No Cement Ponds (The Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics)

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger Show on the choose yourself network. Today on the James Altiger Show. We're looking at some quotes. One of my favorites that I use a lot on the Internet when I'm engaged. The World Wide Web? The World Wide Web. The yeah. Exactly. Is, from Mae West. And the quote is, those who are offended easily should be offended more often. Well, which brings us to Kevin Kelly, who actually is never offended by anything. No. And he says this is so fascinating, this quote. Productivity is for because everyone's obsessed with productivity. And he but he says productivity is for robots. What what humans are gonna be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences. The question that I found myself asking of myself was, where am I not replaceable or the least replaceable? Okay. Maybe I don't have an incredible unique opportunity to change the world, but if I did, somewhere in my life, somewhere in front of me, what would it be? I mean, you you know, both Peter Thiel talks about, you know, make your, kind of the the sector your business is in as small as possible so you could be a monopoly. And Kevin Kelly talks about a 1,000 true fans. But many guests talk about Yeah. Seth Godin also. Start start as small as possible where you can be really successful without taking, I guess, the huge risk. And you see comedians do that all the time. Mhmm. You know, they go into small clubs to try out material. Mhmm. So so it's interesting how it kinda relates then to the to health as well. I hadn't made that connection while while reading the book. 100%. Yeah. The the the decent program you follow or the decent business that you can focus on is better than the perfect that you abandon. And in in the case of entrepreneurship, trying to if everyone is your customer, no one is your customer. And it's very expensive to try to advertise to everybody. So the What what do you you know, a lot of people what do you mean if what's a specific example of everyone is your customer? No one is your customer. Because Google, everyone is their customer. Mhmm. Apple, everyone pretty much is their customer. Well, now. Yes. But I guarantee you, back in the early days with Woz and Steve, they were targeting a very, very specific niche demographic for personal computer with a graphical word processor and so on. It was a niche product. And Google in the early days was, I mean, dismissed entirely by Yahoo. And now, yes, Google is at a point where they're in autonomous vehicles and so on. But I I should say also that in any if you have any rules for being effective, being efficient, being fulfilled in life, there are always going to be exceptions to those rules, people who do entirely the opposite and have good results. But you have to look at the survivorship, the the survivorship bias, and the percentage win rate. So what I mean by that is, for instance, I could say, if you want to have a a a risk mitigated career where you still have the potential of making a lot of money, you should have a college degree. And we don't have to get into this right now because I know there's so many of your guests, by the way, who are anti college. There are. It was refreshing to me. No. There are a lot of guests who are anti college, but the point I wanna make is that it is a it is a mistake and a it's you're falling prey to a number of logical fallacies. If you look at and I see this happening in Silicon Valley all the time because it's romanticized, people say, oh, like Mark Gates, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Therefore, they're successful. They make it a causal thing, whereas Zuckerberg is a mutant in the best way possible. I mean, that guy would have succeeded no matter what. Right. Maybe not if he was born in Rwanda or whatever, but aside from those factors, school, no school didn't matter. Like, that guy was destined for a number of reasons to produce something incredible. But we we can we can stay away from I know this is a hot button issue. But but Peter Thiel addresses it really nicely, and it was a way that I hadn't heard him say it before, which is that he's not saying this is the case. He's not saying nobody should go to college. He's saying he's basically saying, view this as a viable option, which, for years or decades, nobody did. Correct. So No. Exactly. So he's with the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, they are selecting very, very handpicked individuals who display promise as entrepreneurs who are wise beyond their years, technically savvy beyond their age to provide seed funding to. But as you as you pointed out, he went to a great school, went to law school, and there are those who would say, well, he's a hypocrite. And of course, as you pointed out, he says, well, I'm not saying it applies to all people, but that it can be a viable option not to go. So Peter's brilliant guy. He's not, in this case, falling prey to any logical fallacies. But where I was going with that is that back to the start small, I think as a general policy for the the highest percentage of getting on base for your at bats, starting small is the way to go. So, like, even even with, like, writing, for instance, like, you say you've written 4 books now, but, you know, you started off building up with a blog. You know, you've done a TV show, but I'm sure you were shooting videos before then. You you you experiment. That's kind of the essence of what you do. You know, you you coined the phrase lifestyle design because you design involves experimentation. Mhmm. And not not only that, but so let me I'll correct a common misconception, which is and I think this comes across really clearly in the new book, but some folks look at what I do and say early stage tech investing, or they might look at what you do. And I don't wanna speak for you, but I'll speak for me. And, I get questions all the time, like, how have you developed your risk tolerance? You're such a risk taker. How do you risk you you have to risk a lot to make a lot. Like, how do you walk yourself through that? And I just have to kinda laugh because I am really risk averse. I think about risk mitigation at all times. You know, I I don't know if you remember, but, I guess this was August 2014, I wanna say. I was on your podcast, and we talked about this. And I said the key to successful entrepreneurship, at least for me, has been not taking risks, but mitigating them way in advance of starting a business. Yeah. A 100%. And what's what's amusing about that is many of the folks who would be put on an entrepreneurial, podium as freewheeling, crazy Mavericks. Richard Branson. Oh my god. That guy's crazy. Yeah. He just throws caution to the wind and builds all these businesses. No. Not at all. He's written about it even explicitly. His first step is capping his downside before he even takes a stab at anything, capping his downside. Let's look at airlines. Notoriously risky. Okay. What did he do? At one point, he ends up stranded at an airport and Best story, by the way. Yeah. And he's going to be late to get into his destination. So he just he calls up a chartering company, finds out the price. So to charter an airplane, something like I'm making this up. Like, $20.25100. Alright. He has 10 seats at $250, and he's covered the cost. And he and he he scribbles on a piece of of cardboard, I think it was, Virgin Airways or whatever it was at the time, $250 to x. Gets 10 people to chip in, and they get to the they they fill up the plane. They get to their destination. And this woman walks up, and she goes it's something along these lines, but she's like, You know, I'm really happy with that experience. If you guys added some drinks or something like that, virgin could be a thing. And so he starts thinking about it, and he's scratching his own itch. This is another really important one. It's so obvious in a way, but so just so neglected by most folks. They try to come up with a sophisticated Harvard MBA business plan. It's like, no, what is a pain in your ass? Fix that. And so he's like, all right. British Airways, I've had a terrible experience. I think I can do better. Alright. Well, airlines are expensive. So he gets in touch with, I think it was, Boeing to figure out how he can lease a plane but return it to them later with no penalty if it doesn't work out. So from the very beginning, a, he tested it really small. No risk in this particular okay. Maybe he doesn't fill a few seats. Who cares? $25100 total, risk capital. And then he gets a lease where he's not gonna get stuck with this incredibly expensive piece of machinery if it doesn't work out. And so this is the man with the lion mane, Richard Branson, the guy who kite surfs with tiger sharks. That guy is crazy. No, he's not. He's he's he's an adventurer, but from the very get go, he's he's risk mitigating, and starting small as a way to do that. And another point that Seth Godin makes, which I think is very, very important and I'd never heard someone put it this way. He said, Big is safe. You can hide if you try to sell to everyone. Your failures aren't as clear. Your shortcomings, your bad planning for the business isn't as clear. But if you're trying to please 10 people and 3 of them are like, that was a s**tty flight. Richard, I'm not happy. You have nowhere to hide. You get direct feedback very clearly when you're trying to, say, deal with 10 people or a 1000 true fans. And instead of going after music fans, you're going after, I have no idea, Emo music fans who happen to be vegan. Okay. You can find that those people on Facebook, and you can target them. Well, in in your Seth Godin chapter, he mentions his most popular blog post ever was the fail 10 blog post where he basically says, if you can get if you can sell to 10 people who are gonna tell 10 of their friends, and