Transcript: Tim Ferriss on The Productivity Mindset

 

 

The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Tim Ferriss on The Productivity Mindset, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio

Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast. Yes, I know I say I have an extra special guest every week. This week I have an extra, extra special guest, Tim Ferriss bestselling author of numerous books, including the Four Hour Work Week host of the Tim Ferriss podcast. He’s got a bajillion downloads on that. He’s written five number one bestselling books, including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot of buzz. He co-created this with a another gaming company called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of his books or, or conversations or Ted Talks or what have you. I found him to just be such a thoughtful guy. He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment, the the Tim Ferriss experiment, where he’s constantly trying to figure out how his body works, how his psychology works, how his emotional world works, and has tried a variety of different things and sort of fastidiously documented what does and doesn’t work for him. That’s what led to his productivity book, the Four Hour Work Week. It’s what led to his health and fitness book, the Four Hour Body, on and on. He just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out, does the ab tests, figures out what works and what doesn’t. I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

Barry Ritholtz: Well, it, it’s nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I don’t, I don’t have to explain how this rolls. I, what I wanna do is I’m, I’m excited about your book. I know you have a new game out that we want to talk about, but I have to start by delving into your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelor’s in East Asian studies from Princeton. What, what were the original career plans?

Tim Ferriss: So that was after a major switch. So the original career plan was actually neuroscience. Oh, kidding. So I was kidding. A neuroscience major. And there were a few reasons I wanted to focus on that. I have Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and hereditary bipolar and so on in my family.

Barry Ritholtz: So, wait, we, we could have a whole ‘nother discussion on Neurodivergency and, and I was kind of fascinated by a lot of what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage and operate around whatever deficits you’re working with. Some deficits come with separate surpluses, but how significant were all these deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology of just navigating life?

Tim Ferriss: Well, the depression piece was a huge challenge for most of my life, and thankfully that has changed with a couple of different approaches and different tools, and that’s one of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was someone in the Department of Psychology, but within the focus of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time. And I was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because he was focused on the role of serotonin and sleep and mood reg regulations and the neurobiology of depression. He also, and this was early days, he had of an interest in psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my, my interest in psychedelic compounds goes back a very, very long time. That would’ve been 19 95, 96, but I couldn’t personally do. I realized, and it is important and it is necessary at this point in time, the animal testing on rats used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies, but I couldn’t euthanize these rats after doing various tests. And it wasn’t actually torture of any type. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t be hands-on with that at the time. So I switched to East Asian studies, but with a focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in the realm of let’s just say cognitive neuroscience, but more on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to be a research subject in a bunch of his studies.

Barry Ritholtz: No kidding.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Just to see what that was like. But at,

Barry Ritholtz: At the time, had he already won the Nobel and like, I think it was 01, 02, something like that?

Tim Ferriss: No, not yet. Not yet. So this was super early days. Still very well known on campus, but I guess it would’ve been Green Hall. They were pretty boring, to be honest. The tasks hitting space bars or something to indicate when you see a flashing green right box in the upper left hand corner of one of these very old school monitors. But that was one of the ways that I earned whatever it was, $5 an hour to pay for some of my expenses in Princeton?

Barry Ritholtz: I kind of remember he was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California. So my maybe, yeah, he

Tim Ferriss: Bounced around, but at that time Princeton.

Barry Ritholtz: Really, really interesting. So I get the transition, I guess if you’re gonna pick some space related to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, and I had been an exchange student. My first real trip outside of the US was an exchange student at age 15 to Tokyo, Japan. Amazing. Where I went to a Japanese school for a year.

Barry Ritholtz:  Are you fluent at all?

Tim Ferriss: I am, yes. I still speak read less. So write, because you really have to practice that to keep it up. I can still speak and read Japanese and then got a couple of others.

Barry Ritholtz: , I have a friend Noah Smith, who is physics and economics, like a killer double major. And he spent summers in, in raves Kyoto. Says Tokyo, you have to go. And that must have been fascinating at 15.  That has to be a little overwhelming.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a fascinating very, for someone who grew up on Long Island and

Barry Ritholtz: That’s right, you’re an East Hampton kid, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And at that point, I only spoke English very alien. It has the benefit of being incredibly alien, but incredibly safe. And the additional benefit that people tend to speak if they speak at all terrible English, which means you have to learn Japanese. Huh. So in contrast with a lot of, if you go to Spain or if you go to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian because people are gonna default to English. That just doesn’t really happen in Japan. So, not to mention the fact that I got there before smartphones, so I couldn’t just escape to texting with my friends. I was stuck.

Barry Ritholtz: Use Google Translate to actually talk to people!?

Tim Ferriss: Didn’t exist. Yeah. You were stuck. And that was a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason, actually another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had the, one of the strongest, if not the strongest East Asian studies programs for at that time I was most interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would’ve taken even if I had majored in neuroscience.

Barry Ritholtz: So you graduate in 2000. I’m kind of fascinated that very quickly you start writing the four hour work week, which was published in oh seven, like that is a shockingly short period of time. You’re in your twenties. Yeah. When you’re selling what essentially becomes one of the top selling books of oh seven, I mean, it was on every bestseller list. I don’t have to tell you this, but I want listeners to understand. So the first question is, what on earth motivated you five years outta college to say, I think I’m gonna write a book.

00:08:05 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. So I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything. This was a commitment I made to myself after graduation longer than an email ever. Again. That was the promise, because my senior thesis, I felt almost killed me. So I didn’t want to write anything. But one of my professors at Princeton who really changed the trajectory of my life, a professor named Ed Chao, Z-S-C-H-A-U, we’re still in touch. He was a former competitive figure skater took companies public, one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He did everything taught at Harvard Business School, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Real polymath, Renaissance man. And he taught a class called High Tech Entrepreneurship, which was electrical engineering 4 91. But you didn’t need to be an engineer. I wasn’t. And that class is what convinced me to move west. Keep in mind the timing. This was just before the dotcom implosion to kinda chase my riches and engage in tech.

00:09:10 And in 2001, after that startup I joined, had imploded. I started my own company and I was bootstrapping it. I didn’t raise any outside financing. And so Ed asked me to come back and talk to students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year to do this short lecture to students. And in one of the feedback forms, after years of doing this, one of the students who was not being serious, put in his additional comments, I don’t understand why you’re teaching a class of undergrads and graduate students. Why don’t you just write a book and be done with it? And I had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time. So I would get these half-baked ideas for chapter titles or content or whatever, and I couldn’t get to sleep. And I would just jot it down and the notes from the classes I was teaching, which changed over time to track my experiences and these insomnia, middle of the night notes, formed the backbone of something, sent it to a mentor of mine who was an author. And unbidden, without asking me, was like, I think this is a great idea here. Meet so-and-so meet So-and-so, introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping in mind now looking back, 28 or 29 publishers, meaning imprints said no. And then Crown bought it for next to nothing. I

00:10:35 [Speaker Changed] I love all the examples. I’m a big William Goldman fan whose book and ventures in the screen trade Oh, amazing. Introduce the phrase, nobody knows anything into the popular culture. And he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars. All the studios passed on Raiders. Was it paramount that passed on? ET ’cause hey, we have this other alien adventure called Starman. Nobody remembers today. And, and you could go to other,

00:11:05 [Speaker Changed] You can go anywhere, fields, Starbucks, everybody passed on Starbucks

00:11:09 [Speaker Changed] Squid Games. The author couldn’t get it sold for 10 years. Yeah. Ultimately had to sell his laptop. Yeah. ’cause he was so broke. I love the John Wick story. He you have like this Yeah. Top Action Hero could not get Hong Kong gun fu made in Hollywood. Ended up funding it himself along with, I’m trying to remember the other actress who kicked money in and it’s now a $2 billion franchise. Yeah. So love those. So bestselling book that all the imprints passed on. Not a surprise at all. Yeah. It is a throw everything against the wall business model and we don’t care. And we’ll see what sticks and they miss this.

00:11:48 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. It’s a, it’s a hits driven business in some ways. Very similar to the Angel investing later. I mean Sure. This type of kind of power law distribution. And the, what’s been wildest about the Four Hour Work Week, which is, is really a book on increasing per hour output, which is why it found a, a toehold in tech. And then the first New York Times coverage had Mark Andreessen, the famed entrepreneur, and now venture capitalist talking about it. He wants to work 80 hours a week, but he wants to get each of those hours to produce 10 times as much. And that’s the basic underlying theme of the book. So what’s wild about it is almost all the tech tools that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even in 2017 when all of that stuff was irrelevant, the principles, the frameworks and so on, it ended up being on the Amazon top 10 most highlighted books of all time list in two

00:12:46 [Speaker Changed] Meaning from the Kindle version is what’s

00:12:48 [Speaker Changed] So highlighted. Yeah. In 2017. So that would’ve been eight years later when all of the tech tools were just dinosaurs at that point, which has been, it’s been cool to watch. So,

00:12:59 [Speaker Changed] So, so I have, I’m thumbing through the book over the weekend. I read it way back when, and I’m revisiting an old copy, which I should have brought in to have you sign. And my wife says, four hour work week. What’s she, she’s an art teacher, fashion, illustration, and design. She’s like, what’s that about? And I say, I know this is not gonna be a conversation that’s gonna go any place productive. So I just say the Pato principle. Mm. She’s like, what’s that? Well, 80% of the value we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from 20% of whatever that data set is. And she’s like, oh, is that true? I’m like, yeah, kind of really seems to be true. Oh, okay. And I know immediately like, this is not her sort of book, but how grossly am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just reducing it to open principle?

00:13:54 [Speaker Changed] I think if you had to pick one principle in the book, that’s a good one.

00:13:56 [Speaker Changed] That’s it. Right.

00:13:57 [Speaker Changed] To focus on. Now it assumes a few things that sometimes get missed. Right? So people can jump to strategy before they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something. So the definition phase of that book where you’re really getting very clear on which target you are aiming for, I think is a, might sound strange, but an often underemphasized precursor to then doing an 80 20 analysis. Because for 80 20 or Pareto principle analysis, you’re looking at which 20% of the inputs roughly right? It could be 10, it could be 1% are producing the outsized percentage of the returns. Now that could be looking at your customers if you run a business, right? It could be looking at your physical exercise, what’s producing the adaptations. That’s a little trickier to do, but you can figure it out. You could look at it with medications too. I mean, it’s like, there are a lot of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo, Pareto noticed this in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution. It applies all over the place. And actually Richard Kosh, KOCH has written a a lot on this subject under the moniker of the 80 20 principle. But I’d say if you had to pick one principle, that’s the one. Sure.

00:15:22 [Speaker Changed] Since we’re sitting here in Bloomberg, I, I just have to point out, it’s very much true for your portfolio. The vast majority of your gains. And if you read some of the research by people like Bess Binder, Hendrick, Bess Binder in Arizona State, it’s not even 20% that’s generating returns. It’s one or 2%. Yeah. That creates the vast majority. So there’s Pareto principle, hyper pato principle, but it’s kind of fascinating that you use this as a way to hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like you’ve applied this across a wide range of items. Have you ever found a space where it doesn’t work?

00:16:05 [Speaker Changed] I haven’t, to be honest. It’s,

00:16:07 [Speaker Changed] It’s just consistent

00:16:08 [Speaker Changed] Everywhere. It seems to be practically a law of nature that a few things. The the critical few versus the trivial many, it’s, it’s almost always a few things.

00:16:19 [Speaker Changed] The critical few versus the trivial many. Yeah. That, that is a fabulous summation of that. Yeah. I really, I really like that. So let’s, let’s stick with the book for a moment. Sure. In the book, you have a lot of practices and tools and routines. I know some of them are, are still valid today. Some of them may or may not have, for lack of a better word, expired. What were the most important items you learned? What are the ones that people speak to you and say, Hey, this resonated. This really had a big impact on me?

00:16:54 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I would say the first is, well, let me zoom out and say that I, I went back and I looked at the book, which is always tough for me on some level. ’cause I, I, I published it when I was 29, right? I’m turning 48 soon. And so there’s, there’s a little bit of chest puffing and so on. ’cause I was completely unknown at the time, which makes me wince. But overall, the principles are still things that I apply all the time. But the tech tools, like using go to my pc, no, of course not. That’s changed. That world has changed. But the principles and the, the frameworks, the exercises still apply. So there I would say a few things get echoed to me a lot. One is the practice of fear, setting fear,

00:17:38 [Speaker Changed] Fear setting, define fear setting for the audience. Sure.

00:17:41 [Speaker Changed] It’s very simple. So fear setting is based on the, I think, accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught to set goals or we have a framework for trying to set goals like smart, right. Specific, measurable, et cetera, with a timeline. But if you have the emergency break on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business, quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation from your job or your business, whatever it might be, that that is the kind of rate limiter. And what you can do, and people can find this for free, if you just go to watch my TED talk, which has, I don’t know, 12 million views now,

00:18:26 [Speaker Changed] 18 tight minutes of here’s what to do with your life.

00:18:28 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. It’s, well, it just focuses on this exercise of fear setting, which I still do probably once a quarter. And the basic idea is you take whatever you’re considering that you haven’t yet done because you have some degree of fear or apprehension. You write down all of the worst things that could happen. Let’s just call it a list of 20 in excruciating detail. Make them specific. Then you have another column, which is what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each of those things happening. Last column, if e each of those happened, what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding, right? So, okay, you try business after quitting your job, which by the way, I don’t recommend. You can moonlight and do various things to hedge against risk, but then it doesn’t work. Okay. Can you temporarily Airbnb a bedroom in your house or your bed?

00:19:17 Can you get a job bar attending just to get back on your feet? Sure. Of course you can. So when you start to do that, and then there’s a separate page where you also write out the costs of inaction, which is a neglected step. When people are considering what they’re doing, they look at the risks of doing something, but they don’t look at the risks of not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a year, three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial or relationship costs of not doing the thing you’re considering? And when you then look at these things, which represent your thoughts trapped on paper, a lot of people are able to do the scary thing. So I would say that that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept of mini retirements. So engineering a way such that you can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected, which is very, very, very achievable. That seems

00:20:13 [Speaker Changed] Four weeks in a row or a week, every quarter,

00:20:16 [Speaker Changed] Like three to four weeks in a row. Wow.

00:20:18 [Speaker Changed] That’s a lot.

00:20:19 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And what that forces you to do also is upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in your life or in your business, or even in your job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And the value of all those things outlives the mini retirement. So I’d say those are two that come back a lot.

00:20:42 [Speaker Changed] It’s interesting that you are approaching, laying out the pros and cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture. I, I contextualize that a little differently. You and I have both interviewed Ray Dalio. Yeah. And Ray’s great innovation and and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much fake it till you make it attitude. Never admit error. No, no, it’ll be great. Don’t worry if it didn’t work out this year, it’ll work out next year. And Ray very much said, no, that’s wrong. We’re all gonna make mistakes. It’s really important to learn from those mistakes. And I wanna say he’s the first guy that really put that out at all.

00:21:25 [Speaker Changed] But I, not to not to mention the transparency of having almost all meetings recorded, accessible by anyone within his firm. I mean,

00:21:35 [Speaker Changed] Which is kind of horrifying. They

00:21:36 [Speaker Changed] Did some pretty wild stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s a fascinating character. A

00:21:40 [Speaker Changed] Absolutely. But it leads to the question, what you’re talking about is really a way to prep yourself for a fear of failure. Is, is that fair to describe it? And

00:21:54 [Speaker Changed] Sure. Yeah. Or you know what? It’s a fear of failure, but oftentimes it’s this, it’s the fact you achieve, well, very, it’s gonna be very, very hard to achieve your goals. If they’re not very specific and clear. Even if you fail partially, that’s fine. You can still do great things. I think the, the parallel is that if your fears are unclear, nebulous, it’s just a feeling in your gut, but you don’t trap the specifics on paper, they’re very difficult to overcome. They will still be a break in your life. It is just as important to address that as it is to address the goals, to identify those sort of sticking points. And I would also say that I think of risk for people is often ill-defined, and there are many ways in different contexts to define risk. But if we look at it as the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things have a 10 out of 10 value in that category.

00:22:57 Right? And then if you look at, for instance, if you look at the, and I encourage people to do this in fear setting, it’s like, from zero to 10, transient, recoverable, or permanent. What is the potential upside of doing this scary thing that you’re considering doing? And then if you stay doing what you’re doing, like what are the zero to 10 permanent transient risks or potential outcomes of not doing the thing when, when you then see, oh, if I do this thing, there could be all of these potentially semi-permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it and fail, the downsides are transient and like three outta 10, it makes the decision much, much easier. And the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then it’s just execution risk and implementation. And it’s the decision that is the hardest part for most people.

00:23:47 [Speaker Changed] It, it’s amazing that everything you’re saying is so applicable to public markets investing. Yeah. Because when people are in that panic mode, when they’re fearful, oh my God, we’re down 15%, the world is gonna come to an end. It’s always, no, this is transitory, this is temporary. Yep. How can you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it’s really understanding, hey, is this a 10 or is this more likely a 2, 3, 4 on that

00:24:18 [Speaker Changed] Scale? Yeah. And I can actually, I’ll give something else in the, in the investing world, if we’re looking at, when people neglect the other side of a coin, and this is not gonna apply to like these super ultra pros, but a lot of people who participate in the public markets, they think about what to buy, right? What’s a good buy at this moment? They don’t think about hold period. They don’t think about selling strategy. What will be the cues? What are the underlying sort of thesis if invalidated, that would mean they should sell blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don’t have a structured way of thinking about selling. And similarly, it’s like, if you just think about your goal, but you don’t have a structured way of thinking about fear and apprehension and so on, you’re equally handicapped. So that would be an, an easy kind of copy paste comparison, I would say. Huh.

00:25:08 [Speaker Changed] Really interesting. You come out of college with Asian language studies and then you write a book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then pivot to angel investing and or advising?

00:25:25 [Speaker Changed] So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a sense because the four hour work week, I was based in Silicon Valley for 17 years. And I seeded the four hour work week at Tech Heavy Events. In part because it talks about an information, low information diet, and selective ignorance, and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That’s a component of the book. And that pain was most acutely felt by people in tech at the time. So my early adopters, plus the people I had access to were techies in the very early stages of figuring out how I would launch this book. And what that had as a side effect, was developing relationships with various founders. And there were a lot of fans among CEOs and co-founders of startups.

00:26:17 [Speaker Changed] Let me interrupt you, just to remind people. The book comes out in oh seven. Yep. This is before half of the companies that we think of as part of our daily lives. Oh. Well before were, you know, there was no public Alibaba, as I think that’s before Facebook, certainly long before Uber goes, goes public and Shopify, a lot of these companies were, you know, barely a gleam in the creator’s

00:26:42 [Speaker Changed] Eyes. Yeah. They didn’t, a lot of them either didn’t exist or they were very, very early stages. So I launched the book, my main launch strategy was South by Southwest, this festival in Austin, Texas in 2007, which was also the same south by Southwest, where Twitter basically went fully live in public, in full promotional mode. And the other piece of the story of angel investing is that I mentioned in the previous segment, my professor in school, ed Chao, his son-in-law at the time, Mike Maples Jr. Was a very well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, had been an executive of various companies. And we became friendly. He wanted to lose some weight. I wanted to learn more about what he did. So we would have breakfast at this place called Hobies, and I would help him with his strategy for training and so on. At this point, also, the four hour work week could come outta nowhere and hit the New York loan up. Right. Hit the New York Times list, then went to number one and stayed on the New York Times list for four and a half years, or five years or something. That’s insane. And so he like

00:27:48 [Speaker Changed] Are, are you aware just of how lightning in a bottle that

00:27:51 [Speaker Changed] Is? Yeah. It’s bananas. It’s bananas. That’s part of the reason I haven’t wanted to go back and revise any of the writing. I’m like, I don’t wanna touch the butterfly and risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how that happened. Like what did I do? And there were things I did for marketing and PR and so on to help catalyze that. And in exchange I’d say, tell me about your deals. What are you doing? I was always interested in investing. Eventually after a few months, all of these factors combined. I asked Mike and he was very generous with his time. If he might be open to me co-investing with him on some deals, very small checks, like I would put in 10 K so I wouldn’t eat up much of the cap table. I would put in a lot of work to try to help these companies.

00:28:33 And that is how the whole adventure started. I wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person in terms of ratio on the cap table. So that those early founders would become my testimonials, basically for future deals. Very savvy. That’s how the whole thing started. And I decided to treat it like I would treat going to business school. I looked at Stanford at the time, ’cause I’d fantasized about going to Stanford Business School. I was like, okay, that’s 120 k over two years, I would’ve had to pay that outta pocket. So let me create the quote unquote Tim Ferris fund for Angel investing. It’s 120 K over two years, and I’m assuming that it’s sunk cost tuition, it’s gonna go to zero. None of the startups are gonna succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a lot, and relationships that make it worthwhile, I’ll consider it a success. And that was the approach I took to doing it. And the timing was also great because I started in 2007, 2008, 2008 for a few years afterwards, was effectively considered a dotcom depression. Right. But that’s when I met Toby, the Shopify. Shopify, when they had nine employees or 12 employees Wow. And became an advisor. That’s when I started becoming involved with lots of companies of these very early stages, which ended up just to become these behemoths.

00:29:59 [Speaker Changed] I love your concept of this is a sun cost that’s going to zero. I think that’s the absolute right approach with startups. And you hinted at something that I, I have to explore a little bit. Anytime I throw money at a a small startup, it’s essentially a, this is gonna go to zero, but b, I really just want to invest in the jockey. I wanna put money into this person who, hey, this is easier than bearing a body. Yeah. Like, those are the two things I would do for this guy. Yeah. And a check. All right, I’ll, I’ll put a check into that. Yeah. And maybe it works out. I, I sense you have a similar belief in, you’re betting on, not on the horse, but the jockey 120 K is only 12 $10,000 checks. Yep. It’s not a lot. And I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities. What criteria do you use to figure out who gets that check? Well

00:30:51 [Speaker Changed] Also, just as a side note, the reason I started trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is that I ran outta money. I got over enthusiastic and I broke my own rules. And I think the first check I wrote was for like 40 K and immediately imploded. And I was like, uhoh, this is gonna be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of my best hits have been products that I would use personally that I could ideally be a power user of. And there have been a few exceptions, but by and large, they’re addressing problems that I feel acutely or needs that I feel or wants that I feel very acutely. So for instance, clear, how did Clear happen back in the day? It was called Clear Card and it was, it was not widely distributed. It was very little known. And I wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal.

00:31:45 And my blog at the time became very popular. And I wrote a huge piece on, on how to expedite travel. And a PA portion of that was about Clear card. I linked to their website and unbeknownst to me, I was one of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And then at some point the leadership reached out to me and they said, Hey, do you wanna do something? And that’s how, that’s awesome. That relationship started. And I think I was the first advisor to clear, I mean, it was forever ago, so it must’ve been pretty

00:32:12 [Speaker Changed] Close. I wish they were in more airports just blown through JFK LaGuardia. It’s a blast with them.

00:32:17 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Yeah. They’ve done, they, they, from an execution perspective, they’ve been excellent. Also not based in Silicon Valley. And I, I don’t think that Silicon Valley’s the only place to go hunting for great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Canada. Sure. Come on. That was Spotify, another one that was, that was neglected. So I also, so there were a few things. It was like, is it a problem or a need or a want that I feel and understand, is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore it makes it quite easy for me to promote to my audience. Could they be users or customers? And then lastly, for a while until this wasn’t viable, I looked for geographies that were neglected. So I actually, I went hunting in Canada a lot and works

00:32:57 [Speaker Changed] For comedy. Yeah,

00:32:59 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of the early experiences, like stumble upon, I was, I became an advisor to stumble upon and who was the founder of Stumble Upon, a guy named Garrett Camp. Stumble upon, I put tons of time into, he and I became close. We worked really well together. We enjoyed working together. Stumbled upon, ended up being a zero for me. But why is that? Okay. Because I, I talked about the relationships and the skills. Right? Okay. Relationship with Garrett Camp, what does he end up doing next? Co-founder of Uber,

00:33:31 [Speaker Changed] Not Too Shabby. Right.

00:33:32 [Speaker Changed] And then I was one of three people who had helped him with, stumble upon who became advisors to Uber Cab LLC at the time, which was I think 2008.

00:33:43 [Speaker Changed] Oh

00:33:43 [Speaker Changed] My God. By the way, everybody said no to Uber. Everybody.

00:33:46 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. That’s amazing to me because one of the things I find fascinating about VCs is they kind of put their failures on their websites as a badge of honor. Yeah. But it’s mostly, here are the companies we invested in that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh by the way, we passed on Uber, we passed on this, we passed on that. Yeah. You see less of that.

00:34:09 [Speaker Changed] You see less of it. And for me, I would say there’s lots of luck. But I was also trying to approach it in a systematic way. If you’re focused on effectively the way I would think about, let’s say I cut a $25,000 check. I’m like, okay, would I pay $25,000 just to develop these relationships and basically earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing? If so, then great go. If not, then think twice. And taking that approach, all of the skills and the new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks because they’re actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that was intimately connected with the people and the skills that came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again. So

00:35:04 [Speaker Changed] I’m, I’m hearing relationship, I’m hearing tuition for skills and then even quote unquote failures. You don’t know what act two is gonna be where it could go.

00:35:13 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And then lastly, I would say one thing I did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now, but I I had never heard of it, is I treated a portion of my total budget for that real world MBA slash you know, Tim Ferriss fund in quotation marks a portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean? I invested in, I bought secondary, so I bought equity from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now it ended up being very early, but to my mind at the time, they were overpriced. Super expensive. Huh. But being in those deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity in those two companies allowed me to say, I’m in these companies. Which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted in getting new deals. So I expected those to go to zero. That’s marketing budget. Right. They ended up working out kinda very unexpectedly working out really well. But I expected those to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget.

00:36:17 [Speaker Changed] I’ve heard you mention a book by Sebastian Alibi, the Power Law.

00:36:22 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Great book.

00:36:23 [Speaker Changed] Tell us a little bit about what you learned from that book about investing in startups.

00:36:30 [Speaker Changed] That is a, a great book if you wanna learn about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches I had already learned just by being in the trenches for whatever it was, a decade before that book came out, I was introduced to Sebastian through more Money than God. Yes. Which is his book about Yes. Hedge funds. That is an exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, oh my God, give that a read.

00:36:56 [Speaker Changed] Plus he’s British and his take on everything is just,

00:37:00 [Speaker Changed] It’s fantastic.

00:37:01 [Speaker Changed] It’s so dry and so delightfully humorous in an
unintentional way.

00:37:05 [Speaker Changed] Oh, it’s so good. He’s, he’s a wonderful writer and very skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that book and what people might miss about startups is yes, it’s a hits driven business. There’s a power law distribution, meaning it’s pato principle on steroids. You’re probably gonna have one or two or three startups that give you the vast majority of your lifetime earnings, at least as an angel investor who’s not taking management fees. Right? Right. If you’re an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping billion dollar plus funds, like sure you’re gonna do great on management fees.

00:37:44 [Speaker Changed] VCs seem to do okay for themselves. It’s

00:37:47 [Speaker Changed] A pretty good business. Yeah. You have to be smart how, in how you approach it. But as an angel investor, I would say you need to have, if you’re gonna be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy or philosophy around portfolio construction so that you don’t run outta money. Right. It’s like staking someone in poker. It’s like you have to be able to sustain a string of bad luck. Right. And I would say that what Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs in the world of venture capital have done that over time. And there, there are a few things I would point out also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of people miss. ’cause why did it happen in Silicon Valley? It’s like, sure, you can talk about like Fairchild Semiconductor, right. And I think it was the traitorous aid or whoever it was and all of this.

00:38:38 But why did that happen? Like why, why, why? I am always like ask why three times and you get to something interesting. Part of it is that non-competes are incredibly hard, if not close to, impossible to enforce in California. Yeah. What does that mean? It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely. So there’s a lot of competition and a lot of knowledge sharing sometimes to the chagrin of former employers. But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is still to this day it right now it would be the era of ai. If you wanna be in ai, if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent, Silicon Valley’s still the place to be. Yeah. It’s not true for everything, but like it still matters.

