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0:02:09 Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss.
0:02:12 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct
0:02:16 world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, and so
0:02:18 on that you can apply to your own life.
0:02:23 This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the
0:02:24 last month.
0:02:28 Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get
0:02:33 a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going
0:02:34 to one of those episodes.
0:02:36 View this episode as a buffet to wait your appetite.
0:02:37 It’s a lot of fun.
0:02:42 We had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see
0:02:46 the episode’s description, probably right below, wherever you press play in your podcast
0:02:53 app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blog/podcast and find all the details there.
0:02:54 Please enjoy.
0:03:01 First up, John Batiste, an Academy Award-winning and five-time Grammy Award-winning singer,
0:03:03 songwriter, and composer.
0:03:09 His new album, Beethoven Blues, which showcases Batiste’s interpretations of Beethoven’s
0:03:12 iconic works, is out now.
0:03:38 You can find John on Instagram and Twitter at John Batiste.
0:04:01 The
0:04:02 drumming too.
0:04:06 It doesn’t have to be instrumental.
0:04:13 There are so many different ways that you can enter unusual, uncommon states using repetition,
0:04:16 so I’m very, very interested in this, which is why I’m asking.
0:04:17 Yes, for sure.
0:04:23 So, two of the ones that I, not for stage, but just more for crisis, that I go to is
0:04:28 Be Still and Know, which is from the Bible, Be Still and Know that I’m God.
0:04:37 It is this idea that I’ll give you a practice, so Be Still and Know that I am God.
0:04:40 Be Still and Know that I am.
0:04:42 Be Still and Know that I.
0:04:44 Be Still and Know that.
0:04:46 Be Still and Know.
0:04:47 Be Still.
0:04:48 Be.
0:04:54 Just this idea, I’ve sat with that, and each phrase has a different meaning.
0:05:04 Even Be Still and then Breath or Room Tone, there’s messages in that space, there’s messages
0:05:12 in the crevice, so I’ve done that and sat in that, and it’s changed my entire perspective
0:05:20 on a crisis or something that I felt perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps there’s so many opportunities
0:05:29 for us in this life to transmute darkness into light, or even darkness into perspective.
0:05:33 Another one is, “Thy will be done,” which is one of surrender.
0:05:36 Now, we believe there’s a divine power.
0:05:41 There’s, however you name it, whatever your relationship to it is, we’ve, for the most
0:05:48 part, had an experience that something beyond explanation, the universe is carrying us in
0:05:49 some way.
0:05:55 “Thy will be done” is trusting that there’s a divine logic to it all.
0:05:59 When there’s nothing that you can do, “Thy will be done,” “Thy will be done,” “Thy will
0:06:07 be done,” because the belief of this divine logic allows for you to understand that there’s
0:06:12 a path and you are accounted for in that path.
0:06:13 You are accounted for.
0:06:19 There’s so much that is allowed for you to be at the culmination of so many things as
0:06:23 led to you, and there will never be another you, you the only one.
0:06:29 That specificity alone is something that comes to me when I’m in that “Thy will be done.”
0:06:35 It’s a revelation of so many other things, which is also allowing for the right thing
0:06:41 to occur and for me to be accepting of it, versus for me to control it without knowledge
0:06:44 of what the true right thing is.
0:06:50 So there’s so much that you have to cleanse yourself of from believing or from holding
0:06:55 on to that’s not actually connected to the best outcome, but you can’t always know that,
0:06:56 especially in crisis.
0:06:58 It’s very hard to know.
0:07:01 Many parables are always like, “This, this happened.
0:07:02 Such good news.
0:07:03 Maybe.”
0:07:04 Right.
0:07:05 “Such and such happened.
0:07:06 This is terrible.
0:07:07 Maybe.”
0:07:11 It just depends on so many things outside of our sphere of knowledge that on so many levels
0:07:12 can’t be known.
0:07:17 When would you be inclined to say to yourself that last mantra?
0:07:19 When would you apply that in your life?
0:07:24 There’s so many things that happen to us with our health.
0:07:26 I talk about Sulayka a lot.
0:07:28 I love her as you know.
0:07:29 She’s great.
0:07:30 Yeah.
0:07:31 Had her on the show.
0:07:32 Yes.
0:07:34 And I also borrow a lot of phrases from her.
0:07:41 In particular, this idea of being between two kingdoms, this idea of the kingdom of the
0:07:43 well, the kingdom of the sick.
0:07:47 And we all exist in this in-between space.
0:07:53 And we have a passport for both, which is something that she created this understanding
0:07:58 of that through the way she lives through it, the way she gracefully moves through this
0:08:05 time with such grace, with such power, with such clarity.
0:08:13 I think about that. I think about how there’s a certain surrender that’s required of all
0:08:17 of us in times when we deal with health challenges, whether it’s us or a loved one.
0:08:22 And you find yourself in moments where there’s literally nothing that you can do to take
0:08:28 away pain or to take away the unknown and the anxiety of waiting.
0:08:35 So that’s an opportunity for a great amount of growth. That’s an opportunity for a lesson
0:08:43 to be instilled in a way that almost nothing else that I can think of affords you the chance
0:08:45 for. That will be done.
0:08:46 That will be done.
0:08:51 Yeah, this is a coach I worked with for a while. He used to say, “This is your pop quiz
0:08:55 from the universe.” When something unexpected would pop up, he’d be like, “All right, all
0:08:57 that meditation you’ve been doing?”
0:09:02 Let’s see it. Let’s see it. Let’s see it. Let’s see, bro. Come on, bro.
0:09:08 You’ve been rehearsing. This is game time. Let’s see how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Tim,
0:09:12 you know what I’m saying when you’re in that moment. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of sympathy
0:09:16 for watching you both go through that journey. And I can only imagine what it’s like. I mean,
0:09:21 I have been, of course, and most people listening have been in a position where they feel powerless
0:09:27 to help or they don’t know how to help a loved one, but had a lot of sympathy for a challenging
0:09:39 road and also really been in awe of how much growth both of you have exhibited through
0:09:42 the challenges and pain and so on. In any case, I just wanted to say that.
0:09:50 Oh, man, it means a lot to hear that. And it feels so much of the time as odd as it
0:09:58 may sound, it feels like a privilege to go through it together in the way that we have
0:10:08 seen it. It’s shifted into almost the orientation of blessing. And that’s not to say that the
0:10:14 difficulties are any easier, right? It doesn’t change the nature of hard things. They’re
0:10:22 hard. But there’s something about life. There’s a truth. There’s something about going through
0:10:31 the fire that is so required and something about suffering that is so essential. This
0:10:41 idea that we’re meant to run from pain or run from difficult things and find the most
0:10:51 leisurely and completely frictionless existence possible. It’s such a lie. It’s not just
0:10:57 a lie because it’s not possible. But if it were possible, that would kill you the most.
0:11:01 It would rob you in so many ways, which is, of course, easy for me to say, sitting in
0:11:06 this comfortable chair right now in the midst of it. It’s sometimes hard to see it. At the
0:11:11 same time, there was an astrophysicist, Jan 11, who was on the podcast some time ago.
0:11:15 And I’m going to butcher this quote, but it’s more the concept for me that has really
0:11:19 stuck. She said, “Something along the lines of I used to look for the underlying path
0:11:23 that would help me navigate around obstacles. And then I realized there is no underlying
0:11:32 path. The obstacles are the path through which you discover yourself, through which you learn,
0:11:40 through which you grow.” That is the path. Take those away. And then you’re just a free-floating
0:11:45 essence of comfort. That’s just not the human experience. And also, you’re talking about
0:11:52 blessings. So I could imagine even an earlier version of me would say, “Oh, come on now.”
0:11:56 I suppose it’s helpful, but maybe it’s delusional and it’s overly optimistic. But it’s deeper
0:12:03 than that. And I think that misses the mark because given a longer timeframe, given all
0:12:09 the unknowns, it could be a blessing. It could be a curse, but you can’t know which it is
0:12:13 over time. And it depends a lot on your perspective. So you might as well choose blessing. That
0:12:19 is the more enabling perspective. And since you can’t know, it’s a coin flip. Choose the
0:12:25 side of the coin that is most enabling, it seems to me at least, in the abstract. It’s
0:12:30 easy to say. Taxi runs over my foot. We’ll see how I do later today.
0:12:36 It’s that. And it’s also, you only will know when you are there. You have to go there to
0:12:43 know there. You only know what it can be for you when you’re in the fire. Everybody can
0:12:51 talk about what they would do when they are there. We can all say, “Man, if that would
0:13:00 have happened to me, I would slay the dragon.” I would, whatever you think you would do,
0:13:06 most often is not what you would do. And that’s not because you’re not who you think you are.
0:13:10 It’s because there’s so many other factors you can’t know.
0:13:14 And for many things in my life that I think about, the things I’ve learned the most from
0:13:20 are when I’ve embraced the discomfort and realized what I was made of through it.
0:13:23 Let me just sit with that for a second.
0:13:34 Next up, Dr. Bruce Grayson, a leading expert in near-death experiences and the author
0:13:42 of After, a doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond.
0:13:45 You can learn more about Dr. Grayson at brucegrayson.com.
0:13:56 So I want to zoom in and out from the clinical, skeptical side to the hopefully, and I think
0:14:02 we’ll get to quite a few of these, but examples that could be corroborated in some fashion.
0:14:05 And those may overlap with those that are described as out-of-body experiences.
0:14:10 They might not, and we’ll probably come back to that term as well.
0:14:18 But could you tell the story of the, tell me if this is enough of a cue, the red MGB?
0:14:24 Many people in the near-death experience say that they encountered deceased loved ones
0:14:30 in the experience. And that can easily be explained as wishful thinking, expectation.
0:14:34 You think you’re dying, and you would love to see your grandmother once more, so she
0:14:37 comes to you, and there’s no way to prove or disprove that.
0:14:43 However, in some cases, the person having the near-death experience encounters someone
0:14:46 who had died, but nobody yet knew they had died.
0:14:50 So that can’t be dismissed as expectation and wishful thinking.
0:14:52 This is not a new phenomenon.
0:14:55 Plenty of the elder wrote about a case like this in the first century, G.D.
0:14:57 But we’re hearing about a lot of them now.
0:15:02 About 12 years ago, I wrote a paper that had 30 different cases from recent years.
0:15:03 Jack was one of those.
0:15:08 He had an experience, actually he was in South Africa back in the ’70s.
0:15:13 And he was a young technician at that time and had very serious pneumonia, and he would
0:15:16 easily stop breathing and have to be resuscitated.
0:15:19 So he was admitted to the hospital with a severe pneumonia.
0:15:24 And he had one nurse who was constantly working with him as his primary nurse, a young pretty
0:15:26 girl about his age.
0:15:28 He flirted a lot with her where he could.
0:15:31 And one day she told him she’s going to be taking a long weekend off and there’d be other
0:15:34 nurses substituting for her.
0:15:38 So he wished her well and she went off.
0:15:43 And over the weekend while she was gone, he had another respiratory arrest where he couldn’t
0:15:44 breathe.
0:15:46 He had to be resuscitated.
0:15:48 And during that time, he had a near-death experience.
0:15:54 And he told me that he was in this beautiful pastoral scene, and there out of the woods
0:15:57 came his nurse, Anita, walking towards him.
0:16:01 And he was stunned because he was in this different world of what’s she doing there.
0:16:04 So he said, “What are you doing here?”
0:16:07 And she said, “Jack, you can’t stay here with me.
0:16:11 I want you to go back and I want you to find my parents and tell them that I love them
0:16:14 very much and I’m sorry I wrecked the red MGB.”
0:16:18 He didn’t know what to make of that, but she turned around and went back into the woods
0:16:21 and then he woke up later in his hospital bed.
0:16:27 Now he tells me that back in the ’70s, there were very few MGBs in South Africa and he
0:16:29 had never seen one.
0:16:32 When the first nurse came into his room, he started to tell her about his experience and
0:16:35 seeing his nurse, Anita.
0:16:38 She got very upset and ran out of the room.
0:16:43 It turned out that she had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday and her
0:16:47 parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB.
0:16:52 She got very excited, hopped in the car and took off for a test drive and crashed into
0:16:57 a telephone pole and died instantly, just a few hours before his near-death experience.
0:17:03 I don’t see any way he could have known or wanted or expected her to have an accident
0:17:04 and die.