then nothing else ever happens, don't do that business. But if they then tell their 10 friends, then okay, you might have something. So that's a great easy way to test an idea. And he's Seth's just a genius, so they're all geniuses here. We keep saying that over and over again. But you've you've you've self selected, the the geniuses. But I but I noticed a couple other things that that many of these smart and intelligent people say across all these different fields. One is the concept of, saying no. Being able to say no. And you had to learn this yourself once you started to hit a a degree of fame after the 4 hour work week. You started to get proposal after proposal, pitch after pitch. You were doing investing. And saying no is is difficult. Because people say to you, like like, Tim, why don't you have a coffee with me? It'll just take 15 minutes. It never takes 15 minutes, but you still feel bad saying no. Definitely. Yeah. This is this is something that I've had to, as a lot of people, learn as a result of great pain and confusion and anxiety. The the say no, I think, is is best put, and we were chat we were talking about this just before, but Derek Sivers, the the the hell yeah or no. And this came about for him. He had committed to something in Australia, and he was in the US. And it got closer and closer to the the departure date, and he had to buy a flight. And he really just didn't wanna go. A number of things had happened in the interim, and he'd he'd committed to this many months before. And he was talking to a friend of his on the phone, and I think her wording was a little more explicit. But she said, well, it sounds like to me you're at a place in your life where you need to either have a f**k yeah or no. And he's like, God. You're right. That's exactly what it is. So the and this is a quality problem to say, or a quality problem to have. And I think it's worth saying that in the very beginning, when you don't have a leg to stand on and you need to punch above your weight class and like me, when I first landed in Silicon Valley, I'm driving around in my mom's piece of s**t, hand me down minivan, and making no money can barely cover my rent, that's when you say yes to a bunch of things. Which, by the way, I think Derek even mentions in Sure. In the beginning. No. No. Absolutely. 18 or when you're young or when you're not even look. Even me now, if I go into a new career area, say yes to everything. And Chris Sacco also says it in in your interview with him. Go to all the don't even be invited to the meetings. Just go to them. Yeah. Go to all the meetings with that the higher ups have at your company, which he did at Google, and just volunteer to take notes. And they're like, what? And then they'll, 9 times out of 10, let you sit there. So Derek I'm glad you brought that up. So in the beginning, he said, he was in a band, and I know we're jumping all over the place, but he was in a band just starting out. I think he was still at the Berkeley School of Music. And one of his bandmates was like, Ugh, got offered this gig. It's a pig show. It was literally like a state fair where they're selling pigs, and he's like and, Derek was like, What? You got a paid gig? And he's like, Yeah. It's like $20 up in Vermont. You want it? I'll give it to you. And he's like, Hell, yeah. I'll take it. Just starting out, and he goes to that pig show, kicks a*s at the pig show walking around with an acoustic guitar, and it led to all these other gigs down the line. But then, as you said, you get to a point where all of a sudden, you are defending against inbound, and you start to become reactive. And now everyone's everyone else's agenda becomes your agenda. And rather than rather than forging your own path and deciding with clarity what you want to do, you are now choosing from a multiple choice question, which is, oh, s**t. Of these 20 grenades in my inbox, which one do I wanna handle? And at that point, you need to develop the ability to deflect, ignore, and say no. But it doesn't it it might not be kind of a formula such as, oh, when I get so much inbound, I have to start saying more noes. It's what you said earlier. When you kind of have clarity about what you wanna do, also, like, Derek Sivers initially wanted to be on stage. Then it was it was still, if it's not a hell yeah, say no. But many more things were a hell yeah then. So when you're excited about something and you're beginning something and you want opportunities, you're gonna have a lot more hell yes in general. Totally. Yeah. No. I agree. And yet and yet, though, I think a lot of these people in in your book do attribute ultimate peak success to the to learning how to say no because that's what eventually does happen. Yeah. I think getting to a place where you are doing well and you are good at what you do requires a lot of yes. To get to a point where you are great or the best at what you do or 10 x, let's say, someone who is good in terms of financial rewards or otherwise, then you have to be a master at saying no. And the thing is I think Steve Jobs, who was not a very happy person at the end of the day I mean, so so I think that he's put he's put he he's turned into a demigod more often than he should be. But from a product development standpoint and marketing standpoint, absolute genius. But innovation is saying no to a 1,000 things. I'm paraphrasing, but something along those lines. And when you get to that point and this happened for me, and the person who catalyzed it was mutual friend, Kamal Ravikant, brother of Naval. I reached a point where I'd been doing the tech investing. It started off as as as a as a very part time side gig, and, suddenly, I I found myself a number of years later spending probably 50% of my time on it. And I enjoyed it, and I was good at it for whatever reason, well, I know one of the reasons is I had a lot of very good guidance from people who knew what they were doing. You surrounded yourself with the 5 good people. Exactly. I surrounded myself with the 5 good people, people like Chris Sacca, who's now a billionaire. It's crazy since I knew him beforehand, or Naval Ravikant, similar story. These are people who are the best at what they do, at least in retrospect, certainly. And about 2 years ago, two and a half years ago, it stopped being fun. It stopped being fun for a host of reasons. But I found that the the oversupply of money, the faddish nature of tech, and how it had taken all on a lot of attributes of Hollywood that I do not like, they're they're redeeming qualities of Hollywood too, were becoming a drag on my energy. I was it was not it was not giving me energy. It was consuming energy in a very succubus like way, in a bad way. I think, also, there comes a point when you start to move from ambition to meaning. And I think, like, with you with your writing, I, as a reader of this book, have it it impacts me much more than you simply investing in another company. Now that's selfish of me to say, but but if I'm having if there's impact on me from this book, there's impact on a lot of people. So you're having impact from this book more than investing in the next lift or whatever. Well, yeah. I mean, a 100%. Right? So I had this conversation with a Kamal, and I said, look. I'm in an environment now where there's so much money. There's so many players. If I'm gonna continue to invest and not get my face ripped off, if I'm gonna do a good job and actually make money and be responsible, I probably need to start a fund or raise capital or do fill in the blank. And that would require me putting more of a full time focus on that. And he said, please don't stop writing. And he's and he he he made I I really owe him a lot of credit. He said, well, I've seen people come up to you at speaking events who've lost, say, a £100, £200 on the slow carb diet, or had a a transformative experience with the 4 hour work week, and they're crying because the experience had such an impact. He said what you just said. It's like, you're not going to have that effect as one of 20 investors in a company. By the way, the only reason I just said is because he had recounted the conversation with me, so I was just plagiarizing. Well, it's it's it's worth plagiarizing. And if I step out of the line, someone else take my place. And so the question that I found myself asking of myself was, where am I not replaceable or the least replaceable? Again, maybe I don't have an incredible unique opportunity to change the world, but if I did, somewhere in my life, somewhere in front of me, what would it be? And it came back to the writing. So so that was the impetus for ultimately putting a very up a very public, indefinite vacation slash retirement notice related to start ups. And what I also found, I think this is this is important, is that in the beginning, like you said, moving from success to meaning or achievement to appreciation, there's a point where perhaps what creates success for someone and I hate I dislike the word success, but let's just let's just say financial stability. Something that creates financial stability comes out of a place of excitement. You create something you're really excited about, and you're driven by dopamine and and adrenaline. And in my case, now that I was responding to increasingly these manufactured emergencies from founders, which would say something along the lines of and this is a complete bluff, by the way. 99 times out of a 100. Hi, Tim. Got your email from so and so. We shouldn't have given it to them in the first place, by the way. Hey. I got your email from so and so. I'm cc'ing my 3 founders. Okay. Problem number 1. Now, 4 people I don't know have my email address. We're closing tomorrow. We're oversubscribed, but maybe we could squeeze you in for 25 k. We have a lot of respect for what you do. Please find our deck attached. Please let me know by the end of today, a, b, c, d, and