Life-Changing Insights From A Decade Of Self-Improvement - Tim Ferriss (4K)

most people I think would look at you and assume that you're this hyper productive super optimized efficiency machine how much truth do you think's in that I think there's some truth to it I think I'm more effective than I am efficient so if you were to look at me day-to-day part of the reason I don't really ever have journalists Shadow me or do anything like that is because if you were to be a fly on the wall I think I look like I'm doing a whole lot of nothing a lot of the time or I'm just fussing around but I think the choos what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one given thing so I do think I'm good at picking let's call it lead dominoes that tip over other things so high leverage targets that tend to make other things irrelevant or a lot easier so I'm good at that but in the actual execution I think I look like a drowning monkey a lot of the time so I would say there is some truth to it but I would probably replace efficiency with Effectiveness and then in the last 10 to 15 years I think I've deoptimized a lot since for in if you're running a marathon you're not going to take a taxi from point A to point B sure that'll be efficient but that sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise so there's a lot more that I would put in that process over outcome category I would say talk to me about the difference between efficiency and Effectiveness so Effectiveness is there are different ways to look at this the way I look at it is Effectiveness is what you do efficiency is how you do something but doing something well does not make it important or high leverage does that make sense so if you do an 8020 analysis and you determine say in learning a language that if you learn the Thousand highest frequency words you're going to be conversationally fluent choosing that subset of vocabulary and then studying it at a B minus level is better than choosing the wrong set of vocabulary and studying at an A+ level so the what matters more than how or the material matters more than the method the task that you choose matters more than how you do any given task that's how I tend to think about it you say being efficient without regard to Effectiveness is the default mode of the universe mhm why I think it's very easy to mistake motion for progress and it's I think counterintuitive for someone to measure twice and cut once I think frontloading a lot of thinking feels like doing nothing it is doing nothing physically at least in terms of motion so the Drive I would say for a lot of people is to engage in productivity theater to do things that can pass to others or to yourself as something productive look at how busy I am right look at how busy I am and it's not like I am a paragon of hitting home runs in this regard I mean there are plenty of days where just like everybody else I pause for a second and I've been in front of a laptop for an hour and have no idea what I've actually accomplished like I've done stuff I've looked at a screen could not tell you what major projects I've driven forward in any meaningful way so as long as you choose the highest leverage tasks or if as long as you have a system for choosing what is important because that's going to be subjective then over time I think you can snowball your way into long-term success again as you define it having those definitions for yourself is important otherwise you're going to be flailing around or mimicking other people and I think that can end up leading you in a lot of conflicting directions so if what you work on is more important than how you work on it what are the rules that you use to choose what to work on yeah broadly speaking i' I've thought about this a lot and both looking in the rearview mirror but uh even at the time say if you look at my transition it wasn't really a transition they're parallel tracks but incorporating angel investing around 2008 for instance after the success or the initial success of the first book looking at say the podcast in 2014 any of these various decisions there are a few common threads the primary one is asking the question and I'm not the first person to do this but how can I succeed even if I fail or can I succeed even if I fail what I mean by that is if I'm looking at five possible projects or experiments I tend to view them as experiments let's just say I'm looking at six possible projects SL experiments that I could pursue in the next 3 to 6 months let's say three months I really tend to focus in the short term and it'll be clear why that works in the long term in a second if I ask myself which of these will help me to develop or deepen skills develop or deepen relationships the most even if they fail by external metrics I bias towards choosing that project and then even if it fails initially by whatever external metric you might have or perception of the public as long as those skills and relationships transfer they persist after that project those will accumulate over time and so far my experience has been they lead to better success I mean if you look at say York's Dune which failed you have guer and all these incredible people involved and then they split off and created these Masterworks and you see many examples like this so I don't view the failure of Any Given project as a failure as long as there are things developed that can transfer forward into other things so that's how I tend to choose my projects this is like an inverse pic Victory do you know that idea yeah I mean I know what a peric victory is but this is like an inverse of that it's an inverse yeah it's like a Successful Failure yeah however you would phrase that yeah yeah yeah how cool yeah and it really at least for me and and also for others I'm not the only one who's who's thought about it this way uh it really does accumulate over time so as long as you're looking at evaluating your let's just say accomplishment over a longer period of time 3 years 5 years and you're viewing things as experiments as opposed to like Clos Loop success or failure binary outcomes then it's all feedback talk to me about this relationship between 3 months and five years well I my experience for most folks myself included is that if you were to ask me five years ago could you have predicted everything that would have happened in the last five years of course not and my own experience has been that if if I put my all into shorter term projects let's just say 3 months within that I have two to four week experiments that I'm running a very types number one that's kind of semantic insurance against psychological distress from quote unquote failure binary just framing it differently using different language MH to train your thoughts to sort of react differently and furthermore I would say that as you run these experiments let's just say it's three months if you were to try to set in stone some type of three-year plan you're probably going to be creating blindness for yourself where you don't see very attractive doors that open that you had not predicted do you give me an example sure uh me starting the podcast 2014 uh so I launched the 4our chef which was a very difficult book I mean it was a three fouryear project that was crammed into a year year and a half it was a suicide mission of sorts got it done at incredible personal cost yay go masochism and in the process of promoting the book doing the launch I always look for the uncrowded high Leverage channel which is increasing in impact and importance at that time that was podcasting for the first book it was blogs so every time I launch a book I'm looking for that and I put all the chips into podcasts and I had the opportunity to be interviewed on Rogan show and Nerdist and many many others and that was when I became very interested in the format and I saw how with some basic trends at play so Broadband proliferation smartphone uh decreases in cost and improvements in technology that sort of audio as a secondary activity was just going to Skyrocket via these smartphones so I wanted to experiment I never would have known that in advance if I had speced out for instance I only do one book deals I've never done a multi-book deal why because I want to preserve my optionality and in doing that with the say the 4our chef which was successful but not as successful as I wanted it to be since I'd only done a one-book deal when the podcasting became appealing as a break from writing a means of recovery a Del loing phase but also as a way to here's how I think about the skill development improve my ability to ask questions reduce my verbal ticks refine my ability to interview which would transfer to my future non-fiction books which require a lot of research I would also have the ability to deepen my relationships with my close friends example my first episode with Kevin Rose because otherwise doing hours and hours of Google sleuthing on your friends is pretty creepy and having a one-way conversation for two hours is also pretty bizarre but with the podcast I would have the pretext that would allow that and to reach out to people ultimately who I would want to get to know it checked all the boxes and I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that very attractive opportunity had I already set down as a blueprint something fixed as a three-year plan let's just say it seems to me that the people who are very good at long-term plans the only way that that can really come to fruition is if you don't have outlier events but kind of all of us are hoping in some form for an outlier event like we're hoping for the you know 99th percentile win like maybe we're not optimizing for that but we're like yeah like really this could happen and the same with you with the show you know even with all of the the pieces in play Thinking to yourself hey over the next decade this is going to have a billion downloads and you know be maybe even better known than the books which was my thing I was an author coming in and now I'm maybe best known as a podcaster how how are you able to maybe they compete there's no way axiomatically to come into that I think and be like and this is this is how it's going to go you just don't know whether the chips are going to fall no you have no idea and I would also say that I think the the the short-term experimentalism and the long-term planning are not mutually exclusive but the long-term planning that I've seen executed really well is usually executed by people who are top 1% of 1% in a single field y whereas I don't have as best I can tell that degree of expertise I'm more of a generalist so I would sort of linear progression through the they they they have a superpower right they are a LeBron James they are a superstar 10x coder they are a fill-in the blank M they have a very clearly identified superpower that can drive them through a pretty I don't want to say linear path but it allows them to plan with a higher degree of certainty how to take full advantage of that superpower whereas I think I am more of a generalist in the sense that I might be top 20% in a few things when you overlap them in a vent diagram that allow me to try to try to not not always succeeding be a category of one so I'm I'm attempting to be the only and not the best it's a great book called The Blue Ocean strategy that I recommend people read as as you think about this and there's also a chapter in a book called The 22 immutable laws of marketing it's a bit outdated in some ways but the original version has examples uh of something thing they call the the law of category which is simply attempting to create new categories versus dominate crowded existing categories and I think that's a helpful exercise not just for Branding and marketing purposes but for positioning and then when you think about positioning you can work backwards from that and create the product yeah I suppose as well that if you have multiple intersecting domains or subcategories that you're in you have no idea how these things are going to combine together it's like hey this meal is made of steak I can reliably tell you what it's going to taste like this meal is made of 15 different ingredients all cooked in different ways what's the outcome going to be I'm not too sure and I guess that that's where the outlier effect thing come from so talking about from a daily ritual standpoint what does a typical day look like for you morning routine full Works what's a day in the life of look like yeah it depends on where I'm located I was for instance skiing for January and February so it looked very much like a day architected around skiing uh but I'll give you I'll give you a few different examples so here in Austin it would be now it sounds so cliched but nonetheless I've been doing this a long time in the 4our body in 2010 so there you have it but I'll do cold immersion so 40 degrees at say 3 to 5 minutes nothing nothing too incredibly long that immediate immediately upon waking yeah waking up and then I'll I'll feed the dog have some water yep and then coal plunge yep and then I'll go directly from that to hot tub for sort of hyper dilation find that just helps lower back issues and things along those lines how long ah three minutes nothing nothing too crazy uh and this is really for State change it's not for any complex biological Cascade that I could list out it's it's really for a state change and I'll I will back up and say that one of the principles I learned from Tony Robbins and I don't know if if the attribution is originally to Tony but it's something that I've found very very helpful which is a progression the progression is State story strategy so if you are in a say low energy state or a negative State you're going to create a disabling story right or a critical or cynical story which will then impact in the sense that you come up with a subpar strategy so I always start with State and then you will have a more enabling story which could just be from releasing some norepinephrine because you're freezing your balls off and that will enable you to have a better strategy at least for the day you've got an equivalent quote I think it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting right that seems to be pretty parallel okay so we're in the hot tub yeah hot tub get out at that point I might do a small amount of journaling very something very basic right like five minute journals and it the the exact morning routine kind of depends on the day it's not super highly variable but there is some variation right so if I feel like monkey mind is getting the best of me probably something like journaling whether it's morning Pages or five minute Journal is what I'll do shout out Alex icon yeah it's very short or uh the artist way and morning Pages which are are fantastic and uh at that point I will have already identified the night before or the evening before what's in my calendar for that day and I will say that the daily architecture just to make a a 30,000 foot comment is less important to me than the weekly architecture so we can come back to the day and I could talk about training in say Utah but it's very skiing specific like skiing was the one thing that I was focused on so everything revolved around skiing half the day almost every day that's it so all the PT all the prep the Stuart McGill big three exercises that you're familiar with as well all things hundreds of hours right bead extract and all these things all optimized for skiing making me less [ __ ] at skiing oh yeah exactly and then the second half of the day for a few hours were reserved for the most important High leverage business activities often revolving around on Mondays and Fridays for instance recording so set days for recording set times for recording 10:00 a.m. and 3 p.m. we can go into the reasons for that but Tuesday team calls I find that Weekly architecture for me and I'm not the only person who does this there's some very well-known Tech CEOs who also do this is scaffolding that is a little more helpful than having very type parameters on a daily basis because you're going to have unexpected events although I will say if you have to resp reply to a lot of things within 72 hours then you have broken systems like you should revisit your processes and systems so if you're getting a lot of interruptions that you need to handle yourself as firefighter then you have a processor that include slack instant things email anything if you are if you are the if you're the boss let's just say if you are the CEO or or solopreneur if you're making too many decisions that is as fatal as making some of the wrong decisions too many decisions will also kill you um so I would say that the morning generally for me the thread is do not feel rushed for the first hour if I feel rushed for the first hour I'm going to feel rushed for the whole day and is that uh you have related days in which the morning is rushed psychologically emotionally somatically to days that suck yeah Downstream it tends to be a bad day even if from outside looking in you're like hey you put a lot of points on the scoreboard and you didn't look stressed but my internal experience was one of being very rushed yeah uh and people might hear this and they have kids and they say well must be nice you know my my four-year-old's jumping on my jumping on my solar plexus at 6:00 in the morning and I would say I can't speak to that experience because I haven't I mean someday I hope to be able to speak to that experience uh but uh there are people like Jason gagnard who who for instance uh started Mastermind talks who I haven't interacted with in a long time but he just started waking up earlier you know wake up earlier he does his meditation a little bit of exercise and there are workarounds uh extreme extreme own ownership by Ja o w it's a good one to read um so so you can find ways around it okay so we haven't rushed the morning you've planned the night before what the calendar at least for that day is going to look like you also have a weekly Rhythm and architecture which I've I've fallen in love with too although uh stumbled upon as opposed to Designed in advance uh what about when are you writing when are you training when are you recording and why at those times yeah I would say uh training is generally going to be uh pre- lunch or after work let's just say before dinner I like to train before meals just like right before meals and uh writing is not necessarily a daily activity it probably should be it might end up being I've just seen you finish uh five bullet Friday yeah yeah you saw me do five bow of Friday so I actually do write that myself that is not ghost written that is something I do it's the closest I'll ever get to having a diary so I actually enjoy doing it because I can look back every week well I mean you you convinced me uh God I thought this is so funny things that you take for granted about the world uh in retrospect you realize that you were still maybe early on things so like you with podcasting it kind of appeared perhaps obvious to you you probably had an idea that you were first mover for it but I knew for ago when I started my newsletter God it's the only thing that you own Tim Ferris says it's the only thing that you own and it's the most valuable piece of real estate and everything else is mediated by a thing and you can export that CSV and you can move it anywhere else in the world oh my God I'm so late to the party and now I look back and I go I'm so glad that I started that four years ago and I'm now that guy prizing about like dude you need to get get a lead magnet get a so I know we're bouncing around a little bit and I feel like I'm giving a disappointing answer but there's a reason for the disappointment so um first thing actually just to comment on that when I started my podcast many people told me it was too late they're like that ship is sailed Man 2014 so people are always going to tell you you're too late now we could talk about competition and differentiation separately but the the key takeaway for my very disappointing answer to what is my daily routine is that the exact boot up sequence does not matter what matters is how having at least say 3 hours in a block of time uninterrupted where you can focus on one or two of your highest leverage tasks which have been defined beforehand and those highest leverage tasks could be the things that make you most uncomfortable on your to-do list the things that have been punted week to week to week could also be the things that are most energy in the things that give you the most in terms of recharge so that that can be applied to other things so that's an unlock and having uninterrupted blocks of time that's it if you can single task for 2 to three hours a day it sounds ridiculous but you're going to be ahead of 90% of the population because that's how set whatever you need to do to do that just figure it out that's at night that's first thing in the morning which it is for a lot of people with kids who I know who are very very productive for me first thing in the morning just is not going to work so it tends to be after cold plune this set and the other thing I'll probably have a very very light bike to eat if I'm writing I will write for 2 to three hours and then have a late lunch we'll get back to talking to Tim in one minute but first I need to tell you about nomatic I don't know what backpack