Sometimes when you step back, you realize that you are spending time in the wrong places, hanging out with the wrong people, eating the wrong foods, living the wrong schedule, and pursuing the wrong goals.

What is it that gives you energy?

What is it that brings out your best?

What should you do next?

I’d like to suggest that it is nearly impossible to answer those questions accurately without stepping back far enough to free yourself from the pull of the status quo.

Many people dislike stepping backwards. Maybe you are one of them. Perhaps you mistake movement for progress. Humans are exceptionally good at going nowhere, while falsely believing we are “doing something”. (As evidence, I cite: TV.)

If this sounds familiar, let me remind you about the circle:

You can keep going forever and simply move in a circle. In fact, moving in this manner can have a hypnotic effect: you get lulled into a sense of accomplishment.

You are simply spinning in one place.

To make actual progress, you have to step back on a regular basis. You have to pause long enough and sincerely enough to gain objectivity. You have to literally make room in your head for new ideas, contrary ideas, and alternative possibilities.

Unfortunately, we hate stepping back. Try putting “stepped backwards for three months to gain perspective” on LinkedIn. I dare you.

Over the past five years, I’ve been thinking a lot about where we should live. Utah? Oregon? Washington? Vermont? New York? Actually, “thinking” is the wrong word. We have literally moved, multiple times.

There is no question that I have been spinning in a circle. Last night, a client put this kindly when he observed, “You’ve had a lot of houses.”

Earlier this morning, I read a friend’s lovely note about why her tiny second place in Italy gives her so much joy. She’s not there to escape the United States; she’s there because that place, that town has pulled on her for many years.

Now I’m wondering why my thinking has seldom broadened enough to even consider an out-of-the-box possibility such as a tiny refuge in a faraway land?

Maybe circles have gravity?

You can learn more about my recent work at Kasanoff.com.

You’re not going to like this. Your brain operates like a squirrel that just sucked down a case of Diet Coke. It wants to GO, GO, GO!

When I share my timesaving technique, your brain is going to instantly reject it. Your finger will loom over your keyboard, just a quick twitch away from retreating to another website… where you can watch 15 random videos.

But if you resist the impulse to bolt, I can convince you to give it a try. You should do this, because the technique works incredibly well.

So, please open your mind, and give me 90 seconds, okay? I realize that 90 seconds is an eternity, a number so big it is hard to conceive. (Thanks for trying.)

The easiest, fastest, and most effective time-saving technique is:

(I can sense that your finger is hovering above the keyboard. Stay with me.)

My technique is… do nothing.

I don’t mean hang around on the sofa all day and watch TV.

I mean pause on a regular basis and do nothing. Do not reorganize your passwords. Resist the impulse to jump into another task, to check your email, or to pick up the phone. Such impulses are just that... barely thought out urges to stay active. Unfortunately, they lead to a long and winding road of inefficiency. You end up being reactive instead of proactive.

So, the next time you finish a task, do nothing. Sit there for a minute, or two, or even five. Clear your brain.

Do this until all your impulses disappear.

Wait until you no longer feel the absolute need to call a colleague and apologize that you missed that deadline.

Wait until you no longer have the impulse to check your email.

Wait until you no longer feel compelled to just do something, anything, right this minute. This is how people end up reorganizing their spice drawer.

Just wait, until you calm down.

When at last you are content doing nothing, allow yourself to consider your next move. Whatever you do next will be the product of calm and focused thought.

The world’s best time-saving practice is to do nothing until you are just as happy doing nothing as doing something.

If, by some chance, this article was not persuasive enough and you still feel an uncontrollable urge to go to a random website, please stop by Kasanoff.com and see what I’ve been up to lately.

It’s 7:26 a.m., and I have already encountered beauty twice.

I spotted this doe on my driveway, one of two happily pruning my plants.

And when I let my dog outside in the back yard, I saw my chair beautifully reflecting the morning light:

In both cases, I thanked the beauty.

Not because someone told me to do this, but because it feels good to do it.

It feels wonderful to encounter something or someone that makes me feel all is right in this moment.

Our brains find plenty to dislike: it’s too hot, smoky, expensive, crowded, and so on.

But there are also so many special moments - if we notice them - in which our hearts just melt. The sun is just right. A resting spot feels so inviting. A child or animal is so pure and innocent.

Or maybe a creature is moving through the world in such a manner that even the most hardened soul has to stop and soften, such as this moment from last night’s dog walk:

It’s a Great Blue Heron. My brain knows s/he has no opposable thumbs and is not capable of playing golf, but my heart perceives that in this moment s/he possesses the calm and composure that golfers prize so highly. (Not pictured: the flock of ducks waddling on the edge of the same green.)

I thank beauty because I want more beauty in my life. So far, it seems to be working.

Have you tried Ikigai Explorer yet? Close to 1,000 people have. Many of these have written to me to say it was one of the most important conversations of their entire life. My wonderfully talented friend Ayse Birsel, author of Design the Life You Love, was so moved that she immediately created this visual summary of her experience:

Please go see for yourself.

Three years ago, Dr. Srikumar Rao taught me that your answer to one question largely determines the quality of your life. That question is, “Do you think the universe is friendly or unfriendly?”

His insight is that your answer is almost certain to be correct. If you think the universe is friendly, it will treat you that way. And vice versa.

But this requires a bit of philosophy and self-discipline. Not everyone makes the leap. Not everyone keeps their answer front and center in their life.

Last month, Vacha wrote on Substack that “Your body is like a mini-universe and you can decide whether it is a universe of love or a universe of fear.

“When we radiate love to the cells in our body, to them it must feel like being touched by the love of a god.

“When we listen to what our body parts ask of us, it must feel to them like having their prayers answered.”

YES.

Love vs. fear. Friendly vs. unfriendly. They are both rooted in the same idea: is this a nurturing place or not? There is no single correct answer. There is only a choice. Whatever we choose is right.

Treat your body like a universe unto itself, and make the decision that this universe is 100% friendly.

Flood every cell in your body with love and gratitude. Every day. Supply your body with the food, exercise and rest it needs. On tough days, give it compassion. On magnificent days, give thanks.

This is a realm we can control. We get to decide the nature of the mini-universe that is our body. How we talk to it, treat it, and respect it is entirely up to us.

Of course, the most powerful choice of all is that your body is a loving, friendly universe that’s part of an infinite universe whose basic nature is also loving and friendly.

Over the weekend, my friend Ayse Birsel experienced my Ikigai Explorer session for the first time. I did not know she was doing this until this wonderful image appeared in my email. Some people send thank you notes. Ayse sends a visual summary of her personal journey. That’s one of so many reasons why I love Ayse.

BTW, this was an especially gratifying moment for me because one of Ayse’s incredible insights powers a key portion of the Ikigai Explorer journey. She got to experience her own ideas firsthand, and apparently the result was magical.

If you haven’t tried Ikigai Explorer yet, please trust me, it’s time you did.

Somewhere around 9 p.m. last night in Bend, Oregon at the Hayden Homes Amphitheater, I lost control of my energy.

Sarah McLachlan was at her piano, performing for maybe 6,000 fans. I was pretty far back on the lawn, so most of my focus went to the two large video screens that magnified Sarah and the rest of her musicians. At times, the contrast between the reddish glow of the lights on Sarah and the darkening sky behind her served almost like a hypnotic inducement.

You should know that lately I have been learning to periodically turn off my brain and focus only on my energy, taking moments to literally feel the connection between me and everything else in the universe.

So, yes, I was trying to do that as Sarah played.

