What's happening people? Welcome
back to the show at my guest. Today is Tim Ferriss. He's an entrepreneur author and a podcaster Tim is one of the world's leading thinkers and his podcast recently crossed 1 billion downloads today. We get to hear his biggest lessons from two decades of hacking life and self-improvement expect to learn Tim's ultimate hack for productivity. What is morning routine looks like what Tim thought would make him happy when he was younger, but didn't how to deal with depression which books Tim most often gifts his best.
10 exercises for Health and Longevity his thoughts on the current state of podcasting how to avoid the Perils of audience capture how to cultivate self belief the secret to becoming a high performer and much more.
This was very cool. It kind of felt like things coming full circle a little bit before I ever started modern wisdom in 2018. I listen to a podcast from Tim called how to release a podcast in 2017. So he was the guy that taught me how to launch a show before he even knew who I was in before this show even existed. So it was cool to sit down with him and absolute 0 g of this podcasting world and his insights and life lessons really are
Nick he's got this sort of wonderful blend of tactical accuracy and the more pithy sort of philosophical insights very very cool. And there is just so much to take away from today. So I really really hope that you enjoy this one. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and that means that you will miss episodes when they go up the next few weeks have some of the biggest guests that I've ever brought on Modern wisdom coming on and you don't want to miss them and if you want to support the show if you want to say thank you for finding Tim Ferriss and strapping him to a
A chair for three whole hours, or if you just want to make me very happy navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or the Plus in the top right-hand corner on Apple podcasts. I thank you very much, but now ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Tim Ferriss.
Most people I think would look at you and assume that you're this hyper productive super optimized efficiency machine how much truth do you think's in that?
I think there's some truth to it. I think I'm more effective than I am efficient. So if you were to look at me day-to-day part of the reason, I don't really ever have journalists Shadow me or do anything like that is because if you were to be a fly on the wall, I think I look like I'm doing whole lot of nothing a lot of the time warm just futzing around but I think the choosing what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one given thing. So I do think I'm good at picking let's call it lead dominoes the tip over other things so high leverage targets that tend to make other things.
Irrelevant or a lot easier so I'm good at that but in the actual execution, I think I look like a drowning monkey allow the time so I would say there is some truth to it, but I would probably replace efficiency with Effectiveness. And then in the last 10 to 15 years. I think I've di optimized a lot since for instance. If you're running a marathon, you're not going to take a taxi from point A to point B sure they'll be efficient. But that sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. So there's a lot more than I would put in that process over outcome category.
I would say talk to me about the difference between efficiency and Effectiveness. So Effectiveness is there are different ways to look at this the way I look at it as Effectiveness is what you do efficiency is how you do something but doing something well does not make it important or high leverage. Does that make sense? So if you do an 80/20 analysis and you determine saying learning a language that if you learn these thousand highest frequency words, you're going to be conversationally fluent choosing that subset of vocabulary and then studying it.
At a b-minus level is better than choosing the wrong set of vocabulary and studying at an A+ level. So the what matters more than the how or the material matters more than the method the tasks that you choose matters more than how you do any given task. That's how I tend to think about it. You say being efficient without regard to Effectiveness is the default mode of the universe why I think it's very easy to mistake motion for progress, and it's I
I think counterintuitive for someone to measure twice and cut once I think front loading a lot of thinking feels like doing nothing it is doing nothing physically at least in terms of motion. So
The drive I would say for a lot of people is to engage in productivity theater to do things that can pass to others or to yourself as something productive. Look at how busy I am. Right? Look at how busy I am and it's not like I am a paragon of hitting home runs in this regard. I mean, there are plenty of days where it just like everybody else I pause for a second and I've been in front of a laptop for an hour and I've no idea what I've actually accomplished like I've done stuff
stuff. I've looked at the screen could not tell you what major projects I've driven forward to in any meaningful way. So as long as you choose the highest leverage tasks or if as long as you have a system for choosing what is important because that's going to be subjective then over time. I think you can snowball your way into long-term success again, as you define it having those definitions for yourself is important. Otherwise, you're going to be flailing around or mimicking other people.
And I think that can end up leading you in a lot of conflicting directions. So if what you work on is more important than how you work on it. What are the rules that you use to choose what to work on here broadly speaking of that. I've thought about this a lot and both looking in the rearview mirror, but even at the time say if you look at my transition was really
Mission they're parallel tracks, but incorporating Angel Investing around 2008 for instance after the success or the initial success of the first
book
looking at say the podcast and 2014 any of these various decisions.
There are a few common threads the primary one is asking the question and I'm not the first person to do this, but how can I succeed? Even if I fail or can I succeed even if I fail what I mean by that is
If I'm looking at five possible projects or experiments, I tend to view them as experiments. Let's just say I'm looking at six possible projects / experiments that I could pursue in the next three to six months. Let's say three months. I really tend to focus in the short term and it'll be clear why that works in the long term as if I ask myself which of these will help me to develop or deepen skills develop or deepen relationships the most even if they fail by external metrics
I buy a store it's choosing that project and then even if it fails initially by whatever external metric you might have or perception of the public as long as those skills and relationships transfer. They persist after that project those will accumulate over time and so far my experience has been they lead to better success. I mean if you look at say you have to wear skis Dune which failed you have.
Geiger and all these incredible people involved and then they split off and created these Masterworks and you see many examples like this, so I don't view the failure of Any Given project.
As a failure as long as there are things develop that can transfer forward into other things. So that's how I tend to choose my projects. This is like an inverse pyrrhic Victory. You know that idea. Yeah. I mean, I know what a pyrrhic victory is but this is like an inverse of that sin inverse. Yeah. It's like a Successful Failure. Yeah, however you would for yeah. How cool yeah, and it really at least for me and and also for others, I'm not the only one who's who's thought about it this way.
It really does accumulate over time. So as long as
your
looking at evaluating your let's just say accomplishment over a longer period of time three years five years and you're viewing things is experiments as opposed to like closed-loop success or failure binary outcomes, then it's all feedback talk to me about this relationship between three months and five years. Well, I my experience for most folks myself included is that if you were to ask me five years ago, could you have predicted?
Addicted everything that would have happened in the last five years, of course not and my own experience has been that if I put my all into shorter term projects, let's just say three months within that I have two to four week experiments that I'm running a various types. Number one, that's kind of semantic insurance against psychological distress from quote-unquote failure binary just framing it differently using different language to train your
To the river react differently and furthermore. I would say that as you run these experiments. Let's just say it's three months if you were to try to set in stone some type of three year plan, you're probably going to be creating blindness for yourself where you don't see very attractive doors that open that you had not predicted didn't give me an example sure me starting the podcast 2014. So I launched the 4-Hour chef.
F which was a very difficult book, I mean it was a 34-year project that was crammed into a year or year and a half. It was a suicide mission of sorts. Got it done at incredible personal cost. Yay go masochism and in the process of promoting the book doing the launch. I always look for the uncrowded high-leverage channel, which is increasing and impact and importance at that time that was podcasting for the first book. It was blogs.
Every time I launch a book I'm looking for that and I put all the chips into podcasts and I had the opportunity to be interviewed on Rogan show and Nerdist and many many others and that was when I became very interested in the format and I saw how with some basic trends at play. So Broadband proliferation smartphone decreases in cost and improvements in technology that sort of audio is a secondary activity was just going to
sky rocket via these smartphones. So I wanted to experiment I never would have known that in advance if I had specced out for instance. I only do one book deals. I've never done a multi book deal. Why because I want to preserve my optionality.
And in doing that with the say the 4-Hour Chef which was successful, but not as successful as I wanted to be.
Since I've only done a one-book deal when the podcasting became appealing as a break from writing a means of recovery D loading phase but also as a way to here's how I think about the skill development improve my ability to ask questions reduce my verbal tics refine my ability to interview which would transfer to my future non-fiction books, which require a lot of research. I would also have the ability to deepen my relationships with my close friends example my first
Sort of Kevin Rose because otherwise doing hours and hours of Google sleuthing on your friends is pretty creepy and having one way conversation for two hours is also pretty bizarre. But with the podcast out of the pretext that would allow that and to reach out to people ultimately who would want to get to know it checked all the boxes and I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that very attractive opportunity head. I already set down as a blueprint something fixed as a three year plan. Let's just
say it seems to me that the people who are very good at long-term plans. The only way that that can really come to fruition is if you don't have outlier events, but kind of all of us are hoping in some form for an outlier event. Like what hoping for the you know, 99th percentile win, like maybe we're not optimizing for that but will I get like really this can happen and the same with you with the show, you know, even with all of the pieces in play Thinking to yourself. Hey,
A over the next decade. This is going to have a billion downloads and you know be maybe even better known than the books which was my thing. I was an author coming in and now I'm may be best known as a podcaster. How are you able to maybe they compete there's no way axiomatically to come into that I think and be like and this is this is how it's going to go. You just don't know where the chips are going to fall. No. No, I do and I would also say that I think the
The the short-term experimentalism and the long-term planning or not mutually, exclusive but the long-term planning that I've seen executed really well is usually executed by people who are top one percent of one percent in a single field. Whereas I don't have as best I can tell that degree of expertise. I'm more of a generalist. So I would like to do this sort of linear progression through the there. They have a superpower right? They are a LeBron James.
They are a superstar 10x coder. They are a fill in the blank. They have a very clearly identified superpower that can drive them through a pretty I do want to say linear path, but it allows them to plan with a higher degree of certainty how to take full advantage of that super power. Whereas I think I am more of a generalist in the sense that I might be top 20% in a few things when you overlap them in a Venn diagram that allow me to try to try to
not not always succeeding be a category of one. So I'm I'm attempting to be the only and not the
best.
It's a great book called The Blue Ocean strategy that I recommend people read as as you think about this and there's also a chapter in a book called The 22 immutable laws of marketing. It's a bit outdated in some ways. But the original version has examples of something they called The Law of category, which is simply attempting to create new categories versus dominate crowded existing categories. And I think that's a helpful exercise not just for Branding and marketing purposes, but
But for positioning and then when you think about positioning you can work backwards from that and create the product. Yeah, I suppose as well that if you have multiple intersecting domains or subcategories that you're in you have no idea how these things are going to combine together. So hey, this meal is made of steak. I can reliably tell you what it's going to taste like this meal is made of 15 different ingredients all cooked in different ways. What's the outcome going to be? I'm not too sure. Yeah, I guess that that's where the outlier effects thing come from. So talking about
From a daily ritual standpoint. What does a typical day look like for you morning routine full Works. What's a day in the life of Shimon Peres look like it depends on where I'm located. I was for instance skiing for January if I worried so it looked very much like a day architected around skiing.
But I'll give you I'll give you a few different examples. So here in Austin it would be now. It sounds so cliched but nonetheless I've been doing this a long time is in the for our body in 2010. So there you have it but I'll do cold immersion. So 40 degrees at say three to five minutes nothing nothing to incredibly long that media immediately upon waking. Yeah waking up and then I'll know I'll feed the dog have some water. Yep, and then
When cold plunge. Yep, and then I'll go directly from that to hot tub for sort of hyper dilation find that just helps lower back issues and things along those lines along three minutes. Nothing nothing too crazy. And this is really for State change. It's not for any complex biological Cascade that I could list out. It's really for a state change and I'll I will back up and say that one of the principles I learned from Tony Robbins, and I don't know if
If the attribution is originally for to Tony, but it's something that I found very very helpful, which is a progression. The progression is State story strategy. So if you are in a say low energy state or a negative State you're going to create a disabling story right or critical or cynical story, which will then impact
in the sense that you come up with a subpar strategy. So I always start with State and then you will have a more enabling story. It could just be from releasing some norepinephrine because you're freezing your balls off and that will enable you to have a better strategy at least for the day. You've got an equivalent quote. I think it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting right that seems to be pretty Ireland. Okay, so we're in the hot tub. Yeah hot tub get out at that point. I might do a small amount of
Journaling very something very basic, right like five minutes journals and it the the exact morning routine kinda depends on the day. It's not super highly variable, but there is some variation right? So if I feel like monkey mind is getting the best of me probably something like journaling whether it's morning Pages or five minutes Journal is what I'll do shout out Alex ikonn. Yeah. It's very short or the artists way and morning Pages which are fantastic and at that point I will
Have already.
Identified the night before or the evening before what's in my calendar for that day and I will say that the daily architecture just to make a 30,000 foot comment is less important to me than the weekly architecture so we can come back to the day and I could talk about training in say you table it's very skiing specific like skiing was the one thing that I was focused on so everything revolves around skiing half of the day almost every day. That's it. So all the PT all
the prep the Stuart McGill big three exercises that you're familiar with as well already seen hundreds of hours, right? Yeah beat extract and all these things all optimized for skiing making me less shit at skiing. Yeah, exactly. And then the second half of the day for a few hours were reserved for the most important High leverage business activities often revolving around on Mondays and Fridays for instance recording so set days for recording set times for recording
10 a.m. And 3 p.m. We can go into the reasons for that. But Tuesday team calls. I find that Weekly architecture for me and I'm not the only person who does this there's some very well-known Tech CEOs who also do this is scaffolding that is a little more helpful than having fairy type parameters on a daily basis because you're going to have unexpected events. Although I will say if you have to reply to a lot of things within 72 hours.
Towers and you have broken systems like you should revisit your processes and systems. So if you're getting a lot of interruptions that you need to handle yourself as firefighter, then you have a processor that would include slack instant things and email anything if you are if you are the if you're the boss, let's just say if you are the CEO or sore solopreneur.
if you're making too many decisions that is as fatal as making
Some of the wrong decisions too many decisions will also kill you. So I would say that the morning generally for me the thread is do not feel rushed for the first hour.
I feel rushed for the first hour. I'm going to feel rushed for the whole day. And is that you have related days in which the morning is rushed psychologically emotionally semantically two days that suck. Yeah Downstream. It tends to be a bad day. Even if from the outside looking in your like hey, you put a lot of points on the scoreboard and you didn't look stressed but my internal experience was one of being very rushed and people might hear this and they have kids and they say well must be nice. You know my
My 4 year olds jumping on my jumping on my solar plexus had six in the morning and I would say I can't speak to the experience because I haven't mean someday. I hope to be able to speak to experience but there are people like Jason gay nerd who for instance started Mastermind talks though. I haven't interacted with in a long time, but he just started waking up earlier, you know, wake up earlier. He does his meditation a little bit exercise and there are workarounds.
Extreme extreme ownership by jogo. Well link is a good one to read so you can find ways around it. Okay, so we haven't rushed the morning. You've planned the night before what the calendar at least for that day is going to look like you also have a weekly Rhythm and architecture which I've fallen in love with to although stumbled upon as opposed to Designed in advance. Yeah. What about when you writing when you training when you recording and why at those times yeah, I would say training is generally going to be
Free lunch or after work. Let's just say before dinner. I like to train before meals just like right before meals and writing is not necessarily a daily activity probably should be it might end up. Just seeing you finish of five. Bullet Friday. He hadn't yeah, you saw me do five both running. So I actually do right that myself that is not ghostwritten. That is something I do. It's the closest I'll ever get to having a diary. So I actually enjoy doing it so I can look back to week. Well, I mean you you convinced me.
God I thought this is so funny things that you take for granted about the world in retrospect you realize that you were still maybe early on things. So like you with podcasting it kind of appeared perhaps obviously you probably had an idea that you were first mover for it. But I knew for years ago when I started my newsletter God, it's the only thing that you owned him very says, it's the only thing that you own in it's the most valuable piece of real estate and everything else is mediated by thing and you can export that CSV and you can move it anywhere else in the world. Oh my God. I'm so late to the party and now I look back and I got I'm so glad that I
That is that four years ago. And I'm now that guy proselytizing about like dude you need to get the get a lead magnet get oh you did it so I know we're bouncing around. Yeah, but and I feel like I'm giving a disappointing answer but there's a reason for the disappointment. So first thing actually just to comment on that when I started my podcast many people told me it was too late. They're like sure that ship has sailed. He does 14 so people are always going to tell you too late now.
Could talk about competition and differentiation separately. But the key takeaway for my very disappointing answer to what is my daily routine. Is that the exact boot up sequence does not matter what matters is having at least say three hours in a block of time uninterrupted where you can focus on one or two of your highest leverage tasks, which have been defined beforehand.
