Enough Big Goals - Try Tiny Experiments with Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff

30:11Anne-Laure Le Cunff:At first she would sit there and just wait. And after a while, she just got bored sitting in her studio doing nothing. And so she picked up her brushes and started painting again and realized that it was fine, none of her talent had disappeared in the process of getting that surgery. So this is also another example that I like. But then just to sort of play devil's advocate, in the example of you, you wrote these articles for 100 days. That then turned into a very successful newsletter like Nest Labs, this is your big project, 100 ,000 subscribers. How do you, like, I can imagine somebody going, oh I've done my tiny experiment but it hasn't led to a career path and success how do they stay in the framework of I don't need it to work out like I see it all the time on Instagram now people going I'm going to show you my out this is day one of 30 days of doing xyz right yeah but it's also usually linked to a metric which is I'm hoping to get more followers I'll give you another example personal one that illustrates what happens when you don't really get the results you expected or that you wanted.

31:23Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So a few years ago, I don't know why, but everybody around me was telling me, you need to start a YouTube channel. YouTube is the future. You're doomed if you keep on writing a newsletter and you don't have a YouTube channel. And those comments were coming from people I highly respect. And so it got me a bit curious and I thought, okay, let's give it a try. So I designed a tiny experiment and I said I will publish one weekly YouTube video until the end of the year and it was already towards the end of the year I think it was October or November when I decided to do it so I did that and I always tell people it's very important when you assess the results of your experiments to consider both the external and internal signals so external signals is what you just mentioned right number of followers whatever you could put in a dashboard metrics, those kind of things.

32:13Anne-Laure Le Cunff:We're usually pretty good at paying attention to these. But what we rarely look at is the internal signals. How did it actually feel to do the experiment? Because if you're growing an Instagram account or you're doing a YouTube channel and you have all of those new subscribers, new followers, but you hate doing it, is that actually success? And I would argue that it isn't. So in the case of this YouTube channel, external signals, pretty good. Not like I had a million subscribers, but it was pretty decent, good engagement. And if I had kept on going, probably would have grown pretty quick. Internal signals, I absolutely hated recording those videos.

33:04Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Every time I had to sit down in front of the camera. By yourself. By myself. just looking at the dead black eye of the camera with no response whatsoever and having to basically talk to myself and sound like I was having a conversation with my best friend. I, yeah, I was dreading it. And what was really interesting is that not only I hated actually recording the video, but because I was dreading it, it was having a downstream effect on everything else during that day. So if I was supposed to record in the afternoon, I would procrastinate on everything else in the morning because I was already thinking about this video I was supposed to record later on.

33:46Anne-Laure Le Cunff:That's an example when the results you get are not really the results you expected. So what do you do in those cases? Where? Well, experimental mindset. Instead of clinging to saying that, oh, no, this is failure. I'm not good at this. I don't like this. You respond like a scientist. Huh, interesting. I didn't see that one coming. Apparently, I don't like that. And you have different options here. So you can either pivot, so you can tweak it. Maybe it's the format that you don't like. Maybe it's the topics that you don't like. Maybe there's something different that you want to do. Or, and that's completely valid, and I know this is not the story that we tell people online right but you can stop you can just stop and you don't have to keep going with something that you don't like this you don't have to see it through exactly yeah and it's I ask because I'm feeling this interesting thing with the podcast right it initially started as a curiosity I felt incredibly alive after that first session and then suddenly you get to this like weird tipping point after like season two where it was like well it's expensive for me to to do this I pay for a studio I pay for a team I pay for editing so then it starts to be okay well other podcasts make money like do you want to make this make money do you want sponsorship partnership do you want to work with brands do you want to you know figure out ways to make this monetize which then leads you down a more capitalist system of well then you have to play into the game and the rules of podcasting as a career which is well you have to bring on certain guests who have a huge following so that you can get more listeners because more listeners mean partnerships etc so I felt myself at this almost mini crossroads of do I do that play into the game effectively of this industry or do I stick to the curiosity and at the moment I've chosen to stick to the curiosity and I'm still self-funding but it is a difficult one to navigate because you might not have the financial ability to just like keep going and going with your curiosities so I'm wondering you know would you have kept going with that newsletter if it didn't make you any money or what is your recommendation to people when they feel the external pressure of well this is either a job now or you know you have to play into the roles of this industry or not yeah so there is a lot of pressure nowadays to turn any hobby into into something more serious and into an actual job.