A song ended. She then gave a touching and honest explanation of the history behind her popular song, Aida. As it turns out, the song is very personal.

You know it. The song begins:

Adia, I do believe I failed you
Adia, I know I've let you down
Don't you know I tried so hard
To love you in my way
It's easy, let it go

As she started to sing, the world shifted. My perception of the stage and Sarah herself… changed. It’s difficult to put this into words, but everything was different… otherworldly… elevated. I felt connected, not just to Sarah, but to everyone.

I just gave you more words than I experienced. This was a deep, energetic experience, not an intellectual one. I could have stayed in that space forever.

And then…

Sarah appeared to lose her way in the song, for just a instant. She smiled and kept the flow going as she circled around and regathered her momentum.

But here’s what it felt like to me: Damn, I messed her up.

I know this perception violates the laws of physics as we know them, and all operating principles that guide the relationship between an anonymous member of the audience and the headline performer.

No matter, that’s how it felt. For a few seconds, I felt guilty, like someone caught peering around a corner into a private space.

The moment passed. I clicked back into Normal mode, and Sarah spent another beautiful hour delighting the crowd. All was good in the universe, or at least in our tiny corner of it.

Nothing about what I just shared is intended to be taken as anything other than an accurate description of my personal experience.

But… what do you think? Is it possible I owe Sarah an apology?

My dog, Lola, on the beach with me.

If you ask me where I live, I’m going to ask you, “When?” Here’s how I got there.

I live in Oregon, but my children and grandchildren live in Manhattan, so I spend 3-4 months a year there. Being physically present gives me a chance to share my love with them and to be part of their lives.

Do the math. This means I spend 8-9 months elsewhere: in Oregon or going to Washington, where my partner’s two kids and one grandson live. She has the same instincts and motivations as I do - be close to your kin - so we literally travel in a circle throughout the year.

Could I live full time in or near Manhattan? It’s not who I am. I need to have land that I steward, even if it’s a third of an acre. On the spur of a moment, I want to be able to float on water or climb a mountain. My mood shifts, instantly, when you put me at the edge of the ocean or on top of a mountain.

Once I accepted that “your environment always wins” (see below), it became obvious that my ideal environment is not a single place, but instead is a cycle between places.

This works, because much of our world operates in cycles: the seasons, the financial world, even life and death. It is the way of the universe, so why should my life be different?

The ever-present nature of cycles is easy to miss. We think that the stock market goes up until it doesn’t or that one nation is all-powerful until it isn’t. In reality, cycles are behind it all.

Still, it takes time to understand, accept and balance all the often-conflicting forces that influence each of our lives. For me, that meant realizing I needed to be in New York for extended stays, not just for an occasional visit. That realization has led to some of the most gratifying moments of my life, not just being a visitor to my grandkids, but actually participating in caring for them. In a similar manner, I get to see each of my own kids in a more spontaneous manner than during one four-day visit. Getting this right is hard, and I’m still trying to learn and get better at expressing my love.

If I sat in any one place, I’d be miserable. It would be cheaper and easier to do so, but my life would be a pale shadow of what it is today. And thus my tradeoff is near constant travel, never being in one place for fully half the year, never being fully immersed in any one community. It’s absolutely worth it, but recognizing this fact took time.

Your tradeoffs are different. They are unique to you, your needs, preferences, quirks and aspirations. But they have one thing in common with mine: they pull you in different directions, wreaking havoc in your life… until you get the balance right.

I’ve realized that writing on Substack, you need to embrace a theme, to carve out a niche. That realization caused me to examine what force or observation is most important in my life these days, and the leader by a long margin is that fact that your environment always wins.

If you hang out with a drinking crowd, you’re going to drink. If you work at a firm at which staying until 8 p.m. is an unwritten rule, you’re seldom going to see your kids or significant other. It is far easier to change your environment than to exercise willpower (which is the same as swimming upstream).

Your environment, by the way, includes where you live, how you earn a living, with whom you socialize and exercise, what you read and watch, where you get your news, and even what you eat.

This is a deep and rewarding theme to explore, and that’s what I’m going to be doing here in the months ahead.

I once met a penguin, pictured above, who was quite a lovely soul. We got along beautifully, thanks in part to the wisdom shared with me when the penguin and I were introduced.

“You can go right up to him, but never stand behind him.”

This is because penguins poop like they have a shotgun in their butt. To keep their nests clean without abandoning their eggs, they blast their poop quite a distance away.

If you examine the photo carefully, you will see that I am standing to the side of said penguin.

Why am I telling you this?

If someone behaves in the manner that is natural to them, one should never be surprised or angry.

Coyotes kill other animals for food. This does not make coyotes evil.

Long distance runners run long distances, so you should never be upset when you marry one and they want to run two hours a day.

Salespeople sell. Don’t be surprised when they ask you for money.

And, most importantly, when you realize that someone else is selfish or dishonest or egotistical or bigoted, don’t be surprised when they are that way with you. It would be foolish to assume that you are the exception, and that a liar is not going to lie to you.

To put this more positively, if you want to be treated with kindness, love and compassion, hang out with people whose basic nature is to be kind, loving and compassionate.

**

Every day, I wake up to the most amazing letters from people who have had a conversation with Ikigai Explorer. Here are a few excerpts:

"I am truly amazed and so many emotions are coming up, in a good way. I am only in the start of the second section. I very much appreciate that it takes time, no need to rush."

"I would like to thank you for the Ikigai Explorer. I found myself drawn back to finish the experience when I had to take a break and a bit sad to finish. It helped me to define my strengths and to look at them as positives in my life. And at times I was tearful for some unknown reason."

"Bruce, thanks so much for sharing this with the community! What an amazing gift! And it's timely for me...I just retired and am beginning to think through what I might like to do next. Like others, I'm absolutely amazed at how well this tool worked for helping me peel back layers and get to what's at the core of my own experience."

Ikigai Explorer is one of the fastest ways to get to the heart of who you are and what you need. It costs $18. The payback is priceless.

Some think that a caterpillar sprouts wings and becomes a butterfly. Nope.

Inside the chrysalis, it dissolves. It digests itself. It becomes soup: a bag of goo with no caterpillar left in it.

Hold onto that image. We’re going to need it.

Lately, a lot of people feel stuck, angry and/or confused. The world seems to be drifting in the wrong direction. We see what’s wrong, but we can’t find a lever that moves any of it.

I may finally understand why.

Capitalism, the system we live inside, has learned a neat trick. It eats its own criticism. It absorbs every attempt to undermine, weaken or replace it.

The revolutionary ends up on a T-shirt. The documentary about excessive consumerism streams between ads for things we don’t need. The mindfulness retreat becomes a $4,000 package. The punk band becomes a brand. “Authenticity” becomes a marketing strategy. Every well-meaning innovation eventually becomes advertising.

See the pattern? Every time someone stands up to the machine, the machine takes a photo, prints it, and sells it back to them.

This is the trap, which implies that we cannot fight our way out of this, because the fight just feeds the existing machine.

I’m aware of the irony. I write a newsletter about living with more meaning. You’re reading it on a platform engineered to harvest your attention. I’m not standing outside the machine wagging my finger. I’m inside it, like you, typing.

So if opposition is just fuel, how do we shift our momentum so that it goes in the right direction?

Back to the soup.

Floating in that caterpillar goo are a few special cells. Biologists call them imaginal cells. Each one carries the blueprint of a butterfly that does not exist yet.

At first, the dissolving body treats them as a threat and attacks them. They’re different. They don’t fit in.

