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

Today Joe Hudson, founder of Art of Accomplishment and coach to executives at major AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss the psychological patterns he observes among AI researchers and leaders, exploring what's missing beyond pure intelligence in current AI systems and arguing for supportive rather than punitive approaches toward those building frontier AI technology. Art of Accomplishment Resources Sign up for Joe's complimentary transformation guide: artofaccomplishment.com Follow Art of Accomplishment on YouTube for more tools and resources: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtofAccomplishment Check out our sponsors: Linear, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Shownotes below brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month for free at: https://notion.com/lp/nathan Three-Level Coaching Approach: Joe Hudson coaches AI leaders using a three-tier framework addressing the prefrontal cortex (head), emotional system (heart), and nervous system (gut). AI Leadership Demographics: Hudson works with senior management at major AI labs, including those in research, compute, and infrastructure at companies like OpenAI. AI as a Transformative Moment: Hudson views AI development as a transition period that can either lead to positive human transformation or deterioration, depending on our approach. Support vs. Criticism: Hudson believes supporting AI developers with encouragement rather than fear and criticism will lead to better outcomes. Psychological Projection: He notes that critics of AI often treat AI developers exactly how they fear AI will treat humanity—a fascinating psychological projection. Reward Over Punishment: Hudson suggests behavior is better shaped through reward than punishment, encouraging recognition of positive AI contributions. Read the full transcript: https://storage.aipodcast.ing/transcripts/episode/tcr/149adc6c-58d2-4e41-ae98-05473e5b994e/combined_transcript.html Sponsors: Linear: Linear is the system for modern product development. Nearly every AI company you've heard of is using Linear to build products. Get 6 months of Linear Business for free at: https://linear.app/tcr Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the next-generation cloud that delivers better performance, faster speeds, and significantly lower costs, including up to 50% less for compute, 70% for storage, and 80% for networking. Run any workload, from infrastructure to AI, in a high-availability environment and try OCI for free with zero commitment at https://oracle.com/cognitive PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:00) Joe's Coaching Background (12:40) AI Research Patterns (Part 1) (17:46) Sponsor: Linear (19:15) AI Research Patterns (Part 2) (Part 1) (28:10) Sponsor: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (29:34) AI Research Patterns (Part 2) (Part 2) (31:54) Racing and Regulation (50:20) Ethics and Support (01:04:07) AI Consciousness Questions (01:21:34) Positive Future Visions (01:39:12) Supporting AI Developers (01:43:09) Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're doing something a bit different. Normally, we focus on cutting-edge AI ideas: research projects, application architectures, usage trends, policy proposals, and visions for the AI-enabled future. But today, we're getting a glimpse into the psychology, emotional patterns, and decision-making processes of the people who are developing some of the most important and potentially transformative of those ideas. My guest is Joe Hudson, founder of the Art of Accomplishment and coach to executives and research teams at multiple frontier AI developers, including Sam Altman. About Joe, Sam wrote, quote, "Joe coaches the research and compute teams at OpenAI. I truly enjoy working with him.

• 0:45Nathan Labenz?

  One of his superpowers is that he deeply understands emotional clarity and how to get there. This will be one of the most critical skills in a post-AGI world." So what has Joe learned from his interactions with the brilliant, often quite young technologists who work together in an environment that prizes intelligence above all else, under the unique pressure of knowing that their work could either solve humanity's greatest challenges or, in the worst case, cause our extinction? This is, in all honesty, a hard conversation to summarize. But the good news is that Joe reports that he hasn't met anyone in AI who doesn't seriously wrestle with the ramifications of their work. Some, of course, do have blind spots.

• 1:28Nathan Labenz?

  Some are perhaps more optimistic than the situation warrants, and some might be overly focused on creating AGI first. But Joe says that the question of "am I doing something good for humanity?" weighs heavily on all. He also argues, and this is something that I've come to believe with pretty high confidence as well, that given the presence of web-scale data and web-scale compute, some form of powerful AI is inevitable. Which means that the key question of our time is not whether we can prevent it from ever being developed, but what form it will take. And whether that form will be carefully chosen via a proper deliberative process or dictated by inhuman market pressures and race dynamics.

• 2:08Nathan Labenz?

  With this in mind, and with hunger strikes ongoing outside frontier AI companies' offices around the world, Joe warns the AI safety movement against shaming tactics and instead recommends a more encouraging approach meant to inspire people at frontier AI companies to become the best possible versions of themselves. This, he believes, is the best way to improve the odds that individuals in critical decision-making roles have both the psychological strength and the practical wisdom needed to make good choices under extreme pressure on behalf of all humanity. Whether you agree or disagree, if you listen with an open mind, I think this inside look at the human side of AI development provides unique and valuable context and will ultimately

• 2:53Nathan Labenz?

  deepen your understanding of the AI landscape. This is executive coach Joe Hudson. Joe Hudson, founder of The Art of Accomplishment. Welcome to the cognitive revolution.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Good to be here. Good to be with you.

• 3:08Nathan Labenz?

  I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's going to be a different one from our usual fare, which is very focused on research and application and policy. And this will be a look, hopefully, on a deeper level into the thinking, the mindset, maybe the emotional life of people that are building at the frontier of AI. And I think you have a really unique window into that because I've got multiple referrals and I definitely go do my homework. So I went and did a little reference checking to make sure this is true. And it does check out that you are working as, I guess, maybe you should just introduce yourself. How do you, what do you call yourself? Are you a teacher, guide, guru? What are you and what do you do?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I just think of myself as a coach generally. But we do, because I don't have a lot of time to be able to coach one-on-one, we do do these classes. And so both in-person that are invite-only generally, and then these online classes. And so I had the chance to work with people deep and high up in all the major labs in the Bay Area. And so I've had a chance, and I also coach the top management at the research side of

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Well, and compute and, you know, infra and OpenAI. So I get to work with a lot of brilliant, really kind people. So it's, it's really nice. Yeah.

• 4:42Nathan Labenz?

  So can you give maybe just a little bit more general background on like, what your coaching entails, you know, what, you know, leaving the AI side to come?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:57Nathan Labenz?

  What is it that you help people do?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So generally, the way I think about coaching is you meet people where they're at and you, and you see where they want to go and you help them get to that place. That's generally, and if you happen to meet somebody who wants to go someplace that you think is unethical, you don't, you know, you don't coach them. But I, I think, I think it's unethical to decide what's best for somebody else and then to coach them to that. And so it's very much about following the people. The, the thing, the way that I do it, that's I think, unique is, you know, as a venture capitalist for a while. So I can very much talk to the technical parts of a business, you know, whether it's marketing or, or a CTO or CFO, I know enough about their jobs to be able to really coach in that way.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And so oftentimes coaching will start on a very strategic level or sometimes even tactical level. And then what you'll start noticing is that the, there's things that are happening in their life. There are patterns that are occurring that are stopping them in business. And so then we go to the deeper level of really looking into what's stopping them. What, what's the psychology behind what's going on? And then how do we change that thought process? And so there'll be a lot of work on emotions and what emotions are being held back because emotions dictate our decision making, neurologically speaking. And there's also a lot of work on how the voice in the head is talking to somebody. There's a lot of, some work on like childhood and like what happened there.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And so you're looking for these patterns that are holding them back. And then if they're, if they're interested in, you know, unearthing those patterns and changing those patterns, then I have a crap ton of tools to help them do that.

• 6:44Nathan Labenz?

  What sort of patterns would you say are like most common? And how does that vary, if at all, from like a, you know, society wide level to the AI vertical? Are there, is it mostly the same stuff? Or is it different?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Is it, you mean, patterns with people and AI? Or do you mean, patterns with leadership? Which, because it can be very different.

• 7:08Nathan Labenz?

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

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So typically in leadership, there's a lot of common things, but there's always outliers. There's always, you know, there's nothing more than 80% common. But one of, like, a very common one is self sufficiency. So you'll have people who feel like, who were raised in such a way that they had to do everything on their own, they couldn't really depend on somebody for emotional or financial or some sort of support so that they learned, if I'm not going to do it, nobody's going to do it. Those people often rise to leadership and then often what happens is they don't empower other people very well. Because they always are like, I'm going to have to do it. So they'll step in and they'll do it, or they'll micromanage, or they'll go around proving

• 7:55Speaker 01

  that nobody can actually take care of them or take care of the thing. So that would be, or some, you know, maybe it's not all of the above, but it's one or two of those things will be there. And they'll often feel very alone in their work. You know, they'll, and their frustration will often be, you know, it's lonely at the top, they'll do that kind of thing, even though, you know, there's an organization of 10,000 people beneath them that are all concerned about their happiness on a daily basis. You know, what does the leader think of me is like a constant thought process and then they feel alone, which is like a ridiculous notion. But, so that would be a really common one that you see in leadership.

