The Tim Ferriss Show - #623: In Case You Missed It: August 2022 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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Starting point is 00:01:54 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The 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 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. It 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. View this episode as a

Starting point is 00:02:35 buffet to whet your 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 wherever you press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Roloff Botha, who has spent over 20 years building companies in Silicon Valley. He joined Sequoia Capital in 2003 and currently serves as senior steward of the global Sequoia Partnership. I have, and you can't believe everything that you read on the internet, but something in front of me that says you used to have 10 to the ninth power written in the corner of your notepad, I guess, every week when you started at Sequoia. Is that accurate? And if so, could you explain why that's the case? That is accurate. When I joined Sequoia, it was clear that if I wanted to make it as a partner, you needed to produce meaningful gains.

Starting point is 00:03:43 And I'd set myself the goal of producing a billion dollars in gains for the partnership because that would mean that I'd made it at some level. And so 10 to the 9, which is a billion, was my shorthand of reminding myself what I was striving for. Now, what was the notepad used for otherwise? And was this on the top of every page or something you saw on a weekly basis? I'm wondering on the frequency with which you saw this and also what the notepad was used for otherwise. This notepad was used generally for note-taking, but it was really on Mondays in particular when

Starting point is 00:04:17 we had a partner meeting where we would review all the decisions for a particular day. And that would be the notepad where I'd make notes about the companies that we were listening to, my own views on companies, what did I worry about, what did I think was interesting. And so that was the most important day at some level. We refer to it as the Olympic finals at Sequoia. It was the Monday partner meeting

Starting point is 00:04:38 and the importance of getting those decisions right. And so that was the day where I needed to remember very acutely what was I striving for. So I'd done this when I was younger too. I don't know if you'd heard this. I had, and we're going to get to that. Let me ask you, before we flashback and do the sort of the wavy Austin Powers flashback to childhood, which I will do in a minute, with the 10 to the 9th, did you have in your mind a particular timeframe for that? Or was it just a reminder of the magnitude of the goal before you if you wanted to move the needle? I didn't really have a time dimension at the time.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Things have changed a lot in the venture business. Technology has infused so much more of the world. I keep reminding myself when I was at PayPal in 2000, there were about 200 million people on the planet that had internet. 200 million. on the planet that had internet. 200 million. That's wild. And the vast majority of them were on dial-up. So by the time I joined Sequoia in 2003, we didn't even have broadband reaching 50% of the US population yet. So the numbers were still much smaller and technology didn't have the scale that it does have today. And so I just thought eventually get to a billion.

Starting point is 00:05:44 Now, honestly, I feel like it's 10 to the 10 that you does have today. And so I just thought eventually get to a billion. Now, honestly, I feel like it's 10 to the 10 that you need to strive for because technology has infused so much of what we do. So let's do, as promised, the rewind to childhood. And I'll let you take this ball and run with it wherever you want to go. But I did read a bit about your high school system of having your goals visible to you while you were studying. At least that's based on a bit of reading. I think this is actually from, it should be accurate because it's from square cap.com or the articles thereof.

Starting point is 00:06:17 So could you please elaborate on what you did back during that era of your life? I thought I needed, there's a concept in psychology called the Ulysses Pact, which is this idea that in the birth of Ulysses, he wanted to hear the siren. So he had all his soldiers or his sailors wax up their ears,

Starting point is 00:06:36 time to a mast, and that way they could sail past and he could hear the sirens and they wouldn't succumb to them. And so in psychology, the Ulysses Pact is this idea that you make a pact with your future self, knowing that your future self is going to be weak. And so my technique for doing this, not having read about psychology yet, was to put notes in

Starting point is 00:06:55 front of my desk, on the door, leaving my room, and candidly all over my room, reminding me what I was aiming for. And in high school, it was to be the top 10 in my state at the end of high school. At college, it was to be number one. And I would just put all these reminders of what my goals were. So if I was tempted to get up to go make a cup of tea or watch television or take a break, I would just see what I'd written to myself. And I'm reminded of what I need to do if I want to achieve what I want to achieve in life. Do you still use reminders like that of any type or do you feel like you've hit a certain escape velocity where that's no longer necessary? I still use some of those. I mean, when I was at Sequoia, as you pointed out earlier, I had the 10 to the 9. I try to keep track of how I spend my time. When I was in college, I would literally write down the time that I started

