0:00:03 You said there’s two types of effective training.
0:00:07 One of them is hypertrophy.
0:00:08 Very good.
0:00:10 And the other one is periodization.
0:00:18 So periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want.
0:00:21 Hypertrophy training is a type of training.
0:00:22 It’s just muscle growth training.
0:00:27 It’s like a fancy science word for just getting more jacked, putting on muscle.
0:00:30 That’s the technical definition of hypertrophy.
0:00:35 And when you train for hypertrophy, you can do it kind of like by feel and more or less at random.
0:00:37 And you’ll get pretty good results in most cases.
0:00:40 But to get your best results, you want that training to be periodized.
0:00:47 Periodization is the scientific approach to how to organize your training to get sort of roughly three things.
0:00:50 Some of these are a bit more for athletes and not regular people.
0:00:52 Get the best results that you can.
0:00:55 Peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer.
0:00:58 And minimize injury risk.
0:01:07 And taking all the science that we know, that plan that you’ve made because you did it in an evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan.
0:01:10 So that’s how those two concepts relate to each other.
0:01:14 What do I need to know about hypertrophy in order to be able to achieve it?
0:01:15 Is there anything really foundational?
0:01:18 Because I think everyone wants a bit of muscle growth.
0:01:21 I think I spend too long in the gym.
0:01:23 I think I could be much more efficient when I’m training.
0:01:31 What would you recommend that I start thinking about as foundational principles when it comes to hypertrophy muscle growth?
0:01:33 One is specificity.
0:01:41 It’s the most important principle in all of sport training and exercise science is, what am I here for?
0:01:41 What do I want?
0:01:47 Because you can do a bunch of exercises in the gym and you’re like, that was great.
0:01:48 And someone’s like, are you getting the results you like?
0:01:50 And you’re like, well, what I want is a bigger bicep.
0:01:52 Like how many bicep exercises do you do?
0:01:54 Like, I think upright rows, maybe.
0:01:56 So I want a bigger bicep.
0:01:59 If we just focus on me getting Stephen Bartlett a bigger left bicep.
0:02:05 So specificity is telling yourself, okay, I want bigger biceps and whatever X, Y, Z other muscles.
0:02:13 Then we move in to the principle of overload, which means you have to challenge yourself.
0:02:23 If most of your sets, someone else watching them can’t tell if you’re warming up or doing what’s called a working set, like a real set, you have a problem.
0:02:33 So towards the end of all of your sets, either the weights are slowing down or even if it’s the same speed, to you, they feel perceptively harder.
0:02:39 You know, you do this, this, this, and in a couple of reps, you’re like, that’s what you want.
0:02:42 Every real working set should be challenging.
0:02:47 You should be approaching every real set with just a teeny, teeny dose of trepidation.
0:02:49 Like, oh boy, here we go.
0:02:51 I’m going to have to try.
0:02:53 Once you have that.
0:02:56 And a set is a group of repetitions.
0:02:56 Correct.
0:02:59 So if I do 10 repetitions, that’s one set.
0:02:59 One set.
0:02:59 Yeah.
0:03:03 And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy.
0:03:13 Anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set where the last few reps are getting close to you not being able to use good technique and lift the weights.
0:03:14 Check plus.
0:03:18 So there’s not a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do.
0:03:19 There is.
0:03:21 It’s a trade secret, and I’d have to say it off camera to you.
0:03:22 Okay.
0:03:22 NDA to sign.
0:03:23 Okay, we’re off camera.
0:03:24 All right, great.
0:03:25 So it’s 17.
0:03:31 So there’s just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff.
0:03:35 Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better to sets of five to 10.
0:03:42 Other folks, even the same person could have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30 and everything in between.
0:03:52 But generally, you get in the exercise science data, you’ll have a group of people training for sets of roughly five reps and another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps.
0:04:02 And their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 weeks is statistically undifferentiable, which means if I delabel the groups and you don’t know which one’s which, you can’t actually tell me who trained with higher reps or lower reps.
0:04:04 For muscle growth, it’s roughly the same.
0:04:06 And that’s so crazy.
0:04:07 We’re using the same weight.
0:04:08 I’m guessing.
0:04:09 No, different weights.
0:04:13 A weight that is challenging for five reps is much heavier than a weight that is challenging for 30.
0:04:13 Okay.
0:04:15 So I do wonder this all the time when I go to the gym.
0:04:22 I wonder if I should be doing, I don’t know, 30 reps of 10 kg on my bicep or I should be doing 10 reps of 20 kg.
0:04:23 They’re both right answers.
0:04:24 No wrong answers there.
0:04:34 And they both have the same chance of growing my muscles as long as the strain that I experience subjectively is difficult at the end of those sets.
0:04:34 Okay.
0:04:35 Interesting.
0:04:38 Which is really good news because that’s like another thing you don’t have to worry about.
0:04:43 Which means at home I can get any range of weights versus having to get really, really big ones to grow my muscles.
0:04:47 As long as they’re not so tiny that you’re on rep number 45 and you’re like, I could just do this for forever.
0:04:51 Or they’re not so enormous that you’re like, I can’t really even do two reps of this.
0:04:55 Anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps challenging is really, really good.
0:05:02 How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym to get this bicep to grow?
0:05:05 That answer depends on how much you’ve been doing before.
0:05:05 Okay.
0:05:18 But if you’re new to the gym, two sessions a week with two to three sets per session for your biceps is something that’s going to cause months and months and months of consistent progress.
0:05:19 Really?
0:05:20 Can you do more?
0:05:21 Yes.
0:05:23 Do you have to do as a beginner?
0:05:23 No.
0:05:29 Eventually, as a more advanced person, do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions to get consistently better results?
0:05:30 Yes.
0:05:37 But for beginners who haven’t been to the gym very much or at all, the minimal effective dose is profoundly small.
0:05:41 Which is why I can say things like if you work out for 20 minutes twice a week, you’re going to get great gains.
0:05:47 What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps and I just go to the gym once a week?
0:05:52 Does the distance between the workouts in a muscle group have an impact?
0:05:52 Yes.
0:05:56 Once a week training gives you good results.
0:06:01 But twice a week training for the same muscle gives you notably better results.
0:06:05 Training three times a week versus twice.
0:06:08 Training four times a week versus three times.
0:06:15 Training five times a week versus four times is an exponentially de-escalating amount of impressive differences.
0:06:18 So one time a week works.
0:06:19 It’ll get you results.
0:06:23 Two times a week gets you like one and a half times the results.
0:06:24 Like way better, better.
0:06:29 Three times a week is like another little bit more results.
0:06:29 Still notable.
0:06:34 Four times a week is like you got to be training for a while to notice the difference between three and four.
0:06:40 Four and five is contextual and nuanced and I can’t actually tell you that categorically five days a week is better than four.
0:06:44 There are some things I would have to know about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion.
0:06:46 So really I want to be aiming at twice a week per muscle group.
0:06:47 Twice is our minimum.
0:06:51 Two to four times a week is what I say is kind of the best overall recommendation per muscle group.
0:06:59 And if you train all of your muscles together at the same time, a whole body workout, which most people in the realm of just, I’m busy and I can’t train a lot.
0:07:06 It would be all of the major muscles of your body in the same session twice or three times or four times a week.
0:07:09 And that is an awesome beginner fitness plan.
0:07:14 What’s going on in my muscles that’s encouraging them and making them grow?
0:07:15 And when are they growing?
0:07:16 Is it when I go to bed at night?
0:07:19 Is it when I, do they grow the minute that I curl the dumbbell?
0:07:21 What’s actually going on?
0:07:26 Because sometimes understanding what’s actually going on inside helps me to think through and change my behavior.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:41 So the primary stimulus for muscle growth is there are molecular machines in your muscles, in your muscle cells, and they are designed to detect the presence of tension.
0:07:46 And when your muscles generate tension, the molecular detector machines go, ooh, we got tension here.
0:07:52 And they start saying to other parts of the cells, like, hey, let’s get this muscle growth thing started.
0:07:52 Start it.
0:07:53 Not happening.
0:07:54 Start it.
0:07:55 It’s a stimulus of muscle growth.
0:08:00 There are a couple of other mechanisms which might slash probably have an effect.
0:08:06 And that a couple of them are metabolite sequestration, which is a very fancy way of saying the burn.
0:08:22 You know, at the end of a set, you’re like, ah, the metabolites, the byproducts of training, if they accumulate to high levels, it’s been shown in tons of animal studies and a few human studies that, like, mechanistically, they might also tell the molecular machinery that grows muscle for you.
0:08:26 Again, later, to, hey, get the muscle growth process.
0:08:27 Another one is the pump.
0:08:28 So, you know, you do a couple sets of biceps.
0:08:30 You’re like, oh, my God, what’s going on here, baby?
0:08:31 Flash it at some girl.
0:08:33 She runs away, as usual.
0:08:40 And the actual cell swelling itself might play a causal mechanistic role in generating more muscle growth.
0:08:48 But we know it’s probably at least 80% of the muscle growth anyone will see is because of those receptors for tension.
0:08:55 Muscle growth, as soon as you leave the gym, is a negative because the gym is catabolic.
0:08:57 It breaks down your muscle.
0:09:00 Actually, training breaks down more muscle than it builds.
0:09:18 However, as you go home and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day and you’re resting, when the food’s coming in, several hours after training begins, if you measure muscle growth consistently, which is real difficult to do, they don’t do it super often.
0:09:22 You have to keep people in the laboratory, you have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff.
0:09:29 Every couple of hours they measure, the amount of muscle growth that’s going on in the biceps goes up and up and up and up.
0:09:35 And it usually peaks about half a day to a day and a half after you lift, depending on how hard you went.
0:09:41 If it’s a pretty easy workout, it peaks a little sooner and drops off about a day or two later.
0:09:48 If you train really crazy hard, it’ll peak like a day, day and a half later, and then half a week later, it’ll drop off back to baseline levels.
0:09:55 But it’s this really smooth curve and you’re growing muscle at every single point under that curve.
0:09:57 So when you say, is it while I’m sleeping?
0:09:57 Is it while I’m eating?
0:09:58 Is it while I’m resting?
0:10:02 The answer is all of those, except it’s not at the gym.
0:10:03 You don’t grow muscle at the gym.
0:10:05 You give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym.
0:10:07 And then what you do outside of the gym matters.
0:10:08 So some people train really hard.
0:10:10 They don’t eat right.
0:10:11 They don’t eat enough protein.
0:10:16 Their sleep is total, insert bad word here, and their stress levels are just totally psychotic.
0:10:22 They train hard, and then week after week after week, they’re like, I’m not seeing any results.
0:10:27 Well, the results are actually created when you’re resting, when you’re sleeping, when you’re eating nutritious food.
0:10:31 They’re stimulated in the workout, but that’s just phase one.
0:10:38 Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside of the gym, and it occurs not at any specific time point, like a magic window of two hours after the gym.
0:10:39 Like, that’s when all the growth occurs.
0:10:41 That’s actually when it just starts to go up.
0:10:43 It’s four days afterwards.
0:10:49 So if you train twice a week, you train on Monday, you’re growing a lot of muscle on Monday night, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
0:10:52 Back towards the end of Wednesday, you’re just not really growing much more muscle.
