The Productivity Mindset with Tim Ferriss

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This week on the podcast Yes I Know, I say,
I have an extra special guest every week. This week,
I have an extra extra special guest. Tim Ferris, best
selling author of numerous books, including The Four Hour Workweek,
host of the Tim Ferris Podcast. He's got a bajillion

(00:37):
downloads on that. He's written five number one best selling books,
including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new
card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot
of buzz. He co created this with another gaming company
called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of

(01:00):
his books or conversations or ted Talks or what have you.
I find him to just be such a thoughtful guy.
He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment,
the Tim Ferriss Experiment, where he's constantly trying to figure
out how his body works, how his psychology works, how

(01:22):
his emotional world works, and has tried a variety of
different things and sort of fastidiously documented what does and
doesn't work for him. That's what led to his productivity book,
The Four Hour Workweek, It's what led to his health
and fitness book, The Four Hour Body, On and on.
He just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out

(01:46):
does the AB test, figures out what works and what doesn't.
I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you
will also with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferris.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Thanks for having me well here.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
It's nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I
don't have to explain how this rolls. What I want
to do is I'm excited about your book. I know
you have a new game out that we want to
talk about. But I have to start by delving into
your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelors and East Asian

(02:20):
studies from Princeton. What were the original career plans?

Speaker 3 (02:25):
So that was after a major switch. So the original
career plan was actually neuroscience. So oh, no sentence major
And there are a few reasons I wanted to focus
on that. I have Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and hereditary bipolar
and so on.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
So wait, we could have a whole nother discussion on neurodivergency.
And I was kind of fascinated by a lot of
what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage
and operate around whatever deficits you're working with. Some deficits

(03:02):
come with separate surpluses. But how significant were all these
deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology
of just navigating life?

Speaker 3 (03:13):
Well? The depression piece was a huge challenge for most
of my life, and thankfully that has changed with a
couple of different approaches and different tools. And that's one
of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was
someone in the Department of psychology but within the focus

(03:35):
of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time, and I
was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because
he was focused on the role of serotonin in sleep
and mood regulations of the neurobiology of depression. He also,
and this was early days, he had an interest in
psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my interest in psychedelic compounds

(03:58):
goes back a very very long time. That would have
been nineteen ninety five ninety six, but I couldn't personally
do I realized and it is important and it is
necessary at this point in time. The animal testing on rats.
He used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies,
but I couldn't euthanize these rats after doing various tests,

(04:19):
and it wasn't actually torture of any type. I just couldn't.
I couldn't be hands on with that at the time,
so I switched to East Asian studies, but with a
focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in
the realm of let's just say cognitive neuroscience, but more
on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to

(04:41):
be a research subject in a bunch of his studies,
no kid, yeah, just to see what that was.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
Like at the time. Had he already won the Nobel
and like I think it was one to oh two.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
So no, not yet, not yet. So this was super
early days, still very well known on campus. But I
guess it would have been Greenhall. They were pretty boring,
to be honest. The tasks hitting space bars or something
to indicate when you see a flashing green box in
the upper left hand corner of one of these very
old school monitors. But that was one of the ways

(05:12):
that I earned whatever was five dollars an hour pay
for something.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Was he ever in Princeton I kind of remember he
was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California, so.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Maybe yeah, he bounced around, but at that time.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Princeton, huh, really really interesting. So I get the transition.
I guess if you're going to pick some space related
to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, and I had been an exchange student. My first
real trip outside of the US was as an exchange
student at age fifteen to Tokyo, Japan, amazing where I went
to a Japanese school for a year.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Are you fluent it all?

Speaker 3 (05:52):
I am? Yeah, I still speak read less so right,
because you really have to practice that to keep it up.
I can still speak and read Japanese. And then got
a couple of others.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
I have a friend, Noah Smith, who is physics and
economics like a killer double major, and he's spent summers
in raves Kyoto says, Tokyo, you have to go when
that must have been fascinating at fifteen, that has to
be a little overwhelming.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, it's a fascinating very for someone who grew up
on Long Island.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
And that's why you're an East Hampton kid, right.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, And at that point only spoke English, very alien.
That has the benefit of being incredibly alien but incredibly safe.
And the additional benefit that people tend to speak, if
they speak at all, terrible English, which means you have
to learn Japanese. Huh So, in contrast with a lot

(06:50):
of if you go to Spain or if you go
to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian because people are going
to default English, that just doesn't really happen in Japan.
So not mentioned the fact that I got there before smartphones,
so I couldn't just escape to texting with my friends.
I was stuck.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
It was or to use Google Translate to actually talk to.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Me didn't exist. Yeah, you were stuck, and that was
a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason. Actually,
another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had
the one of the strongest, if not the strongest, East
Asian studies programs for at that time, I was most
interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would have taken

(07:30):
even if I had majored in neuroscience.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Huh So you graduate in two thousand, I'm kind of
fascinated that very quickly you start writing The Four Hour
work Week, which was published in seven like that is
a shockingly short period of time. You're in your twenties
when you're selling what essentially becomes one of the top
selling books of seven I mean it was on every

(07:53):
bestseller list. I don't have to tell you this, but
I want listeners to understand. So the first question is,
what on earth motivated you five years out of college
to say I think I'm going to write a book.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, so, I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything.
This is a commitment I made to myself after graduation,
longer than an email ever. Again, that was the promise
because my senior thesis I felt almost killed me. So
I didn't want to write anything. But one of my

(08:25):
professors at Princeton who really changed the trajectory of my life,
a professor named ed shaw Z Scchau were still in touch.
He was a former competitive figure skater, took companies public,
one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He
did everything taught at Harvard Business School, etcetera, etcetera, ETCETERA
real polymath, renaissance man, and he taught a class called

(08:49):
high Tech Entrepreneurship, which was electrical engineering four ninety one.
But you didn't need to be an engineer. I wasn't
and that class is what convinced me to move west.
Keep in mind the timing. This was just before the
dot com inclusion to chase my riches and engage in tech,

(09:10):
and in two thousand and one, after that startup I
joined had imploded, I started my own company and I
was bootstrapping it. I didn't raise any outside financing, and
so Ed asked me to come back and talk to
students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year
to do this short lecture to students, and in one

(09:31):
of the feedback forms after years of doing this, one
of the students, who was not being serious, put in
his additional comments, I don't understand why you're teaching a
class of undergrads and graduate students. Why don't you just
write a book and be done with it. And I
had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time,
so I would get these half baked ideas for chapter

(09:53):
titles or content or whatever, and I couldn't get to sleep,
and I would just jot it down and the notes
from the classes as I was teaching, which changed over
time to track my experiences, and these insomnia Middle of
the night notes formed the backbone of something. Sent it
to a mentor of mine who was an author and

(10:15):
unbidden without asking me, was like, I think this is
a great idea. Here meets so and so meet so
and so introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping
in mind now looking back twenty eight or twenty nine,
publishers meaning imprints said no, and then Crown bought it
for next to nothing.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
I love all the examples. I'm a big William Goldman fan,
whose book and Ventures in the Screen Trade Amazing introduced
the phrase nobody knows anything into the popular culture. And
he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars,
all the studios passed on Raiders? Was it paramount that

(10:56):
passed on et because hey, we have this other alien
adventure called Starman, nobody remembers today, and.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
You could go to other you can go anywhere fields Starbucks,
everybody passed on Starbucks.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Quid Games. The author couldn't get it sold for ten years,
ultimately had to sell his laptop because he was so broke.
I love the John Wick story. You have, like this
top action hero could not get Hong Kong Gun Fou
made in Hollywood ended up funding it himself along with

(11:30):
I'm trying to remember the other actress who kicked money
and it's now a two billion dollar franchise. So the
best selling book that all the imprints passed on not
a surprise at all. It is a throw everything against
the wall business model and we don't care and we'll
see what sticks. And they missed this.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, it's it's a hits driven business in some ways,
very similar to the angel investing later, I mean sure,
type of kind of parallel distribution. And what's been wildest
about Four Hour work Week, which is really a book
on increasing per hour output, which is why it found
a toe hold in tech and then the first New

(12:10):
York Times coverage had Mark Injries and the famed entrepreneur
and now venture capitalists talking about it. He wants to
work eighty hours a week, but he wants to get
each of those hours to produce ten times as much
and that's the basic underlying theme of the book. So
what's wild about it is almost all the tech tools
that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even

(12:33):
in twenty seventeen, when all of that stuff was irrelevant,
the principles, the frameworks and so on. It ended up
being on the Amazon Top ten most highlighted books of
all time list.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Meaning from the Kindle version that's so highlight.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Yeah, in twenty seventeen, so that would have been eight
years later when all of the tech tools were just
dinosaurs at that point, which has been it's been cool
to watch.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
So I have I'm thumb through the book over the weekend.
I read it way back when, and I'm revisiting an
old copy which I should have brought in to have
you signed. And my wife says, four hour work week.
What's She's an art teacher, fashion illustration and design. She's like,
what's that about? And I say, I know this is
not going to be a conversation that's going to go

(13:20):
any place productive, So I just say the Parato principle.
She's like, what's that. Well, eighty percent of the value
we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from
twenty percent of whatever that data set is. And she's like, oh,
is that true. I'm like, yeah, kind of really seems

(13:41):
to be true. Oh okay, And I know immediately like
this is not her sort of book, but how grossly
am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just
reducing it to Parado points.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
I think if you had to pick one principle in
the book, that's a good one, that's it right to
focus on. Now, it assumes a few things that sometimes
get missed, right, so people can jump to strategy before
they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something.
So the definition phase of that book, where you're really

(14:16):
getting very clear on which target you are aiming for,
I think is a might sound strange, but an often
under emphasized precursor to then doing an eighty twenty analysis.
Because for eighty twenty or preto principle analysis, you're looking
at which twenty percent of the inputs roughly right, it
could be ten, it could be one percent are producing

(14:40):
the outsized percentage of the returns. Now, that could be
looking at your customers if you run a business, right,
it could be looking at your physical exercise, what's producing
the adaptations. That's a little trickier to do, but you
can figure it out. You could look at it with
medications too. I mean it's like there are a lot
of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo pareto notice this

(15:02):
in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution.
It applies all over the place. And actually Richard Koshkoch
has written a lot on this subject under the moniker
of the eighty twenty principle. But I'd say, if you
had to pick one principle, that's the one. Sure.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Since we're sitting here in Bloomberg, I just have to
point out it's very much true for your portfolio, the
vast majority of your gains. And if you read some
of the research by people like Bessembinder, Hendrik Bessembinder in
Arizona State, it's not even twenty percent that's generating returns.
It's one or two percent. Yeah, that creates the vast majority.

(15:42):
So there's pareto principle, hyper preto principle. But it's kind
of fascinating that you use this as a way to
hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like
you've applied this across a wide range of items. Have
you ever found a space where it doesn't work?

Speaker 3 (16:05):
I haven't, to be honest.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's just consistent everywhere.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
It seems to be practically a lot of nature that
a few things, the critical few versus the trivial many.
It's it's almost always a few things.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
Critical few versus the trivial many. Yeah, that that is
fabulous summation of that. I really I really like that.
So let's let's stick with the book for a moment. Sure,
in the book, you have a lot of practices and
tools and routines. I know some of them are still
valid today. Some of them may or may not have,

(16:43):
for lack of a better word, expired. What were the
most important items you learned? What are the ones that
people speak to you and say, hey, this resonated, this
really had a big impact on me.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, I would say the first is let me zoom
out and say that. I went back and I looked
at the book, which is always tough for me on
some level because I published it when I was twenty nine, right,
I'm turning forty eight soon, and so there's there's a
little bit of chess puffing and so on because I
was completely unknown at the time, which makes me WinCE.

(17:17):
But overall, the principles are still things that I apply
all the time. But the tech tools like using go
to my PC. No, of course, not that's changed. That
world has changed, but the principles and the frameworks, the
exercises still apply. So there, I would say a few
things get echoed to me a lot. One is the
practice of fear setting.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Fear setting, define fear setting for them.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Sure, it's very simple. So fear setting is based on
the I think accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught
to set goals, or we have a framework for trying
to set goals like smart, right, specific, measurable, et cetera,
with a timeline. But if you have the emergency break

(18:01):
on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business,
quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation
from your job or your business, whatever it might be,
that that is the kind of rate limitter and what
you can do. And people can find this for free
if you just go to watch my ted talk which

(18:22):
has I don't know twelve million views now.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
On eighteen tight minutes of here's what to do with
your life.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
Yah, Well, just focuses on this exercise of fear setting,
which I still do probably once a quarter. And the
basic idea is you take whatever you're considering that you
haven't yet done because you have some degree of fear apprehension,
you write down all of the worst things that could happen.
Let's just call it a list of twenty in excruciating detail,
make them specific. Then you have another column, which is

(18:50):
what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each
of those things happening. Last column. If each of those happened,
what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding? Right? So, okay,
you try business after quitting your job, which, by the way,
I don't recommend. You can moonlight and do various things
to hedge against risk, but then it doesn't work. Okay,

(19:12):
can you temporarily airbnb a bedroom in your house or
your bed? Can you get a job bar attending, just
to get back on your feet, Sure, of course you can.
So when you start to do that, and then there's
a separate page where you also write out the costs
of inaction, which is a neglected step. When people are
considering what they're doing, they look at the risks of

(19:33):
doing something, but they don't look at the risks of
not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a
year three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial, or
relationship costs of not doing the thing you're considering? And
when you then look at these things which represent your
thoughts trapped on paper, A lot of people are able

(19:57):
to do the scary thing. So I would say that
that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept
of many retirements, so engineering a way such that you
can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected,
which is very very very achievable.

Speaker 4 (20:13):
It's four weeks in a row or a week every quarter,
like three to four weeks in a row.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Wow, that's a lot.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, And what that forces you to do also is
upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in
your life or in your business or even in your
job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And
the value of all those things outlives the many retirement.
So I'd say those are two that come back a lot.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
It's interesting that you're approaching laying out the pros and
cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture.
I can textualize that a little differently. You and I
have both interviewed Ray Dalio. Yeah, and raise great in
innovation and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much

(21:04):
fake it till you make it attitude never admit error. No, no,
it'll be great. Don't why if it didn't work out
this year or work out next year? And Ray very
much said, no, that's wrong. We're all going to make mistakes.
It's really important to learn from those mistakes. And I
want to say he's the first guy that really put
that out at all.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
I have not to mention the transparency of having almost
all meetings recorded, accessible by anyone within his firm, I mean.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
Which is kind of horrifying.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
They did some pretty wild stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's
a fascinating character.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Absolutely, But it leads to the question, what you're talking
about is really a way to prep yourself for a
fear of failure? Is that fair to describe it?

Speaker 3 (21:54):
And sure, yeah, or you know what, it's a fear
of failure, But oftentimes it's this, it's the fact you
can achieve. Well, it's going to be very very hard
to achieve your goals if they're not very specific and clear.
Even if you fail partially, that's fine. You can still
do great things. I think the parallel is that if

(22:15):
your fears are unclear, nebulous, it's just a feeling in
your gut, but you don't trap the specifics on paper,
they're very difficult to overcome. They will still be a
break in your life. It is just as important to
address that as it is to address the goals to
identify those sort of sticking points. And I would also

(22:37):
say that I think of risk for people as often
ill defined, and there are many ways in different context
to define risk. But if we look at it as
the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things
have a ten out of ten value in that category.

(22:58):
And then if you look at for instance, if you
look at the and I encourage peo able to do
this in fear setting, it's like from zero to ten transient,
recoverable or permanent, what is the potential upside of doing
this scary thing that you're considering doing? And then if
you stay doing what you're doing, like, what are the
zero to ten permanent transient risks or potential outcomes of

(23:21):
not doing the thing? When you then see, oh, if
I do this thing, there could be all of these
potentially semi permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it
and fail, the downsize are transient and like three out
of ten, it makes the decision much much easier and
the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then
it's just execution, risk and implementation, And it's the decision

(23:45):
that is the hardest part for most people.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
It's amazing that everything you're saying is so applicable to
public markets investing, because when people are in that panic mode,
when they're fearful, oh my god, we're down fifteen percent,
the world is going to come to an end, it's
always no, this is transitory, this is temporary. How can
you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid

(24:10):
those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it's
really understanding, Hey, is this a ten or is this
more likely a two, three, four on scale?

Speaker 3 (24:19):
And I can actually, I'll give something else in the
investing world if we're looking at when people neglect the
other side of a coin. And this is not going
to apply to like the super ultra pros, but a
lot of people who participate in the public markets, they
think about what to buy right, what's a good buy
at this moment. They don't think about whole period. They

(24:39):
don't think about selling strategy. What will be the cues,
what are the underlying sort of theses if invalidated that
would mean they should sell blah blah blah blah blah.
They don't have a structured way of thinking about selling.
And similarly, it's like if you just think about your goal,
but you don't have a structured way of thinking about
fear and ap comprehension and so on, you're equally handicapped.

(25:03):
So that would be an easy kind of copy paste comparison.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
I would say, huh, really interesting. You come out of
college with Asian language studies and then you write a
book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then
pivot to angel investing and or advising.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a
sense because the Four Hour work Week. I was based
in Silicon Valley for seventeen years, and I seeded The
four Hour work Week at tech heavy events in part
because it talks about information low information diet, and selective
ignorance and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That's a component of

(25:47):
the book, and that pain was most acutely felt by
people in tech at the time. So my early adopters,
plus the people I had access to were techies in
the very early state figuring out how I would launch
this book and what that had as a side effect
was developing relationships with various founders and there were a

(26:11):
lot of fans among CEOs and co founders of startups.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Let me interrupt you just to remind people, the book
comes out in seven yep. This is before half of
the companies that we think of as part of our
daily lives. Well before were you know, there was no
public Alibama. I think that's before Facebook, certainly long before
uber goes goes public and Shopify. A lot of these

(26:39):
companies were you know, barely a gleam in the creator's eyes.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, they didn't. A lot of them either didn't exist
or they were very very early stages. So I launched
the book. My main launch strategy was south By Southwest,
this festival in Austin, Texas in two thousand and seven,
which was also the same south By Southwest where Twitter
basically went live in public in full promotional mode. And

(27:04):
the other piece of the story of angel investing is
that I mentioned in the previous segment my professor in
school ed show his son in law at the time,
Mike Maples Junior, was a very well known angel investor
in Silicon Valley, had been an executive at various companies
and we became friendly. He wanted to lose some weight.

(27:27):
I wanted to learn more about what he did, so
we would have breakfast at this place called Hobi's and
I would help him with his strategy for training and
so on. At this point, also the for hour work
we could come out of nowhere and hit the New
York Time, hit the New York Times list, then went
to number one and stayed on the New York Times
list for four and a half years or five years
or something.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
That's insane. And so are you aware just of how
lightning in a bottle that is?

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, it's been as It's part of the reason I
haven't wanted to go back and revise any of the writing.
I'm like, I don't want to touch the butterfly and
risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how
that happened, Like what did I do? And there were
things I did for marketing and PR and so on
to help catalyze that. And in exchange, I'd say, tell

(28:12):
me about your deals, what are you doing? I was
always interested in investing. Eventually, after a few months all
of these factors combined, I asked Mike and he was
very generous at this time if he might be open
to me co investing with him on some deals, very
small checks like I would put in ten K, so
I wouldn't eat up much of the cap table. I
would put in a lot of work to try to
help these companies, And that is how the whole adventure started.

(28:37):
I wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person
in terms of ratio on the cap table, so that
those early founders would become my testimonials basically for future deals.
That's how the whole thing started. And I decided to
treat it like I would treat going to business school.
I looked at Stanford at the time because I'd fantasized

(28:58):
about going to Stanford Business School on like, Okay, it's
one hundred and twenty k over two years. I would
have had to pay that out of pocket. So let
me create the quote unquote Tim Ferriss fund for Angel Investing.
It's one hundred and twenty k over two years, and
I'm assuming that it's sunk cost tuition. It's going to
go to zero and none of the startups are going
to succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a

(29:19):
lot end relationships that make it worthwhile, I will consider
it a success. And that was the approach I took
to doing it. And the timing was also great because
I started in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight,
two thousand and eight. For a few years afterwards, was
effectively considered a dot com depression, right, But that's when

(29:41):
I met Toby they shopify when they had nine employees
or twelve employees, and became an advisor. That's when I
started becoming involved with lots of companies of these very
early stages which ended up just to become these behemoths.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
I love your conce of this is a sun cost,
it's going to zero. I think that's the absolute right
approach with startups, and you hinted at something that I
have to explore a little bit. Anytime I throw money
at a small startup, it's essentially A this is going
to go to zero, but B I really just want

(30:20):
to invest in the jockey. I want to put money
into this person, who Hey, this is easier than bearing
a body like Those are the two things I would
do for this guy. Yeah, and a check. All right,
I'll put a check into that and maybe it works out.
I sense you have a similar belief in your betting
on not on the horse, but the jockey. One hundred

(30:40):
and twenty K is only twelve ten thousand dollars checks, yep,
and I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities.
What criteriay you used to figure out who gets that check? Well.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Also, just as a side note, the reason I started
trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is
that I ran out of money. I got over enthusiastic,
and I broke my own rules, and I think the
first check I wrote was for like forty K and
immediately imploded, and I was like, oh, this is going
to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of

(31:11):
my best hits have been products that I would use personally,
that I could ideally be a power user of. And
there have been a few exceptions, but by and large
they are addressing problems that I feel acutely, or needs
that I feel, or wants that I feel very acutely. So,
for instance, clear how did clear happen? Back in the day,

(31:34):
it was called clear card, and it was it was
not widely distributed, it was very little known, And I
wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal,
and my blog at the time became very popular and
I wrote a huge piece on how to expedite travel
and a portion of that was about Clearcard. I linked

(31:55):
to their website and unbeknownst to me, I was one
of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And
then at some point the leadership reached out to me
and they said, hey, do you want to do something,
And that's how that relationship started. And I think I
was the first advisor to clear. I mean it was
forever ago, so it must have been.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
I wish they were in more airports. Just blown through JFK. Laguardi.
It's a blast with them.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yeah, yeah, they've done From an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also,
not based in Silicon Valley, and I don't think that
Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for
great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Cannabis. I mean,
come on, that was neglected. So I also so there
are a few things, was like, is it a problem
or a need or a want that I feel and understand?

(32:40):
Is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore,
it makes it quite easy for me to promote to
my audience could they be users or customers? And then lastly,
for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for
geographies that were neglected. So I actually I went hunting
in Canada a lot. And it works for comedy yeah, yeah,
or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of

(33:02):
the early experiences like stumble Upon. I became an advisor
to stumble Upon. And who was the founder of stumble Upon,
a guy named Garrett Camp stumble Upon. I put tons
of time into he and I became close. We worked
really well together, We enjoyed working together. Stumble Upon ended
up being a zero for me. But why is that? Okay?

(33:23):
Because I talked about the relationships and the skills, right, okay,
relationship with Garrett Camp? What does he end up doing next?
Co founder of Uber?

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Not too shabby.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
And then I was one of three people who had
helped him with stumble Upon who became advisors to Uber
cab LLC at the time, which was I think two
thousand and eight. Oh my god, by the way, everybody
said note Uber everybody.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Yeah, that's amazing to me because one of the things
I find fascinating about vcs is. They kind of put
their failures on their websites as a badge of honor. Yeah,
but it's mostly here are the companies we vested in
that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by
the way, we passed on Ober, we passed on this,
we passed on that.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
You see less of that, you see less of it.
And for me, I would say, there's lots of luck.
But I was also trying to approach it in a
systematic way. If you're focused on effectively the way I
would think about, let's say I cut a twenty five
thousand dollars check. I'm like, okay, would I pay twenty
five thousand dollars just to develop these relationships and basically

(34:31):
earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing.
If so, then great, go. If not, then think twice.
And taking that approach, all of the skills and the
new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I
love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks
because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that

(34:56):
was intimately connected with the people and the skills that
came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills. And
then even quote unquote failures, you don't know what act
TOO is going to be where it could go.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
Yeah, and then lastly, I would say one thing I
did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now
but I had never heard of it is I treated
a portion of my total budget for that real world
MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferris fund quotation marks a
portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean?
I invested in I bought secondary so I bought equity

(35:35):
from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now it ended up
being very early, but to my mind at the time,
they were overpriced, super expensive, huh. But being in those
deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity
in those two companies allowed me to say I'm in

(35:57):
these companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted
in getting new deals. So I expected those to go
to zero. That's marketing budget, right. They ended up working
very unexpectedly, working out really well, but I expected those
to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
I've heard you mentioned a book by Sebastian Malaby The.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Power lawyeh, great book.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Tell us a little bit about what you learned from
that book about investing in startups.

