The Tim Ferriss Show - #283: Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness - Tim Urban

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet's most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has "captured a level of reader engagement that even the new-media giants would be envious of." Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month and has over 550,000 email subscribers.Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris (page 365 in Tribe of Mentors) and Susan Cain (page 10), Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (page 401), TED curator Chris Anderson (page 407), and Brain Pickings' Maria Popova.Tim's series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk has been called by Vox's David Roberts "the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I've read in ages." You can start with the first one, Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man. Tim's TED Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, has received more than 21 million views.Enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code "TIM" at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts or an incredible gift. Again, that's onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.This podcast is also brought to you by ConvertKit. After trying the competition, this is the only email tool that has made email marketing easy for my team without sacrificing any of the features and benefits I need to run a profitable business. It's got easy-to-use systems, split testing, resending technology, automation, targeted content, high rates of deliverability, integration with more than 70 services -- like WordPress, Shopify, and Sumo -- and excellent customer service.Whether you have a thousand subscribers or a million, whether you run a simple blog or a whole company, ConvertKit has a plan that's scaled to fit your budget and requirements. Go to ConvertKit.com/Tim to try it out and get your first month for free! Test the platform, kick the tires, and make sure it works for you and your business.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Paris, show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

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is a cross post episode, so it appears in both places. And I'll keep this intro short. This conversation you're going to hear is with Tim Urban, and we'll get into his bio in the actual conversation. It was recorded at Barnes and Noble in Union Square, New York City on the launch evening of the Tribe of Mentors book. You can learn all about that at tribeofmentors.com. We had a blast. The audience was awesome. Thank you to everyone who came out.

And we'll probably be doing some more live experiments like this. So without further ado, please enjoy my very wide-ranging conversation with the ever hilarious and fascinating Tim Urban. All right. and fascinating Tim Urban. How's everybody doing tonight? All right. This is exciting.

Thank you all so much for coming. It's a real honor and privilege to have you all here. And we're going to do something a little bit different tonight. Rather than do what is the norm, and perhaps what I've done many times before, which is get up and tell you all about this book that you already own, I thought we'd do a bonus round with one of the guests, one of the people who was interviewed for Tribe of Mentors. So I'm going to welcome him to the stage in just a moment, but I'll read the bio first while I wrestle with the audio. And here we go. One of my favorite people in New York City. So I'm excited and will be asking questions I have not asked him before. So this is a rare live edition

of the Tim Ferriss Show in some ways. Also, here we go. Tim Urban. Who is Tim Urban? Twitter, Facebook, at WaitButWhy, WaitButWhy.com. Tim Urban is the author of the blog WaitButWhy and has become one of the Internet's most popular writers. Tim, according to Fast Company, has captured a level of reader engagement that even the new media giants would be envious of. Today, WaitButWhy receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month, among them Elon Musk, and has more than 550,000 email subscribers. Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Ashenden, that's one of my buddies, hi Chris, Anderson, and brain pickings Maria Popova. Tim's series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk have been called by Vox's David Roberts,

quote, the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I've read in ages, end quote. You can start with the first one, Elon Musk, the world's raddest man. Tim's TED Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, has received more than now. I checked it yesterday, 25 million combined views. Please welcome to the stage the incredible, the brilliant, and handsome Tim Urban.

I feel like this is like your birthday party, and I'm like stepping in the middle, and I'm like, it's very uncomfortable. Well, you know, I said, what other Tim can I bring into the fold for those people who are maybe a little older like I am? This is the T2, the improved version. It's Terminator reference. All right. So I figure we'll jump into it, and what we're going to do is we'll have a conversation, which mostly involves me just asking him questions. And then we'll jump into this fishbowl and answer some of your questions. And then after that, we will have the opportunity, we might be here for a while,

so I will not be offended if people are like, peace, I'm out, I don't want to wait. But we will have a chance to say hello and people who want to have photographs and so on. We'll be able to do that. Okay, let's just jump right into it. All right, Wait But Why. Before Wait But Why, and you and I chatted a little bit about this, I guess. It feels like a couple of nights ago, but maybe it was yesterday. I can't remember. It's been a big week.

You blogged casually for six years or so on the side. Could you tell us about that blog? What subjects did you cover? What characterized what you did part-time for six years? It was called Underneath the Turban. That's a little thing that I came up with. The Turban? Yes, because my name is Tim Urban.

I was 23. It took me a second. It was not a serious project. And it was very much a side project. It was actually, I think I can credit it the fact that it was a side project

for why I was actually able to kind of be productive because I didn't have this pressure to do it. I was like, what's my voice? Who am I as a writer? I wasn't a writer. I was just doing something else. I was going to blog to procrastinate from the other things I was supposed to be doing, which liberated me creatively. Actually, I was able to kind of, you know, do my own thing and, you know, kind of find my voice and be, you know, kind of a little bit, you know, courageous at times. And I think, I think so. So for someone like me is actually

like, it was like, I tricked myself into actually doing stuff that I normally probably would have, you know, been a little bit more belabored and trying to get it going. But yeah. What type of subjects? Was it, was it similar? How was it most different? And how was it most similar to Wait But Why? Yeah. So it was very much more like a blog blog. You know, I'd write about my day. I'd rant about, you know, going to the store. And then they had McDonald's there. And then I was like, don't get the six-piece nugget.

You know, get the four. And then I ordered the 10. And then they actually had the end of the night. So they gave me 18. And then I eat all 18. And it was like that kind of like story about my day. Very much like just the top of my head, just typing, publishing, you know, and it never, it was, it was a small little passionate following of like 700 people, like six comments on a thing, and that was that, and it was, it was this side project, but it was a way for me to actually write

like 300 blog posts over a six-year span. What were the, were there any seeds from that experience that then informed Wait But Why? And why did you create Wait But Why? Yeah. And where's the name come from? Yeah. So, so, um, I, I was able to kind of hone my voice through writing 300 blog posts. I look back at the early ones and I, I wince at like the tones I was using. So it was, you know voice through writing 300 blog posts. I look back at the early ones, and I wince at the tones I was using. So 300 blog posts will teach you the voice you like to write in. So that's one thing. And then I also, towards the end, I decided one night to try to draw something. And I kind of said, let me, you know, I was going to try to depict this concept I thought was funny.

When someone, you know, it's like doppelganger day on Facebook and someone posts a doppelganger that's way better looking than they are. I always think that's kind of hilarious. And I was like, I'm going to draw like a stick figure that's kind of messy looking and then like a handsome stick figure with like a wave of hair. And so I did that. And it hit me that I was like, that would be better in drawing. And I realized I liked that.

And so I discovered that there too. So when I started Wait But Why a couple of years. Did other people also respond positively to that? They did. It got great feedback and then I started every post. The last seven posts on the blog all had drawings. I discovered that at the very end.

Then it was time to start a new project. Why was it time to start a new project? Why not continue writing about the Chicken McNuggets? Good question. No, I'm not trying to be a dick. No, no. It's fair. And I also write about Chicken Nuggets sometimes.

Sorry. This is family programming. Not sure. Sorry. No, it was time in my life in general to turn all my attention, not a third of my attention, to one creative project.

It was always I'm doing something with my full time, and then I'm doing these two creative projects on the side. I'm going to be a pain in the ass. I apologize, but that's my nature. Why was it time? What realization or conversation or getting fired or whatever catalyzed the decision? You know what? It's time for me to put all my eggs in one basket creatively.

It's this thing you do that makes me love your podcast. It's stressful being the person just learning this for the first time. But, no, so for me, it was actually I spent years from the ages of 22 to 31, like, hating myself a little bit because I was burning to do something creative, whether it was writing or music or something. And I always was doing them on the side. It was like that kind of leap of faith in my own ability to do something creative

full-time. It took me nine years. Nine years that I wasn't very happy. And so I finally said, I have to do something full-time. Because I always thought if I could just do something full-time, put all the energy from all of these things into one thing, it would go well. So I decided, you know, I actually owned a business with my friend. Andrew Finn.

And it was the fact that the business got into a decent enough spot that, you know, we were able to start something new. And kind of that's when I jumped on. What was the business? It's a test prep company. You know, this is a great business. Soman Chainani, who's a very successful novelist, also got his beginnings in that world.

A good starter business is something that... Adam Robinson as well. So three people in this book. That's crazy. Just putting it together now. Who knew I was on to the starter business idea? I was just procrastinating from my music career is actually all I was doing when I started because I was tutoring on the side.

And then, of course, the other side things ended up taking all my time, which is what a classic procrastinator would do. But yeah, just simple kind of, each session pays for itself. You don't need overhead. At the beginning, you don't need any full-time employees. But we had built it up to the point where we had good full-time employees, good enough to run it kind of without both of us there. And so it was time to start something.