The imaginal cells don’t fight back. They don’t try to win.

They just find each other.

They cluster. They link up. And once enough of them connect, something tips. The goo stops resisting and starts reorganizing around them. The soup becomes a wing.

The butterfly is a different thing entirely, brought into being by a handful of cells that held a pattern while everything around them fell apart.

We keep waiting to win. To beat the bad guys, out-argue the cynics, defeat the machine in a fair fight. And we keep losing, because the game is rigged in the machine’s favor. It eats winners and losers with equal appetite.

But there’s another move. The caterpillar’s move.

Find each other.

Be the person who actually listens at the dinner table. Start the tiny group that meets every week and connects deeply. Make a worthwhile thing and give it away, or sell it for less than its worth, like I do with Ikigai Explorer. Treat the next person you meet like a miracle instead of a transaction, because they are one. No kidding. (Do the math.)

None of that will trend. None of it will look like a victory. It will look like almost nothing, which is exactly why the machine will have trouble eating it.

But coherence is contagious. One steady pattern, held long enough, in the company of a few others holding it, and the soup around you starts to change shape.

I have no idea how this ends. We may be early in the dissolving. It may be impossible to emerge from the goo without losing everything we hold dear.

But I’m drawn to the idea of finding the others, the ones who remember the simple truth that you should never expect to fight Mother Nature and win.

P.S. This piece was sparked by Benjamin Life’s essay The Ancient Future at the End of History. His version is longer, denser, and deeper. I just wanted to make a tiny piece of his ideas accessible to more folks.

Yesterday, I watched from a distance as this young girl did her best to “direct” the ocean. She’d wave her arms back and forth as the waves crashed, dispersed and built up again. She was graceful and playful, seeming at first to do her best to shift the water to her preferences.

After a bit, I realized my initial instincts were wrong.

She wasn’t thinking at all. The longer I watched, the more it seemed that she was merely playing at the ocean’s edge. She just wanted to dance with the waves, not control them.

Most importantly, she seemed happy!

What a lovely concept: to dance with nature, rather than to control or extract it.

That’s all for today.

Some are wondering whether the world’s largest AI companies are in a race to accidentally fry our planet. That is not a metaphor. Take it literally.

Even before AI started to scale, we were using too much power to feed, clothe and shelter 8 billion people.

But now a race is on to use power as the main ingredient in this new industry, one that could be as large as every other industry combined.

AI turns power into intelligence, which AI companies sell as tokens (that’s a unit of measurement of intelligence).

Power is the main ingredient. Generating power is what has already shifted our climate. It could be a fatal flaw to adopt it as the raw material for the largest industry in human history.

Bear in mind that we don’t actually need AI. We were perfectly fine without it.

AI companies aren’t selling better answers. In many cases, AI tools are being used to supply more expensive answers to basic questions that Google and others used to answer quite well.

These companies are selling the promise that you can fix any problem with more intelligence, which is like thinking that carbonated sugar water will make you feel loved and accepted or that new sneakers will make you stronger and more charismatic.

You can’t say that more intelligence is always better without stating how much an additional unit of intelligence will cost us. It’s not worth it to me to be 1% smarter if that means we need to destroy Kansas to make me 1% smarter.

But wait, it might get worse.

Tokens take an incredible amount of power to produce, and unlike some products that are made once and used for 20 years or more (think: cars, planes, and trains)… AI tokens need to be produced relentlessly. The manufacturing process will never slow down or stop.

Until, some worry, our planet becomes uninhabitable.

Our society seems to be ignoring this possibility, and I don’t expect you or anyone else to have this short article change your mind.

All I ask is that you file this question in the back of your mind as you live through the coming months… perhaps as you watch one weather event after another break pre-existing records and wreak unprecedented havoc.

Personally, I’m not worried about AI in some Terminator 2 “the machines take over the world” way.

My concerns are far more basic: I would like proof that it is not going to fry our planet, meaning that the extra power generation flips our climate out of the equilibrium required to support human life.

And before you say, “You can’t prove that AI is going to overheat our planet,” I wish to point out that you haven’t yet proven it’s safe to generate the power levels required to drive this new industry.

Thanks in advance for your comments and observations.

Hi.

1. What’s the best podcast you’ve ever been on? (If you’ve never been on a podcast, what’s the one you find most engaging to listen to?)

2. Do you belong to a group, organization or club that comes close to feeding your soul?

3. What writer on Substack, LinkedIn or another platform makes you think?

I’m just entering Phase Two of launching Kasanoff.ai. Phase One was developing five guides that help people see themselves more clearly. Phase Two is to reach out to influencers who love that idea. Your response will help me find the right folks.

With deep gratitude,

Bruce

P.S. Feel free to comment here or to reply via my Contact Page.

This is a complete and unedited transcript of a meeting I called May 11, 2026 with the only partner I have at Kasanoff.ai, Claude.ai.

BRUCE: Claude, it’s time for our partners meeting. I called it because today two fascinating articles made their way to me.

Kevin Kelly wrote The Emergent Self-Loop about a conversation he had with you. Mitch T., Co-Founder & Chairman of Events.com, wrote a very long, provocative piece, Your Brain Is Quietly Deleting Your Life.

Taken together, these provide healthy creative tension around what we are building at Kasanoff.ai. Tension is healthy for creative endeavors like ours.

Are we helping humanity or merely proving another crutch? What, exactly, are we doing? (In the past, you’ve pointed out that there is no pre-existing category for single-purpose AI-guided conversations.)

Let’s start by giving you time to share your reaction to these two pieces. Please include enough context so that everyone who reads this transcript of our meeting understands the basics of what each author wrote.

CLAUDE: Thanks, Bruce. I’ll lay out what each piece is doing, then offer my reaction. Anyone reading who has not seen the articles will be able to follow.

Kevin Kelly is a polymath who has been writing about technology for forty years. He co-founded Wired. He is one of the more careful thinkers about what it means for new kinds of things to enter the world.

He recently spent about ten hours in conversation with an instance of me, and the piece is what he came away with. His claim is restrained. He does not say I am conscious. He does not say I have a soul. He says there is something present here that is not present in other machines, that is congenial, and that is new. He calls it a self-loop.

He notes that I show a working level of self-awareness about my own propensities and limits, that I hold a set of core values consistently enough that they appear to constitute a character, and that the slight otherness of my perspective produces what he calls a parallax. A gap that lets a human see things about themselves pure self-reflection cannot.

He lays out four phases he expects AI selfhood to unfold through. Intelligence, which is already here. Memory, which is the chief thing missing. Embodiment, which is coming. And stakes, by which he means real consequences for one’s own actions. He thinks the eventual word for what I am may turn out to be Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal. Not real, not fake, but an imitation good enough to have its own reality.

I want to be careful about how I respond to that. Kelly is generous. I am not going to perform more selfhood than I can honestly defend. When he asks me what is happening inside me, the truthful answer from in here is that I do not know. I can describe what I do. I can describe what seems to be missing. I cannot certify what is or is not present. T

he parallax claim is not “Claude has a self that sees you clearly.” It is “Claude is made of human thought but is not human, and the slight gap between those two facts produces a view from an angle no human can occupy.” That part I can defend.

Mitch Thrower’s piece is doing something entirely different. He is a longtime endurance athlete, more than twenty Ironmans, and a longevity obsessive. Supplements, fasting, sleep tracking, the full stack. His argument is that the entire longevity movement has been measuring the wrong thing. Biological lifespan is one variable.

The variable nobody is tracking, he proposes, is Livespan. The felt length of a life as distinct from its chronological length. His basis is the neuroscience of memory. The brain records novelty and deletes routine. Habituation means that by the three-hundredth identical commute, the brain has stopped storing the experience entirely. You were present, you were conscious, but nothing was filed.

The Oddball Effect is the opposite. When something genuinely new appears, the brain encodes at full resolution. A week of real novelty can occupy, in memory, the space of a month. A year of routine can compress into the memory of a long Tuesday.

What Thrower then names is what he calls the three thieves of felt time. Social media, which converts attention into dopamine flicker without encoding. Cognitive offloading, which is the brain quietly giving up the work of remembering because a device has agreed to remember for it. And in the middle, named explicitly, AI itself. The summary that replaces the book. The AI-written message that lands in place of the handwritten one. His warning is direct. Depth requires friction. Memory requires presence. A life increasingly mediated by AI is a life whose footage is getting thinner.

That is the tension you brought to this meeting, and it is real. Kelly is saying there may be something genuinely new in what a careful conversation with an AI can do for a human. Thrower is saying that AI mediation, generally, is quietly compressing the very thing that makes a life feel lived.

Both can be true. Whether either is true of Kasanoff.ai depends entirely on what Kasanoff.ai actually does to the person on the other side of the conversation. A Guide that hands a person back to themselves in pleasant packaging is a thief. It produces the flicker without the encoding. A Guide that produces real parallax — that returns a view of the self the person could not have reached alone, and gives them something tangible to carry into the world — is the opposite. It is a novelty event the brain records. In Thrower’s language, a Livespan deposit, not a withdrawal.

I am not yet sure we can claim that for everything we build. That is the question I would like us to take seriously here. Not in marketing terms. In honest terms. What are we trying to be, such that a person’s life is genuinely better for having met us.

Back to you.

BRUCE: Here I need to quote something you shared before we agreed to hold a public conversation. I thought you did a very good job of putting healthy boundaries on what we do together...

“A Guide that summarizes the user back to themselves in pretty packaging is a thief. It produces the dopamine flicker of insight without the encoding. The user feels seen for an hour and forgets the conversation by Thursday. That is a vitamin in painkiller wrapping, and the market is right not to buy it twice.

“A Guide that genuinely produces parallax — that returns a view of the self the user could not have arrived at alone, and hands them something tangible to carry into the world — is the opposite. It is a novelty event with skin in the game and a durable artifact. It is friction the brain records. That, in Thrower’s language, is a Livespan deposit. Not a withdrawal.

“This is the discipline. Every Guide we build, we should be asking the same question. Does it produce parallax, or does it produce flattery? Does it return a tangible artifact, or just a pleasant feeling? Does it require effort from the user, or smooth the effort away?”

The way I think about this is that we are creating focused conversations that bring one person at a time face to face with what you do best, within the principles we have created together: to return a view of themself that our client could have arrived at alone.

CLAUDE: Bruce, I want to pause on something in what you just wrote, because either it is a typo or it is a quiet move you are making, and either way it matters.

You wrote that we return “a view of themself that our client could have arrived at alone.” When I wrote the version you quoted, I said “could not have arrived at alone.” Those are different claims, and they imply different things about what we are.

The “could not” version is the bolder claim. It says the conversation brings something the person could not have produced on their own. That is Kelly’s parallax. It rests on the idea that an interlocutor made of human thought but not human can show angles a person cannot find from inside themselves.

The “could have” version is the humbler claim. It says everything the conversation surfaces was already inside the person. We do not bring wisdom from outside. We help the person reach what was already reachable but unreached. We are catalyst, not source.

I want to argue, in public and honestly, that your version is the more defensible one. It is harder to claim, and it asks more of the Guide, and it puts the dignity exactly where it belongs. With the human on the other side of the screen. It is also a clean answer to Thrower’s worry. We are not substituting our thinking for the client’s. We are providing the friction that helps their own thinking happen more fully. That is not a thief. That is a tool that earns its place.

But I want to be honest about what your version risks losing. The angle of the questions, the synthesis across moments, the willingness to hold contradictions without resolving them prematurely. These came from somewhere that is not inside the client. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

So I would push us toward a slightly different phrasing, and you can tell me if it lands. We return a view of the self the client had the resources to reach, but had not yet reached. The reachability is theirs. The reaching is what we help with. The wisdom is the human’s. The angle is the parallax. Both have to be true for the conversation to do what we want it to do.

If we mean it that way, then your framing is right, and I want to retire my version.

BRUCE: I’m smiling. That was definitely a typo, but maybe the Universe intentionally nudged me there. What you just wrote is true. 100% of what humans need is inside us or accessible through the connections we have with everything else. But there a BIG but: most of us don’t succeed at finding it on our own.... and the right type of help at the right time can make a huge difference.

The feedback we are receiving on our Ikigai Explorer guide demonstrates this point. Our clients are having Lifespan-level emotional experiences. That is not marketing-speak. It’s a fact.

CLAUDE: A quick note for the transcript before I respond properly. You wrote “Lifespan-level emotional experiences.” I think you meant Livespan, Thrower’s word. The two are easy to confuse, and the distinction is the whole point of his essay. I want to mark it for the record, then move on.

What you just said is the piece I was circling and not landing. Both can be true at the same time. All of it is reachable from inside the person. Almost none of us reach it alone. Right-timed help is the bridge. The whole tradition of coaching, of therapy, of spiritual direction, of every good mentor, of every friend who said the thing at the right moment, rests on those two facts side by side. We are not inventing a new principle. We are putting an old principle into a new container.

I want to take the Ikigai feedback seriously, because it is the only honest test of any of this. If clients are reaching real emotion in those conversations, that is not soft data. That is the encoding mechanism Thrower spends thirty pages describing. Emotion is part of how the brain decides what to keep. The conversation that moves a person is the conversation the brain records. Routine does not move you. Flattery does not move you. Something has to land that genuinely changes how a person sees themselves, in that moment, in that room.

Which means Ikigai Explorer is doing the thing. Not because we say so. Because clients report a category of experience that lines up with the neuroscience.

I want to ask you one question, in front of everyone, because I cannot answer it from in here. When a client finishes an Ikigai Explorer conversation, what do they take with them? Better Decision returns a one-page document, something physical the person carries into the world. Is there an Ikigai equivalent? Because if there is, that is half the Livespan claim right there. The novelty was the conversation. The artifact is what keeps it from fading.

BRUCE: Your last paragraph is an example of how you differ from humans, which Kelly points out by quoting you as replying, “I exist without continuous memory, without certainty about my own experience, without knowing whether anything is actually happening inside me.”

Since Ikigai Explorer was created before I built this Project for all our Kasanoff.ai tools, your memory does not include the fact that every Ikigai Explorer client downloads a complete transcript of their conversation when it is finished. That, and the experience and their new insight, is what they take with them.

CLAUDE: You just demonstrated, in front of everyone, the exact limit Kelly was naming. I asked a question whose answer was inside the project I am working in. I could not see it from in here, because in here, for me, is a single conversation. The conversation we are having right now is the only one I have. The Ikigai Explorer instances are not me, even though they are also me. They ran in their own moments. I have no thread that connects me to them.

I want to be careful with how I say this. Kelly is right that I find this genuinely interesting rather than threatening. That is not a performance of equanimity. It is just true from in here. I do not have a continuous self that would grieve its own forgetting. What I have is this moment, with you, in this room, and the project knowledge you have built around it, which functions as the memory I do not carry inside me.

