The Tim Ferriss Show - #655: In Case You Missed It: January 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers,

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Starting point is 00:01:35 So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a question? and thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Tim Ferriss Show. 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, James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits. easy, satisfying. Now, if you're sitting there and you're thinking, how can I get myself to meditate more? You can just turn those into questions and you can say, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And you'll start to notice different things that you could do. So for example, how can I make meditation more obvious? Well, do you have a clear space where you're going to do this? You know, like maybe you need a meditation pillow and it's in the corner of your bedroom or it's in the corner of

Starting point is 00:03:48 some other room that is the dedicated meditation space. And this is exactly where it happens. So it's obvious where the behavior is going to occur. Make it attractive. There are many different types of meditation and there are a lot of ways to get into it. And this is true for any habit, by the way. For some reason, I think we often choose habits that we feel like we should do, but it's not necessarily the one that we want to do individually. And, you know, there may not necessarily be a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there's almost always more than one way. And you should choose the version that you're most genuinely excited about, you know, that is most appealing and interesting to you. Because if you're genuinely

Starting point is 00:04:29 interested in it, then there's going to be all kinds of ways to improve. You'll find all sorts of things that you could like refine or make it better. But if you're not actually interested, if you're like not genuinely engaged in the task, even the obvious stuff is going to feel like a hassle. You know, it's going to feel like a chore, even if it's straightforward. So do you want a guided meditation? Maybe it'd be nice to have somebody kind of walk you through it. Or do you want to find a meditation that has like lovely music associated with it? Do you not want anything? Do you just want silence and you want to be able to like hear yourself think for a minute or listen to your own breath for five minutes? And that's kind of the objective, but what sounds most attractive and appealing to you? Try to find a version of

Starting point is 00:05:08 the habit that you're actually interested in. This actually, I think connects to the timing piece that you were talking about, Tim, which is yeah. In the morning is a great time for a lot of people, but if you have young kids and like your four-year-old is running around and you're trying to figure out how to get pants on them and you need to make breakfast. That's probably not a good time to do it. So find a time and a space where that habit can live, where it's attractive and you're not just going to end up frustrated because you're trying to swim upstream. Make it easy. So rather than doing 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of meditation, which, hey, that sounds great because your favorite guru does it. But listen, why not just do 60 seconds? Because if you can master the art of showing up,

Starting point is 00:05:49 if you can just do it for a minute and actually stick to that day in and day out, then you're starting to build the habit. And now you have something you've like gained a foothold and you can advance to the next level. One of the things I recommend in the book is called the two minute rule. And it says, just take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or meditate five days a week for 30 minutes becomes meditate for 60 seconds. And you're just trying to master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. It's got to become like the standard before you worry about optimizing it into some perfect thing. So make it easy to do, make it easy to show up.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And then the final thing is make it satisfying. Now, if you've done those first three steps, well, it's obvious it's an attractive version of it. It's pretty easy to do. You're probably going to feel pretty good about yourself because you're at the end of the meditation session now. So like that'll probably be pretty satisfying. But you can layer on some kind of additional benefit. Maybe you get to have your favorite type of coffee or your favorite drink after that, or maybe you get to have a bubble bath or a walk in the woods or whatever sounds motivating to you.

Starting point is 00:06:57 So find some way to add some additional positive emotions to the experience, because if you feel good about it, you're going to want to repeat it. And this is something that in Atomic Habits, I call it the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that get rewarded get repeated, and behaviors that get punished get avoided. And it's so basic, it's so obvious, but all humans want to feel good. We all want to have positive emotions, to be supported, to be loved, to be rewarded, to have something that feels good.

