Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness – Tim Urban

Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why https://waitbutwhy.com/ and has become one of the Internet's most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has "captured a level of reader engagement that even the new-media giants would be envious of." Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month and has over 550,000 email subscribers. Tim's series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk has been called by Vox's David Roberts "the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I've read in ages." You can start with the first one, Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html. Tim's TED Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/my-ted-talk.html, has received more than 21 million views. This episode is a live talk that was recorded on the launch day of Tribe of Mentors https://tribeofmentors.com/. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/and enter the code "TIM" at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts or an incredible gift. Again, that's onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM. This podcast is also brought to you by ConvertKit https://convertkit.com/Tim/. After trying the competition, this is the only email tool that has made email marketing easy for my team without sacrificing any of the features and benefits I need to run a profitable business. It's got easy-to-use systems, split testing, resending technology, automation, targeted content, high rates of deliverability, integration with more than 70 services — like WordPress, Shopify, and Sumo — and excellent customer service. Whether you have a thousand subscribers or a million, whether you run a simple blog or a whole company, ConvertKit https://convertkit.com/Tim/ has a plan that's scaled to fit your budget and requirements. Go to ConvertKit.com/Tim https://convertkit.com/Tim/ to try it out and get your first month for free! Test the platform, kick the tires, and make sure it works for you and your business.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, or perhaps you're listening to the brand-new Tribe of Mentors podcast, which is currently, as of this recording, number five across all of iTunes and Apple Podcasts. This is a cross-post episode, so it appears in both places, and I'll keep this intro short. This conversation you're going to hear is with Tim Urban, and we'll get into his bio in the actual conversation. It was recorded at Barnes & Noble in Union Square in New York City on the launch evening of the Tribe of Mentors book. You can learn all about that at tribeofmentors.com. We had a blast. The audience was awesome. Thank

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  you to everyone who came out, and we'll probably be doing some more live experiments like this. So without further ado, please enjoy my very wide-ranging conversation with the ever-hilarious and fascinating Tim Urban.

• 2:36Tim Ferriss?

  How's everybody doing tonight?

• 2:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right, this is exciting. Thank you all so much for coming. It's a real honor and privilege to have you all here. And we're gonna do something a little bit different tonight. Rather than do what is the norm, and perhaps what I've done many times before, which is get up and tell you all about this book that you already own. I thought we'd do a bonus round with one of the guests, one of the people who was interviewed for Tribe of Mentors. So I'm going to welcome him to the stage in just a moment, but I'll read the bio first while I wrestle with the audio. And here we go. One of my favorite people in New York City.

• 3:23Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm excited, and we'll be asking questions I have not asked him before. So this is a rare live edition of The Tim Ferriss Show in some ways also. Here we go. Tim Urban. Who is Tim Urban? Twitter, Facebook, @WaitButWhy, waitbutwhy.com. Tim Urban is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the internet's most popular writers. Tim, according to Fast Company, has captured a level of reader engagement that even the new media giants would be envious of. Today, Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month, among them Elon Musk, and has more than 550,000 email subscribers. Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well,

• 4:08Tim Ferriss?

  like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Ashington, that's one of my buddies, hi Chris, Anderson, and brain pickings Maria Popova. Tim's series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk have been called by Vox's David Roberts, quote, "The mediest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I've read in ages," end quote. You can start with the first one, Elon Musk, the world's raddest man. Tim's TED Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, has received more than, now I checked it yesterday, 25 million combined views. Please welcome to the stage the incredible, the brilliant, and handsome, Tim Urban.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  I feel like this is like your birthday party and I'm like stepping in the middle and I'm like, it's very uncomfortable.

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, I said, "What other Tim can I bring into the fold?" For those people who are maybe a little older like I am. This is the T2, the improved version. It's a Terminator reference. Alright. So, I figure we'll jump into it and what we're gonna do is we'll have a conversation, which mostly involves me just asking him questions. And then we'll jump into this fishbowl and answer some of your questions. And then after that, we will have the opportunity, we might be here for a while, so I will not be offended if people are like, "Peace, I'm out, I don't wanna wait." But we will have a chance to say hello and people who wanna have photographs and so on. We'll be able to do that. Okay, let's just jump right into it. Alright, Wait But Why.

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  Before Wait But Why, and you and I chatted a little bit about this, I guess, feels like a couple of nights ago, but maybe it was yesterday, I can't remember, it's been a big week. You blogged casually for six years or so on the side. Could you tell us about that blog? What subjects did you cover? What characterized what you did part-time for six years?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  So it was called "Underneath the Turbin", so that's a little thing that I came up with, and...

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  The Turbin?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yes, cuz my name is Tim Urban. I was 23, I wasn't taking... It was not a serious project.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  And it was very much a side project.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  It was, actually, I think I can credit it because, credit the fact that it was a side project for why I was actually able to kind of be productive, because I didn't have this pressure to do it. I was like, "No, what's my voice? Who am I as a writer?" I wasn't a writer, I was just doing something else. I was gonna blog to procrastinate from the other things I was supposed to be doing, which liberated me creatively, actually. I was able to kind of, you know, do my own thing and, you know, kind of find my voice and be, you know, kind of a little bit, you know, courageous at times. And I think, I think so, so for someone like me is actually like, it was like I tricked myself into

• 7:07Speaker 03

  actually doing stuff that I normally probably would've, you know, been a little bit more belabored in trying to get it going, but, uh, yeah.

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  What type of subjects? Was it, was it similar? How was it most different and how was it most similar to Wait But Why?

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so... It was very much more like a blog blog. You know, I'd write about my day, I'd rant about, you know, going to the store and then they had McDonald's there and then they, I was like, "Don't get the six-piece nugget, you know, get the four." And then I ordered the 10 and then they actually had, at the end of the night, so they gave me 18 and then I eat all 18 and that, it was like that kind of like story about my day, very much like just the top of my head, just typing, publishing, you know. And it never, it was, it was a small, little passionate following of like 700 people and like six comments on a thing and that was that. And it was, it was this side project, but it was a way for me to actually write like 300 blog posts over a six-year span.

• 8:02Tim Ferriss?

  What were this, were there any seeds from that experience that then informed Wait But Why and why did you create Wait But Why?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:13Tim Ferriss?

  And where's the name come from?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so I, I was able to kind of hone my voice through writing 300 blog posts. I look back at the early ones and I, I wince at like the tones I was using. So it was, you know, 300 blog posts will teach you what you like to, you know, the voice you like to write in. And so that's one thing. And then I also, like towards the end, I decided one night to try to draw something and I kind of said, "Let me," you know, I was gonna try to depict this concept that I thought was funny when someone, you know, it was like doppelganger day on Facebook and someone posts a doppelganger that's way better looking than they are, I always think that's kind of hilarious. And I was like, "I'm gonna draw like a stick figure that's kind of messy looking and then like a handsome stick figure with like a wave of hair." And so I did that. And it hit me that I like, I, I was like, "That would be better in drawing" and I realized I liked that.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  And so I discovered that there too. So when I started Wait But Why a couple of years-

• 9:01Tim Ferriss?

  Did other people also respond positively to that or did you just?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Very, yeah.

• 9:06Tim Ferriss?

  They did, okay.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got great feedback and then I started just every post, I was like, the last seven posts on the blog all had drawings. It was like I discovered that at the very end. So then it was time to, you know, start a new project.

• 9:15Tim Ferriss?

  Why was it time to start a new project? Why not continue writing about the chicken McNuggets?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Good question.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, it's not. I'm not trying to be a dick.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  No, no. It's fair. And I also write about chicken nuggets sometimes.

• 9:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry. This is family programming. Not sure. Sorry.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  No, it was time in my life, in general, to like, turn all my attention, not a third of my attention, to one creative project. It was always, I'm doing something with my full-time, and then I'm doing these like, two creative projects on the side.

• 9:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna be a pain in the ass. I apologize, but that's my nature. Why was it time? Like, what realization, or conversation, or getting fired, or whatever, catalyzed the decision? You know, it's time for me to put all my eggs in one basket creatively.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  It's this thing you do that makes me love your podcast. It's stressful being the person.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Just learning this for the first time.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  But, no, so for me, it was actually, I spent the years from ages 22 to 31, like, hating myself a little bit, because I was burning to do something creative, whether it was writing, or music, or something. And I always was doing them on the side. You know, it was like, that kind of, that kind of just leap of faith in my own kind of ability to do something creative full-time. Took me nine years. Nine years that I wasn't very happy. And so I finally said, you know, I have to do something full-time. Because I always thought if I could just do something full-time, with all the energy from all of these things into one thing, it would go, it would go well. So I decided, you know, I actually owned a business with my friend.

• 10:54Tim Ferriss?

  Andrew Finn.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  And it was the fact that the business got into a decent enough spot, that, you know, we were able to start something new. And kind of, that's when I jumped on.

• 11:02Tim Ferriss?

  What was the business?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  It's a test prep company.

• 11:05Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this is a great business. So Mancha Nani, who's a very successful novelist, also... Got his beginnings.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  It's a good starter, a good like starter business.

• 11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Adam Robinson as well. So three people in this book, that's crazy. Just putting it together now.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Who knew, who knew I was on to like the starter business idea? I was just procrastinating from my music career is actually all I was doing when I started it. Cause I was tutoring on the side. And then of course, you know, the other side things ended up taking all my time, which is what a classic procrastinator would do.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  But yeah, just simple kind of, you know, you, the, each session pays for itself. You don't need overhead, you know, you do the beginning, you don't need any full-time employees. So we, but we had built it up to the point where we had good full-time employees, uh, good enough to run, um, run it kind of without both of us there. And so it was time to start something and we'd done this a couple of years ago. We started a podcast app back in 2011 with the theory that podcasts were just going to get bigger and they did. Unfortunately, we didn't know how to build a good app. We built a bad app, shouldn't build a bad app. But we, but now it was a couple of years later and it was time for something new. And I said, I'm going to jump on this and say, I need to do something creative. Let me see if I can do it as also a business that like, we can kind of own together. You can run our tutoring company.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  I'm going to go and start something and you know, I was, it was between kind of like writing a musical, which is a terrible business. I wouldn't want to drag him into that or writing maybe a content website. That's, that can, you know, a platform, media platform, that can, that can be a business. So that's why, that's why we settled on that. I knew those were things I could do creatively well. And so we settled on this and the, the premise was like, what if I took instead of five hours a week to write a blog, 60 hours a week to write a blog? What, what will happen? And I took the things I knew that I had gotten good at on the other blog, which was just kind of writing colloquially. And, uh, and drawing stick figures and, uh, started it from there.

• 12:54Tim Ferriss?

  What is the origin of the name?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  16 hours on GoDaddy searching for gut.com's.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  And man, it was not much, there is not much. But I knew I didn't, I, I, I, uh, I wanted it to be something that wouldn't pigeonhole it into, you know?

• 13:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so, I mean, were you just typing in random combinations of words? Or is there some itch that you had related to the expression? I mean, do you have a habit? I was imagining, oh, it's because people would say something to you and you want to test the assumptions or you wouldn't accept it at face value. So you go, wait, but why? You know, that was in my head, how I explained it.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  I wish it, I wish it was that, uh, situation.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  I checked 2,000 things in GoDaddy. 150 came out.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  My girlfriend knocked out 140 immediately and was like, "Absolutely not." That leaves me with 10, where I was kind of like, "Okay." These are all bad, which is the least bad, which, if the site's good, it can seem kind of cool suddenly, maybe, but it starts off bad, but then it's not bad. And some of the other ones were just extremely embarrassing, so I'm just...

• 14:06Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, you can't dangle that hook in front of me. Were there any that... I can give some examples to, if it makes you feel any better.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Please.

• 14:14Tim Ferriss?

  Book titles that are horrible. But were there any that you really liked that your girlfriend shot down?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  You were like, "We can both do this embarrassing thing." Actually, just you.

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  Also, okay, I'll kick it off. So, there was, for what ended up being the 4-Hour Work Week, there was Lifestyle Hustling. Glad I didn't use that. There was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit, which was promptly vetoed by every retailer. Thank God. There was Broadband and White Sand. I mean, it goes on. It goes on.

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  So, sometimes you need life to save you from yourself.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Those are kind of good. Those are at least are insensical. Like, they have some kind... I understand two of those three, at least.

• 15:03Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, I'll take two out of three. That's partially because I'm giving you, like, the better of the worst.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:07Tim Ferriss?

  But, your turn.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  MiniatureKing.com.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  I was in a deep GoDaddy spiral. You know, have you ever been on one of these? It gets weird. It gets really weird. So, I'm there and I'm like... I'm like into this idea of a king, because I pictured the playing card, King, and I'm like... So, a miniature king, and I suddenly got obsessed with it. I was like, he has little legs and he's very angry. He's very, like, cranky. And there's, like, big adult people walking by him, and he's on the ground. He's, like, two feet tall. And my girlfriend was like, "Jesus, absolutely not."

• 15:42Speaker 03

  But I got so addicted to the King concept that when I started Wait But Why, I made the logo of playing King.

• 15:48Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was just thinking of-

• 15:49Speaker 03

  And he pissed off.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. You were like, "Okay, kind of."

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. I still kind of think Miniature King could have worked.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  You know, he's the mascot. He's cranky, anyway.

• 16:03Tim Ferriss?

  I like it.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  But since then, I've all, you know, what you can do. This happens all the time.

• 16:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you still own MiniatureKing.com?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  I own MiniatureKing.com and about like 15 others. Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot. Jesus Half-Bro is gonna do a site where I'm Jesus's half-brother and how he's like- but he's not like the divine one. He's just like born from like Jesus's mom with like some guy. And he's upset.

• 16:28Tim Ferriss?

  What could go wrong with that?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's got all kinds of, all kinds of psychological issues going on, you know. It's just, he's a lot. He's trying to figure out his career, anyway.

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  What were, if you look back, because I look back and I remember the first, my first attempts at blogging and like the first 12 posts. And, I mean, they're, thankfully, mostly been forgotten over time.

• 16:56Tim Ferriss?

  But what were your first? You had, you had more practice than I did. You'd already put in 300 reps. What were the first posts like? Do you remember any of the topics?

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so, well, with my early blog, I mean, the topics were, it was like, they started with like three-sentence things. So I, one of the, like, the first three was, you know, the title was frankly, and then it said like, "If peeing in the shower is wrong, I don't want to be right." That was a blog post back in the day. Flash forward six years, now Wait But Why, I, I, I knew more. And I, and I, I knew right away it was gonna be like long and thorough because that's, I just, you know, it was my own site and I had a little, you know, I knew I could get into depth. If I, if I, you know, could just, you know, go longer. And so, first, at the beginning, I was anonymous and I'm sure you dealt with this too. At some point, you know, you have to, it's the get-attention phase, so I-

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Anonymous, the only platform, marketing platform I had was my personal Facebook page. And I started with "Seven Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook", which sounds like a BuzzFeed headline, but it was like much more in-depth. I got into the deep, dark psychology of why it's the Wild West of social etiquette and why we're all like our very embarrassing version of ourselves on it, and what the different qualities, the negative human qualities that come through on it. So that was the very first one. I actually went to Easter Island for a month before I started. Wait, but why did you just alone, in the middle of nowhere, write blog posts and pick like my favorite one to put on first to just kind of like figure out what I... And that was the winner.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Why did you pick Easter Island? I liked the fact that you could take like a 2,000-mile yardstick and swing it around the island and not hit any people. Like, that was cool to me. It was just so isolated, plus like the statues and the whole thing. And I was kind of like, "I've always wanted to go..." I was either there or I was gonna go to Lithuania in the winter and just creep out some small village. Yeah, well, you could tell me a small village to creep out sometime. And they were just gonna... And I actually talked to someone and they're like, "You may actually arouse suspicion if you're like just like foreign or like working every day in the cafe." I'm just writing blog posts in isolation, in a small Lithuanian village. Yeah. Sounds like a George Clooney spy movie. Yeah, but I do wanna do that in the mid-dead of winter, go to like a small, cold village somewhere.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Anyway, so... How did the blog posts do, that one? It did well. The very first one, like I chose well. How did you choose it relative to the other ideas that you had? Trying to do some combo of like something that I thought was like true enough to me, that represented like the kind of quality I wanted to do, but also that could go viral. Just the beginning. How can we go viral?

• 19:37Tim Ferriss?

  What year was this?

• 19:39Speaker 03

  2013, summer of 2013.

• 19:40Tim Ferriss?

  2013, alright.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that post did really well. It got 500,000 uniques in the first month.

• 19:45Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that's a...

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, my whole last blog got 250,000 uniques in six years. So this was like, okay, longer. Like, getting into more serious topics and insulting people, like, you know. It's on to something. Plus, you know, what I didn't know at the time was that 2013 was a pretty magical year to be promoting content on Facebook. This was that Facebook decided, let's show everyone just how powerful we are. And they started, this is why Buzzfeed exploded, then Upworthy, you first heard of it in 2013, Viral Nova, these sites exploded because Facebook's algorithm basically said, anyone posting content, we're gonna show it to half a million people. I was in the right place at the right time, and so that was very helpful as well.

• 20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just to maybe underscore one thing, because for instance, when I started my first business, it was the golden age of Google AdWords. I mean, it was shooting fish in a barrel, so inexpensive. And then when the 4-Hour Workweek launched, it was at the same time @SouthBySouthwest when Twitter was effectively publicly debuted. I mean, there were big screens displaying all of the tweets in the world going on, which happened to be concentrated right in Austin, Texas, because it was so small. And I would say that any time is the right time in some way, right? So these opportunities we're talking about, there are these opportunities right now,

• 21:08Tim Ferriss?

  you just have to try to sniff them out, or to shoot in the dark and hope that you'll catch some tailwind. But everybody has, it seems with these stories, some element of luck involved, but you can improve the odds, so that's just...

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Well, right, there's like 10 waves, you know, throughout your time. And one of the waves is cresting when you're starting. You don't know which one, but something is cresting at the time. It's the perfect time to start something for some reason, always.

• 21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and in every story where you find a component of good timing, there's usually a component of bad timing, right? Podcast app, like you were paddling for the right wave, you were just doing it years too early.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, so I want to bring another figure, another character into this picture.

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Who is Winston? Can you tell us about Winston, please?

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Winston's a close friend of mine. I met him in 2005 when he was three months old. I purchased him. And we've lived happily together ever since. He was the size of a golf ball at the time. Now he's the size of a football, which is a huge upgrade for him. He's a tortoise.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  But he's very lovable. He's kind of my apartment screensaver. Like, I'm just sitting there in what would be just an empty, you know, still scene, and there's this, like, moseying thing. Little moseying dinosaur that moseys by. And who doesn't want that? You should all own a tortoise. It's weird that most of you don't own a tortoise.

• 22:37Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you name him Winston?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Because I thought he had a Churchill look to him. Or it's more that Churchill has a tortoise look to him.

