The Tim Ferriss Show - #688: In Case You Missed It: July 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. 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, Richard Koch, entrepreneur, investor, and author of the books, The 80-20 Principle and Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It. Now writing a book called 80-20 Beliefs. And in order to do that, I've interviewed 50 people that I know very well and who I trust to tell me the truth. And they trust to tell me some of the intimate things about their life, particularly what went wrong. And I asked them two questions, very simple questions. One is, is there any belief that has really made a big

Starting point is 00:03:39 difference in your life that at any stage you have changed so you used to believe x and now you believe y and 90 of the people nine out of ten people know it's a very small sample but it's an extraordinary coincidence if they're all saying this and it's not quite true generally say that they have at some stage changed an important belief and a belief i'm not talking about something which is an academic belief you know where you might believe that one politician is better than another or you might believe in green values or you might not i'm talking about belief that has made a big difference in your own life and why has it made a big difference in your own life well it's because you've acted in a certain way and that's generated certain results

Starting point is 00:04:27 So I asked people what belief have you changed and very often that in fact almost invariably Triggers are saying that I actually believe something which was not in my own interests and I call that a toxic belief For example a friend of mine who's about 60 years old, she looks a lot younger, we'll call her Sally, shall we? Sally had quite a nice life. She moved from England, which as you know is cold and rainy and horrible, to South Africa, which as you know is sunny and very nice, to Cape Town, actually, which is the nicest place in South Africa unless you happen to want to track wild animals. It's good for almost everything else.

Starting point is 00:05:12 It's got a wonderful beach, it's got mountains, it's got very nice food, and it's quite cheap as well. So, you know, it's a good idea to go to Cape Town if you want. It's slightly dangerous now, but that's another matter. Anyway, she had a very nice life until the last five years. And in the last five years, catastrophe struck. Her husband was diagnosed in the very early stages of having Alzheimer's disease. And he decided that in order to give his wife, Sally, a chance, he would commit suicide.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Obviously, you know, an awful thing and trauma, you know, for her as well. And then shortly after that happened, COVID happened. And COVID, you know, there are many hard luck stories about COVID. But the one which Sally tells is that she had two dogs and the dogs were very important to her, you know, and particularly important after her husband was gone. And she, in the COVID regime in South Africa, she wasn't allowed to take the dogs out at any stage of the 24 hours of the day without risking imprisonment and having the dogs shot. In other words, you couldn't take them out to do their business or anything like that. You couldn't take them out for any exercise.

Starting point is 00:06:35 And if the police stopped you, they would quite likely shoot the dogs and put you in prison. So she decided that this was not a very nice society to live in any longer. She loved living in South Africa, but then she decided to do something about it. The point is, for the first 55 years of her life, she'd followed the lead of her husband and other people. She'd gone with the flow. The way that she explained it to me was saying, I believe, que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see. Que sera, sera. So, in other words, she trusted to fate, and fate was very good to her.

Starting point is 00:07:13 When her husband had gone, and when the COVID regime in South Africa was so unpleasant, she decided that she could no longer go with the flow, and she took a very brave decision that she would up sticks, sell her house in Cape Town and come and live, as it happens, in Portugal. And that has been enormously successful. It has absolutely, to come back to my earlier theme, it's transformed her happiness. By pure chance, she's met a guy that she's getting married to now

Starting point is 00:07:47 they are very happy together and she's very i mean you can see that her eyes line up she's really really happy three or four years ago she was in the depths of depression and sort of you know she was wondering whether she should follow her husband in terms of committing suicide. So it is possible, if you take charge, to actually do something. And that's why I hate this concept of the baseline happiness level. Because Marx said, philosophers have tried to describe the world, the point is to change it. And similarly, your happiness levels, you know, it's no use them telling you about the baseline happiness level and saying, well, they don't say it, but they almost imply it, but it's inevitable and you can't transcend that.

Starting point is 00:08:32 So if you're an 8, you're stuck between 6 and 10, depending on the weather and circumstances and whether good things have happened to you that day or whatever. But, you know, you can't go down to a 3. Or if you're a 3, you can't go up to a 10. But there are many cases that I know where people have actually transformed themselves. I know someone who was incredibly miserable for a very long time. And why was he miserable? This person was miserable because he grew up in a very well-off upper middle class family.

