Commit A Career Ending Move - Steven Foster on Permissionless Paychecks, Communal Living & Battling Life's Challenges While Pathless

[02:04] Paul: My name's Steven Foster. I've been pathless for 6 years now and like no W-2, just, and try to do it legit. Like I have a wife and kids and it's its own thing. I worked for Apple for 6 years. Did startups and stuff in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area there. Through a little over a decade of that life, I came to this conclusion that the West or like modernity, whatever age and time and place we're in right now, didn't become less religious.

We actually made our careers our religion. In that essay, I was deconstructing, which is like a common term for those who are like in the religious space, like deconstructing my faith in this, in this default path, as you've coined that term to be. I started thinking through that now, 6 years ago, I guess we're going to dive more into that here. But the core of that thesis is like, oh, like these are kind of like religions. And it's kind of weird to like— I'm Mexican-American, grew up on the US-Mexico border, family still in Mexico. And I remember telling an uncle of mine about, yeah, whenever I first started in tech, that I was like so passionate about like Apple and tech and like all the stuff I was doing.

And he looked at me and I'm Speaking in Spanish, of course. And he's looking at me like, what are you— what's wrong with you? Passions for the bedroom? And I was like, oh shoot, that's— yeah, this, this idea doesn't map. He said that to this world. Oh yeah, yeah, this is— yeah, this is Hispanic humor.

It is weird to talk about like passion and mission and commitment for like, yeah, you want to go make money and like provide for your family. Like there's something more going on here. And so in that essay, I ended up pulling on that thread a little bit more and kind of getting into my philosophy of why I went pathless.

[03:43] Steven Foster: You go on in that essay and you say, as a child, it seemed I was taught religion to learn discipline. Discipline was to be applied to education, and education was then to ascend to vocation. From vocation came worth. No wonder we worship work. So I think this would be interesting. Talk to me a little bit more about some of the stories and scripts you grew up with around work.

[04:05] Paul: My dad, literally ended up in a foster home. His family came from Spain, more than likely, from what we were able to find out years later. And my mom's side of the family, indigenous Mexican heritage, came over the border to work agriculture, manual labor type jobs. My parents thought they had made it because they got jobs in grocery stores where there was air conditioning. So that was like this huge step up. And then the fact that like I was explaining to my grandparents, remember, like, oh, I don't pick apples.

There's a computer company called Apple. And I'm like making computers at this it was like such a, such a different world when I had gotten there. And I didn't grow up with the story necessarily that like that was what I had to do. So like I just, you know, I barely graduated high school with like a 2.1 GPA. I really didn't know what I was going to do. I grew up, you know, down there in San Diego County area by Tijuana.

It's like maybe join the Navy, join the Marines. I was probably 3 weeks away from going to go see a recruiter when I randomly had this connection that I ended up with this job at Apple and I'd built some computers and servers in like my junior high, high school days. And so I had some talent and skills for that, I guess. But I think what really threw me into overdrive was I saw very quickly in the dating game as I became an adult, you know, I was kind of this like theater band kid. Didn't really feel confident in like dating life and stuff and get into the real world. And I'm realizing, oh, if I want to be a, you know, you have a great chapter in your book about like, will they love you?

Right, if you leave this default path. I hadn't even really gotten on the default path. If anything, I was starting from behind. I went to like a sort of middle-of-the-road public school. I didn't graduate, excuse me, top of my class or anything. You know, I was feeling really behind getting out of high school and was wondering what I was going to do.

And so I like, I wanted to be loved. If I'm like being honest, right, it's like I wanted to be loved. And the story that was kind of told around my family story is like my mom and dad, who were married for 45 years, had an amazing life. You know, my dad just grinded it out at the job. And same with my mom, just grinded it out at the job their entire lives. And that's how they made their marriage work.

And so I was like, oh shoot, if I want someone to date and marry me, I need to grind it out somewhere where I make the most amount of money I possibly can, because that's what's going to make me lovable, which is a terrifying story to tell yourself about work. But That was the story I had. Yeah.

[06:31] Steven Foster: Yeah. And there's some truth to it at the extremes. I think this is what I talk about in my second book is with all these scripts, there's some truth to it, right? If you're not doing anything in the world, you're going to have a really hard time attracting anyone into your life, right? And so these scripts are useful for contributing to a community, contributing to society. It makes sense.

But then Once you've learned the lesson, I think the challenge in modern culture is letting go of these scripts. And the thing I see over and over again is there are no off-ramps to these things. It is essentially on board into this way of being, this way of always achieving, aiming for more, and you don't know when to exit. But the thing I love about your journey is you didn't go to university. Did you look at going to university or consider it?

[07:27] Paul: I think I asked my dad once, like, you know, is there any money? Like, did you ever save any money for me to, like, go to college? And he was like, dude, your college fund's in the driveway. And it was like, you know, his truck or I don't know, whatever it was, right? Like, that was the joke. And, you know, my parents basically told me, you can go— you should go to community college and work full-time.

You should go to community college full-time, work full-time. That was actually like the requisite if I wanted to stay living at the house after I turned 18 and graduated high school. which I couldn't do. It was like so exhausting working full-time and going to like school and taking however many credits that was at a local community college. And I didn't really know what I was gonna do. And very quickly I saw the path with, you know, Apple was in this explosive growth.

They were like, hey, come up to Cupertino and, and, you know, start working on this cool new tech. And the iPad, I think, was just about to come out. iPhone had just hit. And, um, it was kind of like, look, I could go work or I could go to school for 4 years and I'm going to miss this whole chapter of Silicon Valley and the tech industry and what's happening here. And so because I had a way in, yeah, I just, I kind of, I found a door and I went through it.

[08:33] Steven Foster: How did that happen? You were working in one of the retail stores, right?

[08:37] Paul: I started in— yeah, it was a crazy time because the iPhone had just launched and Apple retail and corporate were freaking out because like they could not staff enough people. To meet that demand. I think Steve wanted to sell— Steve Jobs wanted to sell a million units in the first year. We sold 4. That stressed the entire company out. And so I had a really good friend from high school who did become one of those sort of like electrical engineering protégés where like he had like a master's degree from a very nice university and he was working at the Apple Store part-time as he was finishing that so he could get up into corporate.