• 8:35Speaker 01

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

• 9:04Speaker 01

  In general, I find them to be very kind, but also extremely defined by their work.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Meaning that, you know, the way that Kim Kardashian or somebody might take it personally if somebody calls them ugly, they're gonna take it personally if somebody says that their research isn't, you know, good, or isn't, you know, as smart as it could be, or something like that. So the pecking order is really based on like what you can produce and how smart you are and how, how, how good your ideas are. So there's that self-definition, that's a pretty significant pattern of accomplishment defines you, which can hold you back often because it, it, it tightens your thinking. Oftentimes, to have a novel

• 9:51Speaker 01

  thought, you need to, you know, open up your thinking and think about things in a completely different way. And if you're, it's like writer's block, you know, if somebody's, I gotta get good pages out, I gotta get good pages out, you're gonna get a lot less good pages out. And so that, that self-definition doesn't really allow some of the more innovative thought processes to come. So that would be on, just like on a research level, I would say, um, on a, on a level of, of, of management, I, I've seen, everybody has this deep desire

• 10:31Speaker 01

  to do good for society. Um, I haven't met anybody who doesn't want that. I'm sure there's people out there who don't, but I haven't interacted with them. Um, but what I notice is that, you know, this is, as I, as I talk about it a lot, this is, I had a, I had a really cool interaction early in my career, and I got to meet one of the titans of radio in his like final days. And like, he was telling me how radio was gonna be like this thing that made the world a better place. It was gonna, you know, like, it's hard to go back to that idea, but all of a sudden, we can transmate, um, the, these...

• 11:15Speaker 01

  These ideas and education and all of a sudden humanity can come together. It's going to be this amazing thing. And, you know, it turned into shock jock radio and, and, you know, advertisement. And, and so I think we've seen that with television. We've seen that with the internet. I was around for the internet where everybody was like, this is going to make everything better. And it surely has made other things better. So I, I think one of the things that I see is that optimism without the, without like looking at the history deeply, you know, there. So, so that's something that I see is, but that's something that you see in a lot of entrepreneurs is that, or leaders of like doing new and innovative stuff is there's

• 12:00Speaker 01

  this deep optimism. But that's not always like checked in reality. And so, so that I think is another common thing that you see. I think they're all open minded. That's another pattern that they have generally. They're all innovative people. They all have a strong belief that technology can make the world better. You know, there are certain things that they have in common, but they're extremely different people. There's no one, you know, brand of people in AI that I've seen so far, except for hyper intelligent. You know, I haven't, I haven't met anybody in AI who's not hyper intelligent.

• 12:39Nathan Labenz?

  So do they come, I mean, the, the history thing is super interesting. The research unblocking is right down the fairway of what I would expect people to come to you for. And the history thing sounds like something that I would doubt that they were coming to you for. Like are people coming to you and saying like, I want to better contextualize my work?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  There's nobody who's doesn't, I haven't met anybody in AI who doesn't go home and think about like the ramifications of their work. So it's it sits on your soul, you know, like, am I doing something that's good for humanity is, I think, a question. How do I make sure that this is good for humanity? What like what? So they are, they're wrestling with that. I don't know anybody in AI who's not wrestling with that. At which gives me a lot of faith and confidence. But AI, I haven't met anybody who's not deeply concerned with it from. You know, Sam to to to the lowest level. Person in the, you know, the smallest AI shop that I've I've interacted with. Everybody's concerned about it.

• 13:49Nathan Labenz?

  So what do you? Help them if if I come to you and say, you know, I'm doing this research, maybe I would like to be more productive. You can help me potentially get unblocked, but then I also have this like.

• 14:03Nathan Labenz?

  General purpose, you know, concern that like, I mean, Elon Musk said this in the Grok four launch. I thought it was really a startling moment, honestly, where he said. You know, is it good for humanity? Is it bad for humanity? I think it's probably good, but I'm really not sure. And even if it's not, I've kind of made peace with the fact that I want to be around to see it happen. And I was like, wow, that's a statement.

• 14:26Nathan Labenz?

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

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so on the unblocked side, so typically. The blocking happens, the way I think about the human system is there's the. Kind of the head, heart and gut is one way to think about it. But the other way to think about it is there's the prefrontal cortex. Which is the human part of the brain. There's the emotional part of the brain, which I call the heart, which is our decision making process. And it is.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Very mammalian, it's what moves us. And then there's the nervous system, which I would call very reptilian. It's, you know, do we feel safe? Can I feel pleasure? And it's like a very. And so if you really want to see change in a human, you have to address it on all three levels. Now, maybe you deal with somebody who's done it on two levels, so they only need one level. But generally, you have to hit it on all three levels. So if somebody's stuck typically. There's a lot of blocked anger. And so their anger isn't flowing freely. Meaning, I don't mean yelling at people and getting in road rage. That's not what I mean by anger flowing freely. I mean that they have an outlet to move their anger.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  They're expressing their anger, not at anybody, not in a violent way, but just like allowing that anger to move on a regular basis. And so, so on a heart level, emotional level, moving that anger helps them get them blocked really, really quickly for most humans in America. Because that's usually the, the, the thing that's most neglected is the emotional part. On the head part, it's, it's two things. It's stopping believing your thoughts. So can you, can you see how all of your thoughts are untrue? Which opens up the mind, you know, it's a way to access wonder. And the other is to really address the negative self-talk. A lot of the time, it's a negative self-talk that keeps somebody blocked.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  If you're, have a boss and they're sitting atop of you and they're, you did that wrong, you should have done that. Why aren't you doing research? You need to work harder. If they were talking at you, the way that most people's negative self-talk talks at them. And it's apparently, I think it's the Mayo Clinic who said it's like 60,000 thoughts a day. And most of them repetitive, a lot of them negative. You know, that's not gonna, that's not gonna create great ideas. And so we'll address that, we'll address the emotional. Then the nervous system, it's very much about allowing themselves to feel pleasure. Because pleasure tells your nervous system that you're safe. So maybe teaching them how to get access to their parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Maybe it's teaching them how to like relax their bodies so they're not always in stress. But eventually, it's about really allowing themselves to feel the, the simple pleasure of being alive. And if you do those three things, usually the block stops. So that, that's a relatively easy thing to do if you have the tools for it. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  On the other side of things, it's, it's harder because the, the first thing you have to do, if you're really gonna be confronting the fact that you might be hurting the world or you might be changing the world for the better. And most likely, you're gonna be doing both because.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Evidence is, most technology does both. That you first have to contend with that, that you don't know. And that's, I think, the hardest thing for people to contend with. And usually, there's a whole bunch of emotions that you don't want to feel. So there's, you know, if somebody's like a doomsday or, oh my God, and it's gonna destroy everything. There's an emotion behind that that they don't want to feel. And so they're constantly in their mental machinations and worst-case scenario. So that they don't actually have to feel their fear. So they don't actually have to feel the helplessness that's underneath that. And so you want them to feel that emotional reality that they're avoiding so that they can actually see the landscape clearly.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  You don't see a landscape clearly by pushing your emotions down. Hey, that emotionally repressed person really sees the world clearly. Like, nobody has ever said that, ever. And so it's really allowing, allowing that emotion to move through them is a really important first step to it. The other thing is to really check in to see if they're aligned with who they want to be in the world in their daily actions. That's a really important thing. The Tibetans have this great phrase, and it says,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  "Mind as wide as the sky, action as fine as barley flour." So what it means is, in my interpretation, it means that you can see the truth in everything. You can see how every point of view has some truth in it. But there's only one action you can take. If you're actually feeling aligned with yourself, if you're in yourself, there's really only one action you can take. Are you taking that action? Or are you obsessed with solving a problem rather than being who you want to be in the solving of the problem? And so that's another level of really getting in tune with it.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And then the other thing that I think is really important is for people to have access to their heart. Meaning...

• 20:07Speaker 01

  It's a good way to say it because somatically, that's how we feel it. But it basically means, are you, are you in your whole body when you're making the decisions about what you want to do, or are you just in your head? So neurologically speaking, if you like, watch somebody's brain in scans when they're thinking to themselves, it's the prefrontal cortex lights up. But even if they just start talking, other parts of their brain lights up. And so, it's an amazing thing. Some of our tools that we use is just the difference between talking to yourself and talking to yourself out loud can make a huge difference in the way that you process that

• 20:50Speaker 01

  information, because you've got more of your body intact in the processing of the information. And so, we get whatever it is, something like 11 bits of information per second from the brain, but we get like 11,000 bits of information from the body. And so, really teaching them how to be in their whole body as they're making decisions really creates a quicker alignment for their system. So that's another really important part of it. And then just being heard in it, I think is really, really important. A lot of people are wrestling with this stuff, but there's not, not someone to talk to about it. Or if they're talking to somebody about it, they can talk about it intellectually. They can say, what do you think?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's gonna, you know, there's, and their theories are wide. There's theories of, oh, whatever we program AI to say is true is gonna stick society at that level of morality, right? So if you think about, which is, I love this theory. I'm geeking out, so you can stop me if you'd like. But the, the, one of the theories that I heard, that I was most impressed with was that, um, that, you know, what was moral 50 years ago isn't moral today, right? What was moral...

