The Rich Roll Podcast - Tim Ferriss Is Evolving: Looking Within, Learning Self-Love & Pondering What Matters Most

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

If you think you know Tim Ferriss, think again – this is Tim like you’ve never seen or heard him before. A relentless experimenter and virtuoso of deconstruction, Tim has spent the better part of his adult life studying mastery and sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog and string of four consecutive #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling books, which include The 4-Hour Workweek*,The 4-Hour Body*,The 4-Hour Chef*,Tools of Titans*, and his brand new offering, Tribe of Mentors*. Along the way, Tim became a prominent angel investor and philanthropist, named one of Fast Company‘s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune‘s “40 under 40”. He’s graced the main stage at TED and been featured in every prominent media outlet imaginable. His work hosting The Tim Ferriss Show podcast – one of the most widely listened to podcasts in the world with over 200 million downloads — led The Observer to call him “the Oprah of audio”. I’m willing to bet most of you are already decidedly familiar with this globally renowned polymath. Like you, I’ve followed his blog for years. I’ve read all his books and I listen to his podcast regularly. It’s an understatement to say that Tim’s work has been instrumental in helping me forge the life I’m blessed to lead today. For that I am forever grateful. Nonetheless, I never felt like I really knew the man behind the work. Who is the real Tim Ferriss? It turns out, Tim has been asking himself the very same question. Over the last year, he has endured much. The loss of some good friends matched by turning 40 has left him pondering his mortality. He walked away from tech investing, decamping Silicon Valley for Austin out of a desire to slow the pace of his frenetic life. And a very intense recent 10-day silent meditation retreat is emblematic of a redirected focus inward. Today finds Tim in a rather reflective and contemplative place. A point in time in which he is wrestling with his past, evaluating the person he wants to be, and deeply contemplating what is most important about life. Today we unpack the real Tim Ferriss. Enjoy! Rich

I think we're all on different journeys. There are shared traits, perhaps, for many of us. And we hit different legs in different portions of our lives. So for some people, they start off, say, in the heart or in the gut, and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be. That's me. Right? Yeah.

And then you have other people. Certainly I would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on and put on this incredible armor to protect myself and only realized in the last few years that when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things out, but you also keep a lot in. That's Tim Ferriss, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. the rich roll podcast hey everybody how you guys doing what's the news how are you how's it going are you ready for the holidays are you feeling grateful or are you anxious and stressed you gotta remember gratitude is a practice. And I'm saying that to remind myself, because for me, it's, it's work. It requires focus. Gratitude requires intention

and diligence. And I don't always do it well, but when I do things just go better, they go smoother. And it's more important than ever for me during the holiday season to have that in the forefront of my mind and to prioritize that as a daily routine, as a daily practice. In any event, my name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. Glad to have you. Grateful to have you.

See what I did right there? I don't have to do this show. I get to do this show. See, I'm practicing. Did I mention I got Tim Ferriss on the show? Tim Ferriss? Yep. It's a big one, you guys. It's a good one too. If you think you already know this guy, then I would suggest that you set aside whatever preconceived ideas you may have about Tim because this conversation reveals an entirely different side of this man, Tim, like you have never seen

or heard him before, because we go to some really intimate, personal, and emotionally vulnerable places with this conversation. New terrain for Tim. We explore some areas of his life that he is currently wrestling with, what he is working on, things he has historically not discussed publicly. And I got to say, I was really glad. I was actually honored to be a trusted steward for this exchange because it's delicate and because it explores a whole other side to this person. And I'm really proud of this conversation. It's exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have with him that I've always wanted to have with him. And I'm really proud of this conversation. It's exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have with him that I've always wanted to have with him.

And I'm just super excited to share it with you guys today. For the very few people unfamiliar with Tim, he would describe himself first and foremost as a teacher, quote, a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk, unquote, as the New York Times has described him. Tim is a relentless self-experimenter. He is a deconstructor of mastery and excellence who has spent the last 10 years sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog and string of four consecutive number one New York Times and number one Wall Street Journal bestselling books, which include the

Four Hour Workweek, the Four Hour Bodyour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and his newest release, which just came out, just hit bookstores, Tribe of Mentors. And it's really great. You guys should definitely pick that up. In addition, Tim has been listed as one of Fast Company's most innovative business people. He made Fortune's 40 under 40 list and has been dubbed the Oprah of audio by the Observer and other media for his work hosting the Tim Ferriss Show, one of the most widely listened to podcasts in the world with over 200 million downloads and counting. Got a whole bunch more I want to say about Tim and this conversation before we dig into it. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Tim Ferriss. Okay, Tim Ferriss. I should say that on a personal level over the years, Tim has been an extremely influential figure in my life and his work has been immensely helpful to me. I've never met him in person before this podcast, but nonetheless, his books, his blog, and more recently, his podcast have in so many ways been instrumental in aiding my journey from disgruntled corporate attorney to what I get to do today. And I'm very grateful to him for that. So I've been patiently waiting to have this conversation ever since I started this podcast over five years ago. And as much as I would have loved to have had him on a while back, I think there's something

about patience and timing and trusting that things like this work out when they're supposed to. Because honestly, had this podcast taken place sooner, I just don't think it would have been the type of conversation that I really wanted to have with him. The deep and emotional type of conversations that I really wanted to have with him, the deep and emotional type of conversations that I really like to conduct. And so the timing on this is perfect because Tim has been going through a lot over the last year. He turned 40. He lost some good friends. He moved to Austin from Silicon Valley. He recently completed a very intense 10-day silent meditation retreat, which we talk

quite a bit about in the podcast. And all of these experiences have put him in a really interesting and reflective place in his life, a contemplative place, thinking about his past, about who he is, about who he wants to be and what really matters. And with that, I found within him this amazing willingness to be quite open and emotionally vulnerable about all manner of personal things. And as I point out in the conversation, for as many years as I had been following this guy and his work, I actually didn't really feel like I knew him. I couldn't escape this feeling that despite reading everything he wrote, I still didn't have any real sense of who this guy, Tim Ferriss, is. And I was always left wanting to get to know the real person behind

the work and the success and the public persona. And today we get to go there. We go there in a very meaningful, intimate, connected, and powerful way. And I'm just so pleased that he was trusting enough to let me in. And I think that this conversation, even if you already think you know everything about Tim Ferriss is going to leave you with an entirely new perspective on one of the most influential figures in our culture. And I think that's all I want to say about this. I'm going to let Tim do the rest. So this is me and Tim Ferriss in a way you have never before seen him. Enjoy. Ferris in a way you have never before seen him. Enjoy.

You're a pro. Let's just dig into it, dude. So, super happy to have you here, man. Really excited to talk to you. It's been a long time coming. I think maybe we first had emails, I think in like 2009 or something like that. And we haven't met until today. It was back a while. Yeah. I know you re you reached out to me, um, to, you asked me a few questions when you were working on for our body, uh, which I didn't make the book, but that's okay. Yeah. No, but I was stoked to even, uh, to even talk to you. And I think before we even get into it, um, I wanted to thank you first of all, for writing your first book, this book for our work week, I have the original one here, um, which was super helpful and instrumental, uh, in helping me as I began this transition out of law and into what I get to do today. And I think on a very kind of practical tactical level,

figuring out how I was going to train for these crazy races and still make an income. And it was great. Like it really helped me a lot. And so I appreciate you very much for writing that book. Um, and then secondarily, I wanted to thank you publicly for providing me the opportunity to do a guest blog, uh, when Finding Ultra came out, which was really like that helped me out a lot, man. And so I really appreciate that. Thank you. Still gets a lot of traffic. Yeah.

It was a little like there was a little controversial aspect of that post, as I recall. But no, I appreciate it. Anything called a superfood will polarize. Yeah, no, for sure. that anything called a superfood will, will polarize. Yeah, no, for sure. So, um, I think the thing that I kind of wanted to really get into, into it with you is this journey that you're kind of on currently. Cause when I think about you, I think about, um, you know, somebody who has, who has lived by this kind of rule of, of coming up with not just tools, but kind of a roadmap for how you live. Like you're somebody who, and Jonathan Fields said this the other day, I listened to that podcast. Like you're somebody

who I've always looked at as a person who lives very much in their head, who is very intellectual in their approach to life. And it's reflected in the work that you do, this idea that you're dissecting and deconstructing, you know, how other people do things and applying what works for you into your own life. But I think like traditionally, when I've looked at your work, I've sort of missed the more emotional, heartfelt approach to certain aspects of how to live. And what I'm seeing in you now is like a journey towards that, like an embrace of that in a certain way that I haven't seen in you in the past. And I celebrate that. I think that's really cool.

And that's something I'd like to hear a little bit more about. Let's get into it. Thanks for having me. First of all, it's really nice to be here. And I think we're all on different journeys. There's shared traits, perhaps for many of us. And we hit different legs in different portions of our lives so for some people they start off say in the heart or in the gut and then move to the head later because they

need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be that's me right yeah and then you have other people certainly i would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on. As I did in childhood, some reasonably bad things happened to me as a kid that I don't really want to get into specifics over, but that encapsulates a lot for a lot of people and put on this incredible armor to protect myself and only realized in the last few years that, and when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things out, but you also keep a lot in.

And there were certain ways that I'd handicapped myself very deliberately viewing emotion as a weakness, viewing attachment, emotional attachment in particular as a weakness. Um, my priority for a very long time was to simply hone myself as a as an instrument of competition basically and to use that to validate myself to prove my worth and anything that detracted from that or remotely made me vulnerable i viewed as something that should be disposed of so that led me to the pro and con list to the hyper analytical to the as close as i could manage spock like approach with a high pain tolerance to tackling different things in life and that is just another way of accepting partial completeness, which ironically I wrote about in the four hour body,

which is arguably the most, I'm not going to say clinical that makes it sound really dry. It's, I think it's a fun book, but it's very analytical and very quantified. And I talk about how people should question certain assumptions they've made about what they can or cannot do, such as, well, my, my parents are fat. I'm'm fat that's just the way it is and they accept that as a partial completeness and they never challenge that but i myself never even thought of uh my long-standing lack of interest in emotion as a gap. Does that make sense? Probably as a strength. Like I, you know, from what I've heard in, in how you talk about your childhood, there's a lot of similarities with my childhood. Um, I was somebody who

was a very awkward kid, very much a loner, you know, not a, not by any stretch of the imagination, anybody who looked like they were going to be an athlete, you know, eye patch, head gear, last kid picked for kickball, and really had a lot of difficulty connecting with friends and classmates. And as a result, spent a lot of time alone. Then I discovered swimming. And I feel like, I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this. I feel like the relationship that I developed with that sport is similar to the relationship that you developed with wrestling at that time, because I approached it as, it was the first thing that I was actually good at, you know, and it was kind of this safe place away from school. And I realized very early and often that the more I put into it, the better I got.

So that equation of being diligent and being devoted and working hard had very practical real world results that were advancing my life in a very good way. But it was also a place where I could go and not have to deal. It was like not only a safe place, but a place away where I could just escape. So in some respects, I think I had a compulsive, obsessive, addictive relationship with it. And it was a means of not having to deal with some emotional stuff that I was going through. But when you become successful, when it's moving you forward, it's much more of a reason to continue to not look at that other aspect of your life

because it's serving you. Yeah. There's a, there's a huge amount of overlap. So wrestling for me as a, as someone born premature, I was very, very small until sixth grade. I mean, just gotten, uh, constantly on a daily basis kicked around. I was so small. I was such a small kid. I would, I would generally not even opt to go out to recess because that was just like going out into the terrible,

the, the open sky pen at like a federal prison. I mean, that was a dangerous place for me to be. I would just get dragged around and punched and so on. So I'd read books. And that was the cover that I used to sit on the step right outside of the door that went out to recess and wrestling, which came to me really by luck because I was hyperactive. And my mom was told by other moms that kid wrestling would be a good way to drain my batteries. So I was put into wrestling. And then I think both of us realized

that it was the one sport since it was weight class based that I had access to where I could end up being matched against another equally puny, nerdy kid. And at least one of us got to win. But to underscore something you said, which I think is very true for me as well, is that particularly at that age, but for a long time in school, at least, you have fairly siloed areas of life. I mean, you have academics and it and easy to measure. You do well, you do poorly. And then you have certain sports, particularly if it's an individual sport where you feel like you have some, this is another reason I gravitated towards wrestling, a semblance of control. There's so many things you can't control.

There's so many things you can't control. But part of the reason I always ended up leaning towards individual sports, even though I did play soccer for a short period of time. I played football for one season, which I did not like for a host of reasons. And wrestling, on the other hand, all the credit or all the blame was on you. Lies on you. Yeah. I mean, swimming even more so. so yeah it's the ultimate and self-determinantism yeah determinism right it's just you against the clock i mean you're racing against somebody else i mean in wrestling you have your opponent you have to anticipate what he's going to do and so that's a variable that you don't have in a sport like track and field or swimming but right but it's very much that idea of like you get out what you put into it and there's that equation right and you can

like immerse yourself in that and that becomes an identity no and i liked the controlling of variables to the extent possible and as you get older at least just projecting forward, if we fast forward the film and get into 20s, 30s, certainly 40s now, where more and more of my friends have passed away, right? and affect other parts of your life and the decisions you make in one area that used to be, at least conceptually as a kid, really walled off and siloed bleed over into every other. And I think that many of our strengths in excess become or create glaring weaknesses. Yeah, for sure. So for me, it was this realization, and we could really dig into some of the tools that led me to the conclusion that my current state of being was not only unsustainable in a lot of ways, but really not serving me. And that if I wanted to not just tolerate myself, which I think at best is what I did

for most of my life, then I had to rewire quite a bit. And it involved going back and contending with some really old things. And that many of the seemingly disparate behavioral challenges or short temperedness or impatience with myself or berating myself in my own head or fill in the blank it could be 20 or 30 things that i tended to view as inexplicable separate behaviors were in fact all easily traced back to a handful of things that i protect i i think by necessity protected myself against or felt the need to protect myself against early on by walling off myself emotionally. Yeah. These strengths can be, can manifest as, as character weaknesses over time, you know, and, and I've had a similar journey. What's interesting about your, your journey is that you've, you've lost certain people in your life

and that's put you in a place of self-reflection that has opened you up to entertain new ideas and explore these areas that you're exploring right now. But you didn't have to have some kind of cataclysmic event in your own personal life. Like usually people reach that point of self-reflection when something has gone really bad and, you know, like they, they lose everything or what have you. And, you know, in my case, it's been a journey from self-will to surrender, a place of understanding that self-will is what is going to allow me to make my way into the world. Like I think I've heard you say, like you have a high pain threshold, a high pain tolerance. Like I certainly do, right?

