Summary
Brett and Joe discuss the business behind Art of Accomplishment — how Joe accidentally fell into coaching from venture capital, how the online courses came to be (sparked by COVID), and the philosophy behind pricing and accessibility. Joe explains that his core motivation is enjoyment and following the deeper call, not ego or saving the world.
The conversation dives into the tension between making transformational work accessible and maintaining energetic exchange. Joe describes the money model as ensuring sustainability for the team while offering a range of price points. He reflects on the risks of spiritual tools being corrupted or weaponized, his approach to intellectual property (ask permission to use novel tools), and the inevitable pattern of good teachings being turned into new moralities. His five-year vision: the work extending far beyond him, with him blissfully unaware.
Key Concepts
- Business is a self-awareness practice, not separate from life
- Enjoyment is the compass for surrender to your deeper call
- Energetic exchange requires a felt cost to be transformative
- The best teaching makes the teacher less necessary
- Good teachings inevitably get corrupted into new moralities
Key Quotes
“To me self-awareness is life. There’s no difference. People think about business as something that’s separate from life.”
“If you’re here to help me, no thank you. If you’re here to work together for our mutual freedom, let’s get to work.”
“My enjoyment is the way that I get to gauge how deeply I’m surrendering.”
“The best case scenario is one in which the repercussions of the work are far beyond my capacity to see them.”
“I think if you think you’ve completely annihilated your ego, that is ego in itself.”
Transcript
to me self-awareness is is life there’s no difference you know people think about businesses something that’s separate from life you know I do that in business or it’s just business or and to me business is far more of an art form and how you use it is far more important welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson if you’ve been listening for a while you’ve heard Joe and I refer to the workshops and online courses that this podcast comes from what’s the deal with all of this why do we want you to join our mailing list what’s Our intention are we trying to suck you into something and what’s this going to cost you today I’d like to bring some transparency into what exactly is going on with all this view business Joe how did you get into the coaching business in the first place uh by accident I found myself when Tara and I had a um decided to have a kid and the kid was on the way I realized that I had to stop sitting in a room meditating all the time and make a little money and I went into venture capital and one of the realizations I had early on was that if I didn’t bring my self-awareness practice if if business wasn’t a way for me to continue to develop and understand myself that I would never succeed at business and then as I started to invest I realized the mentality of the people that I invested in were the biggest was the biggest leverage for successful Investments and I started sharing some of the knowledge that I had with them that was successful in many cases and then they started telling me that other people needed me and I didn’t have the time so I did a course and then it just kind of happened when people the line got long and at some point I decided that this was far more of my calling than investing and I was better at it frankly with a lot of you know self-development like programs there’s this way that self-development is turns out to be a tool for somebody to make a bunch of money and like inflate their ego what makes what you’re doing different from that wow I would love to say that I’m different from that but I’m sure that that’s at play at the same time meaning I mean there’s no way that you can completely annihilate an ego I think if you think you’ve completely annihilated it that is ego in itself so so I’m sure my egos at play and uh making money I I enjoy making money I definitely like it but neither of them are the priority in my world and so creating the business is far more about an enjoyment process for me you know maybe two or three years ago I would have said I really want to bring this out to people because it creates happiness and I want to change the world and that that’s really not alive in me anymore it’s far more enliven me it’s just this is something I really enjoy I I get off on I like I like watching people have life-changing experiences I like being a part of that I like building something Beyond me I I like I’m seeing the value through the success of a business so it’s just it’s really a matter of enjoyment for me so you described your journey as like you it started out being interested in self-awareness and meditation and you had a baby and realized you needed some money so you started to get into business into VC and you wanted of course to bring your self-awareness practice with you and make that part of part of what you were doing in business and then it became the business itself how did you transition from you know being a venture capitalist and you know focusing on the quality of awareness of the people that you invested in into making view a business on its own I was really just following the demand I was just following people’s requests for the most part I I have a vision for sure but it’s incredibly informed by what people have asked for and what they want I feel like it’s the same when you’re coaching somebody you