The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 63: Hedge Funds, Investing, and Optimizing Lifestyle (Mark Hart, Raoul Pal)

Episode Date: February 26, 2015

This is an experimental episode. It's a roundtable discussion with two hedge fund experts: Mark Hart and Raoul Pal. It digs into investment, physical training, and more -- all as tools for improving quality of life. How far can you push and improve yourself? These gents tackle this question every day, and it makes for a fun conversation in this episode. All show notes and links can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast Bio -- Mark Hart: Mark Hart is the founder of Corriente Partners, an investment fund focused on placing long/short equity trades based on macroeconomic themes. Mark launched his first hedge fund as a junior partner in November of 1998, and in 2001 launched Corriente Partners, where his macroeconomic framework led him to first question the security of the mortgage and housing market. Managing his portfolio accordingly, Mark earned a sizable return on his positions during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis - one of the single best performances of that downturn. Bio -- Raoul Pal: Raoul writes and publishes The Global Macro Investor, an elite macro economic and investment strategy research service for the worlds leading hedge funds, pension funds, banks and sovereign wealth funds. He is also an advisor to government organizations and a consultant for several family investment offices globally. Raoul has 24 years experience in the financial markets working for investments banks such Goldman Sachs (where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in equities and equity derivatives) and founding and managing a macro hedge fund for GLG Partners, ones of the world's largest hedge fund firms. Raoul recently co-founded Real Vision Television, the worlds first on-demand web TV channel for finance. Additionally, Raoul is the author of “The End Game" which is one of the most read financial articles in the history of the Internet. ***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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that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hey guys, this is Tim Ferriss. And this is an experimental episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It's a little noisy. I'm at the Facebook offices in Menlo Park, California. Just got out of some stuff. But I wanted to get this out to you. So this particular episode is me in conversation with two financial experts. Two hedge fund experts. And those two names are

Mark Hart, and I've had a lot of experience and time with Mark Hart. Mark is the founder of Corriente Partners, an investment fund focused on placing long short equity trades based on macroeconomic themes. He's done a ton, including basically earning a sizable, fantastic return on his positions during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which is one of the single best performances of that entire downturn. He's really good at spotting patterns, and I've done some work with him, which we'll get into. And then there is Raul, and he is the owner of Real Vision Television, from which this interview is pulled, among other things. But he writes and publishes the Global Macro Investor, an elite macroeconomic and investment

strategy research service for many of the world's leading hedge funds, pension funds, banks, and sovereign wealth funds. He does a lot more than that, of course, but I'll try to keep these introductions short. He is also the author of The Endgame, which is an article that turned out to be one of the most read financial pieces in the history of the internet. It's a fascinating conversation between the three of us about business, lifestyle, investing, all of the above. And for those of you who are interested in Real Vision Television, which includes all sorts of names that if you're involved with finance, you might recognize Rick Rule, Mark Hart, Kyle Bass, Mike Novogratz, the list goes on and on and on, really reversing the dumbed down trend that you see in mass media for discussing investment and

finance. And it usually costs $400 a year. If you use the code TIM, T-I-M, then you can get it for $300 a year. I get no profit participation in this. I'm just doing it because I had fun doing this interview. I make nothing from it. In any case, without further ado, please meet both Mark and Raoul and myself in this conversation. Thanks. So, Tim, Mark, thanks very much for getting this all together. I think it's going to be fascinating.

Mark, you did our first ever masterclass, and you talked a lot about not only your trading philosophy and how you do things and how you look at markets, but you broadened it out into how you look at your life and lifestyle and how you broaden your knowledge base. And one of the people you mentioned was Tim. And I said, well, it would be fascinating to find out how Tim and you have interacted and we can all have a joint conversation to see what we can all learn from these kind of things. Because a lot of

people are fascinated behind those concepts because people don't look at their lifestyle as much as they look at their career and stuff like that. So I know, Tim, do you want to give a little bit of background about yourself and Mark, just also for people who don't know about you, yourself as well. Sure. I have been in the Bay Area, San Francisco-related area for about 15 years. And I really have two primary careers, I suppose. One is as a teacher and author. So I've written books, all of which sound like scammy, infomercial products.

So The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef. We could talk about the titling some other time, but the books really, the common theme across all of them is trying to deconstruct world-class performers and look at how the anomalies replicate unusual results over and over and over again. Whether that's in the CEO sphere or in the, say, Olympic-level professional athletics sphere or looking at accelerated learning and so-called prodigies in that arena? How can someone pull tools from those

people so that they can replicate results people usually associate with some type of God-given talent? And there are different types of analyses we do for that. The second career is really startup angel investing and advising. So I was seed level and still am advisor to Uber, Evernote, investor in Twitter, Facebook, about 35 companies total up to this point in time. So those are the two areas where I spend a lot of my energy. Fantastic. Mark? Well, I'm a hedge fund manager. I've been involved in the hedge fund world for probably 16 years,

running my own funds for almost 14 years. And we'll go into all the specifics. I've run several different types of funds, but typically my focus is on macro. It's interesting to me. We had our interview a few months ago and mentioned Tim as a big influence on me. And specifically how that came to pass, I was on top of the world, and then I sort of crashed down to the bottom in 2009. I had some really bad times and it's about that time I read a book called The Art of Learning by a guy named Josh Waitzkin who's become one of my closest friends and absolutely brilliant man.