36:25Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So I would say first, but I think that part is the obvious one. You don't have to turn every hobby into something that makes money. What's really interesting here is that there are some creative projects that actually cost money. And so you start asking yourself this question, not because you're automatically trying to turn a hobby into something that makes money, but because you want it to be sustainable. And in those cases, I think the assumption that it has to be one or the other is maybe where people get stuck. So when it comes to my newsletter, for example, what I did at the beginning was that I started accepting sponsorships on one hand, but I also started doing consulting on the other hand.

37:08Anne-Laure Le Cunff:working on consulting projects meant that I was making enough money on that side of the business that I could only accept sponsorships that made sense for the newsletter even if on their own it was not enough money to make it something that I could do full-time that meant growth that was a little bit slower on the sponsorship side of things but that also allowed me to stop doing consulting only when I was really happy with the kind of offers I was getting for the sponsorship side. And now I'm in a place where I don't really do consulting anymore. If I do it, it's really because the project is something I'm really excited about.

37:50Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I can turn down sponsorship offers when I don't feel like they're aligned with what I want to share with my newsletter audience. So you can go back five years in my newsletter and you will never see, for example, any ad for any kind of supplement or anything like that, which they pay so much. If I had from the beginning started saying yes to having supplements as sponsors, I would have started making money and a lot more money earlier. But I didn't want to because I couldn't test these. I couldn't confidently tell people to take those. And so I think being a bit creative and again, applying that same curiosity, maybe contacting people who have podcasts and asking them how they navigated this.

38:37Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And especially if you see podcasts where you feel like their values are aligned with the ones that you're trying to also uphold when it comes to yours. Almost like, again, like a scientist doing a mini research study where you're asking people, how did you do it? What worked for you? what were maybe different income streams that allow you to keep that kind of freedom when it comes to your podcast while making it sustainable so i would really try to let go of the one or the other kind of limitation which might not necessarily be the case another thing that's coming up for me there is this we're also being now shown and told this very linear progression of personal brand where it's like okay this is the funnel you have the free newsletter that then leads to this that there's a tech product at the end that's really scalable there's a book in the middle that think and so people are now starting to think in advance okay if I write 100 newsletters or if I do 100 podcast episodes that's all with the intended goal of using that as research to write the book the book will then take me to the next thing and then I think we're back to the original thing of goals and linear things but you did write a book so I'm curious was a book something you were thinking about at all?

39:50Is it something that materialized as you went and how and what point did it materialize? And did you also look at that and go, is this something that internally is something I want to do?

40:03Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So the book was not part of the plan. I didn't have a plan. For me, the big change when I started working on what has become Nest Labs, when I started writing my newsletter is that for the very first time in my life, I really said, let go of the plan, let go of the blueprint, don't try and copy paste any kind of recipe for success and just follow your curiosity. And so first that was the newsletter. For the book, what happened is that after a while, when I was around maybe 40 ,000 subscribers, publishers started reaching out. So I started getting emails from publishers asking, hey, have you thought of writing a book?

40:38Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I thought, huh, interesting, because I thought I was going to write fantasy books as a kid, but definitely not nonfiction. I did have to have a very honest conversation with myself, really asking, okay, I'm actually excited about this idea of writing a book, but why am I excited? Is it because of the external validation of what other people will think of me or because I actually have something to say? Exactly. So it was actually like, yeah, it was a tough, not tough, but layered conversation to have with myself and to try and really be honest with myself. And it turns out in that specific case, I was actually really excited about writing a book because I've always loved writing.

41:19Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And it really felt like an interesting challenge going from writing a short newsletter every week to bring it all together into a book. I would say as a, I don't like giving advice to people because everyone's situation is so different. But if anyone is doing what you just described earlier, where they think that they can write 100 newsletters or do 100 podcasts, and then it will make it easier to write the book, in my experience, that's not the case. I thought so, too. I thought, oh, great. I wrote already. I don't know how many I had written at that point, like probably 150 newsletters or I'm just going to collate all of that into a book.

41:59Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Absolutely not. I had to rewrite everything from scratch. there is so much that works well in a short form format in the newsletter that doesn't work at all when you're trying to turn it into a book chapter. And so, yes, the advantage is that I had spent quite a bit of time thinking about those ideas. So this is good. This is great. But the writing itself wasn't particularly made easier by the fact that I had written a newsletter before. so I would say that everything I've done when it comes to the newsletter the book and all of my projects and all of my most exciting projects the past few years are not the result of me planning it in advance but the result of me keeping on showing up keeping on asking questions keeping on trying new things and experimenting and then keeping the door open to new opportunities even if they were not really things that I had been thinking about.

