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The Productivity Mindset with Tim Ferriss · Masters in Business

0:00
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
0:11
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
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Speaker 2: This week on the podcast Yes I Know, I say,
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Speaker 2: I have an extra special guest every week. This week,
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Speaker 2: I have an extra extra special guest. Tim Ferris, best
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Speaker 2: selling author of numerous books, including The Four Hour Workweek,
0:32
Speaker 2: host of the Tim Ferris Podcast. He's got a bajillion
0:37
Speaker 2: downloads on that. He's written five number one best selling books,
0:42
Speaker 2: including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new
0:47
Speaker 2: card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot
0:51
Speaker 2: of buzz. He co created this with another gaming company
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Speaker 2: called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of
1:00
Speaker 2: his books or conversations or ted Talks or what have you.
1:05
Speaker 2: I find him to just be such a thoughtful guy.
1:10
Speaker 2: He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment,
1:15
Speaker 2: the Tim Ferriss Experiment, where he's constantly trying to figure
1:19
Speaker 2: out how his body works, how his psychology works, how
1:22
Speaker 2: his emotional world works, and has tried a variety of
1:26
Speaker 2: different things and sort of fastidiously documented what does and
1:32
Speaker 2: doesn't work for him. That's what led to his productivity book,
1:36
Speaker 2: The Four Hour Workweek, It's what led to his health
1:38
Speaker 2: and fitness book, The Four Hour Body, On and on.
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Speaker 2: He just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out
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Speaker 2: does the AB test, figures out what works and what doesn't.
1:49
Speaker 2: I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you
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Speaker 2: will also with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferris.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for having me well here.
2:00
Speaker 2: It's nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I
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Speaker 2: don't have to explain how this rolls. What I want
2:06
Speaker 2: to do is I'm excited about your book. I know
2:10
Speaker 2: you have a new game out that we want to
2:12
Speaker 2: talk about. But I have to start by delving into
2:15
Speaker 2: your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelors and East Asian
2:20
Speaker 2: studies from Princeton. What were the original career plans?
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Speaker 3: So that was after a major switch. So the original
2:30
Speaker 3: career plan was actually neuroscience. So oh, no sentence major
2:34
Speaker 3: And there are a few reasons I wanted to focus
2:36
Speaker 3: on that. I have Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and hereditary bipolar
2:40
Speaker 3: and so on.
2:41
Speaker 2: So wait, we could have a whole nother discussion on neurodivergency.
2:45
Speaker 2: And I was kind of fascinated by a lot of
2:51
Speaker 2: what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage
2:56
Speaker 2: and operate around whatever deficits you're working with. Some deficits
3:02
Speaker 2: come with separate surpluses. But how significant were all these
3:08
Speaker 2: deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology
3:12
Speaker 2: of just navigating life?
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Speaker 3: Well? The depression piece was a huge challenge for most
3:18
Speaker 3: of my life, and thankfully that has changed with a
3:21
Speaker 3: couple of different approaches and different tools. And that's one
3:25
Speaker 3: of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was
3:29
Speaker 3: someone in the Department of psychology but within the focus
3:35
Speaker 3: of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time, and I
3:37
Speaker 3: was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because
3:40
Speaker 3: he was focused on the role of serotonin in sleep
3:45
Speaker 3: and mood regulations of the neurobiology of depression. He also,
3:49
Speaker 3: and this was early days, he had an interest in
3:52
Speaker 3: psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my interest in psychedelic compounds
3:58
Speaker 3: goes back a very very long time. That would have
3:59
Speaker 3: been nineteen ninety five ninety six, but I couldn't personally
4:03
Speaker 3: do I realized and it is important and it is
4:06
Speaker 3: necessary at this point in time. The animal testing on rats.
4:11
Speaker 3: He used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies,
4:15
Speaker 3: but I couldn't euthanize these rats after doing various tests,
4:19
Speaker 3: and it wasn't actually torture of any type. I just couldn't.
4:23
Speaker 3: I couldn't be hands on with that at the time,
4:25
Speaker 3: so I switched to East Asian studies, but with a
4:28
Speaker 3: focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in
4:32
Speaker 3: the realm of let's just say cognitive neuroscience, but more
4:37
Speaker 3: on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to
4:41
Speaker 3: be a research subject in a bunch of his studies,
4:44
Speaker 3: no kid, yeah, just to see what that was.
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Speaker 2: Like at the time. Had he already won the Nobel
4:49
Speaker 2: and like I think it was one to oh two.
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Speaker 3: So no, not yet, not yet. So this was super
4:54
Speaker 3: early days, still very well known on campus. But I
4:58
Speaker 3: guess it would have been Greenhall. They were pretty boring,
5:02
Speaker 3: to be honest. The tasks hitting space bars or something
5:04
Speaker 3: to indicate when you see a flashing green box in
5:08
Speaker 3: the upper left hand corner of one of these very
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Speaker 3: old school monitors. But that was one of the ways
5:12
Speaker 3: that I earned whatever was five dollars an hour pay
5:16
Speaker 3: for something.
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Speaker 2: Was he ever in Princeton I kind of remember he
5:21
Speaker 2: was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California, so.
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Speaker 3: Maybe yeah, he bounced around, but at that time.
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Speaker 2: Princeton, huh, really really interesting. So I get the transition.
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Speaker 2: I guess if you're going to pick some space related
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Speaker 2: to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, and I had been an exchange student. My first
5:43
Speaker 3: real trip outside of the US was as an exchange
5:45
Speaker 3: student at age fifteen to Tokyo, Japan, amazing where I went
5:49
Speaker 3: to a Japanese school for a year.
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Speaker 2: Are you fluent it all?
5:52
Speaker 3: I am? Yeah, I still speak read less so right,
5:56
Speaker 3: because you really have to practice that to keep it up.
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Speaker 3: I can still speak and read Japanese. And then got
6:03
Speaker 3: a couple of others.
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Speaker 2: I have a friend, Noah Smith, who is physics and
6:07
Speaker 2: economics like a killer double major, and he's spent summers
6:11
Speaker 2: in raves Kyoto says, Tokyo, you have to go when
6:16
Speaker 2: that must have been fascinating at fifteen, that has to
6:18
Speaker 2: be a little overwhelming.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a fascinating very for someone who grew up
6:26
Speaker 3: on Long Island.
6:27
Speaker 2: And that's why you're an East Hampton kid, right.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, And at that point only spoke English, very alien.
6:33
Speaker 3: That has the benefit of being incredibly alien but incredibly safe.
6:38
Speaker 3: And the additional benefit that people tend to speak, if
6:44
Speaker 3: they speak at all, terrible English, which means you have
6:46
Speaker 3: to learn Japanese. Huh So, in contrast with a lot
6:50
Speaker 3: of if you go to Spain or if you go
6:51
Speaker 3: to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian because people are going
6:55
Speaker 3: to default English, that just doesn't really happen in Japan.
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Speaker 3: So not mentioned the fact that I got there before smartphones,
7:02
Speaker 3: so I couldn't just escape to texting with my friends.
7:06
Speaker 3: I was stuck.
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Speaker 2: It was or to use Google Translate to actually talk to.
7:09
Speaker 3: Me didn't exist. Yeah, you were stuck, and that was
7:12
Speaker 3: a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason. Actually,
7:16
Speaker 3: another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had
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Speaker 3: the one of the strongest, if not the strongest, East
7:23
Speaker 3: Asian studies programs for at that time, I was most
7:27
Speaker 3: interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would have taken
7:30
Speaker 3: even if I had majored in neuroscience.
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Speaker 2: Huh So you graduate in two thousand, I'm kind of
7:35
Speaker 2: fascinated that very quickly you start writing The Four Hour
7:40
Speaker 2: work Week, which was published in seven like that is
7:43
Speaker 2: a shockingly short period of time. You're in your twenties
7:47
Speaker 2: when you're selling what essentially becomes one of the top
7:51
Speaker 2: selling books of seven I mean it was on every
7:53
Speaker 2: bestseller list. I don't have to tell you this, but
7:55
Speaker 2: I want listeners to understand. So the first question is,
7:59
Speaker 2: what on earth motivated you five years out of college
8:02
Speaker 2: to say I think I'm going to write a book.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything.
8:12
Speaker 3: This is a commitment I made to myself after graduation,
8:14
Speaker 3: longer than an email ever. Again, that was the promise
8:17
Speaker 3: because my senior thesis I felt almost killed me. So
8:21
Speaker 3: I didn't want to write anything. But one of my
8:25
Speaker 3: professors at Princeton who really changed the trajectory of my life,
8:29
Speaker 3: a professor named ed shaw Z Scchau were still in touch.
8:34
Speaker 3: He was a former competitive figure skater, took companies public,
8:39
Speaker 3: one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He
8:42
Speaker 3: did everything taught at Harvard Business School, etcetera, etcetera, ETCETERA
8:45
Speaker 3: real polymath, renaissance man, and he taught a class called
8:49
Speaker 3: high Tech Entrepreneurship, which was electrical engineering four ninety one.
8:54
Speaker 3: But you didn't need to be an engineer. I wasn't
8:56
Speaker 3: and that class is what convinced me to move west.
9:02
Speaker 3: Keep in mind the timing. This was just before the
9:04
Speaker 3: dot com inclusion to chase my riches and engage in tech,
9:10
Speaker 3: and in two thousand and one, after that startup I
9:13
Speaker 3: joined had imploded, I started my own company and I
9:17
Speaker 3: was bootstrapping it. I didn't raise any outside financing, and
9:20
Speaker 3: so Ed asked me to come back and talk to
9:23
Speaker 3: students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year
9:27
Speaker 3: to do this short lecture to students, and in one
9:31
Speaker 3: of the feedback forms after years of doing this, one
9:35
Speaker 3: of the students, who was not being serious, put in
9:38
Speaker 3: his additional comments, I don't understand why you're teaching a
9:41
Speaker 3: class of undergrads and graduate students. Why don't you just
9:44
Speaker 3: write a book and be done with it. And I
9:45
Speaker 3: had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time,
9:49
Speaker 3: so I would get these half baked ideas for chapter
9:53
Speaker 3: titles or content or whatever, and I couldn't get to sleep,
9:56
Speaker 3: and I would just jot it down and the notes
9:59
Speaker 3: from the classes as I was teaching, which changed over
10:01
Speaker 3: time to track my experiences, and these insomnia Middle of
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Speaker 3: the night notes formed the backbone of something. Sent it
10:10
Speaker 3: to a mentor of mine who was an author and
10:15
Speaker 3: unbidden without asking me, was like, I think this is
10:18
Speaker 3: a great idea. Here meets so and so meet so
10:20
Speaker 3: and so introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping
10:25
Speaker 3: in mind now looking back twenty eight or twenty nine,
10:29
Speaker 3: publishers meaning imprints said no, and then Crown bought it
10:33
Speaker 3: for next to nothing.
10:35
Speaker 2: I love all the examples. I'm a big William Goldman fan,
10:39
Speaker 2: whose book and Ventures in the Screen Trade Amazing introduced
10:44
Speaker 2: the phrase nobody knows anything into the popular culture. And
10:48
Speaker 2: he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars,
10:52
Speaker 2: all the studios passed on Raiders? Was it paramount that
10:56
Speaker 2: passed on et because hey, we have this other alien
11:00
Speaker 2: adventure called Starman, nobody remembers today, and.
11:03
Speaker 3: You could go to other you can go anywhere fields Starbucks,
11:07
Speaker 3: everybody passed on Starbucks.
11:09
Speaker 2: Quid Games. The author couldn't get it sold for ten years,
11:13
Speaker 2: ultimately had to sell his laptop because he was so broke.
11:17
Speaker 2: I love the John Wick story. You have, like this
11:20
Speaker 2: top action hero could not get Hong Kong Gun Fou
11:25
Speaker 2: made in Hollywood ended up funding it himself along with
11:30
Speaker 2: I'm trying to remember the other actress who kicked money
11:33
Speaker 2: and it's now a two billion dollar franchise. So the
11:36
Speaker 2: best selling book that all the imprints passed on not
11:40
Speaker 2: a surprise at all. It is a throw everything against
11:43
Speaker 2: the wall business model and we don't care and we'll
11:46
Speaker 2: see what sticks. And they missed this.
11:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a hits driven business in some ways,
11:52
Speaker 3: very similar to the angel investing later, I mean sure,
11:55
Speaker 3: type of kind of parallel distribution. And what's been wildest
11:59
Speaker 3: about Four Hour work Week, which is really a book
12:02
Speaker 3: on increasing per hour output, which is why it found
12:06
Speaker 3: a toe hold in tech and then the first New
12:10
Speaker 3: York Times coverage had Mark Injries and the famed entrepreneur
12:14
Speaker 3: and now venture capitalists talking about it. He wants to
12:18
Speaker 3: work eighty hours a week, but he wants to get
12:19
Speaker 3: each of those hours to produce ten times as much
12:22
Speaker 3: and that's the basic underlying theme of the book. So
12:27
Speaker 3: what's wild about it is almost all the tech tools
12:30
Speaker 3: that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even
12:33
Speaker 3: in twenty seventeen, when all of that stuff was irrelevant,
12:37
Speaker 3: the principles, the frameworks and so on. It ended up
12:39
Speaker 3: being on the Amazon Top ten most highlighted books of
12:45
Speaker 3: all time list.
12:46
Speaker 2: Meaning from the Kindle version that's so highlight.
12:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, in twenty seventeen, so that would have been eight
12:51
Speaker 3: years later when all of the tech tools were just
12:56
Speaker 3: dinosaurs at that point, which has been it's been cool
12:59
Speaker 3: to watch.
12:59
Speaker 2: So I have I'm thumb through the book over the weekend.
13:03
Speaker 2: I read it way back when, and I'm revisiting an
13:06
Speaker 2: old copy which I should have brought in to have
13:08
Speaker 2: you signed. And my wife says, four hour work week.
13:11
Speaker 2: What's She's an art teacher, fashion illustration and design. She's like,
13:15
Speaker 2: what's that about? And I say, I know this is
13:18
Speaker 2: not going to be a conversation that's going to go
13:20
Speaker 2: any place productive, So I just say the Parato principle.
13:24
Speaker 2: She's like, what's that. Well, eighty percent of the value
13:28
Speaker 2: we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from
13:33
Speaker 2: twenty percent of whatever that data set is. And she's like, oh,
13:38
Speaker 2: is that true. I'm like, yeah, kind of really seems
13:41
Speaker 2: to be true. Oh okay, And I know immediately like
13:44
Speaker 2: this is not her sort of book, but how grossly
13:47
Speaker 2: am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just
13:51
Speaker 2: reducing it to Parado points.
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Speaker 3: I think if you had to pick one principle in
13:56
Speaker 3: the book, that's a good one, that's it right to
13:57
Speaker 3: focus on. Now, it assumes a few things that sometimes
14:05
Speaker 3: get missed, right, so people can jump to strategy before
14:08
Speaker 3: they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something.
14:13
Speaker 3: So the definition phase of that book, where you're really
14:16
Speaker 3: getting very clear on which target you are aiming for,
14:20
Speaker 3: I think is a might sound strange, but an often
14:26
Speaker 3: under emphasized precursor to then doing an eighty twenty analysis.
14:30
Speaker 3: Because for eighty twenty or preto principle analysis, you're looking
14:34
Speaker 3: at which twenty percent of the inputs roughly right, it
14:36
Speaker 3: could be ten, it could be one percent are producing
14:40
Speaker 3: the outsized percentage of the returns. Now, that could be
14:44
Speaker 3: looking at your customers if you run a business, right,
14:47
Speaker 3: it could be looking at your physical exercise, what's producing
14:51
Speaker 3: the adaptations. That's a little trickier to do, but you
14:53
Speaker 3: can figure it out. You could look at it with
14:55
Speaker 3: medications too. I mean it's like there are a lot
14:58
Speaker 3: of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo pareto notice this
15:02
Speaker 3: in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution.
15:09
Speaker 3: It applies all over the place. And actually Richard Koshkoch
15:13
Speaker 3: has written a lot on this subject under the moniker
15:17
Speaker 3: of the eighty twenty principle. But I'd say, if you
15:19
Speaker 3: had to pick one principle, that's the one. Sure.
15:22
Speaker 2: Since we're sitting here in Bloomberg, I just have to
15:24
Speaker 2: point out it's very much true for your portfolio, the
15:28
Speaker 2: vast majority of your gains. And if you read some
15:32
Speaker 2: of the research by people like Bessembinder, Hendrik Bessembinder in
15:35
Speaker 2: Arizona State, it's not even twenty percent that's generating returns.
15:39
Speaker 2: It's one or two percent. Yeah, that creates the vast majority.
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Speaker 2: So there's pareto principle, hyper preto principle. But it's kind
15:47
Speaker 2: of fascinating that you use this as a way to
15:51
Speaker 2: hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like
15:57
Speaker 2: you've applied this across a wide range of items. Have
16:01
Speaker 2: you ever found a space where it doesn't work?
16:05
Speaker 3: I haven't, to be honest.
16:06
Speaker 2: It's just consistent everywhere.
16:08
Speaker 3: It seems to be practically a lot of nature that
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Speaker 3: a few things, the critical few versus the trivial many.
16:16
Speaker 3: It's it's almost always a few things.
16:19
Speaker 2: Critical few versus the trivial many. Yeah, that that is
16:24
Speaker 2: fabulous summation of that. I really I really like that.
16:27
Speaker 2: So let's let's stick with the book for a moment. Sure,
16:32
Speaker 2: in the book, you have a lot of practices and
16:34
Speaker 2: tools and routines. I know some of them are still
16:39
Speaker 2: valid today. Some of them may or may not have,
16:43
Speaker 2: for lack of a better word, expired. What were the
16:45
Speaker 2: most important items you learned? What are the ones that
16:49
Speaker 2: people speak to you and say, hey, this resonated, this
16:53
Speaker 2: really had a big impact on me.
16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say the first is let me zoom
16:59
Speaker 3: out and say that. I went back and I looked
17:02
Speaker 3: at the book, which is always tough for me on
17:05
Speaker 3: some level because I published it when I was twenty nine, right,
17:08
Speaker 3: I'm turning forty eight soon, and so there's there's a
17:11
Speaker 3: little bit of chess puffing and so on because I
17:14
Speaker 3: was completely unknown at the time, which makes me WinCE.
17:17
Speaker 3: But overall, the principles are still things that I apply
17:21
Speaker 3: all the time. But the tech tools like using go
17:25
Speaker 3: to my PC. No, of course, not that's changed. That
17:28
Speaker 3: world has changed, but the principles and the frameworks, the
17:31
Speaker 3: exercises still apply. So there, I would say a few
17:33
Speaker 3: things get echoed to me a lot. One is the
17:36
Speaker 3: practice of fear setting.
17:38
Speaker 2: Fear setting, define fear setting for them.
17:41
Speaker 3: Sure, it's very simple. So fear setting is based on
17:44
Speaker 3: the I think accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught
17:50
Speaker 3: to set goals, or we have a framework for trying
17:54
Speaker 3: to set goals like smart, right, specific, measurable, et cetera,
17:57
Speaker 3: with a timeline. But if you have the emergency break
18:01
Speaker 3: on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business,
18:06
Speaker 3: quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation
18:10
Speaker 3: from your job or your business, whatever it might be,
18:12
Speaker 3: that that is the kind of rate limitter and what
18:18
Speaker 3: you can do. And people can find this for free
18:20
Speaker 3: if you just go to watch my ted talk which
18:22
Speaker 3: has I don't know twelve million views now.
18:25
Speaker 2: On eighteen tight minutes of here's what to do with
18:28
Speaker 2: your life.
18:28
Speaker 3: Yah, Well, just focuses on this exercise of fear setting,
18:31
Speaker 3: which I still do probably once a quarter. And the
18:34
Speaker 3: basic idea is you take whatever you're considering that you
18:37
Speaker 3: haven't yet done because you have some degree of fear apprehension,
18:41
Speaker 3: you write down all of the worst things that could happen.
18:43
Speaker 3: Let's just call it a list of twenty in excruciating detail,
18:47
Speaker 3: make them specific. Then you have another column, which is
18:50
Speaker 3: what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each
18:52
Speaker 3: of those things happening. Last column. If each of those happened,
18:55
Speaker 3: what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding? Right? So, okay,
19:03
Speaker 3: you try business after quitting your job, which, by the way,
19:06
Speaker 3: I don't recommend. You can moonlight and do various things
19:08
Speaker 3: to hedge against risk, but then it doesn't work. Okay,
19:12
Speaker 3: can you temporarily airbnb a bedroom in your house or
19:16
Speaker 3: your bed? Can you get a job bar attending, just
19:20
Speaker 3: to get back on your feet, Sure, of course you can.
19:22
Speaker 3: So when you start to do that, and then there's
19:25
Speaker 3: a separate page where you also write out the costs
19:29
Speaker 3: of inaction, which is a neglected step. When people are
19:31
Speaker 3: considering what they're doing, they look at the risks of
19:33
Speaker 3: doing something, but they don't look at the risks of
19:35
Speaker 3: not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a
19:39
Speaker 3: year three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial, or
19:45
Speaker 3: relationship costs of not doing the thing you're considering? And
19:50
Speaker 3: when you then look at these things which represent your
19:53
Speaker 3: thoughts trapped on paper, A lot of people are able
19:57
Speaker 3: to do the scary thing. So I would say that
20:01
Speaker 3: that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept
20:03
Speaker 3: of many retirements, so engineering a way such that you
20:07
Speaker 3: can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected,
20:11
Speaker 3: which is very very very achievable.
20:13
Speaker 4: It's four weeks in a row or a week every quarter,
20:16
Speaker 4: like three to four weeks in a row.
20:18
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a lot.
20:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, And what that forces you to do also is
20:23
Speaker 3: upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in
20:28
Speaker 3: your life or in your business or even in your
20:30
Speaker 3: job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And
20:34
Speaker 3: the value of all those things outlives the many retirement.
20:39
Speaker 3: So I'd say those are two that come back a lot.
20:42
Speaker 2: It's interesting that you're approaching laying out the pros and
20:48
Speaker 2: cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture.
20:52
Speaker 2: I can textualize that a little differently. You and I
20:55
Speaker 2: have both interviewed Ray Dalio. Yeah, and raise great in
21:00
Speaker 2: innovation and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much
21:04
Speaker 2: fake it till you make it attitude never admit error. No, no,
21:08
Speaker 2: it'll be great. Don't why if it didn't work out
21:10
Speaker 2: this year or work out next year? And Ray very
21:13
Speaker 2: much said, no, that's wrong. We're all going to make mistakes.
21:17
Speaker 2: It's really important to learn from those mistakes. And I
21:20
Speaker 2: want to say he's the first guy that really put
21:23
Speaker 2: that out at all.
21:25
Speaker 3: I have not to mention the transparency of having almost
21:29
Speaker 3: all meetings recorded, accessible by anyone within his firm, I mean.
21:35
Speaker 2: Which is kind of horrifying.
21:36
Speaker 3: They did some pretty wild stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's
21:39
Speaker 3: a fascinating character.
21:40
Speaker 2: Absolutely, But it leads to the question, what you're talking
21:45
Speaker 2: about is really a way to prep yourself for a
21:50
Speaker 2: fear of failure? Is that fair to describe it?
21:54
Speaker 3: And sure, yeah, or you know what, it's a fear
21:56
Speaker 3: of failure, But oftentimes it's this, it's the fact you
22:01
Speaker 3: can achieve. Well, it's going to be very very hard
22:04
Speaker 3: to achieve your goals if they're not very specific and clear.
22:08
Speaker 3: Even if you fail partially, that's fine. You can still
22:11
Speaker 3: do great things. I think the parallel is that if
22:15
Speaker 3: your fears are unclear, nebulous, it's just a feeling in
22:19
Speaker 3: your gut, but you don't trap the specifics on paper,
22:24
Speaker 3: they're very difficult to overcome. They will still be a
22:26
Speaker 3: break in your life. It is just as important to
22:31
Speaker 3: address that as it is to address the goals to
22:34
Speaker 3: identify those sort of sticking points. And I would also
22:37
Speaker 3: say that I think of risk for people as often
22:42
Speaker 3: ill defined, and there are many ways in different context
22:45
Speaker 3: to define risk. But if we look at it as
22:47
Speaker 3: the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things
22:55
Speaker 3: have a ten out of ten value in that category.
22:58
Speaker 3: And then if you look at for instance, if you
22:59
Speaker 3: look at the and I encourage peo able to do
23:02
Speaker 3: this in fear setting, it's like from zero to ten transient,
23:06
Speaker 3: recoverable or permanent, what is the potential upside of doing
23:10
Speaker 3: this scary thing that you're considering doing? And then if
23:13
Speaker 3: you stay doing what you're doing, like, what are the
23:16
Speaker 3: zero to ten permanent transient risks or potential outcomes of
23:21
Speaker 3: not doing the thing? When you then see, oh, if
23:24
Speaker 3: I do this thing, there could be all of these
23:26
Speaker 3: potentially semi permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it
23:29
Speaker 3: and fail, the downsize are transient and like three out
23:32
Speaker 3: of ten, it makes the decision much much easier and
23:37
Speaker 3: the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then
23:40
Speaker 3: it's just execution, risk and implementation, And it's the decision
23:45
Speaker 3: that is the hardest part for most people.
23:48
Speaker 2: It's amazing that everything you're saying is so applicable to
23:51
Speaker 2: public markets investing, because when people are in that panic mode,
23:57
Speaker 2: when they're fearful, oh my god, we're down fifteen percent,
24:00
Speaker 2: the world is going to come to an end, it's
24:03
Speaker 2: always no, this is transitory, this is temporary. How can
24:06
Speaker 2: you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid
24:10
Speaker 2: those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it's
24:13
Speaker 2: really understanding, Hey, is this a ten or is this
24:16
Speaker 2: more likely a two, three, four on scale?
24:19
Speaker 3: And I can actually, I'll give something else in the
24:21
Speaker 3: investing world if we're looking at when people neglect the
24:25
Speaker 3: other side of a coin. And this is not going
24:28
Speaker 3: to apply to like the super ultra pros, but a
24:31
Speaker 3: lot of people who participate in the public markets, they
24:33
Speaker 3: think about what to buy right, what's a good buy
24:37
Speaker 3: at this moment. They don't think about whole period. They
24:39
Speaker 3: don't think about selling strategy. What will be the cues,
24:44
Speaker 3: what are the underlying sort of theses if invalidated that
24:47
Speaker 3: would mean they should sell blah blah blah blah blah.
24:50
Speaker 3: They don't have a structured way of thinking about selling.
24:53
Speaker 3: And similarly, it's like if you just think about your goal,
24:55
Speaker 3: but you don't have a structured way of thinking about
24:58
Speaker 3: fear and ap comprehension and so on, you're equally handicapped.
25:03
Speaker 3: So that would be an easy kind of copy paste comparison.
25:07
Speaker 2: I would say, huh, really interesting. You come out of
25:10
Speaker 2: college with Asian language studies and then you write a
25:15
Speaker 2: book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then
25:21
Speaker 2: pivot to angel investing and or advising.
25:25
Speaker 3: So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a
25:29
Speaker 3: sense because the Four Hour work Week. I was based
25:32
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley for seventeen years, and I seeded The
25:36
Speaker 3: four Hour work Week at tech heavy events in part
25:38
Speaker 3: because it talks about information low information diet, and selective
25:43
Speaker 3: ignorance and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That's a component of
25:47
Speaker 3: the book, and that pain was most acutely felt by
25:50
Speaker 3: people in tech at the time. So my early adopters,
25:55
Speaker 3: plus the people I had access to were techies in
25:58
Speaker 3: the very early state figuring out how I would launch
26:01
Speaker 3: this book and what that had as a side effect
26:06
Speaker 3: was developing relationships with various founders and there were a
26:11
Speaker 3: lot of fans among CEOs and co founders of startups.
