The Tim Ferriss Show - #95: Lessons Learned from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and More

Episode Date: August 4, 2015

Phil Libin (@plibin) is the co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote. Evernote has roughly 150 million users, and I personally use it at least 10 times a day. It is my external brain for capturing all the information, documents, online articles, lists, etc. in my life. In this episode, Phil and I cover a ton. Here are just a few examples: - Philosophical and performance systems: Stoicism, electrical brain stimulation, and more - Phil's favorite lessons learned from Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten) - Creating tech "for yourself" and Evernote's genesis story, leading to approximately 150 million users - The best toast in Singapore, the best hamburger in Tokyo, and why "Goat Simulator" is amazing. - Long-term (10,000-year) thinking and real versus imagined threats More importantly, he digs into his "a-ha" moments, and what you need to do bring your next big idea to life. Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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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. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I've re-recorded this intro like 17 times because I saw my brother last night after a long hiatus apart, and we drank, i.e. Tim drank way, way, way too much wine. So I've had some caffeine. I've had some coconut oil

in pu-erh tea, and this one is going to make it happen, folks. Magic. Okay, onward. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is like many others. It is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, athletes, actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or anybody and everyone in between. And what I mean by that is teasing out the routines, the morning rituals, the favorite books, the behaviors and habits that you can borrow to improve your own life in a professional sense and a personal sense. This episode, we have Phil Libin. Phil Libin is a friend. He is also the co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote. I use Evernote, as you guys probably know, every day. I mean, dozens of times a day.

I used it to handle all of the brain dumps and organization of information and capture of information for my last few books. I also use it to create a paperless life or as close to it as possible. And I was introduced to Evernote by you guys on Twitter, actually. And I want to say 2008, maybe 2009, when I was revising the four-hour workweek. And I ended up recommending Evernote in that once I got hooked on the product. Then I got to know Phil, and then I became an advisor to the company, which is super, super cool. So I've been an advisor since I want to say 2008, 2009, and Evernote now has 150 or so million users and it is your external brain. So you can use it to capture things online.

So you can read them offline. You can use it to capture voice notes, photographs, scan documents with your iPhone, for instance, so that you can take a picture of a receipt, of a menu, of a contract, and then have it OCR'd so that you can search the text that you just took a photo of later. Anyway, I could go on and on about it because I love the product. It's like Uber for me. I can't live without it. But in this episode, we cover so much more than just Evernote, but we do dig in, obviously, to the lessons learned. And speaking of lessons learned, Phil shares his favorite lessons learned directly from Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, and Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten. And if you don't

know who he is, then you should look him up. We talk about philosophical and performance systems like stoicism, electrical brain stimulation, which I know you guys are into. And if you want a ton on that, you can also listen to my Adam Ghazali episode. But Phil is experimenting with brain stimulation for performance enhancement and just general well-being. And we'll talk about that. Creating tech for yourself and the Evernote Genesis story. They're very closely tied together. We have some frivolities like the best toast in Singapore, the best hamburger in Tokyo, and why goat simulator is amazing. And then we talk about long-term thinking,

long-term meaning 10,000 year thinking and real versus imagined threats. We talk about artificial intelligence and a bunch of others. Now, most importantly, in general, across this episode, he digs into his aha moments and what he learned in some cases, how they happened and how you can make that happen for yourself. So Phil is an awesome guy, hilarious, and just an amazing, amazing executive. Now, when we recorded this, he was also CEO of Evernote, but he has been looking for his successor for some time now. And in the meantime, between recording this and publishing it, he found that CEO. So you can just Google new Evernote CEO and you can get all the goods on that. In any case, you can find the show notes,

all the links, the book links, et cetera, at fourhourworkweek.com and just click podcast. So 4hourworkweek.com, click podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy Phil Libin and say hi to him on Twitter at P Libin, L-I-B-I-N. Phil, welcome to the show. Hey, Tim. Good to be here. It has been a while since we hung out and I've noticed the most conspicuous change is that the trademark beard has vanished. And I wanted to know how you decided to make that change, because for as long as I've known you, I have sort of visualized in my head this beard that you have, which is, I guess,

it's not really a goatee. It's not really a full ears to chin beard. It's more like a mouth frame. I don't know if there's a word for those. Mouth frame. Yeah. Man, had I thought of it as a mouth frame, I would have shaved so much earlier. Yeah. That's probably due to my lack of caffeine. But how did you decide to, or why did you decide to shave it off? Well, I had it literally for 20 years. I hadn't shaved in 20 years.

I had this beard. And when I grew it 20 years ago, I was trying to look older. And 20 years later, I figured it was time to start trying to look younger. That works. Yeah, that makes sense and for those people who are familiar with evernote one of the questions that i've heard come up quite a bit is and we'll get to what evernote is of course but why green for the logo the elephant people eventually figure out but right why green well so logos is gray.

So it's an elephant, right? Because elephants never forget. Elephants have great memories. And the elephant is gray. And people ask, well, why is the elephant gray? And it's, well, because that's the color elephants are. And it's on a green background because that's the color that elephants are usually on when they're on grass. So it's not super elaborate.

Got it. Or imaginative. Natural habitat. It is the iconic animal in its natural habitat. And speaking of natural habitat, I'm not going to say iconic animal for either of us, but when did we first meet? I want to say it was in a coffee shop. But do you recall? Yeah, it was in a coffee shop. But do you recall?

Yeah, it was at a – it wasn't a coffee shop. It was like a Filipino restaurant. Oh, it was like a Chinese tapioca pearls slash coffee shop. Yeah, yeah. It definitely involved tapioca. I remember – I definitely remember there was tapioca involved, like in the outskirts of San Francisco. And it was like – I want to say like 1854 or something. It was a while ago.

Right. I think you're using the Egyptian calendar. It was probably 2000, I want to say 2007, 2008. It was early. Yeah. I mean, I think we had only recently launched. And I think I remember like you tweeted something to your followers about what app you should be using to maybe write your next book,

and then I think a bunch of people tweeted back Evernote, and then people in my office saw it and got super excited, and then I think either you reached out to me or I reached out to you, and then we got together for tapioca. So what I remember is that I asked a number of questions. I think I was updating the four-hour work week. Right. And I was looking to replace some of the tools.

And so I would ask my followers on Twitter, what is the best tool for X? What is the best tool for Y? What is the best tool for Z? And Evernote kept on coming up. And I was like, that's impossible. What is this Swiss Army knife of software? And I looked at it and I was like, that's impossible. What is this Swiss army knife of software? And I looked at it and I was like, you know, I really need an intro to this. I'm having trouble figuring out where to start, which I think is a common, a common, uh, stumbling block

or hurdle for people to get over. And then we met up and I remember you took a photograph of the menu, which was on the wall. And shortly thereafter, we're able to search all of the text. And I was like, okay, I get it. And then I think I started with de-paperifying or trying to remove the clutter of paper from my house at that time. So it's all the business cards, all of the legal paperwork, accounting paperwork. I just scanned it because I knew I didn't have to really organize it per se if I could search by the text that was scanned. And for people who don't know, I mean, this was my first use case, but how would you describe Evernote if you could just maybe give a brief synopsis of Evernote for folks? And now, of

course, I mean, I use it 10 to 20 plus times a day. But for those people who are not familiar with Evernote, what is Evernote? And how did you become involved? Or what is your involvement with Evernote? Well, what we started out as wanting to build your second brain. We wanted to make something that would just make people smarter, let you remember everything, let you find all types of information, take notes, clip things from the web, put in documents. And we just kind of refined it from there. So we started out as this very general, simple note-taking tool. And we've evolved to be what we think are kind of the essential everyday pillars of productivity. Evernote is the workspace where you get all your stuff done.

And what are the origins of Evernote? What's the genesis story? There's actually two teams that were working on similar concepts. So there's a team of people that were headed up by this guy named Stepan Pachikov, who is this sort of eccentric, genius, inventor, entrepreneur, Russian-American guy. And he had a team of people that go all the way back to the Apple-Newton days. I don't know if you remember that. Sure.

This was actually the company that Apple pulled out of Russia to do all the handwriting recognition, all the cool stuff on the Newton, like back in the late 80s, way ahead of their time. And they sort of stayed together. They sold that company, and they started another company, and sold that company,

and then they stayed together as this group working on this idea of photographic memory, basically letting people remember everything, capture all information in California. I was in Boston at the time, and I was just finishing up with my second startup, and my core team started thinking about, well, what do we want to do next?

We need to start another company. We don't want to have to go get jobs or anything. What are we going to do? And we thought, well... Strategic unemployment. Exactly. And our whole insight was, let's do something for us. Because our first two companies

we made for other people. Our first company, we did e-commerce software for big stores. And our second company, we did security software for governments and banks. And that was all fine. We were lucky enough to be able to sell both companies,

but we're not a big retailer. We're not a government. We had to wake up every morning thinking, what does the customer want? What does the market want? And we got tired of that. We kind of said, well, screw what the market wants. How about what do we want? Let's just build that. So we sat around thinking,

what do we really want? What do we love? And we batted some ideas around, and our first idea is we said, what do we really want? What do we love? And we batted some ideas around. And our first idea is we said, well, you know, we love video games. Like, maybe we should make a video game studio. And we thought, well, you know, but there's already so many great video games that we don't have time to play. Like, there's already a giant stack at my desk. So, you know, we don't really, the world isn't really going to be that much better

if we add more video games to it. So let's think of something else. And this was 2007. So we thought about, well, all this new social stuff is actually kind of cool. Like, we like that a lot. Maybe we should build a social network. And we thought, that's crazy because, you know, you can't compete with MySpace. Like, MySpace is, you know, in that market.

You know, we're too late to do anything meaningful there. So we gave up on that. And then we said, well, what about productivity? Like, all about productivity? Like all the productivity tools around us just feel old and crappy and out of date and largely irrelevant. What if we make the new version of that? And that we kind of fell in love with. So we had two different teams working on the same problem. And I met Stepan early 2007, and we decided to join forces. So we actually combined the teams and then recreated the company, kind of relaunched the company as a new entity in 07

and launched our first product in 08. And what was the first use case, the first application of Evernote that really kind of made your eyes pop out? Do you have any memories of particular aha moments with either applications that you guys came up with internally or applications and uses that your fans and users came up with? Well, it's funny.

We were getting going kind of right as Twitter was getting going. And so for a while, you know, I just had an alert for Evernote on Twitter and I could read every single time. Anytime anyone mentioned Evernote on Twitter, I would see it because it was only, like, that only happened like a few times a day. It was a few hundred people on Twitter.

Yeah, exactly. So that was easy. And so I literally knew every time anyone said anything on either the internet or Twitter about Evernote, I would either get a Google alert or I would get the tweet alert. So for a while, I actually knew like every single thing that anyone ever said publicly about us. And it was still only like a few things a day. So it was kind of a humbling thing. But I remember this one day pretty early early on, where somebody tweeted, two totally

different people tweeted. One of them tweeted that they were a priest and they loved using Evernote to gather information to write their Sunday sermon. And I remember seeing that and kind of thinking like, ah, that wasn't our intended use case at all. Like, we didn't set out to make something that's good for the clergy. But, you know, it kind of makes sense. Like, when you think about it, like, yeah, if I was a priest and I had to come up with something relatively insightful and witty to say every week, I'd probably spend time, you know, researching and clipping and writing. And like, actually, yeah, Evernote is kind of the ideal thing for that.

So I remember thinking, like, that's kind of a cool, unanticipated use case. And then later that day, some totally different person tweeted, not to the first person, just independently, that he loved Evernote because it made it easy to keep track of all of his sins

so that he could efficiently confess every Sunday. And I remember thinking, yes, now we're onto something. Like we got both ends of the spectrum. We got, we got the priests, we got the sinners. We were like, we were like fully horizontally integrated, uh, theologically integrated, theological, horizontal integration. Uh, and, uh, that, that was when I was first confident that like, maybe we were, maybe we were onto something. How do you personally use Evernote?

And I think that the reason I keep drilling into this is because I remember my challenge was figuring out where to start. Yeah, that's the hardest. I mean, that's still the hardest thing for us is people don't know how to get started. So I guess there are two questions, right? Like, how do you personally use Evernote?

I'd be curious to hear how you most frequently use Evernote. And then secondly, how do you solve that problem? Because this is not unique to just Evernote, right? There are many different products. Let's say Sugru, for instance, which is this kind of Play-Doh that hardens into a rubber that you can use for repairing things has a similar challenge there. There are many different tools and products that face this conundrum. So the first is, how do you- I've got multiple tubes of that at my desk right now. Oh, you do? Yeah, it's great stuff.

Yeah. Because I remember reading about it somewhere and immediately being like, oh, that's awesome. I need to get it right away. And then I got it and I got all these packages that showed up at my desk. I was like, okay, now what? My glasses aren't actually broken, so I don't need it to fix my glasses yet. Right. My iPhone case isn't broken, so I don't need it to fix my glasses yet. Right. My iPhone case isn't broken, so I have to break it to use the Sugru, or what else can I do?

Yeah. So with Evernote on a personal level, how do you use it? So I live in it. I do everything in it. Mostly I use Evernote to run Evernote. We built it for ourselves, and we're still building it for ourselves. So all of the day-to-day things that I need for my job are in Evernote. Like, we built it for ourselves, and we're still building it for ourselves.

So all of the day-to-day things that I need for my job are in Evernote. I primarily use Evernote for work stuff, but I primarily only do work stuff. Like, I don't really have a work-life balance. So I used to have more hobbies and skills, and I would use Evernote for them as well. Like, I was... I'm a plausibly okay cook, and so I had a whole bunch of, you know,

recipes and techniques in Evernote for that. I was trying to learn Japanese at one point, and I was using Evernote for that. But more and more, like, everything that isn't work-related has sort of fallen away. But I just use Evernote for everything work-related. So everything I write, I write in Evernote. All of our meetings are captured in Evernote.

When I want to know what people in the company are working on, I look at Evernote. Evernote kind of gives me an update about, here's what all my coworkers are doing that's relevant to my day. It's kind of become the, the essential, you know, multiple times a day, um,

productivity tool for me. Yeah. I'm looking, well, I'm looking at questions for you in Evernote right now, which is very meta, but, uh,

and so that actually happens a lot. Like the first time that I did a, uh, I remember the first time I talked to a reporter, um, you know, I, I. We did our very first media tour. I went to New York City to meet with some journalists, some reporters back in probably 2008. And I remember the first meeting I had. I don't even remember anymore who the reporter was.

But he was using Evernote to take notes. And he had been already kind of for a while. And so that was actually the first time I saw it kind of in the wild was somebody using it to write down interview questions with me. And so there's all sorts of moments like that that I remember being just super cool. The first time I actually really saw it in the wild, like out on the street, I think it was on that same trip.

I was in a Starbucks in Manhattan and I was waiting in line to get a coffee and there was a guy in front of me in line who was like, I don't know, he looked like an important lawyer or something. He was wearing, you know, he was wearing a very nice suit and he was holding his phone. He had a Bluetooth headset

and he was holding his phone out in front of his face and he had Evernote on his phone and he was like jabbing his finger into like something in Evernote. And he was yelling at somebody over the Bluetooth headset, like proving a point by like jabbing his finger into Evernote. And it was the first time I'd actually seen like somebody use Evernote that, you know, he didn't know, that he didn't have any connection with. And I was going to like, I was standing right behind him.

I was kind of going to kind of introduce myself, but he looked really angry. He decided to. And I was standing right behind him. I was going to kind of introduce myself, but he looked really angry. He decided to just stand there meekly behind him. So what did you think? What was the self-talk when you saw that? Did that trigger any particular thought or feeling in you to see it in the wild for the first time? I thought at some point I should work on a product

to just make people a bit more mellow. I have built something that enables people to yell at each other that doesn't feel great. Maybe we should build something into the next version that chills people out. A mindfulness timeout?

Exactly. There is that somewhat related feature in, I think, it's Siri. If you shake the phone as if you're trying to sort of rattle its brains, it will, it might be Google Maps. I don't know which it is, but it's built into the iPhone. If you shake it, it will actually like ask you in some, in some way, I can't recall offhand, like what is wrong? Yeah. I think, I think, I think Google Maps may maybe, that's like, it asks you if you want to submit like a support request or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of neat. Yeah. But speaking of meditation, so another one is I met a group of monks, of Buddhist monks at, they were with Plum Village. This is at Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery. That's right.

I went to hear Thich Nhat Hanh speak a few years ago. And I didn't know anything about Zen at the time at all. It was just sort of interesting to kind of hear him speak. And he was there with sort of his entourage of monks and nuns. And it was all very, very good, very peaceful. And then afterwards, as soon as he left, I was surrounded by the monks and nuns who were all saying how they just run the monastery in Evernote. And swapping use cases. And it was all really neat.

And so that's when I actually thought we should send someone over there to record some of their bells. So they have like these really beautiful, you know, ancient mindfulness bells. And I thought, okay, let's record them and actually kind of put them into Evernote as some kind of an anti-New York lawyer at a Starbucks yelling at somebody feature. But I've never gotten around to doing that yet, but any day now. That's amazing. His first book, and I'm blanking on the name. I want to say it was Mindfulness is Every Step or something like that, Pieces Every Step perhaps, which was really intended

almost like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations to be a notebook for himself and also his close confidants and new attendees or teachers at Plum Village, which then later became a book. That was the first meditation book that really had a tangible, concrete impact on me because the storytelling and the narrative was so well done. Let's return back to the early days of Evernote. We could keep talking about Zen and stoicism too. I think we'll talk about both. But what I'd love to do, and maybe this is in between, maybe it's a bridge between the two,

is as a CEO, what CEOs did you admire or hope to emulate in the early days of Evernote? Because you have roughly how many users at the moment? About 150 million. Yeah. So that's a big number. That's a number that a lot of companies would aspire to, of course. And we'll talk about maybe growth separately, but as a CEO, you know, what types of leaders or CEOs did you admire and aspire to? Well, you know, there's so many that have been really generous with their time with me.

I mean, that's really kind of the amazing thing about Silicon Valley is just how open everyone's been. So I was able to spend quite a bit of time talking with people who were just heroes of mine forever. So Jeff Bezos, someone who's given me fantastic advice and guidance. Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten, is one of the most amazing people ever. Have you ever talked to him? I haven't. I would love to.

You should. That guy is crazy in a really good way. Very, very, very interesting. I know you have a big Japan connection. I do. Yeah, that'd be a blast. But I had a chance to very briefly meet Steve Jobs. I had a chance to, I actually spent quite a bit of time with Mark Benioff, who's been really excellent in terms of advice and guidance.

So it's been pretty impressive. Probably the person that I kind of most want to be like when I grow up is Reid Hoffman. I'm just a huge fan of Reid and kind of the way that he thinks about things and how thoughtfully he's organized his life and his companies. It was just very cool. So I'm lucky to actually be able to spend some time with these people from time to time. I do agree. I was actually just chatting with someone about the differences between, say, New York and San Francisco, LA and San Francisco, and there's strengths and

weaknesses to all of them. But the ability to wander into a coffee shop or otherwise just get in touch with what you would think would be the untouchables, the very, very well-known, iconic figures, is something that I haven't seen in many other places outside of Silicon Valley. Just the openness and availability that those people express, even though they're at the multi-billion dollar in net worth mark. It's very unique. I don't know if you agree with that, but why do you think these people are so open to share? What makes the environment of Silicon Absolutely. maybe of people like this, but they probably exist everywhere. I just think, you know, almost everyone here who is, you know, who's successful,

who's made, who's made it, quote unquote, who's well-known, like, remembers doing it, him or herself. Right. Like, before they built this giant, world-changing,

multi-billion dollar thing, they hadn't done it either. And it isn't, like, it hadn't done it either. It's not, it's all like in sort of the recent past as well. Virtually everyone who I really admire has gone from just being a normal person to

bending the universe in a significant way in the last decade or two. Yeah. As opposed to in other places where a lot of wealth is concentrated in people who maybe have inherited part of it or have been in those circles for longer.

This is very much a scrappy, entrepreneurial, a lot of immigrant-led communities and everyone remembers before they were important, they weren't. That's kind of a healthy thing. I want to ask you a little bit about

the folks that you interacted with. So Bezos, for instance. He's a fascinating character on so many levels. I mean, very methodically chose books, pitched that within D.E. Shaw, had it turned down, and then turned it into the Everything Store. And when they started, they had, as I understand it,

basically doors from the equivalent of Home Depot across two file cabinets as desks. I mean, that's how people started out. What did you... We did that in my first startup. We made desks out of unfinished doors and what do you call those? Little construction horses. Oh, the saw horses.

Saw horses, yeah. That was our first desk. We just bought doors at Home Depot and put them on saw horses for no good reason. Turns out that's harder and more expensive than buying cheap desks. It's really funny. I just built this side note pull-up rig out of galvanized steel piping and plumbing supplies and whatnot. And it's just, at the end of the day, it cost, particularly if you factor in the labor, it's like, okay, it was a fun project, but probably would have been better use of capital just to buy a cheap rig.

But it's still fun in its own way. One of these days, Tim, you have to coach me to be able to do a pull-up. I would like to do a pull-up once in my life. I will absolutely help you do that. And maybe we can pull in Pavel Tsatsoulin, who, like yourself, is originally from the former Soviet Union. Now, you were born in, I want to say St. Petersburg, but am I getting that right? Well, it was called Leningrad at the time, but yeah. Leningrad.

And do you, I'm not going to quiz you, but do you still speak Russian? I do speak Russian, yes. And with such a heavy, I'm not going to lose track of where we were with Bezos, but with such, I want to come back to that, but with such a heavy Russian component in Evernote from the early days, how did that affect the company culture or growth or anything? If it did, I don't know if it did. I don't, you know, I don't, I'm not sure that it had that much of an effect. The original team on Stepan's side were mostly Russians. Most of the people with me weren't. There was a couple.

I don't really think of myself as particularly Russian. I was eight years old when we came over. I learned English by watching what's happened in reruns and reading Thor comic books. I would have loved to have heard your English in the early days. Yeah, it turned out that my colloquial English came from Thor. I wasn't the most popular kid in junior high school. A lot of praise Odin talk. But it was good for vocabulary development.

You know, forsooth. Henceforth. Henceforth, yeah. But, you know, we had a really great team. I don't think there was anything particularly Russian or not about the company. And certainly in Silicon Valley, there are, like, I think, I'm sure this must be true, that most people who work at Evernote are from somewhere else. I think we probably have more than 50% people born outside of this country. It's just such a heavy immigrant community. We pull people from all over.

We want to get the best people from everywhere in the world to help us build a great product. Speaking of that process of building a great product, or maybe not, what advice did you go to Bezos for? What were some of the questions you asked him or pieces of advice that he gave you if you remember?

The last thing he told me, this was only just a few days ago, but it's changed my life again. Basically, every time I talk to Bezos, it like changes my life. The last one was just recently and it was kind of amazing. Not particularly relevant to the topic at hand,

but super epically awesome anyway. So I've spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars. I'm like Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. It was like on the Brady Bunch, right? Like I just want to go to Mars. I thought this was like the best thing ever. I'm like, Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. It was like I'm the Brady Bunch, right? Like, I just want to go to Mars. I thought this was like the best thing ever. At some point,

if I structure my life correctly, maybe I'll get to go. Like, maybe, like, later on in life, I would totally agree to go, you know, to go one way, because I think it's just so important for humanity to be able to do that. I was just all into Mars. And, you know, I talked to Elon a couple of times, and just was vastly inspired by everything that he's doing

and what SpaceX is doing. And I was listening to Elon speak last week or two weeks ago or something, talking about Mars, and I was super inspired and, you know, ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was kind of saying, oh, I just got to talk to Elon and I'm super excited about Mars.

I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, Mars is stupid. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, once humanity, once we get off of, once we get off the planet, the last thing we want to do

is go to another gravity well like the whole point like the reason that this is so hard to get off the earth is to like defeat gravity the first time once we do that why would you want to go to mars we should just live on space stations and mine asteroids and everything is much better than being on mars and in like 30 seconds he had like completely changed the course of my life. Because he's totally right. And I was like, what? Was this like a midday conversation or was it like a late night after a few drinks conversation? It was after a few drinks.

I'm not sure what time of day it was. That's a great answer. Anyway, so now I know that the future of humanity is to live on space stations and mine asteroids, and hopefully I'll get to do that at some point. Other advice that I've gotten from him has been a bit more practical. All right, well, I'll bite. What other advice?

Well, I mean, the best thing that he's been at in terms of actually building the company is just scaling issues. It's like, how do you deal with things when you're at 20 people? How does that change when you're at 200? How do you think about going from 200 to 2,000 to 20,000? It's all the kind of the growing pains, the life stages of the company. I mean, that's what really occupies most of my attention professionally now.

This is also what Hiroshi Mikitani is fantastic at. Between Mikitani-san and Bezos, those are like, you just get everything that you could possibly want to know about how to scale a company. And every chance I get to actually pick their brain at it, that's usually what we're talking about. When we're not talking about space stations and Mars

and things like that. What are some of the biggest challenges that you've had in scaling Evernote? Well, Mikitani-san says this really cool thing. He's got this law that's like, he calls it like the law of 3 and 10 or something, which is basically that

every single thing in your company breaks every time you like roughly triple in size. Basically, because he was the first employee at Rakuten. He was number one. Now they've got, I don't know, 10,000 or something or more. They said when you're the first person, when you're just one person,

everything kind of works. You've sort of figured it out. At some point, you have three people, and now things are kind of different. Making decisions and everything with three people is different. But you adjust to that, and then you're fine for a while, and then you get to 10 people, and everything kind of breaks and then you're fine for a while and then you get to 10 people and everything kind of breaks. But then you figure that out and then you get to 30 people and everything's different

and then 100 and then 300 and then 1,000. So his like, his hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly this like, these points of three and 10, roughly tripling every size. And by everything, it means like everything, Like, you know, how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, you know, who actually makes decisions.

Like every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples. And his insight is of the company just changes significantly when it triples. And his insight is a lot of companies get into huge trouble because of this. So when you're a quickly growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you blow right through a few of these triplings without really realizing it. And then you turn around and you realize that, oh, we're at 400 people now at Evernote.

And when I really think about it, I'm like, okay, we're at 400 people now, but some of our processes and systems are, we set in place when we were 30. So we kind of skipped, like, a few steps. And everything is, like, creaky and broken because of it. Whereas you really have to, like, you really have to try to adjust. And so startups get in trouble because you kind of blow through these breakpoints really quickly. And so you should constantly be thinking about, perpetually be thinking about how to reinvent yourself

and how to tweak the culture. But then big companies get in trouble for exactly the opposite reason. Because, you know, let's say you get to 10,000 people in your company, and theoretically you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn't to 10,000 people in your company and theoretically you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn't until 30,000

but you're probably not going to get to 30,000 ever or certainly not within a few years. It may take a decade or more for a company to go from 10,000 to 30,000 people but no one feels like waiting around for a decade or more to reinvent yourself and so big companies are constantly pushing all of this bullshit innovation initiatives

because they feel like, well, we have to do something, we have to do something. But they're not actually connected to any fundamental change in the company. They're just kind of floating around by themselves. So by having this mismatch between when things actually change and when you feel that you should actually redo everything, small companies get in trouble, big companies get in trouble. And just being mindful about that is super eye-opening. So that was maybe like one of the most actionable pieces of advice that I got. And this was from Hiroshi Mikotani at Rakuten.

So this is very interesting. The law of three and ten. Now the tripling I get, where does the ten come in? Oh, because otherwise it'd be three and nine. It'd be hard to do the math. Oh. It's just rounding up. He's basically saying like three and then ten and then 30 and then 100. Okay. Otherwise, you'd be –

Right, nine and 27 and so on. Yeah. Who can do that math? Oh man. The, um, have you ever now I know you, you like myself, I have a fondness for Japan. Have you ever seen someone trained, previously trained on an abacus as a kid do mental mathematics? Yeah. It's so fascinating. I mean, because they put their, put their finger up in the air like they're moving beads. And I remember there was this kid on my judo team when I was in Japan as an exchange student for a year who could do, he could multiply three digit numbers. He could do pretty much whatever basic arithmetic you would ask him to do by using this sort of imaginary abacus.

So fascinating. Yeah. My grandmother was a bookkeeper, was an accountant in the Soviet Union. And it was all abacus training for her. And I just remember when I was a kid, she would do math. And I completely remember just being blown away by how that worked, yeah, with the imaginary abacus. With Miki Tani-san's law of three and 10, in pragmatic planning terms, does that mean

that you as Phil at Evernote would try to look ahead to anticipate when you would hit that tripling point and then seek out the new tools and processes that you would need beforehand? We'd really try to. But I also think, so there's the whole tripling aspect, which I think is interesting. Obviously, it's just a framework.

It doesn't really capture every nuance. But then it made me think about another thing, which I think is maybe even more important as to how the world is changing now. Important changes happen at times of change. It sounded like a tautology. That's not how I meant to say it. Let me put it this way. So people will often say about a product like,

oh, but that's, you're really asking people or companies to like change their ingrained behavior. Like how long does it take to change your ingrained behavior? Like we're saying, okay, email sucks. Like email's dead. You have to get off of email, obviously. And a lot of people say, oh, but that's such ingrained change. Like how long will it take a company to, you know, to fundamentally get off of email? And I've been thinking about it like this.

Every time you change jobs, it's like a very good opportunity to reevaluate sort of what works, what doesn't work, and try to be a little bit smarter the next time around. Every time you have like a major life change, like you change jobs or you move into a new house or whatever uh you know you get married like any all of these stuff all of these things kind of are really good opportunities to sort of take stock mentally and be like ah okay we're gonna i've always wanted to do this a little bit better now's the time i'm going to do that and so inside of companies that's basically people changing jobs and you can measure how long like a fundamental corporate change will take based on just the number of job cycles that it requires. So let's just say that like something as profound as like getting rid of email will take like three entire cycles of like people changing their job. And this explains why things happen at such different paces in Silicon Valley versus on the East Coast versus in Europe. Because the tenure, the average tenure of professionals, of knowledge workers, is really shrinking and is much shorter here than in lots of other places. The average tenure of a Google employee right now is something like 1.1 years.

The average person at Google has only been in the job for a little over a year. They're changing jobs all the time. I mean, and at Apple, it's only like 2.something years. And at Evernote, it's a little bit longer, but not much. And so you're constantly having like, everyone is basically acting like a freelancer. Like everyone is doing a job. They don't think they're going to do it forever. They think they're going to do it for a couple of years, and then they're moving on to the

next one. And that's happening like crazy here in Silicon Valley, and it's starting to happen everywhere. And so if like a big change, let's just say hypothetically takes three job cycles, well, if the average job cycle is like a year and a half, then okay, you know, within four or five years, the company has like completely changed this fundamental thing. Whereas if you're in Europe and the average job cycle is like 10 years, it may take him 30 years to get there. So like a change that's obvious here within a few years may take,

you know, may take decades in societies where people are just staying on board for much longer. But something that takes like, something that takes four to five years in Silicon Valley probably takes 20 years in Europe. It probably takes like a year in China. Right. That cycle in China is crazy fast and compressed. Yeah, it really is.

So how do you plan that? And more importantly, we at Evernote are building software. We're building products for modern knowledge workers. How do we embrace this? How do we build products for these types of people? And that's a very different idea than, you know, than Microsoft Office. Like, how do you build something that is meant for people who have a really compressed job cycle, who think of themselves as freelancers, even if they're part of a company?

