The Tim Ferriss Show - #701: In Case You Missed It: September 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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

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Starting point is 00:01:05 company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. 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

Starting point is 00:02:14 to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a 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, Arthur C. Brooks, author of the number one New York Times The Reverse Bucket List is something I do, oh boy, do I ever do it.

Starting point is 00:03:18 And it took me too long to figure this one out. When I was 50, I'm 59 years old. When I was 50, I found my bucket list from when i was 40. you know it was a classic thing and on my birthday i would make a list of my desires my ambitions and i would kind of imagine myself visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things and it would fire me up and make me well kind of feel like a loser quite frankly because it was it was it was lowering my sense of satisfaction, I subsequently found out. And I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I checked everything

Starting point is 00:03:51 off that list, and I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40. And so I thought, I'm a social scientist, so I thought to myself, obviously I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? And basically, this is the problem. This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package. I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction is your halves divided by your wants. Halves divided by wants. That's the model. So it's like, I'll slow down because I know people watching are like, let me write that down. Halves divided by wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently and securely by wanting less. I thought to myself, hmm, so what does that mean? And the answer to that, what does that mean, is I need a reverse bucket list. Not that I'm not going to get nice things

Starting point is 00:04:50 in my life, but I'm going to be consciously detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out. So on my birthday now, my 59th birthday a couple of months ago, I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever, power, ambition, admiration, all these things that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and Mother Nature wires us to accumulate the rewards that will help us survive and pass on our genes. I got it. I know how evolutionary psychology works. And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals. but I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them. I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me. I want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive manager, the bumper

Starting point is 00:05:41 of tissue right behind my forehead. And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying, maybe I get it and maybe I don't, but I'm going to cross it out as an attachment. And I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free. And so you find that to work. Oh, it works. It does not because you don't care about it, but because you're not attached to it in the same way. You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire, a ghost in your head. You've made it into something

Starting point is 00:06:08 that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain. Next up, Sam Korkos, CEO and co-founder of Levels, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that shows you how food affects your health.

Starting point is 00:06:31 The thing that almost always happens is they have this long to-do list and I say, all right, here's what I want you to do. Take everything on this to-do list with the dates that you think they'll get done by,

Starting point is 00:06:41 which is usually this week or next week, and I want you to just put them on your calendar with the amount of time you think it's going to take and then by. Which is usually this week or next week. And I want you to just put them on your calendar. With the amount of time you think it's going to take. And then we'll have another follow-up call next week. And we'll see what happens. And then we have the call.

Starting point is 00:06:53 And then they say, this process doesn't work. I say, why is that? I say, well, I tried to move it over there. But there isn't enough space in my week to fit all these items. It's like, yes. This is the point of the exercise. There literally is not enough time. Your time is finite.

Starting point is 00:07:10 And the number of digital items you can add to a to-do list is infinite. You are working with the wrong constraint, which is like the amount of items you can fit in a database row, as opposed to the number of things that you can fit in your finite time of your calendar. And so we then work on, all right, you probably need Slack during the course of the day. Usually

Starting point is 00:07:31 like 50% is a good target because things come up. Oh, I see. Not the tool Slack, but space, extra space. You need extra space in the day. And so we work on things like, for me, I process a lot of email. And when you say you need space in the day, could you just briefly say more about that? Because the way I'm hearing that is that you have 50% of your time open. Now, is that, for instance, like tomorrow, you would have 50% of your time open? Or does that mean that in advance of scheduling other things, like three weeks from now, each day is 50% open? It's generally 50% open just fully. Got it.

Starting point is 00:08:09 And as you get better at it, I would say I'm probably at 25% open because I've been doing this for many years. At least five years, probably longer. To the point where I can estimate how long it will take me to do something with maybe 90% accuracy. It's like, I need to write a memo on this thing. It's going to take me three and a half hours. And I just know, because I've written so many of these, I just know how long it's going to take. It takes time to hone that, I would think, right? If you ask most people, like, how many calories do you eat at lunch?

