The Exit No One Celebrates

how do we even find words for.

Measuring human flourishing as a, um, as a consequence of, of the technology. Right? And it's so easy to find words or KPIs or whatever for more the automation and, and human redundance path. And not just find the words, but find the incentives too, right?

you know, humans have this inherent sensory ki kind of presence in the world.

Mm-hmm.

And so these agentic systems, you know, these defense systems, these, these sort of supervisory functions, you could even argue that social media has sort of become that, you know, it's become this, um, commercially, it's become something that's impossible to turn off.

Yeah.

Because there's so much reliance on it. Mm-hmm. And, but, but you, you know, once you escape outside of the model model, that's where humans still have a, all this agency, all of this presence. And, but when you are within the confines of the model, it, it, it, it's seductive because it, it, it has this reward system that's been intrinsic.

Yeah.

And, and so it tries to kind of gaslight you that like its view of the world is the only thing that's real.

I wonder how much of it, it's kind of that thing that is very like in the, in the style of communication that is very positive and yeah, that's a great idea. And how much of it is the seductiveness of you can always be on a path of dis discovery and like the next step is so easily available.

You know, I used to remember phone numbers really well. And then, and then I got an iPhone where it was just so easy to rely on the iPhone. I used to have, uh, as a child, I used to be able to navigate, you know, I I, my mom would be driving to a friend's house that was like two hours from our home and I would remember the route exactly, because you, your neural nets are trained on that sensory journey.

the, uh, studies on like automated systems is really interesting.

I, one of the more profound conversations I've had over the last six months was with, um, a member of the team at the Rust Foundation that works on standards and, um, they're actually more of a, a c plus plus engineer, but he, he challenged me very strongly on my thesis for Glaces.

Yeah.

And now that we're in 2026 and we have, you know, my Tesla drives itself pretty much like, uh, I was just in San Francisco and Waymo is everywhere and you know, it, it, it, you have to like, you have to acknowledge the greatness of this stuff.

Yeah.

Um, that's tremendous and that's like novel and it's insane. I, a couple of years ago I took my father to um, Arizona and that's when they were testing Waymo.

Oh, okay. And,

uh, you know, like he, I think he, he even interviewed Bill Gates once, you know, back in the eighties or something like, and to, to, to have seen the trajectory from like the first microprocessor to, to a like fully autonomous robo-taxi.

Yeah.

He was just, he was like a kid in a candy store. I've never seen anything

like it. Yeah, I can imagine. I heard that Wayne are getting bullied in the, in the San Francisco traffic because they're so polite.

Yes, yes they are. This is exactly, there was all these, you know, so this, this brilliant academic reached out to me around the Yara stuff and he, he, he flagged some of his research around something called algorithmic imprint, which is this notion that like, once you let an algorithm with autonomy into the world, it changes the world and you can't, you can't get it back to, to the prior state.

Yeah.

You know, people jump out in front of you because they know it's gonna break. And so it, it creates this new form of vulnerability and it als also creates this new form of, uh, ignorance is probably too strong, but this comfort level Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely. But you know, TTT Tesla just rolled out a trial over the Christmas period for its full self-driving product to all Tesla owners that have the right hardware.

that's interesting. I, I have a, obviously, I, I run a, uh, kind of AI consulting business, especially advising very senior stakeholders on, on the implementation of ai, more for knowledge work.

it's what the cop told me, I think.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And the answer was, yes, you're right. And I'm so sorry and he let me off. But the, the point is that even someone like me that takes this problem very seriously falls into these traps very quickly. Yeah,

absolutely. Yeah.

And I think we just have to remind ourselves like what, you know, going back to the sort of primitives of life and, and good decisions and ethics.

Tell the story about places. 'cause part of the part, what we'll do is, is explore the difference between quitting and stopping, especially for moral reasons in a system incentivized by investors.

having sat through a lot of VC pitches and a lot of strategy around tech, you know, there's this kind of like unwritten thing in, uh, in tech, which is that like good founders are all damaged and, uh, you know, we all have a chip on our shoulder about something and we all wanna push for some, you know, world order.

you know, as a kid I was bullied quite a lot because I was moved from a school where they embraced sort of individualism and an ingenuity to, to a, to a very different school where like outliers were attacked.

And, um, and that made me really pissed off as a kid, you know, like, because it just had absolutely no, like, no, like real intrinsic reason. Um, but y you know, so I I, one of the things that we were talking about at the beginning was this, this podcast, I forget his last name, but Mo The

mo gal,

the Google X.

made me like a teenager has to do this consciously, by the way, such a, like, we're, we're both fathers at this point.

I mean, I'm in so many ways grateful for it, actually. And, and I think that's the key. That's the key, like that unlock, is that I don't wanna be an angry, you know, boisterous, abusive person.

Hmm.

and so I took a gap year and I was like completely just not sure what to do with myself and, um. Ended up realizing that the world doesn't stop when you stop on your trajectory. And I think that that notion of the gap between the narrative in your head and the reality of the world and the chaos of the world is just so critical.

Hmm.

And it was just like the most humbling thing of like, don't take what the screens say, get out into the world, get it, get into, into the actual, um, environment around you.

Hmm.

And that was when I realized how big the mental health crisis was. I did this back of an envelope, maths around absenteeism in the workplace, around the prevalence of anxiety and depression in humans around the, the economic cycle and what it did, especially to sort of white men who were kind of hiding behind their mortgage statements and their credit card that bills.

a complex system with like very long payoff horizons, and the, the people carrying the costs aren't the same people that would invest in proactive care.

And we've got so much work to do still in 2026, but this was like 2008, right?

And

one of the most profound

in the middle of, of all, of the negatives.

And it was definitely expedited for him a little bit by the steroids he was giving because he had some really intense radiotherapy and he became a little bit overexcited for, for about a week. And, but, you know, it was kind of beautiful. And I, I, I must have, I was living here, I'd just moved here to Seattle and I must have spent.

mm,

I was awake, you know, in this time zone. And we would just talk, and I recorded some of it and I gotta, I've gotta find those recordings. But, um, he just, he just became convinced that positivity is the most important thing in life.

Hmm.

So then the, I, I suppose the third go around is, um, about two years ago I, um, I was working in a job I really didn't enjoy. And, um, you know, in a bunch of circumstances that I won't go into because it's just not interesting. I, I found myself free.

Hmm.

And I had some time and I had some energy. And the first thing I did, and I think we spoke about this last time we connected, is I, I just spent, I spent like.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and, and that was like right when I kind of found the courage and the motivation to sort of open that envelope again and think about how I was gonna pay positivity forward. And, um, that was when the idea for Yara came, came to sort of fruition, which was like, for many years I'd, I'd said like, you know.

Hmm.

Generative AI solves a problem. I, you know, I, I, I skipped over the swift Swifty stuff, but about 2013 I gave a talk, excuse me, at a conference articulating AI for good.

Mm. This

notion of like, of building durability between two humans, that results in commitment, which results in change.

Mm.

my thesis with Yara was that generative AI actually undoes that, that,

yeah,

that missing piece. And so I was very excited and I teamed up with some of the smartest people I could find.

The core product

Supervis we kind of created layers, but the, the, the premise was here is a, a character that you can engage with that is not going to judge you for being honest.

Yeah.

And in the early versions it would just sort of, it would just say, sorry, your shit out of luck now bye Yeah. And, and that felt a little bit like being hung up on by a friend, you know?

Hmm.

And I think we probably got about 95% of the way there. There was still these moments where you would tell it that, you know, oh, I love the football club arsenal.

the uncanny valley moment, uh, kinda came in.

Yeah. But most of it was really good. Right.

Yeah.

The problem was that away from our studies, away from our lab, we were seeing increasing incidents in the public domain.

Yeah.