e. Now I'm going straight into a culture of cortisol, and it is just a stress driven, fear of missing out FOMO ride that I'm signing up for. And when you have to spend, say, 7 to 10 years with each company for the big ones to hit, I'm signing up for 7 to 10 years of that type of manufacturing. Right. Because a good company is gonna you you don't even want to exit. Because let's say the stock market's going up 7% a year, but but a good start up is improving 50 to a 100% a year, at least in the starting stages, you never want them to exit. So it's going to take 7 to 10 years. It's a long time for you to say goodbye to your money. It's a long time. It's a long time, and and I'm comfortable with the illiquid nature. But the other thing that happened just from a purely pragmatic fiduciary standpoint is that because those private companies are, generally speaking, an illiquid axe an illiquid asset, meaning I can't sell them, even though I started off being very conservative, meaning using a barbell strategy of sorts like Nassim Taleb would say. I had 90% of all of my liquid assets in, say, cash or cash like equivalents. Really boring, safe stuff, for the for the most part. And then 10%, that was my gambling money. That was my high risk, high reward, high volatility startup binary betting pool. So I had 10%. Well, if you put in 10% and then it's locked up for 10 years and let's say you happen to get lucky or you're good or both, and that 10% swells to 80%, 90% of your net worth, the picture has dramatically changed, but you can't take the chips off the table and rebalance your portfolio because you can't sell them. And so step number 1 in that is stop bleeding or stop making bets. So all those things coincided at once and helped me to say no. But what I found for myself, and this is the most maybe generalized takeaway from that, is that I don't do moderation well. I think it's very important for people to know what where they can do moderation and where they're binary. For instance, some people, they play 10 minutes of World of Warcraft. They're in for 20 hours. And but at the same time, maybe they have a lot of control over drinking. They can have 2 drinks and stop. Okay. Someone else might have the opposite, experience. And for me in start ups, I knew that if I if I told myself, and a lot of VCs try this and they most of them fail terribly, I'm only gonna do a deal a quarter. I'm only gonna do 5 deals a year. Whatever the rule might be, they still end up vetting every company. It's the same amount of work. No. It's very true, and I tend to be with that 0 or a 100. So for me, it's it's a 0. If I get a if I get an introduction, my auto response says I'm no longer doing angel investing. It's an immediate archive. And and I think, again, to to bring it into the book, first off, your chapters on how you invest and what you look for in investing were very good. I highly recommend those chapters. We don't have to go over the details of them, but I I recommend them. But, what you mentioned before about the fear of missing out leading to higher cortisol, leading to higher stress, Stress is probably the the the worst thing you can do for your health, as you mentioned, and it's directly related to cortisol. And you mentioned a lot of the times or a lot of these people mention kind of the fear of missing out and how to avoid that, how to kind of disconnect or take vacations from that fear of missing out. I think that's an important thing that is throughout the book. Oh, a a 100%. I think that And and it's funny how disconnecting being key to success in a populated world. Yeah. So It's a superpower. I mean, where in a world where everyone is connected, the ability to strategically disconnect is a superpower. It really is. And, it makes me think of someone you already mentioned, BJ Novak. And something that stuck with me since that conversation, there were there were a number of things, but one of them was if you find yourself saying to yourself, but I'm making so much money, that's a sign that you're doing the wrong thing. You're in the wrong place, or you're staying with something that that needs to change. If you're like, this is really badada badada, but I'm making so much money, that means you're you're in the wrong place. Another thing what she said, was that before they would start writing a season of The Office, they would have 2 or 3 weeks of this blue sky areas where they would just throw ideas against the dartboard. So, again, it would attach less meaning to any one idea, and it would you know, nobody's kind of missing out on the critical writing. They're just kind of having fun, and that that set the tone. And I think by doing that, by by having these blue sky sessions or practicing your creativity, which then brings I mean, you're in the book too when we talk about I didn't wanna mention, but, yes, I am one of these super geniuses that you're viewing your book. And and, the idea of lowering your standards to get started. And, I'm glad I'm the representative of lowering your standards. No. No. But this is one of the most important concepts in the entire book because lowering your standards, Neil Strauss, a time New York time bestselling author, has a very similar philosophy. You talk to some of the top filmmakers in the book, same philosophy. You talk to some of the CEOs who have managed Salesforces, same story. Low quotas so they're not intimidated to pick up the phone. How does that translate to creativity? Well, if you think that you have to spew genius word for word and finished prose out of your mouth or out of your hand onto a page, you're not going to get started. Most people are gonna procrastinate. So, well, why don't you why don't you tell your version of it? I'm sure your fans have heard this before. But But but, wait, I I wanna, along those lines, you're Robert Rodriguez, chapter, who is great great movie director. But in his first movie, Machete, he, you know Mariachi. Mariachi. Yeah. He he basically, gives himself this creative constraint that's forced on him because he doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't have a lot of resources. He lists everything he owns Yeah. And says I'm gonna use them all in the movie. And then he does it in Spanish, almost to take the pressure off himself. Like, it doesn't have to be great. And then, of course, it's great. Yeah. And and launches this amazing career. But Mhmm. Almost by doing these these weird creative constraint, so he doesn't pressure himself on, you know, fear of missing out on the Oscars or whatever. Mhmm. He takes himself out of the running, and that puts him in the running. Definitely. And another thing he does is he will keep his budgets super low, although he has infinite access to capital. He's a superstar. Right. But he he keeps his budgets low so that he can maintain the highest degree of creative control. Yeah. And the Rodriguez list that you mentioned is such an amazing idea. Just to give you guys some color. So from Mariachi, entire movie. There's there's so many stories about this movie, but entire movie made for $7,000. And the only reason I think it was 7,000. The only reason it cost that much is because he insisted on using film. And, so he'd be like, alright. What do I have access to? Okay. My friend owns a school bus for whatever reason. Alright. We're we're gonna have a we're gonna have a fight scene in the school bus. Alright. My cousin owns a bar. Great. We'll have something happen in the bar. That would be the first scene with the bad guys. And, okay. My buddy's sister has a pitbull. Great. The pitbull's in. And then he it's like somebody had a turtle. So the turtle's in. He's like, people will think we had an animal handler. They'll think we had a huge production budget. And it goes down the list, and then he wrote the script around what he had access to. And, there's so many great stories about it. There's also one from his, and this this comes back to what we were chatting about earlier, but the the turning of weakness into strength or trying to use a lens through it. You see opportunities when problems present themselves. They came across so powerfully with so many of these people. And with Robert, I think it was from Dusk Dusk till Dawn. I don't know if you remember this. 1st day of shooting. That's a movie that made me fall in love with Selma Hayek. Side note. But, 1st day of shooting, and, there's supposed to be this pyrotechnic display or an explosion that goes off. And the explosion causes this fire that rages out of control and destroys, like, 3 quarters of the entire set, everything. And people are crying. People are collapsing onto the ground, holding their heads in their hands. And, I think it was his assistant director came over, and they're like, you thinking what I'm thinking? He's like, yeah. It's charred. Looks crazy. Let's just keep shooting. We'll figure out a way around it. And, a lot of these seemingly genius stylistic choices and he talks about interviewing some of his heroes like Zemeckis and so on. He's like, that weird staccato thing that you did with blah blah blah, such a genius stylistic choice. And the guy's like, no. We ran out of money. We had to high we had to fire the effects guy. But, again, that segues into a lot of the guests here. It seems like they confront a problem, and then they lean into it almost. Like, how can I turn this problem into something something good? And you've done that in your own life. Like, look at the Tim Ferris experiment, the TV show. Mhmm. You you it it it was I don't wanna call it a problem. Whatever. It it was on initially truTV. A few people saw it. It got got canceled. Yeah. The entire the entire kinda start up within Turner got shut down, so everything got tabled. And so you could have been really depressed about it, and instead, you kind of leaned into the problem. You felt it was good. You you got the rights for probably