And Josh was this world-class chess player, world-class martial artist, and the book was about his learning process. So I felt like I needed some help on process and I reached out to Josh. It turned out he did some consulting with hedge funds on process and he agreed to work with me and my team on my process and he suggested that we bring Tim into the fold as well. I didn't know Tim before but Tim has written these books, The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Workweek at the time, since then The Four Hour Chef, read The Four Hour Body which absolutely blew me away. And Tim and Josh started to

implement you know various processes for me and my team. And while I wasn't able to necessarily turn my hedge fund performance around, although I'm still managing money, it completely changed my life, completely changed my outlook. And so when you suggest the possibility of bringing Tim on and interviewing him, I thought it would be great. And what I thought was particularly interesting is in the hedge fund industry, my peers, I mean, these are some of the smartest people in the world and some of the most driven people in the world. And they put enormous effort into what they do and yet most of them have never even considered putting the same sort of effort into kind of improving the quality of life. So I thought it would be great for some people in the financial world to see Tim and to get

a sense of really how far you can improve yourself, how far you can take things. Something that will be interesting is, so Tim, I'd love to think, because I've heard Mark's mindset, but you went in to see this troubled hedge fund manager who was having a tough time. How did you evaluate the situation? How did you think you can help him?

What tools did he need to do things with? And how did you go about that process? Well, I think there are a number of ways to try to, say, improve the performance of the company, a group of people, or even a single person. And in this particular case, of course, the landscape of macro investing, hedge fund management, is not a landscape that I'm going to understand as well as someone like Mark.

But if you look at it almost like rally car racing. So I'm fascinated by rally car racing. I've done some experiments there. But you have a racetrack that is basically designed to kill you. It's not intended to be as safe as possible. The path is somewhat known, but the terrain is unknown. It could be raining. It could be sleeting. And Mark knows where he wants to go. But I can help potentially improve the car itself, so the vehicle, which is the physical body, upon which everything is predicated. So people tend to have this sort of Cartesian separation of mind and body, but at the end of the day, you have

certain levels of neurotransmitters that are produced at a certain rate, depleted at a certain rate, and that is the rate-limiting step in your mental performance. So if you want to have better levels of working memory, sustained attention, and so on, you can optimize those by optimizing the car, i.e. the body, in this case. And you can use exercise to, say, improve a production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and all these things that are very, very interesting. And then you can also look at process. improve a production of brain drive neurotrophic factor and all these things that are very very interesting. And then you can also look at process. So I think Josh is is one of the best in the world and Josh is a very dear friend of mine at

looking at repeatable process. So what are the what are the daily the daily habits and the ways that you approach turning your effort on or off, say, for productivity and recovery throughout the day that you can tweak. So that would be driving the car. So we can look at the process of instead of having the shifter down here in a normal H pattern that you might have, maybe we should elevate that just like they do in rally car so that it's closer to the steering wheel.

And how can you do the equivalent throughout the day? And that might be incorporating different types of sets of questions that you apply to certain scenarios. It might be deciding beforehand, for instance, with a lot of my startups, when you scale to a certain point, you're going to encounter the following types of problems. So how do you plan for that type of crisis management in advance so that you're not reactive, so that you can be analytical when most people would be emotional. And those are some of the tools in the toolkit that I would usually

try to bring to bear in a situation like that. And Josh and I have very complementary approaches, which is part of the reason that we enjoy hanging out so much and working together. And so Mark, so Tim walks in and says, okay, this is what you need to do. How did you take that on board? And then how did you engage with that process and kind of then start to see the benefits flowing through and how did that change you? Well, you know, initially what I tried to do was incorporate 40 different new processes into my life, you know, diet, exercise, meditation, all kinds of things. And I wasn't particularly successful.

And I peeled it back a little bit and started to implement sort of one process at a time. You know, nailing breakfast was a huge one for me. What do you mean by nailing breakfast? I mean having a perfect breakfast. It's what's going to fuel you for the day. It's what's going to, you know, it nourishes you. It's something you always have time for because it's the beginning of the day. Nothing's going to run over and block it out.

So, you know, nailing breakfast, nailing your morning routine was really the first key. Everything from that, you know, built. Started to implement, you know, there are a variety of things I did. I got into martial arts. I'm, you know, pretty much addicted to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And both Josh and Tim are, you know, expert, you know, really world-class martial artists as well. But part of that was even, okay, breaking down the workouts. The times, you know, what time of the day are you going to be the most productive, the most creative? Usually it's after your mind is cleared. How are you going to clear your

mind? Well, your normal conscious mind has thousands of thoughts running through it constantly. But the key is accessing the subconscious mind where you're really doing your thinking. So how do you create these periods of time when you can best access that? So maybe it's breaking up your workout into two workouts a day that are half the length. Maybe it's implementing a five or ten minute a day meditation. And then it's structuring your work day so that you're not answering emails during your most productive time. And then it's self-tracking. And a lot of it starts with establishing a baseline, so knowing where you are. And I think that just to give a very common example of where people get themselves into trouble, if, like most people, you take these extremely elite thinkers in the form of top hedge fund managers who have

annual checkups once a year. And they make decisions based on the results of these blood tests that may come back in range or out of range. And typically the way that even a concierge medical service works is you have this checkup, you get back your blood values. Uh-oh, this is high. This is low. Here are two or three medications to correct these following things. And you realize a few things very quickly. Number one, if you were to take that test the next day, the values would be different.

So you want to always confirm testing results. And you can apply this in many different types of thinking. Secondly, what you're interested in when you look at, say, blood values is not just a snapshot in time, because that's like trying to understand a World Cup game from one photograph. You want to understand trending. So you're better off having slightly less data, so lower resolution, but many snapshots so you can look at where you're trending, as opposed to trying to diagnose and treat based on a single point in time. And what that can do for you, for instance, in the traditional medical system in the United States, or conventional I should say, you might be able to look at, say, your uric acid

levels, which is in some cases indicative of gout if it gets past a certain point. And you could be at the lower range of normal and be ratcheting up 10%, 20% per year, but the doctor won't flag it as a problem until you've crossed into sort of gout symptomatic territory. But if you're taking those snapshots, you can catch it beforehand. And you can identify, say, dietary interventions. Well, perhaps we should reduce fructose. People tend to blame gout and uric

acid on protein intake. Well, fructose has a huge part to play in that. But it all starts with establishing a baseline. So in the case of, say, a daily routine and a weekly routine, you could identify and Mark could identify during his states of flow, and we could talk about what that means, but when he feels effortless production, like he's doing everything well on autopilot, what are the characteristics? What are the prerequisites or the correlates to that? What are the potential triggers? And it starts with journaling. Similarly, what are the 20%, say, of activities or people that produce 80% of the negative emotions and bad decision

making. Let's start chronicling that. And once you start to identify those patterns, say, over a week of journaling, similarly with diet, right? So you could say, oh, well, you're having a meltdown. Now, this is not specific to Mark, but like person X is having, they're getting very frustrated and angry at 11.30, but they're having coffee and a bagel for breakfast.

It's like, OK, well, this might be a very easy fix. Just like a lot of people with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, simply have a gluten sensitivity. It's not like they need any type of, they don't have a small intestine bacterial infection or anything like that. It's just gluten. But it starts with capturing your baseline. And it's astonishing to me how I used to do this and how many people will change many variables without first establishing where they are.

So the first step is, where is the patient? And it's actually a similar thought process to how we look at markets as well. It's the same state of analyzing. If you just have a snapshot, you don't really know anything about anything. What you need to understand is the history, where it's come from, where it's going, and looking at a whole range of different parts of it before you can understand what's going on, I guess. There's no question.

One of the really interesting things about what Tem does, I mean, you can take this, you can go as deep as you want. I mean, you could spend a lot of time and really tweak a lot of details. But this notion of 10,000 hours to mastery, I mean, the way I think of you is as a brain and body hacker. And how do you really shortcut that? And one of the things I thought might be interesting would be to actually point out maybe some of the easy hacks that people can use. Yeah, absolutely. No, there's so many.

And just to sort of dispel some myths, maybe we could start there because the 10th, I'm very familiar with the research upon which the 10,000 hour rule coined by Gladwell or at least popularized by Malcolm Gladwell has been used. There are many, many ways to circumvent that in almost any skill. And I think that the way I study the anomalies rather than discard them as outliers, if that makes sense. And I remember at some point, because I'm a sort of amateur fan of finance and investing and whatnot. The angel investing is a whole separate story, very different from the public markets, certainly. But I think there was at one point, Warren Buffett was addressing efficient market theory.

And he said, well, you could say yes if you have 10,000 orangutans flipping quarters. Like eventually you'll find like 10 orangutans who have flipped heads 100 times in a row. And statistically, sure, you could point out that that doesn't necessarily indicate they have any skill at coin flipping, blah, blah, blah. But if they all happen to come from a particular place in Omaha, you might want to go see what the zookeeper is doing. And so I look for particularly odd concentrations of anomalies. And you can find them in many different gyms. I happen to look at athletic performance a lot because, and I'm going to come back to

your point of easy tips, because many people in, say, the hedge fund world, or you pick the sphere of elite performance that is non-physical, at some point they decided that they were genetically predetermined to be able to do certain things and not be able to do other things. So they were always the fat kid, I'm just boned, that's not something I can change. And so they are partially complete in that way. They're extremely world class at optimizing for, say, reading technicals and trading in a certain fashion or predicting kind of doomsday scenarios and formulating positions accordingly. But they've, in their mind, they view as one of the unchangeable aspects of themselves strength, endurance, sleep. I've always had insomnia, whatever it might be. And by showing

them, well, here's a 12-year-old high school girl who a year and a half ago had never been to a weight room and now she deadlifts 450 pounds for repetitions, maybe you could do this. It offers them a glimpse into what is possible. And as an example of some of the very easy things that people could do, if you wanted to develop, say, a basic ability in Spanish, a conversational ability in Spanish, you could look at someone named Michelle Thomas, M-I-C-H-E-L, and the original recordings, and you could get to a basic level of conversational Spanish in a week.

You could get to fluency in eight to 12 weeks, which is something that I've looked at very closely, language learning. I think you can become functionally fluent in almost any language in eight to 12 weeks. Another example would be breakfast, as Mark said. And specifically, 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. And could it be 20 grams? Could it be 40 grams? Could it be 20 minutes? Could it be 40 minutes? Sure. The 30 within 30 is easy to remember. And the good program or protocol that you follow is better than the perfect program or protocol that you don't. And I think this is also where a lot of top minds in finance fail,

is they try to change too many things at once. And there's a decision fatigue that sets in when you're trying to acquire new habits. But, which is why when I start with someone who's very busy, very driven, I never start with exercise, personally. I try not to, because that is an additional activity that gets layered on top of their current obligations. But you have to eat breakfast, or you have to eat. That is a default behavior, and we're just

going to swap in a new meal. So if you were to have, say, lentils, you could eat them straight out of the can. If you want, some spinach. You could just eat raw spinach if you want, or microwave, it doesn't really matter. And two whole eggs every morning. If you were to do that, and I won't digress into all the details of why those three are a very interesting combination, but spinach, lentils, and eggs. You could prepare it in three minutes.

If you have that breakfast within, say, 30 minutes of waking up, But spinach, lentils, and eggs. You could prepare it in three minutes. If you have that breakfast within, say, 30 minutes of waking up, it's not uncommon if you have more than 20% body fat that you'll lose 20 pounds in the first month, particularly if you're a male. And that would be a very simple hack. So it's like, OK, that's your new breakfast. Try that for a month. Don't change anything else.

And you'll very typically see people lose 15 to 20 pounds. If people have trouble sleeping, they have lifelong insomniacs, as I was for a very long time, they feel groggy in the morning even if they get a lot of sleep or think they've gotten a lot of sleep. It's oftentimes from low blood sugar and not from the length of sleep or lack thereof. So you could have a tablespoon of unsweetened almond butter before you go to sleep. And you'll see a lot of people who are chronically fatigued

fix just like that. And I diagnosed that for myself by implanting a glucose monitor in my side intended for type 1 diabetics. It gave me a readout 24-7 that I could then correlate to my food journal. I do all the crazy guinea pig stuff so that other people don't have to. And if you have to have a cheat meal, so let's say you're like, I'm going to go out with my in-laws. They're Italian. I'm going to have to eat pasta. I'm going to go out with my in-laws. They're Italian. I'm going to have to eat pasta.

I'm really trying to be good, but I have to eat pasta. All right, what can you do? Well, you could have a bit of vinegar. You could have a tablespoon of vinegar before the meal, which will help to lower the glycemic index. So your insulin and glycemic or glucose response to that meal. There are all sorts of tiny little tricks. And the key for me, at least, is finding the smallest behavior, the smallest change that will produce the disproportionately largest result for someone so they continue to take

my advice. That's it. I want to give them the minimum effective dose, just like medicine. I don't want to give you too little because you won't get any result. I give you too much, you're going to have side effects, societal, financial, otherwise, familial. But if I give you just the smallest thing, I say, all right, look, I know you hate exercise. You don't want to do any of this stuff.

I want you to do kettlebell swings one set once a week in the following way. It's going to take three minutes. Kettlebell can fit in 12 square inches on the floor, that's all I want you to do. No more. And if I can use that as the gateway drug into the behavioral change that I want, then I can get them to do almost anything once they start seeing the result. You want to put on 20, 30 pounds of muscle in a month, you can do it. If you have, you know, let's just say if you're 170 pounds or more to start with. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So if you want to learn how to memorize

a thousand digits, a string of a thousand random digits, you can train someone to do that in a week. And so these these impossibles, once you take one of them and reframe them as a possible. So for instance, when I did genetic testing through Navigenics, 23andMe, et cetera, I have something called a nonsense allele for the actin-3 gene. All that means is I shouldn't be able to really produce fast-fetched muscle fiber. So I'm doomed. Can't be fast, can't be strong, et cetera. Well, it turns out when I took a muscle biopsy out of the side of my leg,

my vastus lateralis, I believe, and we analyzed it, I had a very high percentage of type 2A muscle fibers, which is trainable. So I was able to basically renegotiate my genetic destiny, at least according to the current state-of- of the art testing. And so I always feel like outside of very few areas, maybe the law in some cases, reality is negotiable. And that includes physical performance. And that's a great way to shock people into believing that all these other things are

possible. The thing that I've looked at, the thing I'm spending more time thinking about is time itself. Time is, I think, one of the hardest things to control because it's a concept we don't really know how to grasp and how to deal with. I think, how do you look at time and how do you control that element

that gets people kind of breathless with the fear that I just can't do all this stuff? I think of time as one of several currencies. So I think it's very easy to think of, and normal to think of money as a currency, because it is. But what is a currency? A currency is something that you trade for something else. So you use that money to purchase an experience or a possession, let's just say.

Similarly you have time. Perhaps you have mobility as another currency. And time is non-renewable, whereas capital is renewable. So in the hierarchy of prioritization, the time should take past a certain point on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Time should become your number one priority and allocating that effectively. So I think that if you don't have time, it's an indication of not having sufficiently clear

priorities. I think that's it. And when I think about time, again, personally, I'm less interested in can I cram more into a day. It's how do I get the highest quality of life out of the time that I've got. Right. So I think there are many different ways to approach it and there are many people who do a lot of thinking in this area.

I think that there are a lot of contemporary thinkers in David Allen. There are a lot of, of course, you can go as far back, Ben Franklin and beyond, Marcus Aurelius. But I think Peter Drucker, the effective executive, is a fantastic place to start. The focus on effectiveness over efficiency. So effectiveness being choosing your activities wisely,

and then efficiency being doing those activities well. But doing something well does not make it important. And I think there's a lot of, it's very easy to conflate those two in a world where you are constantly hit with propaganda for the latest tools. But the principles are more important than the tools. If you're a good artist, you can use a crayon or a piece of chalk or a paintbrush. But if you're constantly just devising the latest tool and you never develop those artistic skills, it doesn't matter. You're constantly just devising the latest tool and you never develop those artistic skills.

It doesn't matter. And similarly, I think deciding what is important, deciding what is, which is oftentimes what makes you the most uncomfortable, I think, that you least want to do, a pretty good indicator. The general principles of thinking about prioritization remain fairly consistent, I think. And for me, and many of the top performers that I see, just in the startup world, because it's a very exaggerated, it's a world in which you can look at every little problem gets magnified dramatically because of the velocity at which many of these companies are growing.