26:17
Speaker 2: Let me interrupt you just to remind people, the book
26:20
Speaker 2: comes out in seven yep. This is before half of
26:23
Speaker 2: the companies that we think of as part of our
26:26
Speaker 2: daily lives. Well before were you know, there was no
26:30
Speaker 2: public Alibama. I think that's before Facebook, certainly long before
26:35
Speaker 2: uber goes goes public and Shopify. A lot of these
26:39
Speaker 2: companies were you know, barely a gleam in the creator's eyes.
26:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, they didn't. A lot of them either didn't exist
26:45
Speaker 3: or they were very very early stages. So I launched
26:47
Speaker 3: the book. My main launch strategy was south By Southwest,
26:52
Speaker 3: this festival in Austin, Texas in two thousand and seven,
26:55
Speaker 3: which was also the same south By Southwest where Twitter
26:58
Speaker 3: basically went live in public in full promotional mode. And
27:04
Speaker 3: the other piece of the story of angel investing is
27:08
Speaker 3: that I mentioned in the previous segment my professor in
27:12
Speaker 3: school ed show his son in law at the time,
27:15
Speaker 3: Mike Maples Junior, was a very well known angel investor
27:20
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley, had been an executive at various companies
27:23
Speaker 3: and we became friendly. He wanted to lose some weight.
27:27
Speaker 3: I wanted to learn more about what he did, so
27:29
Speaker 3: we would have breakfast at this place called Hobi's and
27:33
Speaker 3: I would help him with his strategy for training and
27:35
Speaker 3: so on. At this point, also the for hour work
27:38
Speaker 3: we could come out of nowhere and hit the New
27:40
Speaker 3: York Time, hit the New York Times list, then went
27:43
Speaker 3: to number one and stayed on the New York Times
27:45
Speaker 3: list for four and a half years or five years
27:46
Speaker 3: or something.
27:47
Speaker 2: That's insane. And so are you aware just of how
27:50
Speaker 2: lightning in a bottle that is?
27:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been as It's part of the reason I
27:54
Speaker 3: haven't wanted to go back and revise any of the writing.
27:56
Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't want to touch the butterfly and
27:59
Speaker 3: risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how
28:02
Speaker 3: that happened, Like what did I do? And there were
28:05
Speaker 3: things I did for marketing and PR and so on
28:07
Speaker 3: to help catalyze that. And in exchange, I'd say, tell
28:12
Speaker 3: me about your deals, what are you doing? I was
28:14
Speaker 3: always interested in investing. Eventually, after a few months all
28:18
Speaker 3: of these factors combined, I asked Mike and he was
28:21
Speaker 3: very generous at this time if he might be open
28:23
Speaker 3: to me co investing with him on some deals, very
28:26
Speaker 3: small checks like I would put in ten K, so
28:27
Speaker 3: I wouldn't eat up much of the cap table. I
28:30
Speaker 3: would put in a lot of work to try to
28:32
Speaker 3: help these companies, And that is how the whole adventure started.
28:37
Speaker 3: I wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person
28:41
Speaker 3: in terms of ratio on the cap table, so that
28:43
Speaker 3: those early founders would become my testimonials basically for future deals.
28:49
Speaker 3: That's how the whole thing started. And I decided to
28:53
Speaker 3: treat it like I would treat going to business school.
28:56
Speaker 3: I looked at Stanford at the time because I'd fantasized
28:58
Speaker 3: about going to Stanford Business School on like, Okay, it's
29:00
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty k over two years. I would
29:04
Speaker 3: have had to pay that out of pocket. So let
29:06
Speaker 3: me create the quote unquote Tim Ferriss fund for Angel Investing.
29:09
Speaker 3: It's one hundred and twenty k over two years, and
29:12
Speaker 3: I'm assuming that it's sunk cost tuition. It's going to
29:14
Speaker 3: go to zero and none of the startups are going
29:16
Speaker 3: to succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a
29:19
Speaker 3: lot end relationships that make it worthwhile, I will consider
29:25
Speaker 3: it a success. And that was the approach I took
29:28
Speaker 3: to doing it. And the timing was also great because
29:32
Speaker 3: I started in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight,
29:34
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight. For a few years afterwards, was
29:37
Speaker 3: effectively considered a dot com depression, right, But that's when
29:41
Speaker 3: I met Toby they shopify when they had nine employees
29:46
Speaker 3: or twelve employees, and became an advisor. That's when I
29:50
Speaker 3: started becoming involved with lots of companies of these very
29:54
Speaker 3: early stages which ended up just to become these behemoths.
29:59
Speaker 2: I love your conce of this is a sun cost,
30:01
Speaker 2: it's going to zero. I think that's the absolute right
30:04
Speaker 2: approach with startups, and you hinted at something that I
30:08
Speaker 2: have to explore a little bit. Anytime I throw money
30:13
Speaker 2: at a small startup, it's essentially A this is going
30:17
Speaker 2: to go to zero, but B I really just want
30:20
Speaker 2: to invest in the jockey. I want to put money
30:22
Speaker 2: into this person, who Hey, this is easier than bearing
30:26
Speaker 2: a body like Those are the two things I would
30:28
Speaker 2: do for this guy. Yeah, and a check. All right,
30:30
Speaker 2: I'll put a check into that and maybe it works out.
30:34
Speaker 2: I sense you have a similar belief in your betting
30:37
Speaker 2: on not on the horse, but the jockey. One hundred
30:40
Speaker 2: and twenty K is only twelve ten thousand dollars checks, yep,
30:44
Speaker 2: and I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities.
30:47
Speaker 2: What criteriay you used to figure out who gets that check? Well.
30:51
Speaker 3: Also, just as a side note, the reason I started
30:54
Speaker 3: trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is
30:57
Speaker 3: that I ran out of money. I got over enthusiastic,
30:59
Speaker 3: and I broke my own rules, and I think the
31:01
Speaker 3: first check I wrote was for like forty K and
31:04
Speaker 3: immediately imploded, and I was like, oh, this is going
31:07
Speaker 3: to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of
31:11
Speaker 3: my best hits have been products that I would use personally,
31:16
Speaker 3: that I could ideally be a power user of. And
31:21
Speaker 3: there have been a few exceptions, but by and large
31:23
Speaker 3: they are addressing problems that I feel acutely, or needs
31:27
Speaker 3: that I feel, or wants that I feel very acutely. So,
31:30
Speaker 3: for instance, clear how did clear happen? Back in the day,
31:34
Speaker 3: it was called clear card, and it was it was
31:38
Speaker 3: not widely distributed, it was very little known, And I
31:42
Speaker 3: wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal,
31:45
Speaker 3: and my blog at the time became very popular and
31:49
Speaker 3: I wrote a huge piece on how to expedite travel
31:52
Speaker 3: and a portion of that was about Clearcard. I linked
31:55
Speaker 3: to their website and unbeknownst to me, I was one
31:58
Speaker 3: of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And
32:01
Speaker 3: then at some point the leadership reached out to me
32:04
Speaker 3: and they said, hey, do you want to do something,
32:06
Speaker 3: And that's how that relationship started. And I think I
32:08
Speaker 3: was the first advisor to clear. I mean it was
32:10
Speaker 3: forever ago, so it must have been.
32:12
Speaker 2: I wish they were in more airports. Just blown through JFK. Laguardi.
32:16
Speaker 2: It's a blast with them.
32:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they've done From an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also,
32:21
Speaker 3: not based in Silicon Valley, and I don't think that
32:25
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for
32:27
Speaker 3: great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Cannabis. I mean,
32:29
Speaker 3: come on, that was neglected. So I also so there
32:34
Speaker 3: are a few things, was like, is it a problem
32:36
Speaker 3: or a need or a want that I feel and understand?
32:40
Speaker 3: Is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore,
32:42
Speaker 3: it makes it quite easy for me to promote to
32:44
Speaker 3: my audience could they be users or customers? And then lastly,
32:49
Speaker 3: for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for
32:52
Speaker 3: geographies that were neglected. So I actually I went hunting
32:54
Speaker 3: in Canada a lot. And it works for comedy yeah, yeah,
32:59
Speaker 3: or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of
33:02
Speaker 3: the early experiences like stumble Upon. I became an advisor
33:06
Speaker 3: to stumble Upon. And who was the founder of stumble Upon,
33:09
Speaker 3: a guy named Garrett Camp stumble Upon. I put tons
33:12
Speaker 3: of time into he and I became close. We worked
33:16
Speaker 3: really well together, We enjoyed working together. Stumble Upon ended
33:19
Speaker 3: up being a zero for me. But why is that? Okay?
33:23
Speaker 3: Because I talked about the relationships and the skills, right, okay,
33:26
Speaker 3: relationship with Garrett Camp? What does he end up doing next?
33:29
Speaker 3: Co founder of Uber?
33:31
Speaker 2: Not too shabby.
33:32
Speaker 3: And then I was one of three people who had
33:34
Speaker 3: helped him with stumble Upon who became advisors to Uber
33:39
Speaker 3: cab LLC at the time, which was I think two
33:41
Speaker 3: thousand and eight. Oh my god, by the way, everybody
33:44
Speaker 3: said note Uber everybody.
33:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's amazing to me because one of the things
33:49
Speaker 2: I find fascinating about vcs is. They kind of put
33:54
Speaker 2: their failures on their websites as a badge of honor. Yeah,
33:58
Speaker 2: but it's mostly here are the companies we vested in
34:00
Speaker 2: that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by
34:04
Speaker 2: the way, we passed on Ober, we passed on this,
34:06
Speaker 2: we passed on that.
34:07
Speaker 3: You see less of that, you see less of it.
34:10
Speaker 3: And for me, I would say, there's lots of luck.
34:14
Speaker 3: But I was also trying to approach it in a
34:16
Speaker 3: systematic way. If you're focused on effectively the way I
34:21
Speaker 3: would think about, let's say I cut a twenty five
34:23
Speaker 3: thousand dollars check. I'm like, okay, would I pay twenty
34:25
Speaker 3: five thousand dollars just to develop these relationships and basically
34:31
Speaker 3: earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing.
34:35
Speaker 3: If so, then great, go. If not, then think twice.
34:38
Speaker 3: And taking that approach, all of the skills and the
34:42
Speaker 3: new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I
34:46
Speaker 3: love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks
34:51
Speaker 3: because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that
34:56
Speaker 3: was intimately connected with the people and the skills that
35:01
Speaker 3: came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again.
35:04
Speaker 2: So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills. And
35:08
Speaker 2: then even quote unquote failures, you don't know what act
35:11
Speaker 2: TOO is going to be where it could go.
35:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then lastly, I would say one thing I
35:15
Speaker 3: did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now
35:18
Speaker 3: but I had never heard of it is I treated
35:21
Speaker 3: a portion of my total budget for that real world
35:25
Speaker 3: MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferris fund quotation marks a
35:28
Speaker 3: portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean?
35:31
Speaker 3: I invested in I bought secondary so I bought equity
35:35
Speaker 3: from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now it ended up
35:40
Speaker 3: being very early, but to my mind at the time,
35:43
Speaker 3: they were overpriced, super expensive, huh. But being in those
35:48
Speaker 3: deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity
35:53
Speaker 3: in those two companies allowed me to say I'm in
35:57
Speaker 3: these companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted
36:02
Speaker 3: in getting new deals. So I expected those to go
36:05
Speaker 3: to zero. That's marketing budget, right. They ended up working
36:09
Speaker 3: very unexpectedly, working out really well, but I expected those
36:14
Speaker 3: to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget.
36:17
Speaker 2: I've heard you mentioned a book by Sebastian Malaby The.
36:21
Speaker 3: Power lawyeh, great book.
36:23
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about what you learned from
36:26
Speaker 2: that book about investing in startups.
36:31
Speaker 3: That is a great book if you want to learn
36:33
Speaker 3: about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches
36:36
Speaker 3: I had already learned just by being in the trenches
36:41
Speaker 3: for whatever it was a decade before that book came out.
36:44
Speaker 3: I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money than God,
36:48
Speaker 3: which is this book about hedge funds. That is an
36:51
Speaker 3: exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, Oh
36:54
Speaker 3: my God, give that a read.
36:56
Speaker 2: Plus he's British and his take on everything is it's fantastic.
37:01
Speaker 2: It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way.
37:06
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very
37:09
Speaker 3: skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that
37:14
Speaker 3: book and what people might miss about startups is, yes,
37:19
Speaker 3: it's a hits driven business. There's a power law distribution,
37:22
Speaker 3: meaning it's preto principle on steroids. You're probably gonna have
37:27
Speaker 3: one or two or three startups that give you the
37:30
Speaker 3: vast majority of your lifetime runnings, at least as an
37:33
Speaker 3: angel investor who's not taking management fees. Right, if you're
37:37
Speaker 3: an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping
37:41
Speaker 3: billion dollar plus funds, like sure, you're going to do
37:43
Speaker 3: great on management.
37:44
Speaker 2: PCs seem to do okay for themselves.
37:46
Speaker 3: It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart
37:49
Speaker 3: in how you approach it. But as an angel investor,
37:52
Speaker 3: I would say, you need to have if you're going
37:54
Speaker 3: to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy
37:58
Speaker 3: or philosophy around folio constructions so that you don't run
38:01
Speaker 3: out of money. Right, It's like staking someone in poker.
38:04
Speaker 3: It's like you have to be able to sustain a
38:07
Speaker 3: string of bad luck. And I would say that what
38:13
Speaker 3: Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs
38:19
Speaker 3: in the world of venture capital have done that over time.
