Transcript: ‘The Man Inside the Minds of the People Building AGI’

The transcript of AI & I with Joe Hudson is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:01:49
2. What it feels like inside the room where AGI is being built: 00:03:14
3. The most important question to ask yourself as AGI approaches: 00:08:15
4. The importance of sitting with uncertainty: 00:17:49
5. How Joe is preparing his daughters for a post-AGI world: 00:21:11
6. How we think, feel, and react; the three layers of human awareness: 00:27:25
7. Staying grounded while coaching the people shaping our future: 00:35:34
8. Why Joe doesn’t take things personally—even when the stakes are high: 00:42:44

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Hudson

Thank you. Good to be here.

Dan Shipper

I'm psyched to talk to you because we've known each other for a while and I just love hanging out with you. We spent the whole weekend together here and it's been just really fun. We do what seems like a yearly beach walk together. So a lot of good stuff. But the reason that I invited you on is you're in this really interesting position. You're the guy inside the minds of the people who are building AGI. And that means you're a coach to a lot of the senior executives at some of the big AI labs, and you get to watch the emotional experience of bringing this into the world. And I want people to get to know you, and I want to get to know what that is and how you feel about it.

Joe Hudson

Cool. I'm excited for it. Just one specification because it would be a conflict of interest to be the coach of many. I'm really just the coach for one company. But a lot of the other people from a lot of the other companies come into my courses and due to really deep emotional and introspective work.

Dan Shipper

What company?

Joe Hudson

OpenAI.

Dan Shipper

Okay, cool. And obviously without revealing confidences, what is that like?

Joe Hudson

It reminds me of when we gave birth the first time, or when my wife and I gave birth— My wife gave birth. I didn't do that. But in that process, I remember going into a hospital, we were deciding where we were going to give birth and again, where she was going to give birth. And I went to a hospital and we were just looking at how it was going in there. And that's very reminiscent of what it is. There's a lot of growth happening really quickly. That company is just multiplying quickly. Everything they're doing is hitting a massive amount of success. So I don't think I've ever seen release of products at this kind of speed and level, both in the industry and in the company, or this kind of growth. I've never seen anybody cross a chasm in this company, so there's a lot of change very quickly. And there's this, oh yeah, we're giving birth to something here. That’s what it feels like.

Dan Shipper

That’s interesting. I feel like there's a lot of different things that could be true about the experience of being in the hospital while someone's giving birth. There’s probably a lot of fear or there's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of this, I'm witnessing something that's almost this indescribable mystery happening. So when you say it is sort of being in that room, what is that?

Joe Hudson

So you know, the way I think about the way I've seen birth happen, especially in modern America, is the first thing that happens is the pregnancy happening. It's obvious that something big is going to occur, and so there's a tremendous amount of projection that occurs. This is going to be the best thing ever. This is going to destroy my life. This is going to take away all my freedom. This is going to finally give me someone to love. All those things are happening. I see that happening both in our society and outside of our society. I see that happening both inside the company and outside of the company. So I don't see any difference. And inside of the company you have all of that. You have people who feel like, oh, this is going great and this is a wonderful thing. And some people are more skeptical and some people are really more skeptical. And so all, all of humanity is in both outside and inside of this particular company and every other company that I've had any kind of exposure to is just very human and what we'd like to do as humans is to say, oh, those people. But it's us people. My experience is the only difference between the people inside the company and the people outside is they just think about it more often. But every position you can think of from excitement to repressed excitement to fear to repressed fear, to concern to optimism, they're all expressed both inside and outside of the company.

Dan Shipper

And you've coached a lot of different people in a lot of different companies.

Joe Hudson

Yes, that's right.

Dan Shipper

So I'm kind of curious if there is any specific difference between the kinds of issues you deal with your general companies that you're a part of vs. this one, given its particular project, which is like creating models.