Starting point is 00:08:40 They'll be like, 6,000 million? I don't know. Seven calories? But then over time, you can calibrate. Okay. Especially if you retroactively update your calendar as well, which is, how long did it actually take me? And when you realize that your estimates were off or they were right, you can start to hone that skill. So I always try to have people put it at 50% open space because something's going to come up. A friend calls you, something happens during the day, you get a message that kind of throws you off. The problem is that it's way easier to pull something in from tomorrow into today because you had extra space than it is to have this cascading problem of just like disastrous. It's like, then I have to push this to this day. Then the next thing you know, you have this Tetris game that you're playing a month out because one thing changed in your schedule and everything breaks.

Starting point is 00:09:30 These concepts come from manufacturing where you have this line, whatever the assembly line is. You need to have slack in the system in order to be able to operate effectively because something will come up. And if there's one thing that comes up that breaks everything downstream, that's a real problem. And over time's one thing that comes up that breaks everything

Starting point is 00:09:45 downstream, that's a real problem. And over time, as you get better, you can reduce that amount of slack. But 50% is a pretty good goal. So you have like my goal for today, I'm going to have a four hour block where I'm going to do X. And then I have some time for me. I know I need to process email or communications broadly for at least two hours a day. So I just have those blocks every day. They're just repeated. So when I start scheduling things, I can't actually fit this in because it's not like I can't do my email. This is my role requires a lot of email. And so it's just clear as day. I cannot do this on Thursday. I can do it next week. So from a process perspective, then, do you start with imagining not at this point, but just so I get a really clear understanding.

Starting point is 00:10:32 Let's just say you're looking at next week. You have these recurring blocks of email that's already in there. You may have other repeating blocks, and I would be curious to know what they are. So let's bookmark that. When you're looking at, say, the to-dos that will be converted into calendar or not for the next week, what does that process look like? Do you start with a to-do list, and then that goes to your EA, and he or she tries to slot them in for the anticipated amount of time. What does that look like from start to finish? Yeah, the answer is you just skip the to-do list step entirely.

Starting point is 00:11:11 So when I get a new task, a lot of my tasks effectively come in through email. So I'll get an email. And this is also another thing that I worked with a couple of people on who really, really struggled with email. And the thing they struggle with is using their email as a to-do list, which is a very common thing that people do. The problem, it creates a lot of anxiety when you have this stack of uncategorized things. It could be 15 minutes. It could be 50 hours. You have no idea until you open up each one individually to figure out how much work it is. And so the same process of translating your

Starting point is 00:11:45 to-do list into your calendar, you can do the same thing with email, which is I worked with somebody recently where I said, all right, let's open each email. How long is this going to take you to respond to? These are like the chunkier ones. It's like 30 minutes. Great. Mark it as done. Copy the link and put that link in your calendar so you're going to spend this 30 minute block responding to this email what's the next one that's going to take me a full hour because i have to write something for them that's interesting so the clearing of the inbox then is really in some capacity scheduling the proper amount of time to reply to these things so you're not looking at this undifferentiated stack of shit exactly that you

Starting point is 00:12:25 are opening multiple times marking is unread going back to forgetting what you read reading at the 17th time or whatever that might be yeah and it's a stress thing it is very stressful to have this list of things it's just an ambiguous amount of effort it is stress relieving to see all right i will do that on Thursday of next week. I have nothing pending right now. I have not dropped any balls because I know that anything that is time sensitive that needed to be done today is already done. And there's nothing, there's no ambiguous deadlines looming that I'm not aware of because they're in my calendar. And if you change it, this is where closing the loop is a helpful factor, which is

Starting point is 00:13:04 if you say, I'm going to block this off where closing the loop is a helpful factor, which is if you say, I'm going to block this off for Thursday, you can tell that person, hey, I'll get back to you on Thursday. And then if you have to move it, you now know that you can say, hey, something came up. I'll get it to you on Monday. And you can just keep them in the loop on that as opposed to just ambiguously dropping the ball. So for me, when I get a new task, it just immediately

Starting point is 00:13:26 goes into my calendar. So if somebody was to say, hey, can you write a memo on this topic so that this team has context on it of where this has gone over the last year? I'll say, sure. How soon do you need it? I'll say, can you have it to me by Wednesday? I'll go to my calendar and I'll block off two hours because I think that's about how long to my calendar and I'll block off two hours because I think that's about how long it'll take. I'll block off two hours on Tuesday that I have open and I'll say, cool, I'll have it to you by Tuesday night. And that's it. The calendar is the to-do list. Next up, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable. And Scott Patterson, author of Chaos Kings, How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age

Starting point is 00:14:15 of Crisis. Nassim, I have a question for you about a letter, and then I have a question for you about personalities, Scott. So temperament may be another way to put it. So is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer? I read this on the internet. I don't know if it's true. You can't believe everything you read, but it was from The Guardian, so I thought it might be credible. One thing is actually, as I actually, I recommend people do that. I wrote that, but not on the day I started. But I recommended that people,

Starting point is 00:14:51 because you feel relief when you do it. Because then you can continue on your job without feeling like someone's controlling you. You've got the gun loaded. The whole idea of Flanby, how you thought about that problem. So you write the resignation letter, and you don't date it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:10 I'm very fascinated by your ways of thinking, the way that you've embraced different philosophies. And you emailed me an aphorism in 2010, and you can correct me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me. This is in 2010. Here's the aphorism of the quote. Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hates it. And then in parentheses, artists. Fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it, and in quotation marks, politicians. Have you always

Starting point is 00:15:46 had that type of robustness or resilience against criticism? Is that something that is inborn? Maybe because I was never really someone who took, you know, established ideas at face value. So you necessarily have, you know, violate some norms, some thinking norms. And often, people protect those norms by, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:12 attacking your reputation. And I realized that while writing Fool by Randomness, I say, hey, you're saying that what I'm doing is random,

Starting point is 00:16:19 we're using wrong models, these don't work. So they attack your reputation. So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was going to be under some kind of reputation. So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was going to be under some kind of fire. And I decided that no, my reputation is how a few important people or people who know something about the subject view me.

Starting point is 00:16:39 And it's not like I don't care about reputation. I only care about reputation in some circles, and it was people I can talk to, to try to explain what it's about, and it has worked out. So, but if you have to go defend your reputation, and you're doing the right thing, it's too much energy wasted, and it's not gonna help. Haters are gonna hate. This resembles another aphorism, inspired by Charlie Munger's, by Charlie Munger's, Charlie Munger's, is that you want to be the most ethical person when people

Starting point is 00:17:10 think that you're corrupt, or you want to be the most corrupt person when people think that you're ethical. Make your choice and use it as guideline. It's the same thing. So, except that there's something in between, that there's some people I care about and I want them to not lose respect for me. Of course, you start with your mother, you have your children, or whatever, your family members, but there are also a lot of people on the planet, and I care about my reputation, but in these circles, not with the general public. So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions,

Starting point is 00:17:46 which I've done over a long life. And Mark, for example, has a lot of enemies, and they're going to pick on something, and you don't care, so you're doing the right things. And how do you know you're doing the right thing? If people you respect approve of your action, not if the general public does. So that segues to my question for you scott which is in the process of doing all these interviews and interacting with these various players on the field and these sort of practitioners these investors and so on have you identified any patterns that you think whether nature or nurture that seemed to recur in people

Starting point is 00:18:27 who are good at what you describe in the book i would say i mean across all three books that i've written which are generally focused on wall street trading hedge fund managers i've met a lot of hedge fund managers over the years none like this guy i have to say we'll probably come back to that but uh i'm not i'll tell you i don't want to be identified as a fund manager yeah that's um it's an identity thing many are very focused on making a lot of money that's a very common trade i mean mark he talked to me about how you know he grew up in the 80s he identified with the reagan era it was a time you know wall street agreed is good he told me he's like did i have a little greed in me yeah i did it was the 80s and he grew up in a family that

Starting point is 00:19:19 was uh his father was a he was a minister in a church. He was sort of a hippie, didn't believe in pursuit of wealth. Mark took the exact opposite view that that was constantly something driving him was the desire to make money. A lot of other hedge fund managers I've met over the years, just they have that drive. And it's something that many people look at these guys and think you're worth a billion dollars, you're worth $2 billion, and yet you're a maniac. You go into work every day and just go crazy. You drive all your employees crazy because you want to be richer than the next guy. I don think mark has that quite that sort of insane level of greed as some do i've met ken griffin founder of citadel disciple of ed thorpe who we talked about we might