Starting point is 00:09:05 He said he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And he expected that life would carry on in being easy. And of course, when he left home and had to earn a living, he discovered that actually things were very difficult. Now, things were not quite as difficult as he imagined they were. I mean, for example, he started a very, very successful business. And he ran that business for six years and made a lot of money from selling it. So when I was talking to this chap who I'll call Alexander,

Starting point is 00:09:34 Alexander, I said, you must have got a degree of self-confidence and good feeling from your experience in starting and running and selling this business. And he said to me, you must be joking. Those six years were years of high anxiety. I was constantly firefighting. It seemed so difficult to me. It seemed so difficult. And I said to him, well, you know, it didn't seem difficult observing it. And he said, well, actually, it was because I expected things to be easy. And you remember, M. Scott Peck wrote a book which starts, Life is Difficult. This is one of the great things about life. If you understand this, you can transcend it because you anticipate that things are going to be difficult and you can take pride in sort of overcoming difficulties.

Starting point is 00:10:24 But if you expect there are going to of overcoming difficulties. But if you expect there are going to be no difficulties, obviously you're going to be disillusioned. And so, paradoxically, this miserable-sounding philosophy which says life is difficult is actually a wonderful philosophy, because it means that you can take pride in getting over difficulties. But when you're confronted with difficulties, what you do is like Alexander and say, it's too difficult. It shouldn't be this difficult. Then obviously you're going to be miserable, despite objectively having a great success. Yeah, it makes me think of, and I wish I had the attribution, but happiness equals reality minus expectations in a sense. And this is also very reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius and meditations,

Starting point is 00:11:06 of course. But how did Alexander, if he did, make the switch? Did he make the switch? He did make the switch, but it took him about 20 years. And he said from the time that he, because he started business when he was in his early 30s, and from being age 40 onwards, then he got into a pretty dark place at one stage. And then he started going to 12 steps meetings where people sit around and say, you know, I've had these difficulties, I've reconstructed my life, and I'm on the path to recovery. He also took some therapy and he also reflected on why he was miserable. And he did realize it was miserable because he expected life to be easy and it wasn't. Very often, having the insight

Starting point is 00:11:54 into what a toxic belief is, is the first step to actually being able to overcome it. Very often, we don't realize what toxic beliefs we have, and therefore we suffer from them. Next up, Jack Kornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, and author of more than 20 books on meditation and mindfulness. The image that I'd like to start with is an archetypal one of the Buddha seated under the tree of enlightenment. The night of his enlightenment, before he was enlightened, the Indian god named Mara, who is the god of greed, fear, hatred, aggression, all of the forces of suffering, appeared and said, what are you trying to do to the Buddha, and this is the way it appeared. He said, you have no idea what you're dealing with. And he said, let me show you this enlightenment stuff. And so he paraded before him all the most beautiful dancing dakinis and gilded chariots, the Lamborghinis of the time. And the Buddha said, you know, been there, done that. Thank you. Okay. And then he said, well,

Starting point is 00:13:22 you have no right to be there. And he started throwing flaming arrows and swords. And the Buddha lifted his hand and touched them all with compassion. And they turned to flower petals. Cool. Then Mara said, you don't even know who you are. You don't know what you're doing. And there's no reason for you to be sitting here. And then Mara came basically in the form of doubt.

Starting point is 00:13:44 And at that point, the Buddha put his hand down and touched the earth and said, will you bear witness to my right as a human being here halfway between heaven and earth to awaken to the way things are? Can you say that one more time? Heaven and earth or heaven and hell? Between heaven and earth. We didn't get to hell yet. If you want to go there, we can go there later.

Starting point is 00:14:04 Halfway between heaven and earth in this human form, be my witness that we human beings have the right to see clearly, not with delusion, not with doubt. And then Mara appeared again, and the Buddha just looked at Mara and said, I see you, Mara. I see who you are. And the minute he said that clearly, Mara dissolved. Now, what people don't know in the Buddha's text is that after his enlightenment, Mara came back to visit the Buddha quite a few times. You'd think there's enlightened retirement, but Mara's part of the game. And Thich Nhat Hanh has a really beautiful image about this, where he sets the scene of the Buddha sitting in a cave. And again,

Starting point is 00:14:46 the Buddha really is a stand-in for your awakened self, sitting in a cave, mouth of a cave, meditating, and his attendant is there, and Mara appears, and his attendant tries to chase Mara away. And the Buddha says, Ananda, is that my old friend Mara? Set out some tea, let us sit down. And he says, is that you, Mara? And usually all that it takes is for the Buddhist to say, is that you, Mara, or I see you, Mara. And Mara looks and kind of sadly slinks away, if you will. So the first thing about anxiety is to acknowledge that it's entirely human, that there are cultural reasons for it, and that there are physiological reasons, that we have fear and we have fear of loss

Starting point is 00:15:29 and all of those things. And to be able to name it and say, oh, this is anxiety. It feels this way in my body. Your hands sweat, your breath stops, your heart. And it's hard to feel. It's unpleasant in the body. And then it has its thoughts.

Starting point is 00:15:43 We'll get to those in a minute. And what you can do in naming R, to feel, it's unpleasant in the body. And then it has its thoughts, we'll get to those in a minute. And what you can do in naming bar, you can say, oh, anxiety, I see you, I feel you. So that's the first thing. And already, you start to step halfway back from it as the witness. So that already begins to liberate you a little bit. And then the next thing is you can also say,

Starting point is 00:16:06 thank you for trying to protect me. Because if you fight against the anxiety, what that is is more anxiety. Oh my God, I got to rid of it. I hate of it. But instead, it's almost like you take a little bow. Okay, Mara, I see you. Thank you for trying to protect me

Starting point is 00:16:21 because that's what it's trying to do. And you remember that statement from Mark Twain where he said, my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened, right? So these are the stories, you meant sort of the advanced stories. Say, thank you, Mara, I see you, thanks for trying to protect me. Then the next thing is to know that there's something called the wisdom of insecurity, that it's actually okay to be insecure. My monastic teachers would say, it's uncertain, isn't it? We could ask them all kinds of things. Tell me about enlightenment.

Starting point is 00:16:54 My teacher would laugh. He said, it's uncertain, isn't it? He wanted us just to get comfortable with uncertainty. And then what happens is when you realize that you can't know, that you come back into the present moment. And then the next thing to do with anxiety is ground your senses. Feel your feet on the floor, or maybe go out in nature, stand there with a tree, feel the roots of the tree, and imagine your own feet as roots into the earth. And notice the wind comes and the storms and all those things happen,

Starting point is 00:17:29 but the tree is rooted and it can stay there and you can be the same. You can let the storms of thoughts and fears and so forth arise. So that's another practice you can do. Then you can question your thoughts. And this is more the beautifully spelled out by Byron Katie, for example, who has these practices of questioning your thought, says, what if that thought isn't true? How can you know that thought is true? And if you look deeply, you can't know it. And you get to a place of realizing that your thoughts are tentative. They're a creation. And you say, thank you.

Starting point is 00:18:02 Thank you for trying to protect me. And again, you become the witness of those thoughts. Then a few more very simple things that you can do. You can find where you feel the anxiety most strongly in your body. And once you feel it, you can feel into its elements. Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Is it vibrating?

Starting point is 00:18:23 The earth, air, fire. So you really get close into it. You can ask it what stories it tells because it'll have a story. And then you say again, not only thank you, thank you for trying to protect me, but you wrap it with kindness, with loving awareness and say, thank you. I know you're worried, I can respect you and hold you with kindness and compassion. And you know that that's not who you are. This is a part, it's something, it's common for human beings. You say, I respect this, and who I am is honoring you and so much bigger than who you are. And you feel yourself literally being both the witness, the grounded one, the I know you, I see you, Mara, and you become more the Buddha rather than the one who's caught by all these

Starting point is 00:19:12 things. Could you say a bit more about asking, for instance, in this case, the anxiety, what stories it tells? Maybe give an example, whether from your personal experience, someone else's, or just a hypothetical, what that might look like? Because it's the first time I've heard that, and that piques my curiosity. So it's a beautiful question, because one of the things that I've learned all over these years is that you can have, the Sufis call it a sobat, a conversation with the heart. And if you let yourself get quiet, it might be after a little walk in the woods or just

Starting point is 00:19:49 sitting quietly, taking a cup of tea or something that you like to drink and letting yourself quiet down or meditating if you want to. And when you get quiet, you can have an inner conversation and there's information that's waiting there for you to ask. So, for example, since we're talking about anxiety and you want to have a conversation with it, you can say to the anxiety, where do I feel you most strongly in my body? Okay, that's a pretty simple one. Then you can say, ask the anxiety, what is the thing you're most afraid of? Usually it will be something like loss, death, something huge. Okay, thank you. Get quiet and say, tell me the story you have about it. And then your anxiety will answer and

Starting point is 00:20:41 it will say, well, if you lose your job, which we're afraid you will, you'll be out on the street, you'll be homeless, people will beat up on you, then you'll be in the hospital or you'll become whatever. And there's a whole disastrous scenario. And you can say, yes, thank you. I hear your story. Then there's another interesting question. So all these are things you can ask.

Starting point is 00:21:01 And if you're willing to ask and get quiet and listen, usually your body and your heart will answer. Then there's another really important question or two that you can ask. What is the most important thing I need to learn from you? And it will give you an answer. I want you to pay attention or I want you to take care of your financial affairs so I don't have to worry so much. Or I want you to make sure you I want you to take care of your financial affairs so I don't have to worry so much. Or I want you to make sure you have friends who know where you are, whatever it happens to be, or some bigger story. And then you can step out of the anxiety.

Starting point is 00:21:35 And this is a really beautiful one. And get quiet and ask, what is my best intention of how I want to live this next month or this next year? If I only had a year to live, what style? How do I want to live this? Because anxiety also has time in it. And so you're sort of stepping out of time and say, all right, so my time's limited. How do I want to live? What is my deepest intention? And if you pause and ask, your heart will answer. Next up, John Romero, video game legend and co-creator of such groundbreaking games as Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. 13 games in one year. I know nothing about game development, but I imagine with a relatively small crew, that sounds like a lot of games. What do you think enabled you guys to do that, that maybe was not present for other people working on games who had much lower output?

Starting point is 00:22:42 What were the ingredients or the approaches or the principles, anything at all, maybe just tolerance for sleep deprivation? I don't know. What were the ingredients that allowed you guys to do that? So the way that we could achieve this game development at such high speed back then was that when we got together as in Software, we had already individually, other than Adrian, who just learned how to put pixels on a computer screen, but he was a fine artist on paper already

Starting point is 00:23:13 for his whole life. Each one of us four had 10 years of game development experience, like all the time. And so we'd already made dozens of games each. Tom Hall, who was our creative director, he was a programmer, an assembly language programmer. He made tons of adventure games. He did action arcade games in assembly language. So he was already a very fluent programmer. John Carmack, of course, coded since he was a kid. I coded since I was 11.

Starting point is 00:23:45 So we'd been making games for 10 years, and the amount of games that we'd made was dozens each. And when you make that many games that quickly, you learn how to scope. And scoping is basically defining exactly what that game should be and not adding to it. Subtracting from it, most likely, if you're going to try and get it done. So scoping is like, this is the amount of

Starting point is 00:24:10 time that I have. This is probably the kind of game that we can make and how big we can make it. Let's do that. And as you get closer and closer to that deadline, you start cutting things away that you don't need to hit that deadline. When we did it before meeting each other, when we did it on our own time, we set ourselves our own goals for finishing our own games. And we got really good at scoping. So when we got together and we saw what we could do together, we also scoped together how big those games should be.

Starting point is 00:24:41 And we had to deliver within two months. So we had to know how good every one of us is, how fast we can all work, and then scope a game to that limitation. And because we had 10 years of game dev experience, we could just slam games out super fast, come up with ideas, bam, start doing the graphics, doing the animation,

Starting point is 00:25:02 programming the engine, making the levels, making the level editors to create levels, you name it. All the tools that are in the background that no one sees to build the game data, put it together in packages that the game can access. There's so much technology that goes on before you get to gameplay programming. But we were used to doing that already for 10 years. So it was not just the experience that we had, but it was also the focus that we had. We were just so happy to be able to make games all day long as a job, which is really just like the luckiest position ever.