relatively pennies on the dollar and put it on iTunes. It was the number one show on iTunes for for weeks. It was a great, great show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and it takes practice. I mean, these whether it's generating ideas, as you well know, it takes practice. Whether it is seeing problems, trying to find the opportunity that is hidden in a problem, that takes practice. It's and you you wanna do that in the small things. Because if you practice on the small things, you will then perhaps be able to use it when their s**t really hits the fan or you have the big things. But if you if you read about it and you're like, okay. Academically, I get it. Now I'm gonna use that next time. There's a gigantic problem to contend with. You're never gonna be able to to to perform under those circumstances. I find for me, what it involves is, again, taking your step out of the narrative. Like, oh, he said, she said this. I've gotta respond this. Like, that's kind of the narrative that's going on. You're in taking a step out of that for a second and saying, okay. Look. This is a problem, but, probably, if I have to write out it to something good could come out of this if I if I just if I just germinate on it for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And and germinating for me is most productive. This is another pattern, that, is is across multiple guests. Journaling of some type. Oh, yes. So many people mentioned journaling. I didn't even include that on my list with the things that they're they're all mentioning how they do morning pages. Yeah. You should interview Julia Cameron who first suggested morning pages. Hopefully, she is. She feels fondly about it because I've probably sold 10,000 copies of that book. The The Artist Way is the is the name of the book, but I I bought the companion. Where is it? It's actually right here in my bag sitting next to me. Just so you guys don't think I'm bulls**tting. See, there it is. Right there. It is. Morning pages. Morning pages. Yeah. Morning and Tauren. And, that was the morning pages specifically were introduced to me by a mutual friend, Brian Koppelman. Yeah. Incredibly successful screenwriter, producer, cocreator of the hit show, billions that's on right now, which is fantastic. And, he said he recommended morning pages probably to a 100 people over time and then 10% or 10 people. So 10% tried it. And of those 10, it's like 9 of them have had multiple hit shows and multiple screenplays sold and so on. So freezing your whether it's goals or neurosis, anxieties on paper is very powerful because it oftentimes, in the case of a problem, allows you to see how overblown or ridiculous it might be, how trivial it might be, and and or how solvable it is, and last, perhaps the opportunity that is is somehow buried within it. So I find journaling a great way to stop chasing my tale in my own head. Because once I put it on paper, it's harder to justify a lot of it. Great too is, you know and and I've spoken to Brian about this, how he will journal, but then not look at the pages for 3 years because that's very technically what she suggests. But I like how you takes you have 2 sections of this. You take your journal page, and then show it, and then break it down, like, what you're thinking about. And I thought that was very useful. Like, that kind of gives people permission to say, you could just put anything on this page, and it will work. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and it's a practice. It's just like anything else. It's like doing the kettlebell swings. You need to do it routinely. Let's stop to take a quick break. We'll be right back. So, So, Tim, we've been hitting so many of the things that, are on my list. I'm gonna kinda quickly go through some of these others, and then I wanna get to some specific quotes that I've outlined in the book. And as you can see again, I ran out of 3 pads because I kept putting pads on pages I wanted to, to talk about. So we can't talk about all of it, but all of it are to to random ones. But first, it seems like, an author that everyone recommends is, Milan Kundera. I'm surprised how many people recommended, like, either Life is Elsewhere or, you know, Unbearable Lightness is Bing. Bing. It comes up a lot. Particularly for artists, it comes up a lot as a recommendation specifically for people who are creators or seeking to be creative. They're And he has a very interesting he's very structurally interesting. Like, he'll he plays with the form of the novel very well. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that, that's one that comes up a lot. Siddhartha comes up a lot by Hermann Hesse. Very short read. And, to these course, stoicism comes up a lot because that's, you're you're a big, fan of stoicism where you have Ryan Holiday on. It was written kind of contemporary stoic books. Yeah. That that comes up a lot. There are a number of documentaries that I've that I'd never heard of prior to interviewing these people that came up multiple times in retrospect, like the Up series. It's sometimes called 7 Ups from the UK where they revisit the same people every 7 years. I think they started when they were in preschool, perhaps, or elementary school and have gone all the way up to now 50, 60. And, the the book that one of the books had a huge impact on me and led down the rabbit hole. So I'd say half of the guests I've interviewed have come from other guests as introductions, which has been really fun. Like Jocko Willink came via Peter Attia, MD. So you wouldn't necessarily expect that intro to come through a doctor, but it did. And I recall at one point having a neuro 2 things happened almost simultaneously. So a neuroscientist or neuroscience PhD who had worked with Adam Ghazali, who's an incredible MD PhD who I've interviewed, someone who worked in his lab recommended to me a book called Radical Acceptance. And right off the bat Tara Brach? Yeah. Yep. Tara Brach. So right off the bat, I just hated the title, and I was very judgmental about it. But the recommendation Why? Did you it's because it seems like a nice idea. Ratified that. It seems like a nice idea, but it seemed like it might be some type of guide to resolving marital disputes with tactics that would be platitudes and not particularly practical. They've just I I've I've seen many books in the self help or plus relationship genre with titles like that that I have not particularly found useful. This was different, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt because it came as recommended from a hardcore scientist. I was like, okay, they have a pretty low woo woo tolerance. Let me take a look. And this book by Tar Brock, very well known Buddhist and meditation teacher, just shook me up my foundation and was the first book. I remember reading it in LA. This is probably, 2 years ago, maybe a little bit less, a year and a half ago. And I had it on Kindle, and I read it one chapter per day at night when I was sitting in the bath with Epsom salts because I was training a lot of the time. And by the time I got maybe 15 or 20% into the book, I had so much work that I wanted to do or experiments that I wanted to run-in my own life that I stopped reading. The highlights were basically 80% of the book. And around the same time, I interviewed Maria Popova of Brain Pickings who's just a phenom. I don't know. How she digests the amount of information she does and turns it into really good intelligent prose just blows my mind. She mentioned that she meditates, which is probably the most consistent pattern of all across everyone I've interviewed, some type of mindfulness practice. She mentioned that she listened to a guided meditation every day, and it was the exact same meditation on a daily basis. And it was the the the smile meditation 2010 from Tara Brach. And I got Tara Brach. I know that name. And that led to then interviewing Tara Brach. But it's, it it's it's really been phenomenal to see how the pieces fit together because you might look at, say, a Jocko and then a Tar Hebrauach and think they have nothing in common. But the the best at what they do in any field, if you take the the a players from, does not matter. The the Highland Games, carpentry, ballet, and palliative care, they will have more in common with one another than they do with the c players in their own field, in my experience. So it's it's been really cool to see how you can you can make a general study of the habits and beliefs that produce excellent even though they're in an entirely different fields. They're they're sort of inter interchangeable. I think that's really one of the main takeaways from this book is that you're interviewing people from all walks of life, but there's maybe one thing in common, which is they've all achieved some level of peak performance, and they do have enormous amounts in common. Like, one thing one thing you ask many people is, what's the advice you would give the 30 year old version of yourself? And most of them actually say nothing. I would not tell that person anything. Yeah. There there there are 2 most common replies to that. So one is I wouldn't tell them anything because the mistakes I've made and so on, all of it has led to where I am, and I'm happy where I am. And all a lot of them occur after the age of 30. Like, a lot of 27 year olds have anxiety. Oh, I haven't achieved Mark Zuckerberg status yet. And yet, you know, you take a guy like Seth Seth Godin when you ask him the question. He says, oh, I was still 9 years of pain, you know, after 30. Oh, sure. Or Dan Carlin in hardcore history. I mean, he's one of the most respected podcasters in in the world at this point, but that came relatively late in his career. And it was great that he says he points out right right up front, I'm not a historian. I don't have a PhD in history, but just just go do it. You you nobody has to give you permission. Or or, by the way, maybe the reverse is true. You you're given permission. The society has already given you permission. Now you just have to do it. Yeah. Exactly. It's like you don't have to you don't have to fight with the shadow puppets of the peanut gallery. I mean, these these invisible detractors you think are gonna shoot you down. And, Naval, this is I don't know if this is in in the book, but I remember Kamal. So Kamal and Naval. So Kamal told me at one point, and Naval said to him, and if I always did what I was qualified for, I would be pushing a broom somewhere. And that is another that is another commonality. Right? You take these people, and they're doing they're almost always attempting things they're completely unqualified for, at least at the surface level. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, what was his most his most profitable film for him personally? Twins. And so if you I didn't know that. Yeah. Twins because everyone saw him as the Terminator. He wanted to do a movie that showcases comedy, and they're like, what? The musclehead Terminator is gonna do comedy? No one thought it would succeed. Everybody thought it would flop except for 1 or 2 kind of Confederate collaborators who wanted to do this project with them. And so they did a deal where they they sacrificed or they they gave up their upfront salaries, which would have been a huge portion of the budget in exchange for massive back end participation, meaning profit sharing. And it just killed because it was an uncrowded bet. Well, you know, another person who who kind of set states this theme in a different way is Scott Adams, when he basically says you have 2 choices. You could be, you know, in the top 1% of a field, which is incredibly hard, or you could be in the top 25% of two fields and combine them. Yep. And you're probably gonna be the the best in that intersection. That's something that I've written about quite a bit as well, but he exemplifies it perfectly with Dilbert. He said that I wasn't the best artist, and I wasn't the funniest guy, but I became, like, one of the funniest artists out there, and Dilbert is this huge success. Yeah. Yeah. Completely. He also talks about the, I guess, the 6 elements of comedy, which are fascinating. That was great. Yeah. The cuteness, the, absurd. It's it's, it's, any talks about Calvin and Hobbes and how it's set up and so on. But the that advice is also echoed by, Marc Andreessen. So billionaire, the coauthor of the Mosaic web browser. I mean, tech innovator, engineer extraordinaire, now one of the best known and most successful investors on the planet, very much talked about the same thing. He said that the the CEOs who often end up doing the best, and I'm paraphrasing here, and he he's actually referred back to that piece by Scott Adams saying that the CEOs who tend to hold the course and be able to perform are not in the top 1 percent in one area, but they are in the top, say, 20% of 2 or 3. So they they are Steve Jobs is a great example. I mean, he's he's extremely good at product, extremely good at marketing, extremely good at perhaps a few other things. And it was the combination of those, including odd aspects that you wouldn't have seen as valuable at the outset, like calligraphy. He took a calligraphy course early on, which informed the typefaces they used for the very first word processor they developed, led to this c**ktail of elements that enabled him with Woz to create people. Well and and I'll I'll refer to Scott Adams' advice again. He basically said if you don't necessarily have your 2 things, here's an idea, which is get in the top 25% of public speaking, because that combined with just about anything else Totally. Put you in the top of that anything else. Absolutely. And I've I've And Warren Buffett also, who, obviously, you don't interview, but Warren Buffett has said the same thing. What really helped him was taking the Dale Carnegie course on public speaking. Yeah. I consider it his best investment of all time. Right. And Who did mention that? One investor did say, Paul Mark Andreessen. Oh, okay. Yeah. Said that the bet quote of Warren Buffett saying the best investor you can make is in yourself, and here's that's coming from the best investor in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it's, it's what I like about what I like about the philosophies and tactics and tools is that it makes it pretty clear to me, at least, and I think this is part and parcel. It's it's a it's a it's a cousin of what we were just talking about conceptually, where you can be in the top 20% of three things and have this disproportionately impressive outcome because of that odd combination. But if you if you want 10 x results, right, you want to 10 x your results, it doesn't necessarily require 10 x the effort. And it's sometimes the smallest little tweaks that can have the largest outputs. Like one one that comes to mind, which is kind of a weird one, is this device called the chili pad, which came up multiple times with Rick Rubin, with this super coach and athlete Kelly Starrett and a few others, which is a sheet you put under your own bedsheet through which there's a bedside device you circulate water at an exact temperature. It's somewhere between 55 degrees, and I wanna say 85 degrees. And you you determine your ideal sleep temperature, and you don't have to fuss with air conditioning and blankets and so on, particularly with someone else in the bed where that's no one is ever running the same temperature. It's a huge pain in the ass, generally. And, that is one of these devices that, as an example, one of my friends who is an extremely successful designer, he's been part of several home run startups, and his Achilles heel has always been sleep. He's had difficulty with sleep. He's had onset insomnia just as I did for a very long time. And How many hours of sleep do you think a person needs? In very individual. So I know people who who genuinely need no more than 3 to 4 hours of sleep. I get 8 to 9. And if I I mean, I'm 8 to 9. I noticed Casey Neistat in the book here is 3. Yeah. So I always wonder about the variance. There's a huge degree of variance, and that is reassuring to me because there are some books or programs or fill in the blank who paint a sort of a consensus picture of excellence. And they're like, hey. Successful people wake up early, man. You sleep when you're dead. Blah blah blah. Right? And, there are plenty of people, like Jocko wakes up at 4:30 every morning. Amelia Moon wakes up probably around the same time. Casey Neistat needs 3 hours of sleep. But then there are people who are like, yeah. I don't really even feel awake until 11 AM. And, you know, morning routine, what's that? I, like, stumble out of bed looking for coffee, and I check my email in the shower. Like, I'm a mess in the morning, but I focus on a few important things. Here's how I prioritize. And, therefore, you don't have to you don't have to get everything right. You just have to get a few things right, and you can tailor those to your constitution. I'm not a morning person, nor do I get 3 hours of sleep. I like my sleep, and, that can work. Right? You know, I wonder, like, given that there's been there's all this commonality between all these people, even though there's some variance, like you mentioned just in sleep, I wonder how much of this is selection bias in the sense that, okay, these are the people who succeed. There might be other people who are the best in the world at the top 25%, but they're the janitor now at the local school. And so we don't we don't really know the answer, but Yeah. You know, it is is it and that you know, and you see in the book here that I have, I've I've highlighted, like, a 1,000,000,000 things. How much can you actually apply all of this advice? You say you have applied, you know, much of the advice. Yeah. I have. I think that so there there are few questions there, and I'll I'll answer each one. So the first is, how do you know, like you said, how do you know this isn't Good to Great? Or Good to Great showcases all these companies, then a bunch of them crater. Right. And at the time, they were Or some of them was like Kodak, or I don't know. I forgot what you said. The exact companies, but these these companies were held up as paragons of excellence in all these different places, and then they crater a few years later. Part of my selection process for not just the podcast, but inclusion in this book, including, because about I would say half of the book is is stuff that did not come from the podcast. So new recommendations or elaborations from past guests, but also some new faces, like, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Square, etcetera. And the selection criterion, there were several criteria, but one of them was trying to focus on people who had succeeded in a large way. And that can be defined different different ways at least 2 or 3 times. So these are if once you're lucky twice, you're good. Well, like, 3, 4, 10 times, you're really good. So it's almost like they they know how to learn the language of excellence. Correct. And they have they have an approach. And as odd or as weird as it might be, they have some approach that they can describe, and they they may have rules. So that's that's part of it. The the second is how on earth so the second question is how on earth do you apply all of this? Good god. I mean, there's there's a lot of stuff. Like, we were talking earlier. Okay. A lot of people wake up, and they think of the things that they're grateful for. And Tony Robbins elaborates a little bit more. I wanna think of some easy things to be grateful for. And then you're talking about, you know, you have a a jar, the jar of awesome, where you put the things that were awesome that happened at the end of the day. And other people say, I go to bed thinking, what were