The Tim Ferriss Show - #589: In Case You Missed It: March 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

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 seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types

Starting point is 00:00:31 to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the last recap episode. For instance, at Hyper Sundays on Twitter suggested that the bios for each guest can kind of slow down the momentum in this format, so we moved all the bios to the end. So we moved all the bios to the end. So we are listening. Keep giving us feedback. View this episode as a buffet to whet your

Starting point is 00:01:10 appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below where we press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to Tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Morgan Housel, bestselling author of The Psychology of Money. Since we're on a bit of a thread here, I will say I ended up with a tremendous cash reserve, in part because I got my nuts kicked into my throat in 2007, 2008. It's just both self-inflicted wounds in the case of selling Amazon and then in the housing market.

Starting point is 00:02:00 And I was very conservative after that point. Or I should say I took a barbell approach of sorts, right? So Nassim Taleb talks about this, but I was in the Bay Area. I felt like I had an informational advantage if I wanted to really commit time to trying to become well-versed and well-networked within technology. So I decided to begin angel investing. That was the highly, highly speculative, potentially high return investing side of things. And then the rest was basically in cash. I mean, the equivalent of being in a mattress. I mean, I didn't even have the guts to put it into an index and I missed some tremendous, tremendous growth as a result of that. It didn't bother me though. At the time, at least I was still sleeping pretty well. I was

Starting point is 00:02:45 enjoying learning what I was learning in tech. And then in January began tracking COVID. This is a 2020 and I was able to deploy a ton of my cash reserves, basically end of March, beginning of April. So it did well, but one could very, I think, convincingly argue that I would have made more money just by having it play in the market for a longer period of time. But I think that would have made it hard for me to sleep at night having just had my face ripped off. I know I'm mixing a lot of metaphors, face balls, you get it, but it was unpleasant. This is the point I'm trying to make. And I'm going to bring this back to how you think about success in investing. And I hate that word, so I'll parse it out a little bit. But I want to

Starting point is 00:03:32 read something from a blog post that you wrote or an article. I'm not sure which you prefer. This is on the Collaborative Fund website, Internal vs. External Benchmarks. And let me just read these two paragraphs. The most important point may be this. Internal benchmarks are only possible when you have some degree of independence. The only way to consistently do what you want, when you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want, is to detach from other people's benchmarks and judge everything simply by whether you're happy and fulfilled. Okay, I want to bold that in your mind. Judge everything simply by whether you're happy and fulfilled, which varies person to person. This next paragraph I circled because I just thought it was

Starting point is 00:04:07 really worth reading over and over again. I recently had dinner with a financial advisor who had a client that gets angry when hearing about portfolio returns or benchmarks. None of that matters to the client. All he cares about is whether he has enough money to keep traveling with his wife. That's his sole benchmark. Quote, everyone else can stress out about outperforming each other. He says, quote, I just like Europe, end quote. Maybe he's got it all figured out. So I just love that because it's highly subjective, meaning it's personal, but it's also very objective. It's an absolute measure. And it's an example of, you know, unless he gets a lot of lifestyle bloat and wants to have a yacht in the Mediterranean or something, it is a goalpost that won't move. All right. So you talk about the importance of the

Starting point is 00:04:50 goalposts not moving. In my experience with people who have gone from very, very moderate circumstances, not having much money growing up to being very, very successful. Offhand, I'm sure there are some examples, but 99% of the people who come to mind who are smart, I think good people who are very much students of life, the goalposts have always moved. Yep. And so I want to know what you've seen work or not work in that specific domain and how you think about it for yourself? I think it's the single most important topic in money, in investing, in finance, and it's the hardest thing to actually make work. Those are both true statements. It's the same for me. I can write about this and say what people should do,