Joe Hudson

Yeah, that's a great question. Again, I would say outside of the fact that the growth is so exponential and the, and the amount of pressure from the outside world is extremely different, if I could push a button and control everything, I would want the entire world to give all the AI labs a tremendous amount of love. Just send a tremendous amount of love and care and just support because these folks are giving birth and instead what seems to be happening is, and as humans are instead there's just all this projection of savior, which is a heavy load to handle for any of these folks, to villain, which is a heavy load to handle for any of these folks. Everybody in the company I noticed is just as human as you and I. There's some distinction, obviously, there they are hyper intelligent folks with a higher propensity to fall on the spectrum of some level of neurodivergence. They’re maybe more sensitive just in general, but what I would want is just people to actually acknowledge that we're creating something different in the world as a species. And how instead of saying, oh my gosh, what's going to happen when this baby is born, or AGI is created, or whatever, how do we want to be while AGI has created, I think, a far more powerful question. There's these moments of transformation in an individual's life, divorce or graduation or breakups. And those are the moments that when people come to me, that's when most of the transformation can occur. It's like that's when we can really become better versions of ourselves or more authentic versions of ourselves, I think is a more specific way of saying it. And we're in a moment in society of a massive transformation. And that means it's a massive opportunity if we treat it as such. Or we can treat it the way some people, like two people get divorced and one of them is like, how am I going to go about doing this? And how am I going to grieve? How am I going to feel all there is to feel? And they're going to be better on the outside of that divorce. The other one's like, fuck, it's all devastation to you.

Dan Shipper

As a child of divorce, I recognize this.

Joe Hudson

And on the other side of that divorce, they're fucked. And I think it's, all of us have that same choice right now because we're on a massive scale, the only thing I can say is that it will be massively transformative. I don't really believe anything that anybody tells me about how it's going to be transformative. I have my thoughts. I don't believe them either. But it's going to be transformative. And what I know for sure is how you sit and be with that transformation is what determines whether you grow or whether you get crushed.

Dan Shipper

I think that's really interesting and I want to know how you're sitting with it or has transformed you and your perspective. So, coming into this, obviously you probably had some feelings about what it is to build a company or maybe even what AGI is or what AI is. And now, obviously I assume you've gone through all the same stages of panic and excitement and I don't know what it's, but I want to understand what that process has been like for you.

Joe Hudson

Really similar to the process of grief. I don't subscribe entirely to these five stages, and I don't think they always happen in order. And I think there's nuances, but it's really similar. I've had massive grief. So one of the number one use cases of all of the AI labs right now is coaching or therapy? Do I think they do a great job of it? I absolutely don't. I mean, I think that the recent thing that happened with sycophancy is an example of that. But will they get better? Will they be as good as me one day? I can't imagine that they won't be. I don't know if that's five years or 20 years away, or two years, or one year away, honestly. The other thing is that the speed of progress is so unique.

(00:10:00)

And so there's the grief. There's the grief of a change, of a transition. There's also an identity collapse, which is the thing that I like the most about it is that a lot of us are identified with what we know. And what we know is getting commoditized. I know how to write or I know how to coach, or I know how to, and the question becomes, well, who are you if being a doctor is commoditized and they can do, and a computer chip can do better than. Or what happens when a computer can do it better than a lawyer? Who are you then if you're not the fancy lawyer in the suit with the Mercedes. So that's the part I actually really dig because I know how much freedom is on the other side of that. But I think very few people understand how an identity collapse can actually create a lot of freedom in a system.

Dan Shipper

Interesting. I want to go deeper on that. So basically I'm hearing you say coaching these people, helping these people bring this into the world. You feel to some degree you're helping them build something that will replace you?

Joe Hudson

I think most of them know that what they’re building is going to replace them as well.

Dan Shipper

And that's causing you grief. And it's also causing you to have to ask yourself, what happens if I'm not a coach or coaching is not the thing that makes me unique and what's left. Both of which are in my world, very clear stages of positive transformation.

Joe Hudson

So that's the good news because I don't think most people see that. But the moment of, oh my gosh, I have been trying to please people my entire life and it's gotten me nowhere and I could have been being in my truth this whole time, or oh my gosh I've lost myself in other people for decades, and I never needed to do that. That moment is a moment that if grief doesn't come, your transformation won’t come either. There is a natural necessity for grief to hit there, and if someone doesn't grieve that, then the transformation doesn't come. So yes, it's grief, but it's also, fuck yeah, grief.

Dan Shipper

Fuck. I love that because I think it gets to something that it’s just this latent thing in a lot of AI criticism, some of it is totally not valid, but some of it is sort of coming from a place of I actually want the world to stay the same, which is never really possible. And grief is a legitimate valuable response to the fact that the world changes to any form of death, which is just transformation. And okay, so you're going through the grief where maybe you're still carrying it, maybe that's still like happening for you.