Speaker 3 (36:31):
That is a great book if you want to learn
about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches
I had already learned just by being in the trenches
for whatever it was a decade before that book came out.
I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money than God,
which is this book about hedge funds. That is an

(36:51):
exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, Oh
my God, give that a read.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Plus he's British and his take on everything is it's fantastic.
It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very
skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that
book and what people might miss about startups is, yes,
it's a hits driven business. There's a power law distribution,
meaning it's preto principle on steroids. You're probably gonna have

(37:27):
one or two or three startups that give you the
vast majority of your lifetime runnings, at least as an
angel investor who's not taking management fees. Right, if you're
an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping
billion dollar plus funds, like sure, you're going to do
great on management.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
PCs seem to do okay for themselves.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart
in how you approach it. But as an angel investor,
I would say, you need to have if you're going
to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy
or philosophy around folio constructions so that you don't run
out of money. Right, It's like staking someone in poker.
It's like you have to be able to sustain a

(38:07):
string of bad luck. And I would say that what
Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs
in the world of venture capital have done that over time.
And there are a few things I would point out
also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of

(38:27):
people miss because why did it happen in Silicon Valley.
It's like, sure, you can talk about like Fairchild Semiconductor,
and I think it was the traitorous aid or whoever
it was, and all of this, but why did that happen?
Like why why? Why? I'm always like ask why three
times and you get to something interesting. Part of it
is that non competes are incredibly hard, if not close

(38:48):
to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean.
It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely.
So there's a lot of competition and a lot of
knowledge sharing, sometimes to the sugar in of former employers.
But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley
is still to this day. Right now it would be

(39:10):
the era of AI. If you want to be an AI,
if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding,
and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent,
Silicon Valley is still the place to be. Yeah, it's
not true for everything, but like it still matters.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
No doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept
of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of
the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not
in terms of monetary returns, in terms of and I'm
delving into your space, in terms of time, energy, productivity efficiency.

(39:47):
What do you find to be the most productive, useful
investments that you've made.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
There are quite a few, I would say anything related
to mental health ranks very highly, and we could talk
about some of the things that have benefited me. So
I come from a family of people who have died
from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder.

(40:13):
I struggled with probably I would say three to four
major depressive episodes a year for most of my life.
And that's that, in each episode ranging on the length
of a few weeks to a few months. I mean,
that is a lot of time in darkness. And now
I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode

(40:34):
of a few weeks every two to three years. Those
are two completely different human experiences.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
How did you manage to actually manage this? Because there
are people who suffer from depression and that's the word, suffer,
and never find a way to get on top of it.

Speaker 3 (40:51):
I'll mention just a few things in the order I
might suggest investigating them. One would be, let's call it
metabolic psychiatry. So, looking at the word of Christopher Palmer,
most recently out of Harvard, I've interviewed him on using
diet to help mental health, and fundamentally it tends to
end up being some version of a keutogenic diet. You

(41:14):
can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting.
So let's just say what I'm doing today and what
I do a lot of the time, which is only
eating between like two pm and ten pm. That's an
eight hour window, so you fast for sixteen hours every day,
and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would
say within a week. You're pretty grumpy for a week
and then you're fine then the next So that was

(41:36):
the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types
of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we
could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and
a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, but this
can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable.

(42:01):
TMS standing for transcranial magnetic stimulation, so it's a type
of brain stimulation and they take something that looks like
a large hockey puck and put it on your head.
It's non invasive and it feels like someone's kind of
tapping your skull. And depending on if you're trying to
address anxiety or depression or OCD, the target can be
different and if people investigate accelerated TMS. In some studies

(42:27):
with major depressive disorder, complete remission in seventy to eighty
percent of participants. Wow, and you might need a booster
once a year, But compared to taking maintenance drugs every
day with non trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is fascinating.
I encouraged to be able to check it out. There

(42:48):
are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated
TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a
lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would
say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
It's like doing of psilocybin or what have.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
You, microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature.
And I've funded a lot of this science since twenty
fifteen with my foundation. I put like double digits of
my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how
much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once,
it could be a few times. Various compounds could be,

(43:24):
say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder, or
different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. NY us
doing a lot of great work on that front, or
MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean the results are
very strong, mind blowing. Yeah. I mean, you have complex
PTST people who've had let's just say, an average length

(43:45):
of diagnosis of sixteen seventeen years, which means many many
interventions have failed, who do two or three sessions with
therapists for mdmac's psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission
of symptoms. That's amazing and it is I believe. There's
a psychotherapist named Stanis Lefgroff, quite legendary in the space,

(44:07):
who says, you know, what the telescope was or is
for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology, psychedelics will
be for the mind. Really, and I believe that these
compounds and the study of these compounds, which has become
very very very popular and destigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize

(44:27):
how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some
of these so called incurable or intractable conditions, including things
like anarexia and many of the things I already mentioned.
Those would be three that I'd say have had a
huge impact on me. And it seems boring We could
talk about it if you want. But exercise, I mean.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
I was waiting for you to bring that up because
every study in the world says that's the miracle cure
for so much psychological challenges. And it's not like you
haven't written about exercise.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
Yeah, it did a whole book on it. So yeah,
the exercise. I'll just mention two other things briefly, cold
exposure and by the way, people have been using this
for hundreds of years.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
But certainly in the Nordish countries. Oh yeah, ye forever.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
Yeah, cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy aka depression,
and there is actually something to it. It could end
up being after a few minutes when you shift from
solely sympathetic nervous system activation fight or flight to parasympathetic.
Could be actually stimulation of the vegas nerve. Who knows.
It's unclear at this point, but cold exposure matters like that.

(45:39):
That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems
to have some durability, which is wild exercise. People think
of exercise and what you read about in the media
a lot is like endorphins and doorphins and doorphins, but
that is not the full picture. If you want to
stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera. Or let me just
broadly say neurodegenerative disease, exercise provokes the release of something

(46:01):
called CLOTHO k l O t h O, which people
can investigate and it is critical in staving off or
or mitigating the onset and progression of these diseases. So
you have clotho endorphins. Surey of endorphins. You have endocannabinoids.
Cannabinoids sounds familiar like cannabis, right, So those can explain

(46:25):
a lot both in terms of anti inflammatory effects of
some types of exercise. The benefits are just insane. So
I would say follow Peter Attia's advice. He is credible
trained at Stanford Johns Hopkins. In terms of Zone two training.
People can just look him up. Zone two training a
few times a week and then Vio two max training

(46:46):
say once a week, and some weight training. But the
if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all,
and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things
like brain drive neurotrophic factor, that is also just a
non negotiable.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
And I have both of my family.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Yeah, so that's where I was going to the exact
question was going to ask, you were never diagnosed, you
just have a genetic predisposition, and you're trying to proactively
just get way out ahead.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
I'm trying to get ahead of it. Yeah, and unfortunately,
you know, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, as just
to use that disease as an example, a lot of
the interventions fail. I think some scientists would agree with this,
not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because
the interventions are too late by the time people have

(47:41):
really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and
so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms,
it might just be too late, But there is an
argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that
late intervention is better than early intervention.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
So I just saw a piece in National Geograph yesterday
that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to
detect Alzheimer's risk sooner, as earlier as your twenties. So
there is some sort of research going on in the
space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive
and individualized to take care of your preventative maintenance in

(48:23):
advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just
mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective
and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like
I just didn't I'm about to turn forty eight, just
did my I do blood testing at least once a quarter,
and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
I just want to function health. Yeah, are you familiar
with function health?

