Summary
In this interview, Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler speak with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, about the intersection of self-awareness, meditation, and leadership. Sam shares his personal journey from being an anxious, high-strung leader who would come to work in a panic with constantly shifting priorities, to becoming a calm, centered leader through years of meditation practice. He describes a pivotal moment lying on the floor of his studio in Mountain View, overwhelmed by deal stress, realizing that his anxiety was strictly counterproductive.
Sam describes his meditation arc — from guided meditations focused on awareness, to the transformational practice of unstructured meditation (sitting for an hour with eyes closed making no effort). He discusses how this led to experiences of non-duality, a diminished sense of self, and a quiet but profound joy. The conversation explores how self-awareness relates to AI development, with Sam arguing that fear-based AI safety communities could be dangerous stewards of AGI. Joe draws parallels between meditation, emotional fluidity, and artificial intelligence, suggesting that intelligence and self-awareness necessarily go together.
The interview also touches on how Sam’s meditation practice changed what he cared about (particularly dropping concern about others’ opinions), how he now rarely experiences anger but doesn’t suppress it when it arises, and how his personal transformation influenced his leadership at OpenAI — particularly his ability to match people to roles by seeing them clearly rather than promoting people who look like himself.
Key Concepts
- Anxiety is detrimental to productivity
- Calmness is a leadership superpower
- Detachment from outcomes enables better outcomes
- Unstructured meditation is the transformational practice
- Intelligence and self-awareness must go together
- Fear-based safety attracts what it fears
Key Quotes
“Every day I would come to work in some sort of a panic. I would think we were doing the wrong things. I would have like totally new priorities that I thought we need to go after.”
“Me feeling this way was not helping in any way. It was not making the deal any more likely to happen, clearly only less.”
“The situations that don’t benefit from calmness and sort of thought and sort of appropriate perspective before action are very few and far between.”
“One of the things I realized actually early on during meditation was just how much I cared what other people thought about me, which was a hugely limiting thing for me work-wise.”
“I feel like incredibly joyful all of the time… and yet I feel like no need to express it. There’s like a quiet version of it that’s really strong.”
“Only the people who sort of knew prudence without fear made it through.”
Transcript
[Music] like if you’re trying to get as smart as possible you want to be able to make the best predictions but what will happen and one of the things that will act is you so yeah I think there is something there which is intelligence and self-awareness to me seem like they have to go together 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 thank you all right everybody I’m really excited about our guest today uh today we’re speaking with Sam Altman Sam is the CEO of openai and he’s the former president of Y combinator how are you doing today Sam doing really well thanks for having me yeah awesome I’m really excited to talk to you just because it seems like what you’re doing and what we’re doing is somewhat parallel in that you’re working to make sure that the AI that we create and make self-aware is aligned with human values and what we’re doing is just making sure that humans are aligned with human values and discovering how to discover what those even are so I really I really am excited for this conversation awesome me too so Sam I’d love to dive into something that you learned about yourself over the course of your life that really just changed your world and changed the way that you operate in business and the way that you think about Ai and about your life I think there’s like a bunch of interesting things I could I could pick here uh it’s a it’s a fun question but the one that resonates me with the most uh and it wasn’t intentional at the time but it became intentional during the process uh was becoming a calm person I think I started off my career in life as a a very like anxious high-strung person much more than I realized and I think it was uh a negative in in many ways the obvious ones about being sort of just generally kind of unhappy and uh you know somewhat miserable um and also just work wise like tremendously less effective uh and a much worse leader and then through a conscious effort eventually what started off is just like interest mostly in exploring meditation um and sort of introspection about why I was the way I was and sort of why I why I was like so sort of high strung and just wound up in a you know unproductive and on way it started I guess as trying to explore why this was like in the way of my productivity and then it became why I was in the way of my happiness that process I think made me just much uh better at my job in addition to much happier in my life I think one of the things anyone learns running the company is there are a lot of crises all of the time and you can get through them uh you do get through them but uh to this degree you kind of believe you’re going to get through them even if you don’t see exactly how uh you get through them much more more effectively and also you really have an effect on how other people that work with you when they look to you for guidance and and sort of culture setting and how they should react it really changes how they should react and and basically like the situations that don’t benefit from calmness and sort of thought and sort of appropriate perspective before action are very few and far between and so I think the steadiness that brings to to work leads to the ability to uh get to much better answers on much harder problems it’s also just like a much more pleasant way to live how did you recognize that this was a that this was a blocker for you both in business and also just in your personal subjective experience yeah as I mentioned it started off with this like thing of like I can kind of like tell this is in the way of my productivity which I think says also something about my mindset at the time but it it then very quickly became uh sort of just this like inner exploration and realized that it was something that seemed obviously better to me seemed cultivatable and thing that I obviously wanted so the idea that it that it was messing with your productivity that the anxiety was messing with your productivity or the anxiousness like how did you see that what was exactly the the things that you saw that you were doing that were that you saw oh wow this is not productive for people who might not know that this is getting in the way of their productivity how could they recognize it a common thing that I’ve heard and that I did my myself is that like every day I would come to work in some sort of a panic I would think we were doing the wrong things I would have like totally new priorities that I thought we need to go after and I’d get like really convinced to like all right if we just go do this one thing like everything will be much better and we’ve gotta like totally like reorient the whole thing now and you know I have this like big new strategy and this big new thing and you know everything I thought like yesterday was bad and I’m like you know we’ve got to like do this immediately that was one way in which it happened and I think like I’ve heard a lot of other people tell similar stories where you’re just you sort of feel like very reactive and all over the place another one and this was like 15 years ago now but I still remember it like you know like watching a movie I had been negotiating this deal I was like not going that well it was like it was pretty important um and it was like you know under extreme time pressure and down to the wire I remember at one point uh just like feeling like I was gonna like explode from the stress about it and I lived in this little like Studio house in Mountain View at the time and it was like a summer day and it was probably like there’s no air conditioning probably like 95 degrees inside and I was like just in gym shorts uh it was on a weekend and I was like so stressed that I was just like laying on the ground with my arms out to the side and like trying to breathe and like feeling like I was just like you know gonna explode and it was this terrible feeling and I realized that like hey I just didn’t want to be doing this and also me feeling this way um was not helping in any way it was not making the deal any more likely to happen clearly only less um it was making me want to like quit and not do this anymore and I was like subjecting myself to this thing because it’s how I thought I was like supposed to be feeling when it was like just strictly bad there was no benefit at all um and that was a moment for me where I was like there has got to be a better way this doesn’t feel to me like the right way to be doing things I heard you say there that the that the feelings that you had there were strictly bad and I’m curious what were they trying to tell you if if anything that you needed to hear to approach the deal in a way that was healthy for you the thing that I would say now is that you know you when people like you sort of say you need to like be detached it doesn’t mean you don’t care it means that you do kind of whatever you can you can control what you can control and then beyond that the outcome is going to be what the outcome is and you kind of realize there are some things out of your control but also like in the long Arc of a company if you get the inputs right the dice rolls don’t always go your way but the outputs eventually come if you just really focus on doing what you can do and being detached from the outcome in any specific case uh eventually you got to the right the right outputs but but if you don’t focus on what you can do um you end up I think sort of like yeah in that moment sort of the way I was acting and responding and feeling uh that did not help me clearly figure out what to do that did not help me think about better ideas that certainly did not instill any confidence in our counterparty yeah I heard you mentioned just there that uh that piece about Detachment to the outcome and something that that we talk a lot about in this work is impartiality and I’m curious what the difference there is between being detached to the outcome and somewhat dissociated from it but then on the other hand or on the on the other side of that actually really caring about the outcome but also accepting whichever way it might go and also trusting yourself to navigate however that that might flow I don’t think I have a magic answer there other than it it sort of like came to me over time and now I both like really care and feel quite detached and I also trust that uh you know it’ll all somehow eventually work out even though the luck multiplier in any given moment is big I think there’s like a lot of introspection work that comes there but I also think that just seeing that work enough times over the course of the career is the best way to really internalize it and learn it and these things that just seem like you know company ending crises don’t end the company or even if they do you get to go start another thing and eventually you realize like huh I went through all of that pain and suffering and I didn’t need to and here we are and you know probably at only like hurt hurt the eventual progress right yeah in my experience the things that I’ve considered to be a company ending crisis tend to become more likely to end the company the more I believe that there’s something there for sure so tell me a little bit about how after this moment when you you had this this moment where you’re just lying on the ground and you could barely breathe and you just had all of this all this sensation all this emotion and you were clearly not operating in a way that was effective and you recognize that something needed to shift and that there was a change of