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July 22, 2026

Dr. Andrew Huberman — Peptides, Performance, and Protocols (#876)

Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. His research spans brain development, visual perception and repair from blinding diseases, the neuroscience of stress and resilience, and neural plasticity. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in top journals including Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron, and his honors include the Cogan Award, the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award.

In 2021, he launched the Huberman Lab podcast, which became and remains the most popular health and science podcast in the world. Dr. Huberman is the co-founder of Scicomm Media, the company behind the podcasts Huberman Lab, Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, and David Senra.

He is the author of Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

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Website | The Huberman Lab Podcast | Twitter | YouTube | Instagram

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Published on July 22, 2026 11:54

July 17, 2026

Better Than Free: How To Differentiate In The Age Of AI

Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and he is the author of one of my favorite essays on making a living as a creator: “1,000 True Fans.”

But if 1,000 True Fans tells you who your customers might be, how do you figure out what to sell them, especially in the age of AI?

I recently published “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?“, and reader Andy Vaughn recommended another Kevin Kelly essay in the comments: “Better Than Free.”

“Better Than Free” answers the what question, and I was shocked I hadn’t seen it before, as it first came out in 2008.

As luck would have it, I know Kevin, so I asked him if he’d like to update or revise the piece. He did so and kindly offered to let me post it here.

When perfect copies of your work cost nothing to make and distribute, what can you actually sell? In 2008, the copy machine was the internet. In 2026, it’s AI, which can produce not just copies but competent variations—of words, images, music, code, and advice—in seconds.

Fortunately, there is still terrain left for humans.

P.S. I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Which of these eight “generatives” are you betting on? What have you tried, and what has actually worked?

Enter Kevin…

[At the request of Tim Ferriss, I’ve condensed this short essay , which I wrote back in 2008, updating it a bit now that Patreon and Kickstarter are almost clichés. I did not have to change much; the central theme still stands: You need to sell things which can’t be copied.]

In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy. That friction worked as a constraint to limit the propagation of copies. If you wrote a book or developed a photograph or carved a statue, it took trouble to reproduce it. We invented a legal system whereby we would reward the creator of the book or the photo or the art or the music or the device by preventing others from reproducing copies of it without the creator’s permission. Creators were granted a temporary monopoly to make the only copies available via a copyright—the right to make copies. Selling legal copies became the livelihood of most creators.

In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone.

We now live in a digital age. If perfect reproductions of our best efforts as creators are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless, and stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.

Well, what can’t be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we purchase when we pay for something that could otherwise be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free in the eyes of the creator. Eight uncopyable values. I call these values “generatives” because they must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured in context of the exchange with the buyer. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, faked, replicated, counterfeited, banked, or reproduced. Instead the generative value must be generated uniquely, in place, in time. These generatives are what are sold, not the copies that carry them.

Eight Generatives Better Than Free

1. Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, the second it is produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via streaming or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. You might pay for a writer’s timely newsletter to get their insights that later appear for free on the web. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often devalued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.

2. Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room — as if it were performed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, no ads). Aspirin is practically free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA would be very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time-consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset and will be reluctant to switch and start over.

3. Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free; the software manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. Consultants make their living doing exactly that. For instance, for 25 years the for-profit company Red Hat has been selling support, training, consultation for enterprises using Linux and other free open source software. The copy of the code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to a user only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting a copy of your DNA is not free, but soon it will be. In fact, I’d bet that pharmaceutical companies will eventually PAY you to get your genes sequenced because they can sell targeted drugs to you that don’t work for everyone. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.

4. Authenticity — You might be able to grab an app for free, but you might like to be sure it is bug-free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was, indeed, actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.

5. Accessibility — Free doesn’t mean it is easy to get. A clearinghouse that can offer otherwise free material in a format that we find easy to use will get our money (Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc.). We want our particular music (remember my tastes), at any time, anywhere in the world. Ditto for books and blogs and movies and apps. In fact, ownership is overrated. Even free stuff has to be stored, backed up, and tended to keep it accessible. An agency can do that for a fee. It works with us to keep everything in order, at our fingertips, with a uniform and dependable interface and therefore acts as a generative force for the copies.

6. Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a phone. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res 16K on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. That hardcover book is embodiment. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same physical room? Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new, insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have and will have to move their bodies to. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. The book is free; the bodily talk by the author is expensive. The movie is free, but the toy merch is expensive. This formula is a common one for many creators.

7. Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if (1) it is very easy to do, (2) it entails a reasonable amount, and (3) they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. The advent of Patreon, a reliable platform that enables fans to easily, dependably, and satisfyingly pay for free stuff is a great boon to creators. I run two different Substack newsletters that are free. But many readers pay for it (via the easy subscription mode) just because they want to establish a connection with me — by directly supporting me. I thank them personally.

8. Findability — A price of zero does not help direct attention to a work. In fact “free” may sometimes make it easy to ignore. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless to the world. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of movies, millions of apps, millions of agents, millions of everything all demanding our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable. We pay the big aggregators like Netflix (and some users, like me, pay YouTube) in part to help us find good free stuff, which is why creators hook up with them. Right now the technologies of findability favor the economic interests of the big aggregators, rather than the creators, who only get a fraction of what the audience spends on their work. Alternatives like my 1,000 True Fans model can help, but are still constrained by the difficulty of findability. One of the promises of AI is that it could enable a more decentralized matchmaking function that would connect the creator who has a one-in-a-million interest with the thousand possible fans in the world with the same one-in-a-million interests.

***

In short, money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution to the demise of the copy because they are attention magnets. Ads have almost been the ONLY solution to the conundrum of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. Ads do work, but I think they are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.

Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies. These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not dependent upon the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse. These generatives are very human skills, by the way, which AIs are not very good at – yet.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED, which he co-founded in 1993, and the bestselling author of books including What Technology Wants , The Inevitable , and Excellent Advice for Living . Explore his work at KK.org , subscribe to his KK Substack , or follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram and on YouTube . Kevin’s most recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show explored his life philosophy, optimism, advice for younger generations, and more.

***

Back to me, Tim:

To make this concrete and provide a dose of inspiration, here are a few friends and past guests who each embody at least one principle brilliantly.

Brandon Sanderson . His “Four Secret Novels” Kickstarter raised $41.75 million, making it the most-funded campaign in Kickstarter history. Fans paid extra for backer-first releases, lavishly illustrated premium leather-bound hardcovers, swag boxes, and a yearlong experience. For a deep dive on Brandon’s business, check this out.
Ben Thompson ( Stratechery ). The tech news is free everywhere; subscribers pay $15 per month for his interpretation. Stratechery was an explicit inspiration for Substack and an early proof that a one-person publication could scale through paid subscriptions.
Maria Popova ( The Marginalian ). Since 2006, The Marginalian has remained free and advertising-free, supported by reader patronage. Its value is Maria’s trusted curation, synthesis, and ability to draw unexpected connections across literature, science, philosophy, and art.
Derek Sivers . He says he replies to every personal email and sells his books directly from his own site, including every digital format with a purchase and pricing additional paper copies close to cost. The words are easy to share; the direct relationship with Derek is scarce.
Ryan Holiday ( Daily Stoic ). The free Daily Stoic email reaches roughly one million subscribers. Its paid offerings include physical coins and medallions, challenges, courses, memberships, signed and leather-bound books, and an actual bookstore, The Painted Porch.
Seth Godin . More than 10,000 free blog posts built the trust. Books, talks, courses, and the cohort-based workshops he pioneered turned those freely available ideas into deeper, participatory experiences.
Boyd Varty . His books and free podcast distribute his ideas inexpensively; the scarce offering is a five-day Track Your Life retreat at Londolozi, including wildlife-tracking expeditions, personal coaching with Boyd, and work with master trackers. You cannot download that.
Matt Mullenweg . WordPress is free and open-source. Automattic—the company behind the hosted WordPress.com service, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other products—provides paid hosting, security, commerce, support, and other services around an open ecosystem. It is a modern version of “software, free; the software manual, $10,000.”

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Published on July 17, 2026 11:27

July 16, 2026

The Random Show — Tim and Kevin Talk Retreats, Mortality, AI Predictions, Supplements, Rock Climbing at (Almost) 50, and Not Waiting for “Someday” (#875)

In this edition of The Random Show, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose reunite over tequila to talk Zen retreats, learning to rock climb at (almost) 50, mortality and grief, why you should stop saying “one day,” AI predictions , and much more.

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Want to hear the last time Kevin and I got together for a Random Show? Listen to our Couch Edition, in which Kevin and I discussed our Zen retreat with Henry Shukman, DIY vagus nerve stimulation, my Bertolotti’s Syndrome back-pain breakthrough, balance boards and slacklining, Emil Abrahamsson’s tendon-strengthening protocol, photobiomodulation and urolithin A for mitochondria, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird-feeder obsession, and much more.

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DISCLAIMER FROM TIM FERRISS: I am not an investment adviser. Nor is Kevin Rose. All opinions are mine alone. Or his. There are risks involved in placing any investment in securities or in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies or in anything. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis of any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person, and that includes you, my dear listener or reader. Everything you’re going to hear is for informational entertainment purposes only.

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Published on July 16, 2026 09:33

July 7, 2026

Guy Oseary — The Legendary Hollywood Power Broker on 5-Minute Decisions, 36 Years of Managing Madonna, 26 IPOs, and Spotting Magic First (#874)

Guy Oseary (@guyoseary) has been spotting talent before anyone else could see it for nearly four decades. Under his leadership at Maverick Records, Maverick sold more than 100 million albums. Guy has managed some of the biggest names in music, including Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and U2, and was named Variety‘s Music Mogul of the Year in 2022. He executive produced Twilight, which became one of the most successful franchises in movie history, generating more than $3.5B.