Starting point is 00:05:42 but it's the same for my wife and I. We struggle with this as much as anyone else about getting the goalposts to stop moving. I think if there is one thing that has helped me, and I would say helped, not fixed, just like helped a little bit around the edges, is something that we talked about earlier, which is that just the idea, the observation that no one is thinking about you as much as you are. And therefore, so much of people's willingness and their desire to spend more is just a social signal to show people how much money you have, whether that's the bigger house, the nicer car, whatever it is. You just want to show other people. And once you realize that people aren't thinking about you that much, they don't care about you that much, they're thinking about themselves and how much people care about them. Once you realize that, then you're like,

Starting point is 00:06:21 okay, I can see what the game is. It's a game that I can't win. So I'm not even going to try to play it. I just want to focus on the internal of like, what's going to make me happy? What do I want? What's actually going to give me pleasure? And let's just do that. And I don't want to think about anyone else. What's that for you? What's the happy and whatever the other thing I bolded, which I promptly forgot. But what are those things for you? I want to wake up every morning and hang out with my kids and I want them to be happy. And I want to do it on my own schedule. If it's a Wednesday morning and I don't want to work, then I'm going to sit on the couch all day and watch Netflix. And if it's a Sunday and I got

Starting point is 00:06:55 a good idea, I'm going to spend all day working. It's all my own schedule on my own time. Whatever I want to do, it's that independence and autonomy. Can you not do that right now? Yes. Yeah, I can. There was a point when I couldn't. And that's why I feel like I'm pretty happy. And I feel like I've done a decent job of doing that. Now, I do have, as a lot of people would, a tendency to be like, oh, what if I got that Porsche? What if we got the bigger house? What if we did this? What if we did that? And it's fun to think that because I love nice cars. I love all of that. It's just so easy to realize there's a great quote that I love. That's the grass is always greener on the side. That's fertilized with bullshit. I think that's, that's really what

Starting point is 00:07:32 it is. That's, that's, that's, that's the accurate phrasing of that, of that well-known quote. And I think that's really what it is. Like the idea that all that nicer stuff is going to make you necessarily happier, I think is just so easy to disprove, especially once you've experienced a little bit of it yourself. And that actually what is going to make people happy is that independence and autonomy that once I remind myself of that, I'm like, okay. And then the game of earning more just becomes a game. It's less about like, oh, if I have more money, I'm going to be happier. No, if my net worth is 10X what it is today, I'm not going to be any happier. That was not true at one point in my life, but I think it's true today. It's probably true for you

Starting point is 00:08:06 right now. It's true for a lot of people listening. And therefore, you can admit that a game is fun and a game is fun to play, but just admit that it's a game and it's actually not going to make you happier. I think I may have a solution for you. I think that all of that experience as a valet could come back to serve you. If you took took a Saturday shift as a valet and took a few Porsches for a joyride, I think you could scratch that itch without the expense or the guilt and karma associated with buying one. You could also buy one, certainly. See, actually, I don't think I've ever talked about this before, but I actually do scratch that itch when I rent a car. When I'm traveling, I rent a car. I always get the extreme upgrade, the highest upgrade that they have. A lot of times, Enterprise will have

Starting point is 00:08:48 a Porsche or something sitting around, and whatever the price is, I'm doing that. That's how I scratch the itch without actually buying it. That's a great way to do it. Because you can rent a Porsche from Enterprise for like 300 bucks a day. It's not cheap. It's not 60 bucks a day, but it's a lot different than buying the damn thing. Next up, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the open source publishing platform, WordPress. What is one fear you would like to conquer? You're going to answer the same one? I can, or you could choose another one yeah i think that'd be it

Starting point is 00:09:26 be fun if we both answer it let's do it because maybe we'll inspire a different way of thinking about it in each other great you know i have a hang-up around body issues and exercise and stuff and it kind of got bigger in like the past six months. And as I'm 37 now, not the old man, young age. We first started talking. And yeah,

Starting point is 00:09:53 I think that's a fear I like to conquer because it's totally irrational. What is the fear exactly? I don't know how to articulate it, but there's something where I don't know how to articulate it. Because it's a fear. It's not rational. It's not something I can put into words. There are a lot of fears that are rational, right? So just because it's a fear doesn't automatically make it irrational.

