The Tim Ferriss Show - #683: In Case You Missed It: June 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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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. 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 to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life.

Starting point is 00:02:18 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 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 slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Simon Coronel, world champion of magic and illegally classified alien of extraordinaryility by the U.S. Government. years then quit and do something you know that leads me towards something whatever i don't know and i just had a sudden flicker of like wait a minute i've heard this story i've heard how this

Starting point is 00:03:29 can go and then very common you blink and you're 40 in middle management and wondering where the decades went and i kind of sensed uh wait that could be me you never know who you are until you're there in the moment until you're faced with the actual trolley lever right you don't know which what you'll do. And so I went on this round-the-world pilgrimage with all my remaining savings at the time. It was the first time I came to America to see the Magic Castle,

Starting point is 00:03:53 to see Vegas and all the Cirque du Soleil shows and all the stuff I'd heard of. And this is before? This is before Accenture. This was in the months, because I realized it was going to be a while before I had free time. I was going to go into this

Starting point is 00:04:04 high-pressure corporate environment. And I did it as kind of a almost creative pilgrimage to kind of – I thought it was like almost injecting inspiration intravenously to kind of keep that fire burning. Stockpile some fire. Exactly. Hide my soul in my sock where they can't find it and drag it into the corporate drudgery. That was sort of the mindset at the time. And I think that was good because I did have a sense I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what or when. And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning an

Starting point is 00:04:31 okay salary, I still lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings. I deliberately didn't buy a car, even though I could have afforded one. And instead, I spent that money on trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting and everything and building savings. I didn't live extravagantly because I kind of had a sense whatever's next. I don't know what's next, but it's going to be good to have a stockpile of savings. And then I realized that the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was fear and enthusiasm battled and fear kept winning. I'm like, I want to leave and do something cool

Starting point is 00:05:05 and do the thing and go full magic or something, but it's scary. I don't feel ready. And then finally, after sort of three more, I was at the company for five years. And after three years longer than I intended to be, just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs and the stability. And one day, finally, some pieces clicked together in my head. There was an actual moment where I realized I'd read an article by a palliative care nurse about her observations on people's end-of-life regrets. And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing. Didn't try the thing. Always wondered.

Starting point is 00:05:39 Never found out. And I realized, yeah, I don't want to die that way. I want to know. Even if it fails, at least you know. So I was like, okay, number one, I have to try the thing. Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready. Enough savings and enough career contacts, enough good magic material or whatever. And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never going to feel ready. And so number three, if there's no right time, then sooner is better than later. And I started drafting my resignation

Starting point is 00:06:05 letter. It was one of those rare moments. Normally, life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was. There was A, B, C. It was a simple equation. It was an algorithm. I'm like, yep, that logically checks out. All right, fuck, I guess I'm doing it. Next up, Jake Mews, CEO of Maui Nui Venison, which provides incredible nutrient-dense food while balancing the axis deer population of Maui. The biggest risk we have every single night is safety. And it became so critically important to have the right people and the right personalities that we had to build a system to measure those personalities. And that's in the recruiting vetting process?

Starting point is 00:06:51 Oh yeah. How do you measure those things? Humility? Yeah. So we created essentially a scorecard. It has six questions per category. So six for humility, six for work ethics, six for emotional intelligence. Questions like, do the energy they bring every night, is it consistent? Isn't it positive? So we talk about body language and emotional intelligence and all these different things within these questions. And I'm happy to provide this thing.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And we use it in three ways. We give it to the person on the second interview when we're hiring somebody. So we say, here's the HHS system. This is the only thing you're accountable to in your first month. And two things happen. They read it and they go, or actually they just don't call back. And I've made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past where you get past this honeymoon phase and people turn into grouches. And it's just, there's people, first mentality's involved.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And I remember a guy that we were going to hire that was a brilliant electrical engineer. He wanted to quit his job, come work with us because he heard about the seven and seven schedule and thought it'd be the best thing ever. And then he read it and he didn't call me back. I really wanted to hire him. And I called him back and I said, any reason you didn't call me back?

Starting point is 00:08:04 He's like, I have terrible body language and I'm not willing to quit my job and take the chance within the first month that I get fired for bad body language because we score them. If you're an A, we celebrate and figure out a way for you, reward you. If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements

Starting point is 00:08:22 that you need to make within some of these categories. And if you're a C, we let you go on the spot no questions asked and you set that expectation up front oh so we said that in the interview they have to like agree to this system coming in they're evaluated by their entire team including them doing a self eval which is a part of the overall score they get to like grade themselves and the team do they are they sent on like a test evening prior to hiring or i guess they just know that once they start going out yeah so we call them tryouts but when somebody comes to try out with us which means we give them a month we hire them on but we call them a tryout and at the end of that tryout which is typically a one

Starting point is 00:09:02 month period they get graded by their entire team and they know it's this like really tense moment where how many people are on a given team eight to ten got it yeah so it's a good average so if somebody yeah if somebody's got a bug up their ass about somebody doesn't matter just one person it always ends up being like a great average and it always ends up being a great measure of that person. And it's been this extraordinary filter for hiring. Asshole is the wrong word. But when we figured out how to use that system, we now grade every person at their first month.

Starting point is 00:09:38 We grade every single person quarterly, including me. Every single person quarterly, including me, every single person gets graded. And there's questions on there like, do they try or ask to do more than is required of them every day? And it's been so amazing to see the mistakes I make in when we're hiring new people or moving people around. Like a great example is I moved a couple people from a field position into a management position. And then all of a sudden their work ethic score started coming down. And it wasn't because they weren't working any

Starting point is 00:10:09 harder. It was I didn't do a good job defining to the team what their new responsibilities were. So they saw them sitting on a computer and doing these things and they're like, well, they're not in the field helping us. And so it's just this amazing quarterly exercise that just pulls out all of the tension within your teams and creates framework for people to address those tensions. And then ultimately what's amazing is to watch people grow. How do you give feedback? Let's say they come back and they've got a bunch of bees. Yeah. So we sit.

Starting point is 00:10:40 What's the big boss do? Yeah. So we sit them down and we say. Is that the royal we or is it just you? No, no. It's multiple people. Yeah, it's me and the two or three other harvest managers. Got it.

Starting point is 00:10:50 Great example. One of the questions we asked talks about, are they genuinely happy to see their teammates succeeding? Because safety is such an important part of what we do. When we bring somebody in that's more talented, just like a sports team moves the best people into the best positions we immediately move people around positions based on their skill sets so somebody has to be genuinely happy to train somebody that may replace them in a role that they may enjoy yeah they used to be the yeah like right striker or whatever exactly got replaced and

Starting point is 00:11:21 it's amazing to watch somebody that really wants to be there because they find purpose and they really love the schedule and they know the impact that they're having to our community have to make the decision to be better for their teammate every night to be like celebrating that person's growth even though it's potentially coming at the cost of something that they enjoy yeah so there's these that's hard oh this whole like i have that's asking i mean i'm not saying it's unreasonable but that i mean that's asking a lot of a lot of people i mean i don't know if i would be honest with myself i think that'd be hard here's the thing like it's been such a amazing exercise with lots of iterations right the first

Starting point is 00:12:01 three iterations i made so many grown men cry and i felt so bad was that your delivery or the measurement where you just like it was just the fuck face it was the measurement was wrong sink or swim no you're getting evaluated by your peers on your personality and the value it's bringing to your team and you have to sit down quarterly and be told your humility is not good enough for this team i assume that the responses are all anonymized yeah everything's anonymized so and then average for what it's worth i've done what's called a 360 interview and i know people who as executives or founders have had these done and without exception myself included every time that

Starting point is 00:12:47 i spoke to somebody who's experienced this for the first time they're like i went and they sat in my car oh and i basically had like a nervous breakdown crisis of meaning the what do i do like these are names everybody would recognize but they were just like holy shit yeah the first time we did it with a large enough team that i included myself in it because we were just so small early on it was like think like the third iteration i was like i need to be a part of this and i got all of the feedback back i was just like oh my god like but if we really want to build extraordinary teams, like I realized my approach to some of our conversations had to be so much better and nuanced to make them better. It wasn't the right approach.

Starting point is 00:13:34 And you learn all of this. You end up reading this thing like Braille after doing it. I've done it like hundreds of times now. Yeah. And I mean, with repetition, I imagine it's like exercise, right? It's like, okay, are you going to apply metrics once a year you're gonna be very very very sore yeah and you might even hurt yourself but it was amazing to see what happened is we built this system because we knew we had to go from like eight people to 45 in a really short period of time to hit our mission goals

Starting point is 00:14:00 about a year and a half ago and i had made poor hiring decisions in the past and they were mostly personality based or they were that person was operating amazing when i was around but the minute i left they turned into a different person and then there's this he said she said game that like this completely erases all of that because it's anonymous team scoring and the manager doesn't have a unweighted vote on whether that person stays around and what ended up happening is that hhs program started attracting people they started hearing about this accountability process to ensure you're attracting better fits oh yeah so coming back to so you're not saying hey fuck face in like the fourth fifth tenth twentieth iteration yeah what's the language that you use um if somebody

Starting point is 00:14:53 has growth opportunities let's go it's really specific to which of the 18 categories they're struggling in right like how does the meeting start? Okay. So we sit down and we, we're going to give them paper and we say like, okay, you're a B minus. Yeah. Tim, we put a 250 pound L on your back.