And I've always considered that to be my armor, to be my strength. I know that I'm not the most talented person, but I can insert myself into a situation and I know how to outwork the next guy. And I can bridge that talent deficit gap and inch my way up close to, you know, where I want to be by virtue of that characteristic. And I always considered that to be almost like a superpower, right? And it wasn't until I was struggling with drugs and alcohol and that brought me to my knees that I had to find a different way because that self-will, I couldn't understand why that self-will

wouldn't solve this problem. That in order to solve this problem, I had to let go of all of that and see it through a completely different lens, that lens of surrender, of completely letting go and allowing other people in, getting to a place of being willing to ask for help and then receive help. Because like yourself, I didn't like myself. I loathed myself for a very long period of time and got to a place of perhaps tolerating myself, but never knew what it meant to experience self-love. And I'm still on that journey. But I had to go to an incredibly dark place in order to access that. And, you know,

it's a journey that I've been on since I've that I never thought would be anything I would be interested in, that I would have repelled as a younger person. You know, a lot of woo-woo stuff and stuff like that. You know what I mean? That I know you have like an aversion to. Yeah. But I see you tiptoeing around the edge of this. And I think that that is very exciting for you. And I think that if you continue to pull on that thread, the self-discovery and the personal growth that you're going to experience is going to blow your mind.

I hope so. I feel like it's already coming. I hope so. I feel like it's already coming. I mean, I feel like a few things that some people listening might identify with. Well, first, may I drink this peaty elixir? Yes, please do. So we have Pu-erh tea here from our friend Colin, who don't have living tea. I'm just going to take a dramatic pre-story sip of puer tea oh so good it is good right all right so a few things that people may resonate with

and might you might also identify with because we do have a lot of shared dna a lot of overlap all right so the pain tolerance i think that embracing a high pain tolerance or developing it was also a coping mechanism that i used to silence my inner voice because i was it was so merciless and such a demon on my back that at any given time, if I scored just even metaphorically speaking, 99 out of a hundred, the only thing that mattered was the one thing that went wrong. And how could I be so stupid or so lazy or so inept or so blind to get that one thing wrong? get that one thing wrong. And the immersion in physical pain through wrestling, through the training that goes into it, through the, the cutting of weight, which is just atrocious, I think was a coping mechanism that I used to silence that. And as, as you've experienced in your life, high tolerance is not always a good thing right so i ended up being introduced to really strong

stimulants in high school ephedrine hydrochloride combined with caffeine and aspirin and the whole nine yards things beyond that and they were tools that i also realized i could take in in tremendous quantities compared to other people which uh which i viewed as a superpower maybe now there are superpowers that's a different kind of pain tolerance yeah and uh so the what i thought was a gift ended up becoming a major handicap and ultimately addiction for me that really has only been kicked at least for the time being in the last few years i mean relying on on stimulants of different types and the the realization that i had this partial completeness and a lot of blind spots and also unresolved facets of myself did

come from some really, really tough periods. I mean, there were, there were many of them, but one in particular was several years ago at the end, the very end of a four and a half year relationship. And, um, she was, I mean, she's a beautiful human being. We're still friends to this day, but she was as opposite on the emotional spectrum or on the sort of empathic self-compassion side of the spectrum. Compared to me as you, as you could possibly imagine i mean she she felt everything that everyone was feeling including herself all the time i mean she was just one of those super empaths which is which is actually sometimes crippling for people and it's hard for

them to walk down the street and say new york city because they just they seem to genuinely feel everything that's going on they're so open like a full body synesthesia that's right right my wife calls it the divine feminine right so uh this this woman experienced that and it was such an odd combination that worked for us meaning our very distinct opposite sides of the coin for a long time until it didn't and i didn't have the vocabulary or even like conceptual schema to understand why she did certain things the way she did it and it was because i just i didn't have the abcs of emotion in myself and uh because it was so locked down yeah it was so locked down it was so locked down that i didn't

realize it was even a thing and if that makes any sense well i think you know it it just seemed irrelevant and unpredictable and right like this is not productive this is not moving me forward and my way works because look at all these books that I've written and look what I'm doing out in the world. And I, with my, you know, character makeup, I got into Princeton and I did. So there's no reason to be self-reflective about it because you're succeeding in the eyes of culture and society. Right. Right. But I would say almost never in the, in my own eyes, there was always, I could have, there was always something I could have done better. There was always something I screwed up and it was a, it was a fear of losing that kept me moving more than any joy of winning.

And never being able to just like experience joy and gratitude for the things that you have been able to accomplish. That has been, that has been a practice that I've worked on in the last few years in particular. Is there a fear of losing it that accompanies that, that it's all going to go away or just not being able to be happy with it? Well, we could, we could answer that as Tim of say say, two years ago or Tim of today. Tim of two years ago. Tim of two years ago, Tim of five years ago especially, felt a tremendous amount of obligation to a lot of people and to support a lot of people and to prepare to support even more people.

And I felt like I had to build a war chest just for that. So it was not a love of money. It was not a love of achievement. A lot of it was a fear of letting other people down or... It's a lot of pressure. Yeah, causing pain of some type for people I love. And I'm past that at this point. I mean, very fortunately, I've had a good string of luck and successes. So it's put me in a position where I can support other people.

But the fact of the matter is I realized realized I'd say two years ago, but especially in the last six months, very recent that, uh, and this is the part that would make my Tim of five years ago, just like vomit a little in his own mouth, which is, uh,

I'm not going to mince words. I still have trouble saying this, but like self-love is not an indulgence. It's not a nice to have. It is a prerequisite. Even if all you want to do is feel successful and take care of the people you love the most, to really take care of them, you have to,

as I've heard said, put on your oxygen mask first. And if you don't do that, you are also shortchanging your ability to care for other people completely. And that's been a very much 180 degree about face for me. Because for a long time, I was like, I don't need to care for myself. Like that's, the word keeps coming back to me, which is self-indulgent. Like, is this self-indulgent? Like, who cares? But ultimately, it's really self indulgent like who cares ultimately it's really self flagellation

right because you can't you can't transmit something you haven't got so in other words you can't love another unless you love yourself and you can't be the best teacher or servant or human being uh you can't convey the best version of yourself if you don't carry that resonance for your own being you know one thing i didn't actually think of this until right now but i think another big change in my life in the last two years has been getting my dog getting molly my first dog as an adult i've always felt like half of a human being without a dog. I just have a very keen connection with canines. And I got Molly two years ago, two and a half years ago, and she's such a loving dog, such a fast learner and such a good mirror. I mean, I began to see my flaws in a way I'd never seen them before because I would get impatient or upset if I was training her for something.

And five minutes later when I would reflect on it, when I did, I'd be like, what the hell is wrong with me? What am I getting so wound up about? This is a dog, has no malice, is nothing but eager to to please what are you so wound up about and it and it i think has has taught me in some ways how to love period which has helped me to relate to myself in a gentler way uh so that's also been an incredible gift. When you had this realization, was there a certain person that you reached out to initially? Or how did you begin in the Tim Ferriss way of trying to unpack this aspect of who you are and how to move forward. Like who are the people that you dialed up? There were a few things.

Number one is I tried to observe changes in friends of mine who are similarly hardwired. And there are a lot of people out there, type a driven people who are really brutal with themselves and very good at achievement very poor at appreciation particularly when it comes to anything they've done and a friend of mine phd in neuroscience really tough on herself recommended a book called radical acceptance by tara brock and just the title alone i was like oh god i think i it's an amazing book downloaded it on kindle right away and promptly ignored it for a few months and then eventually i was in the pit of despair at some point and have suffered from bipolar disorder for decades now, uh, which has is, is no big surprise when you look at my code from having sequenced my full genome, they're like, Oh yeah,

this thing here, like 20 out of 10 from one to 10, you're 20. But, uh, at one dark point, picked up that book, actually not that far from where we're sitting right now, when I was in Malibu at a friend's place, and read 20 or 30 pages the first night and just remember thinking to myself, wow, this is exactly the medicine that I need. And for those who don't have any context, I mean, Tara's amazing.

She has a very tough... She's traveled a hard road. She's had some really difficult experiences in her life. And after digging into that book, I then had the pretext of the podcast to use, to reach out to Tara and say, would you like to conversations on my podcast are pretty selfishly or at least self-interested in the sense that i'll use it as an excuse to get someone like tara on the phone for two hours and then just do a therapy session of course it's the greatest and don't think i'm not going to do that with you before we're finished here but like go ahead and i began to explore, tiptoe around the walls of this sort of new structure or to tiptoe along the boundary of this new world that I hadn't explored. And that extended to Sharon Salzberg and reaching out then via other friends to say Jack Kornfield, who has not been on on the podcast although i would like to have him on at some point and uh also looking to how my listeners responded like did it resonate did it repel not that that would determine whether i proceeded or not but it was reassuring to me and very reinforcing to see how many people seem to need this, including folks at the top,

top, top, top, top of the game. I mean, whatever game that might be, you name it, investing tech, sports, culinary world doesn't matter. You had, you had on some level, you had a little bit of a fear, like, Oh, you know, my crew is not crew is not is gonna they're gonna they're gonna get weirded out by the fact that i have someone like sharon on i wasn't it wasn't so much a fear it was a hypothesis it wasn't even a hypothesis it was more of an i wonder what will happen when i put this out and i expected maybe the hey we want more interviews with billionaire set would, would come back with a, come on, man. Like this is okay, but you can do better. And this is not what I come here for. And maybe. That wasn't the response.

That wasn't the response. I expected the woo woo folks to opt in because that's what woo woo folks do with woo woo stuff or things that that they perceive to be woo-woo friendly. And what ended up happening was, yes, the woo-woo folks were very publicly supportive. And then all of these secretly pained people who felt like they were uniquely damaged reached out to me and said, fuck, man. Like, I had no idea that you went through all this stuff and like i've dealt with so much of this and i i feel like i can't talk to anyone about it and thank you and that has been something that's prodded me to

continue to exploring at least publicly privately i was going to do it no matter what but that has been a real driver for me in wanting to be much more public about all of this. as context when you do a ted talk the way it usually works as i as i know now is you have people who labor over their talk for months and months and months and months they rehearse it thousands of times and it's finally it finally honed and ready to go when they step on stage uh i did that and then a week about week before Ted, right before the last final rehearsal, which is done via video conference with Chris Anderson and the other people at the top of Ted, I scrapped the entire talk and pulled an all-nighter and put together a new one. Because I had this very safe, very solid talk that i felt would do well what was the subject of the original talk the original talk was the stuff that is my default go-to just competitive analysis and more tim living in his head more tim living in his head or just using prefrontal cortex

to figure out workarounds and non-obvious solutions to different types of competitive problems. Perfect audience for that at TED. Fantastic. And then I found out that the talk would be in the opening session and it would be broadcast to movie theaters. So hundreds or thousands of movie theaters. And I had this real unexpected, I'm not going to call it a panic attack but like an existential coming to jesus moment this in the afternoon before the day before this rehearsal where i i just thought to myself what the fuck are you doing like you have a moral obligation if you're going to have that platform to use it for something.

And you're going to get up and talk about like some incremental human guinea pig shit. And that is why I end up scrapping it and then doing the entire talk on my close brush with suicide in college and the safety nets and approaches that I'd created to avoid self-destruction. Because I felt like I had to. It just felt like something I had to do. Do you think that you're describing it as a moral obligation, which sort of contextualizes it as a response to some external pressure, but it feels to me like it was more like an internal dissonance, like this is not authentic to where I'm at right now.

And the message that, that I really want to express. No, that that's exactly it. And I, when, when I say moral obligation, I don't view it as externally imposed at all. Uh, I feel, and I can, and I have felt this way for a long time that, you know, with great audience comes great responsibility and what are you going to do with it and I know people who really abuse it or are really reckless with it and give out advice that can kill people regularly and don't add any caveats or qualifiers which I think is hugely irresponsible and i just felt like this was a uh

as they say in japanese like first and last so this is probably the only chance i'm gonna get because why would they give it to me twice to get on the main stage and do this so you know if we're gonna do it all right yeah it's it's uh it's vulnerability writ large like as large as it could possibly be written right and a sense of being completely exposed yeah and for people who uh weren't at ted which is the majority of people it's a very intimidating crowd so there's also part of me that felt to get on stage and tell people like jeff bezos my recipe for success was kind of preposterous i was like okay well if i can't out success them like let me not out fail them but completely zig instead of And the, what astonished me was a number of things.

First, right after the rehearsal on site, which I was devastated they didn't record because I completely nailed the rehearsal. And I was like, do you sometimes just use the rehearsal? They're like, no, we didn't even record that. And I was like, oh my God. Cause of the lighting, the cameras, everything ready. Yeah. Uh, Ray Dalio, who's the founder of the largest hedge fund

in the world 160 billion dollars under management bridgewater associates came up to me and wanted to thank me for the rehearsal because his son had struggled for so long with bipolar disorder and had learned a lot and we talked for about 10-15 minutes the next day when I got up and I gave the talk, I was very, very nervous, gave the talk and got off stage and didn't really want to talk to anybody. Because in that room and given the lights, it just felt too quiet. When you were delivering? When I was delivering it, it was very hard for me to read how people were responding because unless you're and unless you're telling jokes yeah you don't you can't tell even if you're even if you're telling jokes the acoustics and so on in the room are such that it's very hard to tell what's going on and so i got off stage and i really just

wanted to be by myself and just let out a long exhale and decompress because i'd done it and even if it failed in the room, which I felt like it had, I hope that it would do a lot of good once it went up. Did you have a sense of catharsis though? I did. I did. So I did have a huge sense of catharsis, but I didn't really want to go out and see anyone because I thought that it had flopped in the room. Nonetheless, I was really happy that I did it because the way I was thinking of it was, nonetheless, I was really happy that I did it. So the way I was thinking of it was,

I mean, I ended up not killing myself due to coincidence. I mean, we could get into it if you want, but I mean, the fact that I'm here today is a, it's a miracle because it wasn't, it's not like I talked my way or thought my way out of not pulling the trigger. It was just dumb luck in a bunch of respects. And I felt like if that talk, once it got released, acted as an intervention for even one person, great. Yeah. I'm happy to be embarrassed in front of a hundred and 1500 movers and shakers. It doesn't matter to me. But what ended up happening is they did a book signing the next day in the same building and hundreds of people came up to tell me about it. And this audience, keep in mind, anybody listening to this, like this, the audience at TED, it's just the who's who. It's a nutty, intimidating crowd.