Joe Hudson

Yeah, for me, all emotions come in waves, they come and go. I don't look at grief and go, okay, you should be done by now. According to my calculations, I've grieved enough.

Dan Shipper

That seems very healthy.

Joe Hudson

I have this saying that it is every time I allow my heart to break, it increases my capacity to love. So for me, I hope there's more grief.

Dan Shipper

And coming from this place of facing this question and do you have an answer of, here's who I am after being a coach is not the thing that makes me special?

Joe Hudson

I do have an answer, but it's not an intellectual one. So if you look back into my history, I wrestled with a question, what am I? For decades, that question came across my mind—10, 20 times a day for decades thinking that I would find an answer, only to define that the answer is very silent. It's a very quiet answer. It's nothing that the intellect can comprehend. And so yeah, there's an answer, but it is not one that's ever going to satisfy the intellect. The way I think about this is that there's something that we have been and always been, and then there is a whole bunch of things that come and go, that rise and fall. Our thoughts come and go. We sometimes think we're our thoughts, but how could we be our thoughts if we weren't able to think even at a young age? And we might think it's the body, we might think it's emotional and we might define ourselves by all that stuff, but when you really sit down and just be with that question, what am I, essentially that has never gone, it's always been there. It can't be taken, it can't be given. That is a quintessential question.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, I think it is. That is an interesting answer because it is unsatisfying unless you're in a particular place. And I think it's also interesting because it can create a sense of faith or belief that you may not know what the thing is that you're going to be able to say. But there will be something eventually that you'll be able to say I don't think you have this sort of you have this very deep knowing of there's this thing that you can't say. But I also don't think one way to interpret what you're saying is that in a post-AGIworld, or progress continuous, whatever that means. I don't think that there's not going to be a word for you to be like, I'm AI code. I don't know what it is. There will be another word.

Joe Hudson

We always find a way to identify ourselves. I need to be different from you for me to maintain a sense of self and so I will. During these times of transformation, we can't know ahead of time.

Dan Shipper

Right, which is really interesting. And it's something that people hate because it's uncertain. And uncertainty sucks, right?

Joe Hudson

But people hate it, not because it's uncertain—and uncertainty sucks, uncertainty is freedom. Falling and flying feel really similar for a while. And then falling feels a lot like flying if you never land. So that there's freedom. The only thing that gets in the way is the thought that I'm going to land. But in this particular case, we don't know if it's going to go splat or not, so might as well enjoy the falling slash flying, you know? And I think that, so you were asking me a little bit about how this transition was for me on a personal level, I was noticing that I was getting amped up. I'm quite sensitive, I'm quite empathetic. I go into the office every day. That is, first of all, just an office, which is not the way that I typically hang out. There's bureaucracy and everything like that and there's this feeling of oh my gosh, we're doing something big and exciting.

And I was noticing, I was walking away a lot of days very amped up. My nervous system was really amped up. And, when I was wrestling with it and I had this recognition, I'm like, I have no idea what's going to happen. Nobody does. Everybody thinks they do. They know this transition is occurring. And I recognized, I don't know how it's going to be, but I know I've lived this before. I haven't lived it in this, but I've lived it both in the form of Covid. We all lived through that unknowing of Covid. We knew none of us predicted it correctly, but I've also lived through it in a personal shift, like the way my inner world has shifted. There's moments where my identity fell through the floor and I know what it is to not be able to figure out what to do next. When I work with people, it's very common for somebody to have a really powerful session or go through a week-long thing with me and they get to the grocery store, for example, and they're like, I don't know what to buy. I always bought this thing. I've always just done this on a routine, but now I don't. And because they're living their life afresh because they're looking at the world through different eyes. And I know what that is. I know what that looks like and what I know about it is don't try to get back to what you know quickly and the unknown for as long as possible creates the most freedom and the best transformation. If you go right back to what you know, you're in the same shitty relationship again.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. How are you handling this as a parent? Because I've not met your kids, but one thing I've noticed is just watching you walk around here, there were one or two times where you were on the phone and someone mentioned you were talking to your daughter and you were just laughing and smiling the whole time. And I was just like, ah. And so yeah, I think that's a really important thing, it might be easy to be like, I've done this before, I can handle it. But your kids are off in the world like trying to figure things out when things are changing in this dramatic way.