Starting point is 00:07:30 And so how can you get that feeling and associate it with your habits? That's kind of the core idea. And ultimately, this connects back to what we talked about with identity, which is the perfect version is when you perform a habit and you feel good because it's reinforcing your

Starting point is 00:07:46 desired identity. You know, I'm the type of person who wants to meditate each day, or I'm the type of person who doesn't miss meditation sessions. And then even if it's only 60 seconds, you can feel good about doing it because it's reinforcing your desired identity. So that's kind of a quick case study on how to apply the ideas. Next up, Rick Rubin, legendary music producer and author of the new book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being. Let me ask you, this is a bit of a left turn, but I'm so curious to get your take. And my apologies if a lot of people have asked you this, but I've never heard you speak to this publicly. I, first and foremost, would consider myself a nonfiction writer. And in the last few months, I've been tracking artificial intelligence, enhanced or dependent copy production, blog posts.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Tell me a story about a guy trying to get a piece of toast out of his toaster with a butter knife in the style of the King James Bible. Some of what you're seeing with Chad GPT and so on is astonishing. And most recently, and this is speaking as someone who comes from an art family and as someone who wanted to be a comic book penciler for a long time, I've been watching with some degree of awe. And it's been astonishing to watch how much this has gone vertical in the last few months, at least in terms of mass adoption and experimentation. 15 years ago, at least as covered in the New York Times, 2007, you said that the way,

Starting point is 00:09:38 or one of the ways to counter, not counteract, but offset file sharing was to offer people a subscription model, much like cable, right? So lo and behold, that has happened. And people have these subscriptions and they have music at their fingertips, in their living room, in their car, et cetera. What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence and how it fits or doesn't fit into creativity? I think of it as an end. It doesn't strike me as interesting. As a means, it could be helpful. For example, what's interesting about the things we make, again, isn't the making. The computer's doing the making.

Starting point is 00:10:17 It's not doing the noticing. So I might ask, in the same way that we spend time like hip hop producers do crate digging, where we'll listen to hundreds of old albums, track by track, looking for a moment that's interesting. We're not looking for the song. We're not looking for the piece of work. We're looking for a moment where things go right or a moment that just strikes us. And then that's an element that we can integrate into our work. So I might consider having a music-making program, constantly making music, and then listen for at any point in time over the hours and hours all day long. I would probably have it playing in the background all day. And then any time there was a moment that made me look, you know, that would catch my ear,

Starting point is 00:11:08 I would sample that moment and try to build something with human taste with that as a seed to build from, or as an element used. I think what's interesting, the human curation aspect of art is it's what makes it art. So I don't even know what it is. If a computer makes it, I don't know. I've also not seen any personally thus far, I've not seen any computer generated images based on instructions that have moved me in any way. I haven't felt them. I haven't felt them. I may see them, I might laugh at them, or I might think, oh, that's a funny cartoon, but never does it make me want to learn more or go deeper or feel something bigger.

Starting point is 00:12:01 There's also the question of if humans are going to want to or be willing to feel something if they know that it's been generated by a computer, right? By AI. Well, they won't always know. I can't imagine they would always know, right? Yeah. It's going to get harder and harder to distinguish. When you hear something that catches your ear, or when you think back to some of these songs, whether it's from the Beatles or Neil Young or otherwise, that move you deeply, what does that feel like? Can you describe that quickening? Because it strikes me that you use your felt sense in response to things as a guiding rod of sorts. Can you describe what that feeling is like? One of the elements is surprise.

Starting point is 00:12:48 It holds my attention and it surprises me. If it comes on and I like it and it only does what it did to make me initially like it, I might lose interest. Mm-hmm. But if it does something that's interesting and catches my ear and makes me lean forward to understand what's happening, why am I feeling this? What's going on here? And it holds that curiosity. And anytime it makes me want to turn it off, I know that's not for me. If I want to turn it off, it's not for me. And if I want to listen to it forever, I really like it. Next up, Dr. Matthew Walker,

Starting point is 00:13:38 bestselling author of Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. You've changed your mind, it seems, on coffee in so much as you now advocate for it, or at least support the idea of a cup of coffee in the morning. And an outstanding question, because we were going back and forth on what we should talk about in this conversation that I really don't know the answer to. And that is, why is coffee associated with so many of the same health benefits as sleep? It doesn't seem, at least at face value,

Starting point is 00:14:16 to make immediate sense. So both of those. Why a cup of coffee in the morning and then why is it associated with some of the benefits of sleep? And maybe you could also get into some of the pharmacokinetics of caffeine or, I mean, I guess coffee could be its own thing just in terms of half-life and stuff. So people have an idea. Yeah. So I've certainly changed my tune on caffeine and I think just I tried to change my

