Full transcript: Tim Ferriss on London Real
6:23 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel and joining us today is Mr. Tim Ferriss, who’s the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and most recently, The 4-Hour Chef. He is an entrepreneur, a tangoist, a martial artist, among other things.
6:40 Wired magazine named you the greatest self-promoter of all time in a sea of great self-promoters. Welcome to him. It’s really nice having you here. Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
6:52 We’ve been fans of your work for a long time. We’ll get into that, you know, more later. But you seem to hack the system in so many words, it’s like, I know it’s probably a generalized thing, but that’s what I see with what you do, which is amazing. But the thing that blows my mind is that then after you do it, you go and you tell everyone exactly how you did it, including your latest book on his blog like a week later after he hits the New York Times bestseller list, Tim’s like, this is exactly how I did it.
7:20 And in a world where there’s people keep trade secrets or you’re in Silicon Valley, There’s people that, entrepreneurs, they try to get an advantage. You go out and tell everyone exactly what you do. Why do you do that? I do it for a few reasons. The first is I don’t like to operate from a vantage point of scarcity.
7:41 I really try to assume an abundance of opportunity or at least assume that I have the ability to create more opportunities. So I don’t see any downside to me sharing the details of what I do. Secondly, is that a very small percentage of course of the people who encounter my material will use specific advice and apply it in the real world. I think that my compliance is much higher than perhaps most prescriptive self-help if we wanna put it in that category. We actually just did, when I say we, I’m referring to me and the exact team, the tech side of Lyft.
8:17 There’s an app called Lyft, L-I-F-T, which is a behavioral modification app for the iPhone. and we tracked about 1,400, let’s say 1,400, it may have been even higher, like 4,000 followers of the slow-carb diet for four weeks and had an 82% compliance rate. But the fact of the range is that if I put an article up telling people exactly how to hit the New York Times list, even if I give them the exact prescription, very few will go through and execute on it.
8:44 But as far as I can see, there’s no downside to me if an extra 100 people hit the New York Times list I’m going to take two to three years, maybe even more between books. It’s always what I’ve wanted people to do when I’ve read advice or nonfiction that is prescriptive in some fashion. It always bothers me when you pick up a book of any type that you want to take a lesson away from and they take the first three quarters of that book to explain the problem that you already know or you wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place.
9:16 A magazine article that’s been expanded into the size of a book. I wanted to always take the opposite approach. And say, all right, well, if I put together a thousand-word article, I want that to have the value of a book that’s 100 times longer. It’s also how I put together the books. But it comes from a place of abundance.
9:33 I try to operate from an assumption of abundance, because that also prevents, I think, fear-based decision-making, which usually leads to bad decisions. For instance, in Silicon Valley, it’s not common, actually pretty much non-existent, that VCs will sign, venture capitalists will sign NDAs, they just don’t sign NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. They don’t do that anymore. They never really did. The reason being, if a venture capitalist assumes, if someone has a good idea, that there are half a dozen to a dozen other teams, smart teams working on the exact same idea.
10:17 It’s very rare that someone has a truly original idea that no one else is working on. What that means is the idea isn’t good enough, and if you only have one idea, you’re not going to succeed in the execution anyway because you have to be able to improvise. If you’re good at improvising, you’re going to have other ideas that you can capitalize on. So that is, I think the ethos of Silicon Valley is actually something that has affected me since I moved to the Bay Area about 12 years ago as well.
10:46 The idea that if you can generate one idea, you should be able to generate more, otherwise the company will eventually fail and it can’t succeed on the merits of the idea alone you have to execute. So you hired the guy based on his execution and his potential future ideas, not that idea? Not that, and the idea certainly is a component or an element of it, but it’s the devils that are in the details, really, that I think separate the people who succeed from the people who don’t.
11:14 It doesn’t mean that you have to, that you focus on minutia, it means you pay attention to the small things that are, in fact, the big things. Which I think is true in BJJ, it’s true in book marketing, it’s true in book writing. Very oftentimes it is the little things that are the big things. Relationships too, for that matter. but just getting a little ahead of myself.
11:32 Get back to that. John Lennon is oft quoted as saying that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. And one of the main questions I have for you today is, you know, you’re someone who hacks the human experience and you pay attention to all these minute details of every aspect of your life, or that’s the way it seems to me. And do you ever feel that maybe you’re not in the moment or maybe you’re not enjoying life as much as it could be because you’re trying to figure out how to make it as good as it could be?
11:57 The content that I put out tends to be the highlight reel of that obsessive analytical behavior, but I do think I’m present tense most of the time, and I do have certain practices or routines that I rely on to help that along, because it’s extremely easy, I think, to be achievement focused, so forward driving and goal oriented. What is challenging, I think, for people, certainly in the US and I think in the UK and elsewhere, is having the proper balance of achievement and appreciation, the latter of which depends on having gratitude for what you have in the present state and your quality of life. That can be very difficult.
12:48 And for that reason, I’ll take, let’s say, three to five minutes each morning. And I have a very particular meditative routine that I use with one music track. And I focus on the things I’m grateful for. So I start each day and end each day with a gratitude list, effectively. And that’s a very pragmatic exercise.
13:07 There’s nothing new age or metaphysical about it. But I find that that helps calibrate me for the rest of the day. And I also do take downtime, because I I think you need the negative space to appreciate what it is that you’re trying to create, if that makes sense. Yeah, I can just imagine someone like you finding it quite difficult to switch off. You clearly have a very active and very powerful mind.
13:34 Me and many people in my social circle, we speak about how sometimes it’s difficult to just turn it off and just be. Yeah, it can be very difficult. What I’ve found at least is that I don’t actually, there are few ways that I have experimented with completely turning off, which can be restful, it can also be very stressful I think for certain types of people. One of which is flotation tanks and sensory deprivation, so I actually borrowed from Joe Rogan, which can be very effective and that’s available certainly here in London and in in most industrialized, highly industrialized cities.
14:16 But I find that I recover best when I actually just switch my focus. So instead of doing nothing, I’ll focus on doing something that’s completely unrelated to what I had been focusing on. That makes sense. Active roast. Yeah, and this is in a mental capacity, but also a physical capacity.
14:34 So if I’m, let’s just say for the last year and a half, I focused on writing for our chef and putting out the for our chef, It’s been a huge project in every respective startup. I mean, there are a team of 40 to 50 people at the peak. And I mean, in every time is unimaginable. It was a really large project. And I’ve gone to the gym and focused on, let’s say, deadlifting, occasional swimming, et cetera.
15:00 So when I switch off the way, I’ll probably do that is by focusing on, let’s say, learning a new language in a different location with a completely different type outdoor exercise and I’ll find that helps me to recover better than trying to create emptiness. I’m guessing the more exciting or harder ways you once spoke of taking large doses of magic mushrooms and ego reset. Yeah, you’re an annual ego reset and you mentioned your first broken appearance. Oh yeah, that’s something you still do. Yeah, that hasn’t changed. Wow. Yeah, I it’s and I think the the reason that reset helps is very similar to why the context switching of wholeheartedly focusing on something unrelated to work is relaxing. That is, it strips away a lot of the internal dialogue and the planning that I think pulls you out of the present moment. And magic mushrooms are certainly a very strong, forceful way to to make that happen. But I think it can be done by putting yourself in a very different set of circumstances that forces you to focus on something you don’t typically focus on. It doesn’t have to be a candle flame that you meditate on. A few months ago I took my first trip to Alaska which was really life-changing for me. I ended up five to six hours total flight time north of Fairbanks, which is well above the Arctic Circle, arguably the most remote point in North America, and we were dropped off in a small sea plane on the side
16:42 Of a lake and they gave us our satellite phone and we threw all our gear out and they said we’ll see you in a week. And we ended up hunting caribou, fishing and forging blueberries and whatnot for the entire time there, no phones, no calendars, no computers, not even any books or magazines, didn’t do any reading. It was just all manual labor and working for food and making food. I kid you not, it was probably only five or six days, but when I came back from that experience it was like I’d taken a six month vacation.
17:18 Because I was- Did you miss the technology? Did you miss any information technology whatsoever? I didn’t. a cool guy so yeah yeah the whole the whole crew was amazing I mean we had four or five people there Steven Ellis is amazing I recommend people check him out he’s a fantastic writer too really good writer he is he scavengers guide to haute cuisine he’s written an entire book on the history of the American buffalo he’s a real phenomenal character hysterical too because he sounds like a redneck but he’s you know written for the New Yorker he’s hysterical I love He’s a good chef as well, right?
17:51 Oh, yeah, yeah. He’s funny, though. You read his stuff, and you’re like, wait, you wrote that? Because you’ll be talking to him, and he’ll be walking you through field dressing, a caribou, and he’ll be like, yep, grab his pecker, cut around his scrot, and you’re just like, what? You right for a living?
18:10 Ryan just confided in me before the show that he had hunted and killed squirrels in his past, which blew my mind. I have some family in Arizona and Colorado, so I’m one generation removed. But I saw some of the clips of you on Meat Eater and obviously some stuff in your book where you’re really cutting an animal open and pulling out its warm organs. And you said you felt some weird kind of comfort, right? This is hard to convey, but I’ll do my best.
18:39 I think it’s important for background to explain to people that I was always averse to hunters and hunters. I grew up on the eastern end of Long Island in New York where we have a huge deer problem. There’s massive overpopulation. And therefore, you have all sorts of issues. Lime’s disease, for instance.
18:57 We have the highest incidence of Lyme’s disease, highest density of deer ticks. Therefore, we have extended bow hunting seasons. And my family, I grew up on effectively a farm. The property was previously a farm. And we had deer come across our property, injured deer with arrows sticking in them.
19:18 And from hunters who hadn’t done the job properly. They would die on our property and we’d have to clean it up or like the dog, I remember my dog came back, Frank, he was a rescue, but he came up to our door with a deer leg at one point, we’re just like, good God, what is this, the Flintstones? And we would find beer cans on the side of the road left from hunters who had been trespassing on our property hunting deer. So I always had this very negative impression of hunting and hunters and I thought it was very wasteful because that’s what I saw.
19:48 When writing The 4-Hour Chef, one of the sections is the wild section and I wanted to reconnect outside of the kitchen with ingredients, things we usually recognize as wrapped in some fancy package on a shelf in Whole Foods or a grocery store. And that meant not only learning how to forage but also looking at how to hunt and feeling responsible for the protein that you put on a plate. So I sought out Steve Ranella and that really changed everything because he is an extremely irresponsible and strict hunter in that respect and he grew up hunting and trapping and he was trapping for money I think at age 10 or so maybe even younger in rural Michigan and he showed me how it is possible to not only be respectful when you’re killing an animal but and effective certainly but how it can it can raise your consciousness related to food and just life in general by going through the field dressing and butchering process.
20:52 The point that you brought up was field dressing for people who, it means removing the guts from an animal, basically, is what that means in the field. Which you have to do pretty fast. You have to do it pretty quickly, because the organs, there are lots of issues with leaving the organs inside the animal, certainly. The meat can rot. You can have, depending on the type of shot or the type of kill, you can have all sorts of spoilage.
21:15 You have to remove the organs quickly. A lot of them are edible right away, liver, heart, et cetera, or you don’t want to eat a polar bear liver because you’ll get vitamin A poisoning. Luckily, I’m not hunting polar bears very often. I thought I would be very awkward in the hunting process, and I wasn’t. The only way that I can really explain it, because I would say maybe one or two minutes into, and you’ve seen the photographs, cutting the deer open, going in and removing the organs and whatnot, maybe two minutes into it, I felt like I’d done it a hundred times before.
21:57 It was just the most surreal… A genetic memory from your days as a rugs and gatherer. Yeah, exactly. The way I put it in the book was, how do orphan cats know how to hunt? How do animals know how to behave as if they don’t have parents to demonstrate for them?
22:18 There’s some type of genetic hardwiring that predisposes them to certain behaviors, and that’s the way it felt. It was really uncanny. I remember even Steve was like, you’ve never done this before? I was like, no, man, I’ve never done it. It came very easily.
22:33 It doesn’t explain why I was so awkward the first time I had sex, though. Maybe you weren’t meant to be. Fuck you, Brian. It seems like other species have trouble with that, too, if you watch. It’s like, no, man, you got here on the wrong side.
22:49 So this is probably, well, maybe this is from the DMT you put in my green table. There’s a photograph somewhere. God, this is just the danger of the internet, of this giraffe trying to have sex with a donkey. and it’s like, poor donkey, terrible. So I think even they haven’t quite figured it out.
23:08 Because they’re in captivity like most humans, so of course. That’s something I’m really interested to hear your opinion on because from what I can glean from your books and your blog, would it be fair to say that you are polyamorous? Is that correct? No, I’m not, I don’t share well with others. I mean, as much as I would love to think that I could find the perfect woman who’d be like, sure, I want you to have a harem.
23:30 I haven’t quite stumbled upon that yet. Your framing control is not strong enough. No, maybe not. I think that the polyamory, if it’s very one-sided, might be appealing on some level, but no, I wouldn’t categorize myself because polyamorous, no. I keep thinking about his next book, and I don’t think I’m the first one to say this, but the four-hour relationship always sticks up.
23:56 And at first, I think you were, I don’t know if you said it, I was like, that’s ridiculous, but is it ridiculous? Yeah, I don’t think it’s ridiculous. The challenge with something like the four-hour relationship is that I don’t feel like I am qualified yet. I really only want to write books about things that I feel I have deconstructed and hacked and figured out. And relationships are so broad.
24:21 I think it would be, I would feel hypocritical if I wrote a book that was speculation or just surveying other people. Yeah, but you haven’t figured out cooking. You’re probably the first to admit you just scraped the surface and the fact that you’re learned You’re on a learning curve is like the best way you can communicate it with us, right? Well, I think I think I have figured out the The toolkit and the logical progression for people who want to start cooking. I do feel like I figured that out. Okay Whereas there’s so many variables and relationships God knows But never say never who knows I mean you talked about this book. I mean I wanted to just quickly talk about how Amazon publishing was was involved and how I think you said it allowed you to make I mean how many pictures are in that damn book like 700 pictures of more than a thousand photos more than a thousand photos a few hundred illustrations and it’s It was a beast of a project I never could have imagined how involved it would be and I suppose like a lot of things if you if you know what you’re getting yourself into you never would have done in the first place but it’s that ignorance is sometimes a real blessing in disguise there’s actually a commencement speech I watch pretty regularly from Neil Gaiman who’s a writer became very well known for writing the Sandman series and has since written many books and which have been turned into movies and children’s books and so forth but to give a
25:50 Commencement speech I think it’s titled generally make good art but he talks about the benefit of not knowing what’s impossible and this book would have been impossible to put together I think anywhere almost anywhere outside of Amazon publishing because they have a very long-term view of these types of investments and this book is extremely expensive to produce and was extremely expensive to put together. So I’m very grateful that they were supportive and willing to put together a book that’s almost 700 pages, even though it was slated to be 250 pages. I remember the meeting with me. Oh God, this big meeting, we got together to do this State of the Union ketchup. How’s the book going? Yeah, it’s going really well. It’s going really well.
