AI transcript
0:00:03 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:09 The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between-isode. So this is an episode between longer, deep-dive
0:00:15 interviews with world-class performers. And in this case, I am being asked questions. I do these
0:00:20 every once in a while. I enjoy doing them, and we tend to cover a lot of ground. In this particular
0:00:29 Q&A, I am answering questions submitted by a small group of test readers for my latest book project,
0:00:33 The Knowbook. If you want to see what that’s about and see a few sample chapters, go to
0:00:39 tim.blog slash the knowbook for more information, and you can check out that. The community is now
0:00:44 closed because we have a critical mass of people needed for providing edit feedback and book feedback
0:00:52 and so on, but might expand it once the book comes out. Who knows? This episode was all over the place.
0:00:57 We talked about what my commandments would be if I were to start a cult, which I’m not, don’t worry.
0:01:02 about what my costumes would look like, what my cult uniforms would look like.
0:01:09 The risks of delegating your thinking to AI, how I use and do not use AI in creative endeavors,
0:01:16 stoicism, how I balance that with other types of philosophies, perils of audience capture,
0:01:21 how I think about platforms and audience, and so on. The exercises from the four-hour workweek that I
0:01:29 still use inefficiency, where I actually deliberately introduce inefficiency in my life, and there are
0:01:35 more examples than you might expect, and much, much more. So without further ado, actually with
0:01:39 a little further ado, a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, and we’ll hop right
0:01:42 into the Q&A. Thanks for listening.
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0:04:48 slash Tim. Let’s hop right into it. Start with a question from Joseph. What top
0:04:53 three activities invoke or evoke childhood nostalgia that you’d hope to repeat with your future
0:05:04 children? I thought about this and every answer ended up being outdoors. I recall very early on
0:05:09 when I was a small kid, my mother, we didn’t have a whole lot of money. We had a lot of chicken legs
0:05:18 and a lot of TV dinners, but we would take those chicken legs after we had eaten. So the bones with a
0:05:26 stuck here and there. And occasionally we would go down to the bay out onto a small pier and hang
0:05:33 these chicken legs, these bones into the water and pull up crabs and look at the crabs. And that has
0:05:41 just been indelibly burned into my memory as so exciting. Everything about it was interesting to me
0:05:48 as a kid. And there are other examples that my mom in particular is very good at fostering. She would
0:05:54 take us to the beach and we would use magnets to collect, I suppose, magnetic or black sand. And we
0:06:01 would put the sand into mason jars and then we could play with them with different magnets. And that stuck
0:06:06 out. And then the last example that could give more, but was camping in Vermont. We would spend time
0:06:12 almost every year camping in Vermont at a campground. So there was a social aspect, but we could also go
0:06:18 to rivers and jump off of waterfalls, which at the time seemed a thousand feet tall. In retrospect,
0:06:25 they were probably 15 to 20 feet, but very, very exciting for a young boy. And typically it would
0:06:29 be with one or two of my friends on those camping trips as well, which was amazing.
0:06:33 All right. This is a question from Jeff. What’s something you suspect is true about success,
0:06:38 but you’d never say out loud in a podcast and then in parentheses until now or keynote? Well,
0:06:48 the first thing that came to mind, I think I would hesitate to bring up because it sounds like a quality
0:06:55 problem. And I suppose it is. I do not expect America to weep for the sorrows of people who have
0:07:01 achieved some degree of success. So that is the reasoning behind probably not broadcasting it,
0:07:09 but the basic suspicion that I have, and this is over decades of watching people become quote unquote
0:07:13 successful professionally, financially, as just say those are the metrics we’re using,
0:07:21 is that becoming successful in that way makes the vast majority of people more predisposed to depression
0:07:28 and anxiety, believe it or not. And the reason for that is when you’re striving, when you don’t have
0:07:33 that quote unquote success, you have two things. You have the hope, maybe the belief, maybe both,
0:07:39 that once you have those things, the vast majority of your problems, the things that are eating at you,
0:07:43 the things that keep you up at night, the worries, the this, that, that they’ll just vanish.
0:07:52 By and large, that doesn’t happen. The other thing that the striving period gives you is it gives you a
0:07:57 mission of sorts, gives you a feeling of purpose, purposes to reach this escape velocity where you
0:08:03 have all this money or success or whatever it might be. And once you are the greyhound that catches the
0:08:11 rabbit on the track, you’re kind of like, okay, well, now what do I do with myself? And as I said,
0:08:16 this is probably going to be a head scratcher for a lot of folks because I’m not in any respect
0:08:23 complaining about success. There are things that finances solve, right? Money can solve
0:08:30 money problems. But I think the expectation is there’s going to be a lot more payoff and finality
0:08:36 to the solving of problems, which is not the case. So that would be my suspicion that I generally don’t
0:08:44 say out loud because who the hell really wants to hear it. But the reason I’m mentioning it is that
0:08:53 it can inform what you do as you are in the pursuit of success. And that is perhaps a deal with some of
0:09:02 the issues that are hiding in the basement to come out and look at these tools, developing awareness.
0:09:08 Here’s the book I’m reading yet again, Anthony DeMello, Awareness. Look at meditation practice.
0:09:17 Basically put some of these safety nets in place and explore some of these modalities that can contend
0:09:24 with some of those inner demons or insecurities that will actually come out in much higher volume
0:09:32 once you have caught that rabbit, if that makes sense. So really don’t wait until you have the veil
0:09:40 pulled off to work on those things. And then you can really enjoy the benefits and the upside of that
0:09:46 success without suffering what are actually some very, very real risks and downside existentially,
0:09:52 psychologically. That’s what I would say there. And then follow-up question is if you had to create a
0:09:56 religion with just three commandments based on your life so far, what would they be? And what would
0:10:01 your cult uniforms look like? Well, I think at my cult uniforms, and I’m not planning on making a cult,
0:10:07 maybe I already accidentally did. I don’t know. But they would be very, very comfortable green pajamas
0:10:13 of some type because green is my favorite color. And I care about comfort more than I care about style.
0:10:20 So they’d be very comfortable green pajamas of some type. I don’t know. I want to say silk, but let’s not get
0:10:25 too carried away. Depends on how big the cult is and what the budget is for our uniforms. And then the
0:10:31 three commandments. This is my first stab. I do not have any plans on forming a religion, although I do
0:10:38 think there will be a Cambrian explosion of religions as AI and noise and tech lead people to clamor for
0:10:43 meaning in a mostly, I would say, increasingly secular world. I do think there are going to be
0:10:48 a lot more religions. And that was my prediction about five years ago. But here are the commandments
0:10:52 that I came up with. Number one, movement is medicine. We could unpack that, but I think you get
0:10:58 the idea. Body and mind are not separate. It’s all tied together. So movement is medicine to save the
0:11:06 self, help outside the self. I think self-help is often self-defeating, if that makes sense. It can
0:11:14 reinforce the me, me, me story, I, I, I story of individualism that is so emphasized in, for instance,
0:11:23 the United States and a lot of Western Europe. And I don’t think that certainly anxiety, depression,
0:11:27 different psychiatric disorders, quote unquote, although I’m not sure if you can call them those,
0:11:32 if they become the majority, but they’re not limited to individualistic countries. But I do
0:11:39 think the more you focus on the self, the more your self problems are going to be. So to save the self,
0:11:46 look outside the self, that could take the form of charitable work, brightening someone’s day if you
0:11:54 can’t brighten your own. But it can also take a lot of different forms, such as particular types of
0:12:03 meditation or training focused on poking at the illusion of self or independence or duality,
0:12:08 et cetera. And this may pop up again later. That sounds very esoteric, but what the hell,
0:12:11 we’re talking about religion. So let’s do it. Movement is medicine to save the self, help outside
0:12:17 the self. And then the last one, because I’m thinking about running a cult, if I were actually running a
0:12:22 community and I wanted people to not constantly have drama everywhere and anywhere, although that is
0:12:29 human nature on some level, especially once we get to larger groups, request what you want more of and
0:12:39 what you want less of. Just fucking say it. And I feel like a lot of the drama in life is we push off
0:12:43 the uncomfortable conversations. We don’t ask for what we want. Clearly, we expect people to be mind
0:12:51 readers or we’re very indirect. And if you don’t like something, just speak up. And if it’s tiny,
0:12:58 also like get over yourself and maybe just suck it up and put on your big girl pants. But for the most
0:13:02 part, just speak clearly, ask for what you want, indicate what you don’t like, et cetera.
0:13:07 All right. Those are my three commandments. Sure, I could do better if I put more time into it,
0:13:15 but I don’t want to actually seriously consider building a cult. That’s a dangerous narcissistic
0:13:21 impulse that sadly a lot of folks we see on social media are indulging to the full. All right. Next
0:13:26 one. Becky, when working on a big project that will take a long time to complete from beginning to end,
0:13:30 like a novel or a movie, how do you approach it? The first thing that came to mind is structure,
0:13:37 structure, structure, structure. I want to envision this very clearly and have the ability to move
0:13:44 things around in a physical or almost physical sense. The way that this has been done for a long time
0:13:50 is people use index cards and they put them on a wall with pins or they put them on the floor so that they
0:14:00 can move things around to see how they respond to different types of structure, sequence, editing, et cetera.
0:14:09 And for me, the best tool that I have found thus far is Scrivener. It’s a software program. It’s been
0:14:17 used a lot for plays and screenwriting. I’ve used it for a number of my books. And at this point with
0:14:24 the very experimental notebook, which all of you know is pretty far from being done. Actually, you don’t
0:14:30 know the full scope of it. I guess we’re on something like step 10 or 11. There are like 35 steps.
0:14:39 What the fuck? There’s so much. So I’m going to have to do some significant pairing and also reordering
0:14:45 of things. And the only reason that I perhaps strayed from Scrivener is that nobody in publishing
0:14:53 uses Scrivener, at least as far as I can tell. They use Word or they use Google Docs, but God bless
0:14:59 Google Docs. It’s useful for so many things. But when you end up having 30 to 40 separate documents,
0:15:06 it’s actually a huge pain in the ass to zoom out and look at the larger picture. So I will be
0:15:12 returning to Scrivener shortly. Some questions from Tim. I’m going to pick and choose. All right,
0:15:18 Tim, did this TrueFans preview community, that’s the notebook community for people who may be listening,
0:15:23 fundamentally shape the book? Or was it mostly a marketing engagement tool? Would I do it again?
0:15:29 Why? I would do it again because it’s working to improve the book. Not at all a marketing or engagement
0:15:36 tool. Don’t care about that at all at this point. And it is just to fundamentally help shape the book.
0:15:42 So it has been incredibly helpful. And I’ll speak to this perhaps a little bit later as well,
0:15:49 because there were a lot of questions around AI. I right now do not use AI to write anything.
0:15:57 That is from the perspective of blank page. What I have used AI for a lot is to try to parse feedback,
0:16:04 look at patterns. And I do read through all of the comments on the community.
0:16:11 And then what I will also do, for instance, I’ve had a number of test readers, including two people at
0:16:18 prospective publisher for the print edition, go through the entire, let’s call it, and Neil and
0:16:22 I’ve called it this internally, kind of bloatware version of the book, like the giant 800-page
0:16:31 unrefined version, and have received a lot of feedback from them. I will use AI to then try to
0:16:38 identify for specific steps. Was there a consensus or a majority in keep or cut?
0:16:44 Looking at the feedback for certain steps, can AI pull from those separate documents and just give
0:16:51 me the feedback specific to a particular chapter? I am using AI in that way. And the degree to which
0:16:58 it is the models have improved just in the last few weeks, for instance, looking at Gemini as one
0:17:06 example is remarkable. But I’m not using it for drafting from the blank page. There are two reasons
0:17:11 for that. It’s not that I don’t think it could do a good job, but I don’t want to obsolesce my own
0:17:18 cognitive function. In the same way that I think with so many things, if you don’t use it, you lose
0:17:24 it. Example given Google Maps, like how many of us use Google Maps to do the most basic things
0:17:31 at this point? Or phone numbers, right? You don’t need to remember them, so you don’t. But I do not
0:17:35 want to let my ability to generate or synthesize
0:17:42 to atrophy, particularly in the case of writing. And there are a lot of questions about if I had
0:17:52 kids, what would I encourage them to learn? Given the rapidly developing tools and ecosystem of AI,
0:17:58 it would be writing. It would be clear written communication. I do think that ultimately there will
0:18:06 be a lot of voice interface. But if you want to scrutinize and improve your thinking, the best way
0:18:10 to do that that I have found is doing it through writing. That is how you freeze your thinking. It’s
0:18:14 much harder to do verbally. Even when I was just starting the podcast and trying to improve it, I
0:18:22 hired former researchers and producers from inside the Actors Studio to go over my transcripts so that
0:18:28 they could leave comments on how I could improve, where I had missed opportunities, where I should have
0:18:33 asked follow-up questions, where my sequencing could be improved. That is how I have found you can most
0:18:40 directly improve your thinking, which will then inform your prompting. And I think the race goes to the
0:18:46 best prompter in a sense, knowing not just how to ask prompts, but what to ask from an importance
0:18:51 kind of ranking perspective. So we’ll come back to that. Maybe teach your kids how to use crossbows and
0:18:57 bows and arrows, too, just in case. What do I know? What is this? What is this? All right, let’s keep
0:19:01 moving here. Do you think your biggest success has happened because of your strategies or in spite of
0:19:09 them? It’s impossible to say. Probably both. I think my general distrust of people and hypervigilance has
0:19:13 probably been a handicap. And there are a lot of beliefs around that or that are almost certainly
0:19:19 incorrect or just unsupportable if you look at the chronicle of my life. And then there are some that
0:19:24 I think have stood the test of time, which relate to later questions on four-hour workweek and what I
0:19:28 still use from that book. So let me keep moving here. This is from Stephen. Given your focus on
0:19:33 optimizing efficiency, how do you handle unpredictable variables like traffic, airport delays, and other
0:19:36 disruptions that are beyond your control? So this is a pretty common question for me.
0:19:42 And I think a lot of people imagine me losing my shit when, and I’m not saying that’s what you’re
0:19:50 doing, Stephen, but when things outside of my control start burning up minutes and hours that I
0:19:57 value very highly. Otherwise, why would I spend so much time on efficiency? But I will say that the short
0:20:04 answer is stoicism. Really double-click on stoics and stoic philosophy. And in fact, these types of things,
0:20:10 traffic, airport delays, other disruptions, unforeseen, unpredictable, uncontrollable,
0:20:16 they really don’t bother me. And that is trained. The stuff that bothers me is the kind of stuff,
0:20:21 for instance, that happened last night. I’m in ketosis. I’m eating disgusting amounts of fat.
0:20:27 I’m having a big steak for like the nth time now. And I just wanted something to break up the monotony.
0:20:32 So I asked the bartender, hey, can you recommend any mezcals? Here I am in Texas. There’s a great
0:20:35 selection of mezcal and tequila. And he’s like, oh, there are a bunch of them. He’s like, but I
0:20:41 really like this one. And he recommends this thing very casually. And I have it and it ends up costing
0:20:47 $72 for a glass. What in the fuck? Come on, pal. And he’s like, oh, you just have good taste. I’m
0:20:52 like, asshole. It’s the only one you recommended to me. You don’t tell anyone it’s going to be $72.
0:20:57 That’s the kind of thing that I get upset about. Which, frankly, if I’m reading my Marcus Aurelius
0:21:05 and so on, it’s like, wake up expecting people to be stupid and rude and unreliable, then maybe it
0:21:10 shouldn’t bother me. But that’s the species of frustration that I still need some work to get
0:21:16 beyond, I think. So I think I answered it. This is Corrine. If I were mentoring an 18-year-old today,
0:21:23 right, given the AI driving so much, writing and manual literacy, how to make things, how to fix
0:21:27 things. This is not necessarily for a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-type scenario, although you
0:21:36 never know. It’s, I think, because it is one way to escape the sort of digital doom scrolling and doom
0:21:43 immersion that online has largely become. So for psychological health, I think it’ll be important
0:21:48 to get offline. Like, if that’s crocheting, fine. If it’s painting, fine. If it’s gardening, fine. But I
0:21:56 do think there will be a proliferation and an increase in popularity around those things. And also, there
0:22:05 will be more and more demand for proof of fingerprints, human input and fingerprints on things. Even a lot of
0:22:11 what we consume digitally, proving that with various types of human-made watermarks, right? And there are
0:22:17 companies that are focused on this to a large extent. And I think Kevin and I brainstormed around this
0:22:21 years ago. And that is certainly, I think, where things are going.