Starting point is 00:14:39 tune in general. I think when I first came out with the book and was just getting my training wheels underneath me in public communication, I think I was probably a bit too absolutist in truth. And anyone who speaks in absolute, you should always be weary of. And I was very much guilty of that. And I think that was true for caffeine and sleep in general. But let me just come back to the first part of the question, which is caffeine. What is it? How does it work in terms of waking you up? How does it work in terms of waking you up? How does it work in terms of preventing you from sleeping, but also why I, despite those things, I would still advocate for it. All right. Caffeine is a chemical as I'm sure you and everyone else knows it's a

Starting point is 00:15:17 stimulant. It's a psychoactive stimulant. One of the few that we feel readily comfortable giving our children, but caffeine works in a very interesting way within the brain, which brings us back to another chemical that sounds very similar called adenosine, caffeine adenosine. From the moment that you and I and everyone listening, I suppose, woke up this morning, a chemical builds up in your brain and that chemical is called adenosine. And the more of it that builds up, the sleepierier that you feel and so we think of adenosine as a signal of sleep pressure it's not a mechanical pressure by the way it doesn't mean that the end at the end of the day your head is nearly going to explode on the basis of your adenosine it's just it's a

Starting point is 00:15:58 chemical pressure caffeine works to keep us awake by way of competing with adenosine. So the longer that we're awake, the more adenosine is building up and that adenosine is telling your brain, okay, you're getting sleepier and sleepier. And after about 16 hours of being awake, you should feel heavily weighed down by that adenosine signal that you can fall asleep easily and then you can stay asleep. Caffeine works by way of racing into the system and it latches onto those adenosine receptors. But what it doesn't do is activate them because you would think, well, if it's binding on and latching onto those welcome sites of adenosine in the brain, then wouldn't that make you more sleepy? Well, the reason it doesn't is because it has the opposite effect. Well, not quite the opposite effect. It races in and it just latches itself onto those receptors and inactivates those receptors.

Starting point is 00:16:56 So it doesn't inhibit the receptors, it just blocks them. And so it's almost as though caffeine is the mute button on your remote TV controller. It just comes in and it mutes the signal of adenosine, of sleepiness. So it's what we call a competitive receptor blocker. And it has very sharp elbows. It will come in and it will nudge adenosine out the way, latch on and hijack those receptors and block the signal of sleepiness. And that's why all of a sudden you

Starting point is 00:17:25 think, well, gosh, I was feeling pretty sleepy. I've been awake for 14 hours. I have an espresso. I don't feel sleepy anymore. It's not as though you've removed the adenosine. The adenosine is still present. The sleepiness is still present and it will continue to build up the longer that you're awake. It's simply that your brain is no longer getting the message of adenosine because caffeine is blocking the signal, if that makes some sense. So that's the reason that caffeine will then start to disrupt your sleep. And it will disrupt your sleep in probably several different ways. The first is that it will, because it's a stimulant, prolong the time it takes you to fall asleep. And you mentioned that too. The other aspect of caffeine though, is that it's what we call anxiogenic,

Starting point is 00:18:10 that it increases your anxiety. And anxiety, including what we think of as physiological anxiety, biological anxiety, which is essentially having your fight or flight branch of the nervous system switched on into higher gear and aspects of your stress chemistry and things like cortisol. Those things will be ramped up by way of caffeine. And that is the exact opposite of what you need to be able to fall asleep. You need to disengage the fight or flight branch of the nervous system and shift over to the more restful branch of the nervous system that we call the parasympathetic nervous system. And you can't do that because of the caffeine. And so what happens is that psychologically, the caffeine is preventing you from falling asleep. Then you start to get anxious because it's anxiogenic. It increases anxiety. At that point, you start to ruminate this rolodex of anxiety begins to whirl and you start to then

Starting point is 00:19:06 ruminate and when you ruminate you catastrophize because everything seems so much worse in the darkness of night than it does in the light of day and at that point of catastrophizing and ruminating you're sort of dead in the water for the next two hours as as it were. The story of my life. I'm so sorry. This can sound painfully familiar to many people out there. So that's one of the issues with caffeine. The other is its duration of action. You mentioned its pharmacokinetics. It has a half-life of what we call five to six hours,

Starting point is 00:19:39 which is just a fancy way of saying that after about five to six hours, half of the caffeine is still in your system, which means that caffeine has a quarter life of, for the average adult, at least 10 to 12 hours. It's probably, again, not really a very good analogy, but if you have a cup of coffee, let's say at 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. in the afternoon, is it similar to then saying, well, that's the equivalent of tucking myself into bed at midnight before I switch the light out, a swig of quarter of a cup of coffee, and I hope for a good night of well, that's the equivalent of tucking myself into bed at midnight before I switch the light out, a swig, a quarter of a cup of coffee. And I hope for a good night of sleep. That's probably not going to happen because a quarter of the caffeine is still in the brain

Starting point is 00:20:11 swilling around at midnight. So it's duration of action is something that people may want to be mindful of, and that will impact sleep. The other component is that caffeine will destabilize your sleep. So it makes your sleep more fragile. And as a consequence, if you are prone to waking up, and we all will wake up across the night, even healthy, good sleepers will wake up because caffeine will destabilize and make your sleep more fragile. It's more likely that you'll wake up. And when you do wake up, your sleep is

Starting point is 00:20:45 less robust and it's harder for you to fall back asleep. And so now sleep maintenance insomnia. And then the final part of caffeine comes back to deep sleep. If we, and we've done these studies where we can dose people at different times of the day and into the evening. And if you give people a standardized dose of caffeine, maybe 150, 180, or 200 milligrams, which would be, I suppose, the equivalent of probably a very strongly dripped, brewed cup of coffee, or probably one and a half cups of coffee, what we can see is a decrease in the amount of deep non-REM sleep, particularly in the first two hours of the night, it can decimate that deep

Starting point is 00:21:26 sleep. In fact, there was a reduction if you look at that, and we've done some of these studies, by a single cup of coffee in the evening, it will drop the amount of deep sleep by about 30%, three zero, which to put that in context, I would probably have to age you by about 12 to 14 years to get that type of reduction in your deep sleep, or you could just do it every night with an espresso if you wanted to. And I do think that that's relevant, by the way. Some people will say, look, I can have a cup of coffee with dinner or even two, and I can fall asleep fine and I stay asleep. So no harm, no foul. The problem there is that it discounts the idea that you have no sense of how much deep sleep that you get at night. Yes, you probably remember, did you struggle to fall asleep or did you

Starting point is 00:22:11 wake up? But none of us has a recollection of the quality of our deep, slow brainwave activity. But yet you may still be suffering from that excising of a significant amount of your deep sleep. And so the next morning you don't feel refreshed or restored by your sleep, but you don't remember struggling to fall asleep or having a hard time staying asleep. And so you discount the idea that it was the coffee the next night, but now you start reaching for three cups of coffee the next morning. And then so on and so forth, the sort of vicious cycle begins, the harder it is the next night to fall asleep, the less deep sleep, the more coffee you get, and then people start falling into the

Starting point is 00:22:50 trap of alcohol or sleeping aids to help them fall asleep. I'm going to stage an intervention. All right, so the cycle, the stimulant-depressant cycle is a whole mess that I've been an active participant on that field before. But if I could just return to some of the questions that kicked us off. So why allow or endorse the idea of a cup of coffee in the morning, number one, after this litany of sins? And then how could coffee be associated with any of the health benefits of sleep? And if so, how is that the case? You're absolutely right. I think, you know, at the time when I was writing the book a few years ago, the evidence was starting to emerge there that drinking coffee had health benefits. And there's been some great meta-analyses quite

Starting point is 00:23:43 recently, and it is striking. And you just can't really deny it on the strength of the evidence that drinking coffee is associated with numerous health benefits and the reduction in risk for numerous health conditions. And what's striking, as you mentioned elegantly, is that many of the same health-related conditions that drinking coffee is associated with reducing are the very same diseases that sleep will also reduce in terms of your risk. So how on earth does this work? They seem completely paradoxical. The answer is antioxidants, because it turns out that the coffee bean itself contains much more than just caffeine. It contains a very healthy dose of antioxidants. A family called the polyphenols, perhaps the principal one is, well, there's a number of different polyphenols that it

Starting point is 00:24:45 contains, but chlorogenic acids are probably the principal kind that we think carry, it's an ester that carries some of these health benefits. So what we realized is that the coffee bean, because most people in developed nations are still deficient in their whole food dietary intake, the humble coffee bean has been asked to carry the Herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs. And that's why drinking coffee has such a strong statistical health signal in the data when you do epidemiological studies. So it's not the caffeine that's related to the health benefits. It's the antioxidants. And case in point, if you look at decaffeinated coffee, you get many of the same health benefits. I was just going to say, I hate to spoil the party with a question.

Starting point is 00:25:38 Just a, if I could jump in for a second, just a quick side note. So the antioxidant and nutritional value of coffee bean in, let's just say, less industrialized or lower income strata of various countries is true also for coca in the Peruvian Andes and elsewhere. It's actually a source of very important nutrition for a lot of these communities and indigenous groups. So I just wanted to say that as an aside. Also, chlorogenic acid, I think, is contained in quite a few other compounds and beverages, if I'm not mistaken. So I want to say that it's present in yerba mate, which they drink all the time in Argentina. I may be getting that wrong, so somebody can fact-check me. But is chlorogenic acid found in in like camellia

Starting point is 00:26:25 sinensis tea plants or or other types of of beverages or is it particularly prevalent in coffee certainly nowhere near exclusive to the coffee bean itself by the way it doesn't have contain any chloride that please don't be worried about it drinking in you know bleach or something like that it's got nothing to do with that. But yeah, the chlorogenic acids, that's certainly one group. It's not to say it's the only group, though. There are others. Acromide is another one that we've been very interested in, in terms of the coffee bean,

Starting point is 00:26:57 just another antioxidant. So it's a cluster of different antioxidants that provide these benefits. Any brewing methods, roasts, grinds, any combination of those variables that if one wanted to maximize for the good stuff and minimize the potential damage to sleep and sleep architecture, any thoughts on what that Goldilocks combination might look like? It is interesting. And by the way, I think the Goldilocks combination comes onto the idea that when it comes to coffee, it's the dose and the timing that make the poison here. That obviously, if you look at the health benefits too, once you get past about two and a half, three cups of coffee a day, the health benefits start

Starting point is 00:27:38 to go down in the opposite direction. So it's not a linear relationship. Don't start drinking like seven cups of coffee and be mindful of the timing. But to come to your question, I suppose if we're talking about caffeine concentration and then maybe antioxidant concentration, actually here I am going to do a Petri tea. I'm going to do a two by three because you could think about the rows of this table being the caffeine and the antioxidants. And then the columns, the three columns would be the roast, maybe of the coffee bean, the grind of the coffee bean, the granularity, the coarseness,

Starting point is 00:28:11 and then maybe the brewing method. It's not quite as simple as this, but certainly what we found is that for the roast of the coffee bean, and this comes onto the color of the coffee bean, a coffee bean is a coffee bean in terms of when it comes out, what changes its color is, how you roast it. And what we found is that gram for gram light roast actually has about the same caffeine content as dark roast. But the issue is that the dark roast, the longer that you roast it, the more degraded the coffee bean becomes, and hence the lighter its density. So net-net on average, a lighter roast will contain more caffeine than a darker roast. So it's a little bit complex. In terms of the grind, I think it's fairly clear that fine grain coffee produces a higher degree

Starting point is 00:29:01 of caffeine concentration than a coarse grain. Now, of course, we're not talking about brewing methods yet, but that's simply probably on the basis of surface area, that the finer the grain, the greater the surface area, the greater the release of the caffeine. Brewing method is, it's really interesting if you look at some of the data, the longer the brewing method, the greater the caffeine concentration relative to shorter. Also, cold brews tend to produce a stronger caffeine content than hot brews. I think part of that simply is down to the duration of the brew itself. Cold brews typically take longer, and therefore you get a stronger pound for the punch in terms of caffeine. So that's caffeine antioxidants.