42:53Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And also not opening that door when I don't feel like I'm doing it for the right reasons. I see a lot of authors around me, friends of mine that have been approached by Netflix, for example, to turn their book into a mini documentary or a series. And so I also ask myself if that happens to me, do I do it? Do I not do it? and I don't know yet, but I know that if that happens, I will have to have that honest conversation again because again, do you do it because of status or do you do it because of curiosity? And so is there just no space in your life for big goals? I'm trying to play the parent here who would be very worried about their child not having any longer term ambition.

43:38And I think we can, you know, it might be luck and multiple factors that actually made Nest Labs financially viable for you, but it also might not have been. I can think of people who would be concerned about the lack of structure and the lack of that being something that you can actually anchor onto and say, this is how much money I'm going to make from this.

44:04Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah, I don't think that having a big goal is going to make you more successful. I think what's going to make you successful is to really keep on showing up, paying attention to what works and what doesn't and iterating. Nobody was successful because they said we're going to make X million by the end of the year. They were successful because they said, here's something I truly believe is going to be interesting to explore. Let's take it very seriously and let's work hard to do this and let's see what works and what doesn't and let's keep on adapting. So if I was a parent, what I would want to see in my child is not them telling me I will be the CEO of whatever company.

44:44Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I would love to see everyday curiosity. I would love to see them try new things. I would love to see them not being afraid to fail. And I would love for them to be both ambitious and curious, because I truly believe that if you have those two things, if you're ambitious and curious at the same time, you're going to be successful. You just don't know what that success is going to look like. but pretending that having a clear vision is going to make you more successful I personally think is just falling prey to the illusion of certainty I love that actually now that I think about it maybe I've been thinking about it all wrong I made a commitment to being transparent about the making of this podcast right from the start so here's a quick update of the financial side season four of the slowdown does not currently have a sponsor I really want this podcast to bring to light people, stories and approaches to life that I admire and don't often see in mainstream media.

45:41So I'm taking on the studio editing and making costs of this season myself. If you're a brand or if you know a brand that cares about bringing honest and applicable career advice to people at all stages of their journey, please reach out. I'm eager to find the right partner, hopefully long term, to help fund and continue the show so that it can keep growing. in the meantime your comments reviews and shares of this episode are so important if you're not already hit subscribe share this episode with a friend drop a comment on spotify and a review on apple it really does make a difference and continues to inspire the change that we're hoping to make in slowing down thank you so much for your support what have been your like three biggest learnings of of running this newsletter and this approach so

46:30Anne-Laure Le Cunff:for um three biggest learnings uh the first one is that i don't think there's anything that you cannot learn to do if you apply yourself to it and i don't mean becoming one of the top one percent people at this right but if you want to get yourself from zero to 70 percent there in terms of skills nowadays with the internet you can do that especially with chat gpt now that you can use as a tutor. I think it's absolutely amazing how, yeah, so I went from having really bad imposter syndrome when I was younger to really having this self-belief now that I can kind of figure it out. I will figure it out.

47:12Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It might not always be easy, but I can figure it out. And this is something that the sense of agency is also something I'm trying to really teach to people through my writing, really helping them. I know it's going to sound a little bit cheesy, but really believe in themselves, believe in their ability to figure it out. So that's number one, you can figure it out. Number two, you can just do things. The number of projects that maybe 15 years ago, I would have probably waited to get permission or asked a gatekeeper to do it. Now I just do. I just do, I build something quick, I write something, I test it, I see if it resonates or not.

47:51and yeah you can just do things especially on the internet and number three it's always going to

48:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:take much longer than what you think if there's anything you're you're working on that you actually truly care about and that you want to see grow not with that linear goal of getting to a specific milestone but you know in my case nurturing the nestlabs community and improving my writing and figuring out ways to bring people together and connecting them and keeping on learning, acquiring new skills, all of that is going to take time. And so I think you're going to have a lot more fun in the process and feel a lot less pressure. If again, if you just let go of the end goal and you really focus on the everyday process of showing up and experimenting.

48:43What pattern do you notice in people who struggle to have that exploratory, curious mindset?

