WEBVTT - The Productivity Mindset with Tim Ferriss 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:11.879 Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in 0:00:11.960 --> 0:00:15.480 Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio. 0:00:16.560 --> 0:00:19.639 This week on the podcast Yes I Know, I say, 0:00:19.680 --> 0:00:23.200 I have an extra special guest every week. This week, 0:00:23.280 --> 0:00:27.560 I have an extra extra special guest. Tim Ferris, best 0:00:27.600 --> 0:00:32.159 selling author of numerous books, including The Four Hour Workweek, 0:00:32.680 --> 0:00:37.280 host of the Tim Ferris Podcast. He's got a bajillion 0:00:37.400 --> 0:00:42.400 downloads on that. He's written five number one best selling books, 0:00:42.440 --> 0:00:46.600 including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new 0:00:47.000 --> 0:00:51.040 card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot 0:00:51.040 --> 0:00:55.280 of buzz. He co created this with another gaming company 0:00:55.360 --> 0:01:00.520 called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of 0:01:00.520 --> 0:01:04.920 his books or conversations or ted Talks or what have you. 0:01:05.800 --> 0:01:09.640 I find him to just be such a thoughtful guy. 0:01:10.400 --> 0:01:15.559 He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment, 0:01:15.680 --> 0:01:19.679 the Tim Ferriss Experiment, where he's constantly trying to figure 0:01:19.720 --> 0:01:22.880 out how his body works, how his psychology works, how 0:01:22.920 --> 0:01:26.760 his emotional world works, and has tried a variety of 0:01:26.800 --> 0:01:32.240 different things and sort of fastidiously documented what does and 0:01:32.360 --> 0:01:36.319 doesn't work for him. That's what led to his productivity book, 0:01:36.319 --> 0:01:38.960 The Four Hour Workweek, It's what led to his health 0:01:38.959 --> 0:01:42.080 and fitness book, The Four Hour Body, On and on. 0:01:42.280 --> 0:01:44.880 He just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out 0:01:46.080 --> 0:01:49.000 does the AB test, figures out what works and what doesn't. 0:01:49.680 --> 0:01:52.240 I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you 0:01:52.360 --> 0:01:57.560 will also with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferris. 0:01:57.920 --> 0:01:59.600 Thanks for having me well here. 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:02.680 It's nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I 0:02:03.120 --> 0:02:06.120 don't have to explain how this rolls. What I want 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:10.320 to do is I'm excited about your book. I know 0:02:10.400 --> 0:02:12.240 you have a new game out that we want to 0:02:12.280 --> 0:02:15.880 talk about. But I have to start by delving into 0:02:15.960 --> 0:02:20.760 your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelors and East Asian 0:02:20.800 --> 0:02:24.800 studies from Princeton. What were the original career plans? 0:02:25.800 --> 0:02:30.359 So that was after a major switch. So the original 0:02:30.440 --> 0:02:34.160 career plan was actually neuroscience. So oh, no sentence major 0:02:34.840 --> 0:02:36.799 And there are a few reasons I wanted to focus 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:40.520 on that. I have Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and hereditary bipolar 0:02:40.600 --> 0:02:41.120 and so on. 0:02:41.360 --> 0:02:45.360 So wait, we could have a whole nother discussion on neurodivergency. 0:02:45.400 --> 0:02:51.359 And I was kind of fascinated by a lot of 0:02:51.440 --> 0:02:56.520 what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage 0:02:56.600 --> 0:03:02.520 and operate around whatever deficits you're working with. Some deficits 0:03:02.600 --> 0:03:07.400 come with separate surpluses. But how significant were all these 0:03:08.040 --> 0:03:12.079 deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology 0:03:12.160 --> 0:03:13.600 of just navigating life? 0:03:13.919 --> 0:03:18.160 Well? The depression piece was a huge challenge for most 0:03:18.200 --> 0:03:21.720 of my life, and thankfully that has changed with a 0:03:21.720 --> 0:03:25.520 couple of different approaches and different tools. And that's one 0:03:25.560 --> 0:03:29.560 of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was 0:03:29.600 --> 0:03:35.040 someone in the Department of psychology but within the focus 0:03:35.040 --> 0:03:37.160 of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time, and I 0:03:37.200 --> 0:03:40.360 was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because 0:03:40.400 --> 0:03:44.960 he was focused on the role of serotonin in sleep 0:03:45.000 --> 0:03:48.760 and mood regulations of the neurobiology of depression. He also, 0:03:49.520 --> 0:03:52.800 and this was early days, he had an interest in 0:03:52.840 --> 0:03:58.080 psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my interest in psychedelic compounds 0:03:58.080 --> 0:03:59.800 goes back a very very long time. That would have 0:03:59.840 --> 0:04:03.560 been nineteen ninety five ninety six, but I couldn't personally 0:04:03.600 --> 0:04:06.240 do I realized and it is important and it is 0:04:06.400 --> 0:04:11.400 necessary at this point in time. The animal testing on rats. 0:04:11.560 --> 0:04:14.920 He used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies, 0:04:15.280 --> 0:04:19.719 but I couldn't euthanize these rats after doing various tests, 0:04:19.720 --> 0:04:22.880 and it wasn't actually torture of any type. I just couldn't. 0:04:23.320 --> 0:04:25.440 I couldn't be hands on with that at the time, 0:04:25.560 --> 0:04:28.599 so I switched to East Asian studies, but with a 0:04:28.600 --> 0:04:32.600 focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in 0:04:32.640 --> 0:04:37.080 the realm of let's just say cognitive neuroscience, but more 0:04:37.120 --> 0:04:41.080 on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to 0:04:41.080 --> 0:04:43.520 be a research subject in a bunch of his studies, 0:04:44.120 --> 0:04:46.200 no kid, yeah, just to see what that was. 0:04:46.160 --> 0:04:49.680 Like at the time. Had he already won the Nobel 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:51.599 and like I think it was one to oh two. 0:04:51.560 --> 0:04:54.240 So no, not yet, not yet. So this was super 0:04:54.240 --> 0:04:58.200 early days, still very well known on campus. But I 0:04:58.200 --> 0:05:01.760 guess it would have been Greenhall. They were pretty boring, 0:05:02.160 --> 0:05:04.880 to be honest. The tasks hitting space bars or something 0:05:04.920 --> 0:05:08.040 to indicate when you see a flashing green box in 0:05:08.040 --> 0:05:09.800 the upper left hand corner of one of these very 0:05:09.800 --> 0:05:12.840 old school monitors. But that was one of the ways 0:05:12.839 --> 0:05:16.839 that I earned whatever was five dollars an hour pay 0:05:16.920 --> 0:05:17.279 for something. 0:05:18.320 --> 0:05:21.000 Was he ever in Princeton I kind of remember he 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:25.000 was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California, so. 0:05:25.120 --> 0:05:27.280 Maybe yeah, he bounced around, but at that time. 0:05:27.560 --> 0:05:32.040 Princeton, huh, really really interesting. So I get the transition. 0:05:32.839 --> 0:05:35.280 I guess if you're going to pick some space related 0:05:35.360 --> 0:05:40.280 to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that. 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:43.159 Yeah, and I had been an exchange student. My first 0:05:43.240 --> 0:05:45.960 real trip outside of the US was as an exchange 0:05:45.960 --> 0:05:49.840 student at age fifteen to Tokyo, Japan, amazing where I went 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:51.160 to a Japanese school for a year. 0:05:51.200 --> 0:05:52.120 Are you fluent it all? 0:05:52.320 --> 0:05:56.320 I am? Yeah, I still speak read less so right, 0:05:56.440 --> 0:05:59.320 because you really have to practice that to keep it up. 0:05:59.560 --> 0:06:03.080 I can still speak and read Japanese. And then got 0:06:03.080 --> 0:06:03.839 a couple of others. 0:06:04.200 --> 0:06:07.479 I have a friend, Noah Smith, who is physics and 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:11.480 economics like a killer double major, and he's spent summers 0:06:11.520 --> 0:06:16.159 in raves Kyoto says, Tokyo, you have to go when 0:06:16.720 --> 0:06:18.680 that must have been fascinating at fifteen, that has to 0:06:18.760 --> 0:06:19.800 be a little overwhelming. 0:06:20.320 --> 0:06:26.280 Yeah, it's a fascinating very for someone who grew up 0:06:26.279 --> 0:06:27.040 on Long Island. 0:06:27.320 --> 0:06:29.839 And that's why you're an East Hampton kid, right. 0:06:29.720 --> 0:06:33.120 Yeah, And at that point only spoke English, very alien. 0:06:33.480 --> 0:06:38.719 That has the benefit of being incredibly alien but incredibly safe. 0:06:38.880 --> 0:06:44.040 And the additional benefit that people tend to speak, if 0:06:44.080 --> 0:06:46.800 they speak at all, terrible English, which means you have 0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:50.200 to learn Japanese. Huh So, in contrast with a lot 0:06:50.200 --> 0:06:51.719 of if you go to Spain or if you go 0:06:51.800 --> 0:06:55.200 to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian because people are going 0:06:55.240 --> 0:06:58.040 to default English, that just doesn't really happen in Japan. 0:06:58.200 --> 0:07:02.040 So not mentioned the fact that I got there before smartphones, 0:07:02.080 --> 0:07:05.799 so I couldn't just escape to texting with my friends. 0:07:06.080 --> 0:07:06.640 I was stuck. 0:07:06.640 --> 0:07:09.440 It was or to use Google Translate to actually talk to. 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:12.360 Me didn't exist. Yeah, you were stuck, and that was 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:16.320 a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason. Actually, 0:07:16.320 --> 0:07:20.040 another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had 0:07:20.120 --> 0:07:23.080 the one of the strongest, if not the strongest, East 0:07:23.160 --> 0:07:27.440 Asian studies programs for at that time, I was most 0:07:27.480 --> 0:07:29.760 interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would have taken 0:07:30.440 --> 0:07:32.240 even if I had majored in neuroscience. 0:07:32.320 --> 0:07:35.480 Huh So you graduate in two thousand, I'm kind of 0:07:35.560 --> 0:07:39.960 fascinated that very quickly you start writing The Four Hour 0:07:40.000 --> 0:07:43.600 work Week, which was published in seven like that is 0:07:43.840 --> 0:07:47.120 a shockingly short period of time. You're in your twenties 0:07:47.640 --> 0:07:51.120 when you're selling what essentially becomes one of the top 0:07:51.160 --> 0:07:53.480 selling books of seven I mean it was on every 0:07:53.480 --> 0:07:55.600 bestseller list. I don't have to tell you this, but 0:07:55.640 --> 0:07:58.600 I want listeners to understand. So the first question is, 0:07:59.320 --> 0:08:02.760 what on earth motivated you five years out of college 0:08:02.840 --> 0:08:04.920 to say I think I'm going to write a book. 0:08:05.480 --> 0:08:11.360 Yeah, so, I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything. 0:08:12.520 --> 0:08:14.680 This is a commitment I made to myself after graduation, 0:08:14.840 --> 0:08:17.560 longer than an email ever. Again, that was the promise 0:08:17.640 --> 0:08:21.480 because my senior thesis I felt almost killed me. So 0:08:21.800 --> 0:08:25.800 I didn't want to write anything. But one of my 0:08:25.840 --> 0:08:29.120 professors at Princeton who really changed the trajectory of my life, 0:08:29.400 --> 0:08:34.000 a professor named ed shaw Z Scchau were still in touch. 0:08:34.640 --> 0:08:39.280 He was a former competitive figure skater, took companies public, 0:08:39.400 --> 0:08:42.160 one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He 0:08:42.200 --> 0:08:45.320 did everything taught at Harvard Business School, etcetera, etcetera, ETCETERA 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:49.560 real polymath, renaissance man, and he taught a class called 0:08:49.679 --> 0:08:54.079 high Tech Entrepreneurship, which was electrical engineering four ninety one. 0:08:54.080 --> 0:08:55.720 But you didn't need to be an engineer. I wasn't 0:08:56.480 --> 0:09:01.680 and that class is what convinced me to move west. 0:09:02.040 --> 0:09:04.480 Keep in mind the timing. This was just before the 0:09:04.520 --> 0:09:09.720 dot com inclusion to chase my riches and engage in tech, 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:13.800 and in two thousand and one, after that startup I 0:09:13.880 --> 0:09:17.480 joined had imploded, I started my own company and I 0:09:17.559 --> 0:09:20.560 was bootstrapping it. I didn't raise any outside financing, and 0:09:20.640 --> 0:09:23.600 so Ed asked me to come back and talk to 0:09:23.640 --> 0:09:27.680 students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year 0:09:27.800 --> 0:09:31.560 to do this short lecture to students, and in one 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:35.600 of the feedback forms after years of doing this, one 0:09:35.640 --> 0:09:38.400 of the students, who was not being serious, put in 0:09:38.400 --> 0:09:41.840 his additional comments, I don't understand why you're teaching a 0:09:41.840 --> 0:09:43.959 class of undergrads and graduate students. Why don't you just 0:09:44.000 --> 0:09:45.920 write a book and be done with it. And I 0:09:45.960 --> 0:09:49.439 had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time, 0:09:49.800 --> 0:09:53.480 so I would get these half baked ideas for chapter 0:09:53.600 --> 0:09:56.520 titles or content or whatever, and I couldn't get to sleep, 0:09:56.559 --> 0:09:58.640 and I would just jot it down and the notes 0:09:59.160 --> 0:10:01.360 from the classes as I was teaching, which changed over 0:10:01.400 --> 0:10:06.079 time to track my experiences, and these insomnia Middle of 0:10:06.120 --> 0:10:10.360 the night notes formed the backbone of something. Sent it 0:10:10.400 --> 0:10:13.960 to a mentor of mine who was an author and 0:10:15.040 --> 0:10:18.640 unbidden without asking me, was like, I think this is 0:10:18.679 --> 0:10:20.880 a great idea. Here meets so and so meet so 0:10:20.960 --> 0:10:25.600 and so introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping 0:10:25.760 --> 0:10:29.120 in mind now looking back twenty eight or twenty nine, 0:10:29.160 --> 0:10:33.400 publishers meaning imprints said no, and then Crown bought it 0:10:33.520 --> 0:10:34.800 for next to nothing. 0:10:35.240 --> 0:10:39.600 I love all the examples. I'm a big William Goldman fan, 0:10:39.760 --> 0:10:44.319 whose book and Ventures in the Screen Trade Amazing introduced 0:10:44.400 --> 0:10:48.760 the phrase nobody knows anything into the popular culture. And 0:10:48.800 --> 0:10:52.520 he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars, 0:10:52.640 --> 0:10:56.720 all the studios passed on Raiders? Was it paramount that 0:10:56.760 --> 0:10:59.720 passed on et because hey, we have this other alien 0:11:00.040 --> 0:11:03.320 adventure called Starman, nobody remembers today, and. 0:11:03.679 --> 0:11:07.640 You could go to other you can go anywhere fields Starbucks, 0:11:07.679 --> 0:11:09.400 everybody passed on Starbucks. 