We were lucky to catch up with Chad Woodford recently and have shared our conversation below.

Chad, appreciate you joining us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today.

I would pursue my interests and do what I wanted much sooner, taking Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss. True, they say that you should never make your passion your vocation because then you’ll learn to hate it and it will stop being your passion. But I couldn’t disagree more.

I spent so many years playing it safe and making career decisions out of fear and a striving for financial security. This required me to hide my true self and make compromises about who I am. Instead of being a writer, storyteller, and philosopher I became an engineer and then a lawyer, even though I had no passion for those professions aside from a passing interest in technology and a desire to help people by fighting for them.

It took me almost two decades to start doing what I wanted and to start being myself. Even though I had fun and enjoyed myself during those intervening decades, I lost so much precious time not building my skills and experience and reputation as a writer and philosopher. Furthermore, I spent half my savings on making the eventual pivot to my passions, and lost the other half in some bad investments. So I was back to square one anyway, facing down my greatest fears around financial security.

This is doubly true for anyone seeking to make a career by creating and posting content online. Being successful at this requires consistency over time. So the sooner you start creating and posting (whether that’s a blog or YouTube channel) the better.

As W.H. Murray said:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I took a long and winding road to get to where I am today. I started my career as an AI researcher and engineer, working in industry for six years before going back to school for a law degree. I then worked as a technology and intellectual property attorney in Silicon Valley for over a decade, advising Twitter, Google, Meta, Airbnb, and several startups. I also had my own successful law practice, giving me the confidence I needed as an entrepreneur. After a few stints as a product manager and some time studying yoga and training yoga teachers in India, I returned to the States to get a masters in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Like the completion of a hero’s journey, I have returned to my roots with hard-won wisdom and experience to be an AI philosopher, informing and comforting people concerned about the impact of AI on their lives, and consulting with companies on AI safety and ethics, helping to ensure humane alignment. Part of my mission is to help AI systems reflect the highest potential of humanity.

I do all this with a uniquely holistic and integrated perspective, merging East and West, the spiritual and material, the head and the heart. I believe that the future of humanity will be shaped by technologies that have been designed with wisdom and intelligence, emphasizing human values and a reverence for the sacred.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I help people who are worried about the future affected by AI and societal decay feel more optimistic, calmer, and more informed, more discerning. In short, I inform and comfort people by offering grounded wisdom, reliable information, and spiritual practices, helping people to connect with their inner wisdom and create a more conscious world.

I feel strongly that we need to shift our shared worldview from the predominant materialist worldview that says that everything is made of dead, mindless matter and essentially meaningless, to a more ensouled and idealist worldview where we acknowledge the intelligence of nature and the implications of quantum physics, depth psychology, and even the psychedelic revolutions of the 1960s and now. It is time to recognize the wisdom of ancient spiritual and indigenous traditions, while retaining the intelligence and discernment of the Enlightenment.

We cannot change people’s minds and come up with creative solutions to the various challenges facing humanity without telling a different story about where we came from, where we’re going, and what it all means. This is how we shift society from the state of fear it is currently in to one of love, compassion, service, and community that we need to usher in the consciousness revolution. Technology will be part of that but in its proper place as tool and collaborator, not savior.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

Although NFTs are evidence of a deep desire among creative people and “the little guy” for an egalitarian mechanism for monetizing their work, I think they are a wasteful and misleading sham created by the vested interests in the larger crypto world, which are in turn backed by extremely wealthy investors who desperately want crypto technology to take off. There are plenty of ways to receive payments directly from patrons, fans, and customers without needing a crypto wallet and without participating in pumped up markets with manufactured scarcity for worthless and low-quality “art.”

For more on this see this blog post by Moxie Marlinspike https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

And this fantastic and thorough YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&t=227s

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wisdom.ventures/
• Instagram: @cosmicwit
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cwoodford/
• Twitter: @chd
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cosmicwit

Image Credits
Photos by Mark Kuroda and DJ Pierce.