Speaker 3 (48:46):
I don't know. I function.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
So Silicon Valley startup they have come up with the
way it's not a healthcare company, it's a technology company,
and they say, we want to take one hundred data
point screens of your blood and look at all these
different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice
a year. Your doctor looks at fifteen twenty things. Normally

(49:09):
they'll go one hundred plus. And by the way, depending
on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for
things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. And so now you
could check one hundred and fifty data points and twice
a year especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark,
and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word,

(49:31):
horizontal set of data, and when something sort of spikes
or is out of the normal range, you have a
baseline that you could go back and work. I literally
did this Tuesday, and I was like, oh, that's a
lot of blood, Like, can you leave me a little?
I got stuff to do later, but that in order

(49:51):
to do one hundred different data series, they need a
lot of different blood.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah, they need some blood. And I would say I
don't spend much money on stuff, but I do I deliberately.
Some might say overspend on health. But what I was
going to say is the metabolic psychiatry the less so
accelerated TMS. But actually I should pull that back. TMS
also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's and psychedelic

(50:17):
sisted therapies. The exercise, all of these and the cloth
that I mentioned specifically within exercise, all of those should
in theory help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset
of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying
to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn't have to

(50:38):
be hyper personalized, like these things have clinical data or
published literature behind them. There's still a lot of unknowns,
but you can do these things now.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
So it's so funny you say hyper personalize them. I'm
speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do
you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week,
I'm seeing Tim Ferris, And he says, oh, I love
Tim he is. I love this line. He is the
chief scientist of Tim Ferris the person. And I'm like,

(51:10):
that is such a great way.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
To describe it.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
You've basically created an entire business model around being the
chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even
your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original
game plan or did this just evolve over time.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
I've almost always been that way, in part because I
was born premature at a ton of health issues. Still
have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sunny sitas, all these things.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
That wait thermal regulation.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
Being can't handle hot well. The way that my body
handles hot and cold is strange, so I can overheat
very easily. As an example, the reason that's relevant is
the one sport that my mom put me in that
thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at
when I was a little runt. I was very small

(52:08):
till about six grade. It wasn't swimming, it was wrestling
because the puny kid gets to go against the other
puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant
I needed to try to win quickly before I would
hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts
of bizarre self experimentation, interesting learning how to weight cut

(52:29):
to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The reason that I
wanted to make Tim Ferriss lab this end of one
set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That's how
it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you
might be able to apply this stuff to the brain.
And then in college I started experimenting with all sorts

(52:49):
of stuff, nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that
was I was using kind of off label like hydergen,
various note tropics and so on. And they did have
an effect, like they did have an effect on memory
and cognition, things like desma pressing for short term memory,
for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked. There's no

(53:10):
biological free lunch with that.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Stuff so well, I know free lunch.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
So you do you do pay a price. I would
just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking
and so on. And I'm not a doctor. I don't
play one on the internet. But number one, since you
mentioned it earlier, is I get blood tests done once
a quarter at the very least. Now why is that? Well,
I want more frame as high a frame rate as

(53:37):
possible to look at trends. But separately, I want to
catch things early if I need to catch things. But
I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests,
the risk is that you get one set of lab
results back and you make a ton of big decisions
based on those labs. Here's what I'll say. There are
lab errors all the time, and if you're going to

(53:57):
do consistent blood tests, consistent is the key. In other words,
do it on the same day of the week at
the same time.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Oh really, I would not have guessed that.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
Because your testosterone has diurnal it has.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
So the quest diagnostics as an example, don't eat, don't
take supplements, don't take any meds whatever is on your
your prescription list. Stop the night before unless your doctor
says don't stop.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
Follow your doctor. But I'm saying if you're.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Saying is more important than just how significant.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Just be consistent because if you let's just say you
drink on the weekends and then you do your lap
test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning,
some of your results might be different. I mean, but no,
that's it's not obvious to people because then they might
have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend
and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like altier ASD

(54:50):
all of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year,
he has no idea of the context.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
That's fair.

Speaker 3 (54:55):
Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously and there are
lab errors. So I would say before.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Plus you also just get the regular noise and range
and yeah, sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal.
But it's all nothing is flatlined over time.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would
just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like, really,
if you're about to get on a bunch of meds
and let's it's an emergency. Look, there are emergencies that
you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay,
you have this problem, We're going to put you on
this med for the next year. Before you do that,
do the test again. Just get another blood test two

(55:34):
days later. Second opinion, just confirm it and again not
a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only. Blah blah blah.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
But there you go, dumb question. All the stuff you've
done game creation is not on your CV. Why did
you decide to.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Create a game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitor.
So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling
like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends,
many of whom were neuro divergent, and D and D.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Was a lifeline, absolutely lifeline. So I may be pretty
squarely in the neurodivergent camp.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
Do you still play?

Speaker 3 (56:18):
I don't, But here's why.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
I know plenty of guys forty fifty Yeah, weekly game.
Forget poker.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
It's it's it's too much of a commitment for me now. Initially, so,
I've always wanted to make a game that could help
produce the magic and joy and frankly I mean sort
of the like cognitive training of D and D. I
think D and D is just an incredible game. Kudos
to you know, TSR and Gary Gayax and everybody's who's

(56:45):
created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to
be serious about D and D, it's like being serious
about World of Warcraft, like this is your new part
time job. I mean it's many, many, many hours. So
as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot
going on, maybe I have a dinner with friends and
we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going
to play D and D. There's no way we're going

(57:05):
to play a complex board game. I was curious to see, though,
if I could create something, and a lot of the
podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with,
but that's unspoken. So I interviewed Alan Lee, who's the
founder of Exploding Kittens, one of the most successful game
development companies in the world, and I wanted to see

(57:26):
if maybe, kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I
could create a game with him that would be easy
to learn, hard to master, very very fun for family's
friends whoever kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this
is yet to be proven, so just to be clear,
I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but
that could also possibly be a type of brain training

(57:49):
and cognitive training.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
So you set the bar really low, right, just easy
to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun, oh with all
sorts of cognitive benefites. Yeah, you know, low target with
your first game.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
Well that's why it took two years to land on something.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
Really Oh yeah, that's a long time to build what's
effectively as simple. I have a copy of this at home,
and you guys also sent me a copy here, so
I want to open this up and go over it
with but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly
what this game is about. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
So the game Coyote. It's called Coyote because of the
trickster deity association and a lot of mythologies. Also uniquely
American coyote or North American, I should say, it's very
much a sort of New America's animal. But the trister
piece is important. So Coyote is a game. You can
think of it as rock paper scissors in a group

(58:45):
on steroids, with many different hilarious movements and gestures, and
basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins.
Or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are
reasons that we had both options, but the basic gist
is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in
a circle and each players dealing out cards that make

(59:08):
a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious,
and you each get three lives, and last person standing
in competitive mode wins. That's it. So you can play.
I have friends who've played with their like six year
old daughters. Even though the box says ten years old.
It's very challenging. When it gets challenging, I guess it's

(59:34):
ten minutes a game roughly, probably so pretty low lift.
But if you want to get good at it, you
can play it over and over and over and over again.
Every game is going to be totally different.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
One of the things I was kind of fascinated by
watching the game play was it's a combination of words
and gestures that you have to recall and do in
order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the
same time that you're creating. Tell us a little bit
about how you guys came up with this and what

(01:00:04):
was it like collaborating with Exploding Kittens.

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one,
and we were kind of stuck because the question that
I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question
I was asking myself is what types of board games
or card games do I enjoy? And that didn't get
I mean, your answers are only going to be as

(01:00:28):
good as your questions, and that wasn't working. We had
done various brainstorming sprints in like La, New York, Long Island,
and then flew to Canada to spend time with the
co founder of Exploiting Kittens, and we did our last sprint.
I was like, Okay, look, we've been at this for
a while. We're either going to land on something or
let's call it quits and just call a space a space.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
So a little pressure on it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yeah, yeah, I mean deadlines, you know the magic of
deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type
have you enjoyed? And it might make me sound like
a simpleton, but having drinks and playing rock paper scissors
with your dumb friends is I think very entertaining. Side note,
especially if you try to do it with water in

(01:01:11):
your mouth. Try that with a friend.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
But what does water in your mouth affect.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves, So
it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had
a few drinks. Not recommending everybody drink. So we started
with that as this building block. It's like, Okay, well,
how can we make that group play? And then I
was interested in the cognitive stuff as I mentioned, and
this look. I haven't proven this, but I think it's

(01:01:38):
it's quite similar. You're looking at like interference effects. There
are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test blah blah blah,
and Exploding Kittens. They have an amazing track record. The
whole company started with this game, Exploding Kittens, which was
I think the largest kickstarter of all time.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
At that point in time, the leaders of the company
are still game designers, so it's not a huge bureaucratic
thing run by no offense to middle managers. They're important,
but it's like people who are managers versus makers. Like
the people who run the company are still some of
the best in the world at creating games right. Elon

(01:02:14):
Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He's been involved with
creating entirely new genres of games, just a genius at
creating games. So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome.
They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small, like they really
punch above their weight.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Clouds still a startup.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
Nimbles feels like a startup. Like what they do with
the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's
been awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
I get a sense that, because you're such a thoughtful person,
anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort
of floats above your body and says, what's going on
in this space? Yeah, I've had that experience in publishing. Yeah, Like, wait,
I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave
this way? So I have to ask you that question

(01:03:02):
about the game industry. When you're looking at gaming generally,
what was your experience like going into not only an
entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past,
but like, did you kind of look at the game
industry and say, Hey, this whole place is just wacky

(01:03:22):
and so different from everything else.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
All of the above. And I treated doing something like
the game as I treat the startups. So it's if
I make no money on this, will the relationships developed
and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for? Right,
would I actually tuition? Exactly? Would I pay tuition for
what I'm going to learn? And the answer is c
es right, a lot of late genius. The people Explainking

(01:03:48):
is amazing. By the way, you want to scrappy creative team.
If you're going to deal with things like tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
By the way, do tariffs I mean I'm sure assuming
these are manufactured somewhere out of the United States. Yeah,
do you have to pay tariffs on?

