The Tim Ferriss Show - #210: Becoming the Best Version of You

Episode Date: December 20, 2016

This is a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. The audio is from a live conversation with not one, not two, but three guests: Josh Waitzkin, Ramit Sethi, and Adam Robinson. Josh Waitzkin is an endlessly fascinating person who gets mentioned a lot on this show for good reason. For the uninitiated, Josh was the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He's perfected the techniques that made him into a chess prodigy and a jiu-jitsu black belt, and he shared them in his book The Art of Learning. Ramit Sethi (@ramit) is a personal finance guru who has built a huge company from his blog. He's the best-selling author of I Will Teach You to be Rich. Adam Robinson is the trusted outside global macro advisor to the heads of some of the world's largest hedge funds and family offices. He's written a best-seller on test preparation, developed artificial intelligence text analysis, been recognized as a chess master, and he's hilarious. I hope you enjoy this special edition of the podcast. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now, this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This podcast is also brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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like every episode, it is my job to try to tease out the habits, routines, and specifics from world-class performers so that you can test them and apply them in your own lives. This is a special edition because the audio is coming from a live performance, although I'm not sure you'd call it performance, conversation, a collection of grab-assing and insightful, hopefully, answers from my guests at the 92Y, 92nd Street Y in New York City. It was my first live podcast event on the East Coast, and we had a blast. The guests are threefold. We have two favorites that you guys have loved in the past, and those are Josh Waitzkin, best known as the inspiration, the basis for Searching

for Bobby Fischer. He's thought of as a chess prodigy, but he has a framework and approach that he has applied to several different fields to become world champion in push hands, among other things. Now works with a lot of the top people in the finance world. We have Ramit Sethi, and Josh can be found at joshwaitskin.com.

He very rarely crawls out of his cave, but he joined us on this occasion. Ramit Sethi, at Ramit on both the Twitters and Instagram. He is the, I suppose you could call him, personal finance guru who has built a huge company out of his blog, which started way back in the day. And he is the bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, also has a site by the same name. And then we have a new guest that is Adam Robinson, very close friends with Josh Waitzkin. And where should we begin? Well, you can learn about him at robinsonglobalstrategies.com,

but check this out. Look at this bio. All right. So Adam has made a lifelong study of outflanking the competition. It began with acting as the co-founder, one of the two co-founders of the Princeton Review. So he developed a revolutionary approach to taking standardized tests. And his book became the first ever based on test prep to be reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and become a New York Times bestseller. After selling his interest in that company, he turned his attention to the then emerging field of artificial intelligence. This was in the early 90s, and he developed a program that could analyze text and provide human-like commentary.

He was later invited to join a well-known quant fund, this is in the world of investing, to develop statistical trading models. And then following that, and currently, he is an independent global macro advisor to the chief investment officers of a select group of the world's largest hedge funds, as well as family offices. And he has a degree from Wharton. He has a master's degree from Oxford University. And not only that, he is a rated chess master who was awarded a life title by the United States Chess Federation. And as a teenager, he was personally mentored by Bobby Fisher in the 18

months leading up to his winning the world championship. So seems like too incredible to be nonfiction, but that is Adam and he is, he is hilarious. So I think you guys will really enjoy those three guests. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And I must mention that the live event was helped by MeUndies and Exoprotein. They provided all sorts of goodies to the attendees. So check out some of my favorite underwear and lounge pants. I'm wearing them right now, in fact, at meundies.com forward slash Tim. And you can check out Exoprotein. These are the only bars that I eat these days. And I like them so much that I ended up becoming an investor and advisor to the company. No soy, no dairy, no grain, no gluten, but paleo, 10 grams of protein, and it's the company. No soy, no dairy, no grain, no gluten,

but paleo, 10 grams of protein, and it's real food. You can check it out. It is based on cricket protein of all things, which is about as pure and unadulterated as you can get with full spectrum protein. So check it out, xoexoprotein.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Josh, Ramit, and Adam. So you guys may be familiar with Mr. Waitzkin, the esteemed Mr. Waitzkin. I'll give a little bit of context for those who might not know him, and then I'll let him correct me. Well, many people think of him as a chess prodigy if you've read or seen searching for bobby fisher very much based on his life although i don't think

the word prodigy applies to josh in so much as he really has a an extremely methodical and conscious approach to learning and mastery and he's applied that to tai chi push hands in which he was a world champion. He's applied it to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. First black belt, right? Under Marcelo Garcia, who is the phenom, probably the most successful, best grappler who's ever lived.

And I'll leave it at that for now. Works with a lot of interesting top performers. And we'll get into that, I'm sure. Ramit, where should we begin? It starts a long time. With the long walks on the beach, both of us, and turned a blog way back in the day into one of the most successful destinations and resources for personal finance and very much more than that, has a hugely successful company, has been featured in, was it Fortune? And a spread right aside to Warren Buffett. That's a pretty good company.

And Adam, I think I'm going to leave the introduction, Adam, our mystery guest, to Josh to give just a little bit of context on who Adam is. Okay. Timbo, it's great to be here with you. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Adam is a dear friend of mine. My five-year-old son, Jack, would say he's a closer friend with him. He's a beautiful human being. Adam, back in the day, in the 1960s, was a chess master. He's still in a chess master, but that was when he was really actively playing chess. I'm glad for that. that was when he was really um actively playing chess after that well then he was very close friends with bobby fisher for better or worse in the in the 60s 70s um to really at the center of the of the chess world back then then adam founded the princeton review so he's one of the most

fascinating educational minds he's written 10 educational books um and i've watched adam just work with my little boy with so many people in education. He's a brilliant mind around the learning process. And then Adam took his kind of uniquely versatile mind and applied it to economics, macroeconomics. And that's the world in which he and I met a number of years ago. And Adam is a consultant with some of the, I can't say their names because confidentiality is a huge part of what Adam does but some of the most brilliant and well-known names in the finance industry he's an incredibly brilliant thinker in a lot of fields and I love the guy he's a really beautiful

human he will charm all of you with his his charisma he just captures the room he tried to pinch Ramit's nipples earlier. Wait a second. Wait a second. It's the other way around. It was a welcome approach. So, no, this is a common greeting where he's from. He and I have safety words. Yeah, we do have safety words. And we're going to get into all sorts of nonsense because that's kind of my style. But we have a very smart crew here.

I thought I would just begin by dumbing it all down. Josh, can you tell us, Josh gave me a warning before we got started. It was a tooth caveat. What's happening with the tooth? Be very careful of things you say to Tim right before he pulls you onto his podcast. I've learned that several times. I forgot it this time around. I have a, a number of years ago, I was spearfishing. Free diving is something I love. I was spearfishing uh free diving is something i love i was spearfishing and i it was actually an interesting moment because i had just um speared a couple mutton snapper for lunch with my family down in on habit island in the southern bahamas and i was just taking target practice with this kind of hawaiian sling it's like a bow and arrow and i was shooting these little shells 20 25 feet away just stroking it and i had reached this

this realization where if you barely touch the spear barely grip it as you know from bow and arrow like there was I was just missing by a quarter inch versus large longer and I was in this beautiful zone and then my sister screamed Josh there's a big big barracuda swimming with her and I thought she was in trouble so I released the wrong side of it it exploded into my tooth and um so I had this wonderful snaggle tooth and I just told Tim right before that it came loose right before now so i might i i could very easily have a snaggle tooth with a screw hanging out within about five ten minutes of the beginning of this this discussion which will add to the flavor of it so i'm not sure why we're talking about that but there it is so for those of you listening on audio only this is what you miss when you come

when you don't come to a live tim ferris show. I thought we'd begin, and maybe Adam, we'll start with you. We are recording this towards, say, the tail end of a year. How do you think about the transition from one year to the next? Do you have year's resolutions, or do you have any particular routines or approaches as you close out a year? I try to take stock of what I've learned the past year. And I've learned three things that this year and which two of which you exemplify. And I wish I had known them when I was younger. And I'd like to share them because I think they're

the keys to success. And again, you exemplifyify them and the first is the importance of enthusiasm with everything that you do absolutely everything the second is the importance of connecting to people you know i i live in the world of ideas and it's only this year that i've learned the importance of connecting with brothers like you guys and and the third, this is best illustrated with a metaphor. About 20 years ago, I met the dog who was in The Mask. Do you remember the Jim Carrey movie, The Mask?

Was that just like a personals ad? This was the... No, I met the dog and his trainer. Oh, okay. Got it, got it. So I met the dog and his trainer, and we were walking down the street in New York. And the dog, so this is a star dog, right? A Hollywood star dog.