(00:20:00)

Joe Hudson

I'm definitely encouraging them to use AI. One of my youngest daughters said, I don't want to use AI, it's going to make me dumb. And I was like, how do you use AI to make you smarter? And that changed her.

Dan Shipper

What does that move for her like? I think that's such an important move that most people don't do, but if you do it's a huge unlock.

Joe Hudson

Yeah. I think any technology has the ability to empower you and it has the ability to harm you, and it's just really how you use it. Just a hammer. I can build a house with it. I can smash somebody's brain in or my own brain in like that. And so for me, the quintessential move is how do you trust yourself? That's the most important thing. And then how do you bring consciousness to the tool that you're using? How are you and how do you learn it and how do you learn what you can do with it? I think the thing about AI or any really complex tool is really spending time thinking, how am I going to use this thing? I think that's the thing that most people don't do. Most people don't look at the television and go, how am I going to use this to make my life better? They just go into addictive behavior. I think without a doubt, somebody is going to try to make AI as addictive as possible and it's going to be up to us and our own personal wisdom to decide if we're going to use it or not use it. So for me, teaching my girls that at the end of the day, they're deciding, they get to choose, they're at choice about how they use this. That's kind of the easy, basic thing around it.

The secondary thing around it for them is, actually, I'm very forthright. My girls were 16 and 19, and I'm very forthright about my fears or my concerns, or my hopes, my aspirations, like the coolness of it. I'm very open with them about that whole thing. And I'll just share what's going on like, holy shit, dad, that's intense. And so I'm bringing them along for the ride with them, with my nervous system being like, here we are. So I'm teaching them how to be with themselves in this very intense situation. We're in an intense situation, and so, oh, how do you be with intensity in a way that actually creates freedom for you? So that's another thing that I'm doing with the girls. I don't have a big strategy on, here's how you prepare for a post-AGI world, because I don't believe I know what that is.

But what I know is that their ability to pivot is going to be based on their emotional resilience. It's going to be based on their open-mindedness. It's going to be based on how not neurotic they are. So how much they don't need perfection, how much control they need. And so I've just raised my daughters. Have you seen the podcast with my daughter interviewing me? You can see they are those kinds of people. So I feel like that's the deeper strategy rather than, okay, learn these six tools and be ready to go into the post-AGI economy.

Dan Shipper

I love that answer. Well, I mean, I guess so some of those things you mentioned are able to be— resilience, flexibility, curiosity. How do you, how do you develop that with your girls, with yourself, with people you work with for people listening who may not be familiar with your work.

Joe Hudson

Yeah, so that's a good one. So the main key is that decision making is emotional, happens in the emotional neurologically speaking, happens in the emotional center. So if I took out the emotional center of your brain, you would take maybe a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. Your IQ would stay the same, but your entire world would fall apart because you couldn't make a decision. When people feel overwhelmed at work, usually that's emotional stagnation. If people feel stuck, that's usually emotional stagnation. It's not, they don't know what to do. If people feel like they can't make a decision, that's emotional stagnation.

And so a lot of what I do, or a, I'd say a third of what I do is all about having that emotional fluidity, which means I can feel and accept, welcome all my emotional experiences without trying to manage them in a way that doesn't. take me out of myself and behave in a way that I'm not proud of. So and that, it's moving the anger and the sadness and the fear is a lot of my work because that clarifies decision making that helps you not feel overwhelmed in the world and does a whole bunch of really positive things. So that's a part of the work that I do is really paying attention.

So, to back up for a second, the reason I say a third is because I think of my work as humans having three brains. They have, they have three brains. One is the prefrontal cortex. It's the very human brain. It's the thought. There's the emotional brain. I call that the heart. It's about emotions and emotional fluidity. And then there's a nervous system, part of the brain, which is, I put it in the gut and it's that reptilian, reactive part of us. And if you want transformation to happen for humans, you want to address all three parts of the brain. So we've all been in a place where like, I know I should exercise, but I'm not exercising. I know I shouldn't be such an asshole, but I'm still an asshole, or whatever it is, right? That shows that you get it here, but you haven't gotten in the emotional system. You haven't gotten in the nervous system. And so you'd want to get it in all three places, if I think about the work that I do, generally it is, in the prefrontal cortex, it's about how we talk to ourselves and what our relationship is with ourselves.

