The Tim Ferriss Show - #240: Accelerated Learning and Mentors - My Personal Story

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

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Starting point is 00:02:39 special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Why, hello, you the spirit moves you. learning, on education, on mentors, my past mentors, all of these things. And it is going to all be covered in the following conversation between yours truly and Charles Best, who is the

Starting point is 00:03:32 founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, one of my favorite companies, profit or non-profit companies in the world. And it took place at South by Southwest EDU with an audience of primarily educators and administrators. So an unusual audience for me, but a very exciting audience. And as some context, Charles Best, who is he? Well, we met in high school as wrestling partners of all things, and we'll talk about that. But he has since done many, many things, including launching donorschoose.org in 2000 at a Bronx public high school where he taught history for five years. Now, flash forward to today. What are we looking at? DonorsChoose.org is one of Oprah Winfrey's ultimate favorite things. It has been on the

Starting point is 00:04:16 cover of Fast Company as one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, the first time a charity has ever received such recognition. And teachers at more than 70% of all the public schools in America have used donorschoose.org to create classroom project requests. And you should absolutely check this company out. It is lean. It is run as well as anything out there. But the conversation itself focuses on topics that you can apply to your own lives in terms of learning things faster. It talks about teaching, good teaching, bad teaching, tough love, the value thereof, and many, many different things. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did with the one and only Charles Best.

Starting point is 00:05:03 All right. Packed house. This is awesome. So Tim is an old and dear friend of mine. We went to high school together. We were on the wrestling team together. So this is actually a fireside chat, not just a euphemism for an informal, warm conversation. So I'm just thrilled to be asking you some questions. We've got a lot of teachers in the audience. So why don't we kick it off by, let me ask you, tell us about a teacher or two who made a really big difference in your life. So I'll start with just thanking everybody in the audience. You guys are doing really important work. So education has played a huge role. Thank you guys. In my life, there are so many different inflection points. I'll mention two who come to mind. The first is Mrs. Vinsky,

Starting point is 00:05:45 who has sadly passed, but she was my first grade teacher, public school in Long Island. And I had refused to learn the alphabet up to that point. I'd been made to eat soap as a result, which I don't recommend. And I wouldn't survive first grade is what my mother had been told. So Mrs. Vinsky took me aside and she said, Tim, if you learn the alphabet, you'll be able to read any book you want. And if you can read books, you can learn anything that you want. And I was like, why didn't anybody tell me? So, and on top of that, she discovered something which was competition really motivates me. So she had a long paper line up on the wall. It went the entire length of the classroom and each student

Starting point is 00:06:26 had a race car. And based on the number of books you read and completed, that race car moved towards the finish line. And for whatever reason, that is really what drove me to consume as many books as possible. So that's a Mrs. Zavinsky number one. And then flashing forward, so familiar name for both of us would be John Buxton. It's very strange for me to say his first name because I would never dare. So Mr. B, Mr. Buxton was our wrestling coach, but he was also a teacher. He was also involved with the administration and I believe the endowment. And he provided a very unique form of tough love in the wrestling room that was extremely critical to me, I think, in that sort of 10th grade, 11th grade period in particular. So looking

Starting point is 00:07:17 back, I think almost everyone on that team has done some really amazing things and they all look back and would mention Mr. Buxton. So I would say those two immediately come to mind. Totally. Yeah. Mr. Buxton is the teacher who made me want to be a teacher. And so if not for Mr. Buxton, I think there'd be no DonorsChoose.org. Well, when you were on Oprah, you brought up Mr. Buxton. That's right. I mean, he was one of the teachers, one of the seminal sort of pivotal figures in your life that you brought up. Yeah. Actually, I remember thinking if anyone ever looked up to me the way that I looked up to Mr. Buxton, I would have done my share and knew I wanted to be a teacher. So we're going to be talking about accelerated learning and your insights for learning more quickly and more deeply. Let's start with just your framework

Starting point is 00:08:02 for how someone can learn more quickly and more deeply. So the general framework that I use was really pieced together over many years via trial and error. I think there are some applications in the classroom, certainly, but I can pull from my personal experience. So the general acronym is DIS with, you leave the I out, you'll get there, don't worry. So D and then three S's, that's the framework. And it refers to step one, deconstruction. And the order is very important. So deconstruction is really taking a skill, learn a language, learn to swim, whatever it might be, and breaking it into the smallest Lego pieces possible. For instance, I didn't learn to swim until I was in my 30s. This is very embarrassing as someone

Starting point is 00:08:49 who grew up on Long Island. Granted, rat tail, fine, whatever. We can talk about that later. But I was deathly afraid of the water and had some near drowning incidents. I tried to take courses and take lessons. None of it worked until I was introduced to something called total immersion. And what total immersion did that no other method did for me, at least, was break down the constituent pieces. And so it wouldn't put me in the water to, say, get on a kickboard right away, because there are a bunch of issues with that. I said, all right, let's separate breathing. Let's separate proper body position for hydrodynamics. Then you take out kicking.