Starting point is 00:20:12 talk about later cliff asness who is a stark enemy of a friend initially initially a friend yeah and i have to say cliff is a nice guy when you when you meet a nice guy but is it friends well not nice guys he's also got a dark side also somebody extremely focused on being wealthy very smart they're all extremely smart and i think that's in personalities that's uh i think one of the things that has helped drive my books is these are interesting people you know a lot of them are mathematicians scientists they come out of university with a different expertise in making money, but then they apply that on Wall Street to making money. So it's a combination of they have to be leaders.

Starting point is 00:20:55 They are extremely driven. It baffles me because I'm not like that. You know, I have a degree in English, and I think that's actually why I sympathize with Nassim's writing so much is I came out of a tradition that I love the works of Dostoevsky and existentialism, and one of my favorite books is The Irrational Man. And I came into Wall Street and started reading about how there's this belief that people are irrational and the markets are rational and they are predictable because of this. And I thought, that is just crazy.

Starting point is 00:21:35 To me, I look at financial markets and I see black swans. I see fear and greed. That, to me, is what drives markets, not rational behavior, rational expectations. What are some of the things that make Nassim different or unique in those you've interacted with? I have some of my own questions and thoughts on this, but I would love to hear yours. He mentioned his contrarian nature. It's not a contrarian nature, it's independent. I'll let him answer.

Starting point is 00:22:02 In line with it. I mean, people think I'm contrarian. I'm with the conspiracy theorists on many things. I'm against them on many other things. Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem. So to me,

Starting point is 00:22:14 contrarian is an explicit rather than an attribute. So the other thing is, I thought it was going to be about me. It should be about the idea, the precaution. He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and not financial markets

Starting point is 00:22:30 drives him he doesn't look at the stock market page you know every day like some people do he's you have to figure out what people envy yourself so you know if you're in a hedge fund business and and you have 500 million dollars in a bank and someone else has 600 million dollars gonna be envious of that person i was always envious of people had more erudition than me okay so more erudite and you realize that that's what makes me tick being envious is not good you see but at the same time if you figure out who you tend to envy it's not i don't believe in this i say oh people having enough there's someone here from east hampton the fellow who wrote cash 22 a lot of interesting folks out there yeah he met a financier at the time for hedge funds

Starting point is 00:23:18 and the financier said what is it that about, because he was an author, a very successful one, what is it that distinguishes you from me? You know, look, he told him, I know the meaning of enough. So in other words, he knows you're upper bound. And effectively, I don't play that game. I say, you know, there's a meaning. I am literally, and I say envious of people who are erudite. Like if someone knows Latin very well, I'm envious.

Starting point is 00:23:51 If someone knows Sanskrit, I'm envious. And I discovered that early on. So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money on Wall Street, but I didn't think it was worth the effort. And luckily, with a combination of the universe. I had so much leverage, you know, I was marketing all this stuff, so the spillover on me was more than satisfactory.

Starting point is 00:24:11 So I have, knock on wood, a lot more than I wished. Next up, Shane Parrish, the entrepreneur behind Farnham Street and author of Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. I'd love to get your help defining a phrase, just I suppose explaining a phrase, and then segwaying into a conversation around mental models and cognitive biases and so on. So ordinary moments determine your position and your position determines your results.