And so how do you have a great relationship with yourself as a massive part of the work? So for instance, there's a lot of people who have self-criticism, self-critical thoughts. I'd say almost everybody has it. I think it's like 1 percent of the population, maybe who doesn't have some of it. Some people recognize that some people don't recognize that they're having it. How do you interact with that is a great question. So most people either don't recognize it or they recognize that they just believe everything it says it's, hey, you fucked up on that. It's just like, okay, well, according to that, I fucked up on that. So I must have fucked up with that. We, in fact, most people listen to their voice in their head the same way that a deep believer of a politician listens to a politician. And so I'm often one, having somebody recognize that in themselves that it's happening.

And then two, the second thing that people do is like, how do I stop that voice from happening? Which doesn't work, that which we resist, persist. So what I'll often do is help people, and this happens in our courses as well. I help people react to the voice differently because there is a reaction to that voice. We know neurologically that every time your voice speaks to you like that, a little cortisol bump. It's like it's under threat when it is threatened, when it speaks like that. And so it's draining our adrenal glands. it is costing us a little, some of our energy. It makes us not work as well. Then the next thing that typically happens is somebody says, yeah, but I need that because how will I ever get off the couch and stop drinking here if I don't beat myself up? I don't know. The same way a baby likes to learn to walk. Apparently that the way everything, everything in the world evolves without that negative voice in the head.

And so typically I help somebody with that. Think about it. Imagine if you had a boss and the boss 50,000 times a day, which is about how many thoughts we have in a day according to, I think it's a Mayo Clinic. Do that, imagine you're sitting there doing your work and there's a boss like, Nope, you didn't do that. Nope. That's a little slow. How could you ever get work done without a boss doing that? Well, apparently it could be a lot easier than doing it with a boss. And so that's another place that we unpack for them.

And so, there's kind of seven or eight different tools that we go into about how to change the way that we speak to ourselves. And what it turns out is that the way that we relate to ourselves is often what we project on the world and the way that we relate to the world. So an example of this that pertains specifically to AI is oftentimes the people I notice who are trying to predict the future are the people who are scared and trying to figure out how to be safe. And so their nature is to predict a really shitty future. that's the thing, if you look back through humanity and you look at like the prophecies, none of them are like, and everything works out well at the end all the prophecies are and people are fucked.

(00:30:00)

Dan Shipper

And there is that whole Messiah thing.

Joe Hudson

That's people are fucked and then somebody comes and saves us. I was reading this wonderful thing about like pre-Jesus times and the Dead Sea Scrolls and apparently the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept by a cult that was basically like, we're fucked in a couple hundred years. This has been going on forever. And so it's like, oh, so that's the relationship they have with their life too. Their relationship with themselves is typically not a relationship of trust with themselves. The relationship that they have with themselves typically is not trust and it's worried about how they're going to act next or what's going to happen or if they're going to be able to do the next thing rather than I've got it. And so that person's relationship with themself is being reflected in their actions in the world. And so when you really work on that, it changes that.

Dan Shipper

One of the things we've been talking about this weekend is my obsession with this show, “100 Foot Wave.” And one of the things that you're saying reminds me of is sort of looking at a wave coming in from the beach and either being like, trying to figure out exactly where the wave's going to break or just going out and surfing. And those are two very different ways of being and sometimes figuring out where it's going to go can be a helpful frame of mind. But for really big things you have no familiarity with that are hyper-complex situations, it's just better to surf.

Joe Hudson

Yeah, I think I think about it oftentimes, there's this great study about how leaders have a lot more theta—brainwaves. Theta is that place that you think of meditating or the place that you are in a dream and awake. It's what little kids from zero to eight years old are. And then, I think about a basketball player. There's a time in basketball when you're thinking about logically dissecting the situation, and there's a time when you're putting it in your body, but when you're playing the game, you're out of your head. You're thinking about like, where does the ball have to go? And you’re going to have a horrible game. Get out of your head is what people are going to say. And it's this same way with life or with the surfing that you're talking about.