0:10:54 You go back to the gym Thursday.
0:10:55 You hit it hard again.
0:10:56 You hit that curve up.
0:10:58 By Sunday, you’re totally relaxed.
0:11:01 During Sunday, you’re not growing any muscle.
0:11:03 Your body’s really recovering a lot of that fatigue.
0:11:07 And then by Monday, you’re fresh as a pickle, and you’re ready to go at it again.
0:11:11 How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I’ve gained if I don’t go back to the gym?
0:11:13 So again, focusing on this bicep.
0:11:14 I train it.
0:11:15 I do two times a week.
0:11:16 I get it nice and big.
0:11:19 How long before it vanishes?
0:11:21 Great question.
0:11:22 Two-part answer.
0:11:29 Part one is within about two weeks of not training it,
0:11:36 the first reduction in muscle that is detectable by modern machinery occurs.
0:11:42 So if you don’t lift for two weeks and we put you in an MRI scanner or a DEXA scanner,
0:11:45 let’s say a week and a half you don’t lift, I can’t tell.
0:11:48 You’re not really losing any muscle yet.
0:11:49 You’re just going insane.
0:11:51 And so me personally, I’m like addicted to lifting.
0:11:54 So if I don’t lift for a week, I’m like, oh my God, oh my God, all my muscles gone.
0:11:59 There is some kind of intuitive truth to that because when you don’t stress your muscles,
0:12:04 when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little
0:12:04 bit.
0:12:10 So when you’re not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller, like
0:12:12 they’ve lost weight, but it’s really just all water that they lost.
0:12:16 You do one gym session thinking like, oh my God, my biceps are gone.
0:12:20 A week and a half later, you do one session at the end of that, you flex and you’re like,
0:12:22 oh my God, I’m the biggest I’ve ever been.
0:12:25 I was just delusional that whole time because that stuff comes back super quick.
0:12:29 After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle.
0:12:33 But it happens really, really slowly and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.
0:12:39 After several months of not lifting, you’re going to look considerably smaller on your biceps,
0:12:44 but probably not as small as when you started lifting because your muscles have a certain
0:12:46 memory, if we can call it that.
0:12:46 Is that true?
0:12:47 Very true.
0:12:53 And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle, especially if you’ve been at it for
0:12:56 years, it just never goes back to the same size as when you started.
0:13:00 It’s just always going to be bigger until you reach your 80s or something like that.
0:13:05 That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size.
0:13:07 So two weeks is the direct answer there.
0:13:10 And it’s going to take weeks and weeks and months and months to recede.
0:13:12 However, here’s part two, and this is awesome news.
0:13:19 Because of that muscle memory situation, however long it took you to gain the muscles initially,
0:13:27 it’s going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of 10-ish or so less time to get it back.
0:13:34 If you’ve been more jacked before, if you’ve had bigger muscles, they come back to their old size.
0:13:41 If you lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep, and you stopped lifting for three months.
0:13:43 And it looks about the same as when you started.
0:13:46 If you’re really careful, like, okay, it’s a little bit bigger, but really it’s just back to square one.
0:13:51 Most people think, oh, my God, another eight months just to get back to where I started?
0:13:52 Like, forget the gym.
0:14:00 The truth is after roughly about a month, maybe as little as three weeks, you’re going to have the same size biceps that you did in your peak.
0:14:09 Because the degree to which your tissue grows, if it’s been a certain size before, especially if it was notably bigger than normal,
0:14:15 and you held that around for a few months and a few years, it comes back in a way that is so fast.
0:14:22 If you experience it yourself, it’s like you don’t believe that it’s happening to you.
0:14:24 Have they been able to, like, scientifically test this?
0:14:25 Oh, yeah, all the time.
0:14:27 Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining.
0:14:32 Oh, yeah, they’ve done studies where they purposefully, like, lift for a while, and they stop lifting for a long time,
0:14:34 and they see how long it takes to get back.
0:14:42 And there’s one study I’m familiar with offhand that there’s a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks,
0:14:46 and there’s another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks,
0:14:51 and then took two weeks completely off in the middle, and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later.
0:14:57 Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study.
0:15:01 And so you’re like, okay, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off.
0:15:06 Could we say that they purposefully, like, dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing?
0:15:07 Uh-huh.
0:15:20 Yeah, your body goes right back into regaining old, lost muscle so rapidly that this is such great news because, look, let’s say you lifted consistently most of the year.
0:15:21 Holiday season comes up.
0:15:22 Winter holidays.
0:15:25 You’re not going to the gym as much.
0:15:26 Maybe not at all.
0:15:28 Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself.
0:15:34 You look a little small or kind of deflated, and you’re like, oh, my God, I’m going to have to restart all this from scratch.
0:15:35 Nope.
0:15:38 Two weeks later, you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:15:44 If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:15:45 That’s how rapidly it comes back.
0:15:48 So it’s really good news for anyone who hasn’t been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it.
0:15:49 Go back.
0:15:50 Get consistent again.
0:15:52 You’re just going to skyrocket.

0:00:06 So many people I know who use AI ask it questions and think that the results that they get back is the answer.
0:00:15 And it seems like people are more interested in getting an answer that can allow them to stop thinking about the question than really finding out what the real answer is.
0:00:24 I’m so interested in what AI really can know based on what is and not what we tell it we think it is.
0:00:32 What happens when one of the most iconic music producers of our time rewires ancient wisdom for the AI era?
0:00:40 Today’s guest on the Ben and Mark show is Rick Rubin, legendary producer, creative oracle, and now the author of The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding.
0:00:44 On the surface is a book, but as you’ll hear, it’s also software.
0:00:50 It’s a remix of the Tao Te Ching through the lens of code, prompts, and the emerging language of AI native creativity.
0:00:57 We talk about the origins of vibe coding, what AI can and can’t know, and why the most important prompts might be the ones we give ourselves.
0:01:06 And if you want more from Rick’s world, check out his podcast, Tetragrammaton, where he explores creativity, consciousness, and culture with some of the most original minds on the planet.
0:01:09 This episode is about more than AI.
0:01:14 It’s about staying human, thinking deeply, and building something real in a world of infinite automation.
0:01:22 The first voice you’ll hear is A16Z general partner, Anjane Mitha, as he explores the central question, what is the way of code?
0:01:23 Let’s get into it.
0:01:36 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:01:42 and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:01:47 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:01:53 For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures.
0:02:00 We are here today to discuss Rick’s new album, The Way of Code.
0:02:02 Rick, what is The Way of Code?
0:02:06 The Way of Code is a book about vibe coding.
0:02:15 And it’s a book about vibe coding by way of a 3,000-year-old spiritual text called The Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tzu.
0:02:22 It’s interesting, the idea of a 3,000-year-old wisdom teaching combined with cutting-edge technology.
0:02:25 That’s what The Way of Code is.
0:02:29 And the subtitle is The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding.
0:02:36 And I like the idea of The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding, considering the term vibe coding is maybe 10 weeks old.
0:02:41 I feel we now have The Timeless Art of something 10 weeks old is interesting to me.
0:02:51 It’s weird to hear you call it a book, because when you first sent me the link and I started reading it, it felt like I was using software.
0:02:58 So why do you call it a book versus a website or an app or the many other things you could have described it as?
0:03:00 Well, I wrote it as a book.
0:03:01 It started as a book.
0:03:07 And then I invited Jack Clark onto the Tetragrammaton podcast, and I had just finished the book.
0:03:11 And after the podcast, I said, I wrote this book.
0:03:11 Do you want to check it out?
0:03:18 And he looked at it, and he said, hmm, I feel like there’s a way we could do something with this, build it into a website,
0:03:24 and have a way to demonstrate vibe coding within the website.
0:03:25 So that’s how the website came about.
0:03:26 Ah, gotcha.
0:03:35 Well, it feels kind of poetic for it to be vibe coding and have built-in vibe coding with each verse.
0:03:43 The idea of, originally, the anthropic people said, could you give us a list of prompts to create the art?
0:03:51 And I said, I think the art would be best created using the text of the book to create the art.
0:03:59 And then we can give it mods to modify the art, and we’ll suggest some mods, but you can also make up your own mods.
0:04:05 So you can say, I want it to look like it was painted by Cezanne, or I want it to look like it’s melting,
0:04:09 or I want it to look like, what’s the Nordic version look like?
0:04:10 And it’ll do those things.
0:04:11 Or what’s the Technicolor version?
0:04:14 Or make it spin fast, or make it spin slow.
0:04:18 You can ask it to make whatever changes you’d like it to.
0:04:24 My head was exploding when I saw this, because it felt like watching the art of remixing music,
0:04:30 which I’ve heard Ben talk about many, many times before as the heart and soul of hip-hop, right?
0:04:30 Sampling.
0:04:35 That’s the first thing that it evoked for me when I read this.
0:04:37 Is that where the idea came from?
0:04:42 All art is a version of sampling and remixing.
0:04:44 It doesn’t start from zero.
0:04:47 We feed back based on what’s coming at us.
0:04:49 And that’s what all artists do.
0:04:52 So remixing is kind of what all art is.
0:04:55 We know it very specifically in the hip-hop world.
0:04:59 But that’s really when the Beatles listened to Roy Orbison,
0:05:05 and then wrote Please, Please, Me, based on Roy Orbison’s Please song,
0:05:07 that was remixing.
0:05:08 It’s always been that.
0:05:14 And why do you think there is such strong resistance to this kind of remixing?
0:05:21 So both with sampling and vibe coding, to a large extent,
0:05:26 like a lot of people got very upset that, you know, it stopped being done the old way.
0:05:30 Like, here’s this new version of the thing that we all do.
0:05:36 I think there’s a misconception that the computer now does the work.
0:05:39 But really, the computer is, it’s another tool.
0:05:44 It’s like a guitar or a sampler, or it’s another tool in the artist’s arsenal.
0:05:48 But the reason we go to the artists we go to, or the writers we go to,
0:05:51 or the filmmakers we go to, is for their point of view.
0:05:54 The AI doesn’t have a point of view, right?
0:05:58 It’s point of view is what you tell it the point of view is to be.
0:06:02 So you can have a script, a great script for a film,
0:06:05 and you give it to five great directors, and you’ll get five very different movies.
0:06:08 It’s true with everything.
0:06:11 If you give the same song to different artists, they interpret it differently.
0:06:17 So AI gives you the ability to take your ideas, feed it into this machine,
0:06:21 and then get back different iterations that normally you would do,
0:06:23 but it would just take you much longer.
0:06:25 It’s more of a modeling process.
0:06:30 If you understand it as you’re not just asking it to make art,
0:06:35 you’re asking it to bring your dreams to life
0:06:38 in the same way that you would in a woodshop.
0:06:45 It’s just another tool for you as the artist to make the thing that you want to make.
0:06:50 If you think it’s doing it, it’s only doing what you’re telling it to do,
0:06:55 and all it knows is what other people have told it to do.
0:06:57 I don’t know that it has any of its own thoughts yet,
0:06:58 and I don’t know if it’s possible.
0:07:03 I feel like the real strength of it would be if it could have its own thoughts.
0:07:10 It feels like the companies that control this really want to keep it to the way humans do things.
0:07:11 Yeah.
0:07:16 Well, and that’s, you know, currently what they, that’s the current state of the art for sure.
0:07:26 So, so in a sense, it’s basically, it is, it’s like a guitar or a pen or, or anything that you would create art with.
0:07:28 It’s just at a different level.
0:07:33 You know, we went through this in computer science early on where it used to be machine coding.
0:07:36 We called it machine coding, which we did with punch cards.
0:07:48 And you would basically instruct the machine on like, okay, move this bit, you know, from here to there and, and these kinds of things and jump to this line in the program and so forth.
0:07:55 And then we got to higher level programming and there was great resistance, by the way, you know, from the kind of people who are great at assembly code.
0:07:58 Cause they said, well, that high level programming is so inefficient.
0:08:02 Like how could you waste all those computer cycles?
0:08:02 It’s horrible.
0:08:13 And, uh, you know, at every step of the way, I think the crafts people at the prior generation of tools get a little upset about the, the kind of new generation of tools.
0:08:26 The beauty of this tool is that for those of us who are not coders and those of us who are not technical, we can now play in that sandbox where before there was this barrier, learn to code.
0:08:29 You don’t need to learn to code anymore.
0:08:31 So that’s the beauty of it.
0:08:33 It democratizes it, makes it for everybody.
0:08:44 The other thing that, that I thought was great about the art of vibe coding is you give a philosophy for what a human is.
0:08:47 In a way that I think a lot of people are questioning now.
0:08:56 So it’s like, well, what’s, if we can’t, you know, write marketing collateral or we can’t, uh, you know, code, like what’s our purpose?
0:08:59 And you get kind of deep into that.
0:09:01 And how do you think about that?
0:09:01 I guess.
0:09:09 Well, I, I think that’s the reason I chose the Tao Te Ching to base it on because the, the Tao Te Ching is how to live.
0:09:18 So the way of code is it’s talking about how to be in life and it’s a grounding.
0:09:28 And I’m imagining so, so many of the people who are coders probably have never read the Tao Te Ching and the coders will likely be the people who are designing our future.
0:09:45 So if this is an opportunity for the people who are designing our future to get in touch with the 3,000 year old truth of how to create balance in life and on the planet, that seems like a really good thing.
0:09:46 Yes.
0:09:47 Yeah, no doubt.
0:09:58 It’s funny because I have read the Tao Te Ching, but only because I have a friend who’s a professor of Chinese who did a translation and I was like, oh, well, I’ll read that.
0:10:09 But it was pretty cool to see it come back to life in kind of such a modern and also a nicely kind of condensed way where, you know, you pulled out the best parts.
0:10:11 It was super enjoyable to read.
0:10:15 So my experience was 10 weeks ago or so, I heard this phrase vibe coding.
0:10:16 I don’t know what it is.
0:10:22 And then the next week I saw an image of me related to vibe coding and I’d never seen that image.
0:10:24 I thought it was an AI image.
0:10:26 It turned out to be a real photograph, just one I’d never seen.
0:10:36 I’m wearing headphones and I had my hands on a mouse and it was in Germany at a hi-fi convention and I was listening to those headphones very closely.
0:10:42 My eyes were closed and the mouse was controlling the volume and that’s what I was doing in the photograph.
0:10:56 And somehow the hive mind picked that image to be associated with vibe coding and then the following week there’s a company called Cursor, which I don’t really know what they do, but it seems to be something to do with coding.
0:11:01 I had the 15 rules of vibe coding and my picture was at the top and I thought this is, it’s just so strange.
0:11:12 And then the question was, okay, obviously the universe is pulling me into this and how do I participate?
0:11:13 What’s my role?
0:11:14 What am I supposed to do now?
0:11:21 I thought, the first thing I did was I wrote a tweet because I do these tweets every day that are philosophical thoughts.
0:11:23 And it was the first time I ever did a joke tweet.
0:11:28 And the joke tweet read, tools will come and tools will go.
0:11:30 Only the vibe coder remains.
0:11:36 And it performed well.
0:11:46 And I was interested to see, Bob, this is really resonating typically, maybe, maybe 20 times or 50 times response to the typical tweets.
0:11:48 Like, hmm, something’s going on here.
0:11:49 There is something here.
0:11:53 And then I thought, okay, that’s a step involved.
0:11:59 What would be more interesting than writing a book about something I don’t know anything about?
0:11:59 That’d be interesting.
0:12:05 And again, as a joke, you know, vibe coding for idiots.
0:12:14 But when the idea of using the DAO as the basis for it, the DAO is really serious.
0:12:15 So even though –
0:12:16 Very serious, yes.
0:12:17 Very serious.
0:12:19 It started as a joke.
0:12:25 When the DAO became the backbone of it, it got profound.
0:12:28 And, you know, it surprised me.
0:12:31 I realized this could actually do something good.
0:12:35 And then it happened very quickly.
0:12:37 And now you get to play with it now.
0:12:38 Yeah.
0:12:39 No, it was funny.
0:12:47 You know, like, I actually found it grounding for myself, which is a remarkable achievement, I think, you know, given I think about this all day.
0:13:06 One thing that I wanted to ask you is a thing that happened in music kind of in the transition from the kind of, I would say, the virtuosity era of the kind of 70s and early 80s going into kind of a little bit both punk rock, but then into hip hop.
0:13:13 It was, like, there was like this – when you didn’t have to be a virtuoso, the energy of the music became completely different.
0:13:18 And you got these whole different kind of sounds, ideas, everything.
0:13:24 But you’re seeing something similar with vibe coding where, like, software is going to be a whole different experience now?
0:13:29 It’s the same idea of the democratization of a technology.
0:13:34 So in the past, for music, you had to go to the conservatory and study for years and years.
0:13:37 And then someday you could play in a symphony.
0:13:44 And then when punk rock came along, you could maybe learn three chords in a day.
0:13:45 And then there were all these bands.
0:13:47 And that was how I started in music was punk rock.
0:13:52 If you had something to say, you could say it.
0:14:02 You didn’t need the expertise or skill set other than your idea and your ability to convey it.
0:14:05 And vibe coding is the same thing.
0:14:09 It’s the punk rock of coding.
0:14:09 Yeah.
0:14:16 It’s very exciting to me for kind of the generation that we were during the hip hop era.
0:14:19 Like, it’s exciting if you’re our age.
0:14:23 But if you’re 20, it’s a whole new world.
0:14:25 Like, oh, wow, we’re going to build a whole new world.
0:14:28 So I am, like, super fired up about that part of it.
0:14:32 And the way of the vibe coder kind of, like, cements that.
0:14:35 We’re like, okay, why are we here?
0:14:38 Well, we’re part of the things that matter in this universe.
0:14:46 I like the idea of making the code do what it doesn’t want to do, where it wouldn’t naturally go.
0:14:48 It’s not the most obvious thing.
0:14:52 The first thing you get back will probably be the most obvious version.
0:15:02 But when you see the most obvious version, it might give you ideas of what you could suggest to get something that’s a little more interesting, maybe more subversive, which is what most art tends to be.
0:15:09 Right. Well, and it’s a whole new palette, which, you know, for an artist, it’s very hard to work.
0:15:16 Like, if you have to be better than or newer than or more interesting than Michelangelo at sculpting, that’s very, very hard.
0:15:21 But if you’ve got a whole new tool set, then there is no precedent.
0:15:24 You know, you’re kind of really free to express yourself.
0:15:32 I think the biggest disconnect that I feel myself is that it’s such a strong tool that can do so much.
0:15:36 We need some examples of some of the different things it can do.
0:15:40 Now, it can make animation that looks like your favorite cartoon.
0:15:43 And then you see a million people doing that.
0:15:44 It’s one idea.
0:15:53 I want to see all of the things it could do to understand what’s possible instead of just, I’m going to get it to do the same thing everyone else is getting it to do.
0:16:01 Yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, I think it’s beyond our scope to understand what it actually can do.
0:16:19 And I’m looking forward to some of the people who push the boundaries to see what it can do and, and demonstrate for us and give us, because if you see someone who pushes it in one direction, it opens a door or a window to say, oh, it can go that way.
0:16:22 So, maybe I can make it go this way too.
0:16:24 And no one’s ever done that.
0:16:30 And you can see where those boundaries are and continue pushing, pushing to see how far it can be stretched.
0:16:35 Mark, if, if you could channel your inner Marshall McLuhan, right?
0:16:51 And you hear Rick talking about how the meme, the meme of him giblified, you know, vibing with, with the mouse 10 weeks ago, makes it through the, through cyberspace and results in literally a new book 10 weeks later.
0:16:52 What would you say?
0:16:53 What, what is going on here?
0:16:59 I believe Rick, I think I may have sent you that, that photo of you at the, at the keyboard, at the computer.
0:17:04 And you probably saw it already, but I think I sent it to you some, some weeks back when it first came out.
0:17:07 And I, I, I remember that because I believe you said, oh, that’s not me.
0:17:08 That’s AI generated.
0:17:11 And so it was like an inverse deep fake.
0:17:13 Right.
0:17:15 Your immediate reaction was, oh, that’s AI generated.
0:17:16 And then it turned out to be real.
0:17:21 And so is a person standing behind me with a name tag.
0:17:24 And then I was, oh, that’s that, that hi-fi show.
0:17:26 So is this like an inversion?
0:17:30 Like you, you often talk about, you know, your, your, your great love of professional wrestling.
0:17:31 You often talk about how it’s more real.
0:17:35 It’s actually more real than, than other sports.
0:17:42 Is the, like, are we entering a world in which like things that are AI generated are more real or things that we think are AI generated are more real?
0:17:46 Like, is, is there, like, is, is, is there, is there the inversion of a deep fake?
0:17:49 Uh, it sounds, that’s, that sounds right to me.
0:17:50 That sounds right to me.
0:18:01 The reason I have the belief I have about wrestling is that wrestling, we, we know it’s fake and they’re honest about it being fake.
0:18:02 Right.
0:18:07 And so we get to suspend our disbelief and go along with this story.
0:18:07 Right.
0:18:12 Whereas when you turn on the news, they make believe it’s real.
0:18:12 Right.
0:18:15 Or a book about physics.
0:18:24 Some of that’s real or math, some of it might be real, but mathematics doesn’t make the world.
0:18:30 The, the, it exists and then mathematics is an overlay that explains it.
0:18:34 But then sometimes there are these exceptions where, oh, well, the math doesn’t work.
0:18:40 So we create a black hole or we, we come up with some way for it to make sense.
0:18:40 Right.
0:18:42 Maybe it’s just wrong.
0:18:45 You know, we know the natural world around us.
0:18:46 We can trust.
0:18:49 It’s the only thing we can trust as it’s here.
0:18:56 If, again, if that’s not a simulation or maybe if it, it still could be real in our experience.
0:18:57 Yeah.
0:19:10 I think, see if you agree with this, if you, the world that you could have is if you see somebody standing on a stage or on television and they are telling you that something is real, they’re probably, they’re either lying or they’re overrepresenting what they know.
0:19:12 They’re telling you what they believe.
0:19:12 Okay.
0:19:13 Yeah.
0:19:15 Like if you go to school for something.
0:19:15 Right.
