🥹 The Proudest Moment of My Career
A Miraculous Tale of Humane Innovation | Previewing School of Wise Innovation
This piece is a follow up to With Great Power: an essay I published in July on matching power with wisdom and responsibility.
Dedicated to Jeffrey Pawlak: dear friend, visionary, fellow traveler. I’ve felt you with me this season. May your memory forever be a blessing.
Sharing with you on the 10 year anniversary of the moment I came alive.
THE SCENE: it’s two days after I’ve come down from the mountain of my first vision fast: a rite of passage centered around three days of fasting alone in the woods. My intention was to step into greater maturity. My prayer: teach me how to love life.
I haven’t come back online yet. I’m standing atop a rock next to a gorgeous alpine lake in the Shasta Trinity mountains. Alone and shivering cold, unaware that moments later I would experience the most powerful emotional release of my entire life…
🧵 Weaving a Thread
As the seasons turn three months later, and I transition out of my role at Center for Humane Technology (CHT), I’m reflecting on all the moments, lessons, and relationships that unfolded in a particularly dynamic time in a particularly rich space.
I want to share one story that exemplifies the kind of work I am especially proud of and devoted to in the next chapter. A thread that ties the whole experience together and weaves elegantly into what’s next.
When CHT reached out in summer of 2022, I was deep in the cultural wilderness, literally wandering around Israel and Palestine exploring answers to some of my deepest questions such as: What does Life on Earth want innovators to learn?
It was a challenging transition to return to full-time x remote x knowledge worker work, and I only took the job under the condition that I would also be able to focus on projects that I had been nurturing independently around inner development and startup culture.
I barely made it through an intense transitional autumn of winding down previous engagements, teaching a course on innovation to high school students, attending industry conferences, following the dense news cycles around Twitter / SBF / etc, and participating in exhilarating rapid response projects to a two week holiday break, for which I secured a charming sublet in the Marin headlands to decelerate.
My companion was Josh Schrei’s The Emerald podcast: currents and trends through a mythic lens. A balm for my weary, rationality-battered Soul. I devoured these immersive works of art on topics ranging from birds and resonance to animism and the metaverse. As a bridge-y person, I hop back and forth between the woods and the mainstream, Game A and Game B, the sacred and the profane. I needed some alone time with this podcast to balance things out.
In February, I got the greenlight to carve out some hours to begin exploring my special projects, through the canvas of what it might look like to create human development curriculum for our Foundations course community. Later that month I had the privilege of participating in a Jewish prayer retreat of biblical proportions, and the very first thing I did upon returning to my computer was open Gmail and write Josh the following:
We scheduled a meeting for late March to explore my inquiry. And then AI exploded. CHT scrambled to make sense of what was going on and responded by privately releasing The AI Dilemma presentation, that has significantly influenced the global conversation since.
With so many angles to view the topic through, I focused on the pieces to the conversation that felt most curious and important to me, for example:
This analysis was appreciated by some, but not nearly centered as much as the underlying game theory dynamics and potential policy interventions. I was feeling desperate for outlets to engage the interior dimensions of what was happening in a very public way on the world stage. I needed the full picture. Friend and collaborator David Sauvage became my primary thought partner here, given his expertise in empathy and psychological analysis of leadership (or lack thereof) in the business world.
Hopping on with Josh and David, there was a sense of relief in our shared analysis, and joy in the great potentiality before us to influence the conversation. We talked about how AI was inviting us to confront fundamentally spiritual questions of what it means to be human, what is wisdom, what is relationality. About the power of mythic framing to provide a clearer picture of what’s going on than say statistics. About technologists’ vast power to manipulate reality–akin to magic and sorcery–but without initiation trials and connection to consequences.
Most importantly, we discussed the opportunity to awaken innovators from the myths they are operating in and perpetuating, and align them towards more of the good / true / beautiful / responsible / humane. This was a moment that required a certain lens and message whose time had come. We needed to build the bridge. Josh had the vision and the tools.
And then I waited for months, trading some updates and ideas here and there, but primarily focusing on other projects. However, there was a mysterious way that our conversation planted seeds within me to consider my own relationship with power and responsibility (some chronicled in With Great Power), forcing me to learn hard and valuable lessons in interpersonal relationships and professional collaborations while Josh was humming away at his masterpiece.