the 5 things that were great today? Mhmm. And so there's a lot of kind of affirmation, a lot of kind of reminders of what I'm grateful for or what I'm happy about the past. But, again, if you just do that all day, then you're just kind of, like, practicing all these methods all day. Yeah. You can overwhelm yourself with with too much prescription for sure. So my recommendation would be that you dip in and out of this book and viewing healthy, wealthy, and wise as the three legs of the stool of life that hold it up, you need all 3. So I would suggest either you can do one of 2 things. Focus on one area to maximize. So healthy is put first because I think it is the foundation for everything else. If you don't have health, the rest will fall to pieces or has no worth. So you could just focus on the healthy, for instance, and pick one primary be primary change in exercise and one primary change in diet. That's pretty easy. So maybe that is kettlebell swings, like we discussed 2 or 3 times a week. And so carb diet, let's just say, could be gymnastic strength training. So working on your your shoulder extension and your thoracic mobility and experimenting with exogenous ketones, which are these synthetic ketones, which are kinda crazy and interesting. Okay. And that's it. That's literally all that you implement. So I'll actually give you 3 options. So that's option number 1. Option number 2 would be taking one suggestion from each section, healthy, wealthy, and wise, which I think is probably logically the easiest way to go for a lot of folks. Just take one habit or quote or principle that you can stick on your refrigerator or on your bathroom mirror as a reminder. So just choose one from each, and that's it for at least a 2 week period. A last approach, which, has proved to be effective for me and I never would have guessed it, is, actually recommendation from Cal Fussman, who wrote the, what I learned column for Esquire Magazine or one of the primary writers for decades. He's interviewed everyone. I mean, Gorbachev, you name it. Everyone. And he at one point lost all of his notes for a story about becoming a sommelier for, I think, it was a week. He had boxes and boxes, hundreds of pages of notes, and they were in a basement. It flooded. All the pages turned black with mildew. No notes. And he was he was having a conversation with this novelist who was famous for constantly being on drugs and alcohol. He said, Harry. That's the guy's name. Harry, how can you remember anything when you're always high or drunk? And Harry is this really grizzled, old, old, salty dog. He says, the good s**t sticks. Well, the good s**t sticks. And what I mean by that is what I noticed, for instance, and I I talk a little bit about this in the book, but I flew a researcher out from Montreal to work with me on the book in person for my own psychological well-being. I could have done it remotely, but I wanted a person around. And one morning, he came up to me at the refrigerator. He was grabbing some food, and he said, how are you so calm? And I was taken aback by the question because on book deadline, I'm usually a mess. I'm usually a stress case, super tightly wound, quick to anger. And he said, why are you so how are you so calm? There are a 1,000,000 things flying around. This book is gigantic. There's so many moving pieces. You have family visiting. The car broke down. Your dog just got injured and lacerated, and you're having to do all sorts of care with the vet. My dog got injured. On and on and on. And what I realized was in the process of reviewing these profiles dozens of times, I just started to incorporate a lot of the belief systems and behaviors without writing it down, without journaling, without doing any of the stuff that I always do. You know, and I'll even suggest one other way to use this book, which I've already started using it for. There are so many great quotes, but the quotes are in context. So if if, you know, they're in the context of you dealing with your issues, asking, let's say, Amanda Palmer, who's dealing with her issues. Mhmm. You know? So Amanda Palmer, famous singer. Married to Neil Gaiman. You know, and she said this one thing, say less. And she I I think she was using that to discuss arguing or Conflict resolution. Yeah. And so but I just started making my riffing on that, making notes of when less is more. So I'm that was my 10 ideas list for the day. And I think you could take many of these quotes and kind of just take your own interpret they're they're valuable quotes because these people have spent lives living this advice. So what's your own you know, everybody should come up with their own take on a particular quote. This is a useful exercise. So now which gives me an opportunity to maybe just open randomly and find some random quotes. So, hopefully, I have I have some good ones. I think, I'll skip Peter Thiel because we we talked a lot about him. Here here's one I didn't even know who she was. Tracy Denonzo. Denonzo. This is a great one. When you complain, nobody wants to help you. Mhmm. And I see so many times people complain about their life, and it really is like a turn off. And I feel myself when I'm complaining. I hate myself. Totally. And and Tracy, she has a condition called she was born with spina bifida, which is a a spinal issue that causes incredible pain. And the quote is actually her citing a quotation from Stephen Hawking, who said, like, when you complain and he is as right as as much right as anyone to complain, I suppose. We said, when you complain, no one wants to help you. And this has led me to do all sorts of things, like a 21 day no complaint experiment where I this is borrowed from, actually, I wanna say a pastor or a pastor named Will Bowen, but putting on a bracelet. You'd use a rubber band. Every time you complain, you switch it to the other wrist, and you start the clock over. I'm trying to go 21 days without complaining. And it is a life changer. It's a complete life changer. So that, as a rule, that's something that you could put on your mirror so you see it when you're brushing your teeth every morning. You know? And and and a little lower in that page, you talk, and you say, I was turned down 27 times when pitching the 4 hour work week to New York City publishers. And I was just curious. Were you really rejected 27 times? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I still like 27 publishers? Oh, yeah. Well, there are definitely 27 imprints within the publisher. So different divisions of these big publishers, and they were not they were not always very tactful or delicate about it. I mean, who knew the title of the 4 Hour Worker could make some people so angry? And what again was the original title? The original title was, it was lifestyle hustling or something terrible. Yeah. Like yeah. It had a drug dealer in it. Oh, yeah. No. No. That's right. The very original one was drug dealing for fun and profit because that was the tongue in cheek name of the class that I the guest lecture that I gave at Princeton twice a year. Yeah. Drug dealing for fun and profit. I like the 4 hour work week much better. Yeah. I do too. Everyone's that deal. And, honestly, the 4 hour work week was, in a way, luck because some of the big retailers, the buyers for some of the big retailers had drugged in for fun and profit. There's no way we're gonna carry a book that has that title. And so the publisher came back to me. I really love drug dealing for fun and profit. And they said, sorry. It's playful. Like, good news, bad news. Retailers are interested, but we need to change the title. And that's and then a bunch of Google tests and things later, 4 hour work week. Okay. Here's another quote. Luis von Ahn, another oh, CEO of Duolingo, which I'm familiar with, but I wasn't familiar specifically with him until until this. He said the value of I don't understand. And I I, myself, think that's incredibly valuable. I've seen that in the best negotiators and businessmen. You have to use that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's so powerful in its simplicity. And just, like, being able to disconnect in a world that is always connected, I think it's an undervalued superpower. And, And also admitting you don't know something, which is very hard. You're not allowed in most situations, you're not allowed to admit you don't know something. Like, if you're on TV, let's say, as a pundit, you can't say I don't understand. Yeah. Not only that, but, I mean, a a very high percentage of human beings, high profile or not, are making it up as they go along, and there's a lot of bulls**t out there. So if you look at, say, Malcolm Gladwell and his dad who just say, I don't understand. Oh, yeah. He was another one who mentioned that. I don't understand. Explain that to me. I don't understand. Explain that to me. And his dad is a mathematician, so he had he has Malcolm, but he had zero intellectual insecurities. Just didn't even did not could not care less if someone thought he was an idiot. So he'd be like, I don't understand. Explain that to me. And, let's see. I think Alex also talked about that Bloomberg. He's like, sometimes the most important question is the obvious seemingly dumb question that's just hidden in plain sight. It's okay. With this subprime lending crisis, why would anyone lend money to people they know can't pay them back? Like, that's that's it seems like maybe a naive question, but, like, that's a good question to ask. And then boom. All of a sudden, you have an entire hour long story about answering that question. Let's see. I'm gonna find I'm just randomly hitting different pages here. Oh, yeah. I think this is, this is also a valuable one that I've heard in the past. Justin Barreta, who I did not know, had best advice ever received, don't force it, which is so true, I think. I think if somebody's, like, desperately trying to find