Guy was also an early investor in Vita Coco and co-founded A-Grade Investments and then Sound Ventures, now with nearly $2 billion under management. At A-Grade, his hits included Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify. Sound Ventures launched with less than $100M and has since had 86 exits and 26 IPOs.

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Music Candlebox by CandleboxCome to Daddy by Aphex Twin Confessions on a Dance Floor by MadonnaFrozen by Madonna Jagged Little Pill by Alanis MorissetteMusic by MadonnaPerfect by Alanis MorissettePurple Rain by PrinceRay of Light by MadonnaYou Oughta Know by Alanis MorissetteFilms & TV Beverly Hills, 90210 Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief Twilight Books Where Did I Go Right?: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead by Bernie BrillsteinPeople & BandsJonas Åkerlund Sam Altman Dario Amodei Aphex Twin Glen Ballard Jim Balsillie Marc Benioff Bernie Brillstein Candlebox Rosemary Carroll Kurt Cobain Chris Cunningham Sky Dayton Freddy DeMann Paul Drews Daniel Ek Effie Epstein Evil E Shawn Fanning Flea John Frusciante Michael Goldstone Bill Gross Woody Harrelson Hen Gee Hole Michael Hutchence Ice-T Billy Idol INXS Anthony Kiedis Neerav Kingsland Mike Kirban Jack Kornfield Josh Kushner Ashton Kutcher Courtney Love Madonna Matthew McConaughey Mirwais Demi Moore Mark Morgan Alanis Morissette Morrissey Muse Elon Musk Nirvana William Orbit Sean Parker Prince The Prodigy Rage Against the Machine Red Hot Chili Peppers Steve Rifkind Chris Rock Seth Rodsky Stéphane Sednaoui Mikey Shulman Chad Smith John Somorjai U2 Reese WitherspoonCompanies & OrganizationsAirbnb Anthropic Brillstein Entertainment Partners EarthLink Epic Records Fred Segal Geffen Records (DGC)Idealab Maverick Entertainment Group Maverick Management MTV Napster OpenAI Research In Motion / BlackBerry Rhyme Syndicate Salesforce Ventures Sound Ventures SpaceX Spotify Suno Thrive Capital Uber The Vita Coco Company Vitaminwater (Glacéau)Wise Guy ProdsTools & AppsChatGPT (OpenAI)Claude (Anthropic)Grok (xAI)X (Twitter)

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Published on July 07, 2026 18:40

June 25, 2026

The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871)

“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka” — Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis on the health benefits, sacred history, and unjust prohibition of the most misunderstood plant on Earth.

Dr. Andrew Weil is a pioneer in integrative medicine and founder of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair and serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health.

Wade Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. From 2014 to 2024 he served as Professor of Anthropology and BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia, and from 2000 to 2013 as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.

Connect with the Beneficial Plant Research Association (BPRA):

Website (scroll down to donate)Coca Leaf Research Coca Leaf Documentary Coca Leaf Retreat

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Previous Guest AppearancesDr. Andrew Weil — Optimal Health, Plant Medicine, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #350Dr. Andrew Weil — The 4-7-8 Breath Method, Cannabis, The Uses of Coca Leaf, Rehabilitating Demonized Plants, Kava for Anxiety, Lessons from Wade Davis, The Psychedelic Renaissance, How to Emerge from Depression, Tales from 50+ Visits to Japan, Matcha Benefits, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #615Famed Explorer Wade Davis — How to Become the Architect of Your Life, The Divine Leaf of Immortality, Rites of Passage, Voodoo Demystified, Optimism as the Purpose of Life, How to Be a Prolific Writer, Psychedelics, Monetizing the Creativity of Your Life, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #652Books & FilmsOne River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest by Wade Davis The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community by Catherine J. Allen Reefer Madness Light at the Edge of the World by Wade DavisArticles, Research, & Relevant ResourcesThe New Politics of Coca by Andrew Weil | The New YorkerThe Secret History of Coca by Wade Davis | Rolling StoneThe Therapeutic Value of Coca in Contemporary Medicine by Andrew T. Weil | Journal of EthnopharmacologyCoca: High Altitude Remedy of the Ancient Incas | Wilderness & Environmental MedicineDoes Chewing Coca Leaves Influence Physiology at High Altitude? | Indian Journal of Clinical BiochemistryCoca: The History and Medical Significance of an Ancient Andean Tradition | US National Library of MedicineBeta-Carotene and Smoking: Can the Combination Cause Cancer? | HealthlineNutritional Value of Coca by James A. Duke, David Aulik, and Timothy Plowman | Biodiversity Heritage LibraryRooted in Colonialism, Coca Prohibition Could Be Nearing Its End | FilterCoca Chronicles: Bolivia Challenges UN Coca Leaf Ban | Washington Office on Latin AmericaReport of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf | UN Social and Economic Council (ECOSOC)Fact Sheet: Coca Leaf and the UN Drugs Conventions | Transnational InstituteCoca Yes, Cocaine No? | Transnational InstituteCoca Myths | Transnational InstituteObservations on the Effects of Cuca, or Coca, the Leaves of Erythroxylon Coca by Robert Christison | The British Medical Journal (1876)Travel Medicine, Coca and Cocaine: Demystifying and Rehabilitating Erythroxylum | Tropical Diseases, Travel Medicine, and VaccinesMy Favorite “Smart Drugs” | Tim FerrissColombia: Potential Cocaine Production Increased by 53 Per Cent in 2023 | UN Office on Drugs and CrimeThe Origins of Coca: Museum Genomics Reveals Multiple Independent Domestications from Progenitor Erythroxylum Gracilipes | Systematic BiologyDrug Scheduling | US Drug Enforcement AdministrationA Return to the Village: Community Ethnographies and the Study of Andean Culture in Retrospective edited by Francisco Ferreira with Billie Jean Isbell | University of LondonWhere They Sing to the River: Sierra Nevada, the Heart of the World by Wade Davis | Literary HubCoca Chronicles: Monitoring the UN Coca Review | Transnational InstituteCutting Sugar in Drinks with ‘The Most Illicit Plant in the World’ | FoodNavigatorPsilocybin Proves Promising Treatment for Cocaine Use Disorder, According to UAB Study | UAB NewsDr. Nora Volkow — Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) | The Tim Ferriss Show #673RFK Jr. Launches Plan to Curb “Overprescribing” of Psychiatric Drugs | CNNPhiladelphia CBP Discovers “Green” Cocaine in Shipment from Colombia | US Customs and Border ProtectionIncidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients: A Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies | JAMAThe Annual Running of the Boundaries (from Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis) | PlaytimeMycophobia: The Fear of Mushrooms Reinterpreted | North SporeArgentina Has a Powerful Secret Weapon in the World Cup Final by Wade Davis | Rolling StoneObservations on the Effects of Cuca, or Coca, the Leaves of Erythroxylon Coca by Robert Christison | The British Medical JournalThe Weird (and Wired) Truth Behind What’s Really in Coca-Cola by Claudia Geib | EaterPeopleCatherine J. Allen Harry Anslinger James A. Duke Howard B. Fonda Joseph Goebbels Hermann Göring Peter Hendricks Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Christopher McCurdy Eliot Ness Timothy Plowman Richard Evans Schultes Nora Volkow P.O. WolffOrganizations & InstitutionsAndrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at University of Arizona Beneficial Plant Research Association (BPRA) / The Coca Project University of Florida College of Pharmacy US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)Harvard University Herbaria and Botanical Museum National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)World Health Organization (WHO)Companies & ProductsCoca-Cola Matcha Kari 7 Up Stepan Company True Food KitchenSubstances, Compounds, & ConceptsAdderall (Amphetamine)Atropine Beta-Carotene Coca (Erythroxylum Coca / E. Novogranatense)Cocaine Controlled Substances Act Diamox (Acetazolamide)Kola Nut Kratom Mambe Modafinil Prozac (Fluoxetine)Psilocybin Ritalin (Methylphenidate)Scopolamine Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961)Timestamps[00:00:00] Start.[00:02:38] When coca tea cured my brutal altitude sickness in Chile.[00:04:01] Andy meets coca, 1965: the Andes’ master medicine for gut, energy, mood, metabolism.[00:06:20] 14 alkaloids, one scapegoat.[00:07:11] The paradox: one remedy for both diarrhea and constipation.[00:11:37] 8,000 years, zero addiction — and the 1975 study no one wanted to run.[00:13:11] Eradication began 60 years before there was a cocaine problem.[00:16:27] Two nations inside Peru: alcohol versus coca.[00:17:05] The 1950 UN commission that dictated coca policy by pseudoscience, fear, and racism.[00:18:10] Filed beside fentanyl and heroin; 250,000 families and the price of peace.[00:20:03] What coca actually feels like: milder than half a coffee, no crash, no withdrawal.[00:24:19] Decoupling the leaf from the cartels; why crop substitution is a fantasy.[00:25:54] Domesticated three times; the accident of Schedule II.[00:27:49] The sacred leaf: k’intu, cruceta, Pachamama, runakuna.[00:31:11] Hayo in the Sierra Nevada, and Latin America’s most-denied gift.[00:32:53] The wedge in the door: demand, the FDA, and an entrepreneur’s gold mine.[00:40:22] The story coca deserves — a film, green powders, and one good study.[00:43:12] Monkey mind, the tax of consciousness, and an 84th birthday on coca.[00:47:35] Who to fund: McCurdy and the hunt for legal leaves.[00:49:17] Could coca treat cocaine addiction? Cost, and NIDA’s timing.[00:53:18] “Green cocaine” at the airport: coca is to cocaine as potatoes are to vodka.[00:56:58] A 24-hour ritual run powered entirely by coca.[00:59:07] Why two men gave their careers to one leaf — and the pharmaceutical body count.[01:06:22] America’s legal cocaine capital, and Coke’s secret recipe.[01:09:08] No accident: the hideous prose behind laws we still obey.[01:15:42] Parting thoughts.Quotes from the Interview

“If I told you there was a plant that you could take that gave you a slight lightness of being, a slight kind of skip in your step, a sense of well-being that eliminated all these sort of existential little neuroses that we all suffer as conscious beings, and it allowed you to focus at task whatever that creative task was, whether it was a spinning of wool or the writing of digital code, and you could sit at task all day long concentrating on task with immense focus, with no sense of being under the influence of any plant, nothing as harsh as a second cup of coffee, and you found yourself at the end of the day ready to go home, have dinner, and do it all over again the next day, the truth is that coca has this capacity to improve our lives.”

