Anne-Laure Le Cunff - Rethinking Goals and Life with Tiny Experiments @neuranne

Welcome everyone. I am Rick and I'm super excited to have Anne-Laure Le Cunff to talk a little bit about mindful productivity, creativity, learning, well-being, the whole gamut. She is the expert in this space and I want to get us started by just asking her, tell us a little about your work at Nest Labs for those who aren't familiar with you. You know, a lot of us have seen your work, your interviews with Tiago Forte and your work around, and you heard about your upcoming book. We definitely want to get into But tell us a little about your work in Nest Labs and how you got to be in the position you are.

Yeah, I started writing the Nest Labs newsletter a few years ago, and initially it was just for myself as a way to translate, understand better research papers about neuroscience and write about them in a way that was non-jargony and useful to myself first and potentially to other people. And the newsletter grew pretty quickly. It has about 100,000 people right now. I write about mindful productivity, which is how to be ambitious and achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health.

Why did I write this book? A life full of meaning, achievement, and hope often seems unreachable for Western men. But now, in these pages, an offer is lurking, waiting, expecting, daring, daring you to seize it. This is an offer to give up being a victim, to forever arise a victor. Visit rickwalker.com. All right, so, so tell me a little bit about how you got— how you decide to start writing in the newsletter, um, and, and what's your frequency? And also, like, what, what's your writing process? How do you decide when you're going to write? Morning, evening? Give us the whole gamut. If, if, you know, we're— I'm highly interested in the, the content productivity process.

Yeah, absolutely. I So the reason why I started the newsletter at the time was because I decided to go back to university in my late 20s to study neuroscience, and I discovered something in my studies called the generation effect. And it shows that by creating your own version of something, whether through writing, or that could be a podcast, that could be a video, literally whatever you want to create, but by creating your own version, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. So I thought it was pretty neat and I wanted to apply this and I said, well, I'm going to take something every day for the next 100 days from school and translate it into a short essay. In terms of making it manageable and sustainable for me, I did not define exactly what an essay meant and I think a lot of people might disagree with some of the Some of the newsletters that I sent, they were very, very short. So to me, it was as long as I showed up that day and I wrote something about neuroscience in the newsletter, that counted as an essay. And so some of them were maybe 200 or 300 words, a few bullet points with some ideas I thought were interesting. Others were very long. I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole and it was this very in-depth exploration of a neuroscientific concept. But I did that for 100 weekdays. 100 articles and the newsletter grew through this process because I think quite a few readers were both interested in the content, but also just wanted to see if I could do it. Would I be able to stick to this pact that I had made with myself and that I had announced? So that's how it started. And in terms of routine at the time, I had to start first thing in the morning. That was what I was doing. I had to make sure this happened. And then if the rest of the day was very busy or chaotic or— it didn't matter. I had done the one thing that I had decided to do for that day, this pact of writing one of those 100 articles. When I was done with this first iteration, I actually went for something a little bit more reasonable. And so now I write one article every week that I send every Thursday in the newsletter. And it's not as intense, but it's a lot more sustainable.

What have been some of the more popular articles that you've written?

The most popular one, I've mentioned that a few times publicly, but Time Anxiety was the most popular one, I think. And it is a short one, actually. It's a short one. I published it a few years ago. It went viral several times. It was on the front page of Hacker News. People kept sharing it. And I honestly don't even think this is great writing compared to some of the other articles that I have written. But I think the idea was very resonant. People could really connect to this idea, this experience we've all had of trying to make the most of our time, the anxiety that arises from the feeling that you're never doing enough, that you're not productive enough, that you could be doing more, um, this sense of self-blame and shame that we have when we procrastinate. I think all those are all experiences that we've had however successful we are in life. And so I think it resonated across the board with people, whether they were engineers or entrepreneurs or they were still students, and they kept on sharing it and sharing it again. So that's my most popular article ever.

Do you, do you sense that there is a, a biological cause to that, that sense of shame where we compare our productivity to other people, or is it more socially, uh, based? Like, what— from just from your perspective as an expert in this space, like, where, where do we pick up this this need to compare ourselves?

So I would say both, because it does stem from something that at an evolutionary— from an evolutionary perspective, we want to feel like we belong and that we're useful to our tribe. Because in the past, if you go back thousands of years ago, being kicked out of the tribe meant certain death, right? So you needed to prove that you were useful. Let me stay, let me share the food with you, let me benefit from the protection that we get as a group. And so I am going to contribute in whatever way I can in order to be perceived as useful. The, the problem and the, the social layer on top of that that is more recent is based on the industrialization of our society, where we are now almost conflating the value of an individual in society based on their productivity. So if you contribute, if you work hard, if you're productive, then you are valuable to the company, to society in general. And so because of that, we have developed this sense of self-shame, this blame that we give ourselves when we're not productive enough because we feel like we're not aligned with those incentives that we've been shown in our current society. So biology first, but definitely something that has been exacerbated in recent years.

It seems to me that, you know, I come from the business world, so I spend a lot of my time negotiating transactions, whether it be for investment in a piece of real estate or in private equity business. And a lot of the success, the productivity in our space is geared toward our emotional intelligence, our ability to get along and have an adequate game theory, a willingness to have a playful relationship with others and be able to bring other people into that fold. Because the more people that we have relationships with that are playful in nature, the more transactions that people want to do with us, and therefore, the more productive we are. And so I guess with that in mind, it seems that a lot of productivity in other markets where you're not in a strictly negotiating type of role, like I am, a lot of success there has to do with financial success. And a lot of it, people miss the fact that it— financial success in most, most realms deals with the, the ability, or is dependent on your ability, to be able to relate with one, with, with other people, to be able to communicate and have long-term dialogue and long-term relationships with people. And so I think we, I think we miss a little bit of that. Where do you, where do you, where do you think this, this idea of, of productivity comes from? And how do you do— how would you define it compared to maybe how society defines it.

Yeah, productivity is really the— your, you know, your ability to, to produce. Like, that's really like where it comes from. So it's how effective you are at producing whatever it is you're supposed to produce. And it's a very Taylorist idea that is really based on the idea of producing widgets in factories. And this is why it doesn't really work in today's age where technology keeps on changing and evolving. Whatever idea that you have today might be outdated tomorrow based on the current environment and the new players that came popping, popping out all the time. So this idea of productivity is almost antiquated, really, for compared to what we need right now. And what we need right now is curiosity, creativity. As you said, you're not going to necessarily be valued by some of the top players in your field because because you're very productive and you can show up on time and produce as many widgets as you said that you would, right? You could actually show up just for a 20-minute conversation with someone and provide a lot more value if you have an interesting idea that they hadn't thought about and that they can apply immediately. And so this is why it's very important, I think, for anyone who wants to succeed, whatever success looks like for them, but anyone who wants to succeed in their field, Letting go of this outdated definition of productivity that was defined in the time of factories and redefining your relationship to productivity for 2 days' time are time where new ideas and solutions and innovation is a lot more important than how you spend your time.