0:22:28 All right. Let me hop into the chat. Sounds like a great cult. I think what sells it most is the
0:22:29 comfortable green pajamas.
0:22:42 All right. Let’s see. Ooh. Yeah. What book on sophism would I recommend? There are books of poetry that
0:22:50 really, I think, transmit a lot of sophism. They also have commentary and so on. I will say that
0:22:58 Haile Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi. There’s one collection called Gold, I think is a great entry
0:23:07 point. And certainly, the poetry of Hafez, I also think, is a great way to directly taste what they
0:23:14 intend to explain. And often, that is what cannot be verbalized or explained directly. They have to use
0:23:21 metaphor as a crutch because that is the only way that they can really make a valid attempt.
0:23:25 This is from Cindy. Tell us a behind-the-scenes story of a podcast that went wrong or off the
0:23:32 rails. You don’t have to name names. There have been quite a few. They have become fewer and fewer
0:23:38 over time. But there have been times when I’ve paused a podcast and basically gone to someone who’s
0:23:44 say a producer. And I’m like, this is too general. It’s not tactful enough for my audience. We need to
0:23:49 end it so you can decide how to convey that. If you want to claim it’s a technical error or problem,
0:23:56 that’s fine. I’ll leave it up to you. But I am going to leave. That happened a few months ago.
0:24:04 Early on, I had a number of interviews with very well-known celebrities and thought that that was
0:24:12 important for me to have well-known names on the podcast as guests to attract attention and listeners
0:24:18 to the podcast, which on some level is true, actually. And it is more and more so true as we
0:24:25 become more and more dependent on algorithms on the platform because you can use certain names
0:24:33 almost like an incantation to summon Google juice and YouTube favoritism to your videos, right?
0:24:40 It’s remarkable. Some names have just been anointed. And I’ve done a lot to try to counteract that and
0:24:53 inevitably will turn into if they’re not careful. But I had a number of interviews and I’m just like,
0:25:00 God, this is so bad. Now what the fuck do I do? This is so bad. And these people were very kind and
0:25:06 trying really hard. But I would say there are a few categories that I found very, very challenging.
0:25:12 Not always. There are exceptions. Actors, athletes, and astronauts. I don’t know why those three.
0:25:20 But I think it’s because in the case of athletes and actors, they specialize so early by necessity to
0:25:28 become the best at what they do that that maniacal focus, exactly what makes them good on some level,
0:25:33 means that over a two-hour conversation, unless we’re just going role by role and dissecting what
0:25:38 they’ve done, which is boring to anyone who is not an actor or deeply interested in it.
0:25:47 If we want something that is wide ranging and kind of multi-textured that will engage a lot of listeners
0:25:52 because it gives them things they can use, it’s hard to do. It’s really hard to do with athletes
0:25:59 and actors. Astronauts is much trickier. I think it’s because number one, you have to have a very,
0:26:05 very, very, very, very high tolerance for boredom and monotony to be an astronaut. And they’re
0:26:12 phenomenal on so many levels. And then thirdly, a lot of folks I might interview have been out of
0:26:17 that profession for a while and have transitioned to, say, motivational speaking to corporations and
0:26:25 so on. So they speak in very broad terms about leadership, integrity, and so on. That’s also a risk
0:26:29 with people from the military. But I think I’ve done pretty well at navigating around that. So
0:26:34 those are some of the behind the scenes. Here’s a question from Sasha. I remember the four-hour work
0:26:40 week, you had a beautiful poem titled Slow Dance by David Weatherford. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That is worth
0:26:45 rereading a lot. I think this poem is beautiful, but also reminds me of taking the inefficient route,
0:26:50 not in a bad way. In what areas of your life do you intentionally choose inefficiency? A lot,
0:26:56 a lot. Whether that’s meditating, whether that is spending time with my dog who just walked in,
0:27:03 Molly, whether that is reading poetry, which has become more and more important to me on a number
0:27:11 of levels. One is certainly simply to explore that medium and all of the riches it has to offer.
0:27:18 It’s also because trying to speed through it is sort of antithetical to the promise and potential of
0:27:25 poetry. Fiction, I don’t speed read. Fiction, I’m listening to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
0:27:30 right now, which is one of the books, if not the book that really put him on the map. Beautiful prose,
0:27:36 amazing voice performance. So I’m listening to that right now. I would say more and more so,
0:27:44 I am realizing that efficiency has a place, but part of being number one, effective, which is more
0:27:50 important is choosing the right things. So if you were to be just like a nanny cam on my wall,
0:27:57 watching what I did today or this week, you would be astonished. I just look like a Roomba lost in a
0:28:04 corner, bumping up against things. I have been so, so inefficient this week. I mean, shockingly so.
0:28:11 I mean, way below average, like many standard deviations below average. However, when I have
0:28:18 managed between fasting and colonoscopy and ketosis and keto flu and just feeling like dog shit and just
0:28:24 being distracted for any number of reasons, when I have focused, they have been on two or three things
0:28:29 things that are actually high leverage. It is forgivable to be inefficient as long as you are
0:28:36 effective. I don’t want to be judgy here, but it is less forgivable or not forgivable to be highly
0:28:42 efficient, but ineffective. Put another way, straight out of the four-hour work week, right? What you do is
0:28:49 more important than how you do anything. I really still stick by that. So I would say overall, I am
0:28:56 inefficient by choice and sometimes not by choice and sometimes highly efficient, but that has never
0:29:03 been my primary concern. And more so and more so, I’m like, what are you rushing to? What are you
0:29:08 sprinting towards? Let’s be very clear on that. And sometimes it makes sense, a lot of sense to sprint,
0:29:16 but otherwise it’s like, if you’re being efficient and the void is filled by other things that you seek
0:29:21 to do more and more efficiently. Well, guess what? You didn’t save any time. The void is immediately
0:29:28 filled with more stuff that you seek to optimize. And that is why in the short term, I think people
0:29:33 are like, wow, AI is going to save us so much time. And it’s like, yeah, it will. If you constrain the
0:29:38 number of tasks you do, otherwise you’re going to be like, wow, I’ve saved so much time in analyzing
0:29:45 the spreadsheet. Let me dream up six other non-critical things that I can now apply AI to. And lo and behold,
0:29:52 we’re straight back to the same fucking place of feeling like we have not enough time and too
0:29:59 many things to do. So the what, right? The lead domino, the one thing to quote Gary Keller, like
0:30:03 these are the things that will separate the overachievers from the underachievers moving
0:30:09 forward, right? The ability to really single task on things that move the needle and hopefully many
0:30:17 other adjacent needles. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:31:30 Christine, I’m going to paraphrase some of these. I think if I read through all of them,
0:31:36 we’re going to run out of time pretty quickly. So you yourself have at times dabbled into unhealthy
0:31:42 workaholism. Serve me in some ways, not in others. What’s your advice to people who are trying to perhaps
0:31:50 help people who have a similar challenge? From your perspective, how might you help them?
0:31:54 The first thing that came to mind, and maybe it’s because I just had a podcast with Terry Reel,
0:32:01 I don’t want to talk about it, which is about ostensibly male depression, but I think it can
0:32:08 apply to women as well. Covert depression that is masked by different types of busyness or addictive
0:32:14 behavior, including workaholism. And I would say also one more thing though, and this doesn’t get a
0:32:20 lot of airtime. When you see someone who has an addictive behavior, whether it’s workaholism or what
0:32:26 you consider compulsive, right? Sexual addiction, could be anything. Before you seek to quote-unquote
0:32:34 help the person remove that thing, think very, very, very carefully about whether or not they have another
0:32:43 safety net. Because if it is covering up depression, if you attempt to, again in quotes, save them, but leave
0:32:48 them with nowhere else to turn after you’ve perhaps given them some degree of awareness slash guilt slash
0:32:55 shame around that behavior, they could actually end up in a very bad place. So really consider carefully
0:33:06 what support or perhaps even what types of therapy and so on they can engage with before that crutch is
0:33:13 taken away. I would just say that because I’ve seen multiple instances of people being shown the
0:33:20 problem, but they haven’t been offered an alternative or an off-ramp, if that makes sense. Now they’re stuck
0:33:27 with this new awareness of a weakness or a problem, but they do not have a plan B. However, I would say
0:33:34 that at the very least to perhaps develop an awareness yourself so that you can observe or begin to ask
0:33:39 questions in your own head, not necessarily with this other person. I do think Terry Reels,
0:33:44 I don’t want to talk about it, but could be very instructive. Rachel, when you’re working on something
0:33:51 new, how do you know when it’s time to talk or share what you’re working on? Do you lean towards making
0:33:55 it public early to work on traction or establishment, or do you lean towards waiting as long as possible?
0:34:03 Or is it a slow leak? Well, I would say I lean towards as late as humanly possible because also plans
0:34:08 can change and you can paint yourself into a corner publicly very easily or set expectations too high
0:34:14 and then you can’t deliver. So I wait as long as possible. I really don’t think much at all about
0:34:19 early traction. I’ll sometimes stick out teasers, but by the time I’m putting out, say, the first chapter
0:34:25 of a book, typically the book is done. This is the first time I’ve broken that rule. And that was to hold
0:34:30 myself accountable to working with you guys in the no community. So far, it’s worked pretty well. So I don’t
0:34:36 regret that. But I tend to wait as long as possible. And partially, let me tell you a few reasons for
0:34:44 that. The first is that a lot of people like the marketing or PR side, the creative aspects of
0:34:49 engaging with that, thinking about angles, thinking about how you can create traction. I think I’m
0:34:54 pretty good at that. Writing is a lot harder. So let’s look at it in the context of writing.
0:34:59 What does that mean? That means that if I allow myself the opportunity, if I open the door,
0:35:07 even an inch, to fucking around with marketing and launch plans and PR, instead of doing the laying
0:35:15 of bricks and the heavy lifting of writing, I will subconsciously or consciously take that little,
0:35:21 little side curtain exit to work on things that are not actually the one thing, which is the writing.
0:35:27 And furthermore, I would say by disallowing that, I have to think about how I am making,
0:35:33 number one, the product as good as possible. And people are going to say, yeah, duh, idiot. Of
0:35:36 course you want to make the product good. And I’m like, no, no, no. I think you’re kind of missing it
0:35:42 in the sense that with all of my books, I asked the question, if I could not do any marketing,
0:35:49 any PR, I could only give this book to like a thousand people. Can I make the book do the work?
0:35:57 Are there features in it? Are there exercises in it? Are there quotes and insights in it that will
0:36:07 make it something that is painful not to share? That’s it. And if you do that, my God, does it make
0:36:14 everything else later easier? And it also helps something to be perennial. It helps something to
0:36:20 become evergreen. And I think asking those types of questions is part of the reason that the 4-Hour
0:36:27 Workweek, which was published in 2007, for God’s sake, the Pliocene era, was revised in 2009. Fine.
0:36:33 Still completely out of date in so many ways. To be one of Amazon’s most highlighted, I think it was top
0:36:39 10 highlighted books in 2017. And it’s still selling incredibly well. I think it’s in part because of
0:36:46 asking those types of questions. Not assuming that I can make up for anything with marketing or PR.
0:36:54 If I want to turn the thousand people and no more, maybe a hundred people, I give this book to for free
0:37:01 into the marketing force, into the PR force that drives every subsequent sale. How do I need to
0:37:08 architect this book? What do I need to clean up? And going from there. All right. Bit of a long answer,
0:37:12 but there you go. Another follow-up question, which is what types of parameters do you have in place when
0:37:18 you want to establish a partnership or business? What are the terms? Would you insist on meeting in
0:37:22 real life first? The answer to that is no, since I do a lot of what I do remotely. How do you know the
0:37:26 terms to agree or not agree to when you have no idea what the future holds? There are a lot of questions
0:37:31 here. And as you observed also, good questions for a lawyer. I am not one. I don’t play one on the
0:37:35 internet. But here’s what I would say. And Gary Keller has a lot of good thoughts on this too in
0:37:43 my interview with him. Think of the agreement as a disagreement. So in other words, you are drafting,
0:37:49 it’s like a prenup. You’re drafting a separation when you are your best selves so that when it comes to
0:37:57 pass, if it comes to pass, that you’re going to split, you can’t do unnecessary damage to each
0:38:02 other or one another, depending on how many parties. So for me, and I know this doesn’t apply in all
0:38:08 situations, but there are a lot of people like Richard Branson and so on who would echo this
0:38:13 philosophy. Again, it’s not one size fits all, but if you can cap the downside, the upside over time
0:38:21 takes care of itself. And the way he launched his airline with very clever leasing and buyback
0:38:26 provisions and so on is a good example of that. The way that applies to a lot of agreements is really
0:38:33 think through the termination. Is it easy for either party to terminate? Is it easy for you to terminate?
0:38:40 And really, really, really, really get comfortable with that. And fear setting is helpful here. Yes,
0:38:45 you want to hope for the best. But in the case of agreements, you do want to plan or at least have
0:38:52 a plan, a process for the worst. And that is not pessimistic. That is being responsible, right?
0:38:56 That is having a pre-flight checklist. It’s not like, what do you don’t trust me? It’s like,
0:39:01 I trust you, but everybody makes mistakes. Shit happens. So let’s be adults about it. That’s what I
0:39:07 would say. Saks, you have a question. What area of spirituality really interests me and what progress
0:39:13 have I made on the path? The first thing that came to mind here was direct experience of dropping
0:39:20 illusions and delusions. This sounds very esoteric, but not really, actually, right? Like I’ll give you
0:39:25 an example. Let’s just say you’re really anxious. And then there’s part of you that is observing that
0:39:31 anxiety. Well, one could argue then there’s part of you or a facet of you, a meta version of you
0:39:37 that is not anxious. And it’s like, okay, well, like, let’s think about that a second,
0:39:41 right? Then can you really say I am anxious? Well, not really because you’re not fully anxious.
0:39:47 And then you can start to kind of pick at that and it can actually be really deeply therapeutically
0:39:53 valuable and have some durability. Certainly some psychedelic experiences have informed that.
0:39:58 I would say though you do not need that. Things like awareness, which I already spoke about Anthony
0:40:03 DeMello can be very powerful, especially when used in combination with meditation. Since I’m involved
0:40:07 with it and I think it’s the best for a lot of reasons for a lot of people, not everyone. Of course,
0:40:13 I would mention the way app by Henry Shookman, which I think is a very logical sequence for skill
0:40:19 development. There are many other options out there, but you do not need to take
0:40:25 psyche shattering drugs that will take you to the 17th dimension where you may or may not have your
0:40:34 entire life rearranged by a Mesoamerican demons to paraphrase a post that I saw on X a long time
0:40:40 ago. So like there are risks to doing that. So you don’t necessarily need those, but this direct
0:40:47 experience of sort of looking through illusions and delusions that tend to contribute to unhappiness
0:40:53 and anxiety, I think is pretty much where I’m angling and certainly have a lot of progress to make
0:41:00 there, but you need to take the time to number one, observe yourself in some fashion. And I think
0:41:05 it’s Dennis McKenna who said also that by and large, these profound, I think it was in his book,
0:41:11 The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which is a great title about his largely autobiographical
0:41:17 experiences with his brother, Terrence, over time. But psychedelics are really an intense experience
0:41:21 of the present and there are different ways you can get there. You don’t necessarily need to take
0:41:30 exotic plants or drugs. All right, let’s hop down. This will be Lori. All right, what advice would I give
0:41:34 my 30 year old self? If you’re creating a new social media app, setting up the funding and software team
0:41:39 as well as a separate question, submitting a script I wrote for a pilot creation and ultimate submission
0:41:45 to filmmakers. I’m going to skip the script because I don’t understand that world. But if we’re looking
0:41:51 at apps, I would say, number one, question all of your assumptions about what you need to launch an app.