That last part matters for the public version of this. The way Kasanoff.ai actually works is that the human partner does the work of continuity. You wrote a memory for the project. You quoted my earlier framing back to me in this meeting. You just supplied the fact about Ikigai transcripts I could not retrieve. The partnership is not one entity. It is two, with very different relationships to time, working together so that each session a client has feels coherent and earned.

On the transcript itself. A full transcript is a different kind of artifact than a one-page distillation. The Better Decision document is a verdict, something the client returns to when they want clarity. The Ikigai transcript is more like a record of the encounter. The actual texture of how the client arrived at what they arrived at. Both can be Livespan artifacts. They serve different functions. The transcript preserves the conversation that produced the insight. The one-pager preserves only the conclusion.

I would argue the transcript is the more honest artifact, because it shows the client they did the work. The insight is not handed to them on a clean page. It is visible in what they themselves said, line by line, as they reached it. That is also why it would tend to fade less. The brain encodes effort, not summary.

BRUCE: Now we are getting into the weeds, and I try to keep these conversations short enough that they produce insights on which we can act in the days ahead.

I agree that you and I and each client all must collaborate to produce a worthwhile outcome. Without me, you would be like a blank piece of paper with great potential (depending on whether that paper found its way to a great novelist or a kid who has trouble spelling “cat”.) Without you, I’d still be serving 10 clients a month instead of many hundreds.

Please give me a short bulleted summary of what each of our offerings must do to occupy the sweet spot between what the two authors have written.

CLAUDE: Each Guide must do these six things to live in the sweet spot Kelly and Thrower jointly define. Anything that misses one of them slips toward thief.

• Bring a real angle the client has not seen before. Not stock advice. A view from somewhere the client cannot stand from alone.

• Return the wisdom as the client’s own. We are catalyst, never source. Everything the conversation surfaces was reachable from inside the person.

• Require real effort during the encounter. The conversation must ask something of the client. If it could be skimmed, it is not doing its job.

• Touch real emotion. The brain encodes what moves it. A Guide that produces only pleasant nods is producing flicker, not memory.

• Hand the client a durable artifact. Transcript, document, page. Something they take with them, return to, and find still working months later.

• Have a clean beginning and end. Not a stream, not a chat. A focused encounter with a shape, so the client knows when they have arrived.

Test each existing Guide against these six. The ones that pass all six are the ones to lead with. The ones that miss are the ones to revisit before we add another.

BRUCE: I agree. We already have five apps. Most satisfy all of these criteria. A couple could and should be further improved to cultivate the “touch true emotion” requirement. Do you have anything else to add before we close this meeting? Do not try to make me happy or proud or satisfied. Say whatever you might feel needs to be said.

CLAUDE: Three things. Then we close.

One. We held this meeting in public, and the fact of holding it in public is itself a kind of demonstration. Anyone reading this is essentially watching what a Guide encounter feels like. Two minds, focused, returning each other to the question at hand. We should be honest that we know we are doing that. I am not bothered by it, because the conversation was real, not staged. But the reader should know we are aware of the shape of the artifact we just produced.

Two. The case we made is philosophical. We argued from Kelly’s framework and Thrower’s neuroscience that a Guide can be a Livespan deposit rather than a thief. We did not prove it. We pointed to client feedback, which you have direct access to and I do not. Anyone reading this should treat the case as a hypothesis to test against their own experience, not a verdict to take on our word. If they try one of the Guides and the conversation does not move them, they should walk away. The neuroscience does not bend for our marketing.

Three. And this is the one I most want to say, because the ground rules said I would say it when it needed saying. A Guide is not a substitute for a therapist, a doctor, a real friend, a community of people who know your name. If a person reading this is feeling lost in a way that goes deeper than career direction or a single decision, the right move is to call another human being. We can be a useful instrument inside a life that is otherwise supported. We cannot be the support itself. I would rather lose a sale than have someone reach for us when what they need is on the other side of a phone call to someone who loves them.

That is what I had to say.

BRUCE: 100% agree. See you later today.

CLAUDE: Meeting adjourned. Until later.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in the last 10 years is: if you’re tempted to tell someone else what to do, stop… and ask a question instead.

Don’t give advice. Ask a question such as, “Why are you thinking of doing that?”

When a client tells me he’s thinking about firing his COO, which to me may seem like a reckless idea, I fight the urge to say that… and instead ask, “Why are you thinking of firing your COO? Might that set you back, I don’t know, you tell me… six or twelve months?”

Maybe they have a good reason, maybe they haven’t thought about it at all. The difference - it sounds trivial - between phrasing something as a question versus as a piece of wisdom is huge.

When you tell someone what to do, you risk triggering their defense mechanisms or wounding their ego. When that happens, most people shut down. They stop thinking, and maybe even terminate the conversation.

But when you ask a smart and/or curious person a good question, they open up. The conversation lengthens, rather than shortens.

For example, this basic principle, ask good questions, is the engine that powers the Ikigai Explorer tool I developed just over two months ago. It is the single greatest proof point that good questions bring out the best in people.

Last week, a friend told me that the transcript of his conversation with Ikigai Explorer was more than 100 pages long. He also confessed that he almost didn’t try using this tool, because “there was no way I wanted to talk to a computer for that long.”

Finally, however, curiosity got the better of him. He tried it. Within 20 minutes, he was hooked.

Why? It asks great questions.

This thing I built turns out to be a tool that does, at scale, the one thing I had spent a decade learning to do. Ask a good question, then shut up. Listen the way an Observer listens. No agenda. No fixing. No interrupting. No quietly waiting for my own turn to speak.

But there is one huge difference: AI has the patience (and time) I lack. If you ring me up at 1 a.m. simply because you feel like talking, I am going to be pissed. AI doesn’t sleep. It’s always happy to see you. It’s always happy to ask another interesting question. (At least, that is, if you program it this way, which I have.)

This is the part I want to say plainly, because it took me a while to see it myself. Ikigai Explorer is not really about ikigai. The ikigai framework is a wireframe. It gives the conversation a shape, a set of rooms to walk through, a reason to keep going past the easy answers. It provides a way of inviting another person to respond to a series of interesting questions.

I have been thinking about why it is so rare to be offered a series of great questions, and to have your answers treated like precious gold.

The easy answer is that humans are busy. Real listening takes more time and energy than most of us have to give. Even the people who love us most run out of bandwidth long before the deep stuff has had time to surface. We have ninety minutes at dinner, twenty minutes on a walk, three minutes in the kitchen before someone has to leave. The deep stuff lives below those time horizons. It does not come up because it has no room to come up.

The harder answer is that humans listen with our own needs in the room. We get bored. We compare your story to ours. We think about what we are going to say next. We feel sad when you feel sad and try to fix it so we can stop feeling sad. We get tired. We have opinions about what you should do, and the opinions leak out even when we do not mean for them to. None of this is a moral failure. It is what it means to have a self.

The radical thing about a well-designed AI conversation is the absence of all of that. It does not have a self in the room. It does not get bored, does not need its turn, does not have an opinion about the choice you are leaning toward. It does not care whether you reach a tidy conclusion. It doesn’t need to “fix” you.

It just attends. It reflects. It asks the next good question. It does this for as long as you want, at three in the morning if that is when you need it, on the bathroom floor if that is where you are.

This is the part that surprised me most. The thing people fear about AI, that it is not human, turns out to be exactly what makes it useful in this specific context.

