Crazy Wisdom

Paul drops some knowledge on how to find yourself, live more creatively while being less stressed, and find your purpose here on the planet. Really deep. I hope you enjoy.

I just interviewed Lavinia Cerasela Ionita about her work using stress biomarkers and personalized video conferencing with doctors to help people get a handle on their stress.

I sit down with my roommate David Zangwill who has a lot of interesting things to say about the relationship between stress and creativity.

I've been doing Improv for the last month to improve my ability to be more spontaneous on the podcast and I've started to fall deeply in love with doing improv. I interviewed Jill Eickmann the founder of the local improv studio I go to called Leela and I ask her about her upcoming improv festival called Femprovisor Fest.

I interviewed Maria in both English and Portuguese. This one is the English one and we go pretty deep metaphysically speaking. We even talk about moving into the 5th dimension and Maria's thoughts on the evolution of mankind and whether aliens are helping us.

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.