48:51Anne-Laure Le Cunff:quite often i see two two kind of kind of buckets group of people who struggled with that mindset the first one is the perfectionists so people who are highly ambitious who really want to succeed but because of that almost see curiosity as a distraction and also don't want to try things where they're not 100 % sure this is going to succeed. So they are the kind of people, and I was in that category for a very long time. So that's why I feel like I can speak to it and I have deep empathy for people who are still kind of stuck there. They might only decide to work on projects where they know this is going to be successful.

49:35Anne-Laure Le Cunff:They might not explore projects where it is possibility that they might fail. And because of that, they limit their own growth and they limit also self-discovery. the other category is what i is the cynics so the cynical mindset where you say i don't care about anything i don't care i don't care about succeeding i don't care about having an impact and that mindset is very much a self-protection mechanism because if you say you don't care about anything you're not going to get hurt nobody's going to judge you right but again you really limit your potential for growth for exploration for self-discovery when you don't allow yourself to be a little bit earnest you actually care it makes me think of opportunity cost and people saying oh but if i do all of these tiny experiments the opportunity cost is me doing this this goal this thing that i need to do what what do you say to people that say um you know i don't have time to do that or well i should be doing this other thing instead of that thing i tell them that you'll probably waste even more time long-term by being so focused and obsessed on that one big goal that you think is your one big goal and ignoring the fact that the world is going to change.

50:52Anne-Laure Le Cunff:You're going to change. And it's very unlikely that getting to whatever that milestone you have decided was going to be your happiness and end goal in life. It's very unlikely that you're actually going to be much happier once you get there. So leave room for experimentation. And if you're someone, I know some people, they love goals. They love goals. Okay, I'm not even telling you to completely let go of goals. Have some goals if you want to, but just make sure there's one tiny experiment running in the background, a little bit of space for experimentation. It seems like to even give yourself the space to think about what is my tiny experiment, we need to slow down and think about that and have these internal honest conversations with ourselves why do you think our society finds slowing down so difficult and or what is the current pattern that you feel like we're stuck in that that makes actually like giving us ourselves that space difficult yeah i mean there's an entire self-help category that is called productivity and time management and how to be efficient and all of these topics and the reason why is because our entire society is based around the idea that your your worth as a contributor to society is tied to how productive you are how much you produce how much you contribute because of that any time or energy you spend on things that are not contributing directly contributing to increasing your productivity could be seen as a waste of time.

52:33Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I think this is where the problem is. This is, to me, this is a toxic form of productivity where you're really measuring your worth, your value as a human being based on what you produce. This is also why I write about, I have an entire chapter about that in the book, what I call mindful productivity, because I don't believe that you can let go of productivity completely. We do need, as a society, to function for most people who can to contribute at least something so we can all live together. But it doesn't have to mean that your level of productivity is tied to your worth. And it doesn't have to be this toxic definition of productivity where more is better.

53:13Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It can actually be mindful. It can be something where you're having those conversations with yourself, where you're really taking the time to figure out what is the contribution that I want to have and how can I have this contribution without sacrificing everything else in the process. So yes, society doesn't really currently encourage us to do that. But I do think that society would function better if we all had a little bit more space to consider what kind of contributions we want to make, and how to make them in a more mindful, sustainable way. What are your daily habits to help you slow down in your day to day when things accelerate and get busy?

53:54Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Usually once my proper workday has started, I don't have a lot of time to reflect. So I personally prefer starting my day with it. So I always start with journaling. When I wake up in the morning is the first thing that I do. I make myself a cup of coffee. I open my journal and it's an old school notebook because I don't want to be distracted by my phone or notifications or my emails and I have this moment with myself and sometimes it can be 10 minutes sometimes when there's a lot to unpack it can be a little bit longer but it's a little check-in with myself before I start the day and then I also have a weekly review which is less introspective as my daily journaling habit my weekly review is really just kind of looking at everything I'm working on right now seeing what's working what's not working maybe if there's too much I'm trying to do is there a way for me to either not do something because it's not needed anymore or maybe I should delegate it to someone else or is there maybe a smarter way to do it and I tend to do this one either on Sunday evening or Monday morning and this is again kind of a way to check in with myself and see what's working or not you mentioned there sharing that with the public you have a whole chapter on learning in public.

55:13Why is that something you wanted to include in the book and you feel is important?