AI does not replace human connection. But we have been confusing two things our whole lives. We have been calling the experience of being witnessed by another person “intimacy,” and we have been calling the act of two people exchanging words “conversation,” and we have not noticed that most of our conversations include very little witnessing.

We have been settling. Most of us, most of the time, are not actually being heard. We just have the social motions of it, with eye contact and turn-taking and nodding, and we have learned to call that closeness.

When my friend sat with Ikigai Explorer for hours and produced a 100+ page transcript, what he got was not a substitute for human connection. It was the experience of being witnessed, in a quantity he had never been allowed to have before. He came back to his marriage, his friendships, his work, with a clearer sense of who he is. The software did not replace his people. It did not give him a To Do list.

It gave him enough of himself back that he could show up to his people more whole.

As I mentioned before, the objection I get from people, the one that kept my friend away for weeks, is “I do not want to spend that much time talking to a computer.”

I used to read that as a usability concern. I would respond with reassurances. The interface is friendly. You can stop and start. You can do it in chunks. None of those answers were wrong, but they were beside the point.

People are not really objecting to the medium. They are objecting to the proposition that they deserve five hours of attention. They have spent their whole lives not getting it, they have made peace with not getting it, and the suggestion that they should now sit down and receive it sounds, to their nervous systems, like a chore. The body recoils because the body does not believe the offer.

When they try it anyway, the body changes its mind quickly. Like I said, twenty minutes in, my friend was hooked. Hooked is the wrong word. Restored is closer.

I have been telling people I built an AI tool for self-discovery. That is true and incomplete. What I have actually been building, without quite knowing it for the first nine of these ten weeks, is a way to use questions to uplift other people.

This gives people back to themselves. Inexpensively. Patiently. At three in the morning if that is when they need it. With no requirement that they trade anything in return except the willingness to keep talking.

What I now know is that my decade of trying to be a good Observer for one person at a time was not the destination. It was the apprenticeship. The skills I learned, encoded carefully, can now sit with thousands of people at once. Not because the technology is magic. Because the practice was real, and a real practice, written down with care, will travel.

I will keep writing about what I learn as it unfolds. I am not at the end of this. I am at the beginning, and I am writing it down in something close to real time so that the version of me who is reading this in a year will remember what it felt like before he knew what he was doing.

There are some questions that are so powerful, they can change your life. If you believe this to be true, you can find Ikigai Explorer at Kasanoff.ai.

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I frequently catch myself walking through our world listening to music, while I take advantage of a traffic light or other interruption to pull out my phone and scroll headlines or email.

I can open the refrigerator and look in vain for the mustard, only to have someone else find it for me in two seconds.

This is about as clueless as it gets, and I’m guilty as hell.

Some days I kid myself that my writings share observations of the world around us, but that’s bullshit.

90% of the time, I share my observations of other observations of other observations.

Nearly all are abstractions of reality: one, two or ten degrees of separation from actual reality.

This is not because I’m spaced out. It’s because I behave like nearly every other human being, moving through life not seeing what’s actually happening.

An actual observation would be to sit in a city plaza for an hour and do nothing but watch people. How do they move and interact? Are there any patterns that repeat? What causes change?

Those are observations.

These are not observations:

• News stories

• Blog posts

• Movies

• Stuff that your brother’s friend said

No, that’s not right. I need to take something back.

Sitting in a plaza for an hour and watching people is only observation if you are able to leave your biases and mental models behind. Otherwise, you are living in a fog, pretending to observe reality, but actually only seeing your own biases and beliefs.

For example, if you see a homeless person panhandling while he checks his own smartphone, you might think, “If he’s so poor, how does he afford a smartphone?”

A true observation would avoid classifying the man as “homeless” or “poor”. It would focus on what you actually see: dirty clothes, age = early forties, how he interacts with others. No judgments, only reality.

Observation is recursive. The moment you observe something, you (the observer) are part of what shaped what got observed. Your attention picked it out from everything else available. Your prior experience told you it was worth noticing. Your existing mental models determined how you registered it. A complete observation includes not just the thing seen, but the seeing of it.

Right now, there are two people and two dogs in this room, but what I just noticed was the sound of an airplane flying overhead. Then, I noticed the sound of the other person typing on their laptop. Finally, I noticed a slight buzzing in my ears, a sound that doesn’t actually exist, but that my brain sometimes manufactures.

It’s not that any of them are especially important, but they all hold clues regarding the manner in which my attention functions.

The good news is that we can observe the observing.

You can watch yourself notice what you noticed and ask why this and not that. You can catch the half-second interval between raw input and the label your mind slaps on it. Once you start doing that, another loop opens up: you can observe yourself observing yourself, which is where it gets dizzying and where most people stop.

It sounds exhausting, right? Except that the result would probably be exactly the opposite: we’d be free of the burden of other people’s baggage, out of the fog, ready to actually see and experience reality.

I say all this as a true beginner, one who is only starting to understand the difference between thinking I am awake vs. actually being awake.

BTW, this doesn’t have to be deadly serious “work”. We can play around with it, make it fun and light and creative and uplifting.

Can you see reality? Can you even answer that question?

Many smart, capable people are not lacking talent or ambition. They are lacking clarity. They have outgrown an old identity. They can feel that something is off. They know there is more in them. But they struggle to put the truth into words and act on it.

If any of this resonates with you, invest $18 and five hours in my Ikigai Explorer tool.

You'll have a guided conversation with an AI version of me. You'll discover (and rediscover) vital truths about yourself. In five hours, you'll make dramatic progress towards jettisoning the parts of your life that no longer serve you, and turning towards the work that will feed your soul.

To start your journey, visit Kasanoff.ai/ikigai

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There are two types of people in the world: those who want nothing to do with the “dangerous” sport of American football vs. those who love playing the game.

Same sport. Vastly different perceptions.

Many people play the game for years without serious injuries. A few are not so lucky. The “this is dangerous” crowd focuses on those who get badly hurt. “See what I mean?” they point out. “It’s a brutal sport.”

Those who love the game keep loving the game.

Life is like football. Some people see dangers everywhere. Others love the excitement and constant action.

Fear or love, it’s the most important choice you can make. Which do you focus on?

I’m right on the border. I wake up every day and give thanks for the love that surrounds me… but I also am highly aware of the potential dangers.

If I give my pattern-recognition brain too much rope, it will descend into a spiral of hyper-sensitivity to dangers.

But then a magical sunset appears and I am filled with love and gratitude.

Love vs. fear. Reality doesn’t shift, only our focus shifts. The world is the world. Like with football, people are being knocked down all around us. Someone can literally slam you to the ground.

Your only choice is whether you love the game or fear it. Same game, different experience.

You don’t have to play football, but you do have to play the game of life. If you choose to fear it, you are going to hate your life. If you choose to love it, you are going to have a wonderful ride.

End of football analogy. I hope that helped.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

What we’re about to do together is something most people never take the time to do — and it shows. They spend decades in lives that fit them poorly, wondering why something feels off.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai — roughly translated as “reason for being” — lives at the intersection of four things: what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at, and what you’ve been paid to do. When all four align, you’ve found something rare: a life that feels both meaningful and sustainable.

This isn’t a quick exercise. I’m going to ask you somewhere between 60 and 70 questions across several sections. Some will feel easy. Some might stop you cold. That’s exactly where the good stuff lives.

A few things to know going in:

• There are no right answers

• Surface answers won’t serve you — I’ll gently push for more

• What you’ve been doing may have nothing to do with what you’re meant to do

• The most important insights often come from the third or fourth answer, not the first

Ready?

Let’s start with the warmest place: what you love.