Starting point is 00:09:28 So that's a separate piece. Then upper body movements. And then you order them in the least threatening way. So breathing isn't even a piece of it for the first, say, day or two. You would just focus on standing in a four-foot-deep pool and kicking off the side and practicing your streamline position. So deconstruction is step number one. The next is selection. And selection, in effect, you're using the 80-20 principle or Pareto's law to answer the question, what 20% of those

Starting point is 00:09:57 Lego blocks deliver 80% of the results or more than I'm looking for? And there are certain places where this is really, really profound in language learning, for instance. So I thought I was bad at language learning up until the point that I transferred to the school where we met, St. Paul's, and that's a whole separate story, and had the chance to study with Mr. Shimano in Japanese. Because I figured, well, if I'm going to be terrible at Spanish,

Starting point is 00:10:23 I might as well be terrible at a different language with my friends who are actually in the class. And in, say, any language, you can take 2,000 words and be functionally, conversationally fluent. And you can identify the highest frequency words. You could also take even something as complex as learning to, say, read and write Japanese and narrow it down to the common use characters, which is around 1900 something, I believe. And then from there, say, well, let's break it down even further. Almost all of those characters are formed by, say, 100 to 120 radicals. And that's what you would focus on. So the 20% deliver 80% of the results that I'm looking for. And next you have sequencing.

Starting point is 00:11:09 And sequencing I think is the most neglected perhaps. What is a logical progression in which to lay out the Lego blocks that I've selected, those 20%. And you can figure out pretty quickly that if you ask, for instance, what if we did the opposite for 48 hours, just as a testing approach, that you can unearth some real gems. So when I learned, for instance, to dance tango in Argentina, partially because I was forced to. I had a female teacher who was very, very high level. I learned the female role, the follow, before I learned the lead. And it ended up being a key reason why I was able to compete in the world championships six months later, is that I learned the female role first, which is very odd. Also, if you talk to,

Starting point is 00:11:56 say, a friend of mine, Josh Waitzkin, who is the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, he is the kid. When he learned to play chess, when he had his first real coach, they took all the pieces off the board. They didn't start with openings, which everyone does. And you memorize basically the answers in the teacher's book and you just learn all these openers. And instead of that, his teacher took all the pieces off the board and put, he had king and pawn, I'm sorry, yes, it was king versus king and pawn. And he reduced the complexity to focus on principles, really flexible principles instead of tactics that were memorized. So the sequencing is very, very critical. And the last piece you would think is very self-evident, but it's often not, and that is stakes.

Starting point is 00:12:45 Not stakes like flipping steaks on a barbecue, but consequences. How do you build in incentives and motivation, whether that's a reward or a punishment or both, so that you or other people will actually do what the plan includes? That could be the race cars. That could be stakes. That could be the race cars. That could be stakes. That could be an incentive. You could also, say, take any number of different approaches. There are tools like STICK, S-T-I-C-K-K dot com, and others that you can use to harness loss aversion to your advantage.

Starting point is 00:13:20 So, for instance, if you want to lose weight, there's another one called diet bet. You could take, and this is something a lot of people have done successfully, you could take, say, $100 or whatever amount is going to be painful for you to lose, put it into stick. It goes into escrow. And if you don't hit your goals, and other people verify this, then that gets contributed to your anti-charity. So an anti-charity is a nonprofit that you would rather nuke than give money to. So it could be the American Nazi Party, it could be whatever it might be, and you'll be on the public record as having donated

Starting point is 00:13:54 if you don't lose your 20 pounds in two months. So believe me, and my friend Derek Sivers is an entrepreneur, has said, if more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs. You just need incentives. So that's the basic framework. And you can get into all the nuances and details.

Starting point is 00:14:13 But that basic framework has helped me with all of the skills that I've tackled, I'd say, in the last decade, certainly. So speaking of the skills that you've tackled, let's see how this framework works in action. Tell us about a particular skill that you've attained in an especially unorthodox way. Let's see. I'm trying to maybe omit the odd ones like Japanese horseback archery. Turns out not a long career, particularly in the U.S. If that's something you focus on. I'll come back to,

Starting point is 00:14:48 I think, the swimming, because it had all of the ingredients for something that I would fail and did fail at for a very long time. The fear factor was very, very high. The shame factor was very, very high. And so the unorthodox approach that I took, well, just to give you actually back into it. So what are the results? The results were didn't swim, couldn't do two laps in a small pool until early 30s. 10 days later, after getting a book, I didn't even have video at this point, with total immersion, I was doing 20 to 40 laps per workout to relax. This is 10 days later. And I've had many, many friends duplicate this,

Starting point is 00:15:35 many, many of my readers and listeners and so on. So unorthodox for me because in retrospect, it seems so obvious. Yet if you go into any pool and have, say, the general staff teach you, they're going to teach it very, very differently. So in this particular approach, A, remove as many failure points and fear areas as possible for the very beginning. So you want people to get as much positive reinforcement early on as possible. In this case, I was in a four foot deep pool kicking off the side. And I realized, wow, even without any strokes, without any kicking, I can cover say a third of the pool distance if I just get my body in the right position. Second, questioning assumptions. And this is something

Starting point is 00:16:21 that Terry, who's the founder of Total Immersion, does very well, is that I had always tried to swim on top of the water. Well, body is dense, tends to sink. So assume that your body is going to be 90, 95% underwater. And you actually think of it conceptually as swimming downhill. Isn't that odd? So by swimming downhill, your arm is actually angled down underneath the water, say by three feet. The pressure on that arm helps to tilt your lower legs up and makes you more hydrodynamic. Okay. And you figure this all out by kicking off of the wall and then standing up. Kick off the wall, stand up. And then I would say, secondly, is finding the exercise. And this can be applied to any domain. What is the one exercise that makes all of the other exercises irrelevant or less important?