confess about having had close brushes with suicide or to having chronic depression or to having children who had committed suicide or had been handicapped and felt entirely alone because of similar feelings. And, uh, I would say at least a third of the people there at some point, because I, I came out the first day, first session, first days, and I was there for the rest of the week. I'd say probably a third of the people there came up to me with some personal story. Yeah. Well, I think that, that, uh, that, um, decision to be vulnerable in that way is like a huge move towards becoming a fully integrated human being. And I think that, you know, speaking from my own personal experience as somebody who's enjoyed your content for a long time, I feel like I, and probably a lot of other

people were just waiting for you to tell us who you are, you know, because I think for a long time, it's like, I'm getting a lot of great, um, information from the Tim prescription, like, I have this stuff, but it's like, but who is this guy? Like, I don't even know that I really know who this guy is. Like, and I know that I personally, I was like, I want to know more about you, you know? And I felt like that armor was, was up so hard that you didn't, you weren't ready for that, or you didn't feel comfortable in that. Or maybe you just thought, well, that's not part of what works for me, or that's not how I want to live, you know, publicly. But when you made that decision, it's not surprising. I mean, first of all, it's very courageous to like get up and do that. And then to have that experience of being embraced, it was like, I think everybody else, like your, your fans, people that follow you,

there was a collective exhale. Like now we can really embrace this guy because we have a better understanding of who he is. And that's, that's a really powerful thing yeah i don't i don't think i was even aware uh i don't think i was aware of holding anything back or consciously holding anything back i just i didn't even yeah i'm not surprised to hear that i didn't even see it didn't feel conscious on your part it just felt like but it was still like that's how i was reading at least sure sure and uh yeah it's been a trip so uh i'm not convinced i uh fully know myself yet uh certainly working you're not enlightened yet yeah certainly work in progress always but yeah i'm enjoying embracing a more extended palette of colors and i've also come to realize that historically i've i've this is going to be meta but i've thought of thinking as this exalted

tool that was consciously directed in a in a very a if a then b therefore c sort of logical spreadsheet type of format but if you really dig into it and look at say, Thinking Fast and Slow or Blink or any of these books that examine what we might consider intuitive decisions or gut feel, how the subconscious drives a lot of our survival decisions, thinking is in fact a lot broader. thinking is in fact a lot broader so it's not as though what i've prized for so long which is this very well thought to be uniquely human i kind of doubt that but ability to use the prefrontal cortex in this really analytical way is not at odds with it is not the opposite of say meeting someone and having something in the pit of your stomach say no we don't like this guy and in fact there's there's something to argue that

this uh like first gen ipod that we have in the front of our brains is a relatively new addition to the party the rest of it's been evolving for millennia and one could even argue millions of years. And I've, I've undervalued that for a really long time. And I'm, I'm spending much more attention listening to that now. And I've just seen so many benefits in doing that. Does that make you uncomfortable because you can't quantify it in the same way it makes me less and less uh less and less uncomfortable put maybe a better way i am more and more comfortable with using things without extremely clear labels because you can label something without understanding it right and trick yourself into believing that you know

what something is just because you have the word for it which I think happens all the time and causes all sorts of strife and confusion so I'm okay with kind of trusting in the fact that by hook or crook, by some twist of fate, luck, who knows, seem to have evolved to get to this point and still be around. So there's something to it. As many bugs as I have in my software, it seems to work for something. And I don't think that the conscious voice in my head is necessarily the unbugged part. Right. Maybe that's the buggiest part.

Yeah. Your thinking brain is not always your friend. Right. It can get in the way. I was listening to your most recent podcast with Tim Urban, who's like amazing. That guy's like so entertaining and amazing. And I love the part about, uh, when he's talking about AI and he's sort of describing this, you know, 700 page book and we're on page 699 and, and kind of drawing this analogy between, uh, humans and chimps and then humans and AI in the sense that, um, in the sense that like a chimp can

look up in the sky and see an airplane, but he doesn't, he doesn't know it's an airplane. It's something up there. And there's nothing that you can humanly do. That's humanly possible to get that chimp to understand what exactly that is and how it got there, right? It's just not going to happen because they don't have enough brain matter. And by extrapolating that to AI, the argument that AI will develop to a certain point where us as human beings won't be able to conceptualize what they're doing, because we just we lack the computing power to even understand what it is that's going on around us. And I was thinking about that. And I think baked into that, there's a lesson in humility for all of us us because we walk around

thinking that we are capable of understanding everything. If we just pin it down and think about it enough or write it out or dissect it or deconstruct it, that we can wrap our heads around it. But in fact, that more likely than not is not the case. And so for me, like on a personal level that allows me that, that, that provides like an ample place for wonder, you know, or for faith or for being comfortable with things that you don't fully understand when that, when that instinct comes up or that intuition that's telling you not to do something, you don't have to understand it or deconstruct it, but I think it is important to heed it or to try to validate it on some level. I think it's also helpful if you want to assess or arrive at a humble perspective,

at least as it relates to human knowledge, which I think is important. So you don't make really egregious mistakes when possible. History, reading history is very helpful. And when you go back, not all that far, I mean, you realize, all right, at some point in time, all of the powers that were the equivalent of all the smartest people and the top politicians of the day and scientists and so on thought that the earth was the center of the solar system or the center of the universe. You have like Ptolemaic astronomy and then Copernican and that was heresy. And then you have people who, again, at the very top ranks, thought the germ theory of disease was complete nonsense. And on and on and on it goes. And to think that we're finally, we have found ourselves in a place where no longer is that true.

We've got everything figured out is so ludicrous. There's just absolutely no historical precedent to suggest that that is the case. In fact, there's every historical precedent to suggest that as some doctors say, you know, 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%. And I think that's generous. I've just seen too many weird things in the last few years especially to think that we have even a small fraction that that we have earned even like a five percent ability to say that we understand an equally small fraction of what we can perceive through our senses i think that's i mean that's an aggressive statement in and of itself.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much we don't know. And if you become somewhat comfortable with that and you become a little measured with the strong opinions that you hold and try to ensure that you've earned the right to have those strong opinions, it's hard for me to envision many downsides to that. So does that help you kind of access the gray and everything?

Like how is that manifested? Like that awareness, how has that manifested itself in how you sort of navigate the day? Yeah, I mean, I'm still a very, very hungry learning machine. I still love experimentation. But I'm also increasingly comfortable with just not knowing how certain things work and exploring them anyway. And the tendency, I i think for all of us is to want to come to a

placeholder conclusion right like until i have better data i'm going to conclude that x behaves the way it does because of y and i'm more comfortable now just simply saying, don't know. I don't know. No idea. And for instance, I like debate. I'm decently good at it. I also enjoy competition based on just having practiced it for so long. I hate losing. And if I have someone at, say, a public event, audience Q&A, and they want to just kick the hornet's nest and pick a fight. It's their big moment.

Yeah, yeah. Kick the hornet's nest and pick a fight on any number of a million subjects. I am totally, I'm much more comfortable now simply saying, I politely decline your invitation to argue about something that I have no right to argue over. I don't have any information to have earned an informed opinion. Next question. Is that, how would you have handled that five years ago? I would have dismantled it or attempted to dismantle it by just using rhetoric and questions to make them contradict themselves. And it's not that hard to do.

I mean, you could easily do it. I mean, well, you don't have to be a trial lawyer to be good at this but if you've if you've had legal training i find that it's very common that lawyers enjoy the sport of debate it's not always but i've specifically trained for it yeah i mean i have lawyers in my family and it's like you there are certain dinners where you're just like jesus christ can we stop like we don't need to debate about the cranberries for 10 minutes like fine you win like we don't have to just let's move on all right here's all the family stuff it's all coming yeah yeah so so for for me uh i used to enjoy that sport but but the side effect, the really nasty side effect of playing that sport frequently is that you create the illusion of knowing things that you just don't know.

Or you make someone look stupid who, and I'm not trying to make people look stupid, but if they get really aggressive, they want to pick a fight publicly in a way that i think is unproductive like i historically have had no trouble just like cutting them off at the knees and i'll still do that if someone's like if if it's if it needs to be responded to but if someone has an interesting idea just because you've had more practice with juggling logic in a way that allows you to beat them in a debate doesn't make them wrong and you right what i see in that though is a is a maturation of of a sense of self right because you're you've decoupled um your self-esteem or your proclivity to be happy from the need to win an argument or to be right like in recovery they say like do you want to be happy from the need to win an argument or to be right. Like in recovery, they say like, do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy? Like, and, and so that drive to

like, well, this is competition. Like I have to beat this guy because you know, I, that's how I feel alive or how I feel good about myself to make sure that I'm the alpha and I'm on top here. And I think it takes a, you know, somebody who really is self-assured in the best way to just not engage and not feel the need that they have to bite. And I think I've also realized that part of what I've tried to do, I should say, is pause for a microsecond. I don't always succeed between stimulus and my usual response because my usual responses for decades have just cumulatively made me miserable or feel miserable. So I've tried whenever I'm like, okay oh all right you want to fight i'm good

at this like you if if you're gonna fight i hope you're good i hope you come armed and really well prepared because this is my sport right like that's how i've traditionally responded and uh net net i don't think that has been a huge uh level up in my sense of well-being and inner peace so i've tried to in cases like that ask myself even before going out like if this happens and it happens you know that type of thing can happen on a regular basis what if i just did the opposite like how can i win by how can i win by refusing to engage or what other options are there that are just the opposite they might completely flop but let me try the opposite, whatever that is.

Or even take winning out of it completely. Yeah, sure. That doesn't have to be one of the parameters. I mean, what you spoke to right there is really one of the greatest benefits of consistent meditation practice. Yeah, for sure. So, can we talk about the retreat a little bit? Sure, yeah. When did you finish this 10-day retreat? It was a couple weeks ago. Yeah, for sure. So can we talk about the retreat a little bit? Sure. Yeah.

You just, uh, when, when did you finish this 10 day retreat? It was a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. From hearing you talk about it on, on Jonathan's podcast. I mean, it sounded quite, uh, intense and transformational. Yeah. Yeah, 10 day silent retreat, for those who may not have experienced that, in this case at least, had a few conditions. And some were flexible, some were not. No talking, 10 days long, so no talking, no reading, discouraged from writing, no music, no sense, very little eye contact. Most people opted not to make eye contact.

And the silent piece of that, the not talking piece is by far the easiest. I don't talk to purge thoughts. That's not how I do it. I do it through reading or, or to distract myself away from thought loops. I use either reading or writing, which in my case, I didn't realize until I had those outlets taken away. And, uh, silent retreats for the vast majority of people i've spoken to are these revelatory ultimately blissful experiences that teach them a lot about themselves and then for as best i can tell 10 to 15 percent of people who go in who have a lot of old experiences in particular trauma that they haven't perhaps thought of in 20 30 years those 10 days are going to be just a descent into dante's inferno and feeling like

you are losing your grasp on reality because so many things are coming unwound and bubbling up from the surface and then just erupting through the surface in such a way that it feels like you have this torrent, this like waterboarding of past pain and trauma 24 seven that you can't stop. And it got to the point for me where on day say seven, where much to my frustration and like tragic amusement, each day there was one exception to the talking rule, at least consistently in the schedule. There was a Dharma talks every night. A teacher would get up and say, hey, in effect, here's some tools that might help with what we're trying to do.

And you're waking up at five 30 and the schedule from five 30 to nine 30 outside of meals is 45 minutes sitting meditation, 45 minutes moving to meditation, 45 minutes sitting meditation, 45 minutes moving meditation. That's it. Rinse and repeat until you go to bed. That's it. Rinse and repeat. And the Dharma talk is after, let me get this right. I think it's right before dinner. I may be off, could be right after dinner. Right before dinner, I believe. And it's instructional. But very often it would start with something like the following on, say, day seven. It's been so nice in our individual meetings.

Every other day you have about 15 minutes with a teacher to make sure you're not going through a complete psychotic break. And you're allowed to talk. And you're allowed to talk. And they'll ask you how you're doing and so let's say a dharma dharma talk on day seven a teacher would get up and say you know it's so lovely in some of our discussions to see how many of you are just settling into the stillness and experiencing this deep peace in the meantime i'm sitting there like going completely insane like my my head is somewhere in between like the cell and if people have seen the movie and like hostile and like it i mean it's

not in a great place and i'm just suffering through this like endless repeat of past pain that i thought i had long since forgotten about or hadn't even really remembered in so long. And I genuinely thought that I was going to leave the retreat completely untethered and unable to function. It was that bad. And that was on day six or something? Day seven. So day six, I had this experience that was very odd i also made this entire retreat a lot harder for myself by doing something they strongly advised against which was

fasting for seven days yeah so i've put in those things so i fasted the first two days because much in uh in keeping with my historical pattern i was was like, all right, if I'm going to do a 10 day silent retreat, I'm probably not going to have a chance to do this anytime soon. So let me try to make it as deep as possible. And I fasted for two days going into it, at least roughly fasted, very low, low calorie keto. So that on day three, the first day of the retreat, I could be at like two three millimolars bhb in my blood fantastic if that means anybody to anybody great you're trying to turn this whole thing into an experiment oh it was like as if there wasn't enough you know i know i

know i know well i did not anticipate like the unraveling of tim ferris right i thought i'd be fine because the fact of the matter is as a writer as someone who is effectively a solopreneur, I mean, I have a small team, but they're all remote. I spend most of the day not talking. And I was like, all right, well, this will be hard, but like, it's not going to, it's not going to dismantle me. Yeah. It won't dismantle me. I really underestimated having the reading and writing removed. Yeah. It's like, wait, you just like get in bed and turn the lights out and you go to sleep yeah how does that work oh yeah i mean it's it's yeah it's it was something else so on day six i went really deep in a number of meditation sessions in the afternoon in particular and it coincided with me getting

out of the meditation hall i was just getting claustrophobic i couldn't stay in there and i'd had a number of very difficult days but it seemed in keeping with uh you know sometimes they call it the terrible twos or whatever it might be like the second day third day fourth they're routinely very difficult for people can you do any physical exercise? Like you can, yeah, you can. There are people who were hiking. I was hiking at least once a day during one of the moving meditation sessions. Ultimately I just had to get outside of the meditation hall. I could not sit in there for another session, at least that day. And I went out and I found benches all over the property up in the mountains and would sit and do my meditating there. And I had these very,

very deep experiences where I felt like I was going into, I was going into what you might consider a very altered state. And these parts of my body that have carried tension for as long as I can remember, like to the left side of my sternum, like when I get tense or angry or not tense, when I get angry or overwhelmed, like there's this very, very specific tension that I feel to the left of my sternum in between the breast plate or the sternum and the heart, let's say. And on my back, which was related to an injury I had about eight years ago, I tore my lat off my back basically, which is not something you want to do, but this, this pain in my mid back in the thoracic area.

