Rob Wiblin

And I think as I've just done things in the real world, I'm like, everything is very hard and slow.

And just the feeling of...

doing my job, which involves like, you know, writing these Google Docs and sending these emails is just not like automatically connected to my like higher aspirations.

And there is like a long grind and there's a lot of failure.

And so I think I like have increasing demand for some separate thing that is like specifically trying to like reorient me mentally towards the bigger picture.

I think I probably want some of both.

Like, I think I now, like, I live in a group house with a couple of little kids, which is really great.

And it's good for, like...

But I find, unfortunately, that it takes a lot to pull my mind away.

When I watch TV, I'm thinking about other stuff in the background.

Yeah, so towards the end of the sabbatical, I was planning on taking some time to just start a Substack and write about a bunch of stuff, including a lot of the stuff about EA that we were discussing, a lot of stuff about AI, and sort of see where it went.

And at that time, I honestly didn't have a super strong...

impact case for this, I think.

I didn't think it was crazy that it would be the highest impact thing to do, but the reason I was doing it was just because I just wanted this and not that I could really defend that it was the highest impact thing.

But at that moment, after having gone through this whole journey, I was like, yeah, maybe I have more room in my life for making a career decision on the basis of not just impact.

The reason I decided to stay was that basically while I was out, OpenPhil was conducting a search for a new director to lead our GCR work.

So all our AI work and our biorisk work.

This was the position Holden was in when he left in 2023.

And both of the top two candidates seemed really good to me.

And I felt like someone new coming in could probably really use help from someone who's not...