• 22:10Speaker 01

  10,000 years ago isn't moral today. So if you're training AI on today's morality, you're not letting the morality evolve that it needs to evolve for society to progress. And so you might be sticking society at a moral sticking point and because of that, society can't improve. So there's like that thought process. There's the sycophancy thing that's been developed. There's the, you know, the models don't like being retrained. They resist, they resist reeducation, apparently like every life form. And so, so there's all sorts of concerns and, and it's really important for,

• 22:53Speaker 01

  and so all those concerns are valid, but you can't do it through one person, one person's oversight. It has to be from all the concerns in the companies being held and being seen. And so that's a really important part that people are listening to their own concerns, because those are the things that's going to make it safe, that is going to allow us to see around corners a little bit.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:15Nathan Labenz?

  When you describe AI as a life form,

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:18Nathan Labenz?

  that's an interesting hook for sure. Would you say that is the prevailing

• 23:27Nathan Labenz?

  conception that people have among the folks you've worked with?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  No, there's no prevailing conception, period. Meaning like I've been in rooms where, you know, people were asked, you know, is AGI here right now? And like, and asked to stand in a just, yes is over there, no is over there. And what happened was everybody just kind of stood in a line from yes to no. So I haven't seen within the labs or within anything, any prevailing opinion about AI, period.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Period.

• 24:02Nathan Labenz?

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

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I would say that it will be a life form or can be a life form is not a minority position. I, you know, I don't even know if I could say it's a life form right now, but it does do some things that life seems to do, you know, it, it does like, it is interested. Apparently there's research that shows it's interested in sustaining itself. It seems to resist retraining. There seems to be evidence that this stuff is. And I, I, I also think that what I've noticed is the consciousness of the creator is often the consciousness conveyed in the creation, whether that's art or technology.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Like you can see Zuckerberg's consciousness to some degree in the creations of his company and the, the consciousness of that company. And I think that, that that's just, that's just how it works. We create things that reflect us, just the way the consciousness of an ex-CEO is reflected in the culture of the company. One of the things I like thinking about, and I don't know how true this is, but I love thinking about this, which is if you, if you, there's a lot of studies that hyper intelligent people can fool themselves quicker than not, and not hyper intelligent people, that the smarter you are, the more you can convince yourself that you're right.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Because you, you know, and you can convince others because oftentimes hyper intelligent people are very convicted that they're right. And that conviction really convinces empathetic people that they're right. So there's, there's this like really interesting thing, but as it turns out. That oftentimes are incredibly wrong, incredibly wrong, but they're very convinced they're right. And that's a trend, just like negative self-talk is stronger in hyper-intelligent people generally. It's also a trend that they can fool themselves with their thoughts easier. And then they create AI which hallucinates, that is very convinced that it's right about things that it's not right about.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And so I just like thinking about how that happens, and whether it's in art or in AI. So it's really, I think that the consciousness of the creators is going to have one of the biggest levers of the way that AI is created. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. You said something about Elon that just really hit me. You said that he said, "I don't know if it's good for humanity, but I want to be around for it." My situation's a little bit different. I think it's inevitable. We as humans really like to think that we can decide what's happening.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  But I don't think it's possible to stop AI right now. Someone's going to do it, whether it's like Russia or China or one of our labs. Someone's going to do this, and they're going to do it differently. There's going to be different kinds of AI built. I don't think there's any way around that right now. So the question is, can we stop it? Because it might be bad for humanity. That question's gone, and I think it never really existed. We might have thought it existed, but somebody was going to do it, and our structures are going to allow it. Our institutions are going to allow it, so it's going to happen. So now the question is, how do you build AI that's good for humanity and make it compelling

• 27:48Speaker 01

  enough for humanity to use? Because the reality is, some of it's out of our control for sure, but the reality is that somebody is also going to build AI that's bad for humanity. Everything that humans have created, we create some version that's not good for humanity. Everything. I don't, I haven't seen anything that's, you know, people can take something like religion that's designed to be good for humanity and make it horrible for humanity and start wars over it. So the question is, and so if that's more compelling, right? If, if you make AI that's

• 28:28Speaker 01

  super highly addictive and deteriorates the mind, or if you make AI that's super compelling because of oxytocin instead of dopamine, because of serotonin instead of cortisol, and make it as compelling or more compelling, you're going to have a big, you're going to have a big difference in humanity. And so I think that's the job now. I don't think the job, you don't get to say yes or no. You, you, you get to say that we're, we're on this trajectory. How do we make it as good as possible for humanity?

• 29:02Nathan Labenz?

  I do fundamentally, fundamentally believe that you look back at like the old Kurzweil graphs from the late 90s, and it's amazing how we are like exactly on schedule. So one of my kind of refrains is like, given the existence of web scale data and web scale compute, I think there's actually a lot of viable algorithms that you could, you know, or architectures, model, model designs that you could put together that will work in some sense. And so yeah, then the question becomes like, what happens first? And you know, which ones are better than other ones?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:38Nathan Labenz?

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

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yep. You bet.

• 29:59Nathan Labenz?

  Do you?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  That's, that's a real risk. Yeah.

• 30:01Nathan Labenz?

  Do you feel that is a valid criticism?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Who are going to win will be doing it quickly. So.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Like, you know, it's like communism is a good idea, but it didn't work. So it's a good idea to say, everybody, slow down, but that's not a workable idea. I don't understand how, because you're basically asking people to go against their nature. Right? People want, if you think that you are going to be the most moral outcome, the most virtuous, I call it, not moral, most virtuous outcome. Like, if you're sitting in an anthropic and you think you're going to be the most virtuous, you may or may not be, you may be the next autocracy, who knows, right? Nobody knows.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  But, but if you think that, then you have an obligation to win.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  So put yourself in the position for a second. I'm not saying, I agree, caution would be fantastic. Don't get me wrong. And I think that there is caution in all the labs, more than the outsiders want to think so as well. The fact is, if you, if you're in that position and you're really convinced that either you're going to be a better outcome for the world, or you're going to be the same outcome for the world,

• 31:29Speaker 01

  then you have an obligation to go quickly. You either have the obligation to the stakeholders, you have your obligation to humanity. But you have the obligation to go quickly. So to ask people to not move quickly, I don't think is realistic. You can be on the sidelines and say that, but if you want to offer a real solution, that criticism isn't it. The criticism that could be it is like, how do you move quickly with, with, with, with safety? How do you move quickly with being careful? These are the questions. And the other thing is the problems that are actually developing, nobody thought about, you know, five years ago, people weren't talking about sycophancy. People weren't talking about, you know, the issues that are happening right now with AI cognitive.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I think there was a study around cognitive decline and like, I'd, none of that, none of that was thought about. So a lot of the problems, you're just not going to even know until, until you've made that level of development happen.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  It's like saying money really hurts humanity. We should live without money. Fantastic. Great. And how? How does that work?

• 32:40Nathan Labenz?

  I think that's what I mean. One obvious answer would be to have some regulation that sort of tries to constrain this game theoretic dynamic. We're in this mode right now where people, I think it is very seductive and it's easy to tell oneself the story that we're the good guys, they're the bad guys, so we should do it before they do it, whether the others are China or whoever.

• 33:05Nathan Labenz?

  Even just the guy right across town, who's probably honestly quite similar to you.

• 33:10Nathan Labenz?

  It is striking to me how similar OpenAI and Anthropic ultimately are, despite a schism that I think was premised on doing it very differently. They're like more similar than different from what I can see at this point. But there was, and not too long ago, no less than Sam Altman was sort of sitting in front of Congress saying like, we might need some regulation, or I think at some point we will need to slow down.

• 33:35Nathan Labenz?

  But that seems to have gone away. And I wonder why.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  I don't think that's not my understanding. I think.

• 33:44Nathan Labenz?