0:41:57 So for instance, fundraising, software team, maybe you need those, maybe you don’t. I would look at AI
0:42:04 tools and vibe coding very, very closely. And within the next few years, I mean, it will not take long
0:42:09 within the next maybe two years. I mean, there will be multi-billion dollar companies that have one or two
0:42:19 employees. And these AI agents will effectively be acting as highly trained employees in different
0:42:27 roles. And it will be people who know how to manage that, who can really leverage the technology. So not
0:42:32 to beat a dead horse, but I would say really spend some time trying to build things as quickly as possible
0:42:39 people that are potentially, probably unrelated to the app that you would like to build. Maybe you don’t
0:42:46 experiment with the crown jewel up front, but take a couple of swings, a couple of at-bats with things
0:42:52 that you care less about. But I do think that things are going to be streamlined unbelievably moving
0:43:00 forward. And that will also raise questions about what your durable alpha is. In other words, when the
0:43:05 threshold, when the people that need to clear to enter into the space gets lower and lower and
0:43:12 lower, and anyone who can type English or for that matter, any other language pretty soon is able to
0:43:18 use these tools, what advantage do you have? How are you going to create a category of one or a moat
0:43:23 around your app? I think that is probably a question that I would be asking more and more so.
0:43:29 All right. So I think this is from, I’m going to butcher this name. Hilke, boy, good luck to me. I’m sorry
0:43:34 if I’m, I butchered that, but here we go. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s a good
0:43:40 time to pause and reflect. That’s a quote that I often post and use, and it is attributed to Mark Twain.
0:43:45 And then another, the fishing is best where the fewest go. Which areas of your life have you most recently
0:43:52 applied these principles? I would say, honestly, it’s just really pumping the brakes very directly to my
0:43:59 financial detriment. But at this point, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Related to engaging with
0:44:08 platforms and algorithms and letting audience dictate what I do. So there is something called audience
0:44:12 capture. People have talked about the risks of audience capture, right? When your audience responds
0:44:18 responds really well to something, and then you double down on creating more videos that fit that mold or
0:44:24 saying more outrageous things, and you will be shaped just like a dog being trained to more precisely
0:44:31 triple down, quadruple down on specific things. Then you become a character of yourself. And then the mask
0:44:36 that you wear becomes you yourself, even offline. And lo and behold, you have a big problem.
0:44:43 Well, that applies to audience capture. It also applies to what I would call maybe platform capture,
0:44:50 where to appease and curry favor with the algorithm and to get therefore rewarded with more likes,
0:44:58 more followers, more views, more whatever, you contort and do everything you can to satisfy X.
0:45:05 Maybe that’s short form video. Maybe that’s short form video where you’re not actually driving towards
0:45:11 conversion because they penalize you for putting a URL text in a video, but it’s some type of
0:45:18 entertainment. So now you’re a dancing monkey. And you slowly turn into a dancing monkey.
0:45:23 And not only are you dancing monkey, but now you’re not even choosing which music you’re dancing to.
0:45:33 And I do think that I’ve seen this already, but people online become these tailors acting to the
0:45:42 spec of the platform. And more and more so, I think the vast majority of value of interactions on these
0:45:45 platforms is being captured by the platforms. You can see it in a million different ways. I don’t think
0:45:52 this is controversial or hard to prove. Therefore, as I’m watching all this happening, I am pumping the
0:45:58 breaks. And like when in doubt, do not do is sort of my policy. If a lot of people are doing something,
0:46:07 my first inclination, like a petulant child is to not do it and to really wait to see how my friends
0:46:13 or acquaintances are affected when they follow that recipe for themselves. And a lot of it’s poison.
0:46:17 So I would say that’s currently where I’m really paying a lot of attention to that.
0:46:23 So let me hop to the chat here and keep rocking and rolling.
0:46:33 Okay. I’ve had a couple of questions about Cockpunch, Farlata, and I might as well jump into those from a
0:46:38 few different folks, both in the submitted questions and in the live questions. All right. So they blend
0:46:45 together. They’re compatible. So let me just hit them as a nice little basket. So one of them was on the
0:46:50 future of Cockpunch. It’s so childish. I still find that pretty funny to say. Is more Cockpunch
0:46:56 content coming? And are you considering renaming it Legends of Farlata? You’ve called it that at least
0:47:04 once and it’s stuck in my head. All right. Let me hit that first. So yes, it is likely that moving
0:47:08 forward, if I were to do more with Cockpunch, it would be Legends of Farlata. And part of the reason for that
0:47:17 is that it is a very, I think, viable fictional world with these greater houses and so on. And as you might
0:47:24 have noticed from the fiction, what started off as a joke, although that was really sort of cloud cover
0:47:29 to allow me to experiment with something that I was nervous about and self-conscious about,
0:47:33 which is fiction. I ended up taking it pretty damn seriously and really building it out.
0:47:42 If you really just replace Cockpunch in a few places with Legends of Farlata, add in a few
0:47:49 search replaces, it’s viable. It can actually work as a quote-unquote serious fantasy slash sci-fi
0:47:57 fiction world. And is there more coming? I mean, I am actually in part, and I’ve been meeting with
0:48:04 people at film studios and television studios just broadly, because I think that might be a new sandbox
0:48:11 for me in the near future. But I have in my head a complete trailer for an animated film.
0:48:19 This is so absurdly aspirational and at this point out of reach, but something along the lines of kind
0:48:24 of arcane, right? Now they put $100 million, pretty sure, into season one of that. So I doubt I’m going
0:48:27 to raise that much for something that used to be called the Cockpunch, but I don’t think I’ll have
0:48:35 to, because to create a proof of concept trailer with AI in the next six months, I think could very
0:48:41 much be done. As long as I have some concept art, which I do, and I have the ability to create
0:48:50 compelling voiceover, which I do, and very, very clear sort of directorial ideas around storyboarding,
0:48:57 which I do. I have a whole storyline built out around Ty, Tyrolean, and his father. Some of you
0:49:03 might remember this. So there might be more coming. I can’t get it out of my head. And I love fantasy.
0:49:09 I think I would actually be pretty good at it. Who knows? I’m not making any promises around it,
0:49:14 because I have a bunch of stuff to clear my plate of first, including the notebook, right?
0:49:21 If I’m writing the notebook, but I accidentally say yes to 17 new projects, then I’ve proven myself a
0:49:28 hypocrite. So I need to and want to get a few things done first, but I think there could be
0:49:34 more coming. Somebody asked, I noticed a Cockpunch tattoo on the coyote cards. Good eye, because that’s
0:49:40 very, very small on the back of the cards. Are there other Easter eggs we should be hunting for across
0:49:46 your projects? I would say probably. I mean, should be hunting is a strong way to word it. But are there
0:49:51 Easter eggs? Yeah, I would say there are Easter eggs. So I’ll leave it at that. All right. Since
0:49:56 it’s right in front of me, coyote naming curiosity. Why did I choose the name coyote for my new card game?
0:50:01 Is there a symbolic, mythological, or personal meaning behind it? Yes, all of the above.
0:50:07 There are some crazy stories related to coyotes from direct experience that I might share at some point
0:50:14 in a future book, possibly. This is not the time or the place for it, but there is a deep personal
0:50:19 connection. Coyote also, if you read Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, it’s a book about trickster
0:50:26 mythology across different cultures. And coyote in that book is described as a boundary walker.
0:50:33 And I think of myself that way, or that resonated with me. If you think about what I do interviewing
0:50:38 all of these people from different disciplines, over 800 episodes, what I’ve done in the books,
0:50:45 it is boundary walking. I tend to walk with one foot in different worlds to try to tie them together
0:50:54 in some way. And I also really want to incorporate, and look, the Trickster is not always a benevolent,
0:51:03 purely good figure. Almost never is that the case. But they do stir things up. And there is an element
0:51:09 of playfulness, which, depending on where you are, could be attributed to coyote, could be attributed
0:51:15 to monkeys, could be attributed to fill in the blank. I have literally, this has a crazy story behind it,
0:51:21 which I’ll tell you another time. But I have a wooden statue from Mexico, which is a coyote that
0:51:28 is wearing a monkey mask. So I do think about all of that. So there are a lot of different reasons,
0:51:34 symbolic, mythological, and personal, for naming coyote. But for the purposes of people playing the
0:51:41 game, it is for them to inject some more fun and levity. And also keep in mind, in the game,
0:51:46 for people who don’t know, real quick, coyote the game. It is now one of the best-selling games at
0:51:52 Walmart. It’s exclusive there until end of July, when it’s then going to go to Target and Amazon
0:51:59 everywhere else. It has been a massive hit so far. The videos of gameplay have tens of millions of views
0:52:03 that Exploding Kittens has put up, so you can find stuff there. But it’s basically the way I would
0:52:07 describe it. And I probably need to find a better way to describe it. But it’s like rock, paper,
0:52:12 scissors on steroids for a group. Little kids can play all the way up to adults. And you have the
0:52:21 ability to help or sabotage other people. And the coyote cards and attack cards allow you to do that.
0:52:27 Coyote also screws up the sequence and makes it a lot harder. But people get to play those. So there
0:52:33 are elements of being a trickster, sabotaging things, and also being playful built into the game. And I
0:52:39 think almost everybody could use a bit of that these days. I mean, good Lord, the doom and gloom
0:52:45 is just oppressive. And I do think there’s a lot that’s scary that’s happening right now. But there’s
0:52:55 also a lot of opportunity. And if you fixate on the doom and gloom, if you take everything seriously,
0:53:02 which could also include your positive valence, activities and missions, you’re gonna burn out
0:53:07 before you can actually do the real serious work or complete it. So that’s also a reason for the game.
0:53:12 And for those people listening, I think everybody here probably is aware already,
0:53:17 but you can find it. Tim.blog slash coyote. Or you can just go to pretty much any Walmart. It’s in
0:53:22 3,000 plus Walmarts at this point. And you can buy it online at walmart.com. But if you go to
0:53:25 tim.blog slash coyote, it’ll take you to a product page.
0:53:33 So that was quite a detour on cockpunch, but why not? All right. Then there’s a question.
0:53:37 What tool or tools from the 4-Hour Workweek do you personally come back to most often?
0:53:44 This is quite fun to answer because I started off, I was like, definitely 80-20 and Parkinson’s law
0:53:50 and fear setting. And then I was like, and definition, and elimination, and automation.
0:53:55 And I was like, fuck, I’m going to list off everything in the book. I do use these things
0:54:04 all the time. I would say right now, the things that I have been focusing on predominantly are 80-20,
0:54:09 right? I’m applying that to the notebook right now. Parkinson’s law, I’m applying that to the notebook
0:54:13 right now. Fear setting, I’m applying that to like six different things right now. Elimination,
0:54:20 I’m doing that with company process right now. Automation, we’re also doing that literally
0:54:25 set a policy for Five Bullet Friday Today, a new policy, which is intended to automate certain
0:54:31 types of decisions, right? Because making too many decisions can be as damaging as making the wrong
0:54:38 decisions. So streamlining all of that involves what? Defining what we want, eliminating everything
0:54:42 that doesn’t contribute, and then taking the critical few that remain, automating as much as possible.
0:54:47 This is going to sound familiar to anyone who’s read the 4-Hour Workweek. So I still use a ton
0:54:52 from that book. Am I using e-commerce tools that I wrote about in 2007? No, definitely not.
0:54:59 Things have upgraded. But the philosophies, the frameworks, the basic principles, absolutely,
0:55:07 which were cobbled together, as any readers know, from sources going back thousands of years to hundreds
0:55:13 of years to decades prior. This is me assembling best practices. So I do still use a lot of those.
0:55:18 All right. Stephanie, what is one of your favorite memories with your best friend? Honestly,
0:55:25 the Vermont waterfalls. And I have a photograph of two of my best friends and I standing up on this
0:55:30 huge rock. My mom took the photo about to jump off. And very sadly, one of them has passed away. It was
0:55:38 one of my closest friends and died of an accidental fentanyl overdose. He had never taken drugs. And a heroin
0:55:46 addict friend gave it to him to help with his hangover. And lights out. That was it. So cherish that memory and
0:55:54 cherish that photo for sure. Ooh, that’s a good one from Becky’s iPad. Thank you, Becky’s iPad.
0:56:01 If you were to finance a famous movie series to create a sequel, which would you choose?
0:56:09 Well, I’ll tell you because I loved the original. The book is amazing. The movie I thought was
0:56:14 incredibly well done. And I actually rewatched it two years ago, The NeverEnding Story. As a lot of you
0:56:20 know, because it’s come up in the writing, I think the nothing is a really compelling concept.
0:56:29 And the place of believing and what believing does to ideas is very interesting. And that you could
0:56:38 convey a lot of important things in a really compelling fantasy narrative with some angle on
0:56:43 The NeverEnding Story. So I’ll stick with that. All right. This is a book question from Safa. When is the
0:56:50 book launch estimation? I don’t have a great estimation. I was hoping to have it done in time for a holiday
0:56:55 launch. I just don’t think that is realistic to get it to a point where I am going to be happy with it.
0:57:03 I don’t think it’s practical. I think I would need to kill myself and likely become very miserable in
0:57:12 the process to attempt to do that because the latest really that that would be feasible for a completed
0:57:18 book to be done would, and this would be stretching it. If I wanted a physical book to launch at the same
0:57:23 time as the other formats would probably be end of June, and that would be really racing. And that’s
0:57:27 a month, right? That’s four to five weeks from now. I don’t want to be miserable for the next five
0:57:32 weeks. And I also feel like that misery would be transmitted into the material. People would pick up
0:57:37 on it. People aren’t stupid. For those reasons and more, I think it would take more time. I mean,
0:57:44 there’s a lot that has already been written that is good in the book, but to get it to the finish line
0:57:50 takes a lot. And my experience with books is, I think, similar to people who’ve run marathons.
0:57:58 And the feeling is, you’re 70% done. Congratulations. You only have 70% left.
0:58:06 Meaning, the final steps to get it from good to great, which would be necessary for me to feel in
0:58:12 order to publish it at all, is a lot of work. It is a lot of work. So I’d love to be pleasantly
0:58:20 surprised if it takes less work. But if I want to set myself up for success, I think this is actually
0:58:27 going to come out in a podcast soon. But it’s like, don’t pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength
0:58:33 to handle a difficult life. It’s more like, let’s plan for the strength to handle a difficult path
0:58:39 rather than hoping for an easy path. That’s currently where I am with the book. Still need
0:58:47 to figure out positioning. And we talked about this, but The No Book, it resonates with, as I explain it,
0:58:54 to people who are very, very busy, especially friends of mine who have some degree of public
0:58:59 visibility, even within a very tiny niche. They might just be a famous investor and they don’t
0:59:04 actually do anything on social media, but within their world, they are known and they’re drowning in
0:59:09 inbound. Those people immediately are like, holy fucking shit, please send me an advanced copy of that
0:59:15 book. I don’t care how rough it is. Please send me that book. But for a lot of folks, like last night
0:59:22 when I was having my goddamn $72 Nescal that I didn’t realize was $72, it was good, but please.
0:59:30 I was reading letters. Friends of mine had mailed me some handwritten letters, believe it or not. And I
0:59:33 was reading these and they’re like, hey, what are you doing? What’s that? What’s that? And they were
0:59:38 pretty nosy, actually. So I was like, okay, I’m not going to get any peace here tonight. Let me just engage.
0:59:41 And they’re like, oh, you’re a writer. What are you writing? What are you doing? I was like, all right,
0:59:47 well, let me test out the pitch for the book of no, right? And the subtitle and everything. And they’re
0:59:55 like, huh, cool. And I was like, that’s not a good response. So I need to keep testing the positioning.