Starting point is 00:07:41 studying down to the minute and then I'd write down the time that I got up so that I would have an accurate tally at the end of the day of exactly how much time I actually spent studying instead of just thinking that I was studying and just loafing around the house doing nothing. And so I use Evernote to do that. I organize key things that I want to accomplish for Sequoia and for each of the companies that I work with. So I always have this running list of what are the key things you need to focus on, the three most important things you need to accomplish for a given company over the next, say, six months as a reminder of the most important things. Next up, Will McCaskill, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Will co-founded the non-profits Giving What We Can, the Center for Effective Altruism, and Y Combinator-backed 80,000 Hours. His new book is What We Owe the future. In the last, say, five years, you can pick the time frame, but recent history, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? I think the biggest one of all, and this was really big during writing the book, which was this enormous challenge. It was like my main focus for two years over the course of the pandemic, was evening check-ins with an employee of mine who also functioned a bit like a productivity coach. So every evening I would set deadlines for the next day, both input and output. So input would be how many hours of tracked writing I would do,

Starting point is 00:09:21 where going to the bathroom did not count. And a really big day would be six hours. Sometimes, very occasionally, I'd kind of get more than that. And also output goals as well. So I'd say I will have drafted this section or these sections, or I will have done such and such. I would also normally make some other commitments as well, such as how much time do I spend looking at Reddit on my phone? How much caffeine am I allowed to drink? Do I exercise? Things like this. And Laura Pomerius, who is doing it,

Starting point is 00:09:52 is wonderful and the nicest person ever. And she just never beat me up about this. But I would beat myself up and it would make me, it was incredibly effective at making sure I was just like actually doing things. Because I, like many others, find writing, it's like hard. It's like hard to get motivated. It's hard to keep going.

Starting point is 00:10:11 And sometimes, I don't know, I'd have gotten drunk the night before, let's say, and it was a Sunday. And normally you just, it would be a write-off for the whole day. But I think like, oh no, it'd just be so embarrassing at 7pm to have to tell Laura like, yeah, I didn't do any work because I got smashed. And so instead I would feel hungover and I would just keep typing away. And that was just huge. I mean, I think it increased my productivity. I don't know, it feels like 20% or 25% or something just from these like 10 minute check-ins every day. So these were 10 minute check-ins, seven days a week?

Starting point is 00:10:49 What was the cadence? I was working six days a week. So yeah, if she was doing something else at the weekend, we wouldn't check in. Right. So the format would be, walk me through 10 minutes, would be the first five minutes. Here's how I measure it up to what I committed and here's what I'm doing next. Exactly. So you have a view of the day. Did I hit my input goal, my output goal? How much caffeine did I drink? Did I exercise? And then also like, was I getting any migraines or back pain, which are two kind of ongoing issues for my productivity. And then next would be a discussion of what I would try to do the following day. And interestingly, you might think of a productivity coach as someone who's like really putting your nose to the grindstone. Whereas with Laura, it's kind of the opposite. Because my problem is that I beat myself up too much. And so we would have a conversation. So she's like luring E.T. out of the closet with

Starting point is 00:11:33 the Reese's Pieces candy. Exactly. Yeah. So I would be like, oh, I got so little done today, so I'm going to have to just have a 12-hour day tomorrow or something. Or like I'll work through the night or something like that. And she's like, that doesn't make any sense. You know, we've tracked this before. And when you try and do this, maybe you get like an hour of extra work where you feel horrible for days afterwards. So she would be very good at like countering bullshit that my brain would be saying basically. So a couple of things, caffeine, what were your parameters on caffeine? Like what were the limitations or minimums? I don't know how you set it on caffeine. And then how did you choose this employee specifically for this and why? Caffeine, I think a big thing is just if I drink