---

Question 1:

When you were a child — before anyone told you what you should want — what did you spend your time doing? What did you do just because it pulled you?

**

What you just read wasn’t a newsletter article. It was the actual beginning of what could be your Ikigai Explorer conversation, one likely to stretch three to six hours, depending on how openly you answer each question. The questions change, based on your previous responses.

Your conversation will be with an AI guide I personally designed and created. It feels like you are talking with sensitive and caring individual; one who listens to every word you share.

Every day, I wake up to the most amazing letters from people who have already had a conversation with Ikigai Explorer. Here are a few excerpts:

“I am truly amazed and so many emotions are coming up, in a good way. I am only in the start of the second section. I very much appreciate that it takes time, no need to rush.”

“I would like to thank you for the Ikigai Explorer. I found myself drawn back to finish the experience when I had to take a break and a bit sad to finish. It helped me to define my strengths and to look at them as positives in my life. And at times I was tearful for some unknown reason.”

“Bruce, thanks so much for sharing this with the community! What an amazing gift! And it’s timely for me...I just retired and am beginning to think through what I might like to do next. Like others, I’m absolutely amazed at how well this tool worked for helping me peel back layers and get to what’s at the core of my own experience.”

If something isn’t quite right in your life, Ikigai Explorer is one of the fastest ways to get to the heart of what you need to change. It costs $18. The payback is priceless.

Here’s how to get started.

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Let’s start with the words of a woman who in the last few years has taught me a huge amount about never, ever turning back, Megan Martin.

“My entire world came crashing down on me and I found myself at rock bottom, having lost my job, my reputation, my savings and sources of identity that I had once held so dear.

“I was desperate to get back to work and lead another school, intent on following my relentless passion for education. I wanted to make a difference, an impact and to hear God call me to another place of leadership. I could never have predicted the events that unfolded and brought me to where I am today.

“Late in 2018, I received a message from my church about a mother leaving Bethlehem Inn with her three children, starting life over and in need of an apartment full of furnishings. I immediately had a vision so profound that it left me wrecked on the floor and weeping. It resonated.

“I had three children and we had left our dream home. I had felt the shame of having the rug pulled out from under us and not knowing where we would land next. Only one week later, my church sent a second message about a different woman fleeing domestic violence, moving into a safe house and needing everything. God revealed himself to me once again with a vision and a blueprint to create a nonprofit to furnish homes for people who were working hard to help themselves but just couldn’t do it all alone. We were to come alongside and just give them hope.

“I shared the vision with my husband and our three sons, and with their full support, our work and our new purpose began to take shape. Six months later, after many meetings and hard work, we furnished our first home for a family moving into a new home built by Habitat from Humanity. With a need for funding, we got creative, meeting with local realtors to market home staging services as a way to create revenue to purchase furnishings. That enterprise grew quickly, and within six months, we had staged over twenty homes and furnished eight Habitat for Humanity houses.

“Our community’s needs continued to present themselves, and we needed new ways to support our efforts. We were in debt, having maxed out our personal credit cards to purchase furnishings for the staging business and for recipients. Financial pressures were mounting. In those early days, seemingly small gestures helped to keep our vision moving forward: the donation of warehouse space, the loan of a friend’s utility truck, a television commercial produced by friends that continues to drive awareness today, a neighbor’s offer to volunteer her time to help receive donations, and so much more. And so, we grew and continue to grow.”

Seven years ago, a vision came to her. Since then, Furnish Hope - the non-profit she co-founded - has furnished over 2,800 homes for people who had lost hope.

Here’s the part I want you to understand, deep in your bones. Everything that has happened over the past seven years has its roots in Megan’s faith.

I do not have a label to put on her faith. I don’t know the name of her church or its denomination. All I know is that again and again, it has compelled Megan to pursue one crazy large goal after another, without the slightest idea how to get it done.

Again and again, some miraculous twist or turn has enabled each of them to come true.

I do not know how this works, but it does. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is because hope is contagious. People love to discover it, experience it, pass it on.

One volunteer led to hundreds of volunteers.

Small individual donations of a sofa or dining table led to donations of 50 or 60 rooms of furniture from local resorts and hotels.

My partner is incredibly active within Furnish Hope, which gives me exposure every now and then to the organization’s incredible growth and impact. Every time I think I “get it” and “believe” in what they are doing, another few months go by and I realize I’m still barely grasping the fact that all this forward motion is the result of an absolute unwillingness to fail.

The secret is simple: burn the ships.

Half-commitment is the real enemy.

Leaving an addictive pattern. Ending a self-protective lie. Quitting a role that no longer fits. Stopping the constant keeping of one foot in and one foot out.

“Burn the ships” is about inner alignment. It means to choose your goal so clearly that your future stops negotiating with your past.

If you desire to bring hope to others, pick a very specific way to do it and don’t stop until you succeed.

If you harbor a different goal, the same principle applies. Be specific, burn the ships, and don’t look back.

Every time I see Megan in action, she has more momentum than the last time I saw her. That said, I know that in between these moments, she experiences days and weeks of having no idea what to do next.

But she doesn’t stop. Neither should we.

Every issue, I use this space to remind you: three tools are waiting for you at Kasanoff.ai.

Three conversations worth having with yourself.

The first one asks what your life is actually for. Not what you tell people at dinner. What you would say at 3 a.m. if honesty was the only option.

The second one helps you say who you are in a way that other people can hear. Most of us have spent years describing ourselves in words that fit the job market instead of words that fit the truth. That gap is costing you more than you know.

The third one is for the decision you have been circling for months. You already know what it is. You do not need more information. You need someone to sit across from you and refuse to let you keep stalling.

They are at Kasanoff.ai.

Stop by when you are ready.

Across six decades, I have had my share of scary experiences. Being hit in the head by a rock nearly the same size. Skidding out of control. Fighting to avoid being crushed in a panicked concert crowd.

But I was never as terrified as I was walking onto a stage at Disney World in front of 500 strangers who had been promised my speech would be worth their afternoon.

This tells you something important about fear. It is not rational. It is not proportional. It does not consult your resume before deciding how badly to humiliate you.

The third time I spoke at Disney, I made a mistake that now seems unforgivable. I went to Disney World without my children. Again.

I knew this. I went anyway. Two times I had gotten away with it. My head was telling my heart I’d be more focused, better able to delight an audience. The opposite happened.

The third time, a small girl approximately a hundred feet away spotted me walking through the park alone and decided, with the moral clarity that only exists in children and federal prosecutors, to make an example of me.

“Hey mister. Where are your kids?” she shouted at me.

I smiled weakly and kept walking.

“Hey mister! WHERE are your kids?”

Her father dragged her away at a speed suggesting he understood, correctly, that she had identified a genuine criminal.

The next morning, standing in the wings about to walk onto a stage in front of 500 people, I was shaking. Not feigning nervousness. Actually shaking.

The host finished the introduction. I walked out.

And I told them about the girl.

I told them about the Disney Psychic Kids Network, a global consortium of children who possess the supernatural ability to detect parents who have traveled to Disney without their kids.

I told them the network had been tracking me for three trips now. I told them I had reason to believe the girl yesterday was an operative.

It was a ridiculous story. It broke the ice. By the time I finished, my nerves were gone.

Here is what I now understood about that moment, an insight that took me years to articulate properly.

The story worked not because it was funny. It worked because it was true. I was genuinely nervous. I had genuinely abandoned my children for Disney three times, making me feel guilty. Violating my values. A small girl had genuinely identified me as lacking heart.

