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

Please enjoy this transcript of a special Q&A episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. As some of you know, I tested a “fan-supported model” in 2019 but ended up returning to ads by request. That’s a long story, and you can read more about it at tim.blog/podcastexperiment. I recently sat down on Zoom with some of the supporters, which is the episode you are about to hear. 

I answer questions on how I’ve changed my mind around parenthood, what’s next for me and how I am thinking about next steps, how I find joy, how to live with urgency, my advice for career reinvention in the age of AI, avoiding complacency and ruts, and much, much more.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the episode on YouTube here.

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Tim Ferriss: Cool. Well, this is a cozy bunch, not too big, not too small. And Scott, I like your taste in the headsets.

Scott Washburn: Thanks.

Tim Ferriss: Got Lee popping in. All right, so I think the most interesting way to do this is just to kind of go around and have a conversation, and people can ask their questions. It could be the question that you submitted. Frankly, to keep it interesting for me, it could be something else too, but up to you. 

Let’s see. Sarah, would you like to go first? 

Sarah Thompson: Yeah, so I haven’t seen you in 30 years, which you may or may not remember.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say. I know that name, and I know that face. Yeah.

Sarah Thompson: Yeah. Well, it’s Sarah Carley, probably, to you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s been a minute. Nice to see you.

Sarah Thompson: It’s been a long time. Yeah, so it’s good to see you well. I had a question about something in the past two years that’s been a significant change of mind for you, a place where you’ve really made a big, big pivot in something you thought you knew.

Tim Ferriss: I’d say the biggest pivot that comes to mind is related to parenting, fatherhood. Just never felt like I had any evidence to support that I would be a good dad for a host of reasons, and felt like since that, as far as I know, is a forever decision, or at least a decision until you pass away, hopefully predating your kids, that I just did not feel comfortable thinking about pulling the trigger on something that significant. Also, because I do think on some level, becoming a parent is fundamentally self-interested. I don’t want to call it selfish, but you are choosing to have kids. So you want to make sure you bring them into the most supportive circumstances possible for them to flourish. And I would say in the last handful of years, as more and more of my friends have had kids and then second kids, in some cases third kids, and I’ve spent time with a lot of those kids that I’ve heard over and over again from friends, “You would be a great dad. You’ve got to get on that train, you’ve got to do it.”

So I would say that’s probably the most material pivot, and I can’t say with a hundred percent confidence I’m going to be the world’s greatest dad. But I suppose the question that I ask myself, but never really applied to this, but I do apply to a lot of other places is, with question X or challenge Y, has anyone less capable or less intelligent or less resourced ever figured this out and done a pretty good job? And of course the answer is yes with parenting. And I just, for whatever reason, never made the cognitive hop to apply that same question that I put so many other places to parenting. So I would say that’s the biggest one that comes to mind.

It seems like the next great chapter and adventure, so we’ll see where that goes. I have some pre-reqs to figure out first, girlfriend, partner, wife, mother of the children kind of situation. I guess technically I don’t need to travel that path, but that’s where I’m focused at the moment. Thanks for the question. Nice to see you after three decades.

All right, so we can go in any particular order. So I’m just following some line of sorts on my screen. Scott, would you like to go next? Not to favor all the people with headsets. Oh, no. We have multiple headsets down here, Andrew as well.

Scott Washburn: Yeah. So I guess my question kind of dovetails with Sarah’s a little bit. It seems like you’re thinking about maybe next steps for you and your career. You’ve hit 10 years on the podcast, and it sounds like you’re maybe exploring some new stuff with writing a book and doing art. And I’m just curious what types of new things are you exploring, and how are you maybe thinking about the next, say, 10 years of your life and what’s next?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a big one. Start with the big questions, then we can get down to what’s your new favorite pair of socks later. So I would say, I’ll back into that from the end of the question first. So next 10 years, who knows? For me, I’ve never really had super long-term goals that are well-planned out in part because I feel like, looking at it from the professional perspective at least, if you can hit your plan reliably point by point, it’s probably too far within your sphere of comfort, if that makes sense. And there are so many unpredictable elements that it’s probably, I don’t want to say an exercise in futility because I do think it’s important to have a plan, even if that plan isn’t something you can execute on perfectly.

But my plan time horizon tends to be, I would say, with most things in this six to 12-month range. And the assumption is there that if I do really well at something over that period of time, it will open doors that I could not have predicted or foreseen ahead of time, if that makes any sense. If you think about, say, the first book, if you think about the podcast, I could not in any universe I can imagine have foreseen what those would bring to the door two, three years later. I just could not have even imagined certainly at least half of the things that would’ve appeared. So I tend to think of it in those terms. 

But some of the, let’s just say side quests and alleyways that I’m exploring mostly relate to trying to break outside of what I’ve done before, and there are a few reasons for that. So one is that I recognize in myself that it’s very easy to not become complacent, but to become comfortable with repeating certain recipes that you have in your life, whatever those recipes are. And they typically relate to a domain you know pretty well. So in my case, let’s just say that’s publishing, that’s podcasting on some level, that’s early-stage investing.

And while I enjoy all of those things or facets of each of those things, there’s a benefit. I have felt a huge benefit in identity diversification over time. Each time you try something that’s not really bound within your current identity, it buys you permission to do that over and over again and to open up a whole new realm of possibilities that you might not have considered if, for instance, I viewed myself as an author. I could have constrained myself further to being a business author.

And that was part of the reason I chose to, once the success of The 4-Hour Workweek gave me a certain grace period within which I could try anything because publishers would be like, “Well, we missed the first one, but let’s maybe get the second one.” Or, “We want to keep him for the long term so we can do The 3-Hour Workweek and The 2-Hour Workweek.” So fine, if it makes them happy to do this stupid thing called The 4-Hour Body — and that’s not what the publisher said, but they were more excited for me to stay in my lane. The 4-Hour Body then proved to me I could experiment outside of the lines that would limit me to, say, the business category. And then, that furthermore led me to experiment with a lot of other things.

So that is a long preamble to say that the areas that I’m looking at really closely right now are, for instance, games, just totally out of left field. It wouldn’t fit neatly in my Wikipedia page, I’ll put it that way. And CØCKPUNCH and the whole NFT craziness was an example of also doing something very far afield. And I’ll show you another one actually, because I couldn’t show this to you otherwise. So hold on a second, I’ll show you.