Starting point is 00:10:14 I think this is probably an irrational one. Yeah, alright. It's something around... It's like an insecurity. I'm not going to let you go. So is it an insecurity around appearance? I think it's something, yeah, something about, I'm sorry, I don't know how to go deeper. We can, this is, this is where I should do, do some heavy lifting or help do some heavy lifting.

Starting point is 00:10:41 What would be an example of a time when it shows up for you? The resistance I feel around sort of exercise. That's been growing, I would say, where it shows up like a fear in that I can think of so many excuses why, including like, I'm going to injure myself again, or I'm going to hurt my knee, or my wrists are bad right now, so I shouldn't be doing this,

Starting point is 00:11:10 or like things like that. But which really just add up to be a bunch of excuses. What do you think that is protecting you from? Like if you did not have, because it seems like you're a smart guy. So there's probably some part of you, not to go too far into IFS Dick Schwartz type stuff, but

Starting point is 00:11:29 your subconscious is trying to protect you from something potentially. What is it protecting you from? What do you think it is? I don't know. I mean, it could be injury. It could be performing below your expectations perhaps, like if you exercise

Starting point is 00:11:44 that you're not going to meet some standard you've set for yourself in your mind. I have no idea. performing below your expectations, perhaps. Like if you exercise, that you're not going to meet some standard you've set for yourself in your mind. I have no idea. So it sounds like it's a hesitancy that you can't fully explain. Therefore, it's kind of falling into the category of fear for you. Okay.

Starting point is 00:11:59 How about for you? What's a fear you would like to overcome? Man, how much time do we have? I don't, I think that's a bit of an overstatement, but I mean, shit. If we're drinking our single malt and really going for it, I would say the fear that I am just hardwired

Starting point is 00:12:21 and also just software coded through dna to be depressed and unhappy and that that is a baseline i cannot escape like there's the gravitational pull to out of the box settings is so strong that no matter what i do no matter how many morning routines i tweak no matter how much i exercise no matter how much i program meticulously different areas of my life, the regression to the mean is always going to be to a place of depression or, this is a strong word, but like self-loathing, something that is not quite self-loathing at a 10 out of 10 intensity, but like a discontent and disappointment with myself. That's a big one. That locked in something about mine,

Starting point is 00:13:12 which is like a fear of being bigger. Bigger. Yeah, my family's bigger. Bigger, meaning like obese. Yeah, like I have some pre-built settings, the proclivity towards that. Yeah. Hmm.

Starting point is 00:13:25 Do you believe that? That you're, can you overcome that? Depends on the day. Depends on whether I've had a good stretch or a bad stretch or an average stretch. I mean, even if it is diluting myself, I want to believe that it is something I can overcome. I don't see how the alternative plays out is terrifying to me. If I truly, truly believe that 100% of the time, the consequences of that are staggeringly scary. So I don't want to believe that, but if I were a scientist just looking at the data set,

Starting point is 00:14:06 I'd be like, yeah. If we're rating days like negative two, negative one, zero, plus one, plus two, somewhat like Jim Collins does. If people want more on that, you can just listen to the first conversation I had with him. But I would say I probably average out negative one just on an emotional tone

Starting point is 00:14:29 the gestalt of the day being sort of positive energy negative energy and have you checked it? not in that way that'd be interesting to do not in that way

Starting point is 00:14:36 someday they're around it I should do it also because I do think and my girlfriend has certainly pointed this out and I recognize it as true that I have a negative selection bias.

Starting point is 00:14:48 I think a lot of humans have negative selection bias because you get rewarded by overreacting to threats. What's a stat? You feel a dollar you lose seven times more than a dollar you gain or keep? Yeah. They've done studies around this. Yeah, like how hard would you work to make $100 versus how hard would you work to avoid having like $100 stolen or taken from you, right?