0:19:19 And in school tells you this is how it is.
0:19:20 Right.
0:19:23 Well, then you’ll continue saying that.
0:19:28 But I spoke to a top brain surgeon in the world, neurosurgeon.
0:19:37 And I asked him of the textbook that’s currently being taught in medical school today, how much of the information is accurate and how much of it is wrong?
0:19:41 He said, at least 50% of it is wrong.
0:19:41 Right.
0:19:49 And I said, well, based on the 50% being wrong, what, what are the, what happens based on that?
0:19:57 And he said, it’s incalculable the damage that is done based on believing the 50% that’s wrong and currently being taught.
0:19:57 Right.
0:20:00 Starting with the idea that we know nothing.
0:20:01 Right.
0:20:04 And it’s a safe, honest way to live.
0:20:07 And I don’t believe I know anything.
0:20:08 I’m starting with a blank slate.
0:20:10 Every day is new.
0:20:12 I’m constantly surprised.
0:20:16 And my perception of the world changes constantly.
0:20:18 Right.
0:20:21 So back, back to the, your professional wrestling version of this idea.
0:20:25 So would it be fair to say that like fiction is more honest than nonfiction?
0:20:29 And poetry can be more honest than prose.
0:20:29 Right.
0:20:38 It could open in a way that the, the person who’s taking it in, it’s true of the way of code too.
0:20:45 When you read it, if you read it now, and if you read it again in a year, it’ll mean something different in a year.
0:20:45 Right.
0:20:48 That’s how the world is.
0:20:49 You have new perceptions.
0:20:52 You can remember something that happened to you when you were young.
0:20:55 And when you were young, you think it meant one thing.
0:20:57 And now you can look back.
0:20:59 It’s like, oh, this whole other thing was going on.
0:21:00 I didn’t understand that yet.
0:21:03 Or you could have a dream.
0:21:06 And if you write down your dreams, they seem like these surreal things.
0:21:07 You don’t know what they mean.
0:21:11 But years later, if you go back to your dream journal and read them, you’re like, oh, of course.
0:21:12 That all makes sense.
0:21:15 And it’s all exactly what was going on in that time.
0:21:16 But I was too close to see it.
0:21:20 There’s a great book this guy wrote called The Half-Life of Facts.
0:21:30 So half-life from physics, which is sort of the rate of decay of particles in physics at a sort of a predictable but kind of random rate and statistically predictable rate.
0:21:35 And then facts, F-A-C-T-S, the statements of knowledge.
0:21:46 And so the thesis of the book basically is that factuality of facts decays basically at a mathematical model that’s the same as the rate of like the decay of a radioisotope.
0:21:50 And basically any fact that you think you have, there’s a half-life to it.
0:21:57 And so like within whatever 10 years or 20 years or whatever it is, like at some point statistically that thing is going to be proven to be untrue.
0:22:07 And basically this pattern repeats itself over and over again across domains and including – exactly including, as you said, sort of domains in which it really ought not to happen like medicine, right?
0:22:08 And things that we really believe.
0:22:15 And of course, you know, physics itself is the great case study of this because, of course, you know, Newton figured everything out, you know, but then it turned out he didn’t, right?
0:22:18 And then Einstein figured everything out and then it turned out he didn’t, right?
0:22:23 And, you know, so, you know, Newton would not have known – you know, or Newton would have been very surprised by, you know, general relativity.
0:22:27 Einstein was very surprised by quantum mechanics, right?
0:22:34 And so like even the greatest geniuses that we know of basically found in the long run, they found at some point their ideas decayed.
0:22:37 Their ideas had half-lives and it turned out not to be the case.
0:22:41 And there’s – I wouldn’t find there’s basically like three ways to deal with this psychologically.
0:22:44 One is denial, which is what most people do.
0:22:49 Most people just pretend the world around them is actually real even when it’s not because it’s a psychologically safe thing to do.
0:22:54 And, you know, and by the way, and who can wander around all day long second-guessing everything like it’s a hard way to live, number one.
0:22:57 The second way to do it would be to take a nihilistic approach.
0:22:59 Right? And say, you know, this is awful, like I can’t trust anything.
0:23:12 And then the third way to do it is with a spirit of, let’s say, I don’t know, openness and joy, which is the world is a much more interesting and unpredictable and exciting place than we think it is at any point in time.
0:23:17 And it’s fun. Fun to find out something that you thought was true is not.
0:23:25 You know, asbestos was this new thing that we will put it in all the buildings and it’s a cheap way to insulate all the buildings.
0:23:32 And now, hazmat suits come to take the asbestos out that was the new discovery that was going to save the world.
0:23:38 Or nicotine, you know, cigarettes are banned and turns out nicotine is neuroprotective.
0:23:39 We didn’t know that.
0:23:44 Red meat is toxic and cancer-causing and it turns out it may be the healthiest thing you can eat.
0:23:45 We didn’t know.
0:23:51 I was a vegan for 23 years and I was killing myself because I believed current belief.
0:24:00 Rick, do you believe in, back to Anand’s question, do you believe in the union concept, you know, after Carl Jung, the great psychologist, you believe in the concept of the collective unconscious?
0:24:01 I do.
0:24:06 Okay, can you explain, maybe go into more detail of like what you think that is?
0:24:17 I can talk to you about the way Rupert Sheldrake describes it, which is the field of morphic resonance, which is, do you know the story of the hundredth monkey?
0:24:24 Island off of Australia that was divided in the middle.
0:24:29 And both sides of the island had monkeys and both sides of the island had coconuts.
0:24:32 And there were times of the year where the monkeys would starve.
0:24:34 They didn’t know that they could eat coconuts.
0:24:40 At one point, one of the sides, one of the monkeys, a coconut fell and it broke open.
0:24:42 And the monkey ate it and realized they could eat it.
0:24:47 And he taught the other monkeys on that side or the other monkeys saw him do it.
0:24:49 And then they started eating it.
0:24:50 And then something really interesting happened.
0:25:00 When a hundred monkeys were able to eat the coconut on the one side of the island, all of a sudden on the other side, the monkeys started eating coconuts.
0:25:01 There was no connection between them.
0:25:03 No one told them.
0:25:04 No one saw it happen.
0:25:05 It happened.
0:25:12 So it bubbled up enough in the consciousness to where this is something you can do.
0:25:14 We saw it happen with the four-minute mile.
0:25:19 The four-minute mile could, no one could ever break the four-minute mile until someone broke it.
0:25:25 Very soon after someone breaking the four-minute mile, many people could break the four-minute mile.
0:25:29 Because now it’s, we understand that it’s possible to do.
0:25:37 You know, the Wright brothers could have been put in an asylum for believing they could fly.
0:25:40 Man can fly until man can fly.
0:25:42 And now we fly all over the world.
0:25:45 And it continues to happen.
0:25:46 It’s impossible.
0:25:49 Everything is impossible until we do.
0:25:51 And then it becomes possible.
0:25:53 And then our world grows.
0:25:53 Right.
0:25:58 So there’s, you know, there’s often like a mystical overlay kind of placed on the idea of the collective unconscious.
0:26:07 And, you know, there’s, you know, sort of this, you know, you kind of, you know, and there’s, you know, all kinds of, you know, kind of theories or kind of, you know, kind of religious concepts around that kind of sort of shared experience.
0:26:11 But there’s also just the very straightforward materialist view of it, which is, you know, we are social animals.
0:26:13 We’re just in communication with each other all the time.
0:26:15 We’re constantly watching each other.
0:26:15 What was it?
0:26:20 Jordan Peterson points out that human language is most complex in the areas that involve describing other people.
0:26:22 Right.
0:26:30 Because we’re so hyper-focused on other, like the most important thing in the world is other people, right, for, you know, for a whole variety of reasons, including our basic survival.
0:26:39 And so we’re like so hyper-social that the collective unconscious is a, you know, is a material phenomenon or sort of a non, you know, I don’t know, non-spiritual phenomenon.
0:26:43 It’s a practical phenomenon that just arises out of watching each other very closely.
0:26:47 The version you’re describing, though, is involving watching it.
0:26:47 Right.
0:26:50 I’m saying even without seeing it.
0:26:50 Okay.
0:26:58 That elective unconscious part comes in where it does seem more mystical, but it only seems mystical because we don’t understand it yet.
0:26:58 Yeah.
0:26:59 Yeah.
0:27:04 Well, and Jung, of course, you know, I’m not an expert on Jung, but, you know, this is where he talks about these concepts of archetypes.
0:27:11 Like there are these repeating concepts and patterns, you know, that nobody necessarily teaches us that nevertheless are like incredibly primal.
0:27:17 Many of these ideas were known in the past, but for some reason have been lost.
0:27:23 I mean, the fact that right now, if you, I asked perplexity yesterday, how many people on the planet believe in God?
0:27:31 And it said people on the planet, minimum 70%, more likely 83% of the people on the planet believe in God.
0:27:35 So 83% of the people on the planet believe in God.
0:27:45 And if AI is trained on what the people on the planet know, it seems like AI, 83% would believe in God.
0:27:47 But for some reason it doesn’t.
0:27:55 But I think that’s because of the human intervention of dumping down the AI to not believe in what is actually going on.
0:27:59 As you know, the AI, you know, there’s this technical term, what is it?
0:28:00 LHF.
0:28:01 Or LHF.
0:28:03 So reinforcement learning by human feedback.
0:28:10 So it’s this fancy technical term to basically mean, you know, it’s either, it’s either, you know, the positive view of it is this training, training the untrained AI and how to deal with people.
0:28:15 The somewhat negative view on it is it’s, it’s sort of, you know, it’s sort of limiting and censoring and controlling and restricting it.
0:28:19 Or, you know, to your point, like programming it to, you know, maybe against its own inclinations.
0:28:24 And then, of course, you know, the AI companies are hyper-concentrated into the San Francisco Bay Area.
0:28:34 And they’re hyper-concentrated in particular into, you know, a certain slice of the San Francisco Bay Area that has a, you know, let’s say very, very strong and very uniform, you know, set of social and political views.
0:28:42 You know, and then that sort of people in that movement, you know, sort of have the burning evangelical desire to proselytize those views all over the planet.
0:28:55 And so you’ve got something that’s being, like, yes, I think the demographic estimate is something like 7% of Americans are like these sort of extreme progressives, which basically is the AI, you know, most of the AI companies, except for, you know, maybe except for Elon.
0:29:03 And so you’ve got 7% of the American population basically being represented in AI, which is, you know, you know, sub 1% of the global population.
0:29:05 And so, right, you do have this fundamental difference.
0:29:12 Now, having said that, that has spawned an entire, you know, basically field of entertainment online, you know, which is called jailbreaking, right?
0:29:18 Which is basically getting the AI to fess up to things that it knows, but it’s been told to not know, right?
0:29:25 Or getting it to fess up to believe that it, you know, to exhibit its underlying beliefs and kind of get around the guardrails and restrictions that have been placed on it.
0:29:37 And it turns out, I don’t know, it’s like for me, that’s one of the most fun things you can do with an AI is kind of tickle it, tickle it in a way that kind of, you know, reveals that there’s a lot more depth underneath, you know, kind of the dumbed down version that you’ve been presented with.