26:42 And so I had my agent, and I was like, all right, Steve, I’m going to let you handle this intro of our big topic that we need to discuss, which was page count, and had all the Amazon folks in the room, and it was one of these like coffee spitting moments, like wait, what? How long is this? What? It was pretty hysterical and awkward, but ultimately I’m not, a lot of people think that my decision to go with Amazon, or they, some in the old guard view it as this anti-bookstore move, which it isn’t at all, it’s a pro-reader move.
27:18 The physical book gives the optimal tactile and learning experience to my reader. That’s what I wanted to produce. At the end of the day, I am a product guy. Even though I may be known as a marketer, the marketing starts when you build your product. That’s interesting.
27:32 You know what I mean? If you look at the way the book is spread, it’s all based on content and serialization and excerpting and whatnot. The ride’s been wild though and it’s been incredible to watch the publishing world change. Just the content creation and delivery world change, it’s the wild west, it’s never been more exciting. You had Barnes and Nobles and a few other shops boycott your book, right?
28:00 Oh yeah, I had more than a thousand, well over a thousand stores boycott the book, including like you mentioned Barnes and Noble, which is the largest book retailer in the U.S. That was an attempt on their part to make an example out of me, which didn’t exactly work because I ended up hitting the lists anyway, although there’s a lot that went into that as you know from sitting the post. The primary advantage that Amazon has is the same advantage that you have with your listeners that I have with my blog readers, and that is they have a direct line of communication with their customers, with their end users.
28:43 Traditional publishers are business to business companies. So the VP of sales at Simon & Schuster or Random House will sell to the head category buyer at Barnes & Noble or Book civilian or whichever retailer it might be. They do not know their customers or their preferences, let alone have the ability to communicate with them. And it was extremely appealing to me to have the opportunity to work with a world-class technology company trying to reinvent publishing, as opposed to continue what I had been doing, which was work with very good, but nonetheless, traditional publishers trying to learn technology. Totally different games. It wasn’t a choice between publishers, it was a choice between publisher or technology company.
29:27 Did it hurt you? Not being in Barnes & Noble one? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Just the total book sales.
29:33 I heard in total book sales, the book should have been number one New York Times without question. It debuted at number four, but there are antiquated metrics being used in the publishing world as there are antiquated metrics being used in a lot of places, including online. I mean, there’s a difference between actionable metrics, vanity metrics, and then just bullshit subjective metrics, which quite frankly is what the New York Times list is. If you look at BookScan, which is the most objective reporting for point of sale purchases of books, you can see, I think it was the first week that my book came out, the book that was number two on the New York Times had sold fewer copies than the book that was listed at number 10.
30:14 Yet the reporting mechanism is unknown for the black box that is the New York Times. Sounds like a U.S. selection polls. Yeah, well, politics, man. It sounds like the Argentinian economic office.
30:25 It sounds like every aspect of politics everywhere, from Machiavelli to Italy to, god, you name it. It’s, you know, you don’t hide the fact that you’re a pretty prolific user of nootropics. And I’m quite interested to know how much of your success would you have achieved if you had never touched a nootropic, never had caffeine, never had those, I don’t want to say crutches because it has negative connotations, but do you think you could have done this all without the smart drugs and chemical warfare?
31:02 I think so. The smart drugs and drug use I view as experiments and exploring potential, but I don’t use, unless we count caffeine in its various iterations, So tea, I do have tea every day, typically in the mornings, I have Puerh tea, which has some very interesting properties. I also have Yerba Mate tea quite frequently when I’m on book deadline, I use that at night. For the Theobromine? Theobromine, Theophylline, which is found in tea.
31:36 And I do think that the benefit of the Yerba Mate for me, after living in Argentina, is as much the ritual as it is the stimulant effect. But I’m also having red wine, which isn’t exactly a smart drug. You say the red wine comes out sometimes around 5 p.m. Does it help your thinking process? The red wine, I really try not to have wine too early these days, but what I find is two glasses of wine, not more, relaxes, sort of takes the edge off just enough enough for me to be able to joke around and jest in my writing while still being able to remember what the fuck I’m trying to say.
32:28 Right. Okay. If you do any more. Like, I mean, for these nights, I remember when I was writing a four-hour workweek and I was like, well, it’s, I think, challenging for a lot of people, including me. It’s like if you pop open a bottle of wine and you have two glasses, it’s pretty hard not to finish the bottle, and it can be.
32:45 And I would pop open these, you know, a bottle of wine and I’d have like a third class or fourth class, and then I would look at my writing the next day and I would be like, what the fuck? Absolute nonsense. Is this garbage? It’s like that spider that’s been given Masculine and makes the fuck up. Oh yeah, exactly.
32:59 That’s what my chapter would look like and I’d be like, never again. Strangely enough, a good friend of mine told me that in the ancient Arab world, a lot of their greatest poets and scholars considered red wine to be their muse and they wouldn’t do any of their work without it. I believe it. I believe it. Interesting.
33:16 I find, I mean, I do enjoy red wine. I enjoy the ritual. are very important for conserving your creative resources. In other words, I don’t want to spend a lot of energy deciding what I’m going to have for breakfast each morning, what I’m going to do first, what I’m going to do before bed. I want those all to be automated to the extent that I have a routine that takes care of all those things so that I can apply my decision making to the things where I have the greatest input or impact or output and I really try not to I do think that your the number of decisions you can make in a given day well is finite and if you waste those decisions on small things or trivial things you will you will make either poor decisions or no decisions when it comes to the big things because you only have so much mental bandwidth yeah this has been pretty well this has been pretty well researched there’s been some writing in the New York Times which of course isn’t the first hand data but it goes by a number of names, one which is ego depletion.
34:19 I’m not a huge fan of that term although Dan Ariely who has written a predictably rational great book as well as others out of Duke University has written about it. It really seems that much like muscle glycogen and neurotransmitters there is a finite supply or at least if you deplete it at a rate faster than you’re able to replenish it, however of that actually breaks down physiologically, you basically run out of the ability to make good decisions. But coming back to the smart drug question, I’ve tried, I’ve used everything.
34:50 I’ve tried modafinil, I’ve tried some really unusual stuff, oxiracetam, phenylparacetam, hydrogen, all of the usual suspects. Adderall? Adderall, I’ve tried. Although, I really try to stay away from when possible the methamphetamine analogs of derivatives. I’m not a huge fan of methylphenidate, which is Ritalin, for instance.
35:16 What are your thoughts on modafinil, Tim? My thoughts on modafinil, it’s very strong. I don’t use modafinil much. I had one or two experiences where I had some very severe migraines after using it. And I am not as cavalier with drug use as people might think, even though I mentioned that I’ve used these things, but I take a very methodical approach to do a lot of homework, I would sooner do an extended cycle of low dose anabolic steroids than I would use modafinil consistently.
35:51 Which leads me to my next question. But to touch on the modafinil, just one more time, I do believe that with most drugs, there is an effect side effect correlation. So if you’re getting a very strong positive effect, there are side effects whether you’re able to identify them or not. And this is something that is routinely and repeatedly forgotten somehow by the medical establishment where they’ll have something like Lipitor for cholesterol control or statins.
36:18 I come out and some doctor will proclaim there are so few side effects, at some point they’ll probably put this in the water. I actually read that. And I’m like, I don’t buy it. If it’s having a strong physiological effect, there are going to be side effects. And lo and behold, there are all these issues related to it.
36:35 And I have to believe, much like that, much like MDMA also, which was thought to have no side effects for quite a while until people realize that it turns your serotonin receptors into these wilted flowers, I believe that metathenil probably has very pronounced side effects. And because of its strength, I use it very intermittently. When I was writing the Four Hour Body, I used it once or twice to pull all nighters to get over writer’s block, and that was it.