Starting point is 00:15:09 Yeah, so that is one of my macro fears. Next is Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, and her new book, Bittersweet! How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. I know you have written about, in some respects, inheriting the grief or griefs of our parents and ancestors. Could you speak to that and also mention if there's anything to be done? Is it just like having genetics for small calves and you're like, well, I can go to the gym, but they're always going to be pretty small. Or is there something that we can do with whatever we have accumulated through our bloodline? I went down this whole path of looking at inherited grief, and I ended up devoting a

Starting point is 00:16:12 whole chapter of the book to it. Because originally, it was just because I went to this seminar for bereavement counselors, because I was just curious to learn more about that. And what I found was, we were each asked to tell a story of loss that we had experienced. And I really didn't want to tell my story because I felt like it wasn't as bad as some of the other stories that I heard that day. And I felt wrong to be talking about it. But I felt like I had to because it seemed ungenerous, you know, not to tell my story. And then when I did, I found myself crying much more than anybody else had. And the seminar was run by this incredibly skillful guy named Simcha Raphael. It was at the New York Open Center. And I forget how he came to it, but he basically said to me that I seemed to be carrying a grief that was apart from what I personally had experienced, that I was carrying a deeper grief than that.

Starting point is 00:17:13 And that it was a kind of grief of the ancestors. And I started realizing that I come from this family that's kind of mired in loss, really, on both sides, on my mother's side and my father's side. We lost almost all of our relatives in the Holocaust. And although those weren't people who I knew directly, there's kind of a shockwave that reverberates through. When he said that, I realized that I had always had this kind of tendency, even when I was a kid, to cry at any kind of moment where it was like, that which once was will never be again. Even though at that point I had not really experienced any loss in my life and I had a happy life, I still had this intense reaction. And once he opened up that idea, I started researching the whole area of inherited grief. It's absolutely

Starting point is 00:18:03 fascinating. There's all this research that finds that the children of Holocaust survivors have particular biomarkers that you wouldn't find in another control group population. And you can find this in animals too. It's a pretty new area of research, but the results are incredibly compelling. There seems to be this idea, this thing that we can inherit from the people that came before us. And in a way, the question of whether it comes to us biologically or because of what we learn from our parents culturally, it almost doesn't matter. We're inheriting it somehow. And then to your question of what can you do about it, I have found it incredibly empowering to know this because there's a way in which you can get to the insight of, I'm going to love those ancestors and I'm

Starting point is 00:18:53 going to feel empathy for that which they experienced at the same time that you're holding the idea that their story is not my story. And I don't think we take the time to realize that you can hold both those truths at the same time. Their story is not my story, and yet I love them. These people I've never met before. Because music has been our theme here. There's this amazing song also by Dara Williams. It's called After All. And she is a masterpiece of a song. And it describes how she had been beset by a kind of mysterious depression. And to come out of it, she traveled down what she calls the whispering well of talking to her parents about her family history and

Starting point is 00:19:37 realizing all the different things that she was carrying from the people who had come before her and how that process of excavating all of that and understanding it and loving it, that was what freed her. And then she comes out into a shining light on the other side and it helps her with her depression. So whether we're doing that through some kind of formal therapy or through our own sort of ad hoc process of traveling down the whispering well, there are ways to do it. We don't have to take this right turn because it could really uncork Pandora's box, but this is part of one facet of exploration in looking at psychedelic-assisted therapies is multi-generational trauma or ancestral grief. And I also wanted to mention, lest anyone listening think, who are these wackadoodles? This sounds like some new agey bullshit.

Starting point is 00:20:35 I did a quick search just to pull it up because I know it exists. Here's an example, and this is in Scientific American. Fearful memories passed down to mouse descendants. Genetic imprint from a traumatic experience carries through at least two generations. This is from Nature magazine, which is also a very respectable STEAM publication. And there are, in other words, animal models and scientific studies

Starting point is 00:21:01 and peer-reviewed literature that supports this in various species of animal, including mice. And the authors suggest a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in humans. Now, there's a lot of skepticism. I'm just going to read a little bit of this very quickly. Some researchers are skeptical of the findings because the biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has not been identified. I'm kind of skeptical of such skeptics because we all use, for instance, microwaves every day, but very few of us understand how microwaves or refrigerators, if you don't like microwaves, how they work. So in the absence of a mechanism, this is also true for a lot of commonly prescribed medications.