And I'd had a really tough time every day with the sitting meditation. I had very intense back pain, which a lot of people did. And I was sitting there on this bench and this afternoon and using these tools from the Dharma Talks and various techniques that they were recommending. And it felt like I had ice water suddenly on that part of my chest and the back, the portion of the back that usually hurt. Really odd. I mean, I opened my eyes for a second because it felt like I literally had ice water on my chest and my back. And then the tension in both areas sort of spread out and thinned and then dissipated and my back no longer hurt for the first time in the entire retreat i

was like that's weird huh and i just had this wonderful wonderful meditation session i felt fantastic i mean very joyful in certain ways so what do you make of that what i make of that and what one of the senior teachers made of that when i then proceeded the next day to just completely implode or explode or both depending on how you look at it is that i'd finally removed that armor and it just it allowed a lot in and it allowed a lot out and then it was just one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I mean, I literally felt like I was going insane, but unlike say a, uh, strong guided psychedelic experience, there is no piece of you. At least there was no piece of me that felt like there was an end to the ride. It wasn't

as though I had some meta awareness of being in an experience that would end in five or six hours. I just thought that I was going to a place that I would not recover from. That's terrifying. It was horrifying. And I will. There were a few teachers, but in particular, Jack Kornfield, who, if they had not been there, I think there's a distinct possibility that you and I would not be talking. Book launch would have been canceled. None of this would happen.

I think I would have been in a really bad place. So when people have asked me, oh, do you recommend it? I'm like, uh, not for everybody. No, I don't. And, uh, you really need someone, I think, because at least for me, I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. I didn't, even if you had asked me like, have you had trauma that you think might come up? I'd be like, no, I'm fine. And in fact, they did ask that there was a questionnaire and I was like, no, I'm good. I didn't know what was under the surface because I had forgotten or repressed. I have no idea what the proper term would be. And I mean, thank God, for instance, Jack was there who is very well known. I mean And he's one of five or six people I would say accredited with bringing Buddhist meditative

practices to the West. And what's unique about Jack is that he's not just an experienced meditation teacher. He is also a PhD in clinical psychology and has worked with veterans who've had limbs blown off and have PTSD. He's worked with veterans who've had limbs blown off and have PTSD. He's worked with adolescents who are cutters. He's worked with many different populations in the messy reality of like the real world and very real trauma, not just quoting scripture and telling you to telling you it's a, this is a fantastic opportunity to observe your mind.

There's a, there's a point where that's helpful. And then there's a point where that does nothing, but it helps you realize just how powerful those childhood experiences are. You know, it's, it's reminiscent of, of the work of Gabor Mate, like in his work with childhood trauma and how that manifests later in life. He's been there. He's been on my podcast. Yeah. He's fascinating guy. Fascinating, fascinating guy and yeah yeah so yeah timmy timmy got blindsided not only like i mean yeah i mean i'm glad you made it out of that i'm glad

jack was there to help guide you i also feel like there needs to be like outpatient like some kind of structure to help you integrate back into the world. You know, once you get out of that experience so that you can make sense of it and, you know, take what has been given to you in a way that can benefit your life as opposed to just continue to dismantle and confuse you yeah i think uh this will sound melodramatic but i i would suggest that people maybe think about it this way is consider it as as a thought exercise going into neurosurgery you're going to go in to have neurosurgery to have some complicated procedure performed that usually goes right but that very distinctly could go wrong. It's not, there is a non-trivial likelihood, 10, 15% that something could go catastrophically sideways. You want to go into that with A, the most qualified practitioner practitioners

you can possibly find on the planet planet instead of feeling in a rush and just choosing a retreat b you want to have contingency plans what if i get to the last day and i think that i'm going insane right if the suture bursts in my brain or whatever it is by analogy what do you do you just go home and go to work the next morning no that's not what you do you need to have a plan you go to work the next morning no that's not what you do you need to have a plan you go to new york city and you launch a book yeah i will say well right after the silent retreat i there were a few intervening experiences but then i went i came straight to la to speak on stage at a jet summit the gigantic conference which was complete century overload

but i will say that the main thing i took out of it was not any fixing this is important to to say i don't think i fixed anything through the silent retreat but i realized how how much could be traced back to a handful of things that i had not reconciled within myself and that that's the work like that's the work for me in 2018 it is figuring out ways whether it is through say reading up and meeting reading up on trauma specialists and different methodologies and spending time with trauma specialists, perhaps even considering with medical supervision, something like MDMA, for instance, as an adjunct therapy, not a primary. That's the work for 2018 for me. And everything else is secondary. I mean, everything else.

That's an amazing realization to come out of that with a sense of how important that priority is for you. Yeah. Nothing. I mean, nothing else matters because you could say, well, what about the people you love? It's like, yeah, but I can't, I've realized how incompletely I can give myself to them right now without dealing with this first period. And so what's the daily practice right now? Period.

And so what's the daily practice right now? The daily practice right now is not so much a daily practice. It's getting commitments on the calendar to do the things that I just said are number one so that they don't get displaced by the noise and the static and the pretty cool opportunities that float through that I, in some lapse of judgment, say yes to. They need to be on the calendar. So immediately after the retreat, in the week following, I put things on the calendar, prepaid for them, made commitments to other people to be certain places at certain times so that they would not get displaced. So right now it's really just girding my loins and waiting for that.

Yeah. You should do one of Sharon's retreats. I think it's going to be a while before I do another retreat. But I think it would be a little bit of a different kind of experience. Yeah, it might be. And I had a great, well, great. People are like, oh, do you have fun? I'm like, not the adjective I'd use.

I had a very valuable experience at Spirit Runc. But it was, it was very, very difficult. And I think that at this point, and this is true with many different interventions, whether that's silent retreats, motivational seminars, conferences,

plant medicine. There are, it is very seductive to get frequent flyer miles on the interventions instead of doing the time and energy consuming integration post work. Yeah, it's less sexy. It's less sexy. Like that's the real work. Yeah. It's like, okay, now I'll show you, I'll show you the direction in which you need to push the boulder up the hill. But there comes a time when you're like, okay, I actually just need to put on my big girl pants and like push the goddamn boulder in the right direction. The experiences are like the reveal of what the work needs to be or what it,

what it needs to look like. But I have friends, I'm sure you do too. I mean, I have one friend, this guy did ayahuasca like 52 times in a year or something like that. Like, I don't, you know, God bless him. I don't know what that's about. but at some point it feels like, well, is that helping you or is that a distraction or a procrastination of the work that it's revealing that you then go and do? I don't know the answer to that. I don't have judgment on that, but I would say in the majority of chase, the majority of cases or chases might be actually a pretty good Freudian slip. But in the majority of cases, it is a way to put off doing the work.

Which, by the way, reading can also be, which I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying, since ostensibly I have a brand new book out. And we're going to talk about that. No, no, no, no. And we're going to talk about that. No, no, no, no. But there's always, if you have some degree of intelligence or just slyness, you can always find a seemingly justifiable way to put off doing what it is you should be doing. And as a writer, I feel really qualified to say this because most writers I know will do anything to avoid writing. I mean, it's like, oh, the plant's dying. Well, I can't possibly sit down and work on my new chapter if my environment contains a dead plant.

I really need to fix that dead plant. It's like, oh, my shoes are dirty. Well, I'm going to need to get my exercise later in the afternoon and they need to be ready so that I'm not distracted later. So let me put off writing. The writers will just do anything to get out of writing. And that's human nature. It's not because writers are bad people. It's not because say somebody listening is a bad person that they've maybe been a seminar junkie instead of going back to the notebook they filled up and actually putting next steps on their calendar. next steps on their calendar it's human nature but uh for me right now it's it's about the work and holding myself accountable and

maybe surprisingly to some people uh i am i'm not a huge uh i don't have a high degree of confidence in in willpower or discipline i have a high degree surprising to hear that from someone like you i have a high degree of confidence in systems and accountability and loss aversion that creates the illusion of discipline and willpower right so you could take somebody let's just say who's always had trouble losing weight. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to take photographs of you really unflattering first thing in the morning after you've gone on a bender in your tighty whities in your kitchen.

Now I own those photos. All right. I'm going to also take 5% of your income. And if you don't lose 20 pounds in the next eight weeks and keep it off for six months, not only am I going to release those photographs onto the Internet, post them on Facebook, everywhere your friends, family, colleagues will see them. I'm also going to donate 5% of your income to an anti-charity that you would rather nuke than give money to. And you will be on the public record as having given $5,000 to whatever it might be. nuke than give money to and you will be on the public record as having given five thousand dollars to whatever it might be you know the what who knows george w bush presidential library or the you know american nazi party it doesn't really matter and i'm not sure they're of charity but regardless you get the idea to an organization that you would just be endlessly shamed to be associated with uh unless you lose this weight.

And I guarantee you with that why to, people will figure out the how to. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty powerful external motivator. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be that intense, but I see no reason to, I see every reason to make your incentives compelling. to, I see every reason to make your incentives compelling and most people don't need more willpower or discipline. They need better incentives. So that that's either a reward, uh, or it's some type of punishment and the punishment could be prepaying for say a certain number of training sessions with an athletic trainer that are non-recoupable right maybe that's enough for a lot of people it is even if they make a lot of money for some folks the idea of losing a few hundred bucks right will drive them insane so they will actually show up

or having someone like working out with a friend who's going to bust your balls, metaphorically speaking, gender neutral, whatever. If you don't show up to be their workout partner, maybe that's enough to shame you or guilt you into doing it. Great. Use it. Uh, so, uh, in my case to ensure that I won't lapse because I procrastinate. Sure. I mean, there are things I'd prefer not to do and I can find very easily justified activities that look very sexy from the outside and worthwhile to dodge the things I need to do that are harder. And, uh, the way that I try to ensure I'll do those things, I put them on the calendar. I put down money. I book flights. I make all the plans. I hold myself accountable to other people. I tell my close friends, maybe the details of the silent retreat and spend an hour of their time and mine explaining how important and critical this is for me and what I'm going to do in December and January

and February. And I know they're going to fall. Have you made some of these crazy deals with your friends where they have license to, you know, post on savory photos? I haven't, I haven't done that, but, uh, but, uh, I would, if I felt like I needed it, but just the fact that I've dropped thousands of dollars on travel plans and blocked out my calendar and made appointments with various people and made effectively promises to people in my life very deliberately so that I know they will ask about it later. I will be ashamed of myself if I say that I've bailed. That's enough for me. That's enough to make sure that I'll do it. That's enough to make sure that I'll do it.

Well, I think this dovetails pretty nicely with the new book, Tribe of Mentors, which is great, man. Like you describe it as a, you know, choose your own adventure. You can crack it open to any page, you know, and spend a couple minutes and kind of set your intention for the day. And you did a beautiful job with it. So congrats on that. I love it. And, um, you know, when it, when it got delivered here and I opened it up, I was like, how this motherfucker write a 700 page book, like less than a year after the other, like what kind of robot is this? But then I did my own deconstruction of it. And I was like, oh, I can see how I was able to do this this and yet that doesn't detract from the value of it you know which brings up this other issue that i know is kind of forefront in your mind

this kind of marching order of of reconceptualizing how you navigate um maybe not just your professional life but all aspects of your life with this mantra of you you know, what if it were easy, right? Which is, and this is like another thing where I dovetail with you perfectly because coming from that self-flagellation, self-flagellating, you know, work ethic, you know, you gotta like, if, if you, if you don't feel like you've just punished yourself to the core, then you didn't work hard enough on it. And it could be better if you just suffered a little bit more for the benefit of the end work product. That's how I approach everything. And ultimately that's my enemy because it prevents me from actually embracing, you know, the work. And so this

is something that I've been struggling with and thinking a lot about as well. That idea of like, it doesn't have to be that way. Like that's actually a lie that you're telling yourself, but the idea of it being easy is so uncomfortable. It's like, no, it can't. I can keep telling myself that, but that is not true. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a massive gear shift for me to ask this question, which I do a lot now. What might this look like if it were easy? One substitution that people can use to ease into it if they're really uncomfortable with the easy part is what might this look like if it were elegant? So just fewer moving pieces, right? So if you have to trick yourself into trying it as an exercise in journaling, that's a good way

to do it. The second piece of that is what might this look like if it were fun too, because something can be easier, but still unenjoyable. And both of those things, it sounds so like when you verbalize it, it just sounds so absurd. But I've spent the vast majority of my life as someone who prided himself on a high pain tolerance, in effect, looking for things that were somehow socially rewarding, that involved a high degree of pain and a high degree of unpleasantness. And what ends up happening, at least what happened to me is i went from excelling in areas or sports or business approaches that were rewarding and as a necessary tax involved pain to seeking things that were painful which is not which is the is is

it's mistaking this the it's confusing the causes and the symptom right because you created that imprint at an early age like this is the this is how it works like if i want to win this wrestling match here's what i have to undergo to do that and then that gets applied to every area right and i think where it where things get really mixed up and then can be tragic is many things that involve some discomfort or pain can be productive right but not all things that are painful are lead to anything productive. Right there. And the, and you can just become a masochist without realizing it.

And that's what happened to me. Uh, and I also felt like I could grasp complexity and juggle a lot more effectively than other people. So I was drawn to complexity because I felt I could win there. I felt like it was a, there was a high barrier to entry and that, that gave me a competitive advantage.

And yeah, not to, sorry to interrupt, but like that, like when I was a kid and I was showing prowess as a swimmer, I sought out the 200 butterfly because that was the event that no one wanted to do. Right. It's sort of like looking for that world record that is like hidden or that just no one feels like tackling, like where's the easiest road to success. Well, I'll go to that one thing. That's the, it's the hardest race. Everyone avoids it because it's so painful. That's where I'm going. Right. It's very similar to what you're saying.