— Wade Davis

“[Coca is] as important to that population as peppermint and chamomile are in European medicine. It’s their major medicinal plant.”

— Andrew Weil

“Coca has been used in South America by virtually every culture of the Andean and Northwest Amazon for 8,000 years. And during that time, there’s been no evidence whatsoever of any toxicity, let alone addiction.”

— Wade Davis

“In coca, there are 14 alkaloids. Cocaine is one of them. They all have similar chemical structures and none of them have ever been studied. Once we isolated cocaine from the leaf, everybody lost interest in everything else.”

— Andrew Weil

“Coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka.”

— Wade Davis

“As the anthropologist Catherine Allen said, to deny people coca in the Andes is not like denying the Germans beer or the British tea or the French coffee. It’s actually an act of cultural genocide because you cannot be runakuna, you cannot be of the Andes, of Pachamama, if you do not use the leaves.”

— Wade Davis

“I think that coca is the most perfect example of how we’ve gone wrong in our relations with the natural world, really failing to see that plant for what it is, confusing it with this one component of it, and then getting ourselves in enormous amounts of trouble.”

— Andrew Weil

“I feel that liberating coca is the final act of my professional life. I feel that very sincerely.”

— Wade Davis

Want to hear another episode that untangles the curse and blessing of coca? Listen to this one with ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin, in which we learned about the 8,000-year history of the coca leaf, the varieties of coca and their uses, coca-leaf bonding among the Kogis of Northern Colombia, surviving altitude sickness in the Andes, the adventures of Richard Evans Schultes, ayahuasca and shamanic knowledge, the biocultural conservation of the rainforest, and much more.

The post The “Divine Leaf” with 8,000+ Years of Use — Exploring the Many Benefits of Coca with Dr. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis (#871) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on June 25, 2026 10:08

June 18, 2026

Death by 1,000 Compromises: How to Tap Into Founder Mode

A signpost with four signs pointing in different directions stands silhouetted against a crimson and blue sunset.

The following is a guest post from Mark Pincus (@markpinc), an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist (including signatory of The Giving Pledge), and the founder of Zynga, the pioneering social- and mobile-gaming company behind Zynga Poker, FarmVille, Words with Friends, CSR 2, and many others.

Mark earned a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He created and teaches the strategic product management class at Stanford University. He was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Napster, among other notable startups. Mark is the co-founder of the investment fund Reinvent Capital, which has backed Joby, Aurora, and SpaceX. Prior to Zynga, Mark founded a series of consumer tech companies, including FreeLoader, Inc., which was acquired in 7 months; Support.com, which went public; and the early social network Tribe Networks.

Mark’s new book is Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!

The first chapter, “Book of Life,” is below.

Please enjoy!

Enter Mark…

Know your goal or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.

At 28, I found myself washed up and living in a junior one-bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. I had been the only kid in my Harvard Business School section to graduate without a job. Over the years, my classmates had become partners at Goldman and McKinsey or had started hedge funds, while I managed to get fired from (or was asked to leave) every place I worked. I was now being pushed out of Columbia Capital, a then-fledgling venture capital firm run by future-senator Mark Warner. I spent my afternoons playing pickup soccer and watching HBO, leaving the office by 4 p.m. At night, I drank beers at the Zoo Bar with my best friend Tom Cole—who was living on my sofa—and a bunch of government mainframe engineers, all of us complaining about our lame jobs.

I found myself in a synagogue for the first time since my bar mitzvah. During Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I sat listening to Hebrew prayers I couldn’t follow and started writing in a notebook. Over the next 10 days, until Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year, I wrote about all the reasons my life sucked. I documented my bad decisions, bad habits, and failed dreams and how I felt like a passive follower rather than an active protagonist in my own story.

What I hated most about my life was that I smoked cigarettes. So, on October 19, 1994, I made a decision: I would do a lifetime quit. Even if I didn’t accomplish anything else, 1995 would still be a seminal year in my life—at least Mark 1996 would thank Mark 1994 for cutting out the cigarettes.

Throughout 1995, every day I didn’t smoke was proof that I could control and actively direct my life. The next fall, I went back to my Book of Life. I got more ambitious with what I signed up for. That year I quit my job and launched my first company, FreeLoader. Let’s acknowledge that it was both easier and harder than it would be today—easier because I had no opportunity cost and nothing great to walk away from, and harder because there was nothing great to turn to if the company failed. Amazingly, seven months later, FreeLoader was acquired for $38 million. That allowed me never to work for anyone again and enabled my career as a product maker and entrepreneur.

This experience became the foundation of my Book of Life practice for the next 30 years. Each year I ask: What would Future Mark thank Present Mark for doing? Then, I sign up for a specific change or goal and commit to making it happen.

Some years have been more successful than others. After 1994 and 1995, I thought I could do anything, so I committed to going on a date with Alicia Silverstone, who had just starred in Clueless. I never came close, even though a friend in LA told me she worked out at his gym. (I did eventually meet her in 2018 after we matched on Raya.)

When signing up for my next year, I like to focus on two types of actions or goals. The first is something in my control, like removing my wisdom teeth, or something I can change in my everyday habits, such as quitting alcohol, starting intermittent fasting, or having a daily step goal. Because these are in my control, I know that if I commit, I can succeed. Achieving these first actions helps me accomplish the much bigger second type of goal, which is usually a massive, life-changing dream, such as quitting my job and starting a new company.

My Book of Life hasn’t just kept me accountable to personal goals; it’s also kept me connected to the deeper “why” behind my work. Without this regular practice, it would be too easy to get distracted and lose sight of these convictions. For example, I’m a pretty good investor, but I will never be an amazing one. I don’t care to become one and, honestly, can’t see what difference it would ever make if I were. That’s not my “why.”

A Book of Life is like a compass that helps you come back to your North Star—what will matter to you over your entire life, not just today or even this year. It is what I credit for giving me the focus to found 10 companies and the discipline to sidestep countless dead ends.

Book of Life Practice

My Book of Life practice includes a specific book that I return to year after year. I write in it only during the 10 days between the Jewish High Holidays.

I start off on Rosh Hashanah by reading all of the past years’ entries, cover to cover, to remember where I was, how I felt, and what I hoped for then. I write notes in the margins to my old self saying things like “Hey, good news, we did this” or “I still haven’t done that.”

I like to break the practice into three categories:

Taking stock of where I am at this moment. This is my “spiritual balance sheet.”Looking at the last year, how I did against my goals, which is my “spiritual income statement.”Notes on the next year and thinking about what I hope to get done. What can I commit to?

I begin each new year by writing about how I am feeling. I do that because when I read past years, I want to go back and touch that moment in time. I try to connect with Mark 1994. Do I get who he was and what he thought about? Do I know what he was worried about? As I look back, I see a lot of frustration that I hadn’t committed to more and accomplished more.

Next, I note major events that happened in the past year. I devote a page to what stands out for me, good and bad: weddings, birthdays, health moments, major trips, relationships, challenges. At times, this page includes world events.

As I near the end of the 10 days, I start writing about what I can do in the coming year. For the past 20 years I’ve written, “Next year I’m going to launch Dot Earth.” In 2006, I blogged that there should be an open data transfer protocol (like http) for more than just static web pages. I started dreaming of a metaverse, accessible through the web, that would allow us to connect to interactive experiences far beyond games. I imagined users typing in a single URL to accomplish something in the real world (e.g., I wanted to type zazie.colevalley.earth to get my favorite local coffee blend). I started calling this vision Dot Earth and imagined a new top-level domain system like Dot Com. It’s an instinct that has haunted me for the past 20 years. It was one of the threads that led me to found Zynga. There, I returned to this idea so many times that my teams nicknamed it Mashed Potato Mountain, from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which you will get if you’ve seen it). In recent years, I’ve been working on a company called Erth.AI, which is building the first building block, a browser-based game engine that works in real time with large language models (LLMs). The goal is to enable anyone to vibe create interactive experiences that connect to the real world. I’m not the only one working on their vision for the metaverse. Zuck has invested over $80 billion and even changed his company name to Meta. Even though he is pulling back now, I’m still a believer.

Partner with Your Future Self

When I review my Book of Life each year, I’m having a conversation with myself across time. I look for patterns in how I’ve lived—the surf trips I repeat annually, ending the summers at Burning Man. Some years are indistinguishable, which is always a wake-up call, telling me it may be time for disruption.

As I look back, I see a painful pattern. The story my book seems to tell is that my biggest growth and company building moments have only come from my deepest despair. The more frustration I felt, the more likely that time was associated with me taking a disruptive action—usually starting a company. And the happier I have been with my life, the harder it has been for me to sign up for a big change. In 1994, when I was the most unhappy, I signed up for the biggest disruption of my life (quitting my job and basically burning my résumé) and achieved the biggest positive change, a lifelong career as a product founder. So, if you are feeling dissatisfied, the good news is that this is the best time to do something about that feeling.