1:00:01 I really appreciate all the comments. I’m going through them right now. The positioning will also
1:00:08 potentially determine the book structure and writing when I get it into Scrivener. Fundamentally,
1:00:16 most importantly, I have to like it. So I always reserve veto power. I do not, as the expression goes,
1:00:22 you know, a camel is a horse designed by committee. It’s like, if you let every piece of input matter,
1:00:30 and if you allow every piece of input to inform what you do and you subjugate your own position,
1:00:36 keeping in mind, a lot of the advice will contradict other pieces of advice as well that you get,
1:00:41 you end up with a mess, right? So for me, getting into Scrivener, I’m considering all the comments,
1:00:45 a lot of which are incredibly helpful. Most of which are incredibly helpful. They just might
1:00:51 be diametrically opposed. So I can’t do them both at the same time. Coming back to my point about
1:00:58 audience capture, I do think for me to be happy with what goes out, like individual taste and preference
1:01:05 matters. Because the most important thing is that I can live with it, that I’m happy with it. And I do
1:01:12 think when people completely distrust their own instincts, if they are a writer, a script writer,
1:01:20 a CEO, it doesn’t matter. Anything. A parent. And they start to default to only outside experts.
1:01:26 The recipient of that, whether it’s a child or a reader, can feel that, right? There’s like a certain
1:01:33 fragility in the dilution that they can sense. And I don’t think that is an empowering thing.
1:01:39 So I’m drifting a bit, but ketosis will do that to you. All right. Am I planning to compete in any
1:01:45 more archery events or was Lancaster a one-time experiment? I definitely hope to compete more,
1:01:53 but I need to get surgery on this right elbow first. So I’ll almost certainly do that after I have some
1:01:59 pretty intense physical trips planned this summer. And then the recovery will take a few months. So
1:02:08 it’ll definitely be, I would expect, minimum six months before I’m able to even look at competing
1:02:12 in anything or training seriously for something, which would, of course, be a prerequisite.
1:02:19 Here’s a question from Sasha. When navigating through the ups and downs of life, is there one
1:02:23 specific quote person or thing that sits in the back of your head or keeps you prepared and focused for
1:02:29 whatever’s being thrown at you? Yeah. You know what? There’s a fair amount that I think of. So
1:02:40 there’s a piece of calligraphy right there. That is the nin of ninja, which is actually that calligraphy
1:02:49 is from the current grandmaster of ninjutsu in Japan. I think it’s Hatsumi Masaki, I think is his name.
1:02:53 I’m blanking and I’m embarrassed. I can’t remember it offhand, but that means resilience. It can mean other
1:03:01 things. It can mean hidden, but it can also mean sort of resilience and endurance. So I keep it up there
1:03:07 to remind me of those things. And next to that, I’m not sure if you guys can see it. Well, that little
1:03:16 thing up there, I bought at a restaurant, a diner in Truckee, California, when I was having lunch or
1:03:23 breakfast with Chris Sokka a hundred years ago. And it was just up on the wall along with a hundred other
1:03:28 like tchotchke items. And it says simplify. That’s all it says. And I asked the waitress and then the
1:03:32 manager if I could buy it from them because I was like, I need that. So that’s another one that I see
1:03:39 every day, multiple times a day. And then last, I would say it’s the billboard answer from BJ Miller.
1:03:46 Some of you will know this. So Dr. BJ Miller, who’s helped thousands of people to die transitioning from
1:03:54 life to death in hospice. I did a podcast episode with him in 2016, back in the day, still a great
1:04:00 episode. And I say great because of him, not because of me. I think about that episode a lot,
1:04:06 more so than most episodes. And his answer to what would you put on a billboard was something
1:04:11 that he got from a bumper sticker. So who knows where that was. Don’t believe everything that you
1:04:18 think, right? Don’t believe everything you think. That is the crux maxim that will dictate how much
1:04:26 suffering you have or unnecessary suffering, how much so-called happiness or misery you have.
1:04:32 That’s the one. And there are a lot of tools that help with that. Byron Katie’s The Work and
1:04:37 turnarounds are very helpful. You can find all those worksheets for free online as PDFs.
1:04:42 Let’s hop back in to questions here.
1:04:48 Steven, there’s value in stoicism. However, I’m curious if you think that practicing stoicism might
1:04:53 also dull some positive emotions leading to a less exciting life, not live to the fullest.
1:05:01 I’m paraphrasing. I do think that’s possible actually, which is why I try to inject a healthy
1:05:08 dose. Boy, oh boy. Yeah. This is where I need exogenous ketones to help me. I’m probably at like
1:05:15 0.9 millimolars of BHB in my blood right now. It’s like not quite. I need to get to 1.2,
1:05:20 1.3, and then I’ll actually be sharp right now, depending on caffeine, which is a harsh mistress.
1:05:31 I try to inject Epicureanism and other philosophies into my life. Stoicism is not the only system that
1:05:39 I lean on. There are definitely others. And this is part of the reading. This also relates to the reading
1:05:47 of poetry. Very often it’s mystic traditions or schools of direct revelation, many of which are viewed
1:05:54 as heretical under the larger umbrella of their sort of Abrahamic religions, but Sufism and Christian
1:06:01 mystics as well. I mean, it all echoes. So I would say reading those and their descriptions or metaphors
1:06:12 they use to point out how in many ways, the dropping of illusions corresponds with the direct experience
1:06:22 of the divine and the timeless and so on, which can be so profoundly healing and reassuring offsets the,
1:06:30 or I shouldn’t say that it compliments the stoic schools, which can come off as very robotic and
1:06:36 whether we like it or not, we are not robots, right? So if it’s like, yeah, even if your, even if your
1:06:41 mother or brother dies, like you should not weep a tear because of A, B and C. It’s like, yeah, okay,
1:06:48 well, good luck with that. It’s just not really how it works. So maybe there’s alternate framing
1:06:56 that can help to embrace our human foibles and maybe even capitalize on them because even if you
1:07:02 could suppress them or neuter them entirely, I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. I think
1:07:07 hyper-reactivity and constant dysregulation is a bad thing and overall harmful to yourself and the
1:07:14 people around you. That is all to say that I pull more in. Stoicism is one tool in the toolkit, but
1:07:19 it’s, it’s not the only tool in the toolkit. So, you know, picking up books like this one,
1:07:24 haven’t read it yet, but running toward mystery, the adventure of an unconventional life. There are
1:07:30 many, many, many different inputs that I look to outside of stoicism as valuable as it is. Let’s see.
1:07:37 This is from Nathan. You mentioned TMS therapy on point being added to the PsySafe foundation,
1:07:42 right? So my nonprofit foundation, PsySafe foundation, which has funded a lot of psychedelic science
1:07:49 related projects and studies since 2015-ish, or at least that’s when I started personally doing it.
1:07:55 Now I’m also funding different types of studies and science related to brain stimulation, including
1:08:02 accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS. Anything else you’re thinking about adding,
1:08:06 continuing to dissuade the immediate use of psychedelics, but offering a path where it could
1:08:10 lead up to that. Somatic exercises, something similar to the psychedelics 101 page on your webpage.
1:08:18 I’m funding the different types of brain stimulation, mostly non-invasive, meaning no implants for like
1:08:26 deep brain stimulation. And looking at tools that have, at least based on smaller data sets,
1:08:35 unbelievable effect sizes for intractable psychiatric conditions. So certainly the accelerated TMS for say,
1:08:44 treatment-resistant depression, chronic anxiety, even things like OCD, very, very interesting. And unlike most psychedelic
1:08:49 treatments, they could potentially be applied to people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.
1:08:56 So it broadens the kind of applicable patient base quite substantially. There are other challenges, like these are big
1:09:03 machines. Right now they’re cost prohibitive TMS, but not accelerated TMS. TMS is covered in many instances by
1:09:08 insurance, whereas accelerated TMS is not, etc., etc. I think these are all solvable and I’m working on those too with various
1:09:15 friends who are involved. If people want more on the brain stimulation, check out my podcast with Dr. Nolan Williams about
1:09:23 electroceuticals. And I think in the headline, it’s something like 50 to 70%. It might be higher. 70 to 90% remission of certain
1:09:28 things like treatment-resistant depression after a week of treatment. I mean, it’s nuts. It’s not one and done. You do need
1:09:35 boosters in most cases. It’s still quite tremendous. So what else am I adding to SciSafe Foundation? Actually, quite a bit of
1:09:44 conservation around indigenous language, medicine traditions. That includes land rights and so on. I do think that to even the
1:09:54 karmic ledger, I do think there are certain debts owed to these cultures. It can become very contentious and people can get
1:10:03 very upset around these topics. And there are a lot of sort of entitled voices on every side. But that is something I do feel
1:10:14 is, for me, uncontroversial. We should certainly be helping these cultures and communities from which we have
1:10:22 directly and indirectly benefited so much in the psychedelic ecosystem. I’m looking also at, for instance, metabolic psychiatry.
1:10:24 Like, why am I in ketosis right now?
1:10:34 Well, look at Chris Palmer and metabolic psychiatry. I knew that this week and next week are going to be very high stress.
1:10:43 There are a number of events in my life, family medical issues, et cetera, that are incredibly stressful. And in anticipation of that,
1:10:51 I’ve been watching these goddamn squirrels raid my supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder all day.
1:10:54 They’re right there. They know I’m watching.
1:11:03 Sons of bitches. So brazen. God, I cannot believe this thing works so poorly. In any case, side note. Sorry, guys. I digress.
1:11:14 So I’m also looking at metabolic psychiatry funding studies that look at where nutrition could actually address many of these conditions, which is very compelling.
1:11:28 I think adherence is the hard part. How do you get people to actually follow a ketogenic diet, which is the primary tool within the umbrella of metabolic psychiatry, as effective as it is. And I have done weeks and many months of the ketogenic diet before.
1:11:46 And still, I, for the last several days, I’ve just thought to myself, ad nauseum, that’s the appropriate word, how disgusting this diet is. It’s just like so much cheese and fat and cream. I feel like a human cheesecloth. It’s so gross.
1:12:01 And there are certain ways to make it easier, but it’s pretty terrible. I mean, I got to say, and I’ve done a lot of ketogenic dieting. That’s for someone who’s actually done it. It’s just like, ugh, like the idea of doing this super long-term is gross.
1:12:15 So I’m also looking at the mechanisms of action that underpin, at least to our understanding at this point, the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for at least the plausible mechanisms for helping these conditions, right?
1:12:27 Like how does someone get off 5, 10, 15 medications that they’re taking for schizophrenia after a few weeks of the ketogenic diet? What the hell is going on there?
1:12:37 I mean, that’s a great question. And are there ways to address it, say, potentially using non-invasive brain stimulation that would allow a higher degree of adherence?
1:12:42 What I mean by that is how many people are actually going to follow this godforsaken diet, right?
1:12:49 Over time, the percentage is going to be very low. Most people are going to break, get bored. I would put myself in that camp. I’m not going to do this for months on end. It’s terrible.
1:12:55 So what are some other substitutes? I’ll be investing in those things as well.
1:13:07 Somatic exercises and so on. If you want to step into terrain that rhymes with psychedelic therapy, right, that has some overlap, I think those are incredible tools.
1:13:20 But I don’t think there’s much in terms of moving the bigger needles through Saisei Foundation with early pilots that aren’t yet de-risked for other types of funders.
1:13:30 I would say that the somatic exercise would not be risky enough nor at the edge enough for me to fund, given how small, relatively small, the Saisei Foundation is.
1:13:32 But I’m always looking. Always looking.
1:13:35 Yes, this is from Sachs.
1:13:37 I was recently involved in a Kundalini activation.
1:13:40 Holy shit, did it open a different door to the psychedelic without substances?
1:13:43 Not for the faint ego because it gets crushed in the first few moments.
1:13:46 Look, this will not give enough meat for everybody to chew on it.
1:13:51 That stuff is very powerful and can really crack people open.
1:14:01 So the same types of sort of psychotic episodes and extended destabilizing that you see with psychedelic experiences in some cases, you can definitely see with Kundalini activation.
1:14:04 Like, I don’t claim to be an expert there, but there is something going on.
1:14:10 And it can be really, really, really, really powerful, which can cut both ways, positive and negative.
1:14:15 So for sure, yeah, man, oh man, that is a strong tool, for sure.
1:14:19 What do I think Molly’s ideal trip with me looks like?
1:14:20 I know what it looks like.
1:14:25 It’s in the mountains, going to rivers and lakes.
1:14:27 She is a water dog and a mountain dog.
1:14:29 Those are the two things.
1:14:30 Snow also, big plus.
1:14:31 Molly loves snow.
1:14:39 She’s napping, conserving her energy for later running around the pool when I do my sauna and swimming.
1:14:42 Okay, I mean, that looks like all the questions, guys.
1:14:43 So we’ve hit a lot.
1:14:44 I think I’m going to wrap up there.
1:14:47 So thank you guys for the time.
1:14:55 Thank you for being part of the community, to making this process so fascinating and really
1:15:01 giving me so much valuable direction since as someone who’s in the weeds all the time in
1:15:05 a book, it can be very difficult to zoom out and get the perspective of fresh eyes.
1:15:07 So I really appreciate it.
1:15:10 It’s been awesome to interact also in that forum.
1:15:13 And I’m going to leave it at that, guys.
1:15:14 Have a wonderful evening.
1:15:17 Have a wonderful weekend.
1:15:21 And I will chat with you guys soon in the community.
1:15:22 Take care.
1:15:24 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
1:15:26 Just one more thing before you take off.
1:15:29 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
1:15:33 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before
1:15:34 the weekend?
1:15:39 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short
1:15:40 newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:15:42 Easy to sign up.
1:15:42 Easy to cancel.
1:15:49 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
1:15:52 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
1:15:54 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
1:15:59 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
1:16:04 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot
1:16:05 of podcast guests.
1:16:12 And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share
1:16:13 them with you.
1:16:18 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head
1:16:20 off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:16:24 If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday.
1:16:28 Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday.
1:16:30 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
1:16:31 Thanks for listening.
1:16:34 Sleep is the key to it all.
1:16:35 It is the foundation.
1:16:40 Many of you heard me talk about how today’s sponsor, Eight Sleep, has improved my sleep
1:16:41 with its pod cover.
1:16:43 Well, they just launched their latest product, the Pod 5.
1:16:45 I cannot wait to try it out.
1:16:46 And here’s why.
1:16:50 The Pod 5 introduces Eight Sleep’s latest product, the blanket, which uses the same technology
1:16:54 as the pod’s cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body.
1:16:56 So if you’re too hot, too cold, you can fix it.
1:17:00 If you’re a couple and one of you is hot, one of you is cold, you can fix it as well.
1:17:03 It all fits right over your existing mattress like a fitted sheet.
1:17:10 On average, members report the pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster, 34% deeper sleep
1:17:13 and given them up to one added hour of sleep each night.
1:17:15 Also, the pod’s snoring detection.
1:17:17 My friend Albert might be interested in this.
1:17:22 An automatic elevating platform have reduced user snoring by 45%.
1:17:22 So it does a lot.
1:17:26 You’ll also get a personalized report each morning, allowing you to track your sleep stages,
1:17:31 heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and more, all without having any devices strapped
1:17:32 onto you.
1:17:38 So head over to eightsleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of your very
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1:17:43 You can try it at home for 30 days and return if you don’t like it.
1:17:44 So why not?
1:17:45 Give it a shot.
1:17:46 Sleep is everything.
1:17:49 Again, that’s eightsleep.com slash Tim.
1:17:50 You can spell it out.
1:17:51 Eightsleep.com slash Tim.
1:18:01 Traditional budgeting apps, they can be interesting.
1:18:02 Yeah, they can be helpful.
1:18:06 I’ve tried out a bunch, but they don’t compare to the complete financial command center that
1:18:10 you get with today’s sponsor, Monarch Money.
1:18:14 And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly, have recommended it to me, and
1:18:19 I had my entire team basically test this app out and they’re all still using it.
1:18:24 Monarch is like your own personal CFO, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop
1:18:26 merely earning and start growing.
1:18:31 For instance, one person on my podcast team has tried four other budgeting apps, said linking
1:18:35 his accounts, which includes banking, investments, and crypto had never been easier.
1:18:40 And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he’s ever seen.
1:18:42 It made him want to track his finances.
1:18:48 Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal’s best budgeting app of 2025, and it’s the top recommended
1:18:53 personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30,000 five-star reviews.
1:18:57 So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money.
1:19:00 Use code TIM at monarchmoney.com.
1:19:03 Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year.
1:19:08 That’s 50% off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM.
1:19:13 you
0:00:09 The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between-isode. So this is an episode between longer, deep-dive
0:00:15 interviews with world-class performers. And in this case, I am being asked questions. I do these
0:00:20 every once in a while. I enjoy doing them, and we tend to cover a lot of ground. In this particular
0:00:29 Q&A, I am answering questions submitted by a small group of test readers for my latest book project,
0:00:33 The Knowbook. If you want to see what that’s about and see a few sample chapters, go to
0:00:39 tim.blog slash the knowbook for more information, and you can check out that. The community is now
0:00:44 closed because we have a critical mass of people needed for providing edit feedback and book feedback
0:00:52 and so on, but might expand it once the book comes out. Who knows? This episode was all over the place.
0:00:57 We talked about what my commandments would be if I were to start a cult, which I’m not, don’t worry.
0:01:02 about what my costumes would look like, what my cult uniforms would look like.
0:01:09 The risks of delegating your thinking to AI, how I use and do not use AI in creative endeavors,
0:01:16 stoicism, how I balance that with other types of philosophies, perils of audience capture,
0:01:21 how I think about platforms and audience, and so on. The exercises from the four-hour workweek that I
0:01:29 still use inefficiency, where I actually deliberately introduce inefficiency in my life, and there are
0:01:35 more examples than you might expect, and much, much more. So without further ado, actually with
0:01:39 a little further ado, a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, and we’ll hop right
0:01:42 into the Q&A. Thanks for listening.
0:01:47 Budgeting apps, they can be interesting. Yeah, they can be helpful. I’ve tried out a bunch,
0:01:52 but they don’t compare to the complete financial command center that you get with today’s sponsor,
0:01:57 Monarch Money. And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly, have recommended it to
0:02:03 me, and I had my entire team basically test this app out, and they’re all still using it.
0:02:08 Monarch is like your own personal CFO, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop
0:02:13 merely earning and start growing. For instance, one person on my podcast team has tried four other
0:02:18 budgeting apps, said linking his accounts, which includes banking, investments, and crypto,
0:02:24 had never been easier. And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he’s ever seen. It
0:02:29 made him want to track his finances. Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal’s best budgeting app of
0:02:35 2025, and it’s the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30,000
0:02:41 five-star reviews. So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money.
0:02:47 Use code TIM at monarchmoney.com. Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year. That’s
0:02:55 50% off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM. Sleep is the key to it all. It is the
0:03:00 foundation. Many of you heard me talk about how today’s sponsor, Eight Sleep, has improved my sleep
0:03:05 with its pod cover. Well, they just launched their latest product, the pod five. I cannot wait to try
0:03:10 it out, and here’s why. The pod five introduces Eight Sleep’s latest product, the blanket, which uses the
0:03:15 same technology as the pod’s cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body.
0:03:19 So if you’re too hot, too cold, you can fix it. If you’re a couple and one of you is hot, one of you
0:03:24 is cold, you can fix it as well. It all fits right over your existing mattress like a fitted sheet.
0:03:31 On average, members report the pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster, 34% deeper sleep, and given
0:03:37 them up to one added hour of sleep each night. Also, the pod’s snoring detection, my friend Albert might
0:03:43 be interested in this, and automatic elevating platform have reduced user snoring by 45%. So it
0:03:47 does a lot. You’ll also get a personalized report each morning, allowing you to track your sleep stages,
0:03:52 heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and more, all without having any devices strapped onto you.
0:04:00 So head over to eightsleep.com slash Tim and use code Tim to get $350 off of your very own pod five
0:04:05 ultra. You can try it at home for 30 days and return it if you don’t like it. So why not give it a shot?
0:04:12 Sleep is everything. Again, that’s eightsleep.com slash Tim. You can spell it out, eightsleep.com
0:04:18 slash Tim for $350 off. Shipping is available to many countries worldwide. One more time, eightsleep.com
0:04:48 slash Tim. Let’s hop right into it. Start with a question from Joseph. What top
0:04:53 three activities invoke or evoke childhood nostalgia that you’d hope to repeat with your future
0:05:04 children? I thought about this and every answer ended up being outdoors. I recall very early on
0:05:09 when I was a small kid, my mother, we didn’t have a whole lot of money. We had a lot of chicken legs
0:05:18 and a lot of TV dinners, but we would take those chicken legs after we had eaten. So the bones with a
0:05:26 stuck here and there. And occasionally we would go down to the bay out onto a small pier and hang
0:05:33 these chicken legs, these bones into the water and pull up crabs and look at the crabs. And that has
0:05:41 just been indelibly burned into my memory as so exciting. Everything about it was interesting to me
0:05:48 as a kid. And there are other examples that my mom in particular is very good at fostering. She would
0:05:54 take us to the beach and we would use magnets to collect, I suppose, magnetic or black sand. And we
0:06:01 would put the sand into mason jars and then we could play with them with different magnets. And that stuck
0:06:06 out. And then the last example that could give more, but was camping in Vermont. We would spend time
0:06:12 almost every year camping in Vermont at a campground. So there was a social aspect, but we could also go
0:06:18 to rivers and jump off of waterfalls, which at the time seemed a thousand feet tall. In retrospect,
0:06:25 they were probably 15 to 20 feet, but very, very exciting for a young boy. And typically it would
0:06:29 be with one or two of my friends on those camping trips as well, which was amazing.
0:06:33 All right. This is a question from Jeff. What’s something you suspect is true about success,
0:06:38 but you’d never say out loud in a podcast and then in parentheses until now or keynote? Well,
0:06:48 the first thing that came to mind, I think I would hesitate to bring up because it sounds like a quality
0:06:55 problem. And I suppose it is. I do not expect America to weep for the sorrows of people who have
0:07:01 achieved some degree of success. So that is the reasoning behind probably not broadcasting it,
0:07:09 but the basic suspicion that I have, and this is over decades of watching people become quote unquote
0:07:13 successful professionally, financially, as just say those are the metrics we’re using,
0:07:21 is that becoming successful in that way makes the vast majority of people more predisposed to depression
0:07:28 and anxiety, believe it or not. And the reason for that is when you’re striving, when you don’t have
0:07:33 that quote unquote success, you have two things. You have the hope, maybe the belief, maybe both,
0:07:39 that once you have those things, the vast majority of your problems, the things that are eating at you,
0:07:43 the things that keep you up at night, the worries, the this, that, that they’ll just vanish.
0:07:52 By and large, that doesn’t happen. The other thing that the striving period gives you is it gives you a
0:07:57 mission of sorts, gives you a feeling of purpose, purposes to reach this escape velocity where you
0:08:03 have all this money or success or whatever it might be. And once you are the greyhound that catches the
0:08:11 rabbit on the track, you’re kind of like, okay, well, now what do I do with myself? And as I said,
0:08:16 this is probably going to be a head scratcher for a lot of folks because I’m not in any respect
0:08:23 complaining about success. There are things that finances solve, right? Money can solve
0:08:30 money problems. But I think the expectation is there’s going to be a lot more payoff and finality
0:08:36 to the solving of problems, which is not the case. So that would be my suspicion that I generally don’t
0:08:44 say out loud because who the hell really wants to hear it. But the reason I’m mentioning it is that
0:08:53 it can inform what you do as you are in the pursuit of success. And that is perhaps a deal with some of
0:09:02 the issues that are hiding in the basement to come out and look at these tools, developing awareness.
0:09:08 Here’s the book I’m reading yet again, Anthony DeMello, Awareness. Look at meditation practice.
0:09:17 Basically put some of these safety nets in place and explore some of these modalities that can contend
0:09:24 with some of those inner demons or insecurities that will actually come out in much higher volume
0:09:32 once you have caught that rabbit, if that makes sense. So really don’t wait until you have the veil
0:09:40 pulled off to work on those things. And then you can really enjoy the benefits and the upside of that
0:09:46 success without suffering what are actually some very, very real risks and downside existentially,
0:09:52 psychologically. That’s what I would say there. And then follow-up question is if you had to create a
0:09:56 religion with just three commandments based on your life so far, what would they be? And what would
0:10:01 your cult uniforms look like? Well, I think at my cult uniforms, and I’m not planning on making a cult,
0:10:07 maybe I already accidentally did. I don’t know. But they would be very, very comfortable green pajamas
0:10:13 of some type because green is my favorite color. And I care about comfort more than I care about style.
0:10:20 So they’d be very comfortable green pajamas of some type. I don’t know. I want to say silk, but let’s not get
0:10:25 too carried away. Depends on how big the cult is and what the budget is for our uniforms. And then the
0:10:31 three commandments. This is my first stab. I do not have any plans on forming a religion, although I do
0:10:38 think there will be a Cambrian explosion of religions as AI and noise and tech lead people to clamor for
0:10:43 meaning in a mostly, I would say, increasingly secular world. I do think there are going to be
0:10:48 a lot more religions. And that was my prediction about five years ago. But here are the commandments
0:10:52 that I came up with. Number one, movement is medicine. We could unpack that, but I think you get
0:10:58 the idea. Body and mind are not separate. It’s all tied together. So movement is medicine to save the
0:11:06 self, help outside the self. I think self-help is often self-defeating, if that makes sense. It can
0:11:14 reinforce the me, me, me story, I, I, I story of individualism that is so emphasized in, for instance,
0:11:23 the United States and a lot of Western Europe. And I don’t think that certainly anxiety, depression,
0:11:27 different psychiatric disorders, quote unquote, although I’m not sure if you can call them those,
0:11:32 if they become the majority, but they’re not limited to individualistic countries. But I do
0:11:39 think the more you focus on the self, the more your self problems are going to be. So to save the self,
0:11:46 look outside the self, that could take the form of charitable work, brightening someone’s day if you
0:11:54 can’t brighten your own. But it can also take a lot of different forms, such as particular types of
0:12:03 meditation or training focused on poking at the illusion of self or independence or duality,
0:12:08 et cetera. And this may pop up again later. That sounds very esoteric, but what the hell,
0:12:11 we’re talking about religion. So let’s do it. Movement is medicine to save the self, help outside
0:12:17 the self. And then the last one, because I’m thinking about running a cult, if I were actually running a
0:12:22 community and I wanted people to not constantly have drama everywhere and anywhere, although that is
0:12:29 human nature on some level, especially once we get to larger groups, request what you want more of and
0:12:39 what you want less of. Just fucking say it. And I feel like a lot of the drama in life is we push off
0:12:43 the uncomfortable conversations. We don’t ask for what we want. Clearly, we expect people to be mind
0:12:51 readers or we’re very indirect. And if you don’t like something, just speak up. And if it’s tiny,
0:12:58 also like get over yourself and maybe just suck it up and put on your big girl pants. But for the most
0:13:02 part, just speak clearly, ask for what you want, indicate what you don’t like, et cetera.
0:13:07 All right. Those are my three commandments. Sure, I could do better if I put more time into it,
0:13:15 but I don’t want to actually seriously consider building a cult. That’s a dangerous narcissistic
0:13:21 impulse that sadly a lot of folks we see on social media are indulging to the full. All right. Next
0:13:26 one. Becky, when working on a big project that will take a long time to complete from beginning to end,
0:13:30 like a novel or a movie, how do you approach it? The first thing that came to mind is structure,
0:13:37 structure, structure, structure. I want to envision this very clearly and have the ability to move
0:13:44 things around in a physical or almost physical sense. The way that this has been done for a long time
0:13:50 is people use index cards and they put them on a wall with pins or they put them on the floor so that they
0:14:00 can move things around to see how they respond to different types of structure, sequence, editing, et cetera.
0:14:09 And for me, the best tool that I have found thus far is Scrivener. It’s a software program. It’s been
0:14:17 used a lot for plays and screenwriting. I’ve used it for a number of my books. And at this point with
0:14:24 the very experimental notebook, which all of you know is pretty far from being done. Actually, you don’t
0:14:30 know the full scope of it. I guess we’re on something like step 10 or 11. There are like 35 steps.
0:14:39 What the fuck? There’s so much. So I’m going to have to do some significant pairing and also reordering
0:14:45 of things. And the only reason that I perhaps strayed from Scrivener is that nobody in publishing
0:14:53 uses Scrivener, at least as far as I can tell. They use Word or they use Google Docs, but God bless
0:14:59 Google Docs. It’s useful for so many things. But when you end up having 30 to 40 separate documents,
0:15:06 it’s actually a huge pain in the ass to zoom out and look at the larger picture. So I will be
0:15:12 returning to Scrivener shortly. Some questions from Tim. I’m going to pick and choose. All right,
0:15:18 Tim, did this TrueFans preview community, that’s the notebook community for people who may be listening,
0:15:23 fundamentally shape the book? Or was it mostly a marketing engagement tool? Would I do it again?
0:15:29 Why? I would do it again because it’s working to improve the book. Not at all a marketing or engagement
0:15:36 tool. Don’t care about that at all at this point. And it is just to fundamentally help shape the book.
0:15:42 So it has been incredibly helpful. And I’ll speak to this perhaps a little bit later as well,
0:15:49 because there were a lot of questions around AI. I right now do not use AI to write anything.
0:15:57 That is from the perspective of blank page. What I have used AI for a lot is to try to parse feedback,
0:16:04 look at patterns. And I do read through all of the comments on the community.
0:16:11 And then what I will also do, for instance, I’ve had a number of test readers, including two people at
0:16:18 prospective publisher for the print edition, go through the entire, let’s call it, and Neil and
0:16:22 I’ve called it this internally, kind of bloatware version of the book, like the giant 800-page
0:16:31 unrefined version, and have received a lot of feedback from them. I will use AI to then try to
0:16:38 identify for specific steps. Was there a consensus or a majority in keep or cut?
0:16:44 Looking at the feedback for certain steps, can AI pull from those separate documents and just give
0:16:51 me the feedback specific to a particular chapter? I am using AI in that way. And the degree to which
0:16:58 it is the models have improved just in the last few weeks, for instance, looking at Gemini as one
0:17:06 example is remarkable. But I’m not using it for drafting from the blank page. There are two reasons
0:17:11 for that. It’s not that I don’t think it could do a good job, but I don’t want to obsolesce my own
0:17:18 cognitive function. In the same way that I think with so many things, if you don’t use it, you lose
0:17:24 it. Example given Google Maps, like how many of us use Google Maps to do the most basic things
0:17:31 at this point? Or phone numbers, right? You don’t need to remember them, so you don’t. But I do not
0:17:35 want to let my ability to generate or synthesize
0:17:42 to atrophy, particularly in the case of writing. And there are a lot of questions about if I had
0:17:52 kids, what would I encourage them to learn? Given the rapidly developing tools and ecosystem of AI,
0:17:58 it would be writing. It would be clear written communication. I do think that ultimately there will
0:18:06 be a lot of voice interface. But if you want to scrutinize and improve your thinking, the best way
0:18:10 to do that that I have found is doing it through writing. That is how you freeze your thinking. It’s
0:18:14 much harder to do verbally. Even when I was just starting the podcast and trying to improve it, I
0:18:22 hired former researchers and producers from inside the Actors Studio to go over my transcripts so that
0:18:28 they could leave comments on how I could improve, where I had missed opportunities, where I should have
0:18:33 asked follow-up questions, where my sequencing could be improved. That is how I have found you can most
0:18:40 directly improve your thinking, which will then inform your prompting. And I think the race goes to the
0:18:46 best prompter in a sense, knowing not just how to ask prompts, but what to ask from an importance
0:18:51 kind of ranking perspective. So we’ll come back to that. Maybe teach your kids how to use crossbows and
0:18:57 bows and arrows, too, just in case. What do I know? What is this? What is this? All right, let’s keep
0:19:01 moving here. Do you think your biggest success has happened because of your strategies or in spite of
0:19:09 them? It’s impossible to say. Probably both. I think my general distrust of people and hypervigilance has
0:19:13 probably been a handicap. And there are a lot of beliefs around that or that are almost certainly
0:19:19 incorrect or just unsupportable if you look at the chronicle of my life. And then there are some that
0:19:24 I think have stood the test of time, which relate to later questions on four-hour workweek and what I
0:19:28 still use from that book. So let me keep moving here. This is from Stephen. Given your focus on
0:19:33 optimizing efficiency, how do you handle unpredictable variables like traffic, airport delays, and other
0:19:36 disruptions that are beyond your control? So this is a pretty common question for me.