Yeah, yeah. Let me throw out an idea for you. I want to get your, get your take on this. You look at someone like an Elon Musk who has 100 different really mind-blowing things going on simultaneously, uh, often obviously a once in a millennia genius there. Um, but I, I believe that a lot of us, when we're struggling with productivity, when we're, you know, we're working, you know, 12-hour days, we still can't get everything done, it's mainly because we haven't been doing the right things. Maybe we're sort of like you talked about, working on the old-fashioned way of of doing things instead of looking for innovative and creative outlets through which to effectuate what we hope to have fulfilled in the world. But I believe that we've never met anyone that has worked hard enough on the right things.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's actually— so I think re— that's actually what I mean, like reimagining your relationship with productivity actually doesn't mean not working hard. You can work hard. I, I work really hard, for example. But it's like, it's really about having this intentionality and this awareness of what you're working on and how you're working on it. In the case of Elon Musk, he's working on a dozen very important, very complex projects. So I don't think he's actually a good example for most people, uh, not, not because what he's doing is wrong, but because I don't think that's attainable honestly, for most people. But, uh, what's really important is that he feels like he's working on, on things that he's deeply curious about. He actually wants to figure it out. And so it is not really about, again, the sense of productivity of just like staying in front of your computer and banging your head and trying to make sure that you produce the thing that you were supposed to produce, that your manager told you to produce, right? It's more about cracking a problem. And I think a lot of us have experienced that when you become obsessed with cracking a problem. And, um, in the book I actually talk about how the, the ancient Greeks had two words for time. They had chronos, the very linear definition of time, which is the definition of time that we actually tend to use in our modern society, where you look at each block of time and you try to, to stuff of these boxes with as much things as possible, and this is your definition of productivity. If each square is full of tasks and you're just going through your tasks, then you're being productive. And I really doubt that this is how someone like Elon Musk is managing their time. The, the second word that the ancient Greeks used for time is kairos, and it's not a quantitative definition of time, it's a qualitative definition of time. It's the, the, some people translate it as the, the opportune time, the right moment. And what it looks like is, for example, losing yourself in a conversation, not noticing where the time has gone, or getting in the flow so deeply that you might actually forget to grab lunch because you're, you're just so into the, the whatever task or project that you're working on. And to me, this is what reimagining our relationship to productivity is about. It's about trying to optimize less for Chronos, the linear time of calendars, of minutes, of hours, and optimizing more for Kairos, for the quality, for the depth and the richness of time, trying to have as many experiences as possible that are those kinds of Kairos moments. Rather than trying to win at this artificial Kronos game where we're never going to win because there are always going to be more widgets to build.

Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Why did I write this book? A life full of meaning, achievement, and hope often seems unreachable for Western men. But now, in these pages, an offer is lurking, waiting Expecting. Daring. Daring you to seize it. This is an offer to give up being a victim to forever arise a victor. I want you to imagine your best possible future self and ask, what if I took a risk instead of taking a pass? What if one win could wash away all my weaknesses? What worthy enemy am I avoiding? What would I do if I knew I could never fail? Imagine it. Unbeatable focus, unstoppable passion, incredible resilience, true honor, flourishing family, and more, much more. Everything you need for a life of true and deep meaning. The once impossible is now accessible in 9 steps. You see, I want to rip away the comfort now enslaving your potential. I had to discover the steps the hard way. Hidden where I least wanted to look, in the abandoned genius of ancients, the hard-won wisdom of warriors, the overlooked art of the masters, and not surprisingly, within my own failures. To walk these steps is to undergo a profound evolution as I personally experienced and now I share for the first time. Your personal journey begins now. Transformation starts with a single step. Author Rick Walker has over 25 years' experience in strategy, investing, and global negotiations. A million men have benefited from his lectures and interviews with the most accomplished leaders alive. Now it's your turn. He learned from his failures and successes in his 20s and 30s as he scaled multiple businesses and nonprofits across dozens of countries simultaneously, building better coalitions and destroying dysfunctional ones. That's why for years, the world's elite have privately sought Rick's proven steps, self-improvement tools, and life turnaround principles in their deepest struggles. So from the ashes of unemployment, I rose not just to work again,, but to build the employment of thousands. From heartbreak's hollow echo I learned not just to love again, but to lavish it without limit. From wandering lost in the wilderness I found not just a path, but a purpose that burns eternal. So what do I want for you? What do I want to see after you read this work? I wish to see you rise invigorated by love. To live with purpose. To strike with fire. To emerge from shadow into glorious light. To love boldly beyond mere affection. To journey toward eternal meaning. To wield courage in the face of darkness. To slay the evil you see in the world. To be forged in a ferocity no storm could ever silence. And to never, never go back. So it's your turn. To unlock your mind. To seize happiness, then to deserve power by taking up the responsibility that you've been avoiding. Let me be your guide so that you too can build a life of true meaning in 9 steps. Available everywhere beginning July 5th in print, ebook, and audiobook. Visit rickwalker.com. Now, you are— you're— are you still based in London?

Yeah, I'm currently in Austin, but I'm normally based in London.

Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, I was in London the last 2 weeks for the ARC Forum. Yeah, Jordan Peterson's ARC Forum there, and I was struck by how much the city had evolved over the last decade. There has been, it seems like, a pretty large influx from, you know, I guess, northern Africa, north of the Sahel, and region. I think you probably have some family from that area as well. Uh, uh, in, into, into London, um, compared to when I was there, you know, 15, 20 years ago, it was all sort of Saudi Arabia, you know, the guys that are getting their, their Lamborghinis and Ferraris shipped in for the summer, uh, to London and Paris. So it's changed significantly there. Um, how do you, how do you appreciate, or I guess, how do you compare like the, the great cities? Because it seems like you're traveling a lot around a lot. Like Austin versus London, sort of the old world versus the new world there, you know, and what sorts of environments do you like to operate?