00:39:24 [Speaker Changed] No, no, no doubt about it. So let’s stay with the concept of return on investments. I’m curious as to one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve made, but not in terms of monetary returns. In terms of, and I’m, I’m delving into your space in terms of time, energy, productivity, efficiency. What do you find to be the most productive, useful investments that you’ve made?

00:39:52 [Speaker Changed] There are quite a, quite a few. I would say anything related to mental health ranks very highly. And we, we could talk about some of the things that have benefited me. So I come from a family of people who have died from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder. I struggled with probably, I would say three to four major depressive episodes a year for most of my life. That much. Wow. That’s a lot. And that’s that. And each episode ranging on the length of a few weeks to a few months. I mean, that is a lot of time in darkness. And now I’m at a point where it’s maybe one depressive episode of a few weeks every two to three years. Those are two completely different human experiences. How, how

00:40:40 [Speaker Changed] Did you manage to actually manage this? Because there are people who suffer from depression and that’s the word, suffer and never find a way to get on top of it.

00:40:51 [Speaker Changed] I’ll mention just a few things in the order I might suggest investigating them. One would be, let’s call it metabolic psychiatry. So looking at the work of Christopher Palmer, most recently out of Harvard, I’ve interviewed him on using diet to help mental health. And fundamentally it tends to end up being some version of a ketogenic diet. You can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting. So let’s just say what I’m doing today and what I do a lot of the time, which is only eating between like 2:00 PM and 10:00 PM that’s an eight hour window. So you fast for 16 hours every day and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would say within a week you’re pretty grumpy for a a week and then you’re fine. Then the next, so that was the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types of brain stimulation. Specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and scientists named Nolan Williams out of Stanford. But this can change people over the course of five days. It’s remarkable.

00:42:01 [Speaker Changed] TMS standing for

00:42:02 [Speaker Changed] Transcranial magnetic stimulation. So it’s a type of brain stimulation and it, it takes something that looks like a large hockey puck and put it on your head. It’s non-invasive and it feels like someone’s kind of tapping your skull. And depending on if you’re trying to address anxiety or depression or OCD, the target can be different. And if people investigate accelerated TMS in some studies with major depressive disorder, complete remission in 70 to 80% of participants. Wow. And you might need a booster once a year. But compared to taking maintenance drugs every day with non-trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is fascinating. I encourage to be, to check it out there, there are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There’s a lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because it’s

00:42:59 [Speaker Changed] Like microdosing of psilocybin or what have you,

00:43:01 [Speaker Changed] Microdosing or macro dosing, meaning most of the scientific literature. And I’ve funded a lot of this science since 2015 with my foundation. I put like double digits of my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once, it could be a few times. Various compounds could be say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder or different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. N NYU is doing a lot of great work on that front. Or MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean the results are

00:43:38 [Speaker Changed] Very strong.

00:43:39 [Speaker Changed] Mind blowing. Yeah. I mean you, you have complex PTSD people who’ve had, let’s just say an average length of diagnosis of 16, 17 years, which means many, many interventions have failed who do two or three sessions with therapists for MDMAs psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission of symptoms. That’s

00:43:58 [Speaker Changed] Amazing.

00:43:58 [Speaker Changed] And it is, I believe there’s a psychotherapist named Stanis Leff gr quite legendary in the space who says, you know what the telescope was or is for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology psychedelics will be for the mind. Really. And I believe that these compounds in the study of these compounds, which has become very, very, very popular and de-stigmatized thankfully, will completely revolutionize how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in, in treating some of these so-called incurable or intractable conditions, including things like anorexia. And many of the things I already mentioned, those would be three that I’d say have had a huge impact on me. And it’s, it’s seems boring. We could talk about it if you want, but exercise, I mean

00:44:48 [Speaker Changed] I was waiting for you to bring that up. ’cause every study in the world says that’s the miracle cure for so much psychological challenges. And it’s not like you haven’t written about

00:45:01 [Speaker Changed] Exercise. Yeah. At all. Did a whole book on it. So yeah, the, the exercise, I’ll just mention two other things briefly. Cold exposure, and by the way, people have been using this for hundreds of years, but

00:45:13 [Speaker Changed] Certainly in the Swedish Nord countries. Oh yeah. It’s been,

00:45:17 [Speaker Changed] You know, forever. Yeah. Cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy, AKA depression. And there is actually something to it. It could end up being after a few minutes when you shift from solely sympathetic nervous system activation fight or flight to parasympathetic could be actually stimulation of the vagus nerve. Who knows? It’s unclear at this point. But cold exposure matters like that, that is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems to have some durability, which is wild exercise. People think of exercise and what you read about in the media a lot is like endorphins, endorphins, endorphins. Right. But that is not the full picture. If you wanna stave off Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, et cetera, or let me just broadly say neurodegenerative disease exercise provokes the release for something called Clotho, K-L-O-T-H-O, which people can investigate. And it is critical in staving off or or mitigating the onset and progression of, of these diseases.

00:46:15 So you have cloth endorphins. Sure. You have endorphins, you have endocannabinoids, cannabinoids. Sounds familiar. Like can like cannabis. Right, right. So those ha those can explain a lot both in terms of anti-inflammatory effects of some types of exercise. The, the benefits are just insane. So I would say follow Peter Attias advice. He’s credible, you know, trained at Stanford, Johns Hopkins in terms of zone two training. People can just look him up Zone two training a few times a week and then VO two max training, say once a week and some weight training. But the, if you didn’t do it for the physical benefits at all and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things like brain drive, neurotrophic factor, that is also just a non-negotiable.

00:47:02 [Speaker Changed] So you mentioned both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and Yeah,

00:47:07 [Speaker Changed] I have both in my family. Yeah.

00:47:08 [Speaker Changed] So that’s where I was gonna, the exact question I was gonna ask you were never diagnosed, you just have a genetic predisposition and you’re trying to proactively just get way out

00:47:18 [Speaker Changed] Ahead of this. I’m trying to get ahead of it. Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of the Alzheimer’s treatments as just to use that, that that disease as, as an example, a lot of the, the interventions fail. I think some scientists would, would agree with this. Not necessarily because the interventions themselves can’t work, but because the interventions are too late. By the time people have really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms, it might just be too late. But there is an argument to be made. I mean, it’s very rare that late intervention is better than early intervention. So

00:47:57 [Speaker Changed] I just saw a piece in National Geographic yesterday that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to detect Alzheimer’s risk sooner as earlier as your twenties. Yeah. So there is some sort of research going on in the space that’s productive. You’re talking about something much more aggressive and individualized to, to take care of your preventative maintenance in advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands.

00:48:26 [Speaker Changed] Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like I just did, you know, I’m about to turn 48, just did my, I do blood testing at least once a quarter and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah, I

00:48:43 [Speaker Changed] See. You just had some I just went to function health. Yeah. Are you familiar with function health? I dunno. Function health. So Silicon Valley startup, they have come up with a way, it’s not a healthcare company, it’s a technology company. And they say we want to take a hundred data point screens of your blood and look at all these different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice a year. Your doctor looks at 15, 20 things normally. Yeah. They’ll go a hundred. And by the way, depending on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for things like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, et cetera. And so now you could check 150 data points and twice a year, especially if you are younger, alright, here’s a benchmark. And you’re creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word, horizontal set of data. And when something sort of spikes or is out of the normal range, you have a baseline that you could go back and, and work. I I literally did this Tuesday. Yeah, I yeah, I can see that. And I was like, oh, that’s a lot of blood, isn’t it? Like you, you, can you leave me a little, I got stuff to do later. But yeah, that in order to do a hundred different data series, they need a lot of different blood.

00:49:55 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. They need some blood. And I, I would say I don’t spend much money on stuff, but I do, I deliberately, some might say overspend on, on health, but what I was gonna say is the, the metabolic psychiatry, the less so accelerated TMS, but all, actually I, I should pull that back. TMS also can be applied to something like Alzheimer’s and psychedelic assisted therapies, the exercise, all of these and the cloth I mentioned specifically within exercise, all of those should in theory, help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset of, of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be hyper-personalized. Like these things have clinical data or published literature behind them. There’s still a lot of unknowns, but you can do these things now.

00:50:49 [Speaker Changed] So it’s so funny you say hyper-personalized. I, I’m speaking to a buddy who’s a, a psychologist. Hey, who do you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week I’m seeing Tim Ferris and he says, oh, I love Tim. He is, I love this line. He is the chief scientist of Tim Ferriss, the person. And I’m like, that is such a great way to describe it. Yeah, that’s true. You’ve basically created an entire business model around being the chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even your genetic health. W was this ever part of the original game plan or did just this just evolve over time?

00:51:33 [Speaker Changed] I’ve almost always been that way in part because I was born premature. I had a ton of health issues, still have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sinusitis, all these things that,

00:51:46 [Speaker Changed] Wait, thermal regulation being thermal regulation, always hot or

00:51:49 [Speaker Changed] Cold, can’t handle hot well, the way that my body handles hot and cold is strange. So I can overheat very easily. As an example, the reason that’s relevant is the one sport that my mom put me in that thanks to her that I could be somewhat successful at. When I was a little runt, I was very small swimming up until about sixth grade wasn’t swimming, it was wrestling because the puny kid gets to go against the other puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant I needed to try to win quickly before I would hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts of bizarre, huh? Self experimentation.

00:52:27 [Speaker Changed] That’s interesting.