For sure. And then at some point, especially in the last year, I realized I'm just fighting an empty jacket here. Like, who's my competitor? This is ridiculous. Like, I'm actually just fighting myself. And what might this look like if it were easy and it started as a journaling exercise which is one of the most common patterns in all the interviews I've done and travel mentors and tools Titans and the podcast journaling meditation and journaling are kind of the two partners in a sense they work together really well they that recur over and over again and says journaling one morning on what might this look like if it were easy well I've done it for many many different things with respect to this book yeah specifically yeah for well i did it for the podcast when i started the podcast uh i had to ensure that there was next to no editing right i would do it with my friends in the beginning to make it less intimidating i would allow wine which didn't always turn out very well uh it actually really ended poorly in the first episode in particular but if that's what you needed to do that's what

i need to do just to just like get the lawnmower started i needed to to to grease the skids and make it as easy as possible and uh you can always complicate it later but if you start with the complex the likelihood of quitting or abandoning it very quickly is high or not meeting a deadline in the case of a book for instance and so in the case of this book i never intended on writing it first of all i was just going through this crisis of meaning and had all these existential questions on my mind because i turned you know turned 40 which in and of itself wasn't a big deal. But then the Ted talk about suicide coincided to the day, which was wild with the 10th anniversary of the four hour work week. So people expected me to get up and talk about all these blueprints for success. And I did the

opposite, which was surreal for me as well. And then all of these deaths happened, including one of the mentors in the book, Terry Laughlin, who's had a huge impact on my life passed away a few weeks ago and that was an amazing podcast by the way thank you that was brutal oh man that was a hard one um for those people who don't know yeah i recorded the last long form interview with terry before he died and he actually sounded really good he sounded really good when i he was in the hospital but He sounded really good when I, he was in the hospital, but he sounded really good when I had him on the phone and his daughters felt like things were looking up. And I went on the silent tree, came back and literally the first text I saw when I turned on my phone after 10 days and saw this barrage of notifications was,

did you see the news about Terry? And then a sort of crying emoticon from a friend of mine. I was like, Oh no. And I had to go back and rerecord the introduction because the introduction was this very upbeat, like, I'm so excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I had to change it all the past tense, which is brutal. And all of those things led me to want to reach out to people I respected, many of whom were further down the road, right? They were 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the best in various fields to ask them how they had navigated different things. And when I started reaching out to people as one-offs, I realized pretty quickly that the answers were, it seemed like a missed opportunity for me to keep them to myself.

And that's how the podcast started too, because I'd have these conversations over dinner with a friend and I'd be like, God damn, like this guy just blew my mind for two hours and it's gone. Right. It was just this ephemeral experience that only I and he or she experienced in poof, never to be heard again. And it's, it seemed like such a waste. And I wanted to just try recording those. And similarly, when I started getting answers, I was like, you know, why not just put this in a book? And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. That was another thing that I've done in the last few years to really relieve unnecessary pressure that has been super helpful. I'll do things, but in the very beginning, I'll set the expectations with any partners that

it might not work out. And if it doesn't, I'll whole right and uh so you did yeah you did that with this book right you told the publisher like i'll give the advance back yeah it might not work like it's coming together yeah if it doesn't and it doesn't come together give you the advance back and that's uh now people who are your intelligent listeners who are paying attention may say well wait a second ferris that seems like the opposite of holding yourself accountable right so there are uh but i will say there are times when i want to apply pressure and then there are categories of activities in my life where i've historically applied too much pressure and instead of just like stressing the organism in a beneficial way I'm just like sitting in a tanning bed for ten hours straight which is not helpful and right the idea of writing a book is just going so deep into a pain cave that you may have never resurface yeah you don't need you don't need to

add salt to the wound like it's already going to be a difficult slog and for the first few books I really punished myself unnecessarily. I made it a lot harder than it had to be. And the consequences were pretty dire. I mean, my, my health would suffer and except for during the four hour, four hour body, I was walking the talk for that one. But for the other books, I really let myself deteriorate. And so for this one, I set the expectation. I was like, Hey, I'm going to give this a shot. I'm going to try it the easy way. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Give it the advance bag, which, which puts my publisher in a bit of a pickle. I mean,

it puts them at a bit of a tight position, but fortunately set a release date for this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, thankfully, you know, HMH, Houghton Mifflin has been very patient with me, but I also delivered on the last book, which was set up very similarly in the sense that wanted to try something new. I'm not sure, but if it works, I'm going to know very quickly and I will buckle down and really get it done. And then we will just buy the hairs of our chinny chin chin, be able to publish and print and get everything handled. But yeah, and then it came together. And every time something like that works for me, where I take not necessarily the path of least resistance, but I don't automatically choose the path of most resistance, and it works, it helps to reinforce me not punishing myself.

Right. Like those neural pathways get reinforced a little bit. Yeah. I'm just like, oh, okay, great. Like I don't have to go into the gym and like fracture every bone of my body every time. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. See, this is, I really need to learn this. I'm facing, you know, writing a new book and I'm blocked by fear and by that idea that inevitably this is going to be painful, right? Like I've already made that decision. Right. And this is not serving me, right?

And so reframing it and coming up with a different avenue to approach it, I think, is important. And so that was super helpful to me to have you to hear you talking about this. So regularly. Yeah. One of the, one of the mantras that I've been, that word bothers me still, but one of the, I love your aversion to like any word that is even in the slightest bit. I think I've developed, you know, you, you, you can experience adult onset allergies. So for, for instance, I love eggplant. And two years ago I developed this allergy to eggplant which sucks and it's very severe like my throat will close up and it that that really bothers me but nonetheless have developed this adult and onset allergy and I think I also developed a San Francisco induced adult onset allergy to to a lot of woo woo stuff and if for those people who haven't seen

uh ultra spiritual by jp sears on youtube oh my god just watch that and you'll you'll kind of get it if you've never had the experience uh but yes i'm a i'm a stickler for words in certain words i think just carry a lot of baggage that require a lot of lifting to get around. Anyway, so there's a phrase, let me use that, that I repeat to myself a lot. And in the last two, three years in particular. And the phrase is, don't retreat into story. So there are certain stories we all have that we tell ourselves. And some of the stories are very, very old, right? Like I am X. I can never Y. Oh, I always blah, whatever it is. I'm like, this is all, this is going to be painful. Or I always fuck up, whatever. There's these,

these stories as short as they might be, as poorly as they might sell as a children's book, these short stories that we all have. a lot with this to whether you use an app like headspace or guided meditation from some day say tara brock or sam harris or whatever or just tm or some type of of seated meditation to tell myself and i'll put this at the top of my journal in the morning if i'm using something like the five minute journal in all caps at the top is but don't retreat in the story don't retreat a story i might even if I'm feeling myself starting to tailspin into some old pattern, I will go into my journal. I've never talked about this. And, uh, since I know I'll be using the journal each morning, I will, I will, I will put one of two things at the very top of each journal entry for the next say 15 days before i can forget or procrastinate or not do it

one is don't retreat into story the other one which is very closely related is actually from tony robbins uh who i've gotten to know in the last couple years who impresses me the more i get to know him which is saying a lot because he's freaking tony robbins anyway uh and that is uh state and then an arrow to the right story then an arrow to the right strategy this is really important so state leads to story leads to strategy because what what i've noticed for myself is that if i wake up and I'm just in a funk, didn't get enough sleep, or I'm just maybe feeling the inner, the, the early symptoms of maybe going into a funk for whatever reason, there are many things that can trigger it. What I'll, I'll sometimes make the mistake of doing sitting down and immediately trying to problem solve in a depressed energetic or emotional state and what tony has explained to

me is if you do that the lens that you're going to wear is only going to allow you to see the problems and the negative so you're going to sit down you're going to try to you're going to try to form a strategy from the outset but you're going to have a negative state, a disabling story that you're telling yourself. And the strategy is going to be terrible. Yeah. You're trying to solve the problem with the mindset that created the problem to begin with. Right. And instead, the, the state story strategy leads me to, that's one of the things, and not many things can get me to do this. So I am, I'm very much an evening exercise guy. But that has encouraged me to once again, go in the calendar and pre-book exercise with trainers.

I don't, this is going to sound bad, but like, I don't need trainers. I don't, I've never really had trainers for what I do. See accountability. So I will book myself for things that I would normally never do like one-on-one Pilates classes. Oh my God. Puke, right? Like, which actually done well, technically it's pretty goddamn hard.

It's like a GST, the gymnastic strength training in a lot of respects, but nonetheless, let me not defend my Pilates habit right now, but I will, I will say pre-book Pilates or Acreog or some type of, uh, Olympic weightlifting in the mornings, at least say three days a week. And I'll book it out four weeks in advance and I'll prepay schedule everybody. And I know they are showing up right for me mornings, like 10 AM, which I know is laughable people, but like to make sure that I am up and ready, which means I will have to wake up probably at least nine, which is good, which is an accomplishment for me. Historically gone to bed like three, four or 5am, which it's not helped man,

manage manic depression, by the way. And, uh, but I'll get it on the calendar and that will set my state. Then I will have an enabling story. And then I'll set the strategies. It's a very long-winded way of explaining why I use two prompts at the top of my journal and I'll pre-fill them very honestly. Number one, don't retreat into story. Number two, state arrow, story arrow strategy. Two things on that. The first thing is I have a mantra, a phrase that I use that's similar to that, which is mood follows action. Yeah. Right. Which is essentially saying change your state, right? Like if you change, if you take an action to change your state, um, then you are in a better position to tackle

whatever difficulty you're in. But the idea that you're going to try to solve your problem in the mood in which, you know, is perpetuating it is ridiculous or the idea that you're just going to wait until you feel like doing something in order to feel better like that's never going to work but to get and the second thing is to get back to this idea of of story see that super woo-woo guy picture black and white photograph that guy it's super woo guru dude yeah it's like a guru panty yeah i know he uh actually he's an amazing consciousness and he was here doing an event and he addressed this very subject and he did it in a very interesting way in talking about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves he said imagine a branch on a

tree and every knot on that branch is one of those stories. And over time, as we mature and grow, there's more knots and we, we wed those knots. We, we create a narrative out of the series of these knots and that becomes the story of your life. And for most of us, we go through our whole life without ever challenging those stories. But it's all fabrication, right? It's all illusion. These may be things that happen to you. Your memory of those events may be skewed. But why is it that we choose these knots as being the defining sort of character defining events of our lives. And don't we have a choice to choose different things that happened to us over the course of our life to form a brand new narrative that can tell a different

story about who we are, that then projects, you know, into the future as behavioral change that could completely, you know, reshape how you live. Yeah. And no, it it's it's a i think it's a really useful framework for thinking about it and furthermore i would add that maybe is i alluded to at the journaling for me at least changing the stories or creating new stories much like exercise it's not a one-time decision right it's not one and done this is a practice well that groove is so deep it takes a long time to yeah you have to practice it so i do that through journaling very frequently and i'll have

say prompts that i'll use with i am dot dot. And that is an opportunity each morning to practice new stories. Right. I like that. And I found it very, very valuable, but you need to use repetition. Like you said, the grooves are like, you've been playing the same goddamn track tens of thousands of times. You need at at least at least a few hundred repetitions just to get a toehold with this new story and it does have a chance it doesn't you don't need to reach an equivalent number of repetitions uh particularly since you're now consciously directing yourself the the quality of those reps is better. And I think makes up for a lot of lost time, but you do need to take it as a practice. And for me,

what that means practice, I'll tell you what practice doesn't mean to me. Practice doesn't mean I'll do it when I remember to do it. Practice means I put it on my fucking calendar. Cause if it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist. It doesn't happen. Yeah. Getting back to the book, one of the parts of the book that's been really helpful to me and has spoken to me directly is the strategies around how to say no, you know, which is I just I'm terrible at, you know. And you seem to me to be somebody who's always been pretty good about boundaries. And I can't imagine the opportunities that are coming your way, you know, that you're probably constantly, you know, being fed. And I'm sure most of them were the vast majority of them are super cool things that would be really fun and awesome to do. So let's talk a little bit about the power of saying no and how you think about what to say yes to. Yeah, this is a perennial topic.

And it's a perennial topic and a perennial challenge because whether opportunities or problems, let's talk about problems for a second, because I think the comparison will be helpful. There are many people who think, and I've certainly thought at different points in my life, if I just do X or achieve Y, my problems, these problems will all go away. And what you realize is as you continue on this journey, that is often meandering called life, you don't get rid of your problems.

If you achieve certain types of success, you just trade up. So maybe you had like, you know, the, the Corolla of problems, then you trade up and you've got like the used Mercedes of problems and you trade up and you have whatever the Porsche of problems the the magnitude and complexity can can become really challenging and the opportunities become themselves problems in the sense that and many people listening might say oh come on give me a break like this is such a the one per like like like a one percenter woe is me story but it's not and i'll tell you why because uh thank you very much in in the very very very beginning of your career i do think yes as a default can be very helpful but when i say the very very beginning i, literally maybe one to two years out of college. If you go to college, you don't have to go to

college, but let's just from my personal experience, once you have an, even a vague glimmer of a notion of what you're really good at versus what you're bad at. And once you have a semi-decent group of friends and colleagues and coworkers, the birthday parties, the going out for drinks, the conferences that may or may not piss away three, four days of your life, these start to appear four days of your life, these start to appear and they are the siren song. Uh, in my experience that the, the, when I've encountered stagnation in my life or felt overwhelmed for the most part, uh, sometimes it's due to, you know, catastrophe and huge problems, but very often it's because I've over committed to the kind of sort of cool stuff. And then my calendar is so crowded, uh, you know, as Derek Sivers, who's one of my favorite entrepreneurs would say also just

incredible sort of philosopher, king of programming and a just eccentric guy in the best way possible uh he would say that if it's not a hell yes it's a no right now now that's at a very high level that's helpful but then you have to translate that to strategies and tactics right but i do think that before you can say no effectively there are a few assumptions or first principles that are really helpful to accept, at least for me. Because, for instance, everyone, or not everyone, but a lot of people have heard of inbox zero. That's just never going to happen. Yeah, it sounds like a good idea. Where are you at?

What ends up happening, if the inbox is everybody else's agenda for your time uh and it's asymmetrical right it's very easy for people to send email very time consuming to respond uh particularly if if you look at my top left right there. Yes. 373,950. Are those unread completely? Or like you read them, but you just marked them as unread? That's completely unread. So you haven't even looked at them? Have not even looked at them.

So why even have like that email account connected to your phone? No, it's going to be. Are you constantly creating more and more secret, secret behind the velvet rope email addresses? There is that. But I'm also, I don't want to digress. We could certainly go into crazy tech conspiracy land. But if you want to talk about creepy, and there's a lot of creepy stuff that's been happening with recent upgrades related to Apple and Google as far as I'm concerned, than I do know a lot of people in tech. But when I upgraded my, well, this version of iOS, I had no mail set up. And it's somehow, and I certainly did not input these changes,

determined that I suppose through communication, my assistance account should be automatically set up for notifications on my phone through mail i did not manually do it like password and everything yeah so that's super i consider that very creepy yeah so part of the reason i'm diversifying my digital identity in certain ways but the uh the point being if you even decide to respond politely to all inbound there will come a point if you achieve 20 of what you hope to achieve that becomes untenable. I think unless, unless you have people sending you snail mail or something, maybe that becomes manageable. Um, but, uh, one of the most important principles for me that, that has helped me to say no more effectively, and this is a principle, right?

