#778: Q&A with Tim — What’s Next for Me, Asking Better Questions, Career Reinvention in The Age of AI, Practices for Joy, Getting Unstuck, and More

29:01And I think the decision process that you've already outlined a little bit is things that bring you joy and you've kind of arrived at a couple core principles of things that you're looking for your next projects to help you do. I guess just a little bit more upstream from that, how you made the decision to call time out after the 10 years and take the sabbatical and then just how you got out of the day-to-day of doing what you do so very well. I know you've touched upon it's hard to do that, but just anything on that that you could share would be helpful in terms of how you realigned your thinking to do something a little bit different, but building on what you've already done very well?

29:45I'd say a few things. So I could speak to my decision to hit pause or rethink things. I suppose there are a few fundamental beliefs that led me to do that or allowed me to do that. The first is that constant motion in some respects or constant productivity per se is the enemy of oblique thinking. So if you're looking at seeing a problem or a situation with fresh eyes in an uncommon way that allows you to make unique or highly leveraged decisions, when you are constantly churning, I think it requires you to be this close to the problem. And therefore, it's hard to zoom out. So for me, I had that belief to begin with, that not necessarily stillness, but having a little bit of distance is necessary for me to really consider doing X before the entire rest of the world does X.

30:46And I'm looking for, ideally being a category of one. I don't like competing in my professional life in this particular way. Archery or something like that, great. Compartmentalized, very clear, it's time-bound, pass-fail, follow the points, great. But when it can become a sort of never-ending story of unquestioned ambition within, say, the world of podcasting, then I want to make sure there are periods built in where I have some distance. The other fundamental belief, and I'm sticking with the belief stuff because these are thoughts that we take to be true. Beliefs are thoughts we take to be true.

31:26And I'm sure I'm borrowing that from someone like Byron Katie. The belief structure is sort of the reed raft upon which everything else floats. and if you really want to have the most optionality with your direction, I think it's very helpful to make the implicit beliefs explicit and look at them carefully. So the other belief that I think is helpful, I actually know quite concretely, this is not limited to people who are in the top 1 % of 1%. The world does not end if you slow down or take a break. It'll carry on just perfectly fine, generally, without you. Now, there are constraints if you're saying that you want to take a break from a job that provides all the income from your family and pays the mortgage and puts food on the table.

32:16Obviously, there are constraints. But if you were to delete all social media from your phone and titrate down the aperture of noise and news that gets flooded into your system, you'd be fine. You'd probably be better off. So the hyperkinetic feeling of modern society is not conducive or necessary for making decisions with outsized outcomes, if that makes sense. Those are a few kind of underpinning beliefs. And there are people who prove this, right? A lot of the people that I most respect in their profession, like a Daniel Day-Lewis or something, they disappear for five years at a time. They come back.

32:59No one's like, where's Daniel Day-Lewis? What are his latest tweets about politics? Nobody gives a shit. As long as you're really good at Kraft X, you are going to have, I think, a good number of options. So I'm meandering a little bit, but help me refocus. Is there a particular aspect of your question that you'd like me to hit? I think you're really hitting on a lot of the stuff. And like you said earlier, or some of the stuff about hitting. How do you think about things that bring you joy and then you realign with your beliefs to get there? I think this is really helpful. Thanks, yeah. I mean, it's inspiring that someone as successful as you at something has done this and taken stock and sort of stepped back because it kind of gives the rest of us hope to do the same thing.

33:39You know, even if it's just something that you're just saying, I'm going to take a step back and then do similar to what I'm doing and some other stuff, maybe in a different way with a different lens. It's just helpful to think through that to get the rest of us to the happy place. Yeah. Happy to try to assist. I definitely don't have everything figured out. I would say also that, and this comes back to Christina's question on questions, if you're hitting a dead end or you don't seem to be able to reliably answer a question and it's causing you stress, for instance, like, how can I find joy? Let's just say that you've been banging your head against that question and it hasn't been producing great results.

34:20One thing you can do that I will sometimes do is, okay, maybe that's not a good question, but there's a feeling that I'm going for. If I look back at the past, what are some of the antecedents to joy? So maybe the question isn't like, how do I create more joy? It's how do I create some precursor to that? And for me, one of those is a sense of losing the self or the dissolution of the self. That's another way that I think about these things. Antecedents 2X.