Yeah, it's, they're both so different. And I did choose to do my book launch from Austin for some of those reasons that I'm going to share. So London is where I live. And I really, really appreciate it for all of the culture, all of the opportunities to learn. You can walk around and you feel like you're in a museum. And that's a feeling I absolutely love. I love that I can go for a short walk and I can literally, like, you know, sometimes you walk past a house and it's open and you can walk in, and it's actually the house of a famous writer that used to live there 200 years ago and wrote some of your favorite novels. And, and you were just going out to buy some bread, and that's something that can happen on, on your way to, to the bakery. So there is really something I feel like beautiful about the old world and about the history and how you can actually learn from all I love that and having that access to the books, the, the art, the— even the music. You can go to the opera for the cost of maybe a couple of coffees in New York, in London. So I love that, I absolutely love that. But I decided to come to Austin for my book launch because Austin is not a museum, and, uh, and it's actually also what makes it beautiful. It's in the process of being built, it's new, everybody is creating something. Everybody is curious. I, uh, like, genuinely, like, this is something that happened last week. I was on my way to meet with a friend who has built an amazing business, and she wrote several books. She's in process of writing another one. And I'm sitting in the Uber to get there, and it turns out the Uber driver was also an author. And, uh, we had an amazing conversation about writing, her process, my process. I have this little coffee and walk with my friend. I get another Uber to go back home. That Uber driver was also an author, and they were also in the process of producing a documentary, which is something I kind of want to explore for next year. I do want to try and see if I could produce mine. And so we ended up chatting about how do you produce a documentary when you've never done that before? How do you raise the money to do this? How do you— and the fact that this person who had no particular experience with this was working on this creative project and decided to keep on driving with Uber just to have interesting conversations with people was something that felt uniquely Austin to me. Uh, so that's the difference for me, is that one of them feels a little bit like a museum, and which is beautiful, and I love it. And on a day-to-day basis, I'm— I love London, absolutely love London. The other one doesn't feel like a museum. And this is also what I love about it. And to me, the balance I have found in my life is being based in London and always making sure that I spend a few months in the US every year. And that sometimes that's in New York, sometimes that's in California. Right now it's in Austin. But it's almost as if, like, I feel like to— I need to come here and, and get like a little, like, injection of, of, of just collective creativity. And then I can go back to London where things are Much calmer.

Yes, yes, yes. It's— the books in London are amazing. These little bookshops there are just incredible there because in the United States, if I find a book written in the 18— you know, published in the 1800s here, it's, it's a rarity. But there, there's entire— I found a street just full of bookshops, I think over by— was it Charing Cross maybe? Oh yeah, I know the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, picked up some really great works there that I would never have discovered in the United States. Just incredible experience. And I wanna talk a little about your upcoming book, "Tiny Experiments." I think the week that this launches will, this, the book launches will also be the week that we play this, we stream this live. But tell us a little about "Tiny Experiments," how you got the idea to write it and what's it about and what can we expect from it?

Yeah, um, the book was inspired by two things: my personal experience and my research as a scientist. In terms of personal experience, I, I kind of divide my life in two chapters. There was one chapter where that was very linear. I had a very clear definition of what success looked like. I did well in school, I got a job at Google, I worked on a startup, um, and And yeah, I, I really thought I knew what I wanted. And then there's a second chapter, and there might be more chapters in the future, but that's the current one, that is a lot more experimental. I have fully embraced the fact that I actually don't really know where I'm going, that there might be— that some of the most exciting opportunities that I might have in my life and in my work are things that I cannot imagine today, and that will just happen by virtue of showing up and of doing the work that I do, but I cannot have a perfect 5-year plan of what success looks like. And that actually, by trying to control everything and to plan everything, I'm probably limiting my options and my possibilities in terms of being successful. So that's the phase I'm in right now. And as I said, it was inspired by the personal experience of actually trying the linear way and realizing how limiting it was, and also the sacrifices that I was making at the time that were not the kind of sacrifices that necessarily wanted to make. And I'm talking about my mental health and my relationship to a life right now where I'm still, again, working quite hard, but I have really this sense of not necessarily balance in the, the kind of way it's used sometimes, but more of this sense of groundedness that I feel like even though I don't know where I'm going, I want to keep on exploring in the way that I'm doing it. And Tiny Experiments, the, the entire book is based on the scientific method, which I learned also through my, my neuroscience studies. The scientific method, the big difference between the linear way where you start from an outcome, you say, that's the thing I want, I'm going to work really hard and I'm going to get there. The scientific way and the, the experimental approach is more of a hypothesis. You actually don't know. And you say, maybe if I do this, this will happen. And I might be wrong. The hypothesis might be incorrect. And that's okay. But I'm now going to actually do the thing. And I'm going to collect that data. And once I'm done collecting that data, I will make an informed decision in terms of what the next steps are supposed to be. And again, no clear fixed idea of what the end goal might look like, but still growth and progress. And this is what the book is all about. It's really about shifting from this linear mindset to this experimental mindset and providing a lot of the tools to do that.

Walk me through the process of writing the book. Are you a plotter? Are you an outliner? And, and how much of this is going to be scientifically based versus sort of your personal experience, your observation?

-based. Yeah, there's a quote from G.R.R. Martin that I really like and that I used to think about this way of writing, and that says that some people are architects and some other people are gardeners. And so the architect is taking this top-down approach where you have the outline, you have the plan, and then you fill it by writing the actual content. And the gardener has a more emergent approach. Where you kind of start writing and you see what happens. I'm naturally more of a gardener, but after writing this book, I've come to the conclusion, at least for myself, that you need to be a bit of both in order to write a good book, and you need to be able to, to almost switch modes in between the two. And so in my case, I was actually kind of forced to start from an architect standpoint because I had to write a book proposal. For the publishers to decide whether they wanted to buy the book or not. That was very painful to me because that's not how I normally think. I like having this more emergent gardening-like approach. But starting from this outline was actually quite helpful to go through a first draft, although I had then to go back to the gardening phase and I broke it all apart. I deleted some chapters, moved some others, some of them I cut in half and then put one at the beginning, another one at the end, until I got to something that felt right. So I'm more naturally a gardener, but I think being able to wear your architect hat for a little while and structure the book in a way that makes sense and that is as helpful as possible to the reader is very important. And in terms of whether it's based on my personal experience or on, on other people's experience or, or research, I have a little bit of my experience in there because I think it's helpful and it was a source of inspiration for some of these questions. But in terms of exploring the answers to these questions, I actually have dozens of case studies and a lot of it is based on actual scientific research. I also feel like some of the most helpful books are the ones that are able to combine scientific research but also show examples of what that looks like. In real life, not just the science but the practical applications.

Yeah, yeah, that's so important because you want the reader to feel grounded, um, in reality. You also want them to be able to relate to the author, right? If it's just a voice out here speaking ethereally about research, about the way you— the universe tends to work, how people tend to act, they're so disassociated, not interested in that. It's also hard to build a brand around that too, right? And so, and so I think what you've done what it sounds like, um, is you've been able to weave the two together so that we feel attracted to you as an author, we feel grounded that there's an actual person here, not just sort of a talking brain over here, um, but, but it gives us sort of that, that bifurcated back and forth that keeps us, keeps us alert to, to whatever the message might be.