Starting point is 00:24:51 So what is meant by that line and what is meant by position? So the counterintuitive insight that I had about decision-making from studying sort of Buffett and Munger and Peter Kaufman and a host of other people who've influenced my thinking is that they almost never find themselves out of position. And if you want to think of it as position as your circumstances, they're never forced by circumstances into doing something that they don't want to do. And often that means they look like an idiot in the short term, but in the long term, they win. And if you consider Buffett, for example, as we've talked about, he closes down

Starting point is 00:25:29 his partnership during a bull market in the 60s because he doesn't know how to invest anymore. He's lost touch. He can't find what worked for him. He reopens it later in terms of Berkshire Hathaway. Time Magazine, I think it was 1999, he's on the cover as being out of touch, 2001 stock market bursts. Right now, today, I think as of last quarter, he's got $150 billion on the balance sheet. And so what he's always doing is everybody thinks he's out of touch and he looks like an idiot, but he always wins because no matter what the outcome is, he wins. If the stock market goes up, he wins. If the stock, but he always wins because no matter what the outcome is, he wins. If the stock market goes up, he wins. If the stock market crashes, he wins because he's put himself in a position where no matter what happens, he can take advantage of circumstances

Starting point is 00:26:15 rather than having circumstances take advantage of him. And I think that that's a key element we don't realize. If you put Warren Buffett in a bad position where all of his options are bad, it doesn't matter how smart he is. It doesn't matter how Warren Buffett he is. Everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position, and everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position. Do you then create that position by having a handful of commandments? And I'm making these up. I'm not saying this is what Buffett does because I haven't tracked him as closely as you have. But for instance, I know someone who's cut from a similar cloth and he's like, no short positions, no leverage, and he has four or five rules that

Starting point is 00:26:55 he follows, which means he doesn't always beat the S&P 500, let's say, but he's very rarely in a position where he's a distressed seller or is forced into a bad position. So he is able to play a very long game. So I guess I'm wondering how you consistently create that type of position. So let me talk about it in terms of finance and apply it to something else that's totally, you would think it doesn't apply to. So in finance, you can think of low debt, you can think of saving money, you can think of always having dry powder. It doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world. If you can't take advantage of that idea, you might as well not have the idea. You have to be in a position to take advantage of the ideas that you have. And you have to be in a position where somebody can't

Starting point is 00:27:43 call you in at the exact wrong moment because that's really expensive, as everybody sort of learned during the great financial crisis and is now forgotten. We seem to relearn these lessons over and over again. But positioning applies to so many other things that we don't think about. You can think about it basically as in your sleep, right? Did you work out? Are you healthy? Are you eating well? Are you investing in your relationship with your partner? What position am I in in the moment that I get into a fight or argument or disagreement with my partner or my spouse?

Starting point is 00:28:16 And we don't think about the position we're in at that moment. But if you imagine that there's a patch of grass between you and them, is that grass dry or is it wet? Have I watered that for months, in which case the spark isn't going to light it on fire, or is this smallest little spark going to start this forest fire? And the position that we bring into those arguments matters a lot in terms of the quality of the outcomes that we get. I'll give you another example. We were talking about kids earlier, and I assume a lot of people listening have kids. One of my kids came home with an exam, and he got a really terrible mark. And he hands it to me. He's like a teenager,

Starting point is 00:28:54 so he hands it to me. He's like, I did the best I could, walks away. And normally, the conversation ends there. And I was like, okay, well, now is not the moment that we're going to talk about this, because I know that this teenage attitude thing going on, but we're going to circle back to this. And so later that night, I was like, talk to me about what it means to do the best you can. And what he told me about the best he could was like, when he sat down to write that test from 10 to 11, he focused all of his energy and all of his effort on it. He made the best decisions possible from 10 to 11. But what he forgot or didn't really appreciate is what position was he in at 10 a.m. when he sat down to write that test?

Starting point is 00:29:35 Did he fight with his brother in the morning? Yep, he did. Did he eat a healthy breakfast? Nope, he didn't. Did he get a good night's sleep? Nope, he was up late. Did he study? No, he sort of half-assed it.