So a small mistake turns into a very big mistake very quickly, which makes it easier to see. And for people who are growing at the rate of, say, an Uber, which is unprecedented in the history of startups, or anywhere else, I can apply this in my own life, which is unprecedented in the history of startups. Or anywhere else. I can apply this in my own life. But if you have, say, five to-do items,

what is the one of those five that, if completed, renders the other four unimportant or that makes the other four easier to solve, easier to address? And trying to pick the lead domino in that respect and prioritize and allocate time accordingly, I think is a very simplistic way but effective way to go about picking that. And I like to think of it as the lead domino that

just knocks over the others. Or which of these decisions can I focus on that will prevent 1,000 decisions in the future? And that's a very engineer of engineer like way to approach say engineers or computer scientists have a general hatred of repetitive tasks so if something needs to be repeated they want to create a script or a program to run that and you can do that by deciding what your decision-making framework is in advance. So those are a few of the ways that I think are very simple, but simple works.

If the solution that you find is complicated, it's probably not the right solution. So, you know, Tim, I guess, you know, and it gets back to what I was saying a little bit earlier, you know, you've got people in the hedge fund industry and the investment industry. I mean, these are typically driven people. They're intelligent people and they focus their efforts on their work. And it's satisfying, somewhat satisfying to extremely satisfying. What you and Josh Waitzkin have helped me do is, you know, access other parts of my life and parts of myself and do so very easily. Where the, I guess, the delta in terms of improvement is massive for very small amounts of effort. And I think that hedge fund managers particularly, they're the exact right people who are poised to kind of take advantage of some of the tools and some of the

tricks that you employ. I mean, two things that really come to mind, you like to talk about like taking ice baths. I take freezing cold showers and it's absolute nirvana. Another thing that maybe you could talk a little bit about is lucid dreaming and using lucid dreaming to massively improve performance and improve that sort of conscious subconscious brain connection. I know you've used lucid dreaming to train in wrestling in high school. Yeah, I can talk about both. So the ice baths or cold

therapy, and there are different ways to do it. You can use ice packs in the back of the neck. Really came out of conversations I had with a former NASA researcher named Ray Cronice. And he had tripled his rate of fat loss, which he's an expert in thermodynamics. He measured everything very meticulously after becoming fascinated by how Phelps could eat 10 plus thousand calories per day. Why would that be? And he started looking at the effects of water exposure at different temperatures on caloric expenditure. Long story short, cold exposure can improve immune function, be very effective as an antidepressant therapy.

It affects hormones, including things like adiponectin, that then consequently lead to an increased rate of fat loss in many cases, thermogenesis related to fat. And that was in the 4-Hour Body. A lot of people kind of scoffed at it. It's now since been in the New York Times probably half a dozen times. I think it was just written about a month or two ago. And it's extremely effective, and it's an example, like you said, of something that takes next to no time. You take two bags of ice, put it in the tub, jump in for five minutes,

and it can have a tremendous effect on you, not only for the subsequent, say, four to five hours where you feel like you're on cloud nine in many cases, where your mood and your mental performance is highly elevated, it's not subtle, to the longer-term cumulative fat loss effects, which can be really tremendous. I mean, tripling your rate of fat loss just by a very short intervention like that. So that would be one interesting example. I've been looking at recently the opposite, which is using heat shock, so saunas, for increasing, say, growth hormone release in combination with types of exercise. So studying how the extremes impact your physiology is very interesting to me. But the lucid dreaming is, lucid dreaming is a fascinating subject. So for those people who aren't familiar, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming and you become conscious

of the fact that you are dreaming. And it doesn't have to be anything woo-woo. There's nothing woo-woo about it. And they've demonstrated, I think it was at Stanford, they proved that it existed by having people memorize before sleep subjects eye movement patterns. In REM sleep, your eye movement in the dream correlates to your physical movement when you're laying down. They could do left, left, right, left, left, right, right. They could do that and they could track with an EEG or other tools that they were

in REM sleep and in fact sleeping. So like, okay, now I'm dreaming, just checking in with the researcher, you know, left, left, right, right, et cetera. And when you develop the ability to extend your lucid dreaming experience. And there's a great book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LeBerge that makes it quite simple. But there are exercises that you implement throughout your waking day,

which are called reality checks, where you'll look at aspects of reality that change very frequently in a dream state. So complex patterns, if you had, say, tiles that were laid a certain way longitudinally on a floor, you could look away and look back, and if it changes orientation in your dreaming, if it doesn't, you're probably not dreaming. If you look at a digital watch display, that will also, because you're constantly recreating the landscape in a dream,

that will change if you look away and look back. And you start to develop, and this also pairs very well with something like transcendental meditation or Vipassana meditation. But you get to a point where you can go into a dream state, no longer view sleep as a waste of time. A lot of people do. And you can further reinforce or develop your skills while you're sleeping. So the example that you referred to, you can get to the point where you're spending the vast majority of your REM sleep cycles awake in your dream. And what I did when I was a competitive wrestler, and I went to prep nationals and was an All-American in my weight class,

but one of my idols at the time was John Smith, who was an incredible Olympian and competitor. Went on to then, I think it was Oklahoma State, and dominated as coach. Really pioneered low leg attacks. And I would, in my dream, because I'd watched so many videos of John Smith, I would train with John Smith. And there was a very direct transfer of skill improvement from that state to subsequent practices, which is not that crazy if you think about it. Because there are many studies that have looked at, say, skiing aerialists, so people who, different types of ski jumpers or divers, and looking at the impact of replacing a training session with visualization. And they get to see the same, they see gains in performance. And that's exactly what you're doing when you are dreaming,

but you get the benefit of sort of a simulated kinesthetic experience. So it's a fascinating tool that is really underutilized and underexploited, and it's fun. It's so much fun. Which, at the end of the day, it's like, look, what are we doing this all for? I mean, and you get to a point

when you're playing the game, and it is a game, and we all choose the games we want to play, but it's like, you get to a point and you're like, okay, I've proven I'm really good at this. I'm able to meet my needs.