0:11:09.040 --> 0:11:13.280 Quid Games. The author couldn't get it sold for ten years, 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:16.800 ultimately had to sell his laptop because he was so broke. 0:11:17.679 --> 0:11:20.120 I love the John Wick story. You have, like this 0:11:20.840 --> 0:11:25.600 top action hero could not get Hong Kong Gun Fou 0:11:25.720 --> 0:11:30.400 made in Hollywood ended up funding it himself along with 0:11:30.440 --> 0:11:33.000 I'm trying to remember the other actress who kicked money 0:11:33.040 --> 0:11:35.920 and it's now a two billion dollar franchise. So the 0:11:36.240 --> 0:11:40.320 best selling book that all the imprints passed on not 0:11:40.400 --> 0:11:43.760 a surprise at all. It is a throw everything against 0:11:43.760 --> 0:11:46.000 the wall business model and we don't care and we'll 0:11:46.000 --> 0:11:47.839 see what sticks. And they missed this. 0:11:48.480 --> 0:11:52.360 Yeah, it's it's a hits driven business in some ways, 0:11:52.440 --> 0:11:55.280 very similar to the angel investing later, I mean sure, 0:11:55.440 --> 0:11:59.720 type of kind of parallel distribution. And what's been wildest 0:11:59.760 --> 0:12:02.160 about Four Hour work Week, which is really a book 0:12:02.200 --> 0:12:06.560 on increasing per hour output, which is why it found 0:12:06.600 --> 0:12:10.120 a toe hold in tech and then the first New 0:12:10.200 --> 0:12:14.520 York Times coverage had Mark Injries and the famed entrepreneur 0:12:14.600 --> 0:12:17.960 and now venture capitalists talking about it. He wants to 0:12:18.000 --> 0:12:19.800 work eighty hours a week, but he wants to get 0:12:19.840 --> 0:12:22.760 each of those hours to produce ten times as much 0:12:22.760 --> 0:12:26.920 and that's the basic underlying theme of the book. So 0:12:27.920 --> 0:12:30.079 what's wild about it is almost all the tech tools 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:33.480 that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even 0:12:33.520 --> 0:12:37.160 in twenty seventeen, when all of that stuff was irrelevant, 0:12:37.160 --> 0:12:39.640 the principles, the frameworks and so on. It ended up 0:12:39.640 --> 0:12:45.080 being on the Amazon Top ten most highlighted books of 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:46.199 all time list. 0:12:46.320 --> 0:12:48.920 Meaning from the Kindle version that's so highlight. 0:12:48.679 --> 0:12:51.120 Yeah, in twenty seventeen, so that would have been eight 0:12:51.240 --> 0:12:55.880 years later when all of the tech tools were just 0:12:56.040 --> 0:12:59.000 dinosaurs at that point, which has been it's been cool 0:12:59.000 --> 0:13:00.160 to watch. 0:12:59.480 --> 0:13:03.080 So I have I'm thumb through the book over the weekend. 0:13:03.200 --> 0:13:06.719 I read it way back when, and I'm revisiting an 0:13:06.760 --> 0:13:08.680 old copy which I should have brought in to have 0:13:08.720 --> 0:13:11.240 you signed. And my wife says, four hour work week. 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:15.160 What's She's an art teacher, fashion illustration and design. She's like, 0:13:15.200 --> 0:13:18.920 what's that about? And I say, I know this is 0:13:18.960 --> 0:13:20.840 not going to be a conversation that's going to go 0:13:20.880 --> 0:13:24.640 any place productive, So I just say the Parato principle. 0:13:24.960 --> 0:13:28.400 She's like, what's that. Well, eighty percent of the value 0:13:28.440 --> 0:13:33.600 we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from 0:13:33.679 --> 0:13:38.320 twenty percent of whatever that data set is. And she's like, oh, 0:13:38.480 --> 0:13:41.160 is that true. I'm like, yeah, kind of really seems 0:13:41.200 --> 0:13:44.000 to be true. Oh okay, And I know immediately like 0:13:44.280 --> 0:13:47.840 this is not her sort of book, but how grossly 0:13:47.960 --> 0:13:51.400 am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just 0:13:51.960 --> 0:13:53.840 reducing it to Parado points. 0:13:54.120 --> 0:13:55.960 I think if you had to pick one principle in 0:13:56.000 --> 0:13:57.719 the book, that's a good one, that's it right to 0:13:57.800 --> 0:14:05.079 focus on. Now, it assumes a few things that sometimes 0:14:05.080 --> 0:14:08.080 get missed, right, so people can jump to strategy before 0:14:08.160 --> 0:14:12.880 they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something. 0:14:13.440 --> 0:14:16.680 So the definition phase of that book, where you're really 0:14:16.760 --> 0:14:20.880 getting very clear on which target you are aiming for, 0:14:20.960 --> 0:14:25.000 I think is a might sound strange, but an often 0:14:26.400 --> 0:14:30.520 under emphasized precursor to then doing an eighty twenty analysis. 0:14:30.720 --> 0:14:34.120 Because for eighty twenty or preto principle analysis, you're looking 0:14:34.160 --> 0:14:36.720 at which twenty percent of the inputs roughly right, it 0:14:36.720 --> 0:14:39.520 could be ten, it could be one percent are producing 0:14:40.040 --> 0:14:44.200 the outsized percentage of the returns. Now, that could be 0:14:44.280 --> 0:14:47.440 looking at your customers if you run a business, right, 0:14:47.480 --> 0:14:51.800 it could be looking at your physical exercise, what's producing 0:14:51.800 --> 0:14:53.840 the adaptations. That's a little trickier to do, but you 0:14:53.880 --> 0:14:55.880 can figure it out. You could look at it with 0:14:55.960 --> 0:14:57.920 medications too. I mean it's like there are a lot 0:14:58.000 --> 0:15:02.160 of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo pareto notice this 0:15:02.840 --> 0:15:09.360 in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution. 0:15:09.880 --> 0:15:13.320 It applies all over the place. And actually Richard Koshkoch 0:15:13.360 --> 0:15:17.800 has written a lot on this subject under the moniker 0:15:17.800 --> 0:15:19.680 of the eighty twenty principle. But I'd say, if you 0:15:19.680 --> 0:15:21.920 had to pick one principle, that's the one. Sure. 0:15:22.240 --> 0:15:24.840 Since we're sitting here in Bloomberg, I just have to 0:15:24.880 --> 0:15:28.520 point out it's very much true for your portfolio, the 0:15:28.720 --> 0:15:32.080 vast majority of your gains. And if you read some 0:15:32.200 --> 0:15:35.520 of the research by people like Bessembinder, Hendrik Bessembinder in 0:15:35.600 --> 0:15:39.640 Arizona State, it's not even twenty percent that's generating returns. 0:15:39.640 --> 0:15:42.760 It's one or two percent. Yeah, that creates the vast majority. 0:15:42.800 --> 0:15:47.360 So there's pareto principle, hyper preto principle. But it's kind 0:15:47.360 --> 0:15:50.720 of fascinating that you use this as a way to 0:15:51.120 --> 0:15:57.400 hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like 0:15:57.440 --> 0:16:01.760 you've applied this across a wide range of items. Have 0:16:01.840 --> 0:16:04.080 you ever found a space where it doesn't work? 0:16:05.280 --> 0:16:06.720 I haven't, to be honest. 0:16:06.960 --> 0:16:08.520 It's just consistent everywhere. 0:16:08.600 --> 0:16:11.760 It seems to be practically a lot of nature that 0:16:12.280 --> 0:16:16.800 a few things, the critical few versus the trivial many. 0:16:16.960 --> 0:16:19.720 It's it's almost always a few things. 0:16:19.560 --> 0:16:24.360 Critical few versus the trivial many. Yeah, that that is 0:16:24.520 --> 0:16:27.360 fabulous summation of that. I really I really like that. 0:16:27.760 --> 0:16:31.080 So let's let's stick with the book for a moment. Sure, 0:16:32.240 --> 0:16:34.600 in the book, you have a lot of practices and 0:16:34.640 --> 0:16:38.880 tools and routines. I know some of them are still 0:16:39.080 --> 0:16:42.720 valid today. Some of them may or may not have, 0:16:43.440 --> 0:16:45.880 for lack of a better word, expired. What were the 0:16:45.920 --> 0:16:49.600 most important items you learned? What are the ones that 0:16:49.720 --> 0:16:53.040 people speak to you and say, hey, this resonated, this 0:16:53.080 --> 0:16:54.440 really had a big impact on me. 0:16:54.760 --> 0:16:59.520 Yeah, I would say the first is let me zoom 0:16:59.520 --> 0:17:02.320 out and say that. I went back and I looked 0:17:02.320 --> 0:17:05.600 at the book, which is always tough for me on 0:17:05.640 --> 0:17:08.719 some level because I published it when I was twenty nine, right, 0:17:08.760 --> 0:17:11.679 I'm turning forty eight soon, and so there's there's a 0:17:11.720 --> 0:17:14.600 little bit of chess puffing and so on because I 0:17:14.600 --> 0:17:17.119 was completely unknown at the time, which makes me WinCE. 0:17:17.560 --> 0:17:21.439 But overall, the principles are still things that I apply 0:17:21.640 --> 0:17:24.919 all the time. But the tech tools like using go 0:17:25.000 --> 0:17:28.240 to my PC. No, of course, not that's changed. That 0:17:28.280 --> 0:17:31.040 world has changed, but the principles and the frameworks, the 0:17:31.119 --> 0:17:33.359 exercises still apply. So there, I would say a few 0:17:33.400 --> 0:17:36.240 things get echoed to me a lot. One is the 0:17:36.280 --> 0:17:38.320 practice of fear setting. 0:17:38.920 --> 0:17:40.880 Fear setting, define fear setting for them. 0:17:41.000 --> 0:17:44.800 Sure, it's very simple. So fear setting is based on 0:17:44.960 --> 0:17:50.000 the I think accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught 0:17:50.359 --> 0:17:54.000 to set goals, or we have a framework for trying 0:17:54.000 --> 0:17:57.040 to set goals like smart, right, specific, measurable, et cetera, 0:17:57.520 --> 0:18:01.600 with a timeline. But if you have the emergency break 0:18:01.640 --> 0:18:06.119 on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business, 0:18:06.200 --> 0:18:09.960 quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation 0:18:10.280 --> 0:18:12.159 from your job or your business, whatever it might be, 0:18:12.960 --> 0:18:18.800 that that is the kind of rate limitter and what 0:18:18.840 --> 0:18:20.800 you can do. And people can find this for free 0:18:20.800 --> 0:18:22.840 if you just go to watch my ted talk which 0:18:22.880 --> 0:18:25.520 has I don't know twelve million views now. 0:18:25.600 --> 0:18:28.280 On eighteen tight minutes of here's what to do with 0:18:28.359 --> 0:18:28.640 your life. 0:18:28.720 --> 0:18:31.400 Yah, Well, just focuses on this exercise of fear setting, 0:18:31.400 --> 0:18:34.199 which I still do probably once a quarter. And the 0:18:34.240 --> 0:18:37.359 basic idea is you take whatever you're considering that you 0:18:37.400 --> 0:18:41.399 haven't yet done because you have some degree of fear apprehension, 0:18:41.480 --> 0:18:43.560 you write down all of the worst things that could happen. 0:18:43.640 --> 0:18:47.199 Let's just call it a list of twenty in excruciating detail, 0:18:47.240 --> 0:18:50.160 make them specific. Then you have another column, which is 0:18:50.320 --> 0:18:52.360 what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each 0:18:52.359 --> 0:18:55.520 of those things happening. Last column. If each of those happened, 0:18:55.560 --> 0:19:03.119 what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding? Right? So, okay, 0:19:03.400 --> 0:19:06.400 you try business after quitting your job, which, by the way, 0:19:06.400 --> 0:19:08.680 I don't recommend. You can moonlight and do various things 0:19:08.680 --> 0:19:12.639 to hedge against risk, but then it doesn't work. Okay, 0:19:12.760 --> 0:19:16.840 can you temporarily airbnb a bedroom in your house or 0:19:16.880 --> 0:19:19.840 your bed? Can you get a job bar attending, just 0:19:20.040 --> 0:19:22.600 to get back on your feet, Sure, of course you can. 0:19:22.720 --> 0:19:25.320 So when you start to do that, and then there's 0:19:25.359 --> 0:19:29.240 a separate page where you also write out the costs 0:19:29.240 --> 0:19:31.679 of inaction, which is a neglected step. When people are 0:19:31.680 --> 0:19:33.560 considering what they're doing, they look at the risks of 0:19:33.640 --> 0:19:35.560 doing something, but they don't look at the risks of 0:19:35.720 --> 0:19:39.240 not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a 0:19:39.320 --> 0:19:45.720 year three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial, or 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:49.959 relationship costs of not doing the thing you're considering? And 0:19:50.000 --> 0:19:53.440 when you then look at these things which represent your 0:19:53.480 --> 0:19:57.080 thoughts trapped on paper, A lot of people are able 0:19:57.119 --> 0:20:01.480 to do the scary thing. So I would say that 0:20:01.480 --> 0:20:03.440 that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept 0:20:03.440 --> 0:20:07.240 of many retirements, so engineering a way such that you 0:20:07.280 --> 0:20:11.280 can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected, 0:20:11.359 --> 0:20:13.680 which is very very very achievable. 0:20:13.760 --> 0:20:16.399 It's four weeks in a row or a week every quarter, 0:20:16.880 --> 0:20:18.040 like three to four weeks in a row. 0:20:18.160 --> 0:20:19.040 Wow, that's a lot. 0:20:19.280 --> 0:20:22.960 Yeah, And what that forces you to do also is 0:20:23.080 --> 0:20:28.040 upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in 0:20:28.080 --> 0:20:30.360 your life or in your business or even in your 0:20:30.400 --> 0:20:34.360 job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And 0:20:34.720 --> 0:20:38.880 the value of all those things outlives the many retirement. 0:20:39.000 --> 0:20:41.520 So I'd say those are two that come back a lot. 0:20:42.720 --> 0:20:48.040 It's interesting that you're approaching laying out the pros and 0:20:48.080 --> 0:20:51.360 cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture. 0:20:52.560 --> 0:20:55.159 I can textualize that a little differently. You and I 0:20:55.240 --> 0:20:59.879 have both interviewed Ray Dalio. Yeah, and raise great in 0:21:00.000 --> 0:21:04.840 innovation and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much 0:21:04.960 --> 0:21:08.479 fake it till you make it attitude never admit error. No, no, 0:21:08.520 --> 0:21:09.959 it'll be great. Don't why if it didn't work out 0:21:10.000 --> 0:21:13.119 this year or work out next year? And Ray very 0:21:13.240 --> 0:21:16.960 much said, no, that's wrong. We're all going to make mistakes. 0:21:17.000 --> 0:21:20.879 It's really important to learn from those mistakes. And I 0:21:20.960 --> 0:21:23.800 want to say he's the first guy that really put 0:21:23.880 --> 0:21:25.200 that out at all. 0:21:25.840 --> 0:21:29.200 I have not to mention the transparency of having almost 0:21:29.240 --> 0:21:34.879 all meetings recorded, accessible by anyone within his firm, I mean. 0:21:35.119 --> 0:21:36.280 Which is kind of horrifying. 0:21:36.359 --> 0:21:39.359 They did some pretty wild stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's 0:21:39.400 --> 0:21:40.240 a fascinating character. 0:21:40.480 --> 0:21:45.000 Absolutely, But it leads to the question, what you're talking 0:21:45.040 --> 0:21:50.399 about is really a way to prep yourself for a 0:21:50.720 --> 0:21:54.000 fear of failure? Is that fair to describe it? 0:21:54.080 --> 0:21:56.600 And sure, yeah, or you know what, it's a fear 0:21:56.600 --> 0:22:01.239 of failure, But oftentimes it's this, it's the fact you 0:22:01.280 --> 0:22:04.200 can achieve. Well, it's going to be very very hard 0:22:04.200 --> 0:22:07.240 to achieve your goals if they're not very specific and clear. 