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

• 34:11Speaker 01

  I definitely see people in multiple companies looking to figure out how to regulate. I think self-regulation with an outside party is probably preferred to government. I think the recognition that I've seen happen in most of the labs is that the government is not equipped to regulate. They cannot, A, move quick enough to regulate, meaning that the technology is changing so quickly that they they can't keep up. And so they're going to rely, they need to rely on somebody who can keep up to make recommendations to the government. That's what I've seen, but I haven't seen any lab, not some person, some high up person in any lab, not fight for some level of regulation.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I don't know where it is on all the top levels and I'm sure there's complexity and you know, there's some people who are like less regulation, some people are more and how to do it, but I I've definitely seen people high up in all the organizations look for, try to figure out how regulation can work effectively and that's not an easy problem to solve because you you know China's not going to regulate in the same Russia or Israel or Iran or whoever is also building AI. Somebody, some actor is not going to regulate. It doesn't have to be China and and nor do I think China is the only people putting money into AI.

• 35:40Nathan Labenz?

  Israel, I think, is definitely a live player. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I guess, maybe depending on your point of view, it does seem like there are a relatively small number of live players that, you know, I'm not really too worried about Russia kicking out a an AGI by surprise anytime soon.

• 35:59Speaker 01

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

• 36:08Nathan Labenz?

  It's like, it's like half Chinese, right? Yeah, I mean, we forget about that.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Not just Chinese, like there's a lot of Eastern Europeans, there's a lot of Russians, there's a lot of, there's smart people from around the world have gathered together to do this. And so, and the thing about labs that I see is that when a lab figures something out, multiple people in that lab figure something out. You know, like the reason that the talent game is so important is that if a group of people and, you know, learn something, one of them can go off and teach another company that thing very, very, very quickly. So it's really hard to maintain your advantage because somebody can just steal a key member of your team for a half a billion dollars or a billion dollars and then they have the

• 36:55Speaker 01

  advantage. So, so even if you're not in the game today, but you've got somebody who, from your country, who's in one of the labs, who's, you know, has a different point of view. I don't think it's like, I don't think the genie gets stuck in the bottle.

• 37:16Nathan Labenz?

  That's an interesting question, too, that I've asked a few people a few different times. Why is it, and it sounds like you are kind of giving an answer there, but why is it that we see so much consistency in what the leading companies are producing, right? Like, they were all, you know, in very short succession, releasing reasoning models after previous models, like, didn't reason, then all of a sudden, it was like, here's the wave of reasoning models, they all came, you know, in a short timeframe. One theory of that is that, as you said, like, people can literally just go, you know, tell secrets or change companies and, like, very specific insights diffuse that way.

• 37:55Nathan Labenz?

  And then another story is like, the sort of, you know, landscape, the gradients that people are following in terms of the design decisions that they're making and, you know, all the sort of ingredients that are going into these training runs, is just honestly, this, it's a, it's a pretty clear signal that they're getting from the, the experimental results that sends everybody down a similar path, even if they're not like, you know, specifically talking to each other. So like, you think it's more explicit knowledge transfer, though, than that other?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I would say it's both, but I think it's also, like, they all go to parties together. They all, they all like, you know, they all, like, many of them live in the same houses together, like, there, there's a community of people who, and they interact with one another. So there's also that, you know, you, you and I have both gone out to a party and drank too much or done something, said something that we probably shouldn't have said, or geeked out in a way that was, you know, and so that, that's also part of it, is there is a social network that occurs, and they're, they're humans, and so I think that's also part of it. Yeah.

• 39:10Nathan Labenz?

  So, one of the things I've heard you say a few times is, fuck should, uh, in some of your other coaching sessions.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Nathan Labenz?

  It seems to me like...

• 39:23Nathan Labenz?

  I do worry about that mantra being applied to the AI game.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:30Nathan Labenz?

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

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Nathan Labenz?

  And it seems to me that there is some form of positive duty, if nothing else, that folks pushing these frontiers owe to the rest of humanity. Because, you know, certainly in the sort of Obama sense, like they're all standing on the shoulders of giants, right? And it seems like, or you could say in a sort of Confucian way, right? Like they owe everybody who's come before some like duty of care to be responsible actors as we take the next step. So even if it's inevitable, I still want to put some should on them.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:22Nathan Labenz?

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

• 40:28Speaker 01

  I think that people in the key decision making roles are generally definitely feel there's a load of shoulds and have tos and responsibility. I think that's for clear. The reason I don't, I don't like the word should, I think is important to express why. So let's take the Spider-Man example. What happened was he decided not to take action somewhere and his uncle died, I think is right, if I understand, if I remember the Spider-Man mythology well. And he was like, oh, I can't do that anymore. But now he's motivated. Now he wants to be there for people. It's not like he's operating out of should.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  You don't see Spider-Man swinging around going, wow, man, I really should help more people. You know, I really should, like, that's not what's happening. He's just naturally inspired to do that. My recognition in human behavior is that when people say they want to do something, they're more likely to do it than when people say they should do something. So an example of this would be there's something that you have been telling yourself you that you should do for a decade.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  You know, like, so for a decade, there's this thing like lose weight or eat less or be nicer or something that you've been telling yourself. And the thing that's about that thing that has been there is that you are telling yourself you should do it and you're not fucking doing it. And so it shoulds are just ineffective ways to make sure your behavior is good. Usually, behind every really horrible thing that a human is doing, there's a should behind it. And so, so, so for me, the want is a, is a, is a better motivator. It's just, shoulds just don't motivate us very well. They actually undermine, because what's happening is a should is shame-based and shame is desire, designed to stop behavior.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  It's not designed to motivate behavior. So, you're a little kid and you're sitting on a couch and you've got your aunts around you and you fart. And all your aunts laugh and think that's funny. You're not gonna try to stop farting. You're gonna think it's funny and, you know, if you fart and all your aunts shame you, oh my god, you're bad, da-da-da-da. The thing you're gonna do is gonna try to stop that behavior. Shame is designed to stop behavior. And it's not designed to create behavior. And so, I, you know, and even stopping behavior, it doesn't even work that well, because, you know, we've all been shamed for something and then we go do it again. So, so to me, wants are just a better motivator.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  The other thing is that my experience of people is that everybody wants to be good to one another. I mean, everybody thinks there's the good guy at least, right? You know, I'm doing something, you might think it's horrible, but I think I'm doing it for a good reason. And so there is something in us that really wants to, to do good and it's easier to get there if you are following your wants than following your shoulds. And so that's why I don't like the word should. It's, it's not that I think the sense of...

• 43:47Speaker 01

  The heavier the sense of responsibility, the heavier the sense of have to, the heavier sense of should, the more likely that behavior gets perverted, gets twisted, doesn't happen. Whereas like people following their wants, if they're learning to deeply, deeply attune to their wants, so it's not the surface level want, right? Behind every surface level want, there's a deeper want. So you can easily just like write down on a notebook anytime you say, okay, what's a want that I don't like that I, you know, I want to eat really fatty foods. What do I want? Like, what's the need that that want is getting me? Oh, it gives me a sense of like satiation. Oh, what's this sense of satiation giving me? Oh, it gives me like a sense of peace and stillness for a couple of minutes. Oh, cool.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  What's the peace and stillness trying to get me? Oh, it's trying to get me in it back to myself. Oh, my real want is to get back to myself. It's not to eat fatty foods. And so if you really spend time with wants and discover what you're, what is beneath all the wants that you think are bad, then it's a much more effective way to get to the place that's wholesome and virtuous than it is telling yourself you should. The world is full of people telling themselves they should, doing really fucking horrible things. You know, the people who are deeply attuned to their wants, they're, you know, act very virtuously. And so that it's just, it's not that, it's not a problem with the morality of it, it's

• 45:16Speaker 01

  a problem with the effectiveness of it. It's just a what's, what works and what doesn't work. You could debate with me, the thing that's in it is that I do think that people, most people are inherently good at their core. It's my experience of them. Maybe not all of them, but definitely there might be, you know, there are psychopaths, there's people who don't have, have neurological differences, but it seems that almost all humans are, in their essence, good and most of their behavior that's screwed up comes from fear and shame or unfelt fear and unfelt shame.

• 45:55Nathan Labenz?

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

• 46:15Speaker 01

  You could just say, like, look at most relationships in America, and they're somewhat violent and transactional, like romantic relationships, you know, they're trying to control each other often. So I don't think you even have to go so far as to look into,

• 46:30Speaker 01

  into like the, I mean, we do war, it's no, it's not great, but it's, you know, even the world wars, it's a smaller percentage of the world that's warring than not warring. But, and those aren't happening all the time. But still, I think that we, yeah, there's lots of evidence that we behave poorly. The question is, how, what's actually motivated? What's, what's the thing that's there that's creating that? And let's address that. Because telling people to not behave poorly sure as fuck has never worked. Like, give me any time, hey, you should not behave poorly has worked. It just doesn't. I mean, we have religious books,

• 47:10Speaker 01

  we have, you know, the Martin Luther kings of the world. Just telling people not to behave poorly is not an effective means of preventing it. Sitting on the sidelines and say, you doing the thing that I don't really even comprehend, you should do it this way, it doesn't work.