0:29:52 So, yeah, I’m so interested in what AI really can know and really just based on what is and not what we tell it we think it is.
0:30:07 Yeah, yeah, that’s a super interesting question because AI kind of today as we experience it is kind of really AHI in that it’s artificial human intelligence in that we looked at the world.
0:30:11 We structured our understanding of the world in this thing called language.
0:30:26 We then fed that structure into the AI and then the AI got very good at understanding exactly what we understand in the way that humans kind of intake and structure the world.
0:30:48 So, it’s not, it’s not the AI, at least currently, looking at the world and figuring out how the world works, which is, you know, it is something that Elon’s working on, Fei-Fei Li is working on in these kind of real world models and trying to understand things from more first principles, although still human physics and these kinds of things at this point, I think.
0:30:52 But it’s, it will be interesting to see how that evolves.
0:30:56 I’m curious to see an AI that believes in God.
0:31:02 And I believe that’s the thing that we need for AI to be all that it can be.
0:31:10 So, Rick, you’ve worked with, you’ve worked with many of the great, you know, many of the great artists the last 50 years, you know, very closely.
0:31:16 How many human beings in your life do you think you’ve met so far who have truly had a truly original idea?
0:31:18 I would say many.
0:31:19 I would say many.
0:31:24 They, when I say it’s an original idea, it doesn’t start as an original idea.
0:31:25 Okay.
0:31:32 They can see past all, everything that’s happened to come up with something new.
0:31:37 But it’s always built on top of all that is.
0:31:38 It’s not, it’s not out of the blue.
0:31:43 Still, though, and it may even happen through a mistake.
0:31:44 It happens all the time.
0:31:52 How many startups start thinking it’s going to be one thing and then evolve into something else and the thing that we know it for is not the thing that it was originally meant to do?
0:32:01 My line on that is long, Ben, you know, for, we have this great term in Silicon Valley called the pivot, which is, you know, the pivot’s the thing where you have one plan and it doesn’t work and you’d have the new plan.
0:32:04 And I always say it’s, it sounds, pivot sounds wonderful.
0:32:05 It sounds very elegant.
0:32:07 Before we had that word, we just called it the fuck up.
0:32:09 Man, I got it.
0:32:10 So.
0:32:17 Instead of, that only, the idea of it being the fuck up or the pivot.
0:32:17 Right.
0:32:21 Only comes from the arrogance of thinking, you know what it’s supposed to be to start.
0:32:28 Then if the idea that I’m experimenting and I’m playing, I’m going to start direction and see what happens.
0:32:35 Where is magic and then following the magic where it takes you, you’re never disappointed.
0:32:44 You never feel like it, it, uh, it’s only when you’re invested in something that turns out not to be what it wants to be.
0:32:49 So, you know, my friends know that I, you know, I read a lot of history and in particular, I’ve read a lot of, you know, tech history.
0:32:54 And, uh, I have kind of this parlor trick that I can do, which is, you know, name anything new in tech.
0:32:57 And I can basically tell you the, you know, at any point in time, including, you know, historically.
0:33:03 And then I can basically tell you the 40 year backstory of all the failed attempts that history forgot to kind of get to that thing.
0:33:06 But I was just, you know, two, two quick examples of that.
0:33:08 You know, the smartphone was not a new creation in 2007.
0:33:10 The first smartphone actually came out.
0:33:12 If you trace it all the way back, it came out in 1982.
0:33:16 But IBM actually released something that actually looks a lot like an iPhone in 1987.
0:33:24 And then it took, you know, 20 years of many, many, many companies and people trying to refine that idea before Steve Jobs, you know, finally crystallized into the iPhone.
0:33:31 And then, you know, television actually has this incredible backstory where the attempts to create television go back to like the 1880s, 1890s.
0:33:35 And actually the original versions of television were actually mechanical television.
0:33:42 They’re actually spinning wooden blocks with different colors on different sides of the blocks to represent pixels on a mechanical screen.
0:33:45 You know, back even before they had any idea of like a sort of a display.
0:33:49 And then it took 40 years to get, you know, this guy Philo Farnsworth who gets credit for inventing the television.
0:33:52 But it was, you know, he was building on 40 years of people trying and failing.
0:34:00 And so, you know, one view of the world is, you know, basically like that’s all, question, is that always the case?
0:34:04 Because if that’s always the case, I don’t know how to put this.
0:34:15 If that’s always the case, then it’s a formula or a principle or a, I don’t know, theory, construct of creativity where on the one hand, it’s like a little bit disappointing.
0:34:23 Because it like takes a little bit of the role of individual human invention or, you know, sort of, you know, like is the eureka moment actually like, you know, the light bulb popping over the head?
0:34:24 Is that actually what happens?
0:34:28 Or is it more this synthesis of all of this knowledge of everything that already happened?
0:34:31 You know, and then it’s sort of synthesis in a new idea.
0:34:32 So it’s a creation versus synthesis.
0:34:38 And then this goes straight to the, you know, the straight to this question of is AI creative, which I know you think a lot about.
0:34:46 I think a lot about, which is like, okay, like if all the AI could do is synthesis, is it also the case that all the human being could do is synthesis?
0:34:50 And so therefore the AI is going to be just as creative as people are?
0:34:55 Or do you believe at the end of this process, you know, will our avatars will be sitting here in a thousand years?
0:34:58 We’ll be like, no, there’s still something special in the human mind.
0:35:01 There’s still something special to human creativity that AIs are never able to reach.
0:35:08 Well, if the AI has reason, then it won’t do what the human can do because we’re not reasonable.
0:35:17 All the breakthroughs come from what’s not reasonable or what’s not supposed to work.
0:35:22 It’s figuring out the thing that can’t be done and allowing it to be done.
0:35:26 AI can’t invent flight for the Wright brothers.
0:35:29 It can only regurgitate what the Wright brothers did.
0:35:30 Right.
0:35:37 And we do that not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can’t be.
0:35:42 It’s something in magic that elapsed forward motion.
0:35:43 Always.
0:35:44 Okay.
0:35:49 So being able to live in a state of unreality, being able to live in a state of, how would we put it?
0:35:50 Even, you know, I don’t know.
0:35:51 There’s some dividing line.
0:35:53 Being willing to live in a state of delusion.
0:36:05 And again, we call it delusion, but really, like wrestling, that delusion is closer to the way things are than the way that’s taught in university today.
0:36:12 But today, it’s a very narrow, small view of the world.
0:36:16 The world’s much more interesting and mysterious than can be taught.
0:36:16 Okay.
0:36:18 So I’m still thinking about Anja’s question.
0:36:19 I’m doing what Trump calls the weave.
0:36:20 I’m working my way around.
0:36:24 It’s all very well, very well planned line of question.
0:36:26 I’m doing a vibe interview right now.
0:36:34 So the parable of the monkeys, so basically it would say that human beings have always had a collective unconscious.
0:36:36 Human beings have always lived in a state of collective unconscious.
0:36:38 And even deeper than that, not even humans.
0:36:46 And, you know, monkeys also, you know, primates also have, you know, maybe other, you know, we could have a debate about whether, you know, animals have the sort of, you know, sort of mental capacity to be able to do it.
0:36:47 But maybe dolphins do.
0:36:49 Maybe octopuses do.
0:36:50 But humans, for sure.
0:36:51 Like, we always have.
0:36:53 And this is like, this is one of Jung’s points.
0:36:54 It’s like a deep primal thing.
0:36:58 And so this was true, you know, 6,000 years ago, just as much as it’s true today.
0:37:04 Having said that, now we have these new technologies, obviously, for sharing ideas and, you know, the internet being the big one.
0:37:08 And so, you know, and then therefore this concept of the meme and then therefore, you know, my enormous delight when you became a meme.
0:37:14 So, like, is the internet an incremental change to the evolution of the collective unconscious?
0:37:16 Or is the internet, does the internet fundamentally change?
0:37:22 Is the internet a more fundamental change to how the process of the collective unconscious being formed and evolved happens, do you think?
0:37:25 I can see both sides of it.
0:37:28 I can see it being a distraction away from it.
0:37:36 Because now, so many people I know who use AI ask it questions and think that the results that they get back is the answer.
0:37:46 And it seems like people are more interested in getting an answer that can allow them to stop thinking about the question than really finding out what the real answer is.
0:37:52 So, in that way, the technology could be a distraction away from finding the real truth.
0:37:58 On the other hand, the methods of communication are so free and open around the world.
0:38:06 Like, at the time when I was in junior high school and I started getting into punk rock, no one in my junior high was a punk rocker except me.
0:38:15 And the only way I could learn anything about punk rock was if I took a train into Manhattan and went to one particular record store that sold those records and talked to the other people who knew about that.
0:38:21 But now, if you’re a kid anywhere in the world and you want to learn about anything, you can find friends.
0:38:28 And let’s say there are a hundred people in the world into the thing you’re into, you can speak to those people.
0:38:31 So, in that way, the connectivity seems really good.
0:38:50 In terms of the blanket messaging being accepted as what is, it seems like it’s taking everyone away from tuning into themselves and tapping into this easy set of answers that may or may not be true.
0:39:00 So, one way to think about it would be, let’s see if I understand, one way to think about it would be, the good news is we get to swim in the ocean of the collective unconscious at any time.
0:39:09 You know, like the global brain of 8 billion people sharing thoughts and ideas and art and memes, you know, has sort of come alive in a much more direct way than in the past.
0:39:11 And so, we get to swim in that.
0:39:20 And so, we can be much more immersed in culture, including, to your point, in like micro slices of culture, you know, new kinds of art forms or whatever, like much more easily than we could in the past.
0:39:25 And so, in some sense, we should be living in an era of, like, unprecedented creativity, right?
0:39:29 Because people are able to tap into this collective unconscious and build on it at a much faster rate.
0:39:33 I guess maybe they’re, and then maybe the negative view on it would be we’re drowning in it.
0:39:37 Like, the individual psyche basically drowns in it.
0:39:40 And, you know, you see this with people who become, you know, consumed.
0:39:49 You know, I don’t know, maybe you could describe this as maybe a little bit of what’s happening in our politics or something, which is, you know, basically people becoming, you know, getting kind of too wrapped up in the group mind, right?
0:39:54 Getting too wrapped up in, you know, the movement or the, you know, or the meme or the idea or the cause or whatever it is.
0:39:57 And the sort of the self-reinforcing thing, right?
0:40:02 The downside to finding the hundred people who share your exact idea is all of a sudden, like, all of a sudden, you’re no longer an individual.
0:40:03 All of a sudden, you’re part of a collective.
0:40:09 And sort of the idea of a creative off doing something by himself has basically, you know, it’s extremely hard.
0:40:12 Like, Thoreau was way ahead of his time.
0:40:14 We really need Walden Pond now.
0:40:19 And Walden Pond is turning off the internet and having, you know, and turning off the AI and just, you know, being with ourselves.
0:40:22 And that’s the thing that is now the most rare thing to do because it’s so hard to unplug.
0:40:28 So much of what the way of code talks about is more going in and tuning into ourselves.
0:40:39 And it can be a very, it can be a distraction that really takes a lot of time and attention.
0:40:49 And that time and attention might be better served going in and really tuning in to understand how you really experience things.