0:22:08.359 --> 0:22:10.919 Even if you fail partially, that's fine. You can still 0:22:11.359 --> 0:22:15.680 do great things. I think the parallel is that if 0:22:15.720 --> 0:22:19.040 your fears are unclear, nebulous, it's just a feeling in 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:23.920 your gut, but you don't trap the specifics on paper, 0:22:24.080 --> 0:22:26.960 they're very difficult to overcome. They will still be a 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:31.040 break in your life. It is just as important to 0:22:31.160 --> 0:22:33.879 address that as it is to address the goals to 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:37.920 identify those sort of sticking points. And I would also 0:22:37.960 --> 0:22:42.679 say that I think of risk for people as often 0:22:42.800 --> 0:22:45.640 ill defined, and there are many ways in different context 0:22:45.720 --> 0:22:47.480 to define risk. But if we look at it as 0:22:47.520 --> 0:22:54.040 the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things 0:22:55.119 --> 0:22:57.639 have a ten out of ten value in that category. 0:22:58.080 --> 0:22:59.720 And then if you look at for instance, if you 0:22:59.720 --> 0:23:02.280 look at the and I encourage peo able to do 0:23:02.280 --> 0:23:05.880 this in fear setting, it's like from zero to ten transient, 0:23:06.240 --> 0:23:10.320 recoverable or permanent, what is the potential upside of doing 0:23:10.400 --> 0:23:13.360 this scary thing that you're considering doing? And then if 0:23:13.400 --> 0:23:16.399 you stay doing what you're doing, like, what are the 0:23:16.880 --> 0:23:20.960 zero to ten permanent transient risks or potential outcomes of 0:23:21.200 --> 0:23:24.439 not doing the thing? When you then see, oh, if 0:23:24.480 --> 0:23:26.400 I do this thing, there could be all of these 0:23:26.400 --> 0:23:29.480 potentially semi permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it 0:23:29.520 --> 0:23:32.920 and fail, the downsize are transient and like three out 0:23:32.960 --> 0:23:37.159 of ten, it makes the decision much much easier and 0:23:37.160 --> 0:23:40.359 the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then 0:23:40.400 --> 0:23:45.879 it's just execution, risk and implementation, And it's the decision 0:23:45.960 --> 0:23:47.800 that is the hardest part for most people. 0:23:48.000 --> 0:23:51.600 It's amazing that everything you're saying is so applicable to 0:23:51.800 --> 0:23:57.480 public markets investing, because when people are in that panic mode, 0:23:57.520 --> 0:24:00.760 when they're fearful, oh my god, we're down fifteen percent, 0:24:00.800 --> 0:24:02.960 the world is going to come to an end, it's 0:24:03.000 --> 0:24:06.720 always no, this is transitory, this is temporary. How can 0:24:06.760 --> 0:24:10.000 you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid 0:24:10.040 --> 0:24:12.960 those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it's 0:24:13.000 --> 0:24:16.040 really understanding, Hey, is this a ten or is this 0:24:16.160 --> 0:24:19.119 more likely a two, three, four on scale? 0:24:19.160 --> 0:24:21.280 And I can actually, I'll give something else in the 0:24:21.520 --> 0:24:25.879 investing world if we're looking at when people neglect the 0:24:25.920 --> 0:24:28.399 other side of a coin. And this is not going 0:24:28.440 --> 0:24:31.119 to apply to like the super ultra pros, but a 0:24:31.119 --> 0:24:33.320 lot of people who participate in the public markets, they 0:24:33.320 --> 0:24:36.880 think about what to buy right, what's a good buy 0:24:37.200 --> 0:24:39.879 at this moment. They don't think about whole period. They 0:24:39.880 --> 0:24:44.000 don't think about selling strategy. What will be the cues, 0:24:44.280 --> 0:24:47.800 what are the underlying sort of theses if invalidated that 0:24:47.920 --> 0:24:50.640 would mean they should sell blah blah blah blah blah. 0:24:50.680 --> 0:24:52.600 They don't have a structured way of thinking about selling. 0:24:53.200 --> 0:24:55.760 And similarly, it's like if you just think about your goal, 0:24:55.840 --> 0:24:58.159 but you don't have a structured way of thinking about 0:24:58.400 --> 0:25:03.240 fear and ap comprehension and so on, you're equally handicapped. 0:25:03.760 --> 0:25:07.280 So that would be an easy kind of copy paste comparison. 0:25:07.320 --> 0:25:10.479 I would say, huh, really interesting. You come out of 0:25:10.560 --> 0:25:15.480 college with Asian language studies and then you write a 0:25:15.520 --> 0:25:21.360 book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then 0:25:21.480 --> 0:25:24.720 pivot to angel investing and or advising. 0:25:25.320 --> 0:25:29.439 So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a 0:25:29.480 --> 0:25:32.400 sense because the Four Hour work Week. I was based 0:25:32.440 --> 0:25:35.960 in Silicon Valley for seventeen years, and I seeded The 0:25:36.000 --> 0:25:38.720 four Hour work Week at tech heavy events in part 0:25:38.760 --> 0:25:43.960 because it talks about information low information diet, and selective 0:25:43.960 --> 0:25:47.719 ignorance and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That's a component of 0:25:47.760 --> 0:25:50.760 the book, and that pain was most acutely felt by 0:25:50.760 --> 0:25:54.880 people in tech at the time. So my early adopters, 0:25:55.520 --> 0:25:58.840 plus the people I had access to were techies in 0:25:58.960 --> 0:26:01.639 the very early state figuring out how I would launch 0:26:01.680 --> 0:26:05.960 this book and what that had as a side effect 0:26:06.640 --> 0:26:11.800 was developing relationships with various founders and there were a 0:26:11.840 --> 0:26:16.840 lot of fans among CEOs and co founders of startups. 0:26:17.280 --> 0:26:20.320 Let me interrupt you just to remind people, the book 0:26:20.359 --> 0:26:23.879 comes out in seven yep. This is before half of 0:26:23.880 --> 0:26:26.480 the companies that we think of as part of our 0:26:26.600 --> 0:26:30.119 daily lives. Well before were you know, there was no 0:26:30.240 --> 0:26:34.399 public Alibama. I think that's before Facebook, certainly long before 0:26:35.080 --> 0:26:39.160 uber goes goes public and Shopify. A lot of these 0:26:39.160 --> 0:26:43.040 companies were you know, barely a gleam in the creator's eyes. 0:26:43.119 --> 0:26:45.359 Yeah, they didn't. A lot of them either didn't exist 0:26:45.520 --> 0:26:47.880 or they were very very early stages. So I launched 0:26:47.880 --> 0:26:52.520 the book. My main launch strategy was south By Southwest, 0:26:52.640 --> 0:26:55.040 this festival in Austin, Texas in two thousand and seven, 0:26:55.400 --> 0:26:58.800 which was also the same south By Southwest where Twitter 0:26:58.840 --> 0:27:04.479 basically went live in public in full promotional mode. And 0:27:04.920 --> 0:27:08.280 the other piece of the story of angel investing is 0:27:08.440 --> 0:27:12.000 that I mentioned in the previous segment my professor in 0:27:12.000 --> 0:27:15.160 school ed show his son in law at the time, 0:27:15.640 --> 0:27:19.680 Mike Maples Junior, was a very well known angel investor 0:27:20.200 --> 0:27:23.440 in Silicon Valley, had been an executive at various companies 0:27:23.960 --> 0:27:27.480 and we became friendly. He wanted to lose some weight. 0:27:27.640 --> 0:27:29.560 I wanted to learn more about what he did, so 0:27:29.600 --> 0:27:32.800 we would have breakfast at this place called Hobi's and 0:27:33.040 --> 0:27:35.840 I would help him with his strategy for training and 0:27:35.880 --> 0:27:38.240 so on. At this point, also the for hour work 0:27:38.280 --> 0:27:40.840 we could come out of nowhere and hit the New 0:27:40.880 --> 0:27:43.199 York Time, hit the New York Times list, then went 0:27:43.240 --> 0:27:45.160 to number one and stayed on the New York Times 0:27:45.200 --> 0:27:46.800 list for four and a half years or five years 0:27:46.880 --> 0:27:47.200 or something. 0:27:47.280 --> 0:27:50.080 That's insane. And so are you aware just of how 0:27:50.880 --> 0:27:52.000 lightning in a bottle that is? 0:27:52.040 --> 0:27:54.040 Yeah, it's been as It's part of the reason I 0:27:54.040 --> 0:27:56.800 haven't wanted to go back and revise any of the writing. 0:27:56.840 --> 0:27:59.560 I'm like, I don't want to touch the butterfly and 0:27:59.680 --> 0:28:02.520 risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how 0:28:02.560 --> 0:28:05.320 that happened, Like what did I do? And there were 0:28:05.400 --> 0:28:07.840 things I did for marketing and PR and so on 0:28:07.920 --> 0:28:12.240 to help catalyze that. And in exchange, I'd say, tell 0:28:12.240 --> 0:28:14.280 me about your deals, what are you doing? I was 0:28:14.320 --> 0:28:17.959 always interested in investing. Eventually, after a few months all 0:28:18.000 --> 0:28:20.879 of these factors combined, I asked Mike and he was 0:28:21.000 --> 0:28:23.600 very generous at this time if he might be open 0:28:23.640 --> 0:28:26.040 to me co investing with him on some deals, very 0:28:26.080 --> 0:28:27.879 small checks like I would put in ten K, so 0:28:27.920 --> 0:28:30.200 I wouldn't eat up much of the cap table. I 0:28:30.240 --> 0:28:31.960 would put in a lot of work to try to 0:28:32.000 --> 0:28:36.960 help these companies, And that is how the whole adventure started. 0:28:37.080 --> 0:28:40.560 I wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person 0:28:41.160 --> 0:28:43.680 in terms of ratio on the cap table, so that 0:28:43.720 --> 0:28:48.920 those early founders would become my testimonials basically for future deals. 0:28:49.760 --> 0:28:53.840 That's how the whole thing started. And I decided to 0:28:53.880 --> 0:28:56.640 treat it like I would treat going to business school. 0:28:56.680 --> 0:28:58.720 I looked at Stanford at the time because I'd fantasized 0:28:58.720 --> 0:29:00.479 about going to Stanford Business School on like, Okay, it's 0:29:00.480 --> 0:29:04.320 one hundred and twenty k over two years. I would 0:29:04.320 --> 0:29:06.320 have had to pay that out of pocket. So let 0:29:06.320 --> 0:29:09.479 me create the quote unquote Tim Ferriss fund for Angel Investing. 0:29:09.480 --> 0:29:11.960 It's one hundred and twenty k over two years, and 0:29:12.240 --> 0:29:14.680 I'm assuming that it's sunk cost tuition. It's going to 0:29:14.720 --> 0:29:16.280 go to zero and none of the startups are going 0:29:16.320 --> 0:29:19.800 to succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a 0:29:19.840 --> 0:29:25.280 lot end relationships that make it worthwhile, I will consider 0:29:25.520 --> 0:29:28.800 it a success. And that was the approach I took 0:29:28.920 --> 0:29:32.880 to doing it. And the timing was also great because 0:29:32.920 --> 0:29:34.920 I started in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, 0:29:34.920 --> 0:29:37.720 two thousand and eight. For a few years afterwards, was 0:29:37.760 --> 0:29:41.120 effectively considered a dot com depression, right, But that's when 0:29:41.160 --> 0:29:46.480 I met Toby they shopify when they had nine employees 0:29:46.560 --> 0:29:50.320 or twelve employees, and became an advisor. That's when I 0:29:50.400 --> 0:29:54.000 started becoming involved with lots of companies of these very 0:29:54.040 --> 0:29:58.720 early stages which ended up just to become these behemoths. 0:29:59.120 --> 0:30:01.480 I love your conce of this is a sun cost, 0:30:01.520 --> 0:30:04.640 it's going to zero. I think that's the absolute right 0:30:04.720 --> 0:30:08.320 approach with startups, and you hinted at something that I 0:30:08.400 --> 0:30:13.120 have to explore a little bit. Anytime I throw money 0:30:13.160 --> 0:30:17.200 at a small startup, it's essentially A this is going 0:30:17.280 --> 0:30:20.360 to go to zero, but B I really just want 0:30:20.360 --> 0:30:22.800 to invest in the jockey. I want to put money 0:30:22.840 --> 0:30:26.280 into this person, who Hey, this is easier than bearing 0:30:26.280 --> 0:30:28.560 a body like Those are the two things I would 0:30:28.600 --> 0:30:30.760 do for this guy. Yeah, and a check. All right, 0:30:30.960 --> 0:30:33.440 I'll put a check into that and maybe it works out. 0:30:34.200 --> 0:30:37.720 I sense you have a similar belief in your betting 0:30:37.840 --> 0:30:40.880 on not on the horse, but the jockey. One hundred 0:30:40.920 --> 0:30:44.440 and twenty K is only twelve ten thousand dollars checks, yep, 0:30:44.760 --> 0:30:47.640 and I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities. 0:30:47.960 --> 0:30:51.160 What criteriay you used to figure out who gets that check? Well. 0:30:51.200 --> 0:30:54.000 Also, just as a side note, the reason I started 0:30:54.520 --> 0:30:57.000 trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is 0:30:57.000 --> 0:30:59.480 that I ran out of money. I got over enthusiastic, 0:30:59.560 --> 0:31:01.760 and I broke my own rules, and I think the 0:31:01.800 --> 0:31:04.080 first check I wrote was for like forty K and 0:31:04.320 --> 0:31:07.560 immediately imploded, and I was like, oh, this is going 0:31:07.600 --> 0:31:11.520 to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of 0:31:11.560 --> 0:31:16.880 my best hits have been products that I would use personally, 0:31:16.880 --> 0:31:20.560 that I could ideally be a power user of. And 0:31:21.040 --> 0:31:23.520 there have been a few exceptions, but by and large 0:31:23.600 --> 0:31:27.920 they are addressing problems that I feel acutely, or needs 0:31:27.960 --> 0:31:30.400 that I feel, or wants that I feel very acutely. So, 0:31:30.440 --> 0:31:34.840 for instance, clear how did clear happen? Back in the day, 0:31:34.840 --> 0:31:38.400 it was called clear card, and it was it was 0:31:38.600 --> 0:31:42.640 not widely distributed, it was very little known, And I 0:31:42.680 --> 0:31:45.240 wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal, 0:31:45.800 --> 0:31:48.960 and my blog at the time became very popular and 0:31:49.040 --> 0:31:52.120 I wrote a huge piece on how to expedite travel 0:31:52.400 --> 0:31:55.760 and a portion of that was about Clearcard. I linked 0:31:55.800 --> 0:31:58.480 to their website and unbeknownst to me, I was one 0:31:58.520 --> 0:32:01.760 of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And 0:32:01.800 --> 0:32:04.600 then at some point the leadership reached out to me 0:32:04.640 --> 0:32:05.959 and they said, hey, do you want to do something, 0:32:06.040 --> 0:32:08.840 And that's how that relationship started. And I think I 0:32:08.920 --> 0:32:10.760 was the first advisor to clear. I mean it was 0:32:10.840 --> 0:32:12.360 forever ago, so it must have been. 0:32:12.440 --> 0:32:16.000 I wish they were in more airports. Just blown through JFK. Laguardi. 0:32:16.080 --> 0:32:17.080 It's a blast with them. 0:32:17.200 --> 0:32:21.480 Yeah, yeah, they've done From an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also, 0:32:21.520 --> 0:32:25.040 not based in Silicon Valley, and I don't think that 0:32:25.160 --> 0:32:26.960 Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for 0:32:27.000 --> 0:32:29.720 great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Cannabis. I mean, 0:32:29.920 --> 0:32:34.200 come on, that was neglected. So I also so there 0:32:34.200 --> 0:32:35.920 are a few things, was like, is it a problem 0:32:36.000 --> 0:32:39.520 or a need or a want that I feel and understand? 0:32:40.000 --> 0:32:42.120 Is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore, 0:32:42.120 --> 0:32:44.400 it makes it quite easy for me to promote to 0:32:44.440 --> 0:32:48.840 my audience could they be users or customers? And then lastly, 0:32:49.400 --> 0:32:52.320 for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for 0:32:52.360 --> 0:32:54.880 geographies that were neglected. So I actually I went hunting 0:32:54.880 --> 0:32:59.480 in Canada a lot. And it works for comedy yeah, yeah, 0:32:59.600 --> 0:33:02.280 or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of 0:33:02.320 --> 0:33:06.960 the early experiences like stumble Upon. I became an advisor 0:33:06.960 --> 0:33:09.640 to stumble Upon. And who was the founder of stumble Upon, 0:33:09.880 --> 0:33:12.800 a guy named Garrett Camp stumble Upon. I put tons 0:33:12.840 --> 0:33:16.480 of time into he and I became close. We worked 0:33:16.520 --> 0:33:19.800 really well together, We enjoyed working together. Stumble Upon ended 0:33:19.840 --> 0:33:22.760 up being a zero for me. But why is that? Okay? 0:33:23.280 --> 0:33:26.200 Because I talked about the relationships and the skills, right, okay, 0:33:26.240 --> 0:33:28.960 relationship with Garrett Camp? What does he end up doing next? 0:33:29.960 --> 0:33:30.920 Co founder of Uber? 0:33:31.280 --> 0:33:32.000 Not too shabby. 0:33:32.240 --> 0:33:34.959 And then I was one of three people who had 0:33:34.960 --> 0:33:39.000 helped him with stumble Upon who became advisors to Uber 0:33:39.080 --> 0:33:41.320 cab LLC at the time, which was I think two 0:33:41.360 --> 0:33:44.720 thousand and eight. Oh my god, by the way, everybody 0:33:44.760 --> 0:33:46.400 said note Uber everybody. 0:33:46.800 --> 0:33:49.640 Yeah, that's amazing to me because one of the things 0:33:49.680 --> 0:33:53.960 I find fascinating about vcs is. They kind of put 0:33:54.040 --> 0:33:57.960 their failures on their websites as a badge of honor. Yeah, 0:33:58.000 --> 0:34:00.520 but it's mostly here are the companies we vested in 0:34:00.560 --> 0:34:04.000 that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by 0:34:04.000 --> 0:34:06.200 the way, we passed on Ober, we passed on this, 0:34:06.360 --> 0:34:07.160 we passed on that. 0:34:07.560 --> 0:34:10.120 You see less of that, you see less of it. 0:34:10.320 --> 0:34:14.520 And for me, I would say, there's lots of luck. 0:34:14.600 --> 0:34:16.360 But I was also trying to approach it in a 0:34:16.520 --> 0:34:21.680 systematic way. If you're focused on effectively the way I 0:34:21.680 --> 0:34:23.600 would think about, let's say I cut a twenty five 0:34:23.600 --> 0:34:25.720 thousand dollars check. I'm like, okay, would I pay twenty 0:34:25.719 --> 0:34:31.400 five thousand dollars just to develop these relationships and basically 0:34:31.480 --> 0:34:34.879 earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing. 0:34:35.320 --> 0:34:38.160 If so, then great, go. If not, then think twice. 0:34:38.600 --> 0:34:42.160 And taking that approach, all of the skills and the 0:34:42.200 --> 0:34:46.640 new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I 0:34:46.719 --> 0:34:51.240 love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks 0:34:51.280 --> 0:34:56.239 because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that 0:34:56.440 --> 0:35:00.920 was intimately connected with the people and the skills that 0:35:01.040 --> 0:35:04.000 came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again. 0:35:04.080 --> 0:35:08.120 So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills. And 0:35:08.200 --> 0:35:11.879 then even quote unquote failures, you don't know what act 0:35:11.880 --> 0:35:13.319 TOO is going to be where it could go. 0:35:13.520 --> 0:35:15.560 Yeah, and then lastly, I would say one thing I 0:35:15.600 --> 0:35:18.719 did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now 0:35:18.800 --> 0:35:21.120 but I had never heard of it is I treated 0:35:21.200 --> 0:35:25.320 a portion of my total budget for that real world 0:35:25.400 --> 0:35:28.480 MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferris fund quotation marks a 0:35:28.520 --> 0:35:30.759 portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean? 0:35:31.360 --> 0:35:35.880 I invested in I bought secondary so I bought equity 0:35:35.920 --> 0:35:40.560 from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now it ended up 0:35:40.600 --> 0:35:43.200 being very early, but to my mind at the time, 0:35:43.400 --> 0:35:48.320 they were overpriced, super expensive, huh. But being in those 0:35:48.320 --> 0:35:53.360 deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity 0:35:53.600 --> 0:35:57.759 in those two companies allowed me to say I'm in 0:35:57.800 --> 0:36:02.880 these companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted 0:36:02.920 --> 0:36:05.440 in getting new deals. So I expected those to go 0:36:05.480 --> 0:36:09.640 to zero. That's marketing budget, right. They ended up working 0:36:09.800 --> 0:36:14.279 very unexpectedly, working out really well, but I expected those 0:36:14.320 --> 0:36:17.080 to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget. 0:36:17.360 --> 0:36:21.600 I've heard you mentioned a book by Sebastian Malaby The. 0:36:21.640 --> 0:36:23.000 Power lawyeh, great book. 0:36:23.120 --> 0:36:26.839 Tell us a little bit about what you learned from 0:36:26.880 --> 0:36:29.440 that book about investing in startups. 0:36:31.200 --> 0:36:33.120 That is a great book if you want to learn 0:36:33.120 --> 0:36:36.480 about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches 0:36:36.719 --> 0:36:41.719 I had already learned just by being in the trenches 0:36:41.719 --> 0:36:44.040 for whatever it was a decade before that book came out. 0:36:44.719 --> 0:36:48.040 I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money than God, 0:36:48.080 --> 0:36:51.160 which is this book about hedge funds. That is an 0:36:51.239 --> 0:36:54.680 exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, Oh 0:36:54.760 --> 0:36:56.560 my God, give that a read. 0:36:56.760 --> 0:37:01.000 Plus he's British and his take on everything is it's fantastic. 0:37:01.000 --> 0:37:05.879 It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way. 0:37:06.120 --> 0:37:09.200 Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very 0:37:09.280 --> 0:37:14.839 skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that 0:37:14.920 --> 0:37:19.359 book and what people might miss about startups is, yes, 0:37:19.440 --> 0:37:22.280 it's a hits driven business. There's a power law distribution, 0:37:22.480 --> 0:37:26.759 meaning it's preto principle on steroids. You're probably gonna have 0:37:27.719 --> 0:37:30.719 one or two or three startups that give you the 0:37:30.840 --> 0:37:33.400 vast majority of your lifetime runnings, at least as an 0:37:33.440 --> 0:37:37.120 angel investor who's not taking management fees. Right, if you're 0:37:37.120 --> 0:37:40.799 an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping 0:37:41.160 --> 0:37:43.640 billion dollar plus funds, like sure, you're going to do 0:37:43.719 --> 0:37:44.440 great on management. 0:37:44.480 --> 0:37:46.680 PCs seem to do okay for themselves. 0:37:46.760 --> 0:37:49.160 It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart 0:37:49.680 --> 0:37:51.840 in how you approach it. But as an angel investor, 0:37:52.239 --> 0:37:54.440 I would say, you need to have if you're going 0:37:54.520 --> 0:37:58.680 to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy 0:37:58.880 --> 0:38:01.600 or philosophy around folio constructions so that you don't run 0:38:01.640 --> 0:38:04.640 out of money. Right, It's like staking someone in poker. 0:38:04.680 --> 0:38:07.520 It's like you have to be able to sustain a 0:38:07.560 --> 0:38:13.319 string of bad luck. And I would say that what 0:38:13.640 --> 0:38:18.960 Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs 0:38:19.040 --> 0:38:21.719 in the world of venture capital have done that over time. 0:38:22.280 --> 0:38:24.759 And there are a few things I would point out 0:38:24.800 --> 0:38:27.840 also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of 0:38:27.840 --> 0:38:30.840 people miss because why did it happen in Silicon Valley. 0:38:30.840 --> 0:38:34.480 It's like, sure, you can talk about like Fairchild Semiconductor, 0:38:34.600 --> 0:38:37.360 and I think it was the traitorous aid or whoever 0:38:37.400 --> 0:38:39.880 it was, and all of this, but why did that happen? 0:38:40.120 --> 0:38:42.759 Like why why? Why? I'm always like ask why three 0:38:42.760 --> 0:38:45.200 times and you get to something interesting. Part of it 0:38:45.239 --> 0:38:48.560 is that non competes are incredibly hard, if not close 0:38:48.600 --> 0:38:51.560 to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean. 0:38:51.760 --> 0:38:57.360 It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely. 0:38:57.440 --> 0:38:59.719 So there's a lot of competition and a lot of 0:39:01.280 --> 0:39:04.600 knowledge sharing, sometimes to the sugar in of former employers. 0:39:04.920 --> 0:39:06.920 But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley 0:39:07.080 --> 0:39:10.279 is still to this day. Right now it would be 0:39:10.280 --> 0:39:12.280 the era of AI. If you want to be an AI, 0:39:13.080 --> 0:39:16.839 if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding, 0:39:17.120 --> 0:39:19.400 and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent, 0:39:19.960 --> 0:39:21.879 Silicon Valley is still the place to be. Yeah, it's 0:39:21.920 --> 0:39:24.720 not true for everything, but like it still matters. 0:39:25.280 --> 0:39:28.280 No doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept 0:39:28.320 --> 0:39:31.960 of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of 0:39:31.960 --> 0:39:35.840 the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not 0:39:36.000 --> 0:39:40.640 in terms of monetary returns, in terms of and I'm 0:39:40.680 --> 0:39:46.839 delving into your space, in terms of time, energy, productivity efficiency. 0:39:47.280 --> 0:39:50.160 What do you find to be the most productive, useful 0:39:50.160 --> 0:39:51.520 investments that you've made. 0:39:52.200 --> 0:39:54.960 There are quite a few, I would say anything related 0:39:55.040 --> 0:40:00.279 to mental health ranks very highly, and we could talk 0:40:00.280 --> 0:40:05.080 about some of the things that have benefited me. So 0:40:05.120 --> 0:40:07.600 I come from a family of people who have died 0:40:07.640 --> 0:40:13.120 from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder. 0:40:13.480 --> 0:40:17.040 I struggled with probably I would say three to four 0:40:17.080 --> 0:40:19.840 major depressive episodes a year for most of my life. 0:40:20.360 --> 0:40:23.080 And that's that, in each episode ranging on the length 0:40:23.120 --> 0:40:25.560 of a few weeks to a few months. I mean, 0:40:25.600 --> 0:40:30.120 that is a lot of time in darkness. And now 0:40:30.160 --> 0:40:34.320 I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode 0:40:34.360 --> 0:40:36.520 of a few weeks every two to three years. Those 0:40:36.520 --> 0:40:39.920 are two completely different human experiences. 0:40:40.239 --> 0:40:44.680 How did you manage to actually manage this? Because there 0:40:44.680 --> 0:40:48.680 are people who suffer from depression and that's the word, suffer, 0:40:49.000 --> 0:40:51.120 and never find a way to get on top of it. 0:40:51.480 --> 0:40:53.480 I'll mention just a few things in the order I 0:40:53.560 --> 0:40:56.680 might suggest investigating them. One would be, let's call it 0:40:56.800 --> 0:41:01.280 metabolic psychiatry. So, looking at the word of Christopher Palmer, 0:41:01.360 --> 0:41:05.320 most recently out of Harvard, I've interviewed him on using 0:41:05.520 --> 0:41:11.160 diet to help mental health, and fundamentally it tends to 0:41:11.239 --> 0:41:14.040 end up being some version of a keutogenic diet. You 0:41:14.080 --> 0:41:16.560 can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting. 0:41:16.760 --> 0:41:19.480 So let's just say what I'm doing today and what 0:41:19.560 --> 0:41:21.720 I do a lot of the time, which is only 0:41:21.760 --> 0:41:25.279 eating between like two pm and ten pm. That's an 0:41:25.280 --> 0:41:27.759 eight hour window, so you fast for sixteen hours every day, 0:41:28.160 --> 0:41:31.239 and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would 0:41:31.280 --> 0:41:33.239 say within a week. You're pretty grumpy for a week 0:41:33.280 --> 0:41:36.960 and then you're fine then the next So that was 0:41:36.960 --> 0:41:41.439 the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types 0:41:41.480 --> 0:41:45.560 of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we 0:41:45.600 --> 0:41:50.319 could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and 0:41:50.640 --> 0:41:54.279 a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, but this 0:41:55.120 --> 0:42:01.200 can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable. 0:42:01.400 --> 0:42:05.040 TMS standing for transcranial magnetic stimulation, so it's a type 0:42:05.040 --> 0:42:07.640 of brain stimulation and they take something that looks like 0:42:07.719 --> 0:42:11.719 a large hockey puck and put it on your head. 0:42:11.760 --> 0:42:14.000 It's non invasive and it feels like someone's kind of 0:42:14.000 --> 0:42:17.160 tapping your skull. And depending on if you're trying to 0:42:17.160 --> 0:42:21.120 address anxiety or depression or OCD, the target can be 0:42:21.160 --> 0:42:27.760 different and if people investigate accelerated TMS. In some studies 0:42:27.800 --> 0:42:31.439 with major depressive disorder, complete remission in seventy to eighty 0:42:31.440 --> 0:42:34.680 percent of participants. Wow, and you might need a booster 0:42:34.920 --> 0:42:40.120 once a year, But compared to taking maintenance drugs every 0:42:40.239 --> 0:42:46.719 day with non trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is fascinating. 0:42:46.760 --> 0:42:48.560 I encouraged to be able to check it out. There 0:42:48.560 --> 0:42:50.840 are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated 0:42:50.880 --> 0:42:53.840 TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a 0:42:53.880 --> 0:42:56.239 lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would 0:42:56.239 --> 0:42:59.520 say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because. 0:42:59.280 --> 0:43:01.920 It's like doing of psilocybin or what have. 0:43:01.920 --> 0:43:05.920 You, microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature. 