This, for instance, is a great book, by the way. This is The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil with an introduction by Stan Lee. This is actually a great, great book. And I just visited Comic-Con for the first time, in this case in New York City, which was huge. I could not believe the scale of it. I have always loved illustration and wanted to be a comic book penciller. Actually, this is going to suck for people who only have audio, but I’ll do some more show and tell. Hold on.

Okay, so this is artwork that my mom kept that is from way back in the day. But just to give you an idea, these are covers of magazines that I did way back in like ’95, ’96, and this type of stuff, this type of illustration. I’m not saying it’s the best in the world, but it’s a longstanding interest of mine, and reinvigorating that. So part of what I’ve done is look backwards in time to guess at what might elicit a lot of energy recharge for me in the future, so looking back at what really activated me and seeing if I can explore some of those edges in the future.

Furthermore, animation is way up there, and doing creative pushes, which I experimented first through the fiction writing associated with CØCKPUNCH. Which by the way, if you replace that word with anything else, it is a pretty viable fantasy world. But it was a way to take pressure off of myself, to publicly position it as a joke and a satire, but allowing me with very little pressure to play with things that otherwise, if I presented them as serious, I think could cause a lot of performance anxiety and insecurity. Because if people critiqued it, I would take it very personally.

But stuff like this, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art. This is Frazetta on the cover. Lots of amazing artwork in this one. And those are a few, and there’s certainly the new book project, but within the book project, changing a lot of variables. So for instance, and I haven’t made any decisions around this yet, but the possibility of self-publishing, the possibility of taking that book, presenting it serially. So sharing the first chapter or the first two chapters, something like that. Having a private community of, I don’t know how many people, 100, 200 people maybe, who test aspects of the book and then provide feedback and can refine it over time and release a chapter a week or something like that over time, and have the audience track it, the small audience, the private audience, track it in real time, and then polish the whole thing into a diamond, hopefully, and publish it later, which could be very much — almost certainly at least a high percentage of that project would be outside of traditional publishing.

So I’m taking something I know, but I’m creating a permutation that might lead somewhere very, very interesting. And the way I think, this is a very long answer, but obviously I’m thinking about it a lot. In the case of, say, the publishing, this is true with all the other games, comic books, etc. that I mentioned, I’m looking for projects that will help me to either build or deepen relationships and acquire skills that can transcend that project.

So for instance, CØCKPUNCH, I mean, sure, it succeeded in the sense that it raised $2 million for the Saisei Foundation. All of the proceeds went to my non-profit foundation to fund science and so on, early-stage science. But NFTs as a whole, as you may have noticed, have fallen out of favor for a million and one reasons, which is fine. And I kind of anticipated that might be the case, so I set expectations very, very low up front because you can’t predict these types of market conditions. But I learned a lot through that. Ended up doing a scripted podcast, met some of the best artists in the worlds of, say, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, worked really well with them. So most importantly, proved to myself that I could work with a small team of creatives, and we would actually get along as opposed to me being unreasonable and overly stubborn and a control freak, which are probably ways I would describe myself.

But it actually worked. And I was like, “Holy shit, okay.” As a proof of concept, I could take that new-found confidence, that very limited experiment, but the feeling from that and apply it to possibly something more ambitious or completely different. Animation, as an example, would be a very, very, very different iteration of that process. So I’m not sure if that answers the question, but that’s how I’m trying to think through a lot of these things myself. Is that helpful at all?

Scott Washburn: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.

Tim Ferriss: All right, let’s hop around. Theron?

Theron Barbour: My question for you, Tim, is what’s bringing you joy these days?

Tim Ferriss: I would say it’s always the simple things, right? We can search for all these esoteric means of satisfying this quest for happiness and joy, and usually the absence of those things is remedied pretty quickly with just returning to basics. So for me, I would say I experienced one of the most uninterrupted periods of joy most recently being in the mountains, spending the first half of every day more or less outside with my dog, getting tons of exercise in the sun, pushing the system, adding some stress, getting all the benefits of the hormonal cascade and so on that comes from that. And then, in the second half of the day, spending time on, first and foremost, the admin stuff of life is always there, but really blocking out consistently and it’s easier for me to do this when I have less time in a day to allocate to work. 

When I have all the time in the world and I’m in an urban environment, I can fritter away all that time in 10, 15-minute distractions and end up not really accomplishing very much and not feeling very good about it. If I have the first half of the day, which you could do in an urban environment too, kind of dedicated to motion, movement, physical skill development, in this case time with my dog so it could be some type of group class or otherwise, doesn’t have to be the whole day, but really having that in the first half of the day, then having a two to four-hour period where I’m focused on something very immersive, single tasking without any distractions and in this case, that would’ve been latter half of August, September, and then early October, it would’ve been book-focused and doing that in collaboration with one other person who I’m deeply involving in this book project.

So I would say those are a few and then along the lines of week to week identity diversification so that if one thing stalls or doesn’t do well or as well as I would hope, I can still have a win so to speak, like chalk things up to a win. Archery has been great. That’s ongoing. So I’m spending a lot of time with archery. I overdid it the other day so my shoulder and elbow are killing me because I did it and overdid in a particularly stupid way. So I’m taking a few days off, but that has been a really consistent practice such that, if I’m not in the mountains because practically speaking, I mean you asked me personally what I’m doing, but for a lot of folks they’re like, “Okay, well great.” If you happen to be able to put yourself in the mountains around rivers and lakes, fantastic.

But even where I’m sitting right now, for instance, not tomorrow because I need the elbow and shoulder rest, but the day after that, as soon as I wake up, it’s going to be meditation briefly and I just recently got back on the train and we might speak more about that later in this conversation. Then an hour of archery and then cold plunge. That’s the morning. It doesn’t have to be four or five hours, it can be quite a bit shorter, and that sets the tone for the rest of the day. So those are a few things that come to mind. On an annual level, I would say the most important thing that I do for my sense of joy and well-being, and I think joy for me is very often the forgetting of the self, whereas the quest for happiness can sometimes get turned into an obsessive focus on the self.