00:52:28 [Speaker Changed] Learning how to weight cut to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The, the reason that I wanted to make Tim Ferriss lab, this n of one set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That’s how it started. Huh. And then I realized, wait a second, you might be able to apply this stuff to the brain. And then in college I started experimenting with all sorts of stuff. Nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that was, I was using kind of off-label like hydrogen, various nootropics and so on. And they did have an effect, like they did have an effect on memory and cognition. Things like desmopressin for short term memory, for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked right there. There’s no biological free lunch with that stuff. So

00:53:12 [Speaker Changed] What are the, why no free lunch? What’s the side effect? Well,

00:53:15 [Speaker Changed] You do pay, you do pay a price. I would just say a, a couple of quick tips for health tracking and so on, and I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on the internet. But number one, since you mentioned it earlier, is I get blood tests done once a quarter at, at the very least. Now why is that? Well, I want more frame as high a frame rate as possible to look at trends. But separately, I wanna catch things early if I need to catch things. But I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests, the risk is that you get one set of lab results back and you make a ton of big decisions based on those labs. Here’s what I’ll say. There are lab errors all the time. And if you’re gonna do consistent blood tests, consistent is, is, is the key. In other words, do it on the same day of the week at the same time. Oh

00:54:05 [Speaker Changed] Really? Yes. I would not have guessed that.

00:54:07 [Speaker Changed] That’s interesting because your testosterone has diurnal, it has.

00:54:11 [Speaker Changed] So the quest diagnostics as an example. Yeah. Don’t eat, don’t take supplements, don’t take any meds, whatever’s on your, your prescription lists. Stop the night before unless your doctor says don’t stop. Yeah. Follow

00:54:23 [Speaker Changed] Your doctor. But I’m saying if you measure your,

00:54:24 [Speaker Changed] But like you’re saying Monday at 10 is more important than, how significant

00:54:29 [Speaker Changed] Is that? Just be consistent because wow, if you, let’s just say you drink on the weekends and then you do your lab test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning, some of your results might be different

00:54:39 [Speaker Changed] Of course. I mean that’s

00:54:40 [Speaker Changed] Obvious, but No, that’s, it’s not obvious to people because then really then they might have, after a weekend with birthday party with a friend and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like a LT or a sd, right? All of a sudden doctor only sees it once a year. He has no idea of the context. That’s fair. Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously. And there are lab errors. So I would say before

00:55:02 [Speaker Changed] You, plus you also just get the regular noise and range and Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you’re low normal, sometimes you’re high normal, but it’s all, nothing is flatlined over time. Yeah.

00:55:13 [Speaker Changed] There’s gonna be normal variation. So I, I would just say that I’ll, I’ll keep it to one piece for now. Like really, if you’re about to get on a bunch of meds, unless it’s an emergency, look, there are emergencies that you need to deal with. But if it’s like, okay, you have this problem, we’re gonna put you on this med for the next year, before you do that, do the test again. Just get another blood test. Two days, two days later.

00:55:35 [Speaker Changed] Second opinion,

00:55:36 [Speaker Changed] Just confirm it. Huh. And again, not a doctor, not medical advice, informational purpose is only blah, blah, blah. But there

00:55:42 [Speaker Changed] You go. Dumb question. All the stuff you’ve done, game creation is not on your cv. Why did you decide to create a

00:55:52 [Speaker Changed] Game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitur. So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling like I was saved by games specifically Dungeons and Dragons.

00:56:04 [Speaker Changed] Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends, many of whom were neurodivergent and d and d was a lifeline. Lifeline,

00:56:13 [Speaker Changed] Absolutely lifeline. So I, I may be pretty squarely in the neurodivergent camp. I’m not sure.

00:56:17 [Speaker Changed] Do you still play?

00:56:18 [Speaker Changed] I don’t, but here’s why

00:56:20 [Speaker Changed] I, I know plenty of guys. 40, 50. Yeah. Weekly games. Forget poker. It’s,

00:56:24 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s too much of a commitment for me now initially. So I’ve always wanted to make a game that could help produce the magic and joy and frankly, I mean, sort of the like cognitive training of d and DI think DD is just an incredible game. Kudos to, you know, TSR and Gary Ax and everybody who’s, who’s created that game. It’s unreal. But if you’re gonna be serious about DD, it’s like being serious about World of Warcraft, right? Like this is your new part-time job. Yeah. I mean, it’s many, many, many hours. So as someone now who’s like, everybody else got a lot going on, maybe I have a dinner with friends and we have an hour afterwards, there’s no way we’re gonna play d and d, right? There’s no way we’re gonna play a complex board game. I was curious to see though, if I could create something, and a lot of the, the podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with, but that’s unspoken.

00:57:16 So I interviewed Alan Lee, who’s the founder of Exploding Kittens. Yeah. One of the most successful game development companies in the world. And I wanted to see if maybe kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I could create a game with him that would be easy to learn, hard to master, very, very fun for families, friends, whoever. Kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this is yet to be proven. So just to be clear, I’m actually hoping to do a study on this, but that could also possibly be a type of brain training and cognitive training. So I’m like, so

00:57:50 [Speaker Changed] You set the bar really low, right? Yeah. Just easy to learn. Yeah. Hard to master. Incredibly fun. Oh, with all sorts of cognitive benefits.

00:57:59 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. So,

00:58:00 [Speaker Changed] You know, large, low target. Start, start slow with your first

00:58:02 [Speaker Changed] Game. Well, that’s why it took two years to land on something. Really.

00:58:06 [Speaker Changed] Oh yeah. That’s a long time to build what’s effectively a simple, I have a copy of this at home and you guys also sent me a copy here, so I want to open this up and go over it with, but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly what this game is about.

00:58:21 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. So the game Coyote, it’s called Coyote because of the sort of trickster, deity association and a lot of mythologies, also uniquely American Coyote or North American, I should say. It’s, it’s a, it’s very much a sort of new Americas animal, but the Trier piece is important. So Coyote is a game, you can think of it as rock paper, scissors in a group on steroids with many different hilarious movements and gestures. And basically you can play competitively where it’s last person standing wins or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are reasons that we had both options, but the basic gist is it’s a rhythmic game where you’re going around in a circle and you’re, each player’s dealing out cards that make a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious, and you each get three lives and last person standing in competitive mode wins. That’s it. So you can play, I have friends who’ve played with their, like 6-year-old daughters. Even though the box says 10 years old, it’s, it’s very challenging. When it gets challenging, I guess it’s 10 minutes a game, roughly, probably. Right. So pretty low lift, but if you wanna get good at it, you can play it over and over and over and over again. Every game’s gonna be totally different.

00:59:44 [Speaker Changed] One of the things I was kind of fascinated by watching the gameplay was it’s a combination of words and gestures that you have to recall and do an order while there’s the rhythmic noise going on at, at the same time that you’re creating. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came up with this and, and what was it like collaborating with Exploding kittens?

01:00:08 [Speaker Changed] We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one, and we were kind of stuck because the question that I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question I was asking myself is, what types of board games or card games do I enjoy? And that didn’t get, I mean, your answers are only gonna be as good as your questions. Right. And that wasn’t working. We had done various brainstorming sprints and like La New York, long Island, and then flew to Canada to spend time with the co-founder exploiting kittens. And we did our last sprint. It was like, okay, look, we’ve been at this for a while. We’re either gonna land on something or let’s call, call it quits and just call a spade of spade.

01:00:48 [Speaker Changed] So a little pressure on at the end.

01:00:50 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, deadlines, you know, the magic of deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type have you enjoyed? And I, this might make me sound like a simple tin, but like having drinks and playing rock paper scissors with your dumb friends is I think very entertaining. Side note, especially if you try to do it with water in your mouth, try that with a friend. But

01:01:13 [Speaker Changed] What does water in your mouth affect? Rock, paper,

01:01:16 [Speaker Changed] Scissors. When, when people laugh, they spit water all over themselves. So I, it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had a few drinks, not recommending everybody drink. So we started with that as this building block. It’s like, okay, well how can we make that group play? And then I was interested in the cognitive stuff, as I mentioned, and this is, look, I haven’t proven this, but I I think it’s, it’s quite similar. You’re looking at like interference effects. There are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test, blah, blah, blah, and exploding kittens. They have an amazing track record. The whole company started with this game, exploding Kittens, which was I think the largest Kickstarter of all time. Wow. At that point in time, the leaders of the company are still game designers. So it’s not a huge bureaucratic thing run by no offense to middle managers. They’re important, but it’s like people who are managers versus makers, like the people who run the company are still some of the best in the world at creating games. Right. Elon Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He’s been involved with creating entirely new genres of games, just a genius at, at creating games. So it’s been a blast. Their team is awesome. They’re scrappy, you know, it’s relatively small. Like they really punch above their weight class.

01:02:30 [Speaker Changed] Still a startup, nimble able to,

01:02:32 [Speaker Changed] It feels, yeah. It feels like a startup. Like what they do with the number of people they have is just astonishing. It’s been awesome.

01:02:39 [Speaker Changed] I get a sense that because you’re such a thoughtful person, anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort of floats above your body and says, what’s going on in this space? Yeah, totally. I, I’ve had that experience in publishing. Yeah. Like, wait, I don’t understand the book industry. Why, why do they behave this way? So I have to ask you that question about the game industry. Sure. When you’re looking at, at gaming generally, what was your experience like going into not only an entirely new space that you haven’t worked in in the past, but like, did you kinda look at the game industry and say, Hey, this whole place is just wacky and so different from everything else?