I can certainly satisfy a lot of my wants. Like, what are these psychological states that I want more of? What are the psychological states that I want less of? And the lucid dreaming is wonderful in the sense that it not only improves performance, it helps you develop present state awareness. And it puts you into a similar state if you practice lucid dreaming. Because throughout the day you're doing these reality checks, what is that doing? It's like meditating for 15 seconds 10 times a day.

So you develop a calmness and awareness of how you're feeling so that you don't make emotionally based decisions that are bad for you. And that translates very directly to investing, particularly for the stuff that I don't do much of. I mean, I tend to hold stuff for a long time in the private markets because that's my game that I've chosen to play because I know my lesser self will make bad decisions if I'm allowed to play

in some of the sandboxes that you guys play in. But certainly, all the more reason for, I think, people in the hedge fund world, if they're making daily or weekly or monthly decisions about positions and whatnot, to have a consistent practice so that they can become the observer of their emotional self. That's the question. How do you know? Because you identify, you know yourself, and you know you wouldn't be a good short-term trader, for example.

But you know if you've got a longer strategic view, you're probably, that's your skill set. How do you learn that? Because a lot of people don't get this bit when certain people are good at certain types of things. How do you understand what you're good at? Test. You throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and you see what sticks. And you see what you enjoy and you see what you dislike.

In my particular case, I've actually, I've done, despite myself, done reasonably well in the public markets with a handful of stocks that I've bought. I mean, Pixar was the first stock I ever bought. And then there's a point where I bought Amazon. Amazon did really, really well. But in 2008, when everything was going to, well, seemingly, if you watch too much television, going to hell in a handbasket. And I spend, just by the very nature of, you know, I have a blog with two million readers per month or so. I'm online a decent amount

to write and communicate. So I'm exposed to a lot of this noise, this chicken little, the sky is falling hysteria, for instance, in 2008. And what I realized about myself is that if I can watch a chart of the value of my holding going up and down, and Mr. Market is tapping me on the shoulder asking, are you sure you wanna hold this? Would you like to sell? I really think you should sell. But wait, wait, wait, it just went down.

Maybe you should buy some more. You wanna buy some more? That monkey mind is very untrained in me. It is so poorly behaved, and it's such a bastardly little saboteur in my mind. I need to create constraints that allow me to utilize my strengths while mitigating my weaknesses.

And the way I do that is by investing in startups where I have an informational advantage, where I have a product advantage, and I can also pull, say, a million plus people who are 25 to 40-year-old males in metropolitan cities, primarily on the coasts, who have high disposable income, I can get a very good read on those things, do a lot of front-end due diligence, make a decision, and then I'm locked in.

And that protects me against second-guessing and making subsequent decisions that are going to sabotage the good work I did in the first place. But I learned that by trying different types of investing. So do you think maybe, you talked about journals before, which I think is an interesting concept because there's a certain intellectual integrity when you have to write it down and be honest with yourself. And I think a lot of people in investing aren't honest with themselves. I think it was Paul Tudor Jones would dweud wrthi i mi bod y peth a ddysgwyd am beth sy'n gwneud i weithiwr da yw cael eich

hori amser a'ch hori amser gweithredu yn yr un. Felly, eich hori amser sy'n gweithredu yn y syniad yw, rwy'n credu y bydd y dollar yn mynd i fynd i fyny dros tri blynedd. Rwy'n mynd i roi'r tradd honno ar ôl ddwy wythnos. Mae hynny'n anghywir oherwydd mae'n ffwrdd mawr. Ac mae'r holl ddealltwriaeth a'r cyd-ddealltwriaeth am yr hyn rydych chi'n ceisio ei wneud a phwy rydych chi, It's a big mismatch. And it's all of that intellectual integrity about what you're actually trying to do and who you are. And then it allows you to do that, I guess. To then focus exactly where you know your strengths are. Definitely.

And I think that journaling is one example. I think it has tremendous value, especially if you don't view yourself as a writer. Because what writing allows you to do, and we could call it journaling just so people don't get intimidated, it is allowing you to freeze your thoughts in a form that you can analyze. You're not going to take the time to record yourself for hours and go over it, but you can write two pages every morning. And what I would encourage people to do,

particularly if they're dealing with the stresses of sort of a high pressure trading environment or investment environment, is write down their fears and worries and explore those because it will clarify what they are. Sometimes they'll end up unfounded, which can remove them as an influence that could lead to bad decisions or impulsive decisions. Other times, it'll clarify ways that those risks can be mitigated. But when it's simply a five-second worry that is sort of on loop that repeats itself every hour or two, you never get that level of resolution.

So literally, have some coffee, have some tea, five to 10 minutes in the morning. Just freehand, write about what you're worried about for the day, what you're fearful of. It's hugely pragmatic. It's not just a self-indulgent poetic exercise. So what do you do when you've... So I've written that down, and I've done it for a week. Now how do I analyze that? And how long do I need to do it before I've got a decent data set to deal with?

And what do I do with it when I've got it? Well, so, okay, this is a good question. So I thought when I started doing this that the value would be in spotting the patterns, going back and analyzing. And there is value in that. But part of the value is you're taking these muddy, distracting thoughts

and imprisoning them on paper so that you can get on with your day and act analytically and effectively without irrational concerns affecting your rational process. So you're just taking it out of your mind, plonking it over there for the time being. That's it. Oh, okay. And it's surprisingly effective, and it's it's it's it's surprisingly effective and it's so simple yeah some people do that at night you know if you're if you if you've got that you know you've

got the night horrors and you're thinking about something yeah writing it down yeah get out of your head it's out of your head and then you can do it you know one of the interesting things that that you and josh had me implement was uh was you know in terms of taking advantage of the interesting things that you and Josh had me implement was, in terms of taking advantage of the subconscious mind, was feeding myself questions or problems to deal with before I entered into one of these periods like sleep or meditation or exercise. Can you maybe expand on that? I don't know if you can or how that works. Absolutely. I think that it is a wasted opportunity if there are different levels of processing.