• 22:46Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sort of imagining the, and I know they're not the same, but like the sea turtles in Finding Nemo. It's like, yeah, I can see that, maybe.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, Winston has less charisma, but otherwise.

• 23:01Tim Ferriss?

  When I look at some of your posts, and I've had my life very directly and profoundly impacted by some of your writing, particularly about time remaining with, say, parents or family.

• 23:18Tim Ferriss?

  But when I look at some of your very research-heavy posts, and it feels funny to call them posts, whether it's on AI or other topics that confuse a lot of people. I mean, we're talking about, for those of you who don't have any familiarity, in some cases, 50,000 words, 70,000 words. That's a book, everybody.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  How long is The Four Hour Workweek?

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Four Hour Workweek, that's a solid, now, it's deceptive to use page count, but that's how I think. It's about, I want to say, what, 420 pages, 430 pages? And it's not gigantic Dr. Seuss print. So it's probably closer, if I'm guessing, taking a stab, to the 100,000, 120,000 word mark.

• 24:03Tim Ferriss?

  I seem to have sort of word inflation with the books that I write. They're getting bigger. But when you're tackling one of these posts... What are some of the approaches or questions you ask that allow you to write something better and different? Because presumably, many people are out there trying to learn about these various topics, and yet, you put out these posts that are the size of books that end up going viral. And you make complicated, or seemingly complicated topics, very digestible. So what is your approach to tackling a topic like AI?

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's pretty simple for me. First of all, I just, I do this kind of weird thing where I assume that my audience is a picture like a stadium full of meat. So it's narcissistic fantasy, you know, but it's like, you know, it's just, I'm just writing for, I'm writing the exact post that I would be thrilled to get, right? So I'm just trying, that's my focus group right there, it's right in my head. And it's easy because like, you know, we're all kind of like special, unique people except, not really, there's like 100,000 copies of each of you out there somewhere. And the truth is like, you know, if I just write for me, there's a lot of people that have my exact weird taste, I just know that.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  So I start there with kind of like, who am I writing for? That makes it easy. And so with something like AI, if there's a 1 through 10 scale of how much you know about something, 10 is world-leading expert and 1 has absolutely never heard of the term. You know, I started at 2 or 3 on most stuff, like most laymen, I'm a layman, right, at everything. And so then I spend, just out of my curiosity is the driver, I pick topics I'm excited to dig into. And I'll spend however long it takes, sometimes it's one day, sometimes it's three weeks, sometimes it's three months, but I'll take as long as I need to, to learn enough to get me to maybe like a 5 or a 6 out of 10. You know, I'm not gonna get a PhD, I'm not gonna spend five years getting myself to an

• 26:11Speaker 03

  8 or a 9, but I'm gonna get myself to a 6 where I'm like, I can answer basically any question a layman asks me, I can do a Q and A with an audience on this topic for 10 hours, and I'll have a pretty good, solid answer to everything. Not that I know necessarily the truth of everything, but I know when the Experts don't know the truth and they're arguing. I know what the experts say about basically everything. So I get myself to that level. And then I think about, okay, so experts have sometimes a hard time explaining because they haven't been into two in decades sometimes. And they have this jargon and they don't remember what it's like to be a two out of 10. I was there three weeks ago. I know exactly what my readers know about this. And I know exactly what, so I just look at the road I went down to get myself to a six.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  And I think about, you know, what, how can I do that road way more efficiently if I could go do it again now? How could I do it in a much more fun way? You know, and what's, what's this fun story I can tell to bring readers from the two to a six? And so that's my challenge then is to basically package the road I just went down for three weeks and make it an hour and a half package instead.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, not surprised when they have some follow-up questions.

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Let's pick a subject. Have you written about cryptocurrency or blockchain?

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, perfect.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Highly requested topic.

• 27:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right, I'm sure it is. Now, the reason I ask is that much like AI, I have seen dozens of people attempt to explain without misrepresenting cryptocurrency and blockchain. 101 for the masses. And it seems like almost every single attempt has failed. If you were to take that assignment on, where would you start?

• 27:56Speaker 03

  So I would, I, I, I'd always start, I feel like I'm blindfolded in a room and I'm just trying to figure out where are even the walls here? You know, where is the furniture? I just want to start and understand what I even need to learn. So I want to get a picture of the topic and then I can start diving in, going on various rabbit holes and, and usually going outside the topic. A rabbit hole outside the topic is procrastination, but it also often, you know, it gives you even more context. You'll find some metaphor out there that you end up bringing back. So I'll just read and read and watch YouTube videos. All on the internet.

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  How do you search?

• 28:31Speaker 03

  So.

• 28:32Tim Ferriss?

  Reading, are we talking, you start at Wikipedia? Is that ground zero?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll start at Wikipedia.

• 28:37Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  For just a basic foundation. Wikipedia is good at telling you where the walls are, just letting you even understand the topic in general. And Wikipedia has a lot of good, good knowledge on it. So I'll go there and then I'll go to the bottom of Wikipedia and start clicking on all the reference links. And I'll, you know, usually Google like. You know blockchain PDF and you end up finding all these superbly boring, you know, journal articles. And then I'll go on YouTube. There's a lot of good people, smart teachers explaining stuff on YouTube. They're not gonna explain the whole thing usually. They're gonna explain one part. Maybe I realize that to understand blockchain, you need to first go down three layers. You need to build a foundation that begins with understanding what encryption is. You need to understand how encryption works and public keys and private keys.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  That's when you can start to, on top of that, build an understanding of what a ledger is that would be on these different computers and how it could possibly be secure. And by the time you get to blockchain, you're like eight layers up. But, um, so I'll go find a YouTube video, not on blockchain, but on encryption. And then I'll find a YouTube video explaining what ledgers are in general. I'm reading about the history of ledgers and where they're used in the world and, you know, encryption and where it was in, you know, how it was invented and how it's evolved. And you just keep doing this and the reason I, it's easy for me this part is because I'm super curious. So the more, the more I learn, the less icky the topic gets. So when the topic gets un-icky, it gets, starts to be super delicious, the opposite of it. And then I, and then I can't read enough. Then I start to, it's so fun, suddenly, I'm like, I get it. And then I just wanna like fill in the knowledge and I wanna watch a YouTube video I already

• 30:04Speaker 03

  know the answer to, just to feel good about, oh man, I already knew everything he's saying. This is great. But it solidifies. You hear seven different people articulate it in seven ways and you just, it rounds out your understanding. And by the end, I start to be like, I, I totally get this.

• 30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Finding, I find a video on YouTube. So last, I checked, which is not recently, YouTube was the second largest search engine in the world. It's a lot of great stuff, there's also a lot of nonsense. How do you search? So what are the terms? How do you sort them? How do you go about picking properly?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Well, so in, in Google, it's, I just, I will Google like blockchain. Leave that in a window, open a new window. And I'll Google Bitcoin, new window. Ethereum, new window. Cryptocurrency, new window. Like decentralized systems crypto. New window, cryptocurrency is bullshit. New window, like, you know, whatever. And I'll just keep going. And I'll just think of anything. And then each one of those windows I go back to and I just hold down Command and I just click, click, click, click, click, click. And I have 10 tabs, 10 tabs, 10 tabs. And I just go and read everything. So that's, you Google, you know, again, I'm not, I don't have to discern. I don't care if this Gizmodo article is gonna be, you know, really useful or, you know, whether it's gonna be accurate.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Because the beginning process is just if you read 70 articles that may or may not have validity to them, the total sum of them actually start to understand. What do we know as a species? Where are we all agreeing? And then where clearly a lot of people don't know what they're talking about? Or there's this broad, you know, there's this kind of dichotomy of a view in this one area, these people and these people. YouTube is kind of the same thing. I'll just start watching without discerning. Again, if you're a procrastinator, it's fantastic. Because you don't feel bad about just watching endlessly when you're taking all of your time and it's not what you're supposed to doing. It feels great. So I'll just, I'll just watch. And then of course the sidebar starts to figure out. YouTube very quickly and Google will figure out what you're doing. And then YouTube will start to put all the things on the side for me.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Plus you start to see names you trust. Make money in cryptocurrency. Yeah. Well, even just, it's funny, I'm just writing a post now on like, won't get into this, but like, you know, political stuff. And, you know, normally my sidebar is like, look how much of an idiot Trump is and his voters. And then I go to the, I'm now trying to, you know, I was Googling all these conservative things and because I'm writing about, you know, both sides of stuff. And suddenly YouTube, the internet starts to indoctrinate me the other way. And they're like, look at this like wise Trump voter, like embarrassed this like. And I look over and I'm kind of like, and a couple hours later, I'm like, Trump's the best, like, you know. So like YouTube figures out your angle and will start to kind of like feed you stuff. And then there's certain names you trust. You know, Hank and John Green, like I trust them.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  You know, Kurs Gesat, I trust them. CGP Gray, I trust him. So certain, you know, you'll see certain names you trust. Minute Physics, great. So there's also that. And same with, same with, you know, Google, of course. Like I'll trust certain sources more than others. And once you've ingested massive amounts of information and you've...

• 33:12Tim Ferriss?

  Established a basic map for the territory. What do you think are the tools or approaches? Anything at all that help you to be so good at teaching these subjects? In the way that you present it or structure your pieces?