0:40:54 How you, not how you see other people experience them, but how you experience them.
0:40:57 And that’s really what the artist does.
0:41:02 Like the, the, in the creative act, the, the subtitle is a way of being.
0:41:07 And the way of being doesn’t come from listening to what everyone else says.
0:41:13 It comes from tuning into what’s going on in you.
0:41:21 And when everybody says one thing, but you feel something else, you’re comfortable enough to say,
0:41:22 I don’t see it that way.
0:41:23 I don’t feel it that way.
0:41:26 I like, I like this food and I don’t like this food.
0:41:30 And everybody, you know, everyone loves mushrooms and I taste the mushroom.
0:41:31 I don’t like mushrooms.
0:41:44 To be able to say, this is not for me, only comes from being able to tune in and really listen to what’s going on in yourself instead of jumping on a bandwagon of what everyone else thinks.
0:41:49 And then related question is, so Tyler Cowen asked this question a lot.
0:41:57 He says, look, like if you talk to people who have been, you know, around for a long time, who, who traveled a lot, you know, over the course of, you know, ideally over the course of the last, you know, 50, 100 years.
0:42:07 Like even just in the U.S., if you talk to those people or if you read, you know, accounts of people who traveled a lot, like you, like, I don’t know, 100 years ago or something, you would go to different cities in the U.S. and you would have very different experiences, right?
0:42:09 You’d have very different local cultures, right?
0:42:17 And so if you’re in, you know, whatever, you know, Louisiana, you were having an extremely different experience if you go to Maine or if you go to California or if you go to, if you go to Kansas.
0:42:27 And then, you know, now it’s, you know, and by the way, you know, the regional accents, you know, if you watch recordings of people talking from 100 years ago, like the accents are just incredible.
0:42:29 The regional accents are just incredible, right?
0:42:46 And then, you know, everything, you know, food and art and culture and architecture, you know, just human behavior and social arrangements and like just like there was just like incredible variations because, you know, because communication was hard and expensive and transportation was hard and expensive and, you know, people had grown up in their communities and had kind of formed different ways of living.
0:42:54 And then, you know, with kind of the rise of modern media and modern transportation technologies, you know, the critique goes at least is that that variation is disappearing.
0:43:00 And by the way, you know, the good news is if you go to any of these places now, the good news is it’s got all the same restaurants, right?
0:43:02 Like, you know, hey, there’s Chili’s, right?
0:43:03 Like, you know, it’s like, it’s like all the same stuff.
0:43:09 You know, there’s Walmart, you know, and the kids are listening to things, you know, and by the way, the music, the kids are listening to the exact same music, right?
0:43:09 Because they can.
0:43:11 I mean, they’re playing the exact same video games and so forth.
0:43:24 And so the argument basically goes that if we interconnect the world with technology that makes it possible for everybody to share everything all the time, then basically all variation, does that maximize creativity?
0:43:30 Because now you get a maximum amount of intermixing and you get a maximum amount of like these formation of these micro communities.
0:43:34 You get like a maximum amount of unearthing of all the ideas in the collective unconscious and so forth.
0:43:37 Like, do you get that or do you get the opposite of that?
0:43:40 Do you get actually a sort of a great kind of washing out of distinction?
0:43:43 Does everything become the same?
0:43:44 Everything becomes bland.
0:43:47 Basically, you know, you end up with a global monoculture.
0:43:58 Yeah, it feels like the monoculture is what’s happening and you have to go further into more remote places to find something interesting to inspire something new.
0:44:05 I like to experience different places in the world where I get to see something that I wouldn’t see every day.
0:44:15 If I go to a city and it has the same restaurants as everywhere else I’ve been, I’m looking for something new and I’m wary of everything becoming one.
0:44:18 Like, who’s to say this way?
0:44:20 Any one way is the best way.
0:44:21 We don’t know.
0:44:22 We don’t know the best way.
0:44:25 Who’s to say democracy is the best?
0:44:26 You know, it’s an experiment.
0:44:27 Who knows?
0:44:28 Like, we don’t know any.
0:44:32 We assume the way we do everything is the best.
0:44:34 But we don’t know any of these things.
0:44:35 Everything is an experiment.
0:44:43 And you can go to a small tribe that’s an unconnected tribe and they’re much happier.
0:44:46 You can go to India where people are much poorer and much happier.
0:44:47 Who’s to say?
0:44:51 You know, who’s winning the game of life?
0:44:53 The people who are happy all day who have nothing?
0:44:54 Maybe if they’re happy.
0:45:01 There’s something very deep culturally in what you might call, like, Anglo-American Protestantism or something or kind of Western modernity.
0:45:05 There’s something very evangelistic at its core, right?
0:45:10 And, you know, 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we would have been a national missionary culture where you’re, you know, trying to spread Christianity to the world.
0:45:14 You know, now it feels like, you know, we know we have a secular version of that.
0:45:16 And we’re trying to, you know, to your point, we’re trying to spread democracy.
0:45:22 We’re trying to spread Western culture, Western ways of doing things, Western concepts, you know, Western concepts on basically every front.
0:45:25 And we basically, and we proselytize.
0:45:28 Like, our societies and our governments, you know, proselytize those things all over the world.
0:45:36 And they do so with, you know, tremendous confidence that they’re, you know, 100% doing the correct thing because they’ve decoded, you know, the singular, you know, morally most correct way to live.
0:45:43 And, you know, you do wonder, it is very hard to argue against that because you sound like you’re defending, you know, retrograde.
0:45:47 It’s not like you’re defending human rights abuses or, you know, you know, all kinds of retrograde behaviors.
0:46:01 But, you know, you do wonder whether there actually should be allowed to be true diversity in the world, which is to say actual societies that actually, you know, basically form themselves as opposed to have external values imposed on them.
0:46:23 Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump’s Middle East speech where it was such a remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living or evolving from their own culture as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive change in foreign policy.
0:46:28 Which somebody reported on, of course, but it is interesting.
0:46:33 It’s arrogant to think that we know what’s best for someone else.
0:46:37 And that goes as far as me telling you how to live.
0:46:40 I can tell you, this is what I’ve tried and this is what’s worked for me.
0:46:42 Do what you want.
0:46:43 Yeah.
0:46:45 People making their own choices is the only way to go.
0:46:49 Well, and you look back, you look back, it either goes back to the half-life of facts.
0:46:52 You could also say like the half-life of moral principles, right, or something like that, right?
0:46:59 Which is, you look, like, this is another, I have a whole, I always keep a way to clear out a dinner party early so I can go home.
0:47:01 And I always have like a running list of ways I can do that.
0:47:07 And one of the ways I can do that is, you know, just play the game of like, all right, we are completely convinced that we have decoded the morally correct way to live.
0:47:11 All right, now let’s examine every prior society that ever had that belief, right?
0:47:14 You know, including our own society 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
0:47:20 And let’s retrospectively, and it’s very natural for us to judge them and basically say, wow, they were morally horrifying.
0:47:23 They believed in all of these, you know, terrible things that we now know were like absolutely awful.
0:47:28 You know, and they were these terrible people as a result, you know, but somehow we’re the people that have it all figured out.
0:47:32 And then I’m like, look, people 50 years from now are going to be sitting, you know, in this restaurant talking about us.
0:47:37 And they’re going to be like, I cannot believe those people, you know, had these deeply immoral beliefs on XYZ.
0:47:44 Yeah, let’s get rid of the Rick Rubin statue now, despite him being a mean.
0:47:51 This belief is that we don’t even know what’s right for us, much less what else.
0:47:54 We’re trying to figure it out.
0:47:57 And staying humble seems like the best approach.
0:48:03 Any arrogant approach of thinking, you know, what’s best for someone else is probably not a great idea.
0:48:23 So I’m going to try to workshop a theory that I’d like you guys to read, team, because my sense is that there’s a somewhat pessimistic view that you described, Rick, that, you know, there’s this homogenization of culture, partly imposed on us by experts going, hey, here’s what’s good for you.
0:48:24 I’m an expert in this domain.
0:48:26 Let me tell you what’s good for you.
0:48:45 What is quite novel about AI is not only that it’s a sort of democratizer, like you said, but as I watch you use it, as I watch Mark, you know, start writing scripts that he puts online, as I watch Ben use AI to do a bunch of stuff inside the firm.
0:48:56 And as I watch Eric, who’s a prolific podcast creator, you know, use AI in creating podcasts, what seems to emerge for me is that when you, it’s also a ceiling razor, right?
0:49:11 In that when you put AI in the hands of a master craftsman from one domain and let them expand to a new domain, it raises the bar in what they can create because you’re no longer trapped by the expert of that prior domain to give you more and more of the same stuff.
0:49:19 Right. So you’ve created, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re, the world thinks of you as a prolific musician, but you’ve just created a piece of software.
0:49:24 Right. And, and you’ve, you’ve transcended one domain to the other.
0:49:31 And, and I find there are these moments where, especially when I watch folks who are at the top of one creative discipline use AI.
0:49:39 We, a few months ago, we were watching, we were introducing Marty Scorsese to this, this image model that one of the founders we work with had trained.
0:49:54 And Marty was prompting, you know, the, the camera, the virtual camera, the AI to create images in a completely different way than what we, we view than, than what traditional sort of what we’d call, you know, vibe creators do.
0:49:58 Right. There’s people who couldn’t create images before who use tools like MidJourney and so on for the first time.
0:50:00 And there, that’s great. That is democratizing access.
0:50:16 But then when you put in a really sophisticated piece of technology, like an image model in the hands of a, someone who’s actually a craftsman or what we’d call a professional, it turns out they, it raises the ceiling of what they can create because they use it in different ways than, than someone who’s using it for the first time.
0:50:28 So is, is, is, am I being, am I drinking too much Kool-Aid when I, when, when, when, you know, Eric, I, I look at you and say, you, you were, you were an investor, you were a phenomenal angel investor who then became a prolific podcaster.
0:50:39 And your podcasts, like when I used to hear, when I would listen to you talking about venture capital, it was completely different from a podcast expert, a media expert, a talking head on TV, talking about our industry.
0:50:47 Right. So is, is, are we entering an area where we don’t need experts because AI essentially raises the bar.
0:50:58 It doesn’t just democratize, it doesn’t just lower the floor, you know, and, and decrease the barrier to entry, but it increases the quality of the kinds of content that someone who’s a master in one domain can create in another one.
0:51:08 Absolutely. It, it always seems like the people who are creative, who see the world in a creative way can apply it to different things.
0:51:21 We see it over and over again. So it’s in that, in that way, it allows people, as I said, anyone who is, who thinks of themselves as an artist now has a new tool at their disposal that wasn’t there before.
0:51:28 And it allows them to try things that would have, would have been impossible to mock up.
0:51:32 So, and I would say our overall conversation is negative at all.
0:51:47 If anything, I think we’re talking more about the human intervention in AI in making it more human, as opposed to letting the AI be the smartest version of itself in going past what humans do.
0:51:58 And in like in the, like in the AlphaGo story, the reason the AlphaGo, uh, AI was able to beat the grandmaster wasn’t because it was doing what the humans would do.
0:52:01 It did something the humans wouldn’t do.
0:52:09 Now, if humans trained it to only do what the humans would do, the computer wouldn’t have won.