I also decided to register for this vision fast, on the surface out of a sense of curiosity in the modality, and deep down a newfound willingness to mature.
🤖 The Mushroom in The Machine
With notice around the summer solstice that the episode would be released within a few weeks, I was refreshing Spotify daily like a boy eagerly anticipating the mailman to deliver a present from afar!
So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers (The AI Episode) launched on a Wednesday afternoon in mid July. Going deep into initiatory experiences, embodied ethics, and viewing AI through a mythic lens. Here’s a slideshow of key takeaways.
Traditional cultures view this human life not in terms of what we get to do,
but in terms of what we are required to do.
Not in terms of freedom,
but in terms of responsibility.
Josh had answered my question. Publicly, beautifully, more comprehensively and resonant than the dozens of experts and spiritual leaders I had asked before.
The amount of power I sensed that this piece of media had to shift hearts and minds was so overwhelming to my system, I could hardly pay attention on my first listen, and definitely did not sleep that night, imagining the historic work of art lifting the scales from peoples eyes, changing how they make choices to be in greater alignment with all life.
David, equally moved, exclaimed “You did it! Your job is done!” And it felt true. But most folks I had excitedly shared it with, including colleagues, hadn’t had time to listen to the two hour journey yet, and I needed to get offline for my vision fast. Some doubt settled in. Maybe this wouldn’t amount to much after all.
I hurried to weave some key ideas into With Great Power that I would publish en route to Mt. Shasta: a meditation on technology, responsibility, falling short and going on. A media artifact in its own right that I’m extremely proud of birthing, in collaboration with wonderful David Alder (now offering courses for leaders creating stories that bring the world they’re working toward to life!), integrating much of my lessons from the spring on the personal, organizational, and collective levels.
There’s a lot I want to share about the fast, and it’s challenging to find the words. Subtle and powerful. Themes of interdependence, death and life, crossing the threshold into the next phase of life, clearing, celebrating, returning, pollinators.
I didn’t receive a big grand “vision” per se; rather past visions were reinvigorated and clarified and woven into an updated version of themselves. The message I kept getting was to stay the course. I’m on a good path. Keep going…
🌬️🌊😂👁️
Which brings us back to the alpine lake. Still in the gentle cocoon between finishing the fast and coming back online, I made the trek up to a nearby segment of the Pacific Crest Trail to Deadfall Lakes.
Words and pictures don’t do this scene justice, either. Let’s just say I was having a moment of bliss. Pristine waters all to myself. Joyfully playing underwater like a child.
I took a break on this rock and found myself unusually and vigorously shivering cold. Deciding to surrender into the sensations, I entered a sort of trance state. Of clarity and stillness and connection to the wind and the water and the mountains.
And in that stillness entered what might have been just a fleeting moment of joy–in feeling proud of the podcast and having played my visionary pollinator role in bringing it to bear–regardless of the outcome. For taking a risk to do what felt required of me, following my intuition at the right moment, and navigating politics and ontological differences to play a part in weaving such a beautiful tapestry that radically shifts mindsets and worldviews. In a way that felt rather effortless, natural, fun, purposeful. In other words: humane innovation, for real.
But somehow, the moment expanded. The joy expanded and the tears started shedding. I knew I had done something very important in the larger scheme of things. I knew in my bones that its impact would make waves in culture. I had helped shift an unfathomably large amount of energy.
And then, something happened that I had never experienced in my adult life. I wept. I wept with joy, with gratitude, with awe and reverence for the miracle of life and existence. For everyone and everything that had guided me to that single moment, and all that was possible in the next ones.
I wept in the face of years of visions of a more harmonious world coalescing into something more clear and tangible. No longer being hazy distant horizons but real shores I could play on. I wept in acknowledgment of doing a good job in the larger mysterious unfolding, following the quiet whispers of my Soul’s calling towards serving in a way that was beyond imagination.
Weeping, weeping, weeping at all its beauty and glory. A screech of light. I couldn’t stop. (I was also laughing at the meta-joy I felt in weeping for the first time: omg I’m crying yay!! 😹)
Weeping at I don’t know at all what I was weeping about. Beyond my capacity to understand. Perhaps decades of unprocessed, constipated celebration being released at once. Perhaps weeping at knowing, as Mythologist Michael Meade describes, that when something happens deep in one’s Soul, it also happens deep in the world too.