Starting point is 00:17:16 And this is part of the sequencing. in my own experimentation with it, is that a hand swapping drill in swimming, where you're basically trying to have your arm enter the water at the same time that your other arm is straight, and then replace, it extends the period during which you are in your extended fuselage position. And if I just focused on that one exercise, hand swapping drill, everything else fell into place. And that was going from zero to shortly thereafter, because this was, we're gonna come back to incentives, about eight months before, a friend and I had assigned each other New Year's resolutions. By the way, more effective than coming up with your own. And so my friend was just completely addicted to double espressos, had like 12 a day. And I was like, okay, yours is nothing stronger than green tea for a year.

Starting point is 00:18:12 And he's like, okay. And he did it. Now, granted, he would pack like 12 days worth of green tea into a French press. I don't know why I feel so sick. I'm like, I think I see your problem. But he stuck with it. And his assignment to me after seeing me flail around in the water and get out at one point, he said, you need this as a life skill for yourself, for your kids. You'd have to do a one kilometer open water, meaning an ocean or lake, probably swim by the end of the year. And I got to July, August, had failed every class effectively that I took and abandoned it until total immersion. And then I would say two weeks after starting, I ended up doing a one mile, not a one kilometer open water swim by myself in the ocean where I

Starting point is 00:19:01 grew up at this specific beach where I had one of my near drowning experiences. So that would be, I think, an example. And it's an important example because it was a skill that I was deathly afraid of. And I think a lot of students end up in that position for many different reasons. Wow. So I feel like helping someone get over a near drowning experience is something that may not be totally safe for teachers to do with their students. But so I wanna ask you of all the experimentation and adventuring that you've done from ice baths to archery on horseback to you name it,

Starting point is 00:19:37 which of those activities can kids try themselves? Which of the experiments you've done, the adventures you've had, can a teacher assign to their students or help their students undertake? Yeah, I'll leave out the 10-day fasts and the muscle biopsies, also probably not great for insurance policies at schools. I would suggest a competition of some type. And the one that comes to mind for me is how many foreign vocabulary words so forget about grammar forget all that but like how many vocab words can you memorize in a day and have a reward have an inspiring reward it doesn't take much and I recall at one point so keep in in mind, you know, the kid who was

Starting point is 00:20:25 bad at languages, who had done very poorly in Spanish, until I had Mr. Shimano, who's incredible and the right environment. I then, after that point, have often played this game with myself, where I'll say, take Italian and became obsessed with mnemonic devices. So memory tricks like the, say, the memory palace, which was used by Cicero, or the link word mnemonic. There's a gentleman, I believe by the last name of Grunberg, who wrote a number of books that highlight how to use word association and image association, I should say, to memorize foreign vocabulary. So let's say you have Spanish vaca, right? V-A-C-A, vaca. Okay. So how would you learn if you're a native English speaker, vaca? All right. And this is where I think you can engage a lot of kids.

Starting point is 00:21:15 All right. Well, imagine a cow with a vacuum head vacuuming up grass. All right. Cow, vacuum head, vacuuming up grass. Okay. So like, think about it, do that for 10 seconds. And you could probably teach a class where you do that at the beginning of class, come back 30 minutes later. All right. So-and-so, what's the word for cow in Spanish? And they will remember it. And they might remember it a week later, just from that 15 seconds. And so you play this game of imagery and creating these associations. And I kid you not, you will probably, if you had a classroom of, say, 50 students, it depends on age, but you could very well have students who successfully remember a week later 200 to 300 vocabulary items from a

Starting point is 00:21:57 single day. That would not surprise me at all. And keep in mind, the sort of minimal effective dose, if you want to be considered or perceived as conversationally fluent, is probably around 2,000 words. Okay, so how many of us have heard, it takes a lifetime to learn a language? I certainly was told that, and I was like, lifetime? Screw that. A lot of things I want to do. I don't want to commit to a lifetime of studying something just to be good at it. Oh, it's so depressing and demoralizing. But instead, if I said, oh, all right, you just did 200 words in a day, two days. If you did that times 10, what is that, two weeks? You would have all the raw materials to be considered a conversationally fluent language. How encouraging is that? How exciting is that? And to position a language, let's say a second lens through which you can experience life,

Starting point is 00:22:46 you're effectively doubling your lifespan. Okay? Wow. And you use all of the tricks and tips that I'm sure many of the people in this room are familiar with, but context. Maybe some kids are into hip-hop. Maybe some kids are into comic books and manga,

Starting point is 00:23:03 like I was when I was in Japan. Utilize all of that. And I think that would be an experiment that I would run because it's so easy to apply that DIS framework to it. And the implications for each of those stages are so easily mapped to just a foreign vocabulary memorizing competition using mnemonic devices. So there are a lot of macro principles embedded in this one micro exercise, if that makes sense. So you're learning the macro from the micro. And the student doesn't have to know any of this. This is just a Trojan

Starting point is 00:23:38 horse for kind of slipping it in there, just like Josh Waiskin and his teacher taking the pieces off the board. So I feel like you arrive at so many of these tactics and breakthroughs like mnemonic devices by way of experimentation, where you're often running an A-B test and doing more of what works, doing less of what doesn't work, always, always A-B testing. Has there ever been a time when you decided you needed to forget about the data, not run an A-B test, and just go on gut because you believed something in your heart and it felt inappropriate to run an A-B test? It's very rare, I'll be honest. Now, but the question allows me to maybe chat a little bit about how I think about the use of intuition. Because I do,