37:09 What is it for people that don’t know? Modafinil is commonly known as Provigil, and it has historically been prescribed as an anti-narcolepsy drug. They are developing variants on it and also lobbying to prescribe it for fatigue at this point and it’s been used extensively by military. They use modafinil as well as Ambien quite a lot on when they’re deployed as well as Olympic sprinters. Olympic sprinters use modafinil which was a lot of yeah there are a lot of Olympic sprinters who have been diagnosed as narcolytics which is just a bullshit self-defense or when they get caught using what’s on the band list it just helps them fire those synapses and are just focused or helps them run faster run faster yeah they’re they’re plenty there and I took one before jujitsu tournament once and it was mind-blowing yeah it’s pretty unbelievably powerful drug really it’s really strong did you feel any side effects from it yeah I’ve got a massive migraine as well massive migraine yeah so the brain is extremely sensitive extremely sensitive instrument the body Body operates with many sophisticated feedback mechanisms.
38:28 It’s extremely hard to get a free lunch. You believe that about any drug? I feel like it’s extremely hard to get a free lunch with biochemical enhancement. It doesn’t stop me from playing around with it, but I recognize there’s a penalty you pay. There’s a cost you pay and you have to be prepared to pay that debt, otherwise you really shouldn’t experiment and need to do your homework as well.
38:54 That’s good advice. The free lunch could be argued to be the healthy, wholesome, organic food. I mean, that is going to keep your neurotransmitters pretty much where they should be. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s another issue that I take with the excessive supplement use, and I’ve been guilty of this in the past, but you cannot use supplements to replace proper diet.
39:15 It’s very seductive to think that you can take a handful of pills each morning and make up for sub-par diet, it’s impossible. It’s not possible to do. Because precisely for the reason that to create a supplement, scientists have to isolate the beneficial factors or elements of food, and it is, I think, naive to believe that they’re capable of isolating all of the various co-factors and interdependent aspects of food. There are many examples of the folly of believing that you can, like isolating beta-carotene.
39:50 Take that by itself in high doses, all sorts of problems. Why? Because when it’s naturally occurring, there are other things that are consumed in combination. Yeah, so you have to dial in your diet for sure. That’s good advice.
40:03 Now, Tim, you’ve talked about this startup company you made to create this book for like 40 or 50 people. You’ve talked a little bit about what your workday is like. I know you have all sorts of crazy ideas like you don’t have a to-do list, you a not to-do list, you have an email game which I guess limits the amount of time you spend on email. I just wonder if you could just walk us through like a typical week in your life as far as how you manage a big workflow and just like the little things that you do and that’s a big question.
40:31 Yeah, let’s see. Answer any part that you wish. Yeah, I’ll try. I’ll give a sampling. My weeks are very different and they can also be quite boring on book deadline for instance.
40:44 That there are a few misconceptions about how I work or how I live. I’d say the first is that I’m just this picture of efficiency all day long, like everything’s figured out. It’s like the Dos Equis guy or a five hour energy guy or whatever. And the fact of the matter is, if you were to have this fly on a wall camera and watch me be like, what the fuck is this guy doing for half of the day? Because the fact of the matter is I procrastinate a lot.
41:16 I get a lot of things wrong, but I think I’m very good at getting a few important things right. Why does it make me feel so good to hear this, Brian? If you get a few important things right, you can drop a lot of balls and make a lot of mistakes and it’s fine. You’ll still outpace most people. So that’s point number one.
41:38 Number two is the belief that it’s like girls gone wild, partying with like the Swedish bikini team, and then like my single Lamborghinis with Sean Parker every day, which it isn’t. And I think the creative process, as it relates to book writing certainly, and many others, can be a very lonely, isolating process. And that’s the penance that you pay if you choose that as you are a professional, you’re calling. So a couple of things. These days, I wake up, I tend to wake up on the later side, so typically at 10, maybe even 11, and I’ll wake up, set the kettle for hot water, have 30 grams of protein, so I’ll have a quick protein shake.
42:23 Usually it’s a combination of protein isolate and micellar casein. Then I will sit down and listen to one music track. It’s up to you. Recently I’ve been listening to, It’s time to party like it’s 1999 Prince, and I’ll meditate for the duration of that song, just one song, and I use that as, I tend to use the same song for fairly long stretches of time as a state cue, and I will run through in my head, as I’m taking deep breaths for those three to five minutes, the things that I am grateful for, and I use that, like I mentioned is this this psychological reset and also in terms of internal talk if people find this interesting in terms of self-talk I’ll say you have all the time you need like you have all the time you need to do everything that’s important you don’t have time to do everything you have enough time to do everything that’s important today or in your life just today one day at a time okay I mean in life in general but I’m doing this as a daily okay mental warm-up Then, the song ends, I get up, I make Puerti, and then I will sit down and I try to do an hour of non-email-related work.
43:40 This is most recently, so I’m still on Effectively Book Launch. So I’ll try to do an hour of work or some type of meditative practice. When I say meditative, I mean something non-work-related, like drawing, so I’m trying to reinvigorate my drawing. book penciller for 10 years and was a paid my bills in college partly as an illustrator for two years. It’s like that was this huge core part of my being for so long and I just gave it up I just stopped when I got into the real world so to speak after graduation I was like I don’t have time for that and it’s I’ve just realized it’s this core piece of who I am then I’m trying to bring that back resurrect that this year. Then if I’m going to jump into the into work mode. Typically I will have a post-it with one to three principal to-dos and then not to-dos. So I’ll typically have that cut in half and I’ll have the two to three to-dos and then the not to-dos. And my objective for the day, I’ll also then circle the one of the three that is the force multiplier that would change as many other aspects of my life or or affect all those other to-dos.
44:53 And that’s the first, typically the most uncomfortable to-do that I have to tackle each day. And I will view my day as a success if I knock off that one to-do. That’s it. What’s an example of a not-to-do? Example of a not-to-do would be processing email from the Gmail inbox.
45:15 You’ll write that down, don’t touch the Gmail. Yeah, or I will take that and flip it into a to-do. So like using email game, for instance, or Gmail offline. I actually use Gmail offline a lot to process Gmail because you don’t then get stuck. I think many people when they check email get stuck in the top 10 email because what happens?
45:39 You go in and you respond to the first five and then you get five new responses within five minutes and so you never hack any more than 10 email. out of your inbox, and so I use Gmail offline quite a lot for that. I do think that the pains and the way that it’s set up actually to mimic Outlook in many respects makes processing much faster, but a few tips related to email for people, and email is just like the biggest pain in the ass in the world for everybody.
46:06 There’s a good chance that I’m just gonna quit email for a while for a pretty good good chunk of time. But the… You said it’s like the worst communication technique in so many ways. It’s Yeah, I want to get into the litany of complaints about email, but it really is the productivity killer and the creativity killer, so a few things that help to mitigate that. This is assuming you use Gmail.
46:32 The first is email game, so emailga.me, which prevents you from going to the inbox, and this is something that I wanted to have designed for a very long time. I was actually trying to rally some of the Gmail designers to customize Gmail for me, which of course didn’t happen. But I was like, guys, look at this. It takes 12 clicks to get from this to this. It should only take six.
46:52 And they’re like, here’s how you do it. And they’re like, right, OK, your wish list is at the top of our priority list. Sure, sure. I always think you have a bat phone into Eric Schmidt. Can you do this?
47:03 It’s Tim. It’s Tim. I have bat phones into a few places, but not into the Gmail war room, unfortunately. In any case, what email game prevents you from doing is jumping around in the inbox randomly and checking the same email multiple times. It forces you to process in a very linear fashion, and there are certain game mechanics that typically allow me to process email 40 to 50% faster.
