Crazy Wisdom

I sit down with Tommy Leep who does BD at AngelList and also helps people find their life's work with his company Jetstream. We talk about how people can minimize stress while finding a new career and stress in the context of raising money from investors.

Here is my interview with Peter Rex where I interview him about his fast growing company MakeRise, as well as his experience going against the status quo.  

It was very interesting interviewing someone about stress and creativity in the context of relationships. Its not something that I have thought a lot about, but lead to some wide-ranging insights. If you ask a genius where their ideas come from, none of them are able to actually tell you the answer. It comes from this place of emptiness. This is why meditation can help you become more creative. You already are creative because each thought you think is an example of fascinating creativity. You are creating your reality right now. Your brain is creating meaning out of all the information coming into your brain from your senses. Think about language and all the meanings we prescribe to it even if the other person speaking it meant a completely different thing! I asked her: How does having a stable and secure romantic partnership allow people to become more creative and to manage stress better? She gave a really powerful story about how her own relationship helped support her partner in creating an amazing statue for burning man after crowdfunding it. His car was stolen the night before filming for the crowdfunding campaign. Talk about stress!

Just did an interview with the CEO of Gitlab, Sid Sibrandij. Gitlab is a multibillion dollar company that helps developers become more efficient with less stress. One of the most interesting values they have is that they are totally transparent. They post lots of their meetings and code reviews to youtube so that everyone can see. I was able to ask Sid pretty much anything about the company and he would answer. This could be a source of stress because there is always this line between honesty and kindness. There is such a thing as being too honest and it can hurt people. A really interesting side effect of their strategy of transparency and publishing everything online is they get a whole lot of business because people just find them. That's how I found them too!

Taylor Jacobson is the CEO of Focusmate an amazing product that pairs you with a virtual coworking buddy. Both you and your coworker keep each other accountable for an hour while you pound through tasks. I reached out to Taylor because I'm a user of the product and wanted to hear his thoughts on the connection between stress and creativity.

In this episode I do things a little differently, instead of interviewing Henri Meijer, he helps me to remove limiting beliefs that get in the way of me starting and running a business. Its kind of like business therapy and I'm getting all vulnerable by showing it to my audience. Mentorship and coaching are so important but if you have never done it before it can seem quite abstract. If you've ever been interested in what it might be like, listen to this episode. Check out Henri Meijer's Linkedin for more on what he does! https://www.linkedin.com/in/henri-meijer-55461b26/

Francis has read widely and understands greatly the connection between stress and creativity as the CEO of a company that helps to automate repetitive work. We also go into how remote work is changing the relationship between stress and creativity in the corporate world. 

I sit down with Eliot Peper and we talk about how the world is going through a time of great uncertainty and Eliot shares his advice on how to thrive in this uncertainty. Technological breakthrough is reaching the point of breakout acceleration and this is causing people stress because they don't know where they will end up. The old rules are gone and now the rules are changing every few years.  Listen to this episode if you want to understand how to make it through. 

Today I sit down with Jason and interview him about the stress that comes from managing other people.  One of the most interesting things I learned is that managers should not try to be therapists. They should focus on coaching and if one of their employees is needs more therapeutic help they should be able to refer out to specialists.

In this episode I sit down with my father Stewart Alsop II to talk about being a journalist, being a VC, his favorite investments, and how he thinks about stress and anxiety.