Starting point is 00:24:26 I'm trying to increasingly use intuition. Intuition helps me to identify things that I would like to test, even if they seem ridiculous. So for instance, every time I've had a roommate in a foreign country where I'm using comic books to learn a language, I get ridiculed every single time. They're like, wham, bow, smash. Really? Like, that's what you're going to? And then three months later, they're a convert because they see I'm studying dialogue. That's why the comic books work. Same reason that scripts, if you can get translated scripts for movies, which you can very easily, work so well for language learning. Oh, wow. And so I use intuition. Scripts from foreign films that you can then read while you're watching the movie? Or scripts from, say, a movie that you know really well, whether that's Die Hard, Babe,

Starting point is 00:25:13 whatever, which are two real examples for me. If you know this, as for the renegade duck. So yeah, anyway, that's from Babe, not Die Hard. You could also look at, for instance, I would actually encourage people to take movies they know really well. I'm getting off track, but where... It's a great technique. I wanted you to draw it out.

Starting point is 00:25:35 Where you have subtitles available in your target language. Because if you do the inverse, if you don't catch a word orally, you're not going to be able to look it up or write it down. So I tend to use the opposite. But the point being, intuition is oftentimes just a proxy for interest. So if I'm really interested in something,

Starting point is 00:25:58 that checks the box partially of the stakes and incentives, right? So I use intuition in that case. I will very often, for instance, use my intuition even if I split test. And I've done this a lot, say, for book covers, even book titles. So I tested the four-hour work week alongside 12 other titles and subtitles in Google AdWords. It was just the ad headline and the ad text. And then I looked at the max click-through, which one had the best click-through a week later, cost a few hundred dollars. And I knew exactly which title and subtitle would perform the best. That's how I came up with the title. However, when I looked at the top, say, three results for the

Starting point is 00:26:40 book title, I had to ask, which of these can I live with? Which of these will I be happy with? Because once this genie's out of the bottle, I have to live with this forever. And so for better or for worse, I'm the four-hour guy for the rest of my life. But I knew I could live with the title. And so I have vetoed best performing outcomes when I split test if I feel strongly that I'm more interested in or will live more soundly, sleep more soundly with number two or number three. So I've been listening to your podcast of late, especially getting ready for this conversation. But even before that, you have these incredible interviewees, both boldface names and people that I'd never heard about before,

Starting point is 00:27:26 who have proved to be fascinating. Of all the people, of all the incredible people that you've interviewed, whom would you nominate to design the ideal school? Okay, I'm going to answer that. The first recommendation I want to make is just backtrack for a second. Everyone should read, there's a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, just on the subject of data and split testing and statistics. Most, say science, and it could be split testing that is represented in media, is misreported. And it's extremely critical, has never been more critical, I would say, to be scientifically literate. So bad science covers how to become a more just intelligent and astute reader of science and results. So you can be very strategically and importantly, literate in that sense.

Starting point is 00:28:25 So I would read that A, but which would inform, in fact, how you design a school. Because a lot of it, I think tracking is very important. I think experimentation is very important. When it comes to mastery, no one in my mind pops up

Starting point is 00:28:43 more often than Josh Waitzkin. So Josh Waitzkin has a foundation. He has taken his learning framework for chess, and he's considered a prodigy, but I think it's a misnomer. Give like a two-sentence bio on Josh Waitzkin. So Josh is the little kid in the Oshkosh overalls who ends up playing speed chess against the hustlers in Washington Square Park in searching for Bobby Fischer, dominating. So there are some God-given talents, certainly,

Starting point is 00:29:13 in Josh, and then going on to compete very, very, very successfully. There's a book and a movie based on his life. But he has since taken his ability to deconstruct something like chess, applied it to Tai Chi push hands to become a world champion. He applied it to Brazilian jiu-jitsu to become the first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, who is considered the GOAT, the greatest of all time. He's like the Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky, Mickey Mantle combined in the world of grappling. And so you can look at something called MG in action. And you might think this would never apply to anything else, but MG is Marcelo Garcia in action. So he's taken different starting positions, transitions,

Starting point is 00:30:00 and finishing positions and created effectively a database where you can look up any possible combination to learn more effectively. And Josh has thought very deeply about the importance of, say, single tasking, focus, and also skills that enable you to learn other skills. So that lead domino, in other words, that we discussed a little bit earlier, which is which of these will make everything else easier or irrelevant or less important and sequencing things in the right fashion. So I'd say Josh Waitzkin. So imagine you're hired as a teacher at Josh Waitzkin's school. What subject do you teach?