47:32 Or I should say in 40 to 50% of the time, it would usually take me to process, so I will almost always by default use that. In combination with that, I will use an extension called Boomerang, and what Boomerang allows me to do is have Gmail ping me if I don’t hear a response back to that email in a set period of time so that I don’t have to worry about following up. I don’t have to hold that in my working memory or put it on my calendar. I’ll use Boomerang.
48:02 What it also allows me to do, which is very important, is I can schedule my response to be sent at a future point in time. What that, in effect, permits you to do is to take, let’s say, a week break from email. How do you do that? You take, let’s just say, a full day if you’re really deluged to process email and you schedule all of your responses to go out a week from now, five days from now, and then you actually get some real fucking work done for the five days following that.
48:30 Those are a few tips that I’ve used to create space around email and also to dramatically and minimize the time commitment required by email. But the most important habit is responding to your email. Robert Scoble, who’s a friend of mine, a very well-known technologist, but he at one point told me, and he’s known as the human aggregator, and this guy consumes more information than anyone I know. And he said, for every email I send out, I’ve done the math, I get 1.75 in response.
49:03 So you can see, answering more email does not fix your problem, that actually makes it worse. So you’ll choose ones not to respond to. Yeah, you have to be very judicious. I’ll give you one more thing that I do. So let’s just say I take, and we can talk about the literalism or non-literalism of the four hour work week in a second, because I think it’s important to touch on that, but let’s just say I’m taking two hours prior to lunch each day to focus on something that one would designate as work.
49:33 I will then typically walk about an hour to lunch to get outside, and ideally in the sun, in San Francisco sometimes it’s challenging, certainly in London it’s a real hassle, but I will walk for an hour, and during that period of time, the day before I will have made a list of phone calls that I want to make, and very frequently those will replace email, and in some cases they’re not phone calls at all, I’ll actually record a voice memo and send it directly to someone as a message to prevent long phone calls. But I will make, email is not the best tool for all types of communication. So I’ll very frequently make a list of, let’s say, 10 people I want to talk to and call that will then cut my email in half.
50:17 Because for most people, at least, I’m slightly an anomaly because I get so many pitches sent to me in my system and we get hundreds of email a day. But for most people, I would venture to say it’s safe to assume that you get the vast majority of your email from the same five to 10 people, right? So I will try to shift a lot of that work burden from email to phone and have a clear agenda, 20 minutes or less, for let’s say five to 10 people, and I’ll go on my walk to lunch.
50:47 And then for the afternoons, it’s really that, again, coming back to that one to do, repeatedly over and over again. So I’ll take that post-it note and very frequently just put it on the bottom left-hand corner of my laptop. Really hard to ignore. and make sure you get it done. Yeah, make sure you get it done.
51:00 So, I’m coming back to you hacking the human experience. There’s a question I was thinking about last night that I wanted to ask you, and I’m not sure if I formulated it correctly, but let me give it a shot. You know, you have looked into physiology and psychology very in depth, and has the fact that you’ve discovered that there are these very basal triggers that can affect the human being’s behavior and decision making and things like that, How has that changed your spiritual views?
51:29 Has it made you consider us engineered creatures, or has it made you more atheistic, or? Yeah, this is, this is usually the type of question that gets me death threats later, but I’ll answer it.
51:45 All right, so I, I’m not particularly religious. I am fascinated by science and find, There are some fantastic interviews with Richard Feynman, who’s one of my idols. Richard Feynman was a physicist, but also one of the most acclaimed teachers of the 20th century, incredible Nobel Prize winner. There’s a video, I have it on my blog, a very high quality, a higher quality version of this NOVA excerpt, but it’s called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. He talks about how his knowledge of the stars makes him, in his opinion, appreciate and enjoy the wonder of this miracle of science as much as someone 2,000 years ago who thought that it was a black sheet with holes poked in it, run by the gods.
52:42 For me, having studied the human body and looked very closely at evolutionary biology and other things, I don’t call myself an agnostic because I feel like that is a, it’s a hedge and I don’t like the word because I don’t think it’s meaningful. I think that if you are a theist, you are able to say, I believe in God or I believe in God. That makes you a theist in the same way that theo-theology, right? If you cannot say that, then you are an atheist. It’s that simple.
53:16 Just like A is lack of being atheist. If you can’t say I believe in God or I believe in God, then you’re an atheist. Even if you consider yourself spiritual, you’re still an atheist. And I don’t particularly like using the word spiritual either, but I don’t think, I certainly think there are many things that are currently, remain undiscovered. I certainly hope so.
53:40 And many forces at play that I’m sure we haven’t captured measured but I find the exploration and the science when I say science I don’t view that in as as an infallible dogma either which I think is very dangerous because people have in many ways replaced the they’ve replaced what religion served with this unswerving belief in whatever scientists say now I I think that’s just as dangerous. You shouldn’t just take people’s words for it. But for me, it’s the investigation and the experimentation that I find so fascinating and so much fun.
54:26 So I would say my sense of amazement and wonder related to the world has just grown over time, but it hasn’t made me lean towards any primary religion. I do read a lot about religions, though, and I took religion classes in college, for instance. Very fascinated by some of the traditions and thought systems and philosophies of whether it’s the red letter Christians, or looking at Judaism and Kabbalah and all of this, or even the Qur’an and whatnot. I do find a lot of the thought systems and teachings fascinating.
55:11 But I wouldn’t consider myself a theist. Fair enough. That’s a good answer. That’s a good question, too. What’s San Francisco like and what city would you live in if you weren’t there?
55:19 I know you’re from East Coast. San Francisco. A lot of nerds and dirty hippies, mostly. Is everybody pitching a start-up? That’s what I think.
55:27 I always think that everyone’s pitching a start-up. San Francisco, I never, I really believe for a very long time that I couldn’t live anywhere for more than six months. I really felt that for a long time because I had lived so many places where I just, I grew bored after a pretty short period of time. That could have been a reflection of just where I was as a person, being very restless and maybe not having direction or a sense of purpose. That could have been part of it, but San Francisco just satisfies.
55:59 It checked off so many of my check boxes. all of these ideal characteristics of a city or an environment for me, I really can’t see myself moving. I mean, it’s so odd to hear myself say that, but the Bay Area, so not San Francisco specifically, but the Bay Area itself is just such an odd collision of so many usually separate influences and ecosystems and communities. It’s extremely hard to find elsewhere and extremely hard to replicate elsewhere. So yes, you have Silicon Alley in New York, or you have Silicon Roundabout here, or you have Silicon Fill in the Blank elsewhere.
56:45 But it’s extremely hard to just create a recipe for Silicon Valley and replicate it somewhere else for a great host of reasons. But the Bay Area is, it has for me personally, a wonderful blend of physical beauty, just natural beauty. So it has a very European look to it, but you also have incredible physical beauty within a spitting distance. I mean, I live a 10-minute walk from the subway. I’m just picturing Tony Stocks by the house on the corner of the…
57:20 It’s not that far off, although my house is more modest than Tony Stark’s, but I’m a 10-minute walk to the subway, But I’m also, which means I can be downtown in maybe 15, 20 minutes, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue or High Street here, let’s say, or Financial District. But I can also, in the same 10 minutes, walk into a canyon in a park where I can rock climb outside in the same 10 minutes. That’s very cool. And I can go skiing and surfing in the same weekend if I want.
57:51 I can go to Santa Cruz and surf and then go to Tahoe and ski in the same weekend. It’s a wonderful jumping off point, and it is, in my experience, very unusual that you have simultaneously this huge economic and business engine, which in this case it pertains to startups, and that creativity is also found in the arts. You also have incredible ballet and dance. You have some of the most incredible filmmakers, certainly in the U.S., Francis Fort Coppola, George Lucas, et cetera, and you have fantastic food.
