The Liz Moody Podcast - The ONE Trait The Happiest, Richest Women Have In Common (Anyone Can Have It)

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

 There's one big reason that many of us are not living our dream life, whether it's having our dream career, our dream partner, our dream home, and that is having agency. Agency is one of the key things that the most successful and the most happy people in the world have in common.  My guest today, Cate Hall, has been at various points in her career the number one ranked female poker player in the world, a Supreme Court attorney, a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and the author of the book, You Can Just Do Things. She teaches us how to start to cultivating our own agency and get our dream life. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • The simple reframe that turns impossible goals (money, time, location) into achievable ones • The "crisis manager" mindset trick for silencing the voice that says it's too late • One free 5-minute habit that will radically improve how you see yourself • How to tell the difference between a real obstacle and an excuse in disguise For more from Cate Hall: • Book, You Can Just Do Things: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063488450?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback • Substack: https://usefulfictions.substack.com/ • X: https://x.com/catehall Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Birch: go to https://BirchLiving.com/LizMoody for 20% off a new mattress. • ZBiotics: Head to ZBiotics.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for 15% off • Pique: head to PiqueLife.com/LizMoody for 20% off + a FREE Starter Kit on $100+ of subscriptions • Timeline: visit Timeline.com/Liz to save up to 39% off. • IQBar: text LIZ to 64000 for 20% off. •  OneSkin: go to OneSkin.co/Liz and use code LIZ to get 15% OFF for a limited time. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 462. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's one big reason that many of us are not living our dream life, whether it's having our dream career, our dream partner, our dream home, and that is having agency. Agency is one of the key things that the most successful and the most happy people in the world have in common. So today, Kate Hall, who has been at various points in her career, the number one ranked female poker player in the world, a Supreme Court attorney, a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and the author of the book, You Can Just Do Things, is going to help us get exactly that. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we believe that there is always something that you can

do to create a life that feels amazing. And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. Kate, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. For the person who's going to be just like, yeah, yeah, this is all really easy for her to say. I would love to just start us off by you telling us about your rock bottom and when you realize that you can just do things. So my agency awakening happened over the course of multiple decades. I was always a pretty successful person. And when it came to going to law school and becoming a

lawyer, I just kept moving through the approved steps and kept succeeding. And so I got to a point in my 30s where I was really successful in my career, didn't enjoy it. at all and didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing. The rock bottom point came sort of in between some of those things you listed. So like after the Supreme Court, after professional poker, before the other stuff, there was a period of three and a half years where I was deeply addicted to drugs, where I would wake up every morning, go by drugs, use drugs all day, was completely checked out of my life, lost most of what was worth living for, and was so, so, so stock that I think it was really like kind of a global minimum, I hope, for agency in my life.

What do you credit as the first moment where you were like, wait, I can change my life? I was always a very confident person. I believed that I could change my life at any point. And then in addiction, I like slowly had that confidence shaken and got to a point, I would say, six months before I actually recovered where I was like, maybe I just actually won't get out of this. Like maybe this is just my life from now on and I'm just going to have a bad, small life. That was terrifying for me. And sort of regaining my faith and my ability to do something different was so much of what recovery was about for me. But I think I had the experience that a lot of addicts do, which is there is something that just seems miraculous about the first step.

that you are able to take to get out of it. Like, I was able to, for whatever reason, after multiple years of trying to recover, actually like take this step to put myself in a recovery program where I couldn't get out of it after like a couple of days. I was really like tying myself to the mast of recovery. And it's kind of a mystery why people get to that point whenever it is that they get to that point. But it's like, it's called a moment of clarity where you suddenly like see.

really what your life is going to be like and have like a moment of determination that allows you to change course. So interesting. What kind of drugs were you addicted to? My primary drug was nitrous oxide, which has historically not been a thing that people get addicted to. For people who aren't familiar with it, it's what they give you at the dentist when you're getting like oral surgery, low-key oral surgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an really interesting, um, drug that has like euphoric properties, but also some of the dissociative properties of cadamine. And it's just like in a class all by itself. And it's a quick high, which is why it's interesting to picture getting addicted to it.

I did a lot of whip it in college. And I feel like it was so fast, but it was so intense. Yeah. You can find ways to sort of elongate it. Alongate it. If you're entrepreneurial about it. You're a gentic. Yeah.

Misdirected agency. Yeah. Interesting. How can a person listening know if they are a high agency person or a low agency person? What does agentic actually mean? People are really spiky with respect to the agency in their lives. So I think that's really common. People who are really agentic when it comes to their careers, they're happy to go out and start a business, do things that they've never done before. Then when it comes to their personal relationships or their relationship with themselves or spirituality, there's a lot less of that. And I think in different communities, people tend to spike in different areas of agency, but there's different theaters of your life.

And more commonly, people are high agency in one area and low agency and others. Agency feels like freedom. And I think it's really easy to detect at like a spiritual level when you are moving from areas of lower agency. It's a higher agency. What does it feel like to be low agency? and I think that's like a feeling of stuckness, also a feeling of effortfulness. One of the common misconceptions about agency, I think, is like people think about it like it's effort or willpower or determination or something like that.

If you are constantly having to devote effort and willpower to something that you want in your life, there's a sign that something has gone wrong in an agentic sense. Like some part of your life is designed poorly. And so I advise people to look for the places where it feels. like they're really having to exert this like grinding determination. And that may be the pace in their life where they are actually exerting the least agency. Do you think that willpower is ever a useful thing to try to cultivate? Or do you think that that's always a sign that you're doing something wrong? I have this weird relationship with willpower. I think effort is sometimes necessary.

Like there are a lot of things in life that you can only get through the application of effort. there is a sense in which application of the right kind of effort is part of the point of life. And I think a life where you are eliminating all friction is not necessarily a good life at all. At the same time, I think there's this sort of glorification of willpower that happens in our culture where trying to achieve your goals without like an excess expenditure of effort is sort of seen as like cheating or not good. And I think we see this in the discourse around Ozympic and other weight last drugs a lot where it's like, you know, you should have to earn it. And I think my attitude about that is just like, wow, there are so many things that require effort. There are so many things that

require willpower. If you can find a way of achieving a goal of yours without expending a lot of extra energy, that's just energy that you freed up to spend on something else. And that's great. Is there a type of person who tends to be better at achieving their goals or getting what they want out of their lives? So people who are not naturally pro-social, they ask for permission less. They pay attention to the needs of others less. And so there is an aspect of agency that is just like really comes very naturally to them. Whereas for people who are more rule-bound, pro-social, more interested in sort of slotting in with the community, some of the, the skills of agency come less naturally. And I think it is good for people who are pro-social

to develop more agency because it is just like a generally useful tool for achieving your goals. And it's good for people who have good goals to have an easier time of achieving those goals. But that makes it so much more important to me. So we need to teach the good people, these skills so that they can take on power and change the world. The dedication to my book is to the best who lack conviction, which is from the second coming poem that contains the line, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And I feel like that is a natural pattern that arises in the world as like the power hungry tend to rise in power.

And my hope is that this book can be a guide for people who are pro-social, who are trying to look out for others, but give them like a toolkit that brings more freedom and more flexibility into how they pursue their goals. Yeah, it's interesting that you say it's like that type of person because I care deeply about other people. And because of a number of factors from my childhood, I don't get embarrassed as easily as many other people that I know. And I consider myself a very high agency person.