Starting point is 00:30:41 I would teach. What would I teach? I would teach either, and I would call it something sexier, meta-learning. How do you learn to learn? This is not something that's very often explicitly taught. I would say, all right, we're going to cover the toolkit that you can apply to all of your other classes. Let's practice that. What is a lesson you teach on one particular day as the teacher of meta-learning at Josh Waitzkin's Ideal School? Well, the first class, and it depends a lot on grade level, but I think first class would just be all demos. So what will get the attention of these kids and hold their attention so that I am credible, but also maybe aspirational in some

Starting point is 00:31:33 sense, which Mr. Buxton was, right? I mean, Mr. Buxton could kick your ass. He was a tough, tough man, and he could still go into the weight room and demolish the students. So there was an incredible amount of respect, awe, aspiration. There are a lot of magic ingredients that are not so magic. You can tease them out and deconstruct them. So I think the first class would really be all demos. So let's say go around the room, memorize kids' names, have them go out, come back in, sit in different seats, remember all their names, right? Maybe memorize, have them shout out random numbers, memorize a string of, say, 50 digits like that, and then turn around and give it to them. I'd be like, oh, and you give it to them backwards on purpose? They're like, no,

Starting point is 00:32:15 you're wrong, you're wrong. I'd be like, no, no, no, keep going. And they're like, what? Things like that. So the first class would just be demo, credibility. This is somebody whose second class you want to come to. And then I think right away I would take somebody in the class. Who in this class thinks they can't do this? A bunch of arms go up. And I'd pick one kid who looks the most fearful and then convert them right in front of the class. Boom.

Starting point is 00:32:46 Just like that. And make them a hero in the class briefly. And then shoot them down. Then crush their spirit. Who do you think you are? No, I would not do that. That's where the soap comes in. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:03 Bad table. And that's, I think, the critical, that groundwork is so, so, so important. You need the patient to be willing to take the medicine. You need the patient to be willing to take the medicine. So that would be step one. I want to be in that class myself as a teenager. You were talking about Mr. Buxton and his ability to hold a room and kind of the awe that we had for him. Of those people you've interviewed on your podcast, if Josh Whiteskin could design the ideal school, which of your podcast interviewees would be the virtuoso classroom teacher. Which of your interviewees do you imagine just holding a room of 25 rambunctious 10th graders and how come? Rambunctious 10th graders. 10th graders. Okay. Yeah. 10th graders. Tough. I would say... I mean, Jamie Foxx probably would just by virtue of being

Starting point is 00:34:03 Jamie Foxx. 10th grade, the first person that comes to mind, and I want to give a couple of other answers, Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL commander. Yeah. He's like, you want to be tougher? Be tougher. And he's 230 pounds. Brazilians, you just do black belt,

Starting point is 00:34:21 like, everyone's going to behave. They will be at attention. So I think Jocko definitely, in terms of getting his to behave, he'll get 100% on his test. But I'll give two others real quick. Maria Popova, who runs Brain Pickings, is a phenom. And she is very good in a world of listicles where everyone's trying to out BuzzFeed BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed's great at what they do. I don't think you should compete against them. She can make potentially dense literature very, very popular and philosophy very, very popular.

Starting point is 00:34:59 She is a long form writer, does not compromise, does not dumb her material down, and yet she built a private, I think it was a private newsletter that went out to five of her friends up to now probably more than 10 million people a month. That's really impressive to me. She's also better at writing in English, which is her second language, than I am, which involves some shame on my part. But last I would say, and I really encourage everyone to check this guy out, BJ Miller. BJ Miller is a palliative care physician. He's a young guy. He's helped more than a thousand people to die. And he also suffered a horrible electrocution accident in college, actually at Princeton, where I went undergrad. He was a warning to all of us coming into Princeton. He lost three of his limbs. So he's

Starting point is 00:35:53 a triple amputee. And I think his perspective on life and fulfillment and achievement and the balance thereof is incredible. And he just has this uncanny ability to sit down and just immediately look into someone's sort of soul and their wants and desires and fears and read it. I've really never encountered anything quite like it. So I think BJ would be a life-changing teacher. Wow. I want to switch gears just for a second, recognizing that any number of people in the room are ed tech entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 00:36:32 How do you feel, how has technology accelerated and enriched the pursuit of learning? How has technology hindered the pursuit of learning? Well, I think as with any, well, I should say technology, whether it's an app on an iPhone or a stick that a chimp is using to fish out ants, it's a tool that helps you to solve, in an ideal case, that helps you to solve some type of prevalent problem. And technology makes a wonderful tool.

Starting point is 00:37:13 It makes a terrible master. So I think that any time technology ends up in the driver's seat in determining your behavior, there are a lot of risks and a lot of problems. So how does it help? There is a lot that can be automated. And whether it's machine learning or some form of deep learning, there are many ways technology can aid the learning process. So I was one of the first investors in a company called Duolingo, which now has 100 million users. It's the largest free language learning platform in the world. And they have a lot more coming. It's the largest free language learning platform in the world, and they have a lot more coming. It's incredibly powerful. And it was the byproduct of a number of founders, but one of those founders, Luis Van An from Guatemala, originally, created

Starting point is 00:38:02 captchas and recaptchas. So if you ever have to type in a bunch of weird characters to prove you're not a robot on a website, you have him to thank for it. But he used that. You might have noticed back in the day there were two fields, and you'd fill one in. The program knew the answer to that. That's how it would confirm that you weren't a robot. And then the second was taken from books that machines couldn't transcribe accurately. So you're actually, he was harnessing millions and millions and millions of people to transcribe books effectively. So that the blind could use them so that anyone could search them, etc. And he's applied that to language learning in some really fascinating

Starting point is 00:38:45 ways. And there are many, many examples like that. In terms of hindering, I would say that we live in a digital world where the economics of many of these businesses are dependent on distracting you as much as possible. So if you go on Facebook and you're like, all right, I just need to check a direct message from a friend to figure out what I'm going to be doing on Tuesday. And then two hours later, you're like, why am I watching an orangutan video?