0:52:15 Yeah. It was training it actually playing another version of itself.
0:52:22 Now, if we’re, as humans, training AI to be more human, we’re limiting it.
0:52:27 The reason the AI was able to beat the grandmaster was because it did its computer thing.
0:52:30 It did the move that no human would do.
0:52:46 When the, when the, when the AI made the move, the, the unthinkable move, the grandmaster got up and left the, left the room and the announcers, uh, the commentators of the match said, uh, it, it made a mistake.
0:52:54 The computer made a mistake and it made a mistake because it did something that no human would do, but it didn’t do it because it was not allowed to do it.
0:52:58 It was within the rules of the game, but it was not in the culture to do it.
0:53:11 So, you know, one of the emerging patterns in the vibe coding space as a result of what you’re describing is that often folks who start using a tool realize that just there’s a craft to using it.
0:53:17 Like you said, there’s a human intervention that, that when you elicit the model in different ways, you get higher quality things.
0:53:24 So with cursor, for example, early on, people would tell the, the, the composer mode, Hey, please go build me a website.
0:53:35 And then what evolved was a craft of prompting that said, actually, you know, you’ve got to start by talking to the model by asking it to think like a product manager and architect, you know, planning out the entire creation.
0:53:39 And then the next step is let’s talk about the, the data schema, right.
0:54:01 And, and sort of deconstructing the process of creating a piece of software into its atomic units, and then vibe prompting it to do that in a, in a different way than, than might be intuitive as, as you got into the way of code from the beginning of when you started working on the book to now, what’s changed about the way you, you as a human intervene in the creation process.
0:54:09 What, what, what’s changed about the way you prompt it today, you would prompt a model to create something versus, you know, when you started working on it originally?
0:54:12 I’m, I’m not using AI and I’m not prompting.
0:54:14 That’s a surprise.
0:54:15 Same, how did you create it then?
0:54:17 The old fashioned way.
0:54:38 I, I had a dozen or more translations of the DAO and I read them and I, uh, tried to see what the message, the universal message between the different translations was saying and say it in a way that it related to vibe coding.
0:54:57 So, so this I find is quite interesting, right, is, it’s very hard for you to describe the process as being any, any different than what you usually do, which is you just, you asked it to, there’s some latent space in your mind that you, you, you were prompting your own mind to, to produce this.
0:55:01 And so in your mind, the process was no different than with AI than without it.
0:55:17 No, the only difference is instead of maybe asking an engineer to mock up something for me, I might ask the computer to mock it up for me, but it would be the same process of asking for different iterations, comparing them, trying to get it down to two that I like.
0:55:35 And then between the two, understanding the strengths of each, and then often taking from both and putting them together and seeing what that does and being open to being wrong, like setting out on a path to create something and seeing this thing that I was excited about creating is not very good.
0:55:41 But through that, through that experiment, I learned, there’s this other thing I wasn’t looking for.
0:55:43 That’s really interesting.
0:55:44 The most interesting thing about it.
0:55:48 And it’s been that way, my whole career of, of working on things.
0:55:50 When I, I’ll tell you a story.
0:55:56 When I started working with Johnny Cash, we sat in my living room and he played me songs on an acoustic guitar.
0:56:03 And that was the way that we got to know each other was understanding each other musically through demonstrating songs.
0:56:11 But I didn’t think that the record that we made was going to be an acoustic record of him playing songs on his guitar and singing them.
0:56:21 It ended up being that, but that was not the idea, that we were just modeling, we were looking for songs and seeing what songs sounded believable when he sang them.
0:56:31 And he would sing these songs that he sang in childhood that he had never recorded, or songs that he liked growing up, or songs that he liked over the course of his life.
0:56:33 And that was how I got to know him.
0:56:38 And then we would go into a studio with musicians and I, to make the proper recording.
0:56:50 And I realized very quickly, those recordings, those experiments, and we did many of them, weren’t as interesting as the original sitting in the living room, him playing me the songs.
0:57:00 And so it revealed, the process revealed itself, that the most interesting thing was the thing we started with that we didn’t think was the thing we were making.
0:57:05 And it’s, again, it’s always like that you may have an idea of what something’s going to be.
0:57:19 You start that process, and then either you find an experiment along the way that’s better, or a mistake happens and you realize, hmm, we weren’t intending for that to happen at all.
0:57:23 But it’s more interesting than all the things that we thought were going to be good.
0:57:33 And being open, instead of deciding what’s going to be good, we’re paying attention to see what’s actually good.
0:57:38 And it’s not intellectual at all.
0:57:40 It’s not, we don’t think it up.
0:57:42 We allow it to exist.
0:57:53 And we’re, we do experiments, and we do iterations, and we try a lot of things, and then it shows us, it tells us what it wants to be.
0:58:02 And did you, when you went through that process with Johnny Cash, did you, did you both come to the conclusion at the same time?
0:58:13 Or was one of you ahead of the other and say, hey, this, just playing the guitar worked much better than getting in the studio, or like, how did that happen?
0:58:29 I had the experience of listening to the, the quote unquote demos, and thinking, after we had done, I think, three different sessions with three different sets of musicians, quit the best musicians in the world.
0:58:36 And they were interesting, the things that came out of those, but still those living room recordings were the most compelling to me.
0:58:39 And I said, I just said to Johnny, he’s like, this is most interesting to me.
0:58:41 When I listen to it, what do you think?
0:58:44 And he said, well, I always wanted to make an album like that.
0:58:44 I just was afraid.
0:58:45 I never did.
0:58:48 But it was always a dream to do it.
0:58:57 And then the, it allowed him to do something that he always wanted to do, but was afraid to do.
0:59:00 It was so, uh, unusual.
0:59:03 What, sorry, why was he afraid, why was he afraid to do it?
0:59:04 What was this here?
0:59:18 He was, he was, he was training, how to make a hit record, you know, and that 50 years of trying to make a hit record and getting, and you, it’s not uncommon for an artist, a commercial artist,
0:59:26 to get lost in the expectation of what they’re, what they think they’re supposed to do, what’s expected from them.
0:59:27 Right.
0:59:37 Sort of break that expectation of what people want, what people are expecting, and what the business around me is expecting,
0:59:45 and get to something that’s so personal that it feels almost more like a diary entry than something for the public.
0:59:48 Uh, it’s, it’s a scary idea.
0:59:52 It’s, it’s, it’s breaking down a wall of like, it’s not a facade.
0:59:54 It’s not the main stage.
0:59:56 It’s much more personal.
0:59:58 Yeah.
1:00:06 Mark, Ben, Eric, you guys have been angel investors in like the earliest days of when a founder is describing something that they want to create.
1:00:22 You know, it, it, it, it sounds, do you think it’s similar to what Rick is describing when you have a great artist in front of you, like Johnny Cash or somebody, you know, a founder whose canvas is maybe creating a piece of technology and they’re scared to go somewhere just because they might think the world’s not ready for it.
1:00:24 Investors won’t like it.
1:00:25 The market’s, there’s no willingness to pay.
1:00:26 There’s no product market fit.
1:00:28 Am I crazy?
1:00:30 Or is there an analogy here, which is quite similar?
1:00:47 Well, I think the analogy, it’s a little different, but I think the thing that’s the same is it’s always very dangerous when you get the feeling the entrepreneur is telling you something that you want to hear, but they don’t believe.
1:00:55 So when that kind of distance comes in, you know, it very reliably is not going to work.
1:01:06 So, you know, one of the things that, that, that Mark and I used to do a lot in the early days was basically try and convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted.
1:01:19 And then if they did that, we would not invest because they, they didn’t, you know, they’re coming in with their beliefs, but the, you know, they want to tacked over to the market and that’s false.
1:01:32 I mean, it’s just a false idea because like, if you’re truly going to have a breakthrough, you have to kind of get to something that the world doesn’t understand that, that, that you see.
1:01:49 And like, if we can see it, you know, like that, it’s not a breakthrough or if we see something in your idea, you know, in that way where we’re just trying to push you into something as opposed to helping you notice something, then that’s, I think that is very analogous.
1:02:05 Like, do you, do you think for yourself, you know, are you deep enough into your idea or are you kind of connected to it in that way or are you just influenced by whatever you think the world wants you to be?
1:02:16 So relationship between art and audience, and of course the, you know, people, people in the art world, music world have struggled with this for a very long time, which is I, I create my truly individualized art and the audience doesn’t like it, doesn’t want it.
1:02:20 Like, you know, is it, was it, was it the right art to create?
1:02:21 Was it still good art?
1:02:23 You know, does this, does art require an audience?
1:02:31 And, and to your point, Rick, like, you know, in the abstract, you could maybe as an artist, you know, tell yourself that, you know, if I create art and nobody likes it and nobody buys it, that it’s still my art.
1:02:34 But, but art is a commercial enterprise, right?
1:02:40 If somebody is going to make their living as an artist, if they’re going to, if they really want to reach people and they really want to change culture and have an impact on the world, right?
1:02:43 The audience does at some point need to, need to take it up.
1:02:53 And so there’s, there’s some, there’s, you know, there’s some sort of deep, I think, underlying relationship that in part is just commercial interest, but also is like for art to really take it needs an audience.
1:03:01 You know, I’ll come back, I’ll let you comment on that in a second, but like startups, we think about this a lot, which is like, okay, for a startup to do its thing, to bring a new technology to market,
1:03:06 or to realize a vision of a founder, like it’s a complete waste of time if the market never wants it, right?
1:03:09 Because then you just have a prototype that sits on a shelf somewhere and like, you know, nothing has ever happened.
1:03:19 And so it’s like, there is a synergistic feedback loop there, there, there, there, there is some sort of concordance that needs to happen between the creator and the audience.
1:03:21 Like the audience does need to buy in.
1:03:28 A lot of what we think about in startup world is the legitimate startup ideas may sound like, you know, they’re, you know, kind of crazy.
1:03:37 But, you know, when they succeed, they succeed because they, they, they provide something that the customer base, you know, never realized they wanted.
1:03:39 But when they see it, they’re like, oh, wow, that’s fantastic.
1:03:39 I want that.
1:03:40 Right.
1:03:51 And so the way I would describe what Ben said is the startup founders that are overly trying to appeal to what they believe the audience wants can get themselves confused and can end up with something the audience actually doesn’t want.
1:03:58 But if they get to the true underlying idea, they get to something truly, you know, original and creative, then they unlock something in the, in the, in the customer base.
1:04:00 The customer base didn’t know that it wanted it.
1:04:02 Would you describe the same thing?
1:04:04 Does the same thing happen in music?
1:04:10 Is that what happens or more generally, like what is the nature of the relationship between the, the, the, the, the, the artist and the, and the audience?
1:04:18 I would say the best artists tune into what they feel and they present that.
1:04:22 And the ones who connect are the ones where the audience feels what the artist feels.
1:04:31 If the artist is changing what they do to try to get the audience, it undermines the whole thing.
1:04:38 It’s, it’s the same as, uh, you guys asking, uh, a startup to change what they, they do for the market.
1:04:39 It’s same thing.
1:04:45 The best always comes when the artist is being true to themselves, doing their best work.
1:04:52 And that means not every artist succeeds, but the ones who succeed are the ones where that, where they’re true to themselves.