We're going to get into the more nitty gritty is that to achieve the really big good things you are going to have to let a lot of small recoverable bad things happen no way out and also recognizing a few other things that have been very helpful that and this is i think it's herbert sw or Swopes, who is the first recipient, I believe, of the Pulitzer Prize. And I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, roughly, I can't give you one recipe for success, but I can give you the recipe for failure. And that is trying to please everyone all the time. Also, lip service. People have heard some variation of that before but the the paired quote that i think of a lot is from dr seuss and so ted geisel

which was uh the people who matter don't mind and the people who mind don't matter so if you don't reply to someone in a day or two and they get really really really pissed off i hate to say it but like the people who have a lot of shit going on themselves and yeah they understand they get it uh so those are all just like operating principles then when we get down to strategy you have on the simplest level not responding outside of autoresponder and so if we're looking at email which is usually the most egregious offender you can set up autoresponders that indicate policies right so something you might have something along the lines of uh dear all i'm only able to respond to email directly related to projects i currently have on deadline you know unfortunately i'm not physically capable of replying to all the email that i receive due to cold intros and so on which

also gives people a little fucking slap if they're doing cold intros without asking first below are the answers to 80 of the email i receive right so like number one i'm not doing any book blurbs of any type for for close friends family or otherwise zero number two one i'm not doing any book blurbs of any type for for close friends family or otherwise zero number two like i'm not doing any more startup investing of any type uh abc here's a here's a link to an article that explains why and so on and so forth then it just requires the discipline to not reply even if someone's like hey i just wanted to check in it's like i know you got my autoresponder then then when you're responding i mean part of the one of my greatest not greatest it's not great in in the sense that i am great but one of my happiest realizations when i was putting together

travel mentors was as i got these rejection letters uh these polite declines from people who are too busy to be in the book i got one from from Wendy McNaughton, who's a very famous illustrator. And it was so good. It was so beautifully, brilliantly crafted that I loved her more afterwards than I did before. Keeping in mind, I'd just been rejected, like very clearly rejected. But it was so deftly done. And I was bummed out. I was bummed out for a little bit.

And then I remember i was with my my researcher sitting there and i think we might have had some wine and i said wait a second you know what'd be really funny is if i included the rejection letters because we're talking so much about how to say no and asking people how to say no and we paused for a second and then I realized, wait a minute, why don't I just ask Wendy if I can include her email? It's so hilarious. Yeah. I can dig it up.

Yeah. It's right here. Like you can read that, but yeah. So she ends up in the book anyway. Yeah. So she ends up in the book with her permission. I'm not printing anything without anyone's permission, but everything that she did did not be in the book.

Yeah. I ended up, yeah, I ended up including a number of these rejection letters that I thought were very, very well done. There are criteria that well done rejections check, such as it's not a punt. It's not,

hey, I'm so busy right now, I just can't get it. Maybe sometime soon, like two, three months, when really they just want to say no. And then I put it in my calendar and follow up in three months and it wastes everybody's time. Yeah. Being a people pleaser. Like I make that mistake all the time. Which I've also been guilty of.

Right. But this, so this is the, this is the email. Very, very Wendy. So I included other examples from say Neil Stevenson who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, this incredible, incredible fiction writer. Another from Danny Meyer, who's a legendary restaurateur, Shake Shack, and many, many others. Different styles, right? So you have to find one that fits your personality, but you can borrow language. And I'll point out some of the things that I borrowed from hers.

Hers is really extensive because we know each other quite well and so on. But here it is. Very much suited to her personality. All right. Hi, Tim. Gah. Okay. I've been battling with this and here's the deal. After five intense years of creative output and promotion, interviews about personal journeys and where ideas come from, after years of wrapping up one project one day and jumping right into promoting another the next, dot, dot, dot, I'm taking a step back. I recently maxed out pretty hard and for the benefit of my work, I got to take a break. Over the past month, I've canceled contracts and said no to new projects and interviews. All right, so I want to point, this is Tim commentary. I want to point out this is very common in these good polite declines is that they're making it clear. It's a policy across

the board and that it's not personal. Right. And that may or may not be true, but at least the delivery is that it's a policy. All right. Back to Wendy. I've started creating space to explore and doodle again, to sit and do nothing, to wander and waste a day. And for the first time in five years, I'm finally in a place where there's no due date tied to every drawing, no deadline for ideas. And it feels really right. Here's another commonality that's coming up. So while I really want to do this with you, I respect you and your work. And I'm honored that you'd asked me to participate. And as capital S stupid as it is for me professionally not to do it, I'm going to have to say thank you, but I got to pass. So another commonality is that people will say, you know, I know I'll be kicking myself later.

I'm sure this is going to be a huge success, but just for my sanity or my health, I have to politely decline this. Another thing that comes up a lot is people will say something along the lines of, I would love to do this, but what you would get out of me will be so subpar and mediocre compared to what I might be able to give with a future project. I want to decline both the, both just for my, for my own benefit, but also because I think you'll get better results from other people.

All right. And she says, I'm simply not in a place to talk about myself and my work right now. Crazy for a highly verbal only child to say, hopefully we'll get a chance to talk somewhere down the line i promise any thoughts i'll have for you then will be far more insightful than anything i can share with you right now i hope this space created by my absence is filled by one of the brilliant people i suggested in my previous email and really thank you so much for your interest i'll be kicking myself when the book comes out wendy and

she did send suggestions for other people and a number of them ended up being in the book including the very first profile samin nosrat who's an incredible chef that is one hell of a great right decline but very different from from uh like seth godin who would just say yeah i can't do it yeah sorry not my thing yeah you know so on some level like she's she's going into you know quite a bit of depth into explaining why she can't do it. That's right. Which might fatigue other people. If you didn't have a relationship with her already. That's right.

I think that is reserved. If I had to guess, that's reserved for people she knows. Right. Because it doesn't scale very well, but it really serves a purpose with the relationships that you value and as a contrast i'll read danny myers so danny myer is the founder and ceo of union square hospitality group which includes many restaurants grammar sea tavern the modern maialino shake shack etc all right fascinating guy really really smart did away with tipping in a bunch of his restaurants as a policy for a bunch of reasons with fascinating rationale behind it's a real innovator in the food and beverage world all

right so here's his which was sent to my friend who tried to get the job done, who's super effective. My buddy, Jeffrey, who helped a lot in the four hour chef. So he asked Danny because he knows Danny and this is Danny's response to my friend, Jeffrey, Jeffrey comma greetings. And thanks for writing. I'm grateful for the invitation to participate in Tim's next book project, but I'm struggling at this moment to make time, uh, make time ends meet for all we're doing at USHG. That's his, his business group, including my ongoing procrastination with my own writing projects. I thought carefully about this as it's clearly a wonderful opportunity, but I'm going to decline with gratitude. Know the book will be a big success. Exclamation point. Thanks again, Danny danny right so that's very short yeah uh and i want to

highlight one line that you can just copy and paste right like you don't have to reinvent the wheel and that's that's what's been so fun for me about realizing how little effort needs to go into this when you find something that works it's like you just use the same language so this line i've used a lot you know i thought carefully about this so that's a really key phrase, right? It's not just, I don't like you sound stupid. It's like, no, I actually thought about this. Like I thought about, I thought carefully about this as it's clearly a wonderful opportunity, but I'm going to decline with gratitude period, right? That's a really powerful, gentle way to do it. And there's so many ways that I've been rejected and continue to be rejected. And you can take stuff from it.

I remember, you know, I've been turned down even early on by Seth Godin for stuff, by who else? I mean, God, the list is really, really, really, really long. Guy Kawasaki. But they did it really well. I remember guy at one point declined something and this was just a year or two ago couldn't make it work he's like sorry just can't make this work right so you can be very brief and in some cases that's better because you don't want people to try to counter and then you end up in an email exchange like yeah like

now i'm gonna have to have five emails over it just ends up being whack-a-mole email with you exactly so my preference is to not respond whenever possible uh the only way to receive fewer email is to send fewer email basically uh and i remember robert scoble who's a sort of a uh a perennial figure in the tech world who really helped with the tipping point for the four hour work week in the very beginning. And he did the math at one point because he was getting barraged by so many email. He was, he was, uh, uh, certainly perceived then and still is, uh, as an influencer who can really move the needle. And he said, I've realized doing the math that for every email I send, I get 1.72 in response. You actually mapped it out. You don't have to be a mathematician to realize that is not favorable to sending more email. And in any case, so Guy said to me, hi, Tim.

Sorry, I just can't make this work right now. I'll have to raise a glass from the sidelines and cheer you on. Guy. Right, which is great. So he's being supportive, but he's being clear. he's creating a healthy boundary yeah it's all good and you know something i found very helpful going back to the policy or categorical decline which i think is very helpful there are a number of ways to do it so you can say you know just across the board i'm doing a for my sanity you can say for a b and c reasons it doesn't really matter what the reason is by the way this is they've done

all sorts of interesting uh psychological studies where they'll have say a a confederate or someone involved with the experimenter uh go up to get in line in front of somebody for a copier say at an office and they'll say i'm sorry can i you know i really just need to use the copier i'm in a rush or whatever even they wouldn't say i'm in a rush versus like i really have to use the copier because and what came after because didn't really matter it's like because my dog is really loud today because there was a because exactly there was a reason so i think that also works in declines right so be like due to a b and c or a and b i'm following a strict,

this is one that I've used a lot because I was turned down by a famous investor for a lunch meeting. And I know him really well. And he's like, sorry, I'm following a really strict, no meeting diet for the next month, just to like catch up on everything that I've let slide behind. Because I realized that I'd much rather take meetings and drink coffee and like bullshit than do the stuff I really need to do. And I was like, wow, that's a really choice phrase, a no fill in the blank diet. So I started using that like, no, I'm sorry. I'm on a no conference called diet for the next month. And people wouldn't even question it. It was amazing. So you can do that. That works really well. I think this idea of no, you know, how to say no effectively and do it in a healthy way, you know, it extends so much further beyond how we navigate email.

Especially as, you know, we're in this period of time where it's just, it's impossible to be bored. Like we're so inundated with stimuli and it's so tempting to, you know, see what's going on on Twitter. And if it's not Twitter, it's Instagram or it's Snapchat or it's this, or it's that. And it's like, before you know it, it's four in the afternoon. And you're like, all I've been doing is looking at timelines. Like it's insane. Right. And how do we, you know, so this, the saying no has to be applicable to all manner of,

you know, behaviors and thought patterns in order to like, you know, do what Cal Newport would call like the deep work. Like how do you, how do you cut out the noise, you know, make those decisions about where you want to invest your time and like adhere to them so that you are actually doing what you're supposed to be doing. Oh yeah. And in the case of digital tools and screens and social media, like every, well, almost every person listening to this is going to be so woefully outmatched by companies that are spending billions of dollars to do exactly what you hope to avoid, which is losing your focus. I mean, they're spending billions of dollars of R and D to ensure that you never maintain focus for terribly long, because that is how they're economically incentivized. So let me give two, two tools that have helped me. One is just a tech trick. And then one is a mental framework that I found super, super helpful. So the tech trick actually comes from Whitney Cummings is a really well-known comedian

and writer-director in Tribe of Mentors. And she learned this from, I'm blanking on who it was, but a researcher who used to work at Google. And it's turning your phone to grayscale. And it's wild how much of an effect this has. I was very skeptical. I was like really like i'm gonna cut back on my use of social media by changing it to grayscale you can find how to

turn your phone to grayscale in a million different ways just search search turn to grayscale and then the model of your phone but an iphone it's super super simple and i would say for myself and also readers who've tried this based on feedback on social the irony right that they they are using social i'm certainly using social say 30 to 40 percent less just by changing my phone to grayscale and what is the psychology behind that it's just not as like it's just not pinging your dopamine receptors yeah there's just like some neurological like how much i wonder if people were dieting if they just had like the equivalent of google glass and could switch it to grayscale like would they stop would

they would they not overeat as much i suspect probably actually they would eat less if they saw their food in grayscale right it's i don't know the the neurological basis for it but kind of intuitively makes sense to me the so that that's one really easy trick that you can use. The second is a framework for saying yes or no to things. And that I found really helpful. I use all the time. Kyle Maynard, who's also in Tribal Mentors, is a congenital quad amputee.

What that means is he was born without arms and legs effectively his arms and mid upper arm and his legs and around the hip nonetheless he's in the national wrestling hall of fame number one so like wrap your head around that yeah wrestling fully able-bodied people he was pinned and beaten every match's first season people were calling it child abuse and just crucifying his parents then he started to win then he started to dominate and people called an unfair advantage the same people and wrestle in college like how far did he take how far did he go you know that's a really good question i don't know exactly how far he went i mean he can still wrestle i know because he almost snapped my knee in half when i won a demo and i was like okay yeah that's enough i'm clearly like i'm

gonna get injured uh and i wrestled like i was a pretty good wrestler and um he also i just want people to have a little bit of background. Again, something to think about. So he is the first quad amputee without the aid of prosthetics to climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. There are able-bodied athletes who have died climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He military crawled the whole fucking thing to deposit ashes of a friend who passed away at the summit. The guy's a stud. of a friend who passed away at the summit. The guy's a stud.

And he spends a lot of time with special forces folks and all sorts of fascinating CEOs. And he was given this recommendation from a really high-level CEO. And it was, when you're considering an opportunity, an invitation, maybe a prospective hire, could be anything. Could even be an entree at a restaurant. If you want to ask the server this question,

it actually works really well. Rate it from one to 10. You can't use a seven. And I've been using this pretty much every day since I got this explanation from Kyle, because he said the seven is a very slippery slippery, kind of non-committal, semi-cool value that he found corresponded to things he felt he had to do out of obligation or guilt or fear of missing out. One of the greatest ways five years from now, 10 years from now to end up in a place you're really unhappy with is to let those be your drivers, right? However, if you take seven out, six, you can't justify doing a six that's a barely passing grade so that's a no yeah so it turns a gradient into a binary it turns a gradient into a binary and i've been using that for all sorts of things now it's been great and instead of making another

thing i've tried to do a lot in the last year and did a company offsite, which is a fancy way of saying got like three people together in one place, three or four people to focus on what categories to say yes to or evaluate and what categories to say no to so that it's not one off. Yes or no. One to 10 without seven, instead of making a million one-off decisions, like categorically, without seven instead of making a million one-off decisions like categorically for instance uh speaking engagements i basically do no speaking engagements that aren't going to give me something evergreen i can then share with millions of people so for instance it's like tonight i'm going to be on stage and i'm going to interview terry cruz and that'll be recorded you can use that on the podcast and that was'll go on the podcast. But getting up and giving the same talk to small groups of people over and over again,

I basically stopped doing all of it. I really don't do that anymore. Because as seductive as it is, and there's money to be made, I found it wasn't getting me closer to my personal mountaintop right and for those people who find themselves maybe procrastinating or saying yes to a lot of sevens there's a commencement speech you have to see i'd be surprised if you haven't seen this but um there are a million commencement speeches out there uh neil gaiman's make good art is so good and you can find it online it's very easy to find but neil gaiman who's just the

uber polymath of fiction writers the guy does everything he has the most hypnotic voice imaginable also uh go watch make good art that commencement speech and i just realized that you know a lot of these categories can be eliminated altogether and if it's scary to eliminate them you just make it a short-term trial run, right? So maybe saying I'm never doing speaking engagements again for the rest of my life. That's too much of a commitment. That's more of a commitment than even I want to make for this year. Maybe that's too big. Okay. Let's try for a month. See what the fallout is like, no matter how appealing something seems, just say no for a month. And then we'll reassess in four

weeks and see how you feel. This is a new thing for me too. Not what do the balance in the balances in the accounts look like, not the spreadsheet. Like how do you actually feel about it? Like, are you glad you did it or are you stressed out that you did it? Super easy. It's not easy, but it's binary. Right. Feel good. Great. Let's do it another month. I like that. I like that. that and you know on this idea of of what if it were easy you know you're doing this book launch tour right now you're traveling around

all these you know press obligations etc uh the podcast is still going on and then you just you launch a new podcast like i look at that like to get, like, one or two episodes up a week of this, like, it's a lot. It's a lot. Even with help. So, I was like, oh, my God, you got another podcast? Like, have you automated that? Or, like, how does that, like, I would just be completely stressed out. Yeah, so I can explain.