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36:02all right let's we're just gonna work our way through wade would you like to go next well i just want to say thanks for everything you do like genuinely appreciate it love the content love what you're about learn a lot you've been like a uh gym companion for me for like nine years he's nothing better than a good tim ferris podcast in the gym so genuinely appreciate that i think My question is around, and maybe I'm wrong, it's just an observation I've listened to for a long time, seems like maybe the edges have softened a little bit in regards to your life, maybe personality. Seems like maybe there's a hint of spirituality that's evolved a bit since I've been listening.

36:44So is there anything in particular that has helped maybe soften the edges, and is there a different perspective on spirituality than there used to be? I would say I've definitely softened a lot in the last five years, especially. And maybe I'm just getting older and tired, who knows. But if we take that off the table as an explanation, although I think a lot of stuff comes down to, I was talking to a friend and they were like, oh yeah, I'm just, you know, become so much chiller and conflict resolution with my partner after 10 years, but it took like five years. And I was like, maybe it's just fatigue.

37:21I was sort of being a jerk about it and then just being playful. But if I take that off the table, I mean, there are a few things that were proactive and also just life experiences, I think, that contribute to that. So I would say one is seeing dozens upon dozens upon dozens of close friends or podcast guests who are materially successful beyond belief, have all the prestige you could possibly imagine in a business capacity who are nonetheless dissatisfied or chasing something like a hungry ghost, if that makes sense. And the reason that's relevant is that a lot of the piss and vinegar and sort of spitfire focus that I've had, I think has been predicated subconsciously on some belief that with enough of X success, that success resolves, I'm not going to say all issues, because I never would have said that, but most issues.

38:31And that's just not true. It's just not true at all. I would say also what I've observed in very wealthy people is that they build, they build, they build. Their number moves. They make X amount of money, then they want 10X. And then, no, it's as soon as I have 100X. And then it's as soon as I have 1 ,000X, then I can chill out, and I'll know everything's going to be okay. And if you put that under scrutiny, when I've seen older people, and I've spoken to say grandparents or people who are building dynastic wealth, it seems like this is going to sound obnoxious, but I'll just say it, which is like if you give your kids a ton of money, let's just say that's more than 10 or 20 million bucks, right?

39:17People who are making just obscene amounts of money, building incredible amounts of wealth. There is an amount of money past a certain point that seems to just fuck up your kids horribly. I'm not saying that's always the case, but the, I just want to create a better and brighter future for my kids and give them the things I didn't have and da-da-da-da-da. There's a point where more is a lot less from what I've seen. It's just my personal impression. So if you realize that the professional stuff is not going to solve all your problems or all your challenges, let's just say. And if you realize in accumulating Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth and then donate it all to your kids, if it turns into a serious amount of money, it's probably a bad idea.

40:04It's not just neutral. You might actually really screw your kids up. Then it raises the question why around a lot, at least around the business stuff. I think it contributes, in addition to other things that I'll mention, to taking it seriously, but not too seriously. Taking it less seriously. Does that make sense? And when you take those things less seriously, if you have been inclined to take them very seriously and consequently yourself very seriously, I think by taking those things less seriously, you start to take yourself a little less seriously. These conversations also about legacy and like leaving something to be remembered.

40:44They're helpful in some cases, like those myths, but it's like, how many people can name like the most powerful people in the world when the Assyrians were running around? You know, how many people can name the most powerful Babylonian? Alexander the Great, what's his full name? Nobody knows. So it's like, so So the idea, especially with the amount of information overwhelm that is our current day, the idea of also creating some permanent record of yourself that just persists over more than 10 years after you're dead, if you're lucky, is kind of silly. I mean, it's a little silly. But we all need reasons to do things.

41:28And actually, I think, Josh, you were asking about people who failed and failed and then succeeded. I think myths are very helpful here. So coming up with myths, whether that is like, when I have enough money, it's going to solve everything. Great. That's an incredible incentive for the myth that I am the only person in the world who's destined to create this amazing piece of art. Okay. Maybe that's true, but it's probably a myth, but it can be a very empowering myth. And it makes me think of Seth Godin who said, I'm paraphrasing, but past a certain point, money is a story. So pick a story you can live with that benefits you instead of handicaps you.

42:05Then on the spirituality side, I generally steer away from that term. It's a useful term because there isn't a great replacement in some conversations, but it can get used in a lot of different ways. But I would say that my openness to, it's not even openness, it's like my recognition that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know, I think has opened my mind, as have a lot of strange experiences that I've had with, whether it's psychedelics or otherwise, it's not limited to that. And I explore the fringes, right? I mean, I really do. And I try to keep my skeptics hat on. I think I'm actually quite good at not fooling myself.

