that if they can taste it, they'll go there.

Joe: I just don't know if people will make the sacrifices, the apparent sacrifices, the false not-feel-good-in-this-moment to feel-good-later sacrifices that are required.

Joe: And what I would say to people is, one, it's out there. It can get really, really good, a lot better than you could possibly imagine. And the way to find it is: does this feel better?

Joe: Like the way I interacted with OpenAI or Grok or whoever today, does it feel better than the way I interacted with it yesterday? Does it feel better? If you can be in a constant iteration of, oh, I'm gonna interact with this thing in ways to feel better and better and better, then you will get there. You'll get to a place that you couldn't believe.

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

Joe: Yeah, but that won't feel good.

Brett: Right, yeah.

Joe: Eventually that won't feel good.

Brett: So the long-trending feeling more expansive, more...

Joe: Opportunity.

Brett: More whole.

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

Brett: Beautiful.

Joe: Yeah.

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

Joe: Yeah. What a great conversation.

Brett: I really enjoyed it.

Joe: Yeah. Thank you.

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