0:17:08 There’s certainly no way he could have known how she died and yet he did.
0:17:13 And we’ve got lots of other cases like this that called Piki and Darian cases based on
0:17:19 a book that was published in the 1800s with cases like these, where people encounter deceased
0:17:21 individuals who were not known to be dead.
0:17:23 I don’t know how to explain those.
0:17:30 Now, just to put my skeptics hat on, I could say, “Well, if I were Jack,” it was a Jack,
0:17:34 let’s just say it’s Jack, “that would make one hell of a story if there wasn’t a third
0:17:38 party to independently verify it with.”
0:17:43 But there are other cases and for people listening, we’re going to come back to some of the common
0:17:44 questions.
0:17:49 I would say forms of discussion around these related to possible biological mechanisms
0:17:50 or lack thereof.
0:17:52 We’re going to come back to that in a second.
0:17:59 But there are then cases that are seemingly characteristically quite different and perhaps
0:18:03 can be, I’m going to be curious to know if this has been done or not, but verified with
0:18:04 third parties.
0:18:12 And one that comes to mind that I’ve heard you discuss is related to the surgeon flapping
0:18:20 like a bird and I was hoping that you could give a description of that particular case
0:18:21 study.
0:18:27 Before we get to that, how many near-death experiences have you documented, studied,
0:18:32 or otherwise read about, put into the archives yourself?
0:18:36 How many instances would you say you have encountered in one way or another?
0:18:40 I’ve got slightly more than a thousand in my database at the University of Virginia where
0:18:45 we have validated as much as we can that they were in fact close to death and this is what
0:18:46 happened to them.
0:18:49 I’ve talked to many more people about their near-death experience that I haven’t included
0:18:54 because I wasn’t confident that they really fit the criteria for being in the study.
0:18:57 But it’s really much more common than you might think it was because people don’t talk
0:18:59 about these things.
0:19:01 You mentioned people wanting the publicity of this.
0:19:06 That is actually maybe more true now, but back in the 70s and 80s, nobody wanted to talk
0:19:09 about these things.
0:19:14 If you talk about things you got ridiculed, you got referred to a psychiatrist, you were
0:19:19 called crazy, you were shunned by people you knew, both materialists and religious folks.
0:19:21 They didn’t want to hear about these things.
0:19:24 People did not talk about these events.
0:19:28 What of this surgeon flapping like a bird?
0:19:34 This was a fellow owl in his mid-50s who was a van driver and he was out on his rounds
0:19:42 one day and he had chest pain and he knew enough to stop his rounds and drive to the emergency
0:19:46 room and they did some evaluations and found that he had four arteries to his heart that
0:19:55 were blocked and they rushed him to the emergency room for urgent quadruple bypass surgery.
0:20:00 So he’s lying on the table, fully unconscious, the drapes over and so forth, and he tells
0:20:05 me that in the middle of the operation, he rose up out of his body and looked down and
0:20:12 saw the surgeons operating on and he saw the chief surgeon who he hadn’t met before, flapping
0:20:16 his arms like he was trying to fly and he demonstrated for me.
0:20:21 At that point I laughed, so I thought, “This is obviously hallucination, doctors don’t
0:20:22 do that.”
0:20:27 But he insisted that I check with the doctor, he said, “This really happened, ask him.”
0:20:30 So he told me lots of other things about his near-death experience, but that’s the one
0:20:31 that I was able to verify.
0:20:38 So I talked to a surgeon who actually had been trained in Japan and he said, “Well yes,
0:20:40 I did do that.
0:20:46 I have a habit of letting my assistants start the procedure while I put on my sterile gown
0:20:48 and gloves and wash my hands and so forth.”
0:20:53 Then I go into the operating room and watch them for a while because I don’t want to risk
0:20:55 touching anything with my sterile hands now.
0:21:01 I pointed things out to them with my elbows and pointed things out just the way Al was
0:21:03 saying he was trying to fly.
0:21:05 I don’t know any other doctor that’s done that.
0:21:08 I’ve been a doctor for more than 50 years and I’ve never seen anyone do that.
0:21:12 So it’s kind of an idiosyncratic thing.
0:21:14 Is there any way Al could have seen that?
0:21:17 Well, he was totally anesthetized, he had his heart was open.
0:21:20 I don’t think there’s any way he could have seen that and yet he did.
0:21:33 Next up, Andrew Roberts, historian and New York Times bestselling author of 20 books,
0:21:40 including Napoleon Alive, Churchill Walking With Destiny, and most recently, Conflict,
0:21:47 The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, co-authored with General David Petraeus.
0:21:55 You can find Andrew on Twitter @aroberts_andrew.
0:22:01 Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis?
0:22:07 It seems that that’s something that recurs.
0:22:12 The reason I’m asking about it is, this is a sub-question, how much of it do you think
0:22:14 is nature versus nurture also?
0:22:18 Feel free to take that in any direction you like.
0:22:25 Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war, they both went to military colleges.
0:22:30 So as their level of command grew, as they grew older, the sense of responsibility they
0:22:37 had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling increased exponentially.
0:22:44 So they had the intellectual background, they had the training as well, and as young
0:22:49 men in both cases, they thought a lot about war, about Julius Caesar and Alexander the
0:22:51 Great and so on.
0:22:56 They had a egotism to look at it in a negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in
0:23:03 a positive way that gave them the ability to take these shatteringly important decisions.
0:23:07 So I think it’s much more nurture than nature.
0:23:14 And in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire that they both
0:23:15 had.
0:23:18 There was a, not only in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at
0:23:24 all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were doing
0:23:30 was so good and right and proper and had to be done that they were not kept up at awake
0:23:38 at night over even the death of friends, death of friends that they were responsible for.
0:23:39 They were responsible for.
0:23:43 In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names or in Gospels when
0:23:47 you’re using the royal wheel here, you could bring up other names.
0:23:52 Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive,
0:23:57 who they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in, were there particular minds?
0:24:02 Well certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader.
0:24:04 He was a massive autodidact.
0:24:08 He never went to university and so therefore, when he was a young sublton in India in his
0:24:18 early twenties, he sat down and read the great philosophers as well as writers and he was
0:24:24 particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century historians, English
0:24:25 historians.
0:24:31 And that affected his writing style and of course later his oratorical style, but also
0:24:36 his outlook on life, philosophical outlook on life.
0:24:40 With regard to Napoleon, he was even more literary really because he also wrote short
0:24:43 stories and books and so on.
0:24:50 And so he was very much affected by what he read again as a young man.
0:24:56 And in both cases, it’s slightly, they were reading so much that it’s slightly cut them
0:24:59 off from their contemporaries.
0:25:04 And Napoleon didn’t have many friends when he was in his early twenties.
0:25:11 And Churchill, when the other people were off sleeping in the midday heat of India,
0:25:16 his colleagues and comrades, he’d be sitting there reading Chopin and Gibbon and Macaulay
0:25:17 and so on.
0:25:21 How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings?
0:25:26 They made him into what was called at the time a wig.
0:25:33 We don’t have them today obviously, but they were in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives
0:25:36 who believed in noblesse oblige in the importance of…
0:25:37 What is that?
0:25:38 I’m sorry.
0:25:39 Noblesse oblige.
0:25:46 It’s almost a medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for
0:25:51 the greater good of the community, to protect widows and orphans, to it’s sort of like the
0:25:57 nightly chivalric concept that you get from the middle ages.
0:25:59 And they very much believed in that and so did Churchill.
0:26:02 Let me ask about Napoleon.
0:26:04 So I know shockingly little about Napoleon.
0:26:08 I’m embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well, but you’ve
0:26:11 described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership.
0:26:13 Why do you say that?
0:26:18 There were lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one
0:26:20 that I can think of who could do all of them.
0:26:23 Of course, it helps if you’re winning.
0:26:27 In the last three years of his military career, he’s losing.
0:26:34 But even then, even when he had far fewer troops, when he was retreating, when he was
0:26:39 defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories
0:26:42 in seven days in the 1814 campaign.
0:26:45 That’s two years after the retreat from Moscow.
0:26:51 It’s quite extraordinary capacity, and he was able to win whether he was advancing or
0:26:55 retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking
0:27:01 on the right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center, as at Austerlitz.
0:27:07 He had that capacity, that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness
0:27:12 that was required completely to revolutionize French society.
0:27:18 People think that the French Revolution revolutionized society, the clues in the name as it were,
0:27:24 but in fact, the long-lasting things that actually dragged France into the 19th century
0:27:30 were things like the Code of Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary concept.
0:27:32 They were a Napoleonic concept.
0:27:37 This may seem like a lazy question, but since I’m operating from a deficit here with respect
0:27:43 to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete
0:27:47 of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets?
0:27:53 And I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise
0:27:57 the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts.
0:28:02 But how would you describe what enabled him to do that, where others were unable?
0:28:04 It was inspiration, but also perspiration.
0:28:12 He really did put in the time thinking about it and reading about it by it, I mean warfare.
0:28:15 And of course, he’d been educated in it.
0:28:24 He read the key books as a guy called the Compte de Giver, who in 1772 wrote a book about strategy
0:28:25 and tactics.
0:28:30 And he, 30 years later, put these into operation.
0:28:36 And so he was able to spot the sort of best of the best when it came to a modern thinking
0:28:40 and to, or in this case, 30-year-old thinking, in fact.
0:28:45 That didn’t matter because the weapons of war hadn’t changed in the intervening period.
0:28:52 And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use, the classic example
0:28:54 being the core system.
0:28:55 And when he…
0:28:56 What was it called?
0:28:57 It’s called the core system.
0:28:58 It’s basically…
0:28:59 How do you call it?
0:29:00 A C-O-R-E.
0:29:01 A C-O-R-P-S.
0:29:09 And what he did with them was to create mini armies, essentially, which were able to march
0:29:13 separately, but converge and concentrate for the battle.
0:29:16 And so one of your core would engage the enemy.
0:29:23 And then he would use the other cores to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop
0:29:24 the enemy.
0:29:25 It was a brilliant concept.
0:29:31 And actually, the allies didn’t start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted the core
0:29:32 system.
0:29:36 He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts.
0:29:44 And at the same time, he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men.
0:29:45 And he…
0:29:49 I mean, victory, obviously, is the best thing when it comes to excite the men.
0:29:50 Exactly.
0:29:52 Nothing much works better than that.
0:29:55 But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career.
0:30:03 But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men.
0:30:05 And so he was able to do that.
0:30:08 And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the
0:30:13 classic example, who won the Battle of Waterloo against him, it wasn’t interesting electrifying
0:30:15 the soul of the men at all.
0:30:19 He despised his ordinary soldiers, but nonetheless…
0:30:20 You’re talking about Wellington?
0:30:27 The Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his own soldiers.
0:30:33 And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat, but they loved him because he cared about
0:30:36 how many of them died in battle.
0:30:41 And he never lost the battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander needless
0:30:42 to say.
0:30:43 But he didn’t try.
0:30:44 He didn’t go out.
0:30:48 He would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men.
0:30:55 Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hats and his great coats and his way of taking off medals,
0:31:00 his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders of the day,
0:31:06 his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, he said, “40 centuries look
0:31:07 down upon you.”
0:31:11 And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier in Egypt far away from home, he looks up at
0:31:18 the pyramids and thinks, “Yeah, he’s placing the events of that day in the long historical
0:31:20 parabola.”
0:31:23 And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree.
0:31:29 In about 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there’s some reference
0:31:31 to history all the past.
0:31:37 He too would summon up the idea that, yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British
0:31:41 Commonwealth are on their own, and this, of course, was in the period before America
0:31:45 and Russia were in the war, but we’ve been in terrible straits before.
0:31:49 Look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson and so on.
0:31:51 And we came through those and won.
0:31:54 He also brought up the First World War a lot.
0:31:59 So yes, he too drew on history, and people knew that because he’d written history books
0:32:05 and written biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Moorbrough,
0:32:09 he was with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced.
0:32:16 People trusted his view of history.
0:32:22 And now, an excerpt from Tim’s solo podcast episode, Productivity Tactics, two approaches
0:32:28 I personally use to reset, get unstuck, and focus on the right things.
0:32:33 A few years ago, a creature died in the walls of my home.
0:32:34 It was disgusting.
0:32:38 Now, to be precise, it gave up the ghost in the heating system, so the death fumes were
0:32:42 conveniently pushed directly into my bedroom.
0:32:47 My ex-girlfriend and I discovered this around 11pm as we tucked into bed hoping for a good
0:32:48 night’s sleep.
0:32:52 We could turn off the heat and freeze, that was one option, or we could bathe in the stench
0:32:55 of what I assumed was a raccoon carcass.
0:32:57 And the whole thing made my eyes itch.
0:32:58 It was horrible.
0:33:04 I imagined it downing its last meal, pig entrails, moldy socks, fermented beans, who knows,
0:33:07 before defiantly jamming its bloated body into my HVAC.
0:33:11 Don’t worry, we are getting to some kind of lesson here.
0:33:14 But the kamikaze raccoon was just the first surprise guest.
0:33:20 The opening act in short order, my dog then got horribly sick unrelated to raccoon.
0:33:24 Overdue paperwork started piling up, popping out of nowhere, and onboarding a bunch of
0:33:27 new contractors ran into trouble.
0:33:31 Then I pulled out of a parking spot and scraped the entire side of my car and the car next
0:33:32 to me.
0:33:37 Later that same afternoon, all these Christmas presents I had ordered somehow had run out
0:33:40 of stock and were auto-cancelled, so I was sent scrambling.
0:33:46 And on and on it went more and more clowns piling into the clown car for a shit show
0:33:48 that lasted three to four weeks.
0:33:52 It was just a 15 car pileup of nonsense.
0:33:56 There are the rare times when I feel like I’m in the zone.
0:33:57 Those are great.
0:33:58 Those are fantastic.
0:34:02 Then there are times when I ask myself, “How in holy hell have I become the janitor of
0:34:04 a mountain of bullshit?”
0:34:06 That happens more than you might think.
0:34:10 Put it another way, sometimes you’re the boxer and sometimes you are the punching bag.
0:34:12 We all get our turn as the punching bag.
0:34:13 It doesn’t matter who you are.
0:34:17 As far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter how successful you become.
0:34:22 You’ve always grabbed a number at the deli counter of just wait, eventually you’re going
0:34:24 to get your ass kicked by the universe.
0:34:28 Now, during these periods of firefighting, let’s just call it when stuff is popping up,
0:34:31 this whack-a-mole, I get fidgety and frustrated.
0:34:36 I feel like I’m treading water and patience wears very thin has never been my strong suit
0:34:39 that’s true, especially with myself.
0:34:43 My instinct is to try to fix things as quickly as possible.
0:34:48 That’s all well and good, but I’ve realized that from a place of what the fuck, I often
0:34:50 rush and create more problems.
0:34:56 This is particularly bad, catastrophic sometimes when I try to sprint immediately upon waking
0:34:57 up.
0:35:02 The mantra that has saved me and saved me during that three to four week period I mentioned
0:35:07 was very simple and it’s this, “Make before you manage.”
0:35:09 Make before you manage, that’s it.
0:35:14 What this means is each morning, before plugging holes, fixing things, calling vets, answering
0:35:20 text messages, delegating or yanking out dead raccoons, answering a million text messages,
0:35:23 this mantra was a reminder to make something.
0:35:28 You should read Paul Graham’s essays and listen to Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art commencement
0:35:34 speech for more on all of this, but back to any given day and make before you manage.
0:35:40 Even the most time sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes and by make something, I mean
0:35:41 anything.
0:35:43 It could be anything at all.
0:35:48 You just need to feel like you’ve pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative direction.
0:35:52 For me personally, even a 90 second video of calligraphy could set a better emotional
0:35:58 tone for the entire day, helping me to be more calm as I handle problems, as I execute
0:36:00 all the rest of the stuff later.
0:36:04 Or maybe I attempt to jumpstart my writing with an Instagram caption, or an email to
0:36:06 a friend to take the pressure off.
0:36:09 It’s practically nothing, but it’s enough.
0:36:15 Even token efforts allow me to reassure myself with, “Hey, pal, don’t worry, you did produce
0:36:17 something today.”
0:36:21 And the psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of creation,
0:36:25 no matter how small, is really impossible to overstate.
0:36:26 It’s binary.
0:36:29 Zero to a little bit, those are two different worlds.
0:36:34 If you’re lucky, sometimes that one idea, that one sentence or one shitty first draft
0:36:37 can turn into something bigger, and that happens when you catch the wave.
0:36:43 But the point is to be able to say to yourself, even for five minutes, “Hark, I am a creator,
0:36:45 not just a janitor of bullshit.
0:36:50 Here’s proof that I can and will do more than just manage the minutiae of life.”
0:36:54 And I think, at least personally, I do need that reinforcement.
0:36:57 We all spend time on the struggle bus, happens to everybody.
0:37:02 At the very least, this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it’s my turn.
0:37:12 So, as a reminder, when in doubt, try it out, make before you manage.
0:37:15 And now here are the bios for all the guests.
0:37:22 This isn’t just any episode, this one turned out really, really special.
0:37:29 And I really encourage everybody to listen to this once, as audio only, if you are listening
0:37:37 to this without any video, but also go to youtube.com/timfarris to see the video.
0:37:44 We recorded this episode in the recording studio designed by Jimi Hendrix, where he
0:37:45 slept.
0:37:50 The acoustics, the surroundings, everything is gorgeous.
0:37:52 And my guest was in the flow.
0:37:56 We happen to mesh really well together.
0:37:59 And it’s one of those episodes that I will remember for many years.
0:38:05 My guest, John Batiste, is a five-time Grammy Award-winning and Academy Award-winning singer,
0:38:07 songwriter, and composer.
0:38:13 I met him ages and ages ago, back when he was a mere incredible, incredible musician,
0:38:15 composer, etc.
0:38:18 But I’ve been able to watch him become the Markey Lights John Batiste, and it has been
0:38:20 a thrill to watch.
0:38:22 We talk about it all.
0:38:27 His eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues, is set for a November 15 release.
0:38:33 When we are sitting in Jimi Hendrix’s studio, there are pianos, guitars, you name it, and
0:38:38 we don’t just talk, we walk around and he uses music to answer some of my questions.
0:38:41 It’s phenomenal.
0:38:45 Beethoven Blues marks the first installment in his solo piano series showcasing Batiste’s
0:38:51 interpretation of Beethoven’s iconic works, Reimagined, and that is an understatement.
0:38:57 You’re going to hear a lot of it in this episode towards the last 25 percent, so buckle up and
0:38:58 stick around.
0:39:02 Beethoven Blues follows Batiste’s studio album, World Music Radio, which received five Grammy
0:39:06 nominations, including album of the year.
0:39:10 As a composer, he scored Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night now in theaters.
0:39:15 The film depicts the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live’s very first broadcast
0:39:21 in 1975, underscored by Batiste’s blending of jazz, classical, and contemporary elements.
0:39:26 He composed and produced the music live on set, capturing the intensity of the show’s
0:39:27 debut.
0:39:32 He also appears in the film as Billy Preston, the show’s first musical guest, and certainly
0:39:34 he has lived that out himself.
0:39:38 Additionally, Batiste composed and performed music for the Disney Pixar film Soul, for
0:39:44 which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
0:39:51 You can find him at johnbatiste.com, that’s J-O-N-B-A-T-I-S-T-E dot com on Instagram and
0:39:57 socials @JohnBatiste, and boy oh boy, I love this.
0:39:59 I really think you guys are in for a treat.
0:40:10 Stick around, listen to the whole thing, watch it a second time on video at youtube.com/timferris.
0:40:15 My guest today is Bruce Grayson M.D. He is the Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus
0:40:20 of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and Director Emeritus of the Division of Perceptual
0:40:24 Studies at the University of Virginia, where he has practiced and taught psychiatry and
0:40:27 carried out research since 1995.
0:40:31 He’s also a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and his
0:40:36 most recent book is After a Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About
0:40:37 Life and Beyond.
0:40:43 He has studied, documented more than a thousand near-death experiences, and what made him
0:40:49 appealing to me as a guest with this incredibly unusual terrain is that he was raised with
0:40:59 a secular, what we could call rational, materialist worldview.
0:41:01 Today’s guest, Andrew Roberts.
0:41:06 Andrew Roberts has written 20 books, which have been translated into 28 languages and
0:41:09 have won 13 literary prizes.
0:41:13 These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second
0:41:20 World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, George III, The Life and Reign
0:41:24 of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, and most recently Conflict, The Evolution
0:41:30 of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus.
0:41:36 The Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society,
0:41:41 the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford,
0:41:46 and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
0:41:48 He is also a member of the House of Lords.
0:41:55 You can find all things Andrew at andrew-roberts.net online, and he is also on X, the artist formerly
0:42:00 known as twitter@x.com/aroberts_andrew.
0:42:06 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five
0:42:07 Bullet Friday.
0:42:12 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun
0:42:13 before the weekend?
0:42:17 Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super
0:42:20 short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday.
0:42:22 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
0:42:27 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve
0:42:30 found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week.
0:42:32 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
0:42:38 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,
0:42:43 all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of
0:42:49 podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test
0:42:52 them, and then I share them with you.
0:42:56 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you
0:42:59 head off for the weekend, something to think about.
0:43:02 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday.
0:43:08 Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you’ll get the very
0:43:09 next one.
0:43:09 Thanks for listening.
0:43:14 [MUSIC]

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:08 the Tim Ferriss Show where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all
0:00:13 different types to tease out their habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply
0:00:19 to your own lives. This time around, the format is going to be a bit different by request. I am
0:00:26 the guest in the sense that I took questions. It was an ask me anything of sorts from people who
0:00:33 supported my fan-supported model way back in 2019, believe it or not. That was an ad-free experiment.
0:00:37 Ended up returning to ads by request. That’s a whole long story. If you want to read about how
0:00:45 that went down, you can go to tim.blog/podcastexperiment. But the point is we did a Zoom call and they asked
0:00:50 me anything they wanted to ask. And we covered a lot of ground. I answer questions about how I’ve
0:00:56 changed my mind around parenthood, what’s next for me, and how I’m thinking about next steps,
0:01:01 how I find joy or attempt to find joy, how to live with urgency, my advice for career
0:01:08 reinvention or thinking about careers in the age of AI and all of the unpredictability that entails,
0:01:14 avoiding complacency, ruts, and so much more. Which is not to say I have all the answers,
0:01:19 but certainly I explore a lot of my thinking in this and how to blast. So I hope you enjoy it
0:01:25 as much as I did. And we’re going to get right to it. But before that, just a few words from the
0:01:31 kind people who make this podcast possible. The following quote is from one of the most legendary
0:01:37 entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley. And here it goes. This team executes at a level
0:01:43 you rarely see even among the best technology companies. End quote. That is from Peter Teal
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0:03:12 apply. As many of you know, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a midnight lux mattress
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0:03:22 from friends has always been fantastic. Kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean, they frequently
0:03:26 say it’s the best night of sleep they’ve had in ages. What kind of mattress is it? What do you do?
0:03:31 What’s the magic juju? It’s something they comment on without any prompting for me whatsoever.
0:03:37 I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I
0:03:42 sometimes sleep in and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower
0:03:46 back pain that I’ve had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right
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0:04:05 sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create.
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0:04:15 every night that I use it. The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling
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0:05:14 Cool, this is a cozy bunch. Not too big, not too small. Scott, I like your taste.
0:05:22 You got Lea popping in. All right, so I think the most interesting way to do this is just to
0:05:27 kind of go around and have a conversation. And people can ask their questions. Could be the
0:05:32 question that you submitted, frankly, to keep it interesting for me. It could be something else too,
0:05:36 but up to you. Let’s see. Sarah, would you like to go first?
0:05:42 Yeah, so I haven’t seen you in 30 years. Wish you may or may not remember.
0:05:46 Yeah, I was going to say, I know that name and I know that face. Yeah.
0:05:49 Yeah, well, it’s Sarah Carly. I’ll play to you.
0:05:50 Yeah, it’s been a minute. Nice to see you.
0:05:57 It’s been a long time, so it’s good to see you well. I had a question about something in the
0:06:03 past two years that’s been a significant change of mind for you, a place where you’ve really made
0:06:06 a big, big pivot in something you thought you knew.
0:06:14 I’d say the biggest pivot that comes to mind is related to parenting, fatherhood. Just never
0:06:19 felt like I had any evidence to support that I would be a good dad for a host of reasons. And
0:06:24 felt like since that, as far as I know, is a forever decision or at least decision until you
0:06:32 pass away, hopefully predating your kids, that I just did not feel comfortable thinking about
0:06:41 pulling the trigger on something that significant. Also, because I do think on some level, becoming
0:06:45 a parent is fundamentally self-interested. I don’t want to call it selfish, but you are
0:06:50 choosing to have kids, right? So you want to make sure you bring them into the most supportive
0:06:57 circumstances possible for them to flourish. And it’s, I would say in the last handful of years,
0:07:01 as more and more of my friends have had kids, and then second kids, in some cases, third kids.
0:07:07 And I’ve spent time with a lot of those kids that I’ve heard over and over again from friends,
0:07:12 you would be a great dad. You got to get on that train. You got to do it. So I would say that’s
0:07:18 probably the most material pivot. And I can’t say with 100% confidence, I’m going to be the world’s
0:07:25 greatest dad. But I suppose the question that I asked myself, but never really applied to this,
0:07:34 but I do apply to a lot of other places is, with question X or challenge Y, has anyone less capable
0:07:39 or less intelligent or less resourced ever figured this out and done a pretty good job? And of course,
0:07:48 the answer is yes with parenting. And I just for whatever reason, never made the cognitive hop
0:07:52 to apply that same question that I put so many other places to parenting. So I would say that’s
0:07:58 the biggest one that comes to mind. Seems like the next great chapter and adventure. So we’ll
0:08:03 see where that goes. I have some prereqs to figure out first. You know, girlfriend, partner, wife,
0:08:08 mother of the children kind of situation. Because technically, I don’t need to like travel that path,
0:08:13 but that’s where I’m focused at the moment. Thanks for the question. Nice to see you after
0:08:19 three decades. All right, we can go in any particular order. So I’m just following some line of sorts
0:08:24 on my screen. Scott, would you like to go next? Not to favor all the people with headsets. Oh,
0:08:29 no, we have multiple headsets down here. Andrew as well. Yeah. So I guess my question kind of
0:08:34 dovetails with Sarah’s a little bit. It seems like you’re kind of thinking about maybe next steps
0:08:39 for you and your career. You’re, you know, you’ve hit 10 years on the podcast. Sounds like you’re
0:08:44 maybe exploring some new stuff with writing a book and doing art. And I’m just curious, you know,
0:08:48 what types of new things are you exploring and how are you maybe thinking about the next
0:08:54 say 10 years of your life and kind of what’s next? Yeah, it’s a big one. So I’ll start with
0:08:57 all the big start with the big questions so we can get down to like, what’s your new favorite
0:09:03 pair of socks later? All right, so I would say I’ll back into that from the end of the question
0:09:12 first. So next 10 years, who knows for me, I’ve never really had super long term goals that are
0:09:19 well planned out in part because I feel like looking at it from the professional perspective,
0:09:26 at least, if you can hit your plan reliably pulling up by point, it’s probably too far within your
0:09:33 sphere of comfort, if that makes sense. And there are so many unpredictable elements that it’s
0:09:37 probably, I don’t want to say an exercise in futility, because I do think it’s important to
0:09:46 have a plan, even if that plan isn’t something you can execute on perfectly. But my plan time
0:09:54 horizon tends to be, I would say, with most things in this six to 12 month range. And the
0:10:00 assumption is there that if I do really well at something over that period of time, it will open
0:10:06 doors that I could not have predicted or foreseen ahead of time, if that makes any sense. If you
0:10:13 think about, say, the first book, if you think about the podcast, I could not in any universe I
0:10:20 can imagine have foreseen what those would bring to the door two, three years later. I just could
0:10:26 not have even imagined certainly at least half of the things that would have appeared. So I tend to
0:10:37 think of it in those terms. But some of the, let’s just say, side quests and alleyways that I’m
0:10:45 exploring mostly relate to trying to break outside of what I’ve done before. And there are a few
0:10:52 reasons for that. So one is, I recognize in myself that it’s very easy to not become complacent,
0:10:56 but to become comfortable with repeating certain recipes that you have in your life. Whatever
0:11:02 those recipes are, and they typically relate to a domain you know pretty well. So in my case,
0:11:08 let’s just say that’s publishing, that’s podcasting on some level, that’s early stage investing.
0:11:15 And while I enjoy all of those things or facets of each of those things, I have felt a huge benefit
0:11:22 in identity diversification over time. Each time you try something that’s not really bound within
0:11:29 your current identity, it buys you permission to do that over and over again and to open up
0:11:33 a whole new realm of possibilities that you might not have considered if, for instance,
0:11:40 I viewed myself as an author, I could have constrained myself further to being a business
0:11:46 author. And that was part of the reason I chose to, once the success of the four hour work week,
0:11:51 gave me a certain grace period within which I could try anything because publishers would be like,
0:11:56 well, like we missed the first one, but let’s maybe get the second one or
0:12:00 we want to keep it for the long term so we can do the three hour work week and the two hour work
0:12:05 week. So fine, if it makes them happy to do this stupid thing called four hour body, and that’s not
0:12:11 what the publisher said, but they were more excited for me to stay in my lane. The four hour
0:12:19 body then proved to me I could experiment outside of the lines that would limit me to say the business
0:12:24 category. And then that furthermore led me to experiment with a lot of other things.
0:12:32 So that is a long preamble to say that the areas that I’m looking at really closely right now are,
0:12:38 for instance, games, which is totally out of left field, right? It wouldn’t fit neatly in my Wikipedia
0:12:46 page. I’ll put it that way. And cockpunch in the whole NFT craziness was an example of also doing
0:12:51 something very far afield. And I’ll show you another one, actually, because I couldn’t show
0:12:56 this to you otherwise. So hold on a second, I’ll show you this, for instance, is a great book,
0:13:04 by the way. This is the DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neill with an introduction by
0:13:10 Stanley. This is actually a great, great book. And I just visited Comic-Con for the first time,
0:13:14 in this case, in New York City, which was huge. I could not believe the scale of it.
0:13:21 I have always loved illustration and wanted to be a comic book pencil. Actually,
0:13:26 this is going to suck for people who only have audio, but I’ll do some more show and tell. Hold
0:13:35 on. Okay, so this is artwork that my mom kept that is from way back in the day. But just to give
0:13:48 you an idea, these are kind of covers of magazines that I did way back in like ’95, ’96. And this type
0:13:53 of stuff, this type of illustration, I’m not saying it’s the best in the world, but it’s a long-standing
0:14:01 interest of mine. And reinvigorating that, so part of what I’ve done is looked backwards in time
0:14:09 to guess at what might elicit a lot of energy recharge for me in the future. So looking back
0:14:14 at what really activated me and seeing if I can explore some of those edges in the future.
0:14:22 Furthermore, animation is way up there and doing creative pushes, which I experimented first
0:14:28 through the fiction writing associated with cockpunch, which, by the way, if you replace that
0:14:34 word with anything else, it is a pretty viable fantasy world. But it was a way to take pressure
0:14:41 off of myself to publicly position it as a joke and a satire, but allowing me with very little
0:14:48 pressure to play with things that otherwise, if I presented them as serious, I think could
0:14:52 cause a lot of performance anxiety and insecurity because if people critiqued it, I would take it
0:14:58 very personally. Stuff like this, masterpieces of fantasy art. This is Frazetta on the cover.
0:15:07 Lots of amazing artwork in this one. And those are a few and there’s certainly the new book project,
0:15:13 but within the book project, changing a lot of variables. So for instance, and I haven’t made
0:15:18 any decisions around this yet, but the possibility of self-publishing, the possibility of taking that
0:15:24 book, presenting it serially, so sharing the first chapter or the first two chapters, something like
0:15:31 that, having a private community of, I don’t know how many people, 100, 200 people maybe,
0:15:37 who test aspects of the book and then provide feedback and refine it over time and release
0:15:45 a chapter a week or something like that over time and have the audience track it, the small
0:15:50 audience, the private audience track it in real time and then polish the whole thing
0:15:57 into a diamond, hopefully, and publish it later, which could be very much, almost certainly at
0:16:03 least a high percentage of that project would be outside of traditional publishing. So I’m taking
0:16:08 something I know, but I’m creating a permutation that might lead somewhere very, very interesting.
0:16:15 And this is a very long answer. So obviously, I’m thinking about it a lot. In the case of, say,
0:16:21 the publishing, this is true with all the other games, comic books, etc., that I mentioned.
0:16:31 I’m looking for projects that will help me to either build or deepen relationships and acquire
0:16:37 skills that can transcend that project. So for instance, if, so cockpunch, I mean, yeah, sure,
0:16:43 it succeeded in the sense that it raised $2 million for SciSA foundation, all the proceeds went to
0:16:49 my nonprofit foundation to fund science and so on, early stage science, but NFTs as a whole,
0:16:54 as you may have noticed, have fallen out of favor for a million and one reasons, which is fine.
0:17:00 And I kind of anticipated that might be the case. And so set expectations very, very low up front,
0:17:06 because you can’t predict these types of market conditions. But I learned a lot through that,
0:17:12 ended up doing a scripted podcast, met some of the best artists in the world to say Dungeons and
0:17:16 Dragons and Magic the Gathering worked really well with them. So most importantly, proof to myself
0:17:22 that I could work with a small team of creatives. And we would actually get along as opposed to
0:17:28 like be being unreasonable and overly stubborn and control freak, which are probably ways I would
0:17:32 describe myself, but it actually worked. And I was like, holy shit, okay, as a proof of concept,
0:17:38 I could take that newfound confidence, you know, that very limited experiment,
0:17:44 but the feeling from that and apply it to possibly something more ambitious or completely different,
0:17:50 like animation, as an example, would be a very, very, very different iteration of that process.
0:17:56 So not sure if that answers the question, but that’s how I’m trying to think through a lot of
0:18:03 these things myself. Is that helpful at all? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. All right, let’s hop
0:18:10 around. Theron, my question for you, is what’s bringing you joy these days? I would say it’s
0:18:16 always the simple things, right? We can search for all these esoteric means of satisfying this
0:18:22 quest for happiness and joy. And usually the absence of those things is remedied pretty quickly
0:18:30 with just returning to basics. So for me, I would say I experienced one of the most uninterrupted
0:18:37 periods of joy most recently, being in the mountains, spending the first half of every day
0:18:43 more or less outside with my dog, getting tons of exercise in the sun, pushing the system,
0:18:50 adding some stress, getting all the benefits of the hormonal cascade and so on that comes from that.
0:18:58 And then in the second half of the day, spending time on first and foremost, the admin stuff of
0:19:03 life is always there, but really blocking out consistently. And it’s easier for me to do this
0:19:09 when I have less time in a day to allocate to work. When I have all the time in the world,
0:19:13 right, and I’m in an urban environment, I can fritter away all that time and 10,
0:19:17 15 minute distractions and end up not really accomplishing very much and not feeling very good
0:19:22 about it. If I have the first half of the day, which you could do in an urban environment too,
0:19:29 kind of dedicated to motion movement, physical skill development. In this case, time with my dog,
0:19:32 so it could be some type of group class or otherwise, doesn’t have to be the whole day,
0:19:39 but really having that in the first half of the day, then having a two to four hour period where
0:19:45 I’m focused on something very immersive, single tasking without any distractions. And in this case,
0:19:52 that would have been latter half of August, September, and then early October. It would have
0:20:00 been book focused and doing that in collaboration with one other person who I’m deeply involving in
0:20:07 this book project. So I would say those are a few. And then along the lines of kind of week to week
0:20:12 identity diversification, so that if one thing stalls or doesn’t do well, or as well as I would
0:20:19 hope, I can still have a win, so to speak, like chalk things up to a win. Archery has been great.
0:20:23 That’s ongoing. So I’m spending a lot of time with archery. I overdid it the other day. So my
0:20:29 shoulder and elbow are killing me because I did it and overdid it in a particularly stupid way.
0:20:34 So I’m taking a few days off. But that has been a really consistent practice such that if I’m not
0:20:38 in the mountains, because practically speaking, I mean, you asked me personally what I’m doing,
0:20:42 but for a lot of folks, like, okay, well, great. If you happen to be able to put yourself in the
0:20:47 mountains around rivers and lakes, fantastic. But even where I’m sitting right now, for instance,
0:20:52 not tomorrow because I need the elbow and shoulder rest, but the day after that, as soon as I wake up,
0:20:58 it’s going to be meditation briefly. And I just recently got back on the train, and we might speak
0:21:06 more about that later in this conversation, then an hour of archery, and then cold plunge, right?
0:21:10 And like, that’s the morning, it doesn’t have to be four or five hours, it can be quite a bit
0:21:16 shorter. And that sets the tone for the rest of the day. So those are a few things that come to
0:21:23 mind on an annual level. I would say the most important thing that I do for my sense of joy
0:21:29 and well-being. And I think joy for me is very often the forgetting of the self, whereas the
0:21:38 quest for happiness can sometimes get turned into a obsessive focus on the self. Does that make sense?
0:21:42 At least I think that’s where I slip sometimes. It’s like, I should be happy. I should be happy.
0:21:49 Am I happy? Whereas joy is a sort of emergent experience of forgetting yourself. So for me to
0:21:57 facilitate that, blocking out multiple, say, one week periods where I’m with groups of friends,
0:22:04 that’s just the most reliable way to do it. So each year, I’ll look through the past year, identify,
0:22:10 let’s just call it the relationships that are most enlivening for me, where they’re reliably
0:22:15 always going to be hell yeah. I wish we could have spent more time together. Can’t wait to do that
0:22:21 again. Those people, it’s a short list. And then scheduling time with those people in group
0:22:29 environments, ideally doing something active like your tier back country skiing or hike or in the
0:22:35 case of most recently, I was a hunt with five other people and I don’t hunt very frequently, but
0:22:40 that’s my protein for the next three to six months depending on how many meals I can replicate with
0:22:49 the exact same protein. And those are some of, I suppose, the variables that seem to consistently
0:22:55 deliver. But if I’m out of sorts, it’s like, all right, are you getting enough light in the morning?
0:23:01 Are you getting enough exercise in the morning? Do you have your diet dialed? Are you in a place
0:23:06 like New York City where surprise, surprise, like you’ve been out, you’ve had alcohol four nights
0:23:10 this week with your stupid friends who also do the same thing. It’s very often the basic things and
0:23:15 kind of removing those emergency breaks that facilitates what we’re looking for or what I’m
0:23:22 looking for. Is that helpful? Yeah, that was great. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, so
0:23:28 kind of like wind my way around here. Let’s see. Christina, would you like to go next?
0:23:33 So how late are you watching or talking about how you think about the next, whatever, six,
0:23:39 12 months? What are the things that are really and more about it’s your way of thinking and
0:23:45 questioning and not particularly with that those generalized overtaking where will
0:23:52 the ability to ask the right questions, different questions, good questions is probably the one
0:23:59 part of it. So I’m curious about your thoughts and how to keep those questioning fresh.
0:24:04 Well, not to get too meta. I mean, that is a question I ask myself quite a bit too.
0:24:11 So thanks for bringing it up. I’d say with questions, there are a lot of different
0:24:18 settings for questions. First of all, you can ask me a question. I can ask the group a question.
0:24:25 Those might be different species of questions. Asking yourself questions can also be a different
0:24:31 species of question. And the way I keep questions fresh, I’ll give you a simple tactical answer,
0:24:39 is for instance, I was preparing for a podcast interview recently. And I had a research doc,
0:24:45 had read through the bio, had asked the guest for certain topics they thought would be
0:24:50 interesting to explore. Had done my own searching, come up with some independent questions,
0:24:56 but we all get in ruts that we don’t recognize. And those ruts aren’t necessarily a bad thing,
0:25:02 but they’re an easy thing. So I might have my 10 go to questions. And it’s easier to
0:25:06 sit with those 10 than to come up with another 10, which may or may not work.
0:25:19 So I went into chat GPT, and I said, effectively, how might James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio
0:25:26 interview guest X, what are 10 questions that are variants of questions that have come up a lot
0:25:31 in Inside the Actors Studio, give me 10. Oh, all right, great. And then the next one was like,
0:25:38 give me 10 more for Terry Gross, interviewing the same person. Fresh air, right? Give me 10 more
0:25:46 with Charlie Rose. And it was very, very helpful. Or if like 10 more with Blacks Friedman, sure,
0:25:52 why not? You know, just throw in anyone who is not me, basically. And I’m like, okay, like,
0:25:55 I wouldn’t ask seven of these, but that’s an interesting one. And I wouldn’t have thought
0:26:03 of phrasing it that way. Or it’s asking a question that I think would be of service to my audience
0:26:10 within the theme of the show. So I’m not deviating too far, not getting too far a field. But it’s
0:26:16 coming at it from an angle that I wouldn’t have considered. So I would say, those are all
0:26:22 approaches I take. If I find questions that I like, I save them. You could save them to
0:26:28 anywhere. Every note, notion, wherever you keep your notes. But I have documents that are basically
0:26:34 running lists of questions. And they could come from anywhere. It could be a novel. There are
0:26:40 questions and novels that I yank. One character asks another, could be in an in-flight magazine.
0:26:45 If those still exist, I don’t even know if those still exist, could be practically from anywhere.
0:26:52 And then there are, I would say, consistent questions that I find very helpful,
0:26:58 which you might find in some form like the Five Minute Journal, for instance. Those are consistent
0:27:06 prompts that work to achieve a desired result, much like a recipe. If you’re cooking something
0:27:11 specifically, there are guidelines that tend to work repeatedly. Those are a few ways that I think
0:27:19 about it. All right, let’s hop to Josh. You want to go next? Yeah, I was going to ask if you spend
0:27:25 your life battling tech admin stuff like we do, but that was answered pretty quickly. Yeah, there’s
0:27:32 always that stuff. There’s always that stuff. I guess my real question, some of the successful
0:27:38 people you’ve interviewed have gone through long periods of being unsuccessful or rejected or
0:27:46 bankrupt or whatever. You’ve sort of documented some of your own struggles, writing the body book
0:27:51 and some of the other things. I guess, what are some of the unifying themes about those who eventually
0:27:57 do break through and kind of how to get out of a rut you’ve already touched on, which is part
0:28:02 of my question. But I think anything you could just elaborate on that really should be great.
0:28:08 Yeah, I can. Could you give me if you’re open to it, you don’t have to, but a little more context
0:28:14 for why that question, because that could help. I guess, sort of taking a little bit of a career
0:28:21 break as you have and thinking about things that have brought me joy in the past was certainly one
0:28:26 thing that I’m looking to do next moves. And I think the decision process that you’ve already
0:28:31 outlined a little bit is things that bring you joy and you’ve kind of arrived at a couple core
0:28:36 principles of things that you’re looking for your next projects to help you do. I guess,
0:28:42 just a little bit more upstream from that, how you made the decision to call time out after
0:28:49 the 10 years and take this about upon and just how you sort of got out of the day to day of doing
0:28:54 what you do so very well. And again, I know you’ve touched upon it’s hard to do that, but
0:28:59 just anything on that that you could share would be helpful in terms of how you
0:29:05 realigned your thinking to do something a little bit different, but building on what
0:29:11 you’ve already done very well. I’d say a few things. So, I could speak to my decision to
0:29:20 hit pause or rethink things. I suppose there are a few fundamental beliefs that led me to do
0:29:27 that or allowed me to do that. The first is that constant motion in some respects
0:29:36 or constant productivity, per se, is the enemy of oblique thinking. So, if you’re looking at
0:29:42 seeing a problem or a situation with fresh eyes in an uncommon way that allows you to make
0:29:50 unique or highly leveraged decisions, when you are constantly churning, I think it
0:29:54 requires you to be this close to the problem. And therefore, it’s hard to zoom out. So, for me,
0:30:01 I had that belief to begin with that not necessarily stillness, but having a little bit
0:30:09 of distance is necessary for me to really consider doing X before the entire rest of the world does
0:30:15 X. And I’m looking for ideally being a category of one. I don’t like competing in my professional
0:30:21 life in this particular way. Archery or something like that, great. Compartmentalized, very clear.
0:30:30 It’s time-bound, pass/fail, follow the points, great. But when it can become a sort of never-ending
0:30:38 story of unquestioned ambition within, say, the world of podcasting, then I want to make sure
0:30:42 there are periods built in where I have some distance. The other fundamental belief, and I’m
0:30:47 sticking with the belief stuff because these are thoughts that we take to be true. Beliefs
0:30:52 are thoughts we take to be true. And I’m sure I’m borrowing that from someone like Byron Katie.
0:31:02 The belief structure is sort of the read raft upon which everything else floats. And if you
0:31:09 really want to have the most optionality with your direction, I think it’s very helpful to make
0:31:13 the implicit beliefs explicit and look at them carefully. So, the other belief that I think is
0:31:20 helpful, I actually know quite concretely, this is not limited to people who are in the top 1%
0:31:28 of 1%. The world does not end if you slow down or take a break. It’ll carry on just perfectly fine,
0:31:33 generally, without you. Now, there are constraints if you’re saying that you want to take a break
0:31:37 from a job that provides all the income from your family and pays the mortgage and puts food on the
0:31:43 table. Obviously, there are constraints. But if you were to delete all social media from your phone
0:31:51 and titrate down the kind of aperture of noise and news that gets flooded into your system,
0:32:01 it’d be fine. You’d probably be better off. So, the hyperkinetic feeling of modern society is not
0:32:10 conducive or necessary for making decisions with outsized outcomes, if that makes sense.
0:32:14 Those are a few kind of underpinning beliefs. And there are people who prove this, right?
0:32:19 A lot of the people that I most respect in their profession are like a Daniel DeLewis or something.
0:32:24 They disappear for five years at a time. They come back, no one’s like, “Where’s Daniel DeLewis?
0:32:29 What are his latest tweets about politics?” Nobody gives a shit, right? As long as you’re really
0:32:35 good at KraftX, you are going to have, I think, a good number of options. So, I’m meandering a
0:32:39 little bit, but help me refocus. Is there a particular aspect of your question that you’d like me to
0:32:43 hit? I think you’re really hitting on a lot of the stuff. And like you said earlier, some of the
0:32:48 stuff about hitting, how do you think about things that bring you joy and then you’re realign with
0:32:54 your beliefs to get there? I think this is really helpful. It’s inspiring that someone as successful
0:33:00 as you at something has done this and taken stock and sort of stepped back because it kind of gives
0:33:04 the rest of us hope to do the same thing, even if it’s just something that you’re just saying,
0:33:09 “I’m going to take a step back and then do similar to what I’m doing and some other stuff,
0:33:13 maybe in a different way with a different lens.” It’s just helpful to think through that to get
0:33:20 the rest of us to the happy place. Yeah, happy to try to assist. I definitely don’t have everything
0:33:28 figured out. And this comes back to Christina’s question on questions. If you’re hitting a dead
0:33:34 end or you don’t seem to be able to reliably answer a question and it’s causing you stress,
0:33:40 for instance, like, “How can I find joy?” Let’s just say that you’ve been banging your head against
0:33:45 that question and it hasn’t been producing great results. One thing you can do that I will sometimes
0:33:50 do is, okay, maybe that’s not a good question, but there’s a feeling that I’m going for.
0:33:57 If I look back at the past, what are some of the antecedents to joy? Maybe the question isn’t,
0:34:06 like, “How do I create more joy? How do I create some precursor to that?” For me, one of those is
0:34:14 a sense of losing the self or the dissolution of the self. That’s another way that I think about
0:34:23 these things. Antecedents 2x. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back
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0:35:29 All right. We’re just going to work our way through. Wade, would you like to go next?
0:35:35 Well, I just want to say thanks for everything you do. I genuinely appreciate it. Love the content.
0:35:42 Love what you’re about. Learn a lot. You’ve been like a gym companion for me for like nine years.
0:35:47 Please know them better than a good Tim Ferriss podcast in the gym. So genuinely appreciate that.
0:35:52 I think my question is around, and maybe I’m wrong. This is an observation I’ve listened to
0:35:58 for a long time. Seems like maybe the edges have softened a little bit in regards to your life and
0:36:06 my personality. Seems like maybe there’s a hint of spirituality that’s evolved a bit since I’ve
0:36:13 been listening. So is there anything in particular that has helped maybe soften the edges? And is
0:36:19 there a different perspective on spirituality than there used to be? I would say I’ve definitely
0:36:27 softened a lot in the last five years especially. And maybe I’m just getting older and tired,
0:36:31 who knows. But if we take that off the table as an explanation, although I think a lot of stuff
0:36:38 comes down, I was talking to a friend and they were like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve just become so much
0:36:42 chiller in conflict resolution with my partner after 10 years.” But it took like five years and
0:36:47 I was like, “Maybe it’s just fatigue.” I was sort of being a jerk about it and then just being
0:36:53 playful. But if I take that off the table, I mean, there are a few things that are proactive and
0:37:04 also just life experiences I think that contribute to that. So I would say one is seeing dozens upon
0:37:11 dozens upon dozens of close friends or podcast guests who are materially successful beyond
0:37:19 belief have all the prestige you could possibly imagine in a business capacity who are nonetheless
0:37:26 dissatisfied or chasing something like a hungry ghost, if that makes sense.
0:37:34 And the reason that’s relevant is that a lot of the piss and vinegar and sort of spitfire focus
0:37:43 that I’ve had, I think has been predicated subconsciously on some belief that with enough
0:37:51 of X success, that success resolves, I’m not going to say all issues because I never would have said
0:38:00 that, but most issues. And that’s just not true. It’s just not true at all. I would say also
0:38:07 what I’ve observed in very wealthy people is that they build, they build, they build,
0:38:12 you know, their number moves, they make X amount of money, then they want 10 X and then no, it’s
0:38:15 as soon as I have 100 X and then it’s as soon as I have 1000 X, then I can chill out and I’ll
0:38:24 know everything’s going to be okay. And if you put that under scrutiny, when I’ve seen older people
0:38:28 that I’ve spoken to say grandparents or people who are building dynastic wealth,
0:38:34 it seems like this is going to sound obnoxious, but I’ll just say it, which is like, if you give
0:38:39 your kids a ton of money, let’s just say that’s more than 10 or 20 million bucks, right? People
0:38:44 who are making just obscene amounts of money, building incredible amounts of wealth,
0:38:49 there is an amount of money past a certain point that seems to just fuck up your kids horribly.
0:38:57 I’m not saying that’s always the case, but the, I just want to create a better and brighter future
0:39:05 for my kids and give them the things I didn’t have. And there’s a point where more is a lot less
0:39:11 from what I’ve seen. It’s just my personal impression. So if you realize that the professional
0:39:17 stuff is not going to solve all your problems or all your challenges, let’s just say. And if you
0:39:22 realize, you know, accumulating Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth and then donate it all to your
0:39:28 kids, if it turns into a serious amount of money, it’s probably a bad idea. It’s not just neutral.
0:39:35 You might actually really screw your kids up. Then it raises the question of why around a lot.
0:39:40 At least around the business stuff. I think it contributes in addition to other things
0:39:48 that I’ll mention to taking it seriously, but not too seriously, taking it less seriously. Does
0:39:55 that make sense? And when you take those things less seriously, if you have been inclined to take
0:39:59 them very seriously and consequently yourself very seriously, I think by taking those things
0:40:03 less seriously, you start to take yourself a little less seriously. Like these conversations
0:40:10 also about legacy and like leaving something to be remembered. They’re helpful in some cases,
0:40:16 like those myths. But it’s like, how many people can name like the most powerful people in the
0:40:21 world when the Assyrians were running around? You know, how many people can name the most powerful
0:40:29 Babylonian? Alexander the Great, what’s his full name? Nobody knows. So it’s like, so the idea,
0:40:38 especially with the amount of information overwhelm that is our current day, the idea of also creating
0:40:44 some permanent record of yourself that just persists over like more than 10 years after you’re
0:40:50 dead, if you’re lucky, is kind of silly. I mean, it’s a little silly. But we all need reasons to do
0:40:56 things. And actually, I think, Josh, you were asking about people who failed and failed and then
0:41:02 succeeded. I think myths are very helpful here. So coming up with myths, whether that is like,
0:41:06 when I have enough money, it’s going to solve everything. Great, like that’s an incredible
0:41:11 incentive or the myth that like, I am the only person in the world who’s destined to create this
0:41:15 amazing piece of art. Okay, like maybe that’s true, but it’s probably a myth, but it can be a very
0:41:21 empowering myth. And it makes me think of Seth Gohn, who said, I’m paraphrasing, but you know,
0:41:26 past a certain point, money is a story. So pick a story you can live with that benefits you instead
0:41:33 of handicaps you. Then on the spirituality side, I generally steer away from that term. It’s a
0:41:41 useful term because there isn’t a great replacement in some conversations, but it can get used in a
0:41:51 lot of different ways. But I would say that my openness to it’s not even openness, it’s like my
0:41:57 recognition that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know. I think has
0:42:04 opened my mind, as have a lot of strange experiences that I’ve had with, whether it’s
0:42:08 psychedelics or otherwise, it’s not limited to that. And I explore the fringes, right? I mean,
0:42:14 I really do. And I try to keep my skeptics hat on. I think I’m actually quite good at not fooling
0:42:19 myself. And I will ask, what are the alternate explanations for this? How might this otherwise
0:42:23 be explained, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s a lot of strange stuff out there. It doesn’t mean
0:42:31 it’s magic. But it does highlight sometimes the limits of our current abilities to kind of measure
0:42:36 and freeze frame things for scientific studies. So those are all contributors, I would say in the
0:42:43 bucket, broadly speaking, if not taking myself too too seriously, if my work is a subset of myself,
0:42:50 then it applies to that too, would be having a lot of friends die. Like I’ve had lots of friends
0:42:58 pass away. I’ve had people get very sick. I’ve seen people succumb to dementia. As you get older,
0:43:03 and you see more and more of this, it just highlights the fact that this ride is not,
0:43:10 it’s not a long ride. And I’m not convinced that, you know, death is the end necessarily. But still,
0:43:15 we don’t know, you know, let’s not spend the entire roller coaster worrying about, you know,
0:43:20 whatever Trump said on your phone, like roller coaster is not going to last forever. So
0:43:25 focusing, you know, taking the view, and I’ll poke the person next to you and try to share a laugh,
0:43:32 because it’s just not that long. And even if you come to a quote unquote natural end in old age,
0:43:38 it’s not long. But sadly, I’ve lost a lot of friends and acquaintances, certainly to
0:43:45 car accidents. I mean, you name it, like you just don’t know. So I think the softening is around
0:43:52 a lot of that. The softening also comes from, I think, exploring different modalities for
0:44:00 trying to metabolize the childhood abuse that I’ve talked about elsewhere. And
0:44:11 that requires a degree of cultivated compassion for yourself that I historically have not paid a
0:44:18 lot of attention to. It’s hard for me to see any way around developing compassion, more compassion
0:44:23 for yourself if you want to genuinely express compassion for other people. I’m not sure there’s
0:44:29 a workaround there. I’ve thought about this quite a bit. It goes both ways. But fundamentally, I think
0:44:37 that’s a homework assignment for a lot of people, that if, I’m not going to say solved, but if that
0:44:42 is paid sufficient attention, has all these downstream benefits, one of which I think is
0:44:47 just a general softening, I would say. So those are the things that come to mind.
0:44:53 Oh, thanks, man. That was awesome. Appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. All right. So faces have
0:44:56 moved around a little bit. I’ll try to keep track. I think I can keep track of who’s gone,
0:45:00 who hasn’t. You know, since Tim is up in the corner next to me, I’m going to go with Tim.
0:45:05 You want to go next? Yeah, again, thanks for all you do. It’s an amazing journey from your books
0:45:11 through your podcast journey and cocktunch. Loan to coffee. I’ve got some right over there.
0:45:17 I’m still drinking it. So I had a question that was kind of tuned to all these longevity protocols
0:45:23 with AI and all the latest research that’s coming out as far as the compounds, the protocols,
0:45:28 like how do you keep up, right? For you, I’ve been introduced to Peter Atia, Andrew Shiberman,
0:45:34 Lane Norton, and a lot of other great kind of contemporary, leading edge, science-backed
0:45:41 information seekers and deliverers. So how do you approach handling that, especially with this,
0:45:46 we’re in the age of AI now. So that was going to be my question. That’s what I submitted.
0:45:52 But on the topics that you just have been going through, and it’s in my own life,
0:45:56 I’m realizing these instances, when people are passing,
0:46:04 my dog Pepper passed away just like two months ago. What do you do with grief? And how is that
0:46:10 something that, as far as your approach, something that you see is helpful, something to be avoided?
0:46:16 I mean, you’re kind of all through it with what the information you’ve just been walking us through,
0:46:22 but just kind of with grief because you only have so much time, right? Thanks.
0:46:26 Yeah, for sure. So on the grief side, I definitely don’t think it’s a bad thing.
0:46:33 I think it’s part of the human condition. No expert, but I would say a few things that
0:46:41 this kind of comes back to Wade’s question about spirituality in the sense, and I will come back
0:46:47 to the longevity protocols and so on. Might as well talk about that. But I think that
0:46:53 the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in some respects with the stripping away of religion
0:47:01 from, let’s just call it modern secular society. And what I mean by that is not that we should
0:47:07 believe in a guy with a beard and the clouds. I’m not saying that, but that there are cultural
0:47:18 milestones in some cases, rites of passage, these markers along the way on this journey of life
0:47:24 that are codified in, say, religion. And in some cases, that can be very helpful. So for instance,
0:47:32 morning periods will sometimes be very carefully outlined, and a group of people will agree with
0:47:37 this type of death you mourn for this period of time. Here’s the protocol, maybe you wear black,
0:47:44 and so you can have a feeling of completeness and perhaps closure within the construct of this
0:47:50 societal norm, right? We don’t really have that, like it’s left up to everybody to sort of create
0:47:55 our own. Then I’m not saying this for everybody, there are certainly plenty of religious folks out
0:48:02 there. But by and large, let’s just say in places where I spent a lot of time, Austin, New York,
0:48:07 California, people are somewhat cut adrift. And sure, they might be able to tell you all about
0:48:14 different philosophers they read in college and listen about on podcasts. But fundamentally, there’s
0:48:22 a sense of being somewhat unmoored, I would say. So the grief topic is a really good one,
0:48:28 and it serves as kind of a microcosm of the macro. It reflects the challenges within grief,
0:48:36 I think reflect broader societal challenges. The book on grief and grieving is probably
0:48:40 the most common recommendation that I hear from, say, podcast guests.
0:48:44 So I think that could be worth checking out. On the longevity protocols,
0:48:49 just to take a hard left, I would say I really don’t try to stay up to date with the
0:48:56 longevity protocols in part because there’s so much garbage and there’s so many influencers,
0:49:03 quote unquote, trying to pedal whatever rev share stem cell clinic they’ve partnered with in Tijuana
0:49:10 or whatever might be the case. It’s very difficult to separate fact from fiction. If you don’t have
0:49:16 a really reliable source, I would say just follow Peter. Honestly, Peter, for that specifically,
0:49:23 that’s really his wheelhouse. He focuses on health span. I’ve known him since 2009. I’ve spent time
0:49:30 with his doctors in the clinic. I’ve gone through biograph, which he’s involved with, and so on.
0:49:38 So I have a high degree of confidence in Peter, and I’ve seen him repeatedly turn down offers for
0:49:43 very lucrative business arrangements in exchange for promoting X, Y, or Z. And he just won’t do it
0:49:50 if he doesn’t really feel 100% comfortable supporting their conclusions and claims.
0:49:55 So I would say pay attention to that. And frankly, the more we learn,
0:50:00 the more the basics of the basics for a reason. It’s like creatine’s been around for decades.
0:50:06 This is nothing new. Just took some before doing this conversation, right? It’s present
0:50:12 in a lot of food that we consume naturally. It’s a known quantity in the body, pretty well understood.
0:50:16 As soon as you start getting into the bleeding edge, where it’s like, well, these people are
0:50:21 going to Honduras and injecting themselves with phallus statin and look at these amazing before
0:50:26 and after photos, but it does kind of turn off your FSH. And so might make you infertile in
0:50:30 these animal models, something like that seems to happen. But look how awesome his APAC looks.
0:50:36 It’s like, well, I’m not sure you want to be the third monkey shot into space with that stuff
0:50:43 as a human subject. So I tend to stay away from the bleeding edge. I used to be very aggressive
0:50:47 with this, certainly in my four-hour body days. I was very aggressive with this.
0:50:53 And I think in part because I was fascinated, in part because I didn’t foresee
0:50:58 how nagging certain problems could be. It’s like, yeah, do you fuck up and have problem that causes
0:51:02 like orthopedic issues in your elbow? It’s not a foregone conclusion that that’s going to be fixed
0:51:11 a year later. You might just have like tendinosis for the next 40 years. Oops. So I do pay more
0:51:20 attention to the downside. And I would say that in general, one of the ways that I frame this for
0:51:28 myself is not what can I do that will make me live longer, but what can I subtract that might
0:51:33 make me live longer or just live more healthfully. So for instance, I mean, this is going to sound
0:51:38 maybe funny. And there’s a lot of pseudoscience wackadoodle stuff out there about this, but
0:51:44 just minimizing exposure to plastics and phthalates and things like that. It seems very
0:51:49 conclusive at this point that from an endocrine perspective and so on, these are just very,
0:51:55 very bad news. So it’s like, don’t heat things in plastic. Use more glass. These are very,
0:51:59 very basic things. Use filtration. Again, have proper filtration for your water. Like if you
0:52:04 don’t have really, really good filtration for your water, you might want to take a look at it,
0:52:08 because even in very rural areas, you could have, for instance, in some of the mountainous areas,
0:52:12 I’ve spent time like high levels of arsenic because there used to be mining. And if you’re
0:52:16 way out in the country, you might have higher concentrations of groundwater, pesticides,
0:52:21 things like this from agriculture. So just paying really close attention to that kind of stuff.
0:52:28 Exercise. It’s like the curell, right? It’s like zone two, weight training. Just like,
0:52:34 you just got to do it. Or you don’t have to do it, but people are always glad to have
0:52:39 done it, I would say. And it feels good, for me at least. It’s the most consistent mood elevator,
0:52:45 for sure, in addition to cold exposure. And these tools, I think if someone is
0:52:52 on the verge of being diabetic or diabetic, there could very well be a role for these
0:52:58 drugs like ozepic or munjara, etc. But they’re not free lunches. Come back to the blog post I
0:53:02 wrote some time ago. I think it’s just called no biological free lunches. It’s like, there are
0:53:08 tradeoffs here. And if you don’t know what the tradeoffs are, it’s not because they don’t exist.
0:53:13 It’s just because we have not identified them as consistently yet. But if it’s a matter of
0:53:18 life and death and you need to lose weight, hey, then you do a risk calculus. But in general,
0:53:23 like the stuff that I’m doing for longevity is the stuff I’ve been doing for 10 plus years.
0:53:30 Creatine, exercise, try not to stuff your fucking face every time you sit down to eat,
0:53:38 which is my biggest challenge. I love eating. God, I love eating. But these are known problems.
0:53:41 So those are my thoughts on the longevity stuff. Thanks, Tim.
0:53:45 Yeah, I’m sorry about your dog, man. I think about that all the time. Got my pup right next to me.
0:53:49 It’s just like, oh, God, I think I’m going to cry on planes every time I think about it. So I’m
0:53:56 sorry. All right, Joel, you want to hop in? Hey, Tim and other Tim, sorry about your dog too. I
0:54:01 lost a cat two months ago. Also, had her for 14 years, had her from when she was a kid. And
0:54:07 something that really helped me. I mean, she was, I spent a lot of time with that cat, right? I lived
0:54:13 in a small apartment for many years, just me and her. And now we have some land and I buried her.
0:54:19 I dug her four feet down, I dug the hole myself with my wife, like, just use nighttime and dig
0:54:24 it a hole. And we really think a lot about environmentalism, because we were not religious.
0:54:29 So we just really like thinking about nature. And so to bury her, not cremator, to get her body
0:54:35 from the vets and not put her in a plastic bag and dig her deep enough where animals don’t get to
0:54:40 her and she’s on our land and she’s going to biodegrade, return to the earth. Yeah, and wear
0:54:44 black for a couple of days and see it as morning. I know she’s she was just a cat, but I think there’s
0:54:50 that gravestone, that meme that like 100 years ago where she was enough of a human to be a comfort
0:54:55 in times of stress and sadness, even though she was just a cat. That helped us. That was our
0:55:00 process two months ago, coincidentally. So I just thought I’d share that, Tim. Yeah, thanks.
0:55:05 Yeah, so question. So I’ve got a pre-prepared question that coincidentally. Josh, I saw he was
0:55:10 asking about kind of creative projects and he had a copy during the video, which is pretty cool,
0:55:17 of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. I saw that copy on Josh’s Zoom. So my question is about that.
0:55:22 I think a lot about creativity. I’ve been making a living as an artist for a number of years and
0:55:29 in his book, The Creative Act, Rick talks about the aesthetic. It’s one of the chapters. And he’s
0:55:37 describing creative projects where they give you like a primal feeling of warmth in your body. And
0:55:46 he says that that’s a great creative compass to recognize when you’re searching for a breakthrough,
0:55:53 when you’re like in a slug of bad work and mediocrity and experiments that are going nowhere,
0:55:59 but when you feel ecstatic about something, that’s a great compass for trying to discover
0:56:06 greatness or a breakthrough or he says like an answered prayer. And I surely felt like glimpses
0:56:12 of it at times, but I’m curious in your past, present or your future, what you’re working on,
0:56:20 when you have felt the ecstatic, the ecstatic in creative projects,
0:56:25 and especially like in the future, like what you think in the next projects might be,
0:56:30 what gives you that sense of the ecstatic? I think about this a lot, not in those terms. I mean,
0:56:36 I know Rick decently well and makes sense that that would be in the book. I haven’t read the
0:56:41 entire book, but it makes a lot of sense to be in there. I think a lot about a few things,
0:56:49 not just feeling that I would say for me, it’s a quickening of sorts. It’s like if I’m engaged with
0:56:57 a certain type of project or discussion about a potential project. And I’ve got the kind of two
0:57:04 cups of coffee with no jitters, just that like extreme comfortable focus, like a calm but intense
0:57:10 focus that is energy giving. I pay a lot of attention to that. I also think about clearing
0:57:16 the deck so that you can actually pick up that signal. For instance, if you consume too many
0:57:19 stimulants, too much coffee, too much this, too much macho, whatever the hell it might be,
0:57:27 in a sense, you’re raising the level of gain might not be the right word, but level of static.
0:57:31 So it becomes harder to pick out that signal. You might get a lot of false positives,
0:57:35 or you might be irritable and then get a lot of false negatives where you’re just like,
0:57:38 “Oh, this is making me creepy and crawling.” It’s like, “No, it’s because you had your
0:57:44 fifth double espresso for the day, dummy.” So for me personally, I try to keep track of that.
0:57:53 And paying attention to the physiology, which is not inherently natural for me, or it doesn’t come
0:57:59 in reflexively because I’ve spent so much time looking at kind of the spreadsheet analysis
0:58:04 side of things, being really analytical. But if I get off a phone call and I’m drained,
0:58:08 or if I get off a phone call, I’m like, “Yeah, fuck yeah. I want to do another one of those.”
0:58:16 It’s sometimes that simple. And it’s not that I know with certainty that X marks the spot. This
0:58:20 is the project. When it’s done and it looks like this, this is going to be the ecstatic moment.
0:58:24 It’s not so much that for me. It’s like a scent trail. It’s like an energetic scent trail,
0:58:32 if that makes sense. And there is a description. I can’t remember whose description it was about
0:58:39 writing a novel. And the metaphor was writing a novel is like driving across the country,
0:58:44 starting at night with your headlights on. It’s like, you can’t see your destination,
0:58:48 but you don’t need to see your destination. You just need to see far enough in front of you
0:58:55 to kind of navigate your way and adjust. So I would say for me, those are some of the ways
0:59:00 I think about it. I mean, the cockpunch is ridiculous as it is. That was one of those
0:59:05 where I was just so energized by the prospect of digging into the art specifically,
0:59:11 and the fantasy and what that would do from a freedom perspective in writing fiction versus
0:59:17 highly researched nonfiction. I was like, okay, I don’t know. That seems kind of like a dead end.
0:59:24 And some like, this could be a huge mistake. But I’m getting so much of a physical response. I was
0:59:37 like, fuck it. This seems like not the kind of thing to ignore. And that liberated so much energy
0:59:42 that I could apply not just to that project, but to other projects that I have no regrets about it
0:59:47 whatsoever. I’m curious if you’ve ever gotten into Lord of the Rings because it’s such a cultural
0:59:52 phenomenon. And Lord of the Rings is that a big impact on my life in terms of fantasy.
1:00:00 And with cockpunch and DMD, do they have a hero’s journey, like Bible, Jesus,
1:00:04 like Lord of the Rings does? Did you think about that at all with cockpunch? And does
1:00:11 DMD have that like a singular figure, like Frodo carrying the ring? Have you ever
1:00:16 inserted that or thought about that? DMD, as far as I know, does not have that. Lord of the Rings,
1:00:22 I mean, I was just in Oxford for a week in the UK and was looking at original
1:00:28 handwritten notes from Tolkien and looking at his scripts of Elvish,
1:00:36 spending time in pubs where he and C.S. Lewis and others would hang out. So I am deeply,
1:00:44 deeply interested by Tolkien. I think a good dungeon master will have some felt sense of
1:00:48 the hero’s journey as they’re weaving adventures for people that are playing out in real time. So
1:00:54 the circumstances and the players and the module don’t always conform to like
1:00:57 all is lost and then there’s the redemption. It might just be all is lost and then you’re
1:01:04 fucking dead. So it doesn’t always have like the the Star Wars like, yeah, go R2D2 moment.
1:01:11 Like, do you have a singular hero in cockpunch? As it’s laid out right now that’s not made clear
1:01:18 in my mind, if I were to, so that with some of the recent art I put on Instagram, I said,
1:01:23 okay, we’re going to call this Legends of Varlata. And so I just took the cockpunch out. So let’s
1:01:29 say it’s Legends of Varlata. There is a character that I keep coming back to in my own mind too.
1:01:38 And it’s not a Jesus character, but it’s sort of like an Ender’s Game Frodo-ish character is
1:01:47 Tyrolean. So the son who is in the last few episodes of the podcast. So Tyrolean and his
1:01:52 father, that particular dynamic, I have like an entire, if somebody was like, here’s 100 million
1:01:56 bucks, go make something awesome. I’m like, I know exactly what I would make. This is what I would do.
1:02:02 And it would be fucking amazing. Like, I know the son’s ridiculous and just so arrogant to say,
1:02:06 but it’s like, no, like I based on working with the concept artists, the feedback I can give,
1:02:14 I can storyboard well enough to kind of like Frank Miller-esque, like I can be a primary writer,
1:02:21 but I can also have, I have the sort of directorial cinematic sense for how things might be framed
1:02:27 visually also, that I can work really well with creatives who are working with animation,
1:02:33 moving pictures, whatever. So I would say though, like the two, the core relationship
1:02:39 that would drive that movie would be the father son. And nothing like tragic has happened yet,
1:02:45 but if I were to continue my writing for like a few more thousand words, like stuff would get
1:02:51 very exciting and super off the rails really quickly. And then there would be things to solve
1:02:57 something like that. So yeah, yeah, I think it would be fun. It’s just figuring out how to go from,
1:03:04 you know, Rooster NFTs to $100 million dollar animated film. It’s just a couple of hops in
1:03:10 between that I need to figure out. But seeing, for instance, and I mean, this is like, I’m not a
1:03:17 gaming studio with gajillions of dollars in revenue, but Arcane, seeing what League of Legends and
1:03:24 Riot Games did with Arcane. If you guys haven’t seen Arcane on Netflix, go watch it. It’s bananas.
1:03:30 I mean, if you want to see something where like the most off the rails budget for something animated,
1:03:35 it’s really remarkable. And there’s a YouTube series on the making of which I would also
1:03:43 recommend checking out. All right, let’s see. Chris, the Katana and a Fender Stratocaster,
1:03:47 maybe in the background? Yeah, that was a practice. It should have been more conscious,
1:03:50 maybe in the background, I’m not sure. Oh, I like it. I’m into it.
1:03:54 Yeah, it’s practice. So I mean, well, where do you put it? You put it there. It kind of
1:03:58 helps people when they come into the office, kind of sits the channel a little against.
1:04:02 Thanks first for putting this together. I love the format. It’s kind of neat to meet all different
1:04:08 people. We share an interest in what you’ve been doing and that kind of thing. Yeah, my pleasure.