And how do you make that great? Instead of trying to pass judgment on this and saying that's a bad thing and trying to hold it back, how do you actually embrace it and how do you try to make it more awesome? And that's a big animating force of how we're thinking about things. How different is the current Chinese version of Evernote

compared to, say, the US version? It's the same. There's minor differences in payment methods and stuff like that. China is the only place where we run a totally separate version. We have a version of Evernote that we call the Inchon BG, which basically we kind of cloned

ourselves in China. Everyone told us, if you go to China, you're just going to get cloned. So we said, all right, let's just clone ourselves. So we made a full clone of Evernote that we run ourselves that's separate data centers, separate servers, and other than some minor things around how we interact with payment methods and stuff like that,

it's exactly the same. I appreciate the separate data centers. Well, that's important. That's important for a bunch of reasons, both for performance as well as for just sort of giving people a choice as to where they keep their data. So, yeah. Let's talk for a second about Reid Hoffman, and then I want to come back to some of your personal productivity habits. But Reid is a very interesting – that's my laziest adjective I can use here. He's a compelling character. I've had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time king in the minds of so many people in Silicon Valley.

What makes Reed unique? What are the things that make him, that draw you to him or that you find fascinating about him? Well, you know, I mean, well before I actually got to know him, I was listening about him. Well, you know, well before I actually got to know him, I was listening to him, I was reading his stuff, so I mean, I was just attracted to the ideas. He just has a very,

to me, it's exactly the right balance of kind of big picture philosophically oriented ideas that are really grounded and practical and that you can apply. I really like the thinking behind LinkedIn and what it represented.

It was the strength of the ideas and having exactly the right mixture of lofty and practical. What else? Are there any particular examples that jump out at you or any advice that he's given you or questions you've asked of him? Well, we talk a lot about company scaling.

And we talked a lot. He made a decision fairly early on that he didn't want to be the CEO of the company. And he brought in actually a couple of people. Jeff is the second person that he wound up bringing on. And that's worked out great. And so I've talked to him a lot about what is that like? What's the right amount of letting go?

What is the right amount of staying involved? How do you really think about that? And he's been kind of my main guide through this. I mean, there's been a lot of other people I've talked to as well, but Reid is kind of the person that I'm most looking to emulate. His thoughts around, you know,

really starting with PayPal have been super influential. The best, I think... I'm sorry, go ahead. I think the best thing that I've read from him is actually more recent. It was his last book, The Alliance, which really has sharpened my thinking significantly around this exact idea that we just talked about, this idea of having a relationship between companies and employees that's more honest,

and that's about recognizing what the actual new realities of the world are and trying to embrace them. And he's writing this book really from kind of an HR perspective. I really read it as a product design perspective. I read it as how do we make products for this reality? And that's been really hugely influential. Plus, he's just a super nice guy. Yeah, he is. He has a very different energy from almost all the other folks in the

PayPal mafia. Uh, and that's not to in any way denigrate them, but he, he has, he doesn't seem to have the same sharp edge that a lot of those other guys do. Obviously he's very intelligent and has an extremely incisive intellect, but when you sit down with him, he has a much more relaxed energy, if that makes sense. Right. To what would you attribute that? I mean,

and I mean, he does have, I attribute that to like the extreme edginess and sharpness of the rest of those guys. Thank you. You put anyone in contrast with, uh, uh,

you know, with the rest of the well-known people there and like, everyone's going to seem, anyone's going to seem like you, Tim Ferriss, like in a room next to, you know, Elon and Roloff and Max and people like that is going to seem super mellow and

chill. So, all right. That's a good point. So that works. Now you, you mentioned philosophy a bit earlier and you, and you,

you mentioned stoicism. Did I, maybe I, okay. Maybe I sort of recursively incepted myself. The read has quite a philosophy background as I understand it. I think he, he studied philosophy at Oxford after his Stanford experience.

Are you religious or philosophical? I mean, are there any particular schools of philosophy or trains of thought in religion that you use as a framework in your life? So I'm not particularly religious in the sense I'm not so i'm not particularly religious uh in the sense i'm not you know i'm not theistic uh i i am very interested in having a coherent philosophy of life like a a coherent structure that basically says like here is you know here is why you should bother living and here is what you should try to accomplish and here is uh uh here's what it all means uh and i think a lot of people a lot of people come come to that from a religious background some people come to it from a philosophical background or practical background

but i think it's important at least for me to just to to think about overall structure to have a coherent philosophy of life so i've been uh I've been looking for that for a while. How do you go about looking for it, and have you found any pieces of it? A little bit. You know, mostly I just read a lot, and I kind of have been. You couldn't tell this by talking to me now, but by the end of the world as a kid. I remember, I don't know why, I remember the first, like I was really, really intrigued and kind of obsessed as a little kid with this idea of how the world's going to end. And the first movie I ever saw, I was six it was in russia my father took me to see this movie in a movie theater that was a i was this like little like super nerdy

impressionable you know six-year-old kid and my dad took me to see um this japanese horror movie called legend of the dinosaur which was about like dinosaurs like coming back to life that's the most japanese title ever i love yeah legend of dinosaur and uh this was just like extremely bad parenting like seriously i don't know what he was thinking and uh you know and i couldn't sleep for like for like a month afterwards i was like too terrified to sleep because it's like i thought the world was going to end because dinosaurs are going to come back and bite all of us in half that's what beetlejuice did to my brother that's a second yeah. Yeah. And I remember

one day, like I was just, one night I was lying in bed, I couldn't sleep, and I think my dad kind of got tired of me not sleeping. So he came over and I remember he sat on my bed and he's like, hey, what are you afraid of? What are you worried about? And I said, well, dad, to be honest with you, I'm afraid that the world's going to end because dinosaurs are going

to come back and bite all of us in half. And he said, look, in hindsight, it shouldn't have taken you to see that movie. You don't have to worry about it. Dinosaurs are definitely not going to come back. The world is definitely not going to end with dinosaurs coming back and eating us.

The world's going to end in nuclear war. Thanks, Dad. That's what everyone thought. This was, I don't know, late seventies and in, in the Soviet Union. Um, and that's kind of what everyone thought. And then we moved to the U S and that's what everyone thought here. And so I've been kind of thinking about like, what is the meaning of life and what is like, what happens when things end?

And if things are going to end, like what, what's the purpose of having a purpose? Uh, and I just, you know, read a lot of Thor comics and, and, and then went on to maybe, you know, somewhat more serious things in,

in high school and in college and got into that. And I, I think I'm starting to piece things together. I think I have a generally sunnier disposition towards life. And I think I have inklings of, of what meaning is, but I'm not sure I understand. I know completely.

Uh, I am more recently, I've been reading a lot of Stoicism stuff. So you said Marcus Aurelius and a few others, so I think that's going to be the new trendy. I'm calling it right here. This is going to be the new trendy thing in Silicon Valley. Zen was sort of like last year's thing. The new Zen is going to be Stoicism.

It would have gone like Zen and then macarons and then stoicism. It was like a diversion into pastry. Did you say macaroons? What was the second one? Macarons, yeah, fancy macaroons. Oh, wow, macarons. That's taking it to a whole new level. Maybe like toast.

Like artisanal toast is also big. So maybe it goes like zen and then artisanal toast and then stoicism. But you're going to hear more and more about stoicism being like the hip new philosophy coming out of here. I agree. I agree. I've been trying to do my part with the proselytizing of stoicism, which in and of itself is kind of ironic. But the artisanal toast, if you ever go to Inokashira Park in Tokyo, they have an artisanal toast coffee shop set up in the park where they have panda faces burnt into the sides of the toast that you can buy. It's fantastic. Panda faces and artisanal are not two concepts that go together usually,

but in Japan they can pull it off. Hold on a second. So what image would it have to be if not pandas or is it imageless? Does it have to have some type of like brand on it or how do you how do you envision artisanal toast i think it just has to be you know like perfectly toasted i don't know it shouldn't be it should be a no logo ah it's like the 15 minute pour over of toast that's right well the best toast best toast in the world is in singapore it's kaya toast so you get So you get these thick slabs of toast spread with

butter and kaya. Kaya is like this sweet coconut spread. And then you dip it into really runny soft-boiled eggs. And you have pulled coffee. So there's coffee that they pour over like six feet in front of you. It's the best. Over six feet? Is it like a

Game of Thrones pour from across the room, like Chinese style? That's amazing. kind of. Yeah. Yeah. So you get this like really aerated coffee, uh,

sweet toast dipped into runny eggs. Best thing ever. I'm just imagining this Willy Wonka like chocolate, uh, chocolate colored coffee waterfall that you put stickier mug into. I'm not sure that's the proper image, but it does give me some ideas. So let's step outside of Evernote for a second. Um, what are the most used apps on your phone besides Evernote? Um, well, so basically, so to me, Evernote doesn Well, so basically,

so to me, Evernote doesn't really feel like an app. Like I use, you know, I use like, I think of, you know, email,

messaging, you know, web, and Evernote. That's kind of like the same order of things. It's like it doesn't, it doesn't even feel like I'm using an app when I use it. I'm just, you know,

I'm just using it. I use, you know, so I use a bunch of the messaging apps apps really kind of to test them out, to sort of see how things are going, see what's impressive, where are the good ideas coming from. But again, even there, they don't really feel like apps. In fact, this is probably the thing.

It's like things that I use all the time, I don't think of as apps. I don't think of Uber as an app. I use Uber quite a bit. It doesn't really feel like an app to me. Is it a utility? How do you compartmentalize an app? What does that feel like when you do use an app? It's like a service, I guess.

One of my product hypotheses is that apps are going away. The concept of an app is going to become a lot less important in a few years than it is now. This whole idea that you page through screens of stuff to pick something you want to use,

that's a short-term concept. It's only going to have been with us for a decade or so and then it'll vanish. It'll be replaced with this concept of just experience of services. Amazon, I use the Amazon app. I don't think of it as an app. I use Netflix, but that's not an app. Uh, like one things that have just become these

like permanent fixtures in my life, they're fixtures, but they're not, they're not apps. And I use them, I'll use them everywhere. I'll use them on a phone. I'll use them on the web. I'll use them on my watch, you know, at some point to my glasses, whatever. In terms of like discrete apps that I use on the phone, a lot of games, I mostly just like all of the specific small things on my phone just tend to be games that I'm trying out. What are your favorite games? I go through them pretty fast. Like right now, like, you know, for the past couple of days,

I've been playing Radical Repelling, repelling which is you know what it sounds like repelling like repelling down the side of a rock face yeah you like repel down the side of a rock face and you get power-ups and try try to avoid running into spikes and like drink cans of highly caffeinated beverages that give you bursts of energy it It's very much like real life. Before that, I was kind of into Goat Simulator. So Goat Simulator on iPhone is pretty good. It's definitely the best goat simulation that you can get on your iPhone.

And do you use these games to decompress? Have you always been a gamer? Yeah, I have. I used to play a lot more computer games. Now I don't have quite as much time. Although I did recently start playing Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous? Elite Dangerous, yeah. It's probably the greatest game, maybe thing, ever made. Elite, like Elite Force, but then dangerous, the adjective. Yes, yes. It's a space game uh just came out and amazing and and and like like jeff bezos it basically envisions a a world where humans are everywhere in space but but mostly living on space stations mining asteroids not

really going down to planets so sort of two two factors for that how How far away are we, do you think, from mining asteroids? Because I know there's, for instance, planetary resources, which Peter Diamandis is involved with. Brian Johnson is an investor. A couple of other folks, a lot of the sort of zero-gravity guys are involved with planetary resources, which is focused specifically on mining precious materials off of asteroids.

When do you think we'll actually be in full swing? It's really hard to say. I think the most important thing to nail first is the reusable, repeatable launch vehicles. And tourism is probably going to get us there

before mining does. So I'm actually kind of a big fan of a lot of the space tourism efforts like Virgin Galactic and a few others just because I think, not because I think it's particularly great to send people into the orbit. I mean, that's fine.

But I think we need to get the reusable rockets and launch vehicles going as much as possible. And that'll really unlock everything else. So I think we'll have pretty good, repeatable, reusable launch vehicles within five years. But then how long does it go from there to asteroid mining? I don't know. That could be decades. Especially since it doesn't really make sense to mine asteroids and then ship the results back to Earth.

It probably makes sense to actually just move industry into space. So you should be mining asteroids and building things in space stations. And the only things that should be coming back to Earth is basically data. We should be getting fast Internet connectivity from space, and that's about it. Everything else should just be being made up there. But that's A, above my pay grade, B, I have no idea what I'm talking about,

and C, probably a few decades away. So let's continue talking about things at least above my pay grade, but still might be within yours, I think. If you were looking at the end of the world, the things that could eradicate the human race from the face of earth, aside from us leaving in some Elysium-type fashion,

what would you put in the top sort of three positions as probable causes of human extinction? And would AI be anywhere in that list? Well, so probably not dinosaurs. So I think I've gotten over that. You know, so I'm not afraid of AI. I really think the AI debate is a little bit, it's kind of over-dramatized. And to be honest with you, I kind of find it weird.

And I find it weird for several reasons, but including this one. It's like, there's this hypothesis like, okay, we're going to build super intelligent machines. And then they're going to get exponentially smarter and smarter. And like, so they're going to be basically be much smarter than us. And these like super smart machines are going to make the logical decision that like the best thing to do is to kill us. And that just doesn't like, I feel like there's a couple of steps missing in that, like in that chain of events.

Like I don't understand why the obviously smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans. The smarter I get, the less I want to kill all the humans. Why wouldn't these really smart machines not want to be helpful? What is it about our guilt as a species that makes us think that the smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans? I think that actually says more about what we feel guilty about than what's actually going to happen. And if we really think that a smart decision would be to wipe out humanity,

it's maybe more useful to, instead of trying to prevent AI, maybe it's more useful to think about, okay, what are we so guilty about? And let's fix that. Can we maybe get to a point where we feel proud of our species and say maybe the smart thing to do wouldn't be to wipe it out? I think there's a lot of important issues that are being, I don't know, sublimated into the AI will kill all humans discussion that are probably worth pulling apart and tackling independently. So, yeah, I'm just like I'm not overly concerned about it. I do think that it's worth taking seriously. I think AI is going to be one of the greatest forces for good in the universe, in the universe ever seen.

And it's pretty exciting that we are actually making progress towards it. greatest forces for good in, you know, in the universe that the universe has ever seen. And it's, it's pretty exciting that we are actually making progress, uh, towards it. And what, uh, so if not AI, what would you put at the top of the list? Does anything come to mind as, as if, if the human race were to extinguish itself or be extinguished in the next, say, 20 years, what are the most likely causes in your mind? Well, you know, so there's interesting groups, right, that work on this. There's sort of the existential threats groups, and, you know, they've got all sorts of good theories.

I think it's extremely unlikely that the human race gets extinguished in the next 20 years. I think there's, like, you can basically isolate this into short-term risks which are all self-inflicted. There's a bunch of self-inflicted risks like nuclear war, which is probably still a risk. It's not going to wipe out all humanity, but it

could set us back quite a bit. And there's other, climate change is a serious issue, but it's not going to result in wiping out humanity. It might result in a lot of displacement and a lot of economic cost. Um, you know, there's, there's global pandemics, which again, kind of by their definition, you know, uh, a super flu isn't going to wipe out humanity, but it could be really bad. It could kill a lot of people. Uh. So there's a lot of these like sort of self-inflicted risks,

which I think it's important to get a lot better at dealing with. And then there's the real long-term stuff, which obviously at some point will wipe out everything on Earth. We're talking about, you know, millions of years or even billions of years, you know, asteroid impacts, you know, the sun exploding, supernova, that kind of stuff. And the only real solution there is to, at some point, we do need to become a multi-planet species. So,

you know, no big rush. We don't all need to, like, rush towards the exits, but it is kind of neat to actually be working on things that will enable us at some point to, you know, spread out a bit. I think, among other people, i mean stephen hawking has said pretty clearly as i understand it that uh for us to survive we have to become

multi-planetary yeah or extra planetary maybe at the very least yeah i think i think that's right and but you know it's also an interesting question is what is us, right? So it's plausible that, like, things that look like biological human beings actually never live at scale outside of the planet. But other things we create, you know, other intelligences and consciousness that we create actually might actually be able to spread among the stars. And that's kind of cool, too. Like, I think it's an elegant idea. There's a very cool science fiction short it's an animated short which is actually also very funny uh i think it's about 16 minutes uh called the world of tomorrow which is worth checking out it digs into a lot of this so as a as a side note that's a that's a fun watch you mentioned netflix uh Do you have any favorite documentaries?

Oh, yeah. I have a bunch. You know, I really liked – there was one that I just saw a couple of weeks ago that was really good. I think it was called the gatekeepers. It was like, it was all the living heads of the, the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, just kind of talking very frankly about, um, you know, about life,

about, about, about war, about peace. Uh, and it was just kind of, kind of startling. You have these,

you know, I think it was like eight of them who wound up running, you know, they were the top kind of military and spy people in Israel. And all of them like have, have, have gone, like all of them were saying things that I And all of them, like, have gone, like, all of them were saying things that I think later in life, they've all, like, moved much more

towards reconciliation and peace and dialogue. And it was just as fascinating, fascinating to hear. I watch a lot of, I watch a lot of science documentaries. So I was a big fan of the Neil deGrasse Tyson's, you know, Cosmos reboot. That was great. I watched all of of science documentaries, so I was a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos reboot. That was great.

I watched all of the Carl Sagan version a while ago. The thing that I just saw yesterday, which I didn't actually watch. I signed into Netflix yesterday and saw them promoting this. I didn't even know they made it. But this is a new documentary about James Randi called An Honest Liar or something, which I've now got queued up. I think I'm probably going to watch that tonight. I'm a huge James Randi fan. And I didn't even know they made a movie about him.

So I'm really looking forward to that. In fact, the very first things that I ever bought on the internet, like my first e-commerce transaction, I have a screenshot of it. It was on Amazon. It was in 1996. And it was two books by James Randy. So the first things I ever bought online, the first two James Randy books I ever read,

was also the first time I ever used Amazon. So it was like several important firsts for me that I've got a screenshot in Evernote. And I actually met James Randy afterwards and I had him sign my screenshot in Evernote. So there's sort of five levels of dorkiness in there, but I'm pretty proud of it. Yeah.

Is this James Randi, the magician or which James Randi? Yeah. Yeah. The amazing Randy, James Randi, the magician slash debunker slash skeptic. In the same vein as Penn and Teller, would you say? Yeah. He's sort of like, he's kind of maybe the father of all this, of sort of like the modern

sort of pro-science and skeptical movement. But yeah, so a little bit similar to Penn and Teller stuff, although James Randi doesn't do a whole lot of like magic debunking. It's more about science teaching and... Quackery. I'm looking

online here. It says he has a TED talk called, it's Randy, R-A-N-D-I. And the title of his talk is Homeopathy, Quackery, and Fraud. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of stuff like that. And I haven't actually seen the documentary, so I don't know if it's any good. It probably is. I just – I remember seeing yesterday that it was on Netflix and going, oh, as soon as I have a spare two hours,

I'm going to watch it, which will probably be tonight. Do you have any favorite non-documentary movies? Well, you know, the best movie ever made is The Empire Strikes Back. I noticed your mug. So is that your favorite of the Star Wars series? Yeah. Well, that's objectively the best one. It's not really up for debate. Was it the Tauntauns that pushed it over? Oh, it was so much stuff.

It's just a really good movie. Actually, I've seen it. I watched it again recently, right? Because they just released the digital versions of all six movies. And so I just watched the good three again. Yeah, it's just great. Everything about it. The middle movies of trilogies are usually the best ones, because I think the first movie, the director is still trying a little bit too hard. They have to prove themselves.

And then by the third one, they're trying a little bit too hard, you know, they have to like prove themselves and then by the third one they've got to wrap things up but the second one is like the pacing is different, it's sort of the intermediate thing, it has this like sense of continuity but also more to come like just everything about like that, the middle part usually is good, like I think the two towers

was the best Lord of the Rings movie and so on but Empire Strikes Back in particular was just super strong. But I also watch... I don't watch too much TV. I used to watch Top Gear. But I got canceled.

And then I binge-watched House of Cards and Game of Thrones. Although I haven't watched the last season of Game of Thrones yet. I just binge-watched it this last week. It's good. I won't give you any spoilers. It has a very much has a

herky-jerky upper and downer effect, which I think is very intentional. Yeah. I think that the series is really good. I've read all the books, and I know that the is really good uh i've read all the books and i know the last the last season supposedly departs from some of the books a little bit so i'm interested to see uh how that goes do uh well actually before i give the the notebook question um not about the movie with um that very beautiful woman i'm blanking on her name not that one but

actual physical notebooks. Yeah. Uh, what do you, are you attracted to Ryan Gosling? No, that's my real question. No,

the, the, uh, dreamy. He is dreamy. What book have you gifted most to other people or books? Um, probably,

um, the clock of the long now by, uh, Stuart brand, uh, is maybe the most influential books, maybe the most influential book on me. So it's, this is, um, so I don't know, you know, the long now foundation with Danny, uh, about the clock and Danny Hillis. Yeah. Danny Hillis and Stuart brand, um, again, the co-founders, uh, and then there's, you know, there's a lot of other people involved.

And so this is the organization that's building a 10,000-year clock in the middle of a mountain. And they're also preserving all human languages. It's an organization that's dedicated to long-term thinking. Like, how do you actually make plans for 10,000 years? Which sort of sounds crazy, but it isn't. If we can't make plans for 10,000 years, then no one else is going to. And so Stuart Brand, who is just

this amazing guy, I was lucky enough to actually invite him to speak at our last conference, and he agreed, so it was kind of amazing just to introduce him on stage. Incredible guy. I think he was creator or co-creator of the whole earth catalog way back in the day for those people who remember yeah the whole earth catalog and and and the well one of the first you know internet discussion sites and all sorts of stuff uh and

so his book is the the clock of the long now and it just talks about you know the principles and the foundation and it's a very short read but but in particular, there's one chapter of it, which is, for me, it was really, like, sort of life-changing. I think it's called, like, The Layers of Civilization, and it basically just talks about the six or seven layers of society and kind of how they interact with each other. And it kind of explains, like, it puts the structure of explaining almost everything that you'd ever wondered about in like just a few pages.

Wow. So it's really affected me. I read it when I was pretty young and I've been kind of going back to it every so often. So the Clock of the Long Now, I've given it lots of times, definitely couldn't recommend it more highly. And I'd also highly recommend people check out the Long Now Foundation. I've given it lots of times, definitely. Couldn't recommend it more highly. That, and I'd also highly recommend people check out the Long Now Foundation. It's an incredible group of people. Kevin Kelly's very involved as well.

And as a way to telescope out and even do thought experiments solo related to 10,000 year thinking, for instance. It's a really fascinating website to check out. They also have a bar in San Francisco that I contributed to for their Kickstarter campaign. No, me too. I got one of the whiskey bottles. Oh, you did? I haven't been there yet. Oh, it's beautiful. The interval. Yeah, exactly. The interval. Yeah, exactly. The interval. Yeah, it's at Fort Mason.

Super nice. Yeah, I've heard it's just gorgeous. Now, when I go to, whether it's a coffee shop or a bar, I almost always have a small moleskin, or moleskine, I don't know how to say it properly, notebook with me. I have a lot of trouble separating myself from physical note-taking. Do you use, personally, physical notebooks? I do, yeah. That was weird intonation on the question. Sorry. It sounded more like a statement. Do you use physical notebooks as a statement? But sorry, I didn't interrupt. I do. Yeah. What do you use them for? And why don't you do everything digitally? Well, it is digital. Our partnership with Moleskine is

we can use any notebook. Our Moleskine notebook just works really well since we've optimized our software for it. You just write and then take a picture or an Evernote of the page and it automatically gets cleaned up and indexed and scanned and put in context with everything else.

Just the best of both worlds. It lets you be discreet and unobtrusive and take notes and then immediately have them available digitally for searching and reference and sharing. We're trying to combine the best of... We're trying to give people great experiences

without being pedantic about what has to be digital, what has to be physical. We really want to blend those two things. best of, we're trying to give people great experiences without being pedantic about what has to be digital, what has to be physical. We really want to blend those two things. I think the best products are made when you take into account the physical world, when you take into account how things feel like and how heavy they are and where you put your hands. It's kind of the same if you're designing iPad software or if you're actually designing a physical notebook. You have to think about these things, and it's important for us to think about them

and to try to make beautiful experiences that combine those things. What types of things do you personally put into your physical notebook before scanning them into Evernote? So there's a little trick. I guess I haven't actually told this to anyone before. So here's how this works. You know how if you're

in a meeting and you've got your laptop open and you're taking notes on your laptop, it's like that sort of creates a barrier between you and the other people

and it sometimes feels like a little bit distant, a little bit intimidating? Definitely. We actually make stickers that say, I'm not being rude, I'm taking notes, and never note that you're going to stick on the back of your laptop to solve that problem.

Cool. Or you can use a phone, but if you use a phone in a meeting with someone, then it just kind of looks like you're not paying attention to them. Like all of the dynamics are that you're like texting. Distracted. Yeah, even if you're taking notes. But if you use a notebook, if you write in a notebook while you're talking to someone,

they feel like, man, this person really cares about me. It totally flips the odometer the other way. You are signaling deep caring and interest if you just scribble in a notebook while talking to someone. And so even if you just scribble in a notebook while talking to someone. And so even if you're just

drawing houses and clouds and unicorns. Big Lebowski style. Exactly. So it's the key to making it look like you are really paying attention and connecting with someone is just to have an open notebook and occasionally nod and write something down.

So that's that works super well. So I would say when I'm in meetings, maybe like a third of the time, I'm actually taking notes. And what I'll do is I'll just write specific words or phrases that I know if I see later will actually pop the whole meeting into my head. Yeah, you're writing down the cues. Yeah, uh, I know if I see later will actually like pop the whole meeting into my head. Yeah. You're writing down the cues.

Yeah, exactly. Cues. And, and, and they're not even like necessarily the most important words. They're just, yeah, they're just cues. Uh, so like I made that, I may write down like in this conversation, I may have, I may have like write down like, you know, Lebowski, that was important, but like that will, I know that if I saw that later and i saw that that was like on my timeline and never know it at the same time that i had this conversation uh with tim and you

know it's linked to you and all of our other stuff like that word will just trigger this this memory and it'll come out so i use it for that i use it for for queuing in a way that doesn't create this barrier between me and the other person and in fact not just doesn't create the barrier it actually like it actually makes us feel closer and it makes people think that, uh, that, uh, I'm really paying attention, which you are, right. Which I am. Yeah. All the time. And the, uh, process after that, I'd love to ask about how often do you then scan those into your Evernote? Do you use your phone to take the photograph? Do you tear them out and put them through a machine? I.e. what normal people call a scanner.

You always use your phone. I always use my phone, yeah. Well, I use the scanner. I use the Evernote scanner when I have like a stack of documents. But for business cards and for handwritten notes, I always use my phone. And it's important to do it as close as possible to the time and place of the meeting because then you get all the association.

So basically before I get up, I'll just take a picture. And then I know I have it. I know it's time stamped. It's geo stamped. It's associated with a calendar entry. Basically everything works great if you do it right there. Business card and handwritten notes. If you wait until you get to the office, you lose all that context.

Right. I'm embarrassed to say I never even thought about that because you're not only losing the context, you're creating false signals because you could be throwing it off. And if you look into your calendar to see why that was associated with a given time, then you're actually creating conflict.

Yeah. If I'm meeting with you, especially if it's in my calendar, and I take a picture of, let's say I get your business card and I take a picture of that in Evernote, that will automatically get all your contact info and look you up on LinkedIn and whatever. And then let's say I take some handwritten notes and I take a picture of that,

the handwritten notes will be automatically titled in Evernote, you know, note from meeting with Tim Ferriss. And your business card will have your name and, you know, everything associated with it. So if I did it right there, I've got all of this stuff. And so the next time I search for, you know, the next time I, you know, write something about next time I, I, I, you know, write

something about you or search for you, I'm going to get all that stuff coming up and I'm going to see, I'm going to see my note. I'm going to see your contact info. And then I'm going to see all of the, you know, any like business articles that have come out about you and any of our publisher partners. So it's like, if you do it, if you do it right away, you're just, you're, you're really capturing a very strong signal that not only will you use right there, but it'll make every subsequent access of this information richer. When you think – you mentioned a couple of names earlier, obviously, Bezos, Mkhitaryan, Benioff, Hoffman. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind? Oh, I don't know. I don't know if my mind works like that.

What do you mean? You just said successful, and I didn't pop into a person. I think I immediately flashed on product. The first thing that popped into my mind when you said successful was iPhone. Kind of crazy. But yeah, I guess I don't really think of people as successful. That's a new answer. I like this. So let's explore that. Why the iPhone? Well, maybe it's more like why not people? Because I guess I don't really think of success as being the most interesting characteristic of a person.

A lot of success is luck. Right. Agreed. In fact, I think that anyone who's been successful, even a little bit, has also been lucky. Luck is not... And when I say luck, i mean luck i mean like random occurrence i don't mean like some like mystical you know you make your own luck anything like there's a strong element of of of fortune of random chance to to personal success and then

of course there's also a ton of hard work and really having to you know maximize it um and so tons of people deserve to be successful because they're super smart and interesting and work hard and they just haven't had the luck. So to me, whether or not a person is successful or not isn't the most interesting thing about that person. I really care much more about their ideas and

how interesting or fun they are. So I guess I tend to think more about things, about products that are successful, like iPhone. And that also has an element of luck, but much less. I think that's much more about

really great design and smart planning and great execution and things that are more predictive of and more interesting than applying that measure to people. Let's make it more general. Maybe this will be an equally difficult or misdirected question,

but which historical figure do you most identify with, if any? Historical figure? Wow. I don't know. You know, I don't... Okay, so I'm conscious... I want to be sensitive to not sounding

like I am... I don't want this to come across as false modesty. You're going to give me Winnie the Pooh? Yeah. So the thing is, I actually don't think about myself that much. And I'm being serious about this. In a very specific way.

Okay, so we've already established that I play a lot of video games. I actually don't know if you do. I'm actually reinvigorating my game playing as of a few weeks ago. Okay. So... I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. Oh, I played... I was all Dungeons & Dragons growing up. Yeah.

That was fundamental for me. Okay. So, you know, there's, like, basically two types of games. On, like, PCs and consoles, there's, kind of, first-person games and third-person games, right? There's like first-person shooters and third-person shooters, whatever. And like a first-person game is, you know, you're seeing the game world through the eyes of your character. So, you know, you're running around and shooting or whatever.

And then a third-person game, you know, like Grand Theft Auto or something, is like you're kind of the camera is usually like in back of you. So you're seeing yourself moving around and interacting in the world. So in one game, you kind of, in one genre, you sort of see how you look like in the world. And in another genre, you just

see the world, but you don't really see yourself in it. Right. And I think like a lot of people play like they go through life either in, like, playing a first-player game, a first-person game, or a third-person game. And I don't think there's, like, any one of those is right or wrong. I just think if you look at, you know, for example, if you look at, like, most politicians, like, Bill Clinton, whatever you think of him, like, he's clearly playing a third-person game, right? Like, he is aware of what he looks like, like in any scene. And he's sort of optimizing for that

and optimizing for, you know, how to like do everything correctly because he's seeing himself. And a lot of people are like that. And then there's other people who are clearly playing, you know, the first-person game where they're kind of oblivious about themselves and the world.

