Tee Barnett recently interviewed me for Any Thoughts On. This recording should be a great overview if you’ve followed my work for a while but are confused about my shtick or want to understand my motivations. We recorded this in mid August, so it should be good for another ~2 months before it gets old. Thanks for having me on Tee!

Chris joins the show to discuss how he developed his unusual bounty-based, pay-on-results approach to his practice, which grew out of his frustrations with a coaching and therapy industry optimizing for the wrong things (like feeling good) instead of the right things (like people actually winning at life).

Notable Timestamps:

(00:06:50) The efficient market hypothesis, Chesterton's fence, and "local optimality" as a lens on self-help claims(00:09:16) Chris's own burnout story and the limits of self-guided meditation and self-help books(00:14:52) Developing embodiment, equanimity, and internal awareness together, safely and in sequence(00:20:15) The origins of "one-shots" and the early pay-on-result bounty model(00:27:03) Learning vs. unlearning: two fundamentally different modes of client transformation(00:36:03) The structural incentive problems baked into therapy and coaching business models(00:43:36) The origin story of Chris's pure-bounty, pay-on-results model in year one(00:48:22) The "woo" language of coaching vs. tracking real, externally visible results(00:59:13) Why awareness-raising practices can backfire, and the myth that equanimity comes from more awareness(01:01:36) What actually gives people lasting equanimity, according to the success stories Chris has tracked(01:15:33) Why unlearning is more like surgery than skill-building, and the risks of untracked self-help(01:21:52) How Chris's business model is evolving from pure bounty toward value-based pricing

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* How aiming at what you want gets you more of what you want.

* How aiming at what you don’t want gets you more of that, too.

* Self-fulfilling prophecies in growth, agency, and even AI safety.

Transcript available on Substack.

This podcast extends a recent post:

Referenced media:

Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in AI alignment

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Chris and Joanna riff: The dance between flow and structure, between openness and commitment between the receptive energy we often call feminine, and the directional energy we often call masculine, the capacity to feel and yield and the capacity to hold, to follow through. Boundaries, status, society, and truth.

Transcript: Available via Substack.

Related

Emotional numbness:

“Locally optimal”:

The hostile telepaths problem

“Yang” (agency) and “Yin” (manifestation):

Boundaries:

“Zooming in” on suffering:

Chronic pain:

““God””:

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Seven years of meditation, hundreds of hours of IFS therapy, retreats, etc. hadn’t gotten this AI lab researcher the results he wanted. The romantic bounty also flowed over to the rest of his life—eg, he started disagreeing with his cofounder at the time and even his mom.

Update 2026.05: They recently celebrated one year :)

Note: There’s more I can tell you about this person and our work influenced his career if you ask me privately.

Note: To preserve privacy, Sid’s voice was modified.

Mentioned in

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[Not an AI person.] Multiple therapists and modalities had not gotten Antoine the results he wanted.

After practicing unlearning:

I used to get triggered by very small things…

18 months later:

Since we last spoke I kept getting better by shifting how I understand love, other’s death, making mistakes.. - I keep growing when I want.

Mentioned in

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I met an engineer I’ll call “Bob” at a prediction market conference. He had been unable to get the results he wanted from 8 years of talk therapy and “1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations”.

6 months later:

Every week I’ve had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I pictured doing a long time ago but never really did

12 months later: He says he's doing great.

18 months later: He says he’s very happy and resilient, has lots of friends (and dates) now :)

Note: To preserve privacy, Bob’s voice was modified.

Mentioned in

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Damon Sasi is a mentor of mine, and he is also a therapist who claims to be very psychologically healthy. What’s his inner experience like?

Probably for an average week, maybe I'll suffer for like five minutes

I don't think I have any prolonged internal conflict

Self-loathing to me was a weird concept […] Like, what does it mean to like self-loathe?

It’s not that he had a great childhood, either.

[My childhood] wasn't terrible. And I say this and then maybe I'll give some examples and people will be like, maybe it was terrible. […] my parents divorced when I was pretty young. Both my parents, I think, were very absent. […]

He would get drunk often. He once hit me in the back with a two by four. My older brother was pretty physically abusive before he chilled out. And by chilled out, I mean like, we're cool now, but I left home after high school specifically to get away from him. […]

I think overall the experience I had growing up was just being very alone. I didn't feel like my parents were really my parents. I feel like books raised me in very strong and very real ways I could give examples of. I had a lot of friends. I enjoyed my friendships quite a lot, but I didn't feel like I had family, basically at all. […]

What is it like to be psychologically healthy?

I don't think I've ever hated anyone ever in my life. Possibly this is not true for like very brief moments or brief periods of time or something and it's like hard to remember them. It's just really easy to like let go of hurt or anger against other people.

This is why I actually had to become very good at just forming boundaries when I was young. Like just very clear, very clear boundaries with other people because I just couldn't hold onto anger against them no matter what they did to me, which was like not great given my upbringing. […]

there was one occurrence in my entire life where I think I came closest to what people call depression […]

I've had little T traumas or hang ups or whatever word you want to use for them. But big T traumas just feel like they never happened in part because I never felt like I lacked agency in my life. […]

basically zero [Big 5 personality] neuroticism […]

Related posts:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog