We’ve been taught that we are rational actors making logical choices in a neutral market. It’s a lie. We are feeling machines that occasionally think.
In this 8th session with Jim, we dive into the “soul shift”, into the radical realization that 90% of our decision-making isn’t happening in our conscious, calculating minds, but in the dark, wet basement of our heuristics. If the soul is for feeling what the mind is for thought, as my mother once told me, then our souls have been hijacked by a Game A operating system.
We are on autopilot, playing extractive games because our “feelings” have been socialized to crave status, fear failure, and worship the ladder. Moving to Game B isn’t about a new policy or a better spreadsheet. It’s about a fundamental rewriting of the internal code.
The Immunization of “Fucking Off”
Jim is a rare specimen: an anti-neurotic strategist who spent decades in the belly of the beast without becoming a monster. I wanted to know why. How did he build an immunity to the “immortal psychopaths” we discussed in our last talk?
The answer is surprisingly human. He spent five years “fucking off.”
Before he became a CEO, he was hitchhiking across the country, selling cars, peddling textbooks, and reading 75 books a year while sitting by a pool. He wasn’t “climbing.” He was developing a “leitmotif of life” that prioritized the life of the mind over the status of possessions. He immunized himself against the crushing need to play the game by proving to himself, early on, that he didn’t need the game to be happy.
Most of us never get those five years. We are pushed into the “sausage factory” of testing-based education, where curiosity is a nuisance and boredom is a sin.
The Bridge Between the Abstract and the Physical
We talk about “thinking,” but what is it, really? Jim describes it as the bridge.
He recalls fixing tractors on a “hillbilly farm” in Appalachia and laying concrete driveways with his father. This is the groundedness that keeps the strategist from floating away into pure abstraction. When you know how to replace a water line or swap a Volkswagen motor at age eleven, the world stops being a “push-button surface.” You realize you can influence the substrate.
In a world of DoorDash and Uber Eats, we are being alienated from the very mechanics of our survival. This alienation is the primary tool of the extraction machine.
The Cursor of Attention and the New Goebbels
“You are your attention.”
Jim calls attention the “cursor of consciousness.” Every quarter-second, your brain decides what to focus on. And right now, there is a multi-billion dollar vacuum called TikTok sucking up every spare second of human thought.
Boredom used to be the prelude to a breakthrough. Now, it’s a dopamine deficiency that we “fix” with a scroll.
We end on a chilling warning. The propagandists of the past used radio and TV. The Joseph Goebbels of 2026 won’t use a megaphone; he’ll use an AI-based therapy app. He’ll get you at your most vulnerable, in a trust-based interaction, and subtly program your values before you even know you’re being indoctrinated.
The “soul shift” is a war for our attention. It’s about reclaiming the cursor.
We’re moving from the institutional to the personal, searching for the “density of experience” that might finally allow us to wake up.