42:52And I will ask, what are the alternate explanations for this? How might this otherwise be explained, etc., etc. But there's a lot of strange stuff out there. It doesn't mean it's magic, but it does highlight sometimes the limits of our current abilities to kind of measure and freeze frame things for scientific studies. So those are all contributors, I would say, in the bucket, broadly speaking, of not taking myself too, too seriously. if my work is a subset of myself, and it applies to that too, would be having a lot of friends die. Like I've had lots of friends pass away. I've had people get very sick.

43:31I've seen people succumb to dementia. As you get older and you see more and more of this, it just highlights the fact that this ride is not, it's not a long ride. And I'm not convinced that, you know, death is the end necessarily, but still we don't know. you know let's not spend the entire roller coaster worrying about you know whatever trump said on your phone like roller coasters not gonna last forever so focus you know taking the view you know poke the person next to you try to share a laugh because it's just not that long and even if you come to a quote-unquote natural end in old age it's not long but sadly i've lost a lot of friends and acquaintances, certainly, to car accidents.

44:17I mean, you name it. You just don't know. So I think the softening is around a lot of that. The softening also comes from, I think, exploring different modalities for trying to metabolize the childhood abuse that I've talked about elsewhere. And that requires a degree of cultivating compassion for yourself that I historically have not paid a lot of attention to. It's hard for me to see any way around developing compassion, more compassion for yourself if you want to genuinely express compassion for other people. I'm not sure there's a workaround there. I've thought about this quite a bit. It goes both ways, but fundamentally, I think that's a homework assignment for a lot of people that if, I'm not going to say solved, but if that is paid sufficient attention, has all these downstream benefits.

45:19One of which I think is just a general softening, I would say. So those are the things that come to mind. Thanks, man. That was awesome. Appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. All right. So faces have moved around a little bit. I'll try to keep track. I think I can keep track of who's gone, who hasn't. Since Tim is up in the corner next to me, I'm going to go with Tim. You want to go next? Yeah, again, thanks for all you do. It's an amazing journey from your books through your podcast journey and cocktunch. Love the coffee. I've got some right over there. I'm still drinking it. So I had a question that was kind of tuned to all these longevity protocols with AI and all the latest research that's coming out as far as the compounds, the protocols, like how do you cheap up, right?

46:02For you, I've been introduced to Peter Atiyah, Andrew Schieberman, Lane Norton, and a lot of other great kind of contemporary leading-edge science-backed information seekers and deliverers. So how do you approach handling that, especially with this, we're in the age of AI now. So that was going to be my question. That's what I submitted. But on the topics that you just have been going through, and it's in my own life i'm realizing these instances you know when people are passing my dog pepper passed away just like two months ago what do you do with grief and how is that something that as far as your your approach something that you see is helpful something to be avoided i mean you're kind of all through it with what the information you've just been walking us through, but just kind of with grief, because you only have so much time, right?

46:58Thanks. Yeah, for sure. So on the grief side, I definitely don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's part of the human condition. No expert, but I would say a few things that this kind of comes back to Wade's question about spirituality in the sense, and I will come back to the longevity protocols and so might as well talk about that. But I think that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in some respects with the stripping away of religion from, let's just call it modern secular society. And what I mean by that is not that we should believe in a guy with a beard in the clouds, I'm not saying that, but that there are cultural milestones, in some cases, rites of passage, these markers along the way on this journey of life that are codified in, say, religion.

47:59And in some cases, that can be very helpful. So for instance, mourning periods will sometimes be very carefully outlined. And a group of people will agree, with this type of death, you mourn for this period of time. Here's the protocol. Maybe you wear black. and so you can have a feeling of completeness and perhaps closure within the construct of this societal norm, right? We don't really have that. It's left up to everybody to sort of create our own. And I'm not saying this for everybody. There are certainly plenty of religious folks out there. But by and large, let's just say in places where I spend a lot of time, Austin, New York, California, people are somewhat cut adrift.