0:43:06.120 --> 0:43:09.320 And I've funded a lot of this science since twenty 0:43:09.400 --> 0:43:13.360 fifteen with my foundation. I put like double digits of 0:43:13.400 --> 0:43:17.200 my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how 0:43:17.280 --> 0:43:20.520 much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once, 0:43:20.800 --> 0:43:24.200 it could be a few times. Various compounds could be, 0:43:24.320 --> 0:43:28.879 say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder, or 0:43:29.480 --> 0:43:32.040 different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. NY us 0:43:32.120 --> 0:43:34.600 doing a lot of great work on that front, or 0:43:34.960 --> 0:43:38.279 MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean the results are 0:43:39.000 --> 0:43:42.280 very strong, mind blowing. Yeah. I mean, you have complex 0:43:42.320 --> 0:43:45.200 PTST people who've had let's just say, an average length 0:43:45.200 --> 0:43:49.000 of diagnosis of sixteen seventeen years, which means many many 0:43:49.040 --> 0:43:52.520 interventions have failed, who do two or three sessions with 0:43:53.120 --> 0:43:57.880 therapists for mdmac's psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission 0:43:57.880 --> 0:44:03.040 of symptoms. That's amazing and it is I believe. There's 0:44:03.080 --> 0:44:06.560 a psychotherapist named Stanis Lefgroff, quite legendary in the space, 0:44:07.200 --> 0:44:10.440 who says, you know, what the telescope was or is 0:44:10.560 --> 0:44:14.319 for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology, psychedelics will 0:44:14.360 --> 0:44:17.960 be for the mind. Really, and I believe that these 0:44:18.040 --> 0:44:20.239 compounds and the study of these compounds, which has become 0:44:20.440 --> 0:44:27.520 very very very popular and destigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize 0:44:27.560 --> 0:44:32.040 how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some 0:44:32.120 --> 0:44:36.279 of these so called incurable or intractable conditions, including things 0:44:36.360 --> 0:44:39.560 like anarexia and many of the things I already mentioned. 0:44:40.040 --> 0:44:42.400 Those would be three that I'd say have had a 0:44:42.600 --> 0:44:46.520 huge impact on me. And it seems boring We could 0:44:46.520 --> 0:44:48.640 talk about it if you want. But exercise, I mean. 0:44:48.800 --> 0:44:50.600 I was waiting for you to bring that up because 0:44:50.719 --> 0:44:54.080 every study in the world says that's the miracle cure 0:44:54.200 --> 0:45:00.200 for so much psychological challenges. And it's not like you 0:45:00.239 --> 0:45:02.080 haven't written about exercise. 0:45:02.160 --> 0:45:04.279 Yeah, it did a whole book on it. So yeah, 0:45:04.320 --> 0:45:08.320 the exercise. I'll just mention two other things briefly, cold 0:45:08.320 --> 0:45:11.000 exposure and by the way, people have been using this 0:45:11.080 --> 0:45:12.480 for hundreds of years. 0:45:12.560 --> 0:45:18.280 But certainly in the Nordish countries. Oh yeah, ye forever. 0:45:18.400 --> 0:45:22.160 Yeah, cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy aka depression, 0:45:22.320 --> 0:45:24.840 and there is actually something to it. It could end 0:45:24.960 --> 0:45:27.239 up being after a few minutes when you shift from 0:45:28.239 --> 0:45:31.719 solely sympathetic nervous system activation fight or flight to parasympathetic. 0:45:31.840 --> 0:45:34.800 Could be actually stimulation of the vegas nerve. Who knows. 0:45:34.880 --> 0:45:39.839 It's unclear at this point, but cold exposure matters like that. 0:45:39.840 --> 0:45:42.880 That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems 0:45:42.880 --> 0:45:46.600 to have some durability, which is wild exercise. People think 0:45:46.680 --> 0:45:49.160 of exercise and what you read about in the media 0:45:49.200 --> 0:45:51.400 a lot is like endorphins and doorphins and doorphins, but 0:45:51.440 --> 0:45:54.080 that is not the full picture. If you want to 0:45:54.120 --> 0:45:57.680 stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera. Or let me just 0:45:57.719 --> 0:46:01.719 broadly say neurodegenerative disease, exercise provokes the release of something 0:46:01.760 --> 0:46:05.040 called CLOTHO k l O t h O, which people 0:46:05.080 --> 0:46:10.520 can investigate and it is critical in staving off or 0:46:11.480 --> 0:46:15.319 or mitigating the onset and progression of these diseases. So 0:46:15.440 --> 0:46:19.160 you have clotho endorphins. Surey of endorphins. You have endocannabinoids. 0:46:19.760 --> 0:46:25.720 Cannabinoids sounds familiar like cannabis, right, So those can explain 0:46:25.719 --> 0:46:28.440 a lot both in terms of anti inflammatory effects of 0:46:28.640 --> 0:46:32.480 some types of exercise. The benefits are just insane. So 0:46:32.520 --> 0:46:36.960 I would say follow Peter Attia's advice. He is credible 0:46:37.719 --> 0:46:41.120 trained at Stanford Johns Hopkins. In terms of Zone two training. 0:46:41.480 --> 0:46:43.400 People can just look him up. Zone two training a 0:46:43.400 --> 0:46:46.000 few times a week and then Vio two max training 0:46:46.440 --> 0:46:50.080 say once a week, and some weight training. But the 0:46:50.719 --> 0:46:53.399 if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all, 0:46:53.480 --> 0:46:56.759 and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things 0:46:56.760 --> 0:47:01.560 like brain drive neurotrophic factor, that is also just a 0:47:01.600 --> 0:47:02.400 non negotiable. 0:47:02.840 --> 0:47:07.640 So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. 0:47:07.040 --> 0:47:08.520 And I have both of my family. 0:47:08.600 --> 0:47:10.360 Yeah, so that's where I was going to the exact 0:47:10.440 --> 0:47:13.279 question was going to ask, you were never diagnosed, you 0:47:13.400 --> 0:47:17.360 just have a genetic predisposition, and you're trying to proactively 0:47:17.640 --> 0:47:18.640 just get way out ahead. 0:47:18.719 --> 0:47:21.120 I'm trying to get ahead of it. Yeah, and unfortunately, 0:47:21.640 --> 0:47:24.960 you know, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, as just 0:47:24.960 --> 0:47:28.960 to use that disease as an example, a lot of 0:47:29.000 --> 0:47:32.439 the interventions fail. I think some scientists would agree with this, 0:47:32.680 --> 0:47:36.560 not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because 0:47:36.560 --> 0:47:40.120 the interventions are too late by the time people have 0:47:41.160 --> 0:47:45.960 really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and 0:47:46.000 --> 0:47:49.560 so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms, 0:47:49.760 --> 0:47:52.920 it might just be too late, But there is an 0:47:53.080 --> 0:47:55.080 argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that 0:47:55.200 --> 0:47:57.200 late intervention is better than early intervention. 0:47:57.440 --> 0:48:00.920 So I just saw a piece in National Geograph yesterday 0:48:01.600 --> 0:48:03.880 that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to 0:48:03.920 --> 0:48:08.120 detect Alzheimer's risk sooner, as earlier as your twenties. So 0:48:08.480 --> 0:48:11.880 there is some sort of research going on in the 0:48:11.960 --> 0:48:16.839 space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive 0:48:16.880 --> 0:48:23.680 and individualized to take care of your preventative maintenance in 0:48:23.760 --> 0:48:26.560 advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands. 0:48:27.160 --> 0:48:29.400 Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just 0:48:29.480 --> 0:48:32.640 mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective 0:48:33.840 --> 0:48:36.560 and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like 0:48:36.600 --> 0:48:38.640 I just didn't I'm about to turn forty eight, just 0:48:38.680 --> 0:48:41.200 did my I do blood testing at least once a quarter, 0:48:41.320 --> 0:48:43.640 and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah. 0:48:44.000 --> 0:48:46.200 I just want to function health. Yeah, are you familiar 0:48:46.239 --> 0:48:46.839 with function health? 0:48:46.920 --> 0:48:47.560 I don't know. I function. 0:48:47.680 --> 0:48:50.840 So Silicon Valley startup they have come up with the 0:48:50.880 --> 0:48:54.320 way it's not a healthcare company, it's a technology company, 0:48:54.680 --> 0:48:58.080 and they say, we want to take one hundred data 0:48:58.120 --> 0:49:01.480 point screens of your blood and look at all these 0:49:01.480 --> 0:49:05.160 different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice 0:49:05.160 --> 0:49:09.120 a year. Your doctor looks at fifteen twenty things. Normally 0:49:09.680 --> 0:49:11.960 they'll go one hundred plus. And by the way, depending 0:49:11.960 --> 0:49:15.440 on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for 0:49:15.480 --> 0:49:19.719 things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. And so now you 0:49:19.719 --> 0:49:22.480 could check one hundred and fifty data points and twice 0:49:22.520 --> 0:49:26.920 a year especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark, 0:49:27.000 --> 0:49:31.040 and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word, 0:49:31.120 --> 0:49:36.240 horizontal set of data, and when something sort of spikes 0:49:36.320 --> 0:49:39.600 or is out of the normal range, you have a 0:49:39.640 --> 0:49:42.920 baseline that you could go back and work. I literally 0:49:42.960 --> 0:49:46.000 did this Tuesday, and I was like, oh, that's a 0:49:46.000 --> 0:49:49.200 lot of blood, Like, can you leave me a little? 0:49:49.239 --> 0:49:51.680 I got stuff to do later, but that in order 0:49:51.719 --> 0:49:55.239 to do one hundred different data series, they need a 0:49:55.280 --> 0:49:56.040 lot of different blood. 0:49:56.120 --> 0:49:58.560 Yeah, they need some blood. And I would say I 0:49:58.600 --> 0:50:02.960 don't spend much money on stuff, but I do I deliberately. 0:50:03.200 --> 0:50:05.759 Some might say overspend on health. But what I was 0:50:05.800 --> 0:50:09.319 going to say is the metabolic psychiatry the less so 0:50:09.520 --> 0:50:13.840 accelerated TMS. But actually I should pull that back. TMS 0:50:13.880 --> 0:50:17.480 also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's and psychedelic 0:50:17.520 --> 0:50:21.640 sisted therapies. The exercise, all of these and the cloth 0:50:21.640 --> 0:50:25.480 that I mentioned specifically within exercise, all of those should 0:50:25.800 --> 0:50:31.520 in theory help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset 0:50:31.640 --> 0:50:36.000 of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying 0:50:36.000 --> 0:50:38.759 to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn't have to 0:50:38.760 --> 0:50:43.080 be hyper personalized, like these things have clinical data or 0:50:43.239 --> 0:50:46.440 published literature behind them. There's still a lot of unknowns, 0:50:46.520 --> 0:50:48.880 but you can do these things now. 0:50:49.400 --> 0:50:52.640 So it's so funny you say hyper personalize them. I'm 0:50:52.680 --> 0:50:56.840 speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do 0:50:56.880 --> 0:50:59.319 you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week, 0:50:59.320 --> 0:51:02.479 I'm seeing Tim Ferris, And he says, oh, I love 0:51:02.600 --> 0:51:05.759 Tim he is. I love this line. He is the 0:51:05.960 --> 0:51:10.719 chief scientist of Tim Ferris the person. And I'm like, 0:51:10.960 --> 0:51:12.640 that is such a great way. 0:51:12.440 --> 0:51:13.800 To describe it. 0:51:14.800 --> 0:51:20.560 You've basically created an entire business model around being the 0:51:20.640 --> 0:51:24.800 chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even 0:51:24.840 --> 0:51:29.320 your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original 0:51:29.360 --> 0:51:33.120 game plan or did this just evolve over time. 0:51:33.320 --> 0:51:37.239 I've almost always been that way, in part because I 0:51:37.280 --> 0:51:41.360 was born premature at a ton of health issues. Still 0:51:41.360 --> 0:51:46.000 have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sunny sitas, all these things. 0:51:45.800 --> 0:51:47.360 That wait thermal regulation. 0:51:47.600 --> 0:51:52.040 Being can't handle hot well. The way that my body 0:51:52.480 --> 0:51:55.920 handles hot and cold is strange, so I can overheat 0:51:56.000 --> 0:51:58.520 very easily. As an example, the reason that's relevant is 0:51:58.960 --> 0:52:01.880 the one sport that my mom put me in that 0:52:02.520 --> 0:52:06.520 thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at 0:52:06.560 --> 0:52:08.680 when I was a little runt. I was very small 0:52:08.920 --> 0:52:11.440 till about six grade. It wasn't swimming, it was wrestling 0:52:11.600 --> 0:52:13.520 because the puny kid gets to go against the other 0:52:13.520 --> 0:52:17.160 puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant 0:52:17.239 --> 0:52:20.239 I needed to try to win quickly before I would 0:52:20.320 --> 0:52:25.480 hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts 0:52:25.480 --> 0:52:29.040 of bizarre self experimentation, interesting learning how to weight cut 0:52:29.160 --> 0:52:32.399 to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The reason that I 0:52:32.480 --> 0:52:36.879 wanted to make Tim Ferriss lab this end of one 0:52:37.400 --> 0:52:40.319 set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That's how 0:52:40.360 --> 0:52:43.000 it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you 0:52:43.080 --> 0:52:44.760 might be able to apply this stuff to the brain. 0:52:45.120 --> 0:52:49.680 And then in college I started experimenting with all sorts 0:52:49.680 --> 0:52:54.319 of stuff, nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that 0:52:54.520 --> 0:52:57.320 was I was using kind of off label like hydergen, 0:52:57.719 --> 0:53:01.040 various note tropics and so on. And they did have 0:53:01.040 --> 0:53:03.760 an effect, like they did have an effect on memory 0:53:03.760 --> 0:53:06.920 and cognition, things like desma pressing for short term memory, 0:53:06.920 --> 0:53:10.640 for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked. There's no 0:53:10.680 --> 0:53:12.320 biological free lunch with that. 0:53:12.200 --> 0:53:14.640 Stuff so well, I know free lunch. 0:53:14.880 --> 0:53:16.680 So you do you do pay a price. I would 0:53:16.719 --> 0:53:20.360 just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking 0:53:20.600 --> 0:53:22.680 and so on. And I'm not a doctor. I don't 0:53:22.719 --> 0:53:25.279 play one on the internet. But number one, since you 0:53:25.280 --> 0:53:29.680 mentioned it earlier, is I get blood tests done once 0:53:29.719 --> 0:53:34.120 a quarter at the very least. Now why is that? Well, 0:53:34.440 --> 0:53:37.239 I want more frame as high a frame rate as 0:53:37.280 --> 0:53:40.719 possible to look at trends. But separately, I want to 0:53:40.719 --> 0:53:43.040 catch things early if I need to catch things. But 0:53:43.080 --> 0:53:45.560 I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests, 0:53:45.640 --> 0:53:48.240 the risk is that you get one set of lab 0:53:48.360 --> 0:53:50.760 results back and you make a ton of big decisions 0:53:50.800 --> 0:53:53.640 based on those labs. Here's what I'll say. There are 0:53:53.760 --> 0:53:57.360 lab errors all the time, and if you're going to 0:53:57.440 --> 0:54:02.640 do consistent blood tests, consistent is the key. In other words, 0:54:03.000 --> 0:54:04.839 do it on the same day of the week at 0:54:04.840 --> 0:54:05.520 the same time. 0:54:05.600 --> 0:54:07.520 Oh really, I would not have guessed that. 0:54:07.600 --> 0:54:11.720 Because your testosterone has diurnal it has. 0:54:11.640 --> 0:54:15.680 So the quest diagnostics as an example, don't eat, don't 0:54:15.680 --> 0:54:18.560 take supplements, don't take any meds whatever is on your 0:54:18.680 --> 0:54:21.880 your prescription list. Stop the night before unless your doctor 0:54:21.880 --> 0:54:22.680 says don't stop. 0:54:22.960 --> 0:54:25.600 Follow your doctor. But I'm saying if you're. 0:54:25.040 --> 0:54:29.600 Saying is more important than just how significant. 