start with where they are you don’t tell them what you think their agenda should be you follow their agenda I think business is the same way you don’t ask people to be different you don’t give them an agenda you find out what their agenda is and if it if you can serve that if you can be of service to that and it is aligned internally then by all means go ahead and that’s what happened here it was just the best way I could be of service that was inspiring and enjoyable for me can you tell me more about what you’re working on now like inside and outside of the view courses and what what does that look like for you yeah too much I think I’m working on too much we have the podcast going we have the view um course going we have the AOA course going I have a group of 12 Executives I work with every year as a coach and then we have an occasional in-person Workshop particularly for those Executives but sometimes for others and then there’s the creation of content which is what we’re doing now just generally um spreading the word so that people if it’s right for people they can find it that’s the work yeah when we when we first met Vue was only available through these like small in-person workshops that you just mentioned what’s what’s so important to you about in-person work and what made you start exploring in online format yeah I was ignorant I think the in-person work was I had a conception a limiting thought that it could only be done in person and then coronavirus hit and people came to me and said hey and we need this and this and this and we need it online and I thought no no no no no and luckily I didn’t need the money and eventually I was I was sitting in my hot tub one day and I have this hot tub that goes way too hot and I got some engineered and mess with it and so I’m you know boiling my brain and I had this Epiphany that the way that I learned a lot of this stuff is very different than the way I teach it and so I thought oh wow this is I could potentially teach it online the way that I learned it and then that started the exploration and only to find out that there are ways that when it’s done online it’s more powerful it’s stronger and there’s some ways in which it’s weaker that’s stronger because it’s like more persistent it you have more time with it you don’t get the workshop High it becomes a integrative part of life there are some experiences that can happen in person that are bigger than the experiences that happen online overall on average there’s some exercises you can only do online so and something that you can only do in person and so in that Discovery and just trying to make it better and iterate iterate iterate which is how I do it I I never try for Perfection I just keep on improving and it just turned out that people really dug them we got great NPS scores people really liked it and then I got really motivated because I realized it made me less involved which is really a like a critical component for me in doing any of the work is that I want to become you know like if if someone’s teaching you math you don’t want them to have to be there every time you’re doing math that would be a pretty shitty teacher and so I saw that the online version needed less of me and that became really exciting for me and said then I got more and more inspired by the online work what are you trying to accomplish by growing view as a business it is really just a matter of following my enjoyment I mean I think there’s some Freedom that I have in the fact that I’m not really trying to accomplish anything and it sounds kind of counter-intuitive like you have to have business goals and I do and you know you have to have a vision and I do but at the end of the day I’m really good with things not working because I don’t I’m not attached to tied to my value isn’t created from uh the business outcomes and you know the vision is wouldn’t it be cool for a whole bunch of people to be able to communicate this way and to have breakthroughs and to have happier lives and to enjoy themselves more enjoy each other more have businesses to be more successful particularly businesses where people are open to self-exploration like wouldn’t that be awesome and it would be it’s it’s like it’s a super cool thing but it’s that’s more of like the symptom the the core is my own enjoyment the core is what turns me on what it sounds like that’s a little bit hedonistic almost but it’s not quite that way in the fact that what I’ve learned over time is that when I’m following the deeper call there’s more enjoyment in my life so when I’m it’s almost it’s not almost it is an act of surrender so it’s like I’m surrendering to the call just like a a baby surrenders to a cry like there’s a movement that’s happening my enjoyment is a way for me to directly get in touch with that call that thing that’s pulling me the gravity of my internal exploration the gravity of divinity or Oneness whatever you want to call that thing God and my enjoyment is the way that I get to gauge How Deeply I’m surrendering I love that you’re uh the way you described the vision was a series of run-on questions I didn’t even notice that totally makes sense yeah so yeah you mentioned that you know you’re doing this for your enjoyment and you do have business goals and a vision what are some of the business goals like what’s the revenue model how does this work the first question that that helps me answer the second question is what do I want the money for what what is the money about and so for me money is just another tool in self-exploration that’s its highest