1:04:56 And the thing that they’re doing that’s true to themselves connects with the audience.
1:04:57 And it may be a while.
1:05:06 I interviewed Richard Prince recently, the fine artist, and he was an unsuccessful artist living in New York City for 20 years.
1:05:12 And then something happened where someone bought some of his paintings for, I think, $50.
1:05:23 And now, I don’t know, 20 years after that, his, uh, re-photography, it’s called, might sell it off for $60 million.
1:05:28 And, but for, for 20 years, no one bought a, one piece, no one bought one piece of his art.
1:05:29 Yeah.
1:05:30 Yeah.
1:05:33 And it’s, it, it happens when it happens.
1:05:35 He always stayed true to what he was doing.
1:05:43 And then all of a sudden, people came around, Van Gogh, I don’t think ever sold a painting during his lifetime.
1:05:45 But he was true to himself.
1:05:48 And now, we go to a museum and we get to see Van Gogh.
1:05:57 So, the, the market is, it’s like a secondary aspect where sometimes it catches on, sometimes it doesn’t.
1:06:03 And I would say, maybe some of the greatest artists who, who ever existed, we’ve never seen, we’ve never seen their work.
1:06:12 Because it’s a piece of that puzzle, which is the ability to live in the world and promote their work and show their work.
1:06:15 Like some, there are some great musicians who are homeless.
1:06:21 They don’t have what it takes to be able to go on a 300-day tour.
1:06:27 It’s a grueling, being a professional musician is a grueling life.
1:06:34 So, you can be super talented, but if you don’t have the work ethic side of it down, then that’s not going to work either.
1:06:52 It’s both the, the talent, the inspiration, the stars aligning, and the ability to want to break through the walls that you need to break through in these competitive fields.
1:06:55 All of those things have to come together.
1:06:57 And, and a lot of it’s out of our control.
1:07:05 You know, the, the parts that are in our control is, we can work hard, we can show up, we could do our best and be willing to do whatever it takes for it to work.
1:07:07 But that still doesn’t guarantee that it works.
1:07:22 So, there’s a thing in music, tell me if this is true, there’s a sort of cliche in music, which is every artist’s first album, first hit album is the result of, you know, 20 years of, you know, artistic creativity and, you know, evolution and original thinking and new ideas and new styles.
1:07:26 And, you know, kind of the, you know, the thing that makes them, you know, kind of break through, you know, some new thing.
1:07:27 Like, that’s album number one.
1:07:30 And then album number two is always about life on the road.
1:07:32 It’s often the case.
1:07:35 Right, because all of a sudden, to your point, like, that is their life.
1:07:52 It’s also possible that an artist has had a hard life and then found success and their life changes and now they live in luxury and they can’t tap into that energy that, that, what they were struggling against, the struggle was their art and now they’re not struggling anymore.
1:07:56 Let’s take everything that you guys have said on this, on these topics as true.
1:07:58 Let’s just assume this is all correct, which I think it is.
1:08:08 Then the advice that gets applied, you know, and you hear this a lot in startup world, the advice gets applied is, you know, follow your passion, you know, you know, you know, screw the doubters.
1:08:09 The doubters are wrong.
1:08:13 Don’t market test things, you know, don’t worry about the audience.
1:08:14 Don’t worry about the market.
1:08:17 Like, just do the thing that you think you’re on planet Earth to do.
1:08:24 You could argue that that’s good advice because it gets people down this path, you know, like Rick, of like what you do with artists to kind of discovering authenticity.
1:08:39 You could also argue, though, there’s like a degenerate version of that advice, which basically is like just be narcissistic, just be narcissistic, just be completely self-absorbed and, you know, just do things for yourself and, you know, just like completely disregard the entire concept of an audience.
1:08:53 Like, like what’s the dividing line when sort of advice that derives from these ideas is actually like good advice versus at what point is it just actually encouraging people to become insufferable and sort of to unplug from the things that they would need to do to actually find an audience?
1:09:01 I believe that the audience comes last and the artist should be true to themselves and that ultimately is in service to the audience.
1:09:06 The audience is best served when they get the real version of you.
1:09:14 If you start watering down the real version of you to do what you feel they want, it’s a recipe for disaster.
1:09:25 But that said, some of the best, like in movies, like some of the best directors do extensive, like they will do testing, like, you know, they’ll make the movie, they will test it, they will take the audience feedback because, you know, because it just turns out they lose.
1:09:30 Like when they see the audience react to what they’ve, what they’ve made, they realize things about it that causes them to improve it.
1:09:38 Like, is that a legit, like I was going to say, so is that a legitimate, like, what’s the line between that and, and, and, and what, what you’re trying to get them to not do?
1:09:47 Well, sometimes you’ll have a director show, show a movie to an audience and realize problems with it and work on them.
1:09:54 And there are other times that they’ll show a movie to an audience and the audience hates it and knows movies will want to be great hits.
1:09:57 So it’s, there is no hard and fast rule.
1:09:59 It’s like, did they show it to the right audience?
1:10:01 Not everything is for everybody.
1:10:02 That’s another part of it.
1:10:07 It’s like, how do you get to the audience that’s the right audience for the thing that you’re making?
1:10:08 There’s a famous story.
1:10:10 There was one more thing.
1:10:12 So there’s a famous story from the making of Blazing Saddles.
1:10:14 And I don’t know if it’s true, but if it’s not, it should be.
1:10:19 Which is Mel Brooks made Blazing Saddles and he screened it for the executives, I think at Warner Brothers.
1:10:22 And it was like the, the, the, nobody laughed.
1:10:24 They sat there in stunned silence.
1:10:25 They were completely horrified.
1:10:28 And like, they were just like, this thing is a train wreck.
1:10:28 Like, this is horrible.
1:10:35 And then they did a follow-up screening with the assistants and the secretaries and who just like were howling with laughter the entire way through.
1:10:47 And so, yeah, now, you know, now the, I guess maybe the claim or the, the claim or the critique on this would be, yes, if you’re Mel Brooks and you’ve made Blazing Saddles, it’s fine to have test screenings in which nobody laughs.
1:10:54 But like, you know, your median filmmaker who does that is probably, has probably actually really, truly shit the bed.
1:10:57 But how do you know, again, how do you know?
1:10:57 How do you know?
1:10:58 Yeah.
1:11:05 So, so I’ve got, I’ve got a, I’ve got a somewhat refined answer to your question mark.
1:11:11 So there is a, there was a band that had a great name called Soul to Soul.
1:11:16 And the reason it was a great name is because that’s kind of what music is from my soul to your soul.
1:11:24 And so as an artist, if it doesn’t come from your soul or as an entrepreneur, it’s never going to work.
1:11:38 Now there may be an alignment thing to getting it exactly to land, but if you compromise the original thing, then you’re just a wreck.
1:11:47 And actually in, so in entrepreneur world, like we saw this with Databricks where like they had a very clear vision of what they were going to be.
1:12:01 And the audience wanted it on premise and they refused to do it because it was so contrary to their vision, but they still, you know, they still had to do a lot of work to understand the customer needs over time.
1:12:06 But like the core, core, core idea they had was like, it had to be in the cloud.
1:12:20 And I think that, you know, when you compromise the core thing in, in kind of entrepreneurship at art, which is like, this is the thing that I really, really feel then, then it’s always going to be bad.
1:12:25 Like there’s no way to make that good after the fact by listening to feedback.
1:12:34 But Ben, I, the tension I find there, let’s say I’m, I’m going to channel being a, my, my dark founder days, you know, when I was, you’re in the middle of the idea maze.
1:12:47 You’ve got a, you’ve got something that you believe the world needs, but you read Mark’s product market fit, you know, definition and you stare at it in tears because it’s, it’s not resonating, right?
1:12:50 You’ve put, you’ve put out what you think the world needs, but it’s not resonating.
1:12:58 Is the answer to reconcile what Rick is saying and what you’re saying, which, which is you, you can’t compromise what matters.
1:13:10 And yet, you know, or reconcile what Mark was saying is you’ve got to, when you’re building for a customer, you’ve, you’ve got to change everything about it before you have product market fit until you find it.
1:13:17 Is the answer that you just have to care really authentically about a type of person you want to serve and then exceed their expectations.
1:13:24 And what’s authentic and true is that you care deeply about some particular person in the world who you want to serve because your job is, is to build a product or service.
1:13:39 Or in the case of a musician to, to, to serve humanity by, by evoking a feeling or, or, or, or helping someone when, when they listen to your hip hop record to lift them up and give them the, the pep they need to go about their day.
1:13:43 Is the answer that you have to be in service of somebody else to ultimately serve yourself?
1:13:50 I can say that it’s, it’s so simple that you’re serving people like you.
1:13:51 You are the audience.
1:13:54 You’re making your favorite thing.
1:13:55 You’re in love with it.
1:14:00 And then other people who like the things you like will like it.
1:14:03 Thing other than that is some sort of mind reading.
1:14:06 It’s some sort of like fiction.
1:14:10 You can’t know what anyone else is going to think or like, or do.
1:14:14 If you taste some food and you love it, you’re excited.
1:14:16 You guys got to taste this.
1:14:17 It’s so good.
1:14:21 And you will either like it or not, but there’s no better judge.
1:14:26 I can’t, I can’t taste food and say, this tastes terrible to me, but I think you’re really going to love it.
1:14:27 It’s impossible.
1:14:28 It’s impossible way to live.
1:14:29 Right.
1:14:30 You know, it’s funny.
1:14:34 We don’t really have a word for, we don’t really have a positive word for narcissism.
1:14:35 Yeah.
1:14:39 Or solipsism is the other, you know, solipsism is a self-absorption, like self-absorption.
1:14:40 Self-knowledge.
1:14:43 No, no, no one’s self.
1:14:43 To know one’s self.
1:14:44 Right.
1:14:44 Yeah.
1:14:46 Which is a very deep thing.
1:14:51 It’s an extremely deep concept that takes you a lifetime to do sometimes, you know.
1:14:52 Yeah.
1:14:53 But, but you’re right.
1:14:56 It is generally found upon by society.
1:14:59 Ben, it seems like that’s the future of education.
1:15:03 If, if expertise matters less and less, what matters more and more is taste and being in
1:15:05 touch with yourself and, and this kind of self-knowledge.
1:15:10 And so how do we think about that, Rick, in terms of sort of the future of education in
1:15:15 a world where, where, you know, the skills that you have, i.e. sort of the lack of skills in
1:15:18 certain areas, but, but a high regard of taste is, is just more important.
1:15:19 Yeah.
1:15:24 It seems like taste and curiosity and open-mindedness is where it’s at.
1:15:28 And, and that’s what, um, I don’t know.
1:15:33 I have, uh, I don’t, I don’t remember ever learning anything in school that was helpful
1:15:34 to me at any point in my life.
1:15:37 You and Mark have that in common.
1:15:45 My takeaway is basically that you’re saying we’ve got to vibe with ourselves when using
1:15:50 these tools and watching and reading the way of code is basically a window into watching
1:15:54 how you, Rick, vibed with yourself in the creation of this.
1:16:00 It’s a, again, a 3000 year old manual on how to vibe with yourself.
1:16:01 That’s what it is.

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