Starting point is 00:25:39 So we could focus on doing that. We could scope our games down really, really well. We knew what to cut when it was time to start cutting stuff if we were getting closer to our deadline. And because there was no internet back then and no one had cell phones, there was complete and total focus because our phone never rang. There was a phone on the wall and that thing never rang. So there's no interruptions. Nobody's coming to the house and knocking on the door and interrupting our thoughts. So we could just focus for 12 hours a day at least and just code, design, you name it, constantly. To build on the emphasis you put on scoping, which I think is certainly applicable to so

Starting point is 00:26:24 many different projects, maybe all projects. I mean, that certainly applies to book projects and so on that I've been involved with. Podcasts, right? Thematically choosing where you'll go and where you will not go. I was doing some research and if I'm taking us into a dead end or a cul-de-sac that doesn't make sense, you can tell me. But I read a discussion of different, I suppose, principles at id Software. And a comment came up, which was no prototypes, which was attributed to you and talks about you guys being your own best testing team and so on. I was wondering if, I can't believe everything you read on the internet, of course, but

Starting point is 00:27:04 if this is true, if you could elaborate on what you mean by that. So to get that many games done that fast, you can't be playing around with making prototypes. Prototypes are like, let's test this and see if it works. And let's test that and see it. There's no testing. It's like, here's the game that we're going to make. Here are all the characters that go in the game. Here's how we're going to make here are all the characters that go in the game here's how many levels we have here are all the pieces of the levels that need to be drawn here's all the animations that need to be created all the tools that need to be programmed all that stuff there's no way to do any prototyping if you're going to get done in two

Starting point is 00:27:38 months with four people so we had no prototypes we knew how to code already. So there was like, because we can just see it in our minds, we can just visualize it. And we communicated with each other just going, okay, it's going to look like this on the screen. We're going to see mountains in the background. On the foreground, we're going to have another plane. And we're going to have trees there. And we're going to have up in the trees,

Starting point is 00:27:59 we're going to have these characters and their AI is going to be limited to blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we just kind of describe what the game is. And can do that within let's say an hour yeah at the very beginning of a new game in one hour we can describe that game extensively for what we're going to create in the next two months it wasn't like well then we have to figure out this it was like there is no figuring it out we're just making it so there weren't prototypes it was just we're making the game later on with bigger games that we could spend more time on we could do rmd but we still knew what we were making we just needed to figure out how to make that part

Starting point is 00:28:40 of it it wasn't like we'd build a piece of the game and then throw it away. We would build this functionality in because that was the original design. And if we found out that that functionality actually is a detriment to the game itself, to the soul of the game, then we would remove it. But it wasn't like we were prototyping it. We're making that piece of technology in the game. It was going to be part of the game, but we find out that that is not where the game is really. And then we pull it out. Last but not least, an excerpt from legendary investor Bill Gurley's interview with Tim at this year's South by Southwest conference. How do you do prep? You're doing this many podcasts.

Starting point is 00:29:32 You're not reading a thousand books a year. No. Step number one is write a blog post, which is called, I think it's called The Decision That Removes a Thousand Decisions, and then in parentheses, Why I'm Not Reading Any New Books This Year. So make it a policy.

Starting point is 00:29:43 If you want to say no to a category of thing, make it a public policy. So number one is making it a public policy. I'm not reading any books published this year. That way I can tell every guest not reading books without having to ruffle feathers. The next step is looking at, before I even invite someone, looking at long form video and audio to the extent possible. And maybe I have to find something that was recorded behind doors. That's something that I'm usually pretty good at doing. Interviews, Wikipedia. What am I looking for though? What's the filter? I'm looking for a handful of things. One would be any odd hobbies or Passover comments that weren't fleshed out that I think would make for a good first question or

Starting point is 00:30:26 second question, in part because it will prove to the interviewee that I have actually looked at the details and done my homework, which is really important for a lot of interviewees. Because if you don't prove that early, they're going to go on autopilot and they're gone. They're checked out. They're thinking about their next vacation. You might as well be talking to Max Headroom or something. It's just not going to be very interesting. And then I would say beyond that, I will try to identify what has been neglected, what has not been mentioned. And that can lead some interesting places, not always comfortable places, but that can lead, for instance, if they haven't talked about their childhood at all, I might ask them if they're okay with me asking about their childhood.

Starting point is 00:31:09 A few other key, I would say housekeeping, and this is also in the category of prep. It's just right before we record. I will talk to anyone, we did this even though we know each other, for five to 10 minutes beforehand. Number one, just so everybody can get their hamstrings warmed up. We're not trying to sprint out of the gates after hitting record. Just talk. But there's a format. I will say, you have final cut, just like every one of my guests. This is no gotcha show. I've had that happen to me. It sucks. This is a friendly. My job is to make you sound as good as possible. You have final cut. We can send you the transcript. So don't worry about it. It's not live. So bathroom

Starting point is 00:31:45 breaks, water breaks. You want to restate something, we can do that. And then I ask them, and people comment on this because almost no one asks this, what would make this a home run for you? Looking back after it's published, say two months after it's published, what would make this one of your favorite interviews or something that you would point people to? Great. And then I can help steer it. And that puts people at ease and helps them to be vulnerable. Another thing that I will think of, if I want to try to unbox something that hasn't been explored before, there's probably a good reason it hasn't been explored.

Starting point is 00:32:21 So I will find something in that same category. It could be childhood, could be relationships, could be a business failure. I will volunteer that information from my side first, just to provide some transparency. Because I know that sometimes it seems like I'm talking a lot, and I am. But there are reasons for, in this case, doing that. I'll ask the question so they can think about it. Then I buy them time so that they don't feel too under pressure. Then I volunteer an answer from my own life that basically makes me vulnerable simultaneously and it makes people much more likely to reciprocate. So those are a few of the things that I do. If I have any access to that person or their lives through friends or acquaintances,

Starting point is 00:33:10 then I will also back channel to a few folks and ask them what topics or questions. I'll always preface, I'll say, I'm obviously doing a ton of my own homework because people don't want to help you, including my friends, if you're being lazy. So I'll say, I'm doing a ton of my own homework, but are there any questions or topics that you think could be fun or uncommon to explore with so-and-so? I did this with – I sent a text to you like that for Danny Meyer when I interviewed him recently. Right. And you earn reciprocal trust through those – many of those techniques. Absolutely. And then I will also – and this leads to a lot and it smooths out the entire process.

Starting point is 00:33:46 I will very frequently ask guests, not always, but ask them if there's anyone they think would really have fun having a conversation on the podcast. So I'd say 70% of the guests come from other guests at this point. You asked me that about Mike Movison and you just had him on. I did. One topic that I adore just as a fan of media is what I call pure respect. So I remember Shaq went on this five-minute rant about all the greats that had come before him, which was just super endearing. Tell us a couple of other podcasters that you respect and why. There are a lot. You mentioned one. i mentioned one there are many and i respect them for a whole lot of different reasons i would say it runs the gamut from say like a guy ross

Starting point is 00:34:32 so how i built this yeah who is using i don't want to say this american life format but he's doing a lot of prep a lot of recording and then immaculate editing with his team and telling a story arc. So they might move things around. And that is a particular game. That's a very particular game. And he and his team are very, very good at it. I would say this is going to seem like an easy one, but Joe Rogan has done an excellent job of becoming a category of one. He wasn't emulating someone else. And for those wondering where you might be able to read up on how to do this, there's a chapter called The Law of Category in the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. A lot of the other chapters are outdated. This one, everyone should read. He did an excellent job of number

Starting point is 00:35:22 one, experimenting with a brand new format early. He has been in the podcasting world for a very long time and he's tested a lot. And he found his footing reasonably quickly and the combination of entertainment and in-depth interview and tripling down on long format, I think he deserves a lot of credit for popularizing. He also made incredibly, incredibly good strategic decisions before most. I'll give you an example. YouTube, one of the world's largest search engines, who did one of the very first spectacular jobs of capturing podcasts on YouTube, not just long form, but using clips on a separate channel.

Starting point is 00:36:09 So he has played that game like the consummate professional. And so he would be another example. I think Lex Friedman does an excellent job. I'd say our formats are probably closest in some respects. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who we both know, who focuses on investing and investors, I think does a fantastic job. I could list another 20. There are some really, really good interviewers out there, but it's not enough to be a good interviewer. I really think you need to seek to be a category of one. It's a lot easier to be the only than it is to be the best

Starting point is 00:36:46 when you have millions of podcasts to compete against. So spend a lot of time thinking about positioning. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is a fan favorite. He's been on once before. He always delivers a lot of actionable advice and learnings. His name is Richard Koch, K-O-C-H. Richard is an entrepreneur, investor, former strategy consultant, and the author of several books on business and ideas, including