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so again, the starting point is I'm like, I just went through this and I had to teach myself. And I was bad at teaching myself because I didn't know what I was doing. So now if I could, the experience of a learner is fresh in my head. So that's the first thing, it's helpful. But then I just, I always basically with almost any explainer post like that, I just zoom out. Helicopter up, like, you know, if you're, if you're looking at the land and you see kind of like a beach, you don't know what it is, is that, is this a huge lake? Is this, is this a little beach? And then there's, does it curve around? I don't know. That's how I feel like a lot of the articles on AI or cryptocurrency are. They show you a piece of beach and they, and then the odds are might have a full understanding, but you just look, they're just, they're just describing the beach. So you take a helicopter up and you're like, oh, okay, wait a second.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  This is a big river and there's a, and you go take up further and you're like, oh, no, this is, this is kind of a tributary that goes into the ocean. And now you're kind of up where airplanes go and maybe even the International Space Station goes. And you're like, ah, okay, this is actually what's going on. So I start there myself as a thinker. And then when I'm trying to explain, I'm just going to start there, which is why, you know, people make fun of me because like I'll write about three different things and they all start at the Big Bang. By the time I'm like done with them, I have to basically go back to them. But like sometimes like it's helpful to you just like you just, by the time you get from the Big Bang to now, suddenly it's like we're all like, we can see the whole coastline and now the beach suddenly makes sense. And then I try to make it fun also because who wants to like, it's so many, you know, like the journal articles,

• 35:00Speaker 03

  for example, the experts, like they're often just, they don't, because they're not ready to entertain, you know? And they're just, and it's just bad. It's like textbooks in school were so bad, they were so boring. Part of the reason I like YouTube is because the people who end up with a lot of views on YouTube that are going to end up, you know, on, on my recommended, recommended thing, they're, they have an eye for entertainment. So I try to do the same thing as well.

• 35:20Tim Ferriss?

  And if you were to ask, say, friends of yours who are fans of your writing? What your ingredients for entertaining are? What might they say? Or just to ask you, I'm just not sure. I don't want you to be overly self-deprecating. I'm just trying to figure it out. Yeah, what makes entertaining? Because it is clearly entertaining.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Well, again, entertaining means 10 different things to 10 different people. I get, you know, every post, I get nine emails from like, you know, mothers in Kansas angry at me for swearing. But like, you know, it depends on, you know, it's, you know, it's, I think, trying to add sense of humor into basically everything. Treating it light, good metaphors, you know, and for me, lots of visuals. I'm a visual learner. If I see a block of text and I'm just scrolling down, I'm kind of upset. It's like, feels like homework. But if I scroll down and every few paragraphs, there's a chart, there's a comic, I'm suddenly like, okay, this is fun. I'm kind of excited. Like, and so that's how I think, so I try to do that. That's what I would want. So I like, I like, you know, like, there's so many things where you can just do a funny stick drawing

• 36:25Speaker 03

  or a really good diagram and just, it's just way clearer and sticks in your head more. You know, if I'm going to talk about procrastination, I could talk about like the limbic system and, you know, talk about, you know, how it works and it's our fight or flight zone. Or I can make an instant gratification monkey and like, because that is essentially what it is. And that's more memorable and I think more fun to read at the time.

• 36:47Tim Ferriss?

  So you've really, in my opinion, exhibited a mastery for taking what many people would consider extremely intimidating subjects. Many of them involved in forging what we're going to experience as a species as the future. So I'd like to talk about the future for a second. And I want to read a quote here. All right.

• 37:12Tim Ferriss?

  Believe that you wrote or said this, so correct me if I'm wrong. "I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy." Okay. So what are a few things that you're excited about or see coming down the pike in the future? Doesn't have to be one or two, it could be many.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  It is going to be crazy and here's why. So the first thought a lot of people have is that it's naive to think that the future is all weird, the end of times. Everyone thinks that, you know, you're just another naive person that thinks they live in a special time. Because, and the reason we all have that instinct is because... Biology moves very slowly. It evolves very, very slowly. So 50,000 years is nothing in biology and evolution. So we barely changed. Meaning, we are still a baby born today is a baby that is perfectly optimized to live in a tribe in Ethiopia in 50,000 B.C. And it is, everything about it is ready for survival in that world. But what we've done is taken that baby away from its home planet

• 38:18Speaker 03

  and brought it to another planet, which is the Earth in 2017. And that baby isn't made very well for this world. None of us are, okay? So the first thing to think about is just that a lot of our instincts and a lot of our, you know, intuitions are actually gonna be inherently wrong. We're gonna be living in a delusion that was helpful back then that today just is not great. So the reason, the way you can cut through this and actually see reality when you're, that baby is not, it's not, seeing reality isn't helpful to that baby. Fitting in with the tribe is and believing what the tribe believes is. So today, we wanna see reality. And so you can do things like, you can just look at the facts sometimes. So imagine that the, it's gonna be a long answer. Imagine that, I have a lot to say about this.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Imagine that, this is what I'm saying, but the zoom out. Answers are, can't be short in my head. So imagine that human history is about 1,000 centuries.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  Get comfortable, folks.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Get, settle in. 1,000 centuries of human history, 100,000 years, okay? So each two centuries is a page in a book, okay? How many pages is this?

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  About 700 pages.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Okay, well, 500 pages. Actually, you know, whatever.

• 39:27Tim Ferriss?

  It can make the math easier.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  No, no, no, they're finding older human remains, so fine. So 140,000 years, every page in this book that you're holding is 200 years in human history, okay? So page 1 through 650 of that book, Hunter-Gatherers. If you're an alien reading this book to understand what happened on this planet, you are bored. I mean, this is really boring. Page 650, 10,000 years ago, you have the Agriculture Revolution. Okay, wait, so suddenly, people are coming together and forming cities. Okay, they're starting to actually form larger civilizations. They have a collective intelligence that's starting to form. They can compare notes, they can kind of create a knowledge tower that is bigger than any one of them. It's very interesting stuff, so that's 50 pages ago. Then it gets boring again for a while, okay?

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Page 690 out of 700, right, at the little tiny end of the book here, you have Jesus. You have, you know, 693, you have the advent of Islam. The Roman Empire happens two pages ago, it's already done. 697, you have imperialism. For the first time, you have countries. This is new thing that happened in the last three pages. Page 698, you have the Enlightenment, you have the Renaissance, you have things like this. They discovered that there's galaxies, telescope. Page 699, you have, you finally get to the beginning of the US and the beginning of constitutional democracies, right? Now, page 700 happens, which is from about 200 years ago to today. Okay, so the beginning of page 700, the alien turns the page. Industrial Revolution happens, okay? Big deal, big change, okay?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  And as he reads down the page, things start to go crazy. You start to have, you have, in 699 pages, this alien has read. This boring-ass species has communicated through letters and talking. You know, he was excited about language 500 pages ago, now he's bored. Smoke signals, firing a cannonball in the air, stuff like that, okay? Suddenly, on page 700, we go to the space station. We have the space station, we have the moon, we have airplanes, we have cars. Just on page 700, 699 pages, okay? We have, we only communicate through, well, we have this kind of, you know, simple transportation, communication. Now, we have FaceTime, okay? We have, you know, we have telephone, we have the internet.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  I mean, crazy, right? Less than a billion people for the first 699 pages. On page 700 alone, we cross the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 billion person marks. So the alien's reading, and like, his wife comes in and is like, "Hey, we're gonna have dinner." So he's like, "Shh, shut up, shut up." This is the most intriguing thing suddenly. He's like, "What is about to happen to this species? This is crazy, what just happened on this page." This is when we're born. We're born at the end of page 700, okay? So...

• 42:17Speaker 03

  This is why, when someone says, "What do you think the future's gonna be?" Like, I'm like, "Oh, page 701?" And they're like, "How's this guy talking?" Page 701, there's no way, it's not gonna work.

• 42:27Tim Ferriss?

  Shit just goes bonkers.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the first three sentences of page 701 will take us to 2025, when they predict that, like, you know, AI is gonna basically infiltrate every single industry and part of our lives, the way electricity did in like a 10-year span in the 1880s. I mean, that's the first three sentences. So, to me, I see revolutions, you know, the first half of page 701, the first quarter of page 701, I see revolutions in, you know, VR, AR, I see revolutions in AI, I see revolutions in brain-machine interfaces, we're gonna be able to think thoughts to each other, it's way cooler than language for the first time. I see revolutions in genetic stuff, your grandkids are gonna be like, "So you just had a baby and hoped it was a good baby?" It's gonna seem crazy. It's gonna seem so primitive.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  And you can just go on and on and on with things that... "Look, how about this one? Okay, what are the major leaps for life, like, that you can count on one hand for all of life? Simple cell to complex cell, big one. Complex cell to multicell, big one, we have animals now. Ocean to land, big one. I would say the fourth that fits on this same list is going from one planet to multi-planets as a civilization. That's happening in the next decade with SpaceX. No one's talking about it yet, but they will be. I mean, just the fact that, like, we're gonna witness in our lifetimes one of the great leaps for all of life, like, this isn't normal, so, yeah."

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so, I wanna talk about extraplanetary.

• 43:55Tim Ferriss?

  Just a couple of curious notions that have been bouncing around in my own head. If you had to bet on more humans inhabiting, say, Mars, or inhabiting space stations that don't have to conquer a separate gravity, where would you bet? Because there are...

• 44:17Tim Ferriss?

  Competing camps, or at least technologists who are looking at, say, inhabiting other planets, or saying, "No, that makes no sense, because now you're dealing with a separate environment, gravitational field, etc., we're gonna just build space stations."

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say Mars for a while. Mars is probably gonna have a million people, you know, in the next five or six decades, and then it'll eventually probably end up at a billion people. But I think space stations, in the long run, way better. I mean, it's gonna seem really crappy to be on a planet. It's gonna be, you know, being on a planet's gonna seem very old-school and very kind of rough compared to the space stations we can, you know, imagine dealing with weather. It's gonna seem crazy that you'd have to deal with weather, that you had to deal with things like climate change. It's just not, not our problem. We have to deal with bugs. It's my, I'd be so happy that there's no bugs on the space station, so.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  So I think, in the long run, that. But I have a more important question, which is, are you gonna go to Mars?