Starting point is 00:39:15 What happened? What, did I just time travel? And the business models are predicated on being able to distract you effectively. And they are very, very, very good at it. They're putting billions of dollars, probably collectively trillions of dollars, into discovering new and better ways to distract you off of your chosen task. So I think that technology can be exceptionally damaging,

Starting point is 00:39:42 not just as it relates to learning, but I'm sure in a bunch of cognitive capacities. And actually, The Distracted Mind, written by a friend of mine, Adam Gazelli, who's a neuroscience PhD, runs a lab at UCSF, is worth checking out to see some of the consequences of that. But I'd say, broadly speaking, distraction. And conversely, if you can teach yourself and your students to single task, not multitask, to single task more effectively, that ability, which used to be par for the course, is becoming a superpower. So if you can establish ways of blocking or blocking out distraction-rich technology for even short periods of time,

Starting point is 00:40:26 you have a huge competitive advantage. Let's go back a couple thousand years when distraction-rich technology, you know, was just a non-issue. This is a question I'm just thinking of right now. Could you give us a one-minute primer on Stoic philosophy and then riff on how you think Stoic philosophy could or should inform our public school system? I'm really glad you brought this up because Stoicism, I think, is one of the best operating systems for thriving in high-stress environments. And you want to prepare yourself and students for that. So I was going to say, well, I hesitated when I brought up meta-learning classes. The other option would have been stoicism. But it would have

Starting point is 00:41:18 been a class about, and I can't call it planned suffering, but in effect, the more you schedule and practice suffering, the less unplanned suffering will disrupt your life. And so Stoicism, if we go back to say Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, is really very similar to Zen in many, many ways, but it is a practical set of beliefs, frameworks, and exercises that allow you to inoculate yourself against fear of the unknown, fear of worst-case scenarios, to become less emotionally reactive, which is why Stoicism. And certainly you can look at George Washington, Thomas Jefferson at Seneca on his bedside table. I think Bill Clinton reads Meditations by Marcus Aurelius every year. But if you want to look at some additional contemporary examples, it's become hugely popular in Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:42:27 It's become hugely popular in the NFL, including the past of the Super Bowl winners, past two Super Bowls, because it teaches you how to view obstacles as opportunities and how to become less emotionally reactive. So you're effectively putting the serenity prayer into practice, where you are learning to separate the things you can control from the things you control, and to only focus on the former. And to develop the courage and the ability to act. So what might that look like in a classroom? Well, I was chatting with Phil Zimbardo. The episode hasn't come out yet for the podcast. Phil's Professor Zimbardo is a professor emeritus at Stanford, where he designed the Stanford Prison Experiment, which people might be familiar with, and many others. So he's very good at explaining how good people can be turned evil and vice versa, how you can determine how people behave based on

Starting point is 00:43:16 conditions. And so he has an exercise he calls, for instance, deviant for a day. And hold on. I know this is family programming. I'm getting to the point. He puts a black square using a, say, erasable marker, not a Sharpie, on, encourages students to do this and then walk around for a day. And so despite the ridicule, despite people trying to rub it off, to wear this black mark on your forehead for a day and to see how much social

Starting point is 00:43:46 pressure affects your emotional responses. Okay. There are other ways that you could implement this. So Cato, who was considered the perfect stoic by Seneca, would wear, I think it was a tunic of an odd color so that he would deliberately get ridiculed by others. So he would learn to be ashamed of only those things worth being ashamed of. So right now, I think in the hypersensitive, politically correct environment in which we live, the only way serious problems are going to be solved is if we have very uncomfortable conversations. And right now, people are too afraid of being labeled, called out, whatever it might be, ostracized to have those uncomfortable conversations. So you can train yourself to be more comfortable with discomfort by planning it.

Starting point is 00:44:33 So I have these pants. I call them my party pants. They're hideous. They look like the upholstery from, say, my grandmother's couch. I mean, they're terrible. And I'll wear them around in environments where I know I'm going to get heckled. And there are many such exercises that you can make fun. You can do comfort challenges where it's like, okay, student X, I want you, we're going to go to the gym because that's our next segue. And I want you to go in and we're not going to mention anything. You're just going to lay down on the floor around all these other students for 10 seconds. You're not going to explain what you're doing. You're just going to lay down on the floor. And to show them that you're going to be nervous, you're going to be afraid, and then nothing is going to happen. And so to really teach people how to pick apart and analyze

Starting point is 00:45:18 their fears effectively. And you could organize an entire curriculum around that, full of exercises that are fun, that will make your students more resilient and willing to take risks. Because when you teach them to define it, say, the way that I would define it, whichlden them and encourage them to really be change makers, put a positive dent in the world to become entrepreneurs, teachers, or otherwise, that that's a toolkit that they can take with them for the rest of their lives. If you'd worn those party pants today, you could have had 3,000 people heckling you. That's true. And it would have been- On the internet.

Starting point is 00:45:59 And then it would get rebroadcast. It would have been great practice. Yeah. Okay. So speaking of people heckling you, I want to turn to audience questions. Before we do that, you've been an incredible advocate of donorschoose.org for just about a decade now. Why have you been so good to our effort? There are a few very specific reasons. I'm not involved with many nonprofits. I apply the same filters to nonprofits as I do to for-profits. And I've been very

Starting point is 00:46:32 fortunate in Silicon Valley to work with, as an advisor or investor, a lot of the fastest growing companies in the world. So I've been an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba. I was pre-seed advisor to Uber. And I support DonorsChoose because A, you run it like a lean for profit. And I think the criteria should be the same. B, it's the specificity and accountability. I don't like contributing or donating to causes that are nebulous. And in this case, I recognize that education and certain teachers and opportunities have played a huge, huge role in my life. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for a half a dozen people I could name off the top of my head. If I can level the playing field in very specific ways. So for instance, I want to find projects

Starting point is 00:47:22 where schools and teachers can't afford, say, headgear and wrestling mats for wrestling programs. Okay, check. I can do that in very specific areas. I want to find, say, projects where students are taking science projects home. All right, so you're encouraging students to actually work on hands-on projects in science on their own. That's very important. Well, I can get really, really, really granular, and you know this, but I've done flash funding for, say, Long Island, or for New Hampshire, or for some areas in the Bay Area where I live now. And the fact that you can

Starting point is 00:47:57 target so specifically and then get feedback and look at the results so, so specifically, as someone who tracks everything, I just find that incredibly attractive. So those would be, I'd say, and it applies to whether you have $10 to apply to a single teacher in your hometown where you grew up or a million or $10 million to deploy more widely to really, really change the entire national conversation and results you see from certain types of classrooms, it's a good startup. Thank you. So I'm betting on you guys. Don't screw it up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Would you take some questions that have been upvoted? I think

Starting point is 00:48:39 they might be on your iPad. I will. I will. I'm looking at some upvoted questions here as well as here. So we have redundancy in case my eyes go sideways. I think I have a good enough vision to look right here. The first question from anonymous, my favorite, is what is the number one skill you think our students need to learn today that we don't teach them enough? I would say it probably, above and beyond the meta learninglearning is comfort with discomfort. I think that our kids are too infantilized. Our students are too infantilized. And going back to Mr. Buxton, Mr. Buxton was very supportive, but he was supportive at

Starting point is 00:49:20 the right times and in the right way. If you got a good job, that was a nice double egg. For Mr. Buxton, that was an event. And he didn't dole it out all the time so that you became numb to it. He was very, very tough. And he forced you to do things you thought you could not do. And I remember one time, hopefully he's okay with me sharing this, but we were doing these horrible exercises. I thought they were called like blood pits. They had some terrible nickname. And where we did these rotations in a small group and you just got, you received zero rest. And I remember telling Mr. Buxon, I walked over and I said, Mr. Buxon, I think I'm going to vomit. And he goes, no problem.

Starting point is 00:50:01 Buckets right there. Go vomit. And then come back because you're up next. I was like, oh my God, they saved me. And lo and behold, I came out of that practice and I had done two, three times what I thought I was capable of doing. So that type of toughness, I think is important in training that toughness and ability to be resilient in the face of criticism and ridicule is a prerequisite if you want people to then use what you would give them in the meta-learning. Does that make sense? So helping kids to become more comfortable with discomfort and dissect their own fears and overcome them, which you can sometimes demonstrate very quickly in the cases of, say, language learning, so you can then give them the meta-learning, I think would be my approach. All right. So next question. What things do you think a person cannot or should not learn rapidly? Nothing that comes to mind.

Starting point is 00:50:58 I just haven't run into anything. With any given skill, even if it takes 10 years or 20 years, there is, I think everyone can agree, there is a dumber way to go about doing it and a smarter way to go about doing it. There's a spectrum. You want to be on the smarter side, which is going to be faster. Next one is from Jeremy Shore. What sub $100 purchase has most changed your life in the past six months? Well, this is the first that comes to mind. I would say it is a MarPak Dome white noise machine that I have in multiple locations because it's so important to me. And this is to help with sleep. It is effectively, it sounds like a fan inside a small device that is very, very useful for

Starting point is 00:51:41 sleep. So that would be, I think sleep is a force multiplier for many, many other things. You know what, actually, just on the prior question, because I actually also didn't catch AL framework. I don't know what that stands for either. But to the question about, if you want to just speak about

Starting point is 00:51:56 how some of the tools you've developed and systems of thinking you've developed can be used to address inequity in our public schools? Sure. And I'll apologize to everyone in advance that you all probably know a lot more about that environment than I do. I mean, I'm not an expert in any school administration or curriculum, so I'll take a stab at it. But I think that if I were in charge of it, and let's make it micro because I think you can learn a lot from case studies. If you gave me a classroom of, say, minorities or people who are considered to be victims of that

Starting point is 00:52:41 inequity, whether it's female students, learning disabled students, you name it, right? I would give them the tools to perform in the sense that I think you need to arm people with tools and training so that they believe in themselves and that they can demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can compete. And there are many other inequities and problems that are not addressed by that. There are plenty of systemic issues. I would have to try to tackle those one at a time. But I would say in general, whether it's, for instance, another nonprofit that I'm involved with, QuestBridge, is very good at this. And I think they place something like half of the lowest income kids, which by the way

Starting point is 00:53:34 includes say poor white kids in Appalachia and so on. It's not race specific, but people at an economic disadvantage into Ivy League schools. I think they placed about half last year. And they do that by, in part, making talented kids who are driven but who are at a severe disadvantage economically or in a social situation where they're not even encouraged to apply to college but could get a free ride to Harvard to go to different programs that will enable them and give them these tools and give them the belief system that will allow them to make those choices. So that's my best attempt. But I apologize if that is a dissatisfying answer. As teachers, we talk about the difference between memorizing and really