Starting point is 00:12:18 too much, I'm likely to get a migraine. So I set my limit at three espressos worth so about 180 milligrams of caffeine and i'm very sensitive so it's like 180 is legitimate for a sensitive person yeah yeah exactly so that's like the that's kind of a max that i do whereas a double espresso is fine but then it's like shading in between i'll be like very cautious about and And then how did I choose this person? I think it's like a very subtle thing, the kind of rapport or personal fit you have with someone who can be a good coach where she kind of knew me well enough that she knew the ways to like push me around. The combination of like, maybe I call it friendly pushiness or something was like perfect. And it's very, you know, it could be very easy to go along on either side of that line.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Sounds like I need an evening check-in. All right. Who is my victim going to be? All right. Maybe we can buy it. Yeah. So I'll give you... Will, I know, I know.

Starting point is 00:13:23 I know it's four in the morning, but I had to call you for my evening check-in. Next up, Russ Roberts, the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and the John and Jean Denault Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He hosts the award-winning weekly podcast Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, and is the author of the new book Wild Problems, a guide to the decisions that define us. To what extent are we making ourselves miserable by expecting to find happiness in one person or one person to check all of these boxes, including romantic notions that seem to have largely started in the Western world with the troubadours and so on? I don't know if that's a coherent question, but since you have more experience with these things than I do, I'd love to hear you speak to that in any way whatsoever. That's a deep question, kind of a hard one. I think it's a great insight that a lot of marriages in the past were either arranged by the parents or had

Starting point is 00:14:37 ulterior motives. Even if it was just to get the crops in. We're joking about economies of scale, but economies of scale were not unimportant in most of human history. You had kids partly to help you slop the hogs, I mean, and milk the cows, right? And to take care of you when you got old. a little of both, right? You read Shakespeare, you read Jane Austen. Jane Austen's characters usually are striving to make an advantageous match, not a love match. But they also fall in love. So that's one of the reasons I think her books are so compelling. They don't just want to be pragmatic. But it's a very deep question of whether, what you should look for, what you should expect in marriage. And I think Hollywood misleads us a little bit. The look across the room, and I've argued there are very few movies that capture

Starting point is 00:15:37 love. There are movies that capture romantic attraction, sexual attraction. I'll give you an exception. My Fair Lady. Not a very PC or politically correct movie in modern times. But it's a fascinating portrait of how Henry Higgins falls in love with Eliza Doolittle despite himself, right? He doesn't want to fall in love. He sees his bachelorhood life as an ideal, kind of like Darwin, actually. And yet he finds himself falling in love. And, you know, it's one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. When you think, how do you capture that feeling of real love, not just attraction? He says, I've grown accustomed to her face.

Starting point is 00:16:20 What a magnificent, magnificent line, right? Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs. They're second nature to me now. Like breathing out and breathing in. That's an incredible portrait of domestic life, right? And so, my point being that art actually pays some attention to this thing that evidently has been around for a long time. It's not just about sexual attraction. It's about love and romantic attraction, or whatever you want to call that, partnership, symbiosis to make it really as unromantic as possible, maybe even

Starting point is 00:16:55 less romantic than economies of scale at Costco. But I think to come back to the nub, so what should you look for? What should you expect? And is it worth it? Is it something you should strive for? I'll just say, you know, we can talk about this for another five hours. But the one thing I would add, I don't like it when people say, you know, you have to work at your marriage. You have to work at it.

Starting point is 00:17:23 That's not the way I think of my marriage. I work at crossword puzzles. I work at ditch digging. I work at, you know, writing up my notes for my next podcast. But what you do have to do is you have to treat your partner as a partner, as opposed to somebody who, you know, lives with you, who's pleasant to have as a roommate. They're two different things. And I think in modern life, we've taken away for a thousand reasons the responsibilities of marriage. And I think that's come at a cost, right? And it's made it harder for people to get married. If you look at the data, it's pretty obvious. Let's be scientific for a minute. People are marrying later or not at all.