• 45:12Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  No?

• 45:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not in the near term. I don't wanna be the first monkey shot.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  I'm the first one.

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  I'll let quite a few people work out the kinks on that one. I mean, we can't even figure out how to upgrade iOS without replacing "I"

• 45:26Tim Ferriss?

  with fucking images, like, "I'm gonna let someone shoot me to Mars?" No, no, not early, no.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  Okay, now, picture is 20 years from now, and the last, you know, every 26 months, you know, Earth laps Mars, okay, and they end up next to each other. That's when you have this window to go. So every 26 months, there's gonna be a fleet, colonial fleet, heading there and another fleet coming back, bringing people back. Round-trip tickets.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  How about...

• 45:52Tim Ferriss?

  All the different people on the legs, right?

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, exactly. And there's gonna be, like, first-class things, there'll be, like, fancy people, but everyone'll be, like, jumping around, bouncing around with the gravity. It sounds great, like a zero-gravity cruise ship. So, question is, for you, it's 2038, okay? It's 2045, and it's, uh, it's been proven for the last, like, 20 trips back and forth, no one's gotten hurt, it's totally safe.

• 46:15Tim Ferriss?

  Would I visit?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:17Tim Ferriss?

  What's the total time invested, at this point, in the transportation?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Let's say the first, the shortest round-trip you can do is a 52-monther.

• 46:26Tim Ferriss?

  I would strongly consider it.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  I heard Jeff Bezos say recently onstage, "Before you think about going to Mars, spend a month in Antarctica." That's a cakewalk.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Oh, Antarctica's way better than Mars. Yeah, not much in Antarctica, but 15 or 20 degrees colder. You can't breathe the air. You can't be outside in the sun without a radiation suit.

• 46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I think it depends a lot on the brochure of Mars Club Med that I receive.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yes, it's not good.

• 46:57Tim Ferriss?

  All right, shifting gears a little bit. AI, do you think it is an existential threat or not? And if so, what is the time horizon for it becoming an imminent existential threat?

• 47:12Speaker 03

  So this is one of the great questions. AI is probably the subject I've talked to most experts on. So I'm not an expert, but I really know what the experts think. And I try to keep up to date because they change their minds a lot.

• 47:24Tim Ferriss?

  That will be fine, no worries.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  What I find is very few people who don't think this is going to basically take over everything. The question is when? And I was surprised that even the people that are pessimistic, they kind of think, "Oh, it might be 100 years from now." Most people think 50, 30. And people at DeepMind these days at Google, which is like the leading AI company now, they're saying things like 10. And when I say 10, 10 till what? I'm talking about before any of this moment happens. It's a good... To understand AI, you have to think about two things. There's narrow intelligence and there's general intelligence. So humans have general intelligence. We are smart across the board. We have social skills. We have creativity. We can understand math. We can read. We can be creative. We can learn from experience. You just name anything,

• 48:14Speaker 03

  humans can kind of learn how to be smart there. But when you think about AI, AI is way better than any human at the things it's good at, like chess. It's the world chess master, right? Of course. And it's the world master at everything that it does well. But it's only good at that one thing. So there's AI in your phone. There's AI in your car. There's AI running most stuff at this point. But it's only good at one thing. So the question is, when will AI gain that same breadth that we have? When will it become broadly smart? And until then, it's still gonna change the world. It's still gonna take a huge amount of jobs and create a whole bunch more. So it's gonna be a massive group of changes that happen even before we get general intelligence. But the question that I was referring to before is when do we get to this level where AI is now

• 48:59Speaker 03

  smart like we are, but way, way smarter, what Nick Bostrom calls "superintelligence", where it's as smarter than us as we are than monkeys? Yeah, so basically, if you picture like, not only can a monkey not like build this room, or not only can, you know, you look out in the night sky and you see little lights moving around. You know, humans are so smart, we put those there. We put airplanes and satellites in the night sky, right? So not only can a monkey not do that, you can show the monkey the lights of this building, and you can't even understand that you did it. It just will think that it's just there, that's just a moving star, right? So we're talking about something that not only can we not do what this thing can do, we can't even understand that it did it, even if it tried to explain it. That's how smart this thing is. It's a really crazy concept.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  So things that we think are hard, like curing disease, poverty, you know, climate change, name it, you know, anything that we consider a challenge, easy, piece of cake for the AI. So that's the really exciting side. And then there's the what if we're not in control of it the way we want to be? Not that it's gonna be evil, that's this anthropomorphization that people do. They try to apply human stuff to this thing that's not human. But when you build a house and there's an ant hill there, you're not like, "Ha ha, death to the ants." You just built a house and they were in the way, so you killed them, big deal, right? The fear is that the AI is doing its thing, and that it just, we're kind of in the way, and we programmed it in a way that we didn't think of this thing, but now it's too powerful, we can't change it, and we're toast.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Or it gets annoyed that we're doing something to it that it doesn't want, and we're toast. So you have some high stakes here, and which is why, basically, we're gonna have God on Earth, because we can play God to every other animal right now, even a chimp. Chimps are really smart until we put it in a cage. Now what are you gonna do? We have a gun, we have a taser, we can poison its food. Chimps are nothing compared to our god-like ability, because we have a little intelligence gap over them. Little, in the scheme of things. When this thing has a big intelligence gap over us, it truly can play God to us. So the question is, is it a good God that could solve all of our problems? Or is it like one of those dick gods in the Old Testament, like that guy?

• 51:06Speaker 03

  So, this is what they're talking about. This is why AI safety is so important, but most of the money and time is going into AI development right now.

• 51:15Tim Ferriss?

  So, last question, and then we'll go to audience questions. How do you view happiness? Just to bring it back to things that we may be able to influence, at least speaking for myself and a lot of people in this room. How do you view or define happiness for yourself, if you do at all?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I kind of think of, there's two kinds of happiness, that you have to kind of deal with both. One is like, micro-happiness, like, are your Tuesdays good? Are you generally having a good Tuesday? And then there's like, macro-happiness, like, are you present, are you like, "Yeah, I'll dig into this current life for 20 years, I love it." Or are you like, "I was for nine years after college," which is like, "Well, I'm doing this now, but, I really want to like, I should be doing," you know, and that's macro-happiness. So I think you have to worry about both. I think that the most important one to get right, at the beginning at least, is macro. I think if your macro-happiness isn't there, you know, you're gonna have, you're gonna feel frustrated, kind of, you're gonna have a cloud over you. And then I think you can work on micro-happiness, which is about lifestyle.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  This is what you're so good at, and so I think a lot of people here, you know, really, both, for both kind of happinesses, they look to you, because you have a lot of good advice, but I think with micro, you really, you focus so hard on like, just really crushing, like, a Tuesday. And I think like, but all life is, is literally a Tuesday again and again, and then you die. So crushing the Tuesdays, good deal.

• 52:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's the title of my next book.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Let's get good at it, right? White sand and Tuesdays. But so, yeah, and the thing that's hard is, a lot of times, we assume that it's the external world. We have to succeed, we have to, you know, get this relationship, and then we'll be, and, you know, this is kind of cliche, but we know that it's messing with your internal expectations.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  It's getting your mind in the right place and kind of seeing reality and seeing what is your ego and what is your fear and what is kind of, you know, worrying about judgment and what is actually real that matters to you and realizing that a lot of the perceived risk isn't really dangerous and a lot of the perceived reward isn't really gratifying and it's all there in front of you. If you can just look past your primate self with your very rational, you know, intelligent self and just see it and then learn to internalize it, often suddenly the happiness is, you know, become very clear how to work themselves out and it's often we end up spending all our time trying to, you know, get to those happinesses with the primate kind of self in charge and that usually doesn't get us there.

• 53:46Tim Ferriss?

  So to add to that, reality minus expectations. Is that a useful framework for defining happiness, do you think?

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if, so you just say, you know, your happiness is like an equation. Reality minus expectations is your happiness and, um, and so you can work on two things. You can work on improving your reality or you can work on not lowering, but kind of like refining your expectations to reflect what actually matters to you, which will almost always end up with them lowering in a certain sense and maybe, maybe going up in another sense, but, um, you know, the classic trap, of course, is like, you know, you're in a way better place than you were 10 years ago, but you're just as unhappy because you're the hedonic treadmill concept is this term that psychologists use that, you know, you just, your happiness goes up because something really good happens. Even like, you know, the little examples, you get a new, you buy something new and you wake up in the morning, you're like, oh, my iPhone X10, whatever.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  And you're like all happy and then like, you know, every day that, that goes down and six days later it's just your stupid iPhone again. But we use this in a macro set. You get the new job, you finally get into a really good relationship, you work it out, or you know, you have a sick friend or a parent and then they, they get healthy and wow. And then, um, instead of just, you know, so the obvious, the way to, um, to, to get off the treadmill is, is obvious, just. obsess over gratitude, just like what I have, what I want. And like, looking up, you're gonna be really unhappy. And if you keep, you know, the mountain keeps growing underneath you, but you're not even looking at it. You're just looking up all the time. It's gonna seem like everything sucks. If you're looking down, you're like, "Look at this mountain, it's amazing. Look at all the things I have." Like, you're gonna be really happy. So like, the gratitude things are real. Like, all the, you know, the thing where you're supposed to write the three good things that happened that day.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Uh, every night before you go to bed, write three good things that happened and why they happened. The reason that people want you to, that psychologists say this is good, is because it trains your brain to all day be thinking, "Wait, what's good? I need to do this thing tonight." Like, it's just, what's good, what's good? And you're suddenly, you're looking down at all these things that are good in your life, as opposed to kind of looking up at what sucks? What sucks about this situation? How is the world wronging me? Which is a pure recipe for unhappiness.