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
Oh? Every every gaming company in the US. Pretty much
tabletop game is getting really so you want people who
are creative and can think outside the box for something
like that. From the implications of something like that to
contending with mass mass retail like Walmart and Target, for instance.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Yeah, you're you're You're at Walmart, You're at Target, You're
on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space
quote unquote from how did that happen?

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
Next to impossible?

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
And yet you hit. That's the whole you hit for
the for the cycle, Walmart, Target, Amazon? Where else is
what's left?

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
I'm gonna do it? Mind? You know, mind? This is
my maybe one and only game and if my name
is going to be on it, I need to be
very happy with it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
And so how did you guys manage to penetrate that?

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Well, I'll say first that what's not going to work
is if you are a sole inventor who comes up
with the world's greatest game, a company like a Walmarter
target is not equipped rightly so to deal with thousands
of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins,
don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms

(01:05:10):
and returns and all these things. So if you want
to have a seat at the table, or even a
chance to have a seat at the table, you need
to I think this is fair to say, partner with
someone who already has shelf space and multiple skws so
you can be added to the lineup. And that was
another reason to partner with someone like and exploiting Kittens.

(01:05:32):
And yes, you can do a lot online and the
game is on Amazon. It's been exclusive at Walmart for
the first few months, and then the social video plays
like you mentioned, went completely nuts, and it's actually now
past three hundred million, so it just keeps going and
going and going. The videos of people playing this game.
But you can do a lot that is, say a

(01:05:53):
direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website
or Kickstarter. But it's very easy for techies to underestimate
just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and
targets of the world are.

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
I mean, ninety percent of the US is within ten
miles of one of those or fifteen minutes. It's I mean,
even the food security of the United States depends on
these companies.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
And you price this at nine ninety nine less than
ten bucks. Very reasonable. I'm going to assume at if
this game is as successful as you hope it will be,
and early indications are that it can be, you can
come up with a second pack a different focus.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
So expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a
more complicated role playing game, something like that. Who knows,
But in my case, right with something like this, I'm
used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters,
and no, no, you're jumping in this each jumping. I mean,
even with say the four hour workweek, It's like, had
I land on that title? I split tested all of

(01:06:55):
the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords, and then looked
at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from
the rest, and that was the four hour work weeks.
So like, that's how I don't like taking risks. I
actually think of myself as a risk mitigator.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
But in this case, I'm fascinated by that because you
very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk
his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't
want to play pop psychologists, but but you are not somebody.
It's like, all right, I'm starting out as a studying biology. No, no,

(01:07:30):
I'm pivoting to Asian studies. I'm living in Japan. I'm
stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh now
I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the
life experience of someone who's risk averse.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Well, I would, on one hand, agree with you. On
the other hand, I would say I think that most
risks are incredibly overblown. I would put I would put
risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse,
but if you're too using what you do based on
what you're going to learn, the skills you're going to develop,
the relationships you're going to develop, or deepen. It's very

(01:08:07):
hard to fail over time. So if you're able to
be and this applies to investing obviously, but like long
term greedy, not short term greedy, it's very hard to
lose over time if you're choosing let me be very clear,
ideally areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you

(01:08:27):
would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills
that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm
always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote. Okay,
let's say, let's just say hypothetically that I don't think
this is going to happen, because I think the tariffs
are just a bargaining chip for mineral access right and
other things that'll be traded with.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you.
Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tack.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Yeah, I mean, otherwise we're also like cutting off our
nose to spite our face, and I'm just so interdependent,
so it's it's a bargaining. I don't expect that to continue.
But let's just say that tariffs put every game company
in the US out of business except for one or two.
Then will this still have been worth my time, absolutely,

(01:09:15):
because I have no I'm not getting in advance for this.
I'm doing a profit share. I want incentives to be
fully fully aligned.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
I did the same thing with my book. I don't
want to advance. I want to see whatever upside there is.
By the way, I really have to push back.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
This is just me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
Maybe this's a little question. I maybe there's a little projection.
You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I
love the way you've rationalized or it's not an excuse,
it's an explanations.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
Were reframing it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Yeah, you've framed this into well, I'm going to take
this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I
get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and relationships.
So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen.
You are very much a risk embracer.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
Yeah. And also, if you look at my projects, it's
it's not a sequence of start finished, start finished, start finished.
It's more like a gant chart where things are overlapping.
So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I
put a ton I've been involved with every single possible
aspect of this game. We play tested it with one
hundred plus families, blah blah blah. But podcast is still going,

(01:10:26):
the books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments,
and therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs
in one basket.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
So two last questions on the game before we'll get
to our speed round.

Speaker 3 (01:10:40):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Was
this a purposeful decision to avoid screens, to not create
more screen time?

Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I would say if I look
at the mental health of my audience, let's just call
it twenty million people a month or something over the
last ten years, the degree of depression, anxiety, nihilism is
shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically
antithetical to those things. Right, maybe not depression, but very optimistic.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Yeah, there's a little self selection there. Hey, I have
this issue. Tim seems to figure this out. Yeah, let
me work my way there.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
There's a little bit of that. But if you look
at let's just say, the writing of you know, Derek
Thompson made it amazing writer at the Atlantic who does
a lot more.

Speaker 2 (01:11:27):
No longer at the Atlantic, now he has his own substack.

Speaker 3 (01:11:29):
Yeah right, that's right. He went full in on Substack
and actually this piece I think is from Substack, but
it was effectively, I think it's simply Americans need to
have more fun, but it's.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
A decline of partying in America.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):
That's right. Yeah, that effectively, I think it's something atrocious
like one in twenty five families or people have social
plans in person for any given weekend, and it's down
for is that right? That's amazing, And it's down for
certain age brackets seventy percent in the last time ten years.
And I really feel like digital isn't inherently bad, but

(01:12:07):
the dose makes the poison. Yes, And I think that
if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote.
I really feel like people need to interact with other humans.
We're not evolved for pure screen time, we are not.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
One hundred percent. So last question on the game, what
are your expectations for this? How do you define success?
And I'm going to prevent you from saying I've already
succeeded due to my collaboration all the experience. Hold that aside.
What's your minimum expectations and what would surprise.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
You to the upside? Minimum expectation is that this finds
a small band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody
should read one thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly just
got a kk dot org it's free read that. That
would be super gratifying. But also I always is aim high.