01:03:26 [Speaker Changed] All of the above. And I, I treated doing something like the game as I treat the startups. So it’s, if I make no money on this, will the relationships developed and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for? Right. Would I actually pay

01:03:41 [Speaker Changed] Tuition?

01:03:42 [Speaker Changed] Exactly. Would I pay tuition for what I’m going to learn? And the answer is yes. Right. Ilan Lee genius. The people like blinks amazing, by the way. You want a scrappy creative team. If you’re gonna deal with things like tariffs, by the way, are

01:03:55 [Speaker Changed] Are tar do tariffs, I mean, I’m sure assuming these are manufactured somewhere outside of the United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are, do you have to pay tariffs on

01:04:03 [Speaker Changed] Oh, every, every gaming company in the US pretty much tabletop game is getting smashed. Really? Yep. So you want people who are creative and can think outside the box. Hmm. For something like that, from the implications of something like that to contending with mass, mass retail, like Walmart and Target, for

01:04:21 [Speaker Changed] Instance. Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re at Walmart, you’re at Target, you’re on Amazon. Yeah. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space, quote unquote from, oh, next

01:04:30 [Speaker Changed] To how did that happen to next to Impossible.

01:04:32 [Speaker Changed] And yet you hit, that’s the whole, you hit for the, for the cycle. Walmart, target, yeah. Amazon. Where else is what’s

01:04:39 [Speaker Changed] Left? If I’m gonna do it, my, you know, my, this is my maybe one and only game, and if my name’s gonna be on it, I need to be very happy with it. And so

01:04:47 [Speaker Changed] How did you guys manage to penetrate that?

01:04:49 [Speaker Changed] Well, I’ll, I’ll say first that what’s not gonna work is if you are a sole inventor who comes up with the world’s greatest game, a company like a Walmart or Target is not equipped, rightly so, to deal with thousands of independent game designers who don’t understand retail, don’t understand margins, don’t understand supply chain management, don’t understand net payment terms and returns and all of these things. So if you want to have a seat at the table or even a chance to have a seat at the table, you need to, I think this is fair to say, partner with someone who already has shelf space and multiple SKUs so that you can be added to the lineup. And that was another reason to partner with someone like an exploiting kittens. And yes, you can do a lot online and the game is on Amazon. It’s been exclusive at Walmart for the first few months.

01:05:39 And then the social video plays, like you mentioned, went completely nuts. And it’s actually now past 300 million. So it just keeps going and going and going, wow. The, the videos of people playing this game. But you can do a lot that is, say, direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website or Kickstarter. But it’s very easy for techies to underestimate just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and Targets of the world are. Sure. I mean, 90% of the US is within 10 miles of one of those or 15 minutes. Wow. It’s, I mean, even the food security of the United States depends on these companies.

01:06:16 [Speaker Changed] And you price this at 9 99. Yeah, less than 10 bucks. Very reasonable. Yep. I’m gonna assume at if, if this game is as successful as you hope it will be. And early indications are that it, it can be, you could come up with a second pack, a different focus.

01:06:34 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Expansion packs something completely different. Maybe I try a more complicated, like role-playing game, something like that. Who knows. But in my case, right, with something like this, I’m used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters and

01:06:48 [Speaker Changed] No, no, you’re jumping in z

01:06:50 [Speaker Changed] The jump band. I mean, even with say the four hour work week, it’s like, had I land on that title, I split tested all of the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords and then looked at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from the rest. And that was the four hour work week. So like that’s how I, huh. I don’t like taking risks. I actually think of myself as a risk mitigator, but in this case,

01:07:11 [Speaker Changed] I’m fascinated by that. ’cause Yeah, you very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk his whole career. Yeah. While rationalizing the potential downside. I don’t, I don’t wanna play pop psychologist, but, but you not somebody, it’s like, alright, I’m starting out as a studying biology. No, no. I’m pivoting to Asian studies. I’m living in Japan. I’m stopping what I’m doing to write a book. Oh, now I’m gonna pivot to startups. Yeah. That is not the life experience of a someone who’s risk averse.

01:07:45 [Speaker Changed] Well, I, I would on one hand agree with you. On the other hand, I would say I think that most risks are incredibly overblown. I would put agree, I would, I would put risks in quotation marks, and not to beat a dead horse, but if you’re choosing what you do, based on what you’re gonna learn, the skills you’re gonna develop, the relationships you’re gonna develop or deepen, it’s very hard to fail over time. So if, if you’re able to be, and this applies to investing, obviously, but like long-term greedy, right?

01:08:15 [Speaker Changed] That’s right.

01:08:15 [Speaker Changed] Not short-term, greedy. It’s very hard to lose over time. If you’re choosing, let me be very clear. Ideally, areas where you would pay tuition projects, where you would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills that can transfer outside of that one project, which I’m always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote, okay, let’s say, let’s just say hypothetically, I don’t think this is gonna happen. ’cause I, I think the tariffs are just a bargaining chip for mineral access. I hope you’re right. And other things that’ll be traded with

01:08:47 [Speaker Changed] China. That’s specific my thinking. I’m on the same page as you. Let’s hope that this is just a negotiating tack.

01:08:53 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I mean, otherwise we’re, we’re also like cutting off our nose to spite our face. Yes. I’m just so interdependent. So it’s, it’s, it’s a bargaining chip. I don’t expect that to continue. But let’s just say that tariffs put every game company in the US out of business, except for one or two. Then will this still have been worth my time? Absolutely. 100%. Because I have no, I’m not getting an advance for this. I’m doing a profit share. Right. I want, I want incentives to be fully, fully aligned.

01:09:21 [Speaker Changed] I, I did the same thing with my book. I don’t want an advance. I wanna see what our upside there is. Yeah. By the way, I really have to push back. This is just me. Maybe there’s a little push.

01:09:31 [Speaker Changed] I love it.

01:09:32 [Speaker Changed] Maybe there’s a little projection. You are not risk averse. You really aren’t. And I love the way you’ve rationalized or it’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation. It’s like

01:09:45 [Speaker Changed] Reframing it. Yeah.

01:09:46 [Speaker Changed] You, you’ve framed this into, well, I’m gonna take this risk, but I’m hedged because my downside is I get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and, and relationships. So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen. Yep. You are very much a risk embracer.

01:10:03 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And, and also if you look at my projects, it’s, it’s not a sequence of start, finish, start finish, start finish. It’s more like a Gantt chart where things are overlapping. So you look at this game, it’s like, yeah, I put a ton, I’ve been involved with every, every single possible aspect of this game. We play tested it with a hundred plus families, blah, blah, blah. But podcast is still going. The books are still producing royalties. Right. I still have angel investments and therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs in one basket.

01:10:35 [Speaker Changed] So two last questions on the game before we’ll get to our speed round. Yeah. First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Yep. Was this a purposeful decision to avoid screens to not create more screen time? Yeah,

01:10:52 [Speaker Changed] A hundred percent. I would say, if I look at the mental health of my audience, let’s just call it 20 million people a month or something over the last 10 years, the degree of like depression, anxiety, nihilism is shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically antithetical to those things. Right. Maybe not depression, but very optimistic.

01:11:14 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. There’s a little self-selection there. Hey, I have this issue, Tim seems to figure this out. Yeah. Let me work my way there. There

01:11:19 [Speaker Changed] There’s a little bit of that. But if you look at, let’s just say the writing of, you know, Derek Thompson made it amazing writer at The Atlantic who does a lot more,

01:11:27 [Speaker Changed] No longer at the Atlantic. Now he has his own substack. Yeah.

01:11:29 [Speaker Changed] Right. That’s right. He went full in on Substack. And actually this piece I think is from Substack, but it was effectively, I think it’s simply Americans need to have more fun. But it talk

01:11:39 [Speaker Changed] The decline of partying in America. That’s right.

01:11:41 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. That effectively, I think it’s something atrocious like one in 25 families or people have social plans in person for any given weekend and it’s down for certain. Is

01:11:54 [Speaker Changed] That right? Yeah. That’s

01:11:55 [Speaker Changed] Amazing. And it’s down for certain age brackets. 70% in the last 10 years. And I really feel like digital isn’t inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison. Yes. And, and I think that if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote. I really feel like people need to interact with other humans. We’re not evolved for pure screen time. We are not. Period.

01:12:21 [Speaker Changed] A hundred percent. You’re a hundred percent. So last question on the game. Yeah. What are your expectations for this? How do you define success? And I’m gonna prevent you from saying I’ve already succeeded due to my collaboration, the whole experience I give you. Give you a experience on that. Hold that aside. Yeah. What’s your minimum expectations and what would surprise you? To the upside

01:12:40 [Speaker Changed] Minimum expectation is that this finds a small band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody should read 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. Just go to kk.org. It’s free. Read that. That would be super gratifying. But also, I always aim high. So I, I mean I want this to be the bestselling game at all of the major retailers. That’s incredibly hard to do, by the way. I mean

01:13:07 [Speaker Changed] That’s, that’s millions of units.