Starting point is 00:37:17 four on how to apply the 80-20 principle in all walks of life. His investments have grown at an average of 22% compounded annually over 37 years and have included Filofax, Plymouth Gin, Belgo, Betfair, FanDuel, and Auto One. For those who don't have any reference for that, that is absurdly, absurdly good. He has worked for Boston Consulting Group and was a partner at Bain & Co. before joining Jim Lawrence and Ian Evans to start L.E.K., which expanded from three to 350 professionals during the six years Richard was there. In 1997, Richard's book, The 80-20 Principle, reinterpreted the Pareto Rule, which states that most results come from a small minority of causes and extended it beyond its well-known applications in business into personal life, happiness, and success. The book, rewritten in 2022, has sold more than a million copies,

Starting point is 00:38:09 been translated into roughly 40 languages, and has become a business classic. It was named by GQ as one of the top 25 business books of all time, and it is a book that has had a huge impact on my life and one that I have recommended for at least a decade at this point. Richard's latest book is Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It. He has two upcoming books, 80-20 Beliefs, which identifies the very few beliefs in our lives that strongly influence what we do and therefore the results we get when we talk about some of these 80-20 beliefs in this conversation, as well as 80-20 Daily, a collection of 365 short daily readings using the 80-20 philosophy to achieve the good life. You can find him online

Starting point is 00:38:52 at richardkosh.net. Again, that's richardkosh.net. And on Twitter, at Richard Kosh 80-20. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a rare in-person episode. And my job always is to investigate, interrogate people I consider to be world-class performers. I have one in front of me. He's a friend. He is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Jack Kornfield. You can find him on Twitter at Jack Kornfield. Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. That's an understatement, but maybe we'll come back to that. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to have introduced Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West.

Starting point is 00:39:37 Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie, Massachusetts with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Current projects include Thank you. and Wisdom Ventures, a fund investing in companies that promote compassion. His books, many books, have been translated into 22 languages and have sold roughly 2 million copies. They include The Wise Heart, A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy and the Laundry, one of the best book titles of all time, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, The Art of Forgiveness, Loving Kindness, and Peace, and his most recent book, No Time Like the Present, Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are. You can find all things Jack at jackcornfield.com. That's K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D.com. And we'll link to, of course, all of his social and everything else in the show notes. My guest today is John Romero. Who is John Romero? Computer and video game legend John Romero has designed and published more than 130 games since his first sale at the age of 16.

Starting point is 00:40:57 A teenage programming prodigy, his major achievements include co-inventing a series of revolutionary computer games, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, and Commander Keen that launched the industry's most popular genre, the first-person shooter. The memoir, Doom Guy, Life in First Person, is his first book. You can find him on Twitter, at Romero, and on Instagram, at The Romero. This is a special episode and a turning of the tables. This time around, legendary investor Bill Gurley interviews me, and the recording is from earlier this year at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The conversation explores some of my lessons

Starting point is 00:41:39 learned and favorite findings over the last two decades or so in areas like entrepreneurship, tech, and podcasting, just to name three. I also throw in some favorite books and other spicy bits to keep things interesting. Let me mention a bit more about Bill before we get started. Bill Gurley, you can find him on Twitter at BGurley, G-U-R-L-E-Y, has spent more than 20 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. Over his incredibly impressive venture career, he has worked with such companies as Grubhub, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow, just to name a few. For more takeaways from his incredible investing career, you can find my interview with Bill, that's me interviewing Bill, at tim.blog slash Bill Gurley. And as a side

Starting point is 00:42:31 note, my 2007 South by Southwest keynote, this was a speech, my first appearance at South by, that I mentioned in this conversation with Bill, was what started it all in many senses. It's what put my first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, on the radar of influential bloggers and bigger media outlets, ultimately landing the book on the New York Times bestseller list where it stayed more or less unbroken for the next seven years. It's been a wild ride. And this segment, this brief appearance at South By is what kicked it all off. And if you'd like to hear that 2007 presentation, you can find it at Tim dot blog slash S X S W, which is the

Starting point is 00:43:14 abbreviation for South by Southwest. So one more time, that's Tim dot blog slash S X S W. And my voice sounds hilariously different. My presentation skills, hilariously less refined than they are today. Not to say they're perfect, but things have changed and we get better day by day, little by little. And one last thing, Hugh Forrest, if you are listening, thank you again for giving me a shot way back in the day. It made a difference. And that is why I come back to South by just about every year. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter,

Starting point is 00:44:02 my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to

Starting point is 00:44:44 think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #688: In Case You Missed It: July 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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