0:54:29.719 --> 0:54:32.719 Just be consistent because if you let's just say you 0:54:32.800 --> 0:54:34.520 drink on the weekends and then you do your lap 0:54:34.560 --> 0:54:37.520 test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning, 0:54:38.080 --> 0:54:41.120 some of your results might be different. I mean, but no, 0:54:41.160 --> 0:54:43.839 that's it's not obvious to people because then they might 0:54:43.920 --> 0:54:47.440 have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend 0:54:47.440 --> 0:54:50.560 and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like altier ASD 0:54:50.960 --> 0:54:52.920 all of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year, 0:54:52.960 --> 0:54:54.280 he has no idea of the context. 0:54:54.400 --> 0:54:54.879 That's fair. 0:54:55.719 --> 0:54:59.839 Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously and there are 0:55:00.080 --> 0:55:02.840 lab errors. So I would say before. 0:55:03.120 --> 0:55:06.840 Plus you also just get the regular noise and range 0:55:07.120 --> 0:55:10.120 and yeah, sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal. 0:55:10.440 --> 0:55:13.320 But it's all nothing is flatlined over time. 0:55:13.800 --> 0:55:16.840 Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would 0:55:16.840 --> 0:55:20.840 just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like, really, 0:55:21.760 --> 0:55:23.720 if you're about to get on a bunch of meds 0:55:23.760 --> 0:55:26.400 and let's it's an emergency. Look, there are emergencies that 0:55:26.440 --> 0:55:28.400 you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay, 0:55:28.440 --> 0:55:29.640 you have this problem, We're going to put you on 0:55:29.640 --> 0:55:32.000 this med for the next year. Before you do that, 0:55:32.360 --> 0:55:34.680 do the test again. Just get another blood test two 0:55:34.719 --> 0:55:38.759 days later. Second opinion, just confirm it and again not 0:55:38.800 --> 0:55:42.040 a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only. Blah blah blah. 0:55:42.080 --> 0:55:45.399 But there you go, dumb question. All the stuff you've 0:55:45.440 --> 0:55:51.719 done game creation is not on your CV. Why did 0:55:51.760 --> 0:55:52.359 you decide to. 0:55:52.320 --> 0:55:55.120 Create a game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitor. 0:55:56.680 --> 0:56:01.240 So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling 0:56:01.360 --> 0:56:04.640 like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. 0:56:04.760 --> 0:56:07.719 Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends, 0:56:08.080 --> 0:56:11.160 many of whom were neuro divergent, and D and D. 0:56:11.520 --> 0:56:15.000 Was a lifeline, absolutely lifeline. So I may be pretty 0:56:15.000 --> 0:56:16.760 squarely in the neurodivergent camp. 0:56:16.920 --> 0:56:17.920 Do you still play? 0:56:18.400 --> 0:56:19.879 I don't, But here's why. 0:56:20.040 --> 0:56:23.200 I know plenty of guys forty fifty Yeah, weekly game. 0:56:23.320 --> 0:56:24.080 Forget poker. 0:56:24.320 --> 0:56:28.920 It's it's it's too much of a commitment for me now. Initially, so, 0:56:28.960 --> 0:56:31.760 I've always wanted to make a game that could help 0:56:31.840 --> 0:56:36.480 produce the magic and joy and frankly I mean sort 0:56:36.520 --> 0:56:39.560 of the like cognitive training of D and D. I 0:56:39.560 --> 0:56:42.520 think D and D is just an incredible game. Kudos 0:56:42.560 --> 0:56:45.360 to you know, TSR and Gary Gayax and everybody's who's 0:56:45.360 --> 0:56:48.120 created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to 0:56:48.160 --> 0:56:49.800 be serious about D and D, it's like being serious 0:56:49.800 --> 0:56:51.879 about World of Warcraft, like this is your new part 0:56:51.880 --> 0:56:55.040 time job. I mean it's many, many, many hours. So 0:56:55.560 --> 0:56:59.239 as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot 0:56:59.239 --> 0:57:01.080 going on, maybe I have a dinner with friends and 0:57:01.080 --> 0:57:03.400 we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going 0:57:03.480 --> 0:57:05.359 to play D and D. There's no way we're going 0:57:05.400 --> 0:57:08.200 to play a complex board game. I was curious to see, though, 0:57:08.239 --> 0:57:11.520 if I could create something, and a lot of the 0:57:11.640 --> 0:57:14.920 podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with, 0:57:15.040 --> 0:57:18.280 but that's unspoken. So I interviewed Alan Lee, who's the 0:57:18.280 --> 0:57:21.800 founder of Exploding Kittens, one of the most successful game 0:57:21.840 --> 0:57:26.880 development companies in the world, and I wanted to see 0:57:26.880 --> 0:57:30.400 if maybe, kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I 0:57:30.400 --> 0:57:33.440 could create a game with him that would be easy 0:57:33.440 --> 0:57:38.040 to learn, hard to master, very very fun for family's 0:57:38.080 --> 0:57:41.360 friends whoever kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this 0:57:41.440 --> 0:57:43.560 is yet to be proven, so just to be clear, 0:57:44.080 --> 0:57:45.960 I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but 0:57:46.160 --> 0:57:49.440 that could also possibly be a type of brain training 0:57:49.480 --> 0:57:50.360 and cognitive training. 0:57:50.600 --> 0:57:54.080 So you set the bar really low, right, just easy 0:57:54.120 --> 0:57:57.600 to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun, oh with all 0:57:57.640 --> 0:58:02.400 sorts of cognitive benefites. Yeah, you know, low target with 0:58:02.440 --> 0:58:02.960 your first game. 0:58:03.040 --> 0:58:06.040 Well that's why it took two years to land on something. 0:58:05.840 --> 0:58:08.840 Really Oh yeah, that's a long time to build what's 0:58:08.880 --> 0:58:11.360 effectively as simple. I have a copy of this at home, 0:58:11.840 --> 0:58:14.919 and you guys also sent me a copy here, so 0:58:15.000 --> 0:58:16.600 I want to open this up and go over it 0:58:16.680 --> 0:58:20.560 with but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly 0:58:20.560 --> 0:58:22.000 what this game is about. Yeah. 0:58:22.040 --> 0:58:25.680 So the game Coyote. It's called Coyote because of the 0:58:26.440 --> 0:58:31.160 trickster deity association and a lot of mythologies. Also uniquely 0:58:31.200 --> 0:58:35.320 American coyote or North American, I should say, it's very 0:58:35.400 --> 0:58:39.240 much a sort of New America's animal. But the trister 0:58:39.320 --> 0:58:41.760 piece is important. So Coyote is a game. You can 0:58:41.800 --> 0:58:44.720 think of it as rock paper scissors in a group 0:58:45.280 --> 0:58:50.080 on steroids, with many different hilarious movements and gestures, and 0:58:50.120 --> 0:58:55.040 basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins. 0:58:55.160 --> 0:58:57.840 Or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are 0:58:57.840 --> 0:59:01.479 reasons that we had both options, but the basic gist 0:59:01.560 --> 0:59:05.280 is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in 0:59:05.280 --> 0:59:08.480 a circle and each players dealing out cards that make 0:59:08.520 --> 0:59:13.040 a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious, 0:59:13.920 --> 0:59:18.280 and you each get three lives, and last person standing 0:59:18.360 --> 0:59:22.160 in competitive mode wins. That's it. So you can play. 0:59:22.240 --> 0:59:24.160 I have friends who've played with their like six year 0:59:24.200 --> 0:59:26.720 old daughters. Even though the box says ten years old. 0:59:27.480 --> 0:59:34.160 It's very challenging. When it gets challenging, I guess it's 0:59:34.360 --> 0:59:38.080 ten minutes a game roughly, probably so pretty low lift. 0:59:38.360 --> 0:59:41.000 But if you want to get good at it, you 0:59:41.000 --> 0:59:42.720 can play it over and over and over and over again. 0:59:42.720 --> 0:59:44.040 Every game is going to be totally different. 0:59:44.120 --> 0:59:46.000 One of the things I was kind of fascinated by 0:59:46.080 --> 0:59:50.440 watching the game play was it's a combination of words 0:59:50.560 --> 0:59:53.960 and gestures that you have to recall and do in 0:59:54.280 --> 0:59:58.200 order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the 0:59:58.200 --> 1:00:01.240 same time that you're creating. Tell us a little bit 1:00:01.400 --> 1:00:04.840 about how you guys came up with this and what 1:00:04.920 --> 1:00:08.000 was it like collaborating with Exploding Kittens. 1:00:08.040 --> 1:00:12.520 We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one, 1:00:12.960 --> 1:00:17.720 and we were kind of stuck because the question that 1:00:17.840 --> 1:00:20.160 I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question 1:00:20.200 --> 1:00:22.760 I was asking myself is what types of board games 1:00:22.800 --> 1:00:26.880 or card games do I enjoy? And that didn't get 1:00:26.920 --> 1:00:28.440 I mean, your answers are only going to be as 1:00:28.440 --> 1:00:32.520 good as your questions, and that wasn't working. We had 1:00:32.560 --> 1:00:37.000 done various brainstorming sprints in like La, New York, Long Island, 1:00:37.040 --> 1:00:40.360 and then flew to Canada to spend time with the 1:00:40.720 --> 1:00:43.440 co founder of Exploiting Kittens, and we did our last sprint. 1:00:43.520 --> 1:00:45.000 I was like, Okay, look, we've been at this for 1:00:45.040 --> 1:00:46.840 a while. We're either going to land on something or 1:00:46.920 --> 1:00:49.120 let's call it quits and just call a space a space. 1:00:49.160 --> 1:00:50.360 So a little pressure on it. 1:00:50.640 --> 1:00:52.520 Yeah, yeah, I mean deadlines, you know the magic of 1:00:52.560 --> 1:00:56.920 deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type 1:00:57.680 --> 1:01:00.080 have you enjoyed? And it might make me sound like 1:01:00.120 --> 1:01:04.440 a simpleton, but having drinks and playing rock paper scissors 1:01:04.440 --> 1:01:09.480 with your dumb friends is I think very entertaining. Side note, 1:01:09.600 --> 1:01:11.200 especially if you try to do it with water in 1:01:11.200 --> 1:01:12.480 your mouth. Try that with a friend. 1:01:12.880 --> 1:01:15.880 But what does water in your mouth affect. 1:01:16.520 --> 1:01:20.000 When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves, So 1:01:20.480 --> 1:01:23.320 it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had 1:01:23.400 --> 1:01:26.720 a few drinks. Not recommending everybody drink. So we started 1:01:26.760 --> 1:01:29.160 with that as this building block. It's like, Okay, well, 1:01:29.320 --> 1:01:32.760 how can we make that group play? And then I 1:01:32.880 --> 1:01:35.160 was interested in the cognitive stuff as I mentioned, and 1:01:35.200 --> 1:01:37.960 this look. I haven't proven this, but I think it's 1:01:38.360 --> 1:01:41.160 it's quite similar. You're looking at like interference effects. There 1:01:41.160 --> 1:01:45.080 are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test blah blah blah, 1:01:45.080 --> 1:01:48.200 and Exploding Kittens. They have an amazing track record. The 1:01:48.280 --> 1:01:51.000 whole company started with this game, Exploding Kittens, which was 1:01:51.000 --> 1:01:53.160 I think the largest kickstarter of all time. 1:01:53.440 --> 1:01:53.720 Wow. 1:01:53.840 --> 1:01:56.920 At that point in time, the leaders of the company 1:01:57.200 --> 1:02:00.840 are still game designers, so it's not a huge bureaucratic 1:02:01.040 --> 1:02:03.880 thing run by no offense to middle managers. They're important, 1:02:03.880 --> 1:02:07.560 but it's like people who are managers versus makers. Like 1:02:07.640 --> 1:02:11.080 the people who run the company are still some of 1:02:11.120 --> 1:02:13.920 the best in the world at creating games right. Elon 1:02:14.000 --> 1:02:17.960 Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He's been involved with 1:02:18.000 --> 1:02:23.160 creating entirely new genres of games, just a genius at 1:02:23.240 --> 1:02:26.440 creating games. So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome. 1:02:26.440 --> 1:02:29.520 They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small, like they really 1:02:29.640 --> 1:02:30.480 punch above their weight. 1:02:30.520 --> 1:02:31.800 Clouds still a startup. 1:02:31.960 --> 1:02:35.240 Nimbles feels like a startup. Like what they do with 1:02:35.280 --> 1:02:38.240 the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's 1:02:38.280 --> 1:02:38.960 been awesome. 1:02:39.280 --> 1:02:42.880 I get a sense that, because you're such a thoughtful person, 1:02:43.520 --> 1:02:48.439 anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort 1:02:48.440 --> 1:02:50.680 of floats above your body and says, what's going on 1:02:50.720 --> 1:02:56.400 in this space? Yeah, I've had that experience in publishing. Yeah, Like, wait, 1:02:56.480 --> 1:02:59.200 I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave 1:02:59.280 --> 1:03:02.400 this way? So I have to ask you that question 1:03:02.440 --> 1:03:06.760 about the game industry. When you're looking at gaming generally, 1:03:07.840 --> 1:03:11.200 what was your experience like going into not only an 1:03:11.360 --> 1:03:13.960 entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past, 1:03:14.040 --> 1:03:18.320 but like, did you kind of look at the game 1:03:18.400 --> 1:03:22.680 industry and say, Hey, this whole place is just wacky 1:03:22.720 --> 1:03:24.480 and so different from everything else. 1:03:26.120 --> 1:03:28.920 All of the above. And I treated doing something like 1:03:28.920 --> 1:03:32.720 the game as I treat the startups. So it's if 1:03:32.800 --> 1:03:36.880 I make no money on this, will the relationships developed 1:03:36.920 --> 1:03:41.000 and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for? Right, 1:03:41.080 --> 1:03:43.880 would I actually tuition? Exactly? Would I pay tuition for 1:03:43.920 --> 1:03:45.360 what I'm going to learn? And the answer is c 1:03:45.600 --> 1:03:48.440 es right, a lot of late genius. The people Explainking 1:03:48.520 --> 1:03:52.360 is amazing. By the way, you want to scrappy creative team. 1:03:52.360 --> 1:03:54.040 If you're going to deal with things like tariffs. 1:03:54.040 --> 1:03:58.080 By the way, do tariffs I mean I'm sure assuming 1:03:58.480 --> 1:04:01.480 these are manufactured somewhere out of the United States. Yeah, 1:04:01.680 --> 1:04:03.120 do you have to pay tariffs on? 1:04:03.360 --> 1:04:06.000 Oh? Every every gaming company in the US. Pretty much 1:04:06.040 --> 1:04:09.800 tabletop game is getting really so you want people who 1:04:09.840 --> 1:04:12.840 are creative and can think outside the box for something 1:04:12.880 --> 1:04:15.680 like that. From the implications of something like that to 1:04:16.720 --> 1:04:21.520 contending with mass mass retail like Walmart and Target, for instance. 1:04:21.320 --> 1:04:24.080 Yeah, you're you're You're at Walmart, You're at Target, You're 1:04:24.120 --> 1:04:29.160 on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space 1:04:29.240 --> 1:04:31.280 quote unquote from how did that happen? 