Dr. Peter Attia on How to Increase Creativity and Prevent YouTube Burnout

25:58Can we make it 20 the next week, 30 the next week? Well, at some point it's actually going to become something that you've just accepted. Like I work around this. Cause remember work expands to fill available time. Never forget that work expands to fill available time. So don't ever act like I just need more time to go and do this thing. No, you to do this thing and then the work has to fit around it. Wait, say that again. Work expands to available time. Work expands to fill available time. To fill available time. Yeah. Wow. That's really interesting. Yeah. It's either, that's either Peter's principle or Parkinson's principle.

26:29I can't remember. It's one of those two. But it's a well-known principle, right? Which is if you give a person a task and give them six hours or give a person a task and give them four hours, it's always going to take six hours or four hours. There's no scenario by which work somehow gets compressed. It will always, it's like a gas. It always fills the room it's in. So that feels like the opposite of working out for me. Like if I have available time, it's not filled with. That's my point. So you have to take, you have to put the workout in it because it's just going to compress the amount of time you're working anyway.

27:00So that note actually hits me in a really interesting way of, it's very hard for me to fill available time with anything else. Like I am very committed to exercise. That's something I've been committed to since I was young. So that's like a non-negotiable for me. But in any other time, I basically constantly fill it with work. And the thing that I struggle with with our work and being an entrepreneur is that there is an unlimited amount of work. There's always an opportunity. I think it was one of our friends, Eric, who was there in January as well. but he said, we're only capped by our willingness to work as entrepreneurs and YouTube creators, right?

27:45Like as YouTube creators, this ever expanding environment of the internet where it's like, we always could be doing something to progress our careers. That's the thing I struggle with the most of like, how do I set those boundaries around that thing? Because I'm just, I just am the guy who wants to, if I have a moment, I'm going to open up my laptop and go, what can I progress right now? Yeah. And look, I don't want to be the pot calling the kettle black because I'm an entrepreneur as well. I'm, like I said, I kind of have like four or five different businesses I'm running. So there's never a minute when one of them is not in desperate need of my attention.

28:27But because I am completely and intimately aware of this principle that work expands to fill available time, I just, I know that that's exactly what's going to happen if I'm not deliberate. So then what I have to say is, what are my other priorities? What are the things that I can't let slip? And for me, that list is different than what it might be for you or what it might be for you, and that's okay. But I know what my list is, right? So for me, exercise can't slip, time with my kids can't slip time with my wife can't slip um does it flex at some points it does like the past week has been brutal the next two weeks are going to be brutal um it means i'm not gonna you know i actually didn't have date night with my wife this week which is unusual we always have one night to go out um you know i only got to see one of my kids games or practices i'd like to see two you You know, like there are certain things that, oh, they got squeezed.

29:25But I have a pretty clear sense during the week of what has to get done. And those things are immovable. Because if they're not, if I try to put them in after the fact, they're not going to happen. So what is it? So if I put those immovable objects in place, then it's not the end of the world if a little extra work creeps in. Right? Because I've already taken care of my foundational stuff. So your foundational stuff is going to change. Like you guys don't have kids yet. When you have kids, you will have more foundational things that are going to matter to you. Someone listening to us might be single.

30:01That's great. So they have fewer foundational things. They don't have a relationship they need to tend to. You know, maybe at some point your parents are so old that you actually need to put time into taking care of your parents, which is probably something the three of us don't have to do any of today. So you see what I mean? You have to be somewhat malleable in this, but the framework is understand what the non-negotiables are and account for those first. Now, then there's also strategies for how to do that. I never exercise late in the day. Do you know why? It's way too easy for me to kick it down the road.

30:35If I say I'm going to do my workout from 4 to 6 p.m., there's always an overflow of a call that didn't quite get done. There's always a chance that my kid is going to want to go and hit baseballs. and honestly, I'm going to be really struggling between, do I want, you know, of course I want to go hit baseballs with my son, but I got to work out. Okay, what am I going to do? But by throwing that, for me, throwing those workouts in the morning, there's always a time when it's set to get done and, you know, shy of a ridiculous crisis, it's going to get done. And by ridiculous crisis, I mean something that's only going to happen like once every six months.

31:07Like it's not, this isn't like, oh, it's on the weekly. I'm going to miss that. So, you know, having a standing date night with your wife, where it's just, it's on the calendar and it's like, you're not gonna break that reservation three hours ahead of time because you wanna keep working. It's there, it's already there, it's planned. I think that's actually extremely important is like the standing frameworks. I've noticed that with friendships that as you get older and as you're being an entrepreneur, it's really easy to let friendships and social kind of get pushed to the side. But if you create frameworks where it's like every Wednesday morning we meet and do this workout class together and have breakfast after, which I have with two of my friends.

31:49You got to drag this friend with you. Yeah, that's true. Good luck. But even if we cancel it, you have to take an action to cancel it rather than having it be standing, right? And the other thing I've been thinking about is we've been doing this career for 13 years together. I think about the factors that we've been collaborating with in each of the chapters of our career. Like in our early 20s, the biggest factor was kind of this drive for validation from others, from ourselves, this like, we wanted to make something out of ourselves, right? And that's a collaborative factor in the early stages of this career of being YouTubers.

32:26As you get older, like now we're collaborating with the fact that we have wives and we want to spend time with our wives. We're collaborating with all these other factors and that'll change, continue to change over time. And that's the thing I have been thinking about quite a bit of, you know, obviously you study longevity. And I thought about that coming into this conversation around like, I want to do this career for a long time, but I'm going to have to be very aware of the different factors that we are collaborating with if I want to do this for the next couple decades. So I was, I wanted to get into that subject matter of longevity, how you define that and then dive into some of the factors of it.

33:06And I assume you mean not physical longevity, but career longevity? I guess I tie those two together. I think like, and you tell me if you do or don't, but we had a conversation with an executive one time who called himself a work athlete. And that was the first time I took a step back and I was like, oh, my physical and mental health, similar to an athlete, are directly correlated to my success in my career as a creator. And so I guess when I heard you talk about longevity, I thought about that being directly correlated to my career longevity. Yeah, I think about it as, if I get up before one of these interviews, I get up early, I work out, I eat right, I will have a better interview.

33:48I will also be happier when I get home with my partner. Like they're so tied together. I'll work better with Samir because I feel better about myself. Yeah, so I guess for me personally, I take that part for granted because it's such a high priority regardless of what I'm doing. In other words, regardless of where I am in my career, because I've had a lot of careers, right? So my life has been a bizarre path that has made no sense. Like, you know how they say, like all the dots connect in retrospect? Yeah. Even in retrospect, it's kind of hard to draw the dots. I was actually listening to you on Rogan talk about like the mortgage crisis.