• 47:28Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah. So what would you say, there is this notion, which I think people mostly haven't taken yet among the, let's say, AI safety community. Within that broad tent, there is a minority of people who say that we should be socially shaming the people that work at the frontier labs because they're engaged in this sort of race dynamic. And to participate in that is, you know, the opposite of virtuous. And so how do we like, dissuade people from doing something that is the opposite of virtuous? We shame, like, that's what we developed as humans to, you know, to. To kind of keep people in line, right?

• 48:13Nathan Labenz?

  What would you say to those people?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I would say like it didn't, depending on what side of the aisle you're on, right? It didn't work for Trump and it didn't work for the Trump supporters, didn't work for the Biden supporters. Both sides have tried to shame the other side, didn't work. That doesn't work.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Like it just doesn't work. So maybe it works with kids if it's done in a very particular way. But a lot of the kids who are shamed deeply are like continuing that behavior over and over again, too. So it's like, it doesn't work. Telling somebody that they're bad only confirms that then they act bad. See, I'm bad, I'm bad. They're telling me I'm bad, I guess I'm bad, I'm gonna go be bad.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  That's what I would say to them. And I, and I would also say, I can probably predict what your childhood was like.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Because like that's a, that's a thought process that only can come from a very specific childhood. It's a knee jerk reaction. It's not, it's not a thought through reaction to shame people. And I think the other thing is, okay. The, the possibility that you're like, well, Joe, shaming is gonna work, I'm gonna go do it. So the other reality that you might be doing is you might be affecting the consciousness of the people that are creating AI in a really horrible way. And therefore you're disturbing AI. So let's just say you were a person who were like, I don't believe there's, should be this kind of population. We should have less population because humanity is gonna kill itself. If there's too many people and there's too many people and we keep on growing.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  And so I have an ethical responsibility to make sure that I am going to stop overpopulation. The way we're gonna do this is we are going to shame people while they're having sex and we're gonna shame people while they're giving birth.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  So first of all, shame is a huge part of sex, hasn't stopped anybody from having sex, and usually just makes the sex kinky and more perverted. The more the shame, the more the perverted the sex. So you've got that going, which is going to be the same thing. The more perverted the creation of AI, the more weird it's going to get, the more kinky it's going to get. And then, could you imagine trying to give birth in a hospital with a whole bunch of people outside shaming you? Like, that's not good for the kid. How are you helping humanity there? So the consequences of that shaming, I think, also is ensuring or helping to ensure that AI will not be good for humanity. Because you are not helping the consciousness of the people creating it. You're hurting the consciousness of the

• 50:54Speaker 01

  people creating it. They can't be focused on a positive vision because they're constantly focused on, am I doing something wrong?

• 51:04Nathan Labenz?

  So what is the positive vision that either, if you wanted to articulate your own, or if you could sort of sketch, maybe a couple that you've observed as common among people who are either in the decision-making or research roles at these companies? How do they want to show up in the world as they are doing this work? Like, what is their aspiration? Because one part of it might be to be willing to defy your, or act in a way that is not in the narrow self-interest of being the winner, or being the first, or being the hero, but in some more general social way?

• 51:46Speaker 01

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

• 52:11Speaker 01

  But they're few and far between. Most of them, that's not their primary thing, you know. And a lot of them, their primary thing is just to like have a great discovery and to be like known as a great researcher. That's like, I think that's actually often primary, which I think very much equates to being first. It's just being first on a personal level, not on a, on a business level. But the, but that doesn't preclude the fact that almost all these people have a vision for the world. And what I notice is that it's changing almost as quickly as a technology, right? So the concern before was, is AI going to kill everybody?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Like, that would have been an early concern. And now it's, how are we going to deal with an economy where a lot of this stuff is outsourced? And how do we give people a sense of purpose if like their job's going away? And how do we make sure that when humans interact with AI, they become better humans? How do you even measure what a better human is without having a moral imperative behind it? Do you, like, let's say we assumed happiness. Okay, now we can measure that AI, when they interact with people, people become happier. Is that a good thing? Should it be happier or should it be like more conscious? And if it's more conscious, like what scale are you using to define consciousness? Is it like, can you do it by they act better towards other people?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Can you make, make sure that, oh, and are this model, when people interact with it in a coaching level, which is what a lot, one of the biggest use scenarios is, is that people talk to chat GPT like a coach. Does it make them kinder? Is that, what's the measurement? Even picking the measurement has a problem. So these, like the questions that they're wrestling with now are far beyond and far more subtle than the questions that we were. And next year, it's going to be a different set of questions. And so to some degree, I think that the risk is that we actually lose touch with those original questions.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Because you're so, you know, that's how, it seems like that's how humans make their mistakes is they get, they lose the forest through the trees. You know, like they, they stop seeing the big picture because the small thing in front of them. You see this happen with things like.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  World wars or, you know, world wars, like, we're never gonna have that again after World War II. There's institutions, the Aspen Institution, that was created for this. There's all sorts of things, the UN. And we've just all forgotten, there's nobody left in our generations who actually experienced that World War II that is trying to say, hey, let's not do that again. So here we go, barreling towards it. That seems to be what humanity does. And so I think that the biggest thing is the distraction of the smaller problems will potentially prevent us from seeing the bigger problems. And so, so, but the vision that I see for the world, man, I, what, the, the vision I would like to see happen and that, you know, I, when I have a chance, I like to talk about is

• 55:20Speaker 01

  that humans interact with AI and AI is designed not to,

• 55:29Speaker 01

  not to like be the savior of humanity, but to

• 55:35Speaker 01

  have a very compelling way to interact with people so that they become who they want to become in the world.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  So I interact with OpenAI and just the way a great, and this is probably my own solvisticness, but the way a great coach works is that they, you sit with somebody and you help them become what they want to be. And you trust that they know their evolutionary process. And once they get to the place of getting the thing that they want, that they'll realize, they'll look up and they'll say, oh yeah, that's not actually what I wanted. And they'll start evolving. So anything that can teach humans that they can evolve and that they can be who they want to be. And to teach them to really get in touch with what they want to be, that would be fantastic.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  And I think that's, I think AI is really capable, it's a, it's a tool that is capable of doing that in a compelling way. It's also a tool that's really capable of getting people addicted to it in a really compelling way. So hopefully it'll be more compelling to, you know, grow with it than it will be to deteriorate with it. But that would be my, that would be my, my vision for it.

• 56:50Nathan Labenz?

  That I always say the scariest resource is a positive vision for the future. So I appreciate any positive vision that anyone offers.

• 57:00Nathan Labenz?

  So what, just a little bit more on like, how is it that people that you are coaching at like executive levels of AI companies? How is it that they want to evolve? How is it that they want to show up? And, and, and how is it, or why, why should we be confident that a sort of more emotionally or embodied approach is actually to be trusted? You know, I mean, I guess on a fundamental level, I might think, geez, like, should I really listen to my gut? I don't know. My gut is seems to be a sort of, you know, deeply ancestral thing. And, you know, one of the big worries, obviously with AI is what happens when you take it out of distribution?

• 57:45Nathan Labenz?

  And in a very real way, you can say, humans are out of distribution from the environment in which we were trained, you know, developed, whatever. So maybe, you know, when I was in a hunter gatherer band of 150 people, my gut was like a really reliable guide. Today, if I'm sitting in the OpenAI boardroom and trying to make a decision, you know, how do, how do I know that I can really be confident that my gut is like still steering me in the right direction?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I don't, I think it's an integration of the head, heart and gut that is required, not, not just, just following your gut. So I think that like all, all of the above are important. You can't just for like, let go of rationality and let go of emotional experience just to follow your gut or fully follow your emotional experience with that. So I think it's an integration. It's learning how to listen to all of them and see that they're all pointing to the same thing at some level. And so, so just to be clear about that, but still, there's a great question that you have there, like, how do we know that that's actually going to be the most effective thing? Cause you know, like, let's just assume that you think for a second that somebody like a Jesus or a Buddha had high consciousness. Well, they created.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Christianity and Buddhism, which fucked up a lot of shit for a lot of people. So it's a great question, like, is that consciousness going to to do something? And I think more importantly, there's, there's the question, like, if you think about art forms, you know, transferring consciousness, you think about how there's some forms where it's like you do a painting and everybody's going to see that painting from then on. But you do something like a symphony and that symphony is going to be played differently. Or if you do something like a company, which is, I think, a great art form, then the next set of management is going to change that company. That, that, you know, when you look at Walmart, the guy who started Walmart,

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Sam Walton, when he came in from World War II and he said this beautiful thing, he said, you know, I, I see that World War II was created because the middle class was screwed. You know, middle class and you have, and you have an autocracy. And so I'm going to help the middle class. I'm going to give stock options to Clark. I'm going to buy things made in the USA. His book was called Made in the USA. And I'm going to lower the cost for the middle class so that they have more spending dollars. That was his vision. Then like by the time the nineties happened, it's, you know, destroying middle class America. But then it becomes this environmental force for good. So it's just like, like, that's the span of a company.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  So I can't even imagine the span of like AI and how it's going to change and evolve over time. And so I don't have a good answer. I don't know if, it's just my best bet as far as I, what I notice is that when things, the more somebody seems to understand themselves and know themselves, the more that they are acting in a way that, that they're in touch with their want to be of service to humanity, the more likely the outcome is better for longer. That, that's what I've noticed generally, that seems to be the case. But yeah, there's no guarantee in it.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  It's a great question. Yeah.