38:22
Speaker 3: And there are a few things I would point out
38:24
Speaker 3: also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of
38:27
Speaker 3: people miss because why did it happen in Silicon Valley.
38:30
Speaker 3: It's like, sure, you can talk about like Fairchild Semiconductor,
38:34
Speaker 3: and I think it was the traitorous aid or whoever
38:37
Speaker 3: it was, and all of this, but why did that happen?
38:40
Speaker 3: Like why why? Why? I'm always like ask why three
38:42
Speaker 3: times and you get to something interesting. Part of it
38:45
Speaker 3: is that non competes are incredibly hard, if not close
38:48
Speaker 3: to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean.
38:51
Speaker 3: It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely.
38:57
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of competition and a lot of
39:01
Speaker 3: knowledge sharing, sometimes to the sugar in of former employers.
39:04
Speaker 3: But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley
39:07
Speaker 3: is still to this day. Right now it would be
39:10
Speaker 3: the era of AI. If you want to be an AI,
39:13
Speaker 3: if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding,
39:17
Speaker 3: and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent,
39:19
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley is still the place to be. Yeah, it's
39:21
Speaker 3: not true for everything, but like it still matters.
39:25
Speaker 2: No doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept
39:28
Speaker 2: of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of
39:31
Speaker 2: the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not
39:36
Speaker 2: in terms of monetary returns, in terms of and I'm
39:40
Speaker 2: delving into your space, in terms of time, energy, productivity efficiency.
39:47
Speaker 2: What do you find to be the most productive, useful
39:50
Speaker 2: investments that you've made.
39:52
Speaker 3: There are quite a few, I would say anything related
39:55
Speaker 3: to mental health ranks very highly, and we could talk
40:00
Speaker 3: about some of the things that have benefited me. So
40:05
Speaker 3: I come from a family of people who have died
40:07
Speaker 3: from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder.
40:13
Speaker 3: I struggled with probably I would say three to four
40:17
Speaker 3: major depressive episodes a year for most of my life.
40:20
Speaker 3: And that's that, in each episode ranging on the length
40:23
Speaker 3: of a few weeks to a few months. I mean,
40:25
Speaker 3: that is a lot of time in darkness. And now
40:30
Speaker 3: I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode
40:34
Speaker 3: of a few weeks every two to three years. Those
40:36
Speaker 3: are two completely different human experiences.
40:40
Speaker 2: How did you manage to actually manage this? Because there
40:44
Speaker 2: are people who suffer from depression and that's the word, suffer,
40:49
Speaker 2: and never find a way to get on top of it.
40:51
Speaker 3: I'll mention just a few things in the order I
40:53
Speaker 3: might suggest investigating them. One would be, let's call it
40:56
Speaker 3: metabolic psychiatry. So, looking at the word of Christopher Palmer,
41:01
Speaker 3: most recently out of Harvard, I've interviewed him on using
41:05
Speaker 3: diet to help mental health, and fundamentally it tends to
41:11
Speaker 3: end up being some version of a keutogenic diet. You
41:14
Speaker 3: can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting.
41:16
Speaker 3: So let's just say what I'm doing today and what
41:19
Speaker 3: I do a lot of the time, which is only
41:21
Speaker 3: eating between like two pm and ten pm. That's an
41:25
Speaker 3: eight hour window, so you fast for sixteen hours every day,
41:28
Speaker 3: and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would
41:31
Speaker 3: say within a week. You're pretty grumpy for a week
41:33
Speaker 3: and then you're fine then the next So that was
41:36
Speaker 3: the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types
41:41
Speaker 3: of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we
41:45
Speaker 3: could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and
41:50
Speaker 3: a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, but this
41:55
Speaker 3: can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable.
42:01
Speaker 3: TMS standing for transcranial magnetic stimulation, so it's a type
42:05
Speaker 3: of brain stimulation and they take something that looks like
42:07
Speaker 3: a large hockey puck and put it on your head.
42:11
Speaker 3: It's non invasive and it feels like someone's kind of
42:14
Speaker 3: tapping your skull. And depending on if you're trying to
42:17
Speaker 3: address anxiety or depression or OCD, the target can be
42:21
Speaker 3: different and if people investigate accelerated TMS. In some studies
42:27
Speaker 3: with major depressive disorder, complete remission in seventy to eighty
42:31
Speaker 3: percent of participants. Wow, and you might need a booster
42:34
Speaker 3: once a year, But compared to taking maintenance drugs every
42:40
Speaker 3: day with non trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is fascinating.
42:46
Speaker 3: I encouraged to be able to check it out. There
42:48
Speaker 3: are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated
42:50
Speaker 3: TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a
42:53
Speaker 3: lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would
42:56
Speaker 3: say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because.
42:59
Speaker 2: It's like doing of psilocybin or what have.
43:01
Speaker 3: You, microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature.
43:06
Speaker 3: And I've funded a lot of this science since twenty
43:09
Speaker 3: fifteen with my foundation. I put like double digits of
43:13
Speaker 3: my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how
43:17
Speaker 3: much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once,
43:20
Speaker 3: it could be a few times. Various compounds could be,
43:24
Speaker 3: say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder, or
43:29
Speaker 3: different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. NY us
43:32
Speaker 3: doing a lot of great work on that front, or
43:34
Speaker 3: MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean the results are
43:39
Speaker 3: very strong, mind blowing. Yeah. I mean, you have complex
43:42
Speaker 3: PTST people who've had let's just say, an average length
43:45
Speaker 3: of diagnosis of sixteen seventeen years, which means many many
43:49
Speaker 3: interventions have failed, who do two or three sessions with
43:53
Speaker 3: therapists for mdmac's psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission
43:57
Speaker 3: of symptoms. That's amazing and it is I believe. There's
44:03
Speaker 3: a psychotherapist named Stanis Lefgroff, quite legendary in the space,
44:07
Speaker 3: who says, you know, what the telescope was or is
44:10
Speaker 3: for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology, psychedelics will
44:14
Speaker 3: be for the mind. Really, and I believe that these
44:18
Speaker 3: compounds and the study of these compounds, which has become
44:20
Speaker 3: very very very popular and destigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize
44:27
Speaker 3: how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some
44:32
Speaker 3: of these so called incurable or intractable conditions, including things
44:36
Speaker 3: like anarexia and many of the things I already mentioned.
44:40
Speaker 3: Those would be three that I'd say have had a
44:42
Speaker 3: huge impact on me. And it seems boring We could
44:46
Speaker 3: talk about it if you want. But exercise, I mean.
44:48
Speaker 2: I was waiting for you to bring that up because
44:50
Speaker 2: every study in the world says that's the miracle cure
44:54
Speaker 2: for so much psychological challenges. And it's not like you
45:00
Speaker 2: haven't written about exercise.
45:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, it did a whole book on it. So yeah,
45:04
Speaker 3: the exercise. I'll just mention two other things briefly, cold
45:08
Speaker 3: exposure and by the way, people have been using this
45:11
Speaker 3: for hundreds of years.
45:12
Speaker 2: But certainly in the Nordish countries. Oh yeah, ye forever.
45:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy aka depression,
45:22
Speaker 3: and there is actually something to it. It could end
45:24
Speaker 3: up being after a few minutes when you shift from
45:28
Speaker 3: solely sympathetic nervous system activation fight or flight to parasympathetic.
45:31
Speaker 3: Could be actually stimulation of the vegas nerve. Who knows.
45:34
Speaker 3: It's unclear at this point, but cold exposure matters like that.
45:39
Speaker 3: That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems
45:42
Speaker 3: to have some durability, which is wild exercise. People think
45:46
Speaker 3: of exercise and what you read about in the media
45:49
Speaker 3: a lot is like endorphins and doorphins and doorphins, but
45:51
Speaker 3: that is not the full picture. If you want to
45:54
Speaker 3: stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera. Or let me just
45:57
Speaker 3: broadly say neurodegenerative disease, exercise provokes the release of something
46:01
Speaker 3: called CLOTHO k l O t h O, which people
46:05
Speaker 3: can investigate and it is critical in staving off or
46:11
Speaker 3: or mitigating the onset and progression of these diseases. So
46:15
Speaker 3: you have clotho endorphins. Surey of endorphins. You have endocannabinoids.
46:19
Speaker 3: Cannabinoids sounds familiar like cannabis, right, So those can explain
46:25
Speaker 3: a lot both in terms of anti inflammatory effects of
46:28
Speaker 3: some types of exercise. The benefits are just insane. So
46:32
Speaker 3: I would say follow Peter Attia's advice. He is credible
46:37
Speaker 3: trained at Stanford Johns Hopkins. In terms of Zone two training.
46:41
Speaker 3: People can just look him up. Zone two training a
46:43
Speaker 3: few times a week and then Vio two max training
46:46
Speaker 3: say once a week, and some weight training. But the
46:50
Speaker 3: if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all,
46:53
Speaker 3: and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things
46:56
Speaker 3: like brain drive neurotrophic factor, that is also just a
47:01
Speaker 3: non negotiable.
47:02
Speaker 2: So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
47:07
Speaker 3: And I have both of my family.
47:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's where I was going to the exact
47:10
Speaker 2: question was going to ask, you were never diagnosed, you
47:13
Speaker 2: just have a genetic predisposition, and you're trying to proactively
47:17
Speaker 2: just get way out ahead.
47:18
Speaker 3: I'm trying to get ahead of it. Yeah, and unfortunately,
47:21
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, as just
47:24
Speaker 3: to use that disease as an example, a lot of
47:29
Speaker 3: the interventions fail. I think some scientists would agree with this,
47:32
Speaker 3: not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because
47:36
Speaker 3: the interventions are too late by the time people have
47:41
Speaker 3: really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and
47:46
Speaker 3: so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms,
47:49
Speaker 3: it might just be too late, But there is an
47:53
Speaker 3: argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that
47:55
Speaker 3: late intervention is better than early intervention.
47:57
Speaker 2: So I just saw a piece in National Geograph yesterday
48:01
Speaker 2: that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to
48:03
Speaker 2: detect Alzheimer's risk sooner, as earlier as your twenties. So
48:08
Speaker 2: there is some sort of research going on in the
48:11
Speaker 2: space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive
48:16
Speaker 2: and individualized to take care of your preventative maintenance in
48:23
Speaker 2: advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands.
48:27
Speaker 3: Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just
48:29
Speaker 3: mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective
48:33
Speaker 3: and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like
48:36
Speaker 3: I just didn't I'm about to turn forty eight, just
48:38
Speaker 3: did my I do blood testing at least once a quarter,
48:41
Speaker 3: and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah.
48:44
Speaker 2: I just want to function health. Yeah, are you familiar
48:46
Speaker 2: with function health?
48:46
Speaker 3: I don't know. I function.
48:47
Speaker 2: So Silicon Valley startup they have come up with the
48:50
Speaker 2: way it's not a healthcare company, it's a technology company,
48:54
Speaker 2: and they say, we want to take one hundred data
48:58
Speaker 2: point screens of your blood and look at all these
49:01
Speaker 2: different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice
49:05
Speaker 2: a year. Your doctor looks at fifteen twenty things. Normally
49:09
Speaker 2: they'll go one hundred plus. And by the way, depending
49:11
Speaker 2: on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for
49:15
Speaker 2: things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. And so now you
49:19
Speaker 2: could check one hundred and fifty data points and twice
49:22
Speaker 2: a year especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark,
49:27
Speaker 2: and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word,
49:31
Speaker 2: horizontal set of data, and when something sort of spikes
49:36
Speaker 2: or is out of the normal range, you have a
49:39
Speaker 2: baseline that you could go back and work. I literally
49:42
Speaker 2: did this Tuesday, and I was like, oh, that's a
49:46
Speaker 2: lot of blood, Like, can you leave me a little?
49:49
Speaker 2: I got stuff to do later, but that in order
49:51
Speaker 2: to do one hundred different data series, they need a
49:55
Speaker 2: lot of different blood.
49:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, they need some blood. And I would say I
49:58
Speaker 3: don't spend much money on stuff, but I do I deliberately.
50:03
Speaker 3: Some might say overspend on health. But what I was
50:05
Speaker 3: going to say is the metabolic psychiatry the less so
50:09
Speaker 3: accelerated TMS. But actually I should pull that back. TMS
50:13
Speaker 3: also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's and psychedelic
50:17
Speaker 3: sisted therapies. The exercise, all of these and the cloth
50:21
Speaker 3: that I mentioned specifically within exercise, all of those should
50:25
Speaker 3: in theory help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset
50:31
Speaker 3: of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying
50:36
Speaker 3: to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn't have to
50:38
Speaker 3: be hyper personalized, like these things have clinical data or
50:43
Speaker 3: published literature behind them. There's still a lot of unknowns,
50:46
Speaker 3: but you can do these things now.
50:49
Speaker 2: So it's so funny you say hyper personalize them. I'm
50:52
Speaker 2: speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do
50:56
Speaker 2: you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week,
50:59
Speaker 2: I'm seeing Tim Ferris, And he says, oh, I love
51:02
Speaker 2: Tim he is. I love this line. He is the
51:05
Speaker 2: chief scientist of Tim Ferris the person. And I'm like,
51:10
Speaker 2: that is such a great way.
51:12
Speaker 3: To describe it.
51:14
Speaker 2: You've basically created an entire business model around being the
51:20
Speaker 2: chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even
51:24
Speaker 2: your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original
51:29
Speaker 2: game plan or did this just evolve over time.
51:33
Speaker 3: I've almost always been that way, in part because I
51:37
Speaker 3: was born premature at a ton of health issues. Still
51:41
Speaker 3: have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sunny sitas, all these things.
51:45
Speaker 2: That wait thermal regulation.