And we'd done this a couple years ago. We started a podcast app back in 2011 with the theory that podcasts were just going to get bigger, and they did. Unfortunately, we didn't know how to build a good app. We built a bad app. We shouldn't build app um but we but now it was a couple years later and it was time for something new and i said i'm going to jump on this and say i need to do something creative let me see if i can do it as also a business that like we can kind of own together you can run our tutoring company i'm going to go and start something and you know i

was it was between kind of like writing a musical which is a terrible business I wouldn't want to drag him into that or writing maybe a content website that can you know a platform media platform that can be a business so that's why we settled on that I knew those were things I could do creatively well and so we settled on this and the premise was like what

if I took instead of five hours a week to write a blog 60 hours a week to write a blog what will happen I took the things I knew a week to write a blog, 60 hours a week to write a blog? What will happen? I took the things I knew that I had gotten good at on the other blog, which was just kind of writing colloquially and drawing stick figures and started it from there. What is the origin of the name? 16 hours on GoDaddy searching for gut.coms.

And man, there's not much. There is not much. But I knew I didn't want to. I wanted it to be something that wouldn't pigeonhole it into, you know. All right. So, I mean, were you just typing in random combinations of words? Or is there some itch that you had related to the expression? I mean, do you have a habit? I was imagining, oh, it's because people would say

something to you and you want to test the assumptions or you wouldn't accept it at face value. So you go, wait, but why? You know, that was in my head how I explained it. I wish it was that situation. I checked 2000 things000 things in Godaddy. 150 came out. My girlfriend knocked out 140 immediately and was like, absolutely not. That leaves me with 10 where I was

kind of like, okay, these are all bad, which is the least bad, which if the site's good, it can seem kind of cool suddenly, maybe, but it starts off bad but then it's not bad. Some of the other ones were just extremely embarrassing. So I'm just... Wait a minute.

You can't dangle that hook in front of me. Were there any that... I can give some examples, too, if it makes you feel any better, of book titles that are horrible. But were there any that you really liked that your girlfriend shot down? You were like, we can both do this embarrassing thing, actually just you. Okay, I'll kick it off. So there was, for what ended up being the four-hour work week,

there was lifestyle hustling. Glad I didn't use that. There was drug dealing for fun and profit, which was promptly vetoed by every retailer. Thank God. There was broadband and white sand. I mean, it goes on. It goes on.

So sometimes you need life to save you from yourself. Those are kind of good. Those at least are sensical. They have some kind of... I understand two of those three at least. All right, I'll take two out of three. That's partially because I'm giving you the better of the worst. But, your turn.

Miniatureking.com I was in a deep GoDaddy spiral. You know, if you've ever been on one of these, it gets weird. It gets really weird. So I'm there and I'm like, I'm like, into this idea of a king. weird. So I'm there, and I'm like, I'm like into this idea of a king. Because I pictured the playing card king, and I'm like, so a miniature king, and I suddenly got obsessed with it. I was like, he has little legs, and he's very angry. He's very, like, cranky.

And there's, like, big adult people walking by him, and he's on the ground. He's, like, two feet tall. And my girlfriend was like, Jesus, absolutely not. But I got so addicted to the King concept that when I started Wait for Why, I made the logo a playing card. You know, I was just thinking. And he's pissed off. That's amazing. You were like, okay, kind of. Yeah.

By the way, I still kind of think Miniature King could have worked. Just saying. You know, he's the mascot. He's cranky. Anyway. I like it. But since then, what you can do.. He's the mascot. He's cranky. Anyway. I like it. But since then, what you can do, this happens all the time. Do you still own MiniatureKing.com?

I own MiniatureKing.com and about 15 others. Yeah, there's a lot. Jesus Halfbro is going to do a site where I'm Jesus' half-brother. But he's not the divine one. He's just born from Jesus' mom with some guy. And he's upset. What could go wrong with that? He's got all kinds of psychological issues going on.

He's trying to figure out his career. What were, if you look back, because I look back and I remember the first, my first attempts at blogging and like the first 12 posts. And I mean, they've thankfully mostly been forgotten over time. But what were your first, you had more practice in it. You'd already put in 300 reps. What were the first posts like? Do you remember any of the topics? Yeah. Well, with my early

blog, I mean, the topics really, they started with three sentence things. One of the first three was the title was Frankly and then it said, if peeing in the shower is wrong, I don't want to be right. That was a blog post back in the day. Flash forward six years,

now wait, but why? I knew more. And I knew right away it was going to be long and thorough, because it was my own site, and I knew I could get into depth if I could just go longer. And so first, at the beginning, I was anonymous. And I'm sure you dealt with this too. At some point, you have to, it's the get attention phase. So I, anonymous, the only platform,

marketing platform I had was my personal Facebook page. And I started with seven ways to be insufferable on Facebook, which sounds like a BuzzFeed headline, but it was much more in depth. It got into the deep, dark psychology of why it's the wild west of social etiquette and why we're all our very embarrassing version of ourselves on it and what the different qualities, the negative human qualities that come through on it.

So that was the very first one. I actually went to Easter Island for a month before I started Wait But Why to just alone in the middle of nowhere write blog posts and pick my favorite one to put on first to just kind of figure out what I, and that was the winner. Why did you pick Easter Island? I like the fact that you could take a 2,000 mile yardstick and swing it around the island and not hit any people. That was cool to me. I was just so isolated, plus the statues and the whole thing. I was kind of like, I've always wanted to go.

I was either there or I was going to go to Lithuania in the winter and just creep out some small village. Yeah, well, you could tell me a small village to creep out sometime. I actually talked to someone and they were like, you may actually arouse suspicion if you're foreign or working every day in the cafe.

I'm just writing blog posts in isolation in a small Lithuanian village. Yeah. Sounds like a George Clooney spy movie. Yeah. But I do want to do that in the mid-dead of winter and go to a small, cold village somewhere. But anyway. How did the blog posts do, that one? It did well.

The very first one, I chose well. How did you choose it relative to the other ideas that you had? Trying to do some combo of something that I felt was true enough to me that represented the kind of quality I wanted to do, but also that could go viral. Just beginning, how can we go viral? What year was this? 2013, summer of 2013. All right. Yeah. So that post did really well. It got 500,000 uniques in the first month. Wow, that's an incredible number. Yeah, my whole last blog got 250,000 uniques in six years.

So this was like, okay, longer. Like, getting into more serious topics and insulting people. Like, you know, it's on to something. Plus, you know, what I didn't know at the time was that 2013 was a pretty magical year to be promoting content on Facebook. This was that Facebook decided, let's show everyone just how powerful we are. And they started to make, this is why BuzzFeed exploded then. Upworthy, you first heard of it in 2013. Viral Nova, these sites exploded because Facebook's algorithm basically said, anyone posting content, we're going to show it to half a million people. I was in the right place at the right time.

And so that was very helpful as well. Yeah, just to maybe underscore one thing, because, for instance, when I started my first business, it was the golden age of Google AdWords. I mean, it was shooting fish in a barrel, so inexpensive. And then when the 4-Hour Workweek launched, it was at the same time at South by Southwest when Twitter was effectively publicly debuted. I mean, there were big screens displaying all of the tweets in the world going on, which happened to be concentrated right in Austin, Texas, because it was so small. And I would say that any time is the right time in some way.

So these opportunities we're talking about, there are these opportunities right now. You just have to try to snip them out or to shoot in the dark and hope that you'll catch some tailwind. But everybody has, it seems with these stories, some element of luck involved. But you can improve the odds. Well, right. There's like 10 waves throughout your time. And one of the involved, but you can improve the odds. So that's just. Well, right. There's like 10 waves, you know, throughout your time. And one of the waves is cresting when you're starting. You don't know which one, but something is cresting at the time.

It's the perfect time to start something for some reason, always. Right. And in every story where you find a component of good timing, there's usually a component of bad timing, right? Like podcast app, like you were paddling for the right wave. You were just doing it years too early. All right. So I want to bring another figure, another character into this picture.

Who is Winston? Can you tell us about Winston, please? Winston's a close friend of mine. I met him in 2005 when he was three months old. I purchased him. And we've lived happily together ever since. He was the size of a golf ball at the time. Now he's the size of a football,

which is a huge upgrade for him. He's a tortoise, if you will. But he's very lovable. He's kind of my apartment screensaver. I'm just sitting there in what would be just a still scene, and there's this, like, moseying thing, little moseying dinosaur that moseys by. And who doesn't want that?

You should all own a tortoise. It's weird that most of you don't own a tortoise. Why did you name him Winston? Because I thought he had a Churchill look to him. Or it's more that Churchill has a tortoise look to him. I'm sort of imagining, and I know they're not the same, but like the sea turtles in Finding Nemo. It's like, yeah, I can see that.