Yeah, and, um, and in addition to that, the case studies were very important to me too because I have read books where it's only the, the author's personal experience, and it makes it a bit harder to imagine what that could look like for yourself as a reader if your circumstances are quite different from the ones of the, the author. So it was very important to me also to have my experience, but also to have other people's stories in there. And so I interviewed a nurse, a teacher, a bunch of people who have lives that are very, very different from mine, and trying to figure out what does that look like? What does an experimental mindset look like in those different life circumstances.

And what do— what is the benefit of experimental mindset for someone like me who, you know, I spend most of my day sitting behind a desk trying to deal with people that are difficult? They will— they'll never do what I want them to do, right? I want so-and-so to come down, you know, you know, give me double the money for this, but I also want to pay half the money for this. You know, I've never— I can never get the world to work the way that I want it to work. But what is the benefit of having an experimental mindset versus sort of just, just the traditional mindset?

So the main benefit is that you will unlock some forms of success that you're not able to imagine today. So the linear mindset, you might be very successful with a linear mindset, but you will only be able to go to wherever you're trying to go right now. And, and that can be fine if that's what you want. If you have this, this clear vision of what you want and this is exactly what you want. But again, lots of research shows that we're actually terrible, absolutely terrible at predicting what we will want in 1 year from now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now. And that makes sense, right? Because we predict what we might want based on who we are today, our current context, the current information that we have, and what the world looks like today. All of these things keep on changing all the time. And so the, the linear mindset is really based on an illusion, the illusion of certainty as to what the future is going to look like, including what your future self is going to look like. The main benefit of an experimental mindset is letting go of that illusion, embracing the fact that actually you will change a lot. That's a good thing. The world will change a lot. Is it going to be good, difficult, challenging? We don't know, but it's definitely going to change a lot. And so you can either cling to that illusion of certainty or embrace the uncertainty and design systems for yourself where experimentation just becomes part of your daily life and where it's completely normal for you to have this different approach to uncertainty where instead of trying to solve the problem straight away and to try and, and figure out what the first, maybe the most obvious solution. Instead, you'll be comfortable staying in that uncertainty a little bit longer and say, okay, I have no idea what's going on here, but let's figure it out. And maybe if I try this, then this will happen. Again, hypothesis, starting from a hypothesis versus the illusion of certainty.

And it seems to me that if you have a more of an experimental mindset, you're the outliers, right? The, the, the Gaussian curve maybe looks a little bit different, or maybe it's not as predictable as it would typically be in sort of this linear thinking model that that most of us are accustomed to, that you have the, you have the, actually have the potential for an outlier result to happen down the road. But it also opens up the potential for failure because we're operating outside of our realm of comfort, right? And I think that there's probably a role for us to think about challenges and failure specifically, because I imagine we should assume that we would fail more often when we're operating outside of our comfort zone. And the frequency of smaller failures is, is a worthy sacrifice for the chance of having an outlier of a success in the long run.

Yeah, absolutely. It actually, when you switch to an experimental mindset, it completely changes your definition of success and failure. So with the linear mindset, there's this destination and either you get there, success, or you don't get there, failure. It's very, very binary. When you have an experimental mindset, success is learning something new. So you make a hypo— you design a hypothesis, you formulate it, you say, I think maybe if I do this, then this will happen. The hypothesis could be incorrect, but you will only find out by trying it. And just like a scientist, when they get an unexpected result, they don't say I'm a failure. I got it all wrong. They say, oh, that's interesting. I did not expect that. What can we learn from that? And also the excitement of feeling like maybe you might be one of the only people in the world right now who knows this because you actually tried and now you have this data. And so this is the feeling that you want to have when you experiment in your work and in your life. Oh, now I know I was wrong, but now I know. This is a very different approach to success and failure. Because the only failure in an experimental mindset is not trying and keeping on making decisions based on a hypothesis that's completely wrong, but you don't know.

And so what is the optimal outcome? I mean, you talk about setting up a hypothesis and saying that if I think if I do this, then this will be the outcome there. And I imagine the hope would be that, that your hypothesis is set around something that's a— it's a forward-moving type of objective in your life. It's something that'll move your, your life forward. If I do A, A, B, and C, that I suspect this will happen. Um, and if we're moving in a specific, specific trajectory, most of us are going to say, yeah, we want to move towards a state of what we think in the end will be happiness. Maybe this, this hypothesis would be that if I do A, B, and C, I can sell 10,000 books this month. Um, and my assumption is that if I, if I sell 100,000 books over the next 10 months, then I'm going to get— be closer to happiness there. So I guess my question for you is, what is the role of happiness, joy, and fulfillment in sort of picking these hypotheses?

Yeah, it's— so there's a term in psychology called the arrival fallacy, which shows that we think we kind of attach a sense of future happiness to specific outcomes and goals, and we say If I get there, then I'll be happy. If you experiment, you don't really have this because again, there's no outcome. And the if-then is, you could have the if-then as in, if I do this, I'll be happier, I'll feel better, I'll have more energy, I'll feel more creative, I'll be more productive. You can do that, but it doesn't have this sense of arrival because you're just trying to increment on and iterate on whatever it is that you're doing right now. So you're not trying to get to be happy as in this absolute fixed and impossible state to reach. You're just trying to be happier. And so that becomes a lot easier to decide on what your actions are going to be and what you experiment with because you're only testing whether whatever that is, like, is it like, you know, uh, doing like hosting more events or, or selling more books or whatever that is for you. If I do this, I'll be happier. You can very easily capture in your journal, in your notes, how you feel today. Conduct the experiment and see if you feel happier. If you feel happier, then go for another round, go for another cycle of experimentation. Do it again and then check in again. Am I feeling happier, or is this thing having diminishing returns? Is— am I at a level where actually I'm fine with what I have? I'm— it's not really helping. Is there something else I could experiment with. And so it's really removing this kind of pressure that we have to be happy with a big H, and instead just becoming a little bit happier every day based on the experimentation, the experiments that we design.

So what is the goal? If, if there's not really going to be an endpoint to it, what is the, what is the role of fulfillment in life when we're working hard, we're trying to, you know, experiment with different things, we're failing a lot, but sometimes we have success or trying to move towards that future, some, some state that might be next week, but not, not an ultimate capital H happiness. What is the role of fulfillment and contentment? Or should we, should we never be fulfilled or content?