Does that make sense? At least I think that’s where I slip sometimes. It’s like, “I should be happy. I should be happy. Am I happy?” Whereas joy is this sort of emergent experience of forgetting yourself. So for me to facilitate that, blocking out multiple say one-week periods where I’m with groups of friends. That’s just the most reliable way to do it. So each year, I’ll look through the past year, identify let’s just call it the relationships that are most enlivening for me where they’re reliably always going to be, “Hell, yeah. I wish we could have spent more time together. Can’t wait to do that again,” those people, it’s a short list. And then scheduling time with those people in group environments, ideally doing something active like yurt-to-yurt backcountry skiing or a hike or in the case of most recently it was a hunt with five other people.

I don’t hunt very frequently, but that’s my protein for the next three to six months depending on how many meals I can replicate with the exact same protein. And those are some of, I suppose, the variables that seem to consistently deliver. But if I’m out of sorts, it’s like, “All right. Are you getting enough light in the morning? Are you getting enough exercise in the morning? Do you have your diet dialed? Are you in a place like New York City where surprise, surprise, you’ve been out and you’ve had alcohol four nights this week with your stupid friends who also do the same thing?” It’s very often the basic things and kind of removing those emergency breaks that facilitates what we’re looking for or what I’m looking for. Is that helpful?

Theron Barbour: Yeah. That was great. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. So I’m going to kind of like wind my way around here. Let’s see. Christina, would you like to go next?

Christina Nesheva: I mean, somehow related to what you were talking about how you think about the next whatever, six, 12 months, one of the things I really admire about is your way of thinking and questioning and now particularly with kind of gen AI overtaking, for me the ability to ask the right questions, different questions, good questions is probably the more important. So I’m curious about your thoughts and how do you keep the questioning fresh?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well not to get too meta, I mean that is a question I ask myself quite a bit too. So thanks for bringing it up. I’d say with questions, there are a lot of different settings for questions, first of all. You could ask me a question, I can ask the group a question. Those might be different species of questions. Asking yourself questions. Right. This can also be a different species of question. And the way I keep questions fresh, I’ll give you a simple tactical answer, is, for instance I was preparing for a podcast interview recently and I had a research doc, I had read through the bio, had asked the guest for certain topics they thought would be interesting to explore, had done my own searching, come up with some independent questions, but we all get in ruts that we don’t recognize. And those ruts aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but they’re an easy thing.

So I might have my 10 go-to questions and it’s easier to sit with those 10 than to come up with another 10, which may or may not work. So I went into ChatGPT and I said, effectively, “How might James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio interview guest X? What are 10 questions that are variants of questions that have come up a lot in Inside the Actors Studio? Give me 10.” Boom. All right. Great. And then the next one was like, “Give me 10 more for Terry Gross interviewing the same person.” Fresh Air, right? “Give me 10 more with Charlie Rose.” And it was very, very helpful. Or 10 more with Lex Fridman. Sure. Why not. Just throw in anyone who is not me basically. And I’d be like, “Okay. I wouldn’t ask seven of these, but that’s an interesting one. And I wouldn’t have thought of phrasing it that way.” Or it’s asking a question that I think would be of service to my audience within the theme of the show, so I’m not deviating too far, not getting too far afield, but it’s coming at it from an angle that I wouldn’t have considered.

Right. So I would say those are all approaches I take. If I find questions that I like, I save them. So you could save them to anywhere, Evernote, Notion, wherever you keep your notes, but I have documents that are basically running lists of questions and they could come from anywhere. Could be a novel. There are questions in novels that I yank. One characteristics. Another could be in an in-flight magazine if those still exist. I don’t even know if those still exist. Could be practically from anywhere. And then there are, I would say, consistent questions that I find very helpful, which you might find in some form, like The Five Minute Journal, for instance. Those are consistent prompts that work to achieve a desired result, much like a recipe. If you’re cooking something specifically, there are guidelines that tend to work repeatedly. So those are a few ways that I think about it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Let’s hop to Josh. You want to go next?

Josh: Yeah. I was going to ask if you spend your life battling tech admin stuff like we do, but that was answered pretty quickly.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. There’s always that stuff. There’s always that stuff. Yeah.

Josh: I guess my real question, some of the successful people you’ve interviewed have gone through long periods of being unsuccessful or rejected or bankrupt or whatever. You’ve sort of documented some of your own struggles writing the body book and some of the other things. I guess what are some of the unifying themes about those who eventually do break through and how to get out of a rut? You’ve already touched on, which was part of my question, but I think anything you could just elaborate on that please would be great.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I can. Could you give me, if you’re open to it, you don’t have to, but a little more context for why that question? Because that could help.

Josh: I guess sort of taking a little bit of a career break as you have and thinking about things that have brought me joy in the past was certainly one thing that I’m looking to do next moves and I think the decision process that you’ve already outlined a little bit is things that bring you joy and you’ve kind of arrived at a couple core principles of things that you’re looking for your next projects to help you do. I guess just a little bit more upstream from that, how you made the decision to call time out after the 10 years and take the sabbatical and then just how you got out of the day-to-day of doing what you do so very well. And I know you’ve touched upon it’s hard to do that, but just anything on that that you could share would be helpful in terms of how you realigned your thinking to do something a little bit different, but building on what you’ve already done very well.

Tim Ferriss: So I’d say a few things. So I could speak to my decision to hit pause or rethink things. I suppose there are a few fundamental beliefs that led me to do that or allowed me to do that. The first is that constant motion in some respects or constant productivity, per se, is the enemy of oblique thinking. So if you’re looking at seeing a problem or a situation with fresh eyes in an uncommon way that allows you to make unique or highly leveraged decisions, when you are constantly churning, I think it requires you to be this close to the problem and therefore it’s hard to zoom out.

So for me, I had that belief to begin with that not necessarily stillness, but having a little bit of distance is necessary for me to really consider doing X before the entire rest of the world does X. Right? And I’m looking for ideally being a category of one. I don’t like competing. I don’t like competing in my professional life in this particular way. Archery or something like that, great. Compartmentalized, very clear, it’s time-bound, pass-fail, follow the points, great. But when it can become a sort of never-ending story of unquestioned ambition within say the world of podcasting, then I want to make sure there are periods built in where I have some distance. The other fundamental belief, and I’m sticking with the belief stuff because these are thoughts that we take to be true. Beliefs are thoughts we take to be true and I’m sure I’m borrowing that from someone like Byron Katie.