Starting point is 00:29:45 And so what happened was he was in a bad position at the moment he sat down to write that test. He was ill-prepared to write the test. But yes, he did the best he could in that moment. And so often we think about life in terms of how do I do the best I can in this particular moment rather than how do I put myself in the best position. And part of that is like, we're always predicting, we're predicting creatures. And so we're always trying to gauge what the outcome is and maximize towards that outcome. I want to go all in on Tesla. I want to go all in on whatever, because I want to maximize my return. And what we don't think about is like, okay, well, what is the cost of doing that? What if I'm wrong? And how do I position myself for multiple possible futures where what if my

Starting point is 00:30:30 idea is not correct? Can I still survive? And can I thrive on that? And if you look back and you sort of like look back at Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these historical people who built these great businesses, including Buffett, they always take advantage of a weakness in somebody else's position when their position is strong. Who else would you, and I know you mentioned a few names, but outside of Buffett and Munger, who else would you put on your shortlist? And not to make you pick favorites, I'm sure that you could give a very long list, but just off the cuff, if you had to pick five to 10 people, let's just say, it could be four, but let's aim for five or slightly more people who you really respect as incisive, deliberate decision makers who would make that list. So we have a mutual friend, Naval Ravikant. He would be up there.

Starting point is 00:31:27 Patrick Collison would sort of be up there. Kat Cole, who works at Athletic Greens, one of my favorite people. She's always one step ahead. She's amazing. I think that there's very few people who are well-positioned in everything. If you look at somebody who's extremely good at one thing like buffet that comes with extreme weaknesses you can have a list of exemplars in your head almost of different people who are good at different positions but you have to pick what direction you're going and then what positions do you need to be good at to be good in that direction

Starting point is 00:32:00 and so for me like i circle back to sort to core things, which people don't really think about, but they're core to everything we do in terms of health and relationships and friendship and purpose and community. Am I working on something that I want to be working on? Am I moving closer to my destination? And is my destination the place I want to go? And I think those questions are stuff that we don't really ask ourselves. We're always so focused on how do we accomplish the outcome we want, rather than what are the key elements to this process that allow me to play for a long time? Am I going in the right direction? Do I want to get to where I'm going? So I am going to come back to just the broad question of how to incorporate thinking about

Starting point is 00:32:47 cognitive biases, if I'm saying that correctly, and or mental models. I'm not really, I guess those are different. I'd love to have you, let's begin there. How would you distinguish or define mental models? Then I'm going to go micro and then we'll zoom out. So a great way to think about mental models is the source of all bad decisions is blind spots. Mental models allow you to see a problem through a different lens. You can adopt a different persona.

Starting point is 00:33:11 A great example of a mental model is like, how would Tim Ferriss think about this? And then I adapt what I know about you and I try to see the problem from your perspective. And if I can see the problem from your perspective, now I've done the one thing that actually gets me out of cognitive biases, which is the source of all cognitive biases are basically we believe that what we see is all there is. And we learned about this sort of in physics, right? In grade nine, I think, where you're standing on this train and you're carrying this ball and the train is moving at 60 miles an hour. And how fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to you, the ball's not moving. But if you're watching the train go by, the train is moving at 60 miles an hour. And how fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to

Starting point is 00:33:45 you, the ball is not moving, but if you're watching the train go by the ball's moving at 60 miles an hour. And so the source of all of our problems is that we only see that we're this person on the train holding this ball. And we can't see that there's a person outside who has a completely different view into the exact same situation that we see. So we can mentally use these tools to sort of accommodate how we can look into the world from a different person's eyes or through a different lens, be that biology or through thinking or through, I mean, the most useful ones tend to be like, and then what? Just asking yourself that simple question, I accomplished this, and then what? Then what happens? Inversion. How do I avoid all these negative outcomes that I don't want to get? And the Stoics, you've talked about this in the past, the Stoics have been doing

Starting point is 00:34:34 this for a long time. They call it a premortem. I think that those are just really helpful ways. And what they're really doing is they're just allowing us to put a different lens onto the problem and see it through a different light. And by seeing it through a different light, we slightly reduce our blind spots into the problem. Yeah, totally. I haven't read these in decades, so caveat lector for anyone who picks these up. But some of Edward de Bono's work, I think he's originally Maltese, but so de Bono's

Starting point is 00:35:01 two words, or actually he may just be a Maltese citizen. I can't peg the nationality, it doesn't really matter. He wrote a book called Lateral Thinking. He has another one, I think it's called The Six Thinking Hats or something along those lines, which similarly very helpful just for forcing yourself as a portion of a practice to look at the same situation with a different lens, a different set of questions, a different perspective. Last but not least, another unpredictable and entertaining edition of The Random Show with technologist and serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose. I'll mention something that's sitting outside. I can see it from here that people might be interested in so i i've been and still am a fervent believer in cold therapy using ice baths

Starting point is 00:35:57 as a means of controlling inflammation as a means of mood elevation that lasts on the big time. Unbelievable. And generally my approach has been to get a chest freezer of some type and fill it with ice, et cetera. And that works, but they get really disgusting really quickly.