51:47
Speaker 3: Being can't handle hot well. The way that my body
51:52
Speaker 3: handles hot and cold is strange, so I can overheat
51:56
Speaker 3: very easily. As an example, the reason that's relevant is
51:58
Speaker 3: the one sport that my mom put me in that
52:02
Speaker 3: thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at
52:06
Speaker 3: when I was a little runt. I was very small
52:08
Speaker 3: till about six grade. It wasn't swimming, it was wrestling
52:11
Speaker 3: because the puny kid gets to go against the other
52:13
Speaker 3: puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant
52:17
Speaker 3: I needed to try to win quickly before I would
52:20
Speaker 3: hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts
52:25
Speaker 3: of bizarre self experimentation, interesting learning how to weight cut
52:29
Speaker 3: to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The reason that I
52:32
Speaker 3: wanted to make Tim Ferriss lab this end of one
52:37
Speaker 3: set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That's how
52:40
Speaker 3: it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you
52:43
Speaker 3: might be able to apply this stuff to the brain.
52:45
Speaker 3: And then in college I started experimenting with all sorts
52:49
Speaker 3: of stuff, nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that
52:54
Speaker 3: was I was using kind of off label like hydergen,
52:57
Speaker 3: various note tropics and so on. And they did have
53:01
Speaker 3: an effect, like they did have an effect on memory
53:03
Speaker 3: and cognition, things like desma pressing for short term memory,
53:06
Speaker 3: for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked. There's no
53:10
Speaker 3: biological free lunch with that.
53:12
Speaker 2: Stuff so well, I know free lunch.
53:14
Speaker 3: So you do you do pay a price. I would
53:16
Speaker 3: just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking
53:20
Speaker 3: and so on. And I'm not a doctor. I don't
53:22
Speaker 3: play one on the internet. But number one, since you
53:25
Speaker 3: mentioned it earlier, is I get blood tests done once
53:29
Speaker 3: a quarter at the very least. Now why is that? Well,
53:34
Speaker 3: I want more frame as high a frame rate as
53:37
Speaker 3: possible to look at trends. But separately, I want to
53:40
Speaker 3: catch things early if I need to catch things. But
53:43
Speaker 3: I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests,
53:45
Speaker 3: the risk is that you get one set of lab
53:48
Speaker 3: results back and you make a ton of big decisions
53:50
Speaker 3: based on those labs. Here's what I'll say. There are
53:53
Speaker 3: lab errors all the time, and if you're going to
53:57
Speaker 3: do consistent blood tests, consistent is the key. In other words,
54:03
Speaker 3: do it on the same day of the week at
54:04
Speaker 3: the same time.
54:05
Speaker 2: Oh really, I would not have guessed that.
54:07
Speaker 3: Because your testosterone has diurnal it has.
54:11
Speaker 2: So the quest diagnostics as an example, don't eat, don't
54:15
Speaker 2: take supplements, don't take any meds whatever is on your
54:18
Speaker 2: your prescription list. Stop the night before unless your doctor
54:21
Speaker 2: says don't stop.
54:22
Speaker 3: Follow your doctor. But I'm saying if you're.
54:25
Speaker 2: Saying is more important than just how significant.
54:29
Speaker 3: Just be consistent because if you let's just say you
54:32
Speaker 3: drink on the weekends and then you do your lap
54:34
Speaker 3: test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning,
54:38
Speaker 3: some of your results might be different. I mean, but no,
54:41
Speaker 3: that's it's not obvious to people because then they might
54:43
Speaker 3: have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend
54:47
Speaker 3: and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like altier ASD
54:50
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year,
54:52
Speaker 3: he has no idea of the context.
54:54
Speaker 2: That's fair.
54:55
Speaker 3: Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously and there are
55:00
Speaker 3: lab errors. So I would say before.
55:03
Speaker 2: Plus you also just get the regular noise and range
55:07
Speaker 2: and yeah, sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal.
55:10
Speaker 2: But it's all nothing is flatlined over time.
55:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would
55:16
Speaker 3: just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like, really,
55:21
Speaker 3: if you're about to get on a bunch of meds
55:23
Speaker 3: and let's it's an emergency. Look, there are emergencies that
55:26
Speaker 3: you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay,
55:28
Speaker 3: you have this problem, We're going to put you on
55:29
Speaker 3: this med for the next year. Before you do that,
55:32
Speaker 3: do the test again. Just get another blood test two
55:34
Speaker 3: days later. Second opinion, just confirm it and again not
55:38
Speaker 3: a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only. Blah blah blah.
55:42
Speaker 2: But there you go, dumb question. All the stuff you've
55:45
Speaker 2: done game creation is not on your CV. Why did
55:51
Speaker 2: you decide to.
55:52
Speaker 3: Create a game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitor.
55:56
Speaker 3: So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling
56:01
Speaker 3: like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons.
56:04
Speaker 2: Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends,
56:08
Speaker 2: many of whom were neuro divergent, and D and D.
56:11
Speaker 3: Was a lifeline, absolutely lifeline. So I may be pretty
56:15
Speaker 3: squarely in the neurodivergent camp.
56:16
Speaker 2: Do you still play?
56:18
Speaker 3: I don't, But here's why.
56:20
Speaker 2: I know plenty of guys forty fifty Yeah, weekly game.
56:23
Speaker 2: Forget poker.
56:24
Speaker 3: It's it's it's too much of a commitment for me now. Initially, so,
56:28
Speaker 3: I've always wanted to make a game that could help
56:31
Speaker 3: produce the magic and joy and frankly I mean sort
56:36
Speaker 3: of the like cognitive training of D and D. I
56:39
Speaker 3: think D and D is just an incredible game. Kudos
56:42
Speaker 3: to you know, TSR and Gary Gayax and everybody's who's
56:45
Speaker 3: created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to
56:48
Speaker 3: be serious about D and D, it's like being serious
56:49
Speaker 3: about World of Warcraft, like this is your new part
56:51
Speaker 3: time job. I mean it's many, many, many hours. So
56:55
Speaker 3: as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot
56:59
Speaker 3: going on, maybe I have a dinner with friends and
57:01
Speaker 3: we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going
57:03
Speaker 3: to play D and D. There's no way we're going
57:05
Speaker 3: to play a complex board game. I was curious to see, though,
57:08
Speaker 3: if I could create something, and a lot of the
57:11
Speaker 3: podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with,
57:15
Speaker 3: but that's unspoken. So I interviewed Alan Lee, who's the
57:18
Speaker 3: founder of Exploding Kittens, one of the most successful game
57:21
Speaker 3: development companies in the world, and I wanted to see
57:26
Speaker 3: if maybe, kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I
57:30
Speaker 3: could create a game with him that would be easy
57:33
Speaker 3: to learn, hard to master, very very fun for family's
57:38
Speaker 3: friends whoever kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this
57:41
Speaker 3: is yet to be proven, so just to be clear,
57:44
Speaker 3: I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but
57:46
Speaker 3: that could also possibly be a type of brain training
57:49
Speaker 3: and cognitive training.
57:50
Speaker 2: So you set the bar really low, right, just easy
57:54
Speaker 2: to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun, oh with all
57:57
Speaker 2: sorts of cognitive benefites. Yeah, you know, low target with
58:02
Speaker 2: your first game.
58:03
Speaker 3: Well that's why it took two years to land on something.
58:05
Speaker 2: Really Oh yeah, that's a long time to build what's
58:08
Speaker 2: effectively as simple. I have a copy of this at home,
58:11
Speaker 2: and you guys also sent me a copy here, so
58:15
Speaker 2: I want to open this up and go over it
58:16
Speaker 2: with but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly
58:20
Speaker 2: what this game is about. Yeah.
58:22
Speaker 3: So the game Coyote. It's called Coyote because of the
58:26
Speaker 3: trickster deity association and a lot of mythologies. Also uniquely
58:31
Speaker 3: American coyote or North American, I should say, it's very
58:35
Speaker 3: much a sort of New America's animal. But the trister
58:39
Speaker 3: piece is important. So Coyote is a game. You can
58:41
Speaker 3: think of it as rock paper scissors in a group
58:45
Speaker 3: on steroids, with many different hilarious movements and gestures, and
58:50
Speaker 3: basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins.
58:55
Speaker 3: Or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are
58:57
Speaker 3: reasons that we had both options, but the basic gist
59:01
Speaker 3: is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in
59:05
Speaker 3: a circle and each players dealing out cards that make
59:08
Speaker 3: a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious,
59:13
Speaker 3: and you each get three lives, and last person standing
59:18
Speaker 3: in competitive mode wins. That's it. So you can play.
59:22
Speaker 3: I have friends who've played with their like six year
59:24
Speaker 3: old daughters. Even though the box says ten years old.
59:27
Speaker 3: It's very challenging. When it gets challenging, I guess it's
59:34
Speaker 3: ten minutes a game roughly, probably so pretty low lift.
59:38
Speaker 3: But if you want to get good at it, you
59:41
Speaker 3: can play it over and over and over and over again.
59:42
Speaker 3: Every game is going to be totally different.
59:44
Speaker 2: One of the things I was kind of fascinated by
59:46
Speaker 2: watching the game play was it's a combination of words
59:50
Speaker 2: and gestures that you have to recall and do in
59:54
Speaker 2: order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the
59:58
Speaker 2: same time that you're creating. Tell us a little bit
1:00:01
Speaker 2: about how you guys came up with this and what
1:00:04
Speaker 2: was it like collaborating with Exploding Kittens.
1:00:08
Speaker 3: We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one,
1:00:12
Speaker 3: and we were kind of stuck because the question that
1:00:17
Speaker 3: I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question
1:00:20
Speaker 3: I was asking myself is what types of board games
1:00:22
Speaker 3: or card games do I enjoy? And that didn't get
1:00:26
Speaker 3: I mean, your answers are only going to be as
1:00:28
Speaker 3: good as your questions, and that wasn't working. We had
1:00:32
Speaker 3: done various brainstorming sprints in like La, New York, Long Island,
1:00:37
Speaker 3: and then flew to Canada to spend time with the
1:00:40
Speaker 3: co founder of Exploiting Kittens, and we did our last sprint.
1:00:43
Speaker 3: I was like, Okay, look, we've been at this for
1:00:45
Speaker 3: a while. We're either going to land on something or
1:00:46
Speaker 3: let's call it quits and just call a space a space.
1:00:49
Speaker 2: So a little pressure on it.
1:00:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean deadlines, you know the magic of
1:00:52
Speaker 3: deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type
1:00:57
Speaker 3: have you enjoyed? And it might make me sound like
1:01:00
Speaker 3: a simpleton, but having drinks and playing rock paper scissors
1:01:04
Speaker 3: with your dumb friends is I think very entertaining. Side note,
1:01:09
Speaker 3: especially if you try to do it with water in
1:01:11
Speaker 3: your mouth. Try that with a friend.
1:01:12
Speaker 2: But what does water in your mouth affect.
1:01:16
Speaker 3: When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves, So
1:01:20
Speaker 3: it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had
1:01:23
Speaker 3: a few drinks. Not recommending everybody drink. So we started
1:01:26
Speaker 3: with that as this building block. It's like, Okay, well,
1:01:29
Speaker 3: how can we make that group play? And then I
1:01:32
Speaker 3: was interested in the cognitive stuff as I mentioned, and
1:01:35
Speaker 3: this look. I haven't proven this, but I think it's
1:01:38
Speaker 3: it's quite similar. You're looking at like interference effects. There
1:01:41
Speaker 3: are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test blah blah blah,
1:01:45
Speaker 3: and Exploding Kittens. They have an amazing track record. The
1:01:48
Speaker 3: whole company started with this game, Exploding Kittens, which was
1:01:51
Speaker 3: I think the largest kickstarter of all time.
1:01:53
Speaker 2: Wow.
1:01:53
Speaker 3: At that point in time, the leaders of the company
1:01:57
Speaker 3: are still game designers, so it's not a huge bureaucratic
1:02:01
Speaker 3: thing run by no offense to middle managers. They're important,
1:02:03
Speaker 3: but it's like people who are managers versus makers. Like
1:02:07
Speaker 3: the people who run the company are still some of
1:02:11
Speaker 3: the best in the world at creating games right. Elon
1:02:14
Speaker 3: Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He's been involved with
1:02:18
Speaker 3: creating entirely new genres of games, just a genius at
1:02:23
Speaker 3: creating games. So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome.
1:02:26
Speaker 3: They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small, like they really
1:02:29
Speaker 3: punch above their weight.
1:02:30
Speaker 2: Clouds still a startup.
1:02:31
Speaker 3: Nimbles feels like a startup. Like what they do with
1:02:35
Speaker 3: the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's
1:02:38
Speaker 3: been awesome.
1:02:39
Speaker 2: I get a sense that, because you're such a thoughtful person,
1:02:43
Speaker 2: anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort
1:02:48
Speaker 2: of floats above your body and says, what's going on
1:02:50
Speaker 2: in this space? Yeah, I've had that experience in publishing. Yeah, Like, wait,
1:02:56
Speaker 2: I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave
1:02:59
Speaker 2: this way? So I have to ask you that question
1:03:02
Speaker 2: about the game industry. When you're looking at gaming generally,
1:03:07
Speaker 2: what was your experience like going into not only an
1:03:11
Speaker 2: entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past,
1:03:14
Speaker 2: but like, did you kind of look at the game
1:03:18
Speaker 2: industry and say, Hey, this whole place is just wacky
1:03:22
Speaker 2: and so different from everything else.
1:03:26
Speaker 3: All of the above. And I treated doing something like
1:03:28
Speaker 3: the game as I treat the startups. So it's if
1:03:32
Speaker 3: I make no money on this, will the relationships developed
1:03:36
Speaker 3: and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for? Right,
1:03:41
Speaker 3: would I actually tuition? Exactly? Would I pay tuition for
1:03:43
Speaker 3: what I'm going to learn? And the answer is c
1:03:45
Speaker 3: es right, a lot of late genius. The people Explainking
1:03:48
Speaker 3: is amazing. By the way, you want to scrappy creative team.