purpose and and money is also as a secondary purpose a means of supporting people’s energy and there’s a there’s a definite need for like a flow of money that money stagnant is um is a destructive force in my conception of the world so the goals around money in particular are all about making sure that the people who I work with are well paid um that they have good opportunities that we get to do the stuff that we enjoy and then the money for towards the customer the main purpose is does it make the spirit does it support the spiritual journey or does it not and one of the things that I think is really important is that you create us a slate of products that are accessible for anybody’s Journey so there’s free content for people who have aren’t able to afford and then other content for people who can’t afford and the reason that that’s important is because that exchange of energy is really important meaning like I was in Nicaragua and there was this group of people who were there to deliver food and clothing to these folks in Nicaragua and I was sitting talking to them and I was like you know I feel like it’s a bit destructive what you’re doing they were of course taken aback and I said you know to me if you just give them stuff it teaches them uh that they that they can’t take care of themselves on some level and I far more believe in an exchange and they’re like well these guys have nothing to give and I said you know sure they do they for instance there was a sea turtle shortage going on because they’ve been all been killed I’m like you know the community could do it see Turtles rescue or they could help with the restoration projects for this sea tortoises sea turtles in exchange for it there’s lots of ways and I think it’s really important it’s um a quote that was in a book called The Soul of money that sticks with me and it was an indigenous tribe and they said if you’re here to help me no thank you if you’re here to work together for our mutual Freedom let’s get to work and I think that the monetary exchange towards the customer needs to be that and it needs to be something that’s felt if you’re dealing with somebody who’s a billionaire to say okay I’ll do all this work for you for 200 isn’t an exchange of energy in the same way that it would be or someone who is working at ten dollars an hour so it’s really important that there’s some way that that energy exchange can happen I mean it’s been a common kind of challenge I guess that like really good coaching has been disproportionately available to Executives or high paid Tech workers or something and meanwhile a lot of people who are really struggling and could use a lot of this work the most simply can’t afford to pay for workshops but now that you’re creating like online self-paced courses that don’t require your time to administer what makes you run those as a business when you could give give them out for free yeah that’s a question that I’ve I’ve asked myself a lot you know when we were looking at the business model do we want to do this for free and the answer was that we didn’t think that we would get as much completion and buy-in if it was free and that said I do give it away for free often if the circumstances are right if the approach is right but just generally the thought process is what’s the way that the work does the best work inside of you and that’s how I think about everything I think about it like when we Market something for instance I think about not how do we get someone to buy a course I think about how does the marketing become the beginning of the course how does it become the beginning of self-exploration so everything that I’m doing is serving the self-exploration everything from the way that I bill to how we build the courses to the teamwork that goes into building the courses to how we price it it’s our best guess and I’m sure we’re wrong but it’s our best guess at how we can best serve the people how to get them through the course how to make it meaningful enough for them to Value it so that they give it the right love and attention yeah that’s that seems like a really difficult problem because you have some people for whom 300 bucks is like a throwaway and then other people for whom 300 bucks is like the majority of a rent payment or their entire rent payment and you know it could be argued that both need it equally or could use it could use this work equally but it just have completely different context for money yeah it is it’s a really difficult thing and hopefully we’ll provide stuff the other part of the model is that the higher end stuff pays for the lower end stuff right so the work that I do in companies where there’s a higher dollar per hour can pay for lower price courses so our own sustainability is definitely a part of this and like I said it’s to make sure that everybody in the organization or anybody at contract with has the ability to thrive in their own life because if we’re creating something from a poverty mentality then we’re going to be we’re going to be projecting that poverty mentality into our teachings and so that I think that’s not going to work but the idea for sure and a lot of the goals that I have are about making it more and more available at different price points and different levels of commitment and I don’t have a perfect solution by any stretch and if anybody has one please let us know my experience of doing stuff completely for free has not been as successful as far as um serving the serving the population that I want to serve the people who are interested it just doesn’t seem to work as well and yet we still pull that lever sometimes giving away recently gave away the course to an organization that is Sir you know doesn’t have the money but is doing great work in the world and and I assume we’ll continue to do that you were talking about like sustainability and there’s there are a lot of examples of organizations that are you know like businesses built around some kind of work like this that turns self-inquiry into a business at scale only to have things go south or blow up for a number number of reasons related to their like requirements for sustainability you know like training facilitators and then you know kind of gatekeeping those facilitators and trying to keep a cut and then creating paths that become somewhat manipulative and create dependence people end up becoming financially dependent on a community or in a on a particular organization and feeling trapped so like how can you maximize a positive impact of this work and scale it without it becoming corrupted by the needs of a scaling business yeah so I did an experiment on this before I failed miserably on it this one seems to be far more successful and I think to some degree I was making that mistake and I think it’s the gift of the online component that’s really showed me to some degree the mentality mess up so my perspective I thought I was far more necessary than I was the less necessary that I view myself to be in the work or that I view the organization to be or that you know that our existence alone isn’t necessary for the development of humanity that we’re just here to serve it this kind of development of humanity the more the less we have a risk of becoming one of those organizations so I think that the need to be special or the need to be needed or the need to save any of those kind of needs are what create those organizations the inner work is really the most important thing and that that clarifies the way that the art of this business is expressed and so everything that I do is all about pointing people back to themselves and the less involved I can be the less involved the organization can be the better so that we don’t create an organization where people need us what’s your approach to intellectual property you could say that the the the way of being that view points to is not new and you didn’t invent it and people have been discovering it through many different traditions and how do you consider View to be in some sense like you’re a baby and something that you are stewarding and responsible for and to what sense is it just kind of out there for people to discover this is one of the hardest questions that I wrestle with I’m glad you brought it up because it’s um a place where I I could still use some clarity yeah so uh on one level there’s a part of me that wants everything that I do to be completely open source and anybody could use it for anything on another level I’ve seen that be really dangerous and destructive you know these tools modified slightly can be used for for nefarious purposes or at least unconscious purposes and so there’s this fear that that will happen and and I’ve seen it happen and not even through people having bad intentions it’s just it’s often times someone’s like oh I can use this tool to help a whole bunch of people and they haven’t looked at their own shadow and so their Shadow just kind of you know just completely takes over the work and I’ve seen that happen quite a few times and so the way that I I the iteration that I’m on now is that you ask permission to use any of the tools that are um specific to us if you’re going to go use them and then we make sure that it feels right to us and that you have the right support to do to use those tools um I don’t know if that’s going to be scalable and but that’s what we do in our contracts with people who are taking the courses is basically you can’t go and use this and I remember like one of the first talks I gave and I was giving people all these tools that I had developed and that were a Synergy of other tools you know there’s certain things about 80 of what we do I don’t know anybody else who does them and then 20 of what we do are taken from traditions and from Neuroscience or something that’s like two three thousand years old from you know esoteric texts that I read and everything in between and but the stuff that’s novel it came from my Consciousness and so to some degree there is a I feel safe in the using of those tools and what I’ve noticed is when people use those tools but their Consciousness didn’t create it that that it can become more dangerous because they don’t fully have an understanding of the tool and more importantly I created these tools from my Consciousness and I want other people to create tools from theirs like and so again I want to be less involved and so as people create their own stuff from their Consciousness those are right tools for where they are and where the people near them are so it’s just incredibly useful to have more of those tools out there and rather than making them dependent on my tools and so that’s another reason that we basically have come up with a conclusion that you ask for permission to use the tools one thing that I’ve heard some people have sort of objections when they first encounter this work usually through somebody else is that it seems selfish and there’s like some shades of that in this conversation where you’re talking about you know I’m doing this for my enjoyment and yeah you know it needs to be an energetic exchange and you hear a lot of people talk about you know energetic exchange and like kind of using that word to disown that they’re actually charging for something and that they want money yeah I want your money no doubt about it I I like making money there’s there’s no doubt about that but then again that’s selfish too so what’s the answer that I could give that doesn’t isn’t selfish right even the person who is like I’ve done a tremendous amount of non-profit work and I can find the selfishness in that too and there’s an incredible personal reward in in the in being of service so I I don’t know I don’t even know if the word selfish I don’t know if I even believe in it particularly I feel like that’s just a word that some adult created to control their children the levels of selfishness seem to be a good way to gauge where you are in your own personal development or your selfishness of like I want this now and I don’t want you to have it that level of selfishness just means that you’re in a tremendous amount of misery compared to somebody whose level of selfishness is to be of service to people and I’m sure the mentality of being of service to people is a form of misery compared to another level of selfishness so I don’t buy into selfishness but I think what you’re pointing to outside of that which is kind of a justification of narcissism through spirituality is what I would call that this um idea that I’m going to make myself special or big or I’m gonna get all of my ID needs met through the activities I’m doing the world whether it be business or art or whatever and I’m going to justify it with a whole bunch of spiritual talk and things like I’m gonna listen to My Truth etc etc um I think that’s a really it’s a real risk it’s not to pretend it’s not there it’s not it’s not even like the risk is that I need to see if it’s there the risk is that I need to find the more and more subtle versions of that in play in myself and the and the lucky part is that that it’s misery so I can find those parts pretty easily if I’m just paying attention to where I’m not aligned where I’m in friction with myself and so that’s that’s the work that’s the work but from an outside point of view there’s really nothing I can say that somebody who’s not being assertive with their own needs or is going to hear that’s going to make me sound anything but selfish how much concern do you have that you know these these tools getting out there and mass thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people using like taking these courses in a decentralized way and bringing this into their lives with all of their Shadows what concern do you have that this could you know become weaponized in mass in ways that you don’t expect an unintended ways oh I hate I hate this feeling and now I’m gonna love this feeling um it’s inevitable you know I’m gonna say something that’s a little risky here but you know there’s an atrocity that occurs and it is through that atrocity that 10 other atrocities are prevented and it’s through the prevention of those atrocities that the next atrocity occurs I don’t see a way around good being corrupted into bad and bad creating the next good it seems to be just the way of things so it breaks my heart and that I know to some degree that this stuff has already been weaponized I know that on a small scale someone’s going to bring the view and they’re going to say something like you’re not asking how what questions to somebody to their wife and their wife’s gonna be like up you and then like the view is going to be seen I didn’t Wonder enough right yeah you’re not in Wonder enough yeah that exactly and then and then it’s just going to become a new morality and then somebody’s going to feel oppressed by the morality and then they’re going to be like screw view that thing is just blah blah blah and and then they’re gonna yeah there’s just that I don’t know any way for that to be prevented and it breaks my heart and it’s been happening for I mean I mean look what people have done with the words of Christ or the words of Buddha or and they oppress themselves and others with them all the time it’s going to happen here it’s it I mean it happens with the internet at anything anything of significance gets used to oppress people eventually you know even love gets used to oppress people or the idea of Love yeah exactly so wrapping this episode up what is your vision of a future like five years from now where view conversations are a thing that people just have all the time and it’s become like let’s say it’s it’s successful and it becomes just part of the social lexicon what does that world look like to you it’s all happening and like I’m I’m someone blissfully unaware I think it’s my version of like the best case scenario the the best case scenario is one in which and in a weird way this is already happening where the repercussions of the work are far beyond my capacity to see them and they have extended into other people’s work and and now there’s new and better tools out there that have built on these tools and on a personal note it would be nice to continuing to be excited about the business and continuing to be trying new projects and funneling whatever resources we create into bigger explorations of self-discovery in the world and and I’ve done it all inside of a balance where my children still feel loved and cared for and and that they know deeply that they’re the priority over the work that would be my vision well thank you very much Joe a pleasure you got me crying man thanks mission accomplished thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com thank you