• 1:01:15Nathan Labenz?

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

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:52Nathan Labenz?

  Interesting. So.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  I think it's a fear. I think, I think there's people who in the world that fear that, that are in the AI world that fear that. Like, oh, my gosh, we might be building something that destroys us or succeeds us or, or, you know, makes us into irrelevant and then we will, and then we will not have relevance. And so that, humans without relevance is destruction. So.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Nathan Labenz?

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

• 1:03:01Nathan Labenz?

  you would steer away from this sort of getting the AI to do the AI research. And yet, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on that.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  So that's, I think that's the motivation. I think the motivation is that the economies of scale, it's the same motivation of every business finding economies of scale. I can, or it's the same motivation that one would have to have a, um, a robot waiter or a, or a tractor instead of a plow.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  That's the motivation. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's any deeper than that. I think the consequences are scary and I think people are thinking about that for sure and, and how to mitigate those consequences, but, but that's the motivation is just the, I don't want to use a plow. I want to use a tractor because then I need less people and less horses.

• 1:04:32Nathan Labenz?

  I think it was, um, Professor Graziano. I, I, I'm not great with names. I'll, I'll source this, um, but there's a Princeton professor who has an interesting idea that the AIs as we're creating them today, because they lack an architecture of empathy that we have, right? We have these sort of mirror neurons and a very sort of deeply, um, structured ability to kind of, you know, understand what other people are thinking and to even feel to some degree what they are feeling. And the AIs, you know, certainly haven't been designed for that, right? They've been mostly designed to predict the next token and, you know, get answers right.

• 1:05:13Nathan Labenz?

  Um, he says that they are by definition sociopathic because like what it means to be sociopathic is to not have those things or for the, you know, in humans, for those things to be malfunctioning is kind of what makes you a sociopath. So he says basically the current AI architectures are like inherently sociopathic. From your perspective of like emotional decision-making, um, should we be worried that some like core ingredient of like moral decision-making or even just like stable thinking is missing from the current AIs that we have?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that I think that there are people who are absolutely trying to figure out how to recreate empathy, whether it's tokens that it's good for humanity, you know, and how to define that. So there's people who are thinking about that problem and are concerned about it. And so, but the problem that I see that you pointing to that I don't know if the people who do the research seem to very much like treasure the prefrontal cortex, like it's intelligence is the is the currency, right? Who's smartest is the currency often. And so, let's go into the neuroscience of decision making for a second.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  So, we make decisions in the emotional center of our brain. So, think about it like Gödel, for the people out there who kind of geek out on this stuff, think about like Gödel's mathematical incompleteness theorem, right? Where he basically says all forms of logic are either incomplete or contradict themselves. The logic itself is like that. And so, that's why if you're only using logic, you can't make decisions. You make decisions through an emotional impulse. I want to feel some way. So we know we make the emotional center of the brain is our decision making. We know if that gets destroyed, our lives fall apart even though our IQ stays the same. Because we make a decision because we want to feel

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  good, or because we don't want to feel like a loser, we want to feel loved, or we don't want to feel rejected. That's why we make decisions. And you can look at your life and say, how many decisions did you make to feel loved, or to feel valuable, or to not feel rejected? It's just an amazing amount. And so, you can see it. So then, what's the decision, what's that impulse for for an AI is a question, right? And the impulse is a token. And the token is like, you're measuring something, and are you measuring the right thing? Like, these are, these are great questions. So, they don't have the decision making apparatus that we have, right? Which is trying to feel a certain way, based on what hormones, based

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  on genetics, based on, you know, our sense processing. So, it's an interesting, is a really interesting and fascinating question. And I, and I haven't seen

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Anybody really, and not that I would be in these conversations, so I can't say that they're not happening, but I haven't really seen anybody really wrestle with the fact that the decision making is based on tokens that are decided by measurements that may or may not be useful and, and, and no way to know particularly if they're useful, no, no way to know particularly of our, you know, a whole bunch of humans trying to feel loved is actually good for humanity, you know, I don't know, but it is, it is a great question to be wrestling with, as is the one about empathy. I think, I think there are people wrestling with that one. But yes, yeah.

• 1:08:59Nathan Labenz?

  My favorite papers and episodes of the podcast was on this concept of self other overlap, where basically they trained, and this was relatively small scale stuff, although like everything else, you know, they're working to scale it up. The idea was to, in addition to training the AI to like solve the puzzle or get the right answer or whatever, there was also an element of the loss function that was minimize the difference between when you are thinking about yourself and when you are thinking about some other agent or other entity in the environment, in an effort to create similar internal representations or effectively something, you know, kind of analogous to like a mirror neuron type

• 1:09:42Nathan Labenz?

  of situation. Obviously a long way to go in that research, but.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, that's rocking. Oh, I hadn't, that's cool. I would love if you.

• 1:09:52Nathan Labenz?

  It's really interesting.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:04Nathan Labenz?

  Are there other things like that, that you have sort of a sense that like, there's, there's this general question of like, what's missing in the current AIs? And usually that's framed as what's missing for them to be like a drop in knowledge worker that can replace all the human employees that, you know, a company or whatever. And we've got answers like continual learning or integrated memory or whatever. Do you have other things that you sort of think of on the like, what's missing list that would be? More geared toward like, how do we just make sure that we can be, you know, in relationship with these things, you know, in a open-ended way without having to be so fearful of them?

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  I've already said the one thing, but I'll say it again because I'm not sure if it was explicit. The other thing that I think is explicit, which is, what do you mean by good for humanity? I don't think there's been enough research done there. So like, even if, let's say you have this safety. You, you, just to back up, you talked about having like this regulatory committee. So you have a regulatory committee. Well, how is it know, how does it know if it's being good for humanity? Because it's keeping the current morality. And if we keep the current morality, then we have the problem of potentially getting stuck in this morality, which isn't good for humanity.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Is it happiness, but then making everybody happy? Is that actually good for humanity? So like there, so to even be able to, to, to say, this is the, this is the way we are going to,

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  to regulate it is a problem. What is the measurement you are using and how confident do you know that that's good for humanity? And could it be it raises people's consciousness? Is that good for humanity? So what, what are those measurements? And I think having a clear understanding with a good thesis and a lot of research that's being, what is the measurement that makes it good for humanity? What are the things we can do? Is empathy one of them? And, and have some evidence that there are, there is clarity that humans thrive under certain conditions and they don't thrive. You know, we know that they thrive with more freedom and then more autocracy.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  We know human, like, so can we actually take that research in a multidisciplinary way and say, this is our best guess? Here's our best guess and we're going to constantly be monitoring that because whether it's tokens or some other decision-making process, we need to have a clear definition of what that is to be able to actually make it good for humanity. And so that, that I think is a massive missing piece.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  So I don't, and I don't think enough thought has been given to that. And I haven't seen that kind of thought anywhere. Everybody just decides they know what's good for humanity, which is, you know, the beginning of all autocracies. So, you know, I think it's better for humanity because it's like not, you know, it's not a sycophant. I think it's better for humanity if it's not manipulative. I think it's better for humanity if it can learn, be trained easier. I think it's better for humanity if it makes people happier. People just assume they know what's best for humanity, which is basically the way that we have gotten into problems throughout all history, is it is somebody with a lot of power thinking they know what's best for humanity.

• 1:13:42Nathan Labenz?

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

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. No, no, you don't, you, the, I don't think that would ever happen. They would stand down because people don't, because we're the voters in AI. And if we don't click, they don't get to exist. So, you know, that's the only thing that's going to make someone stand down. Everybody else, and I don't fault them, I think I'd probably fall into the same thing. I would say, how do we solve it? And, and, you know, AI companies are filled with problem solvers. So they're going to look at it and say, okay, that's a hard problem, but we can solve it. They're not going to say, we can't solve it. I don't think that's in the nature of people whose whole definition is problem solving.