Starting point is 00:15:10 You crumpled into an Oregon crane and you couldn't get up. So you're a B minus. And then we celebrate first, some of the categories that they're doing really well in, like some of the categories that point to professionalism or energy or all these different things we celebrate right away. Cause they're each one of the 24 segments have different scores within them that have been averaged throughout their team. And then we address the ones that they're like a C in.

Starting point is 00:15:34 Got it. So they're not cut if they have a C in a particular review point. It's the average. Yeah. Got it. So the C average, it's been amazing to see that system work i've let go several people that were c's that i would have never let go i wouldn't have known to let them go like wouldn't have known that that was the impact

Starting point is 00:15:56 they were having on the team at large it just would have never come out yeah i would love to you mentioned i think you offered to maybe share oh absolutely question so we'll put that in the show notes as well yeah tim.blogs podcast because i'm incredibly curious to check it out myself it's just at least at face value it seems like a very elegant solution to a lot of problems that can seem like fragmented separate problems you have to address in different ways and again like i'm just a system builder and by no means is it perfect but i've heard lots of people speak to how important these different personality traits are and how they reward them and more importantly than the c or the a's being able to like say to somebody this incredible

Starting point is 00:16:44 combination of like humility work ethic and emotional intelligence is making your whole team better and your whole team is telling you your extraordinary ethic things being able to reward and compensate somebody for that and have a measure to do so when you say compensate so let's say they have because i know this is getting the weeds a bit but i feel like yeah that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding so how many questions were there again there's 18 questions six on humility six on work ethic and six on emotional intelligence they get this like a b or c for each of those questions yeah so they get it's graded one through seven yeah we just did

Starting point is 00:17:21 it because there's seven days of the week and we talk about like being at excellent every day so it's one through seven and then we add up all the scores, which is 126 total, and they get a percentage. So if they're an 87, we give them a B plus. Which is the average for the total. Which is the average. How do you reward or compensate the A's? If they're in their first six month of employment and they get two A's or A pluses in a reward, we give them a raise based on that contribution. And then we celebrate with the team, like not always an A this last quarter.

Starting point is 00:17:54 We make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having. And it's already, which is so interesting, they already all know. But to not have framework to reward them for being amazing people has always been this fuzzy place for me where I couldn't reward or compensate that person for being an extraordinary individual that was making their whole team better because it didn't fit into what the classic hard skills define as like they're a great shooter or they're a great driver or one of these different things. And every single one of those A plus people are our most highly skilled people as well. They just, when you operate with a certain level of humility, you are more willing to learn and you learn faster. And every single person that's come through our program

Starting point is 00:18:35 that was like a B minus or a C that was like highly skilled and made the choice not to get better at these, like what I very much consider skills just waited themselves out it's been really cool to see people grow and like you're in this camp and you see these guys with their a lot of them will tape their score up above their bed and they'll like look at it in the morning and say like i was a b minus in this thing i need to bring more consistent energy every night like we've got guys that go up and down and up and down and they're like, okay, I'm going to try and be more consistent. They know what they're working on.

Starting point is 00:19:14 Next up, Maggie Spivey Faulkner's segment from Heresies, a new format that explores the unconventional and unorthodox. Maggie is an anthropological archaeologist and practitioner of indigenous archaeology. American middle-class culture is ruining America. America middle-class culture is ruining middle America and all of America. It's ruining everything. It's ruining literally everything. Yeah. I mean, we export ourselves, so maybe it's ruining the whole world. Let's just extend it. Let's get out there on a limb. When I say that, though, really, what do I mean? I kind of mean American modernism,

Starting point is 00:19:58 the type of America that's existed post-World War II, where we instill in people a certain set of values. We've adjusted our culture. You tell your youth that to be a successful and respected member of society, you leave home at 17 or 18, go somewhere where you don't know anybody, go to college. And then if you're successful, you can start up a little nuclear family out in a nameless suburb or a town that has the same amenities that every town has and live a successful kind spirit of capitalism in there. This is a very particular cultural brand. And as we're no longer in the heady glory days economically of what America was able to achieve after the world was destroyed, and we were the only people that had like working machines anymore, as some of those pockets of fat have dissolved in the United States,

Starting point is 00:21:08 we've been left in this situation where you get extreme social isolation. You get kids that can't get into the Ivy League, even though they feel like they're entitled to it. And then they go spend all their time online, become incels, buy AR-15 and shoot up a school. And I think that it's because we've really moved away from the idea of community in terms of being embedded in a place. You know, there are other European countries with economic issues.