01:13:09 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I mean you’re dealing with tens of millions, the Unos and the behemoths of the space. Right? So to do that is incredibly hard. That’s what I’m aiming for. I think that the products, you know, the game can stand on its own two feet. Like people do love this game. And the reason I like to do that is not because I wanna set myself up for disappointment, but as I think it’s Larry Page of Google has said what people miss is it’s very hard to fail completely. If I aim for that and I’m 50% short, I’m still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential payoff of that huge goal, it’s still gonna exceed my expectations that I would’ve had

01:13:51 [Speaker Changed] A year or two. And just moving into a different space is its own rewards. ’cause it’s so, yeah. You know, it really exercises different parts of the brain than you normally get to, to play

01:14:00 [Speaker Changed] With. It’s, it’s also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed. Which is why after the success of the four Hour work week bought me permission to write more books. I didn’t do the three hour work week. I, I didn’t do the four hour work week for, you know, the sort of single mother soul or whatever. I didn’t do these line extensions ’cause I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a business author. That’s why I did the Four Hour Body and everything on athletic performance because I wanted to be in a different category in the bookstore to see if my readers would follow me. And as soon as I proved to myself that was the case, and to publishers, well, you know, when I hit number one New York Times and blah blah blah, then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so this is another way of testing that, you know, could I play in a completely different sandbox.

01:14:44 [Speaker Changed] So before we get to our five favorite questions, I’ve pulled a few of your questions that either you ask on your pod or other people have asked you. And let’s do this as a speed round and see, lets do it. See

01:14:56 [Speaker Changed] How many it, I’ll try to keep my answer shorter.

01:14:58 [Speaker Changed] Right. Tell us about a hundred dollars or less purchase that has positively impact your life. Be specific.

01:15:05 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I will be specific. Now I’m gonna put in one shameless plug, which is, if people want to figure out this game, just go to coyote game.com. Okay. Back to our regular programming. Two things I would say that have impacted me in the last year would be, there’s something called the Alpha Ball, which is from Tuneup Fitness. And this is something you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back, for dealing with your IT bands, anything. And it’s much better than a foam roller because you can really get into specific spots. It’s very easy to use. You can use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor. And it’s small enough to travel with. So I’d say the Alpha Ball is one, have that my luggage right now because I’m traveling. And then the other one is actually a meditation app called The Way. And it’s taught by someone named Henry Shukman. And it’s more or less a zen type of meditation. Full disclosure, I ended up becoming an advisor to these guys. ’cause I love, I ended up loving the app so much, but I use that once or twice a day. 10 minutes each session. And it’s teaching you sort of a

01:16:14 [Speaker Changed] Guided meditation, is that right?

01:16:16 [Speaker Changed] It’s a it, they’re guided meditations, but it’s a
sequence of practical skills that you’re developing that you can apply outside of
meditation, which is why I like it so much. So I’d say those are two that
immediately come to mind.

01:16:29 [Speaker Changed] So you’ve spent your whole career delving into new areas, learning new skills and learning them quickly. What’s your favorite cheat code for that?

01:16:39 [Speaker Changed] Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the first place. So what I mean by that is if you want to get the best golf coach in the world, you might not be able to afford it. You probably can’t afford it. It’s gonna be, it’s a very common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved. It’s gonna be hard to get direct instruction from somebody who’s top of the field. But if you choose, say almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be. And you look for say, not gold medalists, but silver medalists. Right. Who are by the way, frequently just as good. They

01:17:17 [Speaker Changed] Just, right. It’s the 10th of a second. They, they

01:17:19 [Speaker Changed] Just, yeah. They just, they exactly. They just got 10 minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You can get some of the people who are best in the world to teach you at, at a cost that is next to nothing. So I would say that number one is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked about with the four hour work week with business and entrepreneurship, like picking the goal first. The second is looking at frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot of people just dive into learning languages. Well I think that material beats method, in other words, like picking what you’re gonna learn very carefully is more important, at least in sequence than choosing how you’re gonna do it. A lot of people ask like, what’s the best way to learn X? And I’m like, first of all, you should ask what should I learn? And you can look at word frequency lists and things like that. And for a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the 1000 or 1500 most frequently used words. You can learn that in a few weeks.

01:18:15 [Speaker Changed] Huh. Duolingo du part of

01:18:17 [Speaker Changed] Your Duolingo is outstanding. I mean, of course I’m biased ’cause I invested in their first round. I,

01:18:21 [Speaker Changed] We just were in Paris three years ago, Amsterdam two years ago, Rome last year. And Duolingo, just for those basic phrases is amazing.

01:18:31 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, it’s great. You can, I mean, I’ve used it for Korean as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school. Yeah. And

01:18:36 [Speaker Changed] That’s a tough language, right?

01:18:38 [Speaker Changed] It’s tough. The grammar’s almost identical to Japanese. So I’ve a leg up there. But by the way, like people, if there’s a cartoon, I think it’s like learning how to read Korean 15 minutes. There’s a comic book that literally will teach you how to read Korean. You won’t understand what the hell you’re reading, but you’ll be able to sound out phonetically Korean. And like, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’d say it probably takes an hour. But Duolingo is very well designed and I, I have seen every possible language startup. My fans sent me that one. By the way, my fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify ’cause they knew I I was interested in eCommerce. Huh. So a lot of my best deals have come from my, my readers and my, my listeners. But the Duolingo came about ’cause they were enclosed beta. And a number of my fans reached out and said, you have to try this really? And so I got access and I looked at it and I was like, oh yeah, this is
fundamentally different from everything else I’ve seen.

01:19:31 [Speaker Changed] Give us an example of an unusual habit or just absurd
thing that you love.

01:19:37 [Speaker Changed] I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD. Go ahead. So I take a screenshot whenever I see five fifty five on my phone. So I have hundreds of screenshots of typically 5:55 PM I just love repeating those specific, repeating numbers. I a lot of folks like 1111, nothing against 1111. I think that’s, that’s perfectly fine. But I’m just more of a 5, 5, 5 guy.

01:19:59 [Speaker Changed] Those 11, 11 people, they don’t know what’s up. It’s all about, have you seen the old style analog almost neon tubes that are clocks?

01:20:10 [Speaker Changed] Yes, I

01:20:10 [Speaker Changed] Have. They like what happens when that rolls over to 1111? Do you see something like that? And just shrug and like

01:20:16 [Speaker Changed] 5, 5, 5. I still find it pleasant. I like symmetry. So 1111 has the advantage over 5, 5, 5 that it is pleasingly symmetrical. Like this old friend I used to have Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome. It’s the

01:20:32 [Speaker Changed] Same. Right? I was gonna say 5, 5, 5 is a palindrome, but it’s not truly symmetrical vis

01:20:36 [Speaker Changed] Visually. Exactly. Yeah.

01:20:38 [Speaker Changed] So, so there is, we were talking there a diversion earlier. One of the things I kind of was shocked to learn in the A DHD world is why people will play a song over and over and over again because it tickles a part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional expressions that tend to be more difficult or absence. And it, it makes that like, oh, you’re getting that feedback that you, you haven’t been able to get in the real world. It sounds like the 5 5 5 and the 1111 tickles a similar part of the brain. Yeah,

01:21:16 [Speaker Changed] It could be. I think for me there’s just something soothing about repetition. I don’t know what it is. I mean, it’s why, you know, I mentioned archery, like I love archery and for most people

01:21:25 [Speaker Changed] Archery.

01:21:26 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I love archery and also language learning for most, for a lot of, there’s a lot of repetition involved. And for many people, and I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more boring than going through conjugations or doing archery. Which by the way, if you’re doing it at a high level, you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing over and over again.

01:21:51 [Speaker Changed] Isn’t that true for any particular athletic skill? I mean the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people on, on five people. Yeah. And so just extrapolate that out exponentially. And there are a million variations, the same with chess, whatever. But it really doesn’t matter. Each particular play move step is you’re trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need. Even something like darts. But there are so many variations to your musculature. Your, your thought process is any sport boring hitting a tennis ball? Yeah. I mean, it’s the same stroke over and over again. But there’s a bajillion variations of what can happen.

01:22:34 [Speaker Changed] That’s true. Which makes it interesting with archery, you’re standing in one place shooting at the same thing. Right. Thousands of times. Right.

01:22:42 [Speaker Changed] Any sharp shooting riflery darts, it’s go, go down the list’s

01:22:45 [Speaker Changed] Gonna be highly repetitive. Right Now I like the other sports too, like tennis. I would say that also confusingly, if people are interested in the accelerated learning stuff, the, the, my third book, the Four Hour Chef is basically a book on accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook. So it get, it gets into like how to learn, how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff. You can get a lot further. For instance, I think number one, adults can learn languages faster than children actually really

01:23:13 [Speaker Changed] With, if you, that, that is very an opposite to accepted wisdom.

01:23:17 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. I I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly than kids with a few constraints applied. And just a couple of systems. I mean, I, I really think for, for a native English speakers, for say a romance language or something that isn’t too far flung, like Chinese is gonna be different, but eight weeks you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like pretty functional if you were to carve out not three hours a week. That’s where kids have the advantage is that they’re forced to do it all the time. And they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have no job. That’s right. But, but if you were to put in say, 10 hours a week and take it really seriously, eight to 12 weeks, you could be very functional.

01:24:02 [Speaker Changed] Very fluent.

01:24:03 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. Like you could get around and have like a, a conversation for 10 to 15 minutes with someone.

01:24:08 [Speaker Changed] Wow. Let’s jump to our favorite five questions. We ask all of our guests. Starting really simple. What are you streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime or podcast. What, what’s keeping you entertained?

01:24:21 [Speaker Changed] Well, I just finished the last of us, which I thought was spectacularly well done. Especially as an adaptation from a video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight, which absolutely blew my mind. Just the lost

01:24:40 [Speaker Changed] In Starlight.

01:24:41 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. The, the, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation made my head spin. Because you don’t, well I think most people do not associate South Korea with animation. You might think of Japan.

01:24:54 [Speaker Changed] Isn’t that where most of our low-cost animation is coming from over the past? Well that’s not CGI.