48:42And sure, they might be able to tell you all about different philosophers they read in college and listen about on podcasts. But fundamentally, there's a sense of being somewhat unmoored, I would say. So the grief topic is a really good one. And it serves as kind of a microcosm of the macro. It reflects the challenges within grief, I think reflect broader societal challenges. The book on grief and grieving is probably the most common recommendation that I hear from say podcast guests. So I think that could be worth checking out. On the longevity protocols, just to take a hard left, I would say I really don't try to stay up to date with the longevity protocols in part because there's so much garbage and there's so many influencers, quote unquote, trying to peddle whatever rev share stem cell clinic they've partnered with in Tijuana or whatever might be the case.

49:43It's very difficult to separate fact from fiction if you don't have a really reliable source. I would say just follow Peter, honestly. Peter Atiyah, for that specifically, that's really his wheelhouse. He focuses on healthspan. And I've known him since 2009. I've spent time with his doctors in the clinic. I've gone through Biograph, which he's involved with, and so on. So I have a high degree of confidence in Peter. And I've seen him repeatedly turn down offers for very lucrative business arrangements in exchange for promoting X, Y, or Z. and he just won't do it if he doesn't really feel 100 % comfortable supporting their conclusions and claims.

50:28So I would say pay attention to that. And frankly, the more we learn, the more the basics are the basics for a reason. It's like creatine's been around for decades. This is nothing new. Just took some before doing this conversation, right? It's present in a lot of food that we consume naturally. It's a known quantity in the body, pretty well understood. As soon as you start getting into the bleeding edge, where it's like, well, these people are going to Honduras and injecting themselves with phallistatin and look at these amazing before and after photos. But it does kind of turn off your FSH. And so it might make you infertile in these animal models.

51:04Something like that seems to happen. But look how awesome this APAC looks. It's like, I'm not sure you want to be the third monkey shot into space with that stuff as a human subject. So I tend to stay away from the bleeding edge. I used to be very aggressive with this, certainly in my four-hour body days. I was very aggressive with this. And I think in part because I was fascinated, in part because I didn't foresee how nagging certain problems could be. It's like, yeah, if you fuck up and have a problem that causes orthopedic issues in your elbow, it's not a foregone conclusion that that's going to be fixed a year later.

51:40You might just have tendinosis for the next 40 years. Oops. So I do pay more attention to the downside. And I would say that in general, one of the ways that I frame this for myself is not what can I do that will make me live longer, but what can I subtract that might make me live longer or just live more healthfully. So for instance, I mean, this is going to sound maybe funny, and there's a lot of pseudoscience wackadoodle stuff out there about this, but just minimizing exposure to plastics and phthalates and things like that, it seems very conclusive at this point that from an endocrine perspective and so on, these are just very, very bad news.

52:27So it's like, don't heat things in plastic, use more glass. These are very, very basic things. Use filtration, have proper filtration for your water. If you don't have really, really good filtration for your water, you might want to take a look at it. Because even in very rural areas, you could have, for instance, in some of the mountainous areas, I've spent time with high levels of arsenic because there used to be mining. And if you're way out in the country, you might have higher concentrations of groundwater, pesticides, things like this from agriculture. So just paying really close attention to that kind of stuff.

53:00Exercise, it's like the cure-all, right? It's like zone two, weight training, just like, you just got to do it. Or you don't have to do it, but people are always glad to have done it, I would say. And it feels good, for me at least. It's the most consistent mood elevator for sure, in addition to cold exposure. And these tools, I think if someone is on the verge of being diabetic or diabetic, there could very well be a role for these drugs like Ozepic or Munjara, et cetera, but they're not free lunches. Come back to the blog post I wrote some time ago. I think it's just called No Biological Free Lunches.

53:39It's like there are trade-offs here. And if you don't know what the trade-offs are, it's not because they don't exist. It's just because we have not identified them as consistently yet. But if it's a matter of life and death and you need to lose weight, hey, then you do a risk calculus. But in general, like the stuff that I'm doing for longevity is the stuff I've been doing for 10 plus years creatine exercise try not to stuff your fucking face every time you sit down to eat which is my biggest challenge I love eating god do I love eating uh you know but like these are known problems so those are my thoughts on the longevity stuff thanks Jim yeah I'm sorry about your dog man I think about that all the time got my pup right next to me it's just like oh god it's like I think I'm going to cry on planes every time I think about it.