Starting point is 00:21:40 We still don't actually understand how they work. But putting that aside aside so according to convention this is going back to the article the genetic sequences contained in dna are the only way to transmit biological information across generations random dna mutations when beneficial enable organizations to adapt to changing conditions but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations yet some studies have hinted that environmental factors can influence biology more rapidly through epigenetic modifications, which alter the expression of genes. And it goes into many more examples and so on. But there are a lot of scientists, very credible scientists,

Starting point is 00:22:14 including, looks like many quoted in this, Kerry Ressler, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at Emory University, who have studied this in animals. And I want to say, someone could call BS on this, but I want to say that this biological material can sometimes be transferable from one animal to another, even if they're not direct descendants. So if you use, say, electrical shocks to produce a state of acute anxiety and learned helplessness in mice when you turn off the lights, there is some way of transferring genetic material from that animal to an unrelated but same-species animal that will induce a similar fear of the dark, even though it has not been learned. So there is, in other words,

Starting point is 00:23:05 a biological basis. There seems to be a biological basis for exactly what you're talking about, right? Because Holocaust, in the grand scheme of things, as the example you used, not that long ago. Really just not that long ago. I want to offer two other ideas of ways to cope with that if you feel that, if you're listening and you're thinking, oh, you know, this actually might speak to my experience. One is just kind of a simple reframing that Rachel Yehuda, who was the researcher who first discovered this epigenetic tradition in Holocaust survivors, she talks about how one of the people who she worked with just started to understand this in herself. And she started to

Starting point is 00:23:45 reframe when things would happen to her, like she'd have a bad day of work and kind of overreact. She started saying, oh, well, I now understand that my shock absorbers are a little thinner than somebody else's might be. And so I'm just going to adjust around that. And the simple knowledge and acceptance is an incredible power. To take it even a step further beyond that, I talk to a lot of people who are what you might call wounded healers, which is a kind of archetype in the Western tradition. her pain and then use that to try to heal the same pain that they see other similarly situated people experiencing. And I talked, for example, I write about this in the book with the young woman who I called Farah Khatib. She didn't want to use her real name. She's from the Middle East. And she felt that she didn't just feel, she came from a family in which all the generations of the women before her had suffered these horrible experiences of rape and bereavement

Starting point is 00:24:53 and all kinds of things. And she just found herself like called. She had some job for a multinational company doing marketing or something. And as part of that job, they had to do that thing you do where you do lots of focus groups and listen to people's stories. And as she listened to the stories of other women, there was something in those stories that touched this nerve in her of all the generations who had come before her of women in her family. And she found herself leaving that job and flying back to the Middle East and starting to work with women prisoners and then starting her own not-for-profit to help women refugees. And there's something about that work that she's doing to help heal other people that is

Starting point is 00:25:38 simultaneously healing herself. I also want to say at the same time, it's not like that's kind of a grand story. And when we talk about creative people who transform pain into beauty, you know, they turn out to be Leonard Cohen. That sounds like really grand also, but you don't have to be doing these things on such a grand scale. It's just, you can be doing them on the most minute level and you're still going through that same mechanism of taking pain and turning it into something else. It's the mechanism that matters. Next, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004.