Tim Ferris uses but he should be using this puppy right here the team at nomatic make the most functional durable and highest quality best engineered backpacks on the planet your backpack is an intimate part of your daily life it's carrying your most precious cargo you're taking it with you every single day and this is the thing that I used for a full month while I was on tour I didn't need hold luggage it's a scop meant to keep you poor and late hand luggage is all you need if you have a well-designed backpack and this puppy is the best that I've ever found best of all it's got a lifetime guarantee so if anything breaks during the entire life of the product they will give you a new one for free this is the last backpack that you ever need to buy there are thousands of five-star reviews for all of nomatic stuff but this is my pick of the bunch right now you can see all of the products that I use and recommend from nomatic by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Nom matic.com moderns to get a 20% discount sitewide that's Nom matic.com modern wisdom when does busy work come in if there is any busy work's usually Tuesday right so Tuesday so you've blocked it off as an entire day yeah Tuesday is team calls one-on ones looking at one-on-one documents I have like Tim's weekly briefing which is a document that's updated with various subheadings and I can run through those uh email or assigned or shared in various ways and I'll process through that as needed but uh the busy work Creeps in here and there I'm not going to I'm not going to try to put on a show right there are things that uh you need to do that you aren't going to want to do and I wish I could remember who initially told me this but they effectively said those are that is the work the fun stuff doing the interviews that's the upside of the job you chose but the actual work that pays for that yeah are all the little things you don't want to do so just be grateful because that is what allows you to do the things at least for me that I enjoy doing which is having this type of dance increasingly I'm using a a term that I I learned while reading a news story which is the cost of doing business so I think Facebook got a slap on the wrist with some huge fine for a data breach maybe like five or six years ago yeah and um there was criticism because even though it's a amount of money uh to them it's half of one week of one territory's Topline or something like that like it it wasn't sufficiently big and that look what you can do is you factor in this as the price of doing business this is just the cost of operating and I kind of see a lot of those things it's like oh you want to have conversations with people that you that interest you on the show oh you want to be able to work flexibly and you want to earn your own money and you want to be able to sort of craft a narrative and do the blah blah blah it's like hey guess what these aren't bugs the features like this is what comes along for the ride yeah like you're going to feel pressure you're going to have public scrutiny people are going to criticize you there's going to be judgment there's going to be security concern all of these things you have judgment on YouTube I'm really trying to focus on you but the Moon the Moon has just appeared behind you and it's slowly moving away from you um I have a big head you're going to get in the clips it's kind of like two it's kind of like two nice shapes um okay and then what about a windown routine on a on an evening time what a typical afternoon evening look like for you uh afternoon is going to be some type of activity so rock climbing archery you name it some some type of physical activity because my mind is like a border collie right you leave it inside too long it's going to chew the couch so you got to get out and move the body in some capacity so for me it' be some type of movement I walk a lot also I would say I walk I try to walk two to three hours a day if I'm making any calls I try to do them walking Zoom is an Abomination it's helpful for some things but we've solved this problem about being fixed in one place it's called the phone you can talk walk while you are talking we are evolved to walk if you are compromising your walking you are compromising your mental health so not just physical health so I walk a lot uh that that is something that I think is incredibly critical as a foundational piece of everything that I do wind down routine board games watching Netflix with friends nothing super sophisticated I like to do a pre- dinner if I can sauna and then how long what temperature honestly hot as balls for as long as I can do it not to get too not to get too scientific what does that end up being do you think uh it's probably 195 to 200 for 15 to 30 minutes you know my heat tolerance varies tremendously dayto day yeah mine too uh and I don't push it too hard uh I will go as hard you know as far as I can without like feeling as though I'm going to pass out but I won't do two or three rounds if I do two or three rounds I will feel exhausted the next day which is not from dehydration a lot of people think it's from dehydration it's as best I can tell it's not because I've weighed myself before and after and I'm only losing a few pounds of water and I can I can rehydrate that pretty effectively uh I actually I haven't talked about this it's something else and I know this because I participated as a subject in a heat exhaustion study at Stanford when I first moved to the Bay Area the most Tim Ferris sentence that I participated in a heat exhaustion study when I first moved to Stanford oh yeah yeah it was uh it was it was something I would not necessarily recommend they wanted to study this device which was called nickname the glove and it was a cooling device actually very clever and it was effectively this this large chamber that You' stick your hand into you put your hand on this metal orb and it was vacuum sealed around your wrist and it would circulate very cold water through this metal which is highly condu inductive your your hands have a high capillary density capillary do you say capill density and then that cools the blood which then circulates through your body and they were experimenting with using kind cold hand cool a hot body yeah and they were experimenting with using this with very high-end athletes boxers between rounds Etc oh wow and at the time this was also being studied by the military for possible use in in hot climates and since part of the funding was from the military I volunteered to be a subject you go in I'll try to keep this short but it is pretty entertaining and what they needed you to do is basically march to heat exhaustion so you'd put on fatigues there are a few things that would happen before this helmet backpack with weight in it and then you'd go into a sauna on an incline treadmill and just March until you basically collapsed but in order to measure things correctly they would put in an esophageal probe which is about this long and I have a video of this somewhere I stick it in your nose and it goes all the way down your esophagus down to be as close to your heart as possible uh and this was what the Stanford research researchers wanted you tape it to your nose CU you don't want to swallow that thing you can't swallow your epig latus can't close it's very uncomfortable but then the military wants to have some redundant measurement so you had to put in a a rectal probe of equal length to get as close to your core as possible and with both of those things in you then you march to exhaustion and uh what I can say is it water loss was was not as much as you would expect but I was a disaster for the next two days um So to avoid that type of feeling I'll do one round when I do SAA all of that is to say you don't need to do two rounds in the sauna or stick something up your ass or deep throat a pipe yeah I would I would say on a daily basis not necessary I mean unless that's what kind of thing you're into whatever you want to spend ad how long on a good day when uh you've got it right how long are you spending in bed in bed yes 8 to 10 hours right okay yeah I I like I I I would say have pretty fitful sleep not all the time but I have ever since I was a little kid had a lot of onset insomnia that's actually improved a lot in the last I would say year but particularly with some low back issues I tend to have reasonably fitful sleep so I like to budget a bit of extra time uh and I'm not a super sleeper I'm not someone who wakes up four hours after going to bed feeling fully refreshed yeah I mean there are genetic profiles that are predictive of this I heard that the likelihood of you having that genetic mutation that allows you to work on three or four hours sleep is the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning twice that that's the equivalent dice roll it could be a lot of the top endurance athletes that I've met as well as the a lot of of very high level operators from the military basically get vetted to selection the other people wash out how fun uh yeah I've seen that I would say if I am in deeper ketosis then my total number of hours needed for Sleep goes down and I'll wake up after five or six hours feeling fully refreshed and I will not be groggy in the morning so if if I have let's just say 1.5 millimolars or higher in terms of Ketone levels is measured with something like Precision extra then I need much less sleep it's just a pain in the ass to stank kosis I like my tacos yeah we're in Austin that's all loud what did you think would make you happy when you were younger but didn't I would say the short answer is money for sure I grew up in a family without very much money and there was a narrative that I heard a lot at home if only we had more money if only we had more money and a lot of problems were related to money but I came to translate that into if I have success which I need I can prevent the pain and problems and friction and handicaps that we currently have in this family and on some level that's true in so much as money is a vehicle for doing certain things preventing certain things but it doesn't fix the inner game and it's an amplifier just like alcohol power Fame it amplifies whatever is inside the good and the bad if you're generous you're going to be super generous if you're a jerk you're going to be a super jerk if you have anxiety if you're hypervigilant you worry about dangers it's going to magnify all of that and I was I was certainly not prepared for that and I wouldn't trade my trajectory I'm really grateful for having been so fortunate and I've had some exceptionally good luck and so on but do I think it is worth striving to be financially stable and to have freedom and options to the extent that you can within whatever your constraints are absolutely but I think I viewed money as a potential fix all exterior solution to an internal problem which it was not now I will say would I go back in time and tell myself that maybe not because I think I needed some hope even if it was not founded on reality to have something to strive towards so did you get to read uh Will Smith's Memoir with Mark I haven't read it so uh Morgan hell taught me about a line that's in that he said when I was poor and miserable I had hope when I was rich and miserable I was despondent yeah exactly that is the the best synopsis of what I have more clumsily said about many of the mega rich people I know who are very depressed where have I got to go I'm at the top of lad once the money as a goal is taken away as a surgical fix to whatever problems you feel are external but are largely internal it is it can be very psychologically challenging and yes I mean you know small violin and everyone America weeps for the rich and famous who are going to therapy I get it uh but at the same time it's it's it's worth being aware of I think thinking of it as an amplifier is is helpful so on the way up what I would have told myself maybe at 30 is start working on some of the inner game not from a strict performance perspective because I'd been working on mental toughness training for sports and so on and so forth for executing as a machine as an accomplishment machine but working on some of the other things uh is probably what I would have advised myself at 30 35 talk to me about your relationship with Fame what do most people not understand about Fame and status I should ask you that you're fresh in it I'm definitely feeling it at the moment um what have you learned it's strange for the world to see you in a different way and again appropriate caveat head is not getting too big Micro Niche flame almost no one knows me blah blah blah blah blah but um you the same person to you and you are a different person to other people mhm and it's like have you ever seen those videos of swordfish moving through shes and the swordfish is the same thing but the sh kind of bends around it the reality Distortion field is something that only you know because only you know what the previous state that you were in was and how the world interacted with you and you're now well people are treating me differently and you're like is this because of they want something from me how can I trust the people have they got my best interests at heart is this a compliment it kind of is but then also it's why is it making me feel sort of vigilant and uncomfortable and and I'm really uncertain about this and um I mean it's the the biggest champagne problem in the world right like how are you and again it's the same as the America weeps for the Rich and Famous like who is going to say oh boohoo person that has too much attention or whatever but look I've said this before on the show like I'm I'm really enjoying opening up about the process of going from being an absolute nobody to Micron Niche Fame and laying the breadcrumbs behind me as I go because you don't necessarily I don't know what Dwayne Johnson's like Ascension to fame was like or Kevin Hart or whatever whatever and I'd want to know like if I was a fan of a show like this I'd want to know what it feels like to go through a very large change um but again almost everybody has less Fame and money than they want which means that the sympathy always flows downward not upward thanks for answering because you're you're in the thick of it I would say in in my experience first I did write and a blog post that I would recommend people check out uh I think it's 11 reasons not to become famous and that's worth reading because it could inform decisions that you make about your career if you are tempted like a moth to the flame to chase the followers and the likes and the downloads in the views which can be a great tool but if it ends up directing major decisions it's good to have some breaks installed so you can pause and at least examine those decisions especi you don't want your life to be driven by algorithm changes uh and you can also be shaped by your audience into a character of your most extreme beliefs and behaviors and I'll send you an article one of my favorite articles about that the Perils of audience capture by gnda Bogle it's outstanding I have read it that is that is an amazing article so everyone should read that shout out ginda and stepping back then to talking about the fame piece I will say that money power Fame people strive for these things money is in a sense the easiest for me to understand stand because it's taking a life that can seem very abstract or nebulous and shaping it into something that allows you to put points on the scoreboard so I understand that and I'm also from New York so coming from a place where you see a lot of finance and you meet a lot of people in finance that is a that's an animal that's easier for me to understand than say the power of DC or the Fame of La MH those are archetypes that are a less familiar to me all three can be corrupting and on the side of Fame I will say that I was given advice at the time I wasn't aiming to be famous so I kind of tucked it away in the back of my head but when I was in college a friend of mine was the son of a very famous producer in Hollywood and I went to stay with his family at one point and this producer said to me you want everyone one to know your name and no one to know your face now you and I have ended up in a position where that is not the case there is a lot of facial recognition and my experience is Fame helps with a few things occasionally getting into a crowded restaurant or a better seat and access to other people but you can also get access to a broader network with the power or money and I think those are especially money is in a sense a cleaner approach because there are fewer downsides and particularly if that money is not money for money's sake this is not to malign anyone in finance but for instance if someone created a company to solve a problem they had and it turned into a huge company let's take as an example Toby of Shopify and as a byproduct they end up incredibly wealthy and through that wealth and notoriety they then have access to people that is I I think a cleaner route to more upside than downside soby Lu K could walk through here now and I don't know if anyone in the room would recognize who he was yeah except for me except for you yeah sweetheart of a guy too incredible those guys are it's it's really nice to see when the good guys win he's an example of that awesome uh as are a lot of the Shopify guys the the tradeoffs in terms of privacy and security are significant even on a very micro level I don't know if you've experienced this I would imagine you've had some strange interactions or inbound I seem to attract a very unreasonably reasonable audience so far but I also understand the LW of large numbers yeah and I completely uncited must once a week quote from your article which says million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York City yeah um if you have any sufficiently large data set of people you begin to get outlier events and then as you scale that up toward a billion downloads you know whatever percent of the population of psychopaths whatever percent of that percentage of psychopaths are sufficiently motivated whatever percentage of d d all the way down live within the region that you do and it's like hey that's 200 people yeah um or whatever you know you pick whatever it is that you want like the person that really needs something and you're the guy Y and all of this is part of the reason why particularly as I look forward to hopefully my next big adventure which will be family having kids and so on have some pre prere to check first like girlfriend uh that is usually an intermediary yeah it doesn't have to be but I i' prefer that to be part of the process um so back back on the single scene wink wink ladies who are listening uh if you SK your snowboard let me know so uh part of the reason that I'm thinking about potentially not going to something new but something old in the form of writing instead of emphasizing video is for this reason I don't think I can fully put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube but I do think with the churn rate of content and the sheer volume of video and audio that is created the saturation that the Decay rate of Fame is going to increase in speed right so the half life of Fame is going to go down in other words 10 years ago friends would send around a video and you would see that clip for a week or two it would make the rounds how long is it now 10 seconds and I think that'll be true also for new cycle Andy the fame cycle that's my hope at least for me because I don't want to sustain facial recognition I would love for that to Decay over time I certainly from what I see and I've taken this uh absorbed this vicariously from you from Rogan uh from Douglas Murray as well uh Douglas once sat me down a couple of years ago I was asking him about his dealings with Fame too he said uh one piece of advice keep your private life private yeah and uh Joe has done a phenomenal job as someone who's you know infinitely more scrutinized than I'll ever be uh I don't know the name of his wife I don't know where they go for walks I don't know like maybe he goes to restaurants but it's never to do with that I don't know the name of his kids I don't know what they're studying I don't really know much about him it's it's nowhere near he I think he almost purposefully and this is the best way to do it makes his um private life seems so boring like he purposefully sort of avoids that and kind of glosses over it that there's never enough hooks for velcro to attach to it and I think that that that seems to be a smart a smart process yeah don't don't dox your family or your close friends as a general rule of thumb tell you what's it'll come back and bite you in the ass because if you have motivated stalkers or the town lunatic happens to take an interest in you and like you said which is also something that I've written about if you look at your audience size as analogous to a town size or a city size it's like okay if you're in this if you're in a town of a thousand people how many Village crazies do you have one or two okay and you just multiply that out once you have an audience the size of yours or of mine over time especially where you have transients you're going to have some people who have infinite time and unreasonable curiosity about you yeah uh and they may not have malicious intent sometimes they will but there are going to be crazy people with a lot of time who are actually pretty smart like their Hardware is good their software is bad and for that reason from a very early point you should not I would not suggest having your family anywhere online there's just no upside and they didn't often opt into this so you are making decisions for people and you should perhaps talk to them first in other news this episode is brought to you by momentus trust really is everything when it comes to supplements and that is why I rely on momentus they have the most rigorous third-party testing of any supplement company that I have ever found everything that they make is NSF certified for sport meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it and that ensures that what they say is in the packet is actually in the packet their sleep packs are one of my favorite products which I use every single night before bed they contain only the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep on a nighttime stay asle sleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning best of all there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free try it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back right now you can get a 20% discount on everything sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to liv.