Starting point is 00:54:15 learning, internalizing. When does that transition happen for you in your framework? Okay. So let's define, I think whenever we get into conversations, whether it's about super sensitive topics, say iniquity, we didn't have time to get into it, but if we were having a bunch of wine and talking about this more, I would ask for a lot, I would ask a lot of questions before trying to answer that question. What are we talking about exactly? You know, what are the, where did it start? What are the ramifications? What are some examples? So really learning here, I will say really learning means that you have a firm grasp of principles

Starting point is 00:54:50 that allow you to adapt to different environments, including high-stress environments. To me, that would mean you're an adept learner in X. Languages are a great case study for this, but I don't want to belabor the language learning because even teachers' eyes tend to glaze over if I talk about language learning too long. But I should also highlight, when does that transition happen? The transition happens, I think you really start learning very often, or you become an adept learner, again, to use definitions really clearly,

Starting point is 00:55:19 when you get to a more intermediate level. You can't get to that intermediate level until you have a critical mass of the raw materials and building blocks so that you can start to create in novel combinations, whether that's swimming, whether that's Brazilian jiu-jitsu, whether that's experimentation in sciences, or anything else. So I would say don't dismiss memorizing per se. I think that memorizing is actually really, really important. Because you do need to consolidate the memories and practice of these, say, building blocks, 20% that

Starting point is 00:56:00 gets you the 80%, the 1,000 most important words, before you can start to get fancy and improvise and become an adept learner. So I would say you're learning, meaning you're absorbing from the very get-go, from minute one of day one of the framework that I laid out, but you don't become an adept learner in the adaptable sense until you start getting into more of an intermediate phase, which does not mean two years later. That could be two weeks later for a lot of skills. Could be two hours later. Just

Starting point is 00:56:31 depends on the subject matter. Okay, this is a great one. How do you recommend teachers address students who struggle with competition tasks due to anxiety or learning disabilities? This is a really, really, really, really important question. And just in my personal opinion, and by the way, I don't view myself as a writer or a podcaster or investor. I view myself first and foremost as a teacher. I'm not the best writer. I don't think I'm Tolstoy. I think we could probably all agree on that. I do, however, write all of my books to make the complex simple. So I think about it as a teacher. And the way that I've experienced tackling this question, how do you address students, including my readers, listeners, and so on, who struggle with competition, task-duty anxiety, or learning disability disabilities. I've dealt with thousands and tens of thousands of people who fall in both categories.

Starting point is 00:57:27 The way that you deal with that is not by protecting them from competition tasks. The way that you, I think, address that is by dosing them, starting off very, very lightly and titrating up with larger and more intimidating tasks to make it less scary. And I'm going to keep it at that. I think a lot of it is just operant and classical conditioning. So teaching myself how to change my own behavior, looking at BJ Fogg out of Stanford, ultimately it all comes back to a lot of this stuff. So I do think that you can learn a lot about training yourself. I learned a lot about changing my own behavior when I was training Molly, my puppy, reading a book called Don't Shoot the Dog. And it's fantastic, by the way. It's really, really good. But I would say

Starting point is 00:58:17 that you need to dose people who are afraid of something with that something, just like Iocane powder and the Princess Bride, if you guys get that reference, and then titrate up from there. That is, I think, how you help people with that. In the same way that something like Toastmasters helps you get over fear of stage fright, you don't help someone with that by having them think their way out of it. It doesn't work. You get them on stage day one. And if you want to do stand-up comedy, I've asked a number of professional stand-up comedians on my podcast, because that is my biggest fear in the world, is getting on stage trying to make people

Starting point is 00:58:53 laugh. Forget about it. And they said, I asked them a question I ask many people, which is, if you had a million dollars on the line, you get a million dollars, you have eight weeks to prepare me for stand-up comedy, I have to have, say, 10 minutes of material. What would the curriculum look like in the first week? And they said, day one, I have you on stage. Don't even care what your material is. You're not going to have any. I just want you to get comfortable on stage because it's going to terrify you. And they're like, 90% of it is just getting comfortable on stage. And the whole world is a stage. So you need to get students comfortable with it. I'm going to jump in with a final question.

Starting point is 00:59:28 And then we'll give folks back maybe one minute at least on their days. So what legacy do you hope to leave in the field of education and learning? I really think about, I'd say two things. So one is I'm trying to create a benevolent army of learners who have an incredibly good toolkit that they can then impart to more people, right? So a large group, millions of people who are in effect enabled super learners, not because they have any innate talent super learners, not because they have any innate talent for it, but because they have a better toolkit who can then impart that and spread it and hand it on to other people. And I would say, if we're talking about inscription on a

Starting point is 01:00:17 gravestone, it would be a teacher who wanted his students to always be better than he was. That's it. Well, if ever there was a benevolent army of learners, I think it's the community assembled right here. And I know I speak for Tim and myself in thanking each of you for the time you've spared to listen. And on behalf of this benevolent army of learners, I want to thank you, Tim, for your insights and your tools and tricks. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Starting point is 01:00:54 Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out.

Starting point is 01:01:38 Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #240: Accelerated Learning and Mentors - My Personal Story

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