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to put a, a little icing on top, just to, just to add to that, which is, I was reading recently about some of the supposedly objectively assessed happiest places on earth. And if you look at them, three of them are Costa Rica.

• 56:10Tim Ferriss?

  Tico, Tico pura, Tico puro, maspolino, perdón. Okay, screwed up my gender already. Bad to do in these days, huh? All right, at least I did it in Spanish. Uh, so, moving on.

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  Puyi. I'm gonna move, move on quickly. Costa Rica, Singapore. Any Singaporeans here who wanna shout? Okay. I'm all for it. You don't see it as much in Singapore. And then Denmark. All right, so...

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, you can, you can write a letter. I, I love Norway. But, I, I will, I will, I will rely on National Geographic. You can write them an angry letter. They are very communicative. That's fine. So Norway also. But I can only speak, I can only speak to the Danes, but I will give you the official gold medal. But the silver medal for the Danes. And I, I wanna point out a couple of things, knowing people in all three places, that in Singapore...

• 57:14Tim Ferriss?

  There's very much an optimization for improving your reality. It's very achievement focused and there's a large economic component. Nonetheless, the various combination of factors lead them to be on the very top. On the perhaps opposite side of that equation, or at least in the alternate side, you have the Danes, and I know a lot of Danes. And I remember one point, without even bringing up any of this, I said, "You guys are apparently really happy. Why do you think that is?" And as a group, they said, "We have really low expectations." I was like, "Wow, that's interesting. Hmm, I may noodle on that." And then I think Costa Rica is kind of squarely in the middle in a lot of respects. So, stuff to ponder. Work on both.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  And also, it just struck me that, given all the talk about Stoicism and so on, that I tend to beat people over the head with, Stoicism in a lot of respects, I would view as a complete philosophical system that checks a lot of boxes, but does focus quite a bit on refining your expectations and preparing for the worst-case scenario. So, I often add quite a healthy dose of Epicureanism and so on, which is more on the opposite side. In any case, Tim, thank you so much. And we're going to jump into some audience questions. I know that... Yeah, please get around.

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  And we will definitely be doing some individual hellos. But let me jump in and see what we have here. And I suspect there might be some curveballs slash bear traps that I don't want to step into, so let me see what we have here. Bear with.

• 58:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right. "You're 20, have three to six months pre-job, post-college." All right, I take that to mean three to six months after graduation to do whatever. "No financial, social commitments, and you've already read Tim's books." All right, thank you for that. "How do you spend your time to maximize well-being and develop perspective?" Aman from Paris.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well-being and develop perspective. Three to six months. Now, you may have already done this. Where's Man? Is Man here? Hey, how's it going? All right. So, you may have already done this, but if I were giving advice to

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  the normal American audience for that, I would say, travel for those three to six months. Go to countries where you do not speak the language. Get deliberately lost in places that are safe, perhaps, like Japan, or Costa Rica in most places. And for well-being and developing perspective, well-being would mean deliberately exposing yourself to people who are worse off, maybe at least financially, than yourself. So, spending part of that time volunteering, for instance, in those three to six months. And then, that will simultaneously help you to develop many, many different perspectives. That would be, just as, speaking as someone whose life was changed

• 1:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  completely by a number of overseas experiences, which I had, starting at age sixteen or seventeen. I'd never really spent time outside of the US. That would be my recommendation. Tim, do you have any other, any other thoughts?

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  No, I think that's right in line with what I would have said, which is, basically, traveling to me is like, is another way to zoom out. Because you're just looking at your life from far away. You know, it's like, you don't, you're not going there to look at your life, but you end up thinking about your life. And for some reason, being far away, being out of your comfort zone and out of your element, you just have fresh eyes on your whole situation. You can have this perspective, you can kind of, it's like going in a helicopter and looking at it from up there, and a lot of things make sense. And then, I would have also said, couple that with like, kind of like, a hard zoom in on like, reality, which is, which I think you'd get from, I might have said like, Wait tables, work construction, just do something where you're kind of like, you're just around

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  working people and you just, I don't know, it just, it just, it just reminds you what like, work is like, what reality is like, what adults, you know, go through and then that can like, help you figure out where you're about to, you know, where you're about to be and what you want to do.

• 1:01:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And the, the travel advice, I would not limit to someone just getting out of college. I think everybody, when possible, should have that experience because the benefits outlast the trip. Because what will happen to most people, especially if you put yourself in very foreign environments where perhaps you can't even read what is written, Japan, China, many different examples, right? Whether it's Cyrillic, Arabic, doesn't matter. And you observe different customs. What happened to me at least in Japan, for instance, it's my first real time abroad for a year as an exchange student. The only person who looks like this in a school uniform in a high school of 5,000 Japanese kids, right?

• 1:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  Pretty easy Where's Waldo game. But I was like, wait, they drive on the other side of the street? That doesn't make any sense. Then I was like, wait a second, maybe we don't make any sense. Oh, what, they take a shower before they get into the bathtub? That doesn't make any sense. Wait a second, it makes perfect sense. And I got back and I realized how many rules we follow are just made up. They're just totally made up. Very fragile socially reinforced illusions that we just reinforce. And that's very liberating because you realize, wait a minute, like if all of these different cultures do things differently, maybe I don't have to go there to do things differently. I can do that here. Then you start to really question assumptions

• 1:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  and you become, in my experience, more experimental. Alright, let's go to another question.

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  What trends, industries, topics are you most excited about right now? Patrick? Patrick? Is Patrick here? Yeah. Hey, Patrick. All right. I like that high ten applies to both of us. It simplifies matters. What trends, industries, topics am I most excited about right now? Speaking for myself, trends, I'm not watching very closely. I have trouble explaining why, really. I suppose I'm not trying to capitalize on any trends because I feel like, particularly having left Silicon Valley and having moved to Austin, which I love on almost every level,

• 1:03:50Tim Ferriss?

  if I'm spotting trends that I hope to capitalize on, by the time you see it, you're too late, generally speaking. So I'm not paying a lot of attention to trends. Industries, I am interested, just almost from an academic standpoint, in space travel, not so much from a personal experiential standpoint, but specifically looking at inhabiting planets versus building space stations. That debate is interesting to me because you have some of the smartest humans, last 50, 100 years arguably, with very, very different viewpoints. And whenever that happens in any field, I'm really interested.

• 1:04:35Tim Ferriss?

  You see that in quite a few places. Topics, I would say, and this might be considered a trend, I'm hoping to turn it into a trend, which would be scientific research using current cutting-edge technologies to reexamine both psychedelics and MDMA, which I wouldn't strictly consider in the traditional sense of psychedelic, for applications to very debilitating, serious conditions ranging from PTSD to treatment-resistant depression, end-of-life anxiety, and so forth. So I've taken most of my energy and capital that went into startups and redirecting that

• 1:05:17Tim Ferriss?

  to scientific research at Johns Hopkins, hopefully other places like UCSF, NYU also, that are taking these compounds that have been used... Very, very wisely, I think, in certain contexts for millennia by various civilizations and applying a scientific lens to understand the mechanisms of action and the risks involved, quite frankly, but how they can be less politicized and stigmatized for unscientific reasons and examine so that we have a better understanding of why they do what they do, which can be pretty incredible. What about you? Trends, industries, topics that you're excited about right now?

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  Definitely some of those. Agree with you on getting the stigma off of prospective-altering drugs, but I would also add, there's a lot of cool things going on in what the field that also has a stigma called life extension, and the stigma is that it just seems like it's like narcissistic, rich white guys who want to live forever. But the truth is, and people think it's vain and this narcissistic kind of thing, but really what you could just reframe it as, if you just cure or learn how to manage the four things that kill people, basically, which is like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, cancer, it just means that like, and other things going on in health, like we can just

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  live a lot longer and higher quality later years. Like, who doesn't want that? It's this like knee-jerk reaction that makes people not even want to put money or time into this industry, but like, I just feel like there were definitely people back when humans lived on average to 40, you know, who'd have been like, oh, death at 40 is the lot of man, like, living to 80 or so, but like, now we're all happy about that. No one wants to go back. So if suddenly, you know, I don't know, 140, 140 was the new 90, and 90 was the new 50, like, who's not happy about that? So, you know, we say, oh, because, you know, at that point, you're done. Well, that only exists because we got used to that. We're managing our own expectations. If we all died at 35, I would be like, well, it's been good. But like, I'm not like that.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  I'm all ambitious and excited because I think I have more decades. So I think that there's a lot going on. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are one of the teams that are trying to cure all diseases by the end of the century. Like, this is just a machine, and the diseases are just a glitch inside the machine, like... If we can have enough nanotech and really fancy AI, medicine and everything, we can go in there and fix it. This is a fantastic development. The most heartbreaking thing is someone that you love dying, especially early. Let's work on that. So I think there's a lot going on there, but I think that a lot more would be going on if the stigma of this as kind of like a narcissistic pursuit would just go away.

• 1:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, to comment on one thing there, in terms of the narcissistic rich people, everyone should want the narcissistic millionaires and billionaires to spend as much money as possible on this.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:08:22Tim Ferriss?

