#859: Q&A with Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. This is an in-between-isode, an experimental format that I have revisited a few times, and it's the good old fashioned Q&A. That is, I answer questions submitted and live questions by a small but elite group of test readers of my upcoming No Book. That's the working title, kind of a code name. See tim.blog/the No Book for more information and, I think, 10 or 20 free pages of the book, which should be forthcoming. This episode explores a wide range of topics, including the age of AI. Close to half of the submitted questions were related to artificial intelligence, and I include a bunch of caveats related to my limitations, but there are some thoughts that folks might find interesting, including the closest thing to an AI Nostradamus that I have found. Career pivots and figuring out what to do next. This is related to the AI question, certainly very, very interwoven. Networking at conferences, building offline advantage. This includes callback to my strategy for South by Southwest 2007, when I launched the 4-Hour Workweek. Everything still applies, in my opinion, even more so now. How to vet psychedelic practitioners and spot red flags, building great communities with zero-tolerance policies. I have some experience with that. Book recommendations from my personal shelf. Literally, the shelves right behind me when I recorded this. Thoughts on parenting. I'm sure many of you did not know that, like Pavel Durov of Telegram, I have 120 children scattered throughout this wonderful world, and much, much more. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, I would say conversation, more of a monologue with yours. Truly, thanks for listening.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?
And I'll do that by leading in with a question. How many of you invested in or even know of Diamond Rio? Diamond Rio? Anyone? MP Man F10? Come on now. You guys must remember MP Man F10. These are MP3 players that predated the iPod. And Jobs famously changed it from speeds and feeds into 1000 songs in your pocket. It also had the industrial design, engineering, supply chain, wizardry, along with his marketing genius of course, all to bring to bear on this thing called the iPod, which then produced, you guessed it, some of you wizened gray haired folks, but youngsters do not realizing iPod leads to podcasting. Yes, that was the genesis of this podcasting term. And the reason I bring this up is that I do not consider myself a bleeding edge investor, or even in a lot of instances, a bleeding edge user. I like to be on the dull edge. And I would say that the iPod is a great example of that, because if you looked at some of the technological trend lines, you looked at a few different pieces of hardware that had somewhat de-risked solid-state MP3 players, the timing was right for something to be taken from very, very niche and unwieldy to mainstream. And certainly we've seen that unfold. And I view AI very similarly. And in some respects, it is very amenable to that approach because things are changing so incredibly quickly. And if you hated a model three weeks ago, it might do exactly what you need today. And with all of that, I just want to say, I did not view myself as an AI expert. I think if you're looking for someone who seems to be the Nostradamus of AI, you should read up on Leopold Aschenbrenner. You can look up Situational Awareness the decade ahead. It was penned and published online June 2024 And the number of actual hits, predictive hits that Leopold had is staggering. It is just really about as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be. So Leopold Aschenbrenner, you should check him out. If you're looking for what's coming, if you're looking for what I have observed personally as a Muggle, someone who is non-technical, I'm not writing white papers, but I get to watch a very large audience and I have a lot of friends I can lean on, many of whom are technical. I can fill you in. All right. That's a whole lot of preambles. Let's hop into it. First question is from Hugo. In a world full of tool systems and AI, what human abilities or habits are becoming more valuable, not less? So I'll try to keep this pretty short. I would say the relational, the tactile, anything IRL in real life that can be extended also to, for instance, in my case, informational advantage, offline informational advantage. A lot of the LLMs are slicing and dicing the internet. One might argue all of them are doing that. And whether you are looking at longevity in professional terms, if you're looking at longevity in creative terms, I think putting on the lens of looking at what you can do in IRL that currently, now that certainly robotics are, on the edge of some type of Cambrian explosion, so who knows, maybe it's iRobot three years from now. But for now, the kind of offline differentiator is a big deal. And I would say the relational side, certainly the harnessing of awe, wonder, etc., and nature immersion, which sounds like I'm suggesting everybody disappear off into a commune in the woods or become homesteaders or something. That's not what I'm saying. But for instance, the fact that I have people I can text for very narrow types of expertise, even though they have the access of a generalist, allows me to have an informational advantage because none of that is online. Conversely, if you're using Chat GPT or Claude to try to assess a given