The belief structure is sort of the reed raft upon which everything else floats. And if you really want to have the most optionality with your direction, it’s very helpful to make the implicit beliefs explicit and look at them carefully. So the other belief that I think is helpful, and I actually know quite concretely, this is not limited to people who are in the top one percent of one percent. The world does not end if you slow down or take a break. Right? It’ll carry on just perfectly fine generally without you. Now there are constraints. If you’re saying that you want to take a break from a job that provides all the income from your family and pays the mortgage and puts food on the table, obviously there are constraints, but if you were to delete all social media from your phone and titrate down the aperture of noise and news that gets flooded into your system, you’d be fine.

Hey, you’d probably be better off. So the hyperkinetic feeling of modern society is not conducive or necessary for making decisions with outsized outcomes if that makes sense. So those are a few kind of underpinning beliefs and there are people who prove this, right? A lot of the people that I most respect, in their profession, like a Daniel Day-Lewis or something, they disappear for five years at a time. They come back, no one’s like, “Where’s Daniel Day-Lewis? What are his latest tweets about politics?” Nobody gives a shit. As long as you’re really good at craft X, you are going to have I think a good number of options. So I’m meandering a little bit, but help me — 

Josh: It’s helped.

Tim Ferriss: Focus. Yeah. Is there a particular aspect of your question that you’d like me to hit?

Josh: I guess I think you’re really hitting on a lot of the stuff and like you said earlier, some of the stuff about hitting, how do you think about things that bring you joy and then you realign with your beliefs to get there. I think this is really helpful. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, it’s inspiring that someone as successful as you at something has done this and taken stock and sort of step back because it kind of gives the rest of us hope to do the same thing. Even if it’s just something that you’re just saying, “All right. I’m going to take a step back,” and then do similar to what I’m doing and some other stuff maybe in a different way with a different lens, it’s just helpful to think through that to get the rest of us to the happy place.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, happy to try to assist. I definitely don’t have everything figured out. I would say also that if you seem, and this comes back to Christina’s question on questions, if you’re hitting a dead end or you don’t seem to be able to reliably answer a question and it’s causing you stress, right? For instance, how can I find joy? Let’s just say that you’ve been banging your head against that question and it hasn’t been producing great results. One thing you can do that I will sometimes do is, “Okay. Maybe that’s not a good question, but there’s a feeling that I’m going for. If I look back at the past, what are some of the antecedents to joy?”

So maybe the question isn’t like, “How do I create more joy?” It’s, “How do I create some precursor to that?” And for me, one of those is a sense of losing the self or the dissolution of the self.

Josh: Right. That’s great. Thanks.

Tim Ferriss: That’s another way that I think about these things is antecedents to X. 

Tim Ferriss: Right. All right. We’re just going to work our way through. Wade, would you like to go next?

Wade: One, I just want to say thanks for everything you do. Like, I genuinely appreciate it. Love the content, love what you’re about, learn a lot. You’ve been like a gym companion for me for nine years. There’s nothing better than a good Tim Ferriss podcast in the gym. So genuinely appreciate that. I think my question is around, and maybe I’m wrong, it’s just an observation, but I’ve listened to you for a long time. Seems like maybe the edges have softened a little bit in regards to your life and maybe personality. Seems like maybe there’s a hint of spirituality that’s evolved a bit since I’ve been listening. So is there anything in particular that has helped maybe soften the edges and is there a different perspective on spirituality than there used to be?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would say I’ve definitely softened a lot in the last five years, especially, and maybe I’m just getting older and tired. Who knows? But if we take that off the table as an explanation, although I think a lot of stuff comes down to, I was talking to a friend and they were like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve just become so much chiller in conflict resolution with my partner after 10 years, but it took five years,” and I was like, “Maybe it’s just fatigue.” I was sort of being a jerk about it and just being playful, but if I take that off the table, I mean there are a few things that were proactive and also just life experiences I think that contribute to that.

So I would say one is seeing dozens upon dozens upon dozens of close friends or podcast guests who are materially successful beyond belief, have all the prestige you could possibly imagine in a business capacity, who are nonetheless dissatisfied or chasing something like a hungry ghost, if that makes sense. And the reason that’s relevant is that a lot of the piss and vinegar and sort of spitfire focus that I’ve had I think has been predicated subconsciously on some belief that, with enough of X success, that success resolves, I’m not going to say all issues because I never would’ve said that, but most issues and that’s just not true. It’s just not true at all.

I would say also what I’ve observed in very wealthy people is that they build, they build, they build, their number moves, they make X amount of money, then they want 10x, and then, “No, it’s as soon as I have a 100x,” and then it’s, “As soon as I have 1,000x, then I can chill out and I’ll know everything’s going to be okay.” And if you put that under scrutiny, when I’ve seen older people and I’ve spoken to say grandparents or people who are building dynastic wealth, it seems like, this is going to sound obnoxious, but I’ll just say it, which is like if you give your kids a ton of money, let’s just say that’s more than 10 or 20 million bucks, people who are making just obscene amounts of money, building incredible amounts of wealth, there is an amount of money past a certain point that seems to just fuck up your kids horribly.

I’m not saying that’s always the case, but the, “I just want to create a better and brighter future for my kids and give them the things I didn’t have.” There’s a point where more is a lot less from what I’ve seen. It’s just my personal impression. So if you realize that the professional stuff is not going to solve all your problems or all your challenges, let’s just say, and if you realize accumulating Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth and then donate it all to your kids, if it turns into a serious amount of money, is probably a bad idea. It’s not just neutral. You might actually really screw your kids up. Then it raises the question why around a lot, at least around the business stuff. And I think it contributes in addition to other things that I’ll mention to taking it seriously, but not too seriously. Taking it less seriously. Does that make sense? And when you take those things less seriously, if you have been inclined to take them very seriously and consequently yourself very seriously, I think by taking those things less seriously, you start to take yourself a little less seriously.

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

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

Then on the spirituality side — I generally steer away from that term. It’s a useful term because there isn’t a great replacement in some conversations, but it can get used in a lot of different ways. But I would say that my openness to — it’s not even openness, it’s like my recognition that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know, I think has opened my mind, as have a lot of strange experiences that I’ve had with, whether it’s psychedelics or otherwise, it’s not limited to that.