54:27So I'm sorry. All right, Joel, you want to hop in? Hey, Tim and other Tim, sorry about your dog too. I lost a cat two months ago. Also had her for 14 years, had her from when she was a kitten. And something that really helped me. I mean, she was, I spent a lot of time with that cat, right? I lived in a small apartment for many years, just me and her. And now we have some land and I buried her. I dug her four feet down. I dug the hole myself with my wife. It was nighttime and digging a hole. And we really think a lot about environmentalism because we're not religious. So we just really like thinking about nature.

55:03And so to bury her, not cremate her, to get her body from the vets and not put her in a plastic bag and dig her deep enough where animals don't get to her and she's on our land and she's going to biodegrade, return to the earth. Yeah, and wear black for a couple of days and see it as mourning. I know she was just a cat, But I think there's that gravestone, that meme that from like 100 years ago where she was enough of a human to be a comfort in times of stress and sadness, even though she was just a cat. That helped us. That was our process two months ago, coincidentally. So just thought I'd share that, Tim.

55:36Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so questions. So I've got a pre-prepared question that coincidentally, Joff, I saw he was asking about kind of creative projects. And he had a copy, because we have it in the video, which is pretty cool, of Rick Rubin's The Creative Act. I saw that copy on Josh's Zoom. So my question is about that. I think a lot about creativity. I've been making a living as an artist for a number of years. And in his book, The Creative Act, Rick talks about the aesthetic. It's one of the chapters. And he's describing creative projects where they give you a primal feeling of warmth in your body.

56:14And he says that that's a great creative compass to recognize when you're searching for a breakthrough, when you're in a slog of bad work and mediocrity and experiments that are going nowhere. But when you feel ecstatic about something, that's a great compass for trying to discover greatness or a breakthrough. Or he says it's like an answered prayer. And I certainly felt like glimpses of it at times, but I'm curious in your past project or your future, what you're working on when you have felt the ecstatic, the ecstatic in creative projects. And especially like in the future, like what you think in the next projects might be, what gives you that sense of the ecstatic?

57:05I think about this a lot. Not in those terms. I mean, I know Rick decently well. and makes sense that that would be in the book. I haven't read the entire book, but it makes a lot of sense it would be in there. I think a lot about a few things. Not just feeling that. I would say for me, it's a quickening of sorts. It's like if I'm engaged with a certain type of project or discussion about a potential project and I've got the kind of two cups of coffee with no jitters, just that extreme comfortable focus, like a calm but intense focus that is energy giving, I pay a lot of attention to that. I also think about clearing the decks so that you can actually pick up that signal.

57:51For instance, if you consume too many stimulants, too much coffee, too much this, too much macho, whatever the hell it might be, in a sense, you're raising the level of gain might not be the right word, but level of static. So it becomes harder to pick out that signal. You might get a lot of false positives, or you might be irritable and then get a lot of false negatives where you're just like, oh, this is making me creepy and crawly. And it's like, no, it's because you had your fifth double espresso for the day, dummy. So for me personally, I try to keep track of that. And paying attention to the physiology, which is not inherently natural for me, or it doesn't come in reflexively because I've spent so much time looking at kind of the spreadsheet analysis side of things, being really analytical.

58:39But if I get off a phone call and I'm drained, or if I get off a phone call, I'm like, yeah, fuck yeah, I want to do another one of those. It's sometimes that simple. And it's not that I know with certainty that X marks the spot. This is the project when it's done and it looks like this, this is going to be the ecstatic moment. It's not so much that for me. It's like a scent trail. It's like an energetic scent trail, if that makes sense. and there's a description i can't remember whose description it was about writing a novel and the metaphor was writing a novel is like driving across the country starting at night with your headlights on it's like you can't see your destination but you don't need to see your destination you just need to see far enough in front of you to kind of navigate your way and adjust.

59:28So I would say for me, those are some of the ways I think about it. I mean, a cock punch, as ridiculous as it is, that was one of those where I was just so energized by the prospect of digging into the art specifically and the fantasy and what that would do from a freedom perspective in writing fiction versus highly researched nonfiction. I was like, okay, I don't even know. That seems kind of like a dead end on some, like, this could be a huge mistake. But I'm getting so much of a physical response. I was like, fuck it. This seems like not the kind of thing to ignore. And that liberated so much energy that I could apply not just to that project, but to other projects that I have no regrets about it whatsoever.