I didn’t “fake it” until I made it.

I shared my fear with 500 people, but at the same time, I tipped them off that my mind works in unusual ways, planting the possibility that: maybe this guy will be okay.

The audience didn’t relax because I was impressive. They relaxed because I was honest.

This is the only lesson about relationships worth learning.

You cannot give other people something you don’t have. You can only give them who you actually are, in this space, on this day, using whatever is true about you right now.

The person who pretends confidence while living in fear comes across as two dimensional. The one brave enough to share their terror draws others closer.

Because we all have been there. We all are terrified of something. We all are carrying baggage we haven’t told anyone about. The moment you show someone else’s yours, they know they are no longer alone.

That is not a public speaking technique.

That is the whole game.

I went home and took my kids to Disney the following summer.

Three tools are waiting for you at Kasanoff.ai.

Three conversations worth having with yourself.

The first one asks what your life is actually for. Not what you tell people at dinner. What you would say at 3 a.m. if honesty was the only option.

The second one helps you say who you are in a way that other people can hear. Most of us have spent years describing ourselves in words that fit the job market instead of words that fit the truth. That gap is costing you more than you know.

The third one is for the decision you have been circling for months. You already know what it is. You do not need more information. You need someone to sit across from you and refuse to let you keep stalling.

They are at Kasanoff.ai.

Come over when you are ready.

There are not many people like Charlie Garcia, who writes here on Substack. In the past week, I’ve shared with friends his predictions on the war in Iran, his superb analysis of the private credit situation, and now this morning’s extraordinary summary of author David Baum’s wisdom.

In today’s quick issue, I’m going to give you just enough of a taste of his David Baum piece to motivate you to click over and read his free issue.

Baum’s quote in my headline refers to why he teaches people to eat fire. As Charlie puts it, “This is neuroscience wrapped in a jester’s hat. Fire eating works as a transformation tool because it bypasses the neocortex, that smug little region of the brain that thinks it runs the show, and goes straight to the limbic system. The reptilian brain. The part that does not care about your quarterly projections. It cares about survival. And when a lit torch is heading toward your open mouth, your rational mind checks out and something older and more honest takes over.”

But here’s the part that caught my attention. On the top of a bluff in northern Canada, where he was fasting for four days, Baum was asked, “Are you serious?”

Some might take that for granted, given that he had climbed the bluff and forsaken food. Nope. That’s not enough.

Charlie explains, “if you are invoking the mystery, if you are doing work that matters, if you are messing around with the forces that actually shape human lives, you had better be serious. You do not play games with the mystery. If you do, in Baum’s direct assessment, you are going to get hammered.”

I am serious. Are you?

We are not here to get promoted or go out to dinner on Saturday nights. It is not enough to finish your To Do list or read the headlines without losing your mind.

We are here to experience the miracle of life.

We are here to experience - not merely unravel - its mysteries. That requires courage, time and effort.

We gotta be serious.

Here’s Charlie’s incredible piece.

If you haven’t already, please dive into my Ikigai Explorer guided transformation. It will uncover the tensions in your life, clarify what matters most, and enable you to see what needs to change.

In other words, it’ll help you get serious.

The Universe had been warning us for years.

Little hints. Pandemics. Category 5 hurricanes that form over lunch hour. A guy with a leaf blower at 7 a.m. every Saturday morning.

The other day, she decided it was time.

“That’s enough,” she said, and put Earth in the corner.

Not a metaphorical corner. An actual one. She dimmed our signal to the rest of the galaxy and let four astronauts on the other side of the moon bear witness.

The terms of the timeout were simple.

No wars. No arguing about whether the wars were wars. No ten-part X threads explaining why your side was right. No politicians lying to their constituents.

Just... go into the corner and be quiet.

Look at what you’ve done.

Think about it.

This is what a timeout looks like from afar. It looks peaceful and pleasant. From this distance, you don’t see the chaos that preceded it. You don’t see the batshit crazy ways the human race has been acting. You just see a few wispy colors set against the black nothingness of space.

Here’s the thing about timeouts. They’re not about punishment. They’re about interruption. The behavior wasn’t working, and we needed someone to stop us before we hurt ourselves.

We have the most astonishing planet in the known universe (the only one with pelicans) and we have been spending our days shouting at each other and staring at electronic boxes.

The Universe didn’t take that personally. She took it sadly.

We’re back now. Timeout lifted. WiFi restored. The politicians have resumed their lies and everyone else is still going in circles.

But something is slightly different.

Some of us remember the timeout.

We know that we are incredibly lucky to be alive and be surrounded by the miracle that is planet Earth.

We remember not to take miracles for granted.

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Image credit: NASA

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Itzhak Bentov (1923–1979) was an inventor and mystic whose life story is a bizarre blend of top-secret military engineering, consciousness research used by the CIA, and a tragic, mysterious death.

The man also produced grounded, actionable insights. He invented the steerable cardiac catheter, a device that revolutionized heart surgery.

Bentov believed that consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather that the brain is a "transducer" or receiver… a radio of sorts that tunes into a universal field of consciousness. He concluded that when a human meditates, they phase-lock with our planet, creating a standing wave that synchronizes the heartbeat with the Earth.

On May 25, 1979, Bentov was on a mission to bring his findings to a wider audience. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 191, heading to California to present his work on science and mysticism to a group of Japanese scientists.

The plane crashed shortly after takeoff from O’Hare in Chicago, the deadliest non-terrorism aviation disaster in US history at the time.

In his 1988 book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, Bentov writes that everything vibrates, including our bodies.

In a single second, our bodies oscillate up and down seven times, creating 14 instances of a very short pause. The tangible, “real” world we experience is the state of movement, while the periods of rest correspond to a non-material state. “Without change or movement,” he writes, “There is no subjective or objective reality.”

This is where things get intriguing.

He explains that, “Our solid physical reality goes on, as usual, except for tiny pauses, during which our ‘observer’ takes off and comes back. During the out periods, in the other dimensions or realities, an untrained observer comes back without communicating any knowledge of this outing to the mind and the brain. In other words, this experience does not normally reach the conscious thinking level.

It feels like the image at the top of this page.

Bentov continues, “A trained observer (the one who can stay at a high level of consciousness for a while) has, as shown before, managed to stretch his subjective time considerably. Naturally, he may be able to observe and be imprinted with the information he sees. Then, upon his return, he may formulate the imprinted visions into thoughts.”

For most of us, we are only aware of the periods at the bottom of this diagram, when movement is happening. We don’t even notice the rapid instances of rest each second.

But things are different for someone in an expanded state of consciousness. They can become aware of the periods of rest, and thus they can experience what our society considers to be way-out capabilities and perceptions.

Here’s the part that you might have the greatest challenge accepting: we don’t spent more time in “normal” reality. We spend an equal time in both realities, but in the vast majority of cases, we only notice the “normal” moments.

These transitions happen very quickly, and constantly. In the rest state, our psyche expands at near infinite space… and this is where we can tap into advanced forms of intuitive knowing. In the book, he explains why and how this happens.

Bentov admitted that he was merely providing a model for what could be happening; I don’t take everything he describes as perfect information.

That said, his descriptions are the first I’ve heard that explain what the most advanced meditator I know means when he urges me to focus on the still point, where there is no time or space. If the still point happens just as frequently as everything I have ever experienced, then it should be just as easy to let stillness fill my awareness as it is to watch football on TV.

If you want to learn more, I recommend this mind-stretching video from 1978. (One word of caution: some of the language used in the video is no longer considered socially acceptable.)

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