And so he was walking down, a little Jack Russell Terrier, walking down the street. And every time someone passed by, he went like this. And walked a little further. And I thought, that's so perfect. He expects magic in every encounter. And I think that's one of the key things that I've learned, that if you expect magic in every encounter, you find it. And like this.

I mean, I'm really excited for you guys because i know the magic that's going to happen here with with this crew so uh so that's what i've learned this year so that's what i do with my new years do you now is that something that you ruminate on as an internal dialogue is it something you write down how do you uh are there any ways in which you attempt to ensure that you continue to pay attention to those things? I just try to live it. I mean, there's no... Expecting magic, I just...

Again, I picture that little dog walking down the street. And I lean into every moment expecting magic. The way that dog leaned into every person. Well, I think we saw that we saw that in the green room just before we get we're not going to name names but to everybody in the room even people he hadn't met if he heard their name sort of uh from far away he would go jack and just walk straight up and the person would be like hi and then big hug And then thick as thieves right from the get-go. Ramit, what about you?

How do you think about the end of years, the beginning of new years? I think about relationships. I think in the past it was, you know, I'm 23 or I'm 25 or I'm 28. Where am I supposed to be? And I think at a certain point, that sort of loses its... You realize there's no real roadmap, right? You're going to carve out your own path. The thing that became more important for me is who am I meeting? What's the quality of those relationships? And so if it was up to me, I'll basically sit in my house and work all day long.

And that's just like, I love it. That's what I want to do. And I would just do that forever. And that's probably not the healthiest approach to life. So I try to force myself to go out, not only maintain the relationships I have, but build new ones. And I think the end of the year is a really good time to take stock. So I actually have a list of every single person I met the whole year. I have it in a Google Doc. And I just look at it and say like, like, this is, is this, first of all, is this the right level that I want to be doing?

Like, if I've met five people, that's, that's not good for me. And also, is it just making lists or is it actually making you friends? Like I said, it would be easy for me to just sit around and just work all day. So are you then each, let's say you come home, you've had a number of meetings that day or that week, and on a weekly basis, you're inputting these names? No, I just write it down. I just write down their names. That's it. I see. Just so I can go back and look and say,

like, hey, these are amazing people that I met. And now I'm remembering, I look at it every week. Oh, okay. Wow. I found this interesting article. I want to send it over. Oh, I'm going out to the museum. Let me text this person to come hang out. And it's just a good reminder for me that the business is the business. It's going to grow this and that. But the one thing that I want to fight for to make time for is to build those relationships. What would you like to improve upon most personally or from a business standpoint next year? Oh my God. Easy, easy. By a factor of a thousand. It's becoming a better leader and manager. I feel like in my business, we get the human psychology part of what we do. That's what we do.

But management and leadership is so infinitely complex that I think I could spend the next 20 years just getting good, not even great. How do you think about, and this might be one that we get to as a group, but manager or management, I think, is relatively easy to grasp. People can envision what that means. What is a good leader? How would you define a good leader? Or what are the characteristics that distinguish them from someone who is merely a good manager of, say, a team of 50 people or 100 people? Well, first of all, I'm a student, so I'm trying to learn that myself. But the leaders that I've seen, first off, I think they know when to speak up and when not to speak up. Almost like a good parent. A good parent knows when to get in there and like,

oh, okay, you're about to fall off a cliff. Let me save you. But if you're just going to fall down on the grass, let me let you make that mistake. And that's something that I'm trying to learn, which doesn't come naturally to me. If it were up to me, I want to get in there every minute. And that's not a healthy way, I think, to be a leader. So that's something that I've been working on. My team's been telling me, and I have to listen to that. Other leaders, I think, create a vision for where they want to go, and it's more than money. And that's something that I'd like to get better at as well. I want to underscore something you just said, because it's something I'm also trying to get better at.

This falling on the grass, like letting people fall on the grass. And I don't recall the exact person this came up with, but it was someone who's in the B club, billionaire of some type. And they explained, actually, I do remember exactly who it was. And it was not somebody necessarily,

I don't think he's in the B club, but he's certainly very, very successful. Astro Teller. So he's the head of X, but he's certainly very, very successful. Astro Teller. So he's the head of X, formerly Google X. This is Google's moonshot factory. I guess now Alphabet's moonshot factory where they are working on things like Loon and contact lenses that can act as glucometers. All these really incredible bets on the future. And he was describing how in his organization, people would come to him for a conflict resolution. And he would make a point of insisting,

even though it would take a lot more time, that they figure out how to solve it themselves because he said, if I step in and I solve your conflict, I'm the parent you come to for the quick and easy path you will always come to me and i need to train you to actually develop the skill set of handling this dispute this type of conflict on your own uh what about you josh you're an introspective guy you're very good at blocking out time for deep work i think something that i try to emulate uh to the extent possible when I'm not running around

scattershot 24 seven. What did, what did, what did the last days of a year in the first few days of a year look like or mean to you? I think that's a particularly intense question for me right now, because I, first of all, I just turned 40 a few days ago and I took off for Costa Rica and surfed some big waves on my 40th, and I was reflecting on the year quite a bit. And I came extremely close to dying a year ago. I thought you were going to say again.

No, no, no, no. Like there's a pattern here. Although on the one wheel that came really close, like a couple weeks ago too, but nothing like this. The shallow water blackout. Yeah. And I, I, I think most of you have heard me speak about it with Tim on the podcast last time he pulled me onto it.

But I, um, I was long story short, I was doing this breath hold work and cold water immersion work. I made the mistake of doing it in the water. I've been lifetime free diver, but this not doing hypoxic breath work. And I didn't have, I didn't know even though I'd been free diving my whole life, that it was actually carbon dioxide that gave me the urge to breathe. Um, cause I'd never done breath work that would actually wipe all the carbon dioxide out of my system. And so I went from this ecstatic state to passing out, blacking out underwater, shallow water blackout. And I was in the bottom of the pool for three and a half minutes plus, um, after blacking out underwater, shallow water blackout. And I was in the bottom of the pool for three and a half minutes plus after blacking out before someone pulled me out.

And all the doctors said 45 to 60 seconds, I should be brain dead or dead. So that I've been reflecting on this year through the lens of that experience. And it's been, so I have, you know, as I mentioned to you before, I've had this year of just waves of love, gratitude, and beauty flowing through me. And I've never felt a more powerful dedication to every moment in life and to living life as fully as I can possibly live it. And a core lesson, you asked about lesson, for me that I think about broadly and across disciplines is how insanely important it is to be focused on the most important question, to know what it is. In this situation, I had a technical oversight. I wasn't present to the most important question, which is carbon dioxide is what gives you the urge to breathe. But when you work with brilliant investors, for example, there's no better way to

train someone than then folk then developing their ability to focus on the most important question same thing with chess players know where to look or martial artists know where to focus on it's not the great ones aren't who focus on more they focus on less actually and better and so like that lesson for me which i've applied to intellectual and physical disciplines my whole life, I blew it on in this critical moment of my life. And so it feels much more potent to me. Do you keep, say, the most important question in X? Let's just say it's a project or a challenge or problem, whatever it might be. I know that you have a very consistent journaling practice. Do you keep that question present so that you don't make, for instance, mistakes like that?

Using journaling, how do you go about ensuring that you don't miss that most critical thing when you need it most? Well, as you know, my journaling system is based around studying complexity, reducing the complexity down to what is the most important question. Sleeping on it, and then waking up in the morning first thing, and pre important question i'm sleeping on it and then waking up in the morning first thing and pre-input brainstorming on it so i'm feeding the unconscious material to work on releasing it completely and then opening up my mind and riffing on it and then you're going to say something i was yeah uh you saw me pursing my lips like a goldfish so here we go uh the the question that i had was could you give somebody an example of the type of thing that you would drop into your mind so that you can digest it overnight like what could you give

us an example or examples of the types of things that you might yeah i actually at this point i've been doing this for like 20 some years personally and for now i i use question somewhat metaphorically so often studying complexity i'll study a like if i'm going to be working with someone i'll study a 20 page psychological diagnostic that i've someone's responded to and then i will just release it completely and that that whole thing will be the question and then then what i'll sit with then i'll wake up and sit with it or i'll do a workout and then sit with it and i'll just see what arises what what core patterns what core themes what core blockages did i pick up in all of that right because the unconscious is so much more powerful

at setting complexity than the conscious mind and are you then just jotting these observations or emergent thoughts down on paper as you capture them in that way is that yeah i actually use evernote you do i'm riffing on evernote now but but there's often a question as well i mean i find that most great thinkers are slicing through complexity like a knife through butter and then they arrive an area of stuckness and they'll spend a long time on that stuckness. And they can spend consciously at that point, days, weeks, months, at that stuck point. But they can also study everything involved at that stuck point, sleep on it, wake up, and just slice right through it. And so for me, the question is usually that area of stuckness after I've studied all the complexity.