Dan Shipper

And so a lot of what I do is teaching people. And I think critically, in order for the thinking about it to make any sense or be helpful, you have to have been on the wave and come back out and been like, okay, what did I do wrong? How do I fix that? You can't just think about it without being on leave.

Joe Hudson

I think you can do a little thinking about it in advance.

Dan Shipper

Maybe a little bit, watching some people surf, looking at some things. There's a little bit of that, but you hit diminishing terms really quickly.

Joe Hudson

Yeah, exactly. And then you could literally go on the way, then go watch those same videos and you'll learn twice as much.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. One of the things you brought up earlier is the tremendous sense of responsibility that the people internally at OpenAI feel. And the tremendous amount of pressure that they're under both positive to deliver on this amazing thing that they're trying to do and negative people being like, you're going to totally destroy the world. And I would assume all of that's going inside of all. And I imagine myself as someone who is inside their heads and caring for them. You must feel that too.

Joe Hudson

I have years of training not to do that. And yet it still happens. But I had years and years of training in not taking responsibility for other people's actions. If I'm a coach and I'm taking responsibility for your actions. If I'm coaching you and I'm taking responsibility, then I'm disempowering you, then I'm saying that I'm responsible for you. I'm making you a victim. I'm making you a puppet. It's an amount of hubris or narcissism that is incredibly uncomfortable for me to exist in. And so the way I coach generally is following people. It doesn't look like it when I'm coaching, but there's, I'm kind of opening doors and seeing where they go, and then I'll follow in the door. Okay, if you were a coach where you need to go next, only you know. I can't tell you that.

And so I might be able to say, here's some doors you might not know about. And then they can go there. But to take responsibility for them, I don't find that to be a useful perspective. The ownership. Yes. Responsibility. No. What's the difference? So semantically, I'd have to look at it. How does it feel? Yeah, exactly. The feeling difference is ownership is a sense of empowerment and responsibility is, feels more like it's a weight or have to, or guilt or shame. It is something that stagnates and so, it does something really screwed up when somebody feels responsible. So let's say I'm working with somebody, I'm coaching somebody and I say something that really hurts them. If I feel responsible, I'm like, oh, sorry, making them more of a victim. They can't handle it if I don't feel responsible, and they go, ah, I'm like, ooh, cool. What did we just find there? What's happening there? What's the thing that we need to investigate that, I'm excited for the hurt because I see somehow that we've run across their story. And so the difference there is if you feel this intense form of responsibility, say if you're an AI researcher, you're not going to be as resilient to correct the mistake. Oh shit. I did it. I knew I was going to do it. Oh, I fucked up instead of, oh yeah. Misstep. Let's go like that.

Dan Shipper

It seems like you're sort of pointing to, in some ways, the difference between guilt and shame. The difference between guilt and shame classically is like, I am bad or I did something bad. When people feel ashamed they tend to not take ownership over it when they're confronted with it because it's about them vs. with guilt, it’s easier to take ownership because it's like, not about me, it's just I did something wrong. I fucked that up. So it sounds like that's maybe a little bit of what you're talking about.

Joe Hudson

Yeah. It's interesting. Yes and no. Okay. So I love that framing. I haven't heard of it before. I've heard that I did something wrong and something wrong before, but I never heard the nuance after, which I really like. For me, both guilt and shame are a— I'm going to do this in two parts. So the first one is guilt and shame. Both of them kind of stagnate the emotional experience. Shame more than guilt for sure. And oftentimes when someone's guilt tripping them, they're actually shame tripping them. But we call it guilt tripping. So I don't want people to feel either of those two things because typically, I don't mind. Don't get me wrong, but to stagnate in it really just stops progress. So, as an example, shame is used to stop things. So I'm a little kid and I'm on a couch with my aunts and I fart, and my aunts laugh. Cool. I'm not stopping anything. I sit on a couch and I fart with my aunts. And my aunts are like, shame, shame, shame, shame. I'm going to literally hold it in. It is the same thing with any of the actions in a personal story. Would've been a total shame, totally rigid. But the point is that shame is meant to stagnate us.

And so oftentimes you can't steer a ship that's stagnating. You want to have that movement so people can, but with what you're saying, I think that there is a similarity in the fact that empowerment is apologizing in an upright way. There's nothing. I made a mistake. It's the difference between I made a mistake and I'm iterating. I'm iterating and I failed and I made a mistake. I think it would be maybe even a better way to say, it's like I failed. No, you're iterating.