No, no, I think we can be absolutely fulfilled and content, but we tend to find it in the experimentation itself. So, and this is actually a really good signal to pay attention to. So I highly, highly recommend when you pay, when you conduct an experiment and you want to ask yourself at the end of the experiment, Did that work or not? Right? So there's the hypothesis that you had. It's very important to pay attention to both the internal and external signals. A lot of us, especially if we're a little bit nerdy and the kind of space, the kind of people I would imagine listen or watch to this, we tend to be more comfortable with the external signals. So if the experiment was around writing a newsletter, like we might look at the number of subscribers, the likes, the comments, and those kind of things. We tend to ignore the internal signals. How did that feel actually to sit down every Thursday and write the newsletter? How did you feel when you did that? Was it something that you enjoyed doing or did it feel horrible? Did you have to really drag yourself to open the, the document and start typing? And those two are equally important because I think it, it happens very often. We focus so much on those external metrics of success. That we kind of lock ourselves into that path even though it's not bringing any fulfillment. And so fulfillment is very important, and it is actually a signal to pay attention to while conducting the experiment and not as an end goal that you might feel or experience in the future.

I love that. I love that. And so it seems like a lot of this is, is based off of learning. We're, we're, we're committing, committing to experiments. We're setting hypotheses. Um, we are— there's probably some feedback loop there, right? Whether or not we feel happier afterwards. Um, and there's, there's this learning process that happens. Um, I think that I heard you speak a while back, or maybe I read you say something about the ability to— about how to best to learn to learn. Like, we, we don't always learn in the best messed manner. We're sort of kind of scatterbrained about our learning process. What is your philosophy of education and learning for those of us that are sort of already out in the world trying to, trying to make our own way?

Yeah, and it should be again a lot more based on curiosity and experimentation instead of having, you know, this is why I use the, the, the mental model of the ladder versus the loop in the book, right? And it's like a lot, a lot of the the, the ways our society is designed, whether at work or at school, and so that includes learning, is based on this mental model of a ladder that you're supposed to climb. And that means that you're supposed to go through each step in a specific order, supposed to collect all of the points that you're supposed to get at a specific level, and, and then you're allowed to go on to the next one. And this is how a, you know, if you look at what a curriculum is, and this is what is used mostly within teaching, right? A curriculum. It tells you like, uh, starts with whatever it is, 101, and then you can go on to the next one. And this is how we learn. I think we would learn a lot better if we align the way we teach with the way our brains are designed for learning. And this is actually through cycles of perception and action. So what the brain does is that it actually performs an action. It's, sorry, it starts with a hypothesis, it performs an action, and then it compares what happens with what the prediction was. And sometimes the prediction is correct and your brain will store that information saying, oh cool, when we do A, we get B. And sometimes the prediction is not correct and the brain will also store that information. Oh cool, now we know when we do A, we don't get B, we get something else. And so that's how the brain is designed to learn. That's how children learn. This is why they see fire, they're going to put their hand and see what happens, because they make a prediction that is going to be fun, and they go and they do the thing, and, and then they see that no, the prediction was not correct. So for anyone who wants to, to learn and, and really be a lifelong learner, which I think is essential in today's world— you cannot just rely on whatever knowledge you acquired in school and hope that you'll be able to, to perform and be successful in today's world based on that knowledge. You need to constantly update your knowledge. So for anyone who wants to be a lifelong learner, I would really recommend trying to have a bit of a more nonlinear approach to learning and really being okay with the fact that whenever you're at a point where you have something you're interested in, you have several different paths, like forks, in front of you, and you could go and explore different areas that are more interesting to you or more useful to you. At this point, and it's completely okay to choose the path that makes sense for you right now. And so if, for example, you're studying, you're trying to understand social media, for example, you're just trying to learn about social media. How does it work today? Right? And you are currently writing a book. Maybe it makes more sense for you to spend a lot of time researching BookTok on TikTok. How does BookTok work? Who are the people? What kind of books do they share about? What is the language, et cetera? And maybe understanding how Threads or X/Twitter are working is not something you want to learn right now. In a linear curriculum, you would have to go through all each social media platform and learn about each of them. And then maybe 3 years down the line, you would be allowed to specialize in one of them. So you don't have to do this. You can follow that tree of knowledge in a way that makes sense to you right now.

And it seems that a lot of our desire to learn is comparative in nature, just as we started the conversation with, um, our productivity, right? If I'm, if I'm an attorney and I'm, and I'm, I'm trying to get as many billable hours as possible and I'm sitting next to other attorneys who's billing more hours than I am, I am underperforming versus that person. Um, everything is, is in the comparative. Um, so too it seems like learning, especially with this information age and social media video podcast, you can tell that there, there's always someone smarter out there than, than us, right? There's always someone that knows more about a little bit, a little bit more than we do. And it's really difficult to get around the paradigm of that I'm trying to learn not only because it interests me, but because I want to either appear smart or I want to appear smarter than the next person, right? It's the, it's the old sin of pride. I forgot which commandment it was that, you know, do not covet your neighbor, your neighbor's house or your neighbor's ass or your neighbor's wife. You don't, you don't want to compare yourself or covet or desire that, that which belongs to somebody else because they have it for a reason and you don't. It seems that we, we pick up this falsity that we, that we find that we're valued based off our comparative supremacy to other people. And that's a, that's a, that's an unfortunate thing in the workspace. And, and so how do we, how do we really stay pure to the, the, the intent to learn for our, like, for our own sake, rather than just trying to learn so we can have a better story to tell the next cocktail party or the next interview.

Yeah, and what you said about the social comparison really resonates with me because I feel like in that first chapter of my life I described earlier, this— a lot of the drive was coming from comparing myself to my peers and asking myself whether I was being successful enough. And, um, that's the other problem with the ladders as a mental model of success, is that if visualize it. It's like, it's all of these ladders against the same wall, and it makes it a lot easier to look right and left and, and ask yourself, why is this guy I was in school with is up there and I'm still here? And, and why is this person going faster than I am? And, and, and am I climbing the right ladder? And so all of these questions come from this idea that we have this linear definition of success. When you experiment, all of that goes away because there's no way of comparing your experiment with your parameters, with your context, with your own sources of curiosity, with an experiment someone else is running. They're running their own experiment. They also have no idea what they're doing. They just have a question. They have a— they have curiosity. They might have a hypothesis, and they're experimenting. You're also experimenting. And it will actually be quite fun in a few years to look back on your experiments together and maybe share what you learned. And it also removes a lot of the competition because you can start sharing your failures with others. And failures, again, in a different definition of it, in the sense of an experiment where you can tell people, I tried that, don't do it. It actually, it's that really, that didn't work. And that, that becomes a lot more playful. We're all learning together, making mistakes together, learning together, although we're all working on different things and exploring different paths. This is really why it's helpful to, to stop trying to climb the ladder and instead focus on your own experiments instead.