And this is the first time I'm like, oh, I bet the fact that I don't get embarrassed contributes to me being higher agency. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's just like a superpower, I think. Yeah, that's so interesting. Okay. I have a little game. I asked listeners to write in dreams or goals that they have and then the reason that they don't feel like that goal is achievable for them. So I would love one Kate Hall tip for getting each of these people one step closer to their dreams. Okay. I want to take my family on vacation, but I don't have enough money. One technique is this idea of focusing on interests rather than positions, which is a thing that comes from negotiation tactics. Basically, it's like, instead of focusing on a particular outcome that you want, focus on the underlying interests that

are sort of being expressed in the desire for that outcome. So in this case, maybe the underlying interest is actually, I want to spend more quality time with my family. I want to expose them to a novel experience. And like depending on the way you break down the actual underlying interest to the thing that you've identified as your goal, there may be easier, more direct way. ways and less expensive ways of pursuing those interests rather than focusing narrowly on the way that you've already identified to serve that goal. I love that. I actually did this very recently in my life. My husband and I do want to take our families more on vacation, especially as our parents get older. But we were like, okay, this is hard to fit into our schedule. We're struggling

with this. What do we actually want? Quality time and to make memories together before it's too late. And so we started doing family dinner every other week. And one person gets to pick a game every other week until we play these like really wildly different games because people have very different interests in terms of the games. And we make these like little memories together. And it's on the calendar. So it's assuaged so much guilt of like, have I called them enough? Have I seen them enough? You know? That's brilliant. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I had this problem and I did that thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't even realize it. How does agency interact with privilege and luck? I think there's a lot of people who look at the most successful people in the world and they're like,

Well, they were born on third base and I was not. And so I'm never going to get there. How do you respond to that? I think my primary response is like agency is about your relationship with your own life. It's about like having the best life that is available to you. And it's not the case that everybody gets born with the same set of circumstances. Like people vary in intelligence. They vary in the level of wealth that they're born into.

There's all kinds of privilege. Like some people are born beautiful and other people are. not. There's no escaping the fact that there is this variation in terms of the starting hand that people are dealt. At the same time, I think about agency as, all right, given the life that I am starting with, what is the way that I can arrange my life that is best for me? What is, like, conducive to the highest level of freedom for myself personally? And, like, best aligns the world with the way that I want the world to be. And it's not that you have unmitigated freedom to choose your life or choose your circumstances or choose what the world looks like in a broader level.

It's just things can be better than they are right now. You also talk about putting yourself in the way of luck. Can you share how we can do that? It stems from the core observation that so much of your path in life is determined by chance encounters with a person, with a project, with an idea. Something happens along your path and you collide with it. And sometimes that produces something that is relevant to your marriage or your career or some other domain of your life. And so increasing your service area for luck is really just like, if you think about life as like throwing shots at you, increasing the amount of contact that you have with the world so that you have more chances to get lucky.

And so really it's about putting yourself in situations where you are having more of those opportunities to interact with people, ideas. projects, even if each one of those is like low absolute odds of being transformative for you, if you get enough contact with the world, you get things that are relevant. So what's an example of that for like the average person listening? So a classic example is like networking, which gets a bad rep. But like so much of my ability to switch careers, for instance, has come from just putting myself in situations. I'm usually not going to like networking happy hours, but just like hold outreach to people trying to, you know, make connections, meet people who are working in an industry,

figure out what's going on just by having a lot of conversations. I think for those of us who are more introverted, and I rely on this so much, a better alternative is just writing on the internet. substack is an incredible vehicle. It is how I found most of my following and putting stuff on the internet that sort of represents who you are, the way that you think about things. It can become such a useful filtering mechanism. Like the people who find their way to you through that mechanism tend to be such a really good fit for in terms of like how they see the world, what their interests are. This is one that I hear from so many people in my actual life and then from listeners. I really want a family. I want kids, but I cannot for the life of me find a man that I like.

It's rough out there. How can we take agency in ways that aren't just like, get on the apps, like ask your friends that they have a partner for you. If we want a partner and we can't find a partner, how can we take more agency there? I have multiple levels of answers for this one. This is a great example of one where the interest can be separated from the position. If you really, what you ultimately really want is kids and not necessarily a partner, you can separate those things. And it's such an empowered place to date from. I have a girlfriend and she had kids on her own with the help of family and friends, which is obviously a huge privilege. But now when she's dating, she's like, there's no timeline.

I feel so free. I am being so selective, but I'm having the time of my life. It's like such a different energy that she's dating with. Yeah, that's one option. You can just have the babies directly. Of course, it comes with its own challenges. On the dating question, maybe I can just issue like a blanket warning for everything I will say, which is, I am but one person.

I can only speak from personal experience and my personal experience may be atypical. That said, the approach that I took with my husband was unusual and was actually really important to us ending up together. which was apps and modern dating in general, sort of encourage this view of dating where you are trying to find your perfect person who like you slot in with, who right from the get-go,

like you just sort of click. And the paradox of choice is that we sort of expect to find somebody who satisfies this long list of criteria that we have. The approach that I took with my husband was, I met him on Twitter. I was like, this is a person who I am dramatically different from in a lot of important ways. It's also somebody who I feel like I would like to be more like him in important ways, like in terms of his level of emotional awareness, his attunement to the

world, his like level of spirituality. I found a lot to admire in him. And I just decided like, let's try doing the commitment part first. And so like our first. Our first. state was he was living in a different country. So he came and moved in with me for a couple of weeks. He went back to his home country. And then he came and moved in with me permanently. And we got engaged after a few months and we got married in less than a year. And it is not because we were perfectly suited for each other. Instead, we like took this view of a relationship as marriage is the thing that makes you ready for marriage. Like there's this writer he likes. Um, who talks about the ingredients of a passionate marriage. And one of the core concepts is like marriage

is what makes you ready for marriage. It's like you make a commitment to grow with another person and to figure your shit out together. And that is what creates the feeling of commitment. I think if we had not gotten married in that first year, we would have broken up so many times because we were so different. We really needed that sense of like having. being tied ourselves to the mast in order to make it work. And I think that we have an incredible marriage and an incredible relationship now. And it took so much growth from both of us to get there. So what should that average person take away from that? Should we just find somebody on the street, marry them, and be like, anybody will work. I can just like make this thing work if I commit to it.

I think probably not everybody is worth marrying. A thing that I did for a lot of my life was gravitate toward people who are exactly like me, and that I had that, like, real ease with. And a thing that I did with my husband, which I think was really critical, was instead looking for somebody who was very different in a way that I wanted to move toward. I think I have a lot of strengths that he doesn't have, but he also has a very different set of strengths that I would like to develop in. And so feeling like it's somebody who you can learn from and who you admire in particular respects, I think is sort of the key. thing and then somebody who's just like willing to go for it with you. The whole thing doesn't work

unless you have two people who are really committed to growing together. That is part of the hard part in modern life is you have to find another person who's willing to just like do the experiment of committing early and trying to grow together. The other thing that I like that you said is I had gravitated towards all these other types of people that maybe weren't serving me. And I think this is a side effect of agency that's really positive is the more you do things, the more you learn things, and then the more you can incorporate those lessons into your future things that you do. Yeah. And so I feel like you were like, I dated all these people. I learned all these lessons. And then when the opportunity presented itself to be agentic in the situation, I knew what I needed to know.