Yeah, Winston has less charisma, but otherwise. Yeah. When I look at some of your posts, and I've had my life very directly and profoundly impacted by some of your very research-heavy posts, and it feels funny to call them posts, whether it's on AI or other topics that confuse a lot of people. I mean, we're talking about, for those of you who don't have any familiarity, in some cases, 50,000 words, 70,000 words. That's a book, everybody. How long is the four-hour work week?

Four-hour work week, that's a solid, now it's deceptive to use page count, but that's how I think. It's about, I want to say, what, 420 pages, 430 pages, and it's not gigantic Dr. Seuss print, so it's probably closer, if I'm guessing, taking a stab to the

100,000, 120,000 word mark. I seem to have sort of word inflation with the books that I write. They're getting bigger. But when you're tackling one of these posts, what are some of the approaches or questions you ask that allow you to write something better and different? Because presumably, many people are out there trying to learn about these various topics, and yet, you put out these posts that are the size

of books that end up going viral, and you make complicated or seemingly complicated topics very digestible. So what is your approach to tackling a topic like AI? Yeah. So it's pretty simple for me. First of all, like I just, I do this kind of weird thing where I assume that my audience is a picture, like a stadium full of meat. So it's narcissistic fantasy. No, but it's like, you know, it's just, I'm just writing for, I'm writing the exact post that I would be thrilled to get, right? So I'm just trying, that's my focus group right there.

It's right in my head. And it's easy because like, you know, we're all kind of like special, unique people, except not really. There's like 100,000 copies of each of you out there somewhere. And the truth is like, you know, if I just write for me, there's a lot of people that have my exact weird taste. I just know that. So I start there with kind of like, who am I writing for? That makes it easy. And so with something like AI, if there's a 1 through 10 scale of how much you know about

something, 10 is world-leading expert, and one has absolutely never heard of the term. I started at two or three on most stuff, like most laymen. I'm a layman, right, at everything. And so then I spend, just out of my curiosity as the driver, I pick topics I'm excited to dig into, and I'll spend however long it takes.

Sometimes it's one day, sometimes it's three weeks, sometimes it's three months, but I'll take as long as I need to to learn enough to get me to maybe like a five or a six out of 10. You know, I'm not going to get a PhD. I'm not going to spend five years getting myself to an eight or a nine, but I'm going to get myself to a six where I'm like, I can answer basically any question a layman asks me. I can do a Q and A with an audience on this topic for 10 hours and I'll have a pretty good, solid answer to everything.

Not that I know necessarily the truth of everything, but I know when the experts don't know the truth and they're arguing, I know what the experts say about basically everything. So I get myself to that level. And then I think about, okay, so experts have sometimes a hard time explaining because they haven't been in a two in decades sometimes. And they have this jargon, and they don't remember what it's like to be a two out of 10. I was there three weeks ago. I know exactly what my readers know about this. And I know exactly what, so I just looked at the

road I went down to get myself to a six. And I think about, you know, what, how can I do that road way more efficiently if I could go do it again now? How could I do it in a much more fun way? You know, and what's, what's this fun story I can tell to bring readers from the two to a six? That's my challenge then is to basically package the road I just went down for three weeks and make it an hour and a half package instead. Okay. Not surprisingly, I have some follow-up questions. Let's pick a subject. Have you written about cryptocurrency or blockchain? Not yet. Oh, perfect. Highly requested topic. Right, I'm sure it is. Now, the reason I ask

is that much like AI, I have seen dozens of people attempt to explain without misrepresenting cryptocurrency and blockchain. 101 for the masses. And it seems like almost every single attempt has failed. If you were to take that assignment on, where would you start? So I would, I always start, I feel like I'm blindfolded in a room and I'm just trying to figure out where are even the walls here? Where is the furniture? I just want to start and understand what I even need to learn. So I want to get a picture of the topic,

and then I can start diving in, going on various rabbit holes, and usually going outside the topic. A rabbit hole outside the topic is procrastination, but it also often gives you even more context. You'll find some metaphor out there that you end up bringing back. So I'll just read and read and watch YouTube videos all on the Internet. How do you search? Reading, are we talking you start at Wikipedia?

Is that ground zero? Yeah, I'll start at Wikipedia for just a basic foundation. Wikipedia is good at telling you where the walls are, just letting you even understand the topic in general. And Wikipedia has a lot of good knowledge on it. So I'll go there, and then I'll go to the bottom Wikipedia and start clicking on all the reference links. And I'll usually Google, like, blockchain PDF,

and you end up finding all these superbly boring journal articles. And then I'll go on YouTube. There's a lot of good people, smart teachers, explaining stuff on YouTube. They're not going to explain the whole thing, usually. They're going to explain one part. Maybe I realize that to understand blockchain, you need to first go down three layers.

You need to build a foundation that begins with understanding what encryption is. You need to understand how encryption works in public keys and private keys. That's when you can start to, on top of that, build an understanding of what a ledger is that would be on these different computers and how it could possibly be secure. And by the time you get to blockchain, you're like eight layers up. So I'll go find a YouTube video, not on blockchain, but on encryption.

And then I'll find a YouTube video explaining what ledgers are in general. I'm reading about the history of ledgers and where they're used in the world and encryption and how it was invented and how it's evolved. You just keep doing this. The reason it's easy for me, this part, is because I'm super curious. The more I learn, the less icky the topic gets. When the topic gets un-icky,

it starts to be super delicious. The opposite of icky. Then I can't read it. It's so fun suddenly. I'm like, I get it. Then I just want to fill in the knowledge. I want to watch a YouTube video fun suddenly. I'm like, I get it. And then I just want to like fill in the knowledge and I want to watch a YouTube video I already know the answer to just to feel good about, oh man, I already knew everything he's saying. This is great.

But it solidifies. You hear seven different people articulate it in seven ways and it just rounds out your understanding. And by the end, I start to be like, I totally get this. Finding, I find a video on YouTube. So last I checked, which is not recently, I totally get this. I find a video on YouTube. So last I checked, which is not recently, YouTube was the second largest search engine in the world.

It's a lot of great stuff. There's also a lot of nonsense. How do you search? So what are the terms? How do you sort them? How do you go about picking properly? Well, so in Google, I will Google, like, blockchain. Leave that in a window. Open a new window.

And I'll Google Bitcoin. New window. Ethereum. New window. Cryptocurrency. New window. Like, decentralized systems crypto. New window.

Like, cryptocurrency is bullshit. New window. Like, you know, whatever. And I'll just keep going. And I'll just think of anything. And then each one of those windows I go back to, and I just hold down command, and I just click, click, click, click, click, click. And I have 10 tabs, 10 tabs, 10 tabs. And I just go and read everything.

So that's, Google, you know, again, I don't have to discern. I don't care if this Gizmodo article is going to be really useful or whether it's going to be accurate, because the beginning process is just if you read 70 articles that may or may not have validity to them, the total sum of them actually you start to understand. What do we know as a species? Where are we all agreeing?

And then where, clearly, a lot of people don't know what they're talking about, or there's this broad dichotomy of a view in this one area. There's these people and there's these people. YouTube is kind of the same thing. I'll just start watching without discerning. Again, if you're a procrastinator, it's fantastic because you don't feel bad about just watching endlessly when you're taking all of your time and it's not what you're supposed to be doing. It feels great. So I'll just watch.

And then, of course, the sidebar starts to figure out. YouTube very quickly and Google will's not what you're supposed to be doing, it feels great. So I'll just watch and then of course the sidebar starts to figure out, YouTube very quickly and Google will figure out what you're doing. And then YouTube will start to put all the things on the side for me. Plus you start to see names you trust. Make money in cryptocurrency. Well even just, it's funny, I'm just writing a post now on like,

won't get into this, but like political stuff and normally my sidebar is like, look how much of an idiot Trump is and his voters and then I go to the, I'm now trying to, you know, I was Googling all of these conservative things and because I'm writing about, you know, both sides of stuff and suddenly you, the internet starts to indoctrinate me the other way. And they're like, look at this, like wise Trump voter, like embarrassed this, like, and I look over and I'm kind of like, and a couple hours later I'm like, Trump's the best. So YouTube figures out your angle and it will start to kind of feed you stuff.

And then there's certain names you trust. Hank and John Green, I trust them. Kurzgesagt, I trust them. CGP Grey, I trust him. So you'll see certain names you trust. Minute Physics, great. So there's also that. Same with Google, of course. I'll see certain names you trust. Minute physics, great. So there's also that. And same with, you know, Google, of course. Like, I'll trust certain sources more than others.