Great product makers and entrepreneurs do something similar. Mark Zuckerberg signs up for one major change or goal every year and used to list these as “life events” on his Facebook timeline. Some more clearly involve partnering with future Zuck, such as learning Mandarin, while others are a bit less obvious, like eating what he killed for a year or wearing a tie every day in 2011. More recently, Zuck committed to becoming a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter. Jeff Bezos has what he calls a regret minimization framework to help him make choices he’ll be thankful for in the future.

The things we regret aren’t the TV shows we missed or the extra day at the beach we skipped. We regret the book we never wrote, the instrument we never learned, the health issue we never addressed. We miss not taking the time to fix our teeth or our messed-up knee or running a marathon. I regret not learning guitar. I wish one of those “lost years” had been dedicated to that skill; I’d be playing today, thanking my past self. That’s the point of partnering with your future self—making sure each year contains at least one meaningful accomplishment and that you are taking full advantage of this life.

In 2016, I lost my original Book of Life, which contained 22 years of reflections. While painful, this loss was an important reminder not to be too attached to anything. It also forced me to sit down and try to remember one seminal achievement from each year. For some years, I couldn’t recall anything important. The blank spaces in that exercise taught me as much as the filled ones. That happened out of necessity, but it’s a good exercise and a good place to start a Book of Life practice.

Build a Time Machine

I think of my Book of Life as a time machine that can take me backward and forward in my own life and help me make better decisions. I write notes to my past self in the margins—and many to my future self as well. It’s a lifelong dialog. The practice of coming back to today can be a powerful tool to help motivate us to go after moonshot ideas but also to reset priorities and make hard decisions like killing marginal projects. This practice builds a hunger to disrupt my own patterns.

I saw Tony Robbins do this with 5,000 people in an odd but powerful exercise where he turned the lights off and asked us all to imagine our lives in 20 years if we never changed what we hated most about ourselves and our lives. For 30 minutes I listened as people wailed and cried.

For me this has always felt like a positive exercise (no wailing required). If I come back in time from five years in the future, what will I thank myself for doing? Today, it’s going all in on AI and launching products and companies that deliver on my vision of enabling everyone to live their lives at the speed of play.

Stop Time

There are moments when we realize history is happening around us. These moments, which can be externally driven or your own creation, are when I like to say out loud to myself and my teams, “We need to stop time.”

This is a rallying cry to stop work as usual and get intense, often about a new direction. We have to check in on whether our path still makes sense given whatever new information we’re seeing in the market, and perhaps make hard decisions like a small or big pivot. Then we need to be all in on sprinting to our, hopefully, more clear and relevant objective. Our teams often resist this; some may even opt out. But if you’re right, the team will quickly show up in a much more committed way.

One powerful example was early in building Zynga. In the fall of 2007, the Facebook app ecosystem was exploding and so were our projects. Our teams were spread too thin across a bunch of word games and other small app ideas in addition to our core Zynga Poker game. I called everyone into a room one Monday and said we could keep on building these random new games like everyone else, maybe launching another 10, or double down on Poker, which was at 400,000 Daily Active Users (DAU), possibly doubling it to 800,000 and beyond. I saw the power and competitive advantage in building and running one “franchise” app versus treading water like everyone else, constantly launching new apps to replace the older ones nobody was supporting. It was a risky, uncomfortable bet with no data to prove this would work, and nobody liked it. I forced this decision through anyway, and after some grumbling and friction, we soon had the whole company focused on this one simple goal, which we did achieve. It was also instrumental in setting the strategy for the company, which is true to this day, of building forever franchises (we’ll revisit the power of franchises later).

Time moves so fast that if we don’t intentionally shape these blocks, we risk having nothing to show for them. Committing to a vision with specific outcomes is a way to stop time.

This practice spills over to being disruptive with your teams and products. It’s not necessarily efficient. But being a great product leader and pursuing a big vision almost always means you will have to stop and switch to get the train moving in the right direction. These switches may happen frequently, because the right direction now is often very different from what it was last month or even last week. I always say to my teams, “We need to stop time, because this is so important.”

Stop Being an Expert Witness

My high school yearbook quote, which was written by my classmates, was “Some people have tact. Others tell the truth.” This prophetic line would define my early career. When in business school and interviewing for Disney, I was asked how to bring Disney World to Middle America—a replica in every city. I told my interviewer what I thought: “That doesn’t sound like a good strategy. Multiple lesser-quality parks will probably hurt your brand.” I didn’t get asked back for another interview.

Throughout my career, I found myself functioning as an expert witness—the person who is closest to the data (and the right answer) but furthest from the decision. During a summer internship at Bain & Company, I proudly presented evidence proving that in the snack food industry—the area I was investigating—Bain’s foundational graph (which was created by Mitt Romney himself) was incorrect. Higher relative market shares did not always lead to higher return on sales. I thought Bain was going to offer me a full-time job on the spot. Instead, people were so offended that they walked out of my presentation. No one spoke to me for the rest of my internship.

Later, at TCI, which was then the biggest cable company in the world, run by the legendary John Malone, my boss asked me to analyze an opportunity to put $400 million into Prodigy, the biggest internet service of its time. “Prodigy is a bad service that loses massive money. There’s this other newly public company, AOL, and we could buy that whole company for $110 million,” I said. “Why don’t we just do that?” TCI didn’t do either deal. Prodigy ultimately went bankrupt. In another meeting, after I presented to Malone why we shouldn’t do a deal he really wanted to get done, he said, “I don’t need some wet-behind-the-ears MBA telling me what’s a good investment.” That seemed like the end of my career at TCI.

In each of these jobs, I was the victim in a storyline that kept repeating: The adults would make the final decision, and the underlings like me would then go try to make it work—and try to limit the damage. I didn’t believe in paying dues and working my way up corporate ladders. I struggled with the management principle of “disagree and commit.” I was more “disagree and disagree.” I didn’t make a good employee, although I later realized I was exactly the kind of hire I wanted on my future teams.

The expert witness has been an important concept throughout my career. I was a frustrated expert witness in jobs I had in my twenties; later, I learned to hire other expert witnesses and set them free as “CEOs” by giving them the authority to make decisions in their area of expertise. What’s your current situation? Are you an expert witness, close to the answers but far from the authority to implement them? Or are you in a founder position, and perhaps you can hire expert witnesses and set them loose to prove they’re right?

We All Start as Outsiders

My instinct for my first company, FreeLoader, started in the middle of the night in 1994. I was haunted by this feeling that my life was going nowhere. At the same time this thing I’d been waiting for and dreaming about—this public online network (the internet)—was happening right in front of me, and I wasn’t a part of it. I was filled with FOMO. I felt like an outsider.

Ten years earlier, when I was in college, my brain was infected by George Gilder’s book Microcosm. He pointed out that the previous 100 years had been about the macrocosm, or the physical material world, where fortunes were made from laying railroads and building shopping malls. The next 100 years would be all about the microcosm, or the microchips connected to networks, spreading ideas and knowledge at the speed of light. He predicted that, just as calculators went from taking up an entire room in the 1950s to becoming keychains given away at the bank, everything around us would eventually be infused with productivity gains, becoming abundant and almost disposable.

Now, a decade later, everything was happening in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I found myself trapped in DC, which felt like the furthest possible place from this tech future. Even though I was such an outsider, I felt at a deep instinctive level that I could visualize the whole thing. But I didn’t know how to code. I hadn’t worked at any tech companies. I had no credibility.

The only thing I could think to do was write a long essay about what was happening. I stayed up all night writing about how the Mosaic/Netscape browser and the publicly available internet were going to end the Microsoft monopoly. The browser was going to break open software and internet and consumer services so that any entrepreneur could compete.

I emailed my essay to the editor of Interactive Week, the only publication that was covering new media at the time. I had nothing to lose and not that much to gain. I just had to tell someone what I had figured out and to see whether they thought I was right.

The editor emailed right back asking, “Who are you?” Then he used this thesis as a front-page story under his byline without mentioning me. I didn’t care. I was impressed that Interactive Week thought that I—a nobody, an outsider—had figured things out to the point that they wanted to publish my essay as their own.

The editor threw me a bone when a week or two later he interviewed me. He published a back-of-the-book profile on me as an up-and-coming venture capitalist. Fred Wilson, a junior partner at Euclid Partners, a little venture firm in New York, read the piece and got in touch. Fred was the lone partner at his firm who wanted to do software and internet. When he called, I thought he was interviewing me to be an associate. But when I got there, I saw that his office was so tiny and so full of papers and books that there was no way he could give me a job; there was literally nowhere to put me.

“The world doesn’t need another VC,” Fred said. “What we really need are entrepreneurs we can back. Do you have any ideas?”

I wanted to build consumer software for the web. That was exactly what I had written about in my Book of Life. I had committed to quit my job and go for it, even if at the time I didn’t know what that looked like. So when Fred gave me this small entry, I pounced on it. And it eventually became FreeLoader.

Build a House You Want to Live In

Part of what I get from my Book of Life practice is clarity about my intentions. Each time I’ve started a new company, I’ve tried not to make the same mistakes, though sometimes I’ve overcompensated and made new ones.

By the time I founded Zynga at 41, I had started three other companies—one acquired, one public, and one failed—and learned hard lessons about control. It wasn’t fashionable to still be founding companies at that age. Many of my founder peers had become VCs, and conventional wisdom claimed backing founders over 30 was a mistake. But I wasn’t doing this for a job or money; I was doing this for my passion and satisfaction.

In all my previous companies, especially Support.com, I made so many compromises that paradoxically, as the company achieved bigger milestones, it became less and less a place where I wanted to work. (“Know your goal, or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.”) These compromises involved endless small decisions about location, office space, board and team members. Many founders wake up one day and say, “This isn’t fun anymore, but look what I achieved. I guess I’m just a casualty of our success.” Then it becomes acceptable to think that the tour of duty’s over, and it’s time to hire a CEO. VCs will never argue with that decision; they love it. But it’s rarely the right long-term choice for the company.