1:04:31.320 --> 1:04:32.240 Next to impossible? 1:04:32.880 --> 1:04:35.160 And yet you hit. That's the whole you hit for 1:04:35.200 --> 1:04:39.520 the for the cycle, Walmart, Target, Amazon? Where else is 1:04:39.560 --> 1:04:40.080 what's left? 1:04:40.080 --> 1:04:42.560 I'm gonna do it? Mind? You know, mind? This is 1:04:42.600 --> 1:04:44.640 my maybe one and only game and if my name 1:04:44.720 --> 1:04:45.960 is going to be on it, I need to be 1:04:46.240 --> 1:04:47.040 very happy with it. 1:04:47.080 --> 1:04:49.520 And so how did you guys manage to penetrate that? 1:04:49.640 --> 1:04:53.080 Well, I'll say first that what's not going to work 1:04:53.320 --> 1:04:55.160 is if you are a sole inventor who comes up 1:04:55.200 --> 1:04:58.280 with the world's greatest game, a company like a Walmarter 1:04:58.400 --> 1:05:02.720 target is not equipped rightly so to deal with thousands 1:05:02.760 --> 1:05:06.720 of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins, 1:05:06.720 --> 1:05:10.720 don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms 1:05:10.840 --> 1:05:14.200 and returns and all these things. So if you want 1:05:14.200 --> 1:05:16.280 to have a seat at the table, or even a 1:05:16.360 --> 1:05:18.680 chance to have a seat at the table, you need 1:05:18.840 --> 1:05:21.800 to I think this is fair to say, partner with 1:05:21.840 --> 1:05:25.800 someone who already has shelf space and multiple skws so 1:05:25.960 --> 1:05:29.280 you can be added to the lineup. And that was 1:05:29.320 --> 1:05:32.760 another reason to partner with someone like and exploiting Kittens. 1:05:32.760 --> 1:05:35.920 And yes, you can do a lot online and the 1:05:35.920 --> 1:05:38.480 game is on Amazon. It's been exclusive at Walmart for 1:05:38.520 --> 1:05:41.920 the first few months, and then the social video plays 1:05:41.960 --> 1:05:44.200 like you mentioned, went completely nuts, and it's actually now 1:05:44.240 --> 1:05:46.800 past three hundred million, so it just keeps going and 1:05:46.840 --> 1:05:49.400 going and going. The videos of people playing this game. 1:05:50.200 --> 1:05:53.520 But you can do a lot that is, say a 1:05:53.560 --> 1:05:57.160 direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website 1:05:57.240 --> 1:06:01.640 or Kickstarter. But it's very easy for techies to underestimate 1:06:02.000 --> 1:06:05.920 just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and 1:06:05.920 --> 1:06:06.880 targets of the world are. 1:06:07.120 --> 1:06:07.400 Sure. 1:06:07.560 --> 1:06:09.600 I mean, ninety percent of the US is within ten 1:06:09.640 --> 1:06:13.080 miles of one of those or fifteen minutes. It's I mean, 1:06:13.160 --> 1:06:15.360 even the food security of the United States depends on 1:06:15.440 --> 1:06:16.400 these companies. 1:06:16.560 --> 1:06:20.160 And you price this at nine ninety nine less than 1:06:20.200 --> 1:06:24.960 ten bucks. Very reasonable. I'm going to assume at if 1:06:25.000 --> 1:06:27.680 this game is as successful as you hope it will be, 1:06:27.720 --> 1:06:32.120 and early indications are that it can be, you can 1:06:32.160 --> 1:06:35.280 come up with a second pack a different focus. 1:06:34.920 --> 1:06:38.920 So expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a 1:06:39.000 --> 1:06:42.880 more complicated role playing game, something like that. Who knows, 1:06:42.920 --> 1:06:45.520 But in my case, right with something like this, I'm 1:06:45.600 --> 1:06:48.640 used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters, 1:06:48.680 --> 1:06:51.400 and no, no, you're jumping in this each jumping. I mean, 1:06:51.440 --> 1:06:53.280 even with say the four hour workweek, It's like, had 1:06:53.320 --> 1:06:55.800 I land on that title? I split tested all of 1:06:55.840 --> 1:06:59.640 the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords, and then looked 1:06:59.640 --> 1:07:03.560 at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from 1:07:03.560 --> 1:07:04.880 the rest, and that was the four hour work weeks. 1:07:04.880 --> 1:07:08.040 So like, that's how I don't like taking risks. I 1:07:08.080 --> 1:07:09.840 actually think of myself as a risk mitigator. 1:07:10.240 --> 1:07:13.080 But in this case, I'm fascinated by that because you 1:07:13.320 --> 1:07:16.160 very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk 1:07:16.720 --> 1:07:21.920 his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't 1:07:21.960 --> 1:07:25.840 want to play pop psychologists, but but you are not somebody. 1:07:25.840 --> 1:07:30.400 It's like, all right, I'm starting out as a studying biology. No, no, 1:07:30.440 --> 1:07:34.840 I'm pivoting to Asian studies. I'm living in Japan. I'm 1:07:34.880 --> 1:07:37.240 stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh now 1:07:37.280 --> 1:07:41.360 I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the 1:07:41.720 --> 1:07:44.560 life experience of someone who's risk averse. 1:07:45.960 --> 1:07:48.400 Well, I would, on one hand, agree with you. On 1:07:48.440 --> 1:07:51.520 the other hand, I would say I think that most 1:07:51.680 --> 1:07:55.720 risks are incredibly overblown. I would put I would put 1:07:55.800 --> 1:07:59.240 risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse, 1:07:59.280 --> 1:08:01.320 but if you're too using what you do based on 1:08:01.680 --> 1:08:03.360 what you're going to learn, the skills you're going to develop, 1:08:03.400 --> 1:08:07.479 the relationships you're going to develop, or deepen. It's very 1:08:07.520 --> 1:08:11.120 hard to fail over time. So if you're able to 1:08:11.160 --> 1:08:14.160 be and this applies to investing obviously, but like long 1:08:14.240 --> 1:08:19.360 term greedy, not short term greedy, it's very hard to 1:08:19.439 --> 1:08:22.559 lose over time if you're choosing let me be very clear, 1:08:23.479 --> 1:08:27.920 ideally areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you 1:08:27.920 --> 1:08:31.320 would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills 1:08:31.360 --> 1:08:34.559 that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm 1:08:34.600 --> 1:08:37.719 always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote. Okay, 1:08:37.760 --> 1:08:40.280 let's say, let's just say hypothetically that I don't think 1:08:40.320 --> 1:08:42.559 this is going to happen, because I think the tariffs 1:08:42.560 --> 1:08:45.639 are just a bargaining chip for mineral access right and 1:08:46.000 --> 1:08:47.439 other things that'll be traded with. 1:08:47.560 --> 1:08:49.800 That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you. 1:08:49.880 --> 1:08:52.679 Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tack. 1:08:53.120 --> 1:08:56.320 Yeah, I mean, otherwise we're also like cutting off our 1:08:56.320 --> 1:08:58.440 nose to spite our face, and I'm just so interdependent, 1:08:58.520 --> 1:09:01.320 so it's it's a bargaining. I don't expect that to continue. 1:09:01.320 --> 1:09:06.920 But let's just say that tariffs put every game company 1:09:06.920 --> 1:09:10.000 in the US out of business except for one or two. 1:09:10.720 --> 1:09:14.720 Then will this still have been worth my time, absolutely, 1:09:15.600 --> 1:09:17.720 because I have no I'm not getting in advance for this. 1:09:17.840 --> 1:09:20.439 I'm doing a profit share. I want incentives to be 1:09:20.520 --> 1:09:21.479 fully fully aligned. 1:09:21.640 --> 1:09:23.200 I did the same thing with my book. I don't 1:09:23.240 --> 1:09:25.320 want to advance. I want to see whatever upside there is. 1:09:26.040 --> 1:09:28.559 By the way, I really have to push back. 1:09:29.960 --> 1:09:30.680 This is just me. 1:09:30.920 --> 1:09:33.400 Maybe this's a little question. I maybe there's a little projection. 1:09:34.080 --> 1:09:37.960 You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I 1:09:38.080 --> 1:09:43.040 love the way you've rationalized or it's not an excuse, 1:09:43.080 --> 1:09:44.519 it's an explanations. 1:09:44.760 --> 1:09:45.880 Were reframing it. 1:09:46.120 --> 1:09:49.080 Yeah, you've framed this into well, I'm going to take 1:09:49.120 --> 1:09:53.800 this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I 1:09:53.840 --> 1:09:57.640 get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and relationships. 1:09:57.960 --> 1:10:00.519 So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen. 1:10:01.200 --> 1:10:03.120 You are very much a risk embracer. 1:10:03.479 --> 1:10:06.959 Yeah. And also, if you look at my projects, it's 1:10:07.000 --> 1:10:10.880 it's not a sequence of start finished, start finished, start finished. 1:10:10.880 --> 1:10:13.200 It's more like a gant chart where things are overlapping. 1:10:13.720 --> 1:10:16.120 So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I 1:10:16.160 --> 1:10:19.439 put a ton I've been involved with every single possible 1:10:19.479 --> 1:10:21.559 aspect of this game. We play tested it with one 1:10:21.600 --> 1:10:25.960 hundred plus families, blah blah blah. But podcast is still going, 1:10:26.439 --> 1:10:30.040 the books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments, 1:10:30.720 --> 1:10:34.479 and therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs 1:10:34.479 --> 1:10:35.240 in one basket. 1:10:35.920 --> 1:10:38.960 So two last questions on the game before we'll get 1:10:38.960 --> 1:10:39.960 to our speed round. 1:10:40.080 --> 1:10:40.200 Ye. 1:10:41.000 --> 1:10:47.160 First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Was 1:10:47.200 --> 1:10:51.439 this a purposeful decision to avoid screens, to not create 1:10:51.479 --> 1:10:52.200 more screen time? 1:10:52.240 --> 1:10:54.920 Yeah, one hundred percent. I would say if I look 1:10:54.920 --> 1:10:56.760 at the mental health of my audience, let's just call 1:10:56.800 --> 1:10:59.800 it twenty million people a month or something over the 1:11:00.040 --> 1:11:05.960 last ten years, the degree of depression, anxiety, nihilism is 1:11:06.040 --> 1:11:09.200 shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically 1:11:09.240 --> 1:11:13.760 antithetical to those things. Right, maybe not depression, but very optimistic. 1:11:14.040 --> 1:11:16.200 Yeah, there's a little self selection there. Hey, I have 1:11:16.280 --> 1:11:18.640 this issue. Tim seems to figure this out. Yeah, let 1:11:18.720 --> 1:11:19.679 me work my way there. 1:11:19.720 --> 1:11:21.320 There's a little bit of that. But if you look 1:11:21.360 --> 1:11:24.000 at let's just say, the writing of you know, Derek 1:11:24.040 --> 1:11:26.720 Thompson made it amazing writer at the Atlantic who does 1:11:26.720 --> 1:11:27.200 a lot more. 1:11:27.240 --> 1:11:29.479 No longer at the Atlantic, now he has his own substack. 1:11:29.600 --> 1:11:31.720 Yeah right, that's right. He went full in on Substack 1:11:31.960 --> 1:11:34.720 and actually this piece I think is from Substack, but 1:11:35.320 --> 1:11:38.559 it was effectively, I think it's simply Americans need to 1:11:38.560 --> 1:11:39.719 have more fun, but it's. 1:11:39.600 --> 1:11:41.400 A decline of partying in America. 1:11:41.439 --> 1:11:45.480 That's right. Yeah, that effectively, I think it's something atrocious 1:11:45.520 --> 1:11:50.040 like one in twenty five families or people have social 1:11:50.080 --> 1:11:53.679 plans in person for any given weekend, and it's down 1:11:53.880 --> 1:11:57.000 for is that right? That's amazing, And it's down for 1:11:57.120 --> 1:12:00.519 certain age brackets seventy percent in the last time ten years. 1:12:01.320 --> 1:12:07.040 And I really feel like digital isn't inherently bad, but 1:12:07.080 --> 1:12:10.080 the dose makes the poison. Yes, And I think that 1:12:10.800 --> 1:12:15.240 if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote. 1:12:15.280 --> 1:12:18.639 I really feel like people need to interact with other humans. 1:12:18.680 --> 1:12:21.400 We're not evolved for pure screen time, we are not. 1:12:21.439 --> 1:12:26.120 One hundred percent. So last question on the game, what 1:12:26.160 --> 1:12:29.160 are your expectations for this? How do you define success? 1:12:29.680 --> 1:12:32.240 And I'm going to prevent you from saying I've already 1:12:32.280 --> 1:12:36.080 succeeded due to my collaboration all the experience. Hold that aside. 1:12:36.680 --> 1:12:39.560 What's your minimum expectations and what would surprise. 1:12:39.160 --> 1:12:43.599 You to the upside? Minimum expectation is that this finds 1:12:43.640 --> 1:12:49.759 a small band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody 1:12:49.760 --> 1:12:52.120 should read one thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly just 1:12:52.120 --> 1:12:55.439 got a kk dot org it's free read that. That 1:12:55.520 --> 1:13:01.120 would be super gratifying. But also I always is aim high. 1:13:01.200 --> 1:13:02.960 So I mean, I want this to be the best 1:13:02.960 --> 1:13:06.880 selling game at all of the major retailers. That's incredibly 1:13:06.920 --> 1:13:07.240 hard to. 1:13:07.160 --> 1:13:09.040 Do a BYuT that's that's millions of units. 1:13:09.120 --> 1:13:12.120 Yeah, I mean you're dealing with tens of the Unos 1:13:12.160 --> 1:13:14.559 and the behemoths of the space right, so to do 1:13:14.600 --> 1:13:18.760 that is incredibly hard. That's what I'm aiming for. I 1:13:18.840 --> 1:13:21.320 think that the products, you know, the game can stand 1:13:21.360 --> 1:13:23.599 on its own two feet, like people do love this game. 1:13:24.560 --> 1:13:26.519 And the reason I like to do that is not 1:13:26.560 --> 1:13:28.720 because I want to set myself up for disappointment, but 1:13:28.800 --> 1:13:30.920 as I think it's Larry Page of Google has said 1:13:31.200 --> 1:13:36.559 what people misses, it's very hard to fail completely. If 1:13:36.600 --> 1:13:40.120 I aim for that and I'm fifty percent short, I'm 1:13:40.360 --> 1:13:45.320 still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential 1:13:45.360 --> 1:13:48.920 payoff of that huge a goal. It's still gonna exceed 1:13:49.479 --> 1:13:51.160 oh my expectations that I would have had. 1:13:51.400 --> 1:13:54.040 Agre and just moving into a different space is its 1:13:54.080 --> 1:13:58.400 own rewards because it's so you know, it really exercises 1:13:58.520 --> 1:14:00.760 different parts of the brain than you normally get to 1:14:00.800 --> 1:14:01.080 play with. 1:14:01.200 --> 1:14:04.920 It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which 1:14:04.920 --> 1:14:07.479 is why after the success of the Four Hour work 1:14:07.520 --> 1:14:09.880 Week bought me permission to write more books. I didn't 1:14:09.920 --> 1:14:11.760 do the three hour work Week. I didn't do the 1:14:11.800 --> 1:14:15.759 four hour work Week, Force, you know, the Single Mother's 1:14:15.760 --> 1:14:18.360 Soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because 1:14:18.400 --> 1:14:20.679 I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author. 1:14:21.040 --> 1:14:22.840 That's why I did the four Hour Body and everything 1:14:22.840 --> 1:14:25.880 on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a 1:14:25.920 --> 1:14:28.400 different category in the bookstore to see if my readers 1:14:28.400 --> 1:14:30.280 would follow me. And as soon as I proved to 1:14:30.320 --> 1:14:33.600 myself that was the case and to publishers, you know, 1:14:33.640 --> 1:14:36.479 when I hit number one year times and blah blah blah, 1:14:36.640 --> 1:14:38.920 then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so 1:14:39.080 --> 1:14:42.559 this is another way of testing that, you know, could 1:14:42.600 --> 1:14:44.400 I play in a completely different sandbox. 