Starting point is 00:26:31 So let's talk about the training yourself to be uncomfortable or to become more comfortable with discomfort. Does anything come to mind just in terms of managing your psychology? For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning and you get like whatever emails you have of like stuff that's going on in the world. So it's world events, it's team events, whatever trends we're seeing across our products. And often in there, there's a fair amount of bad news and new things that I need to absorb. And one of the things I've found that just for managing myself is that if I try to just go straight into the day, almost every morning when I wake up and like read through my emails and get the news, it's almost like getting punched with sort of like a ton of new context. And it's like, okay, I need to like internalize this. So I found

Starting point is 00:27:15 that doing, you know, something physical and something that's like meditative to take my mind off of it for like an hour, so that I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's like meditative to take my mind off of it for like an hour so that I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's why, you know, things like foiling or surfing have been really important to me because when you're out there in the water, it's like pretty hard to focus on anything else. When you're on the board, you're focused on making sure you stay on the board and don't mess something up. When you're not, you're, you know, especially if you're kind of towing or something like that, there's not a whole lot of downtime. So I've found that for my own performance is significantly better when I have something like that, that's like meditative and physical and allows me to

Starting point is 00:27:55 kind of output some energy and then I can come back in. And it's almost like I'll have subconsciously settled all the news that have happened in the world. Now it's like, okay, now let's go deal with it. Now, obviously, if there's something that's really an emergency, I'm not going to go do a sport or something. I'll go deal with it. And obviously part of life is you don't always get to control your schedule. And that's kind of how that goes. When I compare kind of how I do on the days when I kind of get to have some time to soak that in or to kind of have an outlet versus just like jumping right in. I find I'm often like stewing in bad news or something. And then I just, I'm not as

Starting point is 00:28:30 productive. So that's sort of my own personal way that I, that I try to manage situations like this. But obviously a key part of this is like having an awesome team. And, and it's not, it's not, you know, primarily about me at this point, you point. It's a big company and we have awesome people who are running all these different groups. So I get that what I'm saying, kind of how I've worked out the system for myself isn't necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people. I think the meditative palate cleanser makes sense though, especially if you're talking about things like foiling where the consequence of a lapse of attention on what you're doing has immediate penalties. So it's regulating in a sense.

Starting point is 00:29:11 Maybe I'm not strong-willed enough or calm enough to just do straight up meditation. It's like I actually need to put myself in a situation where it's difficult to not focus on that thing. Part of this too, I do think managing energy is an interesting thing. I mean, some of the folks who I work with at the company, they say this lovingly,

Starting point is 00:29:30 but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the eye of Sauron. And that basically, they're like, you have this unending amount of energy to go work on something. And if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them. But at the same time,

Starting point is 00:29:45 just kind of managing that so that way I can like manage my own energy and diffuse it well enough. So that way it's like, okay, I have the thing that I'm focused on that that day. And I it's, it's really important to me that I can as often as possible manage my schedule. So I can actually focus on the things that I'm naturally thinking about. I just think the engagement that you get of having like an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something and then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better

Starting point is 00:30:10 than like going and scheduling a meeting that you'll have three weeks later when, I mean, maybe the topic will still be important, but it's not like what's going on at that time. So getting that balance right, I think is an important thing for sustainability for the organization as well. Last but not least, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Stuart Copeland.

Starting point is 00:30:35 Have there been particular dark periods or difficult periods going up to the end of the police era? Well, the police itself was hell. Just kidding. No, I'm not kidding. No, it was both. It was like a Prada suit made out of barbed wire. It was incredible to have that effect on audiences,

Starting point is 00:31:01 to get on stage and do what we did was darned exciting. But it became more and more difficult for us to resolve our creative differences. And they come from an honest place. You know, in the early days, songs would come into the band with just some chords and we'd say, oh, cool, let's play that and let's mess around with it. And the writer of said song would be, oh, really? You you want to play it oh wow guys cool can I make tea you know after you've had written a few hits that humility turns into something else it turns into confidence so the vision of where to take the band began to not be quite so symmetrical. And, you know, I saw the band like this,

Starting point is 00:31:46 Stingo saw it like that, and Andy just saw, great, they're fighting again. And he would just sit up there, he'd pull up a deck chair and throw bombs, you know. And if you are a true creative musician, you don't show up to the studio. At that time, he wasn't, none of us were showing up with a couple ideas, and then the band would develop it. We would all show up to the studio at that time he was he wasn't none of us were showing up with a couple ideas and then the band would develop it we would all show up we all had home recording