Starting point is 00:18:09 And it's changed. And the appeal, this comes back to the Darwin point, the appeal of a long-term commitment from the outside is mostly negative for most people. I think certainly for most men. I don't know if women are different, but they seem to be. It's not fashionable to say that, but I think they are. But men, it's hard. Men struggle to stay in a long-term relationship. Not as appealing to either side. It's pretty obvious in the data. So what do you do? I don't know. Tricky. Could you say more about the diminishing of the responsibilities of marriage and what you mean by that? The part I like about you have to work at your marriage is that it is hard.

Starting point is 00:18:53 There are parts about marriage that are hard. There's parts about having a good marriage that are difficult, that are challenging. There's a great line from Annie Lamott. Her name for God, not me. And most of us naturally see ourselves as God, center of the universe, most important thing, easy. And I think one of the great advantages of marriage is to remind you that it's not all about you. And, you know, some people find that appealing and some people don't. I think I took this line out of the book, but I have a friend who said,

Starting point is 00:19:31 until you get married, his father told him this, until you get married, you're an idiot. I feel that sometimes. I think there's a lot of truth to that. And living with another person as a commitment, not as a contract. Very important difference I talk about in the book. It's more of a covenant and less of a contract. It's really a powerful way to be alive. This is to enhance what I said earlier about what a real marriage is about. It's not about working at it. Oh, let's have a session where we talk about our issues. It's about remembering, comes back to what we said at the very beginning of this conversation, remembering things that are very hard to remember, that you're in this together, this other person has a soul, a desire, a flavor, a preference, and that's hard because you have

Starting point is 00:20:18 yours. And you know what? I like getting what I want, don't you? Yeah, we do, most of us, most of the time. And to figure out how to mesh your plans with your partner's plans, and not just what we're doing on Sunday night, because we can take turns and we'll do Italian tonight, next week we'll do Chinese. But how to make a life together is really hard and beautiful and deeply rewarding if it goes well. And when it doesn't go well, it's horrible, by the way. Don't want to romanticize it at all, right? It's horrible, awful, stultifying, degrading. It's bad. So, it's a high-risk game. And to come back to your earlier question, for most of human history, it wasn't a choice. It was a destiny. It wasn't a decision. You got married. You had to. You felt that way anyway. It doesn't feel that way anymore.

Starting point is 00:21:05 Whole new world. All right. So I have a number of follow-up questions, and I'm not going to spend the nextferential that you just don't have the sort of lens or experience of the world that is as broad and more complete as someone who has decided to partner with someone else yeah okay got it yeah that's it exactly all right. Check. Let me say it in a slightly different way. I've come to believe as I've gotten older that a huge part of, quote, growing up, you know, we like to joke, hey, Tim, what are you going to do when you grow up? You know, like you still have room to grow up. Well, I hope you do.

Starting point is 00:21:58 Right? You're not all grown up. It's like Shalem. Right? You're not whole. You're not grown up. One of the funniest things in life is you look at the people older than you and you think, when I'm their age, I'll feel the way they do. And you get to that age and you don't.

Starting point is 00:22:15 Right? You look at the seniors in high school, right, when you're a sophomore. Wow, they're so confident and they seem so at ease. I can't wait until I'm a senior. Then you're a senior. It's like they were all faking it, every one of them, right? And it's a great thing, I think, to admit that I'm not grown up. I haven't figured it all out. Not mature fully. More mature maybe than I was before, but I'm not mature. It's hard. So a lot of what, to me, of a life well lived is about growing up. And marriage is one way to grow up. Not the only way. There are other ways to grow up. You know, religion, meditation, psychotherapy, marriage, they're all about self-awareness.