And once you've ingested massive amounts of information and you've established a basic map for the territory, the tools or approaches, anything at all that help you to be so good at teaching these subjects in the way that you present it or structure your pieces? Yeah, well, so again, the starting point is I'm like, I just went through this, and I had to teach myself. And I was bad at teaching myself because I didn't know what I was doing. So now if I could, the experience of a learner is fresh in my head. So that's the first thing that's helpful. But then I just, I always basically with almost any explainer post

like that I just zoom out, helicopter up. Like, you know, if you're looking at the land and you see kind of like a beach, you don't know what it is. Is this a huge lake? Is this a little beach? And then does it curve around? I don't know what it is. Is this a huge lake? Is this a little beach? And then does it curve around? I don't know. That's how I feel like a lot of the articles on AI or cryptocurrency are. They show you a piece of beach. And the author might have a full understanding, but they're just describing the beach. So you take a helicopter up and

you're like, oh, OK, wait a second. This is a big river. And you take it further and you're like, oh, no, this is kind of a tributary that goes into the ocean, and now you're kind of up where airplanes go, and maybe even the International Space Station goes, and you're like, ah, okay, this is actually what's going on. So I start there myself as a thinker, and then when I'm trying to explain, I'm just going to start there, which is why, you know, people make fun of me, because I'll write about three different things, and they all start at the Big Bang by the time I'm done with them.

I have to basically go back to them. But sometimes it's helpful. You just, by the time you get from the Big Bang to now, suddenly it's like we're all, we can see the whole coastline, and now the beach suddenly makes sense. And then I try to make it fun also, because who wants to, it's so many, the journal articles, for example, the experts, they're often just, they don't, because they're not writing to entertain, you know, and they're just, and it's just bad.

It's like textbooks in school were so bad. They were so boring. Part of the reason I like YouTube is because the people who end up with a lot of views on YouTube that are going to end up, you know, on my recommended thing, they have an eye for entertainment. So I try to do the same thing as well. And if you were to ask, say, friends of yours who are fans of your writing, what your ingredients for entertaining are, what might they say? Or just to ask you, I'm just not sure. I don't want you to be overly self-deprecating. I'm just trying to figure it out. What makes it entertaining? Because it is clearly entertaining. Well, again, entertaining means 10 different things to 10 different people. I get, you know, every post,

I get nine emails from, like, you know, mothers in Kansas angry at me for swearing. But, like, you know, it depends on, you know, it's, you know, it's I think trying to add sense of humor into basically everything. Treating it light. Good metaphors. You know, treating it light, good metaphors.

And for me, lots of visuals. I'm a visual learner. If I see a block of text and I'm just scrolling down, I'm kind of upset. It feels like homework. But if I scroll down and every few paragraphs there's a chart, there's a comic, I'm suddenly like, okay, this is fun. I'm kind of excited. And so that's how I think.

So I try to do that. That's what I would want. So I like, you know, like there that. That's what I would want. There's so many things where you can just do a funny stick drawing or a really good diagram, and it's just way clearer and sticks in your head more. If I'm going to talk about procrastination, I can talk about the limbic system and talk about how it works and it's our fight or flight zone.

Or I can make an instant gratification monkey, because that is essentially what it is and that's more memorable and I think more fun to read at the time so you've really in my opinion exhibited a mastery for taking what many people would consider extremely intimidating subjects many of them involved in forging what we're going to experience as a species as the future. So I'd like to talk about the future for a second, and I want to read a quote here. All right. Believe that you wrote or said this, so correct me if I'm wrong.

I always thought the future would be intense, but now I think the future is going fully fucking crazy. Okay. So what are a few things that you're excited about or see coming down the pike in the future? It doesn't have to be one or two. It could be many. It is going to be crazy, and here's why. So the first thought a lot of people have is that it's naive to think that the future is going to be so weird.

The end of times, everyone thinks that, you know, you're just another naive person that thinks they live in a special time. And the reason we all have that instinct is because biology moves very slowly. It evolves very, very slowly. So 50,000 years is nothing in biology and evolution. So we barely changed, meaning we are still a baby born today is a baby that is perfectly optimized to live in a tribe in Ethiopia in 50,000 BC. And everything about it is ready for survival in that world.

But what we've done is taken that baby away from its home planet and brought it to another planet, which is the Earth in 2017. And that baby isn't made very well for this world. None of us are. Okay, so the first thing to think about is just that a lot of our instincts and a lot of our intuitions are actually going to be inherently wrong. We're going to be living in a delusion that was helpful back then that today just is not great.

So the way you can cut through this and actually see reality when you're, that baby is not, it's not, seeing reality isn't helpful to that baby. Fitting in with the tribe is, and believing what the tribe believes is. So today, we want to see reality, and so you can do things like, you can just look at the facts sometimes. So imagine that the, it's gonna be a long answer. Imagine that, I have a lot to say about this. Imagine that the, this is what I'm saying, the zoom out. Answers can't be short in my head. So imagine that human history is about a thousand centuries. Get comfortable, folks. Settle in. A thousand centuries of human history, a hundred thousand years, okay? So each two

centuries is a page in a book, okay? How many pages is this? About 700 pages. Okay, 500 pages. Actually, you know, whatever. I made the math easier. No, no, no, no. They're finding older human remains, so fine.

So 140,000 years, every page in this book that you're holding is 200 years in human history, okay? So page one through 650 of that book, hunter-gatherers. If you're an alien reading this book to understand what happened on that book, Hunter Gatherers. If you're an alien reading this book to understand what happened on this planet, you are bored. I mean, this is really boring.

Page 650, 10,000 years ago, you have the agricultural revolution. Okay, wait. So suddenly people are coming together and forming cities. They're starting to actually form larger civilizations. They have a collective intelligence that's starting to form.

They can compare notes. They can create a knowledge tower that is bigger than any one of them. It's very interesting stuff. So that's 50 pages ago. Then it gets boring again for a while. Page 690 out of 700. The little tiny end of the book here, you have Jesus. You have 693, you have the advent of Islam.

The Roman Empire happens two pages ago. It's already done. 697, you have the advent of Islam. The Roman Empire happens two pages ago. It's already done. 697, you have imperialism. For the first time, you have countries. There's this new thing that happened in the last three pages. Page 698, you have the Enlightenment. You have the Renaissance. You have things like this.

They discovered that there's galaxies, telescope. Page 699, you finally get to the beginning of the U.S. and the beginning of constitutional democracies. Now, page 700 happens, which is from about 200 years ago to today. The beginning of page 700, the alien turns the page. Industrial revolution happens. Big deal. Big change. As he reads down the page, things start to go crazy. You start to have, you have 699 pages this alien has read. This boring ass species has communicated through letters and talking. You know, he was excited about language 500 pages ago. Now he's bored.

Smoke signals firing a cannonball in the air, stuff like that. Suddenly, on page 700, we go to the space station. We have the space station, we have the moon, we have airplanes, we have cars. Just on page 700. 699 pages. We only communicate through, well, we have this kind of simple transportation communication. Now we have FaceTime. We have telephone, we have the internet.

I mean, crazy, right? Less than a billion people for the first 699 pages. On page 700 alone, we crossed the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 billion person marks. So the alien's reading, and his wife comes in and is like, hey, we're going to have dinner. So he's like, shut up, shut up, shut up. This is the most

riveting thing. He's like, what is about to happen to this species? This is crazy what just happened on this page. This is when we're born. We're born at the end of page 700. Okay? So. This is why,

when someone says, what do you think the future's going to be like? I'm like, oh, page 701? And they're like, what the hell is this guy talking about? Page 701, there's no way. Shit just goes bonkers. Yeah, the first three sentences of page 701 will take us to 2025, when they predict that AI is going to basically infiltrate every single industry and part of our lives the way electricity did in a 10-year span in the 1880s. I mean, that's the first three sentences. So to me, I see revolutions, you know, the first half of page 701, the first quarter of page 701, I see revolutions in, you know, VR, AR. I see

revolutions in AI. I see revolutions in brain-machine interfaces. We're going to be able to think thoughts to each other. It's way cooler than language for the first time. I see revolutions in genetic stuff. Your grandkids are going to be like, so you just had a baby and hoped it was a good baby? It's going to seem crazy. It's going to seem so primitive. And you can just go on and on and on with things. Look, how about this one? Okay, what are the major leaps for life that you can count on one hand for all of life? Simple cell to complex cell. Big one. Complex cell to multi-cell.

Big one. We have animals now. Ocean to land. Big one. I would say the fourth that fits on this same list is going from one planet to multi-planets as a civilization. That's happening in the next decade with SpaceX. No one's talking about it yet, but they will be. I mean, just the fact that we're going to witness in our lifetimes

one of the great leaps for all of life, this isn't normal. So, yeah. Okay, so I want to talk about extraplanetary. Just a couple of curious notions that have been bouncing around in my own head. If you had to bet on more humans inhabiting, say, Mars, or inhabiting space stations that don't

have to conquer a separate gravity, where would you bet? Because there are competing camps, or at least technologists who are looking at say,, inhabiting other planets or saying, no, that makes no sense because now you're dealing with a separate environment, gravitational field, et cetera.