We're all going to make a ton of mistakes. There's no way that any AI lab isn't going to make them. We're doing something new for the first time. It's just going to be a series of mistakes, but the way that a mistake is looked at is so critical. So looking at the first iPhone is a mistake. All you have to do is look at the iPhone 4, and you look at the iPhone 1 and you're like, yeah, that's a piece of shit compared to iPhone 4. So iPhone 1 must have been a mistake, but we just say first generation, second generation, third generation. But if we eat cake, when we say that we're going to be on a diet, then we fail. We're not like iteration one. Cheesecake next time. We don't iterate. Even though the science is really clear that if you want to lose weight, you don't come up with a diet and fail. You say, here's the 20 different things I'm going to try in succession because that iterative mindset is what succeeds.

(00:40:00)

Dan Shipper

And for you, I know that it's much less present than it might be for someone else who hasn't spent a lot of time with this kind of topic. But I'm sure, as you said, like it sometimes, even still, sometimes you kind of feel that weight. What is that? For example you brought up the glazing thing earlier, or you see a headline in the news and you're like that second because you do, you are very connected to, even if you're not making any choices for anybody. If you've opened a door for someone that they go through, even though they chose to do it, maybe if you hadn't been there, they would've gone through that door or whatever there's always that kind of thing. So how do you deal with that? What do you think about it?

Joe Hudson

Well, the first thing is I don't take it entirely personally, so this is a hard thing to explain folks. But, right now, for example, stop thinking and if you're listening to this, stop thinking. So almost everybody who is listening has already failed. They've already had a thought in them. So, but yet we think that those thoughts are ours and that we're responsible for them. But out of the 50,000 thoughts you've had in the last 24 hours, you didn't decide to have one of them, and you can't make them stop. So is it you? Who is it exactly? What are we talking about? But yet we take things really, really personally. So there's a way in which life is so much more joyful when you're not taking things personally. So that's part of what's happening.

The other part is that I really work on not being defended really. If somebody comes up to me and they say, wow, you're fucking up the planet, or you're screwing everything up, I'll be like, oh, how? What's going on? What am I missing? Or I'll be like, absolutely, yes, totally. I just fucking drove here. Fossil fuels. I'm with you. I can think of 30 ways I destroyed the planet today. I'm not going to defend against that. And so what I notice is that in my defense, if I have to defend myself, if I have to say no, I'm doing something good for the world. Or no, this is all going to go well, or I'm going to justify it in some way. All of that, first of all, takes a huge amount of energy out of me. But second of all, it makes it so that I'm not actually open to an alternative frame of reference.

And to me, the more I'm mature in the world, the more I can see the truth in everybody's frame of preference. And so I want to see the truth in all those kinds of references because that's what's going to allow me to do my best work and potentially make the best decisions and ask the best questions and do all, do my work in the best possible way. The same is if I'm constantly questioning myself, then it's like playing basketball and being in my head. It goes wrong. So there's this, so what I typically do is I take time to reflect. Oh, how do I want to be? What am I doing? What am I missing? And then that was done and now I go do the thing and then a couple weeks later I come back and I just spend some time reflecting, seeing what I miss. A little bit less now for weird reasons, but I like love Twitter because people like, they fuck with me on Twitter and it's like I don't know if you know this, but in Tibetan Buddhist teaching, the second stage of teaching somebody is to just make fun of them relentlessly, try to trigger them to teach them what they're still taking personally. And Twitter is a zen master at that, a Tibetan master at doing that. And so oftentimes I'll take time just to listen to everybody’s crap. It's like the opposite of a trigger warning. Exactly. Trigger warning. Let's see what I do? Let's see what I can be triggered by so that I can find more freedom because every piece of me that gets triggered is something that I haven't reconciled myself.

Dan Shipper

I think there's a misinterpretation of what you're saying that I'd like to represent you in here. What you're saying, how you respond— Any person who hears that, which is good when hard things happen. I can just sort of go to a place where I'm like this formless thing and have a lot of space from all thoughts and it's not really me. And then otherwise I just sort of do what I want and and so it's a way for me to avoid responsibility and that's well and good for Joe because when they invent AGI like he's going to have something good. I’m a lawyer. I'm a paralegal, and like, I'm fucked. And I can't just go to my formless, weird places. So how do you think about that? How would you respond to someone who's interpreting what you're saying in that way?