Starting point is 00:23:00 They're all, if they're done well, they're all about recognizing that you're a part of a much bigger picture than you feel like most of the time. And I think that's really helpful and leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and is the co-founder of Matcha.com, which offers extremely high-quality matcha that is difficult to find outside of Japan. Let me come back to one that you mentioned, and that is kava. So, a friend of mine reached out to me recently to get my two cents on a new supplement that he is taking in place of his evening cocktail. So, he's decided, he's in his seventies and has decided to cut back on alcohol intake because he sees how alcohol affects his sleep using an aura ring and other devices. And he switched to this supplement, which contains two things, kratom and kava. And I know very little

Starting point is 00:24:18 about kava kratom. I have some thoughts on, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on contains mitragynine seems to hit opiate receptors. So I believe there are people who abuse Kratom who have now developed dependencies that are in rehab. At least I've heard some stories related to that. But I know far less about kava. Would you mind elaborating on kava? Kava is the major psychoactive plant that's used in Oceania, in many islands throughout the Pacific. It's the very large root of a large plant in the black pepper family. from it, originally by chewing the root and spitting it into a bowl and mixing it with water or coconut juice, or now more often drying it and powdering it and mixing it into a liquid. And it functions as a social stimulant and lubricant, but it is a natural, sedative, and calmative, and probably the most important anti-anxiety natural product out there.

Starting point is 00:25:27 Extremely useful and essentially no toxicity. And so it does not interact with alcohol. It does not interact with other sedatives. That's quite safe. And I recommend it very frequently to people. Do you know what effect, if any, it has on sleep quality? My friend has the subjective experience of it helping him to wind down and go to sleep, but I wonder what effect it has on sleep quality. Because you look at some, say, sleep aids like Ambien and so on, which help you to fall asleep, but they affect the cycles of sleep in depth. That's putting it mildly. All of these sleep aids, whether over-the-counter or prescribed, I think are dangerous drugs. First of all, they don't reproduce natural sleep.

Starting point is 00:26:08 All of them suppress dreaming, which is an essential component of good sleep. They distort sleep architecture. They're addictive, and they interfere with cognitive function. So I think there's really no justification for using them unless for very short-term use because of situational insomnia. But kava has none of these ill effects. It can be used long-term regularly. I don't know that we have good studies on how it affects sleep quality, but I don't know of any indications that it has any of those adverse effects that the usual sleep aids do. And I suppose I should actually just go back to my friend who is

Starting point is 00:26:45 granted tracking imperfectly, but he's tracking his sleep with the aura ring that does capture some biometric data that is interpolated to land on percentage of sleep as different phases, including REM and so on. So I should actually just go back to him. But the problem, Tim, is that he's using Kratom also, which is a significant agent. And we really would like to see this with kava alone and what it does. So could you expand on that, please? I don't know that much about Kratom. It's been used in Indonesia where it's native to help people break opioid dependence. And it has sedative effects and opioid-like effects. I think there is a downside to it and some concern about people

Starting point is 00:27:35 using it in not good ways. But I'm not an expert on Kratom. last but not least tim answers a question on the relationship between money and happiness did you get any happier when you got rich what do you think a healthy view of money is so i'll take this as a as an opportunity to give a shameless plug to a friend of mine, actually, Ramit Sethi and his podcast, which I think is just I Will Teach You To Be Rich. It may have a different name, but if you just find Ramit Sethi and his podcast, each episode, and I've listened to a ton of them, he has generally a couple on and they talk about their money issues, their money priorities, what it means to live a rich life. And what you realize very quickly is that people have neuroses or stories at the very least around money that both help and hurt them no matter how much money they have. So he can talk to a couple where they barely have enough money to scrape by and they're hundreds of thousands

Starting point is 00:28:52 of dollars in debt. Or he can talk to a couple that's worth $10 million and is still comparison shopping for strawberries. And at the very least, it normalizes some of the unanswered questions and maybe unrealistic expectations that people have around money. To answer your question directly, I would say that it's hard for me, first of all, to point to a line after which I felt rich, if that makes any sense whatsoever. And that if for the time being, and I'm borrowing this from someone else, I think it was a podcast guest, but the value or cost of something being the amount of life energy you exchange for it. So you give to it or get from it in the sort of pro and con, positive and negative sides of things. And what I've noticed for a lot of my friends is that past a certain point, wealth actually turns into an energy

Starting point is 00:29:56 consuming facet of their lives. And this is not to complain, because certainly I feel, and I am, extremely fortunate for a million reasons, but I have observed people who, while they are on the hunt, while they are on the journey to become rich, and I'm putting that in quotation marks in my mind because I think the goalposts tend to move for people and it is, and can be a very nebulous goal, but implicit in that is very often the assumption that once I have this money, once I am rich, once I have won that game, most of my problems or many of my problems will be solved.