We're going to just build space stations. Yeah, I'd say Mars for a while. Mars is probably going to have a million people in the next five or six decades, and then it'll eventually probably end up at a billion people. But I think space stations in the long run way better. It's going to seem really crappy to be on a planet. Being on a planet

is going to seem very old school and very rough compared to the space stations. Imagine dealing with weather. It's going to seem crazy that you'd have to deal with weather, that you had to deal with things like climate change. That's just not our problem. We have to deal with bugs. I'd be so happy that there's no bugs on the space station.

So I think in the long run, that. But I have a more important question, which is, are you going to go to Mars? No. No? Well, not in the near term. I don't want to be the first monkey shot to Mars. I'll let quite a few people work out the kinks on that one. I mean, we can't even figure out how to upgrade iOS without replacing I with fucking images.

Like, I'm going to let someone shoot me to Mars? No, no, not early, no. Okay, now picture it's 20 years from now, and the last, you know, every 26 months, you know, Earth laps Mars, okay? And they end up next to each other. That's when you have this window to go. So every 26 months, there's going to be a fleet,

a colonial fleet heading there, and another fleet coming back, bringing people back. Round-trip tickets. How about all the different people on the legs, right? Yeah, no, no, exactly. And there's going to be, like, first-class things. There'll be, like, fancy people, but everyone will be, like, jumping around,

bouncing around with the gravity. It sounds great, like a zero gravity cruise ship. So question is, for you, it's 2038, okay? It's 2045, and it's been proven for the last like 20 trips back and forth, no one's gotten hurt. It's totally safe. Would I visit? Yeah, yeah.

What's the total time invested at this point in the transportation? Let's say the first, the shortest round trip you can do is a 52-monther. I would strongly consider it. Okay. I heard Jeff Bezos say recently on stage, before you think about going to Mars, spend a month in Antarctica.

That's a cakewalk. Oh, Antarctica is way better than Mars. Yeah, not much in Antarctica, but 15 or 20 degrees colder. You can't breathe the air. You can't be outside in the sun without a radiation suit. So I think it depends a lot on the brochure of Mars Club Med that I receive. Yes, it's not good. All right, shifting gears a little bit. AI, do you think it is an existential threat or not? And if so, what is the time horizon for it becoming an imminent existential threat?

So this is one of the great questions. AI is probably the subject I've talked to most experts on. So I'm not an expert, but I really know what the experts think, and I try to keep up to date because they change their minds a lot. So we'll be fine. No, we're all done. No, we'll be fine. No, we're all done. What I find is very few people who don't think this is going to basically take over everything. The question is when. And I was surprised that even the people that are pessimistic, they kind of think, oh, it might be 100 years from now. Most people think 50, 30. And people at DeepMind these days at Google, which is like the leading AI company now,

they're saying things like 10. And this is, when I say 10, 10 till what? I'm talking about before any of this moment happens. To understand AI, you have to think about two things. There's narrow intelligence and there's general intelligence. So humans have general intelligence. We are smart across the board. We have social skills. We have creativity. We can understand math. We can read. We can be creative. We can learn from experience. You just name anything. Humans can kind of learn how to be smart there. But when you think about AI, AI is way better than any human at the things it's good at, like chess. It's the world chess master, right? Of course. And it's the world master at everything that it does well. But it's only good at that one thing. So there's AI in your phone, there's AI in your car, there's AI running most

stuff at this point, but it's only good at one thing. So the question is, when will AI become, gain that same breadth that we have? When will it become broadly smart? And until then, it's still going to change the world. It's still going to take a huge amount of jobs and create a whole bunch more. So it's going to be a massive group of changes that happen even before we get general intelligence. But the question that I was referring to before is, when do we get to this level where AI is now smart like we are, but way, way smarter, what Nick Bostrom calls super intelligence, where it's as smarter than us as we are than monkeys. Yeah. So basically, if you picture like, not only can a monkey not build this room, or not only can, you know,

when you look out in the night sky and you see little lights moving around, you know, humans are so smart, we put those there. We put airplanes and satellites in the night sky, right? So not only can a monkey not do that, you can show the monkey the lights of this building, and it can't even understand that you did it. It just will think that it's just there. That's just a moving star. So we're talking about something that not only can we not do what this thing can do, we can't even understand that it did it, even if it tried to explain it.

That's how smart this thing is. It's a really crazy concept. So things that we think are hard, like curing disease, poverty, climate change, name it, anything that we consider a challenge, easy, piece of cake for the AI. So that's the really exciting side. And then there's the what if we're not in control of it the way we want to be. Not that it's going to be evil. That's this really exciting side. And then there's the what if we're not in control of it the way we want to be. Not that it's going to be evil. That's this anthropomorphization that people do. They try to apply human stuff to this thing that's not human.

But when you build a house and there's an anthill there, you're not like, ha-ha, death to the ants. You just built a house and they were in the way, so you killed them. Big deal, right? The fear is that the AI is doing its thing and that we're kind of in way, and we programmed it in a way that we didn't think of this thing, but now it's too powerful, we can't change it, and we're toast. Or it gets annoyed that we're doing something to it that it doesn't want, and we're toast. So you have some high stakes here, which is why, basically, we're going to have God on Earth, because we can play God to every other animal right now, even a chip.

Chips are really smart until we put it in a cage. Now what are you going to do? We have a gun, we have a taser, we can going to have God on Earth because we can play God to every other animal right now, even a chimp. Chimps are really smart until we put it in a cage. Now what are you going to do? We have a gun, we have a taser, we can poison its food. Chimps are nothing compared to our godlike ability because we have a little intelligence gap over them, little in the scheme of things. When this thing has a big intelligence gap over us, it truly can play God to us.

So the question is, is it a good God that can solve all of our problems, or is it like one of those dick gods in the Old Testament, like that guy? So this is what they're talking about. This is why AI safety is so important, but most of the money and time is going into AI development right now. So last question, and then we'll go to audience questions. How do you view happiness? Just to bring it back to things that we may be able to influence, at least speaking for myself and a lot of people in this room. How do you view or define happiness for yourself, if you do at all? Yeah, well, I kind of think of there's two kinds of

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

And then I think you can work on micro happiness, which is about lifestyle. This is what you're so good at. And so I think a lot of people here, you know, really both for both kind of happinesses, they look to you because you have a lot of good advice, but I think with micro, you really, you focus so hard on, like, just really crushing, like, a Tuesday. And I think, like,

but all life is, is literally a Tuesday again and again, and then you die. So crushing the Tuesday is a good thing. That's the title of my next book. Let's get good at it, right? White sand and Tuesdays. But so yeah, and the thing that's hard is a lot of times we assume that it's the external world. We have to succeed. We have to, you know, get this relationship and then we'll be, and you know, this is kind of cliche, but we know that it's messing with your internal expectations. It's getting your mind in the right place and kind of seeing reality and seeing what is your ego and what is your fear and what is kind of worrying about judgment and what is actually real that matters to you.

And realizing that a lot of the perceived risk isn't really dangerous and a lot of the perceived reward isn't really gratifying and it's all there in front of you if you can just look past your primate self with your very rational you know intelligent self and just see it and then learn to internalize it often suddenly the happiness is a you know become very clear how to work themselves out and it's a often we end up spending all our time trying to you know get to those happinesses with the primate kind of self in charge. And that usually doesn't get us there. So to add to that, reality minus expectations.

Is that a useful framework for defining happiness, do you think? Yeah. I mean, so you just say, you know, your happiness is like an equation. Reality minus expectations is your happiness. And so you can work on two things. You can work on improving your reality, or you can work on not lowering, but kind of like refining your expectations to reflect what actually matters to you, which will almost always end up with them lowering in a certain sense

and maybe going up in another sense. But the classic trap, of course, is like, you know, you're in a way better place than you were 10 years ago, but you're just as unhappy because you're the hedonic treadmill concept. It's this term that psychologists use that, you know, you just, your happiness goes up because something really good happens. Even like, you know, the little examples, you get a new, you buy something new and you wake up in the morning, you're like, oh, my iPhone X10, whatever. And you're all happy and then every day that goes down and six days later it's just your stupid iPhone again.

But we use this in a macro sense. You get the new job, you finally get into a really good relationship, you work it out, or you have a sick friend or a parent and then they get healthy and wow. And then instead of just, you know, so the obvious way to get off the treadmill is obvious, just obsess over gratitude. There's like, what I have, what I want.