1:03:52
Speaker 3: If you're going to deal with things like tariffs.
1:03:54
Speaker 2: By the way, do tariffs I mean I'm sure assuming
1:03:58
Speaker 2: these are manufactured somewhere out of the United States. Yeah,
1:04:01
Speaker 2: do you have to pay tariffs on?
1:04:03
Speaker 3: Oh? Every every gaming company in the US. Pretty much
1:04:06
Speaker 3: tabletop game is getting really so you want people who
1:04:09
Speaker 3: are creative and can think outside the box for something
1:04:12
Speaker 3: like that. From the implications of something like that to
1:04:16
Speaker 3: contending with mass mass retail like Walmart and Target, for instance.
1:04:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're you're You're at Walmart, You're at Target, You're
1:04:24
Speaker 2: on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space
1:04:29
Speaker 2: quote unquote from how did that happen?
1:04:31
Speaker 3: Next to impossible?
1:04:32
Speaker 2: And yet you hit. That's the whole you hit for
1:04:35
Speaker 2: the for the cycle, Walmart, Target, Amazon? Where else is
1:04:39
Speaker 2: what's left?
1:04:40
Speaker 3: I'm gonna do it? Mind? You know, mind? This is
1:04:42
Speaker 3: my maybe one and only game and if my name
1:04:44
Speaker 3: is going to be on it, I need to be
1:04:46
Speaker 3: very happy with it.
1:04:47
Speaker 2: And so how did you guys manage to penetrate that?
1:04:49
Speaker 3: Well, I'll say first that what's not going to work
1:04:53
Speaker 3: is if you are a sole inventor who comes up
1:04:55
Speaker 3: with the world's greatest game, a company like a Walmarter
1:04:58
Speaker 3: target is not equipped rightly so to deal with thousands
1:05:02
Speaker 3: of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins,
1:05:06
Speaker 3: don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms
1:05:10
Speaker 3: and returns and all these things. So if you want
1:05:14
Speaker 3: to have a seat at the table, or even a
1:05:16
Speaker 3: chance to have a seat at the table, you need
1:05:18
Speaker 3: to I think this is fair to say, partner with
1:05:21
Speaker 3: someone who already has shelf space and multiple skws so
1:05:25
Speaker 3: you can be added to the lineup. And that was
1:05:29
Speaker 3: another reason to partner with someone like and exploiting Kittens.
1:05:32
Speaker 3: And yes, you can do a lot online and the
1:05:35
Speaker 3: game is on Amazon. It's been exclusive at Walmart for
1:05:38
Speaker 3: the first few months, and then the social video plays
1:05:41
Speaker 3: like you mentioned, went completely nuts, and it's actually now
1:05:44
Speaker 3: past three hundred million, so it just keeps going and
1:05:46
Speaker 3: going and going. The videos of people playing this game.
1:05:50
Speaker 3: But you can do a lot that is, say a
1:05:53
Speaker 3: direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website
1:05:57
Speaker 3: or Kickstarter. But it's very easy for techies to underestimate
1:06:02
Speaker 3: just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and
1:06:05
Speaker 3: targets of the world are.
1:06:07
Speaker 2: Sure.
1:06:07
Speaker 3: I mean, ninety percent of the US is within ten
1:06:09
Speaker 3: miles of one of those or fifteen minutes. It's I mean,
1:06:13
Speaker 3: even the food security of the United States depends on
1:06:15
Speaker 3: these companies.
1:06:16
Speaker 2: And you price this at nine ninety nine less than
1:06:20
Speaker 2: ten bucks. Very reasonable. I'm going to assume at if
1:06:25
Speaker 2: this game is as successful as you hope it will be,
1:06:27
Speaker 2: and early indications are that it can be, you can
1:06:32
Speaker 2: come up with a second pack a different focus.
1:06:34
Speaker 3: So expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a
1:06:39
Speaker 3: more complicated role playing game, something like that. Who knows,
1:06:42
Speaker 3: But in my case, right with something like this, I'm
1:06:45
Speaker 3: used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters,
1:06:48
Speaker 3: and no, no, you're jumping in this each jumping. I mean,
1:06:51
Speaker 3: even with say the four hour workweek, It's like, had
1:06:53
Speaker 3: I land on that title? I split tested all of
1:06:55
Speaker 3: the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords, and then looked
1:06:59
Speaker 3: at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from
1:07:03
Speaker 3: the rest, and that was the four hour work weeks.
1:07:04
Speaker 3: So like, that's how I don't like taking risks. I
1:07:08
Speaker 3: actually think of myself as a risk mitigator.
1:07:10
Speaker 2: But in this case, I'm fascinated by that because you
1:07:13
Speaker 2: very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk
1:07:16
Speaker 2: his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't
1:07:21
Speaker 2: want to play pop psychologists, but but you are not somebody.
1:07:25
Speaker 2: It's like, all right, I'm starting out as a studying biology. No, no,
1:07:30
Speaker 2: I'm pivoting to Asian studies. I'm living in Japan. I'm
1:07:34
Speaker 2: stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh now
1:07:37
Speaker 2: I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the
1:07:41
Speaker 2: life experience of someone who's risk averse.
1:07:45
Speaker 3: Well, I would, on one hand, agree with you. On
1:07:48
Speaker 3: the other hand, I would say I think that most
1:07:51
Speaker 3: risks are incredibly overblown. I would put I would put
1:07:55
Speaker 3: risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse,
1:07:59
Speaker 3: but if you're too using what you do based on
1:08:01
Speaker 3: what you're going to learn, the skills you're going to develop,
1:08:03
Speaker 3: the relationships you're going to develop, or deepen. It's very
1:08:07
Speaker 3: hard to fail over time. So if you're able to
1:08:11
Speaker 3: be and this applies to investing obviously, but like long
1:08:14
Speaker 3: term greedy, not short term greedy, it's very hard to
1:08:19
Speaker 3: lose over time if you're choosing let me be very clear,
1:08:23
Speaker 3: ideally areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you
1:08:27
Speaker 3: would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills
1:08:31
Speaker 3: that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm
1:08:34
Speaker 3: always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote. Okay,
1:08:37
Speaker 3: let's say, let's just say hypothetically that I don't think
1:08:40
Speaker 3: this is going to happen, because I think the tariffs
1:08:42
Speaker 3: are just a bargaining chip for mineral access right and
1:08:46
Speaker 3: other things that'll be traded with.
1:08:47
Speaker 2: That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you.
1:08:49
Speaker 2: Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tack.
1:08:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, otherwise we're also like cutting off our
1:08:56
Speaker 3: nose to spite our face, and I'm just so interdependent,
1:08:58
Speaker 3: so it's it's a bargaining. I don't expect that to continue.
1:09:01
Speaker 3: But let's just say that tariffs put every game company
1:09:06
Speaker 3: in the US out of business except for one or two.
1:09:10
Speaker 3: Then will this still have been worth my time, absolutely,
1:09:15
Speaker 3: because I have no I'm not getting in advance for this.
1:09:17
Speaker 3: I'm doing a profit share. I want incentives to be
1:09:20
Speaker 3: fully fully aligned.
1:09:21
Speaker 2: I did the same thing with my book. I don't
1:09:23
Speaker 2: want to advance. I want to see whatever upside there is.
1:09:26
Speaker 2: By the way, I really have to push back.
1:09:29
Speaker 3: This is just me.
1:09:30
Speaker 2: Maybe this's a little question. I maybe there's a little projection.
1:09:34
Speaker 2: You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I
1:09:38
Speaker 2: love the way you've rationalized or it's not an excuse,
1:09:43
Speaker 2: it's an explanations.
1:09:44
Speaker 3: Were reframing it.
1:09:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've framed this into well, I'm going to take
1:09:49
Speaker 2: this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I
1:09:53
Speaker 2: get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and relationships.
1:09:57
Speaker 2: So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen.
1:10:01
Speaker 2: You are very much a risk embracer.
1:10:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. And also, if you look at my projects, it's
1:10:07
Speaker 3: it's not a sequence of start finished, start finished, start finished.
1:10:10
Speaker 3: It's more like a gant chart where things are overlapping.
1:10:13
Speaker 3: So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I
1:10:16
Speaker 3: put a ton I've been involved with every single possible
1:10:19
Speaker 3: aspect of this game. We play tested it with one
1:10:21
Speaker 3: hundred plus families, blah blah blah. But podcast is still going,
1:10:26
Speaker 3: the books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments,
1:10:30
Speaker 3: and therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs
1:10:34
Speaker 3: in one basket.
1:10:35
Speaker 2: So two last questions on the game before we'll get
1:10:38
Speaker 2: to our speed round.
1:10:40
Speaker 3: Ye.
1:10:41
Speaker 2: First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Was
1:10:47
Speaker 2: this a purposeful decision to avoid screens, to not create
1:10:51
Speaker 2: more screen time?
1:10:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. I would say if I look
1:10:54
Speaker 3: at the mental health of my audience, let's just call
1:10:56
Speaker 3: it twenty million people a month or something over the
1:11:00
Speaker 3: last ten years, the degree of depression, anxiety, nihilism is
1:11:06
Speaker 3: shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically
1:11:09
Speaker 3: antithetical to those things. Right, maybe not depression, but very optimistic.
1:11:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a little self selection there. Hey, I have
1:11:16
Speaker 2: this issue. Tim seems to figure this out. Yeah, let
1:11:18
Speaker 2: me work my way there.
1:11:19
Speaker 3: There's a little bit of that. But if you look
1:11:21
Speaker 3: at let's just say, the writing of you know, Derek
1:11:24
Speaker 3: Thompson made it amazing writer at the Atlantic who does
1:11:26
Speaker 3: a lot more.
1:11:27
Speaker 2: No longer at the Atlantic, now he has his own substack.
1:11:29
Speaker 3: Yeah right, that's right. He went full in on Substack
1:11:31
Speaker 3: and actually this piece I think is from Substack, but
1:11:35
Speaker 3: it was effectively, I think it's simply Americans need to
1:11:38
Speaker 3: have more fun, but it's.
1:11:39
Speaker 2: A decline of partying in America.
1:11:41
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah, that effectively, I think it's something atrocious
1:11:45
Speaker 3: like one in twenty five families or people have social
1:11:50
Speaker 3: plans in person for any given weekend, and it's down
1:11:53
Speaker 3: for is that right? That's amazing, And it's down for
1:11:57
Speaker 3: certain age brackets seventy percent in the last time ten years.
1:12:01
Speaker 3: And I really feel like digital isn't inherently bad, but
1:12:07
Speaker 3: the dose makes the poison. Yes, And I think that
1:12:10
Speaker 3: if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote.
1:12:15
Speaker 3: I really feel like people need to interact with other humans.
1:12:18
Speaker 3: We're not evolved for pure screen time, we are not.
1:12:21
Speaker 2: One hundred percent. So last question on the game, what
1:12:26
Speaker 2: are your expectations for this? How do you define success?
1:12:29
Speaker 2: And I'm going to prevent you from saying I've already
1:12:32
Speaker 2: succeeded due to my collaboration all the experience. Hold that aside.
1:12:36
Speaker 2: What's your minimum expectations and what would surprise.
1:12:39
Speaker 3: You to the upside? Minimum expectation is that this finds
1:12:43
Speaker 3: a small band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody
1:12:49
Speaker 3: should read one thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly just
1:12:52
Speaker 3: got a kk dot org it's free read that. That
1:12:55
Speaker 3: would be super gratifying. But also I always is aim high.
1:13:01
Speaker 3: So I mean, I want this to be the best
1:13:02
Speaker 3: selling game at all of the major retailers. That's incredibly
1:13:06
Speaker 3: hard to.
1:13:07
Speaker 2: Do a BYuT that's that's millions of units.
1:13:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you're dealing with tens of the Unos
1:13:12
Speaker 3: and the behemoths of the space right, so to do
1:13:14
Speaker 3: that is incredibly hard. That's what I'm aiming for. I
1:13:18
Speaker 3: think that the products, you know, the game can stand
1:13:21
Speaker 3: on its own two feet, like people do love this game.
1:13:24
Speaker 3: And the reason I like to do that is not
1:13:26
Speaker 3: because I want to set myself up for disappointment, but
1:13:28
Speaker 3: as I think it's Larry Page of Google has said
1:13:31
Speaker 3: what people misses, it's very hard to fail completely. If
1:13:36
Speaker 3: I aim for that and I'm fifty percent short, I'm
1:13:40
Speaker 3: still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential
1:13:45
Speaker 3: payoff of that huge a goal. It's still gonna exceed
1:13:49
Speaker 3: oh my expectations that I would have had.
1:13:51
Speaker 2: Agre and just moving into a different space is its
1:13:54
Speaker 2: own rewards because it's so you know, it really exercises
1:13:58
Speaker 2: different parts of the brain than you normally get to
1:14:00
Speaker 2: play with.
1:14:01
Speaker 3: It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which
1:14:04
Speaker 3: is why after the success of the Four Hour work
1:14:07
Speaker 3: Week bought me permission to write more books. I didn't
1:14:09
Speaker 3: do the three hour work Week. I didn't do the
1:14:11
Speaker 3: four hour work Week, Force, you know, the Single Mother's
1:14:15
Speaker 3: Soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because
1:14:18
Speaker 3: I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author.
1:14:21
Speaker 3: That's why I did the four Hour Body and everything
1:14:22
Speaker 3: on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a
1:14:25
Speaker 3: different category in the bookstore to see if my readers
1:14:28
Speaker 3: would follow me. And as soon as I proved to
1:14:30
Speaker 3: myself that was the case and to publishers, you know,
1:14:33
Speaker 3: when I hit number one year times and blah blah blah,
1:14:36
Speaker 3: then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so
1:14:39
Speaker 3: this is another way of testing that, you know, could
1:14:42
Speaker 3: I play in a completely different sandbox.
1:14:45
Speaker 2: So before we get to our five favorite questions, I've
1:14:47
Speaker 2: pulled a few of your questions that either you asked
1:14:51
Speaker 2: on your pod or other people have asked you, and
1:14:54
Speaker 2: let's do this as a speed round in still right,
1:14:58
Speaker 2: tell us about one hundred or less purchase that has
1:15:02
Speaker 2: positively impact your life.
1:15:04
Speaker 3: Be specific, Yeah, I will be specific. Now I'm going
1:15:07
Speaker 3: to put in one shameless plug, which is if people
1:15:09
Speaker 3: want to figure out this game, just go to Coyote
1:15:11
Speaker 3: game dot com. Okay, back to our regular programming. Two
1:15:15
Speaker 3: things I would say that have impacted me in the
1:15:17
Speaker 3: last year would be there's something called the Alpha Ball,
1:15:22
Speaker 3: which is from Tune Up Fitness, and this is something
1:15:26
Speaker 3: you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back,
1:15:30
Speaker 3: for dealing with your IT bands, anything, and it's much
1:15:34
Speaker 3: better than a phone roller because you can really get
1:15:37
Speaker 3: into specific spots. It's very easy to use. You can
1:15:40
Speaker 3: use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor,
1:15:42
Speaker 3: and it's small enough to travel with. So I'd say
1:15:45
Speaker 3: the Alpha Ball is one. Have that my luggage right
1:15:48
Speaker 3: now because I'm traveling. And then the other one is
1:15:51
Speaker 3: actually a meditation app called The Way and it's taught
1:15:55
Speaker 3: by someone named Henry Shukman, and it's more or less
1:15:59
Speaker 3: a zen type of meditation. Full disclosure. I ended up
1:16:03
Speaker 3: becoming an advisor to these guys because I ended up
1:16:05
Speaker 3: loving the app so much. But I use that once
1:16:09
Speaker 3: or twice a day, ten minutes each session, and it's
1:16:13
Speaker 3: teaching you sort.
1:16:14
Speaker 2: Of a guided meditation.
1:16:16
Speaker 3: Is that Right's they're guided meditations, but it's a sequence
1:16:20
Speaker 3: of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply
1:16:23
Speaker 3: outside of meditation, which is why like it so much.
1:16:26
Speaker 3: Let's say those are two that immediately come to mind.
1:16:29
Speaker 2: So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas,
1:16:33
Speaker 2: learning new skills, and learning them quickly. What's your favorite
1:16:37
Speaker 2: cheek code for That.
1:16:39
Speaker 3: Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the
1:16:42
Speaker 3: first place. So what I mean by that is, if
1:16:46
Speaker 3: you want to get the best golf coach in the world,
1:16:53
Speaker 3: you might not be able to afford it. You probably
1:16:54
Speaker 3: can't afford it. It's going to be it's a very
1:16:56
Speaker 3: common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved.
1:16:59
Speaker 3: It's going to be hard to get direct instruction from
1:17:02
Speaker 3: somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose
1:17:05
Speaker 3: say almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and
1:17:11
Speaker 3: you look for, say not gold medalists, but silver medalists
1:17:15
Speaker 3: who are, by the way, frequently just as good. They
1:17:18
Speaker 3: say they yea, they just exactly, They just got ten
1:17:22
Speaker 3: minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You
1:17:25
Speaker 3: can get some of the people who are best in
1:17:28
Speaker 3: the world to teach you at a cost that is
1:17:30
Speaker 3: next to nothing. So I would say that number one
1:17:33
Speaker 3: is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked
1:17:35
Speaker 3: about with the four hour workweek with business and entrepreneurship,
1:17:38
Speaker 3: like picking the goal first. The second is looking at
1:17:43
Speaker 3: frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot
1:17:45
Speaker 3: of people just dive into learning languages. Well, I think
1:17:48
Speaker 3: that material beats method. In other words, like picking what
1:17:51
Speaker 3: you're going to learn very carefully is more important, at
1:17:55
Speaker 3: least in sequence than choosing how you're going to do it.
1:17:58
Speaker 3: A lot of people ask like, what's the best way
1:18:00
Speaker 3: to learn X? And I'm like, first of all, you
1:18:02
Speaker 3: should ask what should I learn? And you can look
1:18:04
Speaker 3: at word frequency lists and things like that, and for
1:18:07
Speaker 3: a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the one thousand
1:18:11
Speaker 3: or fifteen hundred most frequently used words. You can learn
1:18:14
Speaker 3: that in a few weeks. Lingo Duel Lingo is outstanding.
1:18:19
Speaker 3: I mean, of course I'm biased because I invested in
1:18:21
Speaker 3: their first round we just.
1:18:22
Speaker 2: Were in Paris three years ago, and Slim two years ago,
1:18:26
Speaker 2: Rome last year, and dual Lingo just for those basic
1:18:29
Speaker 2: phrases is amazing.
1:18:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great. I mean I've used it for Korean
1:18:33
Speaker 3: as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school.
1:18:36
Speaker 3: And that's a tough language, right, it's tough. The grammar's
1:18:40
Speaker 3: almost identical Japanese. I have a leg up there. But
1:18:42
Speaker 3: by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I
1:18:44
Speaker 3: think it's like learning how to read Korean fifteen minutes.
1:18:47
Speaker 3: There's a comic book that literally will teach you how
1:18:50
Speaker 3: to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading,
1:18:52
Speaker 3: but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean. And
1:18:55
Speaker 3: like it's a bit of an exaggeration, I'd say probably
1:18:58
Speaker 3: takes an hour. But do u a Lingo is very
1:19:02
Speaker 3: well designed, and I have seen every possible language startup.
1:19:06
Speaker 3: My fans sent me that one. By the way, my
1:19:08
Speaker 3: fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they
1:19:10
Speaker 3: knew I was interested in e commerce. So a lot
1:19:14
Speaker 3: of my best deals have come from my my readers
1:19:17
Speaker 3: and my listeners. But the duelingo came about because they
1:19:22
Speaker 3: were enclosed beta, and a number of my fans reached
1:19:24
Speaker 3: out and said, you have to try this really, and
1:19:27
Speaker 3: so I got access and I looked at it and
1:19:28
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, yeah, this is fundamentally different from
1:19:30
Speaker 3: everything else I've seen.
1:19:31
Speaker 2: Give us an example of an unusual habit or just
1:19:34
Speaker 2: absurd thing that you love.
1:19:37
Speaker 3: I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD go ahead,
1:19:40
Speaker 3: So I take a screenshot whenever I see five point
1:19:43
Speaker 3: fifty five on my phone, So I have hundreds of
1:19:46
Speaker 3: screenshots of typically five point fifty five PM. I just
1:19:50
Speaker 3: love repeating those specific repeating numbers. A lot of folks
1:19:54
Speaker 3: like eleven eleven, nothing against eleven eleven. I think that's
1:19:56
Speaker 3: that's perfectly fine. I'm just more of a five to
1:19:58
Speaker 3: five to five guy.
1:19:59
Speaker 2: Those eleven eleven people, so they don't know what's up.
1:20:02
Speaker 2: It's all about. Have you seen the old style analog
1:20:08
Speaker 2: almost neon tubes that are clocks?
1:20:10
Speaker 3: Yes, Like what happens.
1:20:12
Speaker 2: When that rolls over to eleven eleven? Do you see
1:20:14
Speaker 2: something like that and just shrug and like, I.
1:20:17
Speaker 3: Still find it pleasant. I like symmetry, So eleven eleven
1:20:20
Speaker 3: has the advantage over five five five that it is
1:20:26
Speaker 3: pleasingly symmetrical, like this old friend I used to have,
1:20:30
Speaker 3: Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome.
1:20:32
Speaker 2: It's right. I was gonna say five to five is
1:20:34
Speaker 2: a palind drome, but it's not truly symmetrical visual, so
1:20:39
Speaker 2: there is We were talking there divergent earlier. One of
1:20:43
Speaker 2: the things I kind of was shocked to learn in
1:20:46
Speaker 2: the ADHD world is why people will play a song
1:20:50
Speaker 2: over and over and over again because it tickles a
1:20:54
Speaker 2: part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional
1:20:59
Speaker 2: expressions that tend to be more difficult or absence, and
1:21:03
Speaker 2: it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that
1:21:07
Speaker 2: you haven't been able to get in the real world.
1:21:10
Speaker 2: It sounds like the five five to five and the
1:21:12
Speaker 2: eleven eleven tickles a similar part of the brain.
1:21:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just
1:21:19
Speaker 3: something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is.
1:21:21
Speaker 3: I mean is why I mentioned archery, like I love archery,
1:21:24
Speaker 3: and for most people archery, yeah, I love archery and
1:21:27
Speaker 3: also language learnning. For most for a lot of there's
1:21:30
Speaker 3: a lot of repetition involved and for many people, and
1:21:34
Speaker 3: I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more
1:21:38
Speaker 3: boring than going through conjugations or doing archery, which, by
1:21:44
Speaker 3: the way, if you're doing it at a high level,
1:21:47
Speaker 3: you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing
1:21:50
Speaker 3: over and over a year.
1:21:51
Speaker 2: Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill. I mean
1:21:55
Speaker 2: the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people
1:21:59
Speaker 2: on five people, and so just extrapolate that out exponentially.
1:22:04
Speaker 2: There are a million variations. The same with chess, whatever,
1:22:07
Speaker 2: But it really doesn't matter each particular play move step is.
1:22:13
Speaker 2: You're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need.
1:22:17
Speaker 2: Even something like darts, but there are so many variations
1:22:21
Speaker 2: to your muscula shore, your your thought process. Is any
1:22:25
Speaker 2: sport boring Hitting a tennis ballah? I mean, it's the
1:22:29
Speaker 2: same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion
1:22:32
Speaker 2: variations of what can happen.
1:22:34
Speaker 3: That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing
1:22:37
Speaker 3: in one place shooting at the same thing thousands of times.
1:22:41
Speaker 2: Right any sharp shooting darts.
1:22:46
Speaker 3: Repetitive right now? I like the other sports too, like tennis.
1:22:49
Speaker 3: I would say that also confusingly, if people are interested
1:22:53
Speaker 3: in the accelerated learning stuff My third book, The Four
1:22:58
Speaker 3: Hour Chef, is basically a book unaccelerated learning disguised as
1:23:01
Speaker 3: a cookbook, so it gets into like how to learn,
1:23:03
Speaker 3: how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff.
1:23:07
Speaker 3: You can get a lot further. For instance, I think
1:23:10
Speaker 3: number one, adults can learn languages faster than children. Actually
1:23:13
Speaker 3: really with it.
1:23:14
Speaker 2: If that is very inn opposite to accepted wisdom.
1:23:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly
1:23:22
Speaker 3: than kids with a few constraints applied, just a couple
1:23:26
Speaker 3: of systems. I mean, I really think for a native
1:23:29
Speaker 3: English speakers, for say a Romance language or something that
1:23:33
Speaker 3: isn't too far flung like Chinese is going to be different.
1:23:36
Speaker 3: But eight weeks you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like
1:23:41
Speaker 3: pretty functional, if you were to carve out not three
1:23:46
Speaker 3: hours a week. That's where kids have the advantage is
1:23:48
Speaker 3: that they're forced to do it all the time and
1:23:50
Speaker 3: they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have
1:23:53
Speaker 3: no job. But if you were to put in say
1:23:56
Speaker 3: ten hours a week and take it really seriously eight
1:23:59
Speaker 3: to twelve weeks, you could be.
1:24:01
Speaker 2: Very functional, very fluent.
1:24:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like you could get around and have like a
1:24:06
Speaker 3: conversation for ten to fifteen minutes with someone.
1:24:08
Speaker 2: Wow. Let's jump to our favorite five questions we ask
1:24:12
Speaker 2: all of our guests, starting really simple, what are you
1:24:15
Speaker 2: streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime
1:24:19
Speaker 2: or podcast. What's keeping you entertained? Well?
1:24:22
Speaker 3: I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought
1:24:25
Speaker 3: was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a
1:24:29
Speaker 3: video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because
1:24:34
Speaker 3: I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight
1:24:38
Speaker 3: which absolutely blew my mind.
1:24:39
Speaker 2: Just the Lost in Starlight.
1:24:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation
1:24:47
Speaker 3: made my head spin. Because you don't, well, I think
1:24:49
Speaker 3: most people do not associate South Korea with animation.
1:24:53
Speaker 2: You might think of it most of our low cost
1:24:55
Speaker 2: animation is coming from all the past. Well that's not CGI.
1:24:59
Speaker 3: There's there's a lot of lower cost animation, yes, but
1:25:03
Speaker 3: when you think of say, Cinematic Animation and Studio Ghibli
1:25:07
Speaker 3: out of Japan, let's just say people tend to think
1:25:10
Speaker 3: of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and I think Korea is
1:25:15
Speaker 3: going to be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation.
1:25:19
Speaker 3: We'll see, we shall say we Lost in Starlight is
1:25:21
Speaker 3: a recent phave, and then I've got some weird ones,
1:25:24
Speaker 3: like there's a German language documentary on fasting that I
1:25:29
Speaker 3: found on YouTube. You can't watch it in the US,
1:25:31
Speaker 3: but you can use a VPN to.
1:25:33
Speaker 2: Pretend to say you could watch anything anyway.
1:25:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can use a VPN to pretend like you're
1:25:37
Speaker 3: in Germany. Then you can watch it and just use
1:25:40
Speaker 3: the automatic subtops. What's the name of that one, some
1:25:43
Speaker 3: long German name. I'm just getting started with it, so
1:25:46
Speaker 3: unfortunately I can't remember, but it's it's looking at specifically
1:25:50
Speaker 3: someone who did I want to say, a two to
1:25:52
Speaker 3: three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute who has
1:25:58
Speaker 3: fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I have some
1:26:01
Speaker 3: bones to pick with their approach, but I nonetheless find
1:26:04
Speaker 3: that they have such a huge data set really fascinating.