Starting point is 00:30:36 And on Maslow's hierarchy, if we're talking about shelter, food, right, so rent or mortgage, et cetera, that type of thing. It can be true. But the psychological, psycho-emotional issues tend to not just not get fixed, but sometimes get exaggerated. So by that, I mean power, alcohol, money tend to magnify whatever's there. It's also true with psychedelics for a lot of people. And if you have, say, paranoia or you're worried about people ripping you off, fill in the blank. It could be any number of things. If you feel insecure in ways A, B, and C, all of those levers I just mentioned, including money, tend to amplify those things. If someone's generous, they're going to be super generous. If someone's a stingy asshole,

Starting point is 00:31:23 they're going to be a super stingy asshole, and so on and so forth. And what I found is that people can be very happy and very often are very upbeat when they can hold in their mind the belief that once they cross the finish line, these problems will be fixed. Once they have the money, more often than not, they realize that's not the case. And it can actually result in different types of, and maybe more intractable types of depression or malaise, because then it's like, well, wait a second for 20 years, 30 years, I've assumed this would solve the problem. It didn't. Now what? And on top of that, I would say once you have team, once you have more stuff, let's say somebody buys a second house, et cetera, all of that consumes life energy on some level. And you can create systems and so on,

Starting point is 00:32:16 but it does create a bandwidth drain. And for instance, if you have a bunch of money, people are going to ask you for that money constantly in some form or another, and you will feel compelled, most people will, to think about investing a lot. And generating that initial wealth and being really good at investing are two entirely different sports. So you may be very well-suited to the former and very ill-suited to the latter. So again, coming back to your direct question, did I get any happier when I got rich? I would say that having a certain degree of relief, especially when thinking about caring for aging parents, when thinking about being able to help

Starting point is 00:32:56 family members, being able to help family members and close friends during something like COVID, for instance, especially in the beginning when there was a lot of uncertainty and having some capital made a difference in terms of having optionality and moving people around and so on. All of those things, I would say, give me a greater peace of mind and a certain degree of stillness. But on the other side of the ledger, there's a lot of shit that eats energy. What do I think a healthy view of money is? I would suggest that you actually listen to my podcast episode with Morgan Housel, H-O-U-S-E-L, on the psychology of money. This was a hugely popular episode. And I thought it would be reasonably popular, but it ended up getting a lot of spread via word of mouth and becoming mega popular. So I'd suggest listening to that. I would also say I don't have all the answers because I fit in the category of someone who thought money would fix tons and tons and tons of things and be able to exhale and go maybe lay on a beach and rub cocoa butter on my belly and read novels and be perfectly content to do that

Starting point is 00:34:05 for months and months of the year. Turns out not to be the case. Also, if you're accustomed to driving in sixth gear on the Autobahn, and you've done that for 20, 30 years, getting used to like driving through a school district and stopping at red lights and so on at 20 miles an hour is not automatically easy to do. You think it would be, but if you're used to park or mostly six gear, getting used to the gears in between, at least for me personally, has been very challenging. So I'm still working on it. And I think this is a fascinating, fascinating question.

Starting point is 00:34:38 So I may not have given much clarity, but that is my current state of play with these questions. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Rolof Botha. That's spelled R-O-E-L-O-F-B-O-T-H-A. Rolof has spent more than 20 years building companies in Silicon Valley. He began within the walls of nascent PayPal in the early, early days, which he joined in March of 2000 while completing his MBA at Stanford. He became CFO in 2001 and led the company through both its IPO in early 2002 and subsequent acquisition by eBay. And we have quite a few stories about all of that. Roloff joined Sequoia Capital in 2003, one of the most famed, legendary, and effective venture capital firms ever in the

Starting point is 00:35:27 history of venture capital to help founders build enduring businesses, which he has done many, many times now. He leads the US-Europe business as managing partner and serves as senior steward of the Global Sequoia Partnership. Roloff is a director of 23andMe, Bird, Ethos, Evernote, Inside.com, Landis, MongoDB, Natera, Pendulum Therapeutics, Square, and Unity Technologies. There are more. Previously, he was a director of companies that include YouTube, Tumblr, Zoom with an X, Surex, and Eventbrite. He also led Sequoia's investment in Instagram. Speaking of Instagram, you can find him on Instagram at Roliff Botha, on Twitter, same, and LinkedIn as well. We'll provide all of those in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast.