Starting point is 00:21:44 Look at Italy, look at Greece, but they don't have the same end result because those people are still embedded leads a lot of people to these extremely escapist drug addictions. And, you know, to Josh's point, I'm not talking about Burning Man, right? I'm talking about the kind of drug issues I see in Worcester, Massachusetts. So I think that this extreme adherence to that particular brand of the American dream has ruined our ability to have a functional, I mean, things have just become quite dysfunctional in the country because of it. So I'm trying to, again, refine the heresy with the, it is, so you said it was American dream, and then you said it was maybe more modern. Yeah, modernism. I'm thinking about the hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people in China who have left their communities,

Starting point is 00:22:52 moved into the cities. And so is this what you're talking about, or is it something different than this? And the same thing is happening in India right now, where the same kind of migration is happening, of people leaving these little villages where they have a certain identity, they know who they are, they're moving into big cities, they're going to college and beyond, they're mixing up, they're isolated. Is that where we're talking about this as a general phenomena? Or you're

Starting point is 00:23:20 saying that there's something else different than this? Yeah, I think I do mean it a little bit more pointed than gradual urbanization due to change economically, globally. I think there is a particular brand of the American version of this. And honestly, the people who are most harmed by it, I think, are young men, young white men in America. They're feeling this sea change under their feet. There are more women going to college than men for a decade now. Why? In America. A lot of it is because men are just not achieving dumb metrics that are kind of meaningless, like SAT scores and GPAs at the same rate as women in the United States. I think that it's all American culture bounded, where if you're failing to meet this high kind of this Billy Crystal standard from movies in the 80s and 90s of being able to strike out on your own with just a baseball bat

Starting point is 00:24:25 and an army duffel bag full of stuff walking into New York City to like start your life that you have failed. And I think people are being told that they're literal failures because they're not able to achieve this very time constrained version of American success. And that a lot of the people who are doing some of the worst things in the United States right now are people who have gone through that experience of failure. And it's not necessary. I don't know that there's any analog to that type of failure in modern China or India. And I'm pretty sure there isn't a version of that in Italy or Greece. You live with your parents, you go to college, and then you move down the street when you get married.

Starting point is 00:25:07 Can I ask Maggie, how much of this is the stuff part? The part that you might call consumer culture. That we measure ourselves by how much stuff we have and how good that stuff is and the brands that go with it. And then if you want that, you need cash. And to get that cash, you move to the city because that's where the job is that pays more cash. And then you just meet more people who want the same stuff. How much of it is the stuff part of it? And how much of it is the dream of making it big? Like, you know, the fantasy of becoming the next Elon? And how much of it is the leaving where you grew up to go to a new place? Because all those seem to be part of what you're describing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the stuff is a

Starting point is 00:25:49 major part of it, but I would extend stuff beyond consumer goods and keeping up with the Joneses type stuff to meaningless achievements. What's the real difference from getting a degree from the University of Georgia versus Emory in terms of your life trajectory. Not that huge, but if you don't get into Emory and you have to go to Georgia Southern, suddenly that's like almost like a narcissistic injury where you have this hit to your ego you can never recover from. And it's just constant knocking down of ego that injures people in this way emotionally. What I'm arguing is that those standards are fucking stupid to begin with. They're not based in anything other than the imagination of what we could achieve on the GI

Starting point is 00:26:38 Bill in 1950. At a time where we had far fewer people in the country. We had a far different economic outlook. And I really don't think it's necessarily about leaving home, which I mean, for me, it is personally. I'm coming from this, again, from an outsider point of view. I didn't grow up in this type of culture, but I'm surrounded by it all the time now. So it's all bound up with it. But I think it's more of this absolute, like you said about the Constitution, the written Constitution, this fiction we've created, this fantasy of what you need respect as someone who went to Cornell in upper middle class Boston? I don't know that you are, even if you're making double the money. So quick question for you, Maggie. Yeah. And I'll just add a little backdrop. So Johan Hari is an author, if I'm getting his

Starting point is 00:27:38 name pronounced correctly. He's written books about addiction and also depression, chasing the scream, lost connections. And he returns in a very compelling way over and over again to social isolation. And I suppose what I'm wondering is, as I look at cultures that I understand somewhat, like Japan, for instance, the schooling there and cram schools and test scores are even more determinant in a way of your future than say the SATs are in the US. However, and there are social isolation issues in Japan, but you have multi-generational households. And you look at a place like Costa Rica, multi-generational households. And I'm wondering if that is a crux component of all of this, which it seems to be, is there anything to be done in the U.S.?

Starting point is 00:28:28 Are there changes that you think we could make culturally that would remedy some of the symptoms that you're describing? Maybe celebrate people whose lives are happy as that's the form of success that we should be like lionizing above meeting what is frankly like you said you just said oh there's multi-generational households in japan and there's this really toxic testing culture if you think about it you know not to get too theoretical here in an organismic way where these different facets of culture work like different organs in a system as a whole, like a body that forms a culture, very like Durkheimian way of thinking about things. Maybe you can pick pieces in and out there, like you're explaining these other cultures that you have experience with. Somehow in America, we've picked a set of organs that lead to a particularly toxic end, toxic individualism, individualism at all costs,

Starting point is 00:29:28 really. We don't have maternity leave. It's just like, we don't have universal health care. There's stuff that just makes economic, even neoliberal sense that we don't do because of like toxic individualism. And I do think that if we started focusing on, again, lionizing people who live happy lives, that live fulfilled lives, rather than ones who meet this American archetype, Don Draper, that could lead to a lot of good change. Josh, I think you had your hand up. So I react in a couple different ways to this, Maggie. The first is, you know, if you live in New York City, you have a lot of politicians who come here to ask for your advice, and they quickly pivot to asking for money. But it gives you a chance at least to hear from them. And I try to ask them, what's something true about your constituents that I wouldn't know? And one of them said to me once, you think all my constituents want to move to New York City. They don't. The problem is they don't have jobs where they want

Starting point is 00:30:25 to live. So the first way I react to this, I totally agree. And I think we are failing, to your point, Tim, as a society when we fail to provide employment opportunities, meaningful work, a sense of purpose in the communities where people actually want to live. And we should not assume that everyone wants to move to New York City and work for a Meta and live in a loft in Soho. Although even if you work for Meta, you probably couldn't afford a loft in Soho. So that part I really react to, Maggie, and I agree with you. I probably disagree with you slightly on part of it. If you look at places like Italy and China, just picking two examples of what you cited, probably their biggest problem going forward is a demographic one, where they have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. So you pick two societies and held them up, particularly Italy,

Starting point is 00:31:10 as a place where things are going well. I would say a society where people are sufficiently pessimistic about the world that they're unwilling to have children, and where they have repeatedly voted into office someone like Berlusconi, let alone the person they have now, probably aren't society that I would hold up as exemplars of what our aspirations should be. So I'm not sure I agree with you on that point. And then the third thing I'd probably say is the maladies that you're describing, I think, are real. I think that's a confluence of things, though. I think one element absolutely is consumerism. One element certainly is social media, dislocation. They're all combined. But if I had to come back to one, I probably would go back to the point you made and where I started,

Starting point is 00:31:49 which is we're failing to provide meaningful employment, a sense of purpose, the capacity to support yourself and you support your family in a community that you find meaningful. And we've assumed that's only one type of community, and that's a failing as a society. Next up, Eric Cressy, president of Cressy Sports Performance and director of player health and performance for the New York Yankees. What are your go-to exercises, if you can only pick two or three let's just say for the strengthening of the posterior chain and that hinging action where would you go without a failure looking at a deadlift and deadlift is a broad categorization you might have a trap bar deadlift or a kettlebell deadlift

Starting point is 00:32:39 something that in those realms are gonna be a little bit easier to teach a lot of people go right to the straight bar and some people just are not biomechanically set up to be successful with that. So we don't necessarily go to that. Things like kettlebell swings, if you're ready for the patterning and the higher velocity, I think a lot of people need to train power as much as they need to train strength, particularly as we age. And that's a low impact alternative to going out and sprinting or jumping that isn't going to leave an Achilles on the floor. So I think kettlebell swings probably have some merit in that discussion. Certainly various hip thrust opportunities have come about in the industry from a wide variety of exercise selections

Starting point is 00:33:12 there. I think some people probably do better with them than others, but I do think there's a place for it. Anything in those worlds are good. Single leg RDLs as well. It's kind of like a- Romanian deadlifts. Yeah. Something underneath that deadlift umbrella. But at the end of the day, most of them are going to be deadlift derivatives. Same thing with a kettlebell swing. It's a deadlift that you just execute quickly. Why is power important as we age in addition to strength? And maybe you could differentiate the two. So really think of power as just strength with a time component. It's how quickly we can apply force. And you'll see powerlifting is really not powerful.

Starting point is 00:33:45 It's slow movement. Yeah, Olympic lifting should be called powerlifting. Most of the athletes you see on TV are really, really powerful. The guys that are running fast and jumping high, that's kind of an in-person demonstration of power. But I think where power is tricky, we do know that it tends to detrain fastest. Strength, aerobic capacity, they actually stick around pretty well. Assuming you're not like a crazy high level of those things, you can probably train it. If you're in an intermediate to slightly advanced stage, you can probably train it once every 30 days and it's going to power. No, I'm

Starting point is 00:34:12 talking about strength and aerobic capacity. On the power side of things, it seems like it starts to detrain in as little as five to seven days. So it's very important to actually challenge it. And where it becomes vitally important as we age is, you know, this is the stuff that protects you when you're older and you want to avoid falls. And we know that, you know, you fracture your hip. It's for a lot of people, it's honestly a death sentence, as terrible as it sounds, because, you know, it markedly impacts your mobility. We know that the cognitive decline after, you know, a loss of ambulation is really substantial. So we see a lot of people that just tend to spiral after falls. Being honest, my own father passed away a couple of years ago after he fell down our several stellar steps and fractured his clavicle. And it was very interesting, maybe in the context of the

Starting point is 00:34:52 orthopedic relationship to systemic factors, he kind of went through multi-system failure. He was unhealthy, but a clavicle fracture on a fall really kind of like pushed him over the edge on it. Would a training power have helped that? Probably not. But I think for a lot of people that wind up with hip fractures and things like that, we have to be very mindful of how power could potentially have prevented it. So first, I'm sorry to hear that I did. And second, could you give an example of what type of power training might be incorporated to help mitigate the risk of a fall, for instance? It sounds terrible to say. Any kind of sprinting. I'm not saying go out at age 80 and sprint, but we do see people in those ages that play tennis regularly that are involved in things

Starting point is 00:35:36 that are higher velocity, that involve change of direction. So I think a lot of it is remain athletic into age. So what do we do with folks? We'll throw med balls. We'll do kettlebell swings. Yeah, and for people who may not get that, so medicine balls, right? Medicine balls, good point. Weighted balls that you're sort of throwing against a wall or on the floor. Exactly. And relatively low risk for folks can be really helpful. But I think people sometimes overlook how much they do. My grandmother is 99 years old and she still golfs. That's her version of power training. And she's got two new hips and one knee and she's been doing great. Robocop on the golf course.

Starting point is 00:36:08 So I think that's vitally important. If you don't use it, you lose it. And it's a function of a lot of things. That's mobility. That's strength. The power is probably the most important of the bunch when we talk about aging. Everyone's going to get stiff as they age,

Starting point is 00:36:19 but you don't want to be stiff and weak slash slow. Last but not least, David Maisel, the founding chairman of Marvel Studios and the founder of Mythos Studios. Are there any properties, caricatures, stories that you're not thinking of pursuing yourself, that you just hope someone excellent out there makes into a film or some type of immersive world outside of its original format. I love how you said film or some other type of immersive world. I think that's very savvy, by the way. And we can get into that in the next discussion because I don't believe launching the next universe is going to happen like Marvel did through theatrical film. I think it's going to start with something else and most likely will because of the way the world has changed. So I think the question and the topic as a tease for this next thing, when I left Marvel,

Starting point is 00:37:21 I had to figure out who I was from a person point of view. Would people still want to talk to me if I wasn't running Marvel Studios? Would I still be able to go to restaurants and things like that? Who my real friends were? Then from a business point of view, what would catch my eye? What I'd say is because of Marvel within Disney and the power of the two together, and because of how well Kevin has run Marvel since, Marvel's gotten so big that the bar to launch a new universe has gotten so high and so much tougher because now you're competing against Marvel.

Starting point is 00:37:58 So when I launched in 2008, Iron Man, we had DC as a competitor. We had the Marvel licensed movies, Fox with X-Men, Sony with Spider-Man. They were not just competitors. They could use the Marvel brand. So they were like weird competitors. We were scared about all these people, but in retrospect, we had a relatively open playing field because we didn't have ourselves to compete with the version of Marvel today, which just dominates so much. And we didn't have ourselves to compete with, the version of Marvel today, which just dominates so much. And we didn't have streaming. We didn't have as much social media, all these other distractions on people's time. And it was tough, but it's like, you know, it's the old saying, like, how good we had it. You know, we didn't realize. It's still very tough, but now it's even harder. So something that goes through the filter you're talking about has to be pretty special to pop into what we call universe category or major potentially new mythology.

Starting point is 00:38:53 And I'd love to talk about that more because it is something that a lot of people do ask about and a lot of people are focused on. Obviously, DC just hired a new person to run DC after 20 years of us being able to do what we did at Marvel. David Zaslav, when he bought Warner Brothers from AT&T, said, I want to copy Marvel. I want to do what Marvel did. But we did that 15, 20 years ago. So it shows you even DC hasn't gotten their act together in the same way. And that's a very well-capitalized company with a large number of properties. So it's very hard for a new universe to get created. I don't think it's impossible, but it's got to be differentiated from Marvel so that there's a reason that it exists. I think it has to be introduced in new ways that you sort of tease with new technologies and new ways of storytelling. Probably has to be way more primal and visual

Starting point is 00:39:47 so it gets people's quick attention. They can see what's there. I think it has to have great meaning to him. Marvel had a good meaning in that it's great to be a hero. And I think people relate to something that they feel is adding to their lives. And somehow, whether they sense it or it's just subconscious, that's what all mythologies from Greek and Roman onward have done or before

Starting point is 00:40:10 even Greek and Roman mythology. And it has to be something. I think James Cameron with avatar has probably done the best since Marvel came out with big cultural moments. Now he does things every 10 years though. Right. But that was an original idea. with big cultural moments. Now, he does things every 10 years, though, right? But that was an original idea. I think the next thing probably is a legacy property, but it's still, like Marvel, it had history,

Starting point is 00:40:36 but people could discover it together. So it was the perfect combination. And I think people love to discover something with their friends, and the idea of the new band or something in new technology, like there's just something great. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today comes from a very strange, very mesmerizing, very exciting, and certainly unique world, and that is the world of

Starting point is 00:41:08 magic. Simon Coronel, that's C-O-R-O-N-E-L, is legally classified as an alien of extraordinary ability by the United States government for his skills as a magician and illusionist. Simon discovered magic in 1999 as a first-year student at Melbourne Kickstarter. He is also a regular performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the importance of that will be described in this episode. Simon has appeared twice on the hit TV show Penn & Teller Fool Us. He has won more than a dozen international awards for magic, including being crowned the world champion of magic in 2022 at FISM, F-I-S-M, the Olympics of Magic. And the story behind that is incredible, which we also dive into. You can find all things Simon

Starting point is 00:42:13 at simoncoronel.com. That's S-I-M-O-N-C-O-R-O-N-E-L.com. He is one of a kind. I promise you that. And you can find more on the Magic Puzzle Company at magicpuzzlecompany.com. My guest today is a friend, Jake Mews. Jake Mews is CEO at Maui Nui Venison, a company he co-founded in 2017 that works to balance invasive axis deer populations on the island of Maui, channeling that management into incredible nutrient-dense food. Maui Nui was selected for Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Agriculture of 2023, and its venison has been served in top restaurants across the country, including Alinea, which featured very heavily in The 4-Hour Chef.

Starting point is 00:43:00 That was a big section entirely because it's so impressive. The French Laundry and Saison, where I just mentioned I was one of the very first investors when it was a pop-up with 12 seats, something like that. Josh Skeens, everybody should check him out as well. Prior to Maui Nui, Jake was executive director of the Axis Deer Institute for 12 years, part of a two-decades-long project focused on Ax on axis deer and their long-term management in Hawaii. You can find them at Maui Nui. I'll spell that out for folks. M-A-U-I-N-U-I venison.com. And you can find them on Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, at Maui Nui Venison. The first guest is Maggie Spivey Faulkner. She is an anthropological archaeologist and practitioner of indigenous archaeology, currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She also serves as an assistant chief

Starting point is 00:43:59 of the Upper Georgia tribal town of the Pee Dee Indian Nation of Beaver Creek, a state-recognized Native American group in South Carolina. Her work focuses on using anthropological data to upend harmful misconceptions of Native American peoples embedded in public policy, science, and the public consciousness. Maggie was raised in a tight-knit extended family in rural Hefzibah, Georgia. She is an international fellow of the Explorers Club, a former junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She received her PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018 and her AB from Harvard College in 2008. Joshua L. Steiner is a

Starting point is 00:44:42 partner at SSW, a private investment firm, and a senior advisor at Bloomberg LP, where he was previously head of industry verticals. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Steiner co-founded and was co-president of Quadrangle Group LLC, a private equity and asset management firm. And before co-founding Quadrangle, he was a managing director at Lazard. From 1993 to 1995, he served as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He serves on the boards of Yale University, the International Rescue Committee, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Kevin Kelly, you can find him on Twitter at Kevin, the number two Kelly, helped launch and edit Wired Magazine. He has written

Starting point is 00:45:20 for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. You can find my most recent interview with him at Tim.blog slash Kevin Kelly. He's been for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. You can find my most recent interview with him at tim.blog slash kevinkelly. He's been on the podcast quite a bit and is arguably the most interesting man in the world, but I'll leave that for another time. He is the author of the new book, Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. It is a great book. I literally have it in my suitcase right next to me here in my hotel room. Kevin is currently co-chair of the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years. It's not made up. That is a real thing. He also has a daily blog, a weekly podcast about cool tools, a weekly newsletter, Recommendo, which is

Starting point is 00:45:59 a free one-page list of six very brief recommendations of cool stuff. Last but not least, Noah Feldman, who will be my ongoing co-host. At least that is the plan. You can find him on Twitter, at Noah R. Feldman is a Harvard professor, ethical philosopher, and advisor, public intellectual, rigorous scholar, and historian, rigorous, religious scholar and historian. He's also a rigorous scholar and historian, and author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. You can find my interview with him at tim.blog.com. His upcoming book is Bad Jew, subtitled A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, which is currently available for pre-order. My guest today is Eric Cressy. I've known Eric for

Starting point is 00:46:49 quite some time. You can find him on Twitter at Eric Cressy, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y. Eric Cressy, M-A-C-S-C-S, is president and co-founder of Cressy Sports Performance with facilities in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and Hudson, Massachusetts. He has worked with clients ranging from youth sports to the professional and Olympic ranks, but he is best known for his very extensive work with baseball players. More than 100 professional players train at CSP each offseason. Eric also serves as director of player health and performance for the New York Yankees. You may have heard of them. Eric double majored in exercise science and sports and fitness management at the University of New England and then received his master's degree in kinesiology with a concentration in exercise science at the University of Connecticut. Cressy has published books and video resources that have

Starting point is 00:47:38 been sold in more than 60 countries. He regularly lectures both nationally and internationally, and his research has been published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. He serves as a consultant to New Balance, Proteus Motion, and Athletic Greens. Cressy has a blog and free newsletter at his website, ericcressy.com, and has a podcast at elitebaseballpodcast.com. You can find more about his training facilities at cressysSportsPerformance.com and on social media, Eric Cressy on Instagram, Twitter, and elsewhere. We'll link to all of those in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. My guest today is David Maisel.

Starting point is 00:48:22 And for those of you who don't know the name, you will certainly recognize his work. You can find him on Twitter at Maisel David. He is the founder of Mythos Studios and the former founding chairman of Marvel Studios. In 2003, David pitched Marvel on his idea of Marvel financing and producing its own movies in a connected cinematic universe. He went on to executive produce Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, The First Avenger, and the Angry Birds movie. In 2009, David arranged the sale of Marvel to Disney for a cool $4 billion. David is currently the founder of Mythos Studios, an IP entertainment studio. The Ecos Genesis art collection, all one-of-one original handcrafted digital art, is the first offering in the forthcoming Ecos Genesis Art Collection, all one-of-one original handcrafted digital art,

Starting point is 00:49:06 is the first offering in the forthcoming Ecos universe. And I'm very happy to share this interview because to my knowledge, it is the first time David has ever done a long-form conversation like this publicly where he talks about the ins and outs of how deals are actually made in Hollywood, some of the inside baseball of Tinseltown, making very unorthodox career moves. And I had a blast with this conversation. I learned a lot, had a ton of fun, took a lot of notes in the process, and got me thinking about all sorts of things. And I hope that is true for you as well. You can find Ecos online at ekos.io. On Twitter, you can find both Ecos at Ecos Genesis,

Starting point is 00:49:53 spelled the same way, and at Maisel David. 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

Starting point is 00:50:22 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. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash

Starting point is 00:51:02 Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #683: In Case You Missed It: June 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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