He recommended me that I come in and start out at a store, make sure I was a good culture fit. And then eventually I found myself going up to Cupertino and doing like just the most remedial, like anything like you'll give me. I'm at the point I remember telling my boss, he was like, how much money do you want to make? And I was like, as long as it's in accordance with state law, I'll do it right. Like, I'm literally a 2.1 GPA graduate, right? With— I'm like, this is my only shot.

So I'm like, dude, you can tell me to do whatever. If it's in my power, in my will, I will do it and I will do it for the cheapest amount of money possible.

[09:44] Steven Foster: I don't want to upset you. Was he like, Steven, you need to negotiate a little harder.

[09:48] Paul: He, they ended up, yeah, because when I first started in the store, you know, you're hourly before you become salary. I eventually, I became full-time as an 18-year-old still, but, but yeah, I remember he kind of laughed at me and he withdrew the offer that he gave me and he actually raised it an extra dollar an hour for saying that. And I was like, cool. And also he was like, that's not how you negotiate. He's like, we're going to teach you. We're going to— he's like, we're going to be teaching you a lot of things, apparently.

[10:13] Steven Foster: Talk to me about the culture shock, because I went into college, I was a first-gen college student. And so for me, college was 4 years of learning how the world works, right? Learning how to negotiate, learning how to do all these things. What were some of the challenges of integrating into the corporate Apple culture? I imagine there were many.

[10:35] Paul: Oh man, when I first got to Cupertino, they put me in corporate housing and they were going to give me a rental car. And when you turn 25, you can rent a car, right? That's like the last big milestone thing that happens before you like hit Social Security or whatever. If you're on a corporate plan, you can rent a car at 21, and I'm not 21. And so I remember like the first day, my boss being like, and this is pre-Uber, right? Like we, I think this is happening to me maybe right as the App Store is launching and like the only cool apps are like the beer app and the lightsaber app, right?

I tried walking everywhere and that was exhausting. I ended up making good friends with some people on my team and like they would drive me places. So I've kind of felt like a kid still. I felt like I was like a kid. I remember people like would make fun of me. Like I have, I have photos of me from you know, my time at Apple in those early days.

And people were like, oh, I didn't know we could hire minors. And I was like, well, I'm technically an adult, right? I'd go to these meetings after work. I'm like, I can't drink. I can't, can't drive a car. Apparently I could drive a car, but I couldn't rent a car.

So I felt like a kid. And all of that was just lighting a fire under me, you know, because it was like, man, you're so behind. And this is like just this rare moonshot opportunity. That I just, I was devouring information. I had another good friend. I was still like learning how to program and write code.

I was pretty good on the system side, but I wasn't really good at like object-oriented programming and app development, especially in 2008. There wasn't even really that many ways to learn that. If you took a CS degree somewhere, you might be writing like assembly. So you wouldn't be programming for modern applications, right? And so I remember there was someone that I knew on the team that he would go smoke hookah at a hookah lounge like a few times a week. And I was like, I have to learn, like you're one of the most respected people on this team.

And I was like, I have to learn how to write code from you. And he was like, if you buy me a bowl of shisha, right? Like I'll spend some time with you. And so like, that was one of the ways I like sort of hacked together an education for myself was like buying people food buying people shisha bowls and just being really present and not asking a ton of questions, like really respecting the seniority of some of these people and doing a lot of watch, experiment, get as far as I possibly could to the point where then I'm like, I can ask a really quality question where the people who I'm learning from can tell that I'm doing the absolute most I can and I'm respecting that. I like, I don't want to get in their way.

[13:15] Steven Foster: The thing I find fascinating about your journey is people will often criticize some of the writing and work I do and say, you shouldn't be telling people they can enjoy their work because some people who don't have advantages or some of the privilege, they need to grind. And when I push further, it's the idea that the people need to grind forever. So it seems you woke up to, this is great, I love this opportunity, but this world is really weird. All this mythology, these rituals, this way of being, it's a bit weird. And so I think your perspective really captures some of the weirdness I'm trying to point to, but I have a harder time pointing to it because people will say, well, you're of that world.

[14:07] Paul: I remember someone telling me, like a director-level person at a company that will not be named, I was giving a timeline for a big project and this person like tried to tell me like, oh, well, if Steve Jobs told you to do it in 3 months, you would do it in 3 months. So do it in 3 months. And there became like this almost parody in the Valley, at least from what I experienced, of like people doing a parody of an Eric Schmidt or a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. That never actually worked with him or knew him or like they just— I don't know what was happening. Whatever. Something was happening to the culture around Silicon Valley and work.

There's a good quote that I've heard is people don't leave jobs, they leave managers. And I think cumulatively speaking, and I had so many good managers, I would say I had more admirable managers, directors, leaders, executives that I worked with over my career that were far and away amazing people. And I think there were enough— there were enough that like there were enough interactions with different people kind of along the way that I thought, you know, maybe this isn't the environment for me to be in long term. Yeah.

[15:24] Steven Foster: This is such an interesting point because for me, I also felt very similar. When I landed my first job at McKinsey, it was not— I never actually worked in the big tech world, but it was the East Coast version of it. Very elite company. 98% of the people that work in these kind of companies were raised with parents who were also already hyper-successful. And so they had been raised from an early age, gone to certain schools, taught how to be a certain way in the world. And I think what you're pointing to is this performance layer.

And so maybe the first generation of Silicon Valley, you're literally just working. There's no story to live out, but multiple generations after that, and this is on the East Coast too, there's this performance layer of how you're supposed to be. And I remember one person He's giving a talk to a bunch of interns and somebody said, what, how should we think about succeeding? And he's just repeating this line of, I'll tell you what I did every day. The senior most person in the office, I made sure I never left before him. And I did that for 30 years.

Here I am. And so It's interesting. It— if you do work a lot of hours, that will work. But does that make you excel? Does that make you indispensable? Does that make you actually enjoy your work?

Does that make you actually stick around for the long term? And oh, by the way, is he telling us the growth rates of the firm when he was doing that, which were higher than 15% per year and are now 1 to 2% a year? Yeah. All these things are things that have radically changed. And so what I see is there's this lag in the, in adapting to the reality which you're pointing to in the tech world, which is that the tech world did have these dynamics, but they've slowly shifted over the last 15 years. And if you're not of that world, you— it's really hard to keep adapting to it.

It took me so much cognitive energy to always figure out the games they're playing. They don't— oh, they don't really mean this. Oh, they're just acting. Oh, they don't actually really like this person. And it's so hard to keep up with. And like, yeah, I loved the work, but I hated the performance.

I'm such a bad performer. Yeah.

[18:00] Paul: Well, see, I— because I grew up in like theater and doing like band and stuff like that, like I could be a performer. I think that's actually what got me as far as I did was like, yeah, I was good at the work, but man, could I— like, I knew how to operate on stage. And I was like, oh, this is all fabricated. And then, but you do it long enough and it starts, you know, eating at your soul really quick. And you're like, oh, these people aren't asking how I'm doing out of like, they don't want to know how I'm doing. That's just the corporate speak, right?

Like they didn't put 15 minutes on my calendar because they think I'm valuable. They're trying to make themselves more valuable by getting access to whatever I'm up to or, you know, what's going on, getting the pulse check on whatever's happening. I think we were really focused. I think back to, you know, I was part of a couple startups as well. And I think about probably the most successful startup I was a part of was Lynda.com and their sort of meteoric rise in the early 2010s and the sale to LinkedIn and everything. That team, that early team where like, I know Lynda herself, I still have her phone number in my phone.

Like I could call her up. I know where she lives. Like she, there was a tight group of all of us that were there in the early days. And, and Bruce, her husband, and, and just everyone who was there and a part of that group. And then eventually that team grew so big as we approached that sort of exit where it was like, I don't know everyone here and not everyone is interested in actually knowing me and being in a, in a workplace with me where everyone's just performing and doing the role. What it really boils down to, though, is it boils down to this like belief that this job is more than just the product of what it's producing, right?

That it is this like status signifier and this definer of dignity for yourself and for your peers, and that it borderlines like a, like, salvific, like, prophecy. And that, that's really unhealthy, especially when you become unmoored from all the old sort of cultural, the, like, institutions that have been standing for thousands of years. And you try to say, like, well, now I'm all in on this big glass donut in the middle of suburbia, right? Because that's going to be the cathedral that saves me, right?

[20:13] Steven Foster: So you did leave. We opened up the show with this. Talk to me about your career-ending move. And what do you mean by career-ending?

[20:22] Paul: Going into 2020, so I'd left, I'd gone back to Apple and left. I went into 2020 thinking I'm either going to go on a sabbatical or I had an opportunity with my wife's cousin had a company that we were talking about, like, what would it look like if I came on board? So it was like, oh, maybe I'm going to jump into the next opportunity. Maybe I'm going to go take a little sabbatical. We wanted to leave the Bay Area and move down to San Diego where our families were from. What ended up happening was my wife was at Airbnb when COVID hit, and she was part of like when they laid off like half the company to survive.

And she was doing design, product marketing, things like that for them. And so now we were looking at our lives like, okay, this deal with, you know, her cousin didn't pan out. Their company, I think, folded because of the pandemic. My wife got laid off from her allegedly stable big tech company that was worth a lot of money.

[21:14] Steven Foster: Right.

[21:14] Paul: And we were like, maybe it's time to leave California. So yeah, we like packed up and left and then we ended up jumping in the car and just kind of doing a road trip. And going to different spots in the country. And yeah, like eventually found through my wife's family friends and some connections and stuff, we found this little homestead up in Idaho of all places, which is like a landlocked— for any listener that's not in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, even like you tell people in the United States like, where's Idaho? And they think Iowa or, you know, Illinois, Indiana. It's one of those, Ohio, like But we just found like a little quiet part of the world to like pull back into and really begin rethinking our lives.

And we had— we basically took what was the sort of capital we put together for buying a house and turned that into our, our runway to leave. The career-ending move was like all of our friends saying like, hey, if you leave Silicon Valley, if you leave California, you're never coming back. And it's a career-ending move. And I kept hearing, hearing that even from people who loved us and really cared about us. They were saying that out of concern. And I just, it kept sounding to me like this religion thing, like normally people commit heresy or like, yeah, I'm getting excommunicated or like I'm committing a cardinal sin.

That was what was kind of in the back of my head. Like I've committed this cardinal sin by stepping away from the holy land of work.

[22:40] Steven Foster: Right.

[22:41] Paul: And I was like, wow. Like, Commit a career-ending move. That— why, why does that resonate more with us today in 2025 than someone committing a cardinal sin or committing heresy or, you know, these things that carried weight for the last, you know, hundreds, thousands of years in our civilization? Now all of a sudden we could say that and it's, it's like a breath in the wind. But committing a career-ending move, that title was so provocative when I wrote that and released. I remember people like being like, oh my gosh, like, are you okay?

Like, are you going to be okay? And it's, yeah. And that's, it's terrifying that that title felt so powerful and continues to like draw people in. I get messages from people all the time who read that and they're like, wow, this really resonated with me. And to me, that's, I'd begun thinking that through this career-ending move lens as we were sort of leaving and had committed to at least the exploration of it. And that just further validated that I was doing the right thing by sort of resisting the default path, committing the career-ending move.

And I get that a lot of people are scared about that, right? Like a lot of people want to know they can come back. And, you know, you and I've talked about this. I figure I should say it here, right? Like that is the scary thing, right? Like the timeless truth.

You look at the like biblical Exodus story 3,000 years ago, right? Like once you cross the Red Sea and go into the wilderness, there's no going back to Egypt, right? Like, you can't. The only way through is like forward and like going through the wilderness and finding that promised land. So it is scary. It is really, really scary to be like, oh, if I take this jump, can I accept that there may be no way back, right?

And maybe there is. Maybe it looks different. I've definitely— you and I both have seen people who've left, take a sabbatical, regroup, find their thing and still go back. But yeah, for me, it really was like, I have now departed Egypt and gone into the wilderness and there is no going back.

[24:43] Steven Foster: Even if you go back, it's almost always in different form. And so I think what people are feeling when they leave or take a break or even take a sabbatical is the truth that they will change. That they already know they're on the process of transformation, and this is the public acknowledgement of it. And so what I've seen is that if you're not willing to embrace that, you're really going to struggle on a new path. And I think the thing that helped me was when I left, my fear was going back. So I did, I didn't want to have to go back.