As founders, we make sacrifices, similar to parents. We put the needs of the mission and organization ahead of our own. But if founders are the most essential employees—the keepers of the flame for the mission, vision, and cultural DNA—how can a company afford to lose them and still remain special?

As I built Zynga, my mantra was “Build a house you want to live in.” The mantra came directly from my Book of Life reflections, helping me stay connected to my “why” and reminding me why control matters. Instead of thinking about everyone else, I focused on creating a company and environment that made me excited.

That’s why I purchased and remodeled an old potato chip factory a year before founding Zynga. Financially, this made no sense. I put millions into buying and renovating the former Williams & Company building, and then we raised millions for Zynga’s Series A. We called the building the Chip Factory, a double entendre, given that it went from creating potato chips to creating poker chips. The building may be worth twice as much today, 18 years later, while those same dollars in Zynga became worth billions.

Too often, we underestimate how our workspace affects our creative success. I remember hearing that Steve Jobs insisted on approving carpet choices for conference rooms; this fact was cited as evidence of founders’ insane micromanagement. I see it as beautiful: He cared so much about the product that his work environment needed to be perfect, too.

I didn’t go that far, but I insisted on a commercial kitchen with trained chefs (students from the culinary school across the street). At Tribe, we ate pizza in a dusty warehouse. Back then, I was always excited to visit our VCs because they had beautiful catered lunches. With Zynga, I wanted VCs to visit and think, “They live better than we do!”

Since we were working constantly, the least we could do was live well. In addition to great food, the people in each game studio designed their own space. Even with 1,200 people working there, it felt like a federation of start-ups: Mafia Wars had a meditation room; YoVille had a video game room.

My Founder Mode

My friend Brian Chesky, the Airbnb co-founder and CEO, inspired the term founder mode during a 2024 talk at Y Combinator (YC), the famous incubator that has fostered other massive companies like Stripe and Dropbox. I define founder mode as unapologetic leadership—having the conviction to lead through chaos, even when you’re losing and it’s not obvious your instincts are right.

Most start-ups hit moments when the original idea isn’t working. That’s when the board gets nervous, the team looks to you for confidence, and everyone wants an easy, safe answer. But great companies aren’t built on safe bets; they’re built on bold, uncomfortable decisions that might make you unpopular in the short term but that drive long-term success. Are you ready to be disliked or to stand alone if necessary?

Too often, we over-tune to stakeholders and under-tune to our instincts. Founder mode gives us permission to be our true selves—not to be jerks, but to take the wheel and ignore consensus when necessary. I’ve always referred to my companies as “democratic dictatorships”: Everyone can voice an opinion, and then I make the final decision. Lately, we have seen bold CEOs at Palantir, Coinbase, and even Google tell employees they can leave if they don’t agree with their positions. Start-ups aren’t democracies.

No one will grant you founder mode. Most investors believe 99 percent of founders aren’t qualified for it. Some say founder mode is just a way to give bad founders an excuse to be bad. VCs will always look back and say, “Of course Bezos should have had founder control” (he didn’t). Or Elon. But nobody thought founders should have control at their low points when they wanted to do things everyone else thought were stupid.

Founder mode isn’t about being reckless; it’s having the control and conviction to act without asking permission. Without it, you’re just an employee waiting to get fired from your own company.

Always Keep Control

My father hammered the idea of control into my head. I failed to take his advice throughout the course of my first three companies.

I finally got the point by the time I was raising money for Zynga. I was up front about maintaining control and half jokingly said it was to protect investors from themselves. I started investor calls with “Here are the top 10 reasons you won’t want to invest in my company. If you still want to talk, great.” Ninety-five percent said, “Thanks for saving me time,” and hung up. Many Valley investors have stories about “missing” Zynga. The truth is they turned us down because they wouldn’t accept my terms.

My approach made fundraising harder. Zynga should have been the easiest round ever—we had $200K in monthly free cash flow growing at 30 percent, and I had a proven track record. Yet I struggled to raise $5 million and took a $15 million pre-money valuation. Fred Wilson made me eat the entire option pool. Today, the average Y Combinator company gets better terms than I did then.

When Sequoia questioned our valuation, asking how I could justify $20 million pre-money versus $15 million, I said, “I’m going to build a multibillion-dollar company or fail. If I succeed, it’ll be worth a lot; if I fail, it won’t be worth anything. If you’re worried about the difference between $15 and $20 million, this isn’t the right investment.” We’re seeing ever higher valuations today largely for this reason. VCs today mostly get this trade-off and view most seed and Series A investments as call options on big outcomes.

Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Ultimately, I created conditions for success by refusing to work for a VC-controlled company. I told investors we were mutually choosing each other; they couldn’t just name board members. The board is a company’s DNA, and I wouldn’t accept a junior partner and the resulting “junior partner syndrome,” in which I’d have to negotiate with an entire VC firm through someone who was only an expert witness at their own firm. We would never sell unless we failed.

The best VCs (many of whom are former founders) know how to support founders while getting out of the way. And world-class VCs, including Fred Wilson, Reid Hoffman, and John Doerr, know to back founders in their darkest moments. I was lucky to have them at Zynga.

The Abyss

One thing most founders share is the experience of being in the Abyss. For most of us, this place before and after our start-ups or even jobs we have loved is open-ended and dark. It’s unstructured. The world doesn’t care whether we get out of bed in the morning. We lose purpose and don’t know whether, how, or when we will ever reemerge.

The Abyss also has value that we’re unaware of when we’re in this state, however. Once we get over our anxiety about being in the Abyss, it becomes an opportunity to explore our curiosities. Giving ourselves permission to pursue things that are not obviously useful or productive is critical. These explorations help us tune into our instincts, hone our ideas, and develop our taste.

Support.com, my second company, went public during the last week of the dot-com bubble. Within six months, everything crashed. By March 2001, San Francisco and the consumer internet had entered what I called nuclear winter. South of Market Street, which had been overrun with start-ups, became eerily empty—like a ghost town after the end of the gold rush. Everyone I knew left, and many moved to Tahoe, where real estate prices soared.

That was my first period of unemployment. Tom Cole (who, by then, had been living on my couch for eight years) and I retreated to my house in Cole Valley. I went through a year and a half in the Abyss. I spent my time wandering the neighborhood with my dog Zinga, smoking pot, and meditating. Tom was running a kief bar in my basement (this was before the advent of legal dispensaries). He was a pot mixologist (far ahead of his time), mashing different strains into powders, drying them in martini glasses on my back porch, and putting the concoctions in little labeled bottles with names like “bubblegum.” A bunch of ex-FreeLoader people and other Haight-Ashbury locals would show up at the house to smoke at Tom’s bar.

During this time, I started developing what the legendary business coach Bill Campbell would later call my “18-month thinking.” He said, “You’re one of the best 18-month thinkers I’ve ever met. You can see around corners. Trust that.” What Bill meant was that I had a keen sense of what people would want in the near future. My own take has always been that my usage patterns represent what the early majority of the mass market will want.

While everyone else was declaring the internet dead, I tried to stay close to first principles. I was paying attention to consumer adoption, which never stopped.

Because I wasn’t doing anything and companies weren’t getting funded anyway, I had the luxury to just think about the future. I started to feel a deep well of desire to be engaged in something—almost anything—that would feel productive.

One great thing we can all do in the Abyss is sample everything. I went deeper into cooking and particularly my obsession with the perfect Bolognese sauce. I went to Italy with my girlfriend, Jenny. I decided to eat only pasta with Bolognese at every meal, in my search for the perfect Bolognese. That, and my desire to drive like an Italian race car driver, made Jenny want to break up with me daily. But my search wasn’t just about the sauce; it was about developing the ability to recognize when something truly works.

During this time, I developed a deeper theory of the future cultural revolution that would be set off by the worldwide internet. I called it the “Revolution of the Ants.” I believed that once everyone had unlimited access to this network, we the people would rise up, self-aggregate, and eradicate the need for the gatekeepers—the brokers, the middlemen—whether politicians or newspapers. Money and power would no longer be derived from controlling the message or our access to one another. Instead, there would be a perfect market in which the best ideas would spread. A few years later, I captured this theory in a blog post I wrote on my Blackberry while stuck on a plane. It represented a deep instinct well that would eventually be the people web (social media and social networking).

A small group of us still held a flame for the consumer internet during this nuclear winter. Reid Hoffman and I started to meet with others in San Francisco, talking about Web 2.0. I hosted brainstorming sessions at my house in Cole Valley, which I had transformed into a three-story one-bedroom loft (not a smart real estate move!). I covered the walls with big sticky sheets from these sessions, capturing what we saw as the instinctive pillars of the next wave.

We all realized a core rule of the internet was that “anything that can be free will be,” and our user data would be set free, too. We saw a future web made up of people, not pages. While Google had built its empire on page rank relevancy, we believed the next wave would be built on people relevance. Reid had the idea for LinkedIn. I had the idea for Tribe.

The Abyss is often where our deepest instincts form. It’s where we start seeing patterns that others miss because we’re forced to slow down and really look. Many founders rush through this phase, desperate to get back to “productive” work. But without my time in the Abyss, there would have been no Zynga, no understanding of the social web, no clarity about what I wanted to build.

Imagination Chessboard

In 2003, when I was 38, I started working with a life coach named Erika. I wanted two things: a life partner and a life mission. I’d already had success beyond my hopes and dreams, but I wasn’t satisfied.

Tony Robbins talks about how happiness is where your life meets or exceeds your expectations. By that measure, I should have been happy. But I felt a deeper void. I was happy day-to-day with success, friends, and fun, but my life lacked meaning.