(01:13:01):
So I mean, I want this to be the best
selling game at all of the major retailers. That's incredibly
hard to.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Do a BYuT that's that's millions of units.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
Yeah, I mean you're dealing with tens of the Unos
and the behemoths of the space right, so to do
that is incredibly hard. That's what I'm aiming for. I
think that the products, you know, the game can stand
on its own two feet, like people do love this game.
And the reason I like to do that is not
because I want to set myself up for disappointment, but
as I think it's Larry Page of Google has said

(01:13:31):
what people misses, it's very hard to fail completely. If
I aim for that and I'm fifty percent short, I'm
still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential
payoff of that huge a goal. It's still gonna exceed
oh my expectations that I would have had.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Agre and just moving into a different space is its
own rewards because it's so you know, it really exercises
different parts of the brain than you normally get to
play with.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which
is why after the success of the Four Hour work
Week bought me permission to write more books. I didn't
do the three hour work Week. I didn't do the
four hour work Week, Force, you know, the Single Mother's
Soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because
I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author.
That's why I did the four Hour Body and everything

(01:14:22):
on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a
different category in the bookstore to see if my readers
would follow me. And as soon as I proved to
myself that was the case and to publishers, you know,
when I hit number one year times and blah blah blah,
then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so
this is another way of testing that, you know, could
I play in a completely different sandbox.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
So before we get to our five favorite questions, I've
pulled a few of your questions that either you asked
on your pod or other people have asked you, and
let's do this as a speed round in still right,
tell us about one hundred or less purchase that has
positively impact your life.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
Be specific, Yeah, I will be specific. Now I'm going
to put in one shameless plug, which is if people
want to figure out this game, just go to Coyote
game dot com. Okay, back to our regular programming. Two
things I would say that have impacted me in the
last year would be there's something called the Alpha Ball,
which is from Tune Up Fitness, and this is something

(01:15:26):
you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back,
for dealing with your IT bands, anything, and it's much
better than a phone roller because you can really get
into specific spots. It's very easy to use. You can
use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor,
and it's small enough to travel with. So I'd say
the Alpha Ball is one. Have that my luggage right

(01:15:48):
now because I'm traveling. And then the other one is
actually a meditation app called The Way and it's taught
by someone named Henry Shukman, and it's more or less
a zen type of meditation. Full disclosure. I ended up
becoming an advisor to these guys because I ended up
loving the app so much. But I use that once

(01:16:09):
or twice a day, ten minutes each session, and it's
teaching you sort.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
Of a guided meditation.

Speaker 3 (01:16:16):
Is that Right's they're guided meditations, but it's a sequence
of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply
outside of meditation, which is why like it so much.
Let's say those are two that immediately come to mind.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas,
learning new skills, and learning them quickly. What's your favorite
cheek code for That.

Speaker 3 (01:16:39):
Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the
first place. So what I mean by that is, if
you want to get the best golf coach in the world,
you might not be able to afford it. You probably
can't afford it. It's going to be it's a very
common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved.

(01:16:59):
It's going to be hard to get direct instruction from
somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose
say almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and
you look for, say not gold medalists, but silver medalists
who are, by the way, frequently just as good. They
say they yea, they just exactly, They just got ten

(01:17:22):
minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You
can get some of the people who are best in
the world to teach you at a cost that is
next to nothing. So I would say that number one
is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked
about with the four hour workweek with business and entrepreneurship,
like picking the goal first. The second is looking at

(01:17:43):
frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot
of people just dive into learning languages. Well, I think
that material beats method. In other words, like picking what
you're going to learn very carefully is more important, at
least in sequence than choosing how you're going to do it.
A lot of people ask like, what's the best way
to learn X? And I'm like, first of all, you
should ask what should I learn? And you can look

(01:18:04):
at word frequency lists and things like that, and for
a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the one thousand
or fifteen hundred most frequently used words. You can learn
that in a few weeks. Lingo Duel Lingo is outstanding.
I mean, of course I'm biased because I invested in
their first round we just.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
Were in Paris three years ago, and Slim two years ago,
Rome last year, and dual Lingo just for those basic
phrases is amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
Yeah, it's great. I mean I've used it for Korean
as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school.
And that's a tough language, right, it's tough. The grammar's
almost identical Japanese. I have a leg up there. But
by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I
think it's like learning how to read Korean fifteen minutes.
There's a comic book that literally will teach you how
to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading,

(01:18:52):
but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean. And
like it's a bit of an exaggeration, I'd say probably
takes an hour. But do u a Lingo is very
well designed, and I have seen every possible language startup.
My fans sent me that one. By the way, my
fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they
knew I was interested in e commerce. So a lot

(01:19:14):
of my best deals have come from my my readers
and my listeners. But the duelingo came about because they
were enclosed beta, and a number of my fans reached
out and said, you have to try this really, and
so I got access and I looked at it and
I was like, oh, yeah, this is fundamentally different from
everything else I've seen.

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
Give us an example of an unusual habit or just
absurd thing that you love.

Speaker 3 (01:19:37):
I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD go ahead,
So I take a screenshot whenever I see five point
fifty five on my phone, So I have hundreds of
screenshots of typically five point fifty five PM. I just
love repeating those specific repeating numbers. A lot of folks
like eleven eleven, nothing against eleven eleven. I think that's
that's perfectly fine. I'm just more of a five to

(01:19:58):
five to five guy.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Those eleven eleven people, so they don't know what's up.
It's all about. Have you seen the old style analog
almost neon tubes that are clocks?

Speaker 3 (01:20:10):
Yes, Like what happens.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
When that rolls over to eleven eleven? Do you see
something like that and just shrug and like, I.

Speaker 3 (01:20:17):
Still find it pleasant. I like symmetry, So eleven eleven
has the advantage over five five five that it is
pleasingly symmetrical, like this old friend I used to have,
Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
It's right. I was gonna say five to five is
a palind drome, but it's not truly symmetrical visual, so
there is We were talking there divergent earlier. One of
the things I kind of was shocked to learn in
the ADHD world is why people will play a song
over and over and over again because it tickles a

(01:20:54):
part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional
expressions that tend to be more difficult or absence, and
it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that
you haven't been able to get in the real world.
It sounds like the five five to five and the
eleven eleven tickles a similar part of the brain.

Speaker 3 (01:21:16):
Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just
something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is.
I mean is why I mentioned archery, like I love archery,
and for most people archery, yeah, I love archery and
also language learnning. For most for a lot of there's
a lot of repetition involved and for many people, and
I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more

(01:21:38):
boring than going through conjugations or doing archery, which, by
the way, if you're doing it at a high level,
you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing
over and over a year.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill. I mean
the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people
on five people, and so just extrapolate that out exponentially.
There are a million variations. The same with chess, whatever,
But it really doesn't matter each particular play move step is.

(01:22:13):
You're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need.
Even something like darts, but there are so many variations
to your muscula shore, your your thought process. Is any
sport boring Hitting a tennis ballah? I mean, it's the
same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion
variations of what can happen.

Speaker 3 (01:22:34):
That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing
in one place shooting at the same thing thousands of times.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
Right any sharp shooting darts.

Speaker 3 (01:22:46):
Repetitive right now? I like the other sports too, like tennis.
I would say that also confusingly, if people are interested
in the accelerated learning stuff My third book, The Four
Hour Chef, is basically a book unaccelerated learning disguised as
a cookbook, so it gets into like how to learn,
how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff.

(01:23:07):
You can get a lot further. For instance, I think
number one, adults can learn languages faster than children. Actually
really with it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:14):
If that is very inn opposite to accepted wisdom.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly
than kids with a few constraints applied, just a couple
of systems. I mean, I really think for a native
English speakers, for say a Romance language or something that
isn't too far flung like Chinese is going to be different.
But eight weeks you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like

(01:23:41):
pretty functional, if you were to carve out not three
hours a week. That's where kids have the advantage is
that they're forced to do it all the time and
they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have
no job. But if you were to put in say
ten hours a week and take it really seriously eight
to twelve weeks, you could be.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Very functional, very fluent.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
Yeah, Like you could get around and have like a
conversation for ten to fifteen minutes with someone.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
Wow. Let's jump to our favorite five questions we ask
all of our guests, starting really simple, what are you
streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime
or podcast. What's keeping you entertained? Well?

Speaker 3 (01:24:22):
I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought
was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a
video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because
I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight
which absolutely blew my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
Just the Lost in Starlight.

Speaker 3 (01:24:41):
Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation
made my head spin. Because you don't, well, I think
most people do not associate South Korea with animation.

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):
You might think of it most of our low cost
animation is coming from all the past. Well that's not CGI.

Speaker 3 (01:24:59):
There's there's a lot of lower cost animation, yes, but
when you think of say, Cinematic Animation and Studio Ghibli
out of Japan, let's just say people tend to think
of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and I think Korea is
going to be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation.
We'll see, we shall say we Lost in Starlight is

(01:25:21):
a recent phave, and then I've got some weird ones,
like there's a German language documentary on fasting that I
found on YouTube. You can't watch it in the US,
but you can use a VPN to.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
Pretend to say you could watch anything anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:25:35):
Yeah, you can use a VPN to pretend like you're
in Germany. Then you can watch it and just use
the automatic subtops. What's the name of that one, some
long German name. I'm just getting started with it, so
unfortunately I can't remember, but it's it's looking at specifically
someone who did I want to say, a two to
three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute who has

(01:25:58):
fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I have some
bones to pick with their approach, but I nonetheless find
that they have such a huge data set really fascinating.
So I'm looking at that one. And then podcasts. I
found a new podcast recently called stem Talk, which features
interviews with scientists mostly and I've listened to an interview

(01:26:21):
with someone named Kevin Tracy tracee Y, who is a
very widely cited scientist who's arguably the most credible researcher
who has established a lot related to the vegas nerve
and vegas nerve stimulation. There's a lot of bs and

(01:26:42):
pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal
amongst the noise. So I'm listening to a bunch of
stem talk, different scientists on stem talk, and the interviewers
are outstanding.