They just like, they have things they want to accomplish. they know the way that they want the world to to bend but they don't really have a perception of them for better or for worse like i don't know it always felt like just you know going with the u.s presidents again like it always felt like like george w bush was probably playing a first person game he's like a little bit less like actual visibility in his own head about what he looked like interacting with with the world and again that's like obviously not a judgment at all about their political styles or who you like or don't like or whatever just more about personality and i really think that like i'm fundamentally a first first person gamer like i don't i don't think about like well who do i

identify with who am i most like what do I look like in this scene? You know, what do I look like from here? Like how do I change my outfit? Like those are things that interest me less than what's the world around me. And that probably makes me weak at all sorts of things where I should have better self-awareness. And it probably makes me stronger at other things. Do you meditate or have a meditative practice? You know, I used to a lot more. So I went through a phase, you know, it's required if you're going

to live in Silicon Valley that you have to go through these things. So I went through a Zen phase a couple of years ago. The secular baptism. Yeah, Benioff actually got me into it. Into TM or what type of meditation? No, you know, I've never done transcendental stuff. I'm actually kind of interested in the whole mantra idea. I've never done that. So just Zen. You know, mindfulness and Zen.

And I did it fairly actively for about a year or so. But I mastered it. I won, I think. The important thing is to try really hard, to have a goal, set your mind to it, and you too can master Zen Buddhism.

So I became a Zen master, and now I'm on to other things. Now I'm on to Stoicism. Now you're on to Goat Simulator. Yeah, exactly. I'm onto other things. Now I'm onto stoicism, which is also – Now you're onto goat simulator. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm done. I've reached, you know, level 13 at being a Zen monk, and now I'm onto goat simulator. Why did you stop?

What was the reason for stopping? I didn't really stop. I just sort of – I think my commitment to it kind of waned. So for a while I was meditating about 20 minutes a day. And it was good. It was very clarifying. I then became interested in what could we learn from that

and what could we apply to different products. And then I realized that as I was meditating, I was actually just spending more and more of my time thinking about the meditating, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. I was treating just spending more and more of my time thinking about the meditating, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. I was treating Zen meditation as a very goal-oriented thing,

kind of the opposite of what it's supposed to be. Right. So then I started reading more broadly and got into other things. There's actually a product that, I don't know if you've tried. Have you seen the Think? No. What is that?

T-H-Y-N-C. Oof. Okay. Okay, I see what they're doing there. Yeah, it's sort of super awesome. And if it works, and I've, you know, so it's basically doing like direct brain stimulation through ultrasound.

So you wear this device on your head and it, you know, it beams vibes into your brain and it you know it beams uh vibes into your brain and um gives you energy or focus or calmness and i this totally tripped like every bullshit filter i had when i first saw this like got tripped i was like yeah nonsense um but actually like i read into it i looked at the science and it seemed plausible i was like oh this actually like this this isn't setting off, red flags for me in terms of just being pseudoscience. And so I thought, okay, this seems okay.

And then I actually got to try it a couple of weeks ago, and my personal experience of it was great. Like, I know it's just one person's experience. It's impossible to really say, like, what's suggestion, what's placebo, what's real. But I had a really good experience with it, so I just ordered it. I should be getting mine in the next couple of days.

And I'm actually really interested in this. And this idea that, like, you can actually have significant impact in how you think through meditation, but you might actually be able to have very similar impact in the way you think through just much more direct application of technology, which would be cool.

So, like, if I was a robot was a robot, how would robots meditate? It would be something like this. Yeah, I'm looking at it now, and the placement, it looks like there's one sensor or stimulator right where I would think it to be, which is kind of over the right eyebrow, so the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Is there another at the back or is that the only placement point?

Yeah. So what you're seeing in those pictures is the hair is covering up the antenna. So what you do is you attach this flexible antenna, which you can kind of see. There's like super hot models on the website. Always helps. Right. Yeah. You can see the...

They look very elven. They look like Legolas' cousin. Yeah. Very elven. They're very elven, yeah. So there's a contact point. So there's two different antennas, depending on if you're running the calming one

or the energy one. And they go into two different places in the back of your head. And yeah, they kind of aim. They triangulate that way. And like I said, I'm actually super interested in this. I've talked to the CEO of the company.

I talked to their chief scientist. I think my current inclination is that it's legit, which is kind of amazing. But we'll see. I will do a lot more playing around with it. I should get mine soon. Next time we're in the same time zone. I can bring it over and you can tell me what you think. you guys named Adam Gazali, who runs the Gazali Neuroscience Lab at UCSF. And they do a lot of

work with this type of technology. So I've actually been a subject and an experimenter in some of their research studies for TDCS. So I think there's a lot of promise. You just have to make sure you don't fry your brain into scrambled eggs accidentally. Yeah. You know, details. Well, I think that, I think the TDCS could be this type of brain stimulation could be very interesting also, not just for the direct impact on say performance or subjective state of mind or emotion, but also for showing people what might be possible through meditative practice in the same way that there's a neuroscience PhD and a friend of mine named Sam Harris, who's also on this podcast, who no longer uses psychedelics, but his, his early formative psychedelic experiences

showed him what could be possible with dedicated meditative practice. And that's, that's the tool that he now uses. So the interplay of all of those, uh, all of these different tools for expanding or honing consciousness is very interesting to me. Uh, would you, do you use,

uh, think mostly for calming or stimulating or both? So I've, I've only actually used it once. I don't own one yet. I've put it in my order. It should be showing up soon. So I've had one direct experience with it, which was in London a few weeks ago.

And I did the calming vibe, and it was great. Now, basically, the woman that was putting it on me says, as you're using it, she said you should look for signs to see whether or not it's working. And it's like, okay, like what? She was like, well, for example, you know, can you think of some things that like right now, if you think of them, they just kind of cause you to get like anxious or stressed out or angry. And I'm like, yep, done. As a CEO, pretty easy. She's like, okay, good.

So like in five minutes, like think of those things again and see how you make me feel. See how they make you feel. I put this thing on. I'm controlling it with my iPhone. I'm feeling relatively calm. Then five minutes go by and I start thinking about these things that just cause me this fundamental stress and anxiety five minutes earlier. I was like,

yeah, I'm cool with that. That's okay. I can live with that. That seems okay. Yeah, I can live with that. That seems normal. I think that's not a problem and yeah, I'm comfortable with that. And it was just like, it was really impressive to me. And I know that could be like 100% suggestion or placebo. But what I've read about it combined with talking to the people that I know, combined with direct experience, it's definitely making me relatively sanguine about the possibilities.

Ooh, good word, sanguine. I always get out-GRE'd by my guests on this podcast. It's an issue. I really need to get some flashcards. So speaking of purchases, in the last, say say six to 12 months, could be whatever comes to mind. What $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life? Hmm. $100 or less. It's a start. It's a starting point. If point if any purchase comes to mind that isn't completely out of reach of most people then that's fine um i don't know let me let me think

about it um i've definitely like for some reason my mind like goes to food that's fine um so i have uh um like yeah i don't know i don't know if that's weird maybe just because i'm hungry it's like getting close to lunchtime so like i'm thinking about uh uh i'm thinking about this amazing um uh hamburger that i had in tokyo uh which was but yeah i can't really say that was that was that was that was life-changing. It was good. Or it's just, I mean, it does sound like it positively impacted your life. Was there anything special about the hamburger that comes to mind? So there's this place in Ginza that makes smoked stuff, which is kind of unusual in Japan. They aren't really a smoked food culture, but this place just makes like smoked everything, like

smoked hamburgers and smoked olive oil and smoked soy sauce and smoked rice and eggs and just amazingly good. And they make the world's best hamburger. My favorite hamburger in the world is in this place. And they also make amazing eggs. They've got these beautiful orange in color,

totally fresh eggs that they can put on stuff. And last time I was there, actually about a year ago, I decided I would try to get them to put a fried egg on my hamburger. And this took like 45 minutes of intense negotiation. They were very skeptical

about putting this egg on the hamburger. It had never been done before. And I was like, come on. And then they were really kind of nervous about disappointing me. They weren't sure how to do it. So it was like about 45 minutes. Sorry, I'm cackling because this is so Japanese. I love it.

About 45 minutes of convincing them and then exactly how to fry the egg and put it on top. And so they finally did it. And I had it. And it was amazing because I was like, the only way that you can improve the world's best smoked hamburgers to put a perfectly fried runny egg on it. It was great but they were very like you could tell they were deeply uncomfortable with this whole experience and then i went back there um a year later and it's on the menu oh wow so i was like my contribution to to japanese cuisine is it called the liban no they didn't name it after me i was

kind of i was kind of pissed kind of kind of bummed. Yeah. I don't think they know my name. What is the man with no name? That's probably how you're listed on the reservation. They don't want to summon you to put them into more uncomfortable culinary situations. What was the name of the place? Do you recall? It's called Ginza Engi. Ginza Engi. N-G-E-N-J-I? E-N-G-A-I. Cool. what was the name of the place do you recall uh it's called ginza ng ginza ng ng enji enji

cool and uh it's so good ginza ng very cool uh yeah that's probably the best the best sub hundred dollar purchase in the past past year or so wow well next time i'm there i'll have to check out ginza ng it's a very uh it's a very run-down, cheap part of Tokyo for those people wondering. Hey, it was significantly less than $100. Even in Ginza, you can get a hammer for less than that. I think Ginza literally means like the golden throne or the golden seat. Something like that. But it's a fancy neighborhood.

Easy to get to. And I think that is also, correct me if I'm wrong, I might be getting this totally wrong but the jiro dreams of sushi it's in the same building yeah it's in the same subway station building right it's in the same building yeah it's right it's like the same yeah it's right there yeah if anyone listening hasn't seen jiro dreams of sushi very well worth watching uh what are your now in just to, uh, it's actually a good segue. So that movie is chock full of routines, right? It's very methodical in that restaurant.

What are your morning rituals? What does, what does the first 60 minutes of your day look like on a day that, that is one that you're free to design sort of your ideal for 60 minutes? Oh, well, I don't know if I've had an ideal day in a, in a long time. I mean, my actual day is,

you know, I wake up and I, you know, I grab my phone and, uh, you know, I see like, I see if there's any emergencies,

uh, usually, you know, usually there aren't any. And then I, what time do you wake up? Um, you know, I don't really have a fixed schedule, have a fixed schedule. I don't have kids, so it's fairly easy to not wake up at any particular time. So I usually wake up a couple of hours before my first meeting, maybe two to three hours before my first

meeting, just so I have time to catch up on a little bit of work before I head to the office. So if my first meeting is at 9, I'll wake up at 6, 6.30. But usually I try to schedule meetings. I'm not like a morning person, so I try to schedule my meetings a little bit later. Sometimes I'll sleep till 8 or something.

And then I'll kind of walk around the house for 45 minutes drinking coffee and usually with my phone in my hand, checking on various things and kind of get started slowly. What I would like is I'd like maybe like I would like to have my digest of the day be more automatic. Like I would like to, you know, hear about about what's going to happen, what do I need to know about. I've experimented with setting up various ways where I can maybe

have an RSS feed that I could have read to me or something like that. I've had mixed success with that, but it'd be cool to work on something like that. And that's the digest, your primer for the day to come. Yeah, that would be kind of cool. Cause I find like at that time in the morning, like I don't really want to be making decisions,

but it's a good time. And I definitely don't want to be like talking to people. But it's a good time to, it's like my brain is still spongy at that point. It's a good time to like soak in like, okay, here's what's going to happen. Here's what I'm going to need to start thinking about. That's, that's productive. I hate like, I hate early morning meetings. Those meetings. Those tend not to go well for me. Yeah, I know the feeling. And do you have any particular evening rituals or ways that you prep for the next day that help you get off to a good start?