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom checkout that's Liv m o m n t o us.com wisdom the code modern wisdom a checkout uh speaking of that I also recently became single what have you learned about all the ladies you were just considering me went no that's incorrect that's incorrect I I'm bad SK and I'm bad at I'm bad at snowboarding um what have you learned about choosing a good partner and the limitations of that is love something which is outside of being hackable and optimized I I think there are certainly X factors I don't I don't it's best I can tell I would have figured it out by now if you could reverse engineer it perfectly and just flip a switch uh but I do think over time as you have long relationships and I've been really fortunate to have a number of long relationships I mean multiple relationships in the sort of 3 to six year range with amazing people you learn what seems to work for you and what seems to not work which is not automatically a judgment of the other person it's a judgment of yourself and having a realistic evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses and so on uh so I've certainly found that to me a lot of things are important number one this seems obvious but it's not always obvious because we sometimes gravitate towards our own strengths so if someone is analytical they look for someone who is highly analytical and I think there's a a there are certain base requirements for a good partner you want them to be good problem solvers you want them to be resilient and so on but I'm looking for a compliment I want someone with incredibly High EQ which doesn't mean I have no EQ and I've worked hard to develop it but I want someone who has that as a superpower I would say like my prefrontal cortex is a superpower for other things and I do not want to date a long-haired version of myself throw me off throw me off a skyscraper now no thank you right um and I also want someone I've thought about this very carefully and you I've dated a bit in the last year uh which is sort of the period of my dating so far respect isn't enough because respect is something that people can demand in a sense it's not respect because I feel like that is given it's admiration if I go on two dates with someone I want to be inclined to tell my friends about her and brag about some aspect of her aside from like she is the best ass I've ever seen right it has to be something more than that nothing against Great asses I mean those are fantastic too but it's it's I want to admire my partner and if they're soft spoken and we're at a group dinner I want to say she's not going to say this so I'll say it for her boom and feel really good about doing that and there's a lot more to it I have thought about this uh I mean I could give you my my sort of list of of criteria but it's it's also fundamentally a it's a feeling which is why dating apps can be so incredibly time consuming because what you could learn somebody please make a dating app where the sole purpose is to get people on a 10-minute video call that's it that's it the stated purpose is just 10-minute video call and it's built intrinsically into the app that's it that's the only goal of the app because virtual speed within 2 minutes you know if there is some type of vibe you know if your Spider Sense is saying go or no go and uh I would also say as someone who in a sense took my hyper sensitivity offline because my senses are very sensitive like I am a very not in a uh reactive sense easily offended sense but in the context of my my senses being very high fidelity I took that offline for a lot of my life due to Childhood problems and so on but bringing those back online was important not just for dating but also for navigating the fame stuff because as you have more notoriety people are going to seek you out who you need to be wary of and that's not all the time it's not half of the people but you will have people with ulterior motives and so you want to be very tuned in not to what your analytical mind is producing but to what your prel language evolved other means of assessment are telling you what your body is telling you this is what I'm kind of obsessed by at the moment that uh feeling feelings and integrating emotions is um I know it just seemed for a long time I had I had a desire I guess I still do you know to be seen as a a legitimate thinker like somebody who has intellectual horsepower and a capacity to be rational and do all the know you know went hardcore down the rationality movement and if if only I can learn Shane parish's top 100 cognitive biases off by heart then all of my problems if I read if I can recite thinking fast and slow all of my problems will be turns out that that doesn't particularly work and one of the reasons it doesn't particularly work is that no matter how much you try to sort of clamp down on what's coming up the thing that is coming up is the issue and papering over that crack over and over and over again results in you just playing emotional Groundhog Day and then having an increasingly uh complex Cathedral of different architectures to try and hey that good um to try and uh architector structure to account for it yeah and um I told you before sort of big into this feeling feelings thing or trying to at the moment and um yeah finding not just being at the mercy of them but not just totally being in cognitive horsepower mode and trying to integrate those together and that's fundamentally what you're looking for with a partner as well and M there's something in a relationship uh where you go well objectively all of the boxes have been ticked why can't I get my love attachments lust side to trigger as well like look all of the thing I mean if you look at the rating the rating says you should could be in a relationship with this person yeah and you go yeah but ultimately the heart wants what the heart wants and you don't really get to reverse engineer that and there can be an awful lot of Shame and guilt I've certainly felt this an awful lot of Shame and guilt around um having desires about being like this is the I want a thing yeah who am I to want that thing who are you who are you to make demands of this should you not subjugate your desires in order to serve something which is safer or more peaceful or more familiar or more comfortable or whatever uh and ultimately I think you are fighting a losing battle like your emotions are going to just rip you away from that over time yeah if that X Factor isn't there doesn't matter what you try to rack up in terms of spreadsheets if it's not there especially in the it has to be there in the beginning yeah if the honeymoon period isn't good like what the the marriage isn't going to be I'll also ask myself these days because it's what I'm looking for is you know in 3 to 5 years could this person be my best friend let's say three years and there's a lot that goes into that right there's a lot that goes into that so these are things that I think about uh I am clear on my desires and what I want I'm very clear on that I don't have uh spreadsheet I don't have too much uh conflict I would say about that I definitely have very specific things that I like and that's important to be clear I think where you get into trouble and where you end up being really unfair to people is if you are unclear on what you want and if you are unclear on aspects of yourself that you ironically expect other people to understand when you yourself don't have a grasp of the basics of you yourself uh that's when you're unfair but if if you know what you like and you pursue what you want and what you feel that you need yeah all the more power to you I think Clarity is power and you know there something I say for myself as much as anybody else but you know life rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish like you specificity and you can leave the door open to Serendipity for sure but are you in an environment are you in a life that provides sufficient Serendipity such that you can leave something like this purely chance I don't live in that life I suspect you do not live in that life you have a lot going on so you have to have intentionalism you have to have some intention and you have to well have to is too strong a word but have enough surface area and I'm borrowing this from someone else but surface area for luck to stick but I think with some conditions so that you don't get seduced by the things that have led you astray in the past right there are there are certain archetypes that I'm very very attracted to that I know are problematic for from a compatibility perspective it's not necessar super unhealthy but I know that it's not going to be viable we've gone down this road before unsuccessfully Neil Strauss absolutely broke my brain last year where he said unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments yeah yeah Claire Hughes Johnson uh who helped build Stripe from thought a few hundred employees to 6,000 plus she did basically every job coo included uh she said to me recently well she underscored the importance of making the implicit explicit I just think so much pain can be avoided so much can be achieved just make the implicit explicit direct communication do not expect anyone to be a mind reader when in doubt spell it out easier said than done but I really tried to live that so much of that is habituated though and it it the tone can be set the Rhythm can be set in a friendship you know there there will be friends that you have uh family members that you have where you have a different Cadence of uh communication and openness and honesty and and everything than other people okay so you can do it with some people it is possible for you to set the tone yeah with particular people in that way and again this is something that needs to be very intentional but it's kind of like a onetime a one-time large decision that really sets the tone that you then just continue to top up but if you start off from a place of the implicit being kept implicit then when that changes oh this feels a little bit alien to me this isn't really what I expected in the beginning and uh yeah I I really think that the first two months of dating somebody are unbelievably important for setting expectations this is what we expect from each other this is the way like that's your uh uh January to uh March training window that's the diet you know like the New Year's resolutions will be stuck to the best and then kind of have a hopefully come into land at a nice appropriate level thereafter one of the other things uh for better or worse that we're both uh familiar with is low mood um what are the things that you do to pull yourself out of a funk or how would you advise people to better deal with depression and anxiety or low mood I really think an outs of prevention is worth a pound of cure with this so I I try to prophylactically have routines in place that seem to decrease the likelihood including cold exposure which for a long time was prescribed for melancholy right this is this is not new but like Medieval Times uh like 200 years ago like it was it was a prescription cold baths for melancholy AKA depression so this is what what is old is now new again uh but but certainly cold exposure I would say without a doubt having a consistent exercise routine and something is better than nothing like the difference the Z to one difference between no movement and some movement is black and white so even if it is just going for a 20 minute walk twice a day if you have a very packed Day schedule your calls around your walks social time time with friends which is where I disagree with some of the very strong denouncements of say alcohol um in the sense that like even one drink is terrible for you that may be true from a strictly biochemical perspective and I'm not advising you go out and get shitfaced five nights a week but for instance if one night a week I pre-schedule a group dinner on a Friday and I'm going to cook with friends and that means we drink wine while we're cooking if that alcohol acts as a super Lu a social lubricant and helps me connect with my friends I think there's something to it right there there are social effects not just biochemical effects I don't drink very much but uh the group interactions and scheduling those in advance so on a yearly basis I will block out this is very important for me and again not obsessing on the daily routine but thinking about the weekly which we've dis which we've discussed thinking about the annual so I block out multiple weeks every year year to take trips with family and friends and I have two that I'm organizing right now these are week- long trips there will be let's call it six to 10 people in each group some will be slightly smaller for Wilderness adventures and those are blocked out for the year in advance and this is really critical for a few reasons it's not just about the experience you have all of the group threads and excitement and training and prep and fantasizing and you know stupid dick meme jokes that guys swap or whatever in the WhatsApp groups that lead up to the trip then you have the trip and then you have all the memories and the shared experiences and the Misadventures and the mishaps that you get so much juice out of these things and those act for me as psychological safety nets you always have something to look forward to if you have three or four of these a year that's in big part the podcast I think for me I think we're both kind of the same with this that um the external accountability of someone being there there is a time on the calendar someone is expecting you to be there they are a guest you probably respect them you probably care about what they think about you you probably want to perform well for them and also put them in a great light and and and be a springboard for them and their message because you're interested in what they've got to do all of those things it's like you're not not showing up I've never once I've cancelled in my my previous Life as a club promoter I would not show up for events I would not show up for bits and PE because I could always sort of work somebody else to go and do a thing if it was just me that had to do it but as soon as even one other person was involved or 2,000 appearing at a nightclub I'd be there and I would be there because there was accountability and there was there was this expectation I have never once cancelled a podcast in 750 episodes 6 and a half years due to low mood no matter how low the mood is because there's I I I it it gets taken out it gets eroded away by my excitement to go and do the thing and the same thing is true with a holiday and the same thing is true with uh dinner with a friend the same thing like it's the same reason why a training partner just makes so much sense when you can like I'm every Saturday for instance in Austin I do the same session with Progressive Overlord the same exercises with the same guy we've done this for two years it's one of my favorite days of the week Saturday morning I'm full of caffeine shoulders biceps and triceps starting with coughs best day of the week and and I love it and every single Saturday no matter how [ __ ] the week's gone no matter how bad I'm feeling if we're available and we're both in the city we're both go and do it so let me build on that and say another piece of managing or mitigating or preventing low mood for me is having some identity diversification which means you're not just doing one thing if you have your podcast your startup your job as the sole uh barometer of your selfworth there's so So Many Factors outside of your control or your Investment Portfolio whatever it might be if you were solely fixated on one thing you're too vulnerable to Black Swan events or simply ups and downs due to variables that are outside of your control so in contrast if you have your Saturday workout or you have your deadlift you have rockl you have archery you have whatever it might be in addition to your primary work in addition to drawing in addition to your relationship that you're trying to cultivate and deepen if any one of those things is down just like in a stock portfolio correct if they are somewhat uncorrelated you can still have a good week if you have a terrible week but then you hit a PR on your Saturday workout we did it baby we did it yeah yeah yeah you're hedging you're hedging your identity you're hedging your sort of existential investment yeah exactly and that that is very very very important to me that I have multiple tracks running at the same time so that if if one hits a roadblock that it's it's not just an existential spiral we'll get back to talking to Tim in one minute but first I need to tell you about Maui Nei venison Maui Nei delivers the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door first off the venison sticks are seriously delicious not gamey at all and unbelievably convenient to eat no one accidentally hits their protein goals and these little puppies will help you throughout the day if you're traveling if you're on the road or if you're just a rushed human like the rest of us these things will help you to hit your protein goals and ensure that you're getting good quality meat throughout the day not only do they provide the most nutrient-dense and high protein red meat available they're the 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happiness from tomorrow as and there isn't much there isn't going to be much someone put it to me and if you compromise your sleep for me generally low mood if we want to call it depression does not actually it's not a first call cause for me I would say it's it's typically some type of anxious rumination worrying about something I compromise my sleep because I have onset insomnia then I consume too much caffeine which further compromises my sleep and then after three or four days that's when the low mood SL depressive symptoms show up yeah so anything that compromises sleep I try to avoid in that in that period um three to four friends yeah exactly dinners three to four friends I would say there are also a few other things which I'm very hesitant to mention because they come with a lot of caveats and a lot of people should be excluded because there are contraindications and risks but I would say psychedelic assisted therapies once or twice a year and also something called accelerated TMS which has been a recent discovery of mine although I've been familiar with the TMS technology for more than decade but the more recent iteration of accelerated TM what's T TMS TMS is transcranial magnetic stimulation it's a type of brain stimulation it's a type of brain stimulation and this particular protocol has been pioneered by a number of people one of the better known is Dr Nolan Williams who's out of Stanford and you're effectively taking traditional TMS where you might have 30 plus treatments over several months and compressing it into one week so you're doing 10 treatment sessions a day for 5 days so you're doing 50 sessions of brain stimulation over 5 days how long are they they're very short uh they're in my experience 8 to 10 minutes they're not painful they can be uncomfortable for some people but it feels like a a mild finger flick on the head very tolerable and I will say that this right now is the technology and the intervention that has my interest very solidly above and beyond Psych assisted therapies which I focused on since 2015 in a public forward- facing supporting science type of capacity because the Psychedelic treatments are not widely available there are quite a few hurdles left to pass from a regulatory perspective and also from a scientific perspective let's just say that people with a family history of schizophrenia BPD borderline personality disorder people who might have some some family history of leaning towards the chaos side of things as opposed to rigidity rigidity might be OCD yeah chronic or treatment resistant depression anxiety which I I view and I'm not a psychiatrist or a doctor I don't play one on the internet