Erika didn’t let me off easy. In our first session, she said, “You’re emotionally unavailable. You’re not going to find anyone because you don’t actually want to.” She told me emotionally unavailable people are like alcoholics who can find one another across a bar.

Erika helped me develop what I call my imagination chessboard, which helped me envision what I wanted my life to look like two or five years out. In practice I literally wrote out whatever story I wanted my next life chapter to be. In the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, the young chess prodigy lay in bed at night and imagined the winning chessboard and the different moves that would get her there. If we can picture it in our mind’s eye, we can get there. We know our North Star.

On the personal side, instead of helping me get more dates, she put me on a six-month dating moratorium. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t trying to find someone. Instead, I was clearing out old cobwebs; she literally made me clean out my closets. I had to examine behaviors that didn’t line up with my stated objectives.

On the professional side, my imagination chessboard helped reveal two limiting beliefs that were holding me back from being creatively productive. The first was that I needed my own capital—a thread throughout my whole career and probably true for most other founders, too. I thought if I had $500 million, I could stop worrying about funding and play the long game, build things right, and go for bigger, more creative ideas instead of just what could get VC funding or immediate revenue. The second was my perception that I needed a permanent incubator. I dreamed of having an idea factory—what Bill Gross had done with Idealab, where he raised a large pool of capital and spun out new ventures based on his many ideas.

This exercise showed me that I have often been stuck because of my own limiting beliefs. And if I could get past these, I could start to go deeper on my why. I realized this wasn’t about needing money or having a platform. It was about using 99 percent of my full creative capacity.

In building Zynga, I used this imagination chessboard to get my teams past their own limiting beliefs. I often challenged them to answer, “What if everything goes right?”

My best use of this was in 2007, when EA called me in to meet with their lawyers, whom they conveniently called “business affairs” to sound less scary. Zynga had built a series of games that resembled popular Hasbro titles like Boggle, and EA had the rights, so they threatened to sue us. Erika challenged me to imagine what the best possible meeting would be. I said, “Zynga should be EA’s new Walmart”—meaning their online distribution via social networks to the mass market. So that’s the pitch I prepared. Luckily for me, Bing Gordon decided to drop into the meeting. When he heard me say the Walmart line, he took over the meeting and the whiteboard. EA decided not to sue, and Bing ended up helping me build Zynga.

Today AI can help you develop your imagination chessboard in minutes. Close your eyes and imagine life as it will be in the future when you have achieved your North Star. I create these chessboards all the time. I walk around having conversations with ChatGPT and use each imagination chessboard to go deeper on product use cases. I prompt it to write about life in two years, when I have built my vision for the metaverse and millions of people rely on my platform Erth.AI to turn their ideas into realities for others to consume and love. It helps me live my life at the speed of play and move from a high-level vision to detailed use cases that I can start to play with, test, and iterate on faster.

TL;DR

Keeping a Book of Life practice helps you stay connected to your North Star across time. By partnering with your future self, you create accountability to goals that truly matter—not this week’s distractions, but what you’ll thank yourself for years from now. The exercise is simple: Each year, take stock of where you are, review how you did against last year’s goals, and commit to what you’ll accomplish next. Without this regular practice, it’s too easy to drift through life as a passive observer rather than an active protagonist in your own story. What could make this or next year a seminal year in your life?

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros.

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Published on June 18, 2026 06:51

June 17, 2026

Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early (#870)

Sebastian Mallaby (@scmallaby) is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of six books, including More Money Than God, The Power Law, The Man Who Knew, and The World’s Banker.

His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.

Please enjoy!

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TranscriptsThis episode (coming soon)All episodesShow NotesConnect with Sebastian Mallaby:

BooksThe Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian MallabyMore Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian MallabyThe Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian MallabyEnder’s Game by Orson Scott CardThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes—and Its Implications by David DeutschGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas HofstadterThe Organization Man by William H. WhyteRecommended Reading, Watching, & ListeningDemis Hassabis: How AI Is Unlocking the Secrets of Nature and the Universe | TED TalkSilicon Valley’s Obsession with AI Looks a Lot Like Religion | The MIT Press ReaderOpenAI Employees Say Firm’s Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims | FuturismDeepMind’s Shane Legg on Machine Super Intelligence | The Artificial Intelligence ChannelThe China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade | National Bureau of Economic ResearchWhy Neural Net Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton Is Sounding the Alarm on AI | MIT SloanExistential Risk from Artificial General Intelligence | WikipediaAnthropic Pulls Its Most Powerful AI Models After US Bars Foreign Access | TimeThis Is What Convinced Me OpenAI Will Run Out of Money by Sebastian Mallaby | The New York TimesA Rational Conversation on Where AI Is Actually Going with Benedict Evans | Lenny’s PodcastBenedict’s Newsletter | Benedict EvansSebastian Mallaby on Why the U.S. and China Need to Talk Seriously About AI Safety | The Wire ChinaBiden Needs Allies to Keep China and Russia in Check. Here’s How to Do It. by Sebastian Mallaby | The Washington PostU.S.-China AI Race Escalates + Chip Bans Aren’t Working: A Lesson from Nuclear Proliferation | Council on Foreign Relations (The Spillover)The U.S.-China Economic Cold War, with Sebastian Mallaby | Council on Foreign Relations (The President’s Inbox)Khrushchev Loses His Cool | TimeSebastian Mallaby on AI Safety and the Race for Superintelligence | The Good Fight PodcastGoogle Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for More Than $500M | TechCrunchHas AI Already Killed How-to Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future | Tim FerrissThe Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 (AlphaFold — Hassabis, Jumper, and Baker) | The Nobel PrizeFlagship Pioneering Unveils Lila Sciences to Build Superintelligence in Science | Flagship Pioneering“In the Fields of Observation, Chance Favors Only the Prepared Mind.” — Louis Pasteur | WikiquoteMalcolm Butler’s Game-Sealing Interception in Super Bowl XLIX | NFL FilmsWhat if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction? by Vauhini Vara | The New YorkerRelevant Tim Ferriss Show EpisodesLegendary Investor Bill Gurley on Investing Rules, Finding Outliers, Insights from Jeff Bezos and Howard Marks, Must-Read Books, Creating True Competitive Advantages, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #651Bill Gurley — Investing in the AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons | The Tim Ferriss Show #840Max Levchin, PayPal, and Affirm — The Path from the Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies | The Tim Ferriss Show #869FilmsAlphaGo Mad Max The Terminator 2001: A Space OdysseyPeopleSam Altman Dario Amodei Marc Andreessen Joe Biden Napoleon Bonaparte Nick Bostrom Greg Brockman Malcolm Butler Orson Scott Card David Deutsch John Doerr Benedict Evans David Gammon Bill Gurley HAL 9000 Demis Hassabis Geoffrey Hinton Douglas Hofstadter Sebastian Junger Travis Kalanick Dara Khosrowshahi Nikita Khrushchev Yann LeCun Shane Legg Anthony Levandowski Max Levchin Dustin Moskovitz Elon Musk Luke Nosek Louis Pasteur Arthur Patterson Lenny Rachitsky Alec Radford Kevin Rose Ilya Sutskever Peter Thiel Leo Tolstoy Donald Trump Vauhini Vara Cathie Wood Xi Jinping Mark ZuckerbergCompanies & OrganizationsAccel Alphabet Ant Group Anthropic ARK Invest Benchmark DocuSign Facebook Fairchild Semiconductor Founders Fund Genentech Google DeepMind Hikvision Huawei Lila Sciences Mailchimp Meta Mistral OpenAI OpenTable Palantir PayPal Saudi Aramco Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory SpaceX Stargate Project Uber Waymo X (formerly Twitter)InstitutionsCouncil on Foreign Relations International Atomic Energy Agency Milken Institute Global Conference Stanford University World Trade OrganizationAI Systems & ToolsAlphaFold AlphaGo ChatGPT (OpenAI)Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 (Anthropic)Cloud TPUs Gemini (Google)Gmail Google Maps Google Workspace (“G Suite”)Sora (OpenAI)ConceptsAI Winter Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)Bayh–Dole Act The China Shock Cuban Missile Crisis Cultural Revolution Garden Leave Paperclip Maximizer / Instrumental Convergence Pentamind World Championship, Mind Sports Olympiad Recursive Self-Improvement Super Bowl XLIX The Traitorous Eight Transformer Architecture (“Attention Is All You Need”)Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)Vibe CodingTimestamps[00:00:00] Start.[00:02:11] The twinkly eyed polymath who became Sebastian’s next book.[00:06:55] Picking the next book project the way a great VC picks a startup.[00:09:41] Why God keeps crashing the superintelligence party.[00:11:13] Shane Legg’s grainy 2009 prophecy — and the nervous giggle.[00:13:11] Ilya Sutskever burns an effigy.[00:13:54] Demis at 4 a.m., hunting God’s algorithm.[00:18:43] Super-abundance, Mad Max, and the China shock lesson.[00:22:39] The kitchen debate with Geoff Hinton that flipped Sebastian.[00:24:06] Why a zero-percent chance of doom is indefensible.[00:24:52] Will Washington seize the labs? The Mythos wake-up call.[00:27:18] Anthropic’s bull case, bear case, and a dead parent’s letter.[00:33:24] Where Sebastian and Benedict Evans part ways.[00:38:16] Is the SaaS apocalypse overdone? One word: Palantir.[00:39:53] The AI friend you’ll never switch.[00:41:56] Does Google win consumer AI by default?[00:44:45] Four cities, eight days: China actually talks safety.[00:47:28] A Cold War non-proliferation playbook for AI.[00:49:45] Did the chip export controls actually work?[00:51:49] Burned doves: why Washington swears China won’t talk.[00:54:56] “By 2028, the race is over” — one lab boss’ bet.[00:59:11] Inside Hikvision: toddlers, sensors, and US sanctions.[01:01:07] Bill Gurley’s Uber bet: venture capital perfected.[01:05:18] Luke Nosek bear-hugs DeepMind into existence.[01:10:52] Thiel’s heresy: never invest by committee.[01:11:59] How Founders Fund nearly fumbled the deal of the century.[01:14:30] Selling to Google for $650M: a secret British heist?[01:16:41] The Traitorous Eight, gardening leave, and the UK’s to-do list.[01:20:55] Ender’s Game: “That’s really how I see myself.”[01:23:42] Too dumb for Gödel, Escher, Bach? Maybe an LLM can help.[01:25:19] If not Demis or Sam, then Dario.[01:26:04] My royalties cliff — and what dropped in late 2022.[01:27:47] Lila Sciences and the labs that run themselves.[01:31:13] Sebastian’s billboard: “Prepare your mind.”[01:35:14] The one thing Sebastian will never outsource to AI.[01:40:09] Parting thoughts.Sebastian Mallaby Quotes from the Interview

“These machines will be smarter than us. They will want to survive and they can be deceptive, they can obfuscate, they can go behind your back, pretend they’re doing one thing and then actually do another. All of this has been shown in all the tests of the models. And so we put those things together, I think your probability of doom cannot be zero.”