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
It's interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic,
but just ramping up since then. I want to say,
it's become fifty sixty percent of my television viewing. It's
amazing how.

Speaker 3 (01:27:07):
It's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find
anywhere else. So I think there's a documentary. The name
is something like Learning how to See or the Art
of Seeing, and it's about David Hockney. Oh okay, and
big spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it

(01:27:28):
on YouTube, and I was not able to find it
anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (01:27:31):
Huh. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell
us about who your mentors were and how they helped
shape your career.

Speaker 3 (01:27:39):
Early mentors Stephen Gorik. He was a martial arts instructor
when I was probably twelve thirteen. Just from the perspective
of physical and mental toughness. Because the class was all
adults and then it was me. They did not take
it easily on me, and I was very grateful for that.
They weren't abusive, but they treated me like an adult
who was training for for real, and I think from

(01:28:01):
a toughness perspective, he always reiterated that I could do
more than I thought I could do, much like my
wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to
this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to
do amazing things and they all reference back to him.
Then Ed Shall who was that professor in high tech

(01:28:23):
entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly or
pretty directly, although they wouldn't have expected it, informed later
what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing non
fiction writer who staff writer for the New Yorker. He's
got least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country,

(01:28:44):
I think, And he taught a class at Princeton's seminar
called the Literature Effect, which was on nonfiction writing and I.

Speaker 2 (01:28:52):
To literature of fact name.

Speaker 3 (01:28:54):
Yeah, and that class in terms of thinking about structure,
how to structure writ which by the way helps you
structure your thinking. So all of my grades and my
other classes went up when I took that class. It
was no kidd wild to see. And I'm sure there
are many more. I mean right after graduation, Mike Mables Junior,
in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
That's a good starter list.

Speaker 3 (01:29:18):
For Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I'm very lucky.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites?
What are you reading right now?

Speaker 3 (01:29:25):
Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic,
which is by Marcus Seneca. In this case, meditations by
Marcus are released as well, so Letters from a Stoic
by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world.
I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very,

(01:29:52):
very very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too,
although that might sound odd applied to Stoicism, So Letters
from a Stoic I would say. Vagabonding a book by
Ralph Potts. I think the subtitle is the Uncommon Art
of Long Term World Travel, which is really it's a
book on long term travel, but it's a book on

(01:30:14):
it's a philosophical treatise too. That's a great fun read.
Those are those are two phaves that come to mind.
One More Awareness by Anthony Demello. I believe the subtitle
is the Promises and Perils of Reality. It's just about
becoming more aware, so taking yourself out of the automatic

(01:30:35):
loops that we all have and adopt from parents and
so on. Really good book. It's like one hundred and
twenty pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading
right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve,
which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned and
about it's all about the Vegas nerve research related to
vegas nerve stimulation, etc.

Speaker 2 (01:30:56):
What's the book that you've given most as a gift
and why the.

Speaker 3 (01:31:00):
Books I've given most is a gift includes some of
the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone
were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house,
I have shelves. Each shelf just has fifteen copies of
these books and.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Take one with you.

Speaker 3 (01:31:15):
Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would
say that's idea. It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing
for someone like me, so the same yeah, yeah, it's very,
very very esthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony de Mello.
For sure, I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book
Letters from a Stoic, hundreds of copies of that book

(01:31:36):
back in the day. Now there are a million copies,
or I shouldn't say a million copies. Now there are a
million different books on the subjective psychedelics and psychedelic history,
psychedelic science. But How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollin.
For a while, I had that in my room because
I got early galleys of that book and have since
ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with with Michael,

(01:31:57):
who's amazing. But uh. Other Wise, I also gift my
friends who are nonfiction purists, who are too busy to meditate,
too busy to read fiction. I tend to give them
books of poetry because I'm like, you need to slow down,
and if you feel like you can't meditate for ten
minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour

(01:32:17):
a day. That type of that type of logic leads
me to give them a very short collection of For instance,
there's a new translation of roomy Poetry, relatively new, called
Gold by Halle Eliza Gavori is her name. Who's incredible.

(01:32:38):
She's based in New York City and native speaker. Also,
who's able to go to the source material? So Gold,
which is a new compilation of short, roomy poetry that
is well translated. Unlike a lot of versions you might find.
It's like one hundred pages. And I'd just say to my friend,
I'm like, look, don't read this a dizy. Just read

(01:32:58):
one before you go to bed every night. And those
are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years.

Speaker 2 (01:33:06):
That sounds really interesting. Our final two questions, what sort
of advice would you give to a recent college grad
interested in a career in fill in the blank writing, podcasting,
seed investing, game design. What would you tell them?

Speaker 3 (01:33:25):
If it's nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one,
are you really sure you want to do that? It's
not don't assume it's a good way to make money,
because generally it's not. But I would say, also if
it's a recent grad out, so if you're gonna write nonfiction,
probably go do something interesting before you try to write
something interesting. That would be my advice. That's what very fair,

(01:33:48):
That's what John McFee does. That's what many folks have done.
It is like I get some life experience doing something
first and then write about it. Would probably be my
recommend in the realm of investing finance, I would say
that probably ensure you have an informational, behavioral or network

(01:34:16):
meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do, unless
you're going to do something like low cost index funds,
which I think actually are a great idea for a
lot of people, and I myself also invest in very
very low cost index funds.

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
That's your core you could build, you know, that's your tree.
You could throw some ornaments around it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:35):
Yeah, exactly. I want to like keep your risk capital
and your retirement capital separate.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
What do you know about the world today that would
have been useful to know twenty five years or so
ago when you graduated.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
Yeah, threw out a few. So the first would be
from an investing perspective, you don't need to compete in
the public markets. You can learn a ton through being
around startups or even very on sexy private sector stuff,
and you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So
you don't have to compete against the citadels in the world,

(01:35:11):
Like I don't want to do that, or the rentex
or whatever like like that's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
I don't want to deal with that.

Speaker 4 (01:35:17):
So I would say, also look for white space that
you're you can create your own area where you're a pioneer,
not going into well trod space. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:30):
I would also say invest in what you know. And
that sounds so trite, but the first the first stock
I ever bought was when I was in my teens,
and it was I think it was in my teens.
It might have been a little bit later, but it
was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I
was like, Oh, this is so fundamentally different, Like this
is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew.

(01:35:52):
So I would say that sort of investing from the
perspective of watching main behavior on mainstream more than Wall
Street is actually can be a really viable approach in
the world at large. I would say for me personally,
thirty years ago, I would have said, like, your current

(01:36:13):
experience of mental health and the buggy code that you
inherited from your parents, God bless them, but like you know,
there are some bugs in the code, is not a
sort of psychological death sentence, like you can actually change
those things, because you can, you really can impact those things,

(01:36:33):
and your living proof. I am living proof, and I
would say that, you know, science, science is such an
amazing tool, like the framework of science so necessary for
not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially
psychiatg I don't want to throw psychiatry into the bus,
but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who's

(01:36:57):
worth their salt will say something along the lines of like,
fifty percent of way we know is wrong, we just
don't know which fifty percent. And when I was growing up,
I mean, there were so many definitive statements about like
all right, you're born with this number of neurons and
when they die, they die, and that's it. You can
ever regenerate. These types of things totally false. And I
feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional

(01:37:23):
health will be overturned in the next five years. It's
going to happen fast.

Speaker 2 (01:37:27):
Thank you, Tim for being so generous with your time.
We have been speaking with Tim Ferris, author, podcaster, angel investor.
If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out
any of the previous five hundred and sixty we've done
over the past eleven years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg,

(01:37:50):
wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check
out my new book How Not to Invest The Bad Ideas,
numbers and behaviors that Destroy well How Not to Invest
at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I
did not thank the Cracked team that helps us put
these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank.

(01:38:13):
Jean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer.
Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm
Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on
Bloomberg Radio.

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