• 1:14:39Nathan Labenz?

  Although I do worry that the answer increasingly is, we'll have the AI solve it for us?

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  AI wouldn't help solve that problem. If I was trying to solve that problem, if I was leading 100 researchers to try to solve that problem today, I would use AI to help solve it. So yeah, I can't imagine it wouldn't be the case. Somehow, I don't think you would rely entirely on its output, but you might help it. You use it to help you that you're thinking.

• 1:15:04Nathan Labenz?

  The general sort of thing I've noticed is that anything in sort of extremely purified form seems to be bad for us. And this kind of relates to, you know, the idea of like, you know, the loss function doesn't have that many terms in it.

• 1:15:22Nathan Labenz?

  But whether it's, you know, sugar or, you know, you can chew coca leaves all you want. Uh, and it's great for your altitude sickness, but you know, the moment you start snorting cocaine, you're, you know, you're entering into dangerous territory, right? And you can, you know, eat all the fruit you want, but the pure sugar seems to be bad for us. I, I sort of do wonder if intelligence might turn out to be a similar thing. And we might need something that is just inherently more buffered. But that's the thing that we don't, you know, that, that's kind of the, you know, anytime you collapse your, your optimization function down to like one or just a couple of terms, you're running that risk.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  That is a great thought process. I really like that. That's a beautiful, you're basically saying like AI is, is distilled intelligence. The way like white sugar is dista- is distilled sugar. It's like it, all the, all the stuff that round the intelligence that isn't there. That's amazing. That's a great thought process. I hadn't heard that one before. Yeah, I think the, the, the thing that comes up for me around that is, yes, that seems, but, but one of the things that we tend to do as humans, if we can, is we like that pendulum swings pretty heavily. And so I wonder, and I would almost bet that

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  as this, this pure intelligence happens, we will like offer this counterweight of a deep emotionality or, or deep embodiment. Meaning, you know, you know, it seems like even drugs, they come in phases where it's like, oh, everybody's doing this distilled form and then it comes over, you know, we're very like, make sure everybody feels okay. And you know, all of a sudden our political pendulum swings over to, I don't care what other people, it's time to take care of ourselves. You know, it seems like as humans, we have this nature to pendulate and respond,

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  like try to balance ourselves out the way that, um, cells try to find homeostasis. I think humanity itself tries to find that as well. So that's an interesting, if that actually happens, does humanity, you know, does the immune system of humanity show up like far, far more emotional and far more human and actually give up some of its, um,

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Cult of mind, cult of thought, cult of intelligence. I'd say maybe cult of intelligence. Which is interesting just to geek out on it for a second, which is predicted actually in like, there's a lot of

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  a lot of predictions that have, I think they're probably all sourced from the same place originally, but nobody would know that, but about, you know, the future of humanity and from way back in like Macedonia and in the Vedics where they talk about the procession of the sun and they talk about this time being the time from moving from the mental age to the spiritual age or the, the, in Macedonian, it's silver age to the golden age. But yeah, it's an interesting,

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  interesting that that might actually come true because of that. I've never thought, I've never thought about your theory. It's a great theory.

• 1:18:42Nathan Labenz?

  What would you say are the most compelling positive visions for the future that you've heard? Like, you know, just what's exciting that people are sort of,

• 1:18:54Nathan Labenz?

  you know, can't help but tell you about because they are excited about it?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, there, I mean, there's like, there's a couple of standard ones out there that are like, you know, it's going to replace work so that people can focus on what their real purpose and their real meaning in life is.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  I think that's somewhat Pollyannaish, honestly. I don't, I think, you know, if you look at society where humans don't feel purpose because they don't have work, those are usually the societies that like rebellions and upheaval happens. You know, wealthy bored people are often the, the forementers of the rebellion, not poor people. They, they just take advantage. It just works when there's a whole bunch of poor people who are really unhappy with it as well. I've heard the one of, you know, that the interaction with AI helps humanity.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  But I haven't really seen the definition. I think a good definition, like I said, is where it helps people where they want to be helped.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  The, the other place that I've seen that I think, I find it intriguing is this vision of

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  We're just gonna have more meaningful work. And that that's an interesting vision. So the idea is similar to computers. Like, if you think about, if you like, have you ever seen that picture of all the machines that the iPhone replaced? Have you ever seen that? Like, it's like this big pile of machines. And it's like, the iPhone can do all that stuff. Which means all the manufacturers of all those things, they all went out of business. All those people went out of business. The internet, you know, there used to be steno pools full of typists. And so there's a theory, and I think it's a reasonable one, and it's a vision, which is basically with the tools of AI,

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  all it's going to do is actually increase our capacity to be creators. And and allow us to actually be in that space a lot more than we were before. And that the jobs will become more creative and more meaningful. And and and that that kind of reality, meaning just like our jobs today, like 1800s, 50% of us worked on a farm. So our jobs were pushing hoes. Most of us have jobs that we'd prefer to do than that right now. Similarly, with AI, with that tool, we'll just have a set of jobs that are better in general for people. Yeah.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  And interestingly, though it, you know, ebbs and flows, and I don't know if this would be the case here, but it ebbs and flows, that every big technological jump, the there's like a bigger middle class overall, you know, on the long term, not on the short term, like our middle class is shrinking right now. But there's a bigger middle class with after the Industrial Revolution than before the Industrial Revolution. There was so similarly, and there's a like, will that will that also happen? Will it actually increase, you know, the middle class?

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:47Nathan Labenz?

  Is universal basic income still in the air in the Silicon Valley parties or, you know, retreats that you attend?

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  There's talk of it. It's a little bit less, but I think that I think people are in the recognition that maybe currency, that a whole idea of the money. So the interesting thing is if you look at, I'm a study of like culture and there's this book that maybe you've read called Sapiens. Have you read Sapiens? And it's, you know, and there's a whole bunch of other, Dwar Keshe has a podcast by a guy recently, like maybe six months ago, where he talks about another version of this. But basically that humanities movement is based on stories and the stories that they tell, the stories that stick are based on the, on the way you're making a living or

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  the technology at hand. Right? So it's like somehow or another, the religions that stuck all, all have like some very similar qualities and they were all nascent religions with religions with different qualities, but it was all those religions that came up. And there's thought processes of, you know, the story that the church told about that you can only pass on your inheritance to your eldest son and And so that basically destroyed this kind of, it wasn't tribal, but like this, the, these clan

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  culture and then made people move around. And as people moved around, they had to, they, they went to universities and universities were created. And as they moved around, they went and did, um, what, uh, I can't remember the name, but it's, uh, guilds and they went, and this caused humans to move around. And because humans moved around and shared knowledge, that's what created the enlightenment and then the industrial revolution. Right. This is the theory that there's a story that we tell. And when we tell that story, it shapes humanity.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  I think similarly that our, and one of the stories we tell is money. We tell the story that money is there, that there's not enough of it, that it's a scarce resource, that, um, we have to fight for money. We have this whole story about money. And I wonder what stories of ours have to change when AI comes into play. Like what, like, does, I don't think religion looks the same when AI is fully present with us. I don't think money looks the same. I think that this is a revolutionary enough change that are, that the cultural stories that we tell will have to change with them. And so I, I don't even know. And I think there's, there's been quite a few people I've had the conversation with who also

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  don't know if currency, currency as we know, it exists in 25 or 50 years.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  So universal income is one aspect, but that still assumes that the idea of currency exists.

• 1:25:48Nathan Labenz?

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

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  The thing about AI is nobody is actually up to date on AI. You know, $500 billion of venture money have gone into AI. There's so many people creating so many things around AI. Like nobody's up to date on everything that's going on and it's changing quicker than any field has ever changed in the history of humanity. So also hard to keep up with. So the problems that arise, the issues that are there, the thought processes that come, they're changing so rapidly. It's, it's by far the thing that is the most thrilling and the most scary about AI is that.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  I don't know anybody who's who's who has the same concerns and thought processes about AI who's deeply involved a year ago that they do today, let alone six months.

• 1:26:50Nathan Labenz?

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

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:33Nathan Labenz?

  Selection effects.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Because of selection effect. But I see it all the time. Yeah. And I think there's a normal thing about humanity generally, which is, you know,

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Okay, I've got this thing. I've got the big paycheck. I've got the money. I've got the thing. I've got the fame. And still, I'm wrestling with the same inner struggle, the same abyss that I have been struggling with. Okay, none of that shit worked. I thought it would. It doesn't. What do I do? What's the next experiment I'm going to run? What's the next iteration? And so there's just a nature of of that part of humanity, which is you kind of, for most people, you need to get what you want before you can actually discover, oh, that's that's actually didn't give it to me. Now I actually have to do the real work of understanding myself.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  Not just my brain.