1:00:20I'm curious if you've ever gotten into Lord of the Rings because it's such a cultural phenomenon. and Lord of the Rings has had a big impact on my life in terms of fantasy. And with Cockpunch and DMD, do they have a hero's journey, like Bible, Jesus, like Lord of the Rings does? Did you think about that at all with Cockpunch? Does DMD have that, like a singular figure, like Frodo carrying the ring? Have you ever inserted that or thought about that? DMD, as far as I know, does not have that. Lord of the Rings, I mean, I was just in Oxford for a week in the UK and was looking at original handwritten notes from Tolkien and looking at his scripts of Elvish, spending time in pubs where he and C.S.

1:01:09Lewis and others would hang out. So I am deeply, deeply interested by Tolkien. I think a good dungeon master will have some felt sense of the hero's journey as they're weaving adventures for people that are playing out in real time. The circumstances and the players and the module don't always conform to like, all is lost and then there's the redemption. It might just be all is lost and then you're fucking dead. It doesn't always have the Star Wars yeah, go R2-D2 moment. Do you have a singular hero in Cockplunch? As it's laid out right now that's not made clear, in my mind And if I were to... So that, with some of the recent art I put on Instagram, I said, okay, we're going to call this Legends of Varlata.

1:01:58And so I just took the cockpunch out. So let's say it's Legends of Varlata. There is a character that I keep coming back to in my own mind, too. And it's not a Jesus character, but it's sort of like an Ender's Game Frodo-ish character is Tyrolean. So the son, who is in the last few episodes of the podcast. So Tyrolean and his father, that particular dynamic, I have like an entire, if somebody was like, here's a hundred million bucks, go make something awesome. I'm like, I know exactly what I would make. This is what I would do. And it would be fucking amazing. Like, I know this sounds ridiculous and just so arrogant to say, but it's like, no, like I, based on working with the concept arts, the feedback I can give, I can storyboard well enough to kind of like Frank Miller-esque, like I can be a primary writer, but I can also have, I have the sort of directorial cinematic sense for how things might be framed visually also, that I can work really well with creatives who are working with animation, moving pictures, whatever.

1:03:05So I would say the two, the core relationship that would drive that movie would be the father-son. And nothing tragic has happened yet, but if I were to continue my writing for a few more thousand words, stuff would get very exciting and super off the rails really quickly. And then there would be things to solve, something like that. So yeah, I think it would be fun. It's just figuring out how to go from rooster NFTs to$100 million animated film. It's just a couple of hops in between that I need to figure out. But seeing, for instance, and I mean, this is like, I'm not a gaming studio with gajillions of dollars in revenue, but Arcane, seeing what League of Legends and Riot Games did with Arcane.

1:03:56If you guys haven't seen Arcane on Netflix, go watch it. It's bananas. I mean, if you want to see something where, I mean, like the most off the rails budget for something animated, it's really remarkable. And there's a YouTube series on the making of, which I would also recommend checking out. Alright, let's see, Chris, the Katana and a Fender Stratocaster, maybe in the background? Yeah, that was a practice. It should have been more conscious, maybe, in the background, I'm not sure. Oh, I like it. I'm into it. No, it's a practice source. I mean, where do you put it? You put it there. It kind of helps people when they come in the office.

1:04:33It kind of sits the tunnel a little, I guess. Thanks for us for putting this together. I love the format. It's kind of neat to meet all different people who we share an interest in what you've been doing and that kind of stuff. Yeah, my pleasure. I'm having fun. I was wondering in your case, you know, I'm thinking about your 10 years and that kind of thing. For me, if I looked at the last 10 years for myself, there was an underlying theme for me that I really found that I wasn't that I was an impatient person, but I found that really developing high level patience with both myself and others. It seemed to drag everything else along in a positive way, whether it be compassion or empathy or that kind of thing.

1:05:15If I had to pick a theme in the last 10 years for myself, that would probably be it. That really might account for positive changes and growth in that regard. I was wondering, over the last 10 years, you found a common theme the same way. Last 10 years. Well, I could use some lessons in patience. That's never been my strong suit. I would say my mom has made jokes about my impatience since I was a little kid. So I guess I'm the counter example. Although that's been a project, but if I'm looking at a through line over the last 10 years, I would say it is developing more awareness in different capacities so that I can self-regulate my physiological response.

1:06:01That's a very wordy thing to say. but to explain it i could say that my challenge has been since childhood that i have a very hypervigilant system so my sympathetic nervous system just the noradrenaline and adrenaline all these things kick off at the slightest provocation could be just you know someone dropping a book in a hotel in the room next to me when i'm asleep and then all of a sudden heart rates whatever 120 and I can't get back to sleep, that type of thing. And that can come up also in conversation. If I'm talking to someone and they say something that I create a story in response to, and the story is very upsetting, and then suddenly my physiology is fucked, then the physiology feeds back into the cognitive loop, right?