That were very different from our experience, that were extraordinary and very harrowing, sycophantic piling on of suicidal ideation of addiction, of harmful behavior. And I just couldn't understand. Where in the technology that behavior was emerging from. And we looked really, really hard for it. And I think I've got a lot of empirical things to say, but it comes down to mathematics.

it's like the ultimate filter bubble after a while, I would imagine.

yeah, and actually since I made the decision the very hard, very painful, very drawn out, very ugly decision to stop building that.

does character mean in that, uh, setting?

I'm gonna butcher this, but from, you know, they, they, they have a graph that, and they ran a ton of, you know, red teaming around this.

It's also interesting, if you think about it, forming relationships. I think many people probably feel that they start to do with their, with their ai when they lose their character.

Yes. And they call that the split brain. There's the split brain problem, which was something that came out of neuro rips last year about the, the kind of the, the very disjointed way that post-training often, you know. Pushes loads of academic text, which is written in a very structured, very kind of stiff style.

Yeah.

To kind of give it character and, and, and like, you know, if you ask a model a question and you use the, the, the, the sort of etymology of, uh, of academic discipline, you, you know, you, you end up in that, in that part of the training data and the weights, right?

a

you know, 15,000 word essay about.

Yeah.

And then you, you have all of this, um. The hype cycle, all of the people that are like on Twitter and every day all they post is, this is wild. Look what happened today. You know, at some point we've gotta actually have a moral compass here. And at some point we've gotta say, what is it gonna take to, as Dario very, very painfully points out, prevent World War III being basically an ai, uh, cold War.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think you and I are people who have learned how to get goodness out of AI and know how to sort of put our hand up firmly when we see badness.

Hmm.

But the, the infrastructure that building things that are outside of the model's view, that can constrain it, is exactly what needs to happen in order to get to a place where healthcare and education and defense and finance and insurance and frankly consumer entertainment can be, can be conducted in ways that I would be proud for my children to participate in.

Thank you for sharing. Um, one of the things that you mentioned that perhaps you and I, we've found ways to get the best out of the kinda current technology. And I do think that's from a very individualistic standpoint, I agree with that statement. One thing that I struggle with morally.

you have to enter the arena.

Hmm.

And it, I would say it took me 10 years to, to build the courage to enter the arena. And, and, and, and, you know, once you're in the arena. You don't have a choice. You're in the arena. And, uh, the amount of times I've written things and trashed them and not posted them is I, I, I've lost count.

Mm, in what way?

Cause my children wake up every day and they say, dad, you are, they don't swear at me.

Mm.

And I thought to myself, I don't want them to think I'm a pathetic wimp, just, you know, sitting in my office for 20 hours writing an essay and then never, never publishing it. So I just thought, fuck it. And like, it was a really hard thing to do.

I

had,I just, honestly, I just felt obliged to explain to the 12 people I know that engaged with me on LinkedIn, what I was doing in my career, because they'd been quite supportive through the journey.

And there's something so interesting because everybody kind of understands that vulnerability is good for the algorithm. So we see a lot of fake, vulnerable posts as well. It's really difficult.

yeah. I mean, fake, fake fakery is, is a whole different kettle of stuff. And you know, you could argue that all of digital media is fake. 'cause none of it's human, right? It's all just pixels

measure. That's part of the human experience at the same time.

But it, it wouldn't, you know, I'm looking at a screen right now having a very candid conversation about, mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I would be

absolutely,

yeah. I, I'm very, I'm very grateful for that.

I had the conversation last week, uh, with. A guy here in in Spain that runs the Museum of Failure.

I talk a lot at work about primitives. You know, the, the primitives of thought are words and we have words. And

Those words become the thoughts that lead to the actions that change the world, you know?

And that's exactly what Dr. King teaches us when, when he talks about these things.

uh, imposter syndrome 1 0 1 says, like my word, my words don't matter. And that's, that's absolute bullshit. You know, like the, the, the, the word is the, is the vessel that you convey thought, and that sure.

Actions speak louder than words sometimes. But, uh, you know, one of the things that Digital Worlds flourish on is words or concepts that you can communicate. And, you know, one of the biggest criticisms after the assassination execution, really summary execution of Alex Preti was the lack of business leaders standing up and saying, this is enough.