0:19:42 And I think a lot of people imagine me losing my shit when, and I’m not saying that’s what you’re
0:19:50 doing, Stephen, but when things outside of my control start burning up minutes and hours that I
0:19:57 value very highly. Otherwise, why would I spend so much time on efficiency? But I will say that the short
0:20:04 answer is stoicism. Really double-click on stoics and stoic philosophy. And in fact, these types of things,
0:20:10 traffic, airport delays, other disruptions, unforeseen, unpredictable, uncontrollable,
0:20:16 they really don’t bother me. And that is trained. The stuff that bothers me is the kind of stuff,
0:20:21 for instance, that happened last night. I’m in ketosis. I’m eating disgusting amounts of fat.
0:20:27 I’m having a big steak for like the nth time now. And I just wanted something to break up the monotony.
0:20:32 So I asked the bartender, hey, can you recommend any mezcals? Here I am in Texas. There’s a great
0:20:35 selection of mezcal and tequila. And he’s like, oh, there are a bunch of them. He’s like, but I
0:20:41 really like this one. And he recommends this thing very casually. And I have it and it ends up costing
0:20:47 $72 for a glass. What in the fuck? Come on, pal. And he’s like, oh, you just have good taste. I’m
0:20:52 like, asshole. It’s the only one you recommended to me. You don’t tell anyone it’s going to be $72.
0:20:57 That’s the kind of thing that I get upset about. Which, frankly, if I’m reading my Marcus Aurelius
0:21:05 and so on, it’s like, wake up expecting people to be stupid and rude and unreliable, then maybe it
0:21:10 shouldn’t bother me. But that’s the species of frustration that I still need some work to get
0:21:16 beyond, I think. So I think I answered it. This is Corrine. If I were mentoring an 18-year-old today,
0:21:23 right, given the AI driving so much, writing and manual literacy, how to make things, how to fix
0:21:27 things. This is not necessarily for a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-type scenario, although you
0:21:36 never know. It’s, I think, because it is one way to escape the sort of digital doom scrolling and doom
0:21:43 immersion that online has largely become. So for psychological health, I think it’ll be important
0:21:48 to get offline. Like, if that’s crocheting, fine. If it’s painting, fine. If it’s gardening, fine. But I
0:21:56 do think there will be a proliferation and an increase in popularity around those things. And also, there
0:22:05 will be more and more demand for proof of fingerprints, human input and fingerprints on things. Even a lot of
0:22:11 what we consume digitally, proving that with various types of human-made watermarks, right? And there are
0:22:17 companies that are focused on this to a large extent. And I think Kevin and I brainstormed around this
0:22:21 years ago. And that is certainly, I think, where things are going.
0:22:28 All right. Let me hop into the chat. Sounds like a great cult. I think what sells it most is the
0:22:29 comfortable green pajamas.
0:22:42 All right. Let’s see. Ooh. Yeah. What book on sophism would I recommend? There are books of poetry that
0:22:50 really, I think, transmit a lot of sophism. They also have commentary and so on. I will say that
0:22:58 Haile Liza Gafori’s translations of Rumi. There’s one collection called Gold, I think is a great entry
0:23:07 point. And certainly, the poetry of Hafez, I also think, is a great way to directly taste what they
0:23:14 intend to explain. And often, that is what cannot be verbalized or explained directly. They have to use
0:23:21 metaphor as a crutch because that is the only way that they can really make a valid attempt.
0:23:25 This is from Cindy. Tell us a behind-the-scenes story of a podcast that went wrong or off the
0:23:32 rails. You don’t have to name names. There have been quite a few. They have become fewer and fewer
0:23:38 over time. But there have been times when I’ve paused a podcast and basically gone to someone who’s
0:23:44 say a producer. And I’m like, this is too general. It’s not tactful enough for my audience. We need to
0:23:49 end it so you can decide how to convey that. If you want to claim it’s a technical error or problem,
0:23:56 that’s fine. I’ll leave it up to you. But I am going to leave. That happened a few months ago.
0:24:04 Early on, I had a number of interviews with very well-known celebrities and thought that that was
0:24:12 important for me to have well-known names on the podcast as guests to attract attention and listeners
0:24:18 to the podcast, which on some level is true, actually. And it is more and more so true as we
0:24:25 become more and more dependent on algorithms on the platform because you can use certain names
0:24:33 almost like an incantation to summon Google juice and YouTube favoritism to your videos, right?
0:24:40 It’s remarkable. Some names have just been anointed. And I’ve done a lot to try to counteract that and
0:24:53 inevitably will turn into if they’re not careful. But I had a number of interviews and I’m just like,
0:25:00 God, this is so bad. Now what the fuck do I do? This is so bad. And these people were very kind and
0:25:06 trying really hard. But I would say there are a few categories that I found very, very challenging.
0:25:12 Not always. There are exceptions. Actors, athletes, and astronauts. I don’t know why those three.
0:25:20 But I think it’s because in the case of athletes and actors, they specialize so early by necessity to
0:25:28 become the best at what they do that that maniacal focus, exactly what makes them good on some level,
0:25:33 means that over a two-hour conversation, unless we’re just going role by role and dissecting what
0:25:38 they’ve done, which is boring to anyone who is not an actor or deeply interested in it.
0:25:47 If we want something that is wide ranging and kind of multi-textured that will engage a lot of listeners
0:25:52 because it gives them things they can use, it’s hard to do. It’s really hard to do with athletes
0:25:59 and actors. Astronauts is much trickier. I think it’s because number one, you have to have a very,
0:26:05 very, very, very, very high tolerance for boredom and monotony to be an astronaut. And they’re
0:26:12 phenomenal on so many levels. And then thirdly, a lot of folks I might interview have been out of
0:26:17 that profession for a while and have transitioned to, say, motivational speaking to corporations and
0:26:25 so on. So they speak in very broad terms about leadership, integrity, and so on. That’s also a risk
0:26:29 with people from the military. But I think I’ve done pretty well at navigating around that. So
0:26:34 those are some of the behind the scenes. Here’s a question from Sasha. I remember the four-hour work
0:26:40 week, you had a beautiful poem titled Slow Dance by David Weatherford. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That is worth
0:26:45 rereading a lot. I think this poem is beautiful, but also reminds me of taking the inefficient route,
0:26:50 not in a bad way. In what areas of your life do you intentionally choose inefficiency? A lot,
0:26:56 a lot. Whether that’s meditating, whether that is spending time with my dog who just walked in,
0:27:03 Molly, whether that is reading poetry, which has become more and more important to me on a number
0:27:11 of levels. One is certainly simply to explore that medium and all of the riches it has to offer.
0:27:18 It’s also because trying to speed through it is sort of antithetical to the promise and potential of
0:27:25 poetry. Fiction, I don’t speed read. Fiction, I’m listening to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
0:27:30 right now, which is one of the books, if not the book that really put him on the map. Beautiful prose,
0:27:36 amazing voice performance. So I’m listening to that right now. I would say more and more so,
0:27:44 I am realizing that efficiency has a place, but part of being number one, effective, which is more
0:27:50 important is choosing the right things. So if you were to be just like a nanny cam on my wall,
0:27:57 watching what I did today or this week, you would be astonished. I just look like a Roomba lost in a
0:28:04 corner, bumping up against things. I have been so, so inefficient this week. I mean, shockingly so.
0:28:11 I mean, way below average, like many standard deviations below average. However, when I have
0:28:18 managed between fasting and colonoscopy and ketosis and keto flu and just feeling like dog shit and just
0:28:24 being distracted for any number of reasons, when I have focused, they have been on two or three things
0:28:29 things that are actually high leverage. It is forgivable to be inefficient as long as you are
0:28:36 effective. I don’t want to be judgy here, but it is less forgivable or not forgivable to be highly
0:28:42 efficient, but ineffective. Put another way, straight out of the four-hour work week, right? What you do is
0:28:49 more important than how you do anything. I really still stick by that. So I would say overall, I am
0:28:56 inefficient by choice and sometimes not by choice and sometimes highly efficient, but that has never
0:29:03 been my primary concern. And more so and more so, I’m like, what are you rushing to? What are you
0:29:08 sprinting towards? Let’s be very clear on that. And sometimes it makes sense, a lot of sense to sprint,
0:29:16 but otherwise it’s like, if you’re being efficient and the void is filled by other things that you seek
0:29:21 to do more and more efficiently. Well, guess what? You didn’t save any time. The void is immediately
0:29:28 filled with more stuff that you seek to optimize. And that is why in the short term, I think people
0:29:33 are like, wow, AI is going to save us so much time. And it’s like, yeah, it will. If you constrain the
0:29:38 number of tasks you do, otherwise you’re going to be like, wow, I’ve saved so much time in analyzing
0:29:45 the spreadsheet. Let me dream up six other non-critical things that I can now apply AI to. And lo and behold,
0:29:52 we’re straight back to the same fucking place of feeling like we have not enough time and too
0:29:59 many things to do. So the what, right? The lead domino, the one thing to quote Gary Keller, like
0:30:03 these are the things that will separate the overachievers from the underachievers moving
0:30:09 forward, right? The ability to really single task on things that move the needle and hopefully many
0:30:17 other adjacent needles. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:31:30 Christine, I’m going to paraphrase some of these. I think if I read through all of them,
0:31:36 we’re going to run out of time pretty quickly. So you yourself have at times dabbled into unhealthy
0:31:42 workaholism. Serve me in some ways, not in others. What’s your advice to people who are trying to perhaps
0:31:50 help people who have a similar challenge? From your perspective, how might you help them?
0:31:54 The first thing that came to mind, and maybe it’s because I just had a podcast with Terry Reel,
0:32:01 I don’t want to talk about it, which is about ostensibly male depression, but I think it can
0:32:08 apply to women as well. Covert depression that is masked by different types of busyness or addictive
0:32:14 behavior, including workaholism. And I would say also one more thing though, and this doesn’t get a
0:32:20 lot of airtime. When you see someone who has an addictive behavior, whether it’s workaholism or what
0:32:26 you consider compulsive, right? Sexual addiction, could be anything. Before you seek to quote-unquote
0:32:34 help the person remove that thing, think very, very, very carefully about whether or not they have another
0:32:43 safety net. Because if it is covering up depression, if you attempt to, again in quotes, save them, but leave
0:32:48 them with nowhere else to turn after you’ve perhaps given them some degree of awareness slash guilt slash
0:32:55 shame around that behavior, they could actually end up in a very bad place. So really consider carefully
0:33:06 what support or perhaps even what types of therapy and so on they can engage with before that crutch is
0:33:13 taken away. I would just say that because I’ve seen multiple instances of people being shown the
0:33:20 problem, but they haven’t been offered an alternative or an off-ramp, if that makes sense. Now they’re stuck
0:33:27 with this new awareness of a weakness or a problem, but they do not have a plan B. However, I would say
0:33:34 that at the very least to perhaps develop an awareness yourself so that you can observe or begin to ask
0:33:39 questions in your own head, not necessarily with this other person. I do think Terry Reels,
0:33:44 I don’t want to talk about it, but could be very instructive. Rachel, when you’re working on something
0:33:51 new, how do you know when it’s time to talk or share what you’re working on? Do you lean towards making
0:33:55 it public early to work on traction or establishment, or do you lean towards waiting as long as possible?
0:34:03 Or is it a slow leak? Well, I would say I lean towards as late as humanly possible because also plans
0:34:08 can change and you can paint yourself into a corner publicly very easily or set expectations too high
0:34:14 and then you can’t deliver. So I wait as long as possible. I really don’t think much at all about
0:34:19 early traction. I’ll sometimes stick out teasers, but by the time I’m putting out, say, the first chapter
0:34:25 of a book, typically the book is done. This is the first time I’ve broken that rule. And that was to hold
0:34:30 myself accountable to working with you guys in the no community. So far, it’s worked pretty well. So I don’t
0:34:36 regret that. But I tend to wait as long as possible. And partially, let me tell you a few reasons for
0:34:44 that. The first is that a lot of people like the marketing or PR side, the creative aspects of
0:34:49 engaging with that, thinking about angles, thinking about how you can create traction. I think I’m
0:34:54 pretty good at that. Writing is a lot harder. So let’s look at it in the context of writing.
0:34:59 What does that mean? That means that if I allow myself the opportunity, if I open the door,
0:35:07 even an inch, to fucking around with marketing and launch plans and PR, instead of doing the laying
0:35:15 of bricks and the heavy lifting of writing, I will subconsciously or consciously take that little,
0:35:21 little side curtain exit to work on things that are not actually the one thing, which is the writing.
0:35:27 And furthermore, I would say by disallowing that, I have to think about how I am making,
0:35:33 number one, the product as good as possible. And people are going to say, yeah, duh, idiot. Of
0:35:36 course you want to make the product good. And I’m like, no, no, no. I think you’re kind of missing it
0:35:42 in the sense that with all of my books, I asked the question, if I could not do any marketing,
0:35:49 any PR, I could only give this book to like a thousand people. Can I make the book do the work?
0:35:57 Are there features in it? Are there exercises in it? Are there quotes and insights in it that will
0:36:07 make it something that is painful not to share? That’s it. And if you do that, my God, does it make
0:36:14 everything else later easier? And it also helps something to be perennial. It helps something to
0:36:20 become evergreen. And I think asking those types of questions is part of the reason that the 4-Hour
0:36:27 Workweek, which was published in 2007, for God’s sake, the Pliocene era, was revised in 2009. Fine.
0:36:33 Still completely out of date in so many ways. To be one of Amazon’s most highlighted, I think it was top
0:36:39 10 highlighted books in 2017. And it’s still selling incredibly well. I think it’s in part because of
0:36:46 asking those types of questions. Not assuming that I can make up for anything with marketing or PR.
0:36:54 If I want to turn the thousand people and no more, maybe a hundred people, I give this book to for free
0:37:01 into the marketing force, into the PR force that drives every subsequent sale. How do I need to
0:37:08 architect this book? What do I need to clean up? And going from there. All right. Bit of a long answer,
0:37:12 but there you go. Another follow-up question, which is what types of parameters do you have in place when
0:37:18 you want to establish a partnership or business? What are the terms? Would you insist on meeting in
0:37:22 real life first? The answer to that is no, since I do a lot of what I do remotely. How do you know the
0:37:26 terms to agree or not agree to when you have no idea what the future holds? There are a lot of questions
0:37:31 here. And as you observed also, good questions for a lawyer. I am not one. I don’t play one on the
0:37:35 internet. But here’s what I would say. And Gary Keller has a lot of good thoughts on this too in
0:37:43 my interview with him. Think of the agreement as a disagreement. So in other words, you are drafting,
0:37:49 it’s like a prenup. You’re drafting a separation when you are your best selves so that when it comes to
0:37:57 pass, if it comes to pass, that you’re going to split, you can’t do unnecessary damage to each
0:38:02 other or one another, depending on how many parties. So for me, and I know this doesn’t apply in all
0:38:08 situations, but there are a lot of people like Richard Branson and so on who would echo this
0:38:13 philosophy. Again, it’s not one size fits all, but if you can cap the downside, the upside over time
0:38:21 takes care of itself. And the way he launched his airline with very clever leasing and buyback
0:38:26 provisions and so on is a good example of that. The way that applies to a lot of agreements is really
0:38:33 think through the termination. Is it easy for either party to terminate? Is it easy for you to terminate?