Starting point is 00:32:10 studios now and we would show up with platinum demos having thought through every aspect of the song having thought through not just what i'm going to do but what he's going to do he's going to here's a guitar part and no no no no I've already written the guitar part so play what I already wrote since I wrote the song that's a guitar part that I wrote so play that and that you know we all felt that way about because music's really important to us it's really important that this song I have conceived this song and it should be expressed like that what do you mean you've got another idea that isn't this? Go away with it.

Starting point is 00:32:47 So that caused conflict. It was never an ego clash. When Sting would get the attention and his face on the cover, that's a good day because, you know, we, the band, he's our guy, he's our face, and, you know, I love that. But the music part was, it just got to be such a struggle of You know, I want to express something in this band But I can't because the doors locked because he wrote the song and he's decided how it's gonna be by the way

Starting point is 00:33:16 The decisions that he had made also including the drum part We're pretty good decisions. Actually, the guy really does know music and he really does, he has impeccable producing chops. That's where the conflict came from. Even as I understood that, you know, he comes, turns around and he says, you know, Stuart,

Starting point is 00:33:37 you know, that snare drum, you're just, you're using a rim shot. Fuck off! And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. This is an important point. It doesn't matter that actually

Starting point is 00:33:52 he was right about that Snare Trump thing. That's actually kind of a cool idea, that fucking asshole. But when you're young, all this wisdom, by the way, came decades later. You know, he's deep and quiet. I am noisy and shallow.

Starting point is 00:34:14 We clash. We, because of our history, get along really well and with mutual admiration. You know, we really have a deep bond that is just not breakable. After rehearsal, we meet, you know, we have dinner together, we laugh and we hang out and it's fine. But man, the music thing, and this is the reason I'm going on, because it's so weird. It makes no sense that we created such important music that so many people kind of liked, and yet it came from forcing together these elements that are disparate. So the question I'd love to ask is,

Starting point is 00:34:53 when you have a bad day or a down day, how does that manifest itself? Because you're a passionate guy. Is it anger? Is it depression, anxiety? What is the cocktail? Well, anger is it depression anxiety what is the cocktail well anger is dope anger is dope it is it feels good oh dope yeah okay sorry it feels good yeah few things are more invigorating than a nice swelling of righteous anger.

Starting point is 00:35:26 You know, sometimes I wake up in the morning, I'm in the shower when the brain chemistry is just bad. And I'm looking for someone to pick a fight with. Somebody on TV, a politician, my poor wife

Starting point is 00:35:39 who's about to come into the room. You know, and it's brain chemistry. And just, you you know I'll get into some fantasy of who somebody said this and then I said that and then they said this and then I said that you know then you know the great part of these anger fantasies is that you win every argument you just totally crush and but then I have breakfast I get down to work i turn on my computer and i'm still kind

Starting point is 00:36:05 of but then i get into work and i find that on the day and this isn't every morning by the way just some mornings you wake up you know and um i find that after a morning like that that i have a very serene day go figure so you've sort of prodded the monkey mind with a little barb. Yeah, what is that? It's gotten all of its aggression out. Well, the weird thing is the anger, the physical sensation of anger is very pleasant. Yeah. Especially when there's nothing to be angry about.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Especially when the anger derives from an imaginary conversation that never took place. Yeah. conversation that never took place yeah that is a rarefied purified distilled anger that just is a warm glow all right so not everybody else has that anger and after breakfast they're like oh so did you have did you learn to turn it down or turn it off or was it just it ends out of the shower and you're like Mary Poppins after the goes away it goes. Thank God I mean, you know two things that cause bad decisions or anger and sex You know how many people have made just stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid, you know, that seemed like a really great idea

Starting point is 00:37:19 when I Was really mad or you know was at the disco or whatever, you know, when I've been listening to that music and thrusting my pudenda, one thing leads to another, you know. That music, yeah, music causes bad decisions. And anger's the same, you know, it seemed like a really good idea to tell him what I thought. It wasn't a good idea. And best have those, you know, those moments in the shower. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Morgan Housel, H-O-U-S-E-L. You can find him on Twitter at Morgan Housel. He is a partner at the Collaborative Fund

Starting point is 00:37:59 and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the board of directors at Markel Corporation. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sydney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His book, The Psychology of Money, has sold more than 1 million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. My guest today is one of my favorite guests and a good friend, Matt Mullenweg. Matt is a co-founder of the open source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers more than one third of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automatic, M-A-T-T. See what he did

Starting point is 00:38:45 there? Automatic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital. Can you guess who that's named after? I'll give you three guesses. An investment and research company, he has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., Tech Crunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, it keeps going, Vanity Fair, and the University Philosophical Society. Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the high school for the performing and visual arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. I encourage you to check out ma.tt. He currently

Starting point is 00:39:28 splits his time between Houston and Jackson Hole. For my first interview with Matt way back in 2015, where he had very long hair, go to tim.blog slash Matt. There was some tequila involved. As mentioned, you can find him online at ma.tt. You can find him on Twitter at photomat, that tells you just how many photos he's taken, and on Instagram at photomat. My guest today is Susan Cain, that's C-A-I-N. You can find her on Twitter at Susan Cain. Susan is the author of Quiet Journal, Quiet Power, The Secret Strength of Introverts, and Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 40 languages.

Starting point is 00:40:15 Susan's TED Talk has been viewed more than 40 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks. LinkedIn named her the top sixth influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink, all good people, to curate the Next Big Idea Book Club. They donate all of their proceeds to children's literacy programs. For my first conversation with Susan on the podcast, you can go to Tim.blog forward slash Susan Cain. Her newest book, which she's been working on for some time, and I know because we talked about it last time,

Starting point is 00:40:48 Bittersweet, subtitle, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And I am very excited to dig into this. We'll provide links to all the social in the show notes, but you can find everything Susan Cain at, you guessed it, susancain.net. My guest today is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October of 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta

Starting point is 00:41:26 to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and to focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse, a term you have no doubt heard in the last few weeks and months, moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. He is also the co-founder and the co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife, Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world's toughest challenges, including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California, beautiful place, in 2004. You can find him on Facebook, facebook.com

Starting point is 00:42:10 slash zuck, and on Instagram, instagram.com slash zuck, Z-U-C-K. And Meta, you can find, of course, at metameta.com. Just a few more comments before we dive in. And that is related to questions and subjects. I wanted to cover new ground with Mark. I did not want to rehash questions and topics that have been covered a lot in the media, whether by the New York Times or anyone else for that matter. And one of those topics is Ukraine, because Meta has spoken and published publicly about their ongoing efforts regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So you can read about them also in the show notes, Tim.blog.com slash podcast. And Marcus commented on these things already. If you want to learn about what I am doing on that front, you can go to Tim.blog.com slash Ukraine. But we had limited time

Starting point is 00:43:00 in this conversation, and I wanted to cover subjects that would have some staying power, some relevance moving forward six months, 12 months, maybe even several years when people are listening to this podcast in the future. So imagine yourself a founding member of one of the most successful rock bands of all time. What happens when you break up? For many, that might be the end of the story, but for my guest tonight, who is just getting started with no prior experience, he went on to score films for Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone,

Starting point is 00:43:32 compose for ballet and opera, and even take pilgrimages to Africa where he played drums with hungry lions. I am not kidding. He's a founding member of the police, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and for the last three decades, he's been one of Rolling Stone's top ten drummers of all time.

Starting point is 00:43:52 Please welcome musician master and madman, Stuart Copeland. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

Starting point is 00:44:42 And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday,

Starting point is 00:45:05 drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #589: In Case You Missed It: March 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

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