This was the proudest moment of my career.
Just a few hours later, I turned on my phone to learn that CHT leadership had listened to the podcast, LOVED it, and was strategizing how to use our platform to amplify the message to VIPs (cue Andrew doing a little dance!).
Catching up on group message threads, CHT collaborators were saying things like:
“The best podcast I’ve listened to on AI. It’s amazing.”
“The deepest piece of media I’ve encountered on this moment of AI.”
“By far the best podcast I’ve had the privilege of listening to.”
“Probably the best content I’ve heard on this topic yet.”
“I’ve just spent 15 years co-piloting AI and software start-ups and am now transitioning into a new chapter. The only thing I want to do is co-lead a company that is advancing AI using somatic wisdom to create shared value.”
It was all happening. Arguably the most disruptive media asset in the entire AI conversation was going viral and getting shared with the big names. David, Josh and I hosted an integration conversation for our 10k+ person course community. Wisdom 2.0 shared The Emerald with 100k, and later invited Josh to share the stage at Wisdom & AI Summit along with contemplative luminaries and the heads of the major AI labs. Regular inbounds wanting to support or collaborate. The totality of ripples far from fully revealed.
Between all the ideas flowing around amplifying the podcast, the heat of the visions from my fast, and the last few months of R&D around human development curriculum, I had the opportunity to spend August strategizing for how we could bring more of this work forward at CHT. To leverage our platform, network, and influence to motivate technologists towards inner work, guide them on their journeys, and help them meaningfully integrate wherever they are best positioned to make change.
Meanwhile, I came down the mountain to just about every life portal: the birth of Chanterelle (my housemate’s daughter!), the death of Jeff Pawlak, the moving weddings of Cole and Abbey and Simon and Joanna and Jonathan and Angie, the dynamism of the high holidays and other expansive shifts with family and relationships, the heartbreak of unpseakable tragedy in the holy land. Undoubtedly the greatest breadth and depth of emotions I'd ever experienced in any three month period (what was I thinking when I signed up for that fast?!
🪄 School of Wise Innovation
And ultimately, parting ways with CHT. At the end of the day, CHT deeply appreciates and wants to further this work. And, it’s a very different direction from where their center of gravity is orienting towards, around AI policy and broad scale communications. My flavor of education work will have more room to flourish spun out as an independent initiative.
And so it’s a natural divergence. I’m grateful for the rich experience together, and their help in standing up a sister organization, a yin to their yang, sprouting from a seed that is more inner-focused, long term and solution-oriented, embodied and emergent.
It’s a continuing exploration of the questions I’ve been living into for years now:
The process for bringing ideas into the world is begging for reimagination. How do we innovate in ways that don’t reproduce the conditions that nourish the tendencies that got us here? How can we bring visions into the world in a good way?
Human development is the elephant in the room when it comes to calls for responsible innovation. What is the adequate training and initiation for innovators to be fit to wield powerful innovations?
How can those who have accelerated, decelerate and reorient their energy in service of the highest good?
Here’s a two pager outlining the gestalt of what’s emerging with what I’m tentatively calling School of Wise Innovation: a new-paradigm university, catalyzing research and education around wise and responsible initiation and innovation, for decelerating innovators and the next generation.
At the moment I’m trying to decelerate myself: harvest insights from CHT, engage with potential stakeholders, and set the right conditions to bring whatever this new work is into the world in a way that is more awesome for all involved (i.e. practicing what I preach!).
I’m thrilled to announce our first course this winter: Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI with Josh and friends. His storytelling and depth of wisdom combined with my translation and integration support for innovators will make for something special, that will further the thinking of the wise innovation space.
I’m also working on a Wise Innovation Library to map innovator-oriented retreats, eduational resources, coaches and consultants, challenges and practices. Please feel free to submit resources here.
We’re cooking up special courses, retreats, research initiavites, alignment and integration tools, media and more. If you feel inspired to support the development of any of these initial activities, please get in touch. I also welcome general guidance on idea stage process and building an educational institution (p.s. I’m heading to Auroville next month!). Stay tuned for more announcements!
With extra love and care,
Andrew
עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאִמְרוּ: אָמֵן
May the one who makes peace above make peace below.
Great job, beloved!! Grateful to call you companion on the journey and so excited to see how these devotional gifts draw us all into one another in newly woven ways. <3