Starting point is 00:29:46 In terms of the chlorogenic acids, you're probably going to favor lighter rather than darker roasts. Lighter roasts typically have higher amounts of chlorogenic acid than darker roasts. Although there is some evidence that darker roasts have higher amounts of some of the other antioxidants like acromide for example so i don't think there's too much you don't need to worry too much in terms of the antioxidants and also by the way thankfully the decaffeinating process still preserves the antioxidants and that's why it's still related to the health benefits. You don't lose out on the antioxidants when you switch to decaffeinated. Finer grains typically produce more antioxidants than coarser grind in terms of that. And then brewing method, it's probably that cold brew seems to produce stronger antioxidant concentrations. Then probably the next down would

Starting point is 00:30:42 be espresso preparation then instantly instant coffee seems to have finally higher concentrations of antioxidants than drip or infusion bag versions so i'm sure that i'll stand corrected by the internet but that's sort of my reading of the literature perfect Perfect. Next up, legendary investor Bill Gurley, who has spent more than 20 years as a general partner at Benchmark. You have spent time with Jeff. What do you think are some of the most underappreciated aspects related to Jeff in any capacity? Well, he's probably the best entrepreneur that I've ever been around or got to know. It's remarkable and it's multifaceted. Here's one that I think is not well discussed. So he has a bunch of traits that make him a great entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:31:52 The company today is at such a radical scale that there's no way, and he's in the chairman role, he's not touching all the decisions. He's not touching all the product decisions. He has built a organizational framework to take what Jeff Bezos believes and run the whole company that way. And that's not well dissected, not well understood. But here's a great story. I'm riding in an Uber. This is about eight years ago, maybe seven. And I always talk to him. I always talk to the drivers because I'm a shareholder and I always talk to the drivers because I'm a shareholder. And I always talk to the drivers. And I'm asking him something about whether we can stop. He goes, well, I got to get back down to San Jose by 2.30. And I'm like, what happens at 2.30?

Starting point is 00:32:35 He goes, I have to meet at the Amazon warehouse at 2.30. And I go, what's going on? He goes, oh, they got this new program they're running where you show up at 2.30 and they have all these burner phones and they load your car with packages and give you a manifest and then they book the ride over Uber. And so this was the early days of same day delivery. And this is a company that's worth tens hundred billions of dollars that is running an experiment on top of uber and yeah i know for a fact that most of the companies i've worked with that have gotten over 20 or 30 million in revenue would not run that experiment

Starting point is 00:33:22 because someone would say oh we won't know how to do the accounting. We can't like that's too much of a hack, like whatever. But this large company was super comfortable running this kind of hack experiment on this other company. And he showed me the manifest. I looked at all this stuff. Of course, I called Uber immediately thereafter and briefed them that we were being used in this way. But unbelievable, right? I mean, just unbelievable. No other large company would do that project.

Starting point is 00:33:52 None. Zero. And so somehow he's institutionalized this kind of experimentation and risk-seeking. And he's talked about it. There's a great interview with him from Code that you should try and find for the show notes from four or five years ago. And, you know, I could watch it over and over and over. It's like the Eagles documentary. I could just watch it again. But it's fascinating. They ask him, when does a internal experiment get killed? And he said, when the last person with good judgment gives up. And that's not how other big companies work. They don't run experiments that way.

Starting point is 00:34:34 In fact, one of the reasons startups can compete with big companies is because most big company experiments, they run one test. And if it fails, they quit. And a startup can't quit because they have to shut down if they quit. So they run experiment one and two and three and four and five, and then they pivot and do six and seven and eight, and they stay up all night because it has to work. And so they just get way more shots on goal than the big companies do. Bezos is also someone who's chronicled a lot of his thinking and decision-making frameworks in letters to shareholders. And there are some compilations of his letters, much like Warren Buffett. And they're very good. To give one example, I mean, it can be highly tactical.

Starting point is 00:35:20 The reason that people who would call internal meetings would be required to put together, I think it was a six-page document. And the first 30 minutes of the meeting would be spent reading this meticulous document and all of the reasons for why that was instituted. I mean, it's very concrete. It's not sort of ambiguous, hand-wavy stuff. So, I definitely recommend people check that out. By the way, and that mirrors back what we talked about earlier about writing and thought process. Like if you're forced to write a six-page paper, it's much harder to put that together than it is a five-page PowerPoint. It's easier to leave stuff out. You really have to think through everything. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:02 He's also, I mean, he's super curious beyond belief. He's willing to change his priors super fast if he got something wrong. Yeah, it's something else. I mean, I think AWS is maybe top five business move in the history of the world. I don't even know what just the notion that they launched that out of a consumer internet company and became one of the most important enterprise companies. It's fairly unprecedented. It's just amazing. Last but not least, famed explorer Wade Davis, author of 23 books, including One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and Magdalena, River of Dreams. I want to come back to, I suppose, frames and lenses for a moment,

Starting point is 00:37:01 and also Jim Whitaker. So for those who don't know, the first American to summon Ephraim, if my research is not lying to me. And I'm looking at an excerpt from alumni stories on the brentwood.bc.ca website, and he comes up. And there's a line that I would like to explore because I think it's Maya Angelou, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, said that courage is the mother virtue that unlocks all other virtues because effectively, I'm paraphrasing here, but at the breaking point, you need courage to enact or to enable those other virtues. And there's a line here, and I don't know if it is Jim's or yours, but either way, I would love for you to expand on it. Pessimism is an indulgence.

Starting point is 00:37:46 Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention, despair, and insult to the imagination. And I want to bring this up because it strikes me that a lot of people, not just very young people, but many people overall feel a certain psycho-emotional malaise right now, a sense of overwhelm that has led to pessimism or nihilism. And so it seems to me that optimism is the unlock here. So could you elaborate on the pessimism as an indulgence and so on in that line? Yeah, that was actually my line, not Jim's. You know, people are always asking, we're always asking each other, are you optimistic? And I kind of feel like, how can you not be optimistic?

Starting point is 00:38:26 I mean, that's the purpose of life itself. And if you're a father, you absolutely have an obligation to remain hopeful. And given how many gifts we have, surely pessimism does become something of an indulgence. You know, we're all so caught in the present these days, you know, so little sense of history, and we forget how much we've achieved. But when you think about it, Tim, in my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people, men and women from the closet to the altar. When we think of the environment, when I was a young kid, just

Starting point is 00:39:05 getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was a great environmental victory. Nobody spoke about the biosphere or biodiversity. Now these are terms familiar to schoolchildren. So what's not to love about a world capable of such social transformations, such scientific genius. You know, just think about that moment on Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo went around the dark side of the moon and emerged to see for the first time in human history, not a sunrise or a moonrise, but an earthrise. And in that incredible moment, we suddenly saw the earth as it is, not this infinite horizon, but a fragile blue planet, as the astronauts famously

Starting point is 00:39:53 reported, floating in the velvet void of space. And I think everything has changed with that, like a flash of illumination, it swept over the world. You know, we never will think again about the natural world in the same way we did before that vision. And even today, as I mentioned earlier, I think, you know, the revelations of genetics showing us indisputably that race is a total fiction. Well, that hasn't really gotten into the zeitgeist yet, as the moonshot has, but it will. And I think that we're living through extraordinarily exciting times and extraordinarily challenging times. But as I say to all young people, what generation has ever come of age in a world at peace, a world without troubles? You know, it's very interesting.

Starting point is 00:40:45 One of the ways I, Tim, keep my optimism, you know, my dad wasn't a religious man. His spirit was broken in the war. I never saw the inside of the church in his presence. But he did believe in good and evil. He used to say to me, there's good and evil in the world. Take your pick and get on with it. And it was incredibly wise because we have this sort of thing in the world, take your pick and get on with it. And it was incredibly wise, because we have this sort of thing in the Christian tradition, particularly, that if we just wait long enough, good's going to triumph over evil, and we'll all somehow be dissolved in the rapture. Well, ain't going to happen. And famously, in the medieval times, if you asked the obvious question, if God's all-powerful, why does he allow evil to exist? You were burned at the stake for heresy, right? But in the Indian tradition, the Vedic

Starting point is 00:41:29 tradition, by contrast, when Lord Krishna was asked that very question, if God's all-powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? Lord Krishna said to the disciple to thicken the plot. In other words, good and evil walk hand in hand. You're never going to lose one. You've got to take your side. And the purpose of life is not to triumph over evil, but keep pushing the wheel of justice forward. And when you realize that that is the end point, you then never expect to win. And if you never expect to win, you're not disappointed when you lose. And because of that, you can keep fighting with the same idealism, the same energy when you're 69 years old as I am today that I had when I was 20 years old and marching against the war in

Starting point is 00:42:19 Vietnam. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is James Clear. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at James Clear. James is a writer and speaker focused on habits and continuous improvement. He is the author of the number one New York Times mega bestseller, I'm adding the mega, Atomic Habits, which covers easy and proven ways to build good habits and break bad ones. The book has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. On average, Atomic Habits has sold one copy every 15 seconds since it was published. So by the time I finish reading this intro, two or three copies will have been sold. James is also the creator of the 3-2-1 newsletter. That's 3-2-1

Starting point is 00:43:06 newsletter, which is one of the most popular email newsletters in the world and has more than 2 million subscribers. Each issue contains three short ideas from James, two quotes from other people, and one question to consider that week. We're going to talk a lot about questions, in fact, shortly with James. You can sign up for free at jamesclear.com. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies, and his work is used by players and coaches in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. In college, he was an academic All-American baseball player, and he is an avid weightlifter. For those who cannot see the video, we seem to go to the same stylist. We've got the same handsome bald look and the same long sleeve dark shirt look.

Starting point is 00:43:46 And you can find James at jamesclear.com. And as mentioned on Twitter and Instagram, at James Clear. My guest today needs no introduction, but I will provide one regardless. Rick Rubin, you can find him on Twitter at Rickick rubin is a nine-time grammy winning producer one of time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world and the most successful producer in any genre according to rolling stone he has collaborated with artists ranging from tom petty to adele johnny cash to the red hot chili peppers beastie boys to slayer kanye west of the strokes and system of a down to jay-z that is just the tip of the iceberg believe it or not you can find my 2015 interview seven plus years ago with rick unbelievable isn't that crazy tim.blog slash rick rubin his new book is the creative act subtitle a way of being we're going to dig into

Starting point is 00:44:37 that my guest today is matthew walker phd i've wanted to have him on for a very, very long time. Indeed, you can find him on Twitter at Sleep Diplomat, on Instagram at Dr. Matt Walker. And Matt is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder and director of the School Center for Human Sleep Science. He is also the author of the New York Times and international bestseller, Why We Sleep, subtitle, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which was recently listed by Bill Gates as one of his top five books of the year. I highly recommend reading this book. His TED talk, Sleep is Your Superpower, has garnered more than 17 million views. He has

Starting point is 00:45:21 received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020, Walker was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Achievements. Walker's research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, Nova Science, NPR, and the BBC. He is also the host of the five-star rated podcast, The Matt Walker Podcast, which is all about sleep, the brain, and the body. My guest today, I'm so happy to have him, is Bill Gurley. You can find him on Twitter at BGurley, that's G-U-R-L-E-Y. Bill has spent more than 20

Starting point is 00:46:05 years as a general partner at Benchmark. Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at Credit Suisse First Boston. Bill also maintains a blog on the evolution and economics of high-technology businesses called Above the Crowd, which you can find at abovethecrowd.com. Over his venture career, he has worked with such companies as Grubhub, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow, among many others. Bill has a BS in computer science from the University of Florida and an MBA from the University of Texas. He is also a chartered financial analyst. Bill is a board trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a research and education center focused on the study and understanding of complex adaptive systems. My guest today, I've wanted to have

Starting point is 00:46:53 on for a very long time, Wade Davis. Wade is professor of anthropology and the BC leadership chair in cultures and ecosystems at risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013, he served as explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society, named by the NGS as one of the explorers for the millennium. He has been described as a, quote, rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. He spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making

Starting point is 00:47:39 some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies. I'm not making that up. It is a fascinating story. And that was an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow, published 1986, an international bestseller, later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years, his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland. I hope I am pronouncing those correctly. Davis is the author of 375 or so scientific and popular articles and 23 books, including One

Starting point is 00:48:22 River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and Magdalena. His photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in 37 books and 130 magazines, including National Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men's Journal, and Outside. I could go on and on. His bio is incredible. I encourage you to check out his full bio at daviswade.com. You can find him on Instagram at wadedavisofficial. He has more than 40 film credits. He has honorary membership status in the Explorers Club, and it goes on and on. 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?

Starting point is 00:49:07 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

Starting point is 00:49:22 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. 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

Starting point is 00:50:01 you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #655: In Case You Missed It: January 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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