55:17Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I think you cannot really talk about having an experimental mindset without talking about learning in public. So the best scientists don't work in isolation. They actually work and collaborate with other scientists. They also publish their results and they allow other people to review those results and to share comments and feedback. You can apply the exact same mindset in your everyday life and work. And although I explain in the book that all of the tools that I share, the pact, for example, you can just do it on your own and it's still, it will work. It's already great. And you can discover a lot about yourself in that process.

55:55Anne-Laure Le Cunff:But if you want to accelerate your learning, learning in public is going to make it so you can get feedback and really tighten that feedback loop. There are so many ways you can do this. And one of them is, and that's my preferred one, is writing. So just sharing whatever you learned in the newsletter or on social media. But not everyone wants to have a social media presence or write online. You can make a group chat with a couple of accountability people. Exactly. So you can have exactly a little group chat or you could even have one friend where you say, hey, every week, let's grab a quick coffee on Sundays and ask ourselves each other, has your experiment going?

56:33Anne-Laure Le Cunff:What did you learn? What worked? What didn't? And it's just a nice opportunity to catch up with someone. So learning in public doesn't mean learning with a huge audience. It can be if you'd like to, but it can also be just one other person, as long as there's one other human being that knows exactly you're learning in public. I guess like as someone that's probably a workaholic, I'm always drawn to this question of like, when does curiosity then turn into pressure for you? and do you catch yourself and go no this was just supposed to be a curious experiment kind of back to my question about the podcast of um you know at what point does it maybe turn into a bit of a job and it starts becoming not what you initially thought it was and then there's a level of pressure of oh this sponsor now expects xyz how do you bring it back to that thing or do you just go this is no longer a tiny experiment this is now a project and i need a new tiny experiment Yeah, so yeah, it's a great question because tiny experiments can lead to projects that are not experiments anymore.

57:36Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so I wouldn't say my newsletter is a tiny experiment anymore. And I have a team now. And so this is a conversation you can have and this is not a bad thing at all. If at some point, so let's say you did a first pact where you said, I'm going to do it for 100 weekdays. And then you liked it and you said, let's do it for another 100 weekdays because I want to see if really I like it or not. And then after that, you start having sponsors, you start having all of this added work. And well, then intentionally turn it into a project. What does that look like? For me, hiring people to help me with all of the sponsors, for example, I don't manage any of the sponsorships anymore, allows me to focus on the part that I love.

58:20Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I still love writing the newsletter. Some people have asked me, oh, why don't you delegate the writing? because you can afford it now. Like technically the newsletter. Or you can use ChatGPZ. Exactly. I could save a lot of time with ChatGPT. I could hire a ghostwriter. I know a lot of people who do that. It's almost like firing me from the job I actually like, which makes no sense to me. I actually love writing the newsletter. I don't love managing the sponsorships. And so someone does it for me. And so, yeah, you can absolutely turn it into a project. What's nice also is that if you break it down into its components, you can turn parts of it into more of a project-like way of managing it while keeping another part fairly experimental.

59:04Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So with the writing, for example, I still allow myself to experiment. I've experimented with different formats over the past year, shorter, longer. I've experimented with video essays. I've experimented with different things. And the nice thing is that the project part is that that newsletter needs to be sent every week and we need to make sure the sponsors are happy and all of that. But the writing itself, I can still be quite experimental. What is your working definition of success now? Waking up in the morning and feeling excited about the day ahead. I have no illusion that in 100 years, nobody will remember that I ever existed, which is kind of nice, actually.

59:43Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And this is also something I talk about in the book, but I really focus on generativity instead of legacy in the sense that legacy is really about thinking about the impact you can have long-term after you're dead, wanting to be remembered. And generativity is about the impact you have right now in the present on the people who are here with you, sharing this planet with you while you're alive. And both of them kind of like stem from the same thing. I think ultimately what we want to feel like is that it mattered that we were here. And that's it. and I don't think you know trying to work really hard so so people remember you when you're dead is actually going to make it matter more and to me being being ambitious is also wanting to have an impact right now wanting to be a good friend a good parent um you know good whatever it is that you want to to do today so that's what I try to focus on rather than focusing on my legacy and tell me quickly on on names um nest labs why that name and then tiny experiments how did you come up with that name oh very different in the sense that nest labs was just came to me very easily it was such an obvious name it nest means it's a suffix that you use to describe the quality of being something so the quality of being conscious is consciousness mindfulness awareness And so I wanted Nest Labs to be a mini laboratory for me to explore what it's like to be human.

1:01:23Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So that's Nest Labs. Really didn't spend more than five minutes thinking about it. Tiny Experiments, on the other hand, was not easy to come. So something not many people know is that the original title of the book was not Tiny Experiments. It was Liminal Minds. the idea was that so liminal means the the in-between uh the being on the doorstep of of change this threshold of something being in transition and i wanted to write a book about being more comfortable in those liminal spaces and those spaces of change and transition those spaces of uncertainty hence liminal minds when i started testing it just by asking people or telling people i'm working on a book it's called liminal minds everyone's reaction was the same limit what don't really get it no nobody was getting it um the couple of people who did were like oh yes smart which is not not what i was going for so i ended up going back to the drawing board and trying to figure out what would be a better title and uh i actually i kind of applied the principles in the book to come up with the title and so there was a lot of experimentation I came up with a few ideas.

1:02:41Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I polled my newsletter readers to ask them which ones they liked better. I also designed fake, not fake, the ads were real, but fake product listings on Facebook ads with fake book covers with all of the different titles and actually looked at the click-through rates to see what people would click on, which is actually a really interesting parallel to the conversation we were having earlier about A-B testing for your newsletter. In that case, I actually really wanted to see what people would be more drawn towards in terms of the title. And Tiny Experiments was the clear winner, both with my existing audience and with people who had never heard about me through Facebook ads.

1:03:25Anne-Laure Le Cunff:People really like this one better. And I really felt like it was a good representation of the content of the book as well. So I ended up going with that. It's a great title. And I was wondering, since publishing the book, have there been any things that have happened that you've been really surprised by or have found really interesting in terms of the reception of the book, in terms of people contacting you, asking you to write articles for them? So first, I didn't expect it to resonate so quickly with so many different kinds of readers. That was a bit of a worry that I had is that I have a very specific background, having worked in tech and having gone back to university to study neuroscience.

1:04:05But the emails I get from people are really from people all around the world with all sorts of backgrounds.

1:04:12Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It's doing really well in India. I didn't expect that as well. How many copies has it sold so far? Do you know? So we're at 60 ,000 without India. I couldn't get those numbers. And I know it's doing really, really well in India. So I don't know how many in total. And it came out in March. We're recording this in December. So it's doing well. Very, very happy. So the positive, surprising thing is how it resonates with, seems to resonate with a wide range of people. the less positive is that I was very protected of how ugly the internet can get because most of my readers have been following my journey they know who I am they know where I come from when I started going on a podcast tour and I don't know if you can call that a YouTube tour but really being invited to different shows on different channels that have way bigger audiences than I have, my work started reaching an entirely new audience that had none of this background, doesn't know who I am, and maybe forget that I'm just a human being.

1:05:29Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so I got a few comments when the book came out on some videos on YouTube about my accent, my appearance, how I obviously come from a place of privilege, how my parents probably had a lot of money. And that's why I teach, you know, tiny experiments as a way to navigate life. All of these things, which are absolutely not true, except for the accent. I do have an accent. But that was really interesting in terms of my response where I really thought before that happened that I had a thicker skin than I actually did and actually really hurt me. And I remember spending a few months ago, I was scrolling through the comments and having this kind of like, you know, very negative kind of relationship to the experience, scrolling until I would read the next negative comment.

1:06:24And yeah, it took me maybe a month or two to build kind of a digital immune system that I didn't need

1:06:33Anne-Laure Le Cunff:before. And now I don't really check the comments anymore. If I see something about, again, my accent or my appearance or whatever I just ignore it but that was interesting that was something I learned about myself and it was one of those things where I was really confident where I felt like oh whatever people can talk about me I don't care turns out I did care I do care I think we all care I find it very unusual for somebody to not care at all and you know I guess it poses the question of what feels more important to you like the notoriety of getting this book out or if it is as you say a Netflix deal like the exponential amount of awareness that that would put not just on your work but on you is it worth doing yeah it's um it's something I do think about I in the past year or so because of the book uh and its success which I'm very grateful for I I've become friends with people who are who have a way bigger audience than I have and I'm talking tens of millions of people and quite a few of them talk about the challenges that this brings some of them had to even move houses because some fans would discover their address and would start probably not meaning anything bad but almost stalking them and I know I'm quite far from getting to that point where it would become so problematic but I think the model that I'm most drawn to is James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits which is has been the biggest best setter in that space for the past I think five years if you go on his social media you can't see his face anywhere and I had a another friend who was hanging out with him in New York a few months ago and who told me how amazing it was that he could walk on the street with James Clear and nobody would recognize him because nobody knows what he looks like.