strategy that was called for how did you then approach and find your way towards this introspection and deeper self-awareness that you’re the path that you’re on now yeah I mean that was like an awareness that somebody needed to change but for anything to start changing unfortunately it took quite a long time after that um but that was a moment where I was uh there were many moments where you realize something needs to change but that was a moment where it was very clear that something really needed to change because that was just sort of no way to live and also no way to be to be productive I was like a very dismissive person of anything that had any I’ve done a total 180 on this but any if someone was like you just need to go meditate more I would basically be like well you like I’m really busy and like that’s a dumb thing and you don’t get it you know I would say that about like lots of other things as well but then I think like you know at some point I was like okay I’ll give this a try I think it was years later from that moment but then man it really changed things quickly and then this thing that I had sort of done because I thought it would make me more productive I realized I just wanted to be happier and there were like a number of things meditation was probably the most valuable to me but particular forms of it but but a lot of other work that also helped and then I realized that uh just in the spirit of trying to of like wanting to be happier uh it also had like comfortable Circle and sort of made me not more productive in terms of like volume of work I do but certainly on better inputs and less better outputs you were talking about different modalities of meditation there and that there’s an arc of meditation you’ve been meditating sounds like something like 10 12 years now or something to that effect how can you describe the difference in your approach to meditation when you started in the middle and the end what how is your attitude towards and your approach changed if at all it started with sort of more guided meditations uh or sort of meditations that were focused on awareness or calmness the transformational part for me was getting to unstructured meditation sitting for an hour with your eyes closed and making no effort towards anything and the arc on that for most people starts as you know some version of cell therapy with your eyes shut for a while and then you kind of work through that backlog and it it changes to something else but I certainly changed a lot out of that it sounds like to some degree that that same um impartiality or Detachment of business results also happened internally meaning that like now you can just be with yourself with whatever showed up instead of trying to manage yourself into a state for sure for sure and and like eventually the stuff’s you know kind of stopped showing up or at least shows up much much less um yeah I think like this is a at least for me this was like a long path of meditation uh it was not the shortcut path the shortcut path at least in most of Silicon Valley is plant medicine which I think is great too but uh I think there’s really something to take in the long path in letting this process play out over over years that I encourage people to give consideration to yeah absolutely I’ve been in my experience with plant medicine is you you can often get to places with it that are hard to then re-access when you’re not on any kind of medicine and to be in a process where you learn to let your system process information Straight From the Source straight from your sensory experience uh without any alternates then it’s available to you all the time and not just on weekends yeah I mean look I I think it’s this is all worth exploring it’s all great but but the the kind of the long path or the hard path I think is also really really worth consideration along those lines then how has your relationship to meditation changed and what are some of the points that you experienced along the path where you recognized a different and more effective way to be meditating how does that relate to the way that you relate to it now I definitely didn’t go into meditation saying like what I want is calmness um you know I maybe would have said like what I want is to figure out if there’s like anything here if all these people saying this is like a good thing to try just don’t get it or probably even more I would have said like I would like to be less unhappy that probably would have resonated and it was like very strange how much stuff started changing how little I could like kind of predict where it would it would go and then um you know I think like the first moments that anyone gets to a meditation where you like really deeply feel you know you’ve like read about people’s descriptions of non-duality it always sort of sounded like vague or kind of like and you really deeply feel it that’s always for everyone I’ve talked to it’s like a pretty like profound moment of of interchange uh and I think when you get there then at least for me a lot of external things change pretty quickly and uh so for me it was sort of like this sort of slow build and then a lot of stuff changed pretty quickly uh and then I actually to be honest I don’t meditate as much anymore like I used to do it a lot uh and I still do it now just out of enjoyment or Nostalgia or something but it’s uh you know it’s definitely in a different phase now what are the things that change when that threshold got hit what are the things that you saw that shifted it’s gonna be external world I guess there’s just this sense that like none of this really matters that much and so I’m gonna have a very different relationship to how I you know interact with all of it and also there’s sort of this Clarity on so that’s like one vector of it and there’s also this sort of like Clarity of here all the things I’m doing that are actually causing all the things I don’t want and I I sort of now can see those as a very detached Observer and actually if I want to stop that stuff I’m now able to do so yeah it sounds like sounds like what you’re describing there is that through the practice of meditation