And so that fear is not the healthiest over the long term. And I had to work with that and let go of that as well. But that really helped me because when I walked away, the worst case was having to walk right back. And that enabled me to look forward and just start looking for possibilities and opportunities. And when you're on these paths, you start seeing that everywhere. I wonder how soon you started to realize that.

Talk, talk me through those first few months, right? You're— it's COVID, everyone's a bit lost. You're on a road trip. It fits with where the world was at that point. But when did you start maybe feeling some of the uncertainty or thinking, oh wow, I am in new territory, I need to start moving forward on this new path?

[26:15] Paul: So like the time I was, we moved out of the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. I think it was the weekend of the George Floyd riots. I remember like, I vividly remember how terrifying that was. Yeah. That, and that was kind of like a, oh, I like, how could I raise kids here? This is wild.

And so there, there was that sort of marker. And then we went down to San Diego. We literally put all of our stuff in storage. We didn't know what was going to come next. We were staying with my parents for a little bit. And then I, we got a phone call from my, my cousins, my aunt and uncle and my 4 cousins.

And they're like, hey, I think we're going to come out and visit you. And they live out in Texas. And we're like, why? Everything's closed. And they're like, they didn't believe us. So they actually like came all the way from Texas to actually see that California was still closed in January or no, sorry, June, June of 2020.

And they were like, What are y'all doing out here? And we were like, well, what's it like in Texas? And they're like, people are living. We almost couldn't believe it because of just the, the narrative was so like localized wherever you were and like all the, because everything was so local based. Yeah, it was so disorienting. So we just were like, all right, we'll go road trip out to Texas.

And then we went to Texas and we're like, wow, Arizona and New Mexico and Texas. Are just normal. Then like went to Louisiana and Arkansas and Tennessee and then Kentucky and Missouri. And we hit pretty much every state west of the Mississippi. And so when we found ourselves in, in Idaho and was like, all right, we're going to, we're going to post up here. We got up here, I think July, August of 2020.

And we were like, okay, we like rented a house. We knew we were going to like buy some property eventually. We were starting down that path. And then it was like, We gotta do winter now, right? And like, as you know, Hispanic kid from Southern California, I'd flown, I'd been to New York and Pennsylvania. I'd been back East Coast winters.

I've been to Chicago. And I remember when like we had our first day below freezing, like in November or something, or no, we actually, we got 8 inches of snow in October. And I remember we had signed up for a serve project with the local community church, something. And I was like fixing a woman's roof of her barn out on the prairie in 8 inches of snow. And I remember thinking to myself, like, what have I gotten myself into? Like, I went from writing code and doing this whole thing at Apple not even a year ago till I'm now like putting, like, I'm rebuilding this person's barn in a community project in, and I'm freezing because I don't have the right gear and like I'm learning on the fly again.

It was cool, but it was like, yeah, I'm, I'm learning again.

[29:00] Steven Foster: Were you doing that for money? Money or just to engage with the community? Yeah. What, what were you doing for money? What was the, how much was the runway? How long did you give yourself?

What are some of the experiments you started doing?

[29:14] Paul: Yep. Those are all good questions. The runway we felt like in California was going to look like 6 months to a year. And the thought of going somewhere that was not California was extend the runway to maybe 2 to 3 years was the idea. If absolutely nothing happens now, my wife had consulting opportunities. I had some consulting opportunities.

I started the YouTube channel. I got into photography, was doing a little bit of professional photography for both like product type stuff and then like family lifestyle shoot type stuff. Really ad hoc though. Never really like sunk my teeth into either to any one of those things other than like the YouTube thing. Honestly, though, I think the first like the 6 months were a detox, right? It was like, cool, we're in a state where our utilities cost us about like $100 a month and our grocery bill is about $400 a month.

And coming from the San Francisco Bay Area, that was like, wow, this is, this is about a quarter of what we were spending on those things, you know, a year ago. So we really took the time to like just slow down and detox, really think through those scripts for both of us and for our marriage and like what it meant for our families. And we did a lot of service projects too. Like that's how we met a lot of people was like we signed up to like go rebuild, you know, houses for people that had been, you know, damaged by storms and stuff like that. We, we like tried to serve with like the community, like helping watch people's kids and just whatever we could do to help. We were like, we had some like, I think at one point we had two widows living on each side of us and it was just like helping them out, you know, with daily little things and a couple of elderly people across the road from us.

So it was like, it was very just like, let's be present in the community. Let's try to do like a lot of local stuff. We did have some work, but it was really about exploring locally and being like, who are these like really hardy people living out here in the forest? Like, uh, you know, learning also skills. Like I remember one of our good friends that we met, she like had grown up in the area and was like a professional forager. Like she could go out into the woods and live off of foraging.

And meeting other people. Hunting is really big up here with the national forests and doing everything legit legally, but like learning like, oh wow, there's actually a lot of abundance out here and embracing that abundance of not just like what a community can give you as far as not just like meals and a helping hand and like skills, but like also just how abundant nature actually is. That's something we really don't get in cities. Like I heard a quote Many years ago while I was living in San Francisco was you can't spell scarcity without city. Like cities are manufacturers of scarcity because nature, nature is truly abundant.

And I think that's what we were trying to wrap our heads around was like, oh, people can just like, you get a tag with Fish and Game and you check in with the National Forest and whatever, but like you just go out in the wild and secure all the food that you need for like 6 months. And then you process it and all of a sudden, like, you're not worried about a grocery bill, right? You're not worried about like not getting that deal or doing that, you know, getting that job or that promotion or that bonus because you won't be able to eat steak. It's like it was a, it was a complete rewiring of the brain to see what it could look like to live with basically no money.

Like I met people up here that were— I met one guy Specifically who, like, he wanted to do the, the artist thing and like he was living out of first like a tent and then like an old van in the woods with nothing but like a rifle, a hatchet, and like his oil painting stuff. And like, that's how he went from starving artist to like six-figure gallery.

[32:59] Steven Foster: Right.

[33:00] Paul: And meeting people like that just started rewiring us to be like, oh, like this is a different way of really looking at it. You know, about, about The Pathless Path, because you can, as you've proven, you can go do The Pathless Path in a city, you can travel, you can do the, the digital nomad thing. But there's also this other way where it's like there's a lot of abundance and sustenance. I think we were just thinking about the runway, finance and financial, like financial terms. We, once we got settled in, it was like, oh, now the runway was like, yeah, what's it like to do just like little odds and ends jobs around town, right? Whether we're, helping people for free or not, you know, for paid gigs, whatever.

And then like how much like abundance and sustenance actually is there?

[33:43] Steven Foster: I don't know if you can ever fully disconnect from that in the modern world, but I've definitely even experienced that and I've mostly been living in cities. The shift for me has been going from, okay, I make this amount of money this month, this month, how do I allocate it to all the things I want to spend on or need to spend on? To, okay, if I consume these things, I now need to earn the money to cover it. And therefore, are there more creative ways to deal with this or things I could go without? Or, and this is something I want to explore with you, do I buy time and then just try to earn less, spend less? Such that I can buy, buy the time instead of the stuff, if that makes sense.

And I think this has been a huge thing on your journey. Your journey has not been smooth. Me, I've gone through a lot. I've gone through a lot of ups and downs and health crises, often behind the scenes. I don't talk about these as much, but I've gone through at least 3 or 4 stretches of at least a month long in which I almost had no energy. To work, but being able to say, okay, I don't need to make money, or I can scale down how much I'm trying to make and spend some of my runway, or just not investing for future things on that time, to me is such a relief.

And that only would make— that would not make sense to former me.

[35:18] Paul: Yeah, same.

[35:19] Steven Foster: Because it was every time you're working, you're generating money. But that's not always true on this path. So maybe talk to me about some of the ups and downs and how you've thought about buying your time or just having time to go through some of these crises, spending time with your kids, things like that.

[35:37] Paul: Yeah.

[35:37] Steven Foster: Oh, man.

[35:38] Paul: Yeah. What hap— that's one of the, like, big questions I know we both get asked is like, what happens when everything goes wrong on The Pathless Path?

[35:44] Steven Foster: Yeah. And everything has gone wrong on your path.

[35:46] Paul: Here's the highlight reel. Maybe a few weeks before my son was born, I had a freak accident that, like, destroyed my left leg, tore my medial meniscus in my knee. Fragmented my bones in my ankle. I have permanent damage in my left foot. I had to relearn how to walk. I was basically in PT for 6 months learning, relearning how to walk for the second half of 2022.

Mind you, this is as I'm becoming a parent for the first time. My wife got home from the hospital with— or all of us got home from the hospital. Like, I was being pushed around the hospital too with a wheelchair. My wife, within a couple of hours of coming home, just collapsed, like unresponsive. Have to call the ambulance, ER. She's in the hospital now.

Basically 6 months from my son's birth as well. So I'm struggling to walk at home with a newborn. My wife is in and out of the hospital for basically the first 6 months of his life. We go on a journey with her health. There's maybe some things related to Lyme disease there. So that kind of takes us through like the second half of '22 and into '23.

And then while all this is happening, my, my mom gets diagnosed with cancer and she's told she has 6 months to live. And that end date is basically my son's due date. So now we're also like trying to fit in time with mom and dad and have this quality time amidst all this health chaos. My, my mom's in deep in that battle with cancer in '23. My wife's starting to get better. I'm starting to be able to walk again.

We go into '24 and like Jan— or no, June of '24, my mom starts having some more serious situations with her health and ends up being a lot of travel for me, a lot of time off of work, whatever that was, whether it was the YouTube channel, writing on Substack, any consulting work. My mom ended up passing during Advent, so December last year, '24. And then that just kicked off this whole thing of like, I'm very having to be very present with my dad. Both my mom's parents are still alive. So like I'm helping out with my grandparents were, we basically like, I ended up taking like 6 months off because like the government in the United States, God bless them, like pronounced my dad deceased. So like that created a huge heap of paperwork and closed accounts that we had to reopen.

Like all in the chaos of like your part, your spouse of 45 years just passed. And so like, I'm just trying to like hold it all together. For my grandparents' sake, my dad's sake, my, my kids' sake who are, it's my son. I'm also discovering at this time that my wife is pregnant with our second kid. We're then tracking with these complications my daughter has and trying to figure out that out while working on the sort of homestead out here. I fall and I hit my head.

I have massive TBI brain injury that I had to start taking very like serious recovery protocol steps from. My daughter's born with this rare genetic disease. Uh, we're now in the first 4 months of her life. She's had almost 70 doctor's appointments. To sort of line up all the different pediatricians, nurses, surgeons, all the people who are going to be involved in like the care for getting the best shot at having a normal life as possible, all while like not having great health care, not having the financial, like the money coming in where you're just like, cool, I can, I can pay anyone any time to go do anything for my kids. Like the best I can do is just be really present to a lot of research.

Recover from my own stuff the best I can, taking it as seriously as possible. But yeah, if I can survive, if we— if my family can survive having gone through all that, and we're still in the middle of it, like my daughter's— her health needs— she's gonna be on medication for the rest of her life daily, multiple times a day. She's going to need multiple surgeries here throughout this first year of her life. Like, we're still in the middle of it, and I wouldn't trade I wouldn't trade this. Like, I wouldn't want a job in the middle of this. It was actually like my— one of my cousins, his uncle or my uncle, his dad passed when I had just gone back to work at Apple in like 2016.

And I didn't go to the funeral and it kind of ate at me for many years, I guess 7 years, because then when my mom passed, he was there at my mom's funeral. And I just like, man, I held it together pretty good until I saw my cousin. And I realized like, ooh, like I made a big mistake back then. Like my priorities were messed up and I allowed that sort of story, that default path to take over so much of my life. And now thankfully I can kind of look now and go, oh, I, even though it's hard, it's very hard. I think it'd be hard no matter how much money I was making, no matter what, whatever job I had or whatever.

But I'm really thankful that I'm— I have this freedom to like stop working, even though it's like it's put significant financial stress on my family, to be really present with my daughter, my wife, my dad, my grandparents, you know, because you'll just never get that time back. Like you'll, you'll never get that time back. You can't. That's, that is the real thing you can't buy back, you know, like being present to explain to my son, you know, why why grandma isn't here anymore. Like that, I don't want to hide from that. I have to be really present with my son for that, you know, being there for my dad, being there for my grandparents.

Like that's taken a lot of presence, a lot of presence. And it's, it's cost me greatly. But then there's, there's so much stuff that people don't talk about on that journey, right? Like we're really fortunate to have a really awesome Catholic institution, Catholic hospital nearby. And because of our income, we're not making Silicon Valley money anymore. Like, we basically get healthcare for free from them.

Like, we do pay for a plan that isn't great, but the rest of it's kind of covered by benevolence in some way, which is amazing. My wife's health stuff, she serves on a board of directors of a nonprofit. One of the people on the board there decided to write a check to basically cover all of her health needs for like a year. There have been these very strange things that I couldn't have predicted or put onto a spreadsheet or calculated into the mix when we set foot on that Pathless Path 6 years ago. But by being open and really community-oriented and presence-oriented with just the people around us, that's been the thing that gives us the ability to go through all those things and tackle all those things. And I think that's that's the underrated thing is it's not money.

Like, we live in a country in the United States that has Hippocratic oath. Like, you're not going to be denied care.

[42:23] Steven Foster: I think what you're getting to is we have all these individualistic stories which tell us if you don't take care of everything yourself, you will be left behind or you will ruin your life. And I feel this too, because I do think about, okay, what if something happened? And my answer is I would have to surrender. I would have to release myself to the world and really just trust that I would be taken care of. I probably do not have the financial resource to cover a major health crisis right now, but I do have friends. I have people that care about me, and I would have to open myself up to receive support.

Would it come? I don't know, but that's okay. I think that's scary for people because we have this script, that sort of stance of not taking care of yourself is a bad thing. But I imagine you've had to learn how to receive support.

[43:27] Paul: Yeah.

[43:27] Steven Foster: How has that been for you?

[43:30] Paul: It's, um, it's humbling, right? Especially as like a man, father, and the husband. And being like, ooh, I don't know how this is going to get taken care of, right? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how, like, I'm going to pay for all these surgeries and procedures for my daughter. I didn't know at the time, like, am I going to pay for all this, like, travel and, and care for my mom, right?

Or all the PT stuff that I've had to go through to, like, relearn how to walk and now to, like, get my brain back in order. Oh, man. But so— but, like, I think it can't be understated how important communities are and actually real religion is. Like, real religion gets a knock, I think, in our modern age. As I've gotten older and become a parent, I'm like, real religion is— makes a lot of sense. Like, one of, one of the families from our, like, faith community, they owned a hyperbaric chamber.

And if you know anything about brain injuries, like, you can actually make a really— a much faster recovery if you get hyperbaric exposure. They gave me so many just like whenever they didn't have that thing booked, they were like, why don't you come at this time and get an hour and get 90 minutes in, whatever it was. And I like, I don't know what like LeBron James or Cristiano Ronaldo pay for their like recovery, uh, like access to things like these tools. But I'm like, wow, I could get access to that because there are just some kind people that I've, I've interacted with, served, that share that maybe I can never pay back, that I never gave anyone that much of value to at all.

But I think that is something to be said about leaving the sort of like the holy land of careers is like if you go anywhere else, I don't think it's necessarily that people are nicer, but there's more margin or flexibility, maybe more of just like a communal feeling. In a place where there's maybe 5,000 to 10,000 people who live there year-round versus 20 million.

[45:29] Steven Foster: What is the role of religion? And I know you've gone down a rabbit hole of mysticism. What is the role in all of this on your journey?

[45:38] Paul: Growing up sort of Mexican Catholic, you know, Hispanic Catholic world, I do not believe I was properly catechized. I didn't retain a lot. I did like the Protestant non-denomination thing. That's actually where I met my wife. Like, I was like nominally Christian, right? Like, I would go to church on Sunday.

What really got me into the mysticism part was finding these, these characters in this sort of the Spanish mystics, you know, the Spanish Golden Age really, that kind of had their own Pathless Path story, right? Like during the Spanish Golden Age, in the lead-up to it, it's like, yeah, you joined, you joined the armies of Castile and Navarre, right? And you, you marched to finish the Reconquista. And then after that, it was like, great, we have all this science and we have all this money. And these Spanish mystics were actually like, no, I'm going to go out into the wilderness and find God or meditate and have these spiritual experiences that really kind of challenged even actually the, the church during that time. It was actually really scary.

Like, a lot of the, like, mainline Christians, Catholics in Spain in the 1500s looked at the Spanish mystics like, these people are nuts. These people should go back to their nice, like, little cathedrals and, like, hang out in Madrid and whatever. And instead, these people are going out and having these, these— they're having sweet quiet time and, like, allowing help getting away from the rush of things. And I found something very parallel to our own time, right? Where like California had become this metropolis. It was sort of this like this Wild West outpost and now it was becoming this hub of work, right?

And it was becoming prosperous really in a sense unlike at any time before in its history. And it felt like some of those old Spanish stories like the Spanish Golden Age. And it felt like to survive that, I might need to become sort of my ancestors before me and become one of these, like, mystics. So religion for me really became a very personal thing at first. It was like a way of— if anything, it was like a mental health thing in the truest sense of the word, because I think whatever we call mental health in the English-speaking West, you know, for most of history, we would have talked about the soul. And so it was a way to stay sane in like a very insane time and an insane world.

And then gradually that led me to, and we had actually a great sort of nominally Christian community in the San Francisco Bay Area. We'd get together and have meals together with certain people, but it was nothing like what we have here now where, you know, if something breaks at your house and you need someone to get on your roof, they used to call a buddy up, or like a tree falls on someone's house and like the whole neighborhood comes out with chainsaws and starts cleaning it up, right? Like it's a, it's another level. And so I think religion from the community framework perspective is very underrated, especially when you're somewhere where the government doesn't have a lot of resources to help you. And there really is like kind of no one else coming to save you.

The communal aspect of not just people wanting to be nice and doing nice things, but also the sort of liturgical year that you get with the seasons where we're at now as well. Like, there's, there's a time to mourn things. There's a time to celebrate things. There's a time to have these deep inner, like, inner experiences. And there's a time to have a big joyous celebrations and having that rhythm back in life. Like that's one of the ancient wisdom traditions from like the biblical narrative, right?

Is like you should probably take a day off once a week because if you don't, you're going to, you're going to carry this like heavy burden that you, you need to become God and like own the world and like do everything yourself. And so it's like in the simplest terms, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but it's like you need to take a day off where you slow down and rest.

[49:27] Steven Foster: I think a lot of people are searching for that. I am somebody from anywhere, living anywhere. In Taiwan right now, but in the same vein, I think both me and my wife, we each have a grandfather who was a farmer, and then the previous generation made money in corporations, and then we're sort of living in this digital world, but then craving that sense of place again. And trying to find it and trying to create those traditions and figuring out what it means. I think being back in Asia, we're really reconnecting through our daughter with some of these traditions that have been around for a while. And it's been interesting to see Angie sort of rethink some of these things.

I think East Asia especially has gone through a more intense upgrade from sort of rural life to industrial and modern life, like much faster, much more intense, much, a lot more sort of top-down control. And so trying to figure out, okay, which, which of the stories have some depth once you strip away some of the like political narratives and the top-down narratives and are there for the taking and we can sort of re-embrace with our daughter. And then similarly, I think in the West, a lot of the things with work are really interesting. I think my second book is sort of this reconnection with work. For me, it's this idea of leave work to find work because work is universal. Work is part of life, right?

The work of taking care of your father, your wife, your children. That's work. And so when you zoom out far enough, pretty much all we're doing on this earth is work. The thing we get lost in is we put this special kind of work on a pedestal, which is sitting at a laptop on keys. And once you disconnect from that, it's a little weird to see how special we see that. I spend some days with my daughter taking care of her.

I spend some days supporting Angie in her work. I spend some days doing nothing, which is that, those seasons of rest. And it's weird how it all flows together. It flows in and out. And yeah, when you read some of these religious texts, they're all just saying exactly that.

[52:13] Paul: When Jesus is sending out like his followers to go do the good work, right? Which I think you, you really have helped bring, I think, that idea into the modern world because it's like Jesus is like, the worker is worth his wages. If you show up willing and ready to serve people to the best of your capacity, wherever you are, and you're present about it, you won't have the worry about, oh, my shelter, my healthcare, my food, my fill in the blank.

[52:36] Steven Foster: It's like, but why don't people believe that?

[52:40] Paul: Oh, because of the— it's the city. It's the scarcity mindset, right? It's, it's if you've only ever lived in a city where you never knew your neighbors and the whole economy of it is basically, I live in this apartment. The only people who live in nicer apartments than me or houses, it's because they make more money than me. And basically the floor underneath this apartment is homeless. right?

Like that's the strata of the city. But in, in the more communal environments, it's witnessing the strata that has much more gradient to it in a more communal environment, right? Most of the people who I think believe like, if I don't, like money's my only runway, if I don't have money, I'm screwed. It's because they have an experience or they haven't experienced in recently that communal type environment where people are, are, people want each other around, right? And they want to do everything they can. There's such a trade and barter economy in our little town, right?

Of like all the moms and wives are on like a group chat and they're always like being like, oh, I need milk or I need sugar or I need whatever the thing is. For a long time, we didn't even have a Trader Joe's in like our entire part of the state, half the state just didn't have one. So they were organizing like convoys to go out to a specific grocery store to get certain types of food. And, or just even if someone has abundance, right? You're not used to that, like abundance of— I had a friend who had a really good hunt last season and he's, dude, let's make some deer tacos, like at my house. Right.

And it's like that sort of abundance showing up and that generosity showing up. Most people may not have experienced that if they're in the city, in the grind, right? Because there is no nature to give you that abundance, if that makes sense.

[54:36] Steven Foster: Do you think you could go back into the city now with a different perspective?

[54:40] Paul: I could maybe go back into a city for a few days and then have to pull back and have— I actually have even recently looked at like, man, if I wanted to do like in-person workshops or do something to like serve people in San Francisco, I love San Francisco, I love the Bay Area, I love California. I was like looking at like there's a, like a monastery hermitage that like, that is maybe an hour and a half north of the bay and like the north, northern counties there. And I was like, cool, I could go up to that hermitage and like retreat for 3 days and then like come into the city for 3 days and like maybe find some type of cadence for life like that. I just don't think I'm going back to a full-time, all-time, my wife and I would call them all-time jobs. In tech or finance or biotech or anything. I think it's bad for the soul.

Like, we don't— I think this is another thing we don't talk about. In trying to throw away religion, we tried to suppress the soul and just say, you know, we are just these workers that can go until we drop. And if we do, yes, that is something you can do. But that, I think that's a great crime against yourself and the people who love you or could love you. Or that you could love, right? I think I would go back to the city to some degree if called to.

It would look very different. I probably don't ever work a W-2 salary job ever again. You know, it's been, it's been too long, Paul.

[56:03] Steven Foster: YouTube, you said it's OP. I had to be educated about what OP has, what OP means, but why is YouTube OP? And tell us what OP stands for, for all my elder millennial listeners.

[56:18] Paul: Overpowered. Yeah. For Pathless Path people, I think you and I both hear this when we have conversations with people who want to begin getting on The Pathless Path. It's, I want to have a good runway and then I want to know, like, can I get a good consulting client? Can I do something that is online making money? Right.

The thing with YouTube is like you just show up and make videos and post them on the internet and they have a very clear, like, this is how you make money. Like you get 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 watch hours. I think they've changed that even to make it even easier nowadays. Back when I was like, it was still September of 2020, it was COVID when I started uploading weekly and I was like, I'm just going to try, right? Like the worst case scenario was I would have proof of work that I made 50 videos or 52 videos in 52 weeks in a year or whatever. But it's very clear how you make money, right?

Like you get partnered, like you make videos. If you hit those metrics, You get a partner contract and you— it's very clear to see in the YouTube dashboard, like I make a video, gets so many views. There's a lot of variance. But man, when that first paycheck hit, I think I barely made like $112 or something. It was like the most exciting money I've ever made in my life because it's not passive income, but I do call it permissionless income because it's like I didn't have to— my boss didn't have to tell me something to do to make that income, right? Like I'm partnered with YouTube.

I do what I want on that platform. I have a little bit of strategy and, and insight and thought now to it, but I didn't have to ask anyone permission to make the thing that made me money there. Right. I made the thing. It was valuable to many people on different levels. People watching it, the advertisers who want to pay for the spots, maybe the brand deals that came in.

But I didn't have to ask anyone to do that work. I did that work. I gave myself permission to do that work. I showed up, I did it, and the money then just shows up in my bank account next month. That, that for someone who always had to ask permission, right? Like, oh, can I get this job?

I want to get the— or who's performing for permission, really. That's really what a lot of us are doing in the corporate world. We're performing for permission to do the work that we want to do or to get the pay that we want to get. And it's like, man, when you no longer have to ask permission, who could you be? What would you do? Right.

And that permissionless money will break your brain. It took me 9 months to get that first paycheck. I wish people could go 3 months and hit that milestone to just experience what it's like.

[58:53] Steven Foster: I'm still recovering from this. I've made so much money from my book. That was just a genuine expression from me. And yeah, it's almost Still so hard to believe that I could just be myself.

[59:05] Paul: Oh, I got a crazy— do you want to hear it? Do you want to hear a crazy story?

[59:08] Steven Foster: Yeah, tell us a crazy story.

[59:11] Paul: I was a part of Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber Academy, met a lot of awesome people there, and there was one person there in particular— I won't mention his name, but like, this guy was like, man, yeah, I just need to go. And I could tell he was talented. He needed to be making videos on YouTube on top of all the stuff he was going to be doing. A lot younger than you and I. And I was just like, why don't you just do it? He's like, I'm scared.

Like, I feel like I need money or whatever. And I, I offered him, I was like, how much money do you need? And he wasn't in the United States, he was in another country. And I just said, I will give you $10,000 if that's what it takes for you to start showing up. And he would, he, it like took him back. And he was like, are you serious?

I was like, I will give you that $10,000 over the next year, right? Like as you just start going, right? Well, within the first month, he didn't need to take a dime from me because he already like was lining up the things that he wanted to line up in his life. He just needed to take action, right? He needed to stop looking for permission and find that permissionless income. And he found it by, you know, putting himself out there.

I think the way that life unfolded for him, he wasn't necessarily going to be doing YouTube full time. I think he's doing some other stuff now. But he needed to take that step. And I, I see that with so many people. I think you see that too, right? It's like we're waiting for permission and we're the only ones who can give ourselves that permission.

And once you taste the permissionless paycheck, you just can't go back.

[01:00:34] Steven Foster: One final question. You were part of the inspiration for creating my premium hardcover. And I think if I'm going to link up to your YouTube, it's— you do such a beautiful job. You really care about design, style, photography. You have a very certain style and you introduced me to these Steele Brothers books. They have a book on Walden and it had the text of Walden with some words bolded on the front.

And for some reason it just exploded my imagination and I felt called to do it. I joked in my essay that I didn't, I don't really feel mimetic desire for other people, but I felt mimetic desire for wanting to create something like this book. And so that's what I did. And so thank you for inspiring it. But you said you had a take on why beautiful books are important. So to help my sales strategy, I want to know why beautiful books are important.

[01:01:30] Paul: We live in a time where we don't return often, right? Like the, the endless scrolling, the like infinite scrolling, the endless feed, the desire to travel always to new places and see new things. We don't often return. To things. And so to have a beautiful book, especially for some of your favorite books or the books that have inspired you, like your book The Pathless Path is a perfect book to be sort of crafted into this, this beautiful object because it's going to be a thing that inspires. I think, you know, I know you've sold tens of thousands of copies.

I think in the next— over the next decade, you're going to see that book continue to resonate. There are going to be people who discover it for the first time You know, in 2026, right? Which we're at the end of 2025 now. And they're gonna hopefully read it more than just once. I think about the books that have, you know, impacted me in my life. I have a very nice clothbound 5-volume set of the Bible, right?

I have that Steel Brothers Walden book because when I moved out here to the wilderness, Walden became such an important piece of not just inspiration, but like it became, it gave me some language to talk about the thing that I was doing when I felt like I was at a loss for words. Craig Mod is a favorite. I've been following Craig Mod since first started at Apple and he was, I think, writing for Wired or had done something for Wired. I just wanted to be the Mexican version of Craig Mod, like, and the books that he's created are so beautiful and breathtaking that in a way, like I've wanted to imitate them. And at the same time, like owning his books, you know, his books are in that same category of like a $100 book now. They remind me that like, that's who I want to be.

I want to be an independent creator who's putting out things into the world that are not just valuable for people, but beautiful and inspiring people to do things. The book as an object, I think the backlash has started to come, especially since after COVID, where it's like, people want to have a life outside of screens and the digital realm. I think we still are hungry to have our minds fed. And the book, the Codex, this, you know, dead tree that we bind is the perfect way to have that sort of nourishment of information and prose without a screen, right? Without this like digital gluttony that has come upon the world, right? So having beautiful books, there's just something about having that object there to pick up, right?

And having the icon, the avatar of that information, that idea in your space. I could probably wax poetic about beautiful books for a whole podcast episode itself. I think the last thing I would say is like, when you go over to someone's home and you see a bookshelf and you see what books are on that shelf, that's a statement. It's also a shrine, I think, right? Getting back to the religion thing to tie this all together, right? There is something very religious about the information we carry with us.

Alexander the Great was famed for having a copy of Homer, right? And making sure that he had that story close to him because he knew who he wanted to emulate and he knew what he wanted his life to look like, right? If you went into Alexander the Great's tent, you would find this box that he got from defeating Darius, and inside of that box would have been a copy of, you know, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. I think the books that we have, the stories we tell ourselves, how beautiful they are or how transient they are, how disposable they are, tells a story first and foremost to ourselves, but also to those around us about what are the most important things to us.

[01:05:19] Steven Foster: I think that's a good note to end on. Where can people find your writing and YouTube channel? I'll link it up as well, but anywhere you want to send people or things you want to leave people with?

[01:05:29] Paul: I think the way we'll post this, hopefully you'll, whoever's watching this on YouTube should be able to find that pretty easily. Steven Foster on YouTube, Steven Foster on Substack. I released a little book, a little devotional called Restored in the Rhythm. You can find a link to that on my Substack as well.

[01:05:44] Steven Foster: You did not tell me about this book.

[01:05:47] Paul: It was a very silent release because my daughter was then, had to be induced a few weeks early and yeah. But, uh, it's a little devotional. It's not like a big tome or novel, but it was, uh, yeah, it was one of those things that I felt like I had, I've been wanting to release something. It's just an ebook right now. Speaking of beautiful books, I do plan on making it this, you know, beautiful devotional, but for now I've hit the milestone that it's an ebook and the support's been great. And yeah, we'll get there.