1:08:33Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so I haven't really taken steps to do this. And it's true that at this stage, so early in my journey, being on podcasts and being invited to big YouTube channels is actually one of the most efficient ways to promote the book. So at this stage, I'm still saying yes to all of these opportunities. But if I'm thinking long term, this model to me is the most attractive one where lots of people know about your work. Lots of people are reading your book, but nobody knows what you look like. I think there's this really interesting conversation around the cost of visibility, especially for women, that I don't think we talk about enough.

1:09:08I think right now there's this real sense of there's a gap where anybody can have a personal brand and can make it on the internet and you can have your five minutes of fame and you can build this huge following. But at what cost? I don't think we talk about that enough and the cost of that visibility. I was also wondering as a kind of final question, what kind of learner do you want to become in this next chapter of your life? What are you looking forward to?

1:09:34Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So in that first phase of my experimental journey, the newsletter was my main laboratory. But since then, I actually started conducting my own research at King's College London. And in the next phase of my journey, something I'm really curious to explore is how to start writing about my own research. I feel like I've become quite good at distilling other people's research. And it's going to be an interesting challenge to take my own studies and potentially turn them into another book. That's something I'm thinking about right now. I'm also really making a conscious effort to not rush into the next thing.

1:10:17Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Because I know that's my kind of natural way when I get really excited about something. And I know a lot of us do that, right? Where we finish one project and then it's straight onto the next one. I wanna give myself a little bit of space to breathe, but also to consider whether that next book project is something I'm sufficiently curious about that I actually wanna dedicate the next two to three years of my life to it. Because those are the timescales we're talking about when it's a book and also if this is the topic that I want you to write about so yeah at the moment I'm trying to figure out how I can keep on learning both as someone who writes but also as someone who conducts research I love that I think it's unbelievably important to provide ourselves with that space between projects my last question which I ask everybody is if I had to watch one film or read one book or have some kind of cultural experience that will help me understand you better what would it be oh okay i think actually i'll be able to answer this question with a book and i think that has been turned into a netflix show which i haven't watched but if people like shows better the book how to change your mind by michael pollan which is the book that The reason why I love this book so much, two things.

1:11:43Anne-Laure Le Cunff:First is the topic of psychedelics, which I think is an incredibly important topic at a personal level and which, you know, really changed my life. But also as a writer, I absolutely love the way Pauline writes where he starts the book saying, I don't know anything about this topic. Come with me. And you go on this journey with him where he's not this authority or expert teaching you something. he's a fellow learner and you're going to learn with him and I love this style of writing so I read the book love the book and so that's I think that would be a really great way to know me better and if you're someone who's not really into books I think there's a Netflix show that was based off the book and just to scratch an itch there for me psychedelics also something that has been instrumental in my life um what if you're willing to share was the change or the the um what was the way that it changed your life yeah it's uh it's actually a funny question you have at the end when we don't have the time to unpack it it's another two-hour conversation Yeah.

1:12:52Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It cured my depression. And I was depressed my entire life before I started working with psychedelics. A very functional, depressed person. And I was drinking a lot as well. And working with psychedelics allowed me for the very first time in my life to actually wake up in the morning and feel like, oh, cool to be here. And I also quit drinking. What age and time in your life was that? In my 20s. How did you find out about it as a potential modality? Through friends. But before that, I had only taken mushrooms in a party setting. And then a friend of mine went to a retreat to work with Ayahuasca, not with mushrooms.

1:13:37Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I ended up going there. And yeah, since then, I've been working a lot with different kinds of psychedelics. I grow my own mushrooms. I make my own chocolates. and I really consider psychedelics an integral part of my mental health toolkit as well much more than that even consider treating them like as part of a toolkit doesn't do justice to how much they're helping me well thank you so much and Laura it was wonderful to have this conversation with you thanks so much for having me thank you so much for tuning in this episode has been hosted and created by me, Tiana Tambridge, produced by Whitney Rosenthal, sound and video production and recorded at Brazen Studios, cover art design by Natalia Ruhe.

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