#614: Q&A with Tim on Wealth and Money, Book Recommendations, Advice on Taking Advice, C.S. Lewis, Relationships, Behavior Change and Self-Awareness, Why We Are All (Mostly) Making It Up as We Go, and Much More

Don't believe everything that you think ... I really think scrutinizing our thoughts and beliefs, which are the thoughts we take to be true, is... increasingly important in a world that is designed, mostly enabled by tech platforms and social media, to polarize the shit out of you and to reward you for making your viewpoints more and more extreme and simplified.

How do I feel about the bear market now? I think that no one should be surprised ... What goes up, comes down ... I am preparing to be in what we would consider not just a bear market but a full-fledged recession with high inflation for quite some time.

I fit in the category of someone who thought money would fix tons and tons and tons of things, and be able to exhale, and go, maybe, lay on a beach, and rub cocoa butter on my belly, and read novels, and be perfectly content to do that for months and months of the year. It turns out not to be the case...

I don't have overly political friends. I break up with them. I'm not kidding, generally. People, family—I get very good at redirection to other topics, or I just request that we not talk about politics. Nothing's going to be solved. It's generally, not always, but generally just salty old dudes bitching and moaning.

Basically, no one knows what they're doing. Or, put a different way, that may be too strong, that everyone is making it up as they go along ... As I heard, Stanley Druckenmiller say once, we should not confuse a bull market with being a genius.

I loved 'The Neverending Story,' the book, when I was young. And I misbehaved in school a fair amount, and I would get sent to detention, but what they didn't realize is I loved detention, because I was in the library, and so I could skip these classes that bored the hell out of me and just read whatever I wanted.

People have neuroses, or stories at the very least, around money that both help and hurt them, no matter how much money they have.

When I'm having a really shitty day, it's very common that I don't get much done or don't get anything done. I get to the end of my day, and I've been busy, maybe, and I can't remember a single thing— I could not write down more than one, perhaps, things that I got accomplished that were meaningful in any way.

You wouldn't think that cold exposure would be a real Archimedes lever here, but it does affect dopamine release... and, for me at least, has anti-depressive effects that last a while. It is not 10 or 20 minutes; there is some durability to it.

My view of higher education and graduate degrees, in general, is that it depends a lot on the caliber and name recognition of the school and also what that does to your professional opportunities.

For me, creative pursuit, right now, is dictated by who can I interact with? Even if it's just once a week, even if it's once every two weeks, how can this bring me closer to someone I want to be closer to?

If you know one person who is really, really good—they don't even need to be famous but just very, very competent... Someone who has cultivated a high degree of expertise and ability in any field... If you know one person, you can get to anyone else in that field, generally speaking.

One of the best ways to grow a podcast is focus on mega-celebrities and controversy—and I have almost no interest in doing either of those things.