  You want them to be the people who create the economies of scale for everybody else. And many of the things we take for granted now, like recycling, started off being very hoity-toity, affluent experiments. And you want them to be spending millions of dollars on something that in 10 years is going to be available for $50 at a CVS.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, plumbing, sanitation, these things were all rich people things for a while. And then everyone benefits tremendously from them. So people also get mad. They think, oh, this is just going to benefit the rich. It's this unfair thing where super rich people will be able to live longer. And it's like, yeah, for a while. And then it trickles to everybody because the cost comes down as we get better. So get over it, you know?

• 1:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  On that note, if you want to read some, I think, very interesting thinking related to what might account to life extension, or at least death prevention, Dr. Peter Attia is one to pay attention to. One of my favorite people.

• 1:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  What is the name of the city everyone must visit before they die? Thanks for everything. Steve. Steve Carell. Not to be confused with Steve Carell with this C. Yeah, it's a great name. It's a great name. Spelled differently. On my list, I would have to go with Tokyo. Because it has such an unusual combination of safety, cleanliness, extreme weirdness, and incomprehensibility, even to someone who speaks Jaffa and Haze,

• 1:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  that it provides a really unique... I think I just used that twice and I'm gonna get shit from friends who love to heckle me for using modifiers on "unique", they're like, "No, there's no such thing as very unique." I'm like, "Okay, alright, alright."

• 1:10:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna say it again, just to annoy them. It's a very unique

• 1:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  opportunity to feel extreme discomfort and confusion with elation with next to no real harmful consequences. So, I think that provides an awesome learning opportunity and just a fun trip. So I would say Tokyo is very high on the list.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  Hey, you stole my answer again. I was just in Japan all summer and it's it's like going to another planet and you're like, "Oh, how does how does this civilization live?" And you're on another planet, that's how different it is and just isolated. Western culture has like, you know, infiltrated so many places and it just hasn't really there and they just have done everything their own way. So you're like, "How does the cab door open?" "Oh, it opens by itself." "Then I get in and it closes by itself." That's really cool. So, to give a different answer, I'll say Hanoi, Vietnam, just because crossing the street is just crazy. So there's like bikes, just like motorbikes, just a sea of them.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  A sea of them going by and there's no stoplights and it doesn't stop. And what you do is it walk or is you just walk?

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  It's like Indiana Jones, like walking over the thing. You just walk and you just, and they figure it out.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  And it's unbelievable. It's like you feel like you're like God walking on water or something weird. You're just like, you just like walk out and nothing happens. But the thing you don't wanna do is like, we have freaked out tourists that like stops 'cause then you're doing something they can't anticipate, but you gotta try this.

• 1:11:55Tim Ferriss?

  Steady, well-paced strides.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Tim Ferriss?

  Confident.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  ...the past two months and I came back for a day and I did it by my own, so yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Is it the same there? I didn't go down there.

• 1:12:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's amazing. He spent some time in Houchenin. It's insane. I was actually driving a motorcycle down there and yeah, you just go with the flow or else you die. Yeah. Go with the flow or else you die. Good, good advice. Ah, my goodness. Alright, that one would take us both several hours, knowing the two of us. So I apologize to the person whose name I will not read. Ah, alright, alright. Dear Tim, that applies to both of us. Regarding two crappy pages per day, I'll explain what that means. How do you structure your days and weeks when you are working on a book? Thanks. Gene or Genie, I'm not sure. V? Either way, it's fine.

• 1:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, I'll go with...both. I wasn't sure how to respond. Alright, so the two crappy pages per day, for those who don't know, was advice that I received regarding writing and working on a book, which can be, in my personal experience, a very daunting, intimidating task. And I would get frozen for days or weeks and I'd try to write something and it wouldn't be perfect and I'd throw it out. And a mentor of mine, or an author I knew, said, "Your quota should be two crappy pages per day." And he told me the story about IBM and how they demolished the competition by exceeding

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  every sales quota every quarter and just absolutely steamrolling everyone for a long time. And he asked me, "Do you know why that is?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Because the quotas were low and then people were unintimidated to pick up the phone to make the calls." And you can do the same thing with yourself with writing. And you do that by making your bar for a successful day, two crappy pages. That's it. Even if you throw them both out, you never use them, you've won the day if you have two crappy pages. And of course, over time, there are days when you just get your two crappy pages and they are really, truly terrible. And then there are other days where you overshoot, you're in the flow and you get 10, 15, 20 pages. You don't need so many of those to eventually put together

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  what can become a book. In terms of structuring my days and so on, I'll be super, super specific here.

• 1:14:29Tim Ferriss?

  Because the weeks and months basically look identical. And it's just copy and paste of this particular day. I've realized for myself that I benefit greatly, given historical predisposition to bipolar and all these various things, that's just written in my code. It's a whole separate story, but yeah, it's kind of laughable how predisposed my family is, that writing near sunshine is really important. So I write books generally during summer months. And my day involves getting up, not super early, but for me, respect- respectively early, which would mean, say, 9:00 AM, 9:30.

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  Before the sun is setting. And I wake up, I meditate for 20 to 22 minutes. Should be typically transcendental meditation or some type of guided meditation. Then I jump in the water, because I'm on Long Island. I jump in the water to wake up. I might do a little bit of swimming. I hop out. I already have pages from the night before that I want to edit. I will edit during the day, but I do my prose generation at night. That's just when I have the best output. But I can edit, do that grunt work during the day. I have printed out pages. I will go into a sauna, which requires all sorts of trickery, because you start sweating on the pages, but go into a sauna and I will hand-edit those pages.

• 1:15:58Tim Ferriss?

  Then I come out, take a quick shower. I have a very small breakfast of some type, typically, say, macadamia nuts and some eggs. Very, very small. And I continue to work, very often at a treadmill desk. And the treadmill desk works during this period of time at a very slow pace, because, say, in the case of tribal mentors, I'm handling outreach and editing. I'm not going to do original drafts and composition at the treadmill desk. I will work at the treadmill desk, this is literally the exact day. And this won't take hours to explain. Then, around, say, noon or 1:00 PM, hop on a bike with a researcher or someone that I

• 1:16:43Tim Ferriss?

  have hired to be with me in the same house at all times. Why is this important? I realize that writing is very isolating for me, and it can catalyze a lot of negative mental states and downward spirals, because I feel alone. So, I have someone physically there, even though we could probably do the work remotely. They have to be optimistic, which fortunately, my researcher is. Everything to him is hand-clapping, "Amazing." Really good influence to have around. So, we both get on a bike. So, you'll notice there are little bursts of physical exercise inserted in the day. Get on bikes, ride to this very mediocre deli,

• 1:17:26Tim Ferriss?

  and we have Mediterranean wraps every day. For those interested, it is whole wheat tortilla with chicken, hummus, tomato, avocado added, always extra cost. And we eat our Mediterranean wraps, and I have unsweetened iced tea plus sparkling water. And we will work there until, say, 5 or 6. Sun starts to set, jump on the bikes, sometimes head to the bay, jump in the water again, head home, and then have a snack, work for an additional 2 or 3 hours, then go to dinner. There are 2 or 3 restaurants that we go to, that's it. Those are the rotations.

• 1:18:11Tim Ferriss?

  And for all of these restaurants, I'll give a pro tip. Jesus, what a long answer that I said wasn't gonna be long. All right. Pro tip for people who might want to do this. Now, it's late. We're going out late. We're having dinner at 9 o'clock. A lot of these kitchens close at, say, 9:30, 10:00. What does that mean? Staff's gonna be fucking pissed that we're coming in right as the door's about to close. And I know this, because I worked in service jobs as busboy and waiter in restaurants forever. I get it. So, here's what you do. You have 3 restaurants. You know you're gonna be going to them for a few weeks or a few months. You go to the same restaurant for dinner 3 nights in a row, and then the next restaurant, same place, 3 nights in a row. Each night, you buy rounds of tequila over and over again

• 1:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  for every person who works in the restaurant. Front of house and back of house, really important. These people will now love you.

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  And they will let you hang out for an extra hour, hour and a half. This is really key.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we do this, then we go home, not too much tequila. And we'll continue to prepare things for the next day, go to bed around 1 a.m. say, and then it's Groundhog Day, over and over again. That's it. And there are, very often, I would say every other day, some type of kettlebell swings or exercise that is done immediately before leaving to dinner. It's just that day, over and over and over again. Yes, I see your raised hand. From, yes, Joanne.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Jeannie.

• 1:19:45Tim Ferriss?

  Jeannie, god damn it. Sorry.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  Quite right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  When you're having the Mediterranean wraps, you said you work there at the place you hate because you said that you're...

• 1:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. So, important clarifying question, do I work where we have lunch? Yes, there are outdoor picnic tables, and we will sit down and work outside. That's actually a fairly key point, but you have to have a high tolerance for mosquitoes and ticks, because it's eastern Long Island, so caveat emptor, on the line of disease or... Tim?

• 1:20:19Tim Ferriss?

  Over to you.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  If you take the opposite of that answer, and it's like, imagine your 16 hours awake is like a amorphous wad of self-loathing.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  That's, it's basically, someone asked me the other day, like, what do you, you know, what do you need with your work? What do you need? And I was like, I need a gnome that will follow me around and like, shock me if I'm not working, and like, when I'm supposed to be working. And they were kind of like, it was kind of, but I, um, yeah, no, no, I mean, I mean, this is what you're awesome at and what I admire you for, and I...