I don't anymore. I used to. So I used to back. So when I was meditating for about a year or so, I would try to meditate for 20 minutes, um, every day, um, in the evening. And then I just started like being too tired. So I would just fall asleep in the middle of it, uh, which, you know, isn't, isn't super good. Um, and so at point, I don't really have any particular thing. I've gone back and forth. I tend to try out a lot of the sort of faddish things. I've tried out the, okay, don't look at a screen for the last few hours. Just read a physical book or don't watch TV or look at a laptop. So I've done that, but that didn't really seem to make much of a difference.

Plus, I don't really have trouble sleeping. I sleep pretty well. So I think I'm just lucky. I'm just sort of wired up where when I go to bed, I don't really have trouble sleeping. I sleep pretty well. So I think I'm just lucky. I'm just sort of wired up where when I go to bed, I fall asleep regardless of what else I was doing. I'm looking forward to getting the Think machine and maybe using that to calm down a little bit before sleep. But at this point, I don't have any kind of fixed routine. Got it. For people interested in exploring the paths that you've explored for thinking about meaning, why we're here, purpose, etc. We touched on stoicism briefly, but if you had to recommend one to three books that you have found very thought provoking,

what would you recommend? So I would say, so the clock of the long now, definitely. Yeah. That's just like as, as sort of a, to set the stage for like how to think about things.

It's, it's great. Um, excuse me. Um, I think, um, a book that really had a profound influence on me pretty early on was The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. And I think that was just reissued in some 25th anniversary edition or something that I just saw, which is sort of sad that it was 25 years ago that I read it.

So that's definitely worth reading for just all sorts of like brain expanding ideas. And then, you know, in terms of philosophy, there's a good introduction to stoicism that I read about a year ago when I first started looking into this. I forget the author, but the title is A Good Life. Yeah, that is a good synopsis. And yeah, it was pretty good. Like it wasn't,

like the writing itself, I think it wasn't particularly, you know, shining, but it like, it captured the ideas and presented them in a fairly modern way, you know, pretty elegantly.

So that was a good jumping off point to a bunch of other stuff. So I would like, if I had to give three, I would say, you know, I would say those three.

But, you know really, I think the important thing for me is to really try to have a coherent philosophy of life. And I think a lot of people don't. They sort of think it's pretentious to pretend that you can have a coherent philosophy. Why is that important to you? What does it allow you to do or help you do? It just kind of frames everything and gives a reason for things. I think this is well understood, motivation. So if you're trying to, philosophy aside, you're just trying to communicate with people. You're a CEO and you're trying to get people to do what you want.

It's proven that it's much more effective to give people a reason. And actually it turns out that the reason doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that there is a reason. So if you say, hey, you should do this, it's far more effective to say, hey, you should do this because X, Y, and Z. And it turns out that even if the people don't even understand the X, Y, and Z, as long as they've heard a reason, it just

fits much more neatly into the brain than if they have it. So having a reason just makes smart people far more productive and effective. And that's just very true of me. Like, I want to have a reason for things. I don't want to feel like I am doing things, you know,

shrouded by this existential mystery. I want to think that, like, I want to have a structure to think about why I am making certain decisions. And having a coherent philosophy makes that, makes that, you know, it makes that possible. So coherent philosophy is, would it be comparable in some ways to the 10 commandments where it's like, if you're like, should I covet my neighbor's wife or not? I'm not sure. It's like, well, no, it says, do not cover it. Thy neighbor's wife, therefore decision made. And like, that's the reason is it sort of a, a, a, do you view it as a set of guidelines and a

framework for kind of decision-making in life for simplifying things? Or is it more than that? So the Ten Commandments wouldn't serve this purpose for me just because they don't actually answer the why. Like they're actually – like the way the Ten Commandments are phrased – They don't have the because, right? Right. That's exactly – that's sort of like exactly the cognitively wrong way to do it. Those are just commandments. They're not explanations. Now, there's a lot of religious theory and thought about the why.

So if you're a religious person and you want to base your life around the Ten Commandments, it's probably possible and it's probably possible to actually read quite a bit of other commentary that actually give compelling reasons. You know, if that's the most appealing thing. So I kind of prefer to have the why rather than just the what. And I don't have the exact answers, obviously, but I think I'm getting a better and better feeling

that things aren't random, there is a purpose, and I can work towards making the world better in a specific way in which I want it to be made better. And that feels great. And that's much more motivating than kind of getting up and following orders or getting up and not understanding why. So is your intention then to communicate this to employees or partners,

or is this really something for your own internal use? Oh, well, I'm definitely, I'm pretty, you know, apprehensive about talking about anything that sounds like this to, you know, to employees. Like the last thing I want is, you know, is to be imposing any kind of philosophical worldview, uh, philosophical worldview on people. So if we're having off-the-record conversations over a few drinks, I'm always happy to talk about it. But yeah, my mission in life is not to convince anybody of anything. I just want to have a structure for myself. You don't want to be like Phil of the Branch Davidians?

It's not your goal? The book that you mentioned i i looked up uh the uh the stoic overview is by william irvine and it's a guide to the good life and the subtitle is the ancient art of stoic joy yeah which is a good overview uh it is it really is and it's not it's not what i thought it was like you know i remember studying stoicism in high school or whatever and uh you know i think i had all the wrong ideas about about about what it is so it actually, it was a very interesting read. Yeah. It's, it's helpful because it disabuses people of the notion that stoics are, I remember the description I heard at one point was, um, being a stoic is like being a cow standing in the rain. And it's like, no, it's not quite that,

not quite that's that serious or devoid of positive emotion. If you could have, I know we have just a few minutes left. If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say and where would you put it? Well, you know, this is like, have we talked about this? This is like one of my main goals in life. Oh, no, I don't think we have. Oh, yeah. Like one of the main things that I want to do is I want to be on a billboard advertising whiskey in Japan.

I want to be on a giant Japanese whiskey billboard. Like totally Bill Murray style. But this is like a serious goal of mine. I've been sort of like working towards it for a while. I've talked to the right distillers. And yeah, I think there's a chance it'll happen. We should make this happen. Yeah, let me know if I can help. I'm very like a giant billboard

of me like holding a glass of whiskey in Tokyo. It's kind of like I've even figured out what it's going to say. What is it going to say? So just imagine it's me with a big glass of whiskey and, uh, the caption will say, um, um, Evernote helps you remember. Suntory helps you forget.

That is fantastic. Yeah. It's kind of, it kind of feels like it needs to happen, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or you could have, you know, at this side of another one, you could say Evernote is forever. Suntory is for tonight.

Also good. You could have a whole series of these. You could. That's amazing. It makes me think of the commercial shoot from Lost in Translation when the director talks for like three minutes and the guy's like more energy or whatever. And he's like, I think he said more than that. One of my favorite movies. So good. What's one of my favorite parts is actually an improvised part in that movie when he's waiting in the hospital waiting room and those ladies are all cracking up. Right.

Just such a good movie. Advice to your 30-year-old self. If you had to give advice to your 30-year-old self, what would it be? If I had a time machine or something? Yeah. If you had a time machine and could deliver advice to your 30-year-old self.

If I had a time machine, I can go back. I'm 43 now, so I can go back 13 years and talk to my 30-year-old. So I'm 43 now, so I can go back 13 years and talk to my third year self. I would be like, dude, don't worry about anything because in 13 years you're going to have a time machine. Nothing else really matters. That is a good answer. I think I would say, so when I was 30,

I was working on stuff that I didn't, I was working on my second company, and I wasn't in love with it. I wasn't building it for myself. I was building it for somebody else. And I think what I would have said is, stop taking people seriously when they say you have to worry about what the market wants

and just build what you want. I kind of wish I had gotten started with that in my 20s rather than in my mid-30s. Is there any other parting advice or do you have an ask or suggestion for everybody listening? Well, everyone listening should obviously read every word of of all of your books you know inside forward and back thank you especially especially the

chapter in the four-hour body that's about me that's right the excel spreadsheet that's right because it just makes sense because obviously you can't write a book about attaining the perfect body without having a chapter about me so and in the updated edition that will be published in a year or two we'll talk about your your pull-up quest my pull-up quest is good and no there's actually a bunch more to say you know i've lost i think since the last time we've seen each other i've lost about 50 pounds wow congrats that's a that's a very that's a sturdy robust toddler right there yeah Actually, I just saw I went on like Getty Image

search or whatever. I did a search for myself on Getty Images and there's like eight years of pictures of me and it's like I'm aging in reverse. That's great. It's kind of cool. Eight years ago, I'm like 250 pounds and I'm wearing a suit and tie and I have a beard.

And then just like slowly over eight years, like first the suit disappears, you know, then the collar and like, you know, the tie, the beard, you know,

50 pounds. It's like, I'm definitely in this localized minima. It kind of looks like I'm aging in reverse, which is kind of cool. So I'm just going to assume that that's going to continue forever. I don't, I don't see why it wouldn't.

Um, but we'll see how it goes. It's like Benjamin button, but in real life, exactly. Curious case of Phil Libin. That could be your, your memoir.

Uh, where can people find you online? Uh, where can people connect with you on the social media? Yeah. And, uh, where can they,

of course, find out more about Evernote and give it a spin? Well, so Evernote is just at Evernote.com or your favorite app store. And I am on Twitter. I'm PLibben. And also happy to chat with anyone via email or anything else. I'm Phil at Evernote. My policy is I've been super lucky in just being able to get great advice from people when I asked. So if anyone actually wants to talk to me, my policy is I have to eat lunch anyway.

So anytime anyone wants to come over for lunch, I'm happy to do that. So if anyone's in the area, send me a note and come on by for lunch if you actually want to talk. Your lunches may just become very exciting from this point forward. Well, Phil, you're always very generous with your time. You're always fun to hang out with. And there are many more topics we could discuss. So perhaps sometime we'll do a round two.

People can let us know what other questions they might have for us to explore. And I'm looking at these questions and Evernote. I'm thankful for the product. I've used it for all of my books since we met. I've used it for planning the TV show. I've used it for all of the planning around the podcast. It is,

it is my go-to sort of central repository for everything. So I want to thank you for that. And of course, and I think we should have some whiskey soon and plan that billboard. Let's do it. All right, man. Uh, thanks so much. I will talk to you soon. Take care of time.