that first customer, it's probably not a good idea. Yeah. You know, desperately trying to, raise money or, I don't know, lose a £1,000? Like, you gotta back off on on something. Yeah. The forcing it, I think, applies to so many areas, whether it's a relationship, I think, is often the case, creative work, writing. It's it's always depressed and amused me how if I let's just take 2 different instances for blog writing, blog post writing. They're posts that I will labor over intensively for months in some cases. And they're so detailed, and I think they're they're they're so valuable, and they're greeted with a collective yawn. And then Do you get depressed after those? I get depressed after those. I get I get I get a little down. It's just such I mean, good god. That's a lot of energy and time expenditure. But then there are other posts where it's like something will happen. I'll be like, you know what? That really pisses me off. And I'll write this impassioned short post that takes me a half hour to put together, and it's one of the most popular posts. I think it was one of the comedians you interviewed who said, figure out what makes you angry. What makes you angry. Yeah. Which is great. It's actually great creative advice. And it and instead of looking at anger as a negative thing, you can use it as fuel. You can use it as a tool. Poe Bronson, who's a well known writer, when I asked him ages before I ever wrote the 4 Hour Workweek, I asked him during a q and a what he did to deal what one should do to deal with writer's block. And he said, write about what makes you angry. And What makes you angry right now other than the the total length of this podcast? What makes me angry right now, and this is gonna be sort of ironic in a way, is what makes me very worried more than angry, but it also gets me angry, is the insidious creeping self censorship and destruction of the first amendment in the United States right now. The fact that we have brilliant people being disinvited from college campuses because they may offend or trigger a tiny group of students on campus. That is a an extremely dangerous trend, and, I think that is more terrifying than anything else we have. So that's like a that's like a macro political thing, which I agree with. But what about what what personally makes you angry right now? What personally makes you angry? Or scared? I mean, I'm not dodging here, but I personally think about this a lot, because I get the sense the hypersensitivity entitlement, of those who are using kind of mock outrage or, like, genuine hypersensitivity to attack others on the Internet. It's something I run into all the time. And, it so it does personally affect me for sure. And that, I think, is is, oh, okay. You know, I I'll tell you something that that personally bothers me quite a bit, which is also very counterproductive, and that is the the consequence less labeling of other people as racist, sexist, fill in the blank, est. Those are very powerful words, and there's currently no penalty for people throwing them around in a very haphazard way despite the fact that it can destroy careers. It can destroy marriages. It can just leave a wake of destruction, and these these things are thrown around very, very lightly. It's like people just walking into a neighborhood and shooting a gun in all directions. It's very, very, very, very dangerous. And, I had And that and that's the easiest way to discount someone's work. Like, someone can look at you and say, okay. This is easy for the white male in America to say. And then suddenly, they've just discounted all of your work and research and and thousands of hours of interviews and preparation Yeah. Because of some you know, something that's not necessarily meaningful to the work you've done. Yeah. It's it's it's sort of this intellectually dishonest, McCarthyism like censorship that is is really insidious. And so that type of kind of Fahrenheit 451 self imposed burning of books, which, by the way, folks who haven't read that in a while, you might remember it as an a oppressive government and totalitarian government that that orders the burning of books, but it started with people themselves burning books that would that would offend. And so so to that end, you know, why don't you we're looking at some quotes. One of my favorites that I use a lot on the Internet when I'm engaged The World Wide Web? The World Wide Web. Love you. Exactly. Is, from Mae West, and the quote is those who are offended easily should be offended more often. Well, which brings us to Kevin Kelly, who actually is never offended by anything. No. And he says, this is so fascinating, this quote. Productivity is for because everyone's obsessed with productivity. And he but he says productivity is for robots. What what humans are gonna be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences. And it's such a great point because once we master some area of productivity, we can then start outsourcing it, which is your whole point in the 4 hour work week, really. And but there's always questions to be asked. Better to have a good question than to have a good solution. Yeah. Well, I for for a lot of reasons. Right? Because you can you can get the best answer to a bad question. And, ultimately, that could, at best, not serve you, and at worst, could cause a lot of harm or steer you in completely the wrong direction. So garbage in garbage out definitely applies to questions, which is part of why the podcast has been so much fun for me. I get to think about questions, and I get to study them, and I get to look at what a James Lipton on Inside the Actor Studio does versus a Larry King versus a Charlie Rose, versus a fill in the blank, versus James Altucher, versus it's just fascinating. I I said that is a that is a great part about podcasting is that you could then suddenly start to see the subtleties in different interview styles and learn to appreciate them, which I never was able to to do before. Yeah. And, I mean, Tony Robbins, has said, and, he's he's he's just endlessly, increasingly fascinating the more I get to know him, the quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. So the maybe underappreciated aspect of studying questions is that it questions don't just apply to interacting with other people. The questions you ask yourself are arguably even more important. So, like, what's an example today? What question do you ask yourself? Look. And by the way, I'm asking a dumb question because you also can give us advice. There are no dumb questions. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. I don't think it's a dumb question. Question I asked myself today, was, am I hunting antelope, or am I hunting field mice? And this is actually a Oh, that came from, Newt Gingrich. Yeah. Who I disagree with on almost every level, but, nonetheless, is excellent at certain types of political negotiation, persuasion, and so on strategy. So that quote is in reference to the lion's ability to maybe survive by hunting field mice, but probably ultimately starving even though they're these very rewarding little, in modern terms for us humans, dopamine hits. So it's like, are you the way I translate that is being busy or being productive, and they're not the same thing. And that was just with respect to planning what I want to do with this book, planning with what I want to do on the podcast. You know, am I focusing on the trivial money to keep myself busy, which provides an illusion of progress, Or am I really taking the time to figure out which antelope, I am going to pursue, I e, the the critical few? So I was thinking a lot about that today. Well well, and then we'll go to your chapter here, my favorite thought exercise, fear setting, as opposed to the commonly used goal setting. So what do you think you're afraid of that you haven't yet fully attempted because you're afraid you're gonna fail? You've succeeded at so many things. If you for instance, do you ever consider, I'm gonna write a novel now, and that could it's a different type of writing. It could totally bomb. Are you is that a a fear of yours? Novel, I have a healthy respect for the difficulty of novel writing. I don't think I will write a novel, anytime soon. I would say writing and producing and, ultimately, creating a feature film is something that I have some degree of trepidation about. I would like to do it, but I have some degree of trepidation. And most of the things that I would, I say, fear are not related to projects, And that's in part because I I approach it now very much the way that Scott Adams does in the sense that with his blogging you know, his wife was like, why are you blogging? It's in a very minute incremental gain financially. It consumes a lot of time. But he was looking at not just the blog for the obvious benefits, but for the skills and relationships he would develop through that project even if the project failed. So for me, I almost always try to rig the game just like Scott Adams would recommend so that I win even if it fails. Like podcasting? Okay. So the podcast folds after 10 or I quit after 10 episodes. I got better at asking questions, which helps my research and my thinking. I got better at reaching out to people above my pay grade to try to engage with them. Do do you kinda work through that exercise? Like, okay. I'm gonna try podcasting, and then you write out the line, if this fails, I've at least gained x. I absolutely write it down. Yeah. I'll I'll brainstorm. The question is, how could I win even if this fails? And it usually relates to skills or relationships that I develop. And, the fear setting is very that that's what I do before or when I have decisions that are causing me stress or potential moves, changes that are producing stress in my life. I do this exercise of fear setting where I write down all of the worst case scenarios, all of the the worst things in detail that could happen if I chose to do x or quit at y, whatever it might be. Then that's that's in the first vertical column. I'll just I'll just take a piece of paper and put two lines down so I have 3 columns. 