So whenever we go through the learning process, at, at some point, the facts that we learn, the stories we learn, the, the truths that we learn from our experimentation, and also just our research, that has to lead us somewhere. Like, the idea always has to be connected to something else. That's more relative to us. And so, so for instance, I was in— when I was in London 2 weeks ago, my middle daughter, she's a big Van Gogh fan and she likes the Sunflowers painting. And at the National Gallery, they had it off display for a little bit and they just brought it back on. So we had to bring back— bring it back the next day, and she had opportunity to be able to see that. And she wants to be able to look at that painting by Van Gogh and think about what sort of implications that has for her life, because he has these other paintings about sunflowers just like he has the Starry Night, Starry Skies. He has sort of all these sort of swirly, ethereal types of, types of artwork that are just complete masterpieces. But she wants to try to figure out, Dad, how do I get that to relate to my life? You know, what can I learn from the exceptionals that he painted with? How can I apply that in my, my lacrosse playing, my school, my music, all that sort of thing? And so, um, you know, a lot of people use things like mind maps. A lot of people will use, uh, different processes of synthesis or mental models to be able to reattach what they learn in one domain to other domains. How should we be thinking about all these different things that we learn out— learn about out in the world, applying those? Like, are there tools that you recommend? Are there certain systems that you recommend?

Yeah, um, I, I personally, for people who do enjoy this— not everyone does, and this is actually fine because we were talking about the architect and the gardener earlier. And, um, people who are more architects, they might not enjoy those kinds of tools because those are tools that are a little bit more about having more of a gardening approach. And I, these are tools that include what is called bidirectional linking. And so it's any tool that allows you to link an idea to another and it will show on both nodes. So if I connect an article that I, I read with a project that I'm working on. On the project page, the article will show up, and on the article page, the project will show up. And it creates a kind of like interconnected web, like a knowledge map of everything you're currently thinking about, which from an outsider might look at it and feel like this is a complete mess and have no idea what's going on here, but will, which will make sense to you. There are several of these digital tools that are available. I use Roam Research personally, but there is another one called Obsidian, another one called Loxec. If you just look up bidirectional linking note-taking tools, you will find one. I recommend giving it a try and seeing how you feel. Some people feel a little bit frustrated when they do this, and for these people, I recommend using Notion because it has a very, very light version of bidirectional linking, but it also allows you to structure your thoughts in the boxes and, and the kind of like more architect approach to your knowledge. So that can be helpful. And for me, the way it works is that anytime I open my Roam Research app to add something to it, I make it— it's really, I never don't not do that. I always ask myself how I can connect it to something that is already in there. So whatever I add needs to be connected to something that is already in there. And sometimes the connection can be quite tenuous and maybe again, someone from the outside might think, what do you mean these two things are connected? I know why they're connected and I connect them together. If I'm— read something fun and I go into my note-taking app and I can't come up with any way to connect it to anything, then it doesn't go in my note-taking app. It just means it was a fun thing to read. It was fun. It's great. I had a nice couple of minutes reading about this, but there's no way I'm going to reuse this or find it useful if I cannot find any way to connect it to anything I'm currently thinking about or that I've been thinking about in the past. So that's also a nice filter for me in terms of knowledge management to figure out, does it belong on the map, on the knowledge map or not? And if it doesn't, it's okay. You don't need to save everything and to remember everything that you consumed in terms of content on the internet nowadays.

Yeah, yeah. Now, likewise, are you using any ChatGPT models or LLMs or anything like that? Are you experimenting with any of that right now?

Oh yeah, absolutely. My favorite use case with— I use both ChatGPT and Claude. My favorite use case is to have conversations with researchers that I don't know. And some of them are not— they're not with us anymore. So I would not be able to have a conversation with them. I just upload a bunch of—

You're talking to dead people. You're talking to dead people.

I am actually. I never thought about it this way, but I am actually talking to dead people. The way I do it is that I upload a bunch of their research papers to the LLM, and then I have a conversation with the researcher and I ask them, so, you know, what does your research mean? Why does it matter? Why did you design it in this way? And what I love about this approach is that it's allowing me to have answers based on what is there, what is in the papers, but also what is not in there, or rather what is implicitly in there that the researcher did not explicitly write. So if you go in a paper and you read the limitation, limitation section, it will tell you what the researcher thinks are the limitations. But if you upload the research paper to an LM and ask what are the limitations, and please go beyond what's explicit written here. You actually point out limitations that in the most innocent of cases, the researcher did not notice was a limitation, or sometimes they just felt like, you know what, I'm actually not going to mention this. Nobody will notice, right? An LLM will notice and will tell you that this is a limitation of the research methodology that was used for this paper. So I find it absolutely amazing because I feel like not only I can talk to the researcher, whether dead or alive, but also I can almost like talk to their subconscious where I can ask questions about the why and what's there and what's, what was not included in the final paper.

So are you ingesting all of these papers maybe into one central place so that you can maybe have an all-encompassing person or bot to be able to ask these questions to? Or are you just uploading these like a few papers at a time, different places.

Yeah, I'm actually very excited about the latest models, Claude 3.7, to do this and have a more centralized place. So far with the previous models, it started getting a little bit confused and confusing when I had too many papers in there and it would make mistakes in terms of attributing some research to one researcher or another one. And so I was not getting the best results. What really worked for me was really to create one conversation. With one researcher, upload their papers, and then have this conversation. That being said, it was more of a technical limitation, and I think in the future I might be able to have more of a conference rather than a conversation.