01:24:59 [Speaker Changed] There’s, there’s a lot of lower cost animation. Yes. But when you think of, say, cinematic right. Animation and Studio Gili out of Japan, let’s just say people tend to think of Disney, Pixar, studio Ojibwe. And I think Korea’s gonna be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation. We’ll see, we, we shall see. But Lost in Starlight is a, is a recent fave. And then I’ve got some weird ones. Like there’s a German language documentary on fasting that I found on YouTube. You can’t watch it in the US but you can use A VPN to,

01:25:33 [Speaker Changed] I was gonna say you could watch anything anyway. Yeah. 01:25:35 [Speaker Changed] You can use, you can use A VPN to pretend like you’re in Germany and then you can watch it and just use the automatic

01:25:40 [Speaker Changed] Subtitle. What’s the name of that one?

01:25:42 [Speaker Changed] Oh, some long German name. I’m just getting started with it. So unfortunately I can’t remember. But it’s, it’s looking at specifically someone who did, I wanna say a two to three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute, who has fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I, I have some bones to pick with their approach, but I, I nonetheless find that they have such a huge data set, really fascinating. So I’m looking at that one. And then podcasts, I found a new podcast recently called STEM Talk, which features interviews with scientists mostly. And I’ve listened to an interview with someone named Kevin Tracy, T-R-A-C-E-Y, who is a very widely cited scientist who’s arguably the most credible researcher who has established a lot related to the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation. Sure. There’s, there’s a lot of BS and pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal amongst the noise. So I’m listening to a bunch of STEM talk different scientists on STEM talk. Huh. And the, the interviewers are outstanding. It,

01:26:53 [Speaker Changed] It’s interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic, but just ramping up since then, I wanna say it’s become 50, 60% of my Yeah. Television viewing. It’s amazing how

01:27:07 [Speaker Changed] It’s also great for finding documentaries that you can’t find anywhere else. Right. So I think there’s a documentary. I, I’m the name is something like Learning How to See or The Art of Seeing, and it’s about David Hockney.

01:27:23 [Speaker Changed] Oh,

01:27:23 [Speaker Changed] Okay.

01:27:24 [Speaker Changed] Big fan. The

01:27:24 [Speaker Changed] Spectacular documentary. It’s grainy, but you can find it on YouTube. And I, I I was not able to find it anywhere else.

01:27:30 [Speaker Changed] Huh. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell us about who your mentors were and how they helped shape your career.

01:27:39 [Speaker Changed] Early mentors Steven Gork. He was a martial arts instructor when I was probably 12, 13. Just from the perspective of physical and mental toughness. ’cause the class was all adults and then it was me. They did not take it easy on me. And I was very grateful for that. They weren’t abusive, but they treated me like an adult who was training for, for real. And I think from a toughness perspective, he, he always reiterated that I could do more than I thought I could do. Much like my wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to do amazing things and they all reference back to him then Ed Chao, who is that professor in high tech entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly or pretty directly, although they wouldn’t have expected it informed later what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing nonfiction writer who staff writer for the New Yorker. He is got at least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country, I think. And he taught a class at Princeton’s seminar called The Literature Fact, which was on nonfiction writing. And I took

01:28:52 [Speaker Changed] The literature of fact, what a great name.

01:28:54 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. And that class in terms of thinking about structure, how to structure writing, which by the way helps you structure your thinking. So all of my grades in my other classes went up when I took that class. It was no kidding. It was wild to see. Huh. And I’m sure there are many more. I mean, right after graduation, Mike Maples Jr. In terms of teaching me the ropes of Angel investing. That that’s

01:29:16 [Speaker Changed] A good, good starter list for

01:29:18 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, it’s a pretty good roster. I was very lucky. Let’s

01:29:21 [Speaker Changed] Talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?

01:29:25 [Speaker Changed] Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic, which is by Marcus Seneca. Seneca in this case, meditation’s by Marcus as well. So letters from Stoic by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world. I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very, very, very present and applicable. And frankly fun to read too. Although that might sound odd. Applied to stoicism. So Letters from Stoic, I would say Vagabonding, a book by Rolfe Pots. I think the subtitle is The Uncommon Art of Long-Term World Travel, which is really, it’s a book on long-term travel, but it’s a book on, it’s a Phil philosophical treatise too. That’s a great fun read. Those are, those are two faves that come to mind. One More Awareness by Anthony Dello, I believe the subtitle is The Promises and Perils of Reality. It’s, it’s just about becoming more aware. So taking yourself out of the automatic loops that we all have and adopt from parents and so on. Really good book. It’s like 120 pages. And then in terms of what I’m reading right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve, which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned. And it’s all about, on Vegas, it’s all about the vagus nerve research related to vagus nerve stimulation, et cetera.

01:30:56 [Speaker Changed] What’s the book that you’ve given most as a gift and why?

01:31:00 [Speaker Changed] The books I’ve given most as a gift includes some of the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house, I have shelves. Each shelf just has 15 copies of these books and I take one

01:31:14 [Speaker Changed] With you.

01:31:15 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would say that’s a great idea. I love that. It’s fun. It’s also very visually pleasing for someone like me. So the same, same, great. It’s very, very, very aesthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony Dello for sure. I’ve gifted hundreds of copies of this book, letters from stoic, hundreds of copies of that book back in the day. Now there are a million copies, or I shouldn’t say a million copies now. There are a million different books on the subject of psychedelics and psychedelic history, psychedelic science, but How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollen. For a while I had that in my room because I got early galleys of that book and have since ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with, with Michael, who’s amazing. But otherwise, I also gift my friends who are nonfiction purists who are too busy to meditate, too busy to read fiction.

01:32:07 I tend to give them books of poetry because I’m like, you need to slow down and if you feel like you can’t meditate for 10 minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour a day. That type of, that type of logic leads me to give them a very short collection of, for instance, there’s a, a new translation of Rumi poetry, relatively new called Gold by Hala. Liza GRI is her name, who’s incredible. She’s based in New York City and native, native speaker also who’s able to go to the source material. So gold, which is a new compilation of short roomy poetry that is well translated. Unlike a lot of versions you might find. It’s like a hundred pages. And I just say to my friend, I’m like, look, don’t read this A to Z, just read one before you go to bed every night. And those are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years.

01:33:05 [Speaker Changed] That, that sounds really interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in fill in the blank, writing, podcasting, seed investing, game design. What would you tell them?

01:33:25 [Speaker Changed] If, if it’s nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one, are you really sure you want to do that? It’s not, it’s not, don’t assume it’s a good way to make money. ’cause generally it’s not. But I would say also, if it’s a recent grad, I would say if you’re gonna write nonfiction, probably go do something interesting before you try to write something interesting. That would be my advice. That’s what, you know, very fair. That’s what John McFee does. That’s what many folks have done. It’s like I get some life experience doing something first and then write about it would probably be my recommendation in the realm of investing finance, I would say that probably ensure you have an informational behavioral or network, meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do. Unless you’re gonna do something like lowcost index funds, which I think actually are a great idea for a lot of people. And I, I myself also invest in very, very low cost index funds.

01:34:31 [Speaker Changed] That’s your core. You could build, you know, that’s your
tree. You could throw some ornaments around it.

01:34:35 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wanna like keep your risk capital
and your retirement capital separate.

01:34:42 [Speaker Changed] What do you know about the world today that would’ve been useful to know 25 years or so ago when you graduated?

01:34:50 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I’ll throw out a few. So the first would be from an investing perspective, you don’t need to compete in the public markets. Like you can learn a ton through being around startups or even very unsexy private sector stuff. And you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So you, you don’t have to compete against the citadels in the world. Like, I don’t wanna do that, or the rentech or whatever. Like, I like that’s bringing a knife to a gunfight. I don’t wanna deal with that. So I would say also

01:35:20 [Speaker Changed] Look for white space that you are, you can create your own area where you’re a pioneer. Not going into well trot space. Yeah,

01:35:30 [Speaker Changed] I would also say invest in what you know, and that sounds so trite, but the first, the first stock I ever bought was when I was in my teens and it was, I think it was in my teens, might have been a little bit later, but it was Pixar because I knew the world of animation. I was like, oh, this is so fundamentally different. Like this is gonna change everything. That’s it. That’s all I knew that. And so I, I would say that sort of investing from the perspective of watching main behavior on Main Street more than Wall Street is actually can be a really viable approach. And then in the world at large, I would say for me personally, 30 years ago, I would’ve said like your current experience of mental health and the buggy code that you inherited from your parents, God bless them. But like, you know, there are some bugs in the code is not a sort of psychological death sentence. Like you can actually change those things because you can, you really can impact those things and,

01:36:34 [Speaker Changed] And you’re living proof.

01:36:36 [Speaker Changed] I am living proof. And I would say that, you know, science, science is such an amazing tool, like the framework of science so necessary for not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially psych, I don’t wanna throw psychiatry under the bus, but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who’s worth their salt will say something along the lines of like, 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don’t know which 50%. And when I was growing up, I mean there were so many definitive statements about like, alright, you’re born with this number of neurons and when they die, they die. And that’s it. You can never regenerate these types of things. Totally false. And I feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional health will be overturned in the next five years. It’s gonna happen fast.

01:37:27 [Speaker Changed] Thank you Tim, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Tim Ferris, author, podcaster, angel investor. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out any of the previous 560 we’ve done over the past 11 years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check out my new book, how Not to Invest the Bad Ideas, numbers and Behaviors that Destroy Wealth. How not to invest at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I’m Barry Riol. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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Barry Ritholtz: Tim Ferriss: