Tim-Ferriss

He's amazing. I wanted to ask him a ton of extra questions, including "What have you bought for $100 or less (free OK) that has had the greatest impact on your life in the last few years"? Or "Did you really use to do stone lifting competitions in Europe? Tell me about that."

I have many. The first that comes to mind, which I don't think I've spoken about: A number of friends committed suicide around college and just after, and I nearly did the same. The mistake was thinking that depression lasts forever (it rarely does) and being selfish. I wasn't thinking about how my family would blame themselves forever. It was sheer luck -- a library card for a Dr. Kevorkian-like book ended up getting mailed to a family member by accident, which sparked a conversation that saved me. I hope to write more about this soon. Suicide among 20-30-year olds has skyrocketed in the last decade, at least according to an article I recently read. It's tragic, and I was one of the lucky ones.

Hahaha... I was going for first-place loser but Cory beat me to it! You had some beasts at that poker tournament.

Indeed, I have relocated to Austin TX. After 17 years or so, I decided to leave Silicon Valley.

This answer could be a mini-novel, but suffice to say, here are a few reasons:

1) I wanted to move to Austin after college but didn't get the job at Trilogy Software. Since 2007, I've visited Austin every year and felt the pull to move there each time. It a wonderful exploding scene of art, music, film, tech, food, and more. The people are also -- in general -- much friendlier.

2) After effectively "retiring" from angel investing 2 years ago, I have no professional need to be SF or the Bay Area.

3) Silicon Valley is often a culture of cortisol, of rushing, and of fear of missing out (FOMO). There is also a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid (much like entertainment is some parts of LA), where every dinner has some discussion of rounds of funding, investing, and who is doing what with Uber, Amazon, or someone else. This can be dodged, but it takes very real and consistent effort. I don't want to spend 20-30% of my daily mental calories on avoiding the mono-conversation.

4) Even though Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of brilliant people I've found anywhere in the world, it also has the highest concentration of people who think they're brilliant. The former are often awesome, keenly self-aware, and even self-deprecating (let's call that 15% of the population), but the latter are often smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, and intolerable (let's call that 60% of the population). That ratio just no longer works for me. It's too much. This asshole inflation usually corresponds to bubbles (I've seen it before), when fair-weather entrepreneurs and investors flood the scene.

5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.

6) Golden Gate and tech are terrorist targets, and I don't like being close to the bullseye. This is based on good information from friends who work full-time in threat assessment.

7) I really like the sun and SF is foggy.

8) BBQ.

9) Austin is far more dog-friendly than SF.

10) Sometimes you need to think about the "where" of happiness and change your scenery to prompt new chapters in your life.

In the end, I absolutely LOVE the Bay Area, but it's become a perverted Bizarro world version of what attracted me there in 2000. Many of my best friends in the world are there, and it pained me to leave, but I had to relocate for my own sanity, growth, and happiness.

Oh, and one more time: Texas BBQ.

Hope that helps clarify a bit!

Tim

Yes, absolutely! Thank you for being so awesome. Let me chat with my team to track down the emails. So sorry for any delay!