Joe Hudson

Well, the first thing I would say, a.) you can't prove it, and b.) is that whole thought process that you just put yourself in actually helping you be more successful in a post-AGI world. That would be my second. The third thing, I would be non-defended. I'd be like, yeah, there's some absolute truth to that. There is a part of me that is choosing, specifically choosing not to take on, a sense of self-abuse and heaviness because I don't think it's going to allow me to love you or the people at OpenAI or anybody as well as I could if I wasn't taking that long. So I would also agree with that. I think as far as logically, I would say show me somebody who is making those decisions successfully, that has like that heavy hard sense of obligation. And responsibility. And so what I would say is I have worked with billionaires and ambassadors and people who have a lot of responsibility and consistently I see that heavy hard sense of responsibility that weighs on you on a day-to-day basis makes you make shit decisions. And so if you want to project that onto me. Feel free, it's cool. And maybe take a look at the decision quality that you're making and see and do an experiment and say, oh, let's see if I like to lessen up on that. Will my life get better? Am I better to people?

Dan Shipper

I agree with that. I mean, I, as someone who I have for many years had that kind of very weighty responsibility sense. It feels like the right thing to do or it feels moral or whatever. But I know that I've made a lot of decisions that ended up hurting people more because I had that. And it's definitely a tough place to be. I didn't choose that. I didn't really want to feel that way, but I did. And I don't feel that way anymore and it's so much better.

Joe Hudson

So here's a direct experience for people who are listening that they can have a feeling about it.

Literally have a feeling of love towards anybody in the. So I should try that. Pick somebody that you love or something that you love.

Dan Shipper

I'm thinking about my sister's dog. She's very cute.

Joe Hudson

Think, think about that. And now I want you to take responsibility for that dog without constraining the love. Without making the love smaller. See if you can even do it. Oh, definitely not. So you got a choice. It's a different way of relating to her. That's right. I have a choice. I love people or I think loving them is going to be far more effective at being of service to them than taking responsibility for them.

Dan Shipper

That's really interesting. One way to that was a very interesting exercise because there's this book I love called The Master and His Emissary. And it's really good. It's about the relationship between the left atmosphere and and he quotes this person who did a really intricate study of the anatomy and physiology of your hand. and his basic point is that any kind of more logical left brain analytical way relating to the world is very associated with your dominant hand. It's very associated with the idea of grasping something. I think that sort of, when you have that sort of sense of responsibility is at least for me, very associated with like, I need to hold this thing. and it's very hard to hold something like that and grasp it. You're totally taken out of it. It's an environment that's completely within your control. And the kind of open, loving things. It's just a different way of believing that I don't know what is physiological, I don't know what we relate it to instead, but it's just different from holding something. And holding is important. I need to hold stuff. drink water or whatever. Or feed myself or type my computer. But there's this other way of being that I think we really underemphasize and don't understand particularly well that I think you're pointing to that's really important.

(00:50:00)

Joe Hudson

Yeah. I would say almost all of my work is pointing to that. The balance of those two ways of being. And it's interesting because as you were talking, I was like, oh, there is this one way in which I hold responsibility, but it's a little bit different. And so I don't think I would call it responsibility, but. I have a deep sense of responsibility to say, to not take responsibility for people, or I have a deep sense of responsibility for not answering a question that wasn't asked of me, or not helping somebody unless they ask for help. I have a deep sense of responsibility to live by my principles. The difference is I don't feel like there's a choice to be made there, and I have to. A particular choice. They are a sense of responsibility because I know choosing anything else is painful. So it’s not like I have to do this thing I have, I should. It's not, there's no should. There is just like, I can either do that or it will be painful. I'll either do that or I'll hurt somebody. I'm not doing so and so there's just nothing in me that wants to do it, but there is a sense of responsibility. It's just not heavy.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. Joe, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this.

Joe Hudson

Oh, pleasure. That was awesome. Thank you.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

We also build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Deliver yourself from email with Cora.

We also do AI training, adoption, and innovation for companies. Work with us to bring AI into your organization.

Get paid for sharing Every with your friends. Join our referral program.