but as as forms of thought loops and rigidity those seem to respond reasonably well in some people to psychedelic assisted therapy but there are also people even though these compounds like psilocybe but are not intrinsically physiologically toxic you can still have in intense psychological experiences and say if someone has very high blood pressure or cardiac issues I think that many of them should not take psychedelics even if they're physiologically well tolerated and normals accelerated TMS is a safe accelerated TMS has a a much more favorable safety profile for people who would fall into a lot of these categories it's still very preliminary I would say there are a few hundred people probably a thousand who've been treated using accelerated TMS but the results that I've seen the effect sizes the transformations in people directly that I've seen are pretty remarkable and for me the most durable reduction in anxiety the most durable dramatic reduction in all forms of insomnia has come after accelerated TMS which I did for the one week for the second time I did two rounds and the first round ended up uh using one particular device with more of a shotgun pattern that didn't work for me because for lack of a a more technical way to put it the onoff switch for the anosmatic Target in my brain um are too close together so they were hitting both the on and the off switch the basically canceled the effects out and this is a theory but with more precise neurot targeting using fmri and then uh this particular mapping technology the second time around it did work and it's been it's been pretty remarkable you should not DIY this there are lots of you mean I can't just get a car battery and there are lots of videos online of people buying things off of Amazon and diying this you can [ __ ] yourself up in a big way do not try at home brain stimulation you're going to win a Darwin Award don't do it wow yeah but this is something that I see at the Forefront of potential mental health interventions for treatment resistant depression for anxiety for conditions like OCD although OCD I think appears to be a little trickier uh so th those would be my truly in case of emergency break glass but what's important to note is that I have these things prescheduled right I'm not waiting until I'm in a really acute space which is the time when you are least likely to be to have the motivation to be able to book in a right if we come back to State story strategy right what's your state terrible depressive personalized permanent this is this is how could I be like this I'm always like this I'm never going to be able to fix this so what's your story it's not worth even trying should I even continue da da you have this so your strategy is going to be dog [ __ ] dog [ __ ] or non-existent uh I would say in very very acute situations if someone has suicidal ideation then I think there is a place for intravenous or intramuscular ketamine treatment in clinics but I will say I've seen more high functioning people unravel in the last three years from ketamine than any other substance in terms of addiction it is very very psychologically addictive and that has not had enough AirPlay have you uh been exposed to this ketamine oxytocin nasal spray that is being yeah I've seen it floating around floating around Austin yeah I mean yeah you should not have ketam at home in my opinion something that takes 0 one of a second to just yeah it's it's being treated like hangover-free alcohol and I hate to tell people but there's no biological free lunch and in the short term you do not get automatically punished for using kind of mean which creates the illusion that there is no cost in the long term you can make yourself much more susceptible to depression so it actually has the inverse effect of the so it really is a break glass scenario yeah don't I don't plan on personally using ketamine myself I do know a number of people who have had their lives positively transformed and have not succumbed to any type of addiction in every case that is supervised in clinic use once or twice a year you mean my season in ather in 2010 doesn't count yeah the Camel Back full academy doesn't count what a shame in other news this episode is brought to you by element stop having coffee first 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drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom do you think deep thinkers are more lonely yeah my knee-jerk response to that would be yes for sure I think anyone who is very heady and trapped in the song of me me me in the sense of like recursive thought is going to likely feel isolated and I would say that there may be some argument to be made that with that superpower comes a secondary function which is like a shielding function to not feel to divorce yourself from certain bodily Sensations which is part of the reason not to drag this back into ketamine why ketamine is so seductive for type a highly analytical males and it's not to say that women can't become addicted but from what I've seen it is predominantly male who want to avoid feeling something and that could be subconscious or it could be conscious but it serves the same purpose as alcohol so if you if your family or you have ever used alcohol to take the edge off you are susceptible to ketamine addiction is what I would say similarly you are susceptible to basically viewing your Consciousness and existence from the neck up and I think both can have severe side effects in terms of social side effects sort of psycho emotional side effects certainly there's a a quote from from alander Boton where he says loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind I don't know if I agree with that so I used to I think it can be a tax I used to um I the position that I've arrived at now especially since moving to Austin which is kind of full of cultural psychological refugees from other places where they maybe didn't fit in in any case uh is that you just maybe need to work harder to find your tribe MH that um your uh psychological uh non-typical uh will mean that you are out toward the edges of whatever bell curve of normal of normalness you are so it's going to be fewer people are going to get you but I actually think that that's fine because the people that you do find that you do like and do get on with you will also have that like Oasis in the middle of the desert sensation that's like oh dude you get me like you you think about this too yeah and I I I think while I was still living in the UK I was struggling to connect with people I you know met a million people across my career of standing on the front door of nightclubs and I had a handful of friends most of whom I worked with in one form or another yeah that's not a fantastic friend exposure to conversion ratio like my marketing funnel wasn't marketing right wasn't converting uh I should speak to Toby and then I came to Austin and I realized that well there is a bit more like there it's not been as hard and maybe that's starting to self- select because people kind of are seeking me out and obviously you know like advantages of Fame I suppose or at least of like being frontf facing um but I I think that in the wrong groups yes loneliness can be a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind but it also offers you the opportunity like the only way out is through and through means working maybe a bit harder to find people that are like the people that you want to be around yeah I also I also feel like those who are good at thinking sometimes become hammers looking for nails I know that's true for me in the sense that we think for instance and this this might not be explicit but that we can citate our way in into equinity inner peace you mean we can't I can't do that and there's this fetishizing of Independence especially in the US yeah where if you look for apes monkeys certainly historically hominids who were lone survivors I don't think you're going to find them right we are interdependent as a species we've evolved to coexist so for me I used to view loneliness as a failure of self like a failure of discipline a failure of resilience a failen a failure of inner narrative something like that I think it's much much simpler in the sense that loneliness is usually a failure of group activities in your calendar you know just like you might be doing morning Pages for an hour trying to figure out the riddles of your life and the complexities of your pain it's like no you just need some macademia nuts and a cup of water and a shower you haven't trained in four days yeah you you're you have low blood sugar go eat something yeah I think uh I tweeted this out the other day 90% of problems can be fixed by a good night's sleep a glass of walk water a talk with a friend or a training session like yeah yeah and I I I also will often say to my significant others I'll just say look if I'm trying to like reason my way out of something and you just see me grinding the gears in my head at the table with a notebook just tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for an hour great success yeah tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for a bit lots of people that are listening might feel uh hypervigilance always scanning for threats fear based motivations being something that their varying levels of awareness is something that drives them the benefits of it aren't maybe as obvious but I think people that have hypervigilance of which I'm one I think that you are one as well uh they can be addictive in some ways because the attention that you pay to things and the Precision with which you assess what you're doing and the um care and dextrous with which you go about things is like but that's my competitive advantage that's something that I love yeah what have you come to learn or believe about hypervigilance and a sort of fear-based view of the world I'm going to bounce that back and then I'll answer what's how would you answer that question double edge sword man double-edged sword um the thing that makes me competitive which is my attention to detail and the fact that I care and the fact I try to be precise is also the thing which makes it less enjoyable in the moment and right now I'm trying to optimize for how I feel moment to moment I really want to enjoy the process of things given that almost all of every journey is Journey not destination like destination is going to be the final pertile of the thing it's the day that you get to sit down it's the whatever it's like what's your day-to-day texture of experience like how does your mind feel and uh optimizing for the outcome as opposed to the process has got the bar stol upside down it's pretty uncomfortable to sit on uh um so it's a good way to put it I I I'm kind of still you know like that's again cognitively that's what I can tell you emotionally when it comes to me letting go of my hypervigilance that's a much tougher thing I can tell you the story right I can give you that like nice bow [ __ ] parcel and push it across the table but I'm still very much a work in progress with all of this stuff uh and it's one of the reasons why I feel for guys like uh huberman or AA who have genuine expertise because there is a standard that they are able to communicate at and an a level of understanding that they maybe privately feel like they need to live up to mercifully being a bro scientist rather than a real scientist I have much greater degrees of freedom to mess up and you know again people can performatively do this to protect themselves in a way that I think is it's uh tactically advantageous to say I'm just an idiot I don't know what I'm talking about it's like ah I get I I understand but there's only so far so many times you can say that whilst also proping about what it is that you know and how people should do things but genuinely I you know I'm I'm massively a work in progress and just trying to breadcrumbs behind me so long story hypervigilance good for a competitive Advantage but it is very difficult um when it comes to enjoying stuff dayto day and I want to enjoy things I don't want to look back on a wildly successful life where my cortisol was super high and I I stressed every every moment of getting there I identify with that uh I I think this is this is one of my major projects in life and I can justify and explain the hypervigilance Every Which Way from Sunday but I will say that historically when I've been worried about Losing My Edge especially when it's not very well defined with say meditation this is a common concern with people who have never meditated they worry about losing their Edge and competitive Drive every time I've Incorporated something like Transcendental Meditation no knowing that in the FAQ one of the most asked questions is will I lose my Edge I've not experienced that losing of the edge in terms of actual outcomes the process becomes less stressful but I've not paid that sort of ultimate tax which also is worth cross-examining in the sense that at what point would you be willing to sacrifice some of your competitive Advantage yeah if so how much right these are actually good questions how much of your competitive Advantage what is that competitive Advantage exactly let's put that under a microscope I I [ __ ] I wrote about this a year ago or two years ago said your your Neurosis is not helping your performance yeah I think that I I've thought about this and I think that it's between five and 10% yeah I don't think it's very much no I really don't think it's that much and so one of the ways I've approached this from a work perspective is trying to put my meticulous hyper vigil into trying to train other people to get to at least 90 95% of what I could do let me infect you or just train and then also be inspired when they do things that I wouldn't have ever thought of doing and I'm not the best manager I'll be the first person to say that which is part of the reason why I have the positive constraint of keeping my team very small but number one is awareness right step number one is awareness which is part of the reason why I reread the book aptly named awareness by Anthony Dello I reread that probably twice a year which helps to put you in a position where you step out of yourself and observe some of your thought patterns and beliefs that are driving your behaviors also why I do the introductory course with Sam Harris on the waking up app which is a very old program in terms of that particular 30-day process I do that probably once or twice a year these are all to clean the lens through which I'm looking at myself and there are tools that help with this although I think it is largely a horoscope for men who would never admit to liking horoscopes the anagram I think has some value so I'm a self-preservation six and when you read that description though part of the benefit of reading that description is you do not feel alone so the nickname for that category is the loyalist and I really don't speak anagram I know very little about it but it is helpful to know that you are not uniquely flawed in scanning your environment for threats and paying attention to every minute detail including when it's not necessary uh all of that helps with the base Foundation which is awareness and this is a this is a constant process it's like your knives get dull you need to sharpen your knives this happens over and over it's just a process for me at least and then I would say there are a few exercises that are very helpful not necessarily on a day-to-day basis but on a monthly or quarterly basis this exercise that I call fear setting where I'm looking at the actual worst case scenarios I'm getting very explicit about detailed examples of what I am fearful of and then looking at the likelihoods the probabilities what I could do if they happen to reverse the damage what I could do to avoid them Etc what the cost of inaction is if there's something that's just been sitting on my to-do list or in my calendar that I've been avoiding not just what is the risk of doing this thing but what is the cost of an action maybe it's just thinking about it all the [ __ ] time and having it run in the background and affect my sleep and distract me from other things yeah these are all very helpful and I would say at its core also having a very big yes is important if you're trying to juggle five or six projects that are cool but not really capturing your full attention because for whatever reason they keep you up at night in the best way possible thinking about the possibilities of something if I don't have that that single big yes I think the the bullet Ricochet is around inside the skull which leads to more hyper vigilence because I'm also trying to juggle more things mhm so the more I try to multitask I would say the more likely I am to act hypervigilant and I do think there there's also an art to letting small bad things happen and practicing letting small bad things happen to prove to yourself that it's not the end of the world yeah you're not the president of the universe things are fine the whole world isn't going to fall down around you generally speaking dude so much of what you've just said has been something that I've ruminated about or written about or spoken about or thought about over the last few years that idea of uh the cost of inaction I came up with this term of anxiety cost like opportunity cost and uh all of the time that you think I still need to meditate today I still need to meditate today I still need to meditate today every single time that you think that thing you could have gotten rid of that had you just meditated earlier yeah for sure and uh yeah that thing Stacks up talking about books what are the most commonly gifted books that you have given to other people awareness by Anthony Dello I think the subtitle is the promise the promises and Perils of reality something like that very short read apocalyptic yeah it's it's tough love book it's not for everybody but it's it's good medicine for the right people at the right time so wearen this by Anthony Dello and I have a full shelf of this book in my guest bedroom in my house it's all the same book yeah for fantastic uh I have a few shelves that are all independently filled with different books that are books I gift another one is gold which is a collection of roomy poetry new translations um by Hela Lia Gori I believe her name is outstanding collection also very easy to read not intended to be red front to back it's just like a little night cap little night cap before you go to sleep and I do think the sort of U Mystic inspired poetry since it can be so slippery from the standpoint of language but it's very evocative from a feeling perspective is very good for heady people to read before bed as a way of pulling themselves out of the Tactical practical nitpicky [ __ ] that they might obsess over otherwise I find it very calming so that's that's another that I a lot how to change your mind by Michael pollen I have a number of copies of in part because I get so many questions about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapies is in the science and that's very very good primer for people who want an overview as is the Netflix series minseries how to change your mind especially the MDMA and Sil saan episodes which have some fantastic case studies for a period of time and I could still do this but it's not the chapter that I find myself in currently the effective executive by Peter Ducker think if you want one book on being effective doing the right things not just being efficient doing whatever you're doing quickly and well the effective executive as old as it is is how old is that book now the best that I have found couldn't even tell you 30 40 50 still holds up oh yeah still holds up what about fiction fiction there are a number of books I've gifted a lot motherless Brooklyn which is uh basically a detective Noir story that was also turned into a movie by Edward Norton and the adaptation was very good there's a standin for Robert Moses uh famous from the book The Power broker I mean famous for other reasons but uh that was very well done adaptation it's about a detective with trette syndrome so there are a lot of laughs as well uh but wonderfully written book uh that's shorter there are many many fiction books that I could recommend to folks if I'm trying to convert a non-fiction purist into someone who can who can consider fiction because I think fiction often describes truth in a stickier way than non-fiction completely agreed well look at what non the best non-fiction tries to do it uses stories right don't make a point without the story don't have a story without a point yeah so even though it's it's just like the cold plunge a little a little too much dour to sound original but I think the first dune for instance you want to study leadership the first dune I think Ender Game is fantastic I think these appeal especially to to Naes who are full of piss and vinegar but they're both very good uh I'll give you a number of of different books that come to mind now now that I'm thinking of my bookshelves I have books arranged on my bookshelves to elicit very particular responses from me as I see them I'm really methodical about my bookshelves of wolves and Men is a non-fiction book by Barry Lopez beautifully written changed the entire let's call it genre of naturalistic writing it just showed what was possible it broke