And that ranges. There are many different ways to frame this. Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, talks about system one, system two. People talk about the conscious and subconscious. But if you look at talking about pattern recognition, a lot of the breakthroughs, the sort of lateral or oblique discoveries that people make that are non-obvious. They often happen in the showers. They often happen when listening to music. They often happen when daydreaming. They often happen in the middle of the night in a dream, et cetera. And you can encourage that by prompting that level of processing with a question before you go to bed. And which is why when I journal, it's typically, you know, five minutes first thing in the morning, five minutes before I go to bed.

And I also do a little bit of sort of post-game analysis on the day, at the end of the day. But that's another very, very simple approach for allowing those idle CPU cycles, as we think of them as idle when we're sleeping, although it's not totally accurate, to have a problem to chew on. It's almost like what some people are doing with distributed technology now, where you might have, say, you're trying to borrow computing power to look at protein folding.

And so Sony will make the PS3s in a distributed fashion if people opt in available for that type of offline processing when they're not in use for Call of Duty or whatever. So when you're not in Call of Duty, i.e. your job, you can assign a problem in a very similar way to an extremely powerful computer, which is your brain, to work on while you're asleep.

And it doesn't always produce breakthroughs, of course, but it's a fantastic practice to get into, and it's also something that really doesn't take any extra time. It's not an additive activity. It doesn't displace anything else. One of the things I wanted to make sure we got in this interview is a little bit about yourself. Specifically, there's an excellent book you probably read, Robert Greene's Mastery.

Greene says there are three stages to mastery. The most important is the first one, which is identifying your calling. I look at you you're world-class ballroom dancer martial artist you know life coach I mean there you seem to have mastered so many different things you know what's your calling how is this where does it all come from is Is this cultivated? It's definitely cultivated. So the calling, I think, is studying meta-learning. So the teaching people how to learn or learning how to learn. What is

the framework that can be imposed on any skill? That is my calling, is to study that, test that, research that, and then hand that toolkit to as many people as possible. And it's absolutely a learned skill. I remember when I was in high school, I had to leave my Spanish class because it was too hard for me. And I concluded I was bad at Spanish and bad at languages. And a lot of people make these decisions in junior high or high school, they carry with them for the rest of their lives. They have someone make fun of their singing, oh, I'm a terrible singer, I can't sing. And they carry that for decades. And for me, that happened with language learning. And then I took a year abroad in Japan as an exchange student, and

it wasn't an optional activity. I had to learn Japanese. I was going to a Japanese high school. And I used judo textbooks. And I deconstructed ways of approaching characters so that I could learn how to read and write and came back and I realized that I'd gone from Japanese one to Japanese level six at my high school in six months. And I was like, okay, well now I need to really reconsider this bad at languages conclusion that I reached. It wasn't bad at languages, it was that I had a bad set of instructions, I had a bad recipe. So I think my calling is to master the art of meta-learning. Because a lot of people, there are people who will look at the various areas in which I experiment.

So it's like, alright, he's taking muscle biopsies and implanting glucose monitors and spending time with black market chemists and like NFL combine trainers and then he's taking muscle biopsies and implanting glucose monitors and spending time with black market chemists and NFL combine trainers, and then he's doing this startup stuff. This guy's a jack of all trades. And on some level, that's true. But what's missed when they miss the layer on top of that, which is the meta-learning. There is a common thread and there is a common goal,

which is figuring out what are the untested assumptions what are the best practices that i can test that i can even attempt the opposite of right like the deadlift you know perfect example it's you have people who will say well you know your strongest range of motion is from the knee ups you want to do rack pulls and all this stuff and uh but you find someone like barry r Barry Ross in Los Angeles who's produced multiple world champions and he pulls from the floor up to just below the knee, it's just a few inches, and then they drop the bar. And they do that two to three times, that's the full set. They do less than five minutes of total time under tension per week and I put almost 120

pounds on my deadlift in like eight to 10 weeks. It's insane. And it's the same thing on your recommendations. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. It's insane. And I would encourage, and if Socrates would say the same thing, this is not a new recommendation,

but for people who really want to open their mind to what is possible in every sphere of their lives, particularly if you're male, but not exclusively, get extremely strong. Read, and I'm sure you can find it, people have talked about it online, but the effortless superhuman chapter in the four-hour body on the deadlift, just get, you will not gain a lot of mass, probably less than 10 pounds, and you could add like 100 to 200 pounds on your deadlift. Do that, and the lens through which you view everything will be different. It'll be like looking at the matrix.

And I think that one of my guiding tenets, if I had one, would be a quote from Mark Twain, which is, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. So when you've reached a cheery consensus of any type, it's time to be like, well, wait, let me just time out and ask, what do we all believe is true? And run through and just ask for each of them, what if the opposite were true? The question I wanted to ask is, so if you spend so much time analyzing, improving, when do you get to the state of equilibrium?