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you can also, just to be clear, have really regimented, well-structured self-loathing. Just to make that clear. Continue.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  But I was like, trying to memorize that answer, because I want to like, I think, for me, the times when I am being productive, I find that it, the two days, the two minutes, two pages a day thing resonates with me, because for me, it's like, if I get it, my, my problem when I'm not being productive is that I have this in my head, I'm behind on my stuff, so I need to work 14 hours, I need 14 hours of writing today. And I have done those crazy hours when there's like, a crazy panic in my life, so I, I know I can, so I think I can, but without the panic, it never happens, and then... Six hours into the day, I've already blown it. I've already blown the day and you get discouraged and then you start to self fulfilling prophecy yourself that of course I'm gonna blow it, I blew it the last three days and then... So if I do the same thing, if I say, "I'm gonna write three hours today," and then I've had a successful day,

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  it's amazing, all the positive, like reward pathway feedback that comes in from feeling like you succeeded that day. And then that night, you can go to bed on time because I already succeeded today, as opposed to thinking, "No, I can't go to bed now, I can't like let this be the whole day." And that can feed on itself. And something I try to remind myself is like, someone who is three hours of writing five days a week, but really focused, like phone is away, like deep, deep focus writing. Fifteen hours a week, like it's shocking how much you can produce. Like add those weeks together, forty weeks later, you have a book, right? The difference between the prolific writer and the person, the self loathing person who doesn't write anything,

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  is one does fifteen hours a week out of their one hundred and twelve waking hours a week writing, and the other one does zero out of one hundred and twelve waking hours. So one seventh versus zero sevenths. Six sevenths of those two people's days and lives are the same. I mean, it is so, people, you know, people who can't put something together, they have this daunting kind of assumption that the prolific writer is fundamentally different. They're just, they're just, they're working constantly all the time. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's the consistency, it is the IBM thing.

• 1:22:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've never thought about it that way. That's a really great way to put it, it's so true too. I mean, most, most, most writers I know spend the majority of their time inventing things to do to avoid writing. They're like, "But my, my plant's dying, there's, there's really no way that I could possibly..."

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Winston needs another massage.

• 1:23:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, this is an unconstructive environment. The writing's not gonna be high quality if I don't polish my tennis shoes, and so on. Very, very true. All right, this will be the, the last question and then we'll move on to the next phase of this evening. What experiments, questions, hypotheses are you wrestling with right now? How have they changed over your life? Where do you think they'll take you? Now, we may not have a chance to hit every aspect of this, but let's, let's start with...

• 1:23:47Tim Ferriss?

  What experiments, questions, hypotheses? Let's start with you, Tim.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Shit. So nice having his answer and thinking about my answer.

• 1:23:54Tim Ferriss?

  What experiments, questions, or hypotheses are you wrestling with right now? And then, I'm just gonna abridge this and go to where do you think they might take you?

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's a little like my last answer. I am trying to... So, my mind is structured, as I explained in the TED document. There's three characters. There's the rational decision maker, who's like, "You should probably work right now. It's 10 a.m., it's on a Wednesday. Very good time to work." Then there's his pet, the instant gratification monkey, who... He has a different idea. He has a different idea of what 10 a.m. on Wednesday is good for. And then there's... And the two of them go back and forth, and the instant gratification monkey wins every single time. Which leaves me in what I call the dark playground, where I'm like, not working, but I'm supposed to be. And the only thing...

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  The only thing that breaks that cycle is the third character, who suddenly wakes up when a deadline gets close, or there's some external pressure. That's the panic monster. And the panic monster freaks the monkey out. The only thing the monkey's scared of. He runs away, and I can get my thing done, and I'm gonna die at 45.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  And what I'm trying to learn how to do, especially since I'm about to start my first book next year, so I like, you've done 52 books, I need to like, learn from this man. Is like, you know, a book is too big a project. You can't just do that all at once. It's like, at some point, you have to learn how to have this internal motivation. And for me, I'm like a caricature of myself, but there's a lot of people in this room who maybe aren't classic procrastinators, but... Without realizing it, if there's no kind of deadline, even if they're not down to the wire with the deadline, the deadline itself just being there is what makes them do stuff. And that's dangerous, because actually, a lot of what's really important in life is that kind of important but not urgent stuff. The stuff that doesn't have a deadline.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Seeing your friends and family enough, changing careers, improving yourself in the long run. So I think like this whole, these three characters thing, applies to a lot of people. Applies very much to me. So what I'm working on is trying to just really, really working on having productive days with nothing in the external world making me. Because a child is not good at that. And I'm trying to be less of a child. That's my, that's my goal for the next year.

• 1:26:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I empathize.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Do you?

• 1:26:32Tim Ferriss?

  I do, I do, I do, I do.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  Most productive person in the history of...

• 1:26:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm just really good at showing like the high right, the high right. Wow, I got really super. When I get tired, this is gonna get me in all sorts of trouble. I actually, after spending like a year only speaking Japanese, when I get really tired, I start to mix up my Rs and my Rs. I'm not shitting you.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  Do you speak Japanese?

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 1:26:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a cool language. So, and just so you guys know, just gonna digress for a second. In Japanese, they have "naridu" de "dō." They have a syllatory, and the R, L, and D sounds are kind of combined into one thing. That's why they're not aware of the distinction. They kind of got screwed when God was handing out phonemes. They didn't get a lot of sounds. It's really hard for them to learn other languages. Bit of a ripoff for them. But I'm showing the highlight reel of like a very mediocre movie. So I'm gonna, you know, it creates the illusion that I'm just knocking out productivity all day. Not the case. Which is why when people are like, "Can we follow you around for a day?" I'm like, "No, absolutely not." Absolutely not, because you're just gonna be like, "Are you gonna do something?"

• 1:27:40Tim Ferriss?

  "No, man, I'm like, I found some lint in the carpet and I need to fix this."

• 1:27:45Tim Ferriss?

  Not a good like "Dances with Wolves" experience for the documentary film goer. Alright, so what experiments, questions, hypotheses am I wrestling with right now? I'm gonna make this maybe a little soft around the edges, which is not my style typically. It's like hard, analytical, quantitative.

• 1:28:03Tim Ferriss?

  But whatever. So I've spent the vast majority of my life, at best, tolerating myself. It's true. I had some really horrible experiences early on that led me to just decide, self-love was for other people, I could be a really good instrument for competition, though. I could hone myself into an instrument with a high pain tolerance to be really good at certain things. And that was enough. And then I could get my joy or happiness, wherever I found that, from observing other people. Long story to unpack that fully, but suffice to say, I accepted

• 1:28:43Tim Ferriss?

  a really low level of self-regard and was really, really unforgivingly brutal with myself. I mean, I talked to myself endlessly every day, we're talking about decades, in a way that I would never speak to another person. And what I've realized in the last few months, actually, in particular, is that if you want to fully love other people and to make other people feel loved, you can't get away with just tolerating yourself. You cannot. And you have to learn how to forgive yourself for a lot. But more so than that, for me at least, is to have compassion for earlier versions of yourself

• 1:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  that you might view as cowardly, or ashamed, or weak. And I was introduced to that through something relatively new for me, which is called Meta, M-E-T-T-A, or Loving Kindness Meditation, which sounds super woo-woo. And I mean, the 20-year-old version of Tim would just be vomiting on his shoes right now, hearing this. Like, "Oh my god, really? You're embarrassing us. Stop it." But it's been a really profound shift in my perspective. And realizing that even if my only goal is not necessarily to love myself, but to do the greatest good I can possibly do with my small amount of time on this planet, that I have to put my own oxygen mask on first.

• 1:30:11Tim Ferriss?

  And that's something that comes up a lot in travel mentors. Arianna Huffington, Sharon Salinsbury. It comes up again and again. And I just want everybody to realize, this is part of my...

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose new mission of sorts is for people to realize that if you're feeling damaged or flawed and that leads you to be depressed and to have a really, really low amount of regard for yourself, where you're really aggressively brutal to yourself, that the first thing to realize is that you are not alone in feeling that. And in fact, certainly not everyone in this book, but I would wager, and this is just speculation in most cases, but a very, very high percentage have incredible demons and are fighting battles that we all know nothing about.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  But I mean, really with some very, very dark periods. So A is that you're not alone and B is that you can actually let go of and repair almost all, if not all, of what you think you should just lock away and forget. So that, I suppose, would be what I'm wrestling with right now and working on and trying to communicate. And there's some really concrete ways you can go about it. I would recommend everybody, certainly if any of that resonates, do yourself a favor, get a book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock. Terrible title, fantastic book. Give it a read. It could have a huge impact.

• 1:31:51Tim Ferriss?

  Have psychedelics helped you at all? Yeah, also a question about psychedelics. I would say that yes is my tentative answer, but I would not recommend that anyone touch psychedelics without professional supervision. There are legal ramifications to consider. And I would take it as seriously as you would choosing a neurosurgeon to remove a tumor that if misoperated on would result in a fatality. So a lot of people right now, sorry man, that's about it. Right now, a lot of people are going on Craigslist and finding neurosurgeons. "My friend's a shaman.

• 1:32:33Tim Ferriss?

  We just ordered some stuff from the internet, from China, for ayahuasca. We're gonna do it in our slow cooker." Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad, bad idea. So there are many tools. I don't think that's the only tool. Meditation.

• 1:32:49Tim Ferriss?

  Silent retreats, which I'm not ready to recommend because I do think they can be extremely destabilizing. There are many, many tools in the toolkit, but the point I want to make is, there are tools. And you can start with something that does not involve visiting your ancestors and seeing flashing neon crocodiles in your mind, which could be radical acceptance. So take a look. Thank you guys very much, and thank Tim for being here.

• 1:33:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:33:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.