the category it Incredible Book of wolves and Men there is a fiction book that I was given by my brother I failed to read it three times but my brother has 100% hit rate with me with books and so I assumed it was user error meaning I was screwing up somehow which I was there's a book nine out of 10 people are going to hate this book I'm just going to tell you up front but 10% are going to have their minds blown wide open it's called Little Big Little Big by John Crowley I think the alternate title is the fairies par Parliament let me try that again the alternate title is the fairy Parliament and this book is the closest thing to a fever dream or a psychedelic experience that I've ever found in terms of literature John growley is a very skilled poet who weaves together this tapestry of time and parallel stories history and family trees that is unlike anything I've ever seen and for literally hours and days is after I would read this book and I'll give a tip the takeaway from my initial user in a second but it would affect my perception of reality and time not in a disruptive way for weeks after I finished this book used with ction yeah it didn't disrupt but it it will really change how you interpret the world at least it did for me the recommendation having gone through this number one take a photograph of the family tree that is from the beginning of the book you're going to need it okay don't fixate on it because it will have too many spoilers but at least have it handy if you get really confused the second is this is not a book that you can read 10 pages of put down and pick up four days later you need to plow through the first 150 Pages there are too many plates you need to spin but if you do that if you get to the talking fish it'll make sense when you get there and when you get to the talking fish you're G be like what the [ __ ] a talking fish what kind of book is this then that's when things really get going cool and the strangest thing one of the strangest things about this book to me is I couldn't really tell you what it's about it is such a fever dream of a book it's bizarre beyond words but beautiful beyond description I'll give one more and then we can stop there are a lot of books I can recommend so Milan kundera has a book called The Book of laughter and forgetting which is a collection of short stories incredible incredible that's fiction will really take you through a whole Kaleidoscope of emotions which was part of training to get back on that bike and bring emotions back online I was also exploring music for this especially Persian Arabic aerb johani music you mean you were listening to music whilst reading I'm sorry I was listening to music separately that is not from the Western Cannon because you can make a pretty compelling argument that certain types of music have a larger emotional range than others that's better suited for some musicologist or m music theorist to get into but uh the book of laughter and forgetting and then on the fiction side if you're really interested in sci-fi and you've already you've already hit Dune maybe if you're a fantasy nerd you've already hit the Name of the Wind which would also be top W yes yes phenomenal we could get into fantasy but I don't want to take us too far I do have other fantasy recommendations the short story is by Ted Chang c h i a n g his second collection is exhalation the first is harder to recall in terms of the collection name but if you've ever seen the movie arrival which is a fantastic movie that was based on one of his short stories his short stories are Beyond incredible is this across multiple collections one collection there are two collections that I'm I'm aware of he may have a new collection that I haven't seen yet but either collection well will be incredibly satisfying I've I've I've yet to recommend that to a single person who has not replied with multiple wtfs yeah oh my God this guy is amazing yeah I'll give you two I'll give you one one fiction and one fiction so the non-fiction is the ape who understood the universe by Steve Stewart Williams okay uh evolutionary psychologist currently out in Singapore works at the University of Nottingham it is the best overview of evolutionary psychology it's um in terms of Behavioral ecology it's also very well informed with how we interact with the environment sex differences in the brain uh everything sexual selection full works it is and it's so accessible and it begins by uh an alien looking down on our behavior from above and trying to work out what we're doing the ape who understood the universe uh and from a fiction perspective my highest hit rate of this it's I think I'm at 100% this and I it's my most recommended book Red Rising by pi Brown that thing it's been recommended to me should come with a [ __ ] warning label on it like you talk about ketamine like no no no no no Red Rising that's the thing that people that's the real substance that people need to be concerned about if you can get through the first 60 Pages if you can get out of the minds which you'll understand if you read it you are locked in and he's now up to book Seven I think and there's some novelas and blah blah blah that being said Patrick rothus if you do happen to be listening two hours into this podcast please for the love of God we beg you write the third book write the third book there's so much to be done yeah but anyway uh one other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently are um odd purchases or purchases that I'm spending an inordinate amount of money on compared with what people think I should spend on it for me bed linen has become makes a difference pet Obsession high quality bamboo bed linen MH absolute GameChanger you think about the quality of your mattress you think about the type of pillow that you using all the rest of it but the actual way that your skin interacts with your bed is directly through that bamboo cotton wipes the floor with high thread count normal cotton it's easier than silk and it doesn't make you feel like you're going to slide off the bed if it's if something happens um for you what are the things that you have found are worth spending more money on than most people would consider acceptable say I met this this woman my friend's mother in Panama at one point and just kind of out of nowhere I think it was no it wasn't out of nowhere I was complaining about I think my heel was bothering me and she said invest in your shoes and your bed cuz if you're not in one you're going to be in the other and I thought to myself that's a smart woman right there and she was very very smart on a whole lot of levels so I'd say Footwear in bed so also foot in bed yeah I always wear my my my lace up boots to bed pretty woman Style no shoes or bed in this case end but not at the same time yes uh what bed what shoes I have look they are a sponsor of my podcast but I genuinely I test everything so Helix I have their highest end mattress with an eight sleep on top with an eight sleep on top and uh I do pay attention to the Linens although I don't think I've put enough time into it as you have so maybe I should double click I'll give you it in terms of I'm trying to think of what I put might not be unreasonable I mean certainly food medical care that's probably where I spend the most compared to average MH blood worky type stuff all of that and it's not compulsive I mean I used to do so many bizarre experiments on myself that I would do blood work like every four weeks I don't do that anymore but um been very excited about archery specifically recurve archery using a modified Olympic bow at the moment so I am spending more money on that but honestly it's not that terribly expensive I mean it's few thousand dollars and you can be very well equipped I don't want to be that like pudgy guy looking like an overstuffed sausage and like a full tour to France's get up on like $20,000 bike who's been riding for a week I don't want to be that guy I've been that guy in various things I'm like I'm going to do triathlons and I buy all the gear and lo and behold I try it for a little bit and I'm like I'm never going to do a triathlon that's never going to happen and I accumulate all of this nonsense but I would say broadly speaking I really don't have many expensive Hobbies I found expense to be inversely correlated to enjoyment generally yeah but the certainly maybe skiing maybe skiing I I I actually put a lot of if you add in all the costs associated with that it's high those are not particularly cheap if you're going to own the kit it's not cheap it's not cheap it's um it depends on how committed you are and how long over what period of time you can advertise that cost yeah I think finding what you like and kind of ruthlessly sticking to that up until the point at which you're like I'll see if there's something slightly better for instance Vans make not a sponsor uh but if you're listening uh they make a particular type of that old school shoes called comfy Kush and it's just a slightly more it's 15 bucks more but they've changed the inner and they changed the inso and they Chang everything about them I can do everything in these shoes yeah I can run I can lift I can go on a night out I can walk I can do everything and the advantage of that is that you have a single pipeline from dress shoe to gym shoe and you just continue to buy one new one and then they get phased out and then the old ones go in the bin and you just continue to go through not to turn this into an infomercial for Vans but I will say I have I have black vans they're also the allpurpose shoe if I'm traveling that's the all-purpose shoe correct yeah take me through your most heavily used apps desktop mobile what is your life structured on reli on most heavily I think people are going to be potentially disappointed it's it's nothing terribly sophisticated I would say that the basics are the basics so I won't run through those Google Maps Uber Etc Open Table very very basic I would say on desktop I use something called jump cut to have 30 to 40 things that I can store on the clipboard and I know you have I'm going to get you across to Alfred I'm going to I'm going to convert I need to test the latest version I used I I used Alfred several years ago and I really enjoyed it I haven't used phenomenally good have not used the updated so that's that's a teaser for what you'll explain in terms of Alfred yeah I still use Evernote I know it's somewhat outdated but I was the first adviser to Evernote way back in like 2009 so I just have so much it's such a how you and actually the latest versions have been dramatically streamlined so it's it's actually uh back to being very user friendly so I still use Evernote a lot I use the companion app scannable for scanning documents so if if you don't have a very fast photo scanning app it's worth at least searching for something in that domain trying to think of anything unusual what you use for task management we use a SAA internally for for do you use that personally for your own stuff too personal projects and blah blah I don't I have a scrap of paper in my pocket with some of what I want to do which is not the best system it seems to be this vestigal habit that I cannot get rid of [ __ ] path dependency man'll get it's just it's just ridiculous uh I have tried very much to and I did this beforehand but I've tried to double down on this and uh a gent Named Sam coros of levels which is a great company who's perhaps the most highly systematized process driven person I've ever met in my life like 20 vas right yeah he he makes the point that you should not have a to-do list you should have everything in your calendar effectively and I'm simplifying but I've tried very hard to do that like as soon as I there's something I know I need to do or want to do it goes into the calendar somewhere even if it's a placeholder I do not really use anything for myself as a task manager unless you count my employees who fairly or unfairly are on the hook to remind me to do various things so uh there is some of that but really it's the calendar the calendar drives it what are you using for calendar G right yeah I do not use mail on my phone you don't have any email on your phone no wow God what a new world that I also have no social media apps on my phone yes yeah uh slack slack uh some people on the team internally use that especially since we do work even though I have a small full-time team we have a lot of contractors who work on the podcast and audio editing and video editing and so on uh so we do use slack for that and it's it's a very I don't want to say Bare Bones I mean it's intended to be a very the word that I use a lot for myself as a calibration is elegant I'm looking for elegant Solutions not that I'm An Elegant human but I'm looking for solutions that have the fewest moving pieces and I remember interviewing Morgan Spurlock who made suis me and I think it was inside man as a television series great documentarian and he said once you get fancy fancy gets broken and that's not always the case but the more complexity you have in a system the more execution risk there is and so I try to keep things as Bare Bones and minimalist as possible that can go too far me too yeah you too um that can go too far yes but uh if something comes to mind I'll buy myself some time why don't you tell people about Alfred yeah so Alfred is a desktop assistant I suppose it's kind of a global Search tool it only exists for Mac which uh the tribalism of it makes me kind of love it a little bit more that it's so judgment and kind of like uh like platform racist um it's got a clipboard manager it's got text expander you can set up automations you can message people on iMessage without opening up iMessage you can send a tweet without opening up Twitter um it allows you to do all of this from basically a spotlight search bar in the middle the last 500 things that you've copied I mean look the absolute Basics that you need to use you need a text expander so that a short keyword can then open out into a large chunk of text you can have conditional formatting if you so maybe you give an example so somebody says hey what are what are your top pieces of advice for starting a podcast yeah so this is on my phone this isn't even just on the laptop if I put pdc1 and PDC 2 it brings up two podcast episodes I've done that uh the 90% of what someone's going to ask me what camera do I use what lighting do I use how do I record it where do I upload it what hosting platform how do you prep for a guest all of these things I've just I did them in conversations and it expands it and immediately sends it it's it's the same for invites it's got EML is my email address uh uh what's my uh nmn nmn nmn I think is a phone number um add1 is my address in the US add2 is my address in the UK and it's just all of these things that build out it's all of the stuff that you need to say a lot of the time uh and then a clipboard manager my God we said it before like having only having access to paste the last thing that you copied is [ __ ] barbaric like it is so primitive uh but you know you it means that you can be going through a document and you can think okay I want all of these things but I want them separately so I'm going to take this then this then this then this then this and then you have this sort of flow where then when you put it across into and you yeah it'll change your life people spend so much time copying and pasting stuff so much of our time is spent copying and pasting things or saying the same [ __ ] over email like here's an invite to the podcast or you know this is what to expect when the episode goes live or whatever whatever like all of that stuff so all of that highly used I use Apple notes um I went around the houses uh Evernote uh for while I think I've still got sort of some use cases for Evernote tried notion and it's kind of used for some stuff but it was the complexity kind of got to me and I think there's kind of a high if you want to use it properly uh there can be a little bit of a high lift with that uh I have let's have a look how many notes have I gotten here 2,996 notes on Apple notes um and it it's bulletproof it's never broken I update something on my phone it's immediately cross on there um readwise I like readwise Reed wise is great I use R wise as well uh for the people that don't know it's a a highlight resurfacing and um can also use it for space memorization repetition ebbing house stuff um that's great uh I like getting I set an email to arrive at 7: a.m. every morning with four highlights that it randomly chooses from my um uh history and it just reminds me of books I maybe forgot about or insights that I've lost and then that often Spurs a newsletter maybe later in the week or whatever oh there's a cool thing and I totally haven't written about that um what else do I use heavily it's pretty much it usual stuff audible oh um push to Kindle extension for Google Chrome is a game changer I don't like reading on laptop and I don't I can't read on my phone because my uh natural state is like flitting around and busy work and executive and blah blah blah um push to Kindle links in with your Kindle your Amazon account and it turns any blog post or web page into a perfectly optimized Kindle uh document that appears on every Kindle device that you own and I have a Kindle scribe downstairs with the pen which is really lovely and I have a Kindle Oasis upstairs which I read before bed and um it means that when I then sit down on a morning and I want I have about 10 or 15 minutes to read first thing in the morning I don't need to choose what I'm going to read I just open up my library and there's the stuff that I discovered yesterday ready for me to go through and I can usually get through maybe two articles or something on a morning and that then opens up I read about uh ol ofer burkman's productivity debt idea a couple of days ago fell in love with that read a study about how uh hair length is related to sexual satisfaction amongst North South Korean women uh wait does that mean I can't satisfy South Korean women they need long they need long hair if they have long hair between the two of you you'll have the right amount of hair um but yeah that's those are the big ones I think yeah I I have been experimenting with an app called revery R ve r i I met the lady that's in charge of it two days ago for oh you've got um Dr Spiegel coming on the show yeah yeah so I just interviewed him and I I am interested in hypnosis as a tool legitimate clinical hypnosis as a tool so I've been experimenting with that which I've actually found surprisingly helpful on a number of levels and otherwise I would say apps can be helpful they can also be a form of mistaking the tool as the purpose if that makes sense corre so productivity masturbation productivity masturbation there's a lot of that and masturbation is great but you don't want to do it all the time it's the dose makes the poison as with most things and I mean my my my most critical regular practice that helps me with systems and policies and making single decisions that avoid a thousand separate decisions is taking many retirements which is an old concept something I've practiced for a long time people might recognize it from the 4our work week but it is in brief scheduling 3 to four weeks of effectively being offline doing something having very tight parameters on your access to anything digital or work rated and if you do that you have to set up systems and policies that will persist after you return so your business and your life will be better off after you have done this and so I did that this past October I think it was for about three weeks what did you do I was in suram and South America for three weeks how did you spend your time uh I was spending a good amount of time with the Amazon conservation team operations who do a lot of conservation work for indigenous land rights in Surinam they've done a lot of amazing work in Columbia and I was spending time with some of their ethnobotanists and uh field operators with the trio tribe in suram and for people who don't know because why would you know suram is the smallest country in South America it is this tiny tiny little sliver at the very top of South America uh in between Guyana and French Guana it's a bit confusing to me the pronunciation still to this point very very small used to be a Dutch Colony I think it's 94% forested beautiful country very unusual MH really a Melting Pot of many many different cultures and it was a great experience and I did not I I did a 15minute sort of Crisis check-in just to ensure things weren't burning down very briefly once on a laptop via starlink and that was effectively it for two and a half or three weeks you know what it makes me think about uh if anybody has lived in the same house for more than five years you just accumulate garbage stuff you know all of the cupboards begin to overflow whereas when you're in University or whatever like you have to live lean because you just you can't be bothered to move it and it's kind of a little bit like that but for processes yeah like if the process has become too riant on you if you're too hubby and it's too spoky it's yeah if you want to scale your business if you want to scale the things you enjoy in your life if you want to sell your business ultimately in some fashion doing something like this will improve all of those it gives me it makes my bum hole do that to think about to think about what you've just saider quotient it does uh but that's probably because it's something I need to do too much caffeine maybe no no no never this impossible it's impossible uh why is the 4our body back in the charts the before our body is back in the charts Beyond it being a great book yeah I mean I'm I'm very proud of that book it's held up very well over time it's back in the charts because I want to get the name right so maybe you have this in your notes but because a gentleman named Gary Brea I want to say created a clip that went viral on Tik Tok talking about the 30 3030 principle which would be 30 grams of protein Within 30 minutes of waking up and then 30 minutes of steady state exercise and it all came as a surprise to me because my publisher reached out and said we are out of stock what is going on I had no clue so I put up a note on Twitter to try to figure it out to do some detector like anybody have any idea why suddenly for our bodies back to like number 70 on all of Amazon and people link to this video so I owe Gary Brea uh a thank you and uh that is how it went ballistic and uh that's continued for some time it's sustained for a while because then the video created media tension which has had a pretty thick tail continuing to this day uh which was a a really fascinating phenomenon to watch unfold because I've never I've never been part of anything like that on Tik Tok and I have my own thoughts and reservations around Tik Tok certainly but it is remarkable what Tik Tok can do for resurrecting not necessarily resurrecting cuz th our body was never dead but really revitalizing books it's it's incredible what can happen do you remember there was that video of a dude skateboarding down the street drinking I think Ocean Spray cranberry juice this is a couple of years ago he was listening to a particular song This song goes to number one this guy gets a sponsorship from Ocean Spray cranberry juices Now everywhere it's like this one everyone's taking up skateboarding you know everything that was in this one video and I don't even cranberry juice is the new cold plunge you do honestly dude all so you're right I think I think the 4our body has held up very well what are the strategies from it that you have held on to the most CU I do think it was very prophetic and I was listening to you tell huberman about the fact that you were sticking yourself with some experimental bluc monitor uh1 many many years ago and plugging it into a a [ __ ] pager or something like that um but yeah what what are the the things that you wrote in that book that you are holding on to the most still today say cold exposure when in doubt if I have very little time for training something akin to aam's protocol in that book which is pretty straightforward one set to failure type resistance training so nothing sophisticated it's not going to win you any gold medals at the Olympics but in terms of minimal effective dose still does the job if you have a very very small amount of time to allocate to weight training certainly kettle bell swings and just on on that what are your cues for good kettle bell swings especially as somebody who is sensitive with the lower back with the compression issues that I have right now I'm taking a pause no shearing Force yeah no shearing force on the on the kettlebell swings but if you were if you were okay yeah if I were okay I mean you would want to be bracing and not hyperextending at the sort of upper range you would want to be hip hinging and not squatting this is a huge mistake you see a lot also in crossfitters where they're effectively squatting and then whipping it overhead almost like a high pull y but uh using that hip hinge instead of the squat and focusing on that parallel yeah nipple height I'm not going overhead I just feel like for people particularly I'm trying to guard against the 10 or 20% who are not going to execute perfectly so I want to minimize injury risk yeah and for that reason the American kettle bell swing a movement I I saw there was like a An Origin thing about how it came into CrossFit and blah blah blah it does seem like I don't know I I I I don't get I I understand that it's easier to create standards around movement for it for a for a uh referee or umpire or whatever they're called [ __ ] assessa to be like that went overhead that went overhead that went overhead that's full extension at the top um but it's moved across now into I don't know I've never heard pavl telini talk about what he thinks about that but I don't think I've ever seen him pushing kettle bell overhead I may be wrong I haven't seen it uh I've done long ago I did the the Russian kettle bell certification level one level two so I went through the whole thing and uh really found it valuable on a whole lot of levels but I would the cbles for now with the sheer forces I'm going to table uh the sort of injury prevention prehab type exercises from the the not entirely but largely gray cook FMS type focused stuff in the 4-Hour Body for sure the chop and lift Turkish getup especially that first portion of the Turkish getup for shoulder Health these are all things I still do was uh was hanging was hanging in there there have been a little bit of hanging I don't think uh there I don't think that it was um highlighted in any way um that seems to be the pania for many people's shoulder issues yeah yeah yeah I yeah I think it uh depends a lot on the person I find I mean there there are a lot of things we could talk about related to shoulders since I've had this one completely rebuilt so I've had to go through a lot of shoulder stuff um there's a lot I added to tools of Titans which was effectively an addendum to my previous books like all the things I would have included in a b c and d I ended up collecting into tools of Titans so there's a fair amount in there on say glute medius some exercises from petera who I know you've met with as well as a handful of things related to Acro yoga and Gymnastic strength training which have some absolutely incredible exercises uh that don't require any equipment so for someone who travels a lot these can be incredibly incredibly helpful uh so I would say the vast majority of what you find in that book if I'm getting a little puffy and I want to reduce puff said puffiness then slow carb diet is still where I'll go as my default which is effectively paleo plus plus legumes people get really wound up about lentils and beans so far my GI track has not exploded like a frag grenade that does not happen and for most people it's not what happens uh so I would say that the vast majority of what's in that book I still use on some level yeah still intact let's say that for the rest of time you only had 10 exercises that you could rely on and this is for whatever you you think your goals for the rest of time will be muscularity longevity Mobility 10 exercises what would you choose oh man I don't know if I have the credibility to to weigh in on just for you this is for you well let me tell you where my mind Goes My Mind goes to types of athletic movement more than exercises so instead of Romanian deadlifts I'm thinking Acro yoga overhead squats overhead squats yeah like barbell overhead squats okay rock climbing archery on both sides yeah okay I'll give you that one sure and then some forms of gymnastic strength training from coach Christopher summer I don't know that uh Rings think of it as it includes some ring work which would be more advanced depending on the progression but it's a lot of the strength training floor routines Etc that would be used hand balancing exercises that would be used for prepping gymnastic athletes for competition but for adults who really have limited capacity to adapt okay because I didn't start at age five uh I would choose those okay yeah I would choose those uh in part because historically for me you're getting you're getting Push Pull with the acur you're going to get legs you're going to be doing a lot of single leg pressing and you can choose your partner depending on how much weight you want to use uh or get your partner's pregnant and then you have progressive resistance kidding then uh that would check a lot of the boxes uh for me and keep keep a lot of my creaky issues at Bay with respect to kind of hip back which might seem counterintuitive when you think about the like aah heals overhead squats or the acri yoga which seems to at first require quite a bit of flexibility but you end up developing a lot of strength in end ranges if you're doing it strictly and frankly all of those other things or a number those are also fun at the end of the day uh have you taken up Pickle bow yet I have not uh I've tried it it's fun it's cool doesn't grab me like other things yeah it's interesting it's the first thing I've done in a long time that I absolutely 100% lose myself in completely completely lose completely lose myself in it uh I think you know even the gym uh training a great session with a friend there are moments where you get pulled out because of the sort of intermittent nature of going to the gym and stuff like that and it's been a while since I did a sport like that uh cricket was mine growing up and yeah I I it's not about pickle ball what it's about I think is something which is relatively fast-paced not too intermittent uh and immersive like physically and and mentally and I think if you can hit those you know a problem would be and I imagine this is something that NFL players have to deal with they're on and then they're off but they need to stay on while they're off right you actually have it's built into the the way that the game works uh MLB as well I would guess basketball players don't have that so much right maybe when they're on the bench but you know when you're in the game you are in the game whereas that for me and my kind of psychology um something which doesn't allow me to pull back out and then have to drop back in uh I I do much better with so yeah some of my some of the best flow states that I found in the last two years have been playing that that's great yeah keep it up I think I had an initial experience that turned me off a little bit because I'm playing pickle ball which is it's a fun and it's pretty funny sport also right and the people I ended up playing with were like John Mack Andro and steroids they were so serious and competitive and kind of angry that'll kill the fun I was like how are you guys taking this so seriously that'll kill the fun come on it's like it's like we're we're doing Nerf fencing and people are treating it like life or death like come on come on guys this is intended to be fun well that's another thing you know going back to what we were talking about before holding yourself to high standards allowing yourself to to like enjoy and feel the emotions of the moment I was playing uh mixed doubles last week and the girl that I was playing with young girl having loads of fun we were playing well like it was tight game between us and the the other team and uh you know we I think we won one game and it was now uh 1 one best of three uh and I'm you know with sort of walking back to the Baseline to start serving and I'm like okay so we're going to do this and going to do this and this and she just stopped and said yeah don't forget to have fun and it really it really caught me and I was like oh yeah uh yeah about that but it just hadn't facted in because I was so but it was a really lovely and I mean you've got um a prompt what would this be like if it was easier mhm what would this be like if it was fun yeah yeah totally and they're related often yes you've got a quote that I completely fell in love with in a permissionless environment where you can really embrace the freedom of being able to work whenever you want wherever you want for most people what that is going to turn into is working all the time Wherever You Are and you don't have someone to stop you other than yourself it's much more problematic than you might expect it's a real risk how do you avoid burnout is it planning in those holidays every few months how do you know when you're getting too close to pushing too hard for me it's all scheduling like don't rely on discipline rely on systems and scheduling so in other words if you need to bookend your work day so that you do not work until 8:00 P.M have something scheduled with accountability dinner with friends dinner with friends going out to rock climb going out last night for me going out to dance tango like have something in the calendar that you are committed to going and attending ideally you have some sunk cost to pay for it in advance right have have some incentives lined up to defend against the impulses of your and instincts of your the person that you're going to meet there you've already paid for the class yeah yeah set it up in advance and so I will very often have my team for instance if I happen to be in New York or wherever I am they'll book out dinner reservations and exercise classes plus one I'll have an extra an extra slot that I'll book then it's up to me to fill it it's like all right well look you have three reservations you're going to you're going to pay a cancellation fee at these two places you might as well invite some friends or they'll help me invite some friends or I'll invite my friends in advance but the point is it's blocked out when I look in the calendar it's already there and that is the simplest approach I have found to lead myself to defend the personal time as much as the professional time so is that how you've come to think about discipline and motivation and willpower and stuff like that yeah the discipline and The Willpower is loading it up front to create the systems so that you're not constantly tired from decision fatigue yeah front load it yeah what do you what do you have don't do it the hard way I don't disagree I don't disagree I think uh anything that you need to do more than once you might as well do a system for but it's it's what you said at the very beginning which is about um our desire to be to show ourselves that we are working hard um thinking about things and taking a step back and taking half a day to come up with systems and stuff like that even if it would save you multiple days over the next year there is the Urgent will always get in the way of the important unless you're very very intentional about like yeah okay all right emails all right slack y we'll just wait because once I do this thing I actually have even more time to be able to focus on whatever it is um and thinking in systems is a skill realizing where you can automate and how you can create that you know and this doesn't need to be it doesn't matter if you're a a business owner or a a mother that needs to pick the kids up from school or orchestrate with your partner who's collecting who and all of the rest of the things like there are systems that you can find but uh I think you need to be very very intentional and a lot of the time it doesn't it doesn't necessarily sort of come naturally especially if you're doing busy work yeah yeah and the work's always going to be there you're going to die with stuff on your to-do list that's undone every single one of us and I would recommend we spoke about Oliver a little bit before we started recording I think but Oliver burkman 4,000 weeks go read that book everybody's gonna die with things that have not been checked off their to-do list yeah so given that that is sort of the default mode maybe you reframe it so that it's not an unending source of extreme stress yeah and most things just do not matter that much I do think like look back if you can and like your calendar from a year ago and figure out which of those things were extremely important to you at the time and now in retrospect how many of them are completely trivial had no bearing on anything important that guide you to where you are now it's going to be the majority I asked myself a question during my annual review um what do I think is productive but isn't and what is productive but I don't realize it two separate questions so I'll give you mine you can give me yours um things that I think are productive but aren't uh calls emails sitting at my desk when I'm not working uh uh and slack uh things that are productive but I don't realize it reading Walking With or Without uh accompaniment uh saying yes to brief coffees and uh dinner with people that are coming through town so when I looked at my year so many of the things that I did that had outsized impact was going Morgan howel comes through town and we go for stake and I leave with 10 ideas for newsletters or things I can apply to my own life or a cool story that just makes me feel good uh this isn't uh productivity Purgatory where everything has to be in service of work it's like just it was good it was good for me and it was good across multiple levels and then I look back and sitting at your desk when you are not working and being like yeah but I'm here like look look at how much work I'm doing look boss oh wait I'm the boss yeah wow I'm such a shitty boss I know I am um are there any things that's come up for you there things that uh are productive but you don't realize it or are not productive that you think are anything athletic is going to be net positive cross transfer to everything else so which is slightly different from exercise I mean exercise yes but specifically athletic something that is faster paced where you get punished for not paying attention skiing pickle ball in your case rock climbing these things are all deeply restorative for me even though they are intensely they're energetically intensive and expensive I would say on the unproductive side often any type of competition which is a tough one for me because I like competing and I think I'm a pretty good competitor and I've been rewarded a lot for competing in school you get the top marks or in sports you have a certain record in business you have a certain outcome in investing you have a certain portfolio startups you're rewarded for competing in so many different ways that you can end up choosing allowing the competition to dictate what you do instead of choosing what you should do or might want to do whether there is competition or not does that make sense so yes for instance I'm I'm very I like competing there's part of me that enjoys competing but I don't want to use the wrong tool for the job is part of the reason that I'm exploring other things like rock climbing I don't think I'll necessarily compete in rock climbing archery maybe looking for other avenues to scratch that competitive itch rather than for instance looking at what the latest best practices might be in the podcasts that are growing the fastest sltelevision shows now of course and it doesn't mean I shouldn't experiment with those things but if the primary driver behind it is because I want to quote unquote win win yeah I find that to be a false lead that is a uh as um Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sach said on my podcast before he passed uh prettyy shortly thereafter maybe year year and a half later that is a a temptation to be resisted rather than an opportunity to be seized so I think a big part of maturing is separating those two being able to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a tempt to be resisted and for me much like when I chatted with BJ Novak who's a very well-known writer famous for the office he also does a lot of acting and directing but he's he said and I'm paraphrasing here but something along the lines of whenever I find myself saying about an opportunity but it's so much money that's a red flag that's a cop pause when it's like da D D D D but it's such good money that's a cop pause for me M the drive to compete and win at this point for me is a c a pause when I was younger I think it was really helpful uh really uh critical Fuel and even now it might be at some point but and use it strategically use it strategically because in competition of various types and you see this in the money game and say pure Finance not always but often what's invisible from the outside are the sacrifices that people are making the compromises they are making to fixate solely on whatever this competitive driver might be or whatever the scoreboard might be and for instance one of my very close friends actually one of my college roommates worked for a guy in finance in New York City at one point and this guy was legendary I mean Super Super Famous day trader talking about stressful Rich beyond belief and he always walked around with a a brief case pretty old school with divorce papers ready to go in case he needed them because his relationship had become that Fray and contentious and if you're only reading the the media profiles of this guy that is not included uh so the costs of highle competition are often invisible yes so you have to be careful about emulating people and what I would say is if you're not willing to make there are always sacrifices so try to identify those in the competition in the competitive sphere before you jump in with both feet so for me I would say competition is definitely a flag sometimes it's still a go sometimes it's still a green light but I want to at least use that as a pause same with money the money stuff same same yeah yeah I uh I fell in love with a