— Sebastian Mallaby

“For humans, to contemplate annihilation is absurd and the absurd is a close cousin of humor.”

— Sebastian Mallaby

“All through this topic there is this religious expression because religion is the lexicon for dealing with something that we find too mysterious to really understand.”

— Sebastian Mallaby

“I think any reasonable person should be both excited and a bit frightened, and that’s just the nature of it. It sounds contradictory, but actually, that’s the only rational response.”

— Sebastian Mallaby

“We only need to be ahead for the next couple of years, because by 2028 we will get to recursive self-improvement, where the frontier model codes, by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical, and at that point with recursive self-improvement, we’re done. The race is over. Whoever comes first at that point, that’s it.”

— Sebastian Mallaby

Related Episode

Want to hear another conversation with a legendary investor mapping the AI race and the US–China contest? Listen to my conversation with Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley, in which we discussed the AI bubble debate, circular deals and SPV chaos, angel investing in the AI era, his ten-day deep dive across six Chinese cities, the Xiaomi SU7 factory tour, Lei Jun as “the Steve Jobs of China,” America vs. China (lawyers vs. engineers), regulatory capture, why the IPO market is broken, stablecoins putting Visa and Mastercard on notice, and much more.

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Published on June 17, 2026 06:32

June 12, 2026

Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future

My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago.

Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily.

But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that’s happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.

So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like.

First, some broader stats

For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?

But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.

But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend.

So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years.

My personal sales numbers

Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.

Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication. The sales have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on.

But alas!

There’s trouble in paradise:

YearYear-Over-Year2022baseline2023-5%2024-13%2025-46%2026 (run-rate)-57% vs. 2025

Let that sink in for a minute.

ChatGPT, powered by the updated GPT-3.5 model, launched on November 30, 2022.

There was a gentle -5% slip in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use.

But what about ebooks and audio?

Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.

Now, there are caveats, of course.

We could talk about Amazon stocking changes, post-pandemic shifts of spending, a few potential exceptions, reversion to the mean after outlier events (e.g., TikTok virality of The 4-Hour Body in 2024, thanks to Gary Brecka), and so on.

But, even if I try my best to steelman a counter-argument… it’s all fancy-talk and wishful thinking. I don’t believe any constellation of footnotes begins to explain a near-vertical drop in prescriptive nonfiction.

Many of the strongest self-help franchises on the planet—standout darlings with perennial dominance—are also getting hammered. These are the best performers. You see them on endcaps everywhere books are sold. But if you look at BookScan sales for 2025 vs 2026 thus far, and do a little math, it ain’t pretty. If you rightly assume that self-help books tend to sell the most copies in H1, the biggest names I could think of will be down ~40–60%.

My agent, who has decades of statements to compare against, put it bluntly: 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that’s really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI.

Some publishers point to the growth of YouTube and podcasts, and those certainly contribute, but I think they are relative rounding errors.

What’s actually going on?

Think about what my books are, functionally speaking.

On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.

In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book.

In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books—and thousands of others—that will give you a personalized protocol in 15 seconds, adjusted for your bodyweight, your schedule, your injuries, and your aversion to cottage cheese.

Now, can I share some compelling counter-arguments? Yes, and I will, but the trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The broad trend will spare (next to) no one in the advice business.

Is prescriptive nonfiction the canary in the coal mine?

If “how-to” books are getting crushed because LLMs seem to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized advice… What’s next on the chopping block? Or, what is vulnerable to being replaced by AI-generated alternatives?

How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
Prescriptive podcasts. A huge portion of podcast listening—including a lot of my show—is mining conversations for actionable advice. If an AI can extract, summarize, and personalize the takeaways from 800+ episodes, how many people still press play? The AI alternatives, or summaries, will provide whatever format you prefer: text, audio, video, or whatever comes next. Based on technology that I’ve seen demo’d, Ready Player One (maybe minus the haptics) is a lot closer than people think.
Online courses, newsletters, advice blogs. Same logic. Anything with a core value proposition of “transferring instructions from my head to yours” is now competing with an interface that does it instantly, conversationally, and for free.

My position—and I’d genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.

What does this mean for search that depends on ads? What does this mean for journalism that depends on ads and subscribers?

What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.

Per Pew Research, 83% of Americans haven’t paid for news in any form in the past year. And when they slam into a paywall? A mere 1% pull out a credit card. I have used various tools to get around paywalls, as I don’t want to have 100 new subscriptions, but in the revenue arms race, those tools are getting beaten by new publisher tools. So what happens? I prompt LLMs to give me a summary of the linked articles, and they do it beautifully. There’s a lot lost in the translation, but it’s good enough for a quick update.

Will anything survive in roughly its current form?

Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats. But “give me the 5 steps to X”? That’s a tough business that’s about to get a lot tougher.

So why am I not panicking?

A confession: part of me finds this clarifying.

I never got into writing because of unit economics. I got into it because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know—two or three years of someone’s life, compressed into something you can hold. Books changed my life long before I wrote one, and the books that mattered most to me were never huge bestsellers.

I promised counter-arguments earlier, so here is one:

For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories (e.g., The Harajuku Moment in The 4-Hour Body) that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.

The viral sensation of ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. But well before that, in 2010, The 4-Hour Body was first published. It clocked in at 608 pages and hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Millions ultimately bought it, but a lot of my smart friends texted me some version of this: “I love you, but I’m too busy to read that monster. Could you send me a handful of quick bullets for losing 20 pounds?”

Some of them were pre-diabetic, about to get married, or had some other reason to take this seriously. How many acted upon the bullet points I sent?

Precisely zero—none of them—implemented the advice. In contrast, thousands of readers—who were led along a carefully designed path—lost 100+ pounds (see some before-and-after photos here) after failing other diets their entire lives.

Why? There’s still plenty of magic in meticulously planned journeys and real stories from real people.

So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now:

I’d rather write books for 10,000 people than make short-form video clips for 10,000,000.

Adding a little more, I’d say:

I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.

Why?

For one thing, quite a few of my podcast video clips have gotten 50–100 million views, or 50k likes, or choose-your-vanity-metric, but guess how that’s translated to downloads of the full episodes, where the important nuance is? Precisely zero. You literally cannot see the impact on a graph. The platforms are increasingly better at keeping users captive on their platforms, and algorithm chasing is a race to the bottom.

Second, the market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. In a way, we’re reverting to the earlier days of the Internet.

The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.

The question for every writer, podcaster, and creator isn’t whether the interface shift comes for your format. It’s what you’ll do once it does. As always, I think it’s good to try and dig your wells before you’re dry.

So how do you do that while the sands are shifting under your feet? Perhaps it’s a return to basics:

1) Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
2) Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
3) Success!

Could it really be that simple?

And could it really be that hard? The riptides pulling in the opposite direction are absurdly strong—algo chasing, incentives to create clickbait, bot-assisted “engagement,” and more. AI personalization will make these siren songs 100x more seductive.

But in the end – Could there really be any other choice?

I’m tying myself to the mast of long-form, but maybe I’m delusional or otherwise high on my own supply.

Only time will tell, and that time is coming soon.

***

Agree? Disagree? Different angle? Please let me know in the comments here.

The post Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on June 12, 2026 12:21

June 10, 2026

Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism) (#869)

Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in more than 100 startups. He is the founder and CEO of Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Both companies were created and launched from his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SciFi VC (formerly HVF [Hard, Valuable, Fun]). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, where he served as the chief technology officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2002, he was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year.

Prior to HVF, Max founded, and was CEO of, Slide, a personal media-sharing service, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Max also helped create Yelp, where he served as chairman of its board of directors from its founding in 2005 until 2015. He served on the board for Yahoo! from 2012 to 2015.

Max was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, before moving to the United States and settling in Chicago in 1991. He holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded and led four other technology startups.