1:06:45I explained it to another therapist recently because this was a CBT context. I was like, well, we're going to work on the thoughts. And I said, we can work on the thoughts, but I'm not convinced the thoughts are where things start. I actually think that it's possible, my physiology gets activated. And then it's a state in search of a story. That's the phrasing I used. It's a state in search of a story. You have this uncomfortable feeling or this strong feeling. And because we're meaning making machines, we don't like uncertainty. It's like, well, let me go find a story that could explain that.

1:07:15And maybe it's a story about myself. Maybe it's a story about the world. Maybe it's a story about somebody else. So I would say the last 10 years has been trying to cultivate an awareness with different tools, meditation, psychedelic therapies, reading books like Awareness by Anthony DeMello, so that in the moment, I can at least be aware of what's happening. So for instance, I have been using this app, which is what I use to get back on the train. For the last handful of weeks, Kevin Rose, good buddy Kevin Rose, introduced me to Henry Shookman. And I had Henry on the podcast twice. He is a Zen meditation master.

1:07:54Now, I don't like that master term, but he's one of, I want to say, three or four people authorized to teach this particular school of Zen in the United States. And he then started to develop an app. I invested in it, but it was early days, kind of backup and napkin thing. And now it's built out. It's called The Way, if you want to try it. And I've been using it 10 minutes a day, twice a day. And I had a really, really challenging conversation today with someone I'm very close to. And I could feel my physiology, just kidding. I have so much background with this person. And I was just like, here we fucking go again.

1:08:31It's one of those. I was just like, ah. And I was able to, and this is going to seem very rudimentary, but as I was having this really strong physiological response just to go body. As I'm listening to the person just be like body, I'm just noting that my body is having this extreme response. And by noting it, not trying to suppress it necessarily, I'm just noting it, having that drop in intensity so that I could engage in a way that was less reactive. So I would say the project then for the last 10 years has been developing an awareness of an appreciation of how much my physiology drives everything that happens up here and paying more attention to that.

1:09:14Not just trying to cross-examine the thoughts because the thoughts are, I think, a byproduct sometimes of a rapid heart rate, things like that. Does that answer the question? Absolutely. That's great. All right. Cool. Yeah. Thanks for the question. All right. I think we have one person left. Lee, I believe. Would you like to go? Hi there. I'm from Canada. I was having technical difficulties when everyone was doing our introductions. I guess my question is a two-part or part-and-a-half question. So I'm a 47-year-old man with a five-year-old daughter, so I started late in life. And all I wish for her is to see her find something that lights her up.

1:09:54Anything. I guess that ties into me and my life right now. As I'm wishing that so badly for her, I realize that I need to make a career change. I don't love my job. So I have kind of, I decided to go with a clean sleep. Any of my past doesn't matter. I want to start figuring out something that lights me up. Is there a few questions that you ask yourself if you ever feel stuck trying to figure out what that is? So you're feeling stuck at the moment in terms of choosing a path forward for yourself? To find something that lights me up. I'm lucky right now because I have six months off. so I can think about my next move, where I want to go, what I want to do.

1:10:36Any little ember I get and I follow down that path, I think to myself, okay, well, is AI going to do this in five years? How much effort do I want to put into it? And I'm just trying to, if there's a few questions I can ask myself or a few things I can do, just to find that thing. Yeah, for sure. What are some of the options that you're considering at the moment? So one of them was architecture and house design, but I'm thinking in five years, that's going to be pretty much taken by AI, I'm sure. That's the thing. I'm stuck. I used to be in the restaurant business. I don't have nothing to do with that anymore.

1:11:13I owned a restaurant for a while. And, you know, I'm just kind of at that point where the next decision I make, I really want to get excited about it. And it could be anything. I'm all about learning things and just, I need to find, you know, that spark. So I'm into architecture, and that's what I thought was going to be the path, and I thought, okay, well. I don't have all the answers, of course, but my thinking around AI, because this is a common concern, right? You're not alone in this. A lot of people are wondering what will be gobbled by AI, and I think the short answer is nobody has an idea, right?