1:04:13 I’m having fun. I was wondering in your case, you know, I’ve been thinking about you 10 years and
1:04:19 that kind of thing. For me, if I looked at the last 10 years for myself, it was an underlying
1:04:25 scene for me that I really found that I am. It wasn’t that I was an impatient person, but I found
1:04:32 that really developing high level of patience with both myself and others, it seemed to drag
1:04:38 everything else along in a positive way, whether it be compassion or empathy or that kind of thing.
1:04:44 If I had to pick a theme in the last 10 years for myself, that would probably be it. That really
1:04:51 might account for positive changes and growths in that regard. I was wondering over the last 10
1:04:57 years, you found a common theme to say more. Last 10 years. Well, I could use some lessons
1:05:02 in patience. That’s never been my strong suit. I would say my mom made jokes about my impatience
1:05:08 since I was a little kid. So I guess I’m the counter example. Although that’s been a project,
1:05:14 but if I’m looking at a through line over the last 10 years, I would say it is developing
1:05:24 more awareness in different capacities so that I can self-regulate my physiological response.
1:05:33 That’s a very wordy thing to say. But to explain it, I could say that my challenge has been since
1:05:37 childhood that I have a very hyper-vigilant system. So my sympathetic nervous system,
1:05:43 just the Nordrenaline and adrenaline, all these things, kick off at the slightest provocation.
1:05:48 It could be just someone dropping a book in a hotel in the room next to me when I’m asleep
1:05:52 and then all of a sudden, heart rate’s 120 and I can’t get back to sleep, that type of thing.
1:05:59 That can come up also in conversation. If I’m talking to someone and they say something that
1:06:04 I create a story in response to and the story is very upsetting and then suddenly my physiology is
1:06:09 fucked, then the physiology feeds back into the cognitive loop. I explained it to another
1:06:13 therapist recently because this was a CBT contact. I was like, “Well, we’re going to work on the
1:06:17 thoughts.” I said, “We can work on the thoughts, but I’m not convinced the thoughts are where things
1:06:23 start.” I actually think that it’s possible my physiology gets activated and then it’s a state
1:06:28 in search of a story. That’s the phrasing I used. It’s a state in search of a story. You have this
1:06:34 uncomfortable feeling or this strong feeling and because we’re meaning-making machines, we don’t
1:06:38 like uncertainty, it’s like, “Well, let me go find a story that could explain that and maybe it’s a
1:06:41 story about myself, maybe it’s a story about the world, maybe it’s a story about somebody else.”
1:06:49 So, I would say the last 10 years has been trying to cultivate an awareness with different tools,
1:06:54 meditation, psychedelics therapies, reading books like Awareness by Anthony D’Amello,
1:07:00 so that in the moment, I can at least be aware of what’s happening. So, for instance, I have been
1:07:06 using this app, which is what I used to get back on the train, for the last handful of weeks,
1:07:11 Kevin Rose, good buddy Kevin Rose, introduced me to Henry Shuckman. I had Henry on the podcast
1:07:20 twice. He is a Zen meditation master. Now, I don’t like that master term, but he’s one of,
1:07:25 I want to say, three or four people authorized to teach this particular school of Zen in the United
1:07:33 States. And he then developed, started to develop an app. I invested in it, but it was early days,
1:07:38 kind of back up an appkin thing. And now it’s built out. It’s called The Way, if you want to try it.
1:07:43 And I’ve been using it 10 minutes a day, twice a day. And I had a really, really challenging
1:07:48 conversation today with someone I’m very close to. And I could feel my physiology just getting.
1:07:54 I have so much background with this person. And I was just like, “Oh, here we fucking go again.”
1:08:00 It’s one of those. I was just like, “Oh.” And I was able to, and this is going to seem very rudimentary,
1:08:04 but as I was having this really strong physiological response just to go body,
1:08:10 as I’m listening to the person to be like body, I’m just noting that my body is having this
1:08:14 extreme response. And by noting it, not trying to suppress it necessarily, just noting it,
1:08:22 having that drop in intensity so that I could engage in a way that was less reactive. So I would
1:08:30 say the project then for the last 10 years has been developing an awareness of an appreciation of
1:08:37 how much my physiology drives everything that happens up here and paying more attention to that.
1:08:40 Not just trying to cross-examine the thoughts because the thoughts are, I think, a byproduct,
1:08:44 sometimes of a rapid heart rate, things like that. Does that answer the question?
1:08:45 Absolutely. That’s good.
1:08:52 All right. Cool. Yeah. Thanks for the question. All right. I think we have one person left,
1:08:57 Lee, I believe. Would you like to go? Hi there.
1:09:01 Hi from Canada. I was having technical difficulties when everyone was doing their
1:09:09 introductions. I guess my question is a two part or part and a half question. So I’m a 47-year-old
1:09:15 man with a five-year-old daughter, so I started late in life. And all I wish for her is to see her
1:09:21 find something that lights her up, anything. I guess that ties into me and my life right now.
1:09:26 As I’m wishing that so badly for her, I realize that I need to make a career change. I don’t
1:09:32 love my job. So I have kind of, I decided to go with a clean sleep. Any of my past doesn’t
1:09:37 matter. I want to start to figure out something that lights me up. Is there a few questions that
1:09:44 you ask yourself if you ever feel stuck trying to figure out what that is?
1:09:48 So you’re feeling stuck at the moment in terms of choosing a path forward for yourself?
1:09:53 To find something that lights me up. I’m lucky right now because I have six months off,
1:09:58 so I can think about my next move where I want to go, what I want to do.
1:10:03 Any little ember I get and I follow down that path, I think to myself, okay, well,
1:10:08 is AI going to do this in five years? How much effort do I want to put into it?
1:10:16 There’s a few questions I can ask myself for a few things I can do just to find that thing.
1:10:21 Yeah, for sure. What are some of the options that you’re considering at the moment?
1:10:27 So one of them was architectural and house design, but I’m thinking in five years that’s
1:10:33 going to be pretty much taken by AI, I’m sure. That’s the thing. I’m stuck. I used to be in
1:10:36 the restaurant business. I don’t want nothing to do with that anymore. I owned a restaurant for a
1:10:43 while and, you know, I’m just kind of at that point where the next decision I make, I really want to
1:10:50 get excited about it. And it could be anything. I’m all about learning things and just I need to find,
1:10:56 you know, that spark. So I’m into architecture and that’s what I thought was going to be the
1:11:01 path and then I thought, okay, well, I don’t have all the answers, of course, but my thinking
1:11:05 around AI, because this is a common concern, right? You’re not alone in this. A lot of people
1:11:12 are wondering what will be gobbled by AI and the, I think the short answer is nobody has an idea,
1:11:19 right? Nobody really knows. And it’s easy to become paralyzed given that there’s so much
1:11:28 uncertainty around it. But my feeling is there are certain career paths, let’s just say, that are
1:11:34 already being eaten. If you were to say, I’m going to be a logo designer and earn my money on Fiverr,
1:11:40 I’d say that’s probably going to get consumed within the next very short period of time.
1:11:48 But if you have the flexibility to consider paths, I would pay more attention to the quickening than
1:11:53 speculation about AI. Number one, there’s no right path, right? So you can take some pressure off
1:11:58 yourself when you realize that everybody’s making it up as they go along. Like there’s no one right
1:12:03 answer in the mathematical proof of your life. Does that make sense? It’s going to be a trial and
1:12:10 error process like it is with everything that we do in life. So I would say that with something
1:12:17 like architectural design, for instance, I actually don’t think it is a foregone conclusion
1:12:23 that it’s all going to be consumed by AI in part because there are open questions around this
1:12:27 technology. For instance, will people want to watch movies that are purely generated by AI that
1:12:32 make them cry? Are people going to want to cry knowing that no human was involved, that it was
1:12:40 just based on a large language model plus other AIs being trained on certain data sets, finding
1:12:44 patterns, and then producing a desired emotion? Are people going to want that? For instance,
1:12:50 I mean, people still buy handmade shoes, right? People still buy artwork produced by artists.
1:12:57 People still pay for many things that they could pay less for if they were willing to go to the
1:13:04 lowest cost provider. So there is a market for that. And I think that in questions of taste
1:13:12 and conversation and so on, most people are not going to be do-it-yourselfers with everything
1:13:18 in their lives acting as the direct interface with AI. What I could see is that you end up,
1:13:25 let’s just say, working in architectural design. And instead of having three employees, you have
1:13:33 three really well-trained AIs that you pay $19 to $100 a month for that take the place of those
1:13:38 employees and help you with various aspects of the job. I could see that in the same way that
1:13:40 you might use something like fresh books for accounting, right? And you’d be like, well,
1:13:45 I’m not the best draftsman, but I can do this, this, and this. And my value is in interfacing
1:13:51 with the client and figuring out these following things. And then these steps of the process are
1:13:58 going to be well-handled by an AI. So I think that that’s entirely possible. But my uninformed
1:14:06 perspective is that the magical skill, it’s not magical, but the powerful skill in any rapidly
1:14:11 changing world, which includes AI. It’s not limited to that. There’s a lot of stuff. I mean,
1:14:15 the rate of change is just going parabolic in so many different fields. So it’s not going to be
1:14:22 limited to AI is adaptability and confidence in your ability to trial and error and ultimately
1:14:29 kind of figure it out. So I do think that a lot of this hinges also on how we think about worst
1:14:34 case scenarios. So I don’t know anything about your personal setup, but let’s just say you have
1:14:40 some savings, right? And you have like a methodical plan for handling costs associated with your
1:14:44 daughter and you live in Canada. So unlike in the US, there may be some things covered by
1:14:51 your fine government that we don’t come across as easily here. Then you may have more room to
1:14:56 experiment than you give yourself credit for, if that makes sense, right? You may have more safety
1:15:03 nets, and the worst case may not be that bad. So for instance, you could do, and this is available
1:15:10 on the blog, if you just go to tim.blog/ted, I think there’s the Ted talk on fear setting,
1:15:14 and then there’s the text from the four hour work week on fear setting, just to do that exercise.
1:15:20 And what you may realize is, let’s say worst case, AI eats architectural design,
1:15:27 but you get three or four years of feeling really gratified by your work, you’re learning a ton,
1:15:32 you’re interacting with people, you really respect and it’s like we all deal with bullshit, right?
1:15:36 It’s not going to be all kittens and rainbows, but like overall, you’re like, well, this is so much
1:15:42 better than running that restaurant X number of years ago. And then AI eats it, and you’re like,
1:15:48 okay, now I have to start over. Would you regret having done it? Maybe not. It depends a lot on
1:15:51 what the worst case looks like when you make a granular. And the only way you’re going to
1:15:55 figure that out, or at least the only way I can figure it out is trying to put it on paper
1:15:59 and figure out like, what are the worst things that could happen?
1:16:05 How could I decrease the likelihood of those things happening? Next column, what could I do
1:16:09 to get back on my feet? Okay, so let’s say you try that and you’re like, fuck, that didn’t work.
1:16:13 I need to figure out what’s next, but in the meantime, I need to make some money. Like,
1:16:18 could you do something in your current industry? Could you like worst case? You’re like, I really
1:16:23 don’t want to do it, but I’m going to consult for people who own restaurants for a period of time
1:16:29 to make ends meet. And then I’ll figure out my next move, probably, right? So I would say a place
1:16:37 that might help you get unstuck, and this is true for me as well, is doing the fear setting exercise
1:16:44 and also realizing that very few moves are fatal, like very, very, very few. So those are my thoughts
1:16:50 on that. Awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, you’re welcome. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we’ve been
1:16:56 going for a minute here, and it’s time for me to go get some food since I had basically mixed nuts
1:17:03 and sweet potato fries for my whole day of food, which is not going to necessarily help me live
1:17:08 to be 150. But, you know, we all have our off days. So I’m going to go try to get a proper meal.
1:17:14 And really nice to meet you all and spend time with you all and see some of you for not the first
1:17:20 time in the case of a few folks who were here earlier. So have a wonderful evening and a great
1:17:27 weekend. And thanks for being part of the experiment. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more
1:17:32 thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email
1:17:37 from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and
1:17:43 two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
1:17:49 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share
1:17:54 the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind
1:17:59 of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums,
1:18:05 perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,
1:18:11 including a lot of podcasts, guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
1:18:18 And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short,
1:18:23 a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:18:27 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser,
1:18:33 tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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