Okay, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Let's, let's go back, go back to the book for a second. Why did I write this book? A life full of meaning, achievement, and hope often seems unreachable for Western men. But now, in these pages, an offer is lurking, waiting, expecting, daring, daring you to seize it. This is an offer to give up being a victim, to forever arise a victor. Visit RickWalker.com. Tell me a little about the publishing process, the timelines to be able to get to where you are right now versus when you finished the book. And sort of the marketing efforts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The publishing process was actually very interesting. I'm a first-time author, so all of this was completely new to me. And so I mentioned I had to write a book proposal. So we sent that book proposal, and by we I mean my agent, amazing agent, without whom none of that would have happened. She sent the book proposal to a bunch of publishers, and what happens is that if enough publishers are interested, then the book can go to auction. So the publishers will bid, and that's how you kind of decide who gets to buy the rights for the book. Then you need to write the book, which took me a little bit longer than a year. In my case, it was very helpful because I had been writing the newsletter for already quite a few years, so I had a lot of raw material. But I hadn't realized that how much work it still be. Like, it was nothing like taking the newsletters and turning them into a book. It was more— it was nice that I had already spent a lot of time thinking about these ideas, but I had to rewrite everything. Going from newsletter to this actual book that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it needs to actually be helpful and make sense and connect together, was, was a challenge. It was not really the, the writing muscle that I was used to exercising. So I wrote the, the book, and then, um, that's also the part that was interesting to me, is that if I had been self-published, in between the moment you're done writing and the moment you publish the book, there's not that much time. You just package it and then you hit publish and you upload it to— maybe there's something called Amazon KDP where that's going to distribute your book. You could do that. If you go with a traditional publisher, there are so many more steps in between the moment you finish writing and the moment it actually hits the shelves. And so I finished writing the book a good 8 months ago, 6 to 8 months ago. And we went through a bunch of rounds of copy editing. There was someone at Penguin that went through every single reference in the book and clicked on every link and made sure that what was written in the link corresponded to the way I phrased it in the book. And that's someone I think that's on their legal team. Just making sure that it all makes sense. And then the book cover, choosing the fonts, the design, and then starting marketing, and then sending copies to journalists, and so many steps that I had not even thought about before I got started with the process.

Yeah, yeah. And so you have— so you took 8 months from your finishing the book to Is that to today or to, or to the end of sort of the editing verification process?

No, that's 8 months between my final draft, which I thought was final, but they, they were a few more rounds, uh, my, what I thought was my final draft and publication date. 8 months. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. And then when did, when did sort of marketing, podcast booking, when did that start compared to your launch date?

So I announced that the book was available for pre-orders 6 months ago, so 6 months before the book launch. It was fairly quiet the first 3 months, and the fact that I had announced it was more useful in the sense that I could start reaching out to people and start thinking about what the marketing campaign could look like. But I don't know if it was— now again, it's my first book, so I didn't know. I— now that I look back, I don't know if it was necessary to announce it this early. Um, in the last 3 months though have been maybe some of the most intense months in my entire life. This is where things start accelerating. You have journalists that start reaching out, you have a bunch of podcast recordings, and, uh, organizing the actual book tour. So that means securing venues, talking to bookshops, and, uh, so many little things basically to finalize in order to, to bring this book into the world. And, and really, to me, the reason why I think it's so important to also spend quite a bit of time and energy in that last stretch, those last 3 months, is that if you put it back to back and you take all of these months, it was a good 2 years of writing this book, and even longer if you take into account the fact that I've been writing online for longer than that and thinking about these ideas for longer than that. And So I almost feel like I owe it to the work to put enough effort in those last 3 months to make sure that as many people as possible get to benefit from the work.

And so the book writing events, is that primarily like in bookstore signings, that sort of thing? Or are there other types of events?

Yeah, that's mostly that. It's— there's also— there are also some keynotes so I'm going to be speaking at keynotes at different conferences. They are book clubs. They are companies also that invited me to speak as part of whatever corporate training that they had. The format is still quite similar in general where it's really you coming as an author talking about the ideas in the book, trying to make it useful. And then people get a copy as part of attending the event.

Okay, okay, great. And you have, you have your own platform, right, through your newsletter, through your, your Twitter, through, through your different outlets. Um, and I imagine part of that helped you in the book auction process because I'm sure publishers want to see that you can bring your own audience as well. And so all these events, the podcast booking, that sort of thing, How much of that has been the publisher versus, versus kind of you on your own that you could have done anyway?

Yeah, so I first, I want to address the first part of your question and say that, yes, absolutely, my audience was actually probably a big point in the decision of, of wanting to buy this book. A lot of traditional publishers, they want to see some form of signal that this might resonate with people and that this might be successful. They are still making a bet, and in a very similar way as a VC makes bets with startups, they know, they fully expect that they might have the one or two very successful books that year that are going to cover for every other bet that they made. But obviously they still want to make an informed bet on, especially on a new author. So I just want to acknowledge that absolutely, I think that the, the fact that I had an audience, a newsletter, and especially a newsletter, so my audience is an audience of readers, people who actually enjoy reading, that was a strong signal, I think, for those publishers. So, uh, that's the first part. And then in terms of the kind of roles and responsibilities when it comes to the, the marketing campaign and putting it out there, it's, uh, a lot of it for the podcast A lot of that is me just reaching out to my network, letting my friends know that if they know someone who might think those ideas are interesting, I would love to come as a guest. But they have also— my publisher has also helped make connections that I think would have been quite hard for me to make that were outside of my personal network. So there is really something about working with a publisher such as Penguin, a very established one, where they can open doors that might be a bit harder for me to open, especially again as a first-time author. And I think that's what's very important to keep in mind as I'm sharing all of this, is that I haven't published a book before. And so, there's a lot of those things that I haven't done and I don't have the contacts, and especially the more traditional ones. I know some authors that have started in traditional publishing and that then went on, on self-publishing. So, so they, they both can work. In my case with this book, I'm actually super happy that I went with a traditional publisher. The other factor that's also very personal to me is that I'm based in the UK, but I'm launching this book in the US. And so having this US-based publisher was also very helpful to, again, make those connections and arrange for those things to happen, even though I was not based in the country. So those were some of the things that I thought about. But definitely, it's a— if anyone expects that they can work with a traditional publisher and they will just have to focus on the writing and that the publisher will take care of everything else, this is not how it works.

So are you a big George R.R. Martin fan?

I kind of— yeah, I read quite a few books from him. Yes.

I've found that he's been all over the place. Um, and he has quite the author brand too, right? Wearing the either the suspenders or the overalls and that, that little black or that little, little railroad worker hat that he wears. And he is, he is quite prolific as well. Um, what do you, what do you think? You know, I would, I would say it's pretty clear you're, you're a writer, whether you're, you know, you're a book author or newsletter writer. And you, I'm sure you do a lot of other writing for consumption in your, in your, in your business. Um, what would you say helps you write? Is it, is it mainly just having a block of time? Is it exercise? Is it, um, carbs? For instance, I can't write at all if I consume carbs so far that day, so I have to write early in the morning. It's got to be like 4 or 5 hours at a time, ideally 8 hours. Um, but, but tell me, like, what are the, the necessary things that you have to have in place in order to to write your very, very best?