And like, looking up, you're going to be really unhappy. And if you keep, you know, the mountain keeps growing underneath you, but you're not even looking at it. You're just looking up all the time. It's going to seem like everything sucks. If you're looking down, you're like, look at this mountain. It's amazing. Look at all the things that I have.

Like, you're going to be really happy. So like, the gratitude things are real. Like, all the, you know, the thing thing we're supposed to write the three good things that happen that day every night before you go to bed right three good things that happened and why they happened the reason that people want you to that psychologists say this is good because it trains your brain to all day be thinking wait what's good I need to do this thing tonight like it's just what's good what's good you suddenly you're looking down and all these things that are good in your life as opposed to

kind of looking up at what sucks, what sucks about the situation. How is the world wronging me, which is a pure recipe for unhappiness. Okay, I'm going to try to put a little icing on top just to add to that, which is I was reading recently about some of the supposedly objectively assessed happiest places on earth. And if you look at them, three of them are Costa Rica. Tico, tico pura, tico puro masculino, perdon. Okay, screwing up my gender already.

Bad to do in these days, huh? All right, at least I did it in Spanish. Uh, so, moving on. I'm going to move on quickly. Costa Rica, Singapore. Any Singaporeans here who want to shout? Okay.

I'm all for it. You don't see it as much in Singapore. And then Denmark. All right. Norway. Norway. How about Colombia?

I'm from Norway. I'm sorry. Norway. All right. Well, you can write a letter. I love Norway. But I will rely on National Geographic. You can write them an angry letter. They are very communicative.

That's fine. So Norway also. But I can only speak to the Danes, but I will give you the official gold medal, but the silver medal for the Danes, and I want to point out a couple of things, knowing people in all three places, that in Singapore,

there's very much an optimization for improving your reality. It's very sort of achievement-focused, and there's a large economic component. Nonetheless, the various combination of factors lead them to be on the very top. On the perhaps opposite side of that equation, or at least in the alternate side, you have the Danes, and I know a lot of Danes. And I remember one point without even bringing up any of this, I said, you guys are apparently really happy. Why do you think that is? And as a group, they said, we have really low expectations. I was like, wow, that's interesting.

I mean, noodle on that. And then I think Costa Rica is kind of squarely in the middle in a lot of respects. So stuff to ponder. Work on both. And also, it just struck me that given all the talk about stoicism and so on that I tend to beat people over the head with, stoicism in a lot of respects, I would view as a complete philosophical system that checks a lot of boxes, but does focus quite a bit on refining your expectations and preparing for the worst case scenario. So I often add quite a healthy dose of epicureanism and so on, which is more on the opposite side. In any case, Tim, thank you so much.

And we're going to jump into some audience questions. I know that's... Yeah, please give them a hand. And we will definitely be doing some individual hellos. But let me jump in and see what we have here. And I suspect there might be some curveballs slash bear traps that I don't want to step into. So let me see what we have here. Bear with. All right. You're 20. You have three to six months pre-job post-college. All right. I take that to mean three to six months pre-job, post-college.

All right, I take that to mean three to six months after graduation to do whatever. No financial, social commitments, and you've already read Tim's books. All right, thank you for that. How do you spend your time to maximize well-being and develop perspective? Aman from Paris. Well-being and develop perspective. Three to six months. Now, you may have already done this where's mon it's money hey how's it going all right so you may have already done this but if if i were giving advice to the normal american audience for that i would say travel for those three to six months.

Go to countries where you do not speak the language. Get deliberately lost in places that are safe, perhaps like Japan or Costa Rica in most places. And for well-being and developing perspective, well-being would mean deliberately exposing yourself to people who are worse off, maybe at least financially, than yourself. So spending part of that time volunteering, for instance, in those three to six months,

and then that will simultaneously help you to develop many, many different perspectives. That would be just, speaking as someone whose life was changed completely by a number of overseas experiences, which I had starting at age 16 or 17. I'd never really spent time outside of the U.S. That would be my recommendation. Tim, do you have any other thoughts? No, I think that's right in line with what I would have said,

which is basically traveling to me is another way to zoom out because you're just looking at your life from far away. You know, it's like, you're not going there to look at your life, but you end up thinking about your life. And for some reason, being far away, being out of your comfort zone and out of your element, you just have fresh eyes on your whole situation.

You can have this perspective. You can kind of, it's like going in a helicopter and looking at it from up there and a lot of things make sense. And then I would have also said, couple that with like, kind of like a hard zoom in on reality, which I think you get from, I might have said, like, wait tables, work construction.

Just do something where you're just around working people, and you just, I don't know, it just reminds you what work is like, what reality is like, what don't know, it just reminds you what, like, work is like, what reality is like, what adults, you know, go through. And then that can, like, help you figure out where you're about to, you know, where you're about to be and what you want to do. Yeah, for sure. And the travel advice I would not limit to someone just getting out of college. I think everybody, when possible, should have that experience. Because the benefits outlast the trip. Because what will happen to most people, especially if you put yourself in very foreign environments

where perhaps you can't even read what is written, Japan, China, many different examples, right? Whether it's Cyrillic, Arabic, it doesn't matter. And you observe different customs. What happened to me, at least, in Japan, for instance, which is my first real time abroad for a year as an exchange student, the only person who looks like this in a school uniform in a high school of 5,000 Japanese kids, right?

Pretty easy Where's Waldo game. But I was like, wait, they drive on the other side of the street? That doesn't make any sense. Then I was like, wait a second. Maybe we don't make any sense. Oh, what? They take a shower before they get into the bathtub? That doesn't make any sense. Wait a second.

It makes perfect sense. And I got back and I realized how many rules we follow are just made up. They're just totally made up. Very fragile, socially reinforced illusions that we just reinforce. And that's very liberating because you realize, wait a minute. If all of these different cultures do things differently,

maybe I don't have to go there to do things differently. I can do that here. Then you start to really question assumptions, and you become, in my experience, more experimental. All right, let's go to another question. What trends, industries, topics are you most excited about right now? Patrick.

Patrick, is Patrick here? Hey, Patrick. All right. I like that hi, Tim, applies to both of us. It simplifies matters. What trends, industries, topics am I most excited about right now? Speaking for myself, trends I'm not watching very closely. I have trouble explaining why, really.

I suppose I'm not trying to capitalize on any trends because I feel like particularly having left Silicon Valley and having moved to Austin, which I love on almost every level, if I'm spotting trends that I hope to capitalize on, by the time you see it, you're too late, generally speaking. So I'm not paying a lot of attention to trends. Industries, I am interested, just almost from an academic standpoint, in space travel, not so much from a personal experiential standpoint, but specifically looking at inhabiting planets versus building space stations. That debate is interesting to me because you have some of the smartest humans the last 50, 100 years, arguably,

with very, very different viewpoints. And whenever that happens in any field, I'm really interested. You see that in quite a few places. Topics, I would say, and this might be considered a trend, I'm hoping to turn it into a trend, which would be scientific research using current cutting-edge technologies to re-examine both psychedelics and MDMA, which I wouldn't strictly consider in the traditional sense of psychedelic, for applications to very debilitating serious conditions ranging from PTSD to

treatment resistant depression end of life anxiety and so forth so I've taken most of my energy and capital that went into startups and am redirecting that to scientific research at Johns Hopkins hopefully other places like UCSF, NYU also that are taking these compounds that have been to scientific research at Johns Hopkins, hopefully other places like UCSF, NYU also,

that are taking these compounds that have been used very, very wisely, I think, in certain contexts for millennia by various civilizations and applying a scientific lens to understand the mechanisms of action and the risks involved, quite frankly, but how they can be less politicized and stigmatized for unscientific reasons and examined so that we have a better understanding of why they do what they do, which can be pretty incredible.

What about you? Trends, industries, topics that you're excited about right now? Definitely some of those. I agree with you on getting the stigma off of, you know, perspective-altering drugs. But I would also add there's a lot of cool things going on in what field that also has a stigma called life extension. And the stigma is that it just seems like it's like, you know, narcissistic rich white guys who want to live forever. But the truth is it's, and people think it's vain and this narcissistic kind of thing, but really what you could just reframe it as, if you just cure or learn how to manage the four

things that kill people, basically, which is heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, cancer, it just means that, and other things going on in health, we can just live a lot longer and higher quality later years. Like, who doesn't want that? It's this, like, knee-jerk reaction that makes people not even want to put money or time into this industry. But, like, I just feel like there were definitely people back when humans lived on average to 40, you know, who would have been like, oh, death at 40 is the lot of man, like, living to 80 or so. But, like, now we're all happy about that. No one wants to go back. So if suddenly, you know, I don't know, 140, 140 was the new 90 and 90 was the new 50.