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ProLon — Science-backed Fasting Mimicking Diet that helps activate cellular renewal through fasting, while still eating nourishing meals: ProlonLife.com/Tim Monarch — Track, budget, plan, and do more with your money: Monarch.com/Tim Shopify — Global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/Tim [image error]Listen onSpotify

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Connect with Max Levchin

Website | SciFi VC | Affirm | Glow | Twitter

Relevant ResourcesInterview with Computer Scientist and Internet Entrepreneur Max Levchin | Men’s JournalPayPal Cofounder Max Levchin’s Traumatic Debt Experience Motivated Him to Create Affirm | FortuneMax Levchin Wants to Revolutionize the $2.6 Trillion Consumer Credit Market | Yahoo FinanceMax Levchin, Founder & CEO of Affirm, on How HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun) Has Guided His Founder Journey | Notable PerspectivesIn Data We Trust: Max Levchin Blows Up Consumer Finance | MixpanelMax Levchin: Changemakers 2023 | MoneyQuotations from the Film Ronin | WikiquoteKyoto Scientists Enhance Mind-Reading Technology | Kyoto UniversityReading Minds with Ultrasound: A Less-Invasive Technique to Decode the Brain’s Intentions | CaltechSeeing the Value of Blind Signatures | History of BitcoinHow Peter Thiel Almost Created Bitcoin | John CooganIs Bitcoin Just a Flash in the Pan? Peter Thiel Responds | Mind MattersWilliam Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211 | The Paris ReviewQuotations from William Gibson | WikiquoteQuotations from the Book The Master and Margarita | WikiquoteHow Did the Soviet Union Actually Work? | Look Back HistoryA Healthy Economy Requires a Balance between Socialism and Capitalism | BrewminateFermented-Food Diet Increases Microbiome Diversity, Decreases Inflammatory Proteins | Stanford MedicineCuriosities of Kyiv: Kyiv Velodrome | Kyiv PostWhat Is Affirm? | AffirmMillennials Find Banks Irrelevant (And Why That Matters in Banking) | The Financial BrandWhy It’s Time To Re-Imagine the Financial Services Industry by Max Levchin | LinkedInWhat Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Are Each Doing in Agentic Commerce | Digital Commerce 360Anthropic Steps Up in the Agentic Commerce Race | Surf the WaveChicory and Other Caffeine-Free Coffee Substitutes | WikipediaThe Building in Public How-To Guide by Gaby Goldberg | MediumRelevant Episodes of The Tim Ferriss ShowJason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #600Interview with Peter Thiel, Billionaire Investor and Company Creator | The Tim Ferriss Show #28Kevin Kelly — AI, Virtual Reality, and The Inevitable | The Tim Ferriss Show #164Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets — Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough Is Enough | The Tim Ferriss Show #596Master Investor Ed Thorp on How to Think for Yourself, Mental Models for the Second Half of Life, How to Be Inner-Directed, How Basic Numeracy Is a Superpower, and The Dangers of Investing Fads | The Tim Ferriss Show #604Books Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman Grant by Ron Chernow The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Edward O. Thorp Mark Twain by Ron Chernow The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation) A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman Neuromancer by William Gibson 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer Shut Up, Legs!: My Wild Ride On and Off the Bike by Jens Voigt and James Startt Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss Washington: A Life by Ron ChernowFilms Akira (1988) Nosferatu (1922) Paprika (2006) Ronin (1998) Seven Samurai (1954)PeopleMikhail Bulgakov David Chaum Ron Chernow Robert Cialdini Arthur C. Clarke Richard Feynman Edwin Friedman Murray Gell-Mann William Gibson Reed Hastings Hamilton Helmer Reid Hoffman Sami Inkinen Alan Kay Nellie Minkova Satoshi Nakamoto Luke Nosek Nostradamus John D. Rockefeller Claude Shannon Joseph Stalin Neal Stephenson Peter Thiel Ed Thorp Jens VoigtCompanies & OrganizationsAffirm Boston Dynamics DigiCash DoorDash eBay Instacart Men’s Journal PayPal SciFi VC Virta Health WeChat YelpAI ToolsChatGPT | OpenAIClaude / Claude Code | AnthropicCoffee Tools & ProductsAcaia Orbit Grinder AeroPress Breville Bulletproof Chemex Cometeer Decent Espresso La Marzocco Niche Zero Grinder Orphan Espresso Lido Weber WorkshopsConcepts & ReferencesAgentic Commerce (A-Commerce)Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)Homo Sovieticus Information Theory MetaverseTimestamps[00:00:00] Start.[00:02:50] The Ronin line that rewired how Max makes every decision.[00:06:09] Paprika-style brain-computer interfaces.[00:09:09] PayPal’s founders lived inside a Neal Stephenson novel.[00:19:21] Transformation via Neuromancer and Snow Crash.[00:23:40] The book that found Max his wife.[00:29:24] The real secret to a great marriage.[00:38:29] What’s worth tracking, and what’s not.[00:44:13] A scrawny kid, a clarinet, and a Kyiv velodrome.[00:46:55] What going all-out on a bike actually gives you.[00:51:02] The mantra by which Max rides.[00:53:02] A Soviet kid’s fear of socialism.[01:02:48] Making a profit without destroying society.[01:04:31] What is Affirm, and why did every banker say it would fail?[01:20:18] Why the best mathematicians eschew the lending industry.[01:23:50] Does agentic commerce break Affirm, or supercharge it?[01:28:01] A PhD-level financial advisor in everyone’s pocket.[01:29:58] How close are we to buying anything through one AI chat?[01:36:32] Improving your coffee: cheap, intermediate, and Bugatti options.[01:44:33] The books every first-time founder should actually read.[01:48:08] Claude Shannon, Ed Thorp, and the joy of playful genius.[01:51:00] Why physical books still beat every digital reading experience.[01:51:44] Parting thoughts.Max Levchin Quotes from the Interview

“The attempt to impress your mate on a daily basis is the secret to the best marriage.”

— Max Levchin

“The best recipe we’ve discovered as humanity is capitalism, a force for constant creative destruction where you build the next thing better than the other guy.”

— Max Levchin

“It’s okay to make a little bit less money if you are able to create something that’s societally more successful, more important.”

— Max Levchin

“If you tell an entrepreneur over and over again, ‘This thing will never work unless someone does X,’ the natural response is, ‘Well, I will do X and see if it works.'”

— Max Levchin

“The job apocalypse people are proclaiming is so goofy. There’s so much opportunity to build so many exciting things for everyone, not just a Silicon Valley startup.”

— Max Levchin

Want to hear another conversation with a mathematician who aimed his big brain at real-world money? Listen to my first conversation with legendary blackjack player, quant pioneer, and hedge fund manager Edward O. Thorp, in which we discussed beating blackjack and roulette with the first wearable computer, his friendship with Claude Shannon, what convinced him Warren Buffett would become the richest man in the world, spotting Bernie Madoff’s fraud 17 years early, mental models like externalities and the tragedy of the commons, long-term thinking, knowing when enough is enough, and much more.

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The post Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism) (#869) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on June 10, 2026 07:13

June 2, 2026

Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to the President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics) (#868)

Jake Becraft is the CEO and Co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies. He has guided the company from its founding vision through platform development and into clinical translation, positioning Strand at the forefront of next generation RNA therapeutics.

Beyond his role at Strand, Dr. Becraft is an influential voice in the national biotechnology landscape. He engages and advises policymakers, defense leaders, and industry stakeholders on biosecurity, innovation strategy, and strengthening American competitiveness in advanced biotechnology. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he operates at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and policy, focused on building both the companies and the institutional frameworks required to secure the future of programmable medicine.

He received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT. He serves on the board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).

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Helix Sleep premium mattresses: HelixSleep.com/Tim (20% off any purchase) Incogni, which automatically removes your personal data from the web, helping shield you from fraud, scams, and identity theft: Incogni.com/Tim (use code TIM at checkout and get 60% off an annual plan)[image error]Listen onSpotify

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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

TranscriptsThis episode (coming soon)All episodesSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Jacob Becraft:

Twitter | Strand Therapeutics

Books, Movies, & Recommended ReadingGenentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes | AmazonAll of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Letters to Shareholders, 1997–2020 | QuartrSTX-001 ASCO Poster | Journal of Clinical OncologySophie’s Choice | Prime VideoThe Orphan Drug Act (ODA) | WikipediaApple, Its Control Over the iPhone, and The Internet | Matthew BallHow Smartphones Changed Music and the Music Industry | HypebotThe US Can’t Afford to Offshore Clinical Trials to China | The Washington PostThis May Be the Most Important Medical Story of the Decade | The New York TimesCompanies Strand Therapeutics Amazon Andreessen Horowitz Anthropic Apple AWS (Amazon Web Services)BlackBerry Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS)DeepMind Domino’s (Domino’s Pizza)Facebook Genentech Genzyme Google Holobiome Merck Meta Microsoft Moderna Netflix The New York Times OpenAI PayPal PickFu Playground Global Polymarket SpaceX Spotify Sweetgreen Tesla Thrive Capital Uber Uber Eats The Washington Post Zenno Zip2Institutions & OrganizationsAmerican Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER)Congress (US)Clinical Trial Notification (CTN) (Australia)Department of Health (Abu Dhabi)European Medicines Agency (EMA)Food and Drug Administration (FDA)Institutional Review Board (IRB)Medicaid Medicare MIT MIT Media Lab MD Anderson Cancer Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Nobel Prize The White HouseConceptsAbscopal Effect in Oncology American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting Australia’s Clinical Trial Notification (CTN) Scheme CAR-T Cell Therapy: Cost and Manufacturing Challenges The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (DNA → RNA → Protein)Checkpoint Inhibitors and Cancer Immunotherapy Cutaneous vs. Visceral Metastases in Melanoma FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) Application First Principles Thinking (Elon Musk / SpaceX)In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Clinical Trial Oversight Kaplan-Meier Survival Curves Keytruda (Pembrolizumab) by Merck mRNA-Based Therapeutics Strand’s STX-001: Phase 1 Trial in Solid TumorsPeopleJeff Bezos Jennifer Doudna Jony Ive Steve Jobs Steve Jurvetson Baby KJ Josh Kushner Art Levinson Martin Makary Jamie Metzl Elon Musk Sundar Pichai Vinay Prasad Phil Strandwitz Henri Termeer

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Published on June 02, 2026 14:11