So the number one for me is rest, being rested. I— there's really no point if I haven't slept well to try and, and write. And I will still do it because to me it's very important to at least sit down and, and see if something happens because, you know, you can be surprised sometimes. But, but usually it's not very good and it actually feels quite painful. And so In general, if I, I feel like I'm very tired and I've been trying, I'll take a little nap. That's just what I'll do. I'll stop forcing myself. I'll take a little nap, and that might mean I'll write a little bit less that day, but at least it will be a little bit higher quality than what I would produce if I forced myself. So rest is the number, the number one. And the, the second one is I think it's very important to have good creative output to also have good creative input. And so my content consumption has a massive impact on my writing, and I think that's the same for most people. I do notice it if— but that's connected to the tiredness. If I've been tired, and usually when I'm tired I end up scrolling on social media for a long time on the sofa doing nothing, um, and then it's, it's harder to, to write because it's as if my brain had turned into mush and, uh, and I don't feel really inspired. Whereas if I make sure that I have a good content diet and that I block a little bit of time for reading actual books about ideas that I'm curious about, my writing will automatically become a lot better. So for me, it's really, yeah, the rest and content diet.

Hmm. And so what sorts of things are you reading? Are you reading things about— things that are in your field? Are you learning about learning or productivity and those sorts of secondary types of benefits? Or, you know, what do you, what do you enjoy reading? And then what do you find yourself reading most often?

Yeah, my only really rule, if you can call that a rule, but it's just really making time for reading. And it can be anything and anything I'm curious about. So it actually ends up very often being completely outside of the field that I'm technically supposed to be working on. Because I'm a neuroscientist in the lab, I actually end up reading a lot of research papers that are about the stuff I'm supposed to be spending my time learning about. And so for my reading outside of the lab, I do tend to try to read other stuff. And so that can be novels. I think you can read a lot from— you can learn a lot from novels, from the decisions a character is making, just asking yourself, would I actually react like this or behave like this in this difficult situation? Historical novels also are interesting, not necessarily again in the sense of learning history but learning from history. Even though the details are not exactly the, the right ones because they try to make it a little bit more interesting, it will make you think about again what would you do in that situation. And so it's a great way to also learn more about yourself. And in terms of more like non-fiction books, I love science books. I love also philosophy books. I'm currently reading— a lot of people are surprised that I'm only reading this now, but I am reading the Tao Te Ching, which I started reading a couple of weeks ago. And, uh, so that has really, you know, nothing to do with my work and everything to do with my work. And this is how I feel about a lot of the books that I'm reading, is that you, you would not necessarily immediately connect it to the kind of work that I do, but anything that has to do about what it means to be human, the decisions that we make, the way we think, the way we feel. Any book that touches upon those ideas, and there are many books that fall in that category, will probably be interesting to me.

I love that. Yeah, Lao Tzu was one of the earliest, uh, philosophers. You know, I, I think, you know, it's funny, so I, I actually bought my first copy of that last month myself, and I've, I I, I'd never read it either. And, uh, I went into— I have this, I have this habit, and so whenever I go to a new city and I'm driving, right, I can, I can take whatever I want back. And I always go to these, these used bookstores here in the US. We have Half Price Books. And, and so I, I go in and I buy up all the, all the titles on a specific topic. So for instance, uh, 2 months ago I was traveling, I bought up every book that they had on, uh, Rembrandt Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Van Gogh. I mean, a lot of art books, but then a lot also a lot of biographical type of content. Um, this last time, last month, I went in and bought almost everything they had on Nazism and Hitler, and I bought Lao Tzu's work with it. And I— if you ever go to the checkout there, they make you buy your bag, so that, you know, you've got to— the books are heavy, so you have to buy those, the sturdy bags. And so every time I go, I've got to buy at least 2 new bags. And, um, I bought my 2 bags, and the guy refused to put the Lao Tzu in with the Nazi books. He put in his own bag separately. And, and so I had to carry, carry him out with this one, this one book in this bag and all the other books here. Um, but I found— so I have a, I have a reading library in my part of my offices, and And so what I'll do is I'll set these book bags, these bags of books down. Again, I only paid $5 for these books, so, you know, they're used books, they're not, not that expensive. And every day I will make myself, um, after I do my regular reading, I like do an accelerated read pass through that book, just one new book. And then I, I can only look at it at that one sitting, and then I got to put it up, and then I gotta— and so I have to get through those bags of books before I pick up anything else. So it usually takes me you know, 2 or 3 weeks and I'm through a couple bags of books and it's time to go out of town again. I buy more books, um, there. But it's, it's, it's a good way to do skims of books on top of doing deep dives in your— in my regular reading. But it's, it's funny that we just picked up this, the same classical book for the very first time, um, that we're just both now trying to get to it.

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And I, and I feel like it's like, it's also a lot of people might feel like, oh, um, you know, a little bit of, um, like feeling a bit self-conscious that you feel like, oh, that's something I should have read like such a long time ago, everybody around me has read it. But when you start asking people, there are so many fascinating classics, there's no way you're going to be able to go through all of them. And so if there's something you're curious about, and even if you feel like it's a bit late, I feel like it's better to pick it up now rather than never. So absolutely.

Absolutely, absolutely. Have you had it? Have you gone to a barbecue place there in Austin called the Salt Lick yet?

No. Okay, do they have books too?

They— no, they do not have any books. They don't— they definitely don't have any books, but they've got— if you like barbecue, if you want to try probably the best barbecue in Texas, it's called the Salt Lick there in Austin. It's a little bit outside of town, but it is the probably the number one place in, I would say, Texas to barbecue while you're there if you're going to be there for a while.

Uh, the reason why I was asking is because the copy of, uh, the Tao Te Ching that I got, I actually got in a wine bar in Austin that is also a bookshop. And so I was like, oh, so maybe barbecue and books, why not? It's Austin.

Bring a book, bring a book. That sounds good, that sounds good. Well, we will, we will link to the, to your upcoming book, um, down below. And what is the best way people want to buy want to buy bulk books or to reach out to you for, for keynote, what's the best way for folks to reach out to you?

Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to tinyexperiments.org or you can email me at tinyexperiments@nasslabs.com and let me know if you'd like to order more than one copy and we can get that sorted for you.

Okay. All right. We'll, we'll do that, Nev. We'll put those down in the, in the below link. But thanks so much, Anne-Laure. Thanks so much for your, for your help and helping us understand the ideas that you're working on. Thanks so much for your, your work that just benefits so many of us. I'm excited to dive deep into the book whenever I get my own copy. And, you know, looking forward to seeing how your, your, your book writing career takes off, just like your newsletter writing and the rest of the things that you've been involved with. So, so thanks so much for joining us and we really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yes. Thank you, everyone. Thanks a lot. Have a great one. We're going to roll the outtake now. Why did I write this book? A life full of meaning, achievement, and hope often seems unreachable for Western men. But now, in these pages and our offer is lurking, waiting, expecting, daring, daring you to seize it. This is an offer to give up being a victim to forever arise a victor. Visit rickwalker.com.