This is actually a really good example, I think, to tie in everything that we've been talking about, or a lot of it. All right. So one podcast done well, at least takes a lot of psychic energy and time. I mean, it's, it's to do anything. Well, I mean, it takes a degree of focus that has an energy cost. So the Tim Ferriss show has been, been going now for a few years, started off as a six episode test and uh when people come up to me now in the street i mean nine times out of ten it's it's probably even more than that it's like 19 times out of 20 they talk about the podcast no mention of the books which is on one hand really exciting on one hand kind of depressing but nonetheless that that's it

and i asked myself, if I were to launch a podcast as a way to draw attention to the book, what might it look like? a long time now that there is, there is a high, there is a high degree of reward on iTunes, at least for frequency, frequency of episodes and rate of new subscriber, uh, rate of new subscribers. So what if I launched a new podcast, same title as the book, tribe of mentors, which effectively, because I don't have an audio book version, since audio book versions, by the way, don't count towards the bestseller lists. So why would you want to split your sales? It can always come later.

What if I effectively dripped out the audio book version vis-a-vis a new podcast and put out one a day? Well, if I look at my current workflow for the Tim Ferriss show, where I have two to four hour interviews, that's just not physically possible. Maybe it's physically possible, but I have to drop the entire book launch to do just that. Okay. What might it look like if it were easy? Well, I could look at my 11 questions, which are in the introduction to the book i can read those questions and i could read the introductions of people who agree to read their own profiles and then my questions could be spliced in to each episode and then just have every every one of

these people that you interviewed read their own responses that's right and i will mail them all the exact same mic if they need actually sending them the equipment sending them the equipment they need and uh it's good it's still like a logistical thing to oversee it's a list what i have to in that case figure out i just have to figure out the recipe right and then for people who hear the world algorithm techies throw it around like it's some super complicated magical thing. It's really just a recipe. It's a series of steps, things that are executed to produce a predictable result. So if I can do that, and I've spent a lot of time.

And I mean, this first realization came about, you know, around the formulation of the four-hour work week and learning all the lessons that went into that but if you can do it we all like to think we're uniquely capable that no one could say check our inbox for us but the fact of the matter is we do whether they're sloppy or organized follow certain rules and habits when we check our own inbox for instance you can train someone to do a lot of that certainly when it comes to soliciting uh or incur asking people if they want to opt in to record an episode that i will promote potentially to millions of people that will only take them 10 to 30 minutes and i will send them the equipment and the deadline is fairly flexible i can teach someone else like an assistant or a researcher to help me execute that very easily so i just had to i templatized the emails that would go out in a google doc

and then uh that combined with evernote provided all the tools needed via slack channel dedicated to this new podcast that could be used and and you got mics coming by FedEx coming and going. I have mics flying out to people who need them. And then, but it goes even beyond that. Uh, one of the most important things that I did in the very first episode is I gave myself an out. This is what I mean. And I think everybody should do this when they start podcasts, by the way, give yourself a gracious exit option. First episode, I did what I didn't. Well, I actually also did this for the Tim Ferriss show. I said, Hey, this is an experiment. If it sucks, I'm going to stop. If you guys hate it, I'll probably stop, but I'm going to do six episodes. Uh, this

was before there were seasons of podcasts. So all of a sudden people are coming out with seasons. I'm like, Hmm, that's a curious idea. So I decided that and I'm like, there's lazy, but there's a, there's smarter than I am. There's a genius in it because then you can say season's done huge success. Now I'm going to stop as opposed to Jesus Christ. This isn't working. It's really tiring. I'm going to stop. So in the, in the tribal mentors podcast, episode one, I said, this is, this is a season one. It's going to run for 10 to 15 episodes. What does 10 to 15 episodes equate to? It equates to the first two weeks of launch coming out with one episode every day. So the tribal mentors podcast has been last I checked, I mean, it was number one for several days and it's been the top five And it's been in the top five podcasts of all the podcasts on iTunes for almost a week and a half now, maybe two weeks.

And then I'm going to get to 15 or whatever it is, and I'm done. And guess what? What might this look like if this were easy? It would also look like short episodes that I can combine into longer episodes to use on the Tim Ferriss show that has sponsorships and everything else. And, uh, and it, and it also ties back to even the book, like the tribe of mentors, what is tribe of mentors do among many other things for me and the readers, what does it also accomplish? Which was a bit of an, uh, a late discovery on my part but i realized half of the people in the book would be almost impossible to get on the podcast if the ask i think you're undercutting yourself

i think i think most of those people in there would probably do your show i might take a while yeah well i will tell you i'm not going name names, but a lot of people in that book rejected, not rejected, politely declined to be on the podcast. Right. I see. So then you kind of come back to that. But now I come back with a super, well, relatively speaking, compared to two to four hour interview that has to be scheduled and have calendars meshed and so on, a lightweight request to answer a few questions to be in this book. Now, many of them have seen the response to the book, which has been tremendous. I just found out today,

and it's number one Wall Street Journal business book in the first week, which is exciting. Thank you. So now they're like, yeah, I'll do the podcast. Exactly. So they've seen they did they did i'm not going to say next to nothing because a lot of them put a tremendous amount of time into their answers i mean i mentioned terry cruz his answers just blew me away he really got into it and uh gave really really deep answers but uh lightweight compared to doing

a long podcast now that they've seen the return on investment from the profiles, I have 140 people who are primed to be on the podcast. That saves me a tremendous amount of effort over the next year. Um, and what might this look like if this were easy book tour? Well, I, you know what I, and what might this look like if it were fun? Well, one of the things I've done in the past, which doesn't make anybody happy, at least of which myself is getting up at an event to talk about myself and the book that people have already bought to attend the goddamn event. It's so stupid. And, uh, it's boring for people. I mean, maybe it's not boring. People seem to have had fun with it, but if I'm asking

myself, what might this look like if it were easy? And what might this look like if it were fun? It would be me on stage interviewing someone like Terry Crews to get material that's not in the book to record it to then put it on the podcast. Right. Fantastic. And yeah, that's. That's ingenious. Yeah.

So that's how I'm thinking about it. It's still like a lot of work though. I mean, I'm still like, you It's still like a lot of work though. I mean, I'm still like, you know, what's a day like? How do you get through the day managing all the, I mean, you got people working with you and helping you and you systematize this stuff to a certain extent. But they're still like staying on top of like, okay, what's due? What's going up? When's that happening? All of that.

Like that's. There's a good amount of stuff. I will say that for a book launch, for for instance uh 90 of the work is the book itself right because in in today's world you might be able to game the system if if you want to use the black arts and there's all sort of funny all sorts of funny business that people use with book launches it's crazy uh i mean including things that I would call book laundering, all sorts of trickery that you can use to trick people for, say, a week. But that's about it. If your book sucks, it's toast. I mean, it's just not going to last. It needs to stand on its own two feet. And so the vast majority, it's no mistake,

for instance, that this book with the pull quotes they're almost all now it's antiquated in a sense because I guess 280 characters now for Twitter but almost all these pull quotes are gonna be less than 140 characters that's not a mistake right easily tweetable exactly and but also the content itself and meaning in the nitty gritty of the chapters. And then the 8%, now we're at 98%, right? Then 8% is planning for months in advance. Not necessarily what you're going to do, but what you're not going to do.

So I'll do a review of the last launch and see what pulled its weight and what did not. And categorically, no to almost everything. For instance for instance facebook live in almost every case no will i promote your facebook live no unless you give us advertiser access i mean we can get into the nitty-gritty but it's like no we didn't see any return and you want us to promote the interview that i'm doing on your platform no that defeats the whole purpose of being on and that's always a weird thing yeah and what i've noticed and we're bouncing all over the place but it's like with No, that defeats the whole purpose of being on. That's always a weird thing. Yeah. And what I've noticed, and we're bouncing all over the place, but it's like with, I have not sent, people may not believe this, but I have literally not sent out a single email to anyone in that book saying, could you please promote? Zero.

Because my assumption is, I've sent them all copies. They're doing it because they want the promotion yeah or i mean hopefully they like the book too but it's like i sent them all inscribed books that i spent a lot of time on and that's it and my assumption is if they really like it so that they would be comfortable sharing it they'll share it right if they're not comfortable sharing it and i try to in any way pressure them into it it's going to create skeezy yeah and it's going to create a discomfort that fucks things up later right it's like if i'm playing the long game and maybe i want to have them on the podcast later like doing that is it jeopardizes that and last like maybe i could get them to promote,

but they're not totally into the book. That's also a long-term loss. So I just let it ride. This is what I did with the last book too. And fortunately, I mean, people have been super, super stoked. But in any case, I don't want to get into all of that stuff. But yeah, what would this look like if it were easy? I mean, I'm thinking for the

next book i might just i mean who knows maybe but like i have a couple book ideas in my head which is just my addiction to masochism i guess and i might just give them away for free honestly that's sort of like what james altucher does doesn't he yeah yeah i've given away a lot of books yeah i mean as long as i didn't allow that to give me permission to lower the quality which i think is a is a is a tricky temptation if you're doing giving my stuff for free but it's like you know the most important thing i've ever written i think is a free blog post that i spent months on which was the uh some practical thoughts on suicide. I mean, tough, tough post, most difficult thing to publish I've ever published, but you know, that was free.

It took me months to get done. Um, so where are you, you know, you mentioned earlier, like the personal mountaintop or the summit, like, you know, what is that for you? Like, where are you taking all this adventure heading, Tim Ferriss? I don't know. And that's part of the excitement for me. I really don't know. What I do know, I don't know where I'm going. And not to, I'll pull out another woo-woo cliche,

but the attribution I don't have, maybe you do, but not all who wander are lost. attribution I don't have, maybe you do, but not all who wander are lost. Like I'm actually enjoying exploring right now in what is to me, very new territory, right? For some people they've lived with their emotions and experienced and explored them and felt them for their whole lives. It's not true for me. Um, so this is, this is a brand new terra incognita for me. What are the people closest to you saying to you about this? Like, are they noticing a change in you? Yeah. They're everyone who's really close to me without any prompting from me, without knowing anything about the silent retreat or whatever, we'll sit

down with me for dinner or something. And they'll say, what's going on with you? Not in a bad way. They're just like, there's something different about you. What's going on? And I feel really good. So I'm happy. I'm more than happy right now. And it's not a trade, but if we, if we looked at it that way, I'm, I'm completely happy, But if we looked at it that way, I'm completely happy, elated to trade knowing the destination for just feeling good. And that's where I am right now. Most, if you want to look at it from a professional standpoint, like my most incredibly critical professional opportunities and decisions have come from Slack in the calendar, right? So there are the must do things that are important. Like we talked about that, for instance, some of these things that I put on the calendar for the next month or two, but beyond that, because that's the most important thing beyond

that, after something like this, a book launch or a TV show launch, whatever it might be, I leave a lot of the calendar open because I cannot, whatever I might plan, I assume cannot take into account the incredible and fascinating things and people that will come out of the woodwork as a result of say a launch like this so i just create the space for that all of my best investments if you look at like twitter facebook uber alibaba all this stuff they all came from gaps in the system yeah not through some crazy grand design no white boarding how this is gonna go no no i mean if it's it's for me and i had a conversation with tim o'reilly recently on my podcast which was so much fun uh for people who don't know him you can just check him out he's he's uh considered or he's been nicknamed the trend spotter in silicon valley really good guy and And he spends a lot of time just sitting in stillness and just listening. And that's either going to make some semblance of sense to people or it's not, I won't try to really dig into it, but through meditation and other things, he's, for instance,

on his one habit that has most positively impacted his life in the last year or so is on his morning runs. He goes running every morning. He makes it a point every morning he goes on a run to stop and take a photograph of a flower. Right. And that's an example of just like stopping and experiencing some stillness. And then he'll just pause for a second and then continue on his run. And I'm, I think I've, I've spent so much time yelling at myself internally for so much of my life. There was very little stillness and now I'm taking time and look, I still have my monkey mind. I still have bullshit that bounces around in my skull. And when I sit down and

meditate for those people who might be wondering, like if I meditate for 20 minutes, I would say 19 minutes of that. It's just like to-do list, porn, stupid argument, imaginary hypothetical discussion I might have. It's just nonsense. And then there are like 30 seconds where I'm like, oh, this is possible. Like this, this state of stillness is actually possible. brief and learning to instead of constantly yelling at myself just like pause and i was walking through washington dc a couple of days ago in during this crazy time book launch with a back-to-back insane schedule and going to an event with 800 or 1000 people and and i this up this is another thing I've never done before. I've been reading, oh man, certain poetry.

It's precisely because it does not have an explicit purpose. I want to develop a... That's some serious counter-programming. Yeah, no, like I want to develop a tolerance for that. And I came across... I've tried all sorts of poetry and almost all of it I've ended up rejecting. I'm like, either like, don't get it. I just don't get it. Or it's too flowery or whatever.

And then I found, in English, most people say Hafez, H-A-F-I-Z, who was born about 100 years after Rumi, who people may have heard of. Hilarious. This guy's hilarious. Some of his poetry is so funny. And so I've made it a habit. I've been traveling with this book, which is heavy. But I wanted a paperback and reading one poem a night basically and so i read one before i left the hotel and it talked about in effect just paying attention to stillness and the small sounds that

make you feel better and i was like okay well like as i kind of intended tribe of mentors to be it's like all right i want using the poetry to just have a lens or a question or an idea that i can then put on and walk with for a few hours for the rest of the day so i did that i'm walking through dc and shit's going bonkers and they're like cars blocking off streets because such and such muckety muck is driving down chaos people seem pretty grumpy and then there was this tree i walked by just full of these birds with this incredible bird song right and i was i was fairly agitated like coming into it because i was sleep deprived it's it's a very full week i just paused for like 15 seconds there's no downside to that and just like and listen to these birds and be like, all right, despite all the bullshit going on right now and all the noise, there's this in the middle of the city.

And it just that like one degree changed my state enough that then you telescope out an hour later after walking another mile, get to the venue and I'm in a really good mood. And that's all it took. another mile get to the venue and i'm in a really good mood right that's all it took so i'm trying to pay more attention to those tiny little gaps of stillness instead of just continuing to yell at myself which has has has overall it's produced a handful of wins but it's it's done a lot more damage not sustainable yeah i just thought of the title for this podcast, like Tim Ferriss on why poetry will save your life. Oh, God. Yeah. It's yeah.

And I think one thing I'd like to underscore, because I'm sure there are people out there. score because I'm sure there are people out there. And if I had to guess, I would say a lot of them are probably super driven, aggressive, 20 something males in, in a state of hormonal nirvana because they're just like coursing with testosterone and everything else that'll just allow them to run through walls seemingly without any damage. I would say that what I'm talking about is not mutually exclusive from like the aggression and the winning and the competition. Like you can actually have both. You don't have to choose one.

That's the thing that scares so many people. They think if I start doing that, I'm going to lose my edge or that thing that I've imagined that I've decided is the thing that gives me an advantage and allows me to do what I do in the world. Yeah. That's why a lot of, a lot of my friends, uh, haven't tried meditation because they're, they're just, they're like, Hey man, I'm, I'm really, I'm worried that I'll lose that edge. It's the wording. That's the exact wording they use. Like, I'm worried I'll lose my edge and I won't be able to get it back.

I'm too lackadaisical. If I accept too much, I'll become complacent. Now, the counterpoint to that, you could put a really, you could put like a Machiavellian lens on that and say, imagine yourself in a negotiation and it's very tense. And this person puts something on the table that offends you and you have that extra second to reflect and be present and to like gauge how you're going to respond to that i mean that is like a tactical advantage if there ever was one oh yeah i mean there there are there are definitely tactical advantages uh and i will say that if you if you do a bunch of meditation and woo stuff like there are probably times when you're going to be like i'm so chilled out i just don't really want to

do anything today i'm not gonna lie like there are those moments but i would say a few things to that a does it really matter like what are you striving in the most like like on a macro level like what are you striving for exactly is it to ultimately like chill the fuck out and enjoy things maybe on some on some plane of existence secondly just like you said uh there is a certain magic in not caring and i think that when you incorporate some of these practices which could be as simple as the morning meditation if you're like you know what all this like feel-good stuff don't really care about it you can get some of the feel-good stuff as a side effect of uh from just trying to be more effective by incorporating say morning journaling with the uh keeping in mind the state story strategy progression right and uh that i remember one of the best pieces of advice i ever received

related to negotiation was super simple someone said to me he who cares less wins and basically if you have walkaway power or the ability to just say no. So another, based on that in part, uh, I also developed a rule for myself, which I follow. I have followed very, very, very consistently, which is if so, if someone tries to pressure me to make a decision quickly, the answer is no. Like if you want, if you want a knee jerk response, if someone's like, blah, blah, blah, closing tomorrow, oversubscribe, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like tomorrow oversubscribe i don't know like i either yes or no now like i'm not going to leave until you say yes to x i'm like then the answer is no absolutely no it's like any on the spot decision that you want me to make or forcing me to make

answers no and uh there's tremendous power in that uh and it's a muscle that you strengthen as you practice it and you realize like oh shit like the world didn't end right and it's not just it's not that you don't care like it's more that you're not defined by the outcome or you're not attached you don't have an expectation around the outcome like you know that you're good outside of however this goes down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, we could, we could keep going and going and going. I mean, there's so many things you can do. For instance, you know, I found out recently that Elon Musk went, I think it was in college, 30 days on $1 a day. Did he really? To teach himself that he could do it. Uh, Kevin Kelly, one of my, I would consider him a mentor.

Certainly he's in the book. I mean, my vote or one of my votes for the real world, most interesting man in the world. Fascinating guy. He's got an Amish beard, built his own house, technology futurist who can predict all sorts of crazy things that are coming down the line, even though he never went or he dropped out of school. I mean, his story is just nuts and um kevin also at periods of time would go on extended backpacking trips he still does i mean he's got to be in his 70s now travels with his kids quite a bit and his wife and he'll go say a week of sleeping in his sleeping bag just eating oatmeal and nothing else that's it saw my tent yeah yeah

i sleep in that tent yeah and you do that every once in a while i try to do something like that at least a few days a month i almost always fast at least three days a month uh contiguous days a month which you do need to be careful with you can fuck yourself up so have someone qualified supervisor for stuff like that but uh when you practice uh the the removal of of wants when you have a renunciation practice of some type or an aesthetic practice of some type cold exposure also one of my favorites although it's it's not really the same category, you begin to teach yourself not or realize in some cases, not only can you survive, say, sleeping in the tent or going a week just having like shitty instant coffee and oatmeal and a sleeping bag. But for anyone who's gone from, say, the hustle bustle, grind, grind, grind to like a seven to 10 day hiking trip.

How good do you feel after that? You don't just survive. You feel so revived from it. It's actually like a path towards that thing that we're all seeking for. We're just doing it by pursuing the wrong avenues. You know, it's like through that simplicity and through that, you know, renunciation, even if it's just on a micro level, you can find a sense of self and a sense of calm and a contentedness that, that, you know, we're trying to get and all these other things that we're doing in our life and that continue to elude us. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. two or three years now, uh, which I do almost all the time, uh, probably not on book lunch, but for, uh, for most of the time, uh, screen-free Saturdays. So that, that doesn't mean there are a few exceptions. Uh, I am allowed to use things like Google maps or Uber or whatever

I need to actually get around and survive. But no laptop, no social media. And I have a lot of things that come out on Saturday pre-scheduled, right? So that I don't have to interact on Saturdays. But so screen-free Saturdays have been really helpful to also train me and to train other people to realize the world doesn't end. It's amazing that we're in this place now where it's like, oh my God, a whole day on a Saturday when you don't work that you're not going to look at a screen. Like, you know, craziness. This is where we're at. A fidgety, anxious populace clicking on things is a sort of economically productive populace for many of the companies who design these things and whose revenue models are predicated on advertising or contextual or native advertising.

You don't even realize is advertising, but that is split tested so that you have salacious or scary headlines. Does it feel good to be in Austin and out of that environment? Yeah, you know, Austin feels really good. And I think part of it was finding a better environment for the next chapters of tim professionally and personally i've always had a gravitational pull to austin i wanted to move there after college just didn't get the job at trilogy software and then i got an offer after trilogy is that joe lemont yeah yeah i went to college with joe yeah really yeah no kidding so you went to college

then also with mike maples who was his roommate uh i didn't know him i knew joe i just have a vivid memory of of joe having this house in palo alto it was exactly like those houses from the social network and there were just dude like code monkeys on all these computers and there would be we you know he would throw these huge parties and all these people there and i remember when he's like yeah i'm out like i'm dropping out like I'm my market window is closing and I was like what are you talking about this is like 1987 or something yeah I thought he was out of his mind yeah yeah he's done all right and yeah I don't resent the decision not to hire me I was but I think I make a terrible employee

actually so it's likely a good decision, Austin's always had this pull for me. Uh, so I think that, uh, it gets really nice as I'm considering the next things I'm going to do to have friends who have nothing to do with tech. Uh, and some of my best friends still live in SF. Um, and I love those people, but, uh, it's, it's very new for me to be in a place like Austin where one of my best friends is a filmmaker. Another one of my best friends owns a jujitsu school. You know, another friend is a musician and it goes on and on. So the inputs are so novel and new for me. I think that I'll have a chance to use parts of my brain that have been maybe neglected for a while, which would be nice. So I'm digging it. I'm really digging it.

My pup likes, Molly pup likes Austin as well. Lots of green. Well, cool, man. We got to land this plane. Yeah. You guide us in. I'm excited for you, for your new chapter. And it was great getting to know you.

And it's going to be cool, I think, how this plays out for you as you continue to kind of pull on these threads emotionally. So, good, man. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you being open and sharing all that stuff today. My pleasure. Yeah, my pleasure. Love to just say for, for people listening that, uh, a big part of me opening up in this way, which, um, is getting easier, but it's not easy for me is to hopefully help people or to minimize how isolated so many people can feel, which I felt for a long time,

that I was somehow, if I ended up in a dark place or in a dangerous place even, that I was uniquely flawed and there was no way out and that I was suffering this alone and that other people were just fine and I was a broken toy

and what's the point, et cetera. All this self-talk, again, the retreating into story, all this self-talk, again, the retreating into story, into these loops that can be really perilous and certainly punishing and can create a lot of suffering. You're not alone. And part of the reason that I ask all the people I interview in my books, the recent ones anyway, you know, about failures and so on is to highlight the fact that I ask all the people I interview in my books, the recent ones anyway, about failures and so on, is to highlight the fact that most of the people we think of as superheroes are walking flaws with tons of insecurities and neuroses who have somehow figured out how to build habits around one or two strengths. I mean, really. And I i mean you and i both know some

really really accomplished people and they might not talk about it publicly and they don't have to but like trust me uh with rare exception i can't think of one maybe one but he's like a robot uh the rare exception uh they are all fighting battles that you know nothing about and it's safe to assume also that everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about there's no question about it you know we we project an idealized version of what these people's lives are like that we that we idolize or or that we you, you know, sort of see on screens, they're just human beings, you know, and successful or not, there's no escaping the human condition. Yeah. And there's a, there's, you know, there's a,

there's an expression in you hear sometimes in startups or business, which is a don't believe your own hype. And it might also be phrased as don't believe your own press releases. And what I would say just by analogy is you know if if your facebook feed or instagram feed isn't a complete picture of your life like don't believe the the story and the hype of all of your friends who seem to have the perfect lives on instagram and facebook it's still that's also just the highlight reel right of course so uh yeah someone needs to i remember a friend of mine was saying very

successful friend of mine was saying like where's the instagram feed of me like crying eating haagen-dazs at two in the morning watching like reruns of growing pains like you don't see that very much he's like someone needs to make that Instagram account just to weigh out all the others. I bet there is one or two, but, uh, but I think it speaks to the power of, of, of vulnerability, you know, and this is, this is really what you're doing. Like you're, you're taking this leap into, you know, sharing aspects of who you are in your story in a public setting, which is frightening and takes courage. But I think you're experiencing, you know, the emotional connection, the very real emotional

connection that that creates with not just your audience, but those people who care for you, you know, and it's powerful. It's really powerful. And that is, that is how you can help other people heal. That's my hope, man. So thanks for giving me a forum to have the discussion and thanks for bringing it out. Yeah. My pleasure, man.

The book is tribe of mentors available everywhere. You buy books. It's hard to escape Tim on the internet. I usually go out of your way to not have him show up somewhere, but he is T Ferris on twitter two r's two s's correct that's right yeah tim ferris two r's two s's as well on facebook and instagram now two podcasts two podcasts if you search tim ferris podcast you'll have a bunch pop up if you go on the charts you should probably see tribe of mentors which is a shorter format the episodes are

10 to 30 minutes instead of one and a half to three and a half hours, which are my usual in the Tim Ferriss show. And you can find also a couple of sample chapters, a full list of mentors from Tribe of Mentors at tribeofmentors.com. If you want to take a peek, a lot of good books out there, but I got to give it a plug. You know, if you're, if you're looking for a gift book, I will say very self-interestedly, of course, that I do think there's something in this for just about anybody because it's a choose your own adventure book, like you mentioned. Yeah, it truly is. I mean, you could just pop it open to anywhere randomly or intentionally and, uh, and find good stuff.

Yeah. It will, you know, continue to enrich you in mysterious ways. Regardless, I certainly wish everyone very happy, very safe holidays. I'll close with one thought which is actually borrowed from Gertrude Stein. I

read her say this recently and I'll paraphrase, which is the golden rule goes in two directions. And for those of you who need a reminder, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Also do unto yourself as you would do unto others. So if you're going to practice kindness this holiday season, which I hope you do and beyond start with yourself. Beautifully put. Good talking to you, Tim. You too, man. So that was it. We did it. It's over. That was Tim Ferriss and I.

What'd you guys think of that? It was pretty intense, right? I thought it was really great. I mean, let's be honest. I'm just delighted that I was able to have that kind of conversation with Tim. An amazing experience for me. And I really hope that you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. Take a moment to let Tim and myself know what you thought of the episode on Twitter at T Ferris, two R's, two S's, and you know where to find me at Rich Roll. Be sure to pick up a copy or two or five of Tribe of Mentors. It really is great. It makes for a phenomenal holiday gift.

It's packed with just so much insight from this massive array of some of the most interesting and amazing and dynamic and accomplished people on planet Earth. Also, you can watch our entire podcast on YouTube, youtube.com forward slash richroll. We filmed the whole thing. It's really great. If you enjoy it there and you want to see more podcasts on video, please subscribe to

my channel and leave a comment there below that video. Also, please make a point of checking out the show notes on the episode page for this podcast at richroll.com. Tons of links and resources enumerated there with many links relevant to today's conversation, including the people mentioned, the books mentioned, Tim's TED talk, all of it designed to take your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe on Apple podcasts. That really helps with the show's visibility. It helps extend reach. It helps expand the audience,

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financially to my work. And thank you so much to everybody who has done that. I have scheduled the next Ask Me Anything exclusive AMA video, interactive video content that I'm providing for my Patreon supporters. That's going to be on December 21st at 2 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. But you got to be a supporter on Patreon to join that. So you can check that out if you are and put it in your calendar. Again, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rich Roll. And if you would like to receive a free semi-weekly email from me, I send one out every week or two. It's called Roll Call. Five or six things that I found inspiring, informative, helpful, enlightening,

uh, some articles I read a couple of products that I've enjoyed a documentary that I watched a video that I found illuminating, no spam, not trying to sell you anything, no affiliate links, not any money being made on this, just good stuff. You can sign up for that, uh, in any of the email capture windows on my website. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Sean Patterson for help on graphics. Bobby Sudd, who filmed today's podcast and edited it. Thank you so much for that. And theme music, as always, by Anilema. See you guys back here soon until then stay grateful

practice that gratitude remember how i opened this podcast it's so important you guys keep it in the forefront of your mind prioritize it and watch your experience of this holiday season be transformed peace plants namaste Peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.