Like who's not happy about that? Like so, you know, we say, oh, because, you know, at that point you're done. Well, not only is this because we got used to that. We're managing our own expectations. If we all died at 35, I would be like, well, it's been good. But I'm not like that. I'm all ambitious and excited because I think I have more decades.

I think that there's a lot going on. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are one of the teams that are trying to cure all diseases by the end of the century. This is just a machine, and the diseases are just a glitch inside the machine. If we can have enough nanotech and really fancy AI,

medicine and everything, we can go in there and fix it. This is a fantastic development. The most heartbreaking thing is someone that you love dying, especially early. Let's work on that. So I think there's a lot going on there, but I think that a lot more would be going on

if the stigma of this as kind of like a narcissistic pursuit would just go away. Yeah, to comment on one thing there in terms of the narcissistic rich people, everyone should want the narcissistic millionaires and billionaires

to spend as much money as possible on this. Right. You want them to be the people who create the economies of scale for everybody else. millionaires and billionaires to spend as much money as possible on this. You want them to be the people who create the economies of scale for everybody else. And many of the things we take for granted now, like recycling, started off being very hoity-toity, affluent experiments. And you want them to be spending millions of dollars on something that in 10 years is going to be available for $50 at CBS. Yeah, plumbing, like, and sanitation. These things are all rich, you know, rich people things for a while.

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

If you want to read some I think very interesting thinking related to what might account to life extension or at least death prevention, Dr. Peter Atiyah is one to pay attention to. One of my favorite people. What is the name of the city everyone must visit before they die?

Steve. Steve Carell. Not to be confused with Steve Carell. Yeah, it's a great name. Spelled differently. On my list, I would have to go with Tokyo because it has such an unusual combination of safety, cleanliness, extreme weirdness, and incomprehensibility, even to someone who speaks Japanese,

that it provides a really unique, I think I just used that twice, and I'm going to get shit from friends who love to heckle me for using modifiers on unique. They're like, no, there's no such thing as very unique. I'm like, okay, all right, all right. I'm going to say it again just to annoy them. It's a very unique opportunity to feel extreme discomfort and confusion with elation with next to no real harmful consequences. So I think that provides an awesome learning opportunity and just a fun trip. So I would say I would say Tokyo is very high on the list. You stole my answer again. I was just in Japan all summer and it's like

going to another planet and you're like, oh, how does this civilization live? And you're on another planet. That's how different it is. Western culture has infiltrated so many places and it just hasn't really there. They just have done everything their own way.

How does the cab door open? Oh, it opens by itself. Then I get in and it just hasn't really there and they just have done everything their own way so you're like how does the cab door open oh it opens by itself then i get in and it closes by itself that's really cool so i had to give a different answer i'll say um hanoi vietnam just because crossing the street is just crazy so there's like bikes just like motorbikes, just a sea of them, a sea of them going by and there's no stoplights and it doesn't stop. And what you do as a walker is you just walk. It's like Indiana Jones walking over the thing.

You just walk and you just, and they figure it out. And the thing, and it's unbelievable. It's like you feel like you're like God walking on water or something where you're just like walk out and nothing happens but the thing you don't want to do is like be a freaked out tourist

that like stops because then you're doing something they can't anticipate but you gotta try this steady well paced strides confident yes all pays strides. Yeah. Confident. Yes. Is it the same there? I didn't go down there. Yeah. It's amazing. You spent some time in Ho Chi Minh. Yeah. Go with the flow or else you die. Yeah. Go with the flow or else you die.

Good advice. Oh, my goodness. All right. That one would take us both several hours, knowing the two of us. So I apologize to the person whose name I will not read. All right. All right. Dear Tim.

That applies to both of us. Regarding two crappy pages per day, I'll explain what that means. How do you structure your days and weeks when you are working on a book? Thanks, Jean or Jeannie, I'm not sure, V. Either way is fine. All right, I'll go with both.

I wasn't sure how to respond. All right, so the two crappy pages per day, for those who don't know, was advice that I received regarding writing and working on a book, which can be, in my personal experience, a very daunting, intimidating task. And I would get frozen for days or weeks, and I'd try to write something, and it wouldn't be perfect, and I'd throw it out. And a mentor of mine or an author I knew said, your quota should be two crappy pages per day. And he told me the story about IBM and how they demolished the competition by exceeding every sales quota every quarter and just absolutely steamrolling everyone for a long time. And he asked me, do you know why

that is? And I said, no. And he said, because the quotas were low and then people were unintimidated to pick up the phone to make the calls. And you can do the same thing with yourself, with writing. And you do that by making your bar for a successful day two crappy pages. That's it. Even if you throw them both out, you never use them. You've won the day if you have two crappy pages. And, of course, over time, there are days when you just get your two crappy pages, and they are really truly terrible.

Then there are other days where you overshoot, you're in the flow, and you get 10, 15, 20 pages. You don't need so many of those to eventually put together what can become a book. In terms of structuring my days and so on, I'll be super, super specific here because the weeks and months basically look identical. And it's just copy and paste of this particular day. I realized for myself that I benefit greatly given historical predisposition to bipolar and all these various things. It's just written in my code. It's a whole separate story.

But yeah, it's kind of laughable how predisposed my family is. That writing near sunshine is really important. So I write books generally during summer months. And my day involves getting up not super early, but for me, respectably early, which would mean, say, 9 a.m., 9.30, before the sun is setting. And I wake up, I meditate for 20 to 22 minutes, which would be typically Transcendental Meditation or some type of guided meditation. Then I jump in the water because I'm on Long Island. I jump in the water to wake up. I might do a little bit of swimming. I hop out. I already

have pages from the night before that I want to edit. I will edit during the day, but I do my prose generation at night. That's just when I have the best output, but I can edit, do that grunt work during the day. I have printed out pages. I will go into a sauna, which requires all sorts of trickery because you start sweating on the pages, but go into a sauna and I will hand edit those pages. Then I come out, take a quick shower. I have a very small breakfast of some type, typically, say, macadamia nuts and some eggs. Very, very small. And I continue to work very often at a treadmill desk.

And the treadmill desk works during this period of time at a very slow pace because, say, in the case of Tribe of Mentors, I'm handling outreach and editing. I'm not going to do original drafts and composition at the treadmill desk. I will work at the treadmill desk. This is literally the exact day. And this won't take hours to explain. Then, around, say, noon or 1 p.m., hop on a bike with a researcher or someone that I have hired to be with me in the same house at all times. Why is this important?

I realize that writing is very isolating for me, and it can catalyze a lot of negative mental states and downward spirals, because I feel alone. So I have someone physically there, even though we could probably do the work remotely. They have to be optimistic, which fortunately my researcher is. Everything to him is a hand clapping.

Amazing. Really good influence to have around. So we both get on a bike. So you'll notice there are little bursts of physical exercise inserted in the day. Get on bikes, ride to this very mediocre deli, and we have Mediterranean wraps every day. For those interested, it is whole wheat tortilla with chicken, hummus, tomato, avocado added, always extra cost and we eat our Mediterranean wraps

and I have unsweetened iced tea plus sparkling water and we will work there until say 5 or 6 sun starts to set, jump on the bikes sometimes head to the bay, jump in the water again head home and then have a snack, work for an additional two or three hours, then go to dinner.

There are two or three restaurants that we go to. That's it. Those are the rotations. And for all of these restaurants, I'll give a pro tip. Jesus, what a long answer that I said. It wasn't going to be long. All right. Pro tip for people who might want to do this.

Now it's late. We're going out late. We're having dinner at 9 o'clock. A lot of these kitchens close at, say, 9, 30, 10. What does that mean? Staff's going to be fucking pissed that we're coming in right as the door is about to close. And I know this because I worked in service jobs as busboy and waiter in restaurants forever. I get it.

So here's what you do. You have three restaurants. You know you're going to be going to them for a few weeks or a few months. You go to the same restaurant for dinner three nights in a row. And then the next restaurant, same place, three nights in a row. Each night, you buy rounds of tequila over and over again for every person who works in the restaurant. Front of house and back of house.

Really important. These people will now love you. And they will let you hang out for an extra hour, hour and a half. This is really key. Okay, so we do this. Then we go home. Not too much to Cuba. And we'll continue to prepare things for the next day. Go to bed around 1 a.m. say, and then it's groundhog day over and over again. That's it. And there are very often, I would say every other day, some type of kettlebell swings or exercise that is done immediately before leaving to dinner. And it's just that day over and over and over again. Yes, I see your raised hands. From, yes, Joanne.

Yeah. Jeannie. God damn it. Sorry. Quite all right. When you were having the Mediterranean wraps, you said, do you work there at the place you hate? Because you said that you're...