public company as a good or bad investment or somewhere in between, you can rest assured that many, many people, perhaps even millions of people, have already done this and therefore you're going to be reading more or less the same thing as many others. So that's my stab at that first question. A lot of this is going to boomerang back in Fusion Notes. Let me take a sip of my sipping ketones, excuse me. This is sent to me by Scientist News. I've mixed 10 milliliters into 250 milliliters of water. Do not chug in all caps written with a marker on this experimental container of ketones. So we'll see. If I start seizureing, it'll make for a great short on social media. All right, next question I'm going to take a stab at is, this is from Jeff. With a pre-throat clearing not financial advice, in quotation marks, disclaimer, already granted to you by virtue of this question, where should a small investor be looking to invest in public markets as AI continues to eat our white-collar jobs in the coming months and years? All right, I know I indirectly already gave the caveat. I am not giving any investment advice because that is a terrible thing to do if you're not a registered financial advisor and all that stuff. I'm none of those things. So this is for informational purposes only. Number one, you shouldn't gamble, and I do kind of view it as gambling, or invest anything you cannot afford to lose completely because AI is moving so incredibly quickly, and there's a lot of whipsaw reactivity in the markets. Chat GPT comes out with something that connects to some type of industry in an oblique way, and suddenly six public stocks lose billions and tens of billions of dollars of market cap. There's a lot of craziness. So, as certainly has been said before me, the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So, don't play with anything you're not willing to lose. There are people talking about what's been termed halo trades, trying to look for things that are less likely to get disrupted or destroyed. Kind of the Warren Buffett approach to non-tech investing, by and large, right? Seas candy, railways, et cetera. But I would say that initially sparked by conversations with Kevin Rose, and I hesitate to even mention this, but I do think Google is in a very interesting position. Alphabet, the artist formerly known as Google. Alphabet is an interesting position to, in some respects, kind of own the full stack. Engineers aren't going to like that I'm using that term, but they have distribution. They have hardware in terms of TPUs. They have incredible unparalleled access to information. They've got Demis Hasimus and DeepMind internally. They've got the ability to spin things out like Waymo. There's just so much going on within Alphabet that I find it very fun and terrifying to take a close look at. And I say that also because it is completely unclear, I would say, how exactly Google compensates for or plans for shifting to some type of ad revenue from AI generated responses or an AI based, LLM based platform versus what we use today in the browser. And that's inevitably going to happen. So the bull case is very exciting for Google and the bear case is also pretty compelling. But as I'm looking at stuff out there, I tend not to screw around in the public markets. I just don't feel like I have any advantage whatsoever compared to everybody else who's fine slicing things. But in conversations with friends and looking at it pretty closely, I do think the alphabet's pretty interesting. So there you have it. I'm not saying invest in it. You could really lose money, and it might be that they lose for a while until they win. It could be they lose completely. So there is that. Next question's from David. What are the top three things you should never use AI for? I would say any skill you want to preserve in your head, you should probably not use AI for. So I use AI for editing right now. You very quickly end up on a slippery slope. So if I create a rough draft as I did with the self-help trap, for instance, I would then take that, feed it into these models and give them a personality. You are an editor from the New Yorker. This is your name. Maybe it's a famous editor or the person who worked with Robert Caro, whatever it might be. I mean, that's again, not to compare myself to those people, but I want a good editor. Give me feedback on this rough draft. What the model will do because they want to keep you using the model, of course, is it will give you all the feedback and then it will say, would you like me to incorporate all these changes and draft a version that uses all these things? And that's where I have deliberately hesitated. I've also played around with it and frankly, it's very good, but therein lies the danger because if you want to preserve your ability to synthesize and this will tie into questions shortly about creativity, I do think that it makes some sense to exercise caution. There are already scientists and researchers looking at the negative cognitive impacts of depending on AI, much like your ability to navigate is probably deteriorated since using Google Maps. And I would say net-net, each individual is more enhanced, augmented using these tools. But if you do want to keep certain muscles strong and able, that's where I would hesitate. And look, you can always change your mind later. But if you lose it, it's a hell of a lot harder to reclaim it. So that's where I am at the moment.