And I explore the fringes, right? I mean, I really do, and I try to keep my skeptic’s hat on. And I think I’m actually quite good at not fooling myself, and I will ask, what are the alternate explanations for this? How might this otherwise be explained? Et cetera, et cetera. But there’s a lot of strange stuff out there. It doesn’t mean it’s magic, but it does highlight sometimes the limits of our current abilities to measure and freeze-frame things for scientific studies.

So those are all contributors, I would say, in the bucket, broadly speaking of not taking myself too, too seriously. And if my work is a subset of myself, then it applies to that too, would be having a lot of friends die. I’ve had lots of friends pass away. I’ve had people get very sick. I’ve seen people succumb to dementia. As you get older and you see more and more of this, it just highlights the fact that this ride, it’s not a long ride and I’m not convinced that death is the end necessarily. But still, we don’t know. So let’s not spend the entire roller coaster worrying about whatever Trump said on your phone. Rollercoaster’s not going to last forever.

So focus, taking the view, poke the person next to you, try to share a laugh. ‘Cause it’s just not that long. And it’s, even if you come to a quote unquote natural end in old age, it’s not long. But sadly, I’ve lost a lot of friends and acquaintances, certainly, to car accidents. I mean, you name it. You just don’t know.

So I think the softening is around a lot of that. The softening also comes from, I think, exploring different modalities for trying to metabolize the childhood abuse that I’ve talked about elsewhere. And that requires a degree of cultivating compassion for yourself that I historically have not paid a lot of attention to. And I think as you, it’s hard for me to see any way around developing compassion, more compassion for yourself if you want to genuinely express compassion for other people. I’m not sure there’s a workaround there. I’ve thought about this quite a bit. It goes both ways. But fundamentally, I think that’s a homework assignment for a lot of people, that if, I’m not going to say solved, but if that is paid sufficient attention has all these downstream benefits. And one of which I think is just a general softening, I would say. So those are the things that come to mind.

Wade: Thanks, man. That was awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Wade: Appreciate it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my pleasure. All right, so the faces have moved around a little bit. I’ll try to keep track. I think I can keep track of who’s gone, who hasn’t. Since Tim is up in the corner next to me, I’m going to go with Tim. You want to go next?

Tim: Yeah, again, thanks for all you do. It’s been an amazing journey, from your books through your podcast journey and CØCKPUNCH. Love the coffee.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got some right over there. I’m still drinking it. Yeah, yeah.

Tim: So I had a question that was kind of tuned to all these longevity protocols with AI and all the latest research that’s coming out as far as the compounds, the protocols, how do you keep up? Through you, I’ve been introduced to Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Layne Norton, and a lot of other great contemporary, leading-edge, science-backed, information seekers and deliverers. So how do you approach handling that, especially with this, we’re in the age of AI now. So that was going to be my question. That’s what I submitted. But on the topics that you just have been going through, and it’s in my own life I’m realizing these instances when people are passing. My dog Pepper passed away just like two months ago. What do you do with grief and how is that something that is, as far as your approach, something that you see is helpful, something to be avoided? I mean, you’re kind of all through it with the information you’ve just been walking us through, but just kind of with grief. Because you only have so much time, right? Thanks.

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

So for instance, mourning periods will sometimes be very carefully outlined. And a group of people will agree with this type of death you mourn for this period of time, here’s the protocol, maybe wear black. And so you can have a feeling of completeness and perhaps closure within the construct of this societal norm. We don’t really have that. It’s left up to everybody to create our own. And I’m not saying this for everybody. There are certainly plenty of religious folks out there. But by and large, let’s just say in places where I spend a lot of time, Austin, New York, California, people are somewhat cut adrift. And sure, they might be able to tell you all about different philosophers they read in college and listened about on podcasts, but fundamentally there’s a sense of being somewhat unmoored, I would say.

So the grief topic is a really good one, and it serves as kind of a microcosm of the macro, it reflects — the challenges within grief I think reflect broader societal challenges. The book On Grief and Grieving is probably the most common recommendation that I hear from, say, podcast guests. So I think that could be worth checking out.

On the longevity protocols, just to take a hard left, I would say I really don’t try to stay up to date with the longevity protocols in part because there’s so much garbage and there are so many influencers quote unquote trying to peddle whatever rev-share stem cell clinic they’ve partnered with in Tijuana or whatever might be the case. It’s very difficult to separate fact from fiction if you don’t have a really reliable source. I would say just follow Peter, honestly. Peter Attia for that, specifically, that’s really his wheelhouse. He focuses on health span.

I’ve known him since 2009. I’ve spent time with his doctors in the clinic. I’ve gone through Biograph, which he’s involved with, and so on. So I have a high degree of confidence in Peter, and I’ve seen him repeatedly turn down offers for very lucrative business arrangements in exchange for promoting X, Y, or Z. And he just won’t do it if he doesn’t really feel 100 percent comfortable supporting their conclusions and claims. So I would say pay attention to that. And frankly, the more we learn, the more the basics are the basics for a reason. It’s like creatine’s been around for decades. This is nothing new. I just took some before doing this conversation, right? It’s present in a lot of food that we consume naturally. It’s a known quantity in the body, pretty well understood. As soon as you start getting into the bleeding edge where it’s like, well, these people are going to Honduras and injecting themselves with Phellostatin, and look at these amazing before and after photos. But oh, yeah, it does kind of turn off your FSH and so might make you infertile in these animal models. Something like that seems to happen. But look how awesome his eight-pack looks. It’s like, I’m not sure you want to be the third monkey shot into space with that stuff as a human subject.

So I tend to stay away from the bleeding edge. I used to be very aggressive with this, certainly in my 4-Hour Body days. I was very aggressive with this. And I think in part because I was fascinated in part because I didn’t foresee how nagging certain problems could be. It’s like, yeah, if you fuck up and have a problem that causes orthopedic issues in your elbow, it’s not a foregone conclusion that that’s going to be fixed a year later. You might just have like tendinosis for the next 40 years. Oops.

So I do pay more attention to the downside, and I would say that in general, one of the ways that I frame this for myself is not what can I do that will make me live longer, but what can I subtract that might make me live longer or just live more healthfully, right? So for instance, I mean, this is going to sound maybe funny, and there’s a lot of pseudoscience wackadoodle stuff out there about this, but just minimizing exposure to plastics and phthalates and things like that. I think it seems very conclusive at this point that from an endocrine perspective and so on, these are just very, very bad news. So it’s like, don’t heat things in plastic, right? Use more glass. These are very, very basic things. Use filtration, have proper filtration for your water. If you don’t have really, really good filtration for your water, you might want to take a look at it. Because even in very rural areas, you could have, for instance, in some of the mountainous areas I’ve spent time, high levels of arsenic because there used to be mining. And if you’re way out in the country, you might have higher concentrations of the groundwater pesticides, things like this from agriculture.

So just paying really close attention to that kind of stuff. Exercise, it’s like the cure-all right? It’s like zone two weight training, just like you’ve just got to do it. Or you don’t have to do it, but people are always glad to have done it, I would say. And it feels good, for me at least. It’s the most consistent mood elevator for sure in addition to cold exposure. And these tools, I think if someone is on the verge of being diabetic or diabetic, there could very well be a role for these drugs like Ozempic or Mounjaro, et cetera.

But they’re not free lunches. To come back to the blog post I wrote some time ago, I think it’s just called “No Biological Free Lunches.” It’s like there are trade-offs here. And if you don’t know what the trade-offs are, it’s not because they don’t exist, it’s just because we have not identified them as consistently yet. But if it’s a matter of life and death and you need to lose weight, hey, then you do a risk calculus. But in general, the stuff that I’m doing for longevity is the stuff I’ve been doing for 10 plus years: creatine, exercise, try not to stuff your fucking face every time you sit down to eat, which is my biggest challenge. I love eating, God, do I love eating. But these are known problems. So those are my thoughts on the longevity stuff.

Tim: Thanks, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And sorry about your dog, man. I think about that all the time. Got my pup right next to me. It’s just like, oh, God. I think I’m going to cry on planes every time I think about it. So I’m sorry. All right, Joel? You want to hop in?

Joel Cherrico: Hey, Tim and other Tim, sorry about your dog too. I lost a cat two months ago, also had her for 14 years, had her from when she was a kitten. And something that really helped me, I mean, I spent a lot of time with that cat, right? I lived in a small apartment for many years, just me and her. And now we have some land, and I buried her. I dug her four feet down. I dug the hole myself with my wife. It was nighttime, and digging a hole. And we really think a lot about environmentalism.

‘Cause we’re not religious, so we just really like thinking about nature. And so to bury her, not cremate her, to get her body from the vets, and to not put her in a plastic bag, and dig her deep enough where animals don’t get to her and she’s on our land and she’s going to biodegrade, return to the Earth. Yeah, I’d wear black for a couple days and see it as mourning. I know she was just a cat, but I think there’s that gravestone, that meme that from a hundred years ago where she was more of, she was enough of a human to be a comfort in times of stress and sadness, even though she was just a cat. That helped us. That was our process, two months ago, coincidentally. So just thought I’d share that, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks.

Joel Cherrico: Yeah. So question. So I’ve got a pre-prepared question that coincidentally Josh, I saw he was asking about creative projects and he had a copy, because we do the video, which is pretty cool, of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. I saw that copy on Josh’s Zoom. So my question is about that. I think a lot about creativity. I’ve been making a living as an artist for a number of years. And in his book The Creative Act, Rick talks about the aesthetic. It’s one of the chapters. And he’s describing creative projects where they give you a primal feeling of warmth in your body. And he says that that’s a great creative compass to recognize when you’re searching for a breakthrough, when you’re in the slog of bad work and mediocrity and experiments that are going nowhere. But when you feel ecstatic about something, that’s a great compass for trying to discover greatness or a breakthrough or he says, it might feel, he says like an answered prayer.

And I’ve certainly felt like glimpses of it at times. But I’m curious in your past, present, or your future on what you’re working on, when you have felt the aesthetic, the ecstatic in — ecstatic, sorry, the ecstatic in creative projects, and especially in the future, what you think in the next projects might be, what gives you that sense of the ecstatic?

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

For instance, if you consume too many stimulants, too much coffee, too much this, too much matcha, whatever the hell it might be. In a sense you’re raising the level of, gain might not be the right word, but the level of static. So it becomes harder to pick out that signal. You might get a lot of false positives. Or you might be irritable and then get a lot of false negatives where you’re just like, “Oh, this is making me creepy and crawly.” And it’s like, “No, you had your fifth double espresso for the day, dummy.”

So for me personally, I try to keep track of that and paying attention to the physiology, which is not inherently natural for me, or it doesn’t come in reflexively. Because I’ve spent so much time looking at the spreadsheet analysis side of things, being really analytical. But if I get off a phone call and I’m drained, or if I get off a phone call, I’m like, “Yeah, fuck yeah, I want to do another one of those.” It’s sometimes that simple. And it’s not that I know with certainty that X marks the spot. This is the project. When it’s done and it looks like this, this is going to be the ecstatic moment. It’s not so much that for me, it’s like a scent trail. It’s like an energetic scent trail, if that makes sense.

And there’s a description, I can’t remember whose description it was, about writing a novel. And the metaphor was writing a novel is driving across the country starting at night with your headlights on. It’s like you can’t see your destination, but you don’t need to see your destination. You just need to see far enough in front of you to kind of navigate your way and adjust. So I would say for me, those are some of the ways I think about it. I mean, CØCKPUNCH, as ridiculous as it is, that was one of those where I was just so energized by the prospect of digging into the art specifically, and the fantasy, and what that would do from a freedom perspective in writing, fiction versus highly researched nonfiction. I was like, I don’t even know. That seems a dead end on some, this could be a huge mistake. But I’m getting so much of a physical response. I was like, fuck it. This seems like not the kind of thing to ignore. And that liberated so much energy that I could apply not just to that project, but to other projects, that I have no regrets about it whatsoever. 

Joel Cherrico: I’m curious if you’ve ever gotten into Lord of the Rings? Because it’s such a cultural phenomenon and Lord of the Rings has had a big impact on my life in terms of fantasy and with CØCKPUNCH and D&D, do they have a Hero’s Journey Bible, Jesus like Lord of the Rings does? Did you think about that at all with CØCKPUNCH? And does D&D have that, like a singular figure like Frodo carrying the ring? Have you ever inserted that or thought about that?

Tim Ferriss: D&D, as far as I know, does not have that. Lord of the Rings, I mean, I was just in Oxford for a week in the UK and was looking at original handwritten notes from Tolkien and looking at his scripts of Elvish. Spending time in pubs where he and C.S. Lewis and others would hang out.

So I am deeply, deeply interested by Tolkien. I think a good dungeon master will have some felt sense of the Hero’s Journey as they’re weaving adventures for people that are playing out in real time. So the circumstances and the players and the module don’t always conform to all is lost and then there’s the redemption. It might just be all is lost and then you’re fucking dead. So it doesn’t always have the Star Wars, “Yeah, go, R2D2!” moment.

Joel Cherrico: Do you have a singular hero in CØCKPUNCH?

Tim Ferriss: As it’s laid out right now, that’s not made clear. In my mind, if I were to — sow that with some of the recent art I put on Instagram, I said, “Okay, we’re going to call this Legends of Varlata.” And so I just took the CØCKPUNCH out, right? So let’s say it’s Legends of Varlata. There is a character that I keep coming back to in my own mind, too. And it’s not a Jesus character, but it’s sort of like an Ender’s Game, Frodo-ish character is Tyrolean. So the son who is in the last few episodes of the podcast. So Tyrolean and his father, that particular dynamic, I have an entire, if somebody was like, “Here’s a hundred million bucks, go make something awesome.” I’m like, I know exactly what I would make. This is what I would do and it would be amazing.

I know this sounds ridiculous and just so arrogant to say, but it’s like, no, based on working with the concept artist, the feedback I can give, I can storyboard well enough to kind of Frank Miller-esque. I can be a primary writer, but I can also have, I have the sort of directorial cinematic sense for how things might be framed visually. Also that I can work really well with creatives who are working with animation, moving pictures, whatever.

So I would say the core relationship that would drive that movie would be the father-son. And nothing tragic has happened yet, but if I were to continue my writing for, I don’t know, a few more thousand words, stuff would get very exciting and super off the rails really quickly. And then there would be things to solve, right? Something like that.

Joel Cherrico: Cool. Sounds fun.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think it would be fun. It’s just figuring out how to go from Rooster NFTs to a hundred million dollars animated film. It’s just a couple of hops in between that I need to figure out. But seeing for instance, and I mean I’m not a gaming studio with gajillions of dollars in revenue. But Arcane, seeing what League of Legends and Riot Games did with Arcane. If you guys haven’t seen Arcane on Netflix, go watch it. It’s bananas. I mean, if you want to see something where the most off-the-rails budget for something animated, it’s really remarkable. And there’s a YouTube series on the making of, which I would also recommend checking out. All right.

Let’s see, Chris with the katana and a Fender Stratocaster maybe in the background.

Chris Dengler: Yeah. Yeah, that was a practice — should have been more conscious maybe of the background. I’m not sure.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I like it. I’m into it.

Chris Dengler: No, it is a practice sword. So, well, where do you put it? You put it there. It kind of helps people when they come in the office, it kind of sets the tone a little, I guess. But thanks, first, for putting this together. I love the format. It’s kind of neat to meet all different people who we share an interest in what you’ve been doing and that kind of thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my pleasure. I’m having fun.

Chris Dengler: I was wondering, in your case, thinking about your 10 years and that kind of thing. For me, if I looked at the last 10 years for myself, there’s an underlying theme for me that I really found that it wasn’t that I was an impatient person, but I found that really developing a high level of patience with both myself and others, it seemed to drag everything else along in a positive way, whether it be compassion or empathy or that kind of thing. And if I had to pick a theme in the last 10 years for myself, that would probably be it. That really might account for positive changes and growth in that regard. I was wondering if over the last 10 years you found a common theme the same way?

Tim Ferriss: Last 10 years, well I could use some lessons in patience, that’s never been my strong suit. I would say my mom has made jokes about my impatience since I was a little kid. So I guess I’m the counter example. Although that’s been a project, but if I’m looking at a through line over the last 10 years, I would say it is developing more awareness in different capacities so that I can self-regulate my physiological response.

That’s a very wordy thing to say, but to explain it, I could say that my challenge has been since childhood that I have a very hyper vigilant system. So my sympathetic nervous system, just the noradrenaline and adrenaline, all these things kick off at the slightest provocation. Could be just someone dropping a book in a hotel in the room next to me when I’m asleep, and then all of a sudden heart rate’s, whatever, 120 and I can’t get back to sleep, that type of thing. And that can come up also in conversation if I’m talking to someone and they say something that I create a story in response to and the story is very upsetting, and then something in my physiology is fucked. And then the physiology feeds back into the cognitive loop.

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

So I would say the last 10 years has been trying to cultivate an awareness with different tools, meditation, psychedelic therapies, reading books like Awareness by Anthony De Mello, so that in the moment I can at least be aware of what’s happening.

So for instance, I have been using this app, which is what I used to get back on the train for the last handful of weeks. Kevin Rose, good buddy, Kevin Rose introduced me to Henry Shukman, and I had Henry on the podcast twice. He is a Zen meditation and master. Now, I don’t like that master term, but he’s one of, I want to say three or four people authorized to teach this particular school of Zen in the United States.

And he then developed, started to develop an app. I invested in it, but it was early days kind of back-of-a-napkin thing. And now it’s built out, it’s called The Way if you want to try it. And I’ve been using it 10 minutes a day, twice a day. And I had a really, really challenging conversation today with someone I’m very close to. And I could feel my physiology just getting, I have so much background with this person and I was just like, oh, fuck, here we fucking go again. It’s one of those. I was just like, ah — and I was able to, and this is going to seem very rudimentary, but as I was having this really strong physiological response, just to go body as I’m listening to the person just be like, body, I’m just noting that my body is having this extreme response. And by noting it, not trying to suppress it necessarily, just noting it, having that drop in intensity so that I could engage in a way that was less reactive.

So I would say the project then for the last 10 years has been developing an awareness of an appreciation of how much my physiology drives everything that happens up here. And paying more attention to that, not just trying to cross-examine the thoughts because the thoughts are, I think products sometimes of a rapid heart rate and things like that. Does that answer the question?

Chris Dengler: Absolutely. That’s great. Thanks.

Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. Yeah, thanks for the question. All right. I think we have one person left, Lee, I believe. Would you like to go? Hi, there.

Lee Cole: Hi, from Canada, I was having technical difficulties when everyone was doing their introductions. So I guess my question is a two-part or part-and-a-half question. So I’m a 47-year-old man with a five-year-old daughter. So I started late in life and all I wish for her is to see her find something that lights her up. Anything. I guess that ties into me and my life right now as I’m wishing that so badly for her, I realize that I need to make a career change. I don’t love my job, so I decided to go with a clean slate and not even any of my past doesn’t matter. I want to start to figure out something that lights me up. Is there a few questions that you ask yourself if you ever feel stuck trying to figure out what that is? 

Tim Ferriss: So you’re feeling stuck at the moment in terms of choosing a path forward for yourself.

Lee Cole: To find something that lights me up. I’m lucky right now I have six months off. So I can think about my next move, where I want to go, what I want to do. Any little ember I get, and I follow down that path I think to myself, okay, well, is AI going to do this in five years? How much effort do I want to put into it? And I’m just trying to, if there’s a few questions I can ask myself or a few things I can do just to find that thing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. What are some of the options that you’re considering at the moment?

Lee Cole: So one of them was architectural and house design. But I’m thinking in five years that’s going to be pretty much taken by AI, I’m sure. That’s the thing. I’m stuck. I used to be in the restaurant business. I don’t want nothing to do with that anymore. I owned a restaurant for a while and I’m just kind of at that point where the next decision I make, I really want to get excited about it. And it could be anything. I’m all about learning things and just, I need to find that spark. So I’m into architecture, and that’s what I thought was going to be the path. And then I thought, okay, well I want to spend — 

Tim Ferriss: So I don’t have all the answers of course, but my thinking around AI, because this is a common concern, right? You’re not alone in this. A lot of people are wondering what will be gobbled by AI. And the short answer is nobody has an idea. Nobody really knows, and it’s easy to become paralyzed given that there’s so much uncertainty around it. But my feeling is there are certain career paths, let’s just say, that are already being eaten, right? If you were to say, “I’m going to be a logo designer and earn my money on Fiverr.” I’d say that’s probably going to get consumed within the next very short period of time.

But if you have the flexibility to consider paths, I would pay more attention to the quickening than speculation about AI. I don’t think there is, number one, there’s no right path. So you can take some pressure off yourself when you realize that everybody’s making it up as they go along. There’s no one right answer in the mathematical proof of your life. Does that make sense? It’s going to be a trial and error process like it is with everything that we do in life.

So I would say that — with something like architectural design for instance, I actually don’t think it is a foregone conclusion that it’s all going to be consumed by AI. Now in part because there are open questions around this technology. For instance, will people want to watch movies that are purely generated by AI that make them cry? Are people going to want to cry knowing that no human was involved, that it was just based on a large language model plus other AIs being trained on certain data sets, finding patterns, and then producing a desired emotion? Are people going to want that? Or are people going to want, for instance, I mean people still buy handmade shoes, right?

People still buy artwork produced by artists. People still pay for many things that they could pay less for if they were willing to go to the lowest cost provider. So there is a market for that. And I think that in questions of taste and conversation and so on, most people are not going to be do-it-yourself-ers with everything in their lives acting as the direct interface with AI. What I could see is that you end up, let’s just say, working in architectural design and instead of having three employees, you have three really well-trained AIs that you pay $19 to a $100 a month for that, take the place of those employees and help you with various aspects of the job. I could see that. In the same way that you might use something like Freshbooks for accounting and you’d be like, well, I’m not the best draftsman, but I can do this, this, and this. And my value is in interfacing with the client, figuring out these following things. And then these steps of the process are going to be well-handled by an AI.

So I think that that’s entirely possible. But my uninformed perspective is that the magical skill, it’s not magical, but the powerful skill in any rapidly changing world, which includes AI, it’s not limited to that. There’s a lot of stuff. I mean, the rate of change is just going parabolic in so many different fields. So it’s not going to be limited to AI, is adaptability and confidence in your ability to trial and error and ultimately kind of figure it out. So I do think that — a lot of this hinges also on how we think about worst case scenarios, right?

So I don’t know anything about your personal setup, but let’s just say you have some savings, right? And you have a methodical plan for handling costs associated with your daughter and you live in Canada. So unlike in the US there may be some things covered by your fine government that we don’t come across as easily here. Then you may have more room to experiment than you give yourself credit for, if that makes sense? You may have more safety nets and the worst case may not be that bad.

So for instance, you could do, and this is available on the blog, if you just go to tim.blog/ted, I think there’s the TED talk on fear-setting. And then there’s the text from The 4-Hour Workweek on fear-setting. Just to do that exercise. And what you may realize is, let’s say worst case, AI eats architectural design. But you get three or four years of feeling really gratified by your work. You’re learning a ton, you’re interacting with people you really respect, and it’s like we all have to deal with bullshit, right? It’s not going to be all kittens and rainbows, but overall you’re like, “Wow, this is so much better than running that restaurant X number of years ago.”

And then AI eats it, and you’re like, “Okay, now I have to start over.” Would you regret having done it? Maybe not, right? It depends a lot on what the worst case looks like when you make it granular. And the only way you’re going to figure that out, or at least the only way I can figure it out, is trying to put it on paper. And figure out, “What are the worst things that could happen? “How could I decrease the likelihood of those things happening?” Next column, “What could I do to get back on my feet?”

Okay, so let’s say you try that and you’re like, “Fuck, that didn’t work. I need to figure out what’s next, but in the meantime, I need to make some money.” Could you do something in your current industry? Could you, worst case you’re like, “Oh, I really don’t want to do it, but I’m going to consult for people who own restaurants for a period of time to make ends meet and then I’ll figure out my next move.” Probably, right? So I would say a place that might help you get unstuck, and this is true for me as well, is doing the fear-setting exercise and also realizing that very few moves are fatal. Very, very, very few. So those are my thoughts on that.

Lee Cole: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Tim Ferriss: All right guys, well we’ve been going for a minute here, and it’s time for me to go get some food since I had basically mixed nuts and sweet potato fries my whole day of food. Which is not going to necessarily help me live to be 150, but we all have our off days. So I’m going to go try to get a proper meal. And really nice to meet you all, and spend time with you all and see some of you for not the first time in the case of a few folks who were here earlier. So have a wonderful evening and a great weekend, and thanks for being part of the experiment.