0:38:40 And really, really, really, really get comfortable with that. And fear setting is helpful here. Yes,
0:38:45 you want to hope for the best. But in the case of agreements, you do want to plan or at least have
0:38:52 a plan, a process for the worst. And that is not pessimistic. That is being responsible, right?
0:38:56 That is having a pre-flight checklist. It’s not like, what do you don’t trust me? It’s like,
0:39:01 I trust you, but everybody makes mistakes. Shit happens. So let’s be adults about it. That’s what I
0:39:07 would say. Saks, you have a question. What area of spirituality really interests me and what progress
0:39:13 have I made on the path? The first thing that came to mind here was direct experience of dropping
0:39:20 illusions and delusions. This sounds very esoteric, but not really, actually, right? Like I’ll give you
0:39:25 an example. Let’s just say you’re really anxious. And then there’s part of you that is observing that
0:39:31 anxiety. Well, one could argue then there’s part of you or a facet of you, a meta version of you
0:39:37 that is not anxious. And it’s like, okay, well, like, let’s think about that a second,
0:39:41 right? Then can you really say I am anxious? Well, not really because you’re not fully anxious.
0:39:47 And then you can start to kind of pick at that and it can actually be really deeply therapeutically
0:39:53 valuable and have some durability. Certainly some psychedelic experiences have informed that.
0:39:58 I would say though you do not need that. Things like awareness, which I already spoke about Anthony
0:40:03 DeMello can be very powerful, especially when used in combination with meditation. Since I’m involved
0:40:07 with it and I think it’s the best for a lot of reasons for a lot of people, not everyone. Of course,
0:40:13 I would mention the way app by Henry Shookman, which I think is a very logical sequence for skill
0:40:19 development. There are many other options out there, but you do not need to take
0:40:25 psyche shattering drugs that will take you to the 17th dimension where you may or may not have your
0:40:34 entire life rearranged by a Mesoamerican demons to paraphrase a post that I saw on X a long time
0:40:40 ago. So like there are risks to doing that. So you don’t necessarily need those, but this direct
0:40:47 experience of sort of looking through illusions and delusions that tend to contribute to unhappiness
0:40:53 and anxiety, I think is pretty much where I’m angling and certainly have a lot of progress to make
0:41:00 there, but you need to take the time to number one, observe yourself in some fashion. And I think
0:41:05 it’s Dennis McKenna who said also that by and large, these profound, I think it was in his book,
0:41:11 The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which is a great title about his largely autobiographical
0:41:17 experiences with his brother, Terrence, over time. But psychedelics are really an intense experience
0:41:21 of the present and there are different ways you can get there. You don’t necessarily need to take
0:41:30 exotic plants or drugs. All right, let’s hop down. This will be Lori. All right, what advice would I give
0:41:34 my 30 year old self? If you’re creating a new social media app, setting up the funding and software team
0:41:39 as well as a separate question, submitting a script I wrote for a pilot creation and ultimate submission
0:41:45 to filmmakers. I’m going to skip the script because I don’t understand that world. But if we’re looking
0:41:51 at apps, I would say, number one, question all of your assumptions about what you need to launch an app.
0:41:57 So for instance, fundraising, software team, maybe you need those, maybe you don’t. I would look at AI
0:42:04 tools and vibe coding very, very closely. And within the next few years, I mean, it will not take long
0:42:09 within the next maybe two years. I mean, there will be multi-billion dollar companies that have one or two
0:42:19 employees. And these AI agents will effectively be acting as highly trained employees in different
0:42:27 roles. And it will be people who know how to manage that, who can really leverage the technology. So not
0:42:32 to beat a dead horse, but I would say really spend some time trying to build things as quickly as possible
0:42:39 people that are potentially, probably unrelated to the app that you would like to build. Maybe you don’t
0:42:46 experiment with the crown jewel up front, but take a couple of swings, a couple of at-bats with things
0:42:52 that you care less about. But I do think that things are going to be streamlined unbelievably moving
0:43:00 forward. And that will also raise questions about what your durable alpha is. In other words, when the
0:43:05 threshold, when the people that need to clear to enter into the space gets lower and lower and
0:43:12 lower, and anyone who can type English or for that matter, any other language pretty soon is able to
0:43:18 use these tools, what advantage do you have? How are you going to create a category of one or a moat
0:43:23 around your app? I think that is probably a question that I would be asking more and more so.
0:43:29 All right. So I think this is from, I’m going to butcher this name. Hilke, boy, good luck to me. I’m sorry
0:43:34 if I’m, I butchered that, but here we go. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s a good
0:43:40 time to pause and reflect. That’s a quote that I often post and use, and it is attributed to Mark Twain.
0:43:45 And then another, the fishing is best where the fewest go. Which areas of your life have you most recently
0:43:52 applied these principles? I would say, honestly, it’s just really pumping the brakes very directly to my
0:43:59 financial detriment. But at this point, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Related to engaging with
0:44:08 platforms and algorithms and letting audience dictate what I do. So there is something called audience
0:44:12 capture. People have talked about the risks of audience capture, right? When your audience responds
0:44:18 responds really well to something, and then you double down on creating more videos that fit that mold or
0:44:24 saying more outrageous things, and you will be shaped just like a dog being trained to more precisely
0:44:31 triple down, quadruple down on specific things. Then you become a character of yourself. And then the mask
0:44:36 that you wear becomes you yourself, even offline. And lo and behold, you have a big problem.
0:44:43 Well, that applies to audience capture. It also applies to what I would call maybe platform capture,
0:44:50 where to appease and curry favor with the algorithm and to get therefore rewarded with more likes,
0:44:58 more followers, more views, more whatever, you contort and do everything you can to satisfy X.
0:45:05 Maybe that’s short form video. Maybe that’s short form video where you’re not actually driving towards
0:45:11 conversion because they penalize you for putting a URL text in a video, but it’s some type of
0:45:18 entertainment. So now you’re a dancing monkey. And you slowly turn into a dancing monkey.
0:45:23 And not only are you dancing monkey, but now you’re not even choosing which music you’re dancing to.
0:45:33 And I do think that I’ve seen this already, but people online become these tailors acting to the
0:45:42 spec of the platform. And more and more so, I think the vast majority of value of interactions on these
0:45:45 platforms is being captured by the platforms. You can see it in a million different ways. I don’t think
0:45:52 this is controversial or hard to prove. Therefore, as I’m watching all this happening, I am pumping the
0:45:58 breaks. And like when in doubt, do not do is sort of my policy. If a lot of people are doing something,
0:46:07 my first inclination, like a petulant child is to not do it and to really wait to see how my friends
0:46:13 or acquaintances are affected when they follow that recipe for themselves. And a lot of it’s poison.
0:46:17 So I would say that’s currently where I’m really paying a lot of attention to that.
0:46:23 So let me hop to the chat here and keep rocking and rolling.
0:46:33 Okay. I’ve had a couple of questions about Cockpunch, Farlata, and I might as well jump into those from a
0:46:38 few different folks, both in the submitted questions and in the live questions. All right. So they blend
0:46:45 together. They’re compatible. So let me just hit them as a nice little basket. So one of them was on the
0:46:50 future of Cockpunch. It’s so childish. I still find that pretty funny to say. Is more Cockpunch
0:46:56 content coming? And are you considering renaming it Legends of Farlata? You’ve called it that at least
0:47:04 once and it’s stuck in my head. All right. Let me hit that first. So yes, it is likely that moving
0:47:08 forward, if I were to do more with Cockpunch, it would be Legends of Farlata. And part of the reason for that
0:47:17 is that it is a very, I think, viable fictional world with these greater houses and so on. And as you might
0:47:24 have noticed from the fiction, what started off as a joke, although that was really sort of cloud cover
0:47:29 to allow me to experiment with something that I was nervous about and self-conscious about,
0:47:33 which is fiction. I ended up taking it pretty damn seriously and really building it out.
0:47:42 If you really just replace Cockpunch in a few places with Legends of Farlata, add in a few
0:47:49 search replaces, it’s viable. It can actually work as a quote-unquote serious fantasy slash sci-fi
0:47:57 fiction world. And is there more coming? I mean, I am actually in part, and I’ve been meeting with
0:48:04 people at film studios and television studios just broadly, because I think that might be a new sandbox
0:48:11 for me in the near future. But I have in my head a complete trailer for an animated film.
0:48:19 This is so absurdly aspirational and at this point out of reach, but something along the lines of kind
0:48:24 of arcane, right? Now they put $100 million, pretty sure, into season one of that. So I doubt I’m going
0:48:27 to raise that much for something that used to be called the Cockpunch, but I don’t think I’ll have
0:48:35 to, because to create a proof of concept trailer with AI in the next six months, I think could very
0:48:41 much be done. As long as I have some concept art, which I do, and I have the ability to create
0:48:50 compelling voiceover, which I do, and very, very clear sort of directorial ideas around storyboarding,
0:48:57 which I do. I have a whole storyline built out around Ty, Tyrolean, and his father. Some of you
0:49:03 might remember this. So there might be more coming. I can’t get it out of my head. And I love fantasy.
0:49:09 I think I would actually be pretty good at it. Who knows? I’m not making any promises around it,
0:49:14 because I have a bunch of stuff to clear my plate of first, including the notebook, right?
0:49:21 If I’m writing the notebook, but I accidentally say yes to 17 new projects, then I’ve proven myself a
0:49:28 hypocrite. So I need to and want to get a few things done first, but I think there could be
0:49:34 more coming. Somebody asked, I noticed a Cockpunch tattoo on the coyote cards. Good eye, because that’s
0:49:40 very, very small on the back of the cards. Are there other Easter eggs we should be hunting for across
0:49:46 your projects? I would say probably. I mean, should be hunting is a strong way to word it. But are there
0:49:51 Easter eggs? Yeah, I would say there are Easter eggs. So I’ll leave it at that. All right. Since
0:49:56 it’s right in front of me, coyote naming curiosity. Why did I choose the name coyote for my new card game?
0:50:01 Is there a symbolic, mythological, or personal meaning behind it? Yes, all of the above.
0:50:07 There are some crazy stories related to coyotes from direct experience that I might share at some point
0:50:14 in a future book, possibly. This is not the time or the place for it, but there is a deep personal
0:50:19 connection. Coyote also, if you read Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, it’s a book about trickster
0:50:26 mythology across different cultures. And coyote in that book is described as a boundary walker.
0:50:33 And I think of myself that way, or that resonated with me. If you think about what I do interviewing
0:50:38 all of these people from different disciplines, over 800 episodes, what I’ve done in the books,
0:50:45 it is boundary walking. I tend to walk with one foot in different worlds to try to tie them together
0:50:54 in some way. And I also really want to incorporate, and look, the Trickster is not always a benevolent,
0:51:03 purely good figure. Almost never is that the case. But they do stir things up. And there is an element
0:51:09 of playfulness, which, depending on where you are, could be attributed to coyote, could be attributed
0:51:15 to monkeys, could be attributed to fill in the blank. I have literally, this has a crazy story behind it,
0:51:21 which I’ll tell you another time. But I have a wooden statue from Mexico, which is a coyote that
0:51:28 is wearing a monkey mask. So I do think about all of that. So there are a lot of different reasons,
0:51:34 symbolic, mythological, and personal, for naming coyote. But for the purposes of people playing the
0:51:41 game, it is for them to inject some more fun and levity. And also keep in mind, in the game,
0:51:46 for people who don’t know, real quick, coyote the game. It is now one of the best-selling games at
0:51:52 Walmart. It’s exclusive there until end of July, when it’s then going to go to Target and Amazon
0:51:59 everywhere else. It has been a massive hit so far. The videos of gameplay have tens of millions of views
0:52:03 that Exploding Kittens has put up, so you can find stuff there. But it’s basically the way I would
0:52:07 describe it. And I probably need to find a better way to describe it. But it’s like rock, paper,
0:52:12 scissors on steroids for a group. Little kids can play all the way up to adults. And you have the
0:52:21 ability to help or sabotage other people. And the coyote cards and attack cards allow you to do that.
0:52:27 Coyote also screws up the sequence and makes it a lot harder. But people get to play those. So there
0:52:33 are elements of being a trickster, sabotaging things, and also being playful built into the game. And I
0:52:39 think almost everybody could use a bit of that these days. I mean, good Lord, the doom and gloom
0:52:45 is just oppressive. And I do think there’s a lot that’s scary that’s happening right now. But there’s
0:52:55 also a lot of opportunity. And if you fixate on the doom and gloom, if you take everything seriously,
0:53:02 which could also include your positive valence, activities and missions, you’re gonna burn out
0:53:07 before you can actually do the real serious work or complete it. So that’s also a reason for the game.
0:53:12 And for those people listening, I think everybody here probably is aware already,
0:53:17 but you can find it. Tim.blog slash coyote. Or you can just go to pretty much any Walmart. It’s in
0:53:22 3,000 plus Walmarts at this point. And you can buy it online at walmart.com. But if you go to
0:53:25 tim.blog slash coyote, it’ll take you to a product page.
0:53:33 So that was quite a detour on cockpunch, but why not? All right. Then there’s a question.
0:53:37 What tool or tools from the 4-Hour Workweek do you personally come back to most often?
0:53:44 This is quite fun to answer because I started off, I was like, definitely 80-20 and Parkinson’s law
0:53:50 and fear setting. And then I was like, and definition, and elimination, and automation.
0:53:55 And I was like, fuck, I’m going to list off everything in the book. I do use these things
0:54:04 all the time. I would say right now, the things that I have been focusing on predominantly are 80-20,
0:54:09 right? I’m applying that to the notebook right now. Parkinson’s law, I’m applying that to the notebook
0:54:13 right now. Fear setting, I’m applying that to like six different things right now. Elimination,
0:54:20 I’m doing that with company process right now. Automation, we’re also doing that literally
0:54:25 set a policy for Five Bullet Friday Today, a new policy, which is intended to automate certain
0:54:31 types of decisions, right? Because making too many decisions can be as damaging as making the wrong
0:54:38 decisions. So streamlining all of that involves what? Defining what we want, eliminating everything
0:54:42 that doesn’t contribute, and then taking the critical few that remain, automating as much as possible.
0:54:47 This is going to sound familiar to anyone who’s read the 4-Hour Workweek. So I still use a ton
0:54:52 from that book. Am I using e-commerce tools that I wrote about in 2007? No, definitely not.
0:54:59 Things have upgraded. But the philosophies, the frameworks, the basic principles, absolutely,
0:55:07 which were cobbled together, as any readers know, from sources going back thousands of years to hundreds
0:55:13 of years to decades prior. This is me assembling best practices. So I do still use a lot of those.
0:55:18 All right. Stephanie, what is one of your favorite memories with your best friend? Honestly,
0:55:25 the Vermont waterfalls. And I have a photograph of two of my best friends and I standing up on this
0:55:30 huge rock. My mom took the photo about to jump off. And very sadly, one of them has passed away. It was
0:55:38 one of my closest friends and died of an accidental fentanyl overdose. He had never taken drugs. And a heroin
0:55:46 addict friend gave it to him to help with his hangover. And lights out. That was it. So cherish that memory and
0:55:54 cherish that photo for sure. Ooh, that’s a good one from Becky’s iPad. Thank you, Becky’s iPad.
0:56:01 If you were to finance a famous movie series to create a sequel, which would you choose?
0:56:09 Well, I’ll tell you because I loved the original. The book is amazing. The movie I thought was
0:56:14 incredibly well done. And I actually rewatched it two years ago, The NeverEnding Story. As a lot of you
0:56:20 know, because it’s come up in the writing, I think the nothing is a really compelling concept.
0:56:29 And the place of believing and what believing does to ideas is very interesting. And that you could
0:56:38 convey a lot of important things in a really compelling fantasy narrative with some angle on
0:56:43 The NeverEnding Story. So I’ll stick with that. All right. This is a book question from Safa. When is the
0:56:50 book launch estimation? I don’t have a great estimation. I was hoping to have it done in time for a holiday
0:56:55 launch. I just don’t think that is realistic to get it to a point where I am going to be happy with it.