Starting point is 00:36:21 And they all do. I bought one of the machines, the real pro ones. And then you're stuck with this thing that is an eyesore and you don't know what all do, dude. I bought one of the machines, the real pro ones. Yeah, and then you're stuck with this thing that is an eyesore and you don't know what to do with it.

Starting point is 00:36:29 You can't move it. I tried to sell it, I couldn't. Yeah, so I ended up, because I realized how significant a lever this is for improving my quality of life, just on a daily basis.

Starting point is 00:36:41 And I'll backstep for a second and just say one thing that I learned from Tony Robbins, to give him credit, and I don't know if he came up with this, but is this sequence of state story strategies. It's like fix your state first. Only then can you come up with an enabling story and only then can you come up with an effective strategy. If you're like feeling shitty and you're sleep deprived and you're kind of depressed or anxious or whatever, you try to come up with a strategy, meaning how to fix something, you're not going to come up

Starting point is 00:37:12 with a good strategy, generally speaking. So it's like fix your physical state first, then you can come up with an enabling story, then come up with an effective strategy. So the state piece is very important. There aren't that many ways I have found to change state. Exercise is one, but it requires generally a fair amount of time. Heat is also effective, but again, requires, say, it doesn't sound like a much, but it's like 15 to 30 minutes, let's just say, in a sauna, very effective. Cold is the fastest. It's just the fastest for me. And I've gone without cold therapy because I've not wanted to get some huge chest freezer or a pro model. I am also going to be getting a pro model. But they get all scummy, though, and then you got to put chlorine in them.

Starting point is 00:37:59 Yeah, this is all that. It's a lot. I went on Amazon and I found something called the cold pod, which you set up in like five minutes, you fill it with water from a hose, you put ice in, and it works perfectly well as a cold plunge. And I ended up buying a Yeti cooler to store ice in. So I have a few days of ice. And it's, let's see what would it be it would be like

Starting point is 00:38:27 if you were standing maybe it's hip height and it's probably three feet in diameter and you get in you just kind of crouch in there and it works fucking great it works really well and it costs like 150 or 200 bucks maybe Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's 100 bucks. It's not crazy. 169. There you go. And I've been really impressed with this thing. It's very basic. And even when it's been very hot outside, like you put in two bags of ice and you let it sit for 20 minutes, it's going to get pretty cold. It's not going to be 30 degrees, but it's probably going to be mid 50s, depending on how much water you have in there.

Starting point is 00:39:07 Pro tip, the more water you have in there, the more ice you're going to need to cool it. So don't fill it all the way up to the top. Fill it up like halfway and then add the ice. And it's been a game changer for me. It's a plastic trash can, dude. No, it's not a plastic trash can. I mean, props to whoever made this shit, because it probably cost them like 15 bucks to build one of these. Yeah, it's not a trash can. Just to be clear, I mean, look, we're not talking about a fucking Maserati.

Starting point is 00:39:35 But here's what's nice about it. It's very easy to set up. It's not a trash can, because that makes it sound like it's like mid-chest height and hard. It's easy to pack. You can actually travel with it if you want to travel with it. So I would just say for people who have – How do you travel with it? Oh, it's super easy, man.