And that rhythm between consciously integrating technical information into my being and then releasing it and then seeing what arises is a huge part of how I approach creativity. And for those people who haven't heard my conversation with Reid Hoffman, founder, or at least co-founder of LinkedIn, who's called the oracle of silicon valley oftentimes by a players in silicon valley uh he has a nearly identical process but uh but he i believe does it effectively right before bed you do not no am i right okay could you explain your rationale for for when you sort of infuse your mind with, say, some particular problem, data set, challenge, whatever it might be, and then let it go? What time do you do that and why?

I mean, in my experience, and Reid Hoffman's awesome, and I'm sure what he does is just crushing it for him. But for me, and for people who I've worked with, I've seen the pattern of if they're thinking about it right before bed, they're actually thinking about it consciously. They're not releasing the conscious mind, which is a huge part of that right so you think about hemingway's core principle which you were speaking about when in a in that podcast you did about our best hits or whatever you called it uh josh waste still i think was my headline just that he that he you know a core hemingway principle of of writing and then finishing his workday, leaving something left to write, right? As opposed to tapping the well, finishing it all up, which most people who are externally driven in what they're doing or thinking about how they're

looking or moved by guilt as opposed to something more intrinsic, they feel guilty if they're not, if they don't do everything they have to do versus, you know, Hemingway's principle about doing just that. It's very interesting, but he would always speak about and I read this when I was 11 years old which is a big part of my foundation I think in this in this habit he'd speak about the importance of stopping your thinking at that point then he would relax he would drink wine he would he would release a day drank a lot of wine and also for me as a chess player I found that if I studied chess openings up until bed I was thinking chess positions if I studied it earlier and then released it then I was able to dream about the inside.

So for you now, earlier, does that generally mean end of workday pre-dinner? End of workday pre-dinner. Yeah, and I usually have a workout post-workday, like right immediately at the end of my workday, I have some kind of exercise to do to flush my physiology. So it's before that workout. Okay, we're going to come back to the workout,

but I want to rotate. I could spend seven hours with each of these guys, So it's before that workout. Okay, we're going to come back to the workout, but I want to rotate. I could spend seven hours with each of these guys. And we have spent seven hours together, certainly. Adam, I'd love to know, and I've wanted to actually ask you this for quite a while, is in your calendar, say your weekly calendar, do you have any particular things blocked out or that occur on a weekly basis that are particularly important to you? I know that's super specific. So if nothing jumps to mind. Well, nothing jumps to mind. I advise clients, very large hedge funds on all global asset

classes. So equities, currencies, bonds, commodities, and it's 24-7. And so usually, and by the way, it starts Sunday night, which is when markets open up in China. So there's a brief window in the sense that what Josh does about consciously turning off his mind, I do that about three o'clock on Friday. And for the next 24 hours, I make a point of not thinking about global markets. And then already come Sunday morning, I have to get ready to hit the ground running. So that's usually when I get my ideas is Sunday, because I've given the week over on Saturday to just unconscious dreaming. And then I have to hit the ground running. What are the first few hours of Sunday look like? Do you have any particular morning routines or anything, boot up sequences that you use for yourself?

Work out, meditate. Josh introduced me to heart rate variability training, which is outstanding. I'm the kind of person who can't sit still for normal meditating. So what does your meditation look like? It's just heart rate variability training. I just watch my heart rate for 20 minutes, do it a couple times a day. So I start off the day with that. So it's like the cardiac equivalent of biofeedback or neurofeedback. Yes. And the workout, what is the workout?

Weights, very intense, get it over with. And then sometimes cycling. And then I start to write down what I expect to happen. I think the key to certainly investing is to have expectations and then wait to be surprised. And one of the key things with investing, I don't know how many of you invest, but I think this is a life truism, is to be aware when you hear a voice in your head that says, and you'll usually squint your eyes, or you'll hear someone say the following words,

doesn't make sense. And that's always a sign of something really powerful. So if somebody says to me, it doesn't make any sense why gold keeps going lower, I know that it's got a lot lower to go. Because what that person just said in saying it doesn't make sense is this person has a dozen logical reasons why gold ought to be going higher and it's going lower. And he says that doesn't make sense. But the world always makes sense. What doesn't make sense is his model. And this applies in life. In June, about a year ago, Donald Trump announced his candidacy. And his first, I think his first thing was was we're putting up a wall and and they're gonna pay for it um and his number shot up in the polls and somebody said to me and i

heard pundits on tv saying that doesn't make any sense and i thought oh my god wait but that's precisely it it means it's going higher if a stock goes up and it there's no rational reason it means that there's some x factor that you haven't considered because it makes total sense now in retrospect but then it didn't so whenever you hear someone say something doesn't make sense i was talking to sam zell, great real estate investor, and all he does, he reads the newspaper and all he's looking for are things that don't make sense. So I said, give me an example, Sam. And he says, okay, I'm reading the newspaper and I see that there's a Starbucks that's just opened up, this is like 15, 20 years ago, in Mongolia, right? And he thinks to himself, well, Mongolia, I thought they drank tea. What's with that? He's so curious about this because it makes no sense

that he takes his jet, private jet, flies to Mongolia, and he discovers that they've started mining. This was the beginning of the big China infrastructure build. And the only reason he knew about it was it didn't make any sense. So I'm telling you, that's the key thing. People stumble on these ideas and they dismiss them because they go, ah, it doesn't make any sense. And I'm telling you, that's where the gold mine is.

Things that don't make sense. That's all I pay attention to now. And on Sundays, when you're trying to come up with expectations or I suppose educated or just hunch. And I'm looking for things that don't make sense. No, I understood. There's so many things in my life that don't make sense.

This isn't a therapy session yet. Wait until the tequila comes out. What is the timeline? Are you looking for things that day? Are you looking at things that might occur over a longer time horizon? Sometimes I've set expectations weeks or months prior, and then I wait to see that things unfold as I expect it. And if not, you have to revise your hypothesis.

And one of the reasons I wanted Adam to be on stage is because we hadn't had a real chance to catch up in a while. And I was like, well, why don't we just do it in front of 900 people? So the question that we, I know we've chatted about just a little bit, but you have such an eclectic background. So you have the princeton review you have the chess and now global markets what makes you good at those different fields like if you if if we were talking you're a very humble guy but if we're talking to your closest friends and we ask them what is his superpower or what are the what are the unique abilities or combination of abilities that have made him good in these very seemingly unrelated fields? What would they say? Or what would you say?

Well, I might have to pull in Josh. I'm a heretic. So I always approach things to disrupt the order. And I start with looking for things that no one else will spot. And there are two places that I know people don't prospect. And I've already told you the first, things that don't make sense. And the second is things that are really obvious. It's obvious, no one bothers to examine it. And so in global markets, I start from the premise that understanding is an illusion,

that explanation is impossible. The world is simply too complex to understand, so I don't bother trying. And all I do is I watch investors attempt to make sense of the world, and they form views. So they're looking at the world, trying to predict what's going to happen. And all I'm doing is studying them, because they're the ones who are going to make buy and sell decisions and affect asset prices.

So they study the world. I'm behind them. It's like playing poker. I was going to say, don't play the hand, study the world, I'm behind them. It's like playing poker and- I was gonna say, don't play the hand, play the person across from you. Exactly. And so I see the hands that global investors are playing. So I don't try to understand the world, I just try to get into their heads in the same way I did with chess, right?

Getting into the head of the position or the other player. And in the SAT, getting into the head of the test. This is worth sharing. It'll take about 30 seconds. We've got plenty of time. I went to Wharton undergrad and I got a law degree at Oxford. I come back to New York, and I thought that what I wanted to do was write screenplays. So I go to a friend of my father's and he said, so what are you going to do now, kid? And I said, all expectation, I said, I'm going to be a writer. Just like that, like full of expectation, you know, a recent grad. And this guy was one of the top producers on Broadway ever of all time and he

looks at me for about a minute doesn't say a thing and then he says well then if you're going to be a writer I guess you better have something to say and I don't know shit I I what do I know I'm 25 I have nothing to say and I thought okay well I have to support myself somehow and while I'm writing and I I know if I went to Wall Street or worked in a law firm, I would never find the time to write. So I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll tutor kids. And I thought, well, what could I tutor them? And I thought, I know, the SAT.

Now, you don't know this, but back then, nobody was getting tutored. And I wrote to every private high school in New York. And I remember there were 31 at the time because I had to type 31 letters, the same letter, 31 times. It's like, dear Dalton, or dear Spence, you know, I just graduated. If you have any students who want to prepare for the SAT, send them my way. And out of that mass mailing, I got one student, just a single student. And so I gave her a practice test. I said, you do this, and we'll go over it. And what was fascinating was that she got all the easy questions right and all the medium questions right, but she missed every single hard question, every single one. And just closing your eyes and guessing,

you get one in five. She was batting zero. And she was smart. She was really smart. And I said, oh, Joanne, what are you? I still remember her name, Joanne. And I said, Joanne, could you just tell me your thinking process? And what was fascinating is she crossed off, let's say, choices A, B and C. Get it down to D and E and whichever one she chose, the answer was the other one. And I said, Joanne, could you just explain the logic? Again, trying to get into her head, always about getting into the head. It's all about appearances. It's all about thinking. There is no reality. Plato would have made a lousy investor. Anyway, to get back to Joanne.

Short Plato. Short Plato, exactly. So she says, well, I cross off the ones that I know are wrong. I said, good, good. Then what do you do? She said, well, I pick off the ones that I know are wrong. I said, good, good. Then what do you do? She said, well, I pick the one that I think is right. So I blurted out, well, you've got to pick the one you think is wrong. And then I realized, oh, right. I just cracked the SAT. The only reason a hard question is hard is that whatever seems plausible can't be right.

That's why it's a hard question. And that was my first insight. And then her score shoots up. She tells a bunch of friends and their scores shoot up. 10 students, 100, 200. Then I teamed up with a guy and then we started the Princeton Review. John Katzman. Who was, and I really apologize if I'm misattributing this, but was there a sort of fictional character that you used to typify? Yeah, so I said, because I didn't want her to get, so you get schizophrenic, because then she would think,

okay, well, I think that's right, therefore it's wrong, but wait a second. Like, she'd get into a feedback loop, right? This is like every day of my life. And her brain would explode. So when I was at oxford my my my don uh always referred to blogs as the man on the street so i i thought i would americanize him and i said okay well ask yourself what would joe blogs do and whatever he would do on a hard question you do the opposite and by the way if you're stuck on an easy question, the ones at the beginning, you follow whatever Joe Bloggs would do. And by the way, the test, because of these techniques,

they had to change the SAT because of the stuff I was doing. That's how you know you're doing something right. Yeah. So it's very different now. So you can't use those techniques. Did you ever cause irreparable harm to someone who actually had the last name blogs? I don't know. Okay. I hope not. I hope not. Just wondering.

Do you mind if I throw in one question to dig in on Adam a little bit? Sure, sure. Then I have a whole slew for our silent partner here. So one of the things that's so amazing about Adam is how prolific he is and how high quality it all is and he's he's in this realm of of economics in which maybe one of the first principles is don't speak publicly about one of your views because then you'll get locked into it you'll be able to change your mind and yet he's able to and so one of the the the things i think might be really interesting to hear you talk about is how do you avoid falling into constructs yourself when you're giving advice so consistently? Because I never have views on the

market. I'm always agnostic. So all I'm doing is reporting how the market is positioned to respond. So for example, last November, 13 months ago, early November, U.S. interest rates, I don't know if this will make any sense to you, but were 2.32% on the U.S. 10-year. And Janet Yellen was due to raise interest rates five weeks later. This is, again, about a year ago. And I sent out an alert to my clients saying that

interest rates were about to plunge to multi-year lows. And they said, that makes no sense. And I said, precisely. But I gave them the logic and they understood the logic. It's because one group of traders in the world has never been wrong about predicting interest rates. And it's not who you would think. Well, I'll tell you, it's metals traders. They're, they're always right about that interest rates. And, um, anyway, so I always, once a client asked me, I said, okay, rates are going lower. And he said, well, what would you need to see to change your view? Well, that's a good question. It's, it's the best question ever,

right? It's the scientific method. If you can't falsify your,? Well, that's a good question. It's the best question ever, right? It's the scientific method. If you can't falsify your hypothesis, you don't know whether it's true. If you don't know when you're wrong, you certainly don't know when you're right. So I said, oh, well, if we see copper versus gold rally sharply, then rates will rally. But if copper gold is going lower, then interest rates are going to go lower and they went they plunged she raised rates in december and by july they were at all-time lows which made no sense certainly to janet yellen right she was expecting them to go higher and they went lower so always that's the key thing with anything and probably you could apply that

question to to relationships like this is what i think well what would i need to see so you set that up you set up that marker ahead of time because otherwise confirmation bias will come in and you'll start to rationalize yeah well you'll not only have confirmation bias but then you might even have if depending on the position you take some type of sunk cost fallacy and just start layering problem upon problem. And it's also, by the way, just as a side note, a great way to avoid debates or arguments that will go absolutely nowhere. If you ask someone, this is slightly different, but is there anything I could say that would lead you to change your mind about X? If

that's what they want to have a debate about, if they say no, you're like, great, I'm going to go get a burrito. You can argue with this empty chair because it's pointless exercise to begin with. Such an important question. Ramit, you've really intelligently run, I mean, from my perspective, the company you've built and set policies in place and really made a study of management. And I've watched you refine it over time where you've not only become more successful as a company and organization, but you've become more relaxed and you seem like you have as much bandwidth as you'd care to have, even though your default is just jamming, jamming, jamming. What are some of the most important decisions or different decisions you wish you had made in the early days when you were hiring the very first people, let's say?

Oh, I mean, first things first, I wish that I had understood it's okay to let people make their own mistakes. And the idea that I don't have to be instrumental in every single decision. Now, we have a much bigger idea, a much more refined concept of big wins. Focus on the big things in life. Like for example, the thing that a lot of people may have heard me say is, don't worry about lattes, right? This is a classic thing in personal finance. Everyone says like, oh my God, is, don't worry about lattes, right? This is a classic thing in personal finance. Everyone says like, oh my God, don't spend $3 on lattes, which is the worst

possible advice you can ever listen to because we have limited cognition, limited willpower. We don't want to waste that precious resource on a $3 purchase, right? Get the big things right in life and you don't need to worry about that. I wish I would have applied that earlier on in the business to the people that I started working with. That was sort of unconventional. The other thing that was very conventional was hire great people, fire fast, the sort of things you sort of hear thrown around. Everybody hears it, everybody nods, and everybody ignores it until it happens to them. So every one of my friends who runs a business, we get together behind closed doors and everyone talks about the mistakes they made where they should have

listened to typical advice. And I think one of the problems if you get any level of success is that you start to think those basic rules don't apply to you, when in reality, they apply to you more than ever. So it's very important to just remember, get the basics right. And if you get the basics right in life, you don't have to worry about often optimizing at the margins. Life works pretty well if you have a good job, if you have good relationships, if you have a solid roof over your head, things are pretty good. And that's a good basic thing. Yeah, not majoring in minor things. And this is a lesson I had to learn for myself. Well, I've had to learn for myself repeatedly. I mean, letting the small bad

things happen to get the huge good things done. On the front of hiring, were there any particular books or resources? I know there's a book called Who that a lot of the startup CEOs that I know have found very helpful, which is sort of a distilled version of top grading. Were there any particular resources or bits of advice? I know you've done quite a bit with Jay Abraham, but maybe not on the hiring front. What were the resources or books or otherwise that you found most helpful? I wish I could recommend one, but this is something that I hear a lot of friends who are starting to hire and build their teams. They have 10, 15, 20 people, and they're starting to realize, hey, this is actually pretty important. And they come to me and they go, I want to hire a project manager. How do I hire the best project manager? And I say, basically get ready to eat shit for the next two years because it's really hard and there's no great book that's going to lay it out

because it is inherently complex and messy. And the fact of the matter is the first hire you make is going to be not good. The second's not good. The fifth, but eventually you're going to find, you're going to learn what works, what doesn't. And by the way, it would be different for my company than another company. And we just worked with it. We did a partnership with this other company and they start their meetings off by doing like a cheer and they, you know,

they like sing songs and our company does not do that. Okay. The beats company starts with ritual painting. We sing Kumbaya. And that's great. Their company is awesome. And our company is awesome in its own way. So nothing I could say would help them except that the best advice I could give them is you have to go through the fire. You got to do it. You're going to make mistakes. Just kind of accept that. Reminds me of this story that the director, writer, musician, polymath, Robert Rodriguez told me where he goes to these film festivals and he's had all these huge blockbusters now. And film students or would-be filmmakers come up to him and they go, yeah, you know, I want to do this, but this happened.

And then we didn't have enough money for that. And well, you know, you can't do A, B, and C because this happened. And he said, what they don't realize is that's the job of filmmaker. Nothing is going to work. And it's up to you. Like that is the starting point. Like literally the job description begins with nothing is going to work.

And then you have to figure it out. Now I want to talk to you a little bit about something we were chatting about in the green room, which I think you're particularly good at, and that is, uh, interacting with haters and belligerent people on the internet. Uh, so I've never had anyone send me an email like that in my life. So, so some people like golf, some people like boxing, some people like, I don't know, bad men. You like interacting with belligerent people on the internet.

Love it. So with every single one. So can you describe for us the rules of engagement and sort of best practices for this sport? Okay, let me break it down for you. Everybody listen up because you're going to get one of these people in your life. I'll tell you that right now. First of all, it is very, very sadistic. Okay. When do you get the chance to talk to somebody who runs up to you in the street and says like, F you? Never. It never

happens because people don't do that in the street. Right. But online they do it all the time. Yeah. And then, and then I think about like, I don't really feel much at risk because if I went to a comedy show, if I go to Comedy Cellar, I would never dream of heckling the comedian because that's their job. They're always going to win. So I sit there politely and I listen and I laugh and then I leave. When somebody comes in and sends you a message, but you see 50 or 100 of them a day, there's no chance of them winning. And actually, so I love it because I get the chance to interact with someone I normally would never interact with. If you play it right, you can get to see inside their mind and actually learn something pretty interesting. Sometimes they

might leave it at just F-U. But over time, I've come to realize it's very mathematical. Of 100 people that email me, so they'll say something like, F you or whatever. Just very irrational. Just to translate, that's Burmese. It's fuck you. I'll say something like, why? Because what you need to do at this point, you need to bring it down. You need to tone it down. Or I'll say, what's wrong? Are you having a bad hair day? It's very fascinating what happens next. So 50% of people never respond. You guys find that interesting? They sent you this email,

you respond back, they don't respond at all. So what's up with that? And if you really wanted to find out, you could re-reply a day later and track that. So what is up with that? Okay, I'll tell you what's okay. So let me, 25% of people are going to double down and get really, really angry. In which case you double down and put a picture of someone with a really bad hair day. Yeah. And now they don't know what to do. 25%. And this is, this is why it was all worth it. They go, Oh my God, I didn't know you were actually going to read this. And now you have a discussion, right? Now you can find out why did they send that.

And this happens to me all the time. I cannot even tell you how often. And it is so fascinating to get the chance to talk to someone who's been on my email list for say four years. They never have written me. They've literally gotten tens of thousands of pages of material. We've sent them for free. And the first thing they wrote was F you go, I go, what's up? Why'd you say that? And they go, you know, some random joke I made on page three of this email really set them off. And, and they just had to write back. They had to write back. And most of them, they still say, I didn't think anyone would actually read it. I find it so fascinating that in the world

where we are so connected to other people, there's so many people that feel that no one is actually listening, that they would send an email knowing that no one's going to read it. That's what they believe. They would send it with all this emotionally loaded language and they would just send it out there.

But when someone actually listens, they're struck. And that's when you can start engaging with them i find it totally fascinating so another technique another judo move that i've seen you do on twitter uh specifically which i admire uh and chris saka is also very good at this you should check out his technique is when someone will be like hey fuck you scam artist what the fuck get rich ha ha ha lols you know and you'll risk and and and you'll respond with something like interesting i'm i'm intrigued tell me more and then they don't know what to do because they're expecting you either respond with some anger respond with something trying to be clever but instead you're like, interesting.

Okay. So here's the thing. People are pattern matching, right? If you read Cialdini's book, Influence, he talks about click-wer. You do something and people are going to respond. Very programmatic. Click-wer? It's like, he's- Oh, I got it. Wer. Yeah. People are programmatic. So if you write someone an angry email, they're almost always going to write back really angry. But for me, there for me, I'm not angry at them, right? I haven't done anything. All they did was send me an email, which I've seen a thousand other people send. And I know

it's not me. I know that because that email that they're reading got sent out to like a million other people and they all loved it. So it's probably not me. It's probably something going on with them. And I want to know. So when you sort of respond in a way that's not the obvious, then all of a sudden you shift the entire conversation. Now, if I wrote back and said, F you, now that's what they expected and they feed on that. But when you change the whole dynamic, I think that's when you can have a really interesting discussion. Same thing for business, by the way. If you're looking at markets where, for example, if you were trying to create another Princeton review today, or you're trying to write another

personal finance book, you probably don't want to go with the same click-word programmatic strategy. You want to try to analyze what is missing in the market, how are people not being taken care of or responded to, instead of going with the same thing that everyone else is doing? So Josh, I want to ask you a question. Are you famous on the internet for handling haters well? I don't even, I barely know what the internet is. But you know, this is actually a really great fight principle. Now, I don't have any experience interacting with haters on the internet, but i do have quite a bit of experience interacting with people who essentially say that in person and so wait wait wait wait so you opt not to be on facebook but then you go out and find people who are going to say fuck you in person well i'm talking about competing in martial arts right and

so like it's it's amazing i spent years training at how to deal with um fighting dirty opponents so you know people who you know in some kind of martial arts exchange after the bell will target your eyes or chess or chess yeah chess is like kicking you under the table or cheating with like talking to a coach and you know the chess world but in martial arts it's a little bit less subtle like they'll actually try to like you know kick you in the balls in between or you know take out your knees in in martial arts it's a little bit less subtle. They'll actually try to kick you in the balls or take out your knees in between rounds. It gets pretty wild. They're targeting your eyes, neck, and initially it will throw you off.

But I trained for years because I had to win national world championships. You need to be able to deal with these guys and be at your best when they're at their worst. And so I spent a lot of years bringing in the dirtiest players I could find and learning how to play with them in the gym. And then I remember this time in the 2002 World Championships in Taiwan, I was fighting this Austrian guy, and he was just the textbook dirty player. He was doing this. He was trying to bust my knees up after the bell.

He hit me two solid straight up groin shots, which were well placed. But I'd done all this training at this. And so I was focusing it to him and i smiled at him he got desperate and he kept on you know doing more and more outrageous things and when i responded with no emotion he at the end of the fight he was basically throwing himself on the floor i mean he was completely destroying himself because he needed my response like a leg that was a leg he was used to leaning on and so like i think your principle is brilliant and i practiced the in-person version of it a lot. It's interesting how much they apply. And also I noticed something you just offhandedly said that you trained with dirtier players. And that's something you'll find true of a lot of people who are at the top of their game. They find something that is interesting,

that's helping them develop, and then they will actively seek it out. Like what person in their right mind would seek out dirty players and fight against them? Only someone who wants to be the best. Well, it's a very interesting thing that happens, you know, in, in different forms of competition, which is that if somebody plays outside the rules, the typical response is righteous indignation, right? Because like that person isn't playing by these rules, which are arbitrary rules anyway. So like the weakness of almost any martial artist is the dogma of his sport right and we could go through different martial arts like you know

judo guys for example are incredible fighters but the rule the rules of judo is that you can't line them on your back and so they'll turn themselves and land on their stomach in the middle of a throw which is you know exposed their back to being choked out in a real fight right or jujitsu guys might have a bias against footlocks right or will may not be such good strikers or they can chinese martial arts people believe it's not honorable to fight on the ground so you build all this you know you kind of make a cult of your inhibitions and you make a cult of your inhibitions yeah i think that's actually the that's it's the i think it's my that's actually comes from my dad used that line in one of his books i think it's my that's actually comes from my dad used that line in one of his

books i think it's a great it's a great term because people basically have some kind of insecurity or inhibition um and they they build a cult out of it like they they protect it they instead of taking it on instead of finding the dirty player to um you know to go at your neck and your eyes and so like for example as a fighter the way this manifests is that someone takes out like charts targeting your adam's apple and your eyeballs, and you don't know how to deal with it. You're going to be furious because you don't know technically how to deal with it. But if you train it, how to deal with it, then you're not going to have that emotional

reaction. So we've talked about fighting Austrians. I want to talk about dancing bears. This is going somewhere. Bear with me. I'm not on LSD yet. No, that's a joke. Don't try this at home, kids. We're not on LSD. Yet. No. That's a joke. Don't try this at home, kids.

We're trained professionals on a close course. So Josh is a recluse? Is that fair? Yeah. So Josh, when he's not fighting dirty Austrians, prefers to be left alone for the most part. Occasionally, I'll drag him out to do something like this, in part because he will most certainly text me the next day and go, you fucking fuck, you fucking fuck,

which I find endearing. But he does not engage on the internet, does zero media, and I admire that because you're able to get a lot of deep work done. And it's a challenge for me. I'm able to do it, but it takes a lot more effort because I've exposed myself, not in a criminal way, but in a very public way. And could you explain? So we will sometimes joke when we're forced or volunteer, in my case to do something uh in front of a lot of people or to do something like a speaking engagement like dance baby dance and we'll

talk about the bear so could you could you give us some context on where this came from yeah oh so i have some history with this this theme because i you know when i was 11 years old my dad's book searching for bobby fisher came out and then when i was 15 years old the movie came out and it was a big deal and so I was thrust into this mainstream media spotlight without, you know, asking to be. And that was in the middle of my chess career. And so I had this deep love for this art. And I was so passionate about it. But I had so much attention on me that I found myself getting pulled into this externalized relationship with my first love and it was heartbreaking and i didn't have the internal tools to resist that pull and i've had several times in my life when i've kind of had to do some so i used to develop this

computer chess program called chess master and i had to do you know press things for that and then i wrote um the art of learning and i had to do this big you know what you're doing right now which you're awesome at and um and during that time i got pulled into the public speaking tour quite a bit because everyone wanted it but the thing is that nothing really calcifies the growth process in my opinion like people who are on the speaking tour because they're being asked to speak about the same ideas that they spoke about the year before and the year before they wrote about three years ago and it's supposed to break new ground and i'm i'm personally allergic to anything that will calcify or slow down my growth process because i love learning more than

i love anything and and so i have this ingrained like allergy to um to anything that externalizes my relationship to the game so the last public like keynote address that i ever gave was a lot of years ago. Some speaking agency convinced me to work with them, and I was doing some talks. And I was conflicted about it, and I had all these ethical constraints on them, and they talked me into going to this event in Florida. What were the ethical constraints? I thought I would only work with beautiful companies that were helping the world and that were awesome. They're like, oh, one of these guys. One of these guys.

So they just completely bullshit me about what I was going to go do. And I went out to Florida. I was working with this group. They told me it was donating all these medical supplies to countries in Africa. And I thought it was awesome and beautiful. It turns out I was going to the National Sales Convention of this big group. And I just was literally the follow-up act to a monkey on stage. And I was speaking about...

It was actually a monkey. There was a monkey on stage that was doing like, are you smarter to a monkey on stage. And I was speaking about, it was actually a monkey. There was a monkey on stage that was doing like, are you smarter than a monkey or something? And I was, you know, I just like, I live my life in the realm, like authenticity is the most important thing to me. And I was going to speak about like my pain

and my ideas from chess and martial arts and stuff that I kind of love. And then I was just feeling this wild hilarity of being the follow-back to monkey and being just yeah that was the way the dancing bear thing came from so so that i was the last keynote address i ever gave and so now i only will do a public i mean i only do public things frankly with you i mean i think it's the last many many years that's all i've done and then um if i give a talk it's always a q a which is a dynamic dialogue where i feel like I can learn from, cause you're speaking to a small group or a big group,

group of really brilliant people who are all in on their training process. And, um, it's an exploration that I can learn from, from their questions. And so, um, that's where the dancing bear comes from. Follow back to a monkey, a real monkey. Are you smarter than a monkey? That's coming up next, folks. So, stand by. What book or writer or could-be thinker has most influenced each of you in the last, say, year?

Or someone who's really just influenced you? Adam, do you have any thoughts on who or what that might be? Well, I'm always forging for ideas. So, for example, Cialdini's book, Influence. But I read far afield because the ideas in investing come from outside the domain. If you want to have an insight in whatever your field is, it helps to look outside your field. So I read constantly and I read poetry. I like Rumi. So actually, so I'm going to say Rumi because he's gotten me in touch with the mystical and the mysterious and the magical. Do you gift many books? I'm sorry? Do you gift books to other people?

I gift all the time. I'm a world champion gift giver. What are your... It's really true. Adam gives so many books, gifts. It's amazing to me and my son Jack. He's a world champion gift giver. This is going to be a digression,

which is kind of my thing. I remember once reading a bedtime story to Jack. Long uh and the book was giraffes can't dance and this book for like two weeks has been just decapitating me on amazon this book is a juggernaut it is it is just seriously killing the top 10 list on amazon every christmas giraffes can't Dance will kick your ass. And you just blew it up on your podcast.

I did. Yeah. I think that's like harakiri. I think that's what that's called. Jack loves that book. I will have to delay the publication

of this esteemed podcast featuring Drafts Can't Dance. First one's on me, guys. Come sponsor my podcast. Uh, where the hell was I? Oh yes. So the, you've given a lot of books as gifts. What books have you gifted most often to other people? Is there a short list or just those that come to mind that you've gifted more than once? No, it's really unique to each person. Um, um so so there's no one book because each each gift

is reflects something i want to share with that person but i would imagine there have to be uh some generally applicable books that you've enjoyed that you've given to more than one person or is that not the case oh i'd have to think to think about that. Okay, we'll come back. Yeah, come back to that. We'll come back. We got Rumi and we got Drafts Can't Dance. By the way, I can't let Ramit's fuck you thing go. If any of you want to get in touch with him,

you now know how to get his attention. Oh, God. What have I done? Wait, if you have business opportunities, anything. And I believe this works well with everyone. Thanks so much. And if you want Josh to do a speaking engagement, you have to practice your dirty fighting skills and figure out how to do it good.

Kick him in the groin. Groin kicks. That'll get his attention. And for all the people who've been asking me to introduce them to josh to do media he's not going to do it uh he would rather be uh fighting and cooking turkeys and uh riding his one wheel around surfing and surfing which is a big thing so ramit what about you in terms of uh thinkers or books or anything really that's influenced

your thinking a lot in the last year um i read a lot of military books. I think that the military is amazing at building training programs and identifying people who are good and then making them great. So especially at the special operations level and having met some of those folks and doing some work with them, it's pretty outstanding the way that they can cultivate mastery. So that's great. Books I gifted, Gift of Fear is an amazing book, particularly for women, but I actually think everybody. Learning to Trust Your Intuition. Gavin DeBecker? Yeah, Gavin DeBecker.

And he talks about who, by the way, just not to interrupt, but has a company that does very high-end security details for high-profile folks. Exactly. Trusting your intuition. Knowing when the little intent at the back of your head goes up and you can't see anything. And we so often say, it's nothing. I'm going to walk down that alley or I'm going to just go into my house like normal. But listen and learn to trust your intuition because we have it, but it kind of gets suppressed because we don't want to be that weird person. So that's a great gift. I can't recommend it enough. Two books I wish I could gift more, Charlie Munger's... Poor Charlie's Almanac?

Yeah, Poor Charlie's. I mean, amazing book on mental models, super dense. And nobody wants to get that book as a gift. I mean, it's a gift you have to buy, not get gifted. That one, and also Breakthrough Advertising, which I think is one of the most sophisticated books on marketing ever written, super dense. I read it every year. I learned something new.

Who's the author? Eugene Schwartz. Eugene Schwartz. Eugene Schwartz. And amazing, amazing book on copywriting and really human psychology. But again, nobody wants to get that as a gift. Look it up and buy it if you want it, but it's fantastic.

What about you, Josh? And I'll give you two options here. It could be someone or something that has really changed your or informed your thinking in the last year. Or it could be something that you're really looking into subject matter wise or a particular thinker diving into in the coming year. Well, you and I have talked about books a lot, right? So we're just going to set that. Well, we don't have to set the. We've done a lot of best books.

Set the record on the platter and play the same track. Yeah. But subject matter wise. Yeah. I, I am. So my foundation of books, which we like,

which we've discussed of, you know, Lao Tzu, Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Robert Persig. These are books that were really important to me recently. And we've discussed all these, so we're not going to... Yeah, but I have a question for you about one of them.

Which one? Can we jump in? Yeah, let's do it. So the Tao Te Ching? The Tao Te Ching, yeah. Okay. So this has come up a lot in the podcast. A lot of people like it. Rick Rubin, yourself. But if I recommend that book to say 10 people, of those 10, two may seem to enjoy it and eight are like,

what is this? I can't make any sense out of it. It's just like a book of fortune cookies. It's so ambiguous. There's no there there. Like, what the hell is this? So what are they missing? Or how should they read it?

My favorite definition of wisdom comes from the the um the glossary of robert thurman's translation of the vimala kirti sutra and its tolerance of cognitive dissonance and that's what lao tzu is about right so if you read the doubt first of all i think it depends what translation you read you need to read in my opinion the jia fu feng and jane english version say that one more time jia fu feng and jane english translation of the dada zheng i think is the most is the most true that i've run into and i think i've read them all i don't read ancient chinese so i've had to kind of circle it so lazy and a lot of these are a lot of i almost took up reading learning ancient chinese years ago for that one purpose but the the the reason a lot of

these translations are sort of thesis statements which take away the ambiguity and i think a lot of people don't want to tolerate cognitive dissonance. I mean, logic doesn't tell you what to do. Okay, so is it the lack of specific prescription that is kind of almost a Rorschach test of sense? I mean, you're looking at the tea leaves and what you see tells you, how you interpret it tells you what you need to know? Well, this principle that Ramit was speaking about, you know know the response to aggression with empty space with non-violence i mean this is this is at the essence of of lao tzu um for me it was very important during my period the period where i was transitioning where i was dealing with with this existential crisis in my chess career where i'd

been working with a coach for several years who was urging me to study the opposite style from what was natural to me. I was being pulled into this externalized relationship to things. And it was kind of the entrance into my philosophical exploration of self-expression, of authenticity, of a deeply intrinsic relationship to my search for truth as opposed to being driven by the external competing from the inside out as opposed to the outside in so it was a big part of my my foundation in um in self-development so maybe that's that's that's and all those books that just meant those authors i just mentioned were a huge part of that in the last year um i have to tell you this is a brilliant book i Tim sent me an advanced copy.

I mean, Tools of Titans is a... Tim and I are dear friends. I love the guy, but I give him so much shit. Trust me, I'm not saying this if it isn't true. It's a goldmine. I mean, your podcast is brilliant, and I believe it's your calling in a lot of ways, at least in this period of your life,

because you've taken the art of deconstruction, which I think is your finest art, and you've developed this medium with which you can study people and get to the essence of them so quickly. And I'm stunned by how you can have so many conversations that are deeply meaningful, and you can really get to the essence of someone studying them for a few days or a week. I mean mean i couldn't fucking do that it's it's a beautiful thing to see to see then you have this this is you bring it to the world you're gifting the best ideas of a lot of you know who you consider brilliant people um through this podcast but then you have to listen to you know two three hour talks which is awesome but a lot of people on the patients and this is a way of just shortcutting your way

and so i think this is actually a gold one i've been reading it and loving it myself thanks josh i um i really mean that thanks man yeah it's true dude thanks man i wouldn't say it wasn't true i didn't slip him a 20 he's an expensive date uh thank you josh the other another book which i think is really important right now um is a buddy of mine um you had on, Sebastian Younger, his book Tribe. Yes. 100% agreed. Yeah. I thought your interview with him was beautiful. You guys really... The introduction of these two guys was hilarious. The text exchange to get them to loosen their shit up with one another was really funny, but finally they did. And I thought that was a... Sebastian's been

studying evolutionary psychology. So Josh were we so josh introduced us ridiculous doing this like very nice to meet you sir yes good day sir this very kind of weirdly exchange and so josh jumped in a few a few levels down he's like guys loosen the fuck up i was like okay all right uh tribe i highly highly recommend it's a great short read so i've asked people oftentimes, and we are going to do some Q&A in about 12 minutes. So hold your horses, but we'll definitely get there shortly. The question I've asked often, and there are many, but is what advice would you give your 30-year-old self or your 20-year-old self? Tends to produce one or two of the same

answers. I wouldn't say anything because i wouldn't want to change where i am or enjoy it very common the question though that i'd like to pose is a bit different and it is what advice do you think the happiest version of your 80 year old self would give you now uh so anyone who wants to tackle that is welcome to give it a shot. Well, let me riff off of something that Josh said about, you know, you're talking about the book where two people love it and eight people are like, what is this? And I think that in this day and age, we are given so much advice. And as someone who's in the advice industry, I see it and I have a healthy disdain for a lot of advice. And if you followed the advice that people give you,

you got to wake up and by 3 a.m. you need to be hustling and you need to be doing all this stuff until, you know, it's crazy. You can't do all this stuff and feasibly be a normal human being. I had books that people told me I need to read. And I opened them up and I'm like, this book is shit. Who the hell? But like 20 people I like told me to read it. And then- Give me an example.

Can you think of one? Yes, because I ended up loving it. So here's a classic simple example. 4-Hour Rugby. No. because I ended up loving it. So here's a classic simple example. Four-hour work week. When I was like in my early 20s, I read 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing or Branding. And I'm like, what is this? And then I picked it up again when I was 30. And I'm like, this is awesome. I wasn't ready for it. And I'm glad that I gave it another chance because I didn't have the context

and I'm willing to bet, and I'm not saying that I got better. I just, things just changed. And by the time I was 30, I was ready for it. Guarantee this book, maybe some of the people just don't like it and that's fine. But maybe some of them don't have the context

or they're not ready or it's just not integral. Right now, you know, everybody, including in the book, which I love, meditation's a classic thing. I don't meditate. And I try not to feel guilty about it because I don't think it's the right time in my life. Like I wake up, I have a very calm mind and I have the, you know, the ways that I like to enjoy and all that stuff. It just doesn't involve meditation. But I'm sure, because I believe that most of us

are basically the same in most parts of life. And if we embrace that, then we can optimize it and we can free up that 2% that we're different and get really unique and special. I bet you that as I get a little bit older, I will become more spiritual. I will probably meditate.

These are classic things that happen. I think if I were 80 years old, I would look back and say, listen to the advice and hear what people are telling you to do. But if it doesn't feel right, it's okay to say, you know what, I'm going to put that aside, come back to it in a year or five years. And maybe at that point, the book will be great or I'll be ready to meditate. But I just, I don't have interest in it right now. It just doesn't feel right. And that's okay. I don't need to do what everybody else says. I want to do what's right for me, be a great version of myself, improve, but be really judicious about who you're listening to and what you're applying. I think also you mentioned intuition and the gift of fear.

This is something I've really tried hard to resurrect for myself in the last few years, because I've been driven by pro and con lists and spreadsheets and this, that, and the other thing using my left side of the brain. It's simplistic, obviously, but just trying to use an analytical framework for everything and took a lot of wrong turns i'd be like this deal is great and then i remember at one point ages ago this girlfriend said to me but wait do you trust this guy at all i was like not really and she's like oh jesus and then i did the deal and of course it was a disaster uh so i think the intuition is also really important to develop an ear for when you're making those types of decisions to put things aside. Adam, what would your 80-year-old self tell you now?

One of my favorite quotes was by one of my heroes, Juan Belmonte. And Juan Belmonte was sort of the Rocky of bullfighting in the early part of this century. he fought pre-antibiotics. So even a scratch of a bull's horn, you could die from that. They used to call him the Flying Matador because he was so bad, the bulls would just keep tossing him in the air. But he was really... I did not see that coming. And there's a quote in there that I love, and actually one I'd really like to share

because it's germane to everything we do. Because we hear about achieving and performance and being our best selves, and he said, mind you, this is a bullfighter who rose from poverty to be the best bullfighter of all time. And with no aptitude for the sport, really. And, you know, you're bad at martial arts or surfing, whatever, you know, but you're bad at bullfighting, you die.

And anyway, so he said the following. He said, no life worthy of the name consists of anything more than the continual series of struggles to develop one's character through the medium of whatever one has chosen as a career. Which is fascinating because now your career becomes reframed as merely something with which you're going to develop your character. And so I think that's what my 80-year-old self would just remind me of that. Keep working on your character. It really doesn't matter what you do. What aspect of your character are you most trying to develop in your current primary? Fearlessness.

What was that? Fearlessness. Fearlessness. Yeah. your current primary fearlessness fearlessness yeah Josh it's a tough act to follow that was beautiful man I have trouble remembering four word quotes that was amazing

like to be or not to have alright Josh your 80 year old self well I'm in the to be or not to have? All right. Josh, for your 80-year-old self. Well, I'm in the midst of this transition from being a fighter, a competitor, and then literally a fighter, to being a nurturer primarily. And my relationship to the sport that I'm taking on now is paddle surfing, which is fourth big mountain in terms of my own training is much more about receptivity um and feeling the ocean and entering it like entering that sweet spot of enormous power of something that's

traveled thousands of miles and so a big reason that i've i've gotten that way is because I feel that, that the art of receptivity, um, and is just a never ending pool. I intuit from here. Um, and so receptivity and love is a huge, is a huge part of, of what I,

I intuit is, is where I'll be focused for the next 10, 20, 30 years. And so I would say from here that that's what, from my perspective now, that's what I would think my 80 year old self would be, would be telling me to, to focus on is, is, um, deep listening to humans and nature and, and what's moving most elementally inside of myself. Um, I'm a completely devoted dad

and, um, I don't, I think that I can't imagine my 80 year old self saying anything, but, most elementally inside of myself. I'm a completely devoted dad. And I think that I can't imagine my 80-year-old self saying anything, but seize every moment you can with these little dudes and give them every ounce of love you can. And I also feel in myself now a commitment to living life every last drop, as fully as I can ever live it. And honestly, I live in New York now, and this is putting that into question, because I'm so passionate about the, I love New York.

I'm a New Yorker. I love this city, but I'm yearning for nature right now. I feel in some ways that living on the water is what's needed for this next surge of me living life as fully as possible and, you know, my own development. And so I think that that's the direction my 80 year old self would be giving me a kick in the ass, but, um, but he'll be a lot wiser than I am. So. There's so many questions I want to ask. We'll have to, we'll have to continue this, but, uh, let's start with one, which is what is some of the worst advice that you hear given out in your world and you can choose world

however you want to define it that could be past career current career could be circle of friends could be anything like that but or a terrible piece of advice doesn't have to be the worst but a common piece of advice uh and i mean i'll buy some time here i mean for me i remember applying to colleges and having my guidance counselor in high school tell me to lower all of my standards because I wanted, I had my reach schools, my A-list. I had my, I think I can get into B-list schools and then my safety schools. And he said, no, no, no. He laughed.

He said, oh, Tim, silly, silly boy. You need to take your safety schools and make those your reach schools you're like five paragraphs too high here and uh not realizing at the time i realized this soon thereafter that his incentive was to be able to say x percentage of my students got into their first choice college easiest way to do that is to make everyone lower their standards so that was a terrible piece of advice that i received and a terrible piece of advice that i hear a a terrible advice, piece of advice that I hear a lot. Um, so the antithesis of that would be hold the standard,

which is the advice, for instance, uh, at the fat duck, which was at the time, the number one ranked, uh, restaurant in the world. Heston Blumenthal said that to someone I've had on this podcast,

Chris Young. It's like hold the standard because he tried to pass something off. That was like 99% perfect, but not a hundred percent. Uh, so anyone want to take a stab at that do it the way that guy did it do it the way that guy yeah like people give advice all the time that you should you should follow this prescriptive path to success yeah um and i think that excellence is all about self-expression and so people look outside and try to replicate the path of somebody else but then when the shit hits the fan as it always does when the pressure's on it's not coming from inside of you how much of self how much of self let's just say tim josh and so on is discovery versus creation in your mind

in other words like great question do you start with the raw materials of of everything that josh represents and then it's a it's a it's a it's a process of pulling back the layers of the onion and discovering these different pieces or is it really just tabula rasa i think they're entangled i think that as we're discovering ourselves, we're creating ourselves. I mean, I think about this in the context of someone taking on an art. They have to understand who they are. I think people should do what they love and they should do it in a way that they love. But that evolves. And so it's not stuck.

It's not static. It's dynamic. It's dynamic quality versus static quality. And so there's the act of creation in the discovery process. And I mean, I've experienced like the biggest losses that I've had and the biggest disappointments that I've had have led to the biggest wins of my life. In many ways, that's because I created myself based on the response to that experience. of this principle of unobstructed self-expression, doing it from what's inside out, is that that's always changing, and you have to be attuned to it. So the way I would respond to that would be

that intuitively they're fundamentally entangled and navigating that entanglement is a big part of the genius and the growth curve. Do you agree? I do agree. Well, I agree that that is an interesting viewpoint to have on it. It's something that I'm... That sounds like a dickish way of saying, I didn't understand a thing that you just said. But it's not. It's just that I don't have a firm position on it. It's something

that I'm exploring for myself and thinking through myself. So that's why I hang out with these guys is to get something to chew on. So I have to chew on that. I don't know if I agree with it. I don't know either. You just asked the question. That's what I think. Ramin?

I heard one of the most interesting pieces of advice recently, and it blew up something I'd believed my whole life. So my friend, Nick Gray, runs a company on museums, and he takes people in museums and he gives them tours that are really cool. And he was talking about how he goes to a museum himself. And he said, if I go to a museum, I'm spending 90 minutes max, and the first 30 minutes are in the cafe planning where I'm going to go. And I'm sitting there saying, wait, what? And I said, what do you mean? The way I was raised, you know,

we would go to museum maybe once every five years, maybe as kids, we'd save up our money to go there and we would spend seven hours going every level because we knew we were never going to go back. And what Nick was saying was, in so many words, have the abundance to know that you can go back and don't think that it's once and done. And also know that leave at the peak. There's power in leaving at the peak. And it blew my mind to think that my whole life until that point, 34, that I had just thought, got to go through

every single thing and check the box. But really he's talking about curation. He's talking about abundance all in a simple one sentence example. I love it. It also reminds me where we won't dig into it right now, but we've talked about it before the, the ending on a good rep ending on quality really closely related for both for both achievement in that case and skill development but also just for appreciation and quality of life uh adam what about you which question we're talking about here uh yeah what are your thoughts on the last 10 minutes of conversation uh bad advice that you've received or heard or they want to give i remember i i had sold my interest in the princeton review and i was i was wondering what to do next with my life and i was speaking at the time with two older very

successful like mega successful uh businessmen and um this is about 20 years ago and he and and one of them said i should go into ball bearings like he thought for a second he said adam ball bearings that's great i love that right and i said i said he said okay stay with me here, he said, all the smart talent from universities, and they've gone to Wall Street, and they've exhausted whatever is to be found there. And you're crazy smart, but you're competing with other people who are crazy smart. And why do that? And by the way, I thought he was, so he said there were no more possibilities there, which that also was wrong. But the second part was interesting he said ball bearings he said right but no but you'll see the

relevance in a second he said ball bearings has not had its Edison right he's no one's gone into ball bearings so it's no one's ever thought about ball bearings. It's fertile ground. It's all round things, different shapes, but, I mean, sorry, different sizes. So he said, it was a metaphor, right? The metaphor was go where no one else, go with something that no one's ever looked at. And you look at Uber, like who thought about taxis? You look at Airbnb, you look at the most successful companies and they're pursuing the ball bearings philosophy.

Right. And and so the first part that that opportunities on Wall Street had been exhausted, that part was wrong. But the ball bearings part was right. You know, and I was talking to a friend and I passed on who's wondering what she should do with her career and I said, oh, ball bearings. Find something that I said for... And there was a pencil on the table, like a number two pencil. I said, there, why don't you reinvent the pencil? Who thinks about pencils? I don't.

Which means there's an opportunity there. And the wonderful thing about the world is today you can find any niche and there are enough people in the world that you can make a fortune on number two pencils. Or ball bearings, but find, really, cups. It doesn't matter. Find something that tables. Find something no one thinks about and think about it. No, it's great advice. And it actually reminds me of a trip I had recently. I went to Utah and we went to this, it's not even fair to call it an estate. It was just, it was a state.

I mean, the guy, this single individual basically owned a state. It was this gigantic property. He had his own airstrip. He had tons of buildings. He had his own fishing pond, ludicrously wealthy. And I asked what he did to make all this money. And they go, oh yeah, you know, those little parts of the wing that flip up vertically? He figured those out. Like 10 years ago, something you probably barely notice, and in the aviation world, it was kind of like the equivalent of wheels on luggage.

It was like, why didn't anybody think of that earlier? And now it just prints money. But it was because he took something very unsexy and was willing to dive into it. Well, I want to let these gents have a shot at cavorting and causing trouble in the back. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give a hand for Josh Waiskin,

Ramit Sethi, Adam Robinson. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

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