34:28Yeah. And I was like, wait, what part of your career was that? Yeah, I can tell you the story, but my point is like, independent of what I'm doing in my career, or if I retired tomorrow, the physical cognitive, like the health part of my longevity would always be a high priority. So I agree with you completely that like, if a person needs any more motivation for taking care of themselves, then the future, which is i want to live as long as i can and be as healthy as i can the present should be motivation enough so what you're really saying is is there a performance benefit in the present from being healthy and the answer is unequivocally yes and to the point of the person you interviewed um we use the term athlete for life you need to be an athlete for life um so life is your sport so how do you train for life that's that's what we think about a lot in our practice I think the harder problem and maybe the one I think more about because I don't take this for granted is will I still be doing this in 10 years and if so what needs to be true with respect to my excitement level for it where because I get bored so easily what what has to be true about what I'm doing for me to want to be doing this in 10 years that's the question I think it's a good That's a great question.

35:49It's a really good prompt. Yeah, I mean, we even, on a more micro level when we're talking with aspiring creators, we'll often tell them, whatever the first version is of your channel or your endeavor, make sure you really care about that community or the value that you're providing and the way that you're doing it, your process. Of course, your process can improve, but if what you're doing works, if you find a way that it works and it succeeds, whatever that process is, whatever that community that you're providing value to, If you want longevity, you're going to be doing some version of that that looks very similar in 10 years, right?

36:23It's a very similar type of thing. Can you define, I really like this. The first thing I wrote down from talking to you is the difference between lifespan and healthspan. And I really liked that distinction. Can you define those two terms? Yeah, lifespan is the easier of the two to understand. It's the how long you live. So it's binary, right? It's you're alive or you're dead. So that's kind of call it death certificate death, right? Healthspan is a little harder to define. But it, I mean, there's a medical definition to it, which is sort of not that helpful, which is the period of time in which you are free of disability and disease.

37:02But I think a better definition is really just around the quality of your physical life, your cognitive life, your emotional life. I think those are kind of the three pillars to it. Now, two of those decline inevitably with age. The physical and cognitive piece declined with age. The emotional piece does not. It's not, it doesn't have to. I mean, it can, but it doesn't need to. So you have these two pieces that are linked to biology and that invariably go down. And then you have one that is not as linked to biology and at least not linked in a declining way and doesn't have to go down. And honestly, if you play your cards right, I think it can go up.

37:42So, and that's not binary, right? That's analog as opposed to digital. And it's also very malleable, right? There's a lot that we have control over there with respect to that. More so than on the lifespan side. By the way, we still have a lot of control on the lifespan side, more than people realize. So genes play a very important role in extreme lifespan. And you talk about people who live to 90 or 100, a lot of that is genetic. but for most of us, even if we're not bestowed with ultra longevity genes, we can still do a lot to reduce the risk of dying, you know, before the age of 80 or something like that.

38:27I thought about that and whether or not this is how it's meant to be thought of, because we think about our career quite a bit. I was writing in my journal after we talked about, okay, there's one version of this of how long can we have this channel last? Like how long can this format, this content that we're creating last? And then that's like the lifespan version of our channel. And then the healthspan version is, and how long will I enjoy doing it? Yeah. Is kind of how I thought about it. Or another way to think of it is how, because it's not directly tied to, but it is quite correlated to the first point is, how long will it continue to provide incredible value to the listeners?

39:09That's good. Yeah. I think that's a really important one. And how you stay on that track without fear. I think fear creeps in quite a bit in this career very quickly. Fear of death of the channel, right? Is it fear of death of the channel or is it fear of decline of the product? I mean, and again, those are linked. Which one's actually coming first? isn't isn't the death of the channel just a consequence of something else going wrong yeah yeah i think it's fear of decline of the product but i and i think a lot of that has um a lot of it is linked to process of creating the product and so i think about that quite a bit of like the question you asked like what has to be true if i want to be doing this in 10 years You know, one thing that has been true about the last 10 years is a lot of the job is a relatively sedentary job.

40:11Meaning like we are sitting and working long hours on either editing or working on pre-production, traveling. Like it's a very hard job, or at least we've experienced it to date for a lot of creators to sink into a healthy routine. Because sometimes when you're experiencing like a creative moment, that's going to take you late into the night and impact your sleep. That's going to then, you know, turn into a morning where you're not going to work out. That's going to turn into the next day where you have to meet this deadline and you're going to sit all day and edit. And so that is some of the stuff that I look at.

40:49And I think as like our fellow creators would be interested in, like how long can we do that? How long can we make some of those trades? And should those happen in sprints or how do we think about that as creatives? Well, I mean, I think it's all relative. And I suppose that the younger you are, the more you can get away with. Like when I did my residency in surgery, that was age 28 to 33. So from ages 28 to 33, I made enormous sacrifices to my health, primarily through how little I slept. And it wasn't by choice, obviously. It was like I didn't have a choice. You were going to sleep. I probably averaged 30 hours of sleep a week for five years.

41:44So it's hard to be healthy when that's going on. Wasn't eating well. You're sort of drinking insurers at the nurse's station. eating whatever crap they have at the hospital. The one thing I made room for was exercise because that was just still something I was going to have to do regardless. But many things in my life got compromised. Now, once I was done with that, I was able to sort of get my life back together. But could I do that again today? Definitely not. I couldn't make that sacrifice again if I had to. 20 years later, that's just not something I could do. So I do worry a little bit about the idea that we're gonna just do this for now, just do this for now, just do this for now, because that's a very slippery slope and you can blink your eyes and wake up tomorrow and it's 10 years from now and you're still doing the same thing.

42:46And I meet a lot of people who have traded their health for wealth and when they realize it, it's a little too late to buy it back. And obviously at some point you can't, right? At some point, you know, take an extreme example, right? If you take a person in the final decade of their life who's got all the money in the world and all the success and all the recognition and every accolade you could have, it doesn't really serve you that well when your health is gone. So I know that's not the same as saying, look, someone who's in their 20s is doing a couple of all-night sprints to get content done.

43:21So I'm not suggesting that one shouldn't do that if that's what's necessary, but I'm suggesting that people take a step back and ask to what end? Where is this actually going? Like, is this really something I can convince myself is just something I got to do a couple times a year? Or is this very quickly going to become something I'm doing every week? If I'm doing it every week, I really have to question some of the assumptions here. Why is this happening? Like, why do I, am I understaffed? Do I not have enough people on my team? Am I not good at planning? What, there has to be a reason that I'm staying, I'm pulling two all-nighters a week to get content done.

44:01And I would kind of dig into the process of why that's happening and what's solvable, what resource can I put after this? Because our most precious resource is time, not money. Time is everything. Money is fungible. Time is not. So if someone's listening right now and they're, you know, the version of myself in my 20s, which is basically editing very late into the night, eating pretzels and chips and not working out and, you know, going out on the weekends sometimes, but really not taking anything seriously when it comes to sleep, nutrition, exercise. How do you rank those three? Sleep, nutrition, exercise.

44:42If someone's going, all right, now I'm going to start to get serious. How do you look at those three? Well, I mean, honestly, all of those things really matter for cognitive work. And that's what you guys do, right? Like you guys aren't getting paid for how strong you are, how fast you can run, how high you can jump. Like that's not what's paying you. You're being paid for the quality of your cognitive processes. These are creative processes, but they're, you know, they're also processes of problem solving and other things that go beyond just creativity. But the point is that the brain has to be sort of well-fueled.

45:22So what do we know about this? Well, we know that sleep deprivation, right? If you take a person and you sleep them six hours a night instead of eight hours a night chronically, you know, that's the equivalent of being legally drunk. Now, you might say, well, that's okay because I work really well when I'm drunk, but I think people would argue they probably don't, right? You're probably taking a hit to the quality of your work if you have a blood alcohol above 0.08. Again, that doesn't mean like you're hammered and you're sloshing around, but it means that you are not at your best. Now, the good news is when you're 25, you're still at the peak of your what's called fluid intelligence, right?

46:03So you have, you're, you're peaking in fluid intelligence. So, you know, memory, processing speed, all of those things. So you might not take that much of a hit. Of course, when you're my age, you will, because I'm long past the peak of my fluid intelligence. I'm now climbing the second peak of crystallized intelligence, which is more judgment experiential based. So for me, like, not sleeping is a non-starter. It just, like it does, it literally doesn't matter how bad the world is crumbling around me. I am not going to let myself have two consecutive nights of six hours of sleep. It does happen on the occasional night.

46:42You know, I've got a 4 a.m. flight, or I mean, a 4 a.m. departure for the airport for a 6 a.m. flight, and I can't get to bed before, you know, 10 o 'clock. Yep, I'm going to only be sleeping five and a half hours that night, and it sucks. I'm looking at him because we have a 4 a.m. departure to the airport tomorrow morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had one yesterday. So it's like, I get it. But that's not going to happen two nights in a row. No way. The price I will pay for that in terms of my quality of work is totally unacceptable. And let's be clear, like I get paid for my brain. No one pays me for how good I look or how bad I look.

47:15No one pays me for how much I can dead hang or how many kettlebell swings. Like nobody cares about any of that stuff. every dollar I get paid is because of what's between my ears. There's no chance I'm compromising that. So that comes down to how much alcohol am I going to let myself drink? How do I manage sleep? How do I manage nutrition? How do I exercise? I mean, exercise and sleep are probably the two greatest nutrients for the brain. So I just can't sacrifice those. So I think even if you come at this through the lens of performance, forget longevity. Who cares, right? When you're 25, what could you possibly care about that is 60 years away?

47:57You don't. And I wouldn't ask you to. It's too abstract. But if you think about it through the lens of performance, to me, that's reason enough. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast for 40 % off.

48:35Terms apply. Yeah. I mean, I think that gets increasingly harder, at least for me, when we go on these long trips. you know, or travel, a lot of that gets challenging. And I'm curious about just with sleep being a non-negotiable, is it okay to utilize sleep supplements? Especially when I travel, like it's harder for me in a new environment the first night to go to bed. Yeah. I mean, I think it absolutely is. I mean, I use sleep, I use things to facilitate sleep when I'm at home in my own bed. Like, yeah, I'm using an eight sleep. I should disclose I'm an advisor to aid sleep. So people know that I have a conflict.

49:15But, you know, very, very concerned with temperature. I use tons of, not tons, three or four supplements that aid with sleep. When I'm traveling long distances, so not in the US, but if I'm off in Europe or I'm in the Middle East or wherever, I am absolutely following a jet lag protocol to make sure my sleep is not disrupted where I'm adding more things to my mix. And so, yes, I've got this down to like a formulaic science around managing sleep. You know, little things like I make sure every gym I stay at, even if I have to spend a little bit more or drive a little bit further, it's got a good gym.

49:49Got it. And by the way, if I'm at a gym, like if I'm at a weird hotel that doesn't have a gym, make sure it's tall enough that it's got steps that I can run up and down the steps for a workout. Like it's little things like that, that you might think, oh, who wants to do all that? Well, I don't know. Do you want to perform or not? Right. Like at some, at some level, you know, people have to accept the fact that nothing you're accomplishing is happening by accident. You're very deliberate about your work, right? You are. There's nothing you're doing that's just, well, we'll just kind of let this, no, no.

50:21Everything you're doing, everything that anyone who's listening to us is doing with respect to their work is incredibly deliberate. So you have to be deliberate about these other factors as well. They don't happen by accident, right? You have to have the right food environment. You have to travel with the right snacks. You have to make the right amount of time to get a meal if that's something you're going to prioritize. You know, picking the right hotel takes more time, get it. But that's being deliberate. Like, you would never shoot a video and just load it without editing it. But that's what many people are doing in their lives.

50:54So why are they, if you did that, your videos would suck. So why is it that people are surprised that if they put no thought into, you know, how they plan meals and exercise and sleep that those things suck. Of course, they're going to suck. So this is directly correlated. We've got some questions from creators that I want to play for you throughout this conversation. But this is pretty correlated to this question from Drew. Hey, Peter, my name is Drew Binsky. I am a travel content creator and always on the move. And I had a question about burnout. So the last three trips I've taken in Iran, China, and India, I've come home super sick.

51:28And I am one to push myself to the limits. But it's been too much. And I usually never get sick. So I was wondering, what can I do to fix that? Is it sleep? I've been averaging four to five hours a night. Is it taking more vitamin supplements? Is it working out in the hotel rooms? Is it taking a break? What kind of things can I do to make sure that I come home feeling excited and energetic and just not sick? Thank you so much for all you do. So I would say just listening to what he said, probably the sleep is the best explanation. If you're at four to five hours a night, your immune system is basically shutting down.

52:02And so it's not at all surprising that he's going to come home and his body's just going to kind of collapse. The other thing that's actually going on there is his, without getting too medical jargony, his glucocorticoids are really ramping up to support the stress that he's under. What was that word? Yeah, so glucocorticoids are the stress hormones that help us cope with chronic stress. So cortisol, you've probably heard of cortisol. So that's kind of like the most important of these hormones. And so these hormones are really important when we're under chronic stress, even acute stress, but especially into this chronic stress where they continue to put more glucose into our circulation to keep our brain functioning.

52:48They ramp up other stress hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline. And what happens a lot of times is someone comes back from a situation like that. And maybe you guys have experienced this and they just completely get sick, right? And I think a lot of things are happening. One is the immune issue that I mentioned with respect to sleep catches up with them. But I think the other thing is their endocrine system sort of downregulates very acutely because it finally gets to turn itself off. So this is a system that's only meant to be on for short periods of time. And then let's just say he's talking about like a seven day whirlwind tour.

53:23He's just had it on for seven straight days. So the minute he comes home, it's like, okay, finally I can shut this off. and it shuts it off, but it overcorrects. And so now he's got none of these glucocorticoids. He's got no energy. His immune system's shut down. So again, what would I say to somebody like that? Well, honestly, he's no different than the CEO who's flying around, you know, the CEO of the Fortune 50 company who's flying, who's got to do like the 10 city tour in seven days. And honestly, what I say to them is, you got to make a trade-off. Do fewer cities or spend more time on the road so that you're not as rushed as you are.

54:02Like those are the only two ways to make this happen, right? So you can either say, fine, I'm going to, in seven days, instead of doing 10 visits, I'm going to do six. And I have a little bit more time each day. But if he says, no, I can't do that. I have to do all 10. And I said, then make it 10 days. But he's like, oh, I can't be away from my family for that long. I was like, yeah. I didn't say this was going to be easy. I'm just telling you, those are your choices, right? What about in terms of recovery? because we're not going to China and the places that Drew is going, but we were in Dallas last week.

54:33We're going to New York tomorrow. And inevitably, when we get back, there is that like, it's always three days of just lower energy, kind of a slump, trying to get back in the habit of working out. What can we do in terms of recovery? Even if we do do a good job, right? Of like spacing things out, getting our sleep. What can we do when we get back in terms of recovery? I mean, I think you just have to, I think you'll generally, if you really scrutinize what's going on, the fact that it's taking you three days to get back tells me something's not fully optimized. He said we, but he meant I, just so you know.

55:06That's not me. That's it. Two days for you. Okay. So I would push on that and try to understand what's really happening when you're in New York. Because it shouldn't take two days for you to recover if you're doing everything right. So my guess is if you are scrutinizing it, you might not be sleeping that well, if you think you are. you're maybe timing your flights not well. I know that obviously you're going to have to leave super early in the morning. So it's like, so the question is, are you able to go to bed early enough tonight that that's not going to be disruptive? And by the way, it's great that you're going to bed or getting up at four because you're getting up at seven New York time.

55:43So that's great. But you have to go to bed tonight at New York time. So if you'd go to bed at 11 o 'clock New York time, it means you actually have to go to bed at eight o 'clock tonight. Well, that's not easy to do if you woke up at eight o 'clock this morning. Sure. So you almost have to start the planning a day before. And that's something I typically do. I don't, for me going to New York is only a two hour time zone. But if I'm going to Europe, my planning for that trip starts a day before. It's the full day before. What time do I go to bed? What time do I wake up? How do I use my workout as a way to exhaust me even more?

56:17And then of course, what supplements am I using to help me sleep on the plane so that I can get into the Europe time zone the second I leave the US? Okay, so you brought up this notion of like, I mean, all of us sitting here get paid for our brain. I think that's a lot of creatives. Actually, it's like a lot of people who work, basically. That's your income driver. That's right. There's a question from our friend Eric that I want to bring up here. All right, this is the second take in case you decide to use this that's more concise. Peter, big fan, question for you. In the creator business, you could replace yourself in a lot of ways.

56:53but the main thing you can replace yourself with is creative. It's the thing that gets every creator where they are. And it all comes down to you at the end of the day. Currently, I basically get creative in completely random spurts, which I think a lot of people could relate to. And I'm wondering if you have any ideas, thoughts, or science on how to optimize creativity or to get into a creative space on command. Thank you. Big fan. I am not sure about getting into a creative space on demand, but I do think that there is a pretty decent body of literature on creativity that suggests you have to create room for it.

57:36So, I don't know if you guys have read Ryan Holiday's book, Stillness is the Key. Yeah. Yep. I love Ryan. Yeah. So, and I would put Stillness as one of the 10 most important books that I've read, right? So, So I love, I mean, I read a lot. But if you forced me to say like, what are the 10 most important books that have kind of shaped how you think about the world and think about life, I would put stillness on that list of 10, I believe. And so what you learn in there is as painful as it is, we have to get comfortable with stillness to sort of come up with really good ideas. And it's very difficult to hit those things on demand.

58:18And there's no shortage of stories of some of the greatest works of creativity coming out of years of frustration and toiling and doing seemingly nothing. So my intuition as someone, again, who is not an expert on this, and truthfully, someone who doesn't consider himself very creative. I mean, probably I am for my field. I'm creative. I don't think I'm creative compared to you and your audience. but I know that some of my greatest ideas generally come to me when I'm doing nothing. Yeah, making space for boredom is so hard right now. Yeah. When you say nothing, what do you mean? What does that look like?

59:02So it means, so I like to ruck, right? So you take, you put a heavy backpack on like a backpack with weights and go for a walk. That's nothing. Well, it's nothing in that I don't have anything stimulating me. I don't have my phone with me. I'm not listening to a podcast. I'm such an information addict that it's very difficult for me to do things without also multitasking and bringing in information. So I'm riding my bike on a stationary trainer three or four days a week while I'm always listening to an audio book or a podcast. So I just kind of make the rucking the exception, which is I'm going to go do this thing and I'm not going to listen to music I'm not going to listen to a podcast.

59:44I'm not going to be on a phone call. I'm just going to walk. And the only thing I can pretty much hear is my heavy breathing with this weight on my back. Sitting in the sauna, same sort of thing, just sort of sitting there. Another opportunity of kind of not doing much. Sometimes it's just if I'm on a plane disciplining myself to close my laptop and just maybe listen to music, which again, doesn't seem like a bad thing to do. But for me, it seems like, oh my God, like I'm not working, I'm not working, I'm not working. This is such an important window of time in which I could be getting work done.

1:00:23But if I'm feeling really tired, and by the way, another sign for me that I'm really working too hard is when I have a lot of tasks switching going on. I'm sure you guys can relate to this, right? So I've got Chrome open. I've got email open. I've got WhatsApp open. I've got iMessage open. And I've got a spreadsheet that I'm building a model in. And I've got a Word doc that I'm writing a memo in. And when I can't stop task switching, I'm like, shut this goddamn thing down. It's broken. You're not thinking anymore. If you cannot stop going back and forth, and I get these dumb thoughts like, oh my God, I got to go read about the latest, like I got to read the latest blog on F1.

1:01:04Let me just go read that really quick. Okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's really good. Okay, let me go back to writing this letter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, you know what? I want to look up this on Wikipedia. Like, I want to really understand, like. I find myself there a lot, which is strange because historically I'm actually really good at focusing. Yeah. Like, I always in college, in high school, and in our career, and that's why I've always edited, because I can lock in and I can sit there. But in the last year or so, I find myself in that position so often. Yeah, and same with me. Like, I think I, if focus was an Olympic sport, I would have been the Michael Phelps of it.

1:01:37I would not. Yeah, no, I am. I consider myself that way too. Like I can, I could go to the library in college and just lock in. Wow. So when I'm not, that's a sign. Shut it down. Shut it all down. Because you're not getting any work done at that point. What do you mean shut it down? Like what do you do? Nothing. Sit there and suffer. Sit there and suffer in silence. Got it. Yep. And let it all work itself out. I mean that. But you're not being productive. You just have to accept the fact when you are task switching between eight things, you are getting nothing done of any substance. So why waste any more time?

1:02:11Go through the purge and then come back. That's scary. It's scary to do that because you feel like it's, the thing that'll make you feel better is getting something done. You know, like I know that experience so intimately, but I also know what it feels like in my body to be there and it's a terrible feeling. So that's a good. Well, again, I mean, this is just a great example. Michael Easter has written about this a lot. Like going back to evolution, like do you know how much evolution made boredom painful? Think about it. Like do you think natural selection wanted you just sitting around twiddling your thumbs looking at the stars?

1:02:52I mean, no way. You were going to get eaten. You were not going to find a mate and you were not going to find food. You had to be thinking about like, okay, where do I need to go? What do I need to do? So boredom is, again, we are very selected for boredom to hurt. The members of our species who liked being bored got eaten or didn't pass their genes on. That's why they're not here. Right? Same with the negativity bias. The people who didn't have negativity bias, they got kicked out of the tribe. They died. We don't have their genes anymore. I mean, natural selection is a remarkable honing tool.

1:03:32Yeah. But again, it's an example of how, you know, it's a two-edged sword. It is good, I think, that boredom hurts because it drives us to do things. It drives us to be innovative. It's just that in the last, probably the last 15 years, we may have flipped over in a world where there's so much stimulation that our ability to dissuade boredom has become actually counterproductive. When it comes to boredom in your career, I want to go back to that question that you were asking yourself about, like, what does my career have to look like so that in 10 years I'm not bored by it? Do you have an answer to that?

1:04:19Yeah, I mean, I think it depends which of my careers, because again, there's like, I have all of these different careers. if you're talking about in the content side of things yeah yeah it's i still have to absolutely love um you know get get joy out of the curiosity that comes from you know because the content i create is is about interviewing people right and um and the reason i started the podcast which has been six uh it's been yes or even a little over six years ago was i just realized like i keep having these conversations with scientists and they're so fascinating. And at the end of the conversation, I always think to myself, oh, I wish others could have heard that.

1:05:00So then I, you know, so it's like, well, this is what I want to do, right? I want to talk about science without dumbing it down, but making it accessible to everybody. And if that stops being enjoyable to me, then I have nothing to do in that regard. And I would be okay saying, well, then this is not what I'm going to do. If not communicating science and medicine, doesn't get me excited, then I shouldn't do it. The thing I really appreciate about your model, and I actually have been thinking about this a lot, is that it's not an ad-backed model, which then, for us, we're an ad-backed model, right?

1:05:34Which means, which in most podcasts - Almost everyone. Which then means performance of episodes is at the height. And that can sometimes be at odds with like enjoyment of conversation. Not always, pretty rarely right now. But as I look on a 10-year window, what I recognized, like my answer to that question is, I think when I look at this, enjoying this in 10 years means that I don't have immense performance pressure. I have pressure to provide value to the audience, but not as much pressure in explosive viewership or listenership. And I think the membership model that you have is actually something that I look at, I'm very inspired by, of where I want to get to.

1:06:18so that that is not a factor in the future for us. Yeah, I am really grateful when we decided in 2019 that, hey, okay, we've done this for six months. People seem to really like it. I gotta cover my cost here. Both my opportunity cost and my actual cost. And you're right. I think at the time, there was only one other person I knew that wasn't doing an ad-based model, which was Sam Harris. Yeah. And you know, Sam and I are very close friends. We talked about it a bunch and it was just kind of a no brainer. I actually never really entertained doing ads. Um, no offense. I just, I struggle with, with podcast advertising models cause I don't, I don't find them genuine, right?

1:07:01Like at least when you're watching TV, the ad is coming from the company that is selling something. So it's like, okay, like you want to buy a Coke? Like Coke has made the ad that just trying to get me to buy Coke. I always find it funny when the podcast person is reading the ad as though they love Coke, which is like, really? Do you really love Coke? Or are they just paying you to say that you love Coke? Like it doesn't make any sense to me. Also for what I do, I just think there's a credibility of, which is different for most people in their podcast. It's not a hit to their credibility to sell an ad.

1:07:32I think in what I do, it would be very destructive to my credibility. But you're absolutely right. It means that I focus all of my energy on like curiosity and and relevance and, and how do I, how do I make something that's great? So if you look like, I'm not trying to interview famous people, right? Which is, that's how you, if you want, if you want to interview famous people, like that's how you're going to kind of grow. But, but the truth of it is the most interesting people in my world are not famous, right? Like even people who have won Nobel prizes, they're not famous outside of their scientific community.

1:08:07So I like the idea that I get to interview people who you will otherwise never figure out who they are. And for two or three hours, I want to expose the listener to as much of their world as possible and how it pertains to the future of our health. Yeah. What has it been like to essentially become famous within your field? Because I would imagine you are essentially, especially within the world of medicine and longevity, famous. How has that felt to you? Yeah, I don't really perceive it to be completely honest with you. And I'm not sure, I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. Although I think if you had said this a year ago, I would have been like, I don't really know.

1:08:51But I mean, yeah, I guess to some extent it is. I think I would describe it as micro fame. Like it's not fame fame, right? Like I know what fame fame is because I see it all the time. And I have many friends who are legit famous where they can't go anywhere. For me, it's like three or four times a day, someone will come up to me in a restaurant or an airport and say, thank you so much for your work. I really love it. Can I get a selfie? And honestly, at that level, it's an honor. It's not an inconvenience. It feels great. And people always say basically the same thing, which is they're thanking me, which I think means a lot to me.

1:09:30So it's a huge honor that people say that kind of stuff. Yeah, they're there for value. It's like, thank you for value. Yes, they're like, thank you for the work you're doing. Not like, look how hot Peter T is. Let me take a selfie with you. Exactly. It's exactly right. Which might happen too. Discount that. It's never happened. But I put ourselves in a similar boat. When people come up, it's generally like, hey, thanks for that show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to ask you about just like the, you know, I think when I was younger, being an entrepreneur was very appealing because my father's an entrepreneur.

1:10:03And it got even increasingly more appealing during the internet age when we saw movies like The Social Network and saw like Mark Zuckerberg, a young kid able to create something, you know. And so like being an entrepreneur became very, very sexy. And I'm looking at my dad in his 70s now. and I'm noticing, I'm very aware of the amount of stress he's endured through his whole life. It's kind of his natural state on a day-to-day is that he wakes up and kind of requires a problem to solve. He really can't, like even now in the space where he doesn't need to solve a problem, he creates problems to solve because that's his natural state.

1:10:47And I'm curious about, as I'm looking at myself, I feel very much like that too. And I'm curious about the impact of chronic stress over long periods of time as an entrepreneur. Where does that net us out? Because he has a lot of health problems too. He's got chronic kidney disease. He's got diabetes. He has a lot of health issues. And I can't help but look at that and go, is that the fate of the amount of stress he's endured in his life and his desire on a day-to-day basis to endure more. Well, it's really hard to say on any one individual's case. You know, it's probably more the case that as a result of the stress or the strategy that's been chosen to manage the stress, that some other things also were compromised, such as his nutrition, his exercise, his sleep, and that maybe the chronic diseases are more the result of the imbalance around those things.

1:11:50Stress is clearly something that our relationship exists with on an inverted U, right? So if this is stress and then this is performance on the y-axis, stress on the x-axis, it's basically an inverted U, right? So really, really low levels of stress do not produce good performance, right? Yeah. If you have no stress, if there's nothing driving you, like what are you doing? Right? So as stress goes up, your performance is actually going to get better. But then, and by the way, it's not a symmetric you, right? And everybody's you is a different shape. So some people have a you that just has a little tick at the top, right?

1:12:29So more and more and more stress leads to better and better, better performance. And then it just kind of ticks down. Other people have a you that like gets better and better and better. And then it very quickly comes down. So you have to kind of know yourself. There's a little bit of know thyself in this analysis. But what you have to figure out is like, what's my optimal level of stress for performance and recognize when am I over that? Right? That's a very important thing is, you know, you have to be able to get sort of internal feedback. So an example is like what we talked about earlier, when I'm task switching like crazy, I'm past my level.

1:13:03I've already gone over the edge. So I have to come back. So that's an example of understanding that. The other thing you want to understand is the shape of your curve is malleable by the other things you put in the system. So take away my sleep, take away my exercise, my curve got way narrower. Make sense? If I don't have a workout in me, I'm going to go over that curve much sooner than if I just had a two-hour workout and a great meal. If my relationships are not good, like if my wife and I have a fight, my curve just got way smaller. My performance is going to deteriorate much sooner. If I had a fight with my daughter, if my kids left for school and they were unhappy and I didn't get to walk them and blah, blah, blah.

1:13:53Life impacts the shape of that curve. So what we really want to do is two things. One, understand the things that we do that stretch that curve out to be its biggest, highest, furthest J apex. And then secondly, learn what the dashboard looks like for when am I tripping over the curve? Yeah, that's really interesting. I love that. Learning when you are tripping over that. My mind immediately obviously went to myself, but also our team and recognizing like, how do you build a healthy workplace environment where everyone has variable levels and everyone came in in the morning with a different. That's right.

1:14:30Everyone's, and by the way, everyone's going to have their own different curve, but then each person's curve is going to be different on a given day based on their life and what they bring in from home. And, you know, I mean, I think, I don't know how much of your team is remote versus in person, but the more remote your team is, which is unfortunately true of me and my team is we're all, you know, located in different places. It makes it just that much harder to sort of figure that out. Because a lot of times you can't pick up on these things, you know, over the phone or over Zoom the way you can pick it up.

1:15:01You can pick up on it a little more kind of around the proverbial water cooler. It's an interesting thing to imagine if everyone had that like visible graph in front of them, right? Like if you were looking at someone and they had that graph and you were recognizing where they were. It would be amazing, like, just to be able to sort of, everybody walks in every day, you see the shape of their curve based on what happened, and you see where they are on the curve. Yeah, I wonder, because, like, creativity happens in teams, right? I think also at the event, at the Spotter Summit that we were at, J.J.

1:15:27Abrams was there, and he was talking about creativity in the context of teams. And, like, when a team gets too big, it's hard to, you know, do creativity by committee. There's, like, a singular artistic voice, and then you need a team to surround to foster that creativity. But in small teams, you also need to really know where is everyone at today. Otherwise, it's not going to be effective. And also that can quickly compound to not collaborating well, right? There's definitely days where there's frustration between team members because someone just has a short fuse, right? And this work is hard.

1:16:01You're doing detail-oriented cuts on extremely long episodes. Pressure of last episode didn't do so well. So now this one has a ton of stakes to it. And so all those dynamics is something that we've been thinking about. I think a lot of creators think about too as you build a creative team. What do you think some of the strategies are? Is it like just open communication around where you're at today? Yeah, I mean, when I think about like the most creative of my teams is obviously the content team. And luckily, I don't know. I mean, I just look at the guy who runs that team. His name is Nick Stenson.

1:16:35You know, I think Nick and I know each other very well. So we've worked together for 10 or 12 years now. So we're very, very close. And we don't have a hard time disagreeing with each other. And the team is small enough that we can push back on each other a lot. Got it. And even though I'm like, quote unquote, the boss, the structure is purely horizontal. so everybody on that team will tell me i'm absolutely full of shit when they think i am like they and sometimes actually it hurts my feelings like sometimes they are so brutal with me that i'm like i'm pissed off like i'm not gonna lie right so but but that's really good like the like there's no sense of we can't tell peter what we think right um and and then on top of that, like we, and I'm sure this is something you guys do as well.

1:17:35Like when we screw up, we're pretty quick to apologize. Like we don't let the sun set on a fight. Sure. Right. So we had a pretty big blow up three or four months ago. Like the biggest blow up we've ever had as a team. It probably happened at 10 o 'clock in the morning. By noon, by 11 o 'clock, I was apologizing before we went for dinner that night. We apologized. We all hugged and made up again. So it's important. I think people need to understand something about disagreements. The damage of a disagreement is not the disagreement. It's in the lack of reconciliation. This is important. You guys will learn this when you have kids.

1:18:14You already know this because you're married. It's not that you shouldn't fight with your wife. It's how do you fight, right? Can you do it without name calling? And how do you reconcile when you're in the wrong? And if you're anything like me, you're going to be in the wrong 90 % of the time. Wives are generally right. if we're being brutally honest. Like 90 % of the time my wife and I have a fight, it's my fault. And so it's not that we had a fight, it's can I reconcile pretty quickly? Can I calm myself down enough to realize I was wrong? Do I have the humility to own it and to apologize earnestly and explain why I'm just, I'm gonna be better next time.

1:18:51And so I think that's true with teams. And I think teams that can fight and make up quickly are probably the best teams there are. it's interesting through this conversation some my biggest takeaways are stillness and space because some of the challenges there are when you don't even have the space to reconcile or you don't even have the space to have that conversation because you're so your cup is so full that you just have to get to the next thing yeah you know what i mean like that that i think as running a company that's where i'm looking at it now and going like how do we how do we create more space.

1:19:23Because right now we are thing to thing to thing to thing really quickly. And sometimes those things, you'll let them pass over because you're like, I don't even, I don't know how long that's going to take. So I don't know if I have the space to sit and reconcile. I think you got to make it. It's tough, but I think you got to make it. You have to. Especially if you can work your, get your mind to realize that it's actually, it's an investment. Yeah. It's a product. It doesn't feel like it, but it is an investment. It's just like you would invest in capex you know if you were manufacturing process all right i got a fun one to end on here from uh another creator hey peter it's jordan matter for a youtuber i'm like old really old but i want to be even older i actually want to be the first 100 year old youtuber what is the number one thing i have to do to get there so short and to the point short and to the point i think i think jordan has over 20 million subscribers i think he's 50 years old so he wants to do this until he's 100 what does he have to do to get there boy this is i mean that's a great example of what we talked about earlier right he's got to he's got to do the longevity on both fronts um uh well my recollection because i remember meeting him in february he seemed like he was he was doing a lot of things right um but honestly if you're going to get to 100 you kind of have to do everything right that's that's there's no guarantee you're getting to 100 that's that's you're in really really rarefied air at that point.

1:20:47So one is you got, so one of the, the one important, most important thing he has to do is too late, which is you have to pick the right parents. So he's 50 years too late for that because his genes are set. So if he doesn't have centenarian genes, like I don't, pretty unlikely you're going to live to a hundred, but let's just assume that you're going to take everything that's modifiable. At that point, you're doing everything possible, right? You're, you're, you know, you're managing your lipids, your blood pressure, your glucose, all of those things to the level of what somebody would have had in their twenties.

1:21:20So you're, you know, and that probably includes a lot of pharmacology to keep those things in perfect shape. Um, you're exercising, you know, probably, you know, an hour, six days a week and, you know, being well thought out between how much of that is strength training versus cardio, you know, not going too, too hard and creating, you know, the risk of injury, but, but also So being very consistent and not in long periods of time where you're missing it. You're not eating too much, but you're eating enough protein. You're getting sleep every night. You're managing stress, relationships, all those things.

1:21:51You're probably pretty aggressive on cancer screening. Because if you're going to get cancer, you're going to have to catch it early. And if you don't, the chances that you're going to beat it are next to nil. But that means you're exposing yourself to more false positives. Basically, if you want to live to 100, it becomes really, really involved. And then on top of that, you still have to not let that consume you to the point where you can't do the thing that you want to do until you're 100, which in his case is be a creator. Good luck, Jordan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say find a middle ground there.

1:22:22Yeah. Maybe let's call it 80. Yeah. Do it until you're 80. Yeah. Well, that's great. Thanks so much, Peter. Yeah, thanks, guys. Appreciate it, man. Hopefully we get to do a, I think on my bucket list now is to do a workout with you. Awesome. I think that would be really fun to do some farmer's carries with your hex bar. All right, come to Austin. We'll make it happen. down the street in Austin with you. Perfect. I'll be there too. It's not a bucket list item, but I'll be there. I'll do it. Awesome. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks guys. All right. Welcome to the deep end, the after show after the guest leaves.

1:22:53This is the first time we're doing this. So first of all, thank you guys for joining us here in the deep end, where we're going to talk about our biggest takeaways from the guest. That was a really interesting conversation. One thing I didn't expect to talk about is a question I didn't even prepare was about negative comments and how, you know, you only see the negative comment. Why is that when there's a sea of positive comments and the fact that he based it in like human evolution, that we are not meant to care about whether someone likes you. It's more about whether they don't like you because when you're living amongst like a tribe of people, that's what you need to be aware of.

1:23:31Yeah. I think with, with everything we do, like as, as entrepreneurs and creators, like I do think it's really important to zoom out and look at the human element of all this primarily because also another thing he shared that really, really stuck with me is like he gets paid for the use of his brain. And that is actually like the majority of, you know, creative jobs and entrepreneurial jobs. So then evaluating how your brain is working in the context of what we do every day is really important. And evolution plays into that, which is fascinating. The like negative bias and being hyper aware of that.

1:24:04So you don't get kicked out of your tribe. Yeah. It is such a fascinating like peak into human psychology. And with YouTube creators, we're building tribes that are way bigger than we were ever meant to be building. And you're not face to face with those members of your tribe, right? Or members of, of you never see those people. Yeah. So I thought, you know, in that same context of like negativity, positive reinforcement. The first thing that really stuck out to me about this conversation was his note around ensuring that you're getting dopamine from somewhere else other than this career. I thought that was really interesting because I live day to day and I can feel the highs and lows of my emotional state being pretty rooted in the highs and lows of what we're doing here in the studio.

1:24:55I mean, I have not shaken that ability at all. or not even ability, but just like that feeling. Which is amazing because we're like 13 years in and a good episode still leaves me riding high for multiple days. And a bad episode takes me about a week or more to shake it off. Totally. I think it started to change a bit in my 30s of starting to invest back into like social life and friendships and other things like that. That sounds crazy. but when you're like a heads down entrepreneur, it's pretty hard to look up and root your, you know, dopamine in anything outside of your work. It's still not to a point where I'm like totally absent of that, but that was a really good reminder today to go like, where else are you receiving that?

1:25:45So you're not so tied to the highs and lows of career because it's going to naturally be up and down from now until the end of, you know, when we stop creating together, it's going to be up and down. and so you know where else are we getting that dopamine i liked what he said about work filling the maximum available time yeah and then what you said about scheduling things that are outside of work yeah making it a weekly habit because you don't want to cancel something right it's like harder to make plans but if you just make it a standing like every tuesday we play paddle tennis or whatever it is at least it's there most likely you don't want to cancel it yeah i thought about that like with my own life, like I really should be scheduling more types of like physical activities.

1:26:30Like even you going to a workout class with friends, I've joined you maybe once. Yeah. Like I could, I need that accountability. I think I need like some group accountability and plans. Otherwise I will wake up and be like, eh, I'm a little tired this morning. I think that's also the relationship to like productivity. And I think that's, I've always considered working out to be productive, but I definitely find myself waking up and being like, what's the most productive thing I can do right now? And leaving this conversation, the two things I want to try and value in the next chapter to ensure that we have a long career and that I'm performing at my best is stillness and space.

1:27:11Those two things he brought up quite a bit. And I think thinking about like, do you have space to think? is a really interesting question to ask yourself. Is there any time where you're not having an input of stimulation, whether that be podcast, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, friends, family, wives, whatever that is, like no inputs. Do you have any space like that where you're still? And knowing when you need to make that space for yourself, when you talked about task switching, where you've like, I can't even, it gave me chills. I was like, oh yeah, I've definitely been like trying to buy a flight while also like email my parents something that I'm dealing with over there.

1:27:57And also I'm in a frame IO link and I just can't commit to one of them. Yeah. And I'm just overloaded. It's like, man, maybe I need to be more aware of the times that I'm being completely insane. Yeah. And just be like, look, the only thing you actually need to do is not one of these things. It's none of them. What's hard is that there's like a dashboard for everything or a lot of things in our career. you know, particularly like YouTube studio, you open it, you have a dashboard for how well things are going. There's like green checks or a grade checks. You don't really have that in your life unless you actively create it.

1:28:29Right. Like, unless you're like, what was my week? Like, did I spend time with friends? Did I give myself space? Did I think, you know, like you don't have that dashboard. And this episode recording this with him sitting down with him made me take a step back and go like, all right, if I am someone who needs to like look at progress of things And so with that in mind, how can I create a dashboard for like the holistic picture of my life? Like, did I exercise four times this week or not? It's like very simple stuff, but it is easy to just go and push towards the stuff that does have quantifiable metrics, like what we do on YouTube, like what we do in our business, because that feels really good to progress quantifiable metrics.

1:29:13And problems also will just come to you, which is easy, right? Like one Slack message can be an easily identifiable problem that you're like, well, great. Now I have something to solve. Let's plug in. Yeah. You know, the hard thing to do is be like, at least for me, is to be like, okay, what I'm actually going to do is block off two hours in the morning to work out or eat right or do anything. But you actually, I think I need to treat my personal health the same way or in a very similar way that I treat work. I think I did. Okay. So like, cause that is not hard for me blocking off like two hours in the morning to work out.

1:29:54It's, I can do it. Yeah. It's hard for me from like a discipline. Totally. What I'm saying is I think what we need to do is I need to, like, I need to bring you to that with me, the workout stuff. And what I would ask you is to, I think you're good at stillness. Definitely. I think you're capable of it. I'm much more capable. I'm not that capable of stillness. Yeah, we were hanging out yesterday to watch the PLL championship. And I'm working on our presentation. Yeah, and you're like working on like three different things. I was like, I thought we were just watching this game. Right, but then I took out my computer and I started working on stuff.

1:30:31I'm near incapable of doing that. You are near incapable. Yeah, because I'm like, oh, great. I'm watching a game. Yeah, you need to be playing a game. Yes. That's the only way to get you to be a little bit still. to be like playing paddle tennis or you used to swim. Yeah. Like you're still there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I'm not good at stillness. And that was very loud to me in this conversation. Like I imagine creators who are listening to this conversation, there's going to be one or two things that were really loud to you. The loudest thing to me was space and stillness. I'm very bad at that.

1:31:06And recognizing that his answer to how to get creative was create space for creativity. It's such a simple thing to say, but I was like, it's a good point. Yeah. It's a really good point. I'm going to ask you the question that he said he asks himself. What needs to be true for you to be enjoying this career in 10 years? That one kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. And I wanted to ask him if he had an answer. And he basically said, you know, I just need to make sure that I'm still enjoying these conversations. Yeah. and that holds true but I think I need to spend more time digging into it because I really, when he said that, I was like, oh, I actually don't know what needs to be true for me to not be bored by this career in 10 years.

1:31:54I think it's a really good prompt for everyone listening. I think it's an excellent prompt for everyone. My immediate answer to that question is what I shared in the episode which is a reduction of pressure on performance of content. and an increase in evaluating our content on value to those who are listening or watching. That for me would be like the most enjoyable version of this career because I do have a lot of anxiety around the performance of episodes and I'd like to reduce that and increase my enjoyment of just sitting in curious conversation. I wish I could say that for myself, but I also know that I really enjoy when it feels like you've dominated the conversation that day.

1:32:40When an episode comes out or you make something and you put it out on YouTube and everyone's tweeting about it, there's comments. That to me would keep it exciting. If 10 years from now, we're still dropping things that it's like, we just dominated the conversation today. That's exciting. There's nothing more exciting to me than like people reaching out or a video taking off. I'm going to get you cold plunging So you get your buzz from that, you know? I'm open to that, but I don't know. Maybe that's what it, maybe that's what it takes. Yeah. Good prompt for everyone though. Yeah. What would make what you're doing right now enjoyable in 10 years?

1:33:17And you can shorten that window too. I think there's like simple stuff that we talked about today that I would also urge a lot of creators, entrepreneurs, everyone who's listening to this to think about like the simplicity of sleep, exercise, nutrition. It's almost sounds ridiculous because you're like, yeah, I know it. But unless you actually think about it, you're not thinking about it. There's also so much we did not go into with Peter today. A little bit because we've spoken with him before. And we've gone really into the weeds of like, what do you actually do in terms of sleep? He mentioned on the show, he takes three to four sleep supplements a night.

1:33:52You can find that information from Peter of what he actually takes. When it comes to working out, you can find the exact exercises and the type of workouts that he recommends. And I urge everyone, if you are interested in that, seek it out from him, whether it's in his book or on his podcast, because it's out there and it's really fascinating. Totally. And don't have, I would say, don't have the anxiety that you have to do exactly that. Like, I think one thing that's really great about Peter and learning more about Peter is that he's very much pushes you to go, like it's, every person is different.

1:34:27So like your protocol is going to be different. Yeah. From mine, it's different from his. It's all going to be different, but experiment with what that is. And I told him, look, like I was super inspired the first time I heard you speak. And then I've been somewhat discouraged at the action that I've taken. Like I've been disappointed in the actual like impact. Yeah. But what I didn't say is that I actually have made a lot of improvement. Like I am working out more so than I was. I am more knowledgeable about sleep and certain things. Going in a sauna, cold plunge. Like I, on the arc of my progress, I have made progress because of the fact that I have spent time with him and I've listened to him and I've been reading his book.

1:35:05Even though I am a bit discouraged at like, I wish I had made more progress, but at the same time, I've made progress that I wouldn't have made if I had not been listening to him. Do you remember some of like the lowest moments of our career? Like the most kind of fried and burnt out? Yeah. I mean. What do you remember about those moments? I mean I just I mean I just remember being like you know not really fried and burnt out but like sad as tough as that like I just remember being like I'm like not happy I'm really like unhappy yeah you know like it was like a mix of like social life that I didn't have validation that I wasn't getting from career and not eating right being tired like it was so many things missing my family like there was just it was so much I just remember being like damn I'm like I'm not succeeding and I'm pretty unhappy right now.

1:35:58You know, like no cup was full is kind of what I remember at certain times. Yeah, I think I just remember like being very far away from my why, like why am I doing this? When it was so hard and there was no validation. You know, I just remember being really far away from like why. Yeah, because the videos we were making, you know, at one point at the beginning of this channel, They weren't, we were searching for, we were expressing ourselves and hoping that we would find impact. Yeah. And then once we kind of flipped gears and thought, wait, what's the impact we want to make that we care about?

1:36:37Right. Then we could express ourselves in a way that felt good. Yeah. And also like grew our channel and, you know, has allowed us to have the channel that we have now. Gives you a North Star. Yeah. So just on the back half of this episode, I would urge creators and entrepreneurs who are listening to this to just invest some time into like self-evaluating. Just think about what is driving you. What do you want your day-to-day to look like? And what about what you're doing right now would make it still fun over the next decade? I think it's a really good prompt. So let us know what you thought about this episode.

1:37:13Also let us know what you thought about this little debrief we did after the episode. This is new for us. I had a good time with it yeah I had a good time let us know alright we'll see ya