1:26:08
Speaker 3: So I'm looking at that one. And then podcasts. I
1:26:12
Speaker 3: found a new podcast recently called stem Talk, which features
1:26:16
Speaker 3: interviews with scientists mostly and I've listened to an interview
1:26:21
Speaker 3: with someone named Kevin Tracy tracee Y, who is a
1:26:27
Speaker 3: very widely cited scientist who's arguably the most credible researcher
1:26:36
Speaker 3: who has established a lot related to the vegas nerve
1:26:39
Speaker 3: and vegas nerve stimulation. There's a lot of bs and
1:26:42
Speaker 3: pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal
1:26:46
Speaker 3: amongst the noise. So I'm listening to a bunch of
1:26:49
Speaker 3: stem talk, different scientists on stem talk, and the interviewers
1:26:52
Speaker 3: are outstanding.
1:26:53
Speaker 2: It's interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic,
1:26:59
Speaker 2: but just ramping up since then. I want to say,
1:27:02
Speaker 2: it's become fifty sixty percent of my television viewing. It's
1:27:06
Speaker 2: amazing how.
1:27:07
Speaker 3: It's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find
1:27:10
Speaker 3: anywhere else. So I think there's a documentary. The name
1:27:15
Speaker 3: is something like Learning how to See or the Art
1:27:20
Speaker 3: of Seeing, and it's about David Hockney. Oh okay, and
1:27:24
Speaker 3: big spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it
1:27:28
Speaker 3: on YouTube, and I was not able to find it
1:27:30
Speaker 3: anywhere else.
1:27:31
Speaker 2: Huh. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell
1:27:34
Speaker 2: us about who your mentors were and how they helped
1:27:38
Speaker 2: shape your career.
1:27:39
Speaker 3: Early mentors Stephen Gorik. He was a martial arts instructor
1:27:45
Speaker 3: when I was probably twelve thirteen. Just from the perspective
1:27:48
Speaker 3: of physical and mental toughness. Because the class was all
1:27:50
Speaker 3: adults and then it was me. They did not take
1:27:54
Speaker 3: it easily on me, and I was very grateful for that.
1:27:56
Speaker 3: They weren't abusive, but they treated me like an adult
1:27:58
Speaker 3: who was training for for real, and I think from
1:28:01
Speaker 3: a toughness perspective, he always reiterated that I could do
1:28:06
Speaker 3: more than I thought I could do, much like my
1:28:10
Speaker 3: wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to
1:28:14
Speaker 3: this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to
1:28:16
Speaker 3: do amazing things and they all reference back to him.
1:28:20
Speaker 3: Then Ed Shall who was that professor in high tech
1:28:23
Speaker 3: entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly or
1:28:28
Speaker 3: pretty directly, although they wouldn't have expected it, informed later
1:28:32
Speaker 3: what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing non
1:28:37
Speaker 3: fiction writer who staff writer for the New Yorker. He's
1:28:40
Speaker 3: got least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country,
1:28:44
Speaker 3: I think, And he taught a class at Princeton's seminar
1:28:48
Speaker 3: called the Literature Effect, which was on nonfiction writing and I.
1:28:52
Speaker 2: To literature of fact name.
1:28:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that class in terms of thinking about structure,
1:28:58
Speaker 3: how to structure writ which by the way helps you
1:29:01
Speaker 3: structure your thinking. So all of my grades and my
1:29:03
Speaker 3: other classes went up when I took that class. It
1:29:05
Speaker 3: was no kidd wild to see. And I'm sure there
1:29:10
Speaker 3: are many more. I mean right after graduation, Mike Mables Junior,
1:29:13
Speaker 3: in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing.
1:29:16
Speaker 2: That's a good starter list.
1:29:18
Speaker 3: For Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I'm very lucky.
1:29:20
Speaker 2: Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites?
1:29:23
Speaker 2: What are you reading right now?
1:29:25
Speaker 3: Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic,
1:29:31
Speaker 3: which is by Marcus Seneca. In this case, meditations by
1:29:35
Speaker 3: Marcus are released as well, so Letters from a Stoic
1:29:38
Speaker 3: by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world.
1:29:45
Speaker 3: I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very,
1:29:52
Speaker 3: very very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too,
1:29:58
Speaker 3: although that might sound odd applied to Stoicism, So Letters
1:30:01
Speaker 3: from a Stoic I would say. Vagabonding a book by
1:30:05
Speaker 3: Ralph Potts. I think the subtitle is the Uncommon Art
1:30:09
Speaker 3: of Long Term World Travel, which is really it's a
1:30:12
Speaker 3: book on long term travel, but it's a book on
1:30:14
Speaker 3: it's a philosophical treatise too. That's a great fun read.
1:30:19
Speaker 3: Those are those are two phaves that come to mind.
1:30:22
Speaker 3: One More Awareness by Anthony Demello. I believe the subtitle
1:30:27
Speaker 3: is the Promises and Perils of Reality. It's just about
1:30:31
Speaker 3: becoming more aware, so taking yourself out of the automatic
1:30:35
Speaker 3: loops that we all have and adopt from parents and
1:30:37
Speaker 3: so on. Really good book. It's like one hundred and
1:30:40
Speaker 3: twenty pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading
1:30:42
Speaker 3: right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve,
1:30:46
Speaker 3: which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned and
1:30:51
Speaker 3: about it's all about the Vegas nerve research related to
1:30:54
Speaker 3: vegas nerve stimulation, etc.
1:30:56
Speaker 2: What's the book that you've given most as a gift
1:30:59
Speaker 2: and why the.
1:31:00
Speaker 3: Books I've given most is a gift includes some of
1:31:04
Speaker 3: the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone
1:31:06
Speaker 3: were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house,
1:31:08
Speaker 3: I have shelves. Each shelf just has fifteen copies of
1:31:13
Speaker 3: these books and.
1:31:14
Speaker 2: Take one with you.
1:31:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would
1:31:17
Speaker 3: say that's idea. It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing
1:31:20
Speaker 3: for someone like me, so the same yeah, yeah, it's very,
1:31:25
Speaker 3: very very esthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony de Mello.
1:31:29
Speaker 3: For sure, I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book
1:31:32
Speaker 3: Letters from a Stoic, hundreds of copies of that book
1:31:36
Speaker 3: back in the day. Now there are a million copies,
1:31:39
Speaker 3: or I shouldn't say a million copies. Now there are a
1:31:40
Speaker 3: million different books on the subjective psychedelics and psychedelic history,
1:31:44
Speaker 3: psychedelic science. But How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollin.
1:31:48
Speaker 3: For a while, I had that in my room because
1:31:51
Speaker 3: I got early galleys of that book and have since
1:31:54
Speaker 3: ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with with Michael,
1:31:57
Speaker 3: who's amazing. But uh. Other Wise, I also gift my
1:32:02
Speaker 3: friends who are nonfiction purists, who are too busy to meditate,
1:32:06
Speaker 3: too busy to read fiction. I tend to give them
1:32:08
Speaker 3: books of poetry because I'm like, you need to slow down,
1:32:13
Speaker 3: and if you feel like you can't meditate for ten
1:32:15
Speaker 3: minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour
1:32:17
Speaker 3: a day. That type of that type of logic leads
1:32:21
Speaker 3: me to give them a very short collection of For instance,
1:32:27
Speaker 3: there's a new translation of roomy Poetry, relatively new, called
1:32:31
Speaker 3: Gold by Halle Eliza Gavori is her name. Who's incredible.
1:32:38
Speaker 3: She's based in New York City and native speaker. Also,
1:32:42
Speaker 3: who's able to go to the source material? So Gold,
1:32:45
Speaker 3: which is a new compilation of short, roomy poetry that
1:32:50
Speaker 3: is well translated. Unlike a lot of versions you might find.
1:32:53
Speaker 3: It's like one hundred pages. And I'd just say to my friend,
1:32:55
Speaker 3: I'm like, look, don't read this a dizy. Just read
1:32:58
Speaker 3: one before you go to bed every night. And those
1:33:03
Speaker 3: are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years.
1:33:06
Speaker 2: That sounds really interesting. Our final two questions, what sort
1:33:10
Speaker 2: of advice would you give to a recent college grad
1:33:13
Speaker 2: interested in a career in fill in the blank writing, podcasting,
1:33:19
Speaker 2: seed investing, game design. What would you tell them?
1:33:25
Speaker 3: If it's nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one,
1:33:29
Speaker 3: are you really sure you want to do that? It's
1:33:32
Speaker 3: not don't assume it's a good way to make money,
1:33:35
Speaker 3: because generally it's not. But I would say, also if
1:33:39
Speaker 3: it's a recent grad out, so if you're gonna write nonfiction,
1:33:42
Speaker 3: probably go do something interesting before you try to write
1:33:45
Speaker 3: something interesting. That would be my advice. That's what very fair,
1:33:48
Speaker 3: That's what John McFee does. That's what many folks have done.
1:33:53
Speaker 3: It is like I get some life experience doing something
1:33:56
Speaker 3: first and then write about it. Would probably be my
1:33:59
Speaker 3: recommend in the realm of investing finance, I would say
1:34:07
Speaker 3: that probably ensure you have an informational, behavioral or network
1:34:16
Speaker 3: meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do, unless
1:34:21
Speaker 3: you're going to do something like low cost index funds,
1:34:24
Speaker 3: which I think actually are a great idea for a
1:34:26
Speaker 3: lot of people, and I myself also invest in very
1:34:29
Speaker 3: very low cost index funds.
1:34:31
Speaker 2: That's your core you could build, you know, that's your tree.
1:34:33
Speaker 2: You could throw some ornaments around it.
1:34:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I want to like keep your risk capital
1:34:39
Speaker 3: and your retirement capital separate.
1:34:42
Speaker 2: What do you know about the world today that would
1:34:44
Speaker 2: have been useful to know twenty five years or so
1:34:48
Speaker 2: ago when you graduated.
1:34:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, threw out a few. So the first would be
1:34:53
Speaker 3: from an investing perspective, you don't need to compete in
1:34:57
Speaker 3: the public markets. You can learn a ton through being
1:34:59
Speaker 3: around startups or even very on sexy private sector stuff,
1:35:04
Speaker 3: and you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So
1:35:07
Speaker 3: you don't have to compete against the citadels in the world,
1:35:11
Speaker 3: Like I don't want to do that, or the rentex
1:35:13
Speaker 3: or whatever like like that's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
1:35:16
Speaker 3: I don't want to deal with that.
1:35:17
Speaker 4: So I would say, also look for white space that
1:35:22
Speaker 4: you're you can create your own area where you're a pioneer,
1:35:27
Speaker 4: not going into well trod space. Yeah.
1:35:30
Speaker 3: I would also say invest in what you know. And
1:35:32
Speaker 3: that sounds so trite, but the first the first stock
1:35:35
Speaker 3: I ever bought was when I was in my teens,
1:35:38
Speaker 3: and it was I think it was in my teens.
1:35:40
Speaker 3: It might have been a little bit later, but it
1:35:41
Speaker 3: was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I
1:35:44
Speaker 3: was like, Oh, this is so fundamentally different, Like this
1:35:46
Speaker 3: is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew.
1:35:52
Speaker 3: So I would say that sort of investing from the
1:35:56
Speaker 3: perspective of watching main behavior on mainstream more than Wall
1:36:01
Speaker 3: Street is actually can be a really viable approach in
1:36:06
Speaker 3: the world at large. I would say for me personally,
1:36:09
Speaker 3: thirty years ago, I would have said, like, your current
1:36:13
Speaker 3: experience of mental health and the buggy code that you
1:36:16
Speaker 3: inherited from your parents, God bless them, but like you know,
1:36:19
Speaker 3: there are some bugs in the code, is not a
1:36:24
Speaker 3: sort of psychological death sentence, like you can actually change
1:36:28
Speaker 3: those things, because you can, you really can impact those things,
1:36:33
Speaker 3: and your living proof. I am living proof, and I
1:36:38
Speaker 3: would say that, you know, science, science is such an
1:36:42
Speaker 3: amazing tool, like the framework of science so necessary for
1:36:46
Speaker 3: not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially
1:36:50
Speaker 3: psychiatg I don't want to throw psychiatry into the bus,
1:36:52
Speaker 3: but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who's
1:36:57
Speaker 3: worth their salt will say something along the lines of like,
1:36:59
Speaker 3: fifty percent of way we know is wrong, we just
1:37:01
Speaker 3: don't know which fifty percent. And when I was growing up,
1:37:04
Speaker 3: I mean, there were so many definitive statements about like
1:37:07
Speaker 3: all right, you're born with this number of neurons and
1:37:09
Speaker 3: when they die, they die, and that's it. You can
1:37:11
Speaker 3: ever regenerate. These types of things totally false. And I
1:37:16
Speaker 3: feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional
1:37:23
Speaker 3: health will be overturned in the next five years. It's
1:37:26
Speaker 3: going to happen fast.
1:37:27
Speaker 2: Thank you, Tim for being so generous with your time.
1:37:30
Speaker 2: We have been speaking with Tim Ferris, author, podcaster, angel investor.
1:37:37
Speaker 2: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out
1:37:40
Speaker 2: any of the previous five hundred and sixty we've done
1:37:43
Speaker 2: over the past eleven years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg,
1:37:50
Speaker 2: wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check
1:37:54
Speaker 2: out my new book How Not to Invest The Bad Ideas,
1:37:58
Speaker 2: numbers and behaviors that Destroy well How Not to Invest
1:38:02
Speaker 2: at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I
1:38:05
Speaker 2: did not thank the Cracked team that helps us put
1:38:08
Speaker 2: these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank.
1:38:13
Speaker 2: Jean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer.
1:38:17
Speaker 2: Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm
1:38:21
Speaker 2: Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on
1:38:25
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Radio.