you’ve made it so that you can in real time process your inputs uh if I cleaned up cleaned up the inputs of your sensory system and you’re letting all that information in in a more real time without having to go sit on a cushion and meditate because it just happens throughout the day and meditation is now something that you do for enjoyment and not necessarily something you need to do because you’re just more emotionally fluid in general does that sound accurate yeah roughly what’s inaccurate about it what’s the what’s the piece that’s missing or that is a bad description I mean there are people who say like oh I don’t need to meditate anymore because now I feel like I’m just meditating all the time I certainly haven’t had that experience there’s something about you know sitting for a long period of time that is still really different and not something that I experience sort of in day-to-day life but but the sort of like the ability to sort of observe the world and myself as sort of a more in a more detached way that’s that’s definitely stuck so one of the things that I hear people talk about when they when they get to that place um is that they start worrying that they don’t care or that they that they like they feel like it’s listless or they feel like like they don’t have the passion anymore because they’re associating with the kind of non-personal nature what do you what would you say to those people I definitely worried about that happening to me I didn’t want that to happen you know in the spirit of full transparency I know some people who that has happened to yeah but it certainly didn’t happen to me um it made me care more about work uh it made me more productive um sort of took on a different valence like what I wanted to work on what I what I cared about there’s a bunch of stuff that I didn’t even realize how much I cared about that I just really stopped caring about and there were some new things I really started caring about so there were changes for sure one of the things I realized actually early on during meditation was like just how much I cared what other people thought about me um which was a hugely limiting thing for me work-wise and that was actually of course I still care somewhat but that was like a relatively quick thing to to drop and that was like a very freeing thing in terms of going to work on things that weren’t going to seem cool or at least weren’t going to seem cool for a long time and so it like it changed what I cared about uh but in ways that I I have felt happy about there’s definitely like weird that happens to you during like intense and prolonged meditation and so there were probably moments where I was like oh wow like I’m just totally like you know on this like that shouldn’t be working at all or whatever but but none of that stuck yeah that’s what I often see in people is that their listlessness or the lack of passion is when they’re looking at the parts of themselves that no longer want to exist and and then when they find the parts of themselves that are ready to emerge and evolve that the passion is always right there but obviously the longer they stay in that fear the harder it is to find the thing that does move them now yeah I mean obviously a diminished like when you’re on the front side of it like this idea that your sense of self is going to diminish maybe diminish a lot is like a scary thought and people are like well what’s that going to do to my motivation and everything else and you know like everyone I know almost everyone who meditates a lot does have some degree of sense of self-diminishing often a lot and yet they like still do whatever they were doing they still often do whatever they were doing before or or some you know adapted and maybe better version of it yeah when you look back at your resistance to meditation what is it that you think you are actually resisting uh I think it was that like I felt like it was a waste of time in this sort of like hippie like feelings I just didn’t want to entertain so when you look back at it the resistance was the same as what you thought it was at that time yeah gotcha how do you relate your experience in meditation and feelings in general and the way that that process is through to create your experience and drive your decision making how do you relate that to the work that you’re doing at open Ai and the way that you understand intelligence in general I mean I think for most kinds of work but certainly like very uncertain scientific work that often feels high stakes and that that brings up a lot of emotions for people the ability to sort of like stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments and to make decisions over that are where you’re not too reactive but sort of sticking to long-term principles I think that’s really important and I think in this field in particular unfortunately some of the communities that have been most involved in AI safety I think are the people that are the least calm and I think that’s like a sort of dangerous situation if you have some of the people who have historically been most active thinking and talking about AI safety actually build AGI and be responsible for its safety I think that would be quite bad because it’s it’s an extremely high strung Community with some peculiarities and I remember observing that like one thing I could bring to this is the opposite of whatever that Community has so there’s a principle that I see a lot which is the thing that we uh are scared of is the thing that we attract and it sounds like that’s at least in part of the way that you’re seeing this is that these very high strung very scared people are the ones to protect us from it that there also might be attracting the thing that they’re trying to avoid yeah I think that would be quite bad I could see fear justifying a lot of the arms racy type things that occur in the field yeah I mean that that could happen for sure but I think there’s like a whole bunch of other worse things that that could happen too there’s this great short story about AI called The Gentle seduction and and there was there’s a line in there that I’m going to misquote but it’s something like you know only the only the worlds are only the people who sort of like knew like Prudence without fear made it through and I think that’s it’s not that’s not quite the sense but it’s something like that um maybe it was like new caution without fear but like that’s basically what I think it’s going to take to build to sort of like get through this uh very wild and complex transition we’re going through and if you sort of like create the descendants of humanity from a place of like deep fear and panic and anxiety uh that seems to me like you’re likely to make some very bad choices or certainly reflect not the best of humanity in that neurologically speaking we make decisions emotionally meaning if we take the emotional center of our brain we stop we cease to be able to make decisions even if our IQ and our IQ would stay the same also if you look at I’m always pronounced his name drug girdle I think some people pronounce him but you know he talks about the limitations of logic through the mathematical and completeness Theorem so as you’re building artificial intelligence and if you kind of see that the postulates that we’re working on and the way our intelligence works is through emotions how do you how does that translate into AI how does that how do emotions translate into agif at all as the Thruster I mean first of all I think it’s like important to stay quite humble here and realize that although it does appear now that we know how to build intelligence we may be building a very alien intelligence we don’t quite know how it’s going to work or how it works and it’s possible uh that that we build something that just works you know that can still solve problems and can still understand and learn but just does so in such a different way than we do that if we try to project our own experience of deeply emotional decision making that’s just wrong or that just won’t work but I think it’s also possible that a lot of those things that we experience as emotions as we make depending on how we train the system a lot of those ideas of things like emotions are going to appear in artificial neural networks as well there’s certainly no reason why it couldn’t you know people say like oh we’re not going to have that because you can’t have you know hormones can’t act on artificial neural networks and it’s like of course you can model that it’s like this is clearly possible it’s just we haven’t done it yet and it could also just emerge entirely in the neural network without us ever doing anything actively there there could be something very deeply inherent about creativity or social dynamics or whatever where that’s that’s unavoidable so I think the honest answer is we don’t know and and we need to be open to it doesn’t happen at all or it happens in a very deep way the follow-up question is if it’s a weird one but if you could push a button and the button was basically fear is something that AI gets to experience would you push the button of course okay and what makes that so and and I say that because obviously moving out of anxiety has been an incredibly important thing to you so you see some wisdom in the fear so what creates that I think fear is an important emotion I think fear underlies certainly not all emotions but but quite a lot of them and I think it there’s like often a very important signal there I think it evolved for a reason I don’t think we would have made it through or to where we are without that yeah I think it’s like it’s an important part of sort of the full experience of life and it’s also like you know it’s like a useful signal for Learning and staying alive and all that yeah I think there’s something really interesting about how often the framing around the AI is that emotions are a human thing and then AI is a logical thing and even even that like that that piece about fear and the endocrine system you know the distribution of corticoid receptors in your body is trained by your experience and determines your bodily response to a fearful stimulus and how could that not be part of a learned system that may not be neural in nature but is part of your overall system I’m curious curious what you think about that and how emotions do actually play into play into creating the context in which our decisions are even made and you know proposals for actions are even thought from yeah I mean look as Joe said we clearly make decisions emotionally and then you know justify them with an intellect later again just to repeat it I think we need to be very open-minded to the fact that the digital intelligence we build is just going to be super alien and maybe it won’t be maybe like there’s something so fundamental about the relationship between fear and intelligence which I could totally believe that building any sort of agi-like system necessarily has the ability to experience fear but also maybe not one thing that I think we will find is that biological intelligence is just incredibly limited uh relative to what we’re capable of producing what’s the biggest example of something you’ve learned about yourself by understanding AI as you built this thing it’s like if I write what I mean to say is like I if I write um something on fear I’m going to learn something about fear by writing on it you’re building AI attempting to build AGI what is it teaching you about yourself or about Humanity we talked a little bit earlier about this idea of you know how when you meditate like your sense of self recedes but one of the things that I and I’ve heard a lot of other people describe this in different ways are sometimes the same one that working on AI really like makes you think about all of the kind of like old deep philosophical questions not all but many of them come up a lot in this context of like what’s going to happen when I get uploaded what’s gonna happen when there’s copies made of me do I want to merge do I want to go off exploring the universe like will that still be me like how much of me will that be how like one of the things that I think was like an interesting continuation of meditation was this like very deep felt sense that there is no self that I can still find to identify with in any way at all and I’ve heard a lot of other people who have spent a lot of time thinking about AGI get to that in a different way too it reminds me of the the the Moon um there’s a phenomenon that happens with people who go up into space astronauts uh I don’t know if it’s still happening but when they go and they look at the Earth from a distance and they look at the Moon from the New Perspective that they have the same thing happen where kind of the sense of self uh changes and and one of the I think I’m trying to remember the name of but there’s this whole Institute in Petaluma California that was all built around this man’s experiences astronauts experience of seeing that and then building a center to promote it in the world it seems like it’s got a similar phenomenon yeah but I think really having to contemplate these questions of like what it means to you know get uploaded or merged or whatever like leads people down an interesting path and certainly the more you work on AI the more you think about that in many or at least for me it seems to me like something that I mentioned earlier on the podcast how there seems to be this parallelism between Ai and self-awareness and meditation it seems like the sense of self itself is a specialized form of intelligence that is trained on a certain subset of our history and this is particularly visible in something like a trauma where you recognize a couple features in your environment and then you collapse your entire world to what your environment was like at the time that that trauma was programmed and that the process of feeling through and healing our traumas and integrating those experiences as well as the process of meditating and just feeling past our sense of identity into the rest of what we are actually is a way of increasing our general intelligence by allowing us to move through a wider range of experiences in the world and be able to act on those experiences as they distinctly are and not just as our history was and I’m curious how how that lands with you and your experience with with both Ai and with meditation and your own self-awareness the part about sort of related this to traumas didn’t connect with me I probably just didn’t understand it um but the part about how you know intelligence passed a certain level should necessarily have some model of self-awareness that deeply resonated with me um because I do think you have to be able to sort of understand your place in the world yourself as an agent and an actor in the world um like if you’re trying to get as smart as possible you want to be able to make the best predictions but what will happen and one of the things that will act is you um or your your whatever uh and and you also want to be able to think about like hypotheticals uh so so yeah I think there is something there which is in the limit intelligence and self-awareness to me seem like they have to go together so the other thing that I see happen in people so that when they you called it non-duality but when the sense of self opens up into like a more Universal sense of self which you know that cognitive thing is moved what I notice is that there’s like a movement eventually the person then starts moving more and more into joy that sometimes it takes 10 years for them to just hang out in that space and they they don’t think there’s any the piece is fine and they don’t think there’s anything besides peace that’s available and then they move into Joy how has that experience been for you the movement from oh okay so I am this is a depersonalized life that is I’m not taking personally I still have my passion how is that movement into Joy been for you this is sort of like amusing to me um because I think on the outside I probably seem much less joyous than I used to I’m like not allowed boisterous laughing person and I used to like you know prioritize more doing things that at least match with my image of what a joyful thing looked like I now am like you know pretty happy to like sit around and not do much or go hiker whatever but I feel like incredibly joyful all of the time but not all the time but it’s like it’s it’s rare that I don’t um and yet I feel like no need to express and I don’t think it like comes through talking to me or at least it doesn’t wouldn’t have fit my model of how a joyful person acted but there’s like a quiet version of it that’s really strong and I’m really grateful for almost all the time yeah it definitely sends a lot of calm just talking to you and so wrapping this back around to to your personal experience having gone through this journey and being wherever you are in the journey yourself now what happens when when you’re in a meeting and something happens and it’s some kind of Crisis everyone else gets elevated and alert and something happens in your system and you find yourself that you might be reactive what do you do then once in a while I do react I don’t sit there and try and like make myself not react if it is like I someone that I work with just said like ah like that was that was just the you know the one time you get really heated per year happened a few days ago in a meeting so like I wouldn’t claim to have and certainly not want perfect control nor would I say I try to like pretend to be calm and I don’t feel like I’ll happily get mad if I feel like the situation calls for it just doesn’t seem to call for it very often but it’s not like I’m like sitting there like making this effort to be really calm how do you experience anger when it when it arises in you differently than you used to I don’t think differently just less often but I still like you know like the physiological response in me is like heat and energy you said appropriate I don’t find it appropriate to have the response of anger when how does it feel appropriate like what’s the moment where you’re like this is appropriate it’s great or is it just happens it just when it happened I don’t fight it when it happens it just doesn’t happen that often but I don’t sit there thinking like is this worth getting angry about I just almost always feel like it’s not and then if whatever reason something is I don’t like try to stop it but but it’s rare you know how like most people are like somewhat not most many people are somewhat conflict avoidant but there are these like rare people that like love conflict it seems like an awful way to live but they to me but they love conflict like they go they go searching for it those are the people that seem to like trigger the anger in me the most right I’d make a distinction that I’d make the distinction between loving conflict and wanting conflict they want it yes I agree yeah yeah I love conflict because I always find like a better solution at the end of it but I’ve definitely am not interested in creating yes yeah yeah it’s it’s definitely uh the people who want to create it that’s a better phrase for it yeah I love when people want to recognize where there is some conflict and bring it to the surface before it becomes a bigger festering conflict definitely I’m happy with that it’s what I don’t like is when people want to make fights because it’s like uh it entertains them or whatever because they feel safe in drama somehow yeah which is interesting because my noticing is the people who have that tendency they don’t feel calm unless they’re contained 100 right so that it’s their anxiety and so when you meet them with anger that is the containment that actually calms them down so it’s so interestingly appropriate even though it’s not a conscious thing that’s occurring yeah so if you were talking to either yourself when you were like hippie meditation or if you were talking to a young brilliant kid who’s like hippie meditation and for whatever reason because you probably wouldn’t want to convince them but for whatever reason you were making the argument for meditation what would you say I mean I was gonna say what you just caveat it which is I can’t ever imagine trying to convince someone this is what they should go do and I think if I had tried to convince myself or if someone else had convinced me before I like really was like desperately ready it wouldn’t have worked and so I don’t think I would try to convince anyone but if I had to I would just be like just come try this once with me it probably won’t be your thing you know you’ll probably think of it as a wasted hour but like we’ll hang out and do something fun afterwards I would have done it in some like very like you know easy to dismiss lightweight way it’s funny when we’re talking about people you know introducing other people to the work that we do or one of the courses we talk about the same thing it’s like if you’re trying to convince them to get there then it’s just it’s no good for anybody you or them so yeah from from that perspective then how how do you approach your your company when you have found something that’s working really well for you and you may be aware that the Consciousness that you have is projected throughout your company as its leader how do you see your company evolving either on the self-awareness front on the individual level or organizationally due to the work that you’ve been doing yourself I think one of the things that’s remarkable open AI is we have a very highest I’ve ever seen density of talent and ability but people that have bring extremely different approaches to work and have very different styles um much more so than I would say most companies have like most companies tend to have like a culture and it people can fit into that and get promoted or not and get fired or not hired and so you end up with people who sort of like all feel pretty similar and I think a thing that is that I love about open AI is is just how different people are and so you know there are some like very non-com people and they’re very effective and they sort themselves into the right places in the organization um and that’s probably a good compliment one thing that I think I that I have gotten good at is figuring out how to sort people like figuring out what people’s inherent strengths and abilities and styles are and figure out how to sort them into the right roles I can’t like articulate exactly how but like objectively I think I I have been much better at this than most people running companies and it’s been a great asset for us yeah it sounds like the more that you understand yourself the more you can see the parts of yourself and others that they might not see maybe or maybe you can just like observe other people in a really detached way because you’re not trying to do it in relation to yourself you’re not looking for yourself you’re not I think most people do end up just promoting people that look like themselves and instead you can just when you when you’ve got that out of the way you can just sort of really focus on what is this person’s what makes them them what are they going to excel at and not you know have to relate it to yourself and make a better decision so one of the things particularly I notice around people who are in any kind of search for non-duality is that they think that non-duality is some sort of end that there’s some sort of like place that they’re going to end up and there’s nothing left to be done and since we’ve been talking about it whenever I speak about it I always you know point to the fact that Evolution doesn’t stop at any particular time internally or externally so I was just wondering what’s what’s the thing now inside of yourself that you’re that you’re exploring or working with or seeing through or what’s where’s your journey now I just want to see what happens I think we’re like in the midst of this like most exciting time yet in human history I’m sure there’ll be more exciting ones in the future but I’m just I’m so like I just feel like tremendous curiosity about how all of this is going to play out and because I sort of identify with all of it I’m like deeply interested and curious about all of it and it’s pretty exciting yeah I’m deeply curious as well and I’m really excited to see where where you and open Ai and all the rest of us take this existence through the rest of our lifetimes yeah thank you guys for having me thank you Sam yeah thank you 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 foreign