1:11:50Nobody really knows. And it's easy to become paralyzed, given that there's so much uncertainty around it. But my feeling is there are certain career paths, let's just say, that are already being eaten. If you were to say I'm going to be a logo designer and earn my money on Fiverr, I'd say that's probably going to get consumed within the next very short period of time. But if you have the flexibility to consider paths, I would pay more attention to the quickening than speculation about AI. Number one, there's no right path, right? So you can take some pressure off yourself when you realize that everybody's making it up as they go along.

1:12:34There's no one right answer in the mathematical proof of your life. Does that make sense? It's going to be a trial and error process like it is with everything that we do in life. So I would say that with something like architectural design, for instance, I actually don't think it is a foregone conclusion that it's all going to be consumed by AI, in part because there are open questions around this technology. For instance, will people want to watch movies that are purely generated by AI that make them cry? Are people going to want to cry knowing that no human was involved, that it was just based on a large language model plus other AIs being trained on certain data sets, finding patterns, and then producing a desired emotion?

1:13:20Are people going to want that? For instance, I mean, people still buy handmade shoes, right? People still buy artwork produced by artists. People still pay for many things that they could pay less for if they were willing to go to the lowest cost provider. So there is a market for that. And I think that in questions of taste and conversation and so on, most people are not going to be do-it-yourselfers with everything in their lives, acting as the direct interface with AI. What I could see is that you end up, let's just say, working in architectural design. And instead of having three employees, you have three really well-trained AIs that you pay$19 to$100 a month for that take the place of those employees and help you with various aspects of the job.

1:14:13I could see that. In the same way that you might use something like FreshBooks for accounting, right? You'd be like, well, I'm not the best draftsman, but I can do this, this, and this. And my value is in interfacing with the client and figuring out these following things. And then these steps of the process are going to be well handled by an AI. So I think that that's entirely possible. But my uninformed perspective is that the magical skill, it's not magical, but the powerful skill in any rapidly changing world, which includes AI, it's not limited to that. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, the rate of change is just going parabolic in so many different fields.

1:14:51So it's not going to be limited to AI. Is adaptability and confidence in your ability to trial and error and ultimately kind of figure it out. So I do think that a lot of this hinges also on how we think about worst case scenarios. So I don't know anything about your personal setup, but let's just say you have some savings, right? you have a methodical plan for handling costs associated with your daughter, and you live in Canada. So unlike in the US, there may be some things covered by your fine government that we don't come across as easily here. Then you may have more room to experiment than you give yourself credit for, if that makes sense.

1:15:32You may have more safety nets, and the worst case may not be that bad. So for instance, you could do, and this is available on the blog, if you just go to tim.blog slash TED, I think there's the TED talk on fear setting. And then there's the text from the four-hour workweek on fear setting, just to do that exercise. And what you may realize is, let's say worst case, AI eats architectural design. But you get three or four years of feeling really gratified by your work. You're learning a ton. You're interacting with people. you really respect. And it's like we all deal with bullshit, right? It's not going to be all kittens and rainbows.

1:16:11But overall, you're like, wow, this is so much better than running that restaurant X number of years ago. And then AI eats it. And you're like, okay, now I have to start over. Would you regret having done it? Maybe not. It depends a lot on what the worst case looks like when you make it granular. And the only way you're going to figure that out, or at least the only way I can figure it out, is trying to put it on paper and figure out what are the worst things that could happen? How could I decrease the likelihood of those things happening? Next column, what could I do to get back on my feet? Okay.

1:16:44So let's say you try that and you're like, fuck, that didn't work. I need to figure out what's next. But in the meantime, I need to make some money. Could you do something in your current industry? Could you like, worst case, you're like, oh, I really don't want to do it, but I'm going to consult for people who own restaurants for a period of time to make ends meet. And then I'll figure out my next move. probably, right? So I would say a place that might help you get unstuck, and this is true for me as well, is doing the fear setting exercise and also realizing that very few moves are fatal, like very, very, very few.

1:17:20So those are my thoughts on that. Awesome. Thanks so much. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we've been going for a minute here, and it's time for me to go get some food since I had basically mixed nuts and sweet potato fries for my whole day of food, which is not gonna necessarily help me live to be 150, but you know, we all have our off days. So I'm gonna go try to get a proper meal and really nice to meet you all and spend time with you all and see some of you for not the first time in the case of a few folks who were here earlier. So have a wonderful evening and a great weekend and thanks for being part of the experiment.

1:18:02Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

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