0:57:03 I don’t think it’s practical. I think I would need to kill myself and likely become very miserable in
0:57:12 the process to attempt to do that because the latest really that that would be feasible for a completed
0:57:18 book to be done would, and this would be stretching it. If I wanted a physical book to launch at the same
0:57:23 time as the other formats would probably be end of June, and that would be really racing. And that’s
0:57:27 a month, right? That’s four to five weeks from now. I don’t want to be miserable for the next five
0:57:32 weeks. And I also feel like that misery would be transmitted into the material. People would pick up
0:57:37 on it. People aren’t stupid. For those reasons and more, I think it would take more time. I mean,
0:57:44 there’s a lot that has already been written that is good in the book, but to get it to the finish line
0:57:50 takes a lot. And my experience with books is, I think, similar to people who’ve run marathons.
0:57:58 And the feeling is, you’re 70% done. Congratulations. You only have 70% left.
0:58:06 Meaning, the final steps to get it from good to great, which would be necessary for me to feel in
0:58:12 order to publish it at all, is a lot of work. It is a lot of work. So I’d love to be pleasantly
0:58:20 surprised if it takes less work. But if I want to set myself up for success, I think this is actually
0:58:27 going to come out in a podcast soon. But it’s like, don’t pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength
0:58:33 to handle a difficult life. It’s more like, let’s plan for the strength to handle a difficult path
0:58:39 rather than hoping for an easy path. That’s currently where I am with the book. Still need
0:58:47 to figure out positioning. And we talked about this, but The No Book, it resonates with, as I explain it,
0:58:54 to people who are very, very busy, especially friends of mine who have some degree of public
0:58:59 visibility, even within a very tiny niche. They might just be a famous investor and they don’t
0:59:04 actually do anything on social media, but within their world, they are known and they’re drowning in
0:59:09 inbound. Those people immediately are like, holy fucking shit, please send me an advanced copy of that
0:59:15 book. I don’t care how rough it is. Please send me that book. But for a lot of folks, like last night
0:59:22 when I was having my goddamn $72 Nescal that I didn’t realize was $72, it was good, but please.
0:59:30 I was reading letters. Friends of mine had mailed me some handwritten letters, believe it or not. And I
0:59:33 was reading these and they’re like, hey, what are you doing? What’s that? What’s that? And they were
0:59:38 pretty nosy, actually. So I was like, okay, I’m not going to get any peace here tonight. Let me just engage.
0:59:41 And they’re like, oh, you’re a writer. What are you writing? What are you doing? I was like, all right,
0:59:47 well, let me test out the pitch for the book of no, right? And the subtitle and everything. And they’re
0:59:55 like, huh, cool. And I was like, that’s not a good response. So I need to keep testing the positioning.
1:00:01 I really appreciate all the comments. I’m going through them right now. The positioning will also
1:00:08 potentially determine the book structure and writing when I get it into Scrivener. Fundamentally,
1:00:16 most importantly, I have to like it. So I always reserve veto power. I do not, as the expression goes,
1:00:22 you know, a camel is a horse designed by committee. It’s like, if you let every piece of input matter,
1:00:30 and if you allow every piece of input to inform what you do and you subjugate your own position,
1:00:36 keeping in mind, a lot of the advice will contradict other pieces of advice as well that you get,
1:00:41 you end up with a mess, right? So for me, getting into Scrivener, I’m considering all the comments,
1:00:45 a lot of which are incredibly helpful. Most of which are incredibly helpful. They just might
1:00:51 be diametrically opposed. So I can’t do them both at the same time. Coming back to my point about
1:00:58 audience capture, I do think for me to be happy with what goes out, like individual taste and preference
1:01:05 matters. Because the most important thing is that I can live with it, that I’m happy with it. And I do
1:01:12 think when people completely distrust their own instincts, if they are a writer, a script writer,
1:01:20 a CEO, it doesn’t matter. Anything. A parent. And they start to default to only outside experts.
1:01:26 The recipient of that, whether it’s a child or a reader, can feel that, right? There’s like a certain
1:01:33 fragility in the dilution that they can sense. And I don’t think that is an empowering thing.
1:01:39 So I’m drifting a bit, but ketosis will do that to you. All right. Am I planning to compete in any
1:01:45 more archery events or was Lancaster a one-time experiment? I definitely hope to compete more,
1:01:53 but I need to get surgery on this right elbow first. So I’ll almost certainly do that after I have some
1:01:59 pretty intense physical trips planned this summer. And then the recovery will take a few months. So
1:02:08 it’ll definitely be, I would expect, minimum six months before I’m able to even look at competing
1:02:12 in anything or training seriously for something, which would, of course, be a prerequisite.
1:02:19 Here’s a question from Sasha. When navigating through the ups and downs of life, is there one
1:02:23 specific quote person or thing that sits in the back of your head or keeps you prepared and focused for
1:02:29 whatever’s being thrown at you? Yeah. You know what? There’s a fair amount that I think of. So
1:02:40 there’s a piece of calligraphy right there. That is the nin of ninja, which is actually that calligraphy
1:02:49 is from the current grandmaster of ninjutsu in Japan. I think it’s Hatsumi Masaki, I think is his name.
1:02:53 I’m blanking and I’m embarrassed. I can’t remember it offhand, but that means resilience. It can mean other
1:03:01 things. It can mean hidden, but it can also mean sort of resilience and endurance. So I keep it up there
1:03:07 to remind me of those things. And next to that, I’m not sure if you guys can see it. Well, that little
1:03:16 thing up there, I bought at a restaurant, a diner in Truckee, California, when I was having lunch or
1:03:23 breakfast with Chris Sokka a hundred years ago. And it was just up on the wall along with a hundred other
1:03:28 like tchotchke items. And it says simplify. That’s all it says. And I asked the waitress and then the
1:03:32 manager if I could buy it from them because I was like, I need that. So that’s another one that I see
1:03:39 every day, multiple times a day. And then last, I would say it’s the billboard answer from BJ Miller.
1:03:46 Some of you will know this. So Dr. BJ Miller, who’s helped thousands of people to die transitioning from
1:03:54 life to death in hospice. I did a podcast episode with him in 2016, back in the day, still a great
1:04:00 episode. And I say great because of him, not because of me. I think about that episode a lot,
1:04:06 more so than most episodes. And his answer to what would you put on a billboard was something
1:04:11 that he got from a bumper sticker. So who knows where that was. Don’t believe everything that you
1:04:18 think, right? Don’t believe everything you think. That is the crux maxim that will dictate how much
1:04:26 suffering you have or unnecessary suffering, how much so-called happiness or misery you have.
1:04:32 That’s the one. And there are a lot of tools that help with that. Byron Katie’s The Work and
1:04:37 turnarounds are very helpful. You can find all those worksheets for free online as PDFs.
1:04:42 Let’s hop back in to questions here.
1:04:48 Steven, there’s value in stoicism. However, I’m curious if you think that practicing stoicism might
1:04:53 also dull some positive emotions leading to a less exciting life, not live to the fullest.
1:05:01 I’m paraphrasing. I do think that’s possible actually, which is why I try to inject a healthy
1:05:08 dose. Boy, oh boy. Yeah. This is where I need exogenous ketones to help me. I’m probably at like
1:05:15 0.9 millimolars of BHB in my blood right now. It’s like not quite. I need to get to 1.2,
1:05:20 1.3, and then I’ll actually be sharp right now, depending on caffeine, which is a harsh mistress.
1:05:31 I try to inject Epicureanism and other philosophies into my life. Stoicism is not the only system that
1:05:39 I lean on. There are definitely others. And this is part of the reading. This also relates to the reading
1:05:47 of poetry. Very often it’s mystic traditions or schools of direct revelation, many of which are viewed
1:05:54 as heretical under the larger umbrella of their sort of Abrahamic religions, but Sufism and Christian
1:06:01 mystics as well. I mean, it all echoes. So I would say reading those and their descriptions or metaphors
1:06:12 they use to point out how in many ways, the dropping of illusions corresponds with the direct experience
1:06:22 of the divine and the timeless and so on, which can be so profoundly healing and reassuring offsets the,
1:06:30 or I shouldn’t say that it compliments the stoic schools, which can come off as very robotic and
1:06:36 whether we like it or not, we are not robots, right? So if it’s like, yeah, even if your, even if your
1:06:41 mother or brother dies, like you should not weep a tear because of A, B and C. It’s like, yeah, okay,
1:06:48 well, good luck with that. It’s just not really how it works. So maybe there’s alternate framing
1:06:56 that can help to embrace our human foibles and maybe even capitalize on them because even if you
1:07:02 could suppress them or neuter them entirely, I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. I think
1:07:07 hyper-reactivity and constant dysregulation is a bad thing and overall harmful to yourself and the
1:07:14 people around you. That is all to say that I pull more in. Stoicism is one tool in the toolkit, but
1:07:19 it’s, it’s not the only tool in the toolkit. So, you know, picking up books like this one,
1:07:24 haven’t read it yet, but running toward mystery, the adventure of an unconventional life. There are
1:07:30 many, many, many different inputs that I look to outside of stoicism as valuable as it is. Let’s see.
1:07:37 This is from Nathan. You mentioned TMS therapy on point being added to the PsySafe foundation,
1:07:42 right? So my nonprofit foundation, PsySafe foundation, which has funded a lot of psychedelic science
1:07:49 related projects and studies since 2015-ish, or at least that’s when I started personally doing it.
1:07:55 Now I’m also funding different types of studies and science related to brain stimulation, including
1:08:02 accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS. Anything else you’re thinking about adding,
1:08:06 continuing to dissuade the immediate use of psychedelics, but offering a path where it could
1:08:10 lead up to that. Somatic exercises, something similar to the psychedelics 101 page on your webpage.
1:08:18 I’m funding the different types of brain stimulation, mostly non-invasive, meaning no implants for like
1:08:26 deep brain stimulation. And looking at tools that have, at least based on smaller data sets,
1:08:35 unbelievable effect sizes for intractable psychiatric conditions. So certainly the accelerated TMS for say,
1:08:44 treatment-resistant depression, chronic anxiety, even things like OCD, very, very interesting. And unlike most psychedelic
1:08:49 treatments, they could potentially be applied to people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.
1:08:56 So it broadens the kind of applicable patient base quite substantially. There are other challenges, like these are big
1:09:03 machines. Right now they’re cost prohibitive TMS, but not accelerated TMS. TMS is covered in many instances by
1:09:08 insurance, whereas accelerated TMS is not, etc., etc. I think these are all solvable and I’m working on those too with various
1:09:15 friends who are involved. If people want more on the brain stimulation, check out my podcast with Dr. Nolan Williams about
1:09:23 electroceuticals. And I think in the headline, it’s something like 50 to 70%. It might be higher. 70 to 90% remission of certain
1:09:28 things like treatment-resistant depression after a week of treatment. I mean, it’s nuts. It’s not one and done. You do need
1:09:35 boosters in most cases. It’s still quite tremendous. So what else am I adding to SciSafe Foundation? Actually, quite a bit of
1:09:44 conservation around indigenous language, medicine traditions. That includes land rights and so on. I do think that to even the
1:09:54 karmic ledger, I do think there are certain debts owed to these cultures. It can become very contentious and people can get
1:10:03 very upset around these topics. And there are a lot of sort of entitled voices on every side. But that is something I do feel
1:10:14 is, for me, uncontroversial. We should certainly be helping these cultures and communities from which we have
1:10:22 directly and indirectly benefited so much in the psychedelic ecosystem. I’m looking also at, for instance, metabolic psychiatry.
1:10:24 Like, why am I in ketosis right now?
1:10:34 Well, look at Chris Palmer and metabolic psychiatry. I knew that this week and next week are going to be very high stress.
1:10:43 There are a number of events in my life, family medical issues, et cetera, that are incredibly stressful. And in anticipation of that,
1:10:51 I’ve been watching these goddamn squirrels raid my supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder all day.
1:10:54 They’re right there. They know I’m watching.
1:11:03 Sons of bitches. So brazen. God, I cannot believe this thing works so poorly. In any case, side note. Sorry, guys. I digress.
1:11:14 So I’m also looking at metabolic psychiatry funding studies that look at where nutrition could actually address many of these conditions, which is very compelling.
1:11:28 I think adherence is the hard part. How do you get people to actually follow a ketogenic diet, which is the primary tool within the umbrella of metabolic psychiatry, as effective as it is. And I have done weeks and many months of the ketogenic diet before.
1:11:46 And still, I, for the last several days, I’ve just thought to myself, ad nauseum, that’s the appropriate word, how disgusting this diet is. It’s just like so much cheese and fat and cream. I feel like a human cheesecloth. It’s so gross.
1:12:01 And there are certain ways to make it easier, but it’s pretty terrible. I mean, I got to say, and I’ve done a lot of ketogenic dieting. That’s for someone who’s actually done it. It’s just like, ugh, like the idea of doing this super long-term is gross.
1:12:15 So I’m also looking at the mechanisms of action that underpin, at least to our understanding at this point, the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for at least the plausible mechanisms for helping these conditions, right?
1:12:27 Like how does someone get off 5, 10, 15 medications that they’re taking for schizophrenia after a few weeks of the ketogenic diet? What the hell is going on there?
1:12:37 I mean, that’s a great question. And are there ways to address it, say, potentially using non-invasive brain stimulation that would allow a higher degree of adherence?
1:12:42 What I mean by that is how many people are actually going to follow this godforsaken diet, right?
1:12:49 Over time, the percentage is going to be very low. Most people are going to break, get bored. I would put myself in that camp. I’m not going to do this for months on end. It’s terrible.
1:12:55 So what are some other substitutes? I’ll be investing in those things as well.
1:13:07 Somatic exercises and so on. If you want to step into terrain that rhymes with psychedelic therapy, right, that has some overlap, I think those are incredible tools.
1:13:20 But I don’t think there’s much in terms of moving the bigger needles through Saisei Foundation with early pilots that aren’t yet de-risked for other types of funders.
1:13:30 I would say that the somatic exercise would not be risky enough nor at the edge enough for me to fund, given how small, relatively small, the Saisei Foundation is.
1:13:32 But I’m always looking. Always looking.
1:13:35 Yes, this is from Sachs.
1:13:37 I was recently involved in a Kundalini activation.
1:13:40 Holy shit, did it open a different door to the psychedelic without substances?
1:13:43 Not for the faint ego because it gets crushed in the first few moments.
1:13:46 Look, this will not give enough meat for everybody to chew on it.
1:13:51 That stuff is very powerful and can really crack people open.
1:14:01 So the same types of sort of psychotic episodes and extended destabilizing that you see with psychedelic experiences in some cases, you can definitely see with Kundalini activation.
1:14:04 Like, I don’t claim to be an expert there, but there is something going on.
1:14:10 And it can be really, really, really, really powerful, which can cut both ways, positive and negative.
1:14:15 So for sure, yeah, man, oh man, that is a strong tool, for sure.
1:14:19 What do I think Molly’s ideal trip with me looks like?
1:14:20 I know what it looks like.
1:14:25 It’s in the mountains, going to rivers and lakes.
1:14:27 She is a water dog and a mountain dog.
1:14:29 Those are the two things.
1:14:30 Snow also, big plus.
1:14:31 Molly loves snow.
1:14:39 She’s napping, conserving her energy for later running around the pool when I do my sauna and swimming.
1:14:42 Okay, I mean, that looks like all the questions, guys.
1:14:43 So we’ve hit a lot.
1:14:44 I think I’m going to wrap up there.
1:14:47 So thank you guys for the time.
1:14:55 Thank you for being part of the community, to making this process so fascinating and really
1:15:01 giving me so much valuable direction since as someone who’s in the weeds all the time in
1:15:05 a book, it can be very difficult to zoom out and get the perspective of fresh eyes.
1:15:07 So I really appreciate it.
1:15:10 It’s been awesome to interact also in that forum.
1:15:13 And I’m going to leave it at that, guys.
1:15:14 Have a wonderful evening.
1:15:17 Have a wonderful weekend.
1:15:21 And I will chat with you guys soon in the community.
1:15:22 Take care.
1:15:24 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
1:15:26 Just one more thing before you take off.
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