Starting point is 00:39:54 Oh, it folds up? Yeah, it folds up. You can stick it in a bag. You can take it with you. It's super easy. Put it in your hotel room. Yeah, the hotel loves 50 gallons of water spilling out. So for those people who have perhaps heard about the benefits of cold therapy, but have avoided it

Starting point is 00:40:14 because it's too expensive, it's too time consuming, whatever, this is a way to test it. And I would just say, this is a low hurdle way to test it out. And I used it earlier today. It was fantastic. Changed my day. So that's the Colt Bud. And there are a bunch of other options that look basically identical. I just went with the one with the best reviews. Nothing fancy.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And now here are the bios for all the guests. Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular How to Build a Life column, mega popular. And Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 number one New York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday. His newest book is Build the Life You Want,

Starting point is 00:41:20 subtitled The Art and Science of Getting Happier, with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. We cover a lot of ground. He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks and practices that he implements in his own life and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many other projects. You can find him on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks, on Twitter at Arthur Brooks. This is an old school Tim Ferriss conversation in the sense that we go all the way back to many of the tools, many of the principles from the four-hour work week. And that includes virtual assistants, delegation, processes, massive elimination,

Starting point is 00:42:12 minimalism for maximum leverage, all sorts of great things. And this time I was in the student seat because my guest today has mastered, I think it is fair to say, so many facets of everything I just mentioned. And it was a pleasure to take so many notes myself to follow up on. His name is Sam Korkos. You can find him on Twitter at Sam Korkos, C-O-R-C-O-S. Sam is the CEO and co-founder of Levels, an A16Z-backed startup that shows you how food affects your health using continuous glucose monitors and other biosensors. Fascinating company, incredibly, incredibly practical technology, easy to use, easy to learn from, changes your behavior, changes your life. Check out Levels at levelshealth.com.

Starting point is 00:42:59 The first guest is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who spent 21 years as a risk taker, that is, quantitative trader, before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and, in his words, mostly practical problems with probability. Taleb is the author of a multi-volume essay, The Inserto, and within that you find The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Anti-Fragile, The Bed of Procrustes, and Skin in the Game. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for first introducing me to The Black Swan. These all cover broad facets of uncertainty. His work has been published into 49 languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written as a backup of the inserto more than 70 technical and scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, genetics, quantitative finance, statistical physics, medicine, philosophy,

Starting point is 00:43:49 ethics, economics, and international affairs around the notion of risk and probability. These are grouped in the technical inserto. Inserto is spelled I-N-C-E-R-T-O. Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. I believe he's retired. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder. In other words, the properties of systems that are, in his phrasing, anti-fragile. You can find him on Twitter at NNTaleb, and that's N-N-T-A-L-E-B, also fooledbyrandomness.com. The second guest is Scott Patterson. Scott Patterson is an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, currently based in Washington, D.C., working on climate and energy policy. His new book is Chaos Kings, subtitled How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis,

Starting point is 00:44:32 a profile of the rise of black swan traders such as Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel, as well as a survey of the many perils the world faces today and how we might fix them. Scott has covered a lot. He's covered everything from Berkshire Hathaway to stock exchanges to high-speed traders to financial regulators. His first book, The Quants, describes the rise of mathematical finance and delves into its role in the 2008 financial blowup. Dark Bulls, his second book, tells how computer traders took control of the US stock market starting from the birth of computer trading in the 1980s to the explosion of high-frequency trading in the late 2000s. And you can find him on Twitter at Patterson Scott and on his website,

Starting point is 00:45:13 scottpattersonbooks.com. And lest you think this conversation is only about finance, I want to emphasize that very refined thinking in the world of markets and investing really reflects clarity of analysis and concepts that then lend themselves to a very clear scoreboard. And for that reason, it is a fascinating arena within which you can refine your thinking toolkit for many, many, many other things. And we talk about many of these other areas where these things can be cross-applied. My guest today is Shane Parrish. Shane Parrish is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnham Street and the host of the Knowledge Project podcast, where he focuses on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. And he has many, many top investors and thinkers on his podcast.

Starting point is 00:46:11 His popular online course, Decision by Design, has helped thousands of executives, leaders, and managers around the world learn the repeatable behaviors that improve results. Shane's work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes, among many other outlets. He is the author of the brand new book, Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. You can find him on Instagram at Farnham Street, that's spelled F-A-R-N-A-M Street, on Twitter at Shane A. Parrish, last name P-A-R-R-I-S-H, and all things Farnham Street, including the knowledge project you can find at fs.blog. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off,

Starting point is 00:46:53 and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field,

Starting point is 00:47:36 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. 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 - #701: In Case You Missed It: September 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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