And those highest leverage tasks could be the things that make you most uncomfortable on your to-do list, the things that have been punted week to week to week. It could also be the things that are most energy in the things that give you the most in terms of recharge so that can be applied to other things. So that's an unlock and having uninterrupted blocks of time. That's it. If you can single task for two to three hours a day, it sounds ridiculous, but you are going to be ahead of 90% of the population because that's so whatever.
You need to doing set whatever you need to do to do that. Just figure it out. That's at night. If that's first thing in the morning, which it is for a lot of people with kids who I know who are very very productive for me. First thing in the morning just is not going to work. So it tends to be after cold plunge this that the other thing I'll probably have a very very light bite to eat. If I'm writing I will write for two or three hours and then have a late lunch. We'll get back to talking to Tim in one minute. But first I need to tell you about no Matic. I don't know what backpack Tim Ferriss uses what he should be using this puppy right here.
The team at pneumatic make the most functional durable and highest quality best engineered backpacks on the planet. Your backpack is an intimate part of your daily life. It's carrying your most precious cargo you're taking it with you every single day and this is the thing that I used for a full month while I was on tour. I didn't need hold luggage. It's a psyop meant to keep you poor and late hand luggage is all you need. If you have a well-designed backpack in this puppy is the best that I've ever found best of all it's got a lifetime guarantee. So if anything breaks during the entire life of the
The product they will give you a new one for free. This is the last backpack that you ever need to buy. There are thousands of five-star reviews for all of nematic stuff. But this is my pick of the bunch right now. You can see all of the products that I use and recommend from pneumatic by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to pneumatic.com modern wisdom to get a 20% discount site-wide that's nematic.com / modern wisdom.
When does busywork come in if there is any busy work to usually Tuesday, right? So tell us they've blocked it off as an entire day. Yeah, Tuesday is team calls one-on-ones looking at one-on-one documents. I have like Tim's weekly briefing which is a document that's updated with various sub headings and I can run through those emails are assigned or shared in various ways and I'll process through that as needed but the busy work Creeps in here and there.
Talking to I'm not going to try to put on a show right? There are things that you need to do that you aren't going to want to do and I wish I could remember who initially told me this but they effectively said those are the that is the work the fun stuff doing the interviews. That's the upside of the job you chose but the actual work that pays for that are all the little things you don't want to do. So just be grateful because that is what allows you to do. The things least for me that I enjoy.
Boy doing just having this type of dance increasingly. I'm using a term that I learned while reading a news story which is the cost of doing business. So I think Facebook got a slap on the wrist with some huge fine for a data breach, maybe like five or six years ago. Yeah, and there was criticism because even though it's a huge amount of money to them. It's half of one week of one territories top line or something like that. Like it wasn't sufficiently big and that look what you can do is you factor in this is
The price of doing business is just the cost of operating and I kind of see a lot of those things as I co you want to have conversations with people that you did interest you on the show. Oh you want to be able to work flexibly and you want to earn your own money and you want to be able to sort of craft a narrative into the blah blah blah. It's like hey guess what? These aren't bugs the features like this is what comes along for the ride like you're going to feel pressure gonna have public scrutiny people are going to criticize you that's going to be judgment is going to be security consider the good people did all of these things you have judgment on YouTube.
I'm really trying to focus on you. But the Moon the Moon has just appeared behind you and it's slowly moving away from you have a big head. You're going to get in the clip. Let's kind of like to it's kind of like to nice and it or moon or legs. Okay, and then what about wind down routine on a on an evening time was a typical afternoon evening look like for you afternoon is going to be some type of activity. So rock climbing archery. You name it some some type of physical activity because my mind
Like a border collie, right? You leave it inside too long. It's going to chew the couch. So you got to get out and move the body in some capacity. So for me to be some type of movement, I walk a lot. Also, I would say I walk I try to walk two to three hours a day. If I'm making any calls I try to do them walking Zoom is an Abomination. It's helpful for some things but we've solved this problem about being fixed in one place. It's called the phone. You can talk walk while you were talking we are evolved to walk. If you are compromising you're walking you're compromising your mental.
Health so not just physical health. So I walk a lot that is something that I think is incredibly critical as a foundational piece of everything that I do wind down routine board games watching Netflix with friends. Nothing super sophisticated. I like to do a pre-dinner if I can sauna and then how long what temperature honestly hot as balls for as long as I can do it.
Not against us not to get too scientific. What does that end up being T think it's probably 195 to 200 for 15 to 30 minutes, you know, my heat tolerance varies tremendously day today at mine too. And I don't push it too hard. I will go as hearty as far as I can without like feeling as though I'm gonna pass out but I won't do two or three rounds. If I do two three rounds, I will feel exhausted the next day white which is not from dehydration. A lot of people think is from dehydration. It's is best I can
Tell it's not because I've weighed myself before and after and only use losing a few pounds of water and I can I can rehydrate that pretty effectively. I actually haven't talked about this. It's something else and I know this because I participated as a subject and heat exhaustion study at Stanford. When I first moved to the Bay Area the most Tim Ferriss sentence I participated in a heat exhaustion study when I first moved to Stanford. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was it was it was something I would not necessarily recommend they wanted.
You study this device which was called nicknamed the glove and it was a cooling device actually very clever. It was effectively this this large chamber that you'd stick your hand into you put your hand on this metal orb, and it was vacuum sealed around your wrist and it would circulate very cold water through this metal which is highly conductive. Your hands have a high capillary density capillary and he said completely density and then that cools the blood which then circulates through your body and they were experimenting with using it:
is hand cool the hot body. Yeah, and they were experimenting with using this with very high-end athletes boxers between rounds Etc. Oh wow, and at the time this was also being studied by the military for possible use in in hot climates and since part of the funding was from the military. I volunteered to be a subject you go in. I'll try to keep this short, but it was pretty entertaining and what they needed you to do is basically march to heat exhaustion. So you put on fatigues their
Things have happened before this helmet backpack with weight in it. And then you'd go into a saint on an incline treadmill and just March until you basically collapsed. But in order to measure things correctly that would put in an esophageal probe, which is about this long and have a video this somewhere I stick it in your nose and goes all the way down your esophagus down to be as close to your heart as possible. And this was what the Stanford research this researchers wanted and you tape it to your nose because you don't swallow that thing you can't swallow your epiglottis can't close. It's very
Uncomfortable, but then the military wants to have some redundant measurements you had to put in a rectal probe of equal length to get as close to your core as possible and with both of those things and you then you march to exhaustion and what I can say is water loss was was not as much as you would expect but I was a disaster for the next two days. So to avoid that type of feeling I'll do one around when I do soften. All of that is to say
You don't need to do two rounds in the sauna all it's all that is your ass or deep throat a pipe. Yeah, I would I would say on a daily basis. Not necessary. I mean unless that's what you who kind of thing you're into is what every to go for in the spending sending adults. And for how long on a good day when you've got it right? How long you spending in bed in bed? Yes, 810 hours, right? Okay. Yeah. I liked I would say have pretty fitful sleep. Not all.
The time but I have ever since I was a little kid had a lot of onset insomnia that's actually improved a lot in the last I would say year but particularly was some low back issues. I tend to have reasonably fitful sleep. So I like to budget a bit of extra time and I'm not a super sleeper. I'm not someone who
Wakes up for hours after going to bed drunk feeling fully refreshed. Yeah. I mean there are genetic profiles that are predictive of this. I Huds that the likelihood of you having that genetic mutation that allows you to work on three or four hours sleep is the same likelihood is you being hit by lightning twice that that's the equivalent dice roll. It could be a lot of the top endurance athletes that I've met as well as the a lot of very high level operators from military, basically.
Vetted to have that Anita is it's the because I'll select the other people wash out Alpha. Yeah, I've seen that I would say if I am in deeper ketosis then my total number of hours needed for Sleep goes down and I'll wake up after five or six hours feeling fully refreshed and I will not be growing in the morning. So if I have let's just say 1.5 million molars or higher in terms of Ketone levels as measured with something like Precision extra then I need much less.
Sleep it's just a pain in the ass to stink at OSIS.
I like my tacos. Yeah. Yeah. We're in Austin that's allowed. What did you think would make you happy when you were younger, but didn't
I would say the short answer is money for sure. I grew up in a family without very much money and there was a narrative that I heard a lot at home. If only we had more money. If only we had more money and a lot of problems were related to money, but I came to translate that into if I have success which I need I can prevent the pain and problems and friction and handicaps that.
we currently have in this family and on some level that's true in so much as money is a vehicle for doing certain things preventing certain things, but
it doesn't fix the inner game and it's an amplifier just like alcohol power Fame. It amplifies. Whatever is inside the good and the bad if you're generous are going to be super generous.
If you're a jerk, you can be super jerk if you have anxiety if your hyper-vigilant.
You worried about dangers. It's going to magnify all that and
I was I was certainly not prepared for that and I wouldn't trade my trajectory. I'm really grateful for having been so fortunate and I've had some exceptionally good luck and so on but
do I think it is worth striving to be financially stable and to have freedom and options to the extent that you can within whatever your constraints are. Absolutely but
I think I viewed money as a potential fix all exterior solution to an internal problem, which it was not now I will say
Would I go back in time and tell myself that maybe not because I think I needed some hope even if it was not founded on reality to have something to strive towards see if you get to read Will Smith's Memoir without like man. I haven't read it. So Morgan housel told me about a line that's in that he said when I was poor and miserable I had hope when I was rich and miserable I was despondent.
Added. Yeah, exactly. That is the the best synopsis of what I have more clumsily said about many of the mega rich people. I know who are very depressed.
Where am I go to go? I'm at once of that other once the money as a goal is taken away as a surgical fix to whatever problems you feel our external but are largely internal it is it can be very psychologically challenging and yes, I mean, you know small violin everyone America weeps for the Rich and Famous. We're going to therapy I get it. But at the same time it's it's it's worth being aware of I think thinking about
That as an amplifier is is helpful. So on the way up what I would have told myself maybe at 30 is start working on some of the inner game not from a strict performance perspective because I'd been working on mental toughness training for sports and so on and so forth for executing as a machine as an accomplishment machine, but working on some of the other things is probably what I would have advised myself at 30 35
Oh.
Talk to me about your relationship with Fame. What do most people not understand about Fame and status?
I should ask you that. You're fresh in it. I'm definitely feeling it at the moment. What have you
learned?
It's
strange for the world's to see you in a different way. And again appropriate caveat head is not getting too big Micro Niche flame. Almost no one knows me blah blah blah blah blah, but you are the same person to you and you are a different person to other people and
It's like have you ever seen those videos of swordfish moving through Shoals and the swordfish is the same thing, but the show kind of bends around it. The reality Distortion field is something the only you know, because only you know, what the previous state that you were in was and how the world interacted with you and your now, we'll people are treating me differently and he like is this because of they want something from me. How can I trust the people they got my best interests at heart? Is this a
Compliment it kind of is but then also it's why is it making me feel sort of vigilant and uncomfortable and and I'm really uncertain about this and I mean, it's the the biggest champagne problem in the world, right? Like, how are you and again, it's the same as the America weeps for the Rich and Famous. Yeah, like who is going to say? Oh boo hoo person that has too much attention or whatever. But look, I've said this before on the show. Like I'm really enjoying opening up about the
Us of going from being an absolute nobody to Micro Niche Fame and laying the breadcrumbs behind me as I go because you don't necessarily I don't know what Dwayne Johnson's like Ascension to fame was like or Kevin Hart or whatever whatever and I'd want to know like if I was a fan of a show like this, I'd want to know what it feels like to go through a very large change. But again almost everybody has less Fame and money than they want. Which means
That the sympathy always flows downward and upward.
Thanks for answering because you're in the thick of it. I would say in my
experience.
first
I did right and a blog post. I would recommend people check out think it's 11 reasons not to become famous and that's worth reading because it could inform decisions that you make about your career. If you are tempted like a moth to the flame to chase the followers in the likes and the downloads in the views, which can be a great tool. But if it ends up directing major decisions,
It's good to have some breaks installed. So you can pause and at least examine those decisions special. You want your life to be driven by algorithm changes.
And you can also be shaped by your audience into a caricature of your most extreme beliefs and behaviors. I'll send you an article one of my favorite articles about the Perils of old jeans capture by going to Bogle its outstanding. I've read it that is that is an amazing article. Yes LP. Everyone should read that shout-out Glenda and
Stepping back then to talking about the fame. Peace. I will say
that.
Money power Fame people strive for these things.
money is in the sense that the easiest for me to understand because it's taking a life that can seem very
abstract or nebulous and shaping it into something that allows you to put points on the scoreboard. So I understand that and I'm also from New York, so
Coming from a place where you see a lot of finance and you meet a lot of people in finance. That is that's an animal that's easier for me to understand than say the power of DC or the fame of La those are archetypes that are less familiar to me.
All three can be corrupting.
and
On the side of Fame. I will say that I was given advice at the time. I wasn't aiming to be famous. So I kind of tucked away in the back of my head. But when I was in college friend of mine was the son of a very famous producer in Hollywood, and I went to stay with his family at one point and this producer said to me you want everyone to know your name and no one did know your
face.
Now you and I have ended up in a position where that is not the case. There is a lot of facial recognition and
my experience is Fame helps with a few things occasionally getting into a crowded restaurant or a better seat and access to other people but you can also get access to a broader network with the power or money. And I think those are specially money is in a sense a cleaner approach because there are fewer downsides.
And particularly if that money is not money for money's sake this is not to malign anyone in finance. But for instance if someone created a company to solve a problem they had and it turned into a huge company. Let's take as an example Toby of Shopify and as a by-product they end up incredibly wealthy and through that wealth and notoriety. They then have access to people that is I think a cleaner route to more upside than downside will be look it could
Walk through here now and I don't know if anyone in the room would recognize his life except for me. It's over you. Yeah, sweetheart of guy to incredible. Those guys are that's it's really nice to see when the good guys win. He's an example of that awesome as are a lot of the Shopify guys.
The the trade-offs in terms of privacy and security are significant. Even on a very micro level. I don't know if you've experienced this I would imagine you've had some strange interactions are inbound. I seem to attract a very unreasonably reasonable audience so far, but I also understand the law of large numbers. Yeah, and it is completely unsighted must once a week quote from your article, which says million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York City. Yeah, if
Any sufficiently large data set of people you begin to get outlier events. And then as you scale that up to what a billion downloads, you know, whatever percent of the population of psychopaths whatever percent of that percentage of psychopaths are sufficiently motivated, whatever percentage of data to do all the way down live within the region that you do. It's like hey, that's 200 people. Yeah, whatever, you know, you pick whatever it is that you want like the person that really needs something and you're the guy. Yep, and all of this is part of the reason why I particularly as
as I look forward to hopefully my next big adventure which will be family having kids and so on have some prereqs to check first like girlfriend that is usually an intermediary, but it doesn't have to be but I'd prefer that to be part of the process. So back back on the singles scene wink wink ladies. We were listening if you ski or snowboard, let me know so part of the reason that I'm thinking about potentially not going
to something new but something old in the form of writing instead of emphasizing video is for this reason. I don't think I can fully put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube, but
I do think with the churn rate of content and the sheer volume of video and audio that is created the saturation that the Decay rate of Fame is going to increase in speed. Right? So the half-life of Fame is going to go down in other words.
Ten years ago friends would send around a video and you'd see that clip for a week or two. It would make the rounds. How long is it now ten seconds, and I think that'll be true. Also for news cycle and say was likely the fame cycle. That's my hope at least for me because I don't want to sustain facial recognition. I would love for that to Decay over time. It's certainly from what I see and I've taken this
Absorb this vicariously from you from Rogan from Douglas Murray as well Douglas once sat me down a couple of years ago and I was asking him about his dealings with Fame to he said one piece of advice keep your private life private. Yeah, and Joe has done a phenomenal job as someone who's you know, infinitely more scrutinized than I'll ever be. I don't know the name of his wife. I don't know where they go for walks. I don't know like maybe he goes to restaurants, but it's never to do with that. Don't know the name of it is kids. I don't know what they're studying. I don't really know much about it. So
No one near it he I think he almost purposefully and this is the best way to do. It makes his private life seems so boring like you purposefully sort of a voids that and kind of glosses over it that there's never enough hooks for velcro to attach to it. Then I think that that that seems to be a smart smart process. Yeah don't don't darks your family or your clothes fly as a general rule of thumb take what's in Jill come back and bite you in the ass because if you have motivated stalkers,
Or the town lunatic happens to take an interest in you and like you said just also something that I've written about if you look at your audience size as analogous to a town size or city-sized. It's like, okay, if you're in this if you're in a town of a thousand people how many Village crazies you have one or two? Okay, and you just multiply that out once you have an audience the size of yours or if mine over time, especially
Where you have transients, you're going to have some people who have infinite time and unreasonable curiosity about you know, and they may not have malicious intent. Sometimes they will but there are going to be crazy people with a lot of time who are actually pretty smart like their Hardware is good their software is bad and for that reason,
From very early point you should not.
I would not suggest having your family anywhere online. There's just no upside and they didn't often opt into this. So you are making decisions for people and you should grab to talk to them first. In other news. This episode is brought to you by momentous. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. And that is why I rely on my mantis. They have the most rigorous third-party testing of any supplement company that I've ever found everything that they make is NSF certified for sport meaning that even Olympic
Elites can use it and that ensures that what they say is in the packet is actually in the packet their sleep packs are one of my favorite products, which I use every single night before bed. They contain only the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep on a nighttime stay asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee so you can bye completely risk-free try it for 29 days. And if you do not like it they will give you your money back right now. You can get a 20% discount on everything site wide by going to the link in the show notes below.
Or heading to live momentous.com modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's live. Momemt OU s.com modern wisdom the code modern wisdom
a check out
speaking of that. I also recently became single. What have you learned about? All the ladies are just considering they went. No, that's incorrect. That's incorrect. I you and your body I said about its I'm bad at snowboarding.
What have you learned about choosing a good partner and the limitations of that is love something which is outside of being hackable and
optimized.
I think there are certainly X Factor's. I don't think it's best. I can tell I would have figured it out by now. If you could reverse engineer it perfectly and just flip a switch but I do think over time as you have long relationships. I've been really fortunate to have a number of long relationships. I mean multiple relationships in this sort of three to six year range with amazing people you learn what seems to work for you and what seems to not work which is not automatically a judgment of the other person. It's a judgment of yourself and
Having a realistic valuation of your strengths and weaknesses and so on. So I've certainly found that to me a lot of things are important number one the seems obvious but it's not always obvious because we sometimes gravitate towards our own strengths. So if someone is analytical they look for someone who is highly analytical and I think there's a there certain base requirements for a good partner. You want them to be good problem solvers you want.
Them to be resilient and so on but I'm looking for a compliment. I want someone with incredibly High EQ which doesn't mean I have no EQ and I've worked hard to develop it. But I want someone who has that as a superpower. I would say like my prefrontal cortex is a superpower for other things and I do not want to date a long-haired version of myself. Throw me off. Throw me off a skyscraper now. No, thank you. All right.
And I also want someone I thought about this very carefully and you have dated a bit in the last year which is sort of the period of my dating so far.
Respect isn't enough because respect is something that people can demand in a sense. It's not respect because I feel like that is given its admiration. If I go on two dates with someone I want to be inclined to tell my friends about her and brag about some aspect of her aside from like she has the best ass I've ever seen right has to be something more than that. Nothing against Great assets. I mean those are fantastic to but it's it's I want to admire
Liar my partner and if they're soft spoken and we're at a group dinner. I want to say she's not going to say this. So I'll say it for boom and feel really good about doing that and there's a lot more to it. I have thought about this. But I mean I could give you my wife sort of list of criteria, but it's it's also fundamentally a
it's a feeling which is why dating apps can be so incredibly.
Time-consuming because what you could learn somebody please make a dating app where the sole purpose is to get people on a 10 minute video call. That's it. That's it. The stated purpose is just 10 minutes vehicle and it's built intrinsically into the app. That's it. That's the only goal of the app because virtual speed date within two minutes, you know, if there is some type of Library, you know, if your Spider Sense is saying go or no go
and I would also say as someone who in a sense took my hypersensitivity off line because my senses are very sensitive. Like I am a very not in a reactive sense easily offended sense, but in the context of my senses being very high fidelity. I took that offline for a lot of my life due to Childhood problems and so on but bringing those back online was important
Aunt not just for dating but also for navigating the fame stuff
Because as you have more notoriety people are going to seek you out who you need to be wary of and that's not all the time. It's not half of the people but you will have people with ulterior motives. And so you want to be very tuned in not to what your analytical mind is producing but to what you are pre language evolved.
Other means of assessment or telling you what your body is telling you. This is what I'm kind of obsessed by it the moment that feeling feelings and integrating emotions is no just seemed for a long time. I had a desire I guess I still do you know to be seen as a legitimate thinker like somebody who has intellectual horsepower and a capacity to be rational and do all the right now, you know when hardcore down the rationality movement and if if only I can learn
Shane parishes top 100 cognitive biases off by heart then I all of my problems if I read I can recite thinking fast and slow all of my problems will be turns out that that doesn't particularly work and one of the reasons it doesn't particularly work is that no matter how much you try to sort of clamp down on what's coming up. The thing that is coming up is the issue and papering over that crack over and over and over again results in you just playing emotional Groundhog Day and then having an increasingly complex Cathedral of different architectures.
To try and a that's good to try and architect a structure to account for it. Yeah, and I told you before sort of big into this feeling feelings thing. I trying to at the moment and yeah finding not just being at the mercy of them, but not just totally being in cognitive horsepower mode and trying to integrate those together and that's fundamentally what you're looking for with the partner as well and there's something in a relationship.
Eager. Well objectively all of the boxes have been ticked. Why can't I get my love attachments lust side to trigger as well like looked at all of the things. I mean, if you look at the rating the ratings says you should be in a relationship with this person. Yeah, and you go. Yeah, but ultimately the heart wants what the heart wants and you don't really get to reverse engineer that and they can be an awful lot of Shame and guilt.
I've certainly felt there's an awful lot of Shame and guilt around.
Having desires about being like this is the I want a thing. You know, who am I to want that thing? Who are you who are you to make demands of this? Should you not subjugate your desires in order to serve something which is safer or more peaceful or more familiar or more comfortable or whatever and ultimately I think you are fighting a losing battle like your emotions are going to just rip you off.
Away from that over time. You have that X Factor isn't there doesn't matter what you try to rack up in terms of spreadsheets. If it's not there, especially in the it has to be there in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't even period isn't good. Like guess what the the marriage isn't going also asked myself these days because it's what I'm looking for is, you know, in three to five years could this person be my best friend? Let's say three years and there's a lot that goes into that and there's a lot that goes into that. So these are things that I think about
Out I am clear on my desires and what I want I'm very clear on that. I don't have a spreadsheet. I don't have too much.
Carla conflict I would say about that. I definitely have very specific things that I like and it's important to be clear. I think where you get into trouble and where you end up being really unfair to people is if you are unclear on what you want and if you are unclear on aspects of yourself that you ironically expect other people to understand when you yourself don't have a grasp of the basics of you yourself. That's when you're unfair, but if you know what you like and you
Pursue what you want and what you feel that you need?
All the more power to you. I think Clarity is power and either the something I say for myself as much as anybody else, but you know life rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.
The key specificity and you can leave the door open to Serendipity for sure. But are you in an environment? Are you in a life that provides sufficient Serendipity such that you can leave something like this purely to chance. I don't live in that life. I suspect you. Do not live in that life. You have a lot going on. So you have to have intentional ISM. You have to have some intention and you have to well have to use to strong word but have enough surface area and I'm borrowing this from someone else but surface area for luck to see
Deck but I think with some conditions so that you don't get seduced by the things that have led you astray in the past. Right? Neither. Are there certain archetypes that I'm very very attracted to that. I know are problematic bad phone from a compatibility perspective. It's not necessarily super unhealthy, but I know that it's not going to be viable we've gone down this road before. Yeah, unsuccessfully. Yeah Neil Strauss absolutely broke my brain last job where he said,
Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments Mmm Yeah Yeah clear. He's Johnson who helped build Stripe from thought a few hundred employees to 6,000 plus she did basically every job Co included she said to me recently, will she underscore the importance of making the implicit explicit. I just think so much pain can be avoided so much can be achieved just make the implicit explicit direct communication. Not expect anyone to be a mind reader.
When in doubt spell it out easier said than done but I think so try to live that so much of that is habituated though. And it's the tone can be set the Rhythm can be set in a friendship. Now there will be friends that you have the family members that you have where you have a different Cadence of communication and openness and honesty and and everything then other people. Okay, so you can do it with some people it is possible for you to set the tone.
With particular people in that way. And again, this is something that needs to be very intentional but it's kind of like a one-time a one-time large decision that really sets the tone that you then just continue to top up but if you start off from a place of the implicit being kept in place it then when that change is this feels a little bit alien to me. This isn't really what I expected in the beginning and yeah, I really think that
the first
two months of dating somebody unbelievably important for setting expectations. This is what we expect from each other. This is the way like, that's your January to March training window. That's the diet. You know, like the New Year's resolutions will be stuck to the best and then you kind of have a hopefully come in to land at a nice appropriate level thereafter one of the other things for better or worse that were both familiar with is low mood. What are the things that you do too?
Pull yourself out of a funk or how would you advise people to better deal with depression and anxiety a low mood?
I really think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure with this. So I try to prophylactically have routines in place that seemed to decrease the
likelihood
including cold exposure which for a long time was prescribed for a Melancholy at this is this is not new but like Medieval Times Like hundred two hundred years ago. Like it was it was a prescription cold baths for melancholy AKA depression. So this is what
What is old is new again? But certainly cold exposure. I would say without a doubt having a consistent exercise routine and something is better than nothing like the difference the 021 difference between no movement and some movement is black and white. So, even if it is just going for a 20 minute walk twice a day. If you have a very packed Day schedule your calls around your walks.
social time time with friends which is where I disagree with some of the
Very strong denouncements of say alcohol in the sense that like even one drink is terrible for you that may be true from a strictly biochemical perspective and I'm not advising you go out and get shit-faced five nights a week. But for instance if one night a week, I pre-schedule a group dinner on a Friday and I'm going to cook with friends and that means we drink wine while we're cooking if that alcohol acts as a super Loop a social lubricant and helps me connect with my friends.
I think there's something to it right there. Are there social effects not just about chemical effects. I don't drink very much but the group interactions and scheduling those in advance. So on a yearly basis, I will block out. This is very important for me and again not obsessing on the daily routine, but thinking about the weekly which we've discussed which we've discussed thinking about the annual so I block out multiple weeks every year.
To take trips with family and friends and I have to that I'm organizing right now. These are week-long trips. There will be let's call it six to ten people in each group. Some will be slightly smaller for Wilderness adventures and those are blocked out for the year in advance. And this is really critical for a few reasons. It's not just about the experience. You have all of the group threads and excitement and training and
Rep and fantasizing and seeing a stupid dick named jokes, that guy's swab or whatever in the WhatsApp groups that lead up to the trip. Then you have the trip and then you have all the memories and the shared experiences and the Misadventures in the mishaps that you get so much juice out of these things. And those act for me as psychological safety nets. You always have something to look forward to if Doug's have three or four of these a year that's in big.
The podcast I think for me, I think we're both kind of the same with this that the external accountability of someone being there. There is a time on the calendar. Someone is expecting you to be there. They are a guest you probably respect them. You probably care about what they think about you. You probably want to perform well for them and also put them in a great light and and be a springboard for them and their message because you're interested in what they've got to do all of those things. It's like you're not not showing up. I've never want I've canceled in my previous Life as a club promoter. I would not show up for
Hence, I would not show up the bits and because I could always sort of work somebody else to go and do a thing if it was just me that had to do it. But as soon as even one of the person was involved or 2000 appearing at a nightclub, I'd be there and I would be there because there was accountability in there was this expectation. I have never once canceled a podcast in 750 episode six and a half years due to low mood no matter how low the mood is because there's ii8
it gets
taken out it gets
Eroded away by my excitement to go and do the thing and the same thing is true with a holiday and the same thing is true with dinner with a friend at the same thing. Like it's the same reason why a training partner just makes so much sense when you can like, I'm every Saturday for instance in Austin, I do the same session with Progressive overload the same exercises with the same guy. We've done this for two years. It's one of my favorite days of the week Saturday morning. I'm full of caffeine. It's shoulders biceps and triceps starting with carts best day of the week and
and I love it and every single Saturday no matter how shit the weeks gone. No matter how bad I'm feeling if we're available and we're both in the city we both go and do it. So let me build on that and say another piece of managing or mitigating or preventing low mood for me is having
some identity diversification, which means you're not just doing one thing if you have your podcast your start up your job as the sole but barometer of your self-worth, there's so many factors outside your control or your Investment Portfolio, whatever it might be if you were solely fixated on one thing you're too vulnerable to Black Swan events or simply ups and downs do two variables that are outside of your control. So in contrast if you have your Saturday work out
Or you have your dad left you have rock climbing you have archery of whatever might be in addition to your primary work in addition to drawing in addition to your relationship that you're trying to cultivate and deepen. If any one of those things is down just like in a stock portfolio, right? Correct, if they are somewhat uncorrelated you can still have a good week if you have a terrible week, but then you hit a PR on your Saturday work out. We did it baby. We did it. Yeah. Yeah, you're hedging you're hedging your
Te T you're hedging your sort of existential investment. Yeah, exactly. And that that is very very very important to me that I have multiple tracks running at the same time so that if one hits a roadblock.
That it's not just an existential spiral will get back to talking to Tim in one minute. But first I need to tell you about Maui Nui venison. Now, he knew he delivers the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. First off. The venison steaks are seriously delicious not gamey at all and unbelievably convenient to eat.
No, one accidentally hits their protein girls and these little puppies will help you throughout the day if you're traveling if you're on the road or if you're just a rushed human like the rest of us these things will help you to hit your protein goals and ensure that you're getting good quality meat throughout the day not only do they provide the most nutrient dense and high protein red meat available that the only stress free 100% wild harvested red meat on the market. Also the actively combating the environmental destruction caused by Maui's Axis deer overpopulation, which literally looks like a wild fire from Above So Below
by eating meat are actually helping the environment get 20% off your first order by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Maui Nui venison.com modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout at Mau IA n UI venison.com such modern wisdom and modern wisdom.
A check out. Do you have a like break glass in case of impending low mood protocol?
something you just start to see the
early warning signs. Is there a okay. I need to pull the pin with these these things. Yeah, I would say I would say one. I'll give some that are perhaps more easily Within Reach of of most people and easier to recommend honestly group dinners three to four friends group dinners long group dinners. No alcohol if I see low mood coming then no alcohol.
because of the next day, yeah, you're borrowing happiness from tomorrow as and there isn't much in once there isn't going to be much someone put it to me and if you compromise your sleep for me generally low mood if we want to call it depression does not actually it's not a first cause for me I would say it's typically some type of anxious rumination worrying about something I compromised my sleep because I've onset insomnia, then I consume too much caffeine which further compromises my sleep and then
Oh three or four days. That's when the low mood / depressive symptoms show up. Yeah, so anything that compromises sleep I try to avoid in that in that period And there's some really beautiful friends. Yeah, exactly dinners three to four friends. I would say there are also a few other things which I'm very hesitant to mention because they come with a lot of caveats and a lot of people should be excluded because there are contraindications and risks, but I would say
psychedelic assisted Therapies
Once or twice a year and also something called accelerated TMS which has been a recent discovery of mine. Although I've been familiar with the TMS technology for more than a decade. But the more recent iteration of accelerated TMS. What's TMS TMS is transcranial magnetic stimulation. It's type of brain stimulation. It's type of brain stimulation and this particular protocol has been pioneered by a number of people one of the better-known is
Dr. Nolan Williams who's out of Stanford and you're effectively taking.
Traditional TMS where you might have 30 plus treatments over several months and compressing it into one week. So you're doing 10 treatment sessions a day for five days, you're doing 50 sessions of brain stimulation over five days along with the very short either in my experience 8 to 10 minutes. They're not painful. They can be uncomfortable for some people but it feels like a a mild finger flick on the head very tolerable and I will say that
this right now is the technology and the intervention that has my interest.
very solidly above and beyond psychedelic assisted therapies, which I focused on since 2015 and a public forward-facing supporting science type of capacity because the Psychedelic treatments
are not widely available. There are quite a few hurdles left to pass from a regulatory perspective and also from a scientific perspective.
Let's just say that people with a family history of schizophrenia BPD borderline personality disorder people who might have some some family history of leaning towards the chaos side of things as opposed to rigidity rigidity might be OCD him.
Chronic or treat resistant depression anxiety which I view and I'm not a psychiatrist or doctor. I don't play one on the internet. But as as forms of thought loops and rigidity those seem to respond reasonably well in some people to psychedelic assisted therapy, but there are also people even though these compounds like psilocybin are not intrinsically physiologically toxic you can still have intense psychological experiences and say if someone has very high blood pressure or cardiac issues
I think that many of them should not take psychedelics. Even if they're physiologically well-tolerated normals accelerated TMS is it's a seller 8 at EMS has a much more favorable safety profile for people who would fall into a lot of these categories still very preliminary. I would say there are a few hundred people probably sub 1000 have been treated using celery TMS, but the results that I've seen the effect size is the transformations.
In people directly that I've seen are pretty remarkable and for me the most durable reduction and anxiety the most durable dramatic reduction and all forms of insomnia has come after accelerated TMS, which I did for the week for the second time. I did two rounds and the first round ended up using one particular device with more of a shotgun pattern that didn't work for me because for lack of a more technical way to put it the on off switch for
He hangs your somatic Target in my brain are too close together. So they were hitting both the on and the off switch for the basically cancel the effects out and this is a theory but with more precise neuro targeting using fmri, and then this particular mapping technology the second time around it did work and it's been it's been pretty remarkable. You should not DIY this there are lots of there are not conscious going to combat area and there are lots of videos.
Heroes online of people buying things off of Amazon and DIY in this you can fuck yourself up in a big way. Do not try at home brain stimulation. You're going to win a Darwin Award don't do it. Well, you know, but this is something that I see at the Forefront of potential mental health interventions for treatment-resistant depression for anxiety for conditions like OCD although CD. I think appears to be a little trickier.
So that those would be my truly in case of emergency break glass but what's important to note is that I have these things pre-scheduled. I'm not waiting until I'm in a really acute space which is the time when you are least likely to be to have the motivation to be able to book in right if we come back to State story strategy, right? What's your state? Terrible depressive personalized permanent. This is this is how could I be like this?
So I'm always like this. I'm never going to be able to fix this. So what's your story? It's not worth even trying should I even continue dot dot you of this? So your strategy is going to be dog shit dog shit or non-existent. I would say in very very acute situations. If someone has suicidal ideation then I think there is a place for intravenous or intramuscular ketamine treatment in clinics, but I will say I've seen more high functioning people unravel on the
Three years from ketamine than any other substance in terms of addiction. It is very very psychologically addictive and that has not had enough air play. Have you been exposed to this ketamine oxytocin nasal spray? That is being yeah. I've seen it floating around floating around Austin. Yeah. I mean, I'm you should not have ketamine home in my opinion you dissociative anything that takes point one of a second to just yeah, it's being treated like
Rover free alcohol and I hate to tell people but there's no biological free lunch and in the short term you do not get automatically punished for using ketamine which creates the illusion that there is no cost in the long term. You can make yourself much more susceptible to depression. So it actually has the inverse effect of the radio as a break glass heute scenario. Yeah. I don't I don't plan on personally using ketamine myself. I do know a number of people have had their lives positively transform.
And have not succumb to any type of addiction in every case that is supervised. Din Clinic use once or twice a year. You mean my season in a beefier and 2010 doesn't count. Yeah, the Camelbak full of ketamine doesn't count want to shame in other news. This episode is brought to you by element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt act on your adrenal system element contains a sign.
It's backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium to helps to regulate appetite curb cravings and improve your brain function. You've probably heard me talk about it a million times and that's because I love it. It tastes fantastic. It's got zero sugar. No junk. No colors, no artificial ingredients or any other BS and it's how I start every single morning. Best of all there's a no BS no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it 100% risk-free. If you don't like it for any reason they will give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you
Love it right now. You can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors of your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink LMN t.com modern wisdom. That's drink LMN t.com / modern Westham.
Do you think deep thinkers are more lonely?
Yet my knee-jerk response to that would be yes for sure. I think anyone who is very heady and trapped in the song of me me me in the sense of like recursive thought is going to likely feel isolated and I would say that there may be some argument to be made
that
with that superpower.
Comes a secondary function which is like a shielding function to not feel to divorce yourself from certain bodily Sensations, which is part of the reason not to drag this back into ketamine. Why ketamine is so seductive for type a highly analytical males and it's not to say that women can't become addicted. But from what I've seen it is predominantly male who want to
to avoid feeling something that could be subconscious or it could be conscious but it serves the same purpose has alcohol. So if you if your family or you of ever used alcohol to take the edge off you are susceptible to ketamine addictions what I would say similarly you are susceptible to
Basically, viewing your Consciousness and existence from the neck up and I think both can have severe side effects in terms of social side effects.
Psycho-emotional side effects certainly. There's a quote from Alain de botton where he says loneliness is a kind of tax. We have to pay to atone for certain complexity of mind. I don't know if I agree with them. So I used to think it can be attacks. I used to the position that I've arrived at now, especially since moving to Austin which is kind of full of cultural psychological refugees from other places where they maybe didn't fit in in any case
Is that you just maybe need to work harder to find your tribe that your psychological non-typical nurse will mean that you are out toward the edges of whatever bell curve of normal of normalness. You are so it's going to be fewer people going to get you but actually think that that's fine because the people that you do find that you do like and do get on with you will also have that like Oasis in the middle.
The desert sensation that's like oh dude, you get me like you you think about this too? Yeah, and I I think while I was still living in the UK, I was struggling to connect with people. I you know met a million people across my career of standing on the front door of nightclubs, and I had a handful of friends most of whom I worked with in one form or another. Yeah, that's not a fantastic friend exposure to conversion ratio. Like my marketing funnel wasn't marketing right wasn't converting.
should speak to Toby
and
then
I came to Austin and I realized that what there is a bit more like that. It's not been as hard and maybe that's dying to self select because people kind of at seeking me out and obviously, you know, like advantages of Fame I suppose or at least of like being front-facing.
But I I think that in the wrong groups. Yes loneliness can be a kind of tax. You have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind, but it also offers you the opportunity. Like the only way out is through and through means working maybe a bit harder to find people that are like the people that you want to be around. Yeah. I also I also feel like
Those who are good at thinking sometimes become hammers looking for a Nails. I know it's true for me in the sense that we think for instance and this is might not be explicit, but that we can
Coach at 8:00 our way into Equanimity inner peace. You mean my tosses I can't do that and there's this fetishizing of Independence, especially in the US where if you look for apes monkeys, certainly historically hominids who were lone survivors. I don't think you're going to find them right we are interdependent as a species we've evolved to co-exist. So for me, I used to view loneliness as a failure of self.
A failure of discipline a failure of resilience if aliens a failure of inner narrative.
Something like that. I think it's much much simpler in the sense that it's loneliness is usually a failure of group activities in your calendar. You know, it's just just like you might be doing morning Pages for an hour trying to figure out the riddles of your life and the complexities of your pain is like now you just need some macadamia nuts in a cup of water and a shower you haven't trained in full days. Yeah your blood sugar go eat something. Yeah. I think I tweeted this out the other day 90% of problems can be fixed by a good night's sleep a glass of Walker.
Water a talk with a friend or a training session. Yeah, and I also will often say to my significant other. So I'll just say like if I'm trying to
like
Reason my way out of something and you just see me grinding the gears in my head at the table with a notebook. Just tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for an hour. Great success T. Yeah. So tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for a bit. Lots of people that are listening might feel hyper-vigilance always scanning for threats fear-based motivations being something that the varying levels of awareness is something that drives them.
The benefits of it aren't may be as obvious. But I think people that have hyper vigilance of which I'm one. I think that you are one as well. They can be addictive in some ways because the attention that you pay to things and the Precision with which you assess what you're doing and the care and dexterous Earnest with which you go about things. It's like but that's my competitive advantage. That's something that I love. What have you come to learn or believe about
hyper-vigilance in a sort of fear based view of the world
I'm going to bounce that back and then I'll answer. What's how would you answer that question double-edged sword man, double-edged sword. The thing that makes me competitive which is my attention to detail and the fact that I care and the fact I tried to be precise. It's also the thing which makes it less enjoyable in the moment. And right now I'm trying to optimize for how I feel moment to moment. I really want to enjoy the process of things given that almost all of every Journey
he is Journey not a destination like destination is going to be the final percentile of the thing. It's the day that you get to sit down. It's the web. It's like what's your day-to-day texture of experience? Like how's your mind feel and optimizing for the outcome as opposed to the process has got the Barstool upside down. It's pretty uncomfortable to sit on so it's going to be put it I I'm kind of still you know, like that's it.
then cognitively that's what I can tell you emotionally when it comes to me letting go of my
Hyper-vigilance, that's a much tougher than I can tell you the story. I can give you that like nice bow fucking parcel and push it across the table, but I'm still very much a work in progress with all of this stuff. And it's one of the reasons why I feel for guys like huberman or a tear who have genuine expertise because there is a standard that they are able to communicate at and another level of understanding that they may be privately feel like they need to live up to
to mercifully being a bro scientist rather than a real scientist. I have much greater degrees of freedom to mess up and you know, again people can performative Lee do this to protect themselves in a way that I think is
It's a tactically advantageous to say I'm just an idiot. I don't know I'm talking about it's like I guess I understand but there's only so far so many times you can say that whilst also proselytizing about what it is that you know, and how people should do things. But genuinely I you know, I'm massively a work-in-progress and just trying to leave bread crumbs behind me. So long story hyper-vigilance good for a competitive Advantage, but it is very difficult.
When it comes to enjoying stuff day today, and I want to enjoy things. I don't want to look back on a wildly successful life where my cortisol was super high and I stressed every every moment of getting there.
Identify with that. I think this is this is one of my major projects in life and I can justify and explain the hyper-vigilance Every Which Way from Sunday.
But
I will say that historically when I've been worried about Losing My Edge, especially when it's not very well defined.
With say meditation. This is a common concern with people who have never meditated. They worried about losing their Edge and competitive Drive every time I've Incorporated something like transmittal meditation knowing that in the FAQ. One of the most asked questions is will I lose my Edge. I've not experienced that losing of the edge in terms of actual outcomes. The process becomes less stressful, but
I have not paid that ultimate tax which also is worth cross-examining in the sense that at what point would you be willing to sacrifice some of your competitive Advantage? If so, how much are these are actually good questions like how much of your competitive Advantage what is that Competitive Edge? Exactly? It's put that under a microscope. I fuck I wrote about this a year ago a two years ago said your Neurosis is not helping your performance. Yeah. I think that I've thought about
And I think that it's between 5 and 10% Yeah, I don't think it's very much. No, I really don't think it's that much and so one of the ways I've approached this from a work perspective.
Is trying to put my meticulous hyper-vigilance into trying to train other people to get to at least 90 95 percent of what I could do. Let me infect you just train and then also be inspired when they do things that I wouldn't have ever thought of doing and I'm not the best manager. I'll be the first person to say that which is part of the reason why I have the positive constraint of keeping my team very small.
but
number one is awareness right step. Number one is awareness, which is part of the reason why I reread the book aptly named awareness by Anthony De Mello. I reread that probably twice a year which helps
too.
Put you in a position where you step out of yourself and observe some of your thought patterns and beliefs that are driving your behaviors.
Also why I do the introductory course with Sam Harris on the waking up app, which is a very old program in terms of that particular 30-day process. I do that probably once or twice a year. These are all to clean the lens through which I'm looking at myself.
And there are tools that help with this. Although I think it is largely a horoscope for men who would never admit to liking horoscopes the Enneagram I think has some value so I'm a self preservation six and when you read that description though part of the benefit of reading that description is you do not feel alone. So the nickname for that category is the loyalist and I really don't speak Enneagram. I know very little about it, but
it is helpful to know that you are not uniquely flawed in scanning your environment for threats and paying attention to every minute detail including when it's not necessary all of that helps with the base Foundation, which is awareness. And this is a this is a constant process. It's like your knives get dull you need to sharpen your knives this happens over and over. It's just a process for me at least.
And then I would say there are a few exercises that are very helpful. Not necessarily in a day-to-day basis, but on a monthly or quarterly basis this exercise that I call fear setting where I'm looking at the actual worst case scenarios. I'm getting very explicit about detailed examples of what I am fearful of and then looking at the likelihoods the probabilities what I could do if they happen to reverse the damage what I could do to avoid them.
Etc what the cost of inaction is if there's something that's just been sitting on my to-do list or in my calendar that I've been avoiding not just what is the risk of doing this thing. But what is the cost of an action? Maybe it's just thinking about it all the fucking time and having it run in the background and affect my sleep and distract me from other things. These are all very helpful.
and
I would say at its core also having a very big yes is important. If you're trying to juggle five or six projects that are cool, but not really capturing your full attention because
for whatever reason they keep you up at night in the best way possible thinking about the possibilities of something if I don't have that that single big yes.
I think the bullet ricochets around inside the skull which leads to more hyper-vigilance because I'm also trying to juggle more things. So the more I try to multitask I would say the more likely I am to act hyper-vigilant.
And I do think there's also an art to letting small bad things happen and practicing letting small bad things happen to prove to yourself that it's not the end of the world. Yeah, you're not the president of the universe things are fine. The whole world isn't going to fall down around you generally speaking.
Dude, so much of what you've just said I've has been something that I've ruminated about or written about a spoken about a thought about over the last few years that idea of the cost of inaction. I can with this term of anxiety cost like opportunity cost. Ya and all of the time that you think I still need to meditate today. I still need to meditate today. I still need to meditate today every single time that you think that thing you could have gotten rid of that had you just meditated earlier. Yeah for sure. Yeah that thing Stacks up talking about books.
Soooo, what are the most commonly gifted books that you have given to other people?
Awareness by Anthony De Mello. I think the subtitle is the promise the promises and Perils of reality something like that. Very short read apocalyptic. Yeah. It's it's tough love book. It's not for everybody. But it's it's good medicine for the right people at the right time. So we're in this by Anthony De Mello and I have a full shelf of this book in my guest bedroom my house. It's all the same book. Yeah. That's awesome. I have a few shelves that are all independent.
Lee filled with different books that are books I gift another one is gold, which is a collection of Rumi poetry new translations.
My hell Eliza before I believe her name is outstanding
collection.
Also, very easy to read not intended to be read front to back. It's just like I get up a little nightcap little nightcap before you go to sleep.
and I do think the sort of
Mystic inspired poetry
Since it can be so slippery from the standpoint of language, but it's very evocative from a feeling perspective is very good for heady people to read before bed as a way of pulling themselves out of the Tactical practical nitpicky bullshit that they might obsess over. Otherwise, I find a very calming so that's that's another that I gift a lot how to change your mind by Michael Pollan. I have a number of copies of in part because I get so many questions about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapy is in the
science and that's very very good primer for people who want an overview as is the Netflix series miniseries how to change your mind, especially the MDMA and psilocybin episodes, which have some fantastic case
studies.
For period of time and I could still do this but it's not the chapter that I find myself in currently the effective executive by Peter Drucker think if you want one book on being effective doing the right things not just being efficient doing whatever you're doing quickly and well the effective executive as old as it is is how old is that book now the best that I have found couldn't even tell you 30 40 50 still holds up. Oh, yeah.
Still holds up. What about fiction?
fiction
there are a number of books. I've gifted a lot. Motherless,
Brooklyn.
which is
basically a detective Noir story that was also turned into a movie by Edward Norton need adaptations. Very good. There's a stand-in for Robert Moses famous from the book The Power broker me famous for other reasons, but that was very well done adaptation. It's about a detective with Tourette Syndrome. So there's a lot of laughs as well, but wonderfully written book that's shorter there many many fiction books that I could recommend to folks.
If I'm trying to convert a nonfiction purist into someone who can who can consider fiction because I think fiction often.
Describes truth in a stickier way the nonfiction completed grade, but look at what non-fixed the best non-fiction tries to do. It uses stories. Right? Don't make a point without the story don't have a story without a point. Yeah. So even though it's it's just like the cold plunge a little a little too much dish or to sound original but I think the first dune for instance you want to study leadership. The first dune think Ender's Game is fantastic. I think these appeal especially to
Two males are full of piss and vinegar but they're both very good. I'll give you a number of different books that come to mind that now that I'm thinking my bookshelves I have books arranged on my bookshelves to elicit very particular responses from me as I see them really methodical about my bookshelves of wolves and men as a nonfiction book by Barry Lopez beautifully written changed the entire. Let's call it a genre of naturalistic writing. It just showed what was possible it broke the category it Incredible Book.
Of wolves and Men there is a fiction book that I was given by my brother. I failed to read it three times, but my brother has 100% hit rate with me books. And so I assumed it was a user error meaning I was screwing up somehow which I was there's a book nine out of 10. People are going to hate this book. I'm just going to tell you upfront but 10% are going to have their minds blown wide open. It's called Little Big Little Big by John Crowley. I think the alternate title is the fairies part Parliament, which other
Again, the alternate title is the fairies Parliament.
And this book is the closest thing to a fever dream or a psychedelic experience that I've ever found in terms of literature. John Crowley is a very skilled poet who weaves together this tapestry of time and parallel stories history and family trees that is unlike anything I've ever seen and for literally hours and days after I would read
This book and I'll give a tip the takeaway from my initial user error in a second, but it would affect my perception of reality and time not in a disruptive way for weeks after I finished this book use with caution. Yeah, I didn't disrupt but it will really change how you interpret the world. At least it did for me the recommendation having gone through this number one take a photograph of the family tree that is from the beginning of the book.
You're going to need it. Okay, don't fixate on it because it will have too many spoilers but least have it handy if you get really confused. The second is this is not a book that you can read ten pages of put down and pick up four days later. You need to plow through the first 150 Pages. There are too many plates you need to spin.
But if you do that, if you get to the talking fish, it'll make sense and get there and when you get to talking phishing attack, what the fuck is talking to fish kind of book is this then that's when things really get going cool and the strangest thing one of the strange things about this book to me is I couldn't really tell you what it's about. It is such a fever dream of book. It's bizarre beyond words, but beautiful beyond description. I'll give one more then then we can stop there lot of books I can recommend.
So Milan kundera has a book called The Book of laughter and forgetting which is a collection of short stories incredible incredible that's fiction will really take you through a whole Kaleidoscope of emotions, which was part of me training to get back on that bike and bring emotions back online. I was also exploring music for this especially Persian Arabic azerbaijani music when you were listening to music whilst reading, I'm sorry, I was listening to music separately that is not from the Western Canon because
because you can make a pretty compelling argument that certain types of music have a larger emotional range than others that's better suited for some musicologist from YouTube music theorist to get into but
Book of laughter and forgetting and then on the fiction side, if you're really interested in sci-fi and you've already you've already hit Dune maybe if your fantasy nerd you've already hit the Name of the Wind which would also yes. Yes phenomena, we could get into fantasy, but I don't take us too far. I do have other fantasy recommendations the short stories by Ted Chiang CH I Ang his second collection is exhalation. The first is harder to recall in terms of the collection name, but if you've ever seen the movie arrival,
So which is a fantastic movie that was based on. My name is short stories. His short stories are Beyond incredible is this across multiple collections one collection there to collections that I'm aware of you may have a new collection that I haven't seen yet. But either collection well will be incredibly satisfying I've yet to recommend that to a single person who is not replied with multiple wtfs. Oh my God, this guy is amazing. Yeah.
I'll give you two I'll give you one one non fiction and nonfiction. So the nonfiction is the ape who understood the universe by Steve Stewart Williams. Okay, evolutionary psychologists currently out in Singapore works at the University of Nottingham. It is the best overview of evolutionary psychology. It's in terms of Behavioral ecology. It's also very well-informed with how we interact with the environment sex differences in the brain everything sexual selection a full works it is and it's so accessible and it begins by
by an alien looking down on our behavior from above and trying to work out what we're doing the ape who understood the universe and from a fiction perspective my highest hit rate of this. It's I think I'm at 100% this and I'm not it's my most recommended book Red Rising by Pierce Brown that thing that's been recommended to me should come with a fucking warning label on it like you talk about ketamine like no no Red Rising. That's the thing that people that's the real substance that people need to be.
and about if you can get through the first
Sixty Pages you can get out of the mines, which you understand if you read it you are locked in and he's now up to Buck.
7 I think of as some novellas and blah blah blah that being said Patrick rothfuss. If you do happen to be listening to hours into this podcast, please for the love of God we beg you right the third book ride the third book, there's so much to be done. But anyway one other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently our
Odd purchases or purchases that I'm spending an inordinate amount of money on compared with what people think I should spend on it for me bed linen has become a to difference hat Obsession high-quality bamboo bed linen. Absolute Game Changer you think about the quality of your mattress you think about the type of pillow that using all the rest of it, but the actual way that your skin interacts with your bed is directly through that bamboo cotton wipes the floor with high thread count normal.
Cotton it's easier than silk and it doesn't make you feel like you're going to slide off the bed. If it's something happens for you. What are the things that you have found are worth spending more money on than most people would consider acceptable or saying
I met this this woman my friend's mother and Panama one point and just kind of out of nowhere. I think it was no it wasn't out of nowhere. I was complaining about think my heel was bothering me and she said invest in your shoes and your bed because if you're not in one you're going to be in the other night. I thought to myself that's a smart woman right there and she was very very smart on a whole lot of levels. So I'd say we're in bed. So also little wet in bed. Yeah. I always wear my my lace-up boots.
To bed pretty woman Style no shoes or bed in this case end but not the same time. Yes. What what bad what shoes I have look they are sponsoring my podcast, but I genuinely tie test everything so Helix, I have their highest and mattress with a night's sleep on top with an eight sleep on top and I do pay attention to Linens. Although I don't think I've put enough time into it as you have so I shall give you will click I'll give you it. Hmm.
in terms of I'm trying to think of what I put
might not be unreasonable. I mean certainly food Medical Care
That's probably where I spend the most compared to average blood wacky type stuff all of that. Yep, and it's not compulsive. I mean I used to do so many bizarre experiments myself that I would do blood work like every four weeks. I don't do that anymore, but
I'm very excited
about
archery specifically recurve archery using a modified Olympic boat the moment. So I am spending more money on that. But honestly, it's not that terribly expensive is few thousand dollars and you can be very well equipped. I do want to be that like pudgy guy looking like an overstuffed sausage and like a full Tour de France get up on like 20,000 dollar bike who's been riding for a week. I don't wanna be that guy. I've been that guy in various things like I'm going to do triathlons and I buy all the gear and
and behold I try for a little bit and like I'm never going to do a triathlon that's never going to happen and I accumulate all of this nonsense, but I would say
broadly speaking. I really don't have many.
Expensive Hobbies. I found expense to be inversely correlated to
enjoyment generally, but this certainly City skiing maybe skiing II actually put a lot of if you add in all the costs associated with that it's high. It's also not particularly cheap that if you're going to hold onto kit it's not cheap. It's not cheap. It's it depends on how committed you are and how long over what period of time you can advertise that cost. Yeah, I think finding what you like and kind of ruthlessly sticking to that up until
The point at which you like I'll see if there's something slightly about for instance Vans make not a sponsor. But if you listening they make a particular type of their old school shoes called comfy Kush and it's just a slightly more. It's 15 bucks more but they've changed the inner and they change the insulin they change everything about them. I can do everything in these shoes. Yeah, I can run I can lift. I can go on a night out. I can walk. I can do everything and the advantage of that is that you have a single pipeline.
From dress shoe to gym shoe and you just continue to buy one new one and then they get phased out and then the old ones go in the bin and you just continue to go through that to turn this into an infomercial for Vans, but I will say I have I have black fans. They're also the all-purpose shoe if I'm traveling that's the all-purpose shoe. All right.
Take me through your most heavily used apps desktop mobile. What is your life structured on reliant on most heavily?
I think people are going to be potentially disappointed. It's nothing terribly sophisticated. I would say that the basics of the basics so I won't run through those Google Maps Uber Etc OpenTable very very basic. I would say on desktop. I use something called jump-cut to have 30 to 40 things that I can store on the clipboard and I know you have I'm Gonna Get You across to Alfred. I'm going to get I'm
Convey need to test the latest version. I used I used Alfred several years ago, and I really enjoyed it. I haven't you a nominally good have not used the updated. So that's that's a teaser for what you'll explain in terms of Alfred. I still use Evernote. I know it's somewhat outdated but I was the first advisor to Evernote way back in like 2009. So I just have so much it's such as cost. How are you going to happen? And actually the latest versions have been dramatically streamline, so it's actually back to being very user-friendly so still
Is Evernote a lot? I use the companion app scannable for scanning documents. So if you don't have a very fast photo scanning app, it's worth at least searching for something in that domain trying to think of anything unusual, which is the task management. We use a sauna internally for tell you that person if you run stuff to personal projects and why don't I have a scrap paper in my pocket with some of what I want to do, which is not the best system.
seems to be
this vestigial habit that I cannot get rid of can path dependency man. It's just it's just ridiculous. I have tried very much to and I did this beforehand, but I've tried to double down on this and a gent Named Sam carcass of levels, which is a great company whose perhaps the most highly systematized to process driven person I've ever met my like 20 va's, right? Yeah. He
He makes the point that you should not have a to-do list. You should have everything in your calendar effectively, and I'm simplifying but I've tried very hard to do that like as soon as I there's something I know I need to do or want to do it goes into the calendar somewhere. Even if it's a
placeholder.
I do not really use anything for myself as a task manager unless you count my employees who fairly or unfairly are on the hook to remind me to do various things. So there is some of that but really it's the calendar the calendar drives it. What do you think the calendar?
Gee, sweet, right? Yeah, I do not use mail on my phone. You don't have any email on your phone. No. Wow God what a new world. I also have no social media apps on my phone. Yes. Yeah slack slack some people on the team internally use that especially since we do work, even though I have a small full-time team. We have a lot of contractors who work on the podcast and audio editing and video editing and so on so we do use slack for that.
And it's a very I want to see Bare Bones. I mean it's intended to be a very
The word that I use a lot for myself as a calibration.
Is elegant I'm looking for elegant Solutions. Not that I'm An Elegant human, but I'm looking for solutions that have the fewest moving pieces and I remember interviewing Morgan Spurlock who made Super Size Me and I think is inside man as a television series great documentarian, and he said once you get fancy fancy gets broken and that's not always the case, but the more complexity you have in a system the more execution risk there is and so I try to
to keep things as bare-bones and minimalist as possible. Like I go too far. Me too. Yeah you too that can go too far. Yes, but
if something comes to mind, I'll buy myself some time. Why don't you tell people about Alfred? Yes. Alfred is a desktop assistant. I suppose it's kind of a global Search tool it only exists for Mac, which the tribalism of it makes me kind of love it a little bit more, but it's so judgmental and kind of like like platform Lee racist. It's got a clipboard manager. It's got textexpander. You can set up automations. You can message people on iMessage without opening a by message you can
Send a tweet without opening up Twitter. It allows you to do all of this from basically a spotlight search bar in the middle the last 500 things you've copied. I mean luck the absolute Basics that you need to use. You need a text expander. So that as a short keyword can then open out into a large chunk of text. You can have conditional formatting if you don't maybe give an example so somebody says hey, what are what are your top piece of advice for starting a podcast? Yeah. So this is on my phone. This isn't even just on the laptop. If I put P DC 1 and P DC to it brings up to podcast episodes. I've
done that the 90% of what someone's going to ask me what camera do I use? What lightning do I use? How do I recorded? Where do I upload it? What hosting platform? How do you prep for a guest all of these things? I've just I did them in conversations and it expands it and immediately sends it. It's the same for invites. It's got EML is my email address. What's my NM men and women and a man I think is a phone number add one is my address in the
You as add to is my address in the UK and it's just all of these things that build out all of the stuff that you need to say a lot of the time and then a clipboard manager my God, we said before like having only having access to paste. The last thing that you copied is fucking barbaric like it is so primitive, but you know, you it means that you can be going through a document and you can think okay. I want all of these things but I want them separately. So I'm going to take this then this then this then this then this and then you have this sort of flow where
Then when you put it across into an innie, it'll change your life people spend so much time copying and pasting stuff so much about time is spent copying and pasting things or saying the same shit over email. Like here's an invite to the podcast or you know, that this is what to expect when the episode goes live or whatever whatever like all of that stuff. So all of that highly used I use Apple notes. I went round the houses Evernote for what I think I've still got some use cases for Evernote tried notion and it's kind of used for some stuff, but it was
The complexity kind of got to me and I think this kind of a high if you want to use it properly they can be a little bit of a high left with that. I have double look how many notes I got on here.
2996 notes on Apple notes and it's bulletproof never broken out update something on my phone. It's immediately cross onto their read wise. I like read wise realize is great. I usually do eyes of all the people that don't know it's a highlight resurfacing and can also use it to space memorization repetition ebbinghaus stuff. That's great. I like getting a certain email to arrive at 7:00 a.m. Every morning with four highlights that
randomly chooses from my history and it just reminds me of bucks. I may be forgotten about or insights that I've lost then that often Spurs a newsletter maybe later in the week or whatever. There's a cool thing and I told you I'm written about that. Let's do use heavily. It's pretty much it usual stuff audible. Oh push to Kindle extension for Google Chrome is a game changer. I don't like reading on laptop and I don't I can't read on my phone because my natural state is like flitting around and
He work an executive and blah blah blah push the Kindle links in with your Kindle your Amazon account and it turns any blog post or web page into a perfectly optimized Kindle document that appears on every Kindle device that you own and I have a Kindle scribe downstairs with the pain, which is really lovely and I have a Kindle Oasis upstairs, which I read before bed and it means that when I Den sit down on a morning and I want I have about 10 or 15 minutes to read first thing in the morning.
I don't need to choose what I'm going to read out open up my library and there's the stuff that I discovered yesterday ready for me to go through and I can usually get through maybe two articles or something on a morning and that then opens up. I read about Oliver berkman's productivity debt idea a couple of days ago. I fell in love with that read a study about how hair length is related to sexual satisfaction. Amongst North Korea South Korean women. What does that mean? I can't satisfy South Korean women. They need luck. They need long hair if they have long hair.
And that's when the two of you you'll have the right amount of hair. But yeah, that's those are the big ones. I think. Yeah, I have been experimenting with an app called reverie are EV ER. I times the lady that's in charge of it two days ago for oh, you've got dr. Spiegel coming on the show. Yeah. Yeah, Saucy just interviewed him and I am interested in hypnosis as at all legitimate clinical hypnosis is a to also been experimenting with that which I've actually found surprisingly helpful on a number of levels and
Otherwise, I would say apps can be helpful. They can also be a form of.
Mistaking the tool as the purpose if that makes sense. So productivity masturbation productivity masturbation. There's a lot of that and masturbation is great. But you don't do it all the time. It's the dose makes the poison as with most things and I mean my my my most critical regular practice that helps me with systems and policies and making single decisions that avoid 1,000 separate
decisions.
Staking mini retirements, which is an old concept something I've practiced for a long time people might recognize it from the 4-Hour Work week, but it is in brief scheduling three to four weeks of effectively being offline doing something having very type parameters on your access to anything digital or work-related. And if you do that, you have to set up systems and policies that will persist after you returned. So your business and your life will be better off after you have done this button. So I did that.
This past October. I think it was for about three. What did you do? I was in Suriname in South America for three weeks. How did you spend your time? I was spending a good amount of time with the Amazon conservation team operations who do a lot of conservation work for indigenous land rights and Suriname, they've done a lot of amazing work in Colombia and I was spending time with some of their ethnobotanist sand field operators with the trio tribe.
In Suriname and for people who don't know because why would you know Suriname is the smallest country in South America? Does this tiny tiny little sliver at the very top of South America in between Guyana and French Guiana. It's a bit confusing to me the pronunciation still to this point. Very very small used to be a Dutch Colony think it's 94% forested.
Beautiful country very unusual really a Melting Pot of many many different cultures and it was a great experience and I did not I did 15 minute sort of Crisis check in just to ensure things weren't burning down very briefly once on a laptop via starlink.
And that was effectively it for two and a half or three weeks. You know, it makes me think about if anybody has lived in the same house for more than five years. You just accumulate garbage stuff, you know, all of the cupboards begin to overflow. Whereas when you're in University or whatever like you have to live lean because you just you can't be bothered to move it and it's kind of a little bit like that but for processes like if the process has become too reliant on you with your to hubby and it's too
Smokey it's if you want to scale your business, if you want to scale by things you enjoy in your life. If you want to sell your business ultimately in some fashion doing something like this will improve all of those it gives me it makes my bumhole do that to think about to think about what you've just hug her quotient. Yeah, plus it does but that's probably because it's something I need to do too much caffeine moving. No, no never
impossible. It's impossible. Why is the 4-Hour Body back in the charts?
For our body is back in the charts Beyond it being a great bug. Yeah. I mean, I'm very proud of that book. It's held up very well over time. It's back in the charts because I want to get the name right? So maybe you have this in your notes. But because the gentleman named Gary breca, I want to say created a clip that went viral on Tick Tock talking about the 30 30 30 principle, which would be
30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up and then 30 minutes of steady state exercise and
it all came as a surprise to me because my publisher reached out and said we are out of stock. What is going on? I had no clue. So I put up on note on Twitter to try to figure it out to do some detector whining anybody have any idea why suddenly for our bodies back to like number 70 on all of Amazon and people link to this video so I know Gary breca a thank you and that is how it went ballistic and
That's continued for some time. It's sustained for a while because then the video created media attention which has had a pretty thick tail continuing to this day which was really fascinating phenomenon to watch unfold because I've never I've never been part of anything like that on Tick Tock and I have my own thoughts and reservations around Tick-Tock certainly, but
It is remarkable. What Tick-Tock can do for resurrecting not necessarily resurrecting is for our body was never dead but really revitalizing books. It's incredible. We can happen to remember those that video of a dude skateboarding down the street drinking. I think Ocean Spray cranberry juice. This is a couple of years ago and this is when he was listening to a particular song This song goes to number one. This guy gets a sponsorship from Ocean Spray cranberry juice is now everyone it's like this one.
He's taking up skateboarding, you know, everything that was in this one video and I don't even cranberry juice is the new cold plunge you honestly do so, you're right. I think I think the 4-Hour Body has held up very well. What are the strategies from it that you have held onto the most because I do think it was very prophetic and I was listening to you tell human about the fact that you were sticking yourself with some experimental glucose monitor V1 many many years ago and
Plug it into a fucking page or something like that. But yet what what are the things that you wrote in that book that you are holding onto the most still today to cold exposure when in doubt if I have very little time for training something akin to Occam's protocol in that book, which is pretty straightforward. Once it to failure type resistance training. So nothing sophisticated. It's not going to win you any gold medals at the Olympics, but in terms of minimal effective dose still does the job
if you have a very very small amount of time to allocate to weight training certainly kettlebell swings and just on that whether your cues for good kettlebell swings, especially as somebody who is sensitive with the lower back with the compression issues that I have right now. I'm taking a pause. No shearing Force yellow shearing force on the on the kettlebell swings, but we gave you were if you were okay. Yeah if I were okay, I mean you would want to be bracing and not hyperextending at the sort of up.
Range you'd want to be hip hinging not squatting. This is a huge mistake. You see a lot also in crossfitters where they're effectively squatting and then whipping it overhead almost like a high pole. Yep, but using that hip hinge instead of the squat and focusing on that gluteal activation and my personal opinion not lifting any higher than is necessary. So you basically to parallel the at nipple height. I'm not going overhead. I just feel like
for people particularly
I'm trying to guard against the ten or twenty percent who are not going to execute perfectly. So I want to minimize injury risk. And for that reason the American kettlebell swing a movement. I sold the was like a An Origin thing about how it came into CrossFit and blah blah blah. It does seem like I don't know. Okay, I understand that. It's easier to create standards around movement for it for a for a referee or umpire or whatever. They're called fucking assessor to be like that one overhead that one over here that we never had that.
Extension at the top, but it's moved across now into I don't know. I've never heard Pavel touch Shalini talk about what he thinks about that, but I don't think I've ever seen him pushing kettlebell overhead. I may be wrong. I haven't seen it yet. I've done long ago. I did the Russian kettled certification level 1 level 2. So I went through the whole thing and really found it valuable on a whole lot of levels, but I would say the kettlebells for now at the shear forces. I'm gonna table the sort of injury prevention prehab.
AB type exercises from the the not entirely but largely great cook FMS type focused stuff in the 4-Hour Body for sure the chop and lift Turkish getup, especially that first portion of the Turkish getup for shoulder Health. Hmm. These are all things. I still do was the was hanging was hanging in the there might have been a little bit of hanging. I don't think they're I don't think that it was highlighted in any way. Hmm, that seems to be
The Panacea for many people's shoulders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the person I find mean there are a lot of things we could talk about really to shoulder since I've had this one completely rebuilt. So I've had to go through a lot of shoulder stuff.
There's a lot I added two tools of Titans, which was effectively an addendum to my previous books like all the things I would have included in a b c and d I ended up collecting into tools of Titans. There's a fair amount in there on say glute medius some extras from Peter Tia who I know you've met with as well as a handful of things related to acroyoga and Gymnastic strength training, which have some absolutely incredible exercises.
That don't require any equipment. So for someone who travels a lot, these can be incredibly incredibly helpful. So I would say the vast majority of what you find in that book if I'm getting a little puffy and I want to reduce puff said puffiness then slow carb diet is still where I'll go as my default which is effectively paleo. Puss plus legumes people get really wound up about lentils and beans so far. My GI tract is not exploded.
Frag grenade that does not happen, but for most people it's not what happens. So I would say that the vast majority of what's in that book. I still use on some level.
I'm still intact. Let's say that for the rest of time you only had ten exercises that you could rely on and this is for whatever you think your goals for. The rest of time will be muscularity longevity Mobility 10 exercises. What would you choose? Oh, man. I don't know if I have the credibility to weigh in on this just for you. This is for you. Well, let me tell you where my mind Goes My Mind goes to
types of athletic movement more than exercises. So instead of Romanian deadlifts. I'm thinking acroyoga overhead squats overhead squats. Yeah, like barbell overhead squats, okay.
Rock climbing archery on both sides. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you that one sure and then some forms of gymnastic strength training from coach Christopher summer. I don't know that ring think of it as
It includes some ring work which would be more advanced depending on the progression. But it's a lot of the strength training floor routines Etc. That would be used hand balancing exercises. That would be used for prepping gymnastic athletes for competition, but for adults who really have limited capacity to adapt, okay, so I didn't start at age 5, I would choose those. Okay. Yeah, I would choose those in part because
historically for me you're getting you're getting push-pull with the a cure you're going to get legs. You're gonna be doing a lot of single leg pressing and you can choose your partner depending on how much weight you want to use ha ha ha get your partner's pregnant. Then you have progressive resistance. I'll get kidding then that would check a lot of the boxes for me.
and keep a lot of my
creaky issues at Bay with respect to kind of hip back which might seem counterintuitive when you think about the like a stew heels overhead squats or the a curio go which seems do at first require quite a bit of flexibility, but you end up developing a lot of strength in end ranges. If you're doing it strictly and frankly all those other things are a number of those are also fun at the end of the day.
Have you taken up pickleball yet? I have not. I've tried it. It's fun. It's cool. Doesn't grab me like other things. Yeah. It's interesting. It's the first thing I've done in a long time
that
I absolutely 100% lose myself in completely great completely stick with it completely lose myself in it. I think, you know, even the gym training a great session with a friend there are moments where you get pulled out because of the sort of intermittent nature of going to the gym and stuff like that. It's been a while since I did a sport like that cricket was mind growing up. And yeah, I it's not about pickleball.
What it's about I think is something which is relatively fast paced not to intermittent and immersive like physically and mentally I think if you can hit those, you know a problem would be and I imagine this is something that NFL players have to deal with their on and then they're off but they need to stay on while they're off right you actually have it's built into the way that the game works MLB as well. I would guess basketball players don't have that so
Right, maybe when they're on the bench, but you know when you're in the game you are in the game. Whereas that for me and my kind of psychology something which doesn't allow me to pull back out and then have to drop back in I do much better with so yet some of my
some of the best flow states that I found in the last two years have been playing that that's great. Keep it up. I think I had an initial experience that turned me off a little bit because I'm playing pickleball, which is it's a fun and it's pretty funny sport also Reich and the people I ended up playing with we're like John Mcenroe on steroids are so serious and competitive and kind of angry. That'll kill the fun. How are you guys taking this? So seriously, it'll kill the fun. Come on.
It's like it's like weird. We're doing Nerf fencing and people are treating it like life or death. I might come on. Come on guys. This is intended to be fun. Well, that's another thing, you know going back to what we were talking about before holding yourself to high standards allowing yourself to like enjoy and feel the emotions of the moment. I was playing mixed doubles last week and the girl that I was playing with young girl. I've been loads of fun. We were playing well like it was tight game between us and the the other team and you know, we I think we won one game
Was now 11 best of three and I'm you know would sort of walking back to the Baseline to start serving in America. So we're going to do this I'm going to do this again and she just stopped and said yet don't forget to have fun. I didn't really mind. It really caught me and I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah about that, but it just hadn't factored in because I was so but it was a really lovely q and I mean you've got um,
A prompt what would this be? Like if it was easier? Hmm, what would this be? Like if it was fun? Yeah. Yeah, totally then they're related often. Yes.
You've got a quote that I completely fell in love with in a permissionless environment where you can really embrace the freedom of being able to work whenever you want wherever you want for most people what that is going to turn into is working all the time wherever you are and you don't have someone to stop you other than yourself. It's much more problematic than you might expect. It's a real risk. How do you avoid burnout? Is it planning in those?
Those holidays every few months. How do you know when you're getting too close to pushing too hard?
For me, it's all scheduling likes don't rely on discipline rely on systems and scheduling so in other words.
If you need to book end your work day so that you do not work until 8:00 p.m. Have something scheduled with accountability.
Dinner with friends dinner with friends going out to rock climb going out last night for me going out to dance tango like have something in the calendar that you are committed to going and attending ideally you have some sunk cost pay for it in advance and have us have some incentives lined up to defend against the impulses of your and instincts of your less. You do something you going to meet that you've already paid for the class. Yeah. Yeah set it up in advance. And so I will very often have
i-team for instance if I happen to be in New York or wherever I am. They'll book out.
Dinner reservations and exercise classes plus 1 all of an extra extra slot that I'll book then it's up to me to fill it. I was like, all right, we'll look you have three reservations. You're going to you're going to pay a cancellation fee at these two places you might as well invite some friends or they'll help me invite some friends or Island by my friends in advance. But the point is it's blocked out when I look in the calendar. It's already there and
That is the simplest approach. I have found two.
Lead myself to defend the personal time as much as the professional time. Hmm. So is that how you've come to think about discipline and motivation and willpower and stuff like that?
Yeah, the discipline and The Willpower is loading it up front create the systems so that you're not constantly tired from decision
fatigue
front-loaded.
Yeah, what do you what do you don't do it the hard way? I don't disagree. I don't disagree I think.
Anything that you need to do more than once you might as well do a system for but it's what you said at the very beginning which is about our desire to be.
To show ourselves that we are working hard thinking about things and taking a step back and taking half a day to come up with systems and stuff like that. Even if it would save you multiple days over the next year. There is the Urgent will always get in the way of the important unless you're very very intentional about. Okay. Alright emails. All right slack we'll just wait because once they do this thing actually have even more time to be able to focus on whatever it is and thinking in systems.
is a skill realizing where you can automate and how you can create that, you know, and this doesn't need to be it doesn't matter if you're a
The business owner or a mother that needs to pick the kids up from school or orchestrate with your partner who's collecting who and all of the rest of the things like there are systems that you can find but I think you need to be very very intentional and a lot of the time it doesn't it doesn't necessarily sort of come naturally, especially if you doing busy work. Yeah, and the work is always going to be there. Do you think you're going to die with stuff on your to-do list that's undone every single one of us and I would recommend we spoke about all of her.
A little bit before we started recording. I think that Oliver Berkman 4000 weeks go read that book. Everybody's gonna die with an things that have not been checked off their to-do list. So given that that is sort of the default mode. Maybe you reframe it so that it's not an unending source of extreme stress. Yeah and most things just do not matter that much.
I do think like look back if you can I like your calendar from a year ago and figure out which of those things were extremely important you at the time and now in retrospect how many of them are completely trivial had no bearing on anything important the guy you to where you are now going to be the majority. I asked myself a question during my annual review.
What do I think is productive but isn't and what is productive by don't realize it two separate questions. I'll give you mine and give me yours things that I think are productive but aunt calls emails sitting at my desk when I'm not working and slack things that are productive, but I don't realize it reading Walking with or without accompaniment saying yes to breathe.
Of coffees and dinner with people that coming through town.
So when I looked at my year so many of the things that I did that had outsized impact was going Morgan housel comes through town and we go for steak and I leave with 10 ideas for newsletters or are you things I can apply to my own life or a cool story? That just makes me feel good. This isn't productivity Purgatory where everything has to be in service of work. It's like just it was good. It was good for me and it was good.
Across multiple levels and then I look back and sitting at your desk when you are not working and being like yeah, but I'm here like luck luck at how much work I've look boss. Oh wait, I'm the boss. Yeah, that's a shitty party. I know I am. Are there any things that come up the either things that are productive but you don't realize it or not productive that you think
are.
Anything athletic is going to be net positive cross transferred everything else so which is slightly different from exercise mean exercise.
Yes.
But specifically athletic something that is faster paced where you get punished for not paying attention.
Skiing pickleball in your case rock climbing these things are all deeply restorative for me, even though there are intensely are energetically intensive and expensive.
I would say on the
unproductive side off in any type of competition, which is a tough one for me because I like competing and I think I'm a pretty good competitor, and I've been rewarded a lot for competing in school. You get the top marks or in sports. You have a certain record.
In business you have certain outcome the in investing you have a certain portfolio startups, you're rewarded for computing in so many different ways that you can end up.
Choosing allowing the competition to dictate what you do instead of choosing what you should do or might want to do whether there is competition or not. So I make sense. Yes. Yes, for instance. I'm very
I like competing. There's part of me that enjoys competing, but I don't want to use the wrong tool for the job which is part of the reason that I'm exploring other things like rock climbing. I don't think on the shirt compete in rock climbing archery may be looking for other avenues to scratch that competitive itch rather than for instance looking at what the latest best practices might be in the podcasts that are growing the fastest / television shows now, of course, and it doesn't mean I shouldn't
Experiment with those things, but if the primary driver behind it is because I want to quote unquote win. Yeah, I find that to be a false lead. That is a as Lord, Rabbi. Jonathan sacks set of my podcast before he passed pretty shortly thereafter. Maybe a year year and a half later.
That is a temptation to be resisted rather than an opportunity to be seized. So think a big part of maturing is separating those two being able to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized in a temptation to be resisted and for me.
Much like when I chatted with b.j. Novak is a very well-known writer famous for the office. He also does a lot of acting and directing but he's he said and I'm paraphrasing here but something along the lines of whenever I find myself saying about an opportunity, but it's so much money.
That's a red flag. That's a cute a pause when it's like that data, but it's such good money. That's a cute a pause for me the drive to compete and win at this point for me.
is acute a pause when I was younger, I think it was really helpful really critical Fuel and even now it might be at some point but use it strategically use it strategically because in competition
a various types and you see this in the money game and say pure Finance not always but often.
What's invisible from the outside are the sacrifices that people are making the compromises? They are making to fixate solely on whatever this competitive.
Driver might be or whatever the scoreboard might be. And for instance one of my very close friends. Actually my one of my college roommates worked for a guy in finance in New York City at one point in this guy was legendary. I mean Super Famous day trader talk about stressful.
Rich beyond belief and he always walked around with a briefcase pretty old-school with divorce papers ready to go in case he needed them because he has relationship and become that frayed and contentious and if you're only reading the the media profiles of the sky that is not included.
So the costs of high-level competition are often invisible. Yes. Yes, if you be careful about emulating people and what I would say is if you're not willing to make their always sacrifice of so try to identify those in the competition in the competitive sphere before you jump in with both feet. So for me, I would say competitions definitely flag.
Sometimes it's still go. Sometimes it's still a green light, but I want to at least use that as a pause same with money the money stuff Sam Sam.
Yeah,
yeah, I fell in love with a essay from Jason pogan where he said except that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who got good at One Thing by sacrificing literally everything else and I think in my experience looking at high performers, they're not ubiquitous human wide examples of Perfect People. They're usually very competent in one narrow domain and
Times they've managed to hold on to the remainder and sometimes they've had to completely burn everything else down either as a byproduct of or Upstream as the creator of their success.
Yeah, I would modify that slightly to say just be cautious about meeting your Heroes because a lot of them will have Clay feet. There are counter examples. There are feet. Well just means that they're flawed right in one way or another and
we're all flawed or are we all have weaknesses of some sort or another but there are counter examples in the sense that there are people I've met who I've idolized on some level and they end up to be even better broad-spectrum masters of multiple domains really consciously deliberate about say family life on top of who's the man who are the most impressive individuals full stack humans that you've met.
There there quite a few I would say.
Seth Godin is very high.
Very wise really walks the walk.
And I've spent enough time with him now to see him in a lot of different environments to get to understand more about how he raised his kids and he's just figured it out for himself in such a congruent way. Right what he says is what he means is what he lives. There is no discrepancy and that is not true for everyone on the Internet by the way, but it is true for a fair number.
They're quite a few Founders who have put in that.
In that in that bucket as well.
Toby we mentioned him already Shopify certainly would fall in that category. I'm sure I can think of quite a few and a lot of my very good friends would fall into that into that category where a lot of them fall a little short and that's why I'm not mentioning more names is in the physical care the self-care beast when it comes to the physical the physical machine that prepared to the body is 10 sacrifice the health in order to achieve many of the things also probably including family life and the oblast waitzkin would be
High on the list as well as he doing now. Where is Josh? Well, silly filing easy for laying or is foiling more than e foiling toe in foiling but he is just
he's inspiring to me because
our hardwiring is also so different. I mean it's hard to not be different from Josh. But for those people who don't recognize the name, he was the basis for the book in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer incredibly incredibly skilled chess player and then translated that Tai Chi Push Hands. I think he became world champion there and then became the first black belt under Marcelo Garcia a nine-time world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and he's taken his tool kit and his hardware and applied it to multiple domains, but I also had a chance to see him and personal life with friends.
Ed's and
another
this is not really answering a question you've asked but if you were to ask me what I have grown to Value more and less as I have become older, I would say and this relates to how I think of full-stack loyalty and long relationships.
I value more than simple or simply intelligence. I like intelligence kind of table stakes and it's possible to be very smart very hardworking and very low Integrity. Those are the people you really need to watch out for and it's not the lazy low Integrity stupid people. You got to worry about it's like the smart and or hard-working who are also of questionable ethics. Those would be we got to worry about I would say
another person who really walks the walk and of all ramakant would be another he's a well known serial founder. I recently spent a week in a row a ton with him at that Prospero thing. Yeah. So and of all we've all is you don't have to guess what Nepal thinks which I really appreciate me too. There was a Clarity. I'm a people pleaser and I'm trying to rehabilitate it and there was a
Definitiveness to if we're in a big group. There's a big Gathering. I'm sure you've seen this happen before the right you're in a meet-up and the particular group that you're in the conversation has gone in a direction that novel finds boring. He's gone. He is now over the other side. There's no as our Grace's needed particularly. If you say something that he doesn't agree with you also say that and
I know like I think.
In some ways that whatever socially awkward or the need validation side of me would see that as a high-risk strategy because I want people to like me but what you don't realize is that what you like is someone who you can trust you want somebody who when they say a thing you reliably believe that they mean the thing and what that means is you're not looking.
In for someone who tells you what you want to hear you're looking for someone who tells you the
truth.
Yeah, and if you're going to have any degree of public exposure
fame money power you're going to need that more than ever.
Because you're going to attract sycophants who will tell you, whatever they think you want to hear.
To extract whatever they happen to want. So it's going to become increasingly important. I'll give you some other examples actually now that I had a minute to think about it Jersey Greg Erick and his wife and yellow Greg Erick, very few. People are going to know these names their polish émigré is who fled Poland
During a period of time when the solidarity this resistance movement underground had people being murdered and the streets and they fled ended up in the US with next to no money. And they now live in beautiful part of Northern California. They both have multiple World Records in Olympic weightlifting now retire your the fuck up. He's now retired. They developed a system of training called the happy body with micro progressions that the
Nations that I've seen them producing people is beyond belief part of the reason that I named the overhead squats as one of my top five is because of Jersey he is something like 65 67 now he can he can still at this point in time when you watch him dance. He looks excuse me when you watch him walk. He looks like a lithe dancer or something kind of Glides across the floor is very mobile. Very strong. He can stand on an Indo Board like a balance board with a
barbell fully loaded with way it whip it over his head and a lightning-fast snatch land and a perfect snatch a saint heels stand up drop the weight down and repeat doing multiple snatches on a balance word and he's got to be 65 67 at this point. So he's got the full cycle walk on it for the demony thing as walks the walk and his wife also walks the walk and
I want to see their relationship Dynamics their relationships their Dynamics with their kids. I'm really trying to only idolize or emulate people when I can assess the fabric of the relationship Integrity around them can't always do that. So you can you can try to experiment with different habits from this person or that person just be careful because the sacrifices are invisible. Yes, unless that person is sharing things very explicitly. I've been fascinated by the price that people
people pay to be someone that you admire, you know, what is it that this person has to sacrifice either consciously or unconsciously ordered the byproducts of them getting to the place that they are you looking in the outlier in a very particular domain. What are the other things that have come along for the ride talking is all about loyalty who's a quote I stumbled upon from Christopher Hitchens that said a Melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you cannot Make Old Friends. Yeah, and there's something beautiful about being along with people for the ride. So Maya
to Dean that you met earlier on he was here from episode 16 years, you know, we worked together for a long time before that and there's something really cool about being able to see the trajectory of your relationship of where you were of where he was what's happening and like that's cool to do and yeah, I worry about the sort of transient transactional nature that people have of being able to do the
Digital Nomad thing which is fantastic, but not having Roots down not being able to sort of embed yourself socially and the same thing happens with internet, you know, I unfriend you I'll block your basically deleted from my life. I don't think that that's a particularly evolutionarily adaptive way to use the mechanisms that we have the social support. Well,
You know, I would add to that just thinking of the quote that you read earlier about the freedom to work anywhere anytime often meaning that you end up working all the tall places all the time that the most under.
Emphasize chapter in the 4-Hour workweek is the filling the void chapter which people tend to skip over so I got a I'll get to that later and the gist of that is suppose a underlying assumption. What which I happen to think is correct. And that is that the positive does not take care of itself. In other words. If you fix the work piece and you have enough money, that's suddenly your life will be great because you will instantaneously manifest these relationships and
activities and so on that make the hard work worth it that doesn't automatically happen. You have to build those things along the way and if you have a void because you've let all of your your hobbies atrophy. You've let relationships atrophy. Maybe you're just moving from place to place to place. So you have no constants. The void will fill itself with more work because you do not have a compelling replacement work will end up swelling to fill the void. If you don't have a compelling yes to other alternatives.
That are in the calendar.
That is almost a certainty is not just a possibility. It's a certainty which is why when I sometimes get asked.
What what do you wish people would pay more attention to in the 4-Hour workweek? It's the filling the void chapter. That's a question that you asked a lot of people. What is it that in X people gloss over the you wish that they didn't basically what is a highly unpopular but important Insight. I know that you're a fan of questions. So that's one of yours that I think is really fantastic very very well done talking about the world of podcasting and content creation. What do you make of where we're at now having your decade ish?
Each anniversary we're going into a new world of short form and video and high production and low production and desire for authenticity and credibility. What do you make of where podcasting is at now and where it's going in the medium term future.
Well, I would say a few things. I mean when when I started the podcast in 2014 as I might have mentioned people told me the ship has already sailed. It's too late. It's crowded that wasn't true. It's certainly more saturated now, but I think there's always a market for great. It's just going to be harder on a whole lot of different levels to cut through the noise.
And to position properly right to differentiate to try to be a category of one as much harder now and I'm inspired by on one hand the incredible production value that a lot of people have brought to bear actually not a lot handful. I would say you exemplify the production value. Thank you. And I like that you're pushing the envelope. It's inspiring to watch and simultaneously. I don't want to compete against that because frankly
You're going to win I don't like playing games that I lose. That's that's that's not my my go-to strategy. And I think that you are very well suited to this particular style of this medium and for me then personally, it's a matter of asking a lot of questions and doing some deep thinking and journaling which I am going to use the 10th anniversary as an opportunity to do.
about predominantly what gives me energy versus what takes energy from me and doubling down on that because
The function of the podcast is not predominantly to make money. It's turned into a good business. I'm very grateful for that. But it's really the experience of having this type of dance keeping me on my toes refining the craft of interviewing and having conversation.
The spontaneous nature of that not unlike pickleball or rock climbing or a sport where you need to pay attention.
And if you are in this recursive thought Loop, let's just say where you happen to be in a funk having a 23 hour long conversation. If it's active is a very effective way of taking you out of that state that could have been in my most problems can be fixed by these things or a podcast for two hours our pockets were doing yeah on the macro level. I think that video is going to continue to become
More important as a discovery mechanism as a driver of growth. It's hard for me to see what would
push that in another Direction given the platform prioritizing of video.
So we'll see. We'll see I am very curious to see.
In particular and I don't have a solution for this. But if there will be improvements in Discovery that actually get mainstream adoption or adoption at all outside of YouTube
suggestions. Yep.
I do think that curation and curators instead of having say one Oprah tell half the country what to read what to watch I think and we're already seeing this of course, but a proliferation of a lot of people who might even opt out of video and social media
Media to use that old tool email right? Whether it's my newsletter 5 V Friday or your newsletter. I think people will have to for sanity's sake and to try to constrain decision fatigue and overwhelm. Probably find whatever their version is of a curator to like they'll tear for them. Okay, right. So rather than being a scout and seeking all of this information on the into myself, I will maybe have three sub stacks and a couple of convertkit new.
That is that I subscribe to and that will be my content consumption. Right? Like I have a few dozen friends primarily tell me. Yeah, actually the crust me who I trust and we share things that we find that is how 90% of what I find ends up in 50 Friday. It's through a very small subset of friends whose judgment. I trust. Yeah. Yeah. I know me intimately. Well, I should formalize that mole, but I do have a very high hit rate.
Of degenerate intellectuals that scour the sub stacks and and the Twitter's and whatever and just due to be seen this recently if you seen that recently and it's so fruitful when it comes to your content consumption yourself. I know the amount of time that it takes to prep for the episodes and stuff outside of that.
Where do you go? What newsletters do you subscribe to? What YouTube channels do you watch? What podcasts do you listen to?
I have a very deliberate I would say low information diet or a very tight filters so
Small group of friends who send me things podcast guests who make recommendations. Those would also be included often times in my friend group. I develop pretty good relationships with all these folks and they often come into being guests having listened to a lot of my episodes to begin with they'll send recommendations.
I've a very and I'm fortunate in this but it's also not sheerly. It's not purely by chance. I would say it's by Design. I have a very eclectic friend group very very Motley Crue. So I'm able to pull from a lot of disparate worlds. Not just Tech not just science not just this that or the other thing I have Tina religious Scholars I've got
Some very esoteric folks who will also send me stuff. They'll be like, hey, you should check this guy out. This Falconer who gets all these high-end jobs in Vegas. I'm like, okay sure. Let's check out the falconer. And then I go down this Rabbit Hole falconry and my find something that's amazing or a few years ago. I was chatting with a steaming with this Muslim scholar who sent me a link to an episode on the etymological roots.
Many of the words and dune based on scholarship of Islam amazing episode. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, and I feel very very fortunate that that is one of the amazing byproducts of what I do when I consume media, it's generally going to be shorter articles on my phone if they're longer profile articles say in the New Yorker for instance. There is a long article on
building artificial languages for Fantasy worlds Game of Thrones Avatar Etc. And that was in the New Yorker. It's going to be 20 30 pages. I will print that out and I'll read it on paper. I'm old school that way or I will web clip it to Evernote and read it in Evernote in which case I'll add if I find something I want to search for later. I will fold it but I'll also add three asterisks so I can control F search for three asterisks later and find my highlights. So I'll sometimes do that.
I would say the majority of the time if I'm consuming media these days it's going to be audio so it'll be it'll be audiobook or it will be podcasts almost always podcast episodes are recommend to be my friends ad hoc.
And I will always ask someone if anything in particular really stuck with them from it. And if they can't name something I'm out. I won't even bother to good filter. I use filters like that a lot. If someone sends me a start-up pitch. I have similar filters like this one of the top three entrepreneurs you have met in the last three years if the answer is no it's not. Okay, so doesn't even doesn't even get opened. So in the case of things getting recommended for instance, I'm listening right now.
Now to a three-part series on 99% invisible which is a great podcast been around a long time Roman Mars and he is a co-host who's helping with this and they walk through this book The Power broker by Robert Caro famous book Pulitzer prize-winning book about Robert Moses. Most powerful man in New York for a very very long time in the entire story behind that this book is a beast to get through but they walk people through and the intention is to have people read along. We also get a lot just from listening and they also interview Robert Caro, which is
Rare in these episodes and some listening to a three-part series of that. I do not listen, I would say less than one percent of the time. Do I listen to any current
events?
I can get up to speed on this things very quickly through my friend Network. And sometimes I will do that. I usually go to the very old stuff. So I listened to history Hardcore History fall of civilizations is a podcast that I really enjoy they're very long, but the episode on on on ancient Sumer was very
good.
Shorter episodes philosophize this things that tend to be Evergreen and have no current event aspect. Those would be a few that come to mind. I fell in love with one cold the end of the world with Josh Clark times uplifting like fall of civilization apocalyptic. It's just a ten-part limited series came out about four years ago, and it's just a breakdown of X risk, each of them about one different type of exercise can natural pain diverse Community extinct.
Existential risk essential existential risk yet, but it's beautifully sounds scaped. I used to listen to a lot of audio books as a kid and you know a radio drama with actors and sound effect and they're walking through the woods and stuff. And this thing's just gorgeously done. I've never really that modern wisdom for me is so all-encompassing and totally liberated for me to pursue whatever I'm interested in. I've never really thought like I would like to do a passion project like this is the passion project but
If I was ever to do something that creatively was a little bit different I would be pretty fired up to do something that has that degree of sound scaping and sort of immersion to it that I feel like that would be a cool. Not that I don't have enough to do already but they'll be like a cool other projects. I just really I love the sensation of listening to that. I must have gone back and listen to it, you know, like five times its 10 episodes It's on a podcast. It's free end of the world with Josh Clark highly highly recommended for that side know.
As you go watch the Squatch Dune to in a theater is optimized for sound if I were know. I've I went to go and see it but it was it wasn't in the IMAX fancy. Thank good or do be yeah, if you see it optimized for sound. It's a great experience. I didn't realize when Oppenheimer came out that
Does 24 theaters around the world that allowed you to watch 70ml IMAX natively in the correct aspect 24. Globally. One of them is in San Antonio right around the corner and some Indian kids channel some dude 10,000 subscribers did a good video in the video caught a little bit of fire. He's like why you can go to watch it and it was what the best thing is these
for and then if you haven't got those there's 150 that are kind of this which is almost as good and it's not that and then there's 3,000 data like that and then blah blah blah. It was a really great video and I was like well and I paused it on the 24 so San Antonio how cool yeah, they're yeah really really cool. So that was good. I think two or three or maybe you're in l.a. You mentioned you kind of alluded earlier on to the Perils of audience capture.
Either personally or professionally when it comes to content creation, how do you avoid the mimetic poll of regressing to the crowd of kind of feeding red meat to people either interpersonally to get them to like you because of a need for validation or to the audience in order to get them to like you and to kind of keep the place going? How do you follow your own curiosity and sort of stay true to that whilst also knowing that there is a degree of game playing that?
And it needs to be done.
Well see that in terms of audience acceptance being liked by my
audience.
I don't actually think about it that much in part because when I do my past year review each year to plan my next year and block out these periods of time and so on one of the components of that is putting down my current list of say the 10 friendships that I would like to maintain or deepen and asking myself did I spend as much time as I would have liked with these 10 people last year could be five people the numbers not.
terribly important and if the answer is
no
then whenever I'm faced with the choice of deciding to roll the dice with new friends putting time into a new person, which is a gamble or putting time into the pre-existing guaranteed upside religion. I usually go with the prior relationships, so I care most about
Those people who are fully equipped and well practiced in calling bullshit on me.
And don't hesitate to speak their mind I care about those people first and
foremost
more so than my audience and what they care about is doing what gives me the greatest sense of personal aliveness.
and using that as my
Compass My True North I would say that
I also want to know broadly speaking or be conscious of what type of audience I am attracting.
And are there any constants I want to maintain? All right, are there certain types of interests certain types of psychographics demographics that I want to keep consistent because those are the people I would like to surround myself with for instance. And for that reason if I have an episode that does
Absurdly well like 2020 2021 did one or two episodes related to web three cryptocurrency Etc. Although that wasn't the stated objective. I was delivering on the promise of deconstructing world-class performance was talking about the habits routines mental models Etc of these people, but the subject of the hour they wanted to discuss with something related to crypto those episodes went parabolic bananas and
Yeah.
I try to take that. I always take that actually there. I can't think I'm gonna miss of an exception before I try to replicate before I tried to add more fuel to the fire by adding 5 themed episodes on X doing a mini series of six on X because X delivered a lot of downloads and maybe I can capitalize on that from a financial perspective by doing a b and c I ask myself if I telescope out 6 months 12 months from now.
And I have done this how will the composition my audience have changed who will I have repelled who will have attracted and when I went through that visualization exercise, I didn't like how it looked.
Which is not to say there are there are there are great people involves and a lot of my closest friends are very heavily involved in some of these areas in addition to others. They do not hold on to any one of these components like religious Zeal. It's identifying themselves with lots of assists and isms and so on.
However, there's a lot of collateral damage in those communities as well and a lot of terrible Behavior. So.
I made the decision not to replicate I didn't do it. I actually I went the opposite direction and
As long as you take care of your audience, and you need to decide in advance, if you're hosting your own personal Ted, who are the thousand people you invite.
Where every break every meal you're going to be with these people and you get assigned to a random table.
Okay, if that were to be six months of your life not just a weekend event. How would you want to compose that audience?
Okay. Well that's a consideration. But but the first determining factor is what gives me the greatest sense of aliveness because it gives me endurance. It keeps my the more curiosity is used the more you have and it's sort of the opposite of a finite resource in that respect and
Those are the basics of how I approach it and there are trade-offs right? I saw this this woman and climbing gym recently. She had a shirt on that said no Solutions only trade-offs and I wasn't sure what that referred to but I kind of like that as Mustafa was that to tell my soul quote. I was it there are no Solutions only trade up. There we go. Thanks now. I know the attribution great,
so
I side with that quite a bit and
there are always trade-offs eating when you're opening one door. You're probably closing one. It might be temporary. It could be over a longer period of time so I am more than happy to make trade-offs on the business model economic side to optimize for the longer game. I'm also using the podcast is a way to Workshop many other things right just like I used the blog for a long time to workshop and experiment with things ended up becoming books later you
Trace the 4-Hour Body back to my first really viral blog post. I am constantly workshopping. I'm constantly sort of lobbing a pebble into the pond to see what the ripples do. Yeah, and when the the newsletter in Twitter is so good for that. I think to just and and the podcast as well. We have a quite a good repurposing engine going on from you know, this episode and things will be clipped that are short and then something will take fire and I'm like, well why why did that get
Hundred thousand likes on Instagram like what about that section or thing? No matter what? Is that worth exploring a little bit more in a piece of writing and it's like it's like read wise for your own content. You know what I mean? It's sort of resurfaces shit that you forgot that he'd said. I love all of that money when you were talking about your friends and what they what they want for you and what they value in you it kind of got me thinking about how any friends who
Are more happy for you when you make loads of money and have loads of plays and aren't more happy for you when you're just fired up about what you're doing. I'm particularly good friends. So optimizing not only for those sorts of people to be around you but also to think well if that's what my friends want for me. They don't care about how much money I've got. They don't care about good friends don't care about how many plays I'm doing. Well if it's both good for them and good for me.
Glee has very few reasons to not do that. And I understand there is a degree of game playing in this is I think different creators with differing sort of scopes of how much they do. This. This is something that we think about a lot, you know, like we want to get plays we need to do the human my get plays we want our players I download place. Yes, correct. What did you think about it? That's like British ISM or something. Oh no much more basic than that. So hey play you do you correct. Yeah.
So, you know, there's a degree of from Long Island. I take a while there's degree packaging that you need to do with this. But you also don't want to desensitize the audience to with the limbic. Hijack things. So aggressively that they don't sort of trust what you're saying anymore and finding that balancing game like ethical algo hacking we call it how much of this is. Okay, and how much of this is not and I'd as soon as there's a kick but increasingly and this is like a champagne problem. I suppose more the mod that the show
Groan, the more that I think about like am I excited 10 minutes before I sit down with the person do I want them to hurry up and if I want them to hurry up good and if I just optimized for doing more of that and I think the same is true for friends. Yeah, you know, I had this Insight again coming from a nightlife background were so many young people don't have friends that have drinking partners and much of the reason that they drink is because the events that they're attending are so boring that the only way they can get themselves through it is to sedate themselves out of realizing just how boring it is.
and
the same thing is true with the books that you're reading. I've been told that I'm supposed to be interested in this book. Okay, and how do you feel when you read it fucking hate it? All right, maybe bail out and read more Red Rising or Patrick rothfuss or whatever like just read the thing that's good to you because that's going to fuel you way more than like and there's certainly times when you need to do things that are hard like you need to put the nose to the grindstone. There are going to be writing the book doing.
More research going over a fourth draft of the of the whatever whatever I'm sure you're intimately familiar with. Yeah fine for them. Like a 12-lead only need four drafts early days. I blog posts and like 30th draft 37.
let's say that this somebody listening to who
Wants to dream bigger hmm and wants to have more self belief that they can make things happen in the world.
What would you say to them?
Well, I would say first that.
Just like you'd have having done hundreds of these interviews with amazing people from all different walks of life.
That the high performers are usually buckets of neuroses. Just like everybody else with some really serious and securities that maybe they're aware of maybe they're not who figured out how to capitalize on one or two strengths.
And have been able to create systems so that they can focus and leverage those things.
You'll get everything that's built around us. The roads the bridges the highways the skyscrapers assisting Chapel all made by humans, right and
You know the spectrum that of accomplishment is really really wide. So that's the first thing I would point out. It's like theirs.
You don't need to be endowed with all these magical faculties to create these things.
Secondly, I would say that.
paradoxically it's often less crowded to aim for
the home runs than it is to aim for the base hits because so many people underestimate themselves that the base hits and the doubles are more crowded just in terms of top of the bell curve then aiming for the big there's a there's a warning though that I should add to that which is it's very easy to hide behind the big this is barred from Seth Godin. In other words. You can say I want to change the world. Okay great, but then on a day-to-day week-to-week month-to-month basis, what does that mean? You're actually doing what is your next physical a
Even for that and people can hide behind this big nebulous hand wavy thing and okay. Well, what's the antecedent to that? What's the antecedent to that? Maybe it's just fun and product Market fit and building a company that solves a problem with the product. Great. Okay. Let's back out of that. Now. What do you need to do? All right. I need an MVP of my website. Okay, great. Put it on some paper. Okay. Can you show that to somebody forget about building the website, you know have your first contact with customers? Okay great. Can you get them to pay you?
holler, if not back to the drawing board, and I think that with the dreaming big it's important to be able to back up but
a lot of it just comes down to
trying a lot doing 80/20 analysis to identify what the trivial many are and what the critical few are being able to separate those two double down on the critical few understanding what your strengths are so that you can find something that is easier for you than it is for most people right having a support system around you like Friends by the way, very high yield question to ask just ask your friends when of
You seen me at my best. When have you seen me at my
worst
and get a lot of good until that
way
and
then just play the game to the best of your ability and really try to be a category of one. It's a lot easier if you find the right Arena to be the only instead of being the best which does not mean you don't focus on quality, but if you don't think in terms of trying to create a new category for yourself very often you end up in a red ocean type of scenario with a race to the bottom type of dynamic where it is incredibly difficult to create a career an identity a source of income that has a protective mode.
Or margin for error of any type. So I would encourage people to deeply think about that as well. So that's a lot but
Last and not least I would say if you're serious all the time. You're going to burn out before you get the truly serious stuff done. So don't take it. Don't take every day. Like it's a life-or-death thing at the end. We're all dust like the Empire Builders you listen to the fall of civilizations from these iconic Empire Builders, like you're not going to recognize any of the names. So if we get like all wound up about our podcasts or whatever. It's like don't worry about it. Yeah No One's Gonna care in 50 years. Yeah.
I don't worry about it. If you are insecure guess what the rest of the world is to here we go. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think
Hmm Yeah,
we have this assumption. At least I always did there is an asymmetry between what we see of our own mental vacillations and what we see of other people's motivations in the actions that they take everybody else looks like a slick rational agent and we look like a wavering idiot right because
All of the back and forth that somebody goes through doesn't show up in their actions. They just do the thing after all of that, but you see your own flaws and foibles from a front row seat and I think it's very easy to overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. If you're the sort of person that can listen to a three hour podcast and sit and be engaged and be curious and want to improve yourself and you're considering these sort of things. You are already in a rarefied strata of people, I think yeah, and you know the difference
It really just comes down to it. You're going to take a bit of action intentionally in the right direction, but for inordinately long period of time but I think one of the other realizations I've had over the last couple of years has been that
I haven't got insanely better with the podcast. I've got a bit better having got insanely better with the podcast.
The main thing that's happened is I just didn't stop and it shows the power of compounding and consistency and like it's weird to think that consistency is a selection mechanism in itself like that. Simply doing a thing more makes you better regardless of the quality that you do it and over time you will get better by doing it, but that consistency is so rare consistency is consistency is important, but I think if it's not deliberate practice, you won't automatically get
I do think
it's
it's
possible to end up mailing it in. Maybe I do see because if we come to consistency tons into routine, it turns switching off. Yep. Yep. Yep complacency, especially if you end up wanting to scale what you're doing with volume. So for instance, I used to do more episodes per month than I do now and I scaled back because I noticed I started dragging my feet a little bit and I had one or two episodes or I was like that was on
autopilot
and I ratcheted back to fewer episodes per month problem solved trade-off takes bravery them, right? Yes. Yes trade off financially in terms of plays in terms of blah blah.
Increasingly, I respect people that are able to make those kinds of sacrifices something which has a public cost but a private benefit and and the nice thing about something like that also is it's what Jeff Bezos my call to a door. You can go back. I can always do more episodes of a decision. Yeah, it's not it's not a big deal. You can hit control Z. If you want you can always do more episodes. What is it? You want to achieve?
hmm
wife hunting successfully haven't had kids. I think that's the next chapter not in a rush, but also not dragging my feet. I think that's I think that's the next phase.
From a business perspective. I mean honestly, I don't really care. I don't more money's not going to give me the Fulfillment that I would like to have in something like a family right you could quadruple you could 100x the amount of money. I have it's it's just a silo of Human Experience. It's not going to address everything. It's not going to scratch every Edge. So I think I think
I think the family experience is is the next experience that's unfortunately not something that is incredibly easy to just reverse engineer and execute plan and Achieve as many other things are but I'd say that that's that's that's one of the few things that comes to mind that I would say is distinctly not present currently, right certainly self-care.
Athletic performance some type of physical competition is in the works and that's important, but it's part of my self-care routine as opposed to a macro level life.
Decision like life partner, right?
I'm excited for that. I'm excited for the unrelenting dad podcast the child-rearing experts that are going to come on.
Yeah, we'll see if I'm even in the public eye at that point. I might just back out disappear. I've a friend Chris Bumstead. He's a Olympia physique Champion. He's kind of like the face of the sigma male movement at the moment and I think he's won five times in a row 25 Pete. Maybe he's going for six this year or something like that and his goal. He's 22 million followers on Instagram for million-person YouTube channel, like all these supplement companies is outright goal is produced babies.
He's Retreat to cabin in the woods with wife and babies. Like that's the thing, you know, David parole. Yeah. Yeah. So David said on a call we had forever ago five years ago. Now he's done really well with rite of passage financially and and status and stuff like that. He said,
Throughout my 20s and most of my 30s. I thought what I was doing was making my self more successful so that I could be more successful. And what I realized was I was making myself into the kind of man. That would be the father to my future children, and I thought that was really cool to think about
at the time much of what you're doing has a
ego-driven sometimes narcissistic sometimes competitive status full all of the things the testosterone coursing all of the rest of it.
But in retrospect it was this sort of weird.
Ancillary benefit that you didn't think about that. It was teaching you lessons and forging skills for you that are going to allow you to pay it forward and we're the opposite how so well, you could be developing the skills to be a cold-blooded killer and execute without empathy or remorse. I think that's it. That's a failure if that happens. That's a massive failure of the person to not to think sufficiently closely about what they're doing. Yeah. I don't think it's
Even though I mean, I do think it takes a conscious decision. I mean there are lots look I can't speak to the female experience. I'm not a female but there are a lot of men out there with extremely high IQ and extremely low EQ situational awareness or frankly sort of compassion or empathy. It's either not innate or not practiced, but
There's plenty of that. That's a failure that makes me sad. It makes me sad to think that somebody can have the capacity to do great things and then to not do the interpersonal thing to pay that forward and I think it's nice to hear sort of what your
So many of your goals on around objective metrics of success, and maybe it's the honorable thing about it is far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them that may be true. It may be
A mountain that you can only be not bothered about conquering after you've got to the top of it could be some of that but it's cool. It's cool to hear that. That's like a I would also recommend and I do not have kids. So what do I know? But certainly I've seen people some at the mountain and then attempt to retreat to the woods to the cabin and have the wheels come off completely. I would strongly suggest people consider taking
These mini retirements try that out and see what your withdrawal symptoms are because there will be withdrawal symptoms. So test drive these things and if you're planning to retire and sail a sailboat around the world go do that for three or four weeks test it out and you can then help to train yourself to be better adapted to make that transition. That's not always easy to go from the Autobahn to park. Yeah, you might want to experiment with the gears in between for a while. Yeah, Rich role was telling me about his man you Ari.
That he does every year and it did the same thing as a man you are. It's like a it's like a purposeful Retreat type thing where he does the offline tang and blah blah blah. But yeah that made me that made my bumhole poker against a lot of bumhole puckering going on over there to what happened Tim Ferriss ladies and gentlemen, Tim. I told you before we started you were a huge inspiration before I began the show the launch sequence.
We went through I still how to launch a podcast podcast from you in 2017 that came at an apt time this started in February of 2018. And you were the one that convinced me para socially to start a newsletter. I really massively appreciate everything that you do. You've been a huge inspiration. I love the fact that you're an influence in the world. I love seeing the evolution that you're going on. It's great. I really really appreciate you. Thank you very much for joining me today. Well, thanks man. It's been a real privilege and
And lovely to watch you executed such a high level. It's inspiring. Very very exciting. So keep going.
