Modern Wisdom - #780 - Tim Ferriss - The Lessons, Hacks & Books That Changed My Life

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster. Tim is one of the world’s leading thinkers and his podcast recently crossed 1 billion downloads. Today get to hear his biggest lessons from 2 decades of hacking life and self-improvement. Expect to learn Tim’s ultimate hack for productivity, what his morning routine looks like, what Tim thought would make him happier when he was younger but didn't, how to deal with depression, which books Tim most often gifts, Tim's best 10 exercises for health & longevity, his thoughts on the current state of podcasting, how to avoid the perils of audience capture, how to cultivate self belief, secrets to becoming a high-performer and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals  Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get up to 32% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on your first order from Maui Nui Venison by going to https://www.mauinuivenison.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tim Ferriss. He's an entrepreneur, author, and a podcaster. Tim is one of the world's leading thinkers and his podcast recently crossed 1 billion downloads. Today we get to hear his biggest lessons from two decades of hacking life and self-improvement.

Expect to learn Tim's ultimate hack for productivity. What his morning routine looks like. What Tim thought would make him happy when he was younger but didn't, how to deal with depression, which books Tim most often gifts, his best 10 exercises for health and longevity, his thoughts on the current state of podcasting, how to avoid the perils of audience capture,

how to cultivate self-belief, the secret to becoming a high performer, and much more. This was very cool. It kind of felt like things coming full circle a little bit. Before I ever started Modern Wisdom in 2018, I listened to a podcast from Tim called How to Release a Podcast in 2017. So he was the guy that taught me how to launch a show

before he even knew who I was and before this show even existed. So it was cool to sit down with him, an absolute OG of this podcasting world and his insights and life lessons really are unique. He's got this sort of wonderful blend of tactical accuracy and the more pithy sort of philosophical insights. Very, very cool.

And there is just so much to take away from today. So I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Don't forget that you might be listening, but not subscribed. And that means that you will miss episodes when they go up. The next few weeks have some of the biggest guests that I've ever brought on Modern Wisdom coming on, and you don't want to miss them.

And if you want to support the show, if you want to say thank you for finding Tim Ferriss and strapping him to a chair for three whole hours. Or if you just want to make me very happy, navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or the plus in the top right-hand corner on Apple podcasts. I thank you very much.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Ferriss. Most people, I think, would look at you and assume that you're this hyper productive, super optimized efficiency machine. How much truth do you think's in there? I think there's some truth to it. I think I'm more effective than I am efficient. So if you were to look at me day to day, part of the reason I don't really ever have journalists shadow me or do anything like that is because if you were to be a fly on the wall, I think I look like I'm doing a whole lot of nothing a lot of

the time, or I'm just futzing around. But I think the choosing what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one given thing. So I do think I'm good at picking, let's call it lead dominoes, the tip over other things. So high leverage targets that tend to make other things irrelevant or a lot easier. So I'm good at that. But in the actual execution, I think I look like a drowning monkey a lot of the time. So I would say there is some truth to it, but I would probably replace efficiency with effectiveness. And then in the last 10 to 15 years, I think I've deoptimized a lot since, for

instance, if you're running a marathon, you're not going to take a taxi from point A to point B. Sure, that'll be efficient, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. So there's a lot more that I would put in that process over outcome category. I would say talk to me about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. So effectiveness is there are different ways to look at this. The way I look at it is effectiveness is what you do. Efficiency is how you do something, but doing something well does not make it

important or high leverage. Does that make sense? So if you do an 80 20 analysis and and you determine say in learning a language that if you learn the thousand highest frequency words, you're going to be conversationally fluent. Choosing that subset of vocabulary and then studying it at a B minus level is better than choosing the wrong set of vocabulary and studying at an A plus level. So the what matters more than the how, or the material matters more than the method, the tasks that you choose matters more than how you do any given task. That's how I tend to think about it.

You say being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe. Why? I think it's very easy to mistake motion for progress. I think it's very easy to mistake motion for progress. And it's, I think, counterintuitive for someone to measure twice and cut once. I think front loading a lot of thinking feels like doing nothing. It is doing nothing physically, at least in terms of motion. So the drive I would say for a lot of people

is to engage in productivity theater, to do things that can pass to others or to yourself as something productive. Look at how busy I am. Right, look at how busy I am. And it's not like I am a paragon of hitting home runs in this regard. I mean, there are plenty of days where just like everybody else, I pause for a second and I've been

in front of a laptop for an hour and I have no idea what I've actually accomplished. Like I've done stuff. I've looked at a screen, could not tell you what major projects I've driven forward in any meaningful way. So as long as you choose the highest leverage tasks, or as long as you have a system for choosing what is important, because that's gonna be subjective, then over time, I think you can snowball your way into long-term success again, as you define it. Having those definitions for yourself is important.

Otherwise you're gonna be flailing around or mimicking other people. And I think that can end up leading you in a lot of conflicting directions. So if what you work on is more important than how you work on it, what are the rules that you use to choose what to work on? Yeah, broadly speaking, I've thought about this a lot and both looking in the rear view mirror,

but even at the time, say, if you look at my transition, it wasn't really a transition, they were parallel tracks, but incorporating angel investing around 2008, for instance, after the success or the initial success of the first book, looking at say the podcast in 2014, any of these various decisions. There are a few common threads. The primary one is asking the question and I'm not the first person to do this, but how can I succeed even if I fail or can I succeed even if I fail?

What I mean by that is if I'm looking at five possible projects or experiments, I tend to view them as experiments. Let's just say I'm looking at five possible projects or experiments, I tend to view them as experiments. Let's just say I'm looking at six possible projects slash experiments that I could pursue in the next three to six months. Let's say three months. I really tend to focus in the short term and it'll be clear why that works in the long term in a second. If I ask myself which of these will help me to develop or deepen skills, develop or deepen relationships the most, even if they fail by external metrics? I bias towards choosing that project. And then even if it fails initially by whatever external metric you might have or perception of the public, as long as those skills and relationships transfer, they persist

after that project, those will accumulate over time. And so far, my experience has been they lead to better success. I mean, if you look at say, Jodorowsky's Dune, which failed, you have Geiger and all these incredible people involved, and then they split off and created these masterworks. And you see many examples like this. So I don't view the failure of any given project as a failure, as long as there are things developed that can transfer forward into other things. So that's how I tend to choose my projects. This is like an inverse Pyrrhic victory. Do you know that idea? Yeah. I mean, I know what a Pyrrhic victory is, but this is like an inverse of that. It's an inverse. Yeah. It's like a successful failure.

Yeah. However you would phrase it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How cool. Yeah. And it really, at least for me and also for others, I'm not the only one who's thought about it this way. It really does accumulate over time. So as long as you're looking at evaluating your, let's just say accomplishment over a longer period of time, three years, five years, and you're viewing things

as experiments as opposed to like closed loop success or failure binary outcomes, Then it's all feedback. Talk to me about this relationship between three months and five years. Well, I, my experience for most folks, myself included is that if you were to ask me five years ago, could you have predicted everything that would have happened in the last five years? Of course not. did everything that would have happened in the last five years. Of course not.

And my own experience has been that if, if I put my all into shorter term projects, let's just say three months within that, I have two to four week experiments that I'm running of various types. Number one, that's kind of semantic insurance against psychological distress from quote unquote failure. Binary. Just framing it differently, using different language to train your thoughts to sort of react differently.

And furthermore, I would say that as you run these experiments, let's just say it's three months. If you were to try to set in stone some type of three year plan, you're probably going to be creating blindness for yourself where you don't see very attractive doors that open that you had not predicted. Did you give me an example? Sure. Uh, me starting the podcast 2014. Uh, so I launched the four hour chef, which was a very difficult book. I mean, it was a three, four year project that

was crammed into a year, year and a half. It was a suicide mission of sorts. Got it done at incredible personal cost. Yay. Go masochism. And in the process of promoting the book, doing the launch, I always look for the uncrowded high leverage channel, which is increasing in

impact and importance. At that time, that was podcasting. For the first book, it was blogs. So every time I launch a book, I'm looking for that. And I put all the chips into podcasts and I had the opportunity to be interviewed on Rogan's show and Nerdist and many, many others. And that was when I became very interested in the format. And I saw how with some basic trends at play, so broadband proliferation, smartphone decreases in cost and improvements in technology that sort of audio as a secondary activity was just going to skyrocket via these smartphones. So I wanted to experiment. I never would have known that in advance if I had spec'd out, for instance, I

only do one book deals. I've never done a multi-book deal. Why? Because I want to preserve my optionality. And in doing that with the, say the four hour chef, which was successful, but not as successful as I wanted it to be. Since I'd only done a one book deal when the podcasting became appealing as a break from writing. Means of recovery and deloading phase but also as a way to here's how I think about skill development improve my ability to ask questions reduce my verbal text.

reduce my verbal tics, refine my ability to interview, which would transfer to my future nonfiction books, which require a lot of research. I would also have the ability to deepen my relationships with my close friends. Example, my first episode with Kevin Rose, because otherwise doing hours and hours of Google sleuthing on your friends is pretty creepy. And having a one-way conversation for two hours

is also pretty bizarre. But with the podcast, I would have the pretext that would allow that. And to reach out to people ultimately who I would want to get to know. It checked all the boxes and I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that very attractive opportunity. Had I already set down as a blueprint, something fixed as a three year plan, let's just say. set down as a blueprint, something fixed as a three-year plan, let's just say.

It seems to me that the people who are very good at long-term plans, the only way that that can really come to fruition is if you don't have outlier events. But kind of all of us are hoping in some form for an outlier event. Like we're hoping for the 99th percentile win. Like maybe we're not optimizing for that, but we're like, yeah, like really this could happen.

And the same with you with the show, you know, even with all of the pieces in play, thinking to yourself, Hey, over the next decade, this is going to have a billion downloads and, you know, be maybe even better known than the books, which was my thing. I was an author coming in and now I'm maybe best known as a podcaster. How, how are you able to, or maybe they compete. There's no way axiomatically to come into that. I think I'd be like, and this is, this is how it's

going to go. You just don't know where the chips are going to fall. No, you have no idea. And I would also say that I think the, the, the short-term experimentalism and the long-term planning are not mutually exclusive, but the long-term planning that I've seen executed really well is usually executed by people who are top 1% of 1% in a single field.

Whereas I don't have as best I can tell that degree of expertise. I'm more of a generalist. So I would say- They've got this sort of linear progression through the- They have a superpower, right? They are a LeBron James. They are a superstar 10X coder. They are a fill in the blank. They have a very clearly identified superpower

that can drive them through a pretty, I don't wanna say linear path, but it allows them to plan with a higher degree of certainty how to take full advantage of that superpower. Whereas I think I am more of a generalist in the sense that I might be top 20% in a few things when you overlap them in an event diagram that allow me to try to, try to, not, not always succeeding, be a category of one. So I'm attempting to be the only and not the best. It's a great book called The Blue Ocean Strategy

that I recommend people read as you think about this. And there's also a chapter in a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's a bit outdated in some ways, but the original version has examples of something they called the law of category, which is simply attempting to create new categories versus dominate crowded existing categories. And I think that's a helpful exercise, not just for branding and marketing purposes, but for positioning. And then when you think about positioning, you can work backwards from that and create the product.

Yeah, I suppose as well that if you have multiple intersecting domains or subcategories that you're in, you have no idea how these things are going to combine together. So like, hey, this meal is made of steak. I can reliably tell you what it's going to taste like. This meal is made of 15 different ingredients all cooked in different ways.

What's the outcome going to be? I'm not too sure. Yeah. And I guess that that's where the outlier effect thing comes from. So talking about from a daily ritual standpoint, what does a typical day look like for you? Morning routine, full works. What's a day in the life of Tim Ferriss look like? It depends on where I'm located.

I was for instance, skiing for January and February. So it looked very much like a day architected around skiing. But I'll give you a few different examples. So here in Austin, it would be, now it sounds so cliched, but nonetheless, I've been doing this a long time in the four hour body in 2010. So there you have it. But I'll do cold immersion. So 40 degrees at say three to five minutes. Nothing, nothing too incredibly long.

That immediate immediately upon waking. Yeah. Waking up and then I'll, I'll feed the dog, have some water and then cold plunge and then I'll go directly from that to hot tub for sort of hyper dilation. Find that just helps lower back issues and things along those lines. How long? Ah, three minutes.

Nothing, nothing too crazy. Uh, and, and this is really for state change. It's not for any complex biological cascade that I could list out. It's, it's really for a state change. And I will back up and say that one of the principles I learned from Tony Robbins, and I don't know if the attribution is originally to Tony, but it's something that I found very, very helpful, which is a progression.

The progression is state story strategy. So if you are in a, say low energy state or a negative state, you're going to create a disabling story or a critical or cynical story, which will then impact. In the sense that you come up with a subpar strategy. So I always start with state and then you will

have a more enabling story. She could just be from releasing some norepinephrine because you're freezing your balls off and that will enable you to have a better strategy, at least for the day. You've got an equivalent quote. I think it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. Right. That seems to be pretty parallel.

Okay. So we're in the hot tub. Yeah. Hot tub get out at that point. I might do a small amount of journaling, very something very basic, right? Like five minute journals and it, the, the exact morning routine kind of depends on the day it's not super highly variable, but there's some variation, right? So if I feel like monkey mind is getting the best of me, probably something like journaling, whether it's morning pages or five minutes journal is what I'll do. Shout out Alex icon.

Yeah, it's very short or, uh, uh, whether it's morning pages or five minutes journal is what I'll do. Shout out Alex Icon. Yeah, it's very short or the artist's way and morning pages, which are fantastic. And at that point, I will have already identified the night before or the evening before what's in my calendar for that day. And I will say that the daily architecture just to make a 30,000 foot comment is less important to me than the weekly architecture. So we can come back to the day and I can talk about training in say Utah, but it's very skiing specific. Like skiing was the one thing that I was focused on. So everything revolves around skiing half the day, almost every day. That's it. So everything revolves around skiing half of the day, almost every day, that's it.

So all the PT, all the prep, the Stuart McGill, big three exercises that you're familiar with as well. All of these things. Hundreds of hours. Right. Beat extract and all these things, all optimized for skiing. Making me less shit at skiing.

Oh yeah, exactly. And then the second half of the day for a few hours were reserved for the most important high leverage business activities, often revolving around on Mondays and Fridays, for instance, recording. So set days for recording, set times for recording, 10 AM and 3 PM. We can go into the reasons for that, but Tuesday team calls. I find that weekly architecture for me, and I'm not the only person who does this. There's some very well-known tech CEOs who also do this is scaffolding that is a little more helpful than having very tight parameters on a daily basis because you're going to have unexpected events. Although I will say if you have to reply to a lot of things within 72 hours and you have broken systems, like you should revisit your processes and systems.

So if you're getting a lot of interruptions that you need to handle yourself as firefighter, then you have a process or a policy. That would include Slack, instant things, email. Anything. If you are the boss, let's just say, if you are the CEO or, or a solopreneur, if you're making too many decisions, that is as fatal as making some of the wrong decisions, too many decisions will also kill you. Um, so I would say that the morning generally for me, the thread is do not feel rushed for

the first hour. If I feel rushed for the first hour, I'm going to feel rushed for the whole day. And is that, uh, you have related days in which the morning is rushed psychologically, emotionally, semantically to days that suck. Yeah. Downstream. It tends to be even if from the outside looking in, you're like, Hey, you put a lot of points on the scoreboard and you didn't look stressed.

But my internal experience was one of being very rushed. And people might hear this and they have kids and they say, well, must be nice. You know, my, my four year olds jumping on my jumping on my solar plexus at six in the morning. And I would say I can't speak to that experience because I haven't. I mean, someday I hope to be able to speak to that experience. But there are people like Jason Gagnard who for instance started mastermind talks who I haven't interacted with in a long time, but he just started waking up earlier.

Wake up earlier, he does his meditation, a little bit of exercise and there are workarounds, uh, extreme, extreme ownership by Jocko Wellink is a good one to read. Um, so you can find ways around it. Okay. So we haven't rushed the morning. You've planned the night before what the calendar, at least for that day is going to look like.

You also have a weekly rhythm and architecture, which I've, I've fallen in love with too, although stumbled upon as opposed to designed in advance. What about when are you writing? When are you training? When are you recording? And why at those times? Yeah, I would say training is generally going to be pre lunch or after work, let's just say before dinner. I like to train before meals, just like right before meals. And writing is not necessarily a daily activity. It probably should be. It might end up being-

I've just seen you finish a Five Bullet Friday. Yeah, you saw me do Five Bullet Friday. So I actually do write that myself. That is not ghostwritten. That is something I do. It's the closest I'll ever get to having a diary. So I actually enjoy doing it because I can look back at it every week. Well, I mean, you, you convinced me, uh, God, I thought this is so funny.

Things that you take for granted about the world, uh, in retrospect, you realize that you were still maybe early on things. So like you with podcasting, it kind of appeared, perhaps obviously you probably had an idea that you were a first mover for it, but I knew four years ago when I started my newsletter, God, it's the only thing that you own. Tim Ferriss says it's the only thing that you own and it's the most valuable piece of

real estate and everything else is mediated by a thing and you can export that CSV and you can move it anywhere else in the world. Oh my God, I'm so late to the party. And now I look back and I go, I'm so glad that I started that four years ago. And I'm now that guy proselytizing about like, dude, you need to get, get a lead magnet.

So I know we're bouncing around and I feel like I'm giving a disappointing answer, but there's a reason for the disappointment. So, uh, first thing actually, just to comment on that, when I started my podcast, many people told me it was too late. They're like, should that ship has sailed? 2014. So people are always going to tell you you're too late. Now're like, that ship is sailed, man. 2014. So people are always going to tell you you're too late. Now we can talk about competition and differentiation separately, but the key takeaway for my very disappointing answer to what is my daily routine is that the exact boot up sequence does not matter. What matters is having at least say three hours in a block of time uninterrupted where you can focus on one or two

of your highest leverage tasks which have been defined beforehand. And those highest leverage tasks could be the things that make you most uncomfortable on your to-do list, the things that have been punted week to week to week, could also be the things that are most energy in the things that give you the most in terms of recharge. So that can be applied to other things.

So that's an unlock and having uninterrupted blocks of time. That's it. If you can single task for two to three hours a day, it sounds ridiculous, but you are going to be ahead of 90% of the population. Because that's how low the bar has been set. Whatever you need to do to do that, just figure it out. That's at night. That's first thing in the morning, which it is for a lot of people with kids, who I know who are very, very productive.

For me, first thing in the morning just is not going to work. So it tends to be after cold plunge, this, that, and the other thing, I'll probably have a very, very light bite to eat. If I'm writing, I will write for two to three hours and then have a late lunch. We'll get back to talking to Tim in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Nomadic. I don't know what backpack Tim Ferriss uses, but he should be using this puppy right here. The team at Nomadic make the most functional, durable and highest quality, best engineered backpacks on the planet.

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if you have a well-designed backpack and this puppy is the best that I've ever found. Best of all, it's got a lifetime guarantee so if anything breaks during the entire life of the product they will give you a new one for free. This is the last backpack that you ever need to buy. There are thousands of 5 star reviews for all of Nomadic's stuff but this is my pick of the bunch. Right now you can see all of the products that I use and recommend from Nomadic by going

to the link in the show notes below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom to get a 20% discount site wide. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. When does busy work come in? If there is any busy work, it's usually Tuesday. Right. So Tuesday you've blocked it off as an entire day. Yeah. Tuesday is team calls, one-on-ones looking at one-on-one documents. I have like Tim's weekly briefing, which is a

document that's updated with various subheadings and I can run through those, uh, email or assigned or shared in various ways and I'll process through that as needed. But, uh, the busy work creeps in here and there. I'm not going to, I'm not going to try to put on a show, right? There are things that you need to do that you aren't going to want to do. And I wish I could remember who initially told me this, but they effectively said. Those are the, that is the work, the fun stuff doing the interviews. That's the upside of the job you chose, but the actual work, the fun stuff, doing the interviews. That's the upside of the job you chose, but the actual work that pays for that

are all the little things you don't want to do. So just be grateful because that is what allows you to do the things, at least for me, that I enjoy doing, just having this type of dance increasingly. I'm using a, a term that I learned while reading a news story, which is the cost of doing business. So I think Facebook got a slap on the wrist with some huge fine for a data breach, maybe like five or six years ago. And there was criticism because even though it's a huge amount of money, to them, it's half of one week of one territory's top line or something like that. Like it wasn't sufficiently big. And that, look, what you can do is you factor in

this as the price of doing business. This is just the cost of operating. And I kind of see a lot of those things as like, Oh, you want to have conversations with people that you, that interest you on the show. Oh, you want to be able to work flexibly and you want to earn your own money. And you want to be able to sort of craft a narrative and do the blah, blah, blah. It's like, Hey, guess what? These aren't bugs.

They're features. Like this is what comes along for the ride. Yeah. Like you're going to feel pressure. You're going to have public scrutiny. People are going to criticize you. There's going to be judgment. There's going to be security concern. They're going to be all of these things.

You have judgment on YouTube. I'm really trying to focus on you, but the moon, the moon has just appeared behind you and it's slowly moving away from you. Um. I have a big head. You're going to get an eclipse. It's kind of like two. It's kind of like two nice moon shapes. Okay. And then what about a wind down routine on an evening time? What does a typical afternoon evening look like for you?

Afternoon is going to be some type of activity. So rock climbing, archery, you name it. Some type of physical activity because my mind is like a border collie, right? You leave it inside too long, it's gonna chew the couch. So you gotta get out and move the body in some capacity. So for me to be some type of movement, I walk a lot also. I would say I walk, I try to walk two to three hours a day. If I'm making any calls, I try to do them walking.

Zoom is an abomination. It's helpful for some things, but we've solved this problem about being fixed an abomination. It's helpful for some things, but we've solved this problem about being fixed in one place. It's called the phone. You can talk, walk while you're talking. We are evolved to walk. If you are compromising your walking, you're compromising your mental health. So not just physical health. So I walk a lot. That is something that I think is incredibly critical as a

foundational piece of everything that I do. Wind down routine board games, watching Netflix with friends, nothing super sophisticated. I like to do a pre dinner if I can sauna and then. How long, what temperature? Honestly, hot as balls for as long as I can do it. Not to get too, not to get too scientific. What does that end up being?

Do you think? It's probably 195 to 200 for 15 to 30 minutes. You know, my heat tolerance varies tremendously day to day. Yeah, mine too. And I don't push it too hard. I will go as hard, you know, as far as I can without like feeling as though I'm going to pass out, but I won't do two or three rounds. If I do two or three rounds, I will feel exhausted the next day, which is not from dehydration. A lot of people think it's from dehydration.

It's best I can tell it's not because I've weighed myself before and after and I'm only losing a few pounds of water and I can, I can rehydrate that pretty effectively. I actually haven't talked about this. It's something else and I know this because I participated as a subject in a heat exhaustion study at Stanford when I first moved to the Bay Area. The most Tim Ferriss sentence that I participated in a heat exhaustion study when I first moved to Stanford. Oh yeah yeah it was it was it was something I would not necessarily recommend. They wanted to study this device which was called, nicknamed the glove, and it was a cooling device,

actually very clever. It was effectively this large chamber that you would stick your hand into. You put your hand on this metal orb and it was vacuum sealed around your wrist and it would circulate very cold water through this metal which is highly conductive. Your hands have a high capillary density, capillary, do you say capillary? Density and then that cools the blood which then circulates through your body and they were experimenting with using this device. A cold hand cool a hot body. Yeah and they were experimenting with using this with very high end athletes, boxers between rounds, etc. Oh wow. And at the time, this was also being

studied by the military for possible use in hot climates. And since part of the funding was from the military, I volunteered to be a subject. You go in, I'll try to keep this short, but it is pretty entertaining. And what they needed you to do is basically march to heat exhaustion. So you put on fatigues. There are a few things that would happen before this helmet backpack with weight in it. And then you'd go into a sauna on an inclined treadmill and just March until you basically collapsed. But in order to measure things correctly, they would put in an esophageal probe, which is about this long. And I have a video of this somewhere. I stick it in your nose and it goes all the way down your esophagus down to be as close to your heart as possible. And this was what the Stanford

researchers wanted and you tape it to your nose because you don't want to swallow that thing. You can't swallow your epiglottis can't close. It's very uncomfortable. But then the military wants to have some redundant measurements. You had to put in a rectal probe of equal length to get as close to your core as possible. And with both of those things in you, then you marched to exhaustion. And what I can say is water loss was not as much as you would expect, but I was a disaster for the next two days. So to avoid that type of feeling, I'll do one round when I do sauna. All of that is to say you don't need to do two rounds in the sauna or

stick something up your ass or deep throat a pipe. Yeah. I would, I would say on a daily basis, not necessary. I mean, unless that's what you're kind of thing you're into. It's whatever you're going to spend the evening. Consenting adults. Have fun. How long on a good day when you've got it right, how long are you spending in bed?

In bed? Yes. Eight to 10 hours. Right. Okay. Yeah. I like to, I, I would say have pretty fitful sleep, not all the time, but I have ever since I was a little kid had a lot of onset insomnia. That's actually improved a lot in the last, I would say year, but particularly with some low back issues, I tend to have reasonably fitful sleep. So I like to budget a bit of extra time. And I am not a super sleeper. I'm not someone who wakes up four hours after going to bed and feeling fully refreshed. Yeah. I mean, there are genetic profiles that are predictive of this. I heard that the likelihood of you having that genetic mutation that allows you to

work on three or four hours sleep is the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning twice, that that's the equivalent dice roll. It could be a lot of the top endurance athletes that I've met as well as a lot of very high level operators from the military basically get vetted to have that need to be because the other people wash out. How far? Yeah, I've seen that. I would say if I am in deeper ketosis, then my total number of hours needed for sleep goes down and I'll wake up after five or six hours

feeling fully refreshed. And I will not be groggy in the morning. So if I have, let's just say 1.5 millimolars or higher in terms of ketone levels as measured with something like a precision ectra, then I need much less sleep. It's just a pain in the ass to stay in ketosis. I like my tacos.

Yeah, we're in Austin. That's a lot. What did you think would make you happy when you were younger, but didn't? I would say the short answer is money. For sure. I grew up in a family without very much money and there was a narrative that I heard a lot at home, if only we had more money. For sure. I grew up in a family without very much money and there was a narrative that I heard a lot at home. If only we had more money, if only we had more money and a lot of problems were related to money. But I came to translate that into if I have success, which I

need, I can prevent the pain and problems and friction and handicaps that We currently have in this family and on some level that's true in so much as money is a vehicle for doing certain things preventing certain things, but It doesn't fix the inner game and It doesn't fix the inner game and it's an amplifier just like alcohol, power, fame. It amplifies whatever is inside the good and the bad. If you're generous, you're going to be super generous. If you're a jerk, you're going to be a super jerk.

If you have anxiety, if you're hyper vigilant, you worry about dangers, it's going to magnify all of that. And I was certainly not prepared for that and I wouldn't trade my trajectory. I'm really grateful for having been so fortunate and I've had some exceptionally good luck and so on. But do I think it is worth striving to be financially stable and to have freedom and options to the extent that you can within whatever your constraints are? Absolutely. But I think I viewed money as a potential fix all. Exterior solution to an internal problem. Which it was not. Now I will say, would I go back in time and tell myself that maybe not, because I

think I needed some hope, even if it was not founded on reality to have something to strive towards. So did you get to read a Will Smith's memoir with Smith's memoir? No, I haven't read it. So Morgan House will taught me about a line that's in that. And he said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope when I was rich and miserable, I was despondent. Yeah, exactly. That is the best synopsis of what I have more clumsily said about many of the mega rich people I know who are very depressed.

Where have I got to go? I'm at the top of the ladder. Once the money as a goal is taken away as a surgical fix to whatever problems you feel are external but are largely internal, it can be very psychologically challenging and yes, I mean, you know, small violin and everyone America weeps for the rich and famous who are going to therapy. I get it. Uh, but at the same time, it's, it's, it's worth

being aware of, I think thinking of it as an amplifier is, is helpful. So on the way up, what I would have told myself maybe at 30 is start working on some of the inner game, not from a strict performance perspective, because I'd been working on mental toughness training for sports and so on and so forth for executing as a machine as an accomplishment machine, but working on some of the other things is probably what I would have advised myself at 30, 35. Talk to me about your relationship with fame. What do most people not understand about fame and status?

I should ask you that. You're fresh in it. I'm definitely feeling it at the moment. Um, what have you learned? It's strange for the world to see you in a different way. And again, appropriate caveat head is not getting too big. Micro niche flame, almost no one knows me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, um, you are the same person to you and you are a different

person to other people. And it's like, have you ever seen those videos of swordfish moving through shoals and the swordfish is the same thing, but the show kind of bends around it. The reality distortion field is something that only, you know, because only you know what the previous state that you were in was and how the world interacted with you. And you're now, well, people are treating me differently. And you're like, is this because of, they want something from me? How can I trust the people?

Have they got my best interests at heart? Is this a compliment? It kind of is, but then also it's why is it making me feel sort of vigilant and uncomfortable and, and I'm really uncertain about this. And, um, I mean, it's the biggest champagne problem in the world, right? Like how are you, and again, it's the same as the America weeps for the rich and famous. Like who is going to say, Oh, boohoo person that has too much attention or whatever. But look, I've said this before on the show,

like I'm really enjoying opening up about the process of going from being an absolute nobody to micro niche fame and laying the breadcrumbs behind me as I go, because you don't necessarily, I don't know what Dwayne Johnson's like ascension to fame was like or Kevin Hart or whatever, whatever. And I'd wanna know, like if I was a fan of a show like this, I'd want to know what it feels like to go through

a very large change. But again, almost everybody has less fame and money than they want, which means that the sympathy always flows downward, not upward. Thanks for answering. Because you're in the thick of it. I would say in my experience, first, I did write a blog post

that I would recommend people check out. I think it's 11 reasons not to become famous. And that's worth reading because it could inform decisions that you make about your career. If you are tempted like a moth to the flame to chase the followers and the likes and the downloads and the views, which can be a great tool, but if it ends up directing major decisions, it's good to have some breaks installed so you can pause and at least examine those decisions.

Especially you don't want your life to be driven by algorithm changes. And you can also be shaped by your audience into a caricature of your most extreme beliefs and behaviors. I'll send you an article, one of my favorite articles about that, the perils of audience capture by Gwenda Bogle. It's outstanding. I've read it. That is an amazing article. So everyone should read that. capture by Gwenda Bogle. It's outstanding. I've read it. That is an amazing article. Yeah.

So everyone should read that. Shout out Gwenda. And stepping back then to talking about the fame piece, I will say that money, power, fame, people strive for these things. Money is in a sense, the easiest for me to understand because it's taking a life that can seem very abstract or nebulous and shaping it into something that allows you to put points on the scoreboard. So I understand that. I'm also from New York. So.

coming from a place where you see a lot of finance and you meet a lot of people in finance, that is a, that's an animal that's easier for me to understand than say the power of DC or the fame of LA. Those are archetypes that are less familiar to me. All three can be corrupting. And on the side of fame, I will say that I was given advice. At the time, I wasn't aiming to be famous, so I kind of tucked it away in the back of my head. But when I was in college, friend of mine was the son of a very famous producer in Hollywood.

And I went to stay with his family at one point. And this producer said to me, you want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face. Now you and I have ended up in a position where that is not the case. There is a lot of facial recognition. And my experience is fame helps with a few things.

Occasionally getting into a crowded restaurant or a better seat and access to other people, but you can also get access to a broader network with the power or money. And I think those are, especially money is in a sense a cleaner approach because there are fewer downsides. And particularly if that money is not money for money's sake, this is not to malign anyone in finance. But for instance, if someone created a company to solve a problem they had, and it turned into a huge company. Let's take as an example, Toby of Shopify. And as a by-product, they end up incredibly wealthy. And through that wealth and notoriety, they then have access to people.

That is, I think, a cleaner route to more upside than downside. Toby Lockheed could walk through here now and I don't know if anyone in the room would recognize who he was. Except for me. Except for you. Yeah. Sweetheart of a guy too. Incredible. Those guys are, it's really nice to see when the good guys win. He's an example of that. Awesome. As are a lot of the Shopify guys. The trade-offs in terms of privacy and security are significant, even on a very micro level. I don't know if you've experienced this.

I would imagine you've had some strange interactions or inbound. I seem to attract a very unreasonably reasonable audience so far, but I also understand the law of large numbers and I completely unsighted must once a week quote from your article, which says million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York city. Yep. If you have any sufficiently large data set of people, you begin to get outlier events.

And then as you scale that up toward a billion downloads, you know, whatever percent of the population of psychopaths, whatever percent of that percentage of psychopaths are sufficiently motivated, whatever percentage of, all the way down, live within the region that you do. And it's like, hey, that's 200 people. Yeah. Oh, whatever, you know,

you pick whatever it is that you want. Like the person that really needs something and you're the guy. Yeah. And all of this is part of the reason why, particularly as I look forward to, hopefully my next big adventure, which will be family, having kids and so on, have some pre-reqs to check first, like girlfriend. That is usually an intermediary, but it doesn't have to be,

but I'd prefer that to be part of the process. So back, back on the single scene, wink, wink, ladies, we were listening. If you ski or snowboard, let me know. So part of the reason that I'm thinking about potentially not going to something new, but something old in the form of writing instead of emphasizing video is for this reason. I don't think I can fully put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube, but I do think with the churn rate of content and the sheer volume of video and audio that is created the saturation that the decay rate of fame is going to increase

in speed, right? So the half life of fame is going to go down. In other words, 10 years ago, friends would send around a video and you would see that clip for a week or two. It would make the rounds. How long is it now? 10 seconds.

And I think that'll be true also for news cycle and notoriety, the fame cycle. That's my hope, at least for me, because I don't want to sustain facial recognition. I would love for that to decay over time. Certainly from what I see. And I've taken this, uh, absorbed this vicariously from you, from Rogan, from Douglas Murray as well. Uh, Douglas once sat me down a couple of years ago and I was asking him about his dealings with fame too. And he said, uh, one piece of advice, keep your private life private.

Yeah. And, uh, Joe has done a phenomenal job as someone who's, you know, infinitely more scrutinized than I'll ever be. Uh, I don't know the name of his wife. I don't know where they go for walks. I don't know. Like maybe he goes to restaurants, but it's never to do with that. I don't know the name of his kids.

I don't know what they're studying. I don't really know much about it. to restaurants, but it's never to do with that. I don't know the name of his kids. I don't know what they're studying. I don't really know much about it. It's no when near it. I think he almost purposefully, and this is the best way to do it, makes his, um, private life seems so boring. Like he purposefully sort of avoids that and kind of glosses over it that there's never enough hooks for Velcro to attach to it. And I think that that, that seems to be a smart process.

Yeah. Don't dox your family or your close friend. As a general rule of thumb. Tell you what's interesting. It'll come back and bite you in the ass because if you have motivated stalkers or the town lunatic happens to take an interest in you. And like you said, just also something that I've written about. If you look at your audience size as analogous to a town size or a city

size, it's like, okay, if you're in a, if you're in a town of a thousand people, how many village crazies do you have? One or two. Okay. And you just multiply that out. Once you have an audience, the size of yours or if mine over time, especially where you have transients, you're going to have some people who have infinite time and unreasonable curiosity about you.

And they may not have malicious intent. Sometimes they will, but there are going to be crazy people with a lot of time who are actually pretty smart. Like their hardware is good, their software is bad. And for that reason, from a very early point, you should not, I would not suggest having your family anywhere online. There's just no upside. And they didn't often opt into this.

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Speaking of that, I also recently became single. What have you learned about all the ladies who were just considering me went, no, that's incorrect. That's incorrect. I am bad at snowboarding. Um, what have you learned about choosing a good partner and the limitations of that is love something which is outside of being hackable and optimized. I think there are certainly X factors. I don't, I don't, it's best I can tell. I would have figured it out by now if you could reverse engineer it perfectly and just flip a switch.

a switch. But I do think over time, as you have long relationships, I've been really fortunate to have a number of long relationships, I mean, multiple relationships in this sort of three to six year range with amazing people. You learn what seems to work for you and what seems to not work, which is not automatically a judgment of the other person. It's a judgment of yourself and having a realistic evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses and so on. So I've certainly found that to me, a lot of things are important. Number one, this seems obvious, but it's not always obvious because we sometimes gravitate towards our own strengths. So if someone is analytical, they look for someone who is highly analytical. So if someone is analytical, they look for someone who is highly analytical. And I think there's a, there are certain base requirements for a good partner.

You want them to be good problem solvers. You want them to be resilient and so on, but I'm looking for a compliment. I want someone with incredibly high EQ, which doesn't mean I have no EQ and I've worked hard to develop it, But I want someone who has that as a super power. I would say like my prefrontal cortex is a super power for other things. And I do not want to date a long haired version of myself. Throw me off, throw me off a skyscraper now. No, thank you. Right.

And I also want someone I've thought about this very carefully. And I have dated a bit in the last year, uh, which is sort of the period of my dating so far, respect isn't enough. Cause respect is something that people can demand in a sense. It's not respect because I feel like that is given, it's admiration. If I go on two dates with someone, I want to be inclined to tell my friends about her and brag about some aspect of her aside from like she has the best ass I've ever seen, right? It has to be something more than that. Nothing against great asses. I mean, those are fantastic too, but it's, it's, I want to admire my partner.

And if they're soft spoken and we're at a group dinner, I want to say, she's not going to say this, but so I'll say it for her boom and feel really good about doing that. And there's a lot more to it. I have thought about this. Uh, I mean, I could give you my, my sort of list of criteria, but it's, it's also fundamentally a, it's a feeling, which is why dating apps can be so incredibly time consuming because what you could learn, somebody please make a dating

app where the sole purpose is to get people on a 10 minute video call. That's it. That's it. The stated purpose is just 10 minute video call and it's built intrinsically into the app. That's it. That's the only goal of the app because virtual speed dating within two minutes, you know, if there is some type of,, you know if your spider sense is saying go or no

go. And I would also say as someone who in a sense took my hypersensitivity off line because my senses are very sensitive. Like I am a very not in a reactive sense, easily offended sense. But in the context of my senses being very high fidelity, I took that offline for a lot of my life due to childhood problems and so on. But bringing those back online was important, not just for dating, but also for navigating the fame stuff. Because as you have more notoriety, people are going to seek you out

who you need to be wary of. And that's not all the time. It's not half of the people, but you will have people with ulterior motives. And so you want to be very tuned in, not to what your analytical mind is producing, but to what your pre-language evolved, other means of assessment are telling you, what your body's telling you. This is what I'm kind of obsessed by at the moment, that feeling feelings and integrating emotions is, I know it just seemed for a long time, I had a desire,

I guess I still do, to be seen as a legitimate thinker, like somebody who has intellectual horsepower and a capacity to be rational and do all the right. And I, you know, went hardcore down the rationality movement. And if, if only I can learn Shane Parish's top 100 cognitive biases off by heart, then all of my problems, if I read, if I can recite thinking fast and slow, all of my problems will be turns out that that doesn't particularly work. And one of the reasons it doesn't particularly work is that no matter how much you try to

sort of clamp down on what's coming up, the thing that is coming up is the issue and papering over that crack over and over and over again results in you just playing emotional Groundhog Day and then having an increasingly complex cathedral of different architectures to try and, hey, to try and architect a structure to account for it. And I told you before, sort of big into this feeling feelings thing, trying to at the moment. And yeah, finding not just being at the mercy of them, but not just totally being in cognitive horsepower mode and trying to integrate those together. And that's fundamentally what you're looking for with a partner as well. And there's something in a relationship where you go, well, objectively, all

of the boxes have been ticked. Why can't I get my love attachments lust side to trigger as well? Like, look, all of the things, I mean, if you look at the rating, the rating says you should be in a relationship with this person. Yeah. And you go, yeah, but ultimately the heart wants what the heart wants. And you don't really get to reverse engineer that. And there can be an awful lot of shame and guilt.

I've certainly felt this an awful lot of shame and guilt around, um, having desires about being like, this is the, I want a thing. Yeah. Who am I to want that thing? Who are you, who are you to make demands of this? Should you not subjugate your desires in order to serve something which is safer or more peaceful or more familiar or more comfortable or whatever? And ultimately, I think you are fighting a losing battle. Like your emotions are going to just

rip you away from that over time. Yeah. That X factor isn't there. It doesn't matter what you try to rack up in terms of spreadsheets. If it's not there, especially in the, it has to be there in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, if the honeymoon period isn't good, like guess what? The marriage isn't gonna be good.

And I'll also ask myself these days because it's what I'm looking for is, in three to five years, could this person be my best friend? Let's say three years. And there's a lot that goes into that And there's a lot that goes into that. Right. There's a lot that goes into that. So these are things that I think about, uh, I am clear on my desires and what I

want, I'm very clear on that. I don't have a spreadsheet. I don't have too much, uh, conflict. I would say about that. I definitely have very specific things that I like. And that's important to be clear. I think where you get into trouble and where you end up being really unfair to people is if you are unclear on what you want. And if you are unclear on aspects of yourself that you ironically expect other people to understand, when you yourself don't have a

grasp of the basics of you yourself, that's when you're unfair. But if you know what you like and you pursue what you want and what you feel that you need, all the more power to you. I think clarity is power. And it is something I say for myself as much as anybody else, but life rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish. Specificity. And you can leave the door open to serendipity for sure, but are you in an environment? Are you in a life that provides sufficient serendipity such that you can leave something like this purely to chance? I don't live in that life. I suspect you do not live in that life. You have a lot going on.

So you have to have. Intentionalism. You have to have some intention and you have to, well, have to is too strong a word, but have enough surface area, and I'm borrowing this from someone else, but surface area for luck to stick. But I think with some conditions

so that you don't get seduced by the things that have led you astray in the past. Right. There are certain archetypes that I'm very, very attracted to that I know are problematic from a compatibility perspective. It's not necessarily super unhealthy, but I know that it's not going to be viable. We've gone down this road before unsuccessfully. Neil Strauss absolutely broke my brain last year where he said,

unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Claire Hughes Johnson, uh, who helped build Stripe from thought a few hundred employees to 6,000 plus, she did basically every job, COO included. She said to me recently, well, she underscored the importance of making the implicit explicit.

I just think so much pain can be avoided. So much can be achieved. Just make the implicit explicit direct communication, not expect anyone to be a mind reader when in doubt, spell it out easier said than done. But I think so much of that is habituated though. And it, the tone can be set. The rhythm can be set in a friendship. No, there are, there will be friends that you have, uh, for family members that

you have, where you have a different cadence of, uh, communication and openness and honesty and, and everything than other people. Okay. So you can do it with some people. It is possible for you to set the tone with particular people in that way. And again, this is something that needs to be very intentional, but it's kind of like a one time, a one time large decision that really sets the tone that you then just continue to top up.

But if you start off from a place of the implicit being kept implicit, then when that changes, Oh, this feels a little bit alien to me. This isn't really what I expected in the beginning. And, uh, yeah, I, I really think that the first two months of dating somebody are unbelievably important for setting expectations. This is what we expect from each other. This is the way like that's your, uh, January to, uh, March training window. That's the diet, you know, like the new year's resolutions will be stuck to the

best and then you kind of have a hopefully come into land at a nice appropriate level thereafter. One of the other things, uh, for better or worse that we're both, uh, familiar with is low mood. Um, what are the things that you do to pull yourself out of a funk or how would you advise people to better deal with depression and anxiety or low mood? I really think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure with this. So I try to prophylactically have routines in place that seem to decrease the

likelihood including cold exposure, which for a long time was prescribed for melancholy. This is not new. But like medieval times? Like 100, 200 years ago. It was a prescription, cold baths for melancholy aka depression. So this is what his hold is now new again. But certainly cold exposure, I would say without a doubt having a consistent exercise routine and something is better than nothing. Like the difference, the zero to one difference between no movement and some movement is black and white. So even if it is just going for a 20 minute walk twice a day, if you have a very packed day, schedule your calls around your walks. Social time, time with friends, which is where I disagree with some of the very strong denouncements of say alcohol in the sense that like even one drink is terrible for you. That may be true from a strictly biochemical perspective and I'm not

advising you go out and get shitfaced five nights a week. But for instance, if one night a week, I pre-schedule a group dinner on a Friday and I'm gonna cook with friends and that means we drink wine while we're cooking. If that alcohol acts as a social lubricant and helps me connect with my friends, I think there's something to it, right? There are social effects, not just biochemical effects. I don't drink very much, but the group interactions and scheduling those in advance.

So on a yearly basis, I will block out. This is very important for me. And again, not obsessing on the daily routine, but thinking about the weekly, which we've discussed thinking about the annual. So I block out multiple weeks every year to take trips with family and friends. And I have two that I'm organizing right now. These are week long trips. There will be, let's call it six to 10 people in each group. Some will be slightly smaller for wilderness adventures. And those

are blocked out for the year in advance. And this is really critical for a few reasons. It's not just about the experience. You have all of the group threads and excitement and training and prep and fantasizing and, you know, stupid dick meme jokes that guys swap or whatever in the WhatsApp groups that lead up to the trip. Then you have the trip and then you have all the memories and the shared experiences and the misadventures and the mishaps that you get so much juice out of these things. And those act for me as psychological safety nets. You always have something to look forward to if you have three or four of these a year. That's in big part, the podcast, I think for me, I think we're both kind of the same with this, that, um,

the external accountability of someone being there, there is a time on the calendar, someone is expecting you to be there. They are a guest. You probably respect them. You probably care about what they think about you. You probably want to perform well for them and also put them in a great light and be a springboard for

them and their message, because you're interested in what they've got to do. All of those things. It's like, you're not, not showing've got to do. All of those things. It's like, you're not, not showing up. I've never once I've canceled in my, my previous life as a club promoter. I would not show up for events. I would not show up for bits and pieces. I could always sort of work somebody else to go and do a thing.

If it was just me that had to do it. But as soon as even one of the person was involved or 2000 appearing at a nightclub, I'd be there and I would be there because there was accountability and there was this expectation. I have never once cancelled a podcast in 750 episodes, six and a half years due to low mood no matter how low the mood is because there's I, I, it, it gets taken out. It gets eroded away by my excitement to go and do the thing. And the same thing is true with a holiday.

And the same thing is true with dinner with a friend at the same thing. Like it's the same reason why a training partner just makes so much sense. When you can, like every Saturday, for instance, in Austin, I do the same session with progressive overload, the same exercises with the same guy. We've done this for two years. It's one of my favorite days of the week, Saturday morning. I'm full of caffeine, shoulders, biceps and triceps, starting with calves. Best day of the week.

And I love it. And every single Saturday, no matter how shit the week's gone, no matter how bad I'm feeling, if we're available and we're both in the city, we both go and do it. So let me build on that and say another piece of managing or mitigating or preventing low mood for me is having some identity diversification, which means you're not just doing one thing. If you have your podcast, your startup, your job as the sole barometer of your self-worth, there's so many factors outside of your control or your investment portfolio, whatever it might be. If you were solely fixated on one thing, you're too vulnerable.

The black swan events are simply ups and downs due to variables that are outside of your control. So in contrast, if you have your Saturday workout or you have your deadlift, you have rock climbing, you have archery, you have whatever it might be in addition to your primary work, in addition to. Drawing in addition to your relationship that you're trying to cultivate and deepen. If any one of those things is down, just like in a stock portfolio, if they are somewhat uncorrelated, you can still have a good week if you have a terrible week,

but then you hit a PR and your Saturday workout. We did it, baby. We did it. Yeah. Yeah. Pass. You're hedging baby. We did it. Yeah. Pass. You're hedging your identity, you're hedging your sort of existential investment.

Yeah, exactly. And that is very, very, very important to me and that I have multiple tracks running at the same time. So that if one hits a roadblock, that it's not just an existential spiral. We'll get back to talking to Tim in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Maui Nui venison. Maui Nui delivers the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door.

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Is there a, okay. I need to pull the early warning signs. Is there a, okay, I need to pull the pin with these things. Yeah, I would say one, I'll give some that are perhaps more easily within reach of most people and easier to recommend. Honestly, group dinners, three to four friends, group dinners, long group dinners, no alcohol. If I see low mood coming, then no alcohol.

Because of the next day? Yeah. You're borrowing happiness from tomorrow as someone put it to me. And if you compromise your sleep, for me, generally low mood, if we want to call it depression does not actually, it's not a first cause. For me, I would say it's typically some type of anxious rumination worrying about something. I compromise my sleep because I have onset insomnia. Then I consume too much caffeine, which further compromises my sleep. And then after three or four days,

that's when the low mood slash depressive symptoms show up. So anything that compromises sleep, I try to avoid in that period. Dinner's three to four friends. Yeah, exactly. Dinner's three to four friends. I would say there are also a few other things, which I'm very hesitant to mention because they come with a lot of caveats and a lot of people should be excluded because there are contraindications and risks, but I would say psychedelic assisted therapies once or twice a year. And also something called accelerated TMS, which has been a recent discovery of mine.

Although I've been familiar with the TMS technology for more than a decade, but the more recent iteration of accelerated TMS, TMS is transcranial magnetic stimulation. It's a type of brain stimulation. It's a type of brain stimulation. And this particular protocol has been pioneered by a number of people. One of the better known is Dr. Nolan Williams, who's out of Stanford. And you're effectively taking traditional TMS where you might have 30 plus treatments over several months and compressing it into one week. So you're doing 10 treatment sessions a day for five days. You're doing 50 sessions of brain stimulation over five days.

How long are they? They're very short. Uh, they're in my experience, eight to 10 minutes. They're not painful. They can be uncomfortable for some people, but it feels like a mild. Finger flick on the head. Very tolerable. And I will say that this right now is the technology and the intervention that has my interests very solidly.

Above and beyond psychedelic assisted therapies, which I've focused on since 2015 in a public forward-facing, supporting science type of capacity because the psychedelic treatments are not widely available. There are quite a few hurdles left to pass from a regulatory perspective and also from a scientific perspective. Let's just say that people with a family history of schizophrenia, BPD, borderline personality disorder, people who might have some family history of leaning towards the chaos side of things as opposed to rigidity. Rigidity might be OCD, chronic or treatment resistant depression, anxiety, which I view and I'm not a psychiatrist or a doctor, I don't play one on the internet,

but as forms of thought loops and rigidity, those seem to respond reasonably well in some people to psychedelic assisted therapy, but there are also people, even though these compounds like psilocybin are not intrinsically physiologically toxic, you can still have intense psychological experiences and say, if someone has very high blood pressure or cardiac issues, I think that many of them should not take psychedelics, even if they're physiologically well tolerated and normals accelerated. TMS is a safe accelerated.

TMS has a, a much more favorable safety profile for people who would fall into a lot of these categories. much more favorable safety profile for people who would fall into a lot of these categories. It's still very preliminary. I would say there are a few hundred people, probably sub a thousand, who've been treated using accelerated TMS, but the results that I've seen, the effect sizes, the transformations in people directly that I've seen are pretty remarkable. And for me, the most durable reduction and anxiety, the most durable, dramatic reduction in all forms of insomnia has come after accelerated TMS, which I did for the, for the second time, I did two rounds and the first round ended up using one

particular device with more of a shotgun pattern that didn't work for me because for lack of a more technical way to put it, the on off switch for the anxiety, a somatic target in my brain are too close together. So they were hitting both the on and the off switch for the basically canceled the effects out. And this is a theory, but with more precise neuroing using FMRI and then this particular mapping technology, the second time around it did work. And it's been pretty remarkable. You should not DIY this.

I mean, I can't just get a car battery and slap that sucker on. There are lots of videos online of people buying things off of Amazon and DIYing this, you can fuck yourself up in a big way. Do not try at home brain stimulation. You're going to win a Darwin award. Don't do it. Wow. Yeah. But this is something that I see at the forefront of potential mental health interventions for treatment resistant depression, for anxiety, for conditions like OCD, although OCD I think appears to be a little trickier. Uh, so those would be my truly in case of emergency break glass, but what's

important to note is that I have these things pre-scheduled. I'm not waiting until I'm in a really acute space. Which is the time when you are least likely to be, to have the motivation to be able to book in. Right. If we come back to state story strategy, right? What's your state? Terrible, depressive, personalized, permanent.

This is, this is how could I be like this? I'm always like this. I'm never going to be able to fix this. So what's your story? It's not worth even trying. Should I even continue? Dot, dot, you like this. I'm never gonna be able to fix this. So what's your story? It's not worth even trying. Should I even continue? Dot, dot, you have this. So your strategy is gonna be.

Dog shit. Dog shit or nonexistent. I would say in very, very acute situations, if someone has suicidal ideation, then I think there is a place for intravenous or intramuscular ketamine treatment in clinics, but I will say I've seen more high functioning people unravel in the last three years from ketamine than any other substance in terms of addiction. It is very, very psychologically addictive and that has not had enough airplay. Have you been exposed to this ketamine oxytocin nasal spray that is being yeah, I've seen it floating around floating around Austin

Yeah, I mean you should not have ketamine at home in my opinion takes 0.1 of a second to just Yeah, it's it's being treated like hangover free alcohol and I hate to tell people but there's no biological free lunch And in the short term you do not get automatically punished for using ketamine, which creates the illusion that there is no cost in the long term. You can make yourself much more susceptible to depression. So it actually has the inverse effect of the, it really is a break glass.

A huge scenario. Yeah. I don't, I don't plan on personally using ketamine myself. I do know a number of people who've had their lives positively transformed and have not succumbed to any type of addiction in every case that is supervised in clinic use once or twice a year. You mean my season in Ibiza in 2010 doesn't count? Yeah, the camelback full Aketamine doesn't count. What a shame. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning.

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colours, no artificial ingredients or any other BS and it's how I start every single morning. Best of all, there's a no BS, no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it 100% risk free. If you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident Do you think deep thinkers are more lonely? Yeah, my knee jerk response to that would be yes, for sure. I think anyone who is very heady and trapped in the song of me, me, me, in the sense of like recursive thought is going to likely feel isolated. And I would say that there may be some argument to be made that with that superpower comes a secondary function which is like a shielding function to not feel, to divorce yourself from certain bodily sensations, which is part of the reason not to drag this back into ketamine, why ketamine is so seductive

for type A highly analytical males. And it's not to say that women can't become addicted, but from what I've seen, it is predominantly male who want to avoid feeling something. And that could be subconscious or it could be conscious, but it serves the same purpose as alcohol. So if you're family or you have ever used alcohol to take the edge off, you are susceptible to ketamine addiction is what I would say. Similarly, you are susceptible to basically viewing your

consciousness and existence from the neck up. And I think both can have severe side effects in terms of social side effects, sort of psycho-emotional side effects, certainly. There's a quote from Alain de Botton where he says, loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. I don't know if I agree with that. So I used to think it can be a tax. I used to. Um, I, the position that I've arrived at now, especially

since moving to Austin, which is kind of full of cultural psychological refugees from other places where they maybe didn't fit in, in any case, uh, is that you just maybe need to work harder to find your tribe that, um, your, uh, psychological, uh, non-typicalness, uh, will mean that you are out toward the edges of whatever bell curve of normal, of normalness you are. So it's going to be fewer people are going to get you, but actually think that that's fine because the people that you do find that you do like and do get on with you will also have that like oasis in the middle of the desert

sensation that's like, Oh dude, you get me. Like you, you think about this too. And I, I think while I was still living in the UK, I was struggling to connect with people, I, you know, met a million people across my career of standing on the front door of nightclubs and I had a handful of friends, most of whom I worked with in one form or another. Yeah. That's not a fantastic friend exposure to conversion ratio.

Like my marketing funnel wasn't marketing, right? Wasn't converting. Uh, I should speak to Toby. And then I came to Austin and I realized that, well, there is a bit more. Like it's not been as hard and maybe that's starting to self-select because people kind of seeking me out and obviously, you know, like advantages of fame, I suppose, or at least of like being front facing. But I, I think that in the wrong groups, yes, loneliness can be a kind of tax. You have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind, but it also offers you the opportunity.

Like the only way out is through. And through means working maybe a bit harder to find people that are like the people that you want to be around. Yeah. I also, I also feel like those who are good at thinking sometimes become hammers looking for nails. I know that's true for me in the sense that we think for instance, and this might not be explicit, but that we can cogitate our way into equanimity, inner peace. You mean we can't, I can't do that?

And there's this fetishizing of independence, especially in the US, where if you look for apes, monkeys, certainly historically hominids who were lone survivors, I don't think you're going to find them. We are interdependent as a species. We've evolved to coexist. So for me, I used to view loneliness as a failure of self, like a failure of discipline, a failure of resilience, a failure of inner narrative, something like that. I think it's much, much simpler in the sense that loneliness is usually a failure of group activities in your calendar. You know, it's just like you might be doing morning pages for an hour trying to figure out the riddles of your life and the complexities of your pain. It's like, no, you just need some macadamia nuts and a cup of water and a shower.

You haven't trained in four days. Yeah. You're a little blood sugar. Go eat something. Yeah. I think, uh, I tweeted this out the other day, 90% of problems can be fixed by a good night's sleep, a glass of water, a talk with a friend or a training session. Yeah.

Yeah. And I also will often say to my significant others, I'll just say, look, if I'm trying to like, reason my way out of something and you just see me grinding the gears in my head at the table with a notebook, just tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for an hour. Great success.

Yeah. It's like, tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for a bit. Lots of people that are listening might feel hypervigilance, always scanning for threats, fear based motivations, being something that the varying levels of awareness is something that drives them. The benefits of it aren't maybe as obvious, but I think people that have hypervigilance of which I'm one, I think that you are one as well, they can be addictive in some

ways, because the attention that you pay to things and the precision with which you assess what you're doing and the care and dexterousness with which you go about things is like, well, that's my competitive advantage. That's something that I love. with which you go about things is like, oh, but that's my competitive advantage. That's something that I love. What have you come to learn or believe about hypervigilance and a sort of fear based view of the world? I'm going to bounce that back and then I'll answer what's, how would you answer that

question? Double-edged sword, man. Double-edged sword. The thing that makes me competitive, which is my attention to detail and the fact that I care and the fact I try to be precise is also the thing which makes it less enjoyable in the moment. And right now I'm trying to optimize for how I feel moment to moment. I really want to enjoy the process of things, given that almost all of every journey is journey, not destination.

Like destination is going to be the final percentile of the thing. It's the day that you get to sit down. It's the whatever it's like, what's your day to day texture of experience? Like, how does your mind feel and, uh, optimizing for the outcome as opposed to the process has got the bar stool upside down. That's pretty uncomfortable to sit on. So, I'm kind of still, you know, like that's, again, cognitively, that's what I can tell you emotionally when it comes to me letting go of my hypervigilance.

That's a much tougher thing. I can tell you the story, right? I can give you that like nice bow, fucking parcel and push it across the table. But I'm still very much a work in progress with all of this stuff. And it's one of the reasons why I feel for guys like Huberman or Atiyah, who have genuine expertise, because there is a standard that they are able to communicate at and a level of understanding that they may be privately feel like they need to live up to.

Mercifully, being a bro-scientist rather than a real scientist, I have much greater degrees of freedom to mess up. And you know, again, people can performatively do this to protect themselves in a way that I think is, it's a tactically advantageous to say, I'm just an idiot. I don't know what I'm talking about. It's like, ah, I get it. I understand, but there's only so far, so many times you can say that whilst also proselytizing

about what it is that you know and how people should do things. But genuinely, I'm massively a work in progress and just trying to leave breadcrumbs behind me. So long story, hypervigilance, good for a competitive advantage, but it is very difficult, um, when it comes to enjoying stuff day to day, and I want to enjoy things, I don't want to look back on a wildly successful life where my court is

always super high and I stressed every, every moment of getting that. I identify with that. Uh, I think this is, this is one of my major projects in life. And I can justify and explain the hypervigilance every which way from Sunday. But I will say that historically, when I've been worried about losing my edge, especially when it's not very well defined,

with say meditation, This is a common concern with people who have never meditated. They worry about losing their edge and competitive drive. Every time I've incorporated something like Transcendental Meditation, knowing that in the FAQ, one of the most asked questions is, will I lose my edge? I've not experienced that losing of the edge in terms of actual outcomes. The process becomes less stressful, but I've not paid that sort of ultimate tax, which also is worth cross-examining in the sense that at what point would you be willing to sacrifice some of your competitive advantage?

Yeah. If so, how much, right? These are actually good questions. Like how much of your competitive advantage, what is that competitive advantage exactly? Okay. Let's put that under a microscope. I fucking, I wrote about this a year ago, two years ago, said your, your neurosis is not helping your performance.

Yeah. I think that I I've thought about this and I think that it's between five and 10%. Yeah. I don't think it's very much. I really don't think it's that much. And so one of the ways I've approached this from a work perspective is trying to put my meticulous hyper vigilance into trying to train other people to get to at least 90, 95% of what I could do.

Let me infect you. Or just train and then also be inspired when they do things that I wouldn't have ever thought of doing. And I'm not the best manager. I'll be the first person to say that, which is part of the reason why I have the positive constraint of keeping my team very small. But number one is awareness, right? Step number one is awareness, which is part of the reason why I reread the book aptly named awareness by Anthony de Mello. I reread that probably twice a year, which helps to put you in a position where you step out of yourself and observe some of your thought patterns and beliefs that are driving your behaviors. Also why I do the introductory course with Sam Harris on the waking up app, which is

a very old program in terms of that particular 30 day process. I do that probably once or twice a year. These are all to clean the lens through which I'm looking at myself. And there are tools that help with this. Although I think it is largely a horoscope for men who would never admit to liking horoscopes, the Enneagram I think has some value. So I'm a self preservation six. And when you read that description, though, part of the benefit of reading that description is you do not feel alone. So the nickname for that category is the Loyalist and I really don't speak Enneagram, I know very little about it, but it is helpful to know that you are not uniquely flawed in scanning your environment for threats and paying attention to every minute detail including when it's not necessary. All of that helps with the base foundation which is awareness and this is a constant process. It's like your knives get dull you need to sharpen your knives.

This happens over and over it's just a process for me at least. And then I would say there are a few exercises that are very helpful not necessarily on a day-to- day basis but on a monthly-to-day basis, but on a monthly or quarterly basis. This exercise that I call fear setting, where I'm looking at the actual worst case scenarios. I'm getting very explicit about detailed examples of what I am fearful of and then looking at the likelihoods, the probabilities, what I could do if they happen to reverse the damage, what I could do to avoid them, et cetera. What the cost of inaction is, if there's something that's just been sitting on my to-do list or in my calendar that I've been

avoiding, not just what is the risk of doing this thing, but what is the cost of inaction. Maybe it's just thinking about it all the fucking time and having it run in the background and affect my sleep and distract me from other things. These are all very helpful. And I would say at its core also having a very big yes is important. If you're trying to juggle five or six projects that are cool but not really capturing your full attention because for whatever reason they keep you up at night in the best way possible thinking about the possibilities of something. If I don't have that that that single big yes, I think the, the bullet ricochets around inside the skull, which leads to more hyper vigilance because I'm also trying to juggle more things. So the more I try to multitask, I would say the more likely I am to act hyper vigilant.

And I do think there's, there's also an art to letting small bad things happen and practicing letting small bad things happen. practicing letting small bad things happen. To prove to yourself that it's not the end of the world. Yeah. You're not the president of the universe. Things are fine. The whole world isn't going to fall down around you. Generally speaking.

Dude, so much of what you've just said has been something that I've ruminated about or written about or spoken about or thought about over the last few years. That idea of, uh, the cost of inaction. I came up with this term of anxiety cost, like opportunity costs. Yeah. And, uh, all of the time that you think I still need to meditate today, I still need to meditate today. I still need to meditate today.

Every single time that you think that thing, you could have gotten rid of that, had you just meditated earlier. Yeah, for sure. Uh, yeah, that thing stacks up talking about books. What are the most commonly gifted books that you have given to other people? Awareness by Anthony de Mello. I think the subtitle is the promise, the promises and perils of reality. Something like that.

Very short read. Apocalyptic. Yeah. It's a tough love book. It's not for everybody, but it's good medicine for the right people at the right time. So Awareness by Anthony DiMello. And I have a full shelf of this book in my guest bedroom in my house. It's all the same book?

Yeah. Fantastic. I have a few shelves that are all independently filled with different books that are books I gift. Another one is Gold, which is a collection of Rumi poetry, new translations. My Halaliza Gafori, I believe her name is, outstanding collection. Also very easy to read, not intended to be read front to back. It's just like a little nightcap before you go to sleep. And I do think the mystic inspired poetry,

since it can be so slippery from the standpoint of language, but it's very evocative from a feeling perspective, it's very good for heady people to read before bed as a way of pulling themselves out of the tactical, practical, nitpicky bullshit that they might obsess over otherwise. I find it very calming. So that's another that I gift a lot. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, I have a number of copies of, in part because I get so many questions about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapies and the science. And that's very, very good primer

for people who want an overview. As is the Netflix series, mini series, How to Change Your Mind, especially the MDMA and psilocybin episodes, which have some fantastic case studies. For a period of time, and I could still do this, but it's not the chapter that I find myself in currently, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.

Think if you want one book on being effective, doing the right things, not just being efficient, doing whatever you're doing quickly and well, the effective executive as old as it is, is how old is that book now? The best that I have found. Couldn't even tell you 30, 40, 50 still holds up. Oh yeah. It still holds up.

What about fiction? Fiction, there are a number of books I've gifted a lot. Motherless Brooklyn, which is basically a detective noir story that was also turned into a movie by Edward Norton. The adaptation was very good. There's a stand in for Robert Moses, famous from the book, The Power Broker. I mean, famous for other reasons, but that was very well done adaptation. It's about a detective with Tourette's syndrome. So there's a lot of laughs as well, but wonderfully written book. That's shorter. There are many, many fiction books that I could recommend to folks. If I'm trying to convert a nonfiction purist into someone who can consider fiction,

because I think fiction often describes truth in a stickier way than nonfiction. Completely agreed. But look at what nonfiction, the best nonfiction tries to do, it uses stories, right? Don't make a point without the story, don't have a story without a point. Yeah, so even though it's just like the cold plunge, a little too much du jour to sound original,

but I think the first Dune, for instance, you want to study leadership, the first Dune, I think Ender's Game is fantastic. I think these appeal especially to males who are full of piss and vinegar, but they're both very good. I'll give you a number of different books that come to mind. Now that I'm thinking of my bookshelves, I have books arranged on my bookshelves to elicit very particular responses from me as I see them. I'm really methodical about my bookshelves to elicit very particular responses from me as I see them. I'm really methodical about my bookshelves. Of Wolves and Men is a nonfiction book by Barry Lopez,

beautifully written, changed the entire, let's call it genre of naturalistic writing. It just showed what was possible. It broke the category. It incredible book of Wolves and Men. There is a fiction book that I was given by my brother. I failed to read it three times, but my brother has a 100% hit rate with me with books. And so I assumed it was a user error, meaning I was screwing up somehow, which I was. There's a book, nine out of 10 people are going

to hate this book. I'm just going to tell you upfront, but 10% are going to have their minds blown wide open. It's called Little Big by John Crowley. I think the alternate title is the Ferry's Parliament. The alternate title is the Ferry's Parliament. And this book is the closest thing to a fever dream or a psychedelic experience that I've ever found in terms of literature. John Crowley is a very skilled poet who weaves together this tapestry of time and parallel stories, history and family trees that is unlike anything I've ever seen. And for literally hours and days after I would read this book, and I'll give a tip, the takeaway from my initial user error in a second, but it would affect my perception of reality

and time, not in a disruptive way for weeks after I finished this book. Use with caution. Yeah, it didn't disrupt, but it, it will really change how you interpret the world. At least it did for me. The recommendation, having gone through this number one, take a photograph of the family tree that is from the beginning of the book. You're going to need it.

Okay. Don't fixate on it because it will have too many spoilers, but at least have it handy if you get really confused. The second is this is not a book that you can read 10 pages of put down and pick up four days later. You need to plow through the first 150 pages. There are too many plates you

need to spin. But if you do that, if you get to the talking fish, it'll make sense when you get there. And when you get to the talking fish, you're like, what the fuck? A talking fish? What kind of book is this? Then that's when things really get going. Cool. And the strangest thing, one of the strangest things about this book to me is, I couldn't really tell you what it's about. It is such a fever dream of a book. It's bizarre beyond words, but beautiful beyond description.

I'll give one more then then we can stop. There are a lot of books I can recommend. So Milan Kundera has a book called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which is a collection of short stories. Incredible, incredible. That's fiction will really take you through a whole kaleidoscope of emotions, which was part of me training to get back on that bike and bring emotions back online. I was also exploring music for this,

especially Persian, Arabic, Azerbaijani music. You mean you were listening to music whilst reading? I'm sorry. I was listening to music separately that is not from the Western canon because you can make a pretty compelling argument that certain types of music have a larger emotional range than others. That's better suited for some musicologist or music theorists to get into. But the book of laughter and forgetting and then on the fiction side, if you're really interested in sci-fi and you've already, you've already hit dune, maybe if you're a fantasy nerd, you've already hit the name of the wind, which would also be a top rec.

Yes. Phenomenal. We could get into fantasy, but I don't want to take us too far. I do have other fantasy recommendations. The short stories by Ted Chang, C-H-I-A-N-G, his second collection is Exhalation. First is harder to recall in terms of the collection name, but if you've ever seen the movie arrival, which is a fantastic movie that was based on one of his short stories, his short stories are beyond incredible.

Is this across multiple collections, one collection? There are two collections that I'm aware of. You may have a new collection that I haven't seen yet, but either collection will, will be incredibly satisfying. I've yet to recommend that to a single person who has not replied with multiple WTFs. Oh my God, this guy is amazing. CB Yeah. I'll give you two. I'll give you one nonfiction and one fiction. So the nonfiction is The Ape Who Understood the universe by Steve Stewart Williams. Okay.

Evolutionary psychologist currently out in Singapore, works at the University of Nottingham. It is the best overview of evolutionary psychology. It's in terms of behavioral ecology. It's also very well informed with how we interact with the environment, sex differences in the brain, everything, sexual selection, full works. It is, and it's so accessible. And it begins by an alien looking down on our behavior from above and trying

to work out what we're doing, the ape who understood the universe. And from a fiction perspective, my highest hit rate of this, it's, I think I'm at a hundred percent for this and I'm, it's my most recommended book, Red Rising by Pierce Brown. That thing. It's been recommended to me. Should come with a fucking warning label on it. Like you talk about ketamine.

Yeah. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Red Rising. That's the thing that people, that's the real substance that people need to be concerned about. If you can get through the first 60 pages, if you can get out of the minds, which you'll understand if you read it, you are locked in and he's now up to book seven, I think.

And there's some novellas and blah, blah, blah. That being said, Patrick Rothfuss, if you do happen to be listening two hours into this podcast, please for the love of God, we beg you, right. The third book, right. The third book, there? The third book. There's so much to be done. But anyway, uh, one other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently are, um, odd purchases or purchases that I'm spending an inordinate amount of money on compared

with what people think I should spend on it. For me, bed linen has become a pet obsession, high quality bamboo bed linen. Absolute game changer. You think about the quality of your mattress. You think about the type of pillow that you're using all the rest of it, but the actual way that your skin interacts with your bed is directly through that bamboo cotton wipes the floor with high thread count, normal cotton, it's easier than silk and it doesn't make you feel like you're going to slide off the bed.

If it's something happens, um, for you, what are the things that you have found are worth spending more money on than most people would consider acceptable or sane? I met this, this woman, my friend's mother in Panama at one point and just kind of out of nowhere. I think it was, no, it wasn't out of nowhere. I was complaining about, I think my heel was bothering me and she said, invest in your shoes and your bed because if you're not in one, you're going to be in the other. And I thought to myself, that's a smart woman right there. And she was very, very smart on a whole lot of levels. So I'd say footwear in bed.

So also- Footwear in bed. Yeah. I always wear my lace up boots to bed. Pretty woman style. No shoes or bed. In this case end, but not at the same time. Yes. What bed, what shoes?

I have, look, they are a sponsor of my podcast, but I genuinely, I test everything. So Helix, I have their highest end mattress. With an eight sleep on top. With an eight sleep on top. And, uh, I do pay attention to the linens, although I don't think I've put enough time into it as you have, so maybe I should double click. I'll give you it.

In terms of, I'm trying to think of what I put, might not be unreasonable. I mean, certainly food, medical care, that's probably where I spend the most compared to average. Blood work, you type stuff. All of that. And it's not compulsive. I mean, I used to do so many bizarre experiments on myself that I would do blood work like every four weeks. I don't do that anymore. But, um, I've been very excited about archery, specifically recurve archery using a modified Olympic bow at the moment. So I am spending more money on that, but honestly, it's not that terribly expensive. I mean, it's a few thousand dollars and you can be

very well equipped. I don't want to be that like pudgy guy looking like an overstuffed sausage and like a full tour de France get up on like a $20,000 bike who's been riding for a week. I don't want to be that guy. I've been that guy in various things. I'm like, I'm going to do triathlons and I buy all

the gear and lo and behold, I try it for a little bit and I'm like, I'm never going to do triathlon. That's never gonna happen. And I accumulate all of this nonsense, but I would say broadly speaking, I really don't have many expensive hobbies. I have found expense to be inversely correlated to enjoyment generally.

But there's certainly, say, be skiing, maybe skiing. I actually put a lot of, if you add in all the costs associated with that, it's high. Also not particularly cheap. If you're going to own the kit, it's not cheap. It's not cheap. It's, um, it depends on how committed you are and how long, over what period of

time you can advertise that cost. Yeah. committed you are and how long over what period of time you can advertise that cost. Yeah. I think finding what you like and kind of ruthlessly sticking to that up until the point of which you're like, Oh, let's see if there's something slightly better. For instance, vans make not a sponsor, but if you're listening, they make a particular type of that old school shoes called comfy Kush. And it's just a slightly more, it's 15 bucks more, but they've changed the inner

and they changed the insult and they change everything about them. I can do everything in these shoes. I can run, I can lift, I can go on a night out. I can walk, I can do everything. And the advantage of that is that you have a single pipeline from dress shoe to gym shoe, and you just continue to buy one new one, and then they get phased out, and then the old ones go in the bin,

and you just continue to go through. Not to turn this into an infomercial for vans, but I will say I have black vans. They're also the all-purpose shoe. If I'm traveling, that's the all-purpose shoe. Correct. Yeah. Take me through your most heavily used apps,

desktop, mobile. What is your life structured on, reliant your most heavily used apps, desktop, mobile. What is your life structured on, reliant on most heavily? I think people are going to be potentially disappointed. It's nothing terribly sophisticated. I would say that the basics are the basics, so I won't run through those. Google Maps, Uber, et cetera, open table, very, very basic. I would say on desktop, I use something called jump cut

to have 30 to 40 things that I can store on the clipboard. And I know you have- I'm gonna get you across to Alfred. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna convert you. I need to test the latest version. I used, I used Alfred several years ago and I really enjoyed it. I haven't used it. Phenomenally good.

Have not used the updated. So that's, that's a teaser for what you'll explain in terms of Alfred. I still use Evernote. I know it's somewhat outdated, but I was the first advisor to Evernote way back in like 2009, so I just have so much. It's such a sub cost. How are you going to And actually the latest versions have been

dramatically streamlined. So it's, it's actually back to being very user friendly. So I still use Evernote a lot. I use the companion app scannable for scanning documents. So if you, if you don't have a very fast photo scanning app, it's worth at least searching for something in that domain. Trying to think of anything unusual. What do you use for task management? We use Asana internally. Do you

use that personally for your own stuff too? Personal projects and blah, blah. I don't. I have a scrap of paper in my pocket with some of what I want to do, which is not the best system. It seems to be this vestigial habit that I cannot get rid of. Fucking path dependency, man. It'll get you. Yeah, it's just ridiculous. I have tried very much to, and I did this beforehand,

but I've tried to double down on this and a gent named Sam Korkos of Levels, which is a great company, who's perhaps the most highly systematized process driven person I've ever met in my life. He's got like 20 VA's right? Yeah. Yeah. He, he makes the point that you should not have a to-do list.

You should have everything in your calendar effectively. And I'm simplifying, but I've tried very hard to do that. Like as soon as I, there's something I know I need to do or want to do, it goes into the calendar somewhere, even if it's a placeholder. I know I need to do or want to do it goes into the calendar somewhere, even if it's a placeholder. I do not really use anything for myself as a task manager, unless you count my employees who fairly or unfairly are on the hook to remind me to do various things. So there is some of that, but really it's the calendar. The calendar drives it.

What are you using for calendar? G suite. Right. Yeah. I do not use mail on my phone. You don't have any email on your phone. No. Wow.

God, what a new world. I also have no social media apps on my phone. Yes. Yeah. Uh, Slack, Slack, uh, some people on the team internally use that, especially since we do work, even though I have a small full-time team, we have a lot of contractors who work on the podcast and audio editing and video editing and so on. Uh, so we do use Slack for that. And it's, it's a very, the word that I use a lot for myself as a calibration

is elegant. I'm looking for elegant solutions. Not that I'm an elegant human, but I'm looking for solutions that have the fewest moving pieces. And I remember interviewing Morgan Spurlock who made Super Size Me. And I think it was Inside Man as a television series, great documentarian. And he said, once you get fancy, fancy gets broken. And that's not always the case,

but the more complexity you have in a system, the more execution risk there is. And so I try to keep things as bare bones and minimalist as possible. That can go too far. Me too. Yeah minimalist as possible. That can go too far. Me too. Yeah, you too. That can go too far.

Yes. But if something comes to mind, I'll buy myself some time. Why don't you tell people about Alfred? Yeah, so Alfred is a desktop assistant, I suppose. It's kind of a global search tool. It only exists for Mac, which the tribalism of it makes me kind of love it a little bit more that it's so judgmental and kind of like, uh, like platformly racist.

Um, it's got a clipboard manager. It's got text expander. You can set up automations. You can message people on iMessage without opening up iMessage. You can send a tweet without opening up Twitter. It allows you to do all of this from basically a spotlight search bar in the middle. The last 500 things that you've copied. I mean, look, the absolute basics that you need to use, you need a text expander so that a short keyword can then open out into a large chunk of text.

You can have conditional formatting if you do. Maybe give an example. So somebody says, hey, what are, what are your top pieces of advice for starting a podcast? Yeah. So this is on my phone. This isn't even just on the laptop. If I put PDC one and PDC two, it brings up two podcast episodes. I've done that, uh, the 90% of what someone's going to ask me, what camera

do I use, what lighting do I use? How do I record it? Where do I upload it? What hosting platform? How do you prep for a guest? All of these things. I've just, I did them in conversations and it expands Where do I upload it? What hosting platform? How do you prep for a guest? All of these things. I've just, I did them in conversations and it expands it and immediately sends it. It's the same for invites.

It's got EML is my email address. Uh, what's my, uh, NMN, NMN, NMN I think is a phone number. Um, add one is my address in the U S a DD two is my address in the UK. And it's just all of these things that build out. It's all of this stuff that you need to say a lot of the time. Uh, and then a clipboard manager, my God, we said it before, like having only having access to paste to the last thing that you copied is fucking barbaric. Like it is so primitive.

Uh, but you know, it means that you can be going through a document and you can think, okay, I want all of these things, but I want them separately. So I'm going to take this and this and this and this and this and this. And then you have this sort of flow where then when you put it across into it and you, yeah, it'll change your life. People spend so much time copying and pasting stuff. So much of our time is spent copying and pasting things or saying the same shit over email. Like here's an invite to the podcast or, you know, this is what to expect

when the episode goes live or whatever, whatever, like all of that stuff. So all of that highly used, I use Apple notes. Um, I went around the houses, uh, Evernote, uh, for what I think I've still got sort of some use cases for Evernote tried notion and it's kind of used for some stuff, but it was the complexity kind of got to me and I think there's kind of a high, if you want to use it properly, uh, there can be a little bit of a high lift with that. Uh, I have, let's have a look. How many notes have I got on here? 2,996 notes on Apple notes. Um, and it's bulletproof. It's never broken. I update something on my phone. It's immediately cross under there. Um, read wise.

I like read wise. Read wise is great. I use read wise as well. Uh, for the people that don't know, it's a highlight resurfacing and, um, can you also use it for space memorization, repetition, Ebbinghaus stuff. Um, that's great. Uh, I like getting a set an email to arrive at seven AM every morning with four highlights that it randomly chooses from my, um, uh, history.

And it just reminds me of books that I may be forgotten about or insights that I've lost and then that often spurs a newsletter maybe later in the week or whatever. Oh, there's a cool thing. And I totally haven't written about that. Um, I'll still use heavily. It's pretty much it. Usual stuff, audible.

Oh, um, push to Kindle extension for Google Chrome is a game changer. I don't like reading on laptop and I don't, I can't read on my phone because my natural state is like flitting around and busy work and executive and blah, blah, blah. Um, push to Kindle links in with your Kindle, your Amazon account, and it turns any blog post or webpage into a perfectly optimized Kindle document that appears on every Kindle device that you own. And I have a Kindle scribe downstairs with the pen, which is really lovely. And I have a Kindle Oasis upstairs, which I read before bed.

And it means that when I then sit down on a morning and I want, I have about 10 or 15 minutes to read first thing in the morning, I don't need to choose what I'm going to read. I just open up my library and there's the stuff that I discovered yesterday ready for me to go through. And I can usually get through maybe two articles or something on a morning. And that then opens up. I read about, uh, Oliver Berkman's productivity debt idea a couple of days ago. Fell in love with that.

Read a study about how, uh, hair length is related to sexual satisfaction amongst North Korea, South Korean women. Uh, wait, does that mean I can't satisfy South Korean women? They need long, they need long hair. If they have long hair between the two of you, you'll have the right amount of hair. Um, but yeah, that's, those are the big ones. I think.

Yeah. I, I have been experimenting with an app called reverie R E V E R I. I met the lady that's in charge of it two days ago for, oh, you've got- Dr. Spiegel. Coming on the show. Yeah, yeah, so I just interviewed him and I am interested in hypnosis as a tool,

legitimate clinical hypnosis as a tool. So I've been experimenting with that, which I've actually found surprisingly helpful on a number of levels. And otherwise I would say apps can be helpful. They can also be a form of mistaking the tool as the purpose, if that makes sense. So-

Productivity, masturbation. Productivity, masturbation. There's a lot of that. And masturbation is great, but you don't want to do it all the time. It's the dose makes the poison as with most things. And I mean, my most critical regular practice that helps me with systems and policies and making single decisions that avoid a thousand separate decisions is taking mini retirements, which is an old concept, something I've practiced for a long time. People might recognize it from the four-hour workweek, but it is in brief scheduling three

to four weeks of effectively being offline, doing something, having very tight parameters on your access to anything digital or work-related. And if you do that, you have to set up systems and policies that will persist after you return. So your business and your life will be better off after you have done this. And so I did that this past October, I think it was for about three weeks. What did you do? I was in Suriname in South America for three weeks. How did you spend your time? I was spending a good amount of time with the Amazon Conservation Team Operations who do a lot

of conservation work for indigenous land rights in Suriname Team Operations who do a lot of conservation work for indigenous land rights in Suriname. They've done a lot of amazing work in Colombia. And I was spending time with some of their ethnobotanists and field operators with the Trio tribe in Suriname. And for people who don't know, because why would you know Suriname is the smallest country in South America. It is this tiny, tiny little sliver at the very top of South America in between Guyana and French Guiana. It's a bit confusing to me, the pronunciation still to this point. Very, very small. It used to be a Dutch colony. I think it's 94% forested, beautiful country, very unusual, really a melting pot of many, many different cultures. And it was a great experience. And I did a 15 minute crisis check

in just to ensure things weren't burning down very briefly once on a laptop via Starlink. And that was effectively it for two and a half or three weeks. You know what it makes me think about? If anybody has lived in the same house for more than five years, you just accumulate garbage stuff. All of the cupboards begin to overflow. Whereas when you're in university or whatever, you have to live lean because you just, you can't be bothered to move it. And it's kind of a little bit like that, but for processes, it's like, if the process has become too reliant on you, if you're too hubby and it's too spooky. It's

yeah. If you want to scale your business, if you want to scale the things you enjoy in your life, if you want to sell your business, ultimately in some fashion, doing something like this will improve all of those. It gives me it makes my bum hole do that to think about to think about what you've just put her quotient. Yeah, it does. But that's probably because it's something I need to do. Too much caffeine, maybe. No, no, never.

It's impossible. It's impossible. Why is the four hour body back in the charts? Oh, the four hour body is back in the charts. Beyond it being a great book. Yeah. I mean, I'm very proud of that book. It's held up very well over time.

It's back in the charts because I want to get the name right. So maybe you have this in your notes, but because the gentleman named Gary Brekka, I want to say created a clip that went viral on Tik TOK talking about. The 30, 30, 30 principle, which would be 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up and then 30 minutes of steady state exercise. And it all came as a surprise to me because my publisher reached out and said, we are out of stock. What is going on? I had no clue. So I put up a note on Twitter to try to figure it out, to do some detector.

I'm like, anybody have any idea why suddenly the four are bodies back to like number 70 on all of Amazon? And people linked to this video. So I owe Gary Brek a thank you. And that is how it went ballistic. And that's continued for some time. It's sustained for a while because then the video created media attention, which has had a pretty thick tail

continuing to this day, which was a really fascinating phenomenon to watch unfold because I've never been part of anything like that on TikTok. And I have my own thoughts and reservations around TikTok certainly, but it is remarkable what TikTok can do for resurrecting, not necessarily resurrecting because the four-hour body was never dead, but really revitalizing books. It's, it's incredible. What can happen? Do you remember there was that video of a dude

skateboarding down the street drinking, I think, ocean spray cranberry juice. This is a couple of years ago. I miss this one. He was listening to a particular song. This song goes to number one. This guy gets a sponsorship from ocean spray. Cranberry juice is now everywhere.

It's like this one, everyone's taken up skateboarding, you know, everything that was in this one video. And I don't even, cranberry juice is the new cold plunge. You honestly do. All right. So you're right. I think, I think the four hour body has held up very well.

What are the strategies from it that you have held onto the most? Cause I do think it was very prophetic. And I was listening to you tell Huberman about the fact that you have held onto the most? Cause I do think it was very prophetic. And I was listening to you tell Huberman about the fact that you were sticking yourself with some experimental glucose monitor, uh, many, many years ago and plugging it into a fucking pager or something like that. Um, but yeah, what, what are the things that you wrote in that book that you are holding onto the most still today? It's a cold exposure when in doubt, if I have very little time for training, something akin to Occam's protocol in that book, which is pretty straightforward,

one set to failure type resistance training. So nothing sophisticated. It's not going to win you any gold medals at the Olympics, but in terms of minimal effective dose still does the job. If you have a very, very small amount of time to allocate to weight training. Certainly kettlebell swings and- Just on that, what are your cues for good kettlebell swings, especially as somebody who is sensitive with the lower back? With the compression issues that I have right now, I'm taking a pause- No shearing force. Yeah, no shearing force on the kettlebell swings.

But if you were, if you were okay. Yeah, if I were okay, I mean, you would want to be bracing and not hyper extending at the sort of upper range. You'd want to be hip hinging and not squatting. This is a huge mistake. You see a lot also in Crossfitters where they're effectively squatting and then whipping it overhead, almost like a high pole. But using that hip hinge instead of the squat and focusing on that gluteal activation

and my personal opinion, not lifting any higher than is necessary. So basically- So you're going to parallel? Yeah, nipple height. I'm not going overhead. I just feel like for people with particularly, I'm trying to guard against the 10 or 20% who are not going to execute perfectly.

So I want to minimize injury risk. And for that reason, the American kettlebell swing, a movement, I saw it. There was like a, an origin thing about how it came into CrossFit and blah, blah, blah. It does seem like, I don't know. I, I, I understand that it's easier to create standards around movement for it, for a referee or an umpire or whatever they're called, a fucking assessor,

to be like, that one overhead, that one overhead, that one overhead, that's full extension at the top. But it's moved across now into, I don't know, I've never heard Pavel Tatsulini talk about what he thinks about that, but I don't think I've ever seen him pushing a kettlebell overhead. I may be wrong. I haven't seen it. Uh, I've done long ago. I did the the Russian kettlebell certification level one, level two. So I went through the whole thing and,

uh, really found it valuable on a whole lot of levels. But I would say the kettlebells for now with the sheer forces I'm going to table, uh, the sort of injury prevention, prehab type exercises from the, the not entirely, but largely gray cook FMS type focused stuff in the four hour body for sure. The chop and lift Turkish getup, especially that first portion of the Turkish getup for shoulder health. These are all things I still do. Was the, was hanging. Was hanging in there?

There might've been a little bit of hanging. I don't think that it was highlighted in any way. That seems to be the panacea for many people's shoulder issues. Yeah. I think it depends a lot on the person. I find, I mean, there are a lot of things we could talk about related to shoulders since I've had this one completely rebuilt. So I've had to go through a lot of shoulder stuff. There's a lot I added to tools of Titans, which was effectively

an addendum to my previous books, like all of the things I would have included in A, B, C, and D, I ended up collecting into tools of Titans. So there's a fair amount in there, B, C, and D, I ended up collecting into tools of tightness. So there's a fair amount in there on say, glute medius, some extra for Peter Atiyah, who I know you've met with, as well as a handful of things related to acro yoga and gymnastic strength training, which have some absolutely incredible exercises, uh, that don't require any equipment. So for someone who travels a lot, these can be incredibly, incredibly helpful. So I would say the vast majority of what you find in that book, if I'm getting a little puffy

and I want to reduce said puffiness, then slow carb diet is still where I'll go as my default, which is effectively paleo plus legumes. If people get really wound up about lentils and beans. So far, my GI tract has not exploded like a frag grenade. That has not happened. And for most people, it's not what happens. Um, so I would say that the vast majority of what's in that book, I still use on

some level, yeah, still intact. Let's say that for the rest of time, you only had 10 exercises that you could rely on. And this is for whatever you think your goals for the rest of time will be. Muscularity, longevity, mobility, 10 exercises. What would you choose? Oh man. I don't know if I have the credibility to weigh in on 10 exercises. It's just for you. This is for you. Well, let me tell you where my mind goes. My mind goes to types of athletic movement more than exercises.

So instead of Romanian deadlifts, I'm thinking Acra yoga, overhead squats. Overhead squats. Yeah, like barbell overhead squats. Okay. Rock climbing, archery on both sides. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you that one. Sure. And then some forms of gymnastic strength training from coach Christopher summer. I don't know that. Uh, rings. Think of it as

it includes some ring work, which would be more advanced depending on the progression, but it's a lot of the strength training, floor routines, et cetera, that would be used hand balancing exercises that would be used for prepping gymnastic athletes for competition, but for adults who really have limited capacity to adapt. Okay. Cause I didn't start at age five. Uh, I would choose those. Okay. Yeah. I would choose those, uh, in part because historically for me, you're getting, you're getting push pull with the Acre. You're going to get legs. You're going to be doing a lot of single leg pressing and you can choose your partner depending on how much weight you want to use. Or get your partner's pregnant and then you have progressive resistance. Okay.

Kidding. Then, uh, that would check a lot of the boxes, uh, for me and keep a lot of my creaky issues at bay with respect to kind of hip back, which might seem counterintuitive when you think about the like, as to heels overhead squats or the Acro yoga, which seems to at first require quite a bit of flexibility, but you end up developing a lot of strength and end ranges if you're doing it strictly. And frankly, all of those other things or a number of those are also fun at the end of the day. Have you taken up pickleball yet? I have not. I've tried it. It's fun. It's cool. It doesn't grab me like other things. Yeah, it's interesting. It's the first thing I've done in a long time that.

I absolutely, 100% lose myself in completely, completely, completely lose myself in it. I think, you know, even the gym, uh, training a great session with a friend. There are moments where you get pulled out because of the sort of intermittent nature of going to the gym and stuff like that. And it's been a while since I did a sport like that. Uh, cricket was mine growing up and yeah, I, it's not about pickleball. What it's about, I think is something which is relatively fast paced, not too intermittent, uh, and immersive like physically and mentally. And I think if you can hit those, you know, a problem would uh, and immersive, like physically and mentally.

And I think if you can hit those, you know, a problem would be, and I imagine this is something that NFL players have to deal with the on and then they're off, but they need to stay on while they're off, right? You actually have it's built into the way that the game works, uh, MLB as well. I would guess basketball players don't have that so much, right? Maybe when they're on the bench, but you know, when you're in the game works, MLB as well. I would guess basketball players don't have that so much. Right. Maybe when they're on the bench, but you know, when you're in the game, you are in the game.

Whereas that for me and my kind of psychology, um, something which doesn't allow me to pull back out and then have to drop back in, uh, I, I do much better with, so yeah, some of my, some of the best flow states that I've found in the last two years have been playing that. That's great. Yeah. Keep it up. I think I had an initial experience that

turned me off a little bit because I'm playing pickleball, which is it's a fun and it's pretty funny sport also. And the people I ended up playing with were like John McEnroe and steroids. They were so serious and competitive and kind of angry. That'll kill the fun. I was like, how are you guys taking this so seriously?

That'll kill the fun. Come on. It's like we're, we're doing nerf fencing and people are treating it like life or death. I'm like, come on, come on guys. This is intended to be fun. Well, that's another thing, you know, going back to what we were talking about before, holding yourself to high

standards, allowing yourself to, to like enjoy and feel the emotions of the moment. I was playing a mixed doubles last week and the girl that I was playing with young girl, having loads of fun. We were playing well, like it was tight game between us and the, the other team. And, uh, you know, we, I think we won one game and it was now, uh, one, one best of three. Uh, and I'm, you know, with sort of walking back to the baseline to start serving. And I'm like, okay, so we're going to do this and going to do this and she just stopped and said, yeah, don't forget to have fun. And it really caught me.

And I was like, Oh yeah. Uh, yeah, about that. But it just hadn't factored in because I was so, but it was a really lovely cue. And I mean, you've got, um, a prompt, uh, what would this be like if it was easier? What would this be like if it was fun? Yeah. Yeah, totally. And they're related often.

Yes. You've got a quote that I completely fell in love with. In a permissionless environment where you can really embrace the freedom of being able to work whenever you want, wherever you want. For most people, what that is going to turn into is working all the time wherever you are. And you don't have someone to stop you other than yourself. It's much more problematic than you might expect. It's a real risk. How do you avoid burnout? Is it planning in those holidays every few months? How do you know when you're getting too close to pushing too hard? For me, it's all scheduling. Don't rely

on discipline. Rely on systems and scheduling. So in other words, if you need to bookend your workday so that you do not work until 8 p.m., have something scheduled with accountability. Dinner with friends. Dinner with friends. Going out to rock climb. Going out last night for me, going out to dance tango. like have something in the calendar that you are committed to going and attending. Ideally, you have some sunk cost to pay for it in advance. And have some incentives lined up to defend against the impulses of your and instincts of your lesser self. You're the person that you're going to meet there. You've already paid for the class. Yeah. Yeah. Set it up in advance. And so I will very often have my team, for instance, if I happen to be in New York or wherever I am, they'll book out dinner reservations and exercise

classes plus one, I'll have an extra extra slot that I'll book. Then it's up to me to fill it. It's like, all right, well, look, you have three reservations, you're gonna pay a cancellation fee at these two places. You might as well invite some friends or they'll help me invite some friends or I'll invite my friends in advance. But the point is it's blocked out. When I look in the calendar, it's already there. And that is the simplest approach I have found

to lead myself to defend the personal time as much as the professional time. So is that how you've come to think about discipline and motivation and willpower and stuff like that? Yeah, the discipline and the willpower is loading it upfront to create the systems so that you're not constantly tired from decision fatigue. Frontload it. Yeah. What do you, what do you have? Don't do it the hard way. I don't disagree.

I don't disagree. I think, uh, anything that you need to do more than once you might as well do a system for, but it's, it's what you said at the very beginning, which is about, um, our desire to be. To show ourselves that we are working hard, thinking about things and taking a step back and taking half a day to come up with systems and stuff like that. Even if it would save you multiple days over the next year, there is the urgent will always get in the way of the important, unless you're very, very intentional about like,

yeah, okay, all right, emails, all right, Slack, yeah, we'll just wait because once they do this thing, I actually have even more time to be able to focus on whatever it is. And thinking in systems is a skill, realizing where you can automate and how you can create that. And this doesn't need to be,

it doesn't need to be, it doesn't matter if you're a business owner or a mother that needs to pick the kids up from school or orchestrate with your partner, who's collecting who and all of the rest of the things. Like there are systems that you can find, but I think you need to be very, very intentional. And a lot of the time it doesn't necessarily sort of come naturally,

especially if you're doing busy work. Yeah. And the work's always going to be there. You're going to die with stuff on your to-do list that's undone every single one of us. And I would recommend, we spoke about Oliver a little bit before we started recording, I think, but Oliver Berkman, 4,000 weeks, go read that book. Everybody's going to die with things that have not been

checked off their to-do list. So given that that is sort of the default mode, maybe you reframe it so that it's not an unending source of extreme stress. And most things just do not matter that much. I do think like look back if you can, like your calendar from a year ago and figure out which of those things were extremely important to you at the time. And now in retrospect, how many of them are completely trivial, had no bearing on anything important that got you to where you are now. It's going to be the majority. I asked myself a question during my annual review. Um, what do I think is productive, but isn't and what is productive, but I don't realize it to separate questions. So I'll give you mine and you can give me yours.

Um, things that I think are productive, but aren't, uh, calls, emails, sitting at my desk when I'm not working, and Slack. Things that are productive, but I don't realize it. Reading, walking with or without accompaniment, saying yes to brief coffees, and dinner with people that are coming through town. So when I looked at my year, so many of the things that I did that had outsized impact was going, Morgan

Housel comes through town and we go for steak and I leave with 10 ideas for newsletters or things that I can apply to my own life or a cool story that just makes me feel good. Uh, this isn't a productivity purgatory where everything has to be in service of work. It's like just, it was good. It was good for me. And it was good across multiple levels.

And then I look back and sitting at your desk when you are not working and being like, yeah, but I'm here, like, look, look at how much work I'm doing. Look boss. Oh wait, I'm the boss. Yeah. Wow. I'm such a shitty boss. I know I am.

Um, are there any things that come up for you there? Things that, uh that are productive, but you don't realize it or are not productive that you think are. Anything athletic is going to be net positive, cross transfer to everything else. So, which is slightly different from exercise. I mean, exercise, yes,

but specifically athletic, something that is faster paced, where you get punished for not paying attention. Skiing, pickleball in your case, rock climbing, these things are all deeply restorative for me, even though they're energetically intensive and expensive. I would say on the unproductive side, often any type of competition, which is a tough one for me because I like competing and I think I'm a pretty good competitor and I've been rewarded a lot for competing in school you get the top marks or in sports you have a certain

record in business you have a certain outcome in investing you have a certain portfolio startups you're rewarded for competing in so many different ways that you can end up choosing, allowing the competition to dictate what you do instead of choosing what you should do or might want to do, whether there's competition or not. Does that make sense? So for instance, I'm very, I like competing. There's part of me that enjoys competing, but I don't want to use the wrong tool for the job, which is part of the reason that I'm very, I like competing. There's part of me that enjoys competing,

but I don't want to use the wrong tool for the job, which is part of the reason that I'm exploring other things like rock climbing. I don't think I'm necessarily compete in rock climbing, archery maybe, looking for other avenues to scratch that competitive itch rather than, for instance, looking at what the latest best practices might be in the podcasts that are growing the fastest slash

television shows now, of course. And it doesn't mean I shouldn't experiment with those things, but if the primary driver behind it is because I want to quote unquote, win, I find that to be a false lead. That is a, as Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said on my podcast before, he passed pretty shortly thereafter, maybe a year, year and a half later. That is a temptation to be resisted rather than an opportunity to be seized. So I think a big part of maturing is separating those two, being able to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted. And for me, much like when I chatted with BJ Novak, who's a very well-known writer, famous for The Office, he also does a lot of acting and directing. But he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but something

along the lines of whenever I find myself saying about an opportunity, but it's so much money. That's a red flag. That's a cue to pause when it's like that, that, that, that, that, but it's such good money. That's a cue to pause for me. The drive to compete and win at this point for me is a cue to pause. When I was younger, I think it was really helpful, uh, really, uh, critical fuel. And even now it might be at some point, but use it strategically, use it

strategically because in competition. Of various types. And you see this in the money game and say pure finance, not always, but often what's invisible from the outside or the sacrifices that people are making, the compromises they are making to fixate solely on whatever this competitive driver might be or whatever the scoreboard might be. And for instance, one of my very close friends, actually, one of my college roommates worked for a guy in finance in New York city at one point. And this guy was legendary. I mean, super famous day trader talking about stressful rich beyond belief.

And he always walked around with a briefcase, pretty old school with divorce papers ready to go in case he needed them because his relationship had become that frayed and contentious. And if you're only reading the, the media profiles of this guy, that is not included. So the costs of high-level competition are often invisible. You have to be careful about emulating people. And what I would say is if you're not willing to make, there are always sacrifices. So try to identify those in the competition and the competitive sphere before you jump in with both feet. So for me, I would say competition is definitely a flag.

Sometimes it's still a go. Sometimes it's still a green light, but I want to at least use that as a pause. Same with money, the money stuff. Same same. Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I fell in love with a essay from Jason Pagan, where he said, uh, except that all of your heroes are full of shit.

Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else. And I think in my experience, looking at high performers, they're not ubiquitous human wide examples of perfect people. They're usually very competent in one narrow domain. And sometimes they've managed to hold on to the remainder. And sometimes they've had to completely burn everything else down, uh, either

as a by-product of, or upstream as the, uh, uh, creator of the success. Yeah. I would modify that slightly to say, just be cautious about meeting your heroes because a lot of them will have clay feet. There are counter examples. There are feet. Well, it just means that they're flawed in one way or another. And we're all flawed or we all have weaknesses of some sort or another,

but there are counter examples in the sense that there are people I've met. who I've idolized on some level and they end up to be even better broad spectrum masters of multiple domains really consciously deliberate about say family life on top of who's the most impressive individuals, full stack humans that you've met. impressive individuals, full stack humans that you've met. There, there are quite a few. I would say Seth Godin is very high, very wise, really walks the walk. And I I've spent enough time with him now to see him in a lot of different environments to get to understand more about how he raised his kids and

He's just figured it out for himself in such a Congruent way right what he says is what he means is what he lives. There is no discrepancy and That is not true for everyone on the internet, by the way. But it is true for a fair number. There are quite a few founders who I would put in that in that, in that bucket as well. Toby, we mentioned him already, Shopify certainly would fall in that category. I'm sure I could think of quite a few. And a lot of my very good friends would fall in that category. I'm sure I could think of quite a few and a lot of my very good friends would fall into that into that category Where a lot of them fall a little short and that's why I'm not mentioning more names is in the physical care the self-care piece when it comes to

The physical the physical machine that prepared to the body is to sacrifice their health in order to achieve many of the things also Probably including family life and Josh Witskin would be high on the list as well. What's he doing now? Where is Josh? Uh, well, he's still e foiling. He's e foiling or he's foiling more than e foiling toe in foiling, but, uh, he is just, uh, he's inspiring to me because our hardwiring is also so different. I mean, it's hard to not be different from Josh, but for those people who don't recognize the name, he was the basis for the book in the movie, Searching for Bobby Fisher. Incredibly, incredibly skilled chess player and then translated that Tai Chi push hands. I think he became world champion there and then became the first blackball under Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And he's taken his toolkit and his hardware and

applied it to multiple domains. But I also have had a chance to see him in personal life with friends. And another, this is not really answering a question you've asked. But if you were to ask me what I have grown to value more and less as I have become older, I would say, and this relates to how I think of full stack, loyalty and long relationships. I value more than simple or simply intelligence. Like intelligence is kind of table stakes. And it's possible to be very smart, very hardworking

and very low integrity. Those are the people you really need to watch out for. And it's not the lazy low integrity, stupid people you gotta worry about. It's like the smart and or hardworking who are also of questionable ethics. Those are the people you gotta worry about. It's like the smart and or hardworking who are also of questionable ethics. Those are the people you got to worry about. I would say another person who really walks the walk, Naval Ravikant would be another. He's a well-known serial founder.

I recently spent a week in Roatan with him at that Prospero thing. Yeah. So Naval is, you don't have guess what Naval thinks, which I really appreciate. Me too. There was a clarity. Uh, I'm a people pleaser and I'm trying to rehabilitate it. Um, and there was a. Definitiveness to if, if we're in a big group, there's a big gathering. I'm sure you've seen this happen before you're in a meetup and the particular group that you're in. The conversation has gone in a direction that Naval finds boring.

He's gone. He's now over the other side. There's no as or graces needed particularly. Uh, if you say something that he doesn't agree with, he will also say that. And, um, I know, like I think in some ways that whatever socially awkward or the, um, uh, need for validation side of me would see that as a high risk strategy because I want people to like me. But what you don't realize is that what you like is someone who you can trust. You want somebody who, when they say a thing, you reliably

believe that they mean the thing. And what that means is you're not looking for someone who tells you what you want to hear. You're looking for someone who tells you the truth. Yeah. And if you're going to have any degree of public exposure, fame, money, power, you're going to have any degree of public exposure, fame, money, power, you're going to need that more than ever because you're going to attract sycophants who will

tell you whatever they think you want to hear to extract whatever they happen to want. So it's going to become increasingly important. I'll give you some other examples actually now that I had a minute to think about it. Jersey Gregorek and his wife Aniela Gregorek, very few people are going to know these names. They're Polish emigres who fled Poland during a period of time when the solidarity, this resistance movement underground had people being murdered in the streets and they fled ended up in the US with next to no money. And they now live in a beautiful part of Northern California. They both have multiple world records in Olympic weightlifting. Now retired. Now retired. They developed a system of training called the

happy body with micro progressions that the transformations that I've seen them produce in people is beyond belief. Part of the reason that I named the overhead squats as one of my top five is because of Jersey. He's something like 65, 67. Now he can still at this point in time, when you watch him dance, he looks, excuse me, when you watch him walk, he looks like a lie ate dancer or something. He kind of glides across the floor. He's very mobile, very strong. He can stand on an endo board, like a balance board with a barbell, fully loaded with weight, whip it over his head in a lightning fast snatch, land in a perfect snatch, ass on heels, stand up, drop the weight down and repeat doing multiple snatches on a balance board.

And he's got to be 65, 67 at this point. stand up, drop the weight down and repeat doing multiple snatches on a balance board. And he's got to be 65, 67 at this point. So he's got the full stack. He walks the walk and his wife also walks the walk. And, uh, I want to see their relationship dynamics, their dynamics with their kids. I'm really trying to only idolize or emulate people when I can assess the fabric of the relationship integrity around them. Can't always do that. So you can, you can try to experiment with

different habits from this person or that person. Just be careful because the sacrifices are invisible unless that person is sharing things very explicitly. I've been fascinated by the price that people pay to be someone that you admire. You know, what is it that this person has to sacrifice either consciously or unconsciously? What are the byproducts of them getting to the place

that they are? You're looking at an outlier in a very particular domain. What are the other things that have come along for the ride? Talking as well about loyalty, there's a quote I stumbled upon from Christopher Hitchens that said, a melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you cannot make old friends. Yeah. And there's something beautiful about being along with people for the ride.

So my editor Dean that you met earlier on, uh, he was here from episode one, six years, you know, we, we worked together for a long time before that. And there's something really cool about being able to see the trajectory of your relationship, of where you were, of where he was, what's happening. Like that's cool to do. And, uh, yeah, I, I worry about the sort of transient transactional nature that people have of being able to do the digital nomad thing, which is fantastic, but not having roots down, not being

able to sort of embed yourself socially. Uh, I, and the same thing happens with internet, you know, I'll unfriend you, I'll block you, you're basically deleted from my life. I don't think that that's a particularly, uh, evolutionarily adaptive way to use the mechanisms that we have for social support, uh, well. You know, I would add to that, just thinking of the, the quote that you read earlier about the freedom to work anywhere, anytime, often meaning that you end up working all the

time, all the places, all the time. The most under emphasized chapter in the four hour work week is the filling the void chapter, which people tend to skip over. So like, I'll get to that later. And the gist of that is, I suppose, an underlying assumption, which I happen to think is correct, and that is that the positive does not take care of itself. In other words, if you fix the work piece and you have enough money that suddenly your life will be great because you will instantaneously manifest these relationships and activities

and so on that make the hard work worth it. That doesn't automatically happen. You have to build those things along the way. And if you have a void because you've let all your hobbies atrophy, you've let relationships atrophy, maybe you're just moving from place to place to place, so you have no constants. The void will fill itself with more work because you do not have a compelling replacement. Work will end up swelling to fill the void if you don't have a compelling yes to other alternatives that are in the calendar. That is almost a certainty. It's not just a possibility, it's a certainty, which is why when I sometimes get asked, what do you wish people would pay more attention to in the four hour workweek?

It's the filling the void chapter. That's a question that you ask a lot of people. What is it that in X people gloss over that you wish that they didn't basically what is a highly unpopular but important insight? Uh, I know that you're a fan of questions, so that's one of yours that I think is, is really fantastic. Very, very well done. one of yours that I think is really fantastic. Very, very well done. Talking about the world of podcasting and content creation.

What do you make of where we're at now? Having your decade-ish anniversary, we're going into a new world of short form and video and high production and low production and desire for authenticity and credibility. What do you make of where podcasting is at now and where it's going in the medium term future? Well, I would say a few things. I mean, when I started the podcasts in 2014, as I might've mentioned, people told me the ship had already sailed. It's too late, it's crowded. That wasn't true. It's certainly more saturated now, but I think there's always a market for great. It's just going to be harder on a whole lot of different levels to cut through the noise and to position properly, right?

To differentiate, to try to be a category of one is much harder now. And I'm inspired by on one hand, the incredible production value that a lot of people have brought to bear, actually not a lot, handful. I would say you exemplify the production value. Thank you. And I like that you're pushing the envelope. It's inspiring to watch and simultaneously, I don't

want to compete against that because frankly, you're going to win. I don't want to compete against that because frankly, you're going to win. I don't like playing games that I lose. That's not my go-to strategy. And I think that you are very well suited to this particular style of this medium. And for me then, personally, it's a matter of asking a lot of questions and doing some deep thinking and journaling, which I am going to use the 10th anniversary as an opportunity to do. About predominantly what gives me energy versus what takes energy from me and doubling down on that because. The function of the podcast is not predominantly to.

because the function of the podcast is not predominantly to make money. It's turned into a good business. And I'm very grateful for that, but it's really the experience of having this type of dance, keeping me on my toes, refining the craft of interviewing and having conversation. The spontaneous nature of that, not unlike pickleball or rock climbing or a sport where you need to pay attention. And if you are in this recursive thought loop, let's just say where you happen to be in a funk, having a two, three hour long conversation, if it's active is a

very effective way of taking you out of that state that could have been in my, most problems can be fixed by these things or a podcast for two hours. Our podcast. On the macro level, I think that video is going to continue to become more important as a discovery mechanism, as a driver of growth. It's hard for me to see what would push that in another direction given the platform prioritizing of video. So we'll see. We'll see. I'm very curious to see in particular, and I don't have a solution for this, but

But if there will be improvements in discovery that actually get mainstream adoption or adoption at all outside of YouTube suggestions. I do think that curation and curators instead of having say one Oprah tell half the country what to read, what to watch. I think, and we're already seeing this of course, but a proliferation of a lot of people who might even opt out of video and social media to use that old tool email, right? Whether it's my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday, or your newsletter, I think people will have to for sanity's sake and to try to constrain decision fatigue and overwhelm, probably find whatever their version is of a curator to filter for them.

Okay. Right. So rather than being a scout and seeking all of this information on the internet myself, I will maybe have three sub stacks and a couple of convert kit newsletters that I subscribe to. And that will be my content consumption. Right. Like I have a few dozen friends primarily. Tell me, yeah, actually. Who trust me, who I trust and we share things that we find. That is how 90% of what I find ends up in Five Bullet Friday. It's through a very small subset of friends whose judgment I trust. Yeah. Yeah. Who know me intimately well.

I should formalize that more, but I do have a very high hit rate of, um, degenerate intellectuals that scour the sub stacks and the, the Twitter's and whatever. And just, dude, have you seen this recently? Have you seen that recently? And it's so fruitful when it comes to, uh, your content consumption yourself. I know the amount of time that it takes to prep for the episodes and stuff. Outside of that, where do you go?

What newsletters do you subscribe to? What YouTube channels do you watch? What podcasts do you listen to? I have a very deliberate, I would say low information diet or I have very tight filters. So small group of friends who send me things, podcast guests who make recommendations, those would also be included oftentimes in my friend group. I develop pretty good relationships with all these folks. And they often come into being guests, having listened to a lot of my episodes to begin with. They'll send recommendations.

I have a very, and I'm fortunate in this, but it's also not purely by chance. I would say it's by design. I have a very eclectic friend group, a very, very motley crew. So I'm able to pull from a lot of disparate worlds, not just tech, not just science, not just this, that, or the other thing. I have, you know, religious scholars. I've got some very esoteric folks who will also send me stuff. They'll be like, Hey, you should check this guy out. This Falconer who gets all these high-end jobs in Vegas. I'm like, okay, sure. Let's check out the Falconer. And then I go down this rabbit hole of Falconery. I might find something that's amazing. Or a few years ago, I was chatting with a, I was DMing with this Muslim scholar who sent me a link to an episode on the etymological

roots of many of the words in Dune based on scholarship of Islam. Amazing episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible. Yeah. And I feel very, very fortunate that that is one of the amazing byproducts of what I do. When I consume media, it's generally going to be shorter articles on my phone. If they're longer profile articles,

say in the New Yorker, for instance, there was a long article on building artificial languages for fantasy worlds, Game of Thrones, avatar, et cetera. And that was in the New Yorker. It's going to be 20, 30 pages. I will print that out and I'll read it on paper. I'm old school that way. Uh, or I will web clip it to Evernote and read it in Evernote, in which case I'll add, if I find something

I want to search for later, I will bold it, but I'll also add three asterisks so I can control F search for three asterisks later and find my highlights. So I'll sometimes do that. I would say the majority of the time, if I'm consuming media these days, it's gonna be audio. So it'll be audiobook or it will be podcasts. Almost always podcast episodes are recommended

to be my friend's ad hoc. And I will always ask someone if anything in particular really stuck with them from it. And if they can't name something, I'm out. I won't even bother. That's a good filter. I use filters like that a lot. If someone sends me a startup pitch, I have similar filters.

It's like, is this one of the top three entrepreneurs you have met in the last three years? If the answer's no, it's like, okay. one of the top three entrepreneurs you have met in the last three years? If the answer is no, it's like, okay. So doesn't even, doesn't even get opened. So in the case of things getting recommended, for instance, I'm listening right now to a three part series on 99% invisible, which is a great podcast. It's been around a long time.

Roman Mars, and he has a cohost who's helping with this. And they walk through this book, the power broker by Robert Carrow, famous book Pulitzer prize winning book about Robert Moses, most powerful man in New York for a very, very long time. And the entire story behind that. This book is a beast to get through, but they walk people through and the intention is to have people read along, but you also get a lot just from listening and they also interview Robert Car Caro, which is very rare in these episodes.

And so I'm listening to a three-part series of that. I do not listen, I would say, less than 1% of the time do I listen to any current events. I can get up to speed on those things very quickly through my friend network. And sometimes I will do that. I usually go to the very old stuff. So I'll listen to history, hardcore history, fall of civilizations is a

podcast that I really enjoy. They're very long, but, uh, the, the episode on, on, on, uh, ancient Sumer was very good shorter episodes, philosophize this things that tend to be evergreen and have no current event aspect, uh, those would be a few that come to mind. I fell in love with one called the end of the world with Josh Clark. Sounds uplifting. Kind of like fall of civilization. It's nice and apocalyptic.

It's just a 10 part limited series. Uh, it came out about four years ago and it's just a breakdown of X-risk. Uh, each of them, um, about one different type of X-risk natural pandemic. Meaning extinction, existential risk, existential existential risk. Yeah. Um, but it's beautifully soundscaped. Um, so I used to listen to a lot of audio books as a kid and, um, you know, a radio drama with actors and sound effects and they're walking through the woods and stuff and this thing's just kind of like um, you know, a radio drama with actors and sound effects and they're

walking through the woods and stuff. And this thing's just gorgeously done. I've never really, that modern wisdom for me is so all encompassing and totally, um, liberated for me to pursue whatever I'm interested in. I've never really thought like I would like to do a passion project. Like this is the passion project. But if I was ever to do something that creatively was a little bit different, I would be, um, pretty fired up to, ever to do something that creatively was a little bit different, I

would be pretty fired up to do something that has that degree of soundscaping and sort of immersion to it. That I feel like that would be a cool, not that I don't have enough to do already, but that would be like a cool other project. Cause I just really, I love the sensation of listening to that. I must have gone back and listened to it, you know, like five times it's 10 episodes, it's on Apple podcast. It's free.

Ended the world with Josh Clark. Highly, highly recommended for that. Side note, you should go watch the, you should go watch Dune Two in a theater that's optimized for sound. If you haven't. Oh, I went to go and see it, but it wasn't in IMAX fancy thing.

Good. Or Adobe, yeah. If you see it optimized for sound, it's a great experience. I didn't realize when Oppenheimer came out that there's 24 theaters around the world that allowed you to watch 70 mil IMAX natively in the correct aspect. 24 globally. One of them is in San Antonio. Right around the corner.

And some Indian kids channel, some dude, 10,000 subscribers did a good video and the video caught a little bit of fire. It was like where you can go to watch it. And it was, well, the best thing are these 24. And then if you haven't got those, there's 150 that are kind of this, which is almost as good and it's not that. And then there's 3000 that are like that. And then blah, haven't got those, there's 150 that are kind of this, which is almost as good and it's not that.

And then there's a 3000 that are like that. And then blah, blah, blah. It was a really great video. And I was like, and I paused it on the 24. I was like, San Antonio, how cool. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really cool.

So that was good. I think two or three maybe are in LA. You mentioned, you kind of alluded earlier on to the perils of audience capture. Um, either personally or professionally, when it comes to content creation, how do you avoid the mimetic pull of regressing to the crowd of kind of feeding red meat to people either interpersonally to get them to like you because of a need for validation, or to the audience in order to get them to like you and to kind of keep the plays going. How do you follow your own curiosity

and sort of stay true to that, whilst also knowing that there is a degree of game playing that kind of needs to be done? Well, I would say that in terms of audience acceptance, being liked by my audience, I don't actually think about it that much. In part because when I do my past year review each year to plan my next year and block out these periods of time and so on, one of the components of that is putting down my current list of say the 10 friendships that I would like to maintain or deepen and asking myself, did I spend as much time as I would have liked with these 10 people last year? It could be five people. the number's not terribly important. And if the answer is no, then whenever I'm faced with the choice

of deciding to roll the dice with new friends, putting time into a new person, which is a gamble, or putting time into the preexisting, guaranteed upside relationships, I usually preexisting guaranteed upside relationships. I usually go with the prior relationships. So I care most about those people who are fully equipped and well practiced in calling bullshit on me and don't hesitate to speak their mind. I care about those people first and foremost, more so than my audience. And what they care about is doing what gives me the greatest sense of personal aliveness. And using that as my

compass, my true north, I would say that I also want to know broadly speaking, or be conscious of what type of audience I am attracting. And are there any constants I wanna maintain? Are there certain types of interests, certain types of psychographics, demographics that I wanna keep consistent because those are the people I would like to surround myself with.

For instance, and for that reason, if I have an episode that does absurdly well, like 2020, 2021 did one or two episodes related to web three cryptocurrency, et cetera. Although that wasn't the stated objective, I was delivering on the promise of deconstructing world-. I was delivering on the promise of deconstructing world-class performance. I was talking about the habits, routines, mental models, et cetera, of these people. But the subject of the hour they wanted to discuss was something related to crypto. Those episodes went parabolic. Bananas. And I try to take that. I always take that actually there.

There, I can't think of an exception before I try to replicate before I try to add more fuel to the fire by adding five themed episodes on X doing a mini series of six on X because X delivered a lot of downloads. And maybe I can capitalize on that from a financial perspective by doing A, B and C. I ask myself, if I telescope out six months, 12 months from now, and I have done this, how will the composition of my audience have changed? Who will I have repelled? Who will I have attracted? And when I went through that visualization exercise, I didn't like how it looked.

Uh, which is not to say there, there are great people involved and a lot of my closest friends are very heavily involved in some of these areas. In addition to others, they do not hold on to any one of these components like religious zealots identifying themselves with lots of ists and isms and so on. However, there's a lot of collateral damage in those communities as well and a lot of terrible behavior. So I made the decision not to replicate. I didn't do it. I actually I went the opposite direction. And as long as you take care of your audience and you need to decide in advance, if you're hosting your own personal Ted, who are the thousand people you invite where every break, every meal you're going to be with these people and you get assigned to a random table. Okay.

If that were to be six months of your life, not just a weekend event, how would you want to compose that audience? Okay. Well, that's a consideration. But the first determining factor is what gives me the greatest sense of aliveness because that gives me endurance. It keeps my, the more curiosity is used, the more you have. Right. It's sort of the opposite of a finite resource in that respect. And those are the basics of how I approach it. And there are trade-offs, right?

Uh, I saw this, this woman in climbing gym recently, she had a shirt on that said, uh, no solutions, only trade-offs. And I wasn't sure what that referred to, but I kind of liked that as a prompt. Was that to Thomas soul quote? Oh, is it? There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Oh, there we go. Thanks.

Now I know the attribution. Great. So I sat with that quite a bit and there are always trade-offs. Even when you're opening one door, you're probably closing one. It might be temporary. It could be over a longer period of time. So I'm more than happy to make trade-offs on the business model economic side to optimize for the longer game. I'm also using the podcast as a way to workshop

many other things, right? Just like I used the blog for a long time to workshop and experiment with things that ended up becoming books later. You can trace the four hour body back to my first really viral blog post. I am constantly workshopping. I'm constantly sort of lobbing a pebble into the pond to see what the ripples do.

Yeah. And it's not- The newsletter and Twitter are so good for that, I think, to just, and the podcast as well, we have quite a good repurposing engine going on from this episode and things will be clipped that are short, and then something will take fire and I'm like, well, why did that get a hundred thousand likes on Instagram?

Like what about that section or thing? And I'm like, is that worth exploring a little bit more in a piece of writing? And it's like, it's like read wise for your own content. Uh, you know what I mean? It sort of resurfaces shit that you forgot that you'd said. I love all of that, man. When you were talking about, um, your friends and what they, what they want for you and what they value in you, it kind of got me thinking

about how, um, any friends who are more happy for you when you make loads of money and have loads of plays and aren't more happy for you when you're just fired up about what you're doing, aren't particularly good friends. So optimizing not only for those sorts of people to be around you, but also to think, well, if that's what my friends want for me, they don't care about how much money I've got. They don't care about good friends. Don't care about how many plays I'm doing.

Well, if it's both good for them and good for me intrinsically, there's very few reasons to not do that. And I understand there is a degree of game playing and this is, I think, different creators with a differing sort of scopes of how much they do this. This is something that we think about a lot, you know, like we want to get plays. We need to do the- What do you mean by get plays? We want-

Oh, plays like downloads? Plays, yes, correct. Sorry. I thought that was- What did you think of that? I thought it was like Britishism or something. Oh, no, no, no, no, much more plays like downloads. Plays. Yes, correct. Sorry. What did you think of that? I thought it was like Britishism or something. Oh no, no, no, no, no. Much more basic than that.

Sorry. Play. You do. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so you know, there's a degree of- From Long Island, I take a while. There's a degree of packaging that you need to do with this, but you also don't want to

desensitize the audience with the limbic hijack things so aggressively that they don't sort of trust what you're saying anymore. Yeah. And, um, finding that balancing game, like ethical algo hacking, we call it. Um, you know, how much of this is okay and how much of this is not. And I, as soon as there's ick, um, but increasingly, and this is like a champagne problem, I suppose, um, more, the more that the show has grown, the more that I think about, like, am I excited 10 minutes before I sit down with the person? Do I want them to hurry up?

And if I want them to hurry up. Good. And if I just optimized for doing more of that, and I think that the same is true for friends. You know, I had this insight again, coming from a nightlife background where, uh, so many young people don't have friends, they have drinking partners. And much of the reason that they drink is because the events that they're attending are so boring that the only way they can get themselves through is to

sedate themselves out of realizing just how boring it is. And, uh, the same thing is true with the books that you're reading. I've been told that I'm supposed to be interested in this book. Okay. And how do you feel when you read it? Fucking hate it. All right. Um, maybe bail out and read more red rising or, or, or Patrick Rothfuss or whatever.

Like just read the thing that's good to you. Cause that's going to fuel you way more than like, and there's certainly times when you need to do things that are hard. Like you need to put the nose to the grindstone. They're going to be writing the book, doing more research, going over a fourth draft of the, of the whatever, whatever I'm sure you're intimately familiar with. Um, yeah, four of them like, ah, to only need four drafts, a blog post and like 30 draft 37.

Um, let's say that there's somebody listening who wants to dream bigger and wants to have more self-belief that they can make things happen in the world. What would you say to them? Well, I would say first that just like you, having done hundreds of these interviews with amazing people from all the different walks of life, that the high performers are usually buckets of neuroses just like everybody else with some really serious insecurities that maybe they're aware of maybe they're not who figured out how to capitalize on one or two strengths and have been able to create systems so they can focus and leverage those things. You look at everything that's been built around us, the roads, the bridges, the highways, the skyscrapers, the Sistine Chapel, all made by humans. Right. And, you know, the spectrum of accomplishment is really, really wide.

So that's the first thing I would point out. It's like there's, you don't need to be endowed with all these magical faculties to create these things. Secondly, I would say that paradoxically, I think, you know, You don't need to be endowed with all these magical faculties to create these things. Secondly, I would say that paradoxically, it's often less crowded to aim for the home runs than it is to aim for the base hits. Because so many people underestimate themselves that the base hits and the doubles are more crowded just in terms of top of the bell curve than aiming for the big. There's a warning though that I should add to that, which is it's very easy to hide behind

the big. This is borrowed from Seth Godin. In other words, you can say, I want to change the world. Okay, great. But then on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis, what does that mean you're actually doing? What is your next physical action for that? And people can hide behind this big nebulous,

hand wavy thing. And it's like, okay, well, what's the antecedent to that? What's the antecedent to that? Maybe it's just finding product market fit and building a company that solves a problem with the product. Great, okay. Let's back out of that.

Now what do you need to do? All right. I need an MVP of my website. Okay. Great. Put it on some paper. Okay. Can you show that to somebody? Forget about building the website, you know, have your first contact with customers. Okay. Great. Can you get them to pay you a dollar? If not, back to the drawing board. And I think that with the dreaming big, it's important to be able to back up. But a lot of it just comes down to trying a lot, doing 80-20 analysis to identify what the trivial many are and what the critical few are being able to separate those two double down on the critical few understanding what your strengths are so that you can find something that is easier for you than it is for most people. Right having a support system around you like friends by the way very high yield question to ask just ask your friends when have you Just ask your friends, when have you seen me at my best? When have you seen me at my worst?

You can get a lot of good intel that way. And then just play the game to the best of your ability and really try to be a category of one. It's a lot easier if you find the right arena to be the only instead of being the best, which does not mean you don't focus on quality, But if you don't think in terms of trying to create a new category for yourself, very often you end up in a red ocean type of scenario with a race to the bottom type of dynamic where it is incredibly difficult to create a career, an identity, a source of income that has a protective mode or margin for error of any type. So I would encourage people to deeply think about that as well. So that's a lot. But last and not least, I would say if you're serious all the time, you're going to burn out before you get the truly serious stuff done.

So don't take it. Don't take every day like it's a life or death thing. At the end, we're all dust. The Empire Builders, you listen to the fall of civilizations from these iconic Empire Builders, you're not going to recognize any of the names. So if we get all wound up about our podcasts or whatever, it's like, don't worry about it. Yeah.

No one's going to care in 50 years. Yeah, don't worry about it. If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is to do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

We have this assumption, at least I always did. Um, there is an asymmetry between what we see of our own mental vacillations and what we see of other people's motivations in the actions that they take. Everybody else looks like a slick rational agent and we look like a wavering idiot, right? Because all of the back and forth that somebody goes through doesn't show up in their actions. They just do the thing after all of that. But you see your own flaws and foibles from a front row seat. And I think it's very easy to overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. If you're the sort of person that can listen to a three hour podcast and sit and be engaged and be

curious and want to improve yourself and you're considering these sort of things, you are already in a rarefied strata of people, I think. Yeah. And you know, the difference really just comes down to it. You're going to take a bit of action intentionally in the right direction for inordinately long period of time. But I think, uh, one of the other realizations I've had over the last couple of years has been that, um, I haven't got insanely better with the podcast.

I've got a bit better, but I haven't got insanely better with the podcast. The've got a bit better, but I haven't got insanely better with the podcast. The main thing that's happened is I just didn't stop. And it shows the power of compounding and consistency. And like, it's weird to think that consistency is a selection mechanism in itself. Like that simply doing a thing more makes you better, regardless of the quality that you do it at. And over time you will get better by doing it, but that consistency is so rare. Consistency is important,

but I think if it's not deliberate practice, you won't automatically get better. I do think it's possible to end up mailing it in. I do see people- it's, it's possible to end up mailing it in. I do see people get- Because it becomes, consistency turns into routine, it turns into switching off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Complacency. Especially if you end up wanting to scale what you're doing with volume. So for instance, I used to do more episodes per month than I do now. And I scaled back because I noticed I started dragging my feet a little bit and had one or two episodes where I was like, that was on autopilot. And I ratcheted back to fewer episodes per month.

Problem solved. Trade-off. It takes bravery though. Right. Yes. Yes. Trade-off, uh, financially in terms of plays, in terms of blah, blah. Uh, increasingly I respect people that are able to make those kinds of sacrifices,

something which has a public cost, but a private benefit. Um, and the nice thing about something like that also is it's what Jeff Bezos might call a two way door. public cost, but a private benefit. And the nice thing about something like that also is it's what Jeff Bezos might call a two way door. You can go back. I can always do more. Reversible decision. Yeah. It's not, it's not a big deal.

You can hit control Z if you want, you can always do more episodes. What is it you want to achieve now? Hmm. Wife hunting successfully, having some kids. I think that's the next chapter. Not in a rush, but also not dragging my feet. I think that's the next phase. From a business perspective, I mean, honestly, I don't really care. More money is not going

to give me the fulfillment that I would like to have in something like a family, right? You could quadruple, you could do a hundred X amount of money I have. It's just a silo of human experience. It's not going to address everything. It's not going to scratch every edge. So I think the family experience is the next experience. That's unfortunately not something that is incredibly easy to just reverse engineer and execute, plan and achieve as many other things are. But I'd say that's one of the few things that comes to mind that I would say is distinctly not present currently. Right? Certainly self-care, athletic performance, some type of physical competition is in the works and that's important, but it's

part of my self-care routine as opposed to a macro level life decision like life partner, right? I'm excited for that. I'm excited for the unrelenting dad podcasts, the child rearing experts that are going to come on. Yeah. We'll see if I'm even in the public eye at that point, I might just back out. Disappear. I have a friend, uh, Chris Bumstead.

He's a Olympia physique champion. He's kind of like the face of the stigma male movement at the moment. And, um, I think he's won five times in a row. It's a five Pete. Maybe he's going for six this year or something like that. And his goal, he's 22 million followers on Instagram, 4 million person YouTube channel, like all these supplement companies. His outright goal is produce babies, retreat to cabin in

woods with wife and babies. Like that's the thing. You know, David Perel? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, David said on a call we had forever ago, five years ago now, um, he's done really well with rite of passage financially and, and, and status and stuff like that.

He said, uh, throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I thought what I was doing was making myself more successful so that I could be more successful. And what I realized was I was making myself into the kind of man that would be the father to my future children. And I thought that was really cool to think about at the time, much of what you're doing has a ego driven, sometimes narcissistic, sometimes competitive status, full all of the things, the competitive status full, all of the things, the testosterone coursing, all of the rest of it.

But in retrospect, there was this sort of weird ancillary benefit that you didn't think about that it was teaching you lessons and forging skills for you that are going to allow you to pay it forward. And- Or the opposite. How so? Well, you could be developing the skills to be a cold-blooded killer and execute without empathy or remorse. I think that's a failure. If that happens, that's a massive failure of the person to not think

sufficiently closely about what they're doing. Yeah. I don't think it's uncommon though. I mean, I do think it takes a conscious decision. I mean, there are lots, look, I can't speak to the female experience, I'm not a female, but there are a lot of men out there with extremely high IQ and extremely low EQ, situational awareness, or frankly, sort of compassion or empathy.

It's either not innate or not practiced, but there's plenty of that. That's a failure. That makes me sad. It makes me sad to think that somebody can have the capacity to do great things and then to not do the interpersonal thing, to pay that forward. And I think it's nice to hear sort of what your, so

many of your goals aren't around objective metrics of success and maybe it's the Navarre thing about it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them. That may be true. It may be, uh, a mountain that you can only be not bothered about conquering after you've got to the top of it. Um, but it's cool. It's cool to hear that that's like a, I would also recommend, and I did not have kids. So what do I know?

But certainly I've seen people summit the mountain and then attempt to retreat to the woods, to the cabin and have the wheels come off completely. I would strongly suggest people consider taking these mini retirements. Try that out and see what your withdrawal symptoms are, because there will be withdrawal symptoms. So test drive these things. And if you're planning to retire and sail a sailboat around the world, go do that for three or four weeks. Test it out. And you can then help to train yourself to be better adapted to make that transition.

It's not always easy to go from the Autobahn to park. Yeah. You might want to experiment with the gears in between for a while. Yeah. Rich Roll was telling me about his manuary that he does every year. And, uh, it, uh, it did, it did the same thing. What is a manuary? It's like a, it's like a purposeful retreat type thing where he, he does the offline

thing and blah, blah, blah. But yeah, that made me, that made my bumhole pucker again. A lot of bumhole puckering going on over there. That's what happens. Tim Ferriss, ladies and gentlemen, Tim, I told you before we started, you were a huge inspiration before I began the show. Uh, the launch sequence that we went through is still how to launch a podcast podcast from you in 2017 that came at an apt time. This started in February of 2018.

Uh, and you were the one that convinced me parasocially to start a newsletter. Uh, I really massively appreciate everything that you do. You've been a huge inspiration. I love the fact that you're an influence in the world. I love seeing the evolution that you're going on. Um, it's great. I really, appreciate everything that you do. You've been a huge inspiration. I love the fact that you're an influence in the world. I love seeing the evolution that you're going on. It's great. I really, really appreciate you. Thank you very much for joining me today.

Well, thanks, Ben. It's been a real privilege and lovely to watch you execute at such a high level. It's inspiring, very, very exciting. So keep going. Oh, offense, yeah, oh, yeah, offense