1st column, all the worst things can happen. 2nd column is what I could do to minimize the likelihood of each of those happening. And then the last column is how can I get back to where I am now if those happen? And once I go through that, it it disarms and derisks the entire proposition. And I usually realize that the fears are extremely unfounded and that if there is any damage, it's either trivial or reversible or both. I think that's, that's really good advice. I'm gonna find at least one more. Oh, this was actually a really interesting one from Eric Weinstein who runs, Teal Capital. Consent and this is related to what you were talking about earlier, what your what your fears are about what's happening in society. In general, consensus is how we bully people. And, you know, that's that's a scary thought because we do let you know, you think of democracy as this kind of god given, philosophy that enlightened people in the 1700 came up with. But there's a dangerous side to it, which is that consensus can really harm the people who don't agree. Absolutely. And and the point he makes is that for for those things that are that are purely and defensively fact based, irrefutably accurate. You don't need a consensus. There's no algebra consensus because you don't need it. And yet but there is a Washington consensus. There is a fill in the blank consensus. And whenever you hear that, it is a means of social pressure and manipulation to be outside of that consensus if you are holding a minority opinion. I think the good thing there, though, is as a creator or a creative person, moving outside the consensus, and trying to to create either a business or art out of the minority, that's where you get into, okay. I'm gonna, you know, build a following from a smaller group, the people who aren't in the consensus. Oh, totally. And you mentioned Kevin Kelly. Of course, he is well known for writing one of my favorite essays called 1,000 True Fans, which, relates to this in a lot of ways. But Eric and I so we were talking about my my what scares me or what the fears are. We're we're discussing these social justice warrior, outrage porn culture that that you see most visibly, I suppose, in social media. So he and I actually debuted a term in that interview that I've been that I've been saw that. Yeah. That I've been thinking about. So I like experimenting. Words are weapons, and what you the words you use dictate how you think. And I've experimented with creating words and trying to inject them into the popular lexicon a few different times. So there are phrases like lifestyle design, which was successful. Then there was another one that I threw out there about, I wanna say, 9 months ago, something like that, to see what would happen. And I said, I propose a new word, telladultery. I love that. It's fine here, but go ahead. When you watch a TV show solo that you've agreed to watch with a significant other. Right? Tell adultery. Okay. My my daughter Yeah. Just committed tell adultery on me. She finished watching we were both watching the series lost, which is from 10 years ago, but we were both watching it together. She just went ahead and finished the whole series. Yeah. Tell adultery. And that that had some legs. And I remember the moment I was with my mom in an airport overseas, and she had a magazine. And she said, oh, this is a really funny word. You'll like this. And it was telladultery. And I know I'm the 1st person to use it. So if you do a search, it it brings up my Twitter post. That's funny. Now now that's for s**ts and giggles for for actual to actually help steer and a national conversation and change the problem of people throwing around racist and sexist and so on with no fear of repercussions and damaging other people in significant ways, I came up with the term bigoteer. So a bigoteer is obviously a bad thing. That's why it's composed the way it is. And these are people who label other people bigots for personal gain, whether it's more clicks, whether it's Yeah. It's the cheapest way to get, to get a following. Yeah. Exactly. So so so if that term gains traction and people begin to use it, someone could then have on the Wikipedia page, for instance, is a well known bigoteer, and that is not a bad thing. That is not a good thing. It's a it is a clear consequence, and I think potentially could act as a disincentive for people to to behave in such a reckless fashion. But we'll see. But that is that was the first that was the first debut of Bigoteer was in that interview with with Eric Weinstein. So so in the why section because I I appreciate your suggestions in the health section. I'm probably gonna apply them. The wealthy section, people should definitely read all of your tips on angel investing and all the interviews with great investors. In the why section, what and and we'll even close it out with this. What would you say is the advice that you were able to immediately apply where you noticed kind of what you call force multiplier results. Like, there was a big effect on your life when you apply because wisdom is more subtle. It's more subjective. Yeah. There are there are a lot. Pick 1. I'll pick 1, but I'll just give you the first one that comes to mind. They're Derek Sivers is The s**t that sticks. Yeah. The s**t that sticks. Derek is a treasure trove as are a lot of the folks, but, I will go to BJ Miller. So he's the since we mentioned him already, he doesn't require a lot of explanation. His answer for what would you put on a billboard was don't believe everything that you think. And I think that is extremely profound. And the way I translated that for myself, particularly after some of the, psychedelic work that I've done over the last 3 years, was a phrase. So I translated that into an actionable phrase for myself, which was don't retreat into story. Because I, and I think almost everyone, have stories that are disabling. They are narratives about why I'm not good at this or why maybe I'm a bad person because of x, y, or z, or I've always been this disabling thing, and I'm I will always be this disabling thing. And and or I will I will start to fantasize in some way about someone else doing something malicious to me. Like, they they didn't show up on a conference call. This is an an exaggeration. I'm not quite this I totally wound. Yeah. Okay. So it's like someone didn't show up on a conference call, and I set everything aside to be on the conference call. That person disrespected me because they're probably doing a, b, c, d, or e. All made up. It's just imaginary. Yet I wind myself up and and and and create this problem. So when I start going down one of those imaginary routes, I will my pattern interrupt is don't retreat into story. Don't retreat into story. And I think it's hard because sometimes it's a blind spot. Like, sometimes you don't really know what it is you're thinking. That's exactly right. Which is which is part of the reason that using, say there are a million ways to go about it. But whether you listen to a Tara Brach 2010 smile meditation, which is a recording, or use an app like Headspace or do some type of meditation or mindfulness practice, which 80 plus percent of the people in the book do on a daily basis so that you have at least a a tiny fraction of your day which is spent observing your thoughts. I do this in the morning just as a warm up so that I'm less reactive later. That helps you to develop the self awareness. Or you can go, Oh, s**t, I know what I'm doing. I actually see what I'm doing. Let's not get swept away of swept away with this wave of, like, pending rage that I'm manufacturing for myself. So, you know, don't retreat into story. Alright. Well, Tim Tim Ferris, I don't know I don't know how long has this podcast been. This has been, like, one of my longest podcasts ever. This is, I think, 3 3 hours, maybe maybe longer. Tools of titans, The tactics, routines, and I didn't even read the subtitle before this. The tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world class performers. Congratulations. I really do think this is I've as you know, because you've been on my podcast a bunch of times, I've enjoyed all of your other books. I enjoy the Tim Ferriss Experiment. I enjoy your podcast. This is this is really the best book. I as you see, I've outlined a 1,000,000,000 things. I'm gonna plagiarize it. Just without even giving you credit, I'm gonna plagiarize it constantly. I'll give talks about it without mentioning your your name at all, and, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. I flew out here to get you on the podcast. And I I really appreciate it. I always love hanging out, and I've learned a lot from you. I mean, you're in there for a reason, and I have recommended your chapter and advice to a lot of the other titans in the book, quite frankly. Excellent. So I I always appreciate and value time with you, man. So thanks for having me on. Thanks, Tim. For more from James, check out the James AlticeSure Show on the choose yourself network at jamesalticere.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today. Hey. Thanks for listening. Listen. I have a big favor to ask you, and it will only take 30 seconds or less, and it would mean a huge amount to me. If you like this podcast, please let me know. Please let the team I work with know. Please let my guests know, and you can do this easily by subscribing to the podcast. It's probably the biggest favor you could do for me right now, and it's really simple. Just go to iTunes, search for the James Altucher Show, and click subscribe. Again, it will only take you 30 seconds or less, and if you subscribe now, it will really help me out a lot. Thanks again.