58:27 I mean, I love eating, and so you have all of these things in one place, and it’s very difficult for me to find all of those things in other places. I find bits and pieces that I haven’t found all of those things in any one place outside of that area. If I had to live somewhere else, it would have to pertain to a specific period of time for me or a specific objective. I could see living. Buenos Aires, when you tangoed, it’s good for a while.
58:53 It’s good for a while, but like doing business in Argentina, are you kidding? No offense to the artists out there, but my God, it’s just like, forget it, right? I could see living in Austin, Texas for a period of time. For those people who may not be familiar with Texas, if you imagine Texas as a red state meeting a Republican state, Austin is like the weirdest little focal point of blue and like hippies and tattoos and good food and music. It’s a big music scene.
59:23 And I got to know Austin in a few ways. The first was actually through a job offer. I almost moved to Austin after college. Trilogy Software, there’s a big startup scene in Austin. And they also have this amazing festival culture.
59:39 So you have South by Southwest, which I go to pretty much every year, I’ll be going again this year. tech and music. Tech and music and film, it’s awesome. So I really like Austin a lot. Do you get productivity groupies? Let’s see, what does that mean? There are a lot of ways I could do this. So you’re at South by Southwest and some girl comes running up to you and goes, damn I loved your book, you want to get a drink? Yeah, I mean that happens which is hugely flattering. I figured out pretty quickly after the four-hour work week came out that it’s not always a good idea to take people up on that offer. But I’m very fortunate to have, for the most part, very sane, very smart fans. I’ve been very fortunate in that respect, I really love hanging out with my readers and I wouldn’t be here without them so I think that’s the way it should be.
1:00:49 For instance, last night I was just gutted because we had to clear out after the speaking event that I did and so the book signing and whatnot was really constrained and so people weren’t able to get necessarily like inscriptions or we weren’t able to chat at all and that just killed me because I actually loved interacting with my readers and I learned this is not not some trite bullshit thing, I do learn in a very selfish way, like I enjoy the blog as much as I do because I learn as much from my readers as I give them and I learn on a weekly basis more than I could ever give from my readers and oftentimes I’ll write a blog post just because I want the experts in the woodwork who know more about that subject to come out and be like, not a bad point Tim, but like let me school your ass, like here’s Here’s how you actually do it.
1:01:38 You can see that. If I put up a post on the 80-20 guitar post and how to approach learning guitar from this minimal effective dose, you look at the comments, man, you take the comments are just as good as the post itself in a lot of ways. You see that over and over and over and over again. That’s cool. You have a strange kind of celebrity status like the people that know you, know you well.
1:02:03 I was mentioned you’re gonna be on the show and some people were like Tim Ferriss some people were like who? Where have you been? It’s strange that way I mean that I mean do you find that when you go around the world that there’s like kind of a Digital digital effect for Tim Ferriss people don’t know you where they don’t oh sure Yeah, and do you want to be more famous? That’s a good question stop writing books, you know It’s a really good question. I mean I’m certainly and I think this is just a sign of the times but To whatever extent I am a celebrity, I’m certainly not a what I would consider a real celebrity. It’s you know, like Brad Pitt or something. You can’t walk outside and have any peace of mind.
1:02:44 I have this sort of this micro celebrity that’s limited to very certain spheres, right? So if I go somewhere like South of Market or the Mission District coffee shops in San Francisco, it’s like, you know, I will get noticed right which is weird even to this day for me I don’t know it’s just it’s because the last few years have been a blur or if I go to let’s say the Ace Hotel in New York or certain areas in New York people are like who is this guy because it’s it’s so disproportionate how many people might recognize me in those places but it’s like if I go to Michigan or something no one’s gonna know who the hell I am or next to none you know it’s very very selective and I I do think that 10 years ago you might have Oprah, right? You had like one or two or three tastemakers on broadcast television.
1:03:36 And I read something recently which was really fascinating. It was in a details magazine about the future of Hollywood. And they were saying, and I don’t know how accurate this is, but I assume it probably is, that 20, 30 years ago you had a handful of late night shows, let’s say. Saturday Night Live, Johnny Carson, that had 20, 30 million viewers. You don’t have that anymore.
1:03:59 The most popular TV shows have two, three, maybe four million viewers at the very high end for a network. I think that what we will see is you’ll have the same type of curation and celebrity and impact as an okra, but it will be segmented across 50, 100, 5,000 different channels per se and different demographics. So the long tail. Yeah, absolutely. It’ll be a long tail. Do I want to be more famous?
1:04:31 I don’t know man. It’s this is something I grapple with because There are certain aspects of the public exposure that are not good. I mean like the death threat thing I’m not kidding about like I get you’ve had death threats. Oh, yeah Yeah, like I mean that’s every month or so I get like crazy people random or because something religious related you say usually religion related and just I mean but it’s from some statement like I made I don’t view it as that controversial but there are people who take that kind of statement or the personal and so I get some really crazy stuff aside from that though there is a lack of privacy that even I experience which can be disconcerting right you know so people who will try to reach out to family members and pretend like they’re my assistant to get personal information weird things like that and I’m not saying that to complain about the successes I had, I’m very grateful for them, but there is a price you pay, and I think that is one of the things that sometimes makes me want to just disappear for a few years.
1:05:33 The reason I don’t automatically do that is because when you have a platform, it gives you a tremendous amount of leverage to positively affect the world, or negatively, certainly. But it gives you, it gives you a real megaphone that you can use for changing people’s lives and I do take, I really enjoy that. But it can also act as a beacon or a magnet for total weirdos. It absolutely does both. And so if I want to impact more people, on one hand I do believe it would be extremely beneficial for me to do things, more things on television let’s say, or more things on fill-in-the-blank medium that allows me to reach higher numbers, greater numbers of people.
1:06:17 But I will be trading up in my set of problems, and I’ll move from, if I have the Toyota Corolla of publicity problems now, I’ll have the Mercedes S-Class of problems. But it does afford you the possibility that you can call Steve Vernella up and be like, let’s go do this hunting trip for me. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, absolutely.
1:06:37 I don’t want people to think that I’m playing the woe is me card, no, because I recognize I’ve been extremely fortunate to have the opportunities that I have and to have the audience that I have. I’m very grateful for it. There’s not a day that I don’t think about that. And I don’t, I don’t actually, I can deal with a lot of the weird stuff like the death threats. I’m just like, yeah, I’ll bring it.
1:06:57 I hope you’re well trained. Like, you know, I forbid you break into my house and you don’t come over. I will gut you like a deer. Yeah, exactly. I hurt field dressing in my foyer.
1:07:07 But I do, what I worry about is almost all family related because I’ve been dating the same girl for two years, she’s great, there will be a point when I have a family and that’s when I will, my tolerance for that kind of shit is gonna really get extremely low. When you’re out in the public and that’s when, yeah. If people mess with my family, I don’t trust myself to respond tactfully to that Yeah, I have the same problem with London Real, you know, I get stopped in the tube now.
1:07:40 But it allows us to give good guests, like, dirty idiots. It’s funny, like, there was an MMA fighter, Quentin Jackson, who was talking about his groupies. Yeah, he’s great. But he was like, all my groupies are men. You don’t get it.
1:07:54 Well, exactly, right. So they all want to have sex with me. Well, in the tech world, you know, I had a buddy who was like, you know, he’s even better known than I am, and he said, it’d be one thing. And he has a long-term girlfriend, too. But in the early days, it would have been awesome if I had all these really hot female groupies.
1:08:13 It’s like, but I didn’t. They were all like 15-year-old sweaty-pump fanboys. And he’s like, which is cool, but at the time, as a single dude, it would have been nice, a couple of hot girls. You must have a geeky male fan base. It’s probably pretty well-rounded.
1:08:29 I have a very eclectic fan base. I do have the tech fan base, which is a really cool fan base to be able to communicate with because I see a lot of things before the general public season, which is a lot of fun, but I also have some really eclectic audience because the book spans such a broad spectrum of subject matter. With the four-hour body and all these really odd physical experiments and powerlifting, like I know some of the top power lifters in the world, but I also know a lot of Navy SEALs and snipers and rangers and stuff because they’re really, some of these guys are just, they’re mutants when it comes to physical performance.
1:09:13 I mean, some of these guys are just beyond, beyond, yeah. I mean, you see a movie like Jason Bourne, I love the first Jason Bourne film, and you’re like, cool fiction character doesn’t exist. Like I’ve met people who are Jason Bourne, it’s insane. I mean, they’re just like, you know, guys who are two, three times stronger than I am. And I’m like, for general population, I mean, pretty strong.
1:09:38 And, but they’re like, yeah, you know, I think I might run a 50 mile race this weekend, just like for fun. And then they know, they’re like, yeah, I could not train for six months and I could like run a marathon and then deadlift 500 pounds at the end. Speaking of mutants, when it comes to physical performance, I know Ryan’s going to kill me after the show for asking this, but I have to. I’m curious now. What do you think would win in a fight between a lion and a silverback girl, though?
1:10:03 You don’t have to answer that. Yeah, you asked that same question when you were high on a roguing shot. A lion and a silverback girl, yeah.
1:10:14 You know, I’m gonna have to go with lion. I’m gonna have to go with lion, yeah. But I think it has so much to do with setup, you know? It’s like if they’re in a 15-foot ring, Don’t know, but if the line is able to stock and get behind the silverback game over, you know, I mean Can’t believe I’m actually pondering that Yeah, I just feel like Silverback also, I think if I had to really like drill down I think would have the most force production at At a range that would be like similar to a kickbox or in a way if you follow my meaning Yeah, so once once the lion has its head here, I really just don’t think there’d be much. I don’t think a Silverback has has all too much pressing power. Okay All right, that’s it You know you’re talking about give it to the Liger over both of them
1:11:18 You’re talking about living in Silicon Valley and you’re surrounded by entrepreneurs all the time And I know you’ve been involved as like an angel investor or an advisor and you name it like, you know You know Twitter Facebook stumbled upon all sorts of companies And when I see you come out with this book Like once my first questions was like, you know, why do you do the book? Is this like a Tim Ferriss almost like is this your performance art? Is this kind of how you express your creativity to the world because you don’t have to do this I don’t think no, I don’t think you do it for the money. I Certainly hope not. It’s a bad decision if I do I do. I feel as though, for whatever reason, my strength might be, you know, my gift if I have one, is this odd ability to sustain obsession over an extended period of time on one subject and just dissect the hell out of it. And the three books are intended to really go together. And so I feel like this is sort of the closing of a chapter for me in a lot of ways because they’re intended to cover Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, the Ben Franklin trilogy, and I feel like hopefully these books will outlast me.
1:12:38 I view a lot of what I do elsewhere as extremely ephemeral, it just gets lost in the Niagara Falls of information and digital, and I’m hoping that the books will have a lasting enough impact on the readers that they will hopefully survive in some form for decades and decades. I’d really like that to be the case. Through teaching you become immortal, is that expression? Yeah, I suppose. So this all comes down to some weird nonsense, it’s the complex.
1:13:06 I’m just messing with you. No, no, no. I mean, I think narcissism is underrated. I shouldn’t say that. By narcissism, I think that that’s going to end up quoted somewhere in Jesus.
1:13:17 I think that ego is underrated. I think you have to, to have any degree of confidence to do things outside the norm, you have to believe that you are able to do things that in many cases haven’t been done before. And it doesn’t mean you’re an arrogant bastard about it, but I do think that that requires a certain irrational self-esteem that people could denigrate by calling egotistical or narcissistic, but I think it’s a very valuable tool. I think it’s a necessary component.
1:13:51 Do you feel the same way, don’t you, Byron? I always say that. I think a little bit of ego is important because otherwise you don’t take pride in your work. You don’t go out there and you have, like you said, do those things other people aren’t doing. You don’t cut against the grain.
1:14:01 I agree, there’s a point where it can get to be too much. No one wants to hang around you anymore. Or you cannot see your own flaws. Yeah, and I think there’s also a difference between self-contained belief and verbalizing, not belief. And I think there’s tactful ways and very undactful ways to verbalize it.
1:14:24 But if you take the humblest guy in the world who’s an amazing world-class performer, they’re plenty confident. They might not verbalize it in the same way that Muhammad Ali would, or Mark Cuban might. But you have to have that belief, otherwise you would not attempt the types of things they attempt. And then certainly, I think, moreover, to not only survive, but bounce back from the inevitable failures and mistakes that you’re gonna make. You need to have not only enough confidence, you need to have a surplus of confidence because you’re gonna take hits along the way.
1:15:04 Yeah, you said that in one of your blog posts. Well, if that’s an old one that you said, even the most successful people in the world have those depressing moments, and you said more so with startup people. Oh, I think so, yeah. Why is that? Startups are very manic depressive.
1:15:21 As organisms and I think that that can be exacerbated in many, many different ways. But starting companies, so it doesn’t just mean venture backed startups in Silicon Valley, is a very creatively and physically draining process and it’s extremely easy to have a startup become all consuming where your entire self identity is wrapped up in the success or failure successes or failures of that company, and due to the fact that there are inevitably so many factors outside of your control that affect the company, macroeconomic cycles for talking about venture backed, etc., fickle nature of board members, who knows, that the ups and downs can be very severe and oftentimes are, which I think is part of the reason also that Silicon Valley I think produces a lot of good entrepreneurs is that there there are opportunities to diversify your identity and go rock climbing and go mountain climbing and get outside.
1:16:27 So I think that there are more safety nets in many ways that people can create when they’re in that type of environment that actually facilitate ultimately being effective in the startup. Certainly not exclusive to Silicon Valley, but I do think that’s one of the perhaps lesser spoken about advantages of being there. Will you be one of those entrepreneurs that you read about in Silicon Valley someday? Will you ever do that full time? Do you find that fulfilling?
1:16:52 I know you’re involved, I don’t know how you’re involved in some of these companies that can see your advisor or a startup, but some guys make their whole identity about I’m the startup of this, or I’m an adventure capital firm, but. Yeah, I don’t feel like that’s. I don’t think you’ll ever be that guy. Yeah, I don’t see founding a, and running a venture backed startup myself. I’ve just kind of been there, done that, with having that be my 100% and I’m not terribly interested.
1:17:24 I also think, quite frankly, I mean, it’s a young, and this is going to sound sexist, but it’s like a young guys game, but it’s a young person’s game. There are exceptions to that rule, but it’s like once I have a kid, do I want to run? How old are you, Tim? I don’t want to run a startup. I’m 35.
1:17:42 Okay. You want to compete against a 22-year-old who can, like, live on ramen and, you know, fumes for months at a time? I don’t. But I would also say that from a strictly financial standpoint, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I don’t think, for me to start my own start-up when I can invest in and advise a portfolio of 20 to 30 companies. I mean, I will make more money for my start-ups than I’ll ever make for writing, and the books have done pretty well.