It is like it's been creeping into people's souls. Like how is it to live through? Because the experience from Europe, like we, we have plenty of of issues here as well. This is not a good versus, bad, but, but that specific thing must feel like incredibly tough to, to, especially as a father and like, how much should I be part of this discussion in order to try to save it versus keep my sanity by, by taking a step back, is it even possible to take a step back because it form forms so much of the kind of public conversation that becomes the private conversations.

Yeah. And it's still very raw, right? Mm-hmm. You know. Three sleeps after this happened and, you know, maybe 15 sleeps or something after Renee was murdered.

there's a relentlessness around that as well, because it, it is something else before that and something else before that.

It's exhausting. I mean, yeah. I mean, it, it, like, I'm trying to find gratitude and it's hard, right? Mm. Because, um, although I will tell you that, um, so Saturday, like my wife's friend had a birthday party and we had to sort of put a brave face on.

Mm.

it was very challenging. 'cause on the, we took a taxi from our home to, to, to this.

Hmm.

It's, it's a strange time. And, and, and it does as a, to answer your question, you know, as a father, you know, I've got two girls Right. And women's rights have been stripped by this administration and the Supreme Court Yeah.

for somebody who, who spent a lot of time thinking about the moral questions of today, the, the audience of this podcast are typically people that actually wield power, even though it's in a, in a business landscape.

That's such a good question. Um, there is this, I believe strongly, and this makes me contrarian perhaps, but you know, I think all the best ideas are somewhat contrary. I strongly believe that, um, that money is a catalyzing force, a bit like compute, and I think there's a legitimacy to making money that is required.

it like Kindle to do, to read list after you recommended it last time.

Yeah. You know, the whole universe is contained in an apple wedge in a lunchbox. It's just, there's so much beauty in this book.

Hmm.

Where the brain rediscovers love rediscovers purpose. Instead, it's just this rat race, this treadmill, this constant grind. And I don't think anyone can truly lead from a place of fight or flight. I, I just don't. And so, you know, whether it's through faith or through exercise, or through meditation, or through all of the above.

it's similar to one of the most counterintuitive insights that I've gotten.

Yeah.

And

me too,

I think the insight for me at that retreat was you can't give from an empty cup. Like you can kind of fake, we, we talked about authenticity before. You can kind of fake the giving behaviors, but

yes.

There's nothing, but it's

not real.

no, exactly. Exactly. And unless you're, you're kind of kind to towards yourself, it's almost impossible to be kind in the universe. And that's one of those things, especially living in, I'm an entrepreneur, I run a podcast, like life is hectic. I have two kids. We just moved to new country. Like there's always a long ass to do list.

Yeah.

20 minute meditation is like a bandaid on a, on a ripped off, uh, knee, you know?

Exactly. Yeah. And I, and again, like, it's, it's, it's, it's ironic.

Yeah.

You know, but you know, just take your shoes off, walk in some dirt and Yeah.

Hmm.

Claude doesn't have a parasympathetic nervous system.

Hmm.

Claude doesn't give a shit. Right? No. And so. It might tell you all about one. I've learnt a lot Yeah,

exactly.

From talking to it about, yeah. Yeah. Uh, H HRV and, you know, cold plunges and, uh, you know, go do ayahuasca. But, um, I always thought, like you, I always labeled that stuff as indulgence.

Yeah.

And I felt that it was selfish.

Yeah.

And I felt that it was inherently pursuing, you know, the same emotions as lust and, uh, and it just, that just couldn't be more far from the truth

So starting with the kind of, um, regression towards the mean that you talked about all the way in the beginning where we, when we were discussing bullying in school, and it's very, very difficult to, and create, takes a tremendous amount of, kind of guts to go against the grain.

I think

some

people are just naturally contrarian.

They're, you know, they're for sure, but there's, there's a lot of incentives, especially if you think about it from like an investor culture or whatever, to, to like go towards the playbook. Um, and doing something different takes you risk a lot on a personal level, um, to do something different. And then one thing that I think all my listeners have in common, because I I discuss a lot of leadership on this podcast is an, is an interest in becoming better leaders and taking perhaps the luxury to, uh.