Yeah, that's true. You got a lot of feedback from the world. I think failure is one of the best, best, best things that we have as a resource as a tool because the more that we try to do, the more that we fail, the more that we learn. And that's just going to spiral us upward. Yeah, absolutely. Failure is one of those things that we learn to avoid early. And that was definitely a lot of my outlook for my first several decades of life was just like, I must be the best at things I must not fail. And it caused me to avoid a lot of interests that I might have otherwise had or past that I might have otherwise explored because I was just so afraid of failure. I'm sure you've thought about this a lot in writing the book and in talking to people.

Like, why do you think so many of us let failure hold us back from our one wild and precious life so much? I don't know where we get this from early on. I hate to just blame schooling because it's so convenient, but there is a lot about the way that the educational system is set up where it's like success is clearly really good, failure is clearly really bad. And so much of our energy is directed at training kids how to succeed and how to avoid failure. I don't know how we ended up in that equilibrium in the first place. Like why do we have this intolerance for failure? Maybe it makes sense at like a population level for us to really not want people to fail and to sort of like sort people into areas where they will be successful. But it's terrible for individuals.

It teaches people to be afraid of something that actually is not in itself bad. Non-total failure, which almost all failure is, is not that bad. It's actually just a way of getting information from the world. Sometimes the information is costly, but like in most cases you can then use it to grow and improve. So it's really a shame that that people get this message driven into them from so early because then it is hard to work it out of your system. Well, and it's hard to get the information that you need to succeed in life. I think about it as we all had a bucket and then every time you fail, you like put a drop of information in the bucket.

The person who's trying all the time and failing all the time, they're going to have this like huge bucket of tools and resources. And the person who is not trying and not failing is going to have this empty bucket of like three things in it that they can rely on when they're trying to make decisions or go after a dream or live a life that feels good. I mean, if you, you can just think about it, like, if you are only trying to do things where you are pretty confident that you're going to succeed, you're cutting off the whole upside in your life distribution because you're ruling out the things where you might only have a 10% chance of success. But if you succeed, you're going to succeed wildly. Is there anything pragmatic that people can do to do things even though they're scared or to break through this fear of failure? For fear of failure, for fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment.

I think there's a certain amount of like experiential learning that just has to happen and a sort of trap that people can fall into, which I did for a long time, and I'm still prone to this, is like believing that if you can sort of like think the right series of thoughts, it will stop sucking to be embarrassed or to feel rejected or fail. You like cannot think your way into feeling differently about these things. all that you can do is go out and get exposure to them and habituate yourself emotionally to failure and rejection and embarrassment. And they become so much less acute and so much less like looming over time. I used to have this like pathological fear of failure. I just remember feeling like if I was not

the best ever at whatever the thing was that I was doing, it was like life was basically not worth living. It was really, really intense. And I look back on that. I'm just like, what? What was I thinking? Like, failure is much, much less painful than you think it's going to be unless it's catastrophic. And part of the like goal is to get reps at points of failure that are non-catastrophic. So you get that data and you stop being so afraid of it. Okay, next one. I want to be a singer-songwriter for my career, like a 38-year-old indie pop star, but The music industry is so hard to break into. It's hard to stand out in a landscape of so many musicians.

And I also worry that it's too late for me. What would you say to this person? I think this fear that it's too late to do something is really, really common. And it tends to hit really shockingly early in life. Like to the extent that you want counter examples, you could just go on Wikipedia and find a list of people who've like succeeded at things starting late in their careers. And there will be multiple. pop stars who are in this category. I think that we know at some level that it's not actually too late,

but we let that be a break on trying stuff out. And so the question is like, how do you actually convince yourself to try despite that feeling of it being too late? And there's like a really corny thing that I advocate doing, which applies in most. circumstances where it feels like it's too late. It's this crisis manager mindset that I developed an addiction. And the idea here is just like basically finding a way to forget about your personal history and like the facts and circumstances that you find yourself in and focus really narrowly on the practical path ahead of you. So the technique is pretend you are not yourself, pretend that you are a crisis manager who has been dropped into your life. And you have your goal set

in front of you and you're not responsible for everything that has come before. So you have like narrowly a goal, like literally pretend that you are a professional crisis manager. You've been dropped into your life. And the goal ahead of you is become a pop star at 38. Try to, instead of thinking about all of the mistakes and like opportunities that you've missed to land yourself in your current position, just focus really narrowly on like what is the goal and what is the series of practical steps that will allow me to get there and then just like walk the path. It's shocking, at least in my experience, how effective this can be. Because really like when we are feeling like it is too late to do something is often not actually responsive to the circumstance that we find ourselves in,

it is really about this feeling of emotional ickiness that we have about the choices that we have made in the past to put us in the position that we are now in. What would be the first step you would take if you wanted to be a pop star? Go search for people who have done this path later in life. You will find examples. And imitation is generally incredibly effective. Like, just figure out what steps those other people took to get discovered later in life and repeat them.

Yeah, 100%. I also do think that, like, part of being agentic is. trying to search for answers that are definitely out there, whether it's examples or when I was younger and I was trying to get my first agent, I was literally like Googling how to write a book proposal, how to get an agent. I found like a sample proposal online and I copied that. And I do think a lot of these questions are directly out there, not in these like greater ways. Like how do I follow my dreams? Like how do I do this exact specific thing? What is the first step? I have mixed feelings about AI and AI's relationship with agency, I think AI is likely to be a great buy for cater in terms of

it will make some people a lot more authentic. It will make many people a lot less agentic. If you want to learn a new thing, if you want to develop like a concrete plan for learning a new thing or going after a new goal, it is a great tool for doing that because you can put a query like this in AI and say like, help me develop a concrete plan for achieving X goal. And it will help you come up with ideas. And that can be like a great starting point. Talk to me about why you think it's going to make some people more agentic and some people as agentic. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like if it's off gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life. And most conventional mattresses are loaded with synthetic foams,

flame retardants, microplastics, and more. If I were not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. The birch mattress is incredible. It made with organic cotton, natural latex, and ethically sourced wool. So it has literally no off-gassing. You can not smell anything right when you unbox it. It has no microplastics, no synthetic foams or flame retardants. And the wool makes it so breathable, which if you've listened to this podcast for more than five minutes, you know that I run very, very hot. The birch mattress has been a game changer for that. It's also hypoallergenic, which is really worth paying attention to if you find yourself waking up stuffy or congested. And then comfort-wise, Zach sleeps on his back and then

I sleep on my side and my stomachs. And we both wake up feeling really good, no aches and pains. CNN actually named the Birch mattress, the best mattress for side sleepers. And Wired named it the best organic mattress period. Birch ships right to your door. It sets up in minutes and it comes with 120-night risk-free trial. So if it is not for you, they will pick it up for free. Go to birch living.com Liz Moody for 20% off. That is birchliving.com slash Liz Moody and you're going to get 20% off birch living. com slash Liz Moody. A lot of you guys know that about four years ago, I started being what I call an intentional

drinker, meaning that I've stopped drinking just because it's like a Thursday night. Now I drink a few times a month at the most. And the only downside of that is that I have almost zero tolerance for feeling poorly after I drink now because I'm so used to feeling energetic and good every single day, which is why I am so, so excited about Zbiotics pre-alcohol. I tried these for the first time at my friend's birthday party in Vegas, and I was very skeptical, but now they are my absolute go-to. Zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic,

invented by PhD microbiologists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. When you drink, alcohol converts into a toxic byproduct in your gut, and it's actually a build-up of that byproduct, not dehydration, like we have been told forever, that's to blame for those rough days after drinking. Zbiotics pre-alcohol produces an enzyme that helps break that byproduct down. The science actually makes a ton of sense. And again, I felt a huge difference. August does not slow down and neither to you.

Pre-alcohol keeps it that way. Go to zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody and use code Liz Moody for 15% off. That is zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody, code Liz Moody. If you were worried about microplastics, this is the one change you need to make that not nearly enough people are talking about. Almost every single tea bag contains glues and microplastics. And when you steep your tea in boiling water, the bags release billions of microplastic and nanoplastic particles into your cup.

Yes, even the organic brands. And then you think you're drinking this like little health elixir, but you're actually just drinking a cup of microplastics. Because of this, I now only drink loose leaf tea or the peak tea crystals. These are so good for on the go. They come in little packets of powder. And then you mix that powder into hot or cold water with no tea bag necessary. You like stir the entire packet of the powder into the water.

They have a ton of delicious green teas. They have black teas. They have white teas. They have herbal teas. So no matter what your preference is, peak can give you a healthier option. I have turned so many people onto their teas and now they're all obsessed. It's all that they drink. I also love, speaking of macha, their son got a lot of.

matcha, and I say this as a very, very, very picky matcha drinker. It is time to commit to intentional health. You can unlock 20% off and establish your powerful foundation for sustained well-being at peaklife.com slash Liz Moody. That's P-I-Q-U-E-Life.com slash Liz Moody. AI like agency is a great general purpose tool. It can help you go further faster. in any direction. The career transition that I'm making right now is one that if I did not have the

ability to use AI, I would never have dreamed of making because it requires me to learn so much, so quickly. I'm starting a new business that is going to be doing philanthropic and life management services for this discrete population of people who are newly wealthy, but trying to give all their money away. I'm having to learn a lot really, really quickly. I don't think I would be able to do what I am doing on the timeline that I'm able to do it if it weren't for AI. This is an example of a way in which AI is definitely increasing my agency. And I see this in other friends and other projects. At the same time, I think that if you look at what has happened with social media in the last decade or so,

like social media has not been agency enhancing for the most part. although it creates new opportunities, it creates opportunities for connection and like putting yourself out there that you wouldn't have had otherwise. A lot of what it also does is make consumption frictionless and allow you to be served stuff that will generate dopamine in your brain without a lot of friction. You see it in many people's relationships with social media, including my own, the agency destroying potential of technology, because there is this prospect of being able to live in a reality that is totally curated for you, totally frictionless, and just like sort of sand all of the meaning off of life as a part of that.

I feel that strongly. If we wanted to make sure that we were using AI to increase our agency, and if we're looking out for warning signs that we are using it in a way that's going to make us less agentic over time, what would you say for them? AI can be a wonderful tool if you're using it to help you understand the world more deeply. I think about it as a tutor as opposed to something that is like generating the report that then I rely on. If you are substituting your own judgment, your own discretion, your own understanding with that of this tool, I think that is one. it becomes agency destroying. And I think a great test of if you do understand something is if you can explain it to somebody else.

Like that's my favorite. Like I'll say, hey, Zach, I learned this thing. And then he'll start poking holes in it. And I'm like, wait, did I learn this thing? So I think that's really helpful. Okay. I want my husband to overcome his depression and self-doubt. But I have found that I cannot control him or his brain.

But he's my life partner. So his life impacts me a lot. What agency do we have with other people? I don't have amazing advice for somebody who is. aspiring to like increase the agency of another person. It kind of has to come from within. And then like the initial spark can create this virtuous cycle of increased capacity and increased self-understanding. But there has to be like an initial decision that is some form of like cosmic grace, I think, to try to change something. I did a interview with Dr. Marissa Franco.

She talks about self-verification theory. which is the idea that when things are in a front to our view of the world or our view of ourselves, it actually causes increased cortisol. It makes us stressed out. So if somebody gave you a compliment that just does not ring true to you, it actually makes you feel worse than if somebody didn't give you a compliment at all. Interesting. So when it applies to somebody who you feel like they could be doing more in their life, you want to give them that little push, what she suggests with the compliment is give them something that's believable for them and only just a,

tiny a step removed from their reality. And so I wonder if there's like an agency version of that where maybe when you were in the throes of your addiction, you couldn't picture like, oh, but like you could go have this big beautiful life at some point. But there's like, you could take a walk around the block. You could enjoy a picnic outside. Like are these tiny steps that we could offer people as little ladders if we want them to have more agency that fit within their view of the world, fit within in their view of themselves. And then once they experience that success, that leads to another and another and another. I think it's possible. I think I think the observation is good and true. No, no, no. I think with both depression and addiction, the core challenge is not wanting to get

better. So, I mean, that's at least been my experience with depression. It's the experience that I've heard from other people. When I have been depressed, which I spent many years of my life, super depressed, suicidal, I knew the things that were. would make me better. And I simply didn't want to do them. And that aversion was so much stronger than the desire to be better because the desire to be better lived in some future reality that was not like immediate and tactile. And so I think like if you are at the point where a person is ready to take suggestions and like go for walks, like you're at the part of the cycle already where they can just like hit escape velocity very quickly. Like one of the interesting. One of the

interesting things about depression. If you are able to overcome that activation barrier and start taking basic steps to care for yourself, you can get into this like virtuous upward spiral. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like that initial little bit of being willing to take advice, doing the things that you know are good for you, even though you don't want to. That is what I always found really difficult for myself when I was in that situation. Okay. So then maybe by question, for you is how can we use our agency to let go of our desire to instill agency and other people? Like when you see somebody that you love, whether it's depression addiction, whether it's their dating life, their work life. And you're like, oh my God, I just like want to help you do this thing.

How can we use our agency to let go of wanting that? That's a really interesting question. Al-Anon and other 12-step programs for people who are in the lives of addicts was developed for this. For like figuring out which. aspects of a situation you actually have the ability to control or influence and which you don't. It is notoriously difficult to just let somebody that you love suffer and like allow that to happen. And even if we were deeply convinced that that was like the thing that was best for them on some sort of cosmic level. Yeah.

I think it would still be really hard for people to do it. And it's not really like a thing that people are convinced of. The best you might be able to do for the most part is. is acceptance that the other person is the way that they are. But like not wanting them to change, not wanting them to better, I think it might just be like too hard. I actually respect that. I think that there's like,

there's not a podcast solution for every problem. And I actually think that we do a lot of harm when we suggest that there is. Yeah, exactly. Some problems are just really difficult. Some problems are just really difficult. Okay. I would like to write a book. but I'm afraid I'm secretly a very bad writer,

and it would just be a loss of time to write a bad book. I'm also afraid on the flip side of being seen and judged by many people if I do succeed. You got the whirlpool on one side and the cliffs on the other side. That is a hard thing to navigate. Did you just see Odysseus because you've made two references now? We're tying ourselves to the mast and then we have a whirlpool. Tying yourself to the mast was the chapter in the book before Odysseus was even.

Before I even knew that it was coming out as a movie, That's a really powerful one. But yes, the whirlpool and I don't even remember what they're called. Yeah, yeah. That is an Odysseus reference that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Fair. I think my like core answer to this person would be fear of failure I get. If you also don't want to be seen succeeding, I might have a question about like, why do you want to be a writer?

Like what is the underlying interest that is motivating that? Often we have goals that we have decided are like the ultimate. goals that we are dealing with instead of the underlying interests. And so what are the reasons somebody might want to write a book? Maybe they want, like, the respect of a particular set of peers. Maybe they want to have, like, accomplish this really difficult intellectual challenge. You know, there are, like, different things that can motivate people, certainly admiration. Depending on your answer to that, it might just be that, like, writing a book is not the right vehicle for getting it. If you really do have this, like, very specific set of preferences

where you really, really want to write a book. You don't want to do it badly, but you also don't want to be seen doing it well. I guess you're... Write a mediocre book. Right down the middle. I guess, like, the answer is do it well and do it anonymously. I don't know who that's satisfying for, but, like, you can't write stuff on the internet anonymously or pseudonymously, and people do that and people are successful as writers under pseudonyms.

I think it's self-protective, though. This is just my opinion. But I think that I'm afraid of being seen and judged by many people if I succeed is very related to the I'm afraid I'm a bad writer. Like I think it's like the self-protective mechanisms. And this is one of the things I love about your work is we have so many lies we're telling ourselves that are preventing us from going after our dreams. And to me, the fact that both of these things were in one submission, I'm like, let's disentangle those lies we're telling ourselves. Do you think that it's like, it's not that you don't want to be seen succeeding. It's that you don't want to be seen by a bunch of people who will try to tear you down and actually sort of prove that you suck despite being successful.

I do think we see what the internet does to successful people these days, like the discourse around yesteryear, which is one of the most successful books that's been published recently. and then you have as many people hating on it as loving it. And that's one of the things that's made it so successful. So I do think that's really scary. I love your advice for like knowing when we're giving ourselves a real reason to not do something or try something and when we're giving ourselves an excuse so that we don't have to actually do the scary thing that will serve us in the long run. That's a great question.

Where my mind immediately goes is like just trying to actively imagine that the constraint is like resolved and see if it resolves the underlying things. So like, what would that mean in this case? If there was a way to write a book where you knew that nobody was allowed to publicly criticize you, would that then be an appealing prospect for you? And I think that the answer will give you some indication of whether that's actually the issue for you. If it is the issue, sometimes you're able to like, again, directly address that specific constraint and find a way around it. And if it's not actually the issue, then maybe the actual issue is it's really hard to write a book. It takes a lot of work.

And so if it's like, I'm not allowed to fail, I just have to put, you know, two years into writing this book first. Like, does that become an attractive proposition to you? If not, that's good information to have. I'm also like, we're putting the cart way before the horse. Like, can we sit down and write 200 words every single day before we're picking? the whole world reacting to those worlds or words. Extremely good point. Write a few substock articles first.

Yeah. Like do anything first. And also, art particularly is so subjective. There are so many books that I personally think are truly terrible that have been published and that are massively successful. I mean, the internet knows about my hatred for Colleen Hoover. I, like, cannot handle her writing. But I, like, understand that people love it and I don't begrudge them in any way for that.

I can't get into the acotar, the fairy like smut. Okay. Oh, I didn't know. Which people are probably like that. So reductive, Liz, it's so much more than that. But like, I'm so happy it exists. I'm so happy it's helped so many people like rediscover their libido, all of these things. So, like, art is so subjective.

And there's stuff that I like that other people are like, why do you like that? That's like a terrible book. So I'm just kind of like, do the thing. Yeah. And then people will react how they react. Okay, let's do two more. I would like to live abroad or just to. in a new state, but it's hard to recreate my salary and job elsewhere. The reason I included this one

is I heard from so many people who want to live abroad, but cannot for the life of them. It's like, they're like, this is my biggest dream, but they get so paralyzed when it comes to thinking about actually doing it. What would you say to these people? It's kind of an interesting one because it's like a lot of people do it, right? Like a lot of people move to another country and spend some time there. And it's a big hassle, but like it is something that is objectively achieved by many people in the world. And so I guess my first reaction would be like there are probably some jobs that it is just like really, really hard to do elsewhere. If you specifically want to like work for an AI startup, it is hard to do that in most countries. It's hard to do that in most places in the

world besides the Bay Area right now. Geography is a thing. At the same time, for most things, I would guess that there is some roughly equivalent, maybe not like exactly identical situation that you could put yourself in. Remote work, finding work in an adjacent field. I would maybe try to decouple the question of like, am I sort of anchoring on the salary that I need to have a good life in this country at the same time as I am thinking about moving to another country with a different cost of living? It's hard to give advice without knowing more, but the question feels a little bit like coped to me. And so I'm inherently a little bit suspicious. My thinking on this one is like, we have to prioritize at a certain point. Like, do you want to have your dream job? Do you want to

live in your dream location? How much are you prioritizing money? How much are you prioritizing being your friends and family? And I think being really honest with yourself about where it is living abroad and, you know, walking down those cobblestone streets and like sitting in that cafe, where does that fall in your list of priorities? And it's okay if other stuff comes above that. But then you owe it to yourself to not be sitting there and being like, well, but I really want this. Yeah, yeah. This is a great example of one that just gets harder and harder.

As you get older. As you get older. Until you get kind of old and then it feels like easier. Yeah. Then you go back around. Totally. I have a girlfriend who moved to England a few years after we moved to England and she took a huge pay cut to live in London because the salaries are just significantly

lower there. But she really wanted to live in London. And so for her that was worth it. And so I do think doing the math of like, what are the things I'm and what are the things I'm giving up and how does that sit within the story of my life? How does anybody live in London? I don't understand it. It's so expensive, but nobody makes any money.

So I actually think it's cheaper than you would think to live there. Like, weirdly, like the groceries are much cheaper. The rent, I think, like, especially if you're not in central, central London, and the public transportation is so good. Okay. So you can live, like, more out there. But yeah, the salaries are insane. Yeah.

They're like literally half as much. Totally. Yeah. Okay. Let's do this is the last one. I want to figure out my purpose, but I don't know where to begin. So I want you to talk to the person who wants their life to feel different than it does right now, but they don't know directionally what that looks like at all.

I think about this as like there are two core questions in life in some way. One is like, what should I want? And then how do I get it? And so much of agency is focused on the second question. It's like, once you know what you? you want. There's a whole panoply of tactics you can use to get it. A lot of what my book is about and what agency is about is figuring out how to go after what you want in the most direct way possible with like a measure of ruthless prioritization. There are sort of prompts for curiosity,

some of which appear in the book, which are about like getting you to dream bigger, getting you to notice areas in your life where you are annoyed is another example. Like, Because your annoyance is often a good sort of pointer to something that you wish was different in the world, once you allow yourself to think, like, maybe I could be the person to fix that thing, that can be a great pointer toward problems that are worth focusing on. But the problem of, like, how do I figure out what I want is so much harder from my perspective than how do I go out and get it once I've figured that out? Okay.

So I have a question and a comment for you. one, you've had the most careers of anybody ever talked to. So I do think there's some sort of lesson there of like we don't need to want one thing. We can want so many things and it all does add up. And I'm curious for you, for all of the pivots you've made, how have you known the next thing that you wanted? Yeah, it's funny. I only realized something in the last few weeks that I have never left a job knowing what I was going to do next. The closest I've ever come was when I left law to play poker. And there I was like, I'll play

poker for a little bit. But it was kind of like, while I figure out what else I'm going to do? I have, you know, wound down a company. I've left jobs. I've left careers. And over and over not known what is going to come next. And the only way that I have like found myself in path after path and career after career is like focusing narrowly on what is the most invigority. And invigorating, interesting thing in the world to me right now, and how do I, like, build something around that? And trying to really listen to that internal sensibility of, like, what actually makes me feel more alive and then be really opportunistic in a good way about, like, sussing out the opportunities that you have to act on that and really jumping on them wholeheartedly,

I think that has been sort of the key to all of these pivots that I've had. had in my life. I've also heard you talk about Marie Kondo in your entire life. Can you explain what that would mean as a concept? Yeah. So the core concept for anybody who doesn't know it, though perhaps everybody does, Marie Kondo is this declutter, extraordinary and her secret for getting people to clean up their living spaces, go around and ask them, does this spark joy? And things that don't spark joy, you get rid of. And this seems like very silly in one sense because it's just like, it's basically like reframing the question of do you like this, you know? But I think it is really effective for people because when you are focused narrowly on that question of like, does this spark

joy? You get to like not ask a bunch of other questions. Like what is the history of why this thing is in my life? What will it say about me as a person if I decide to throw away this like thing that was really important to somebody else to give me or like the thing that reminds me of this historical event. And so focusing more narrowly on the question of like, does this spark joy, I think gets you to like ignore a bunch of other stuff that actually isn't conducive to the goal of having a cleaner house? Similarly, you can do a similar thing with life, which is just like, is this subject actually intensely interesting to me? Does it spark joy? And pair away the things that do not result in a yes. Because there's all sorts of other questions you can be asking

yourself if you're deciding what to do next. Like, is this a good career? Is this the kind of thing that somebody in my position would do? What other people think that this is like a stupid thing to turn down? And the more you're asking yourself those like proxy questions instead of like, is this super interesting? Does this spark joy? I think the worst results you're going to get. Love it. Going through your book and also going through everything that everybody sent in, I felt like there were essentially five key reasons that people weren't going after their dreams or living their dream life. And those to me were money, time, it's out of their control or they feel like it's out of their control. They don't know what they want or fear of rejection or judgment.

Do you feel like my list is missing anything? I think the one that I didn't hear is a fear of loss of identity. It is really easy to sort of pick a lane in life and stay in that lane. And you'll sort of have like a narrative for your life that rules out totally different types of actions that you could take, rules out like more dramatic changes that you can make even to your like internal operating system, like your personality, because you have this sense of this is who I am. And it's a little tricky to figure out like, why do we have that sense of who I am that is relatively rigid? Like, what is the advantage in that that causes us to cling to it? I think that the relevant thing is it is not necessarily real.

Like you can change who you are at a pretty deep level and you can allow your life to like branch off in completely different directions. But this like internal constraint really rules out seeing a bunch of other options. A thing that people do a lot is instead of sort of thinking about their life from first principles, they are instead like running this related. search, which is like, what would somebody in my position do? To some extent, what is the normal thing for a person like me to do? And we allow that consciously or unconsciously to steer our behavior quite a lot when instead we could be going off in totally different directions. So one like kind of squishy example that I think gives you a sense of the range. I had a story in my head for almost my entire life up until maybe a couple of years ago, that,

it was not important for me to be warm, friendly to people. And I sort of accepted that as a limitation of myself, this like degree of antisociality that I had and treated it as kind of like a law of nature rather than a thing that was malleable. And it took my husband being like, you realize that like you're kind of limiting yourself in life being regarded as a cold person, right? And you realize that you could actually change that, right? Like people do change that. That was necessary at the age of like 40 years old for me to start working on that as like a thing that I really focused on. And I feel like it did unlock a lot of potential in me like social as well as professional. I had this really powerful story of like I'm just an introverted

person. I'm just like not friendly but I have like other things going on that sort of compensate for it and I needed to be sort of knocked off of that path. What did you do? A lot of it, I think for me, was actually fear of rejection. I had a pretty lonely early life. And I think I learned that like putting myself in situations to be rejected socially was just so painful that I didn't do it. I just like decided that I was an introvert.

I decided that I wasn't good socially. I was just going to like be quiet, do my way. work. And so I think getting out of that required addressing a lot of fear that I had. And once the fear went away, once I was able to like address the fear of being awkward socially, it doesn't fundamentally affect my value as a person. Like I can weather sort of awkward interactions. There's like a self-protectiveness of like if I don't make myself available to be liked, I don't have to be heard of people don't like me. And then you were like, maybe I can let people not like me and that'll be okay. Yeah, yeah. And that has just given me so much more freedom.

when it comes to interacting with people. And I think paradoxically, it made me a lot more likable. Interesting. I love that. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish. And over time, that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more.

We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, mitochondria, does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support

healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Support your cells and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor. One of the easiest micro habits to change your diet is to stop giving yourself the unhealthy

option, the option you don't want to reach for in the first place. So the key is to plan ahead and I do that by keeping IQ bars in my car and in my bag. So no matter how busy the day gets, I already have a smart, healthy option ready to go. These were one of the bars that my personal RD recommended for me as I worked with her over the course of a year to lose 30 pounds in a healthy way, and I truly, truly love them. This is the perfect time to try IQ Bar's ultimate sampler pack that includes brain and body boosting bars, mushroom coffees, and more. All of their products are entirely free from gluten, dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial sweeteners. There's a reason why IQ Bar has over 15,000 five-star

reviews and counting. It's because IQ bars have more fiber. Fiber is going to be the word of the day this year. I promise you guys. They have more fiber, less sugar and carbs than other protein bars, and they actually somehow, even with all of that, still taste good, which is truly a miracle. Right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, including the Ultimate Sampler Pack, plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text Liz to 64,000. Text Liz to 64000. That's Liz to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cell.

They sit there releasing inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells, and they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin spent five years testing over 900 peptides to figure out how to help reduce the accumulation of senescent cells. cells and they finally landed on it. OSO1, the first peptide scientifically studied to reduce skin's biological age at the molecular level. OSO1 goes in and it clears out the senescent cells so it helps skin function like healthier, younger looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing.

It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a day. difference. My skin looks firmer. It looks glowier. The texture feels dramatically smoother. I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. And again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. One skin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies in over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up for a limited time. Get 15% off with code Liz at one skin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.

com with code Liz. Okay, so I feel like we've talked about money. We have talked about they don't know what their dream life is. We've talked about fear a little bit, especially rejection or judgment. I did want to quote a line that you shared in this book that I thought was really powerful,

which is the fear of being seen even fleetingly as low status stops human beings from living richer lives to an unbelievable degree. Can you share? a little bit more about that and some examples of how people are doing this to themselves. It's like what I was saying, like your lack of fear of embarrassment is really a superpower. I think so much of what stops people from trying new things, even things that they could be good at, is just you don't want to be seen being bad at it.

So it's like the singer who doesn't want people to see them at a stage where they're still learning, the aspiring writer who doesn't want people to see their early work and react badly to it. we are really, really fearful of being seen as low in status. And that keeps us from so much like exploration that we could do beyond a really early age. Poker was a great sort of exposure therapy thing for me in this respect. Because in order to get good at poker, I just had to play poker. You can't play poker by yourself. I have to play it with other people. And that means other people are going to see you do dumb ass stuff a lot.

There's no other way. Allowing myself to like be low in status on the way to getting better at it. I think that was like a great sort of generalizable lesson that I got out of poker. I also wonder, I do think the internet has made this infinitely harder in both that anything you put on the internet could suddenly be seen by like millions of people. and we are exposed to people who have put in the reps over years and years and years constantly. Like we see the best of the best every single day on our feed. And I do wonder if there's a way to be low status in a more like analog life. Like go play at a cafe.

I don't know if that would be helpful for people. But I do wonder if there's pragmatic steps to like get over the sphere of being low status other than like just go do the thing. Yeah, yeah. I think this is a really fair point. It is one of the more obnoxious parts of modern life. that you can be seen doing something kind of innocuous, and suddenly that can be seen by a lot of people. It's actually fairly painful to, you know, be in that position where you go viral and are mocked by a lot of people. Yeah, I think this is an example where the world would be better if there is a way to do things more analog.

Like, maybe you can go to an event where nobody's phones are allowed. There's probably ways to, like, approximate this. But also it might be in the vein of it's a low probability downside and you can't let your entire life be ruled by the fear of it. Okay. And then the other two that I just want to make sure we address is the idea that something is out of their control. And that's why they don't have agency in that situation.

I feel like we've talked about that like a little bit, like figure out what your real dream is. Is that your best advice for, oh, I don't have control over this, but it is the thing I want for my life. It's also this concept that like, you. You may not have perfect freedom. You may not have the ability to control everything, but it's often possible to make your life a little bit better and move in the direction of the thing that you want. Incremental progress is really a good thing to aspire to.

And then what about time? I heard from so many people who are like, this is my dream, but like I have to keep my kids alive. I have to get the laundry done. I also have to go to work. I also have to have a relationship with my partner and I have to have friends. Like where am I supposed to find the time to do this stuff? Yeah.

It's hard. Time is unfortunately finite. I mean, I think it's interesting. Like when people have kids, they do end up sacrificing a lot of things for it. At the same time, they end up caring for multiple other living beings at the same time as they have their preexisting careers often. Many of them also have time for like friends and other things, which I take as some evidence. that you can often like pack more into your life than you realize. And I think there's like sort of what we were talking about earlier with respect to like

your life does not change with more money nearly as much as you think it will. I think it's also a little bit true of time where it sort of seems like I can be in a position where I have a lot less work or a lot more work. And time just kind of like expands to. to, you know, like, isn't that like the idea that time expands to fit the amount of time you allow? So if you give yourself like an hour for a project, that project will take an hour. If you give yourself 30 minutes, often you will find a way to get it done in 30 minutes. Yeah, yeah. That, I mean, that is what I do for a lot of my life currently is I'm like,

I have 16 hours in a day, conscious. This is the stuff that I have to pack into it. And that's going to mean that I just do some stuff in half the time that I would like to do it in. But if you really are time constrained, like you find a way. And I think that's probably the experience of a lot of parents too. Yeah. And I also think that parenting is nice because it gives you a concrete reason to let go of perfectionism. And I think if non-parents could take like a page out of that book and be like, this is not going to be 100 out of 100. But creating something that's 85 out of 100 is better than creating nothing.

Yeah, absolutely. Most things are not actually worth doing to the highest standard. Yeah. Wait, talk to me more about that because I do think a lot of people, that is a thing preventing them from going after their dreams. One of the common myths of my life was, I think, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And most things are not worth doing well. Wait, why? Most things are just worth doing. Like, most things are just things that you need to accomplish.

How well do your groceries need to be shopped? How well does your laundry need to be done? Like, most stuff just needs to be done. And if you can bring a spirit of, like, good enough or satisfy. to more areas, it frees up more time to do other stuff. I had a real problem with perfectionism for a lot of my life and I've gotten a little bit more freedom from that in recent years, partly just from being really, really busy to the point where things have to slip or there actually isn't an alternative, something's got to give. And I think the more you can embrace the

discernment to tell when things actually have to be done really well versus just like done in some form, the more space you give yourself to operate. 100%. The last thing I want to say on time is I had Laura Vandercam, who's a time management expert on the podcast, and she says, and I think about this all the time, we have less time in a day than we think, but we have way more time in a week than we think. And she's tracked thousands of people's times over the year. So this is like real data from research she has done.

And she's like looking for those micro pockets of time and also being like, what would it look like to not do this every day, but like maybe you fit it in on Monday and then Thursday and then Saturday. and then all of a sudden you have a habit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do think we, like, have 20 minutes that we could send an email that would move us in the direction of our dreams. We have 15 minutes.

We could watch a YouTube video about becoming an indie pop singer and working on our voice training or whatever. We have these little micro pockets of time that we can use to push our lives in the direction that we want to push that. There's like a related saying that might be like a Bill Gates thing, to be honest, which is like most people overestimate the end. amount of social change that will happen in a year and underestimate the amount that will happen in 10 years. Like, we really are not that good at figuring out what compounding effort looks like.

That's such a good point. Do you think that these tips, everything we're sharing in this episode applies differently to somebody with neurodivergence than a neurotypical person? No doubt. I've been diagnosed with ADHD. I realize that people really vary in the extent to which they have these things. Part of the agency conversation that I think is really interesting is, like, figuring out what levers you can pull and pulling them. And the idea is that, like, people will have different levers, people will have different amounts of levers. But, like, you have some levers. And I think that that's what this conversation is for me, regardless of where you're coming from. Totally agree. Yeah. Okay. I have a speed round for you. What's one thing that people commonly do to go after a big dream that you would never do, knowing everything you know about agency? I think I would never go get a graduate degree. I didn't think you'd say that. Wait, tell me, tell me more. It's a little bit wild to think, especially in this day and age, of spending like six years getting a PhD in some subject when there are almost always easier ways to go after the things that you want. Wow. That's so interesting. Do you think that advanced degrees, I think barring being a doctor or something like that, but are like outsourcing your agency to,

to a credentialing institution. I think also like things that let you practice are often that too. Like I think most people go to law school because they don't want to have to make a harder decision. And you say this as somebody who's got to law school. If somebody's like considering a career pivot and they're like, I think the best way that I can do this career pivot is to go and get an advanced degree, what would you have them do instead? I think if you have a really specific goal in mind and that goal is something that requires a degree, maybe that's an exception. You can't be a college professor without having a PhD and you can't actually be like a criminal defense attorney without a legal degree. But I think it is a lot more common to identify getting an advanced degree as like a way of taking a time out from decision making and just like doing something that is socially approved and good and acceptable won't raise a lot of eyebrows.

A lot of people discover once they are out of law school that they have no interest in being lawyers and never really thought about it. dollars and dead. Then you kind of got to be a lawyer. What's the hottest take you have about finding your purpose? I think it's kind of a mistake to think about finding your purpose as though it's the thing that you're going to find as opposed to like finding your interest over and over again. Finding your purpose feels like a good way to get locked into a narrow identity from my perspective. What's one thing that you wish you could say to somebody who feels stuck, but it feels like a little too harsh, a little too mean to say out loud. If you had full permission to say anything, what would it be? I think it is really. really easy from the inside of a position where you're stuck for it to feel like you are uniquely stuck. Your situation really is irrevocable and it's not true. I have been and seen people who are in terrible circumstances in life that feel like you will never be able to recover and it is generally possible to make your life a whole lot better if you make the decision to do it and then

go after it. Finish this sentence. People would have so much more control over their lives if they just stopped worrying about being embarrassed. And then this can be in the realm of agency or anything else. But what is one habit that's changed your life? I'm like not a big habit person, which is kind of funny. But I have really gotten into like having a wind down routine at the end of the day.

So I have a really comfy robe that I change into and I have my little game that I do at the end of each day. Wait, what game? It's called Pips from the New York Times. It's their newest, like, puzzle game. I'm really addicted to it. I'll try it. My husband and I do the cross.

We do the MIDI crossword every night and we like race against each other. So I'm always looking to add to my New York Times game. Amazing. Yeah, yeah. I'm a huge crossword person too. Pips is just like piqued my interest recently. Yeah. And I find that actually having a sequence of things that I do that gets me out of work brain a little bit

allows me to, one, sleep, but also like connect with my husband. husband just like get a little bit of a break from that brain. And then you're a big fan of feedback. So we're pretty much at the end of the episode, but I have three questions for you about feedback. One is, why do you think feedback is so important? An analogy that I've used before is trying to improve as a person without getting feedback from people who know you is like cooking without tasting.

Like you just cannot adjust your approach unless you know what you are doing wrong. And what's one way that we could all list it a little bit more feedback? in our life. Like, who should we be asking these questions to? What should we be asking them? My number one piece of advice for people who want to increase their personal agency is always the same. Nobody ever does it. It is implementing an anonymous feedback box for yourself. I do this on all my social media. I get one comment every two days, I would say, from somebody who might know me or might not know me anonymous, just like, here's a thing that I've noticed about you. Sometimes it comes of the suggestions. Sometimes it doesn't. But like having a place where people can give you feedback

where you actually eliminate the social friction of doing that, you will get so much more feedback. It is really, really powerful. And how do you not let that like ruin your life? Like I can read podcast reviews and I'll read like a hundred great ones and then one will say something mean and it ruins my day. It is again a habituation thing and it is developing like a sense of self that is robust to what the world thinks about you. If you are the kind of person who immediately takes on board and accepts the validity of any piece of criticism that you hear about yourself, like that is the first thing to work on and maybe then move on to the anonymous feedback. But also getting a lot of anonymous feedback is a great way to habituate yourself to people

thinking things about you that you think are wrong, seeing things about you that you would rather nobody see. Like those are the hardest ones where it's like, oh, Oh, yeah, that person has really nailed something. I didn't think that that was obvious to other people. And over time, it's like, it just gets better. It just gets easier. How often do you find yourself working on or making adjustments based on the feedback versus being like, that's interesting, but I don't agree?

I would say it's about a third of the time that I decided is something, like, of the serious comments that tell me something that I, like, maybe wasn't fully paying attention to. It's about a third of the time that I think, like, this person has a perceived something that is true and be something that is worth the investment of my time and energy to try to do something about. Because some things are true, but they just don't matter that much. And you kind of got to prioritize. And then you do just get messages from people and, like, the more visible you become, the more messages you get from people who just like don't get you on some fundamental level. And

you have to sort of accept that that will happen and be okay, just saying like, that's fine. Some people are just going to think something about me that's wrong. Yeah, I imagine. imagine that latter part would actually solidify one sense of identity in a way because you're, you're like having to calibrate, like, wait, who am I really within this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my last question for you about feedback is how do you think I did as a podcaster during this interview? You did incredible. I'm not kidding. You're a really great, you're a really great host. Like, for one thing, it's really incredible how few people will like read a book or prepare for a conversation before you go on their show. It was like,

Very atypical for somebody to have read the book that they're interviewing you about. I do feel like that is like the bare minimum of like you owe that to your guest. Like you've taken your time to come and do this interview with me. And then everybody listening. Like this is a significant chunk of time. So I do think that is. And I wasn't fishing for compliments. But I just felt like your like feedback is important.

I was like, well, I get feedback. That was great. Yeah. We love to leave people with one action step, something that they can do the second they turn off this podcast to begin to experience a change in their own life. So what is one thing people can do right now? I would recommend that people go set up an anonymous feedback box. There's a website that is free.

It's called admonimus.com where you can do this. It'll take you five minutes. And if you don't have a public profile, are we like sending this to friends and family members? That's what I did at first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I developed more of a public profile, I like started putting on a social media. I started like really trying to put it out there to people. But at first I just sent it to a huge number of friends, a huge number of people that I worked with.

I don't actually want to know who is giving me the feedback. And so you want to send it to enough people that you won't be able to figure it out. And do you have specific questions on there? Or is it just like give me feedback? I think mine is just like, what would you like to give me feedback on? It's just like a very open-ended question. Yeah. Cool.

Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your wonderful book and anything else that you want to highlight? Yeah. So the book is a practical guide to developing more personal agency from somebody who did it relatively late in life. So somebody who spent a couple of decades just sort of walking down this success path without really an idea of why they were doing it. I have made a bunch of different pivots since then. I have, as we've talked about, recovered from a point of really, really low agency. And I've developed this conviction that there is a learnable set of tactics. that people can use in order to increase their own personal agency.

This is my attempt to sort of distill that into a series of lessons for people. And the book is called You Can Just Do Things. It's available wherever books are sold. And where else can people find you? It can find me on Substack at Useful Fictions and on Twitter at Kate Hall. Amazing. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening on Apple or watching on Spotify or YouTube.

You can subscribe or follow so our next episodes get sent direct. to your feed. If you like this episode, leave a comment or better yet, send it to a friend, a coworker, a parent, or somebody else that you think might love it. All right, I love you. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor.

One of the easiest micro habits to change your diet is to stop giving yourself the unhealthy option, the option you don't want to reach for in the first place. So the key is to plan ahead and I do that by keeping IQ bars in my car and in my bag. So no matter how busy the day gets, I already have a smart, healthy option ready to go. These were one of the bars that my personal RD recommended for me as I worked with her over the course of a year to lose 30 pounds in a healthy way, and I truly, truly love them. This is the perfect time to try IQ Bar's ultimate sampler pack that includes brain and body boosting bars, mushroom coffees, and more. All of their products are entirely free from gluten,

dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial sweeteners. There's a reason why IQ Bar has over 15,000 five-star reviews and counting. It's because IQ bars have more fiber. Fiber is going to be the word of the day this year, I promise you guys. They have more fiber, less sugar, and carbs than other protein bars, and they actually somehow, even with all of that, still taste good, which is truly a miracle. Right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, including the Ultimate Sampler Pack, plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text Liz to 64,000. Text Liz to 64000. That's Liz to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply, see terms for details.

You guys ask me constantly if the hype around red light is real. And the answer is yes, but with one huge caveat. Most of the devices on the market aren't actually powerful enough to make a difference. But if you get one that is, it can transform your skin, your pain, your energy, your hair, even your mood. The huge problem is that the vast majority of red lights on the market are nowhere near the right dose level or what's called a radiance to actually have those benefits. That is why I love Loombox. It was founded by a doctor who could not find a device that actually met the

studied standards to have real results. So she made her own. It is a lightweight portable panel. You can use it anywhere that you need it. I love putting it on my head for headaches. And it is a god send for cramps. And of course, I use it every single day on my skin. Each bulb amidst both red and near infrared light. Wavelengths and irradiens are third party verified. It's FDA registered, which is so rare. It's really less of a beauty gadget and more of a medical device that also happens to be great for beauty. So if you have been curious about trying red light therapy, Loombox is the one that I would recommend. And right now you can get 40% off. 40% off when you go to the loombox.com slash Liz. One more thing. If you have an HSA or FSA, Loombox may qualify as a medical

expense through TrueMed and qualified customers save about 30% on average. You can head to trummed.com slash loombox to check your eligibility before you buy. TrueMed is for qualified customers. HSA, FSA tax savings vary. Again, though, go to the loombox.com slash Liz for that 40% off.