1:18:10 I’ll do, I will have, at least on paper, and that’s always subject to change, but even in terms of the amount that I could take off the table right now, it would be very commensurate with all of my royalties to date from all three books. So it also makes more financial sense for me to invest in multiple companies where I can take a meaningful equity stake as opposed to putting myself into one company. And you enjoy it too. You love these ideas a lot. I enjoy the breadth of exposure that I get to different business models, different types of entrepreneurs by working with multiple companies also.
1:18:51 It’s fun. It’s fun. I mean, to be able to go into Evernote headquarters after I’ve seen their first office with 30 people, now they’re at 400 and some odd people, and to see everything that’s going to be coming out in six months, or to talk to Uber, for instance, about what’s coming down the line in six months. It’s just so much fun. Or to be able to even test all that stuff before it comes out.
1:19:14 They’re like, yeah, what’s your account? Okay, cool. We’ll set you up with all the new stuff you can play around with before it comes out. We’re going to know what I’m not supposed to know, but to know what Google’s coming out with, and to see it demoed on phones and whatnot before it comes out. It’s just fun.
1:19:28 It’s a lot of fun. I don’t think I would have that same enjoyment from running one company myself. Fair enough. It’s him, you know, I’ve got one more question for you. Yesterday we had someone in the studio called Jeff Thompson and he’s written a book called Fear the Gift of Exceptional People.
1:19:49 And he was explaining to us how when he was a young man he took a piece of paper and he wrote down a pyramid with all of his fears, putting the one he was most afraid of at the top and the one he was least afraid of at the bottom And you seem to be someone who has everything going from, you don’t seem very fearful, you seem to meet life’s challenges head on. Would you mind sharing with us some of your fears? Sure, I don’t have many, and I can explain why, I think that’s by conditioning and training more than anything else.
1:20:22 Fears would be watching my parents get old, that I’ve realized is going to be very tough for me. Second would be not dying but living with any type of physical handicap or degeneration is something that I really want to mitigate against. And that’s about it. Well actually you know what I fear? I fear getting this is something I do fear quite a lot is is missing, once again, falling back into old patterns and missing the forests for the trees and ending up competing with the Joneses, which is really easy to do.
1:21:12 It’s really easy. It’s easy to do in the Bay Area too. Super easy. It’s really easy. It’s very easy and seductive because the path I choose to keep up with the Joneses is a very different path I would choose if I if I did not have that type of positional economics driving my behavior. So I fear succumbing to peer pressure in that way.
1:21:38 Is that economic peer pressure or Twitter followers or a number of startups? I’d say it’s mostly financial stuff. Yeah just because like I could make a lot more money if if I ran a fund and I’m not saying the running fund is easy but But there are people who would give me money where I could make multiples of what I’m making now, running fun, not really what I want to do. But I think it can be very challenging when you are in a peer group where you see people taking that type of path where, let’s say, your three, four, five best friends go from making a few hundred thousand to a few million to 10 million to 20 million a year.
1:22:22 It’s hard to watch when you’re like, fuck, I could do that. It takes a tremendous amount of, I think, self-discipline and a different philosophical operating system to contend with that without choosing the same path. Because it’s not the right path for everyone. But I would say that the reason I don’t have more fears, and obviously there are temporary fears that come and go, is I think it’s for reading a lot of stoicism, honestly. and trying to put into practice, I mean specifically Seneca, Seneca the Younger and Letters from the Stomach.
1:22:57 I’ve read your blog post and I was wondering if you’d like to know anything. Oh it’s just such a fantastic book and really just an operator, I mean Seneca as a philosopher is sort of my preferred vehicle and my preferred role model because he used philosophy for other things, he wasn’t primarily a philosopher, he used the equivalent of the wealthiest investment banker in Rome, advisor to the emperor, one of the most famous playwrights, and his toolkit was in part stoicism in these various rules for decision making, which separates him in my mind from people who were primarily talkers, primarily paid to sit on a porch and spout philosophical suggestions when they weren’t required to put any of it into practice in very high pressure environments, whereas he was.
1:23:51 So Lettuce from Stoke will definitely be a top recommendation. I think it allows you to learn to value only those things that cannot be taken away in many, many circumstances, just is a very empowering mindset to have. Fair enough. It’s just like, okay, you’re going to take my house, you’re going to take my belongings. Makes no difference.
1:24:16 It gives you a degree of confidence that I think is difficult to have by other means. Wow. That’s a good answer. Last thing, Tim. What’s next for you?
1:24:27 Are you taking some time off? I thought I remember you saying you were going to go to Indonesia and just completely unplug. Yeah. I’m going to disappear for a bit. I’m going to disappear for a…
1:24:36 It’s a big continent, so I didn’t give you away there. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll disappear. I’m not sure.
1:24:42 It’ll be somewhere warm. Maybe Indonesia. Maybe Southeast Asia. I’ve spent a lot of time in South America, but I’ll disappear for a few weeks to primarily decide what to remove from my life, commitments, belongings, relationships that have somehow become negative or toxic. And then I’ll come back.
1:25:07 Still not commit to any huge big project, do some clean up and remove as much psychic drag as possible, and then I’ll figure out what my next step is, but I’m not in a huge rush. I’m not in a huge rush. I don’t have any desire to put out a book a year or whatever. I don’t even know if I’ll do another book. I probably will.
1:25:25 I have one or two ideas that are gestating a bit, but who knows, it could be a children’s book. It could be fiction. I want to exercise a different part of my brain. The encyclopedic, hyper-obsessive, non-fiction cortex of my brain is over-traded. It’s pretty cashed off.
1:25:41 It’s over-trained. I need a break. I need to do like a scratch and sniff book or something. It’s going to do it in an autopsy. They’re like, oh my God, look at this.
1:25:50 What is this? A tumor? No, it’s this non-fiction cortex. I never used it. If people want to get your book, what’s the best way for them to do it?
1:25:58 I think the easiest way, yeah, the easiest way to get any of the books is to go on Amazon. Certainly. I think, I’m not sure what the retail distribution is in the UK. I mean, the first two books are available in a lot of languages, the four-hour work weeks and 35 plus at this point. But Amazon is typically the easiest one to find at the lowest price and if they want samples of any of the books, I mean, they can go to fourhourbody.com, fourhourchef.com.
1:26:26 Certainly, the heartbeat of everything that I do online is the blog, which is just a four-hour blog, F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-E-L-O-G.com, and you can find, geez, it’s getting close to to 500 posts, but they’re sorted by category. And like you said, if you wanna find out exactly how I hit the New York Times, I don’t make any mystery. I mean, I’ll lay out exactly the sequence that I use. He logged every media appearance he did, every show. Yeah, in chronological order.
1:26:57 So I don’t make any secrets of what I do. That’s exactly the opposite. So yeah, hopefully people enjoy the sample. I mean, there are plenty of people who just read the blog. but I think the books bring things together in a way that the blog doesn’t, obviously, because the four out of blog means that I use it to experiment with my readers as much as I use it to experiment with myself.
1:27:19 Guinea pig alert. Yeah, exactly. Awesome, and you’re on Twitter, which is at T Ferriss, that’s F-E-R-R-I-S-S. You got it. And we’re going to be giving out, I think we’ve got four or five signed copies of The Four Hour Chef.
1:27:34 To the best quote from the episode, everyone already think of a few so if you’ve heard the best quote if you tweet that out with the URL of this YouTube video we’re gonna give one away for a Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday when this drops next week and I don’t know what else to say dude I just he was speaking my gratitude earlier and I’m so thankful to have spent an hour with this man yeah that was really positive thank you so much my pleasure this is this is my favorite type of conversation have been just this long-form relaxed. So hopefully I’ll be back. Awesome. We’d love to have you. And we wish you the best.
1:28:09 Thanks very much. Same to you. All right. And until then… It is most certainly about the journey.
1:28:14 Indeed. Thanks, guys.