Mm-hmm.

I'm gonna try to pull in the, uh, kinda imposter syndrome as well, because I do think that all of these things kind of tie together mm-hmm. Among all of us, uh, anxious overachievers. Um, I think there's like a trifecta or, or something where it's, unless you find ways to almost synthetically do these kind of reflective things, it's almost impossible to, like, nothing in society is kind of rigged towards you ending up with your own conscious values.

Well, do you think Elon Musk is happy?

Oh God, no.

I don't think he is. Yeah.

Even more important, I don't think perhaps that he values happiness, like, or, or can have the same relationship to happiness that you and I have

you know, I used to be quite inspired by his work and, you know, I, I own one of his cars and, uh, and I think, you know, somewhere between the sort of ego boost of becoming the owner of Twitter and the revelation that one of his children was transgender, that gave rise to a, a, a, a shift in his, in his personality, which is clearly one that suffers from tremendous amount of personality disorder.

I think the, the word synthetic in my mind was you need to create consciously pockets.

it's,

it's, it's funny It's

faith.

That's interesting though. I've actually written about how compared to the US Europe is, is quite agnostic, right? So

yeah,

there's a bunch of things that really hasn't anything to do with what specific God there is that the church probably did. That was really, really good. But we kind of misunderstood what that was.

Yes,

we don't have really, um, rites of passages. That we used to have For mourning, yes. For growth. For, for entering into, into the grownup society.

Adolescence. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It's, it's interesting how we kinda stripped all of those off. At least in, in Sweden, where I come from there, there's very little of rites of passages left.

yes,

I get the same feeling when I go up hiking in the mountains.

Congregation. Yeah. This notion of being part of the flock is a very comforting kind of component in, in, in sort of how to build peace and rest and Yeah.

mm-hmm.

you know, because I think what we all know now, sort of deep down is that something's missing, right?

Yeah.

I completely agree with you that, um. That like modern life requires more structure.

Mm-hmm.

And I think in my mind's eye, the only difference is one of those was in, was indoors and the other was outdoors. So may, maybe it's just the structures around ourselves that, that change the, the kind of impact or the imprint of those, those environments and like being, it's

interesting.

And that's actually one of the reasons I don't do a podcast, is I've always had a phobia of cadence. Know, and, and lot of people

is a commit thing or,

yeah.

I mean, I can do the same thing for, for all the good reasons or all the bad reasons, right? Like it's, you can try to optimize your HRV for, for all of the vanity reasons, right?

And this is exactly what I was trying to argue in my essay, right? Like if, if you tell an algorithm that harm is bad. And you give it a hundred reasons and you only optimize it for the avoidance of harm, then what's left?

Hmm.

Emptiness. A vessel. Whereas if you are, if you tell an algorithm that humans deserve to have dignity and flourish and should be humble and accountable, but should also be able to, to grow and, and, and, and to build, then that's where you create cathedrals rather than deserts. And, and I think, you know, when I look at some of the writing over the last few weeks, when I look at some of the trend lines in ai, you know, when I look at this sort of brute force, the sort of 9, 9, 6, everyone's working all the time.

as many people in this industry do have ADHD or they have neurodivergent behaviors that that mean that they're vulnerable to being exploited around reward systems.

Right. And, and I think. Being really out front about that, both with your children, but also with yourself being intellectually honest about, you know, are you just doom scrolling or casual gaming or building even for the sake of the rush. It gives you, when you see it, render

we're, we're pretty bad at that, sitting with bad feelings, right?

fallacy the time. Often we tell ourselves, and I, you know, some, some of the feedback I've received has humbled me over the course of my career. But you know. When, when you have limited money and maximal objective and you are trying to squeeze something special out of a constraint, it's so, it's so easy to lie to yourself about why.

can you unpack that?

so in product management, we often have sprints and we say, you know, after, after this sprint we're gonna ship, right? Mm-hmm. And then you, you have a bunch of assumptions about what you're gonna find out, what you're not gonna know, and you know where you're gonna be. But ultimately it's still chaos, right?

Hmm.

And Will will say, well, we committed to the board and to our investors that this is gonna ship on the 15th of February, and therefore, you know, we've got to just keep pushing, keep pushing.

when you were talking, my, my head went to. Like you have this professional role, right?

I, yeah, I, I, I agree so much that, uh, so one of the themes that I was contemplating bringing up was, um, you know, about a year ago when, um, the, the work I was doing around Yara started to, to, to sort of shape out a little bit.

Mm-hmm.

And, and I think, there's a lot there that could be unpacked, but I think that the sort of, the headline is like, follow your heart, right? Like, if, if your heart is saying you wanna be building and your company is saying you shouldn't be building, then you've built the wrong company.

Yeah.

And you know, you've got to find the primitives that enable you to flourish, even if it means finding organizational, the structure that, um, that, that, that acknowledges that you could be both a good CEO and a goods.

it's so rare that you see a founder's story. I actually met one of them just recently, founder of a, a, um, investment company for, for all intents and purposes, but, but his passion was property development. Uh, and he started developing more and more properties and became more and more just a CEO and he actually ended up handing over the reins, but still remaining or, or moving back to property development and is still the majority owner.

keeping up with the Joneses, my coach used to call it, you know, you like, you live in a neighborhood and someone's got a bigger car than you, and someone's got a boat and someone's got this and someone's got that.

You

know, having, having the ability to. To embrace being, being a, a student of many disciplines.

Have you heard about the concept of, uh, the golden shadow?

It rings a bell, but I No, please enlighten me. So

so the way that I got told the story of what your shadow is, and I think it was a beautiful story, is that you're born into this world, into a, a palace of, of.

I love that

about that. And especially in the concept now of, of moving countries and rearranging our lives.

Yeah.

And also in, in the context of what is the business that I'm trying to build? Like it's, it's not intended to make the most amount of money. It, it's part of a much broader ecosystem that includes how can I be present as a husband, as a father?

when we first met, you said it's like it's your flex, right?

Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah.

My podcast enables me to, to, to get access to people that I wouldn't normally have access to, that's for sure. True.

Yeah. But I think inherent in that analysis is, is, is, is a, is a thought error, I would argue, because why should you not have access to those people?

Yeah, sure.

You know?

Yeah.

You have the right to, to share great ideas, to bring your philosophy, which I, which I have a lot of respect for, and your, and your, your moral and ethical views into the minds of other leaders. Right. And so, like, and this, you, you made a comment about ego, which I think is such an important part of this, right?

Hmm.

That, you know, the optimizing the right parts of ego, you know, we, we,

yeah.

We shouldn't gaslight the ego question.

No, a

We should, embrace ego as men, as, as, as fathers.

okay.

Taking a position, but being willing to accept that that position might be wrong. And there's a sort of an irony and a kind of a, a slight sort of, slight of hand almost to having a, a position, but also knowing that it could be wrong.

Hmm.

And, and so I would argue

it's

a good starting point.

Mm.

Flourishing and, and being, being, being a forward thinking. Intellectually capable member of this civilization that we're continuing to Perfect.

Yeah.

And with varying degrees of success, that's, that's where we ultimately should be tethered. Um,

you said that there are no good answers, but I would argue that there are clear, bad answers to the question.

and there are good answers, there's no right answer. I think like it's, it's, yeah.

Fair. Very good.

One of the, the concept of this law as a moral idea that Nigel Simmons promotes is that it's an archetype and you never reach the, you never reach the top.

I'll make a commitment back to you. Uh, I'm heading into a really interesting period. Going away on retreats. Again, I think values is gonna be front and center for my reflections for, for the coming months.

I mean, I feel like this is the first of many, so let's, let's, let's, let's keep talking, please.

Yeah,

absolutely. But, um,

exactly.

Are the, way to, to unlock that for everybody and, uh, and to do so with grace and humility.

Perfect. Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much. This was beautiful.

Thank you very much.