Starting point is 00:36:21 My guest today is William McCaskill. That's M-A-C-A-S-K-I-L-L. You can find him on Twitter at Will McCaskill. Will is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. A Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur, he also co-founded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, the Center for Effective Altruism, and the Y Combinator-backed 80,000 Hours, which together have moved over $200 million to effective charities. You can find my 2015 conversation with Will at Tim.blogs.com. Just a quick side note, we probably won't spend too much time on this, but in that 2015 conversation, we talked about

Starting point is 00:36:56 existential risk and the number one highlight was pathogens. Although we didn't use the word pandemic, certainly that was perhaps a prescient discussion based on the type of research, the many types of research that Will does. His new book is What We Owe the Future. It is blurbed by several guests of this podcast, including neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, who wrote, quote, no living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will McCaskill, dot, dot, dot. This is an altogether thrilling and necessary book. And quote, you can find him online, williammccaskill.com. My guest today is Russ Roberts. I've wanted to have Russ on the show for a very long time indeed.

Starting point is 00:37:40 Russ Roberts is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean Denault Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Roberts is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean Denault Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Roberts is interested in making complicated ideas understandable. He founded and hosts the award-winning weekly podcast Econ Talk, one of my favorites, Conversations for the Curious, with more than 800 episodes available in the archives, which I believe began in 2006, back in the Pliocene era. One of the pioneers. Past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Lewis, Angela Duckworth, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, among many others. His two rap videos, believe it or not, on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek have more than 13 million views on YouTube. I highly recommend both. I just watched them again, I would say an hour ago, just prior to getting warmed up for this conversation. His

Starting point is 00:38:32 latest book, Wild Problems, A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, explores the challenges of using rationality when facing big life decisions. He's also the author of Gambling with Other People's Money, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, The Price of Everything, The Invisible Heart, and The Choice. You can find all things Russ Roberts at russroberts.info, and on Twitter, you can find him at EconTalker. My guest today is Andrew Weil, MD. He is a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. He has also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. So let's cover some backstory. Dr. Weil received a degree in biology, in this case, botany. That was the focus from

Starting point is 00:39:17 Harvard College in 1964 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1968. I'll skip some of his bio, which we cover a lot in the first ever conversation we had on this podcast. But from 1971 to 75, as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled all over the place in North and South America and Africa collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease. From 71 to 84, he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants. He really knows what he's talking about. Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Andrew

Starting point is 00:39:54 Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he also holds the Lovell Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Medicine. He is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. He is a fantastic communicator. Through its fellowship in integrative medicine. He is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. He is a fantastic communicator. Through its fellowship in integrative medicine and residency curricula, the center is now training doctors and nurse practitioners all over the world. And New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Weil is the author of 15 books on health and wellbeing. I don't know how you have the longevity and endurance to write 15 books. I petered out after five, but he has written many, and I'll just mention a few, Mind Over Meds, Fast Food, Good Food,

Starting point is 00:40:33 True Food, that name will come up again, Spontaneous, Happiness, Healthy Aging, and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health. He's also co-founder of the restaurant-trained True Food Kitchen. I go there often in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of Matcha.com. That is M-A-T-C-H-A.com, which offers extremely high quality matcha that is difficult to find outside of Japan. You can find him on all the socials, Dr. Weil, that's D-R-W-E-I-L. That is also the website, drweil.com. You can find the Matcha.com company at said URL and also on Instagram at matcha Kari K A R I. 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 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter,

Starting point is 00:41:22 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:42:09 If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #623: In Case You Missed It: August 2022 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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