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

If you take the opposite of that answer imagine your 16 hour awake is like a amorphous wad of self-loathing it's basically someone asked me the other day what do you need with your work and I was like I need a gnome that will follow me around and like

shock me if I'm not working at like what I'm supposed to be working. And they were kind of like, it was kind of, but, um, I, um, yeah, no, no. I mean, I mean, this is where you're awesome at and what I admire you for. And you can also, just to be clear, have really regimented, well-structured self-loathing just to make that that clear. But I was trying to memorize that answer because I think for me, the times when I am being productive, I find that two days, two minutes, two pages a day thing resonates with me because for me, it's like if I get it in my mind, my problem when I'm not being productive is that I have this in my head. I'm behind on my stuff, so I need to work 14 hours. I need 14 hours of

writing today. And I have done work 14 hours. I need 14 hours of writing today. And I have done those crazy hours when there's a crazy panic in my life, so I know I can, so I think I can, but without the panic, it never happens. And then six hours into the day, I've already blown it. I've already blown the day, and you get discouraged, and then you start to self-fulfilling prophecy yourself that, of course, I'm going to blow it. I blew it in the last three days. So if I do the same thing, if I say,'m going to write three hours today and then I've had a

successful day, it's amazing all the positive like reward pathway feedback that comes in from feeling like you succeeded that day. And then that night you can go to bed on time because I already succeeded today as opposed to thinking, no, I can't go to bed now. I can't like let this be the whole day. I didn't, and that can feed on itself. And something I try to remind myself is someone who is three hours of writing five days a week, but really focused, like phone is away, like deep, deep focus writing 15 hours a week, like it's shocking how much you can produce. Like add those weeks together, 40 weeks later, you have a book, right? The difference between the prolific writer and the self-loathing person who doesn't write anything is one does 15 hours a week out of their 112 waking hours a week writing, and

the other one does zero out of 112 waking hours. So one-seventh versus zero-sevenths. Six-sevenths of those two people's days and lives are the same. I mean, people who can't put something together, they have this daunting kind of assumption that the prolific writer is fundamentally different. They're working constantly all the time. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's the consistency.

It is the IBM thing. I've never thought about it that way. That's a really great way to put it. It's so true, too. I mean, most writers I know spend the majority of their time inventing things to do to avoid writing. They're like, but my plant's dying. There's really no way that I could possibly. Winston needs another massage. Yeah, I mean, this is an unconstructive environment.

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

Let's start with you, Tim. Shit. It's so nice having his answer about my answer. What experiments, questions, or hypotheses are you wrestling with right now? And then I'm just going to abridge this and go to where do you think they might take you? Well, it's a little like my last answer. I'm trying to... So my mind is structured,

as I explained in the TED Talk you mentioned. There's three characters. There's the rational decision maker who's like, you should probably work right now. It's 10 a.m. It's on a Wednesday. Very good time to work. Then there's his pet, the instant gratification monkey,

who he has a different idea. He has a different idea of what 10 a.m. on Wednesday is good for. And the two of them go back and forth, and the instant gratification monkey wins every single time, which leaves me in what I call the dark playground where I'm not working, but I'm supposed to be. And the only thing,

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

and I'm going to die at 45. And what I'm trying to learn how to do, especially since I'm about to start my first book next year, so I, like, you've done 52 books, I need to, like, learn from this man, is, like, you know, a book is too big a project. You can't just do that all at once. It's like at some point you have to

learn how to have this internal motivation. For me, I'm like a caricature of myself, but there's a lot of people in this room who maybe aren't classic procrastinators, but without realizing it, if there's no kind of deadline, even if they're not

down to the wire with the deadline, the deadline itself, just being there is what makes them do stuff. And that's dangerous. Um, because actually a lot of what's really important in life, uh, is that kind of important, but not urgent stuff, the stuff that doesn't have a deadline, seeing your friends and family enough, uh, changing careers, improving yourself in the long run. So I think this whole these three characters thing applies to a lot of people. Applies very much to me, so what I'm working on is trying to just

really, really working on having productive days with nothing in the external world making me. Because a child is not good at that, and I'm trying to be less of a child. That's my goal for the next year.

Yeah, I empathize. Do you? I do. I do. I do. I do. Most productive person in the history of... No, I'm just really good at showing the high right.

The high right. Wow, I got really super. When I get tired, this is going to get me in the history of... No, I'm just really good at showing the high right. Wow, I got really super. When I get tired, this is going to get me in all sorts of trouble. I actually, after spending a year only speaking Japanese, when I get really tired, I start to mix up my R's and my L's. I'm not shitting you. Wow. Do you speak Japanese?

Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, it's a cool language. And just so you guys know, I'm just going to digress for a second. In Japanese, they have nariru de ro. They have a syllabary and the R, L, and D sounds

are kind of combined into one thing. That's why they're not aware of the distinction. They kind of got screwed when God was handing out phonemes.

They didn't get a lot of sounds. It's really hard for them to learn other languages. Bit of a rip off for them. But, I'm showing the highlight reel of like a very mediocre movie.

So it creates the illusion that I'm just knocking out productivity all day. Not the case. Which is why when people are like, can we follow you around for a day? I'm like, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Because you're just going to be like,

are you going to do something? No, man. I'm like, I found some lint in the carpet and I need to fix this. Not a good like dances with wolves experience for the documentary film goer. All right. So what experiments, questions, hypotheses am I wrestling with right now? I'm going to make this maybe a little soft around the edges, which is not my style. Typically it's like hard, analytical, quantitative, but whatever. So I've spent the vast majority of my life

at best tolerating myself. It's true. Had some really horrible experiences early on that led me to just decide, sort of self-love was for other people. I could be a really good instrument for competition, though. I could hone myself into an instrument with a high pain tolerance to be really good at certain things. And that was enough.

And then I could get my joy or happiness where I found that from observing other people. Long story to unpack that fully, but suffice to say, I accepted a really low level of self-regard and was really, really unforgivingly brutal with myself. I mean, I talked to myself endlessly every day. We're talking about decades. In a way that I would never speak to another person. And what I've realized in the last few months actually in particular is that if you want to fully love other people and to make other people feel loved, you can't get away with just tolerating yourself. You cannot. how to forgive yourself for a lot. But more so than that, for me at least,

is to have compassion for earlier versions of yourself that you might view as cowardly or ashamed or weak. And I was introduced to that through something relatively new from me, which is called METTA, M-E-T-T-A, or Loving Kindness Meditation, which sounds super woo-woo. And I mean, the 20-year-old version of Tim would just be vomiting on his shoes right now hearing this. Like, oh my god,

really? You're embarrassing us. Stop it. But it's been a really profound shift in my perspective and realizing that even if my only goal is not necessarily to love myself but to do the greatest good I can

possibly do with my small amount of time on this planet, that I have to put my own oxygen mask on first. And that's something that comes up a lot in travel mentors. Arianna Huffington, Sharon Salzberg, it comes up again and again. And I just want everybody to realize this is part of my, I suppose, new mission of sorts, is for people to realize that if you're feeling damaged or flawed, and that leads you to be depressed and to have a really, really low amount of regard for yourself, where you're really aggressively brutal to yourself,

that the first thing to realize is that you are not alone in feeling that. And in fact, certainly not everyone in this book, but I would wager, and this is just speculation in most cases, but a very, very high percentage have incredible demons and are fighting battles that we all know nothing about. But I mean, really, with some very, very dark periods. So A is that you're not alone, and B is that you can actually let go of and repair almost all, if not all,

of what you think you should just lock away and forget. So that, I suppose, would be what I'm wrestling with right now and working on and trying to communicate. And there's some really concrete ways you can go about it. I would recommend everybody, certainly if any of that resonates, do yourself a favor, get a book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock.

Terrible title, fantastic book. Give it a read. It could have a huge impact. How have psychedelics helped you at all? Yeah, so a question about psychedelics. I would say that yes is my tentative answer, but I would not recommend that anyone touch psychedelics without professional supervision.

There are legal ramifications to consider, and I would take it as seriously as you would choosing a neurosurgeon to remove a tumor that if misoperated on would result in a fatality. So a lot of people right now, sorry man, that's about it. Right now a lot of people are going on Craigslist and finding neurosurgeons. My friends at Shaman would just order some stuff from the internet from China for ayahuasca. We're going to do it in our slow cooker. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad, bad idea.

So there are many tools. I don't think that's the only tool. Meditation, silent retreats, which I'm not ready to recommend because I do think they can be extremely destabilizing. There are many, many tools in the toolkit, but the point I want to make is there are tools. And you can start with something that does not involve visiting your ancestors and seeing flashing neon crocodiles in your mind, which could be radical acceptance. So take a look.

Thank you guys very much. And thank Tim for being here. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.