Because otherwise, you end up with your monkey mind focusing on you and trying to tweak all the bits and pieces. When do you get to the point where you say, OK, I've got to the kind of status quo, or is there no status quo? Is it all about constant improvement? I'm very aggressive and very competitive. I think that there's sort of a subtext to that question that I think is important, which is related to satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

I don't think that seeking constant improvement and dissatisfaction have to go hand in hand. So I feel like if you're not getting stronger, you're getting weaker. If you're not getting stronger, you're getting weaker. If you're not getting younger, you're getting older. If you're not getting further away from death, you're getting closer. There's no equilibrium. The biological system generally doesn't work that way. I mean, there are some forms of homeostasis the body seeks to achieve, but I think that I'm constantly trying to improve. It doesn't mean I'm

trying to improve everything, but I'm trying to improve something. And however, the lucid dreaming, some type of mindfulness practice, which can be jujitsu, it can be transcendental meditation, doesn't need to be staring at a candle flame in your mind's eye. That's not designed for everyone. Although you can use apps like Headspace or Calm, which are very effective for people who otherwise can't sit still for 10 minutes. When you allocate time for some type of appreciation, that is how you reach equilibrium with the drive for achievement and when you find someone who is solely focused on achievement and has not created the bandwidth or time or activities for appreciation

they're usually pretty miserable and uh i mean i'm sure you guys know a lot of very successful financially successful people certainly i i know lots of very financially successful people. Certainly, I know lots of very financially successful people who are utterly miserable. And I think the danger in pursuing that game exclusively is that you get to a point where you have all the money that could possibly solve your problems, and you realize that it doesn't solve all your problems. So you're solving the wrong problems. And that's why I think some of the richest people are the most miserable. Because when people have less money, they can hold out with the hope that money will fix these intrinsically sort of existential or physical or emotional or psychological

problems. But when you reach the pinnacle, then you're like, wait a second. I still have this whole set of problems. But when you reach the pinnacle, then you're like, wait a second, I still have this whole set of problems. I thought that an extra X amount of dollars per year would have solved this. Lo and behold, no, you still have the work to do. So I think that developing a holistic set of practices that appreciates the full human, including the body, which is, it is your machine. You can't just take care of the driver, i.e. the mind. You need the Ferrari, so you should really care for it.

But I think that the way you reach equilibrium or a sensation of balance is by having the appreciation and a set of activities and practices for that, and then a set of activities and behaviors for achievement. Yeah, I think just one thing I'd add to it is, and I think something that you and Josh have taught me, is just to love the process. So you're pushing, you're pushing, you're working, you're working, you're working, but it's not even stopping and smelling the roses, but it's enjoying the path and loving the path. No, absolutely.

And I think that it's perhaps cliched to say life is a journey, not a destination. But at the end of the day, I think from a very strictly pragmatic standpoint, you have to focus on the process because due to good or bad luck, you can get a bad result after a very good process. You can get a great result after a very bad process. So your method of investing could be covering your eyes and throwing a dart at a dartboard with a list of companies on it. And you could get lucky and have a great outcome.

But that doesn't make that a good process. And vice versa. You could do all the research in the world and there's some blind spot that you couldn't have identified. And you end up with a bad result. But the way that you end up, I think, being proud of how you are building is by refining and trying to have the most perfect process possible. And that also, I think, prevents a lot of the depression and malaise that can come from

bad outcomes, which are just part of the game. I mean, it's... Yeah, and particularly financial markets. What's interesting in financial markets is losing. Even if you lose only a small amount of the time, that losing part, the pain of that far outweighs the benefits of when you're actually making any money. Yeah. Yeah. There's a really good book called, that I enjoyed anyway, called What I Learned Losing

a Million Dollars, which looks at sort of the psychological dynamics of making and losing money and what happens when you personalize those or attribute to talent what should not be attributed to talent or lack thereof. But what I realized, for instance, when we were talking earlier about how I realized I was not well-suited for the public markets, personally, if I'm the one doing the managing of that, is I realized that exactly that, that a small loss, the magnitude of that negative emotion was exponentially larger than even if I made five times that amount positively.

And as a result, I didn't have the stomach to invest enough where a reasonable rate of return would be meaningful to me. And I was like, on the pro and con list, that makes that ill-suited to my temperament and psychology. But oddly enough, people might say, well, you don't have the risk tolerance. It's like, no, no, no. I don't have the appetite for that type of risk.

But I can do a binary investment in a startup where it's going to be 0 or 10x or 100x, and I have no problem with that. I'm much more comfortable with that because between the investment and the outcome, I'm prevented from making bad decisions. Yeah, that's right. Because in private investing, you don't get the choice of marking to market. You don't have to worry about, am I losing 10% today, tomorrow, whatever it is.

It's just like, I'm in it for the ride. I've made my decision. And the payoff is that. The loss is that. And that's it. That's it. Right. Exactly.

And I think investing is a good metaphor for life. I mean, it's allocation. It's allocation of resources. And sort of bringing it back to what we were talking about earlier, it's a mistake to view your primary and only currency as capital. I think time and mobility, these all determine the actual value of your capital. Because if you don't have time, you can't exchange that money for experiences. And what's your, the capital, your capital is your quality of life, I guess, in some

way, shape, or form. And all of those are the currencies that you trade for that? Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Great. Tim, well, thanks very much. And Mark, thanks a lot.

I think it's been really fascinating. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it's been really fascinating. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Cheers. Hope you enjoyed that chat, everyone. And if you'd like more on investing, hedge funds, finance, et cetera, et cetera, you might enjoy a number of the interviews that I

have done for the Tim Ferriss show, including Peter Thiel, who was a co founder of PayPal, first money into Facebook, or Arnold Schwarzenegger on his real estate empire and how twins became his most profitable movie, for instance, for him personally. And you can find all of that at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And then for Real Vision, Real Vision TV, that's what you just listened to. Go to realvisiontv.com. And if you use the code TIM, T-I-M, you can get $100 off. So it's not $400 a year.

It's $300 a year. I don't make anything from it. I just think they're doing very interesting work. So realvisiontv.com, code TIM. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you soon. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers.

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