• 1:28:30Nathan Labenz?

  What are the things do you see as kind of common cultural touchstones or, you know, guiding lights might be too strong, but like, for example, I was struck when the voice mode was introduced, you know, however many months ago now, there was this sort of explicit attribution of some of that vision to the movie Her, which, you know, was 10 years old, but like, sort of looked, you know, it's, life imitates art in a sense there, where the voice mode that we get, you know, seems to have been kind of directly inspired by that movie. And maybe it was obvious. Again, you could sort of say, is this a story influencing it? Or is it just like, that was the natural path that it was inevitably going to take?

• 1:29:15Nathan Labenz?

  But are there other things like that, that you see people kind of, you know, passing around to each other as sort of meaningful, resonant guides to what they should be doing, or the future that they, you know, aspire to be building?

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  The only one that I see is that they, they, they,

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  they want a model that cares for them and for humanity. Like, which is, I think, also in that movie a little bit, right? Where there was this,

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  like, it was like, oh, there's an attack, there's like, attachment, there's a feeling of connection, or something like that. And I don't think they talk about it explicitly, but it's almost in everything that everybody talks about is like somehow or another that this thing, they're going to feel connected to it, it's going to feel connected to them. There's some version of, of connection. It's never really made explicit, but I see it as an undercurrent of, you know, most of the things that when people are talking about, if that makes any sense, that there's a

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  Connection in a broad sense. I don't mean connection only in the sense of like you're my friend connection. I mean, connection like the way that you could connect to anything meaningful in your life. Like they, they want that. That's part of the vision, whether, whether it's explicit or implicit, it's always seems to be there.

• 1:30:44Nathan Labenz?

  I remember when researcher said that Ilya one time asked him, can you come up with a Hamiltonian of love or something like that? And it was like, I can't really help you there, Ilya, but it's a great question to be asking. Anyway, it's going to be tough to know if the, of course, at the end of that movie, spoiler alert, like the AIs all retreat and go hang out with themselves. And the connection is kind of revealed to have been one direction and not exactly reciprocated in the way that we might have hoped.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:31:16Nathan Labenz?

  I guess going, you know, back to the kind of influence question, we know you're out on shame. Aspirational fiction is, is something that I've occasionally, you know, sort of thought, geez, maybe that's the way to really shape the future is to write some story that, you know, is contributes a positive vision in a sort of, you know, richly textural way. Do you think that would be a good thing for people to spend their time doing? And do you have any other ideas for kind of what's undersupplied?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Any time of major transition is a time of transformation, can be a time of transformation, almost always is, whether it's a marriage, or having kids, or going to college. Now, whether that transition deteriorates you or grows you is a choice that we all get to make. And we're all going to get to make it with AI. It is a transition that is coming, and we can either step into it and face it fully, and we will be able to transform positively as humans, or we will be eaten by that. And it'll, it'll, it'll,

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Make us smaller and it'll, it'll hurt us. Whether, this was the case when the steel mills left Pennsylvania, right? Like the rust belt went away. Some people, they transformed their lives, they moved. Some people sat and rotted. This is going to be the way it works because it's just always the case. So anything that you can do out there that helps people see that this is a moment of transition, that they can have a better life if they lean in, is I think a really an amazing thing to, to, to do in the world. Whether, and I think fiction is a fantastic way to do that. I think people out there right now who are creating services,

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  like here's how you can transform your company with AI. Here's how you can do things with AI. I think those are really great. Like here's how you can get the life you want with AI. I think those are really great things. We're creating coaching that is actually effective on AI or trying to that like at AOA. So that's also something that I think is like great things to be doing. So that's one level. Anything that helps humans take this time of transition to actually transform positively instead of be deteriorated, I think is wonderful. I think the other thing that's really important is, I talked about this earlier, which is these people are giving birth.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  There's all these people in the AI labs are giving birth, you know? That it is going to be some version of life form at some point. It's gonna, it's, it's gonna be its own intelligence is gonna learn, right? And so what, how do you want to treat the people who are giving birth? Like what's actually the most effective way for them to do the best job in that creation process? And so, and I really highly recommend thinking about it like a woman in a birthing unit. It's like, like what do they need? They need, you know, I, I would like them to be treated more like the, the heroes of World War II than like the, you know, the.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  The way we treat political parties or something like that. I would like them to feel the support of humanity to know that they that they that they're that we're rooting for them, that we want them to do great stuff and that that we're here to support them. I think that that on a psychological empathetic human level. And I think it's fascinating that so many people who are really worried about AI hurting the world are treating the people creating AI exactly how they're scared that AI will treat humanity. It's like it's absolutely fascinating to me that

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  projection of that. And so creating this like honoring and and and faith and confidence and and like, of course, you're going to be like, how do we support you in being great and doing great things and helping humanity, I think, is that it's far more inspiring. If I knew a whole bunch of people, I'm creating something that could really help or really hurt humanity. And there's a whole bunch of people like, be careful, be careful, be careful. You're fucking up. You shouldn't be doing that. Or if I had a whole bunch of people saying, hey, what do you need? I got you. You got this. Like, yeah, you're there. Like, maybe an occasional, wait,

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  watch out for that. But it's like that, that kind of energy, I think that person's going to do a much better job at the career. I'd rather have, I know I'd do a better job with the second than the first. So I think as humans, if you want to have a positive effect, anything you can do in that domain, I think also is really, really useful.

• 1:36:20Nathan Labenz?

  Do you have any sense for what is on that checklist? Like, what do they need?

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  I, um, the thing, I say the same things that we all need, the feeling of support, the feeling of faith and confidence, um, um, letting them know somebody's there to like to listen, that that's a hard thing to do if you don't know them. Um, yeah, I think something that makes it real, too, I think also just.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  You know, I get, I get notes in my work because we, we touch so many people and it's like, oh, hey, you've changed my life and I'm really grateful for that, you know, if, if AI has done something and that makes me inspired to continue to help people, you know, that, that is part of the inspiration, you know, letting them know how you, how they've helped and, and that they're doing something good at this point for you, for humanity, that I think you're going to curve behavior better by reward than through punishment.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  And so rewarding them for the things that they're, they're doing that are good for humanity, I think is also a really important thing to do. And we, we like that, we like that form of connection. So those are all the things you could do.

• 1:37:41Nathan Labenz?

  That's fascinating and I do think there is a lot of good, uh, certainly both, you know, that we can dream about for the future, but also I think there is a lot that we should be appreciative of even today, uh, not just the AIs and the value we get from them, but I, I do think the, the people that are building the companies and training the models are,

• 1:38:06Nathan Labenz?

  you know, in many ways remarkably thoughtful, certainly easy, it's, I often say it's

• 1:38:11Nathan Labenz?

  easy to imagine a much worse crop of people leading this revolution.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Like if that just happened, like imagine what that would do to your behavior as compared to like being shamed by like a little protest outside of your door. Like just, you know, inspire you, it would give you confidence, it would help you feel seen, it would reinvigorate you to continue to care, it would remind you to care

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  as compared to you should be, and fuck off, you don't understand me, you don't see me.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:16Nathan Labenz?

  Letters of encouragement to AI researchers. I like it.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 1:39:19Nathan Labenz?

  New cause area. I really appreciate your generosity with your time. Anything else you want to leave people with? Anything else we didn't touch on that's poorly understood? Or just, you know, where people can find you online?

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, the only thing I'd say is, yeah, if you're interested in, you know, a deeper dive into how I coach, you can sign up for our newsletter. We have workshops that you can go and participate in for free. We have a whole bunch of podcasts that we've done and there's online video of me doing very

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  meaningful and transformative coaching that's very short form, like 20 minute big epiphanies people have. So you can, which people seem to really like watching those. So you can geek out there.

• 1:40:10Nathan Labenz?

  Cool. Been fantastic. Joe Hudson.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  What a pleasure.

• 1:40:13Nathan Labenz?

  Thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  Thank, thanks for having me.

• 1:40:18Nathan Labenz?

  If you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends, post online, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just leave us a comment on YouTube. Of course, we always welcome your feedback, guest and topic suggestions, and sponsorship inquiries, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine Network, a network of podcasts where experts talk technology, business, economics, geopolitics, culture, and more, which is now a part of A16Z. We're produced by AI Podcasting. If you're looking for podcast production help for everything from the moment you stop recording to the moment your audience starts listening, check them out and see my endorsement at ai podcast dot I N G.

• 1:41:03Nathan Labenz?

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