essay from Jason pgan where he said uh accept that all of your heroes are full of [ __ ] Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who got good at One Thing by sacrificing literally everything else and I think in my experience looking at high performers they're not ubiquitous human wide examples of Perfect People they're usually very competent in one narrow domain and sometimes they've managed to hold on to the remainder and sometimes they've had to completely burn everything else down uh either as a byproduct of or Upstream as the uh creator of their success yeah I would modify that slightly to say just be cautious about meeting your Heroes because a lot of them will have Clay feet there are counter examples Fe well just means that they're flawed in one way or another and we're all flawed or we all have weaknesses of some sort or another but there are counter examples in the sense that there are people I've met who I idolized on some level and they end up to be even better broadspectrum masters of multiple domains really consciously deliberate about say family life on top of Who's the who are the most impressive individuals full stack humans that you've met there there are quite a few I would say Seth Goden is very high very wise really walks the walk and I I've spent enough time with him now to see him in a lot of different environments to get to understand more about how he raised his kids and he's just figured it out for himself in such a congruent way right what he says is what he means is what he lives there is no discrepancy and that is not true for everyone on the Internet by the way uh but it is true for a fair number there are quite a few Founders who I would put in that in that uh in that bucket as well Toby we mentioned him already Shopify certainly would fall in that category I'm sure I could think of quite a few and a lot of my very good friends would fall into that into that category um where a lot of them fall a little short and that's why I'm not mentioning more names is in the physical care the self-care piece when it comes to the physical the physical machine they're prepared to the body as Temple sacrifice their health in order to achieve many other things also probably including family life and blah blah Josh wein would be high on the list as well what's he doing now where is Josh uh well still efiling he's EF foiling or he's foiling more than e foiling toe and foiling but uh he is just uh he's inspiring to me because our hardwiring is also so different I mean it's hard to not be different from Josh but for those people who don't recognize the name he was the basis for the book in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer incredibly incredibly skilled chess player and then translated that to taii Push Hands I think he became world champion there and then became the first black Bol under Marcelo Garcia nine-time world champion in Brazilian jiujitsu and and he's taken his toolkit and his hardware and applied it to multiple domains but I also have had a chance to see him in personal life with friends uh and another this is not really answering a question you've asked but if you were to ask me what I have grown to Value more and less as I have become older I would say and this relates to how I think a full stack loyalty and long relationships I value more than simple or simply intelligence right like intelligence is kind of table sticks um and it's possible to be very smart very hardworking and very low Integrity those are the people you really need to watch out for and it's not the lazy low Integrity stupid people you got to worry about it's like the smart and or hardworking who are also of questionable ethics those people got to worry about uh I would say another person who really walks the walk nval rant would be another uh he's he's a well-known serial founder I recently spent a week in Rowan with him at that prospera thing yeah so Nal nval is you don't have to guess what Nal thinks which I really appreciate me too there was a Clarity uh I'm a people pleaser and I'm trying to rehabilitate it um and there was a definitive to if if we're in a big group there's a big Gathering I'm sure you've seen this happen before you're in a Meetup and the particular group that you're in the conversation has gone in a direction that nval finds boring he's gone he's now over the other side there's no hes or Graces needed particularly uh if you say something that he doesn't agree with he will also say that and um I don't know like I think in some ways the whatever social awkward or the um need for validation side of me would see that as a high-risk strategy because I want people to like me but what you don't realize is that what you like is someone who you can trust you want somebody who when they say a thing you reliably believe that they mean the thing and what that means is you're not looking for someone who tells you what you want to hear you're looking for someone who tells you the truth yeah and if you're going to have any degree of public exposure fame money power you're going to need that more than ever because you're going to attract sycophant who will tell you whatever they think you want to hear to extract whatever they happen to want so it's going to become increasingly important I'll give you some other examples actually now that I had a minute to think about it uh Jersey Gregor and his wife anela Gregor very few people are going to know these names there are polish igrs who fled Poland uh during a a period of time when the the solidarity this resistance movement underground had people being murdered in the streets and they fled ended up in the US with next to no money and they now live in beautiful part of Northern California they both have multiple World Records in Olympic weightlifting now retired who the [ __ ] are these people now retired they developed a system a training called the happy body with micro progressions that the Transformations that I've seen them produce in people is beyond belief part of the reason that I named the overhead squats as one of my top five is because of Jersey he's something like 65 67 now he can he can still at this point in time when you watch him dance he looks uh excuse me when you watch him walk he looks like a li dancer or something he kind of Glides across the floor he's very mobile very very strong he can stand on an Indo Board like a balance board with a barbell fully loaded with weight whip it over his head in a lightning fast snatch land in a perfect snatch ass on Heels stand up drop the weight down and repeat doing multiple snatches on a balance board and he's got to be 6567 at this point so he's got the full stack gone for the the body thing he walks the walk and his wife also walks the walk and uh I want to see their relationship Dynamics their relation their Dynamics with their kids I'm really trying to only idolize or emulate people when I can assess the fabric of the relationship Integrity around them can't always do that so you can you can try to experiment with different habits from this person or that person just be careful because the sacrifices are invisible unless unless that person is sharing things very lently I've been fascinated by the price that people pay to be someone that you admire you know what is it that this person has to sacrifice either consciously or unconsciously what are the byproducts of them getting to the place that they are you're looking at an outlier in a very particular domain what are the other things that have come along for the ride um talking as well about loyalty there's a quote I stumbled upon from Christopher Hitchin that said a Melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you cannot Make Old Friends yeah and There's Something Beautiful about being along with people for the right so my editor Dean that you met earlier on uh he was here from episode one six years you know we we worked together for a long time before that and there's something really cool about being able to see the trajectory of your relationship of where you were of where he was what's happening like that's cool to do and uh yeah I I I worry about the sort of transient transactional nature that people have of being able to do the digital Nomad thing which is fantastic but not having Roots down not being able to sort of embed yourself socially uh I I and the same thing happens with internet you know I'll unfriend you I'll block you you're basically deleted from my life I don't think that that's a particularly uh evolutionarily adaptive way to uh use the mechanisms that we have for social support uh well yeah I would add to that just thinking of the the quote that you read earlier about the freedom to work anywhere anytime often meaning that you end up working all the time all places all the time the the most under emphasized chapter in the 4our work week is the filling the void chapter which people tend to skip over so like I'll get to that later and the gist of that is I suppose a underlying a assumption which I happen to think is correct and that is that the positive does not take care of itself in other words if you fix the work piece and you have enough money that suddenly your life will be great because you will instantaneously manifest these relationships and activities and so on that make the hard work worth it that doesn't automatically happen you have to build those things along the way and if you have a void because you've let all your your hobbies atrophy you've let relationships atrophy maybe you're just moving from place to to place to place so you have no constants the void will fill itself with more work because you do not have a compelling replacement work will end up swelling to fill the void if you don't have a compelling yes to other Alternatives that are in the calendar that is almost a certainty it's not just a possibility it's a certainty which is why when I sometimes get asked what what do you wish people would pay more attention to in the our work week it's the filling the void chapter yeah that's a question that you ask a lot of people what is it that in X people gloss over that you wish that they didn't basically what is a highly unpopular but important Insight uh I know that you're a fan of questions so that's one of yours that I think is is really fantastic very very well done um talking about the world of of podcasting and content creation what do you make of where we're at now having your your decade is anniversary we're going into a new world of short form and video and high production and low production and desire for authenticity and credibility what do you make of where podcasting is at now and where it's going in the medium-term future well I would say a few things I mean when when I started the podcast in 2014 as I might have mentioned people told me the ship had already sailed it's too late it's crowded that wasn't true it's certainly more saturated now but I think there is always market for great it's just going to be harder on a whole lot of different levels to cut through the noise and to position properly right to differentiate to try to be a category of one is much harder now and I'm inspired by on one hand the incredible production value that a lot of people have brought to bear actually not a lot handful I would say you exemplify the production value thank you and and I like that you're pushing the envelope it's inspiring to watch and simultaneously I don't want to compete against that because frankly you're going to win I don't like playing games that I lose that's that's that's not my my go-to strategy and I think that you are very well suited to this particular style of this medium and for me then personally it's a matter of asking a lot lot of questions and doing some deep thinking and journaling which I am going to use the 10th anniversary as an opportunity to do about predominantly what gives me energy versus what takes energy from me and doubling down on that because the function of the podcast is not predominantly to make money it's turned into a good business and I'm very grateful for that but it's really the experience of having this type typ of dance keeping me on my toes refining the craft of interviewing and having conversation the spontaneous nature of that not unlike pickle ball or rock climbing or a sport where you need to pay attention and if you are in this recursive thought Loop let's just say where you happen to be in a funk having a two three hour long conversation if it's active is a very effective way of taking you out of that state that could have been in my most problems can be fixed by the things or a podcast for two hours yeah or a podcast for two hours yeah on the macro level I think that video is going to continue to become more important as a discovery mechanism as a driver of growth it's hard for me to see what would push that in another Direction given the platform prioritizing of video uh so we'll see we'll see I I I'm I'm very curious to see in particular and I don't have a solution for this but if there will be improvements in Discovery that actually get mainstream adoption or adoption at all outside of YouTube suggestions y uh I do think that curation and curators instead of having say one Oprah tell half the country what to read what to watch I think and we're already seeing this of course but a proliferation of a lot of people who might even opt out of video and social media to use that old tool email right whether it's my newsletter five buet Friday or your newsletter I think people will have to for sanity's sake and to try to constrain decision fatigue and overwhelm probably find whatever their version is of a curator to filter for them okay right so rather than being a scout and seeking all of this information on the internet myself I will maybe have three substacks and a couple of convert newsletters that I subscribe to and that will be my content consumption right like I have a few dozen friends primarily tell me yeah actually who trust me who I trust and we share things that we find that is how 90% of what I find ends up in five of Friday it's through a very small subset of friends whose judgment I trust yeah yeah I you know me intimately well I should formalize that more but I do have a very High hit rate of um degenerate intellectuals that scour the substacks and and the the twitters and whatever and just dude have you seen this recently have you seen that recently and and it's so fruitful when it comes to uh your content consumption yourself I know the amount of time that it takes uh to prep for the episodes and stuff outside of that where do you go what newsletters do you subscribe to what YouTube channels do you watch what podcasts do you listen to I have a very deliberate I would say low information diet or I have very tight filters so uh small group of friends who send me things podcast guests who make recommendations those would also be included oftentimes in my friend group I develop pretty good relationships with a lot of these folks and they often come into being guest having listened to a lot of my episodes to begin with they'll send recommendations I have a very and I'm fortunate in this but it's also not sheerly it's not purely by chance I would say it's by Design I have a very eclectic friend group very very mly crew so I I I'm able to pull from a lot of disperate Worlds not just Tech not just science not just this that or the other thing I have uh you know religious Scholars I've got some very esoteric folks who will also send me stuff they'll be like hey you should check this guy out this Falconer who who who gets all these high-end jobs in Vegas I'm like okay sure let's check out the falconer and then I go down this Rabbit Hole of falconry and might find something that's amazing or a few years ago I was chatting with a um was dming with this uh Muslim scholar who sent me a link to an episode on on uh the eological roots of many of the words in Dune based on uh scholarship of Islam an amazing episode yeah yeah incredible yeah uh and uh I feel very very fortunate that that is one of the amazing byproducts of what I do uh when I consume media it's generally going to be shorter articles on my phone if there are longer profile articles say uh in the new Yorker for instance there was a a long article on building artificial languages for Fantasy world's Game of Thrones Avatar Etc and that was in the New Yorker it's going to be 20 30 pages I will print that out and I'll read it on paper I'm old school that way uh or I will web clip it to Evernote and read it in Evernote in which case I'll add if I find something I want to search for later I will bold it but I'll also add three asterisks so I can contrl f search for three as risks later and find my highlights so I'll sometimes do that I would say the majority of the time if I'm consuming media these days it's going to be audio so it'll be it'll be audio book or it will be podcasts almost always podcast episodes are recommended to be my friends ad hoc and I will always ask someone if anything in particular really stuck with them from it and if they can't name something I'm out I won't I won't even bother that's a good fil uh I use filters like that a lot if someone sends me a startup pitch I have similar filters it's like is this one of the top three entrepreneurs you have met in the last three years if the answer is no it's like okay it's out doesn't even doesn't even get opened so in the case of things getting recommended for instance I'm listening right now to a three-part series on 99% invisible which is a great podcast it's been around a long time Roman Mars and he has a co-host who's helping with this and they walk through this book The Power broker by Robert Carrol famous book pure priz winning book about Robert Moses most powerful man in New York for a very very long time and the entire story behind that this book is a beast to get through but they walk people through and the intention is to have people read along but you also get a lot just from listening and they also interview Robert carol which is very rare in these episodes and so I'm listening to a three-part series of that I I do not listen I would say less than 1% of the time do I listen to any current events um I can get up to speed on those things very quickly through my friend Network and sometimes I will do that I usually go to the very old stuff so I'll listen to history Hardcore History fall of civilizations is a podcast that I really enjoy they're very long but uh the episode on on on uh ancient suer was very good shorter episodes philosophies this things that tend to be Evergreen and have no current event aspect um those would be a few they come to mind I fell in love with one called the end of the world with Josh Clark sounds uplifting kind like fall of civilization nice and apocalyptic it's just a a 10p part limited series it came out about four years ago and it's just a breakdown of X risk uh each of them um about one different type of x- risk natural Pand risk meaning Extinction existential risk existential existential risk yeah um but it's beautifully soundscape um so I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks as a kid and um you know a radio drama with actors and and sound effects and they're walking through the woods and stuff and this thing's just gorgeously done I've never really that modern wisdom for me is so all-encompassing and totally um liberated for me to pursue whatever I'm interested in I've never really thought like I would like to do a passion project like this is the passion project but if I was able to do something that creatively was a little bit different I would be um pretty f up to do something that has that degree of soundscaping and and sort of immersion to it that I feel like that would be a cool not that I don't have enough to do already but that would be like a cool other uh project I just really I love the sensation of listening to that I must have gone back and listen to it you like five times it's 10 episodes It's on Apple podcast it's free uh end of the world with Josh Clark highly highly recommended uh for that um uh side note you should go watch the you should go watch Dune 2 in a theater that's optimized for sound if you oh i' I went to go and see it but it was it wasn't in the IMAX fancy thing good yeah or Dolby yeah if you see it optimized for sound it's a great experience I didn't realize um when Oppenheimer came out that there's 24 theaters around the world that allowed you to watch 70 mil IMAX natively in the correct aspect 24 globally one of them is in San Anton right around the corner and some uh Indian kids channel uh some dude 10,000 subscribers did a good video and the video caught a little bit of fire he was like why you can go to watch it and it was um well the best thing these 24 and then if you haven't got those there's 150 that are kind of this which is almost as good and it's not that and then there's uh 3,000 that are like that and then blah blah blah it was a really great video and I was like oh and I paused it on the 24 I like San Antonio how cool yeah really really cool so that was good I think two or three maybe are in La um you mentioned you kind of alluded earlier on to the Perils of audience capture um either personally or professionally when it comes to content creation how do you avoid the mimetic pull of regressing to the crowd of kind of feeding red meat to people either interpersonally to get them to like you because of a need for validation or uh to the audience in order to get them to like you and to kind of keep the plays going how how do you follow your own curiosity and sort of stay true to that uh whilst also knowing that there is a degree of game playing that kind of needs to be done well I would say that in terms of audience acceptance being liked by my audience uh I don't actually think about it that much uh in part because when I do my past year review each year to plan my next year and block out these periods of time and so on one of the components of that is putting down my current list of say the 10 friendships that I would like to maintain or deepen and asking myself did I spend as much time as I would have liked with these 10 people last year it could be five people the numberers not Terri important and if the answer is no then whenever I'm faced with the choice of deciding to roll the dice with new friends putting time into a new person which is a gamble or putting time into the pre-existing guaranteed upside relationships I usually go with the prior relationships so I care most about those people who are fully equipped and well practiced in calling [ __ ] on me and don't hesitate to speak their mind I care about those people first and foremost more so than my audience and what they care about is doing what gives me the greatest sense of personal aliveness and using that as my compass My True North I would say that I also want to know broadly speaking or be conscious of what type of audience I am attracting and are there any constants I want to maintain right are there certain types of interests certain types of psychographics demographics that I want to keep consistent because those are the people I would like to surround myself with for instance and for that reason if I have an episode that does absurdly well like 2020 2020 one did uh one or two episodes related to web 3 cryptocurrency Etc although that wasn't the stated objective I was delivering on the promise of deconstructing world-class performance I was talking about the habits routines mental models Etc of these people but the subject of the hour they wanted to discuss was something related to crypto those episodes went parabolic bananas and I try to take that always take that actually there there I can't think of an of an exception before I try to replicate before I try to add more fuel to the fire by adding five themed episodes on X doing a minseries of six on X because X delivered a lot of downloads and maybe I can capitalize on that from a financial perspective by doing ab andc I ask myself if I telescope out six months 12 months from now and I have done this how will the composition of my audience have changed who will I have repelled who will I have attracted and when I went through that visualization exercise I didn't like how it looked uh which is not to say there there there are great people involved and a lot of my closest friends are very heavily involved in some of these areas in addition to others yeah they do not hold on to any one of these components like religious zeits identifying themsel with lots of ists and isms and so on however there's a lot of collateral damage in those communities as well and uh a lot of terrible Behavior so I made a decision not to replicate I didn't do it I actually I went the opposite direction and as long as you take care of your audience and you need to decide in advance if you're hosting your own personal Ted who are the thousand people you invite where every break every meal you're going to be with these people and you get assigned to a random table MH okay if that were to be six months of your life not just a weekend event how would you want to compose that audience okay well that's a consideration U but but the first determining factor is what gives me the greatest sense of aliveness because that gives me endurance it keeps my the more curiosity is used the more you have right it's sort of the opposite of a finite resource in that respect and those are the basics of how I approach it and there are trade-offs right uh I saw this this woman in a Climbing Gym recently she had a shirt on that said uh no Solutions only tradeoffs and I wasn't sure what that referred to but I kind of like that as was that it's a Thomas Soul quote Oh is it thereo Solutions only trade Ops oh there we go thanks yeah now I know the attribution great so I sat with that quite a bit and there are always trade-offs you when you're opening one door you're probably closing one it might be temporary it could be over a longer period of time so I more than happy to make tradeoffs on the business model economic side to optimize for the longer game I'm also using the podast as a way to Workshop many other things right just like I used the blog for a long time to workshop and experiment with things that ended up becoming books later you can trace the 4our body back to my first really viral blog post uh I constantly workshopping I'm constantly sort of lobbing a pebble into the pond to see what the ripples do yeah I mean the uh the the newsletter and Twitter is so good for that I think to just and and the podcast as well we have quite a good uh repur ing engine going on from you know this episode and things will be clipped that are short and then something will take fire and like well why why did that get 100,000 likes on Instagram like what about that section or thing is that worth exploring a little bit more in a a piece of writing and it's like it's like readwise for your own content uh you know what I mean it sort of resurfaces [ __ ] that you forgot that you'd said I love all of that man when you were talking about um your friends and what they what they want for you and what they value in you it kind of got me thinking about how um any friends who are more happy for you when you make loads of money and have loads of plays and aren't more happy for you when you're just fired up about what you're doing aren't particularly good friends so optimizing not only for those sorts of people to be around you but also to think well if that's what my friends want for me they don't care about how much money I've got they don't care about good friends don't care about how many plays I'm doing well if it's both good for them and good for me intrinsically there's very few reasons to not do that and I understand there is a degree of game playing and this is I think different creators with uh differing sort of scopes of how much they they do this this is something that we think about a lot you know like we want to get plays we need to do the what do you mean by get plays we want oh plays like downloads plays yes correct sorry I thought that was was did you think I I know thought it's like britishism or something oh no no no no much more basic than that so on YouTube Correct yeah uh so you there's a degree of from Long Island I take a while there's a degree of packaging that you need to do with this but you also don't want to desensitize the audience with the lyic hijack things so aggressively that they don't sort of trust what you're saying anymore and um finding that balancing game like ethical algo hacking we call it um how much of this is okay and how much of this is not and I as soon as there's ick um but increasingly and this is like a a champagne problem I suppose um more the more that the show has grown the more that I think about like am I excited 10 minutes before I sit down with the person do I want them to hurry up and if I want them to hurry up good and if I just optimize for doing more of that and I think the same's true for friends yeah you know I I had this Insight again coming from a nightlife background where uh so many young people don't have friends they have drinking partners and much of the reason that they drink is because the events that they're attending are so boring that the only way they can get themselves through is to sedate themselves out of realizing just how boring it is and uh the same thing is true with the books that you're reading I've been told that I'm supposed to be interested in this book okay and how do you feel when you read it [ __ ] hate it all right um maybe bail out and read more Red Rising or or or Patrick rothus or whatever like just read the thing that's good to you CU that's going to f you way more than like and there's certainly times when you need to do things that are hard like you need to put the nose to the grindstone there are going to be writing the book doing more research going over a fourth draft of the of the whatever whatever I'm sure you're intimately familiar with um yeah four of them like ah to only need four drafts early days blog posts in like 30 draft 37 um let's say that there's somebody listening who wants to dream bigger mhm and wants to have more self-belief that they can make things happen in the world what would you say to them well I would say first that just like you having done hundreds of these interviews with amazing people from all different walks of life that the high performers are usually buckets of neurosis just like everybody else with some really serious insecurities that maybe they're aware of maybe they're not who have figured out how to capitalize on one or two strengths and have been able to create systems so they can focus and leverage those things you look at everything that's been built around us the roads the bridges the highways the sky scrapers assistin Chapel all made by humans right and you know the spectrum of accomplishment is really really wide um so that's the first thing I'd point out it's like there's you don't need to be endowed with all these magical faculties to create these things uh secondly I would say that paradoxically it's often less crowded to aim for the home runs than it is to aim for the base hits because so many people underestimate themselves that the the base hits and the doubles are more crowded just in terms of top of the bell curve than aiming for the big there's a there's a warning though that I should add to that which is it's very easy to hide behind the big this is borrowed from Seth Goen in other words you can say I want to change the world okay great but then on a day-to-day week to week month-to-month basis what does that mean you're actually doing what is your next physical action for that and people can hide behind this big nebulous handwavy thing mhm and it's like okay well what's the antecedent to that what's the antecedent to that maybe it's just finding product Market fit and building a company that solves a problem with a product great okay let's back out of that now what do you need to do all right I need an MVP of my website okay great put it on some paper okay can you show that to somebody forget about building the website you know have your first contact with customer okay great can you get them to pay you a dollar if not back to the drawing board and uh I I think that with the dreaming big it's important to be able to back up but a lot of it just comes down to trying a lot doing 8020 analysis to identify what the trivial many are are and what the critical few are being able to separate those two double down on the critical few understanding what your strengths are uh so that you can find something that is easier for you than it is for most people right having a support system around you like Friends by the way very high yield question to ask just ask your friends when have you seen me at my best when have you seen me at my worst you can get a lot of good Intel that way and then just play the game to the best of your ability and really try to be a category of one it's a lot easier if you find the right Arena to be the only instead of being the best which does not mean you don't focus on quality but if you don't think in terms of trying to create a new category for yourself very often you end up in a red ocean type of scenario with a race to the bottom type of dynamic where it is incredibly difficult to create a career an identity a source of income that has a protective Moe or margin for error of any type so I would encourage people to deeply think about that as well so that's a lot but last and not least I would say if you're serious all the time you're going to burn out before you get the truly serious stuff done so don't take it don't take every day like it's a life or death thing at the end we're all dust like the Empire Builders you listen to the fall of civilization from these iconic Empire Builders like you're not going to recognize any of the names so if we get like all wound up about our podcasts or whatever it's like don't worry about it yeah no one's going to Care in 50 years yeah don't worry about it if you are insecure guess what the rest of the world is too there you go do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself you are better than you think mhm yeah we have this assumption at least I I always did um there is an asymmetry between what we see of our own mental vacillations and what we see of other people motivations in the actions that they take everybody else looks like a slick rational agent and we look like a wavering idiot right because all of the back and forth that somebody goes through doesn't show up in their actions they just do the thing after all of that but you see your own flaws and foobles from a front row seat and um I think it's very easy to overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself if you're the sort of person that can listen to a three-hour podcast and sit and be engaged and be curious and want to improve yourself and you're cons considering these sort of things you are already in a rarified strat of people I think yeah and you know the difference really just comes down to you're going to take a bit of action intentionally in the right direction for a inordinately long period of time but I think uh one of the other realizations I've had over the last couple of years has been that um I haven't got insanely better with the podcast I've got a bit better but I haven't got insanely better with the podcast the main thing that's happened is I just didn't stop mhm and it shows the power of compounding and consistency and like it's weird to think that consistency is a selection mechanism in itself like that simply doing a thing more makes you better regardless of the quality that you do it at and over time you will get better by doing it but that consistency is so rare consisten consistency is important but I think if it's not deliberate practice you won't automatically get better mhm uh I do think it's it's possible to end up mailing it in I I I do see consistency turns into routine it turns into switching off yep yep yep complacency especially if you end up wanting to scale what you're doing with volume so for instance I used to do more episodes per month than I do now and I scaled back because I noticed I started dragging my feet a little bit and I had one or two episodes where I was like that was on autopilot and I ratcheted back to fewer episodes per month problem solved tradeoff takes bravery though right yes yes tradeoff uh financially in terms of plays in terms of blah blah uh increasingly I respect people that are able to make those kinds of sacrifices something which has a public cost but a private benefit um and and the nice thing about something like that also is it's what Jeff Bezos might call a two-way door you can go back I can always do more epis decision yeah it's not it's not a big deal you can hit control Z if you want you can always do more episodes what is it you want to achieve now um wife hunting successfully having some kids I think that's the next chapter not in a rush but also not dragging my feet I think that's I think that's the next phase from a business perspective I mean honestly I don't really care Ian I don't more more money is not going to give me the Fulfillment that I would like to have in something like a family right you could quadruple you could 100x the amount of money I have it's it's just a silo of Human Experience it's not going to address everything it's not going to scratch every Edge so I think I think I think the family experience is is the next experience that's unfortunately not something that is incredibly easy to just reverse engineer and execute plan and Achieve as many other things are uh but I'd say that's that's that's that's one of the few things that comes to mind that I would say is distinctly not present currently right certainly self-care athletic performance some type of physical competition is in the works and that's important but it's part of my self-care routine as opposed to a macro level life decision like life partner right I'm excited for that I'm excited for the unrelenting dad podcasts the child rearing experts that are going to come on yeah we'll see if I'm even in the public eye at that point I might just back out disappear I have a friend uh Chris Bumstead he's a Olympia physique Champion he's kind of like the face of the sigma male movement at the moment and um I think he's won five times in a row it's a five Pete maybe he's going for six this or something like that and his goal he's 22 million followers on Instagram 4 million person YouTube channel like all these supplement companies uh his outright goal is produce babies Retreat to cabin in woods with wife and babies like that's the the thing you know David Perell yeah yeah so um David said on a call we had forever ago five years ago now um he he's done really well with right of passage financially and and and status and stuff like that he said uh throughout my 20s and most of my 30s I thought what I was doing was making my myself more successful so that I could be more successful and what I realized was I was making myself into the kind of man that would be the father to my future children and I thought that was really cool to think about at the time much of what you're doing has a ego-driven sometimes narcissistic sometimes competive status full all of the things the testosterone csing all of the rest of it but in retrospect there was this sort of weird anciliary benefit that you didn't think about that it was teaching you lessons and forging skills for you that are going to allow you to pay it forward and or the opposite how so well you could be developing the skills to be a cold-blooded killer and execute without empathy or remorse I think that's that's a failure if that happens that's a massive failure of the person to not think sufficiently closely about what they're doing yeah I don't think it's uncommon though I mean I I do think it takes a conscious decision I mean there are lots I look I can't speak to the female experience I'm not a female but there are a lot of men out there with extremely high IQ and extremely low EQ situational awareness or frankly sort of compassion or empathy it's it's either not innate or not practiced but there's plenty of that that that's a failure that makes me sad it makes me sad to think that somebody can have the capacity to do great things and then to not do the interpersonal thing to pay that forward and I think it's nice to hear sort of what your so many of your goals aren't around objective metrics of success and maybe it's the nval thing about it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them that may be true it may be uh a mountain that you can only be not bothered about conquering after you've got to the top of it um yeah there could be some of that uh but it's cool it's cool to hear that that's like a I would also recommend and I do not have kids so what do I know but certainly I've seen people Summit the mountain and then attempt to retreat to the woods to the cabin and have the wheels come off completely I would strongly suggest people consider taking these mini retirements try that out and see what your withdrawal symptoms are because there will be withdrawal symptoms so test drive these things and if you're planning to retire and sail a sailboat around the world go do that for three or four weeks test it out and you can then help to train yourself to be better adapted to make that transition but it's not always easy to go from the autobond to park yeah you might want to experiment with the gears in between for a while yeah Rich Ro was telling me about his manuary that he do every year and uh it uh it did it did the same thing what is manuary it's like a it's like a a purposeful Retreat type thing where he he does the offline thing and blah blah blah but yeah that made me that made my my bumhole pucker again a lot of bum hole puckering going on over there it's what happens Tim Ferris ladies and gentlemen Tim I told you before we started you were a huge inspiration before I began the show uh the launch sequence that went through is still how to launch a podcast podcast from you in 2017 that came at an apt time this started in February of 2018 uh and you were the one that convinced me parasocial to start a newsletter uh I I really massively appreciate everything that you do you've been a huge inspiration I love the fact that you're an influence in the world I love seeing the evolution that you're going on um it's great I really really appreciate you and thank you very much for joining me today well thanks man it's been a real privilege and uh lovely to watch you execute at such a high level it's inspiring very very exciting so keep going thank you