1:14:45.040 --> 1:14:47.840 So before we get to our five favorite questions, I've 1:14:47.840 --> 1:14:51.519 pulled a few of your questions that either you asked 1:14:51.560 --> 1:14:54.240 on your pod or other people have asked you, and 1:14:54.680 --> 1:14:58.360 let's do this as a speed round in still right, 1:14:58.720 --> 1:15:02.400 tell us about one hundred or less purchase that has 1:15:02.680 --> 1:15:04.559 positively impact your life. 1:15:04.720 --> 1:15:07.320 Be specific, Yeah, I will be specific. Now I'm going 1:15:07.360 --> 1:15:09.240 to put in one shameless plug, which is if people 1:15:09.240 --> 1:15:11.639 want to figure out this game, just go to Coyote 1:15:11.640 --> 1:15:15.160 game dot com. Okay, back to our regular programming. Two 1:15:15.280 --> 1:15:17.680 things I would say that have impacted me in the 1:15:17.760 --> 1:15:22.160 last year would be there's something called the Alpha Ball, 1:15:22.840 --> 1:15:26.800 which is from Tune Up Fitness, and this is something 1:15:26.840 --> 1:15:29.679 you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back, 1:15:30.320 --> 1:15:34.519 for dealing with your IT bands, anything, and it's much 1:15:34.560 --> 1:15:37.840 better than a phone roller because you can really get 1:15:37.880 --> 1:15:40.120 into specific spots. It's very easy to use. You can 1:15:40.160 --> 1:15:42.120 use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor, 1:15:42.640 --> 1:15:45.360 and it's small enough to travel with. So I'd say 1:15:45.400 --> 1:15:48.000 the Alpha Ball is one. Have that my luggage right 1:15:48.000 --> 1:15:51.320 now because I'm traveling. And then the other one is 1:15:51.560 --> 1:15:55.360 actually a meditation app called The Way and it's taught 1:15:55.400 --> 1:15:59.320 by someone named Henry Shukman, and it's more or less 1:15:59.720 --> 1:16:03.040 a zen type of meditation. Full disclosure. I ended up 1:16:03.080 --> 1:16:05.519 becoming an advisor to these guys because I ended up 1:16:05.560 --> 1:16:09.360 loving the app so much. But I use that once 1:16:09.439 --> 1:16:13.519 or twice a day, ten minutes each session, and it's 1:16:13.560 --> 1:16:14.639 teaching you sort. 1:16:14.479 --> 1:16:16.040 Of a guided meditation. 1:16:16.200 --> 1:16:20.280 Is that Right's they're guided meditations, but it's a sequence 1:16:20.439 --> 1:16:23.599 of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply 1:16:23.680 --> 1:16:25.960 outside of meditation, which is why like it so much. 1:16:26.040 --> 1:16:29.599 Let's say those are two that immediately come to mind. 1:16:29.800 --> 1:16:33.000 So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas, 1:16:33.080 --> 1:16:36.879 learning new skills, and learning them quickly. What's your favorite 1:16:37.000 --> 1:16:38.120 cheek code for That. 1:16:39.000 --> 1:16:42.200 Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the 1:16:42.240 --> 1:16:46.320 first place. So what I mean by that is, if 1:16:46.479 --> 1:16:51.960 you want to get the best golf coach in the world, 1:16:53.000 --> 1:16:54.559 you might not be able to afford it. You probably 1:16:54.600 --> 1:16:56.840 can't afford it. It's going to be it's a very 1:16:56.880 --> 1:16:59.599 common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved. 1:16:59.600 --> 1:17:02.760 It's going to be hard to get direct instruction from 1:17:02.800 --> 1:17:04.879 somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose 1:17:05.520 --> 1:17:11.320 say almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and 1:17:11.400 --> 1:17:14.839 you look for, say not gold medalists, but silver medalists 1:17:15.400 --> 1:17:17.600 who are, by the way, frequently just as good. They 1:17:18.439 --> 1:17:22.280 say they yea, they just exactly, They just got ten 1:17:22.320 --> 1:17:25.160 minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You 1:17:25.240 --> 1:17:28.160 can get some of the people who are best in 1:17:28.200 --> 1:17:30.720 the world to teach you at a cost that is 1:17:30.760 --> 1:17:33.200 next to nothing. So I would say that number one 1:17:33.240 --> 1:17:35.519 is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked 1:17:35.560 --> 1:17:38.160 about with the four hour workweek with business and entrepreneurship, 1:17:38.200 --> 1:17:42.600 like picking the goal first. The second is looking at 1:17:43.040 --> 1:17:45.519 frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot 1:17:45.560 --> 1:17:48.679 of people just dive into learning languages. Well, I think 1:17:48.760 --> 1:17:51.479 that material beats method. In other words, like picking what 1:17:51.560 --> 1:17:55.200 you're going to learn very carefully is more important, at 1:17:55.280 --> 1:17:58.240 least in sequence than choosing how you're going to do it. 1:17:58.280 --> 1:17:59.800 A lot of people ask like, what's the best way 1:18:00.160 --> 1:18:02.040 to learn X? And I'm like, first of all, you 1:18:02.040 --> 1:18:04.320 should ask what should I learn? And you can look 1:18:04.320 --> 1:18:07.360 at word frequency lists and things like that, and for 1:18:07.400 --> 1:18:11.919 a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the one thousand 1:18:11.960 --> 1:18:14.360 or fifteen hundred most frequently used words. You can learn 1:18:14.400 --> 1:18:19.280 that in a few weeks. Lingo Duel Lingo is outstanding. 1:18:19.280 --> 1:18:21.120 I mean, of course I'm biased because I invested in 1:18:21.120 --> 1:18:22.479 their first round we just. 1:18:22.520 --> 1:18:26.160 Were in Paris three years ago, and Slim two years ago, 1:18:26.400 --> 1:18:29.839 Rome last year, and dual Lingo just for those basic 1:18:29.880 --> 1:18:31.040 phrases is amazing. 1:18:31.200 --> 1:18:33.599 Yeah, it's great. I mean I've used it for Korean 1:18:33.720 --> 1:18:36.120 as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school. 1:18:36.640 --> 1:18:40.320 And that's a tough language, right, it's tough. The grammar's 1:18:40.320 --> 1:18:42.640 almost identical Japanese. I have a leg up there. But 1:18:42.680 --> 1:18:44.840 by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I 1:18:44.840 --> 1:18:47.800 think it's like learning how to read Korean fifteen minutes. 1:18:47.840 --> 1:18:50.240 There's a comic book that literally will teach you how 1:18:50.240 --> 1:18:52.479 to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading, 1:18:52.880 --> 1:18:55.360 but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean. And 1:18:55.479 --> 1:18:58.080 like it's a bit of an exaggeration, I'd say probably 1:18:58.080 --> 1:19:01.960 takes an hour. But do u a Lingo is very 1:19:02.000 --> 1:19:05.879 well designed, and I have seen every possible language startup. 1:19:06.160 --> 1:19:08.240 My fans sent me that one. By the way, my 1:19:08.280 --> 1:19:10.640 fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they 1:19:10.680 --> 1:19:14.360 knew I was interested in e commerce. So a lot 1:19:14.400 --> 1:19:17.240 of my best deals have come from my my readers 1:19:17.280 --> 1:19:21.960 and my listeners. But the duelingo came about because they 1:19:22.000 --> 1:19:24.920 were enclosed beta, and a number of my fans reached 1:19:24.920 --> 1:19:27.160 out and said, you have to try this really, and 1:19:27.240 --> 1:19:28.800 so I got access and I looked at it and 1:19:28.800 --> 1:19:30.760 I was like, oh, yeah, this is fundamentally different from 1:19:30.800 --> 1:19:31.639 everything else I've seen. 1:19:31.880 --> 1:19:34.720 Give us an example of an unusual habit or just 1:19:34.800 --> 1:19:36.599 absurd thing that you love. 1:19:37.240 --> 1:19:40.519 I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD go ahead, 1:19:40.640 --> 1:19:43.880 So I take a screenshot whenever I see five point 1:19:43.880 --> 1:19:46.280 fifty five on my phone, So I have hundreds of 1:19:46.360 --> 1:19:50.200 screenshots of typically five point fifty five PM. I just 1:19:50.280 --> 1:19:54.120 love repeating those specific repeating numbers. A lot of folks 1:19:54.160 --> 1:19:56.679 like eleven eleven, nothing against eleven eleven. I think that's 1:19:56.760 --> 1:19:58.800 that's perfectly fine. I'm just more of a five to 1:19:58.880 --> 1:19:59.639 five to five guy. 1:19:59.600 --> 1:20:02.439 Those eleven eleven people, so they don't know what's up. 1:20:02.600 --> 1:20:07.360 It's all about. Have you seen the old style analog 1:20:08.040 --> 1:20:10.080 almost neon tubes that are clocks? 1:20:10.320 --> 1:20:12.600 Yes, Like what happens. 1:20:12.240 --> 1:20:14.719 When that rolls over to eleven eleven? Do you see 1:20:14.720 --> 1:20:17.400 something like that and just shrug and like, I. 1:20:17.360 --> 1:20:20.719 Still find it pleasant. I like symmetry, So eleven eleven 1:20:20.760 --> 1:20:25.320 has the advantage over five five five that it is 1:20:26.080 --> 1:20:30.200 pleasingly symmetrical, like this old friend I used to have, 1:20:30.520 --> 1:20:32.080 Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome. 1:20:32.080 --> 1:20:34.040 It's right. I was gonna say five to five is 1:20:34.080 --> 1:20:39.519 a palind drome, but it's not truly symmetrical visual, so 1:20:39.640 --> 1:20:43.320 there is We were talking there divergent earlier. One of 1:20:43.360 --> 1:20:46.559 the things I kind of was shocked to learn in 1:20:46.600 --> 1:20:50.519 the ADHD world is why people will play a song 1:20:50.760 --> 1:20:54.080 over and over and over again because it tickles a 1:20:54.200 --> 1:20:59.360 part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional 1:20:59.439 --> 1:21:03.080 expressions that tend to be more difficult or absence, and 1:21:03.720 --> 1:21:07.280 it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that 1:21:07.360 --> 1:21:10.240 you haven't been able to get in the real world. 1:21:10.880 --> 1:21:12.760 It sounds like the five five to five and the 1:21:12.760 --> 1:21:16.040 eleven eleven tickles a similar part of the brain. 1:21:16.400 --> 1:21:19.120 Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just 1:21:19.160 --> 1:21:21.720 something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is. 1:21:21.800 --> 1:21:24.639 I mean is why I mentioned archery, like I love archery, 1:21:24.720 --> 1:21:27.840 and for most people archery, yeah, I love archery and 1:21:27.920 --> 1:21:30.840 also language learnning. For most for a lot of there's 1:21:30.840 --> 1:21:34.280 a lot of repetition involved and for many people, and 1:21:34.320 --> 1:21:38.160 I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more 1:21:38.200 --> 1:21:44.400 boring than going through conjugations or doing archery, which, by 1:21:44.439 --> 1:21:46.799 the way, if you're doing it at a high level, 1:21:47.200 --> 1:21:50.240 you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing 1:21:50.360 --> 1:21:51.160 over and over a year. 1:21:51.240 --> 1:21:55.400 Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill. I mean 1:21:55.439 --> 1:21:59.439 the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people 1:21:59.479 --> 1:22:04.400 on five people, and so just extrapolate that out exponentially. 1:22:04.800 --> 1:22:07.160 There are a million variations. The same with chess, whatever, 1:22:07.600 --> 1:22:13.680 But it really doesn't matter each particular play move step is. 1:22:13.760 --> 1:22:17.360 You're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need. 1:22:17.640 --> 1:22:21.080 Even something like darts, but there are so many variations 1:22:21.080 --> 1:22:25.080 to your muscula shore, your your thought process. Is any 1:22:25.479 --> 1:22:29.200 sport boring Hitting a tennis ballah? I mean, it's the 1:22:29.200 --> 1:22:32.680 same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion 1:22:32.800 --> 1:22:34.280 variations of what can happen. 1:22:34.479 --> 1:22:37.400 That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing 1:22:37.479 --> 1:22:42.120 in one place shooting at the same thing thousands of times. 1:22:41.840 --> 1:22:47.040 Right any sharp shooting darts. 1:22:46.000 --> 1:22:49.080 Repetitive right now? I like the other sports too, like tennis. 1:22:49.320 --> 1:22:53.920 I would say that also confusingly, if people are interested 1:22:53.920 --> 1:22:58.280 in the accelerated learning stuff My third book, The Four 1:22:58.320 --> 1:23:01.599 Hour Chef, is basically a book unaccelerated learning disguised as 1:23:01.600 --> 1:23:03.599 a cookbook, so it gets into like how to learn, 1:23:03.640 --> 1:23:06.799 how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff. 1:23:07.439 --> 1:23:09.920 You can get a lot further. For instance, I think 1:23:10.040 --> 1:23:13.080 number one, adults can learn languages faster than children. Actually 1:23:13.680 --> 1:23:14.200 really with it. 1:23:14.560 --> 1:23:17.880 If that is very inn opposite to accepted wisdom. 1:23:18.000 --> 1:23:22.080 Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly 1:23:22.200 --> 1:23:26.000 than kids with a few constraints applied, just a couple 1:23:26.000 --> 1:23:29.840 of systems. I mean, I really think for a native 1:23:29.880 --> 1:23:33.360 English speakers, for say a Romance language or something that 1:23:33.439 --> 1:23:36.080 isn't too far flung like Chinese is going to be different. 1:23:36.600 --> 1:23:41.880 But eight weeks you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like 1:23:41.960 --> 1:23:46.000 pretty functional, if you were to carve out not three 1:23:46.040 --> 1:23:48.640 hours a week. That's where kids have the advantage is 1:23:48.680 --> 1:23:50.560 that they're forced to do it all the time and 1:23:50.600 --> 1:23:53.080 they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have 1:23:53.120 --> 1:23:56.080 no job. But if you were to put in say 1:23:56.640 --> 1:23:59.360 ten hours a week and take it really seriously eight 1:23:59.400 --> 1:24:01.040 to twelve weeks, you could be. 1:24:01.120 --> 1:24:02.759 Very functional, very fluent. 1:24:03.400 --> 1:24:06.240 Yeah, Like you could get around and have like a 1:24:06.320 --> 1:24:08.400 conversation for ten to fifteen minutes with someone. 1:24:08.560 --> 1:24:12.280 Wow. Let's jump to our favorite five questions we ask 1:24:12.400 --> 1:24:15.600 all of our guests, starting really simple, what are you 1:24:15.600 --> 1:24:19.479 streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime 1:24:19.600 --> 1:24:22.080 or podcast. What's keeping you entertained? Well? 1:24:22.120 --> 1:24:25.040 I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought 1:24:25.080 --> 1:24:29.040 was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a 1:24:29.120 --> 1:24:34.920 video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because 1:24:34.960 --> 1:24:37.919 I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight 1:24:38.000 --> 1:24:39.599 which absolutely blew my mind. 1:24:39.720 --> 1:24:41.280 Just the Lost in Starlight. 1:24:41.400 --> 1:24:46.080 Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation 1:24:47.120 --> 1:24:49.400 made my head spin. Because you don't, well, I think 1:24:49.439 --> 1:24:53.040 most people do not associate South Korea with animation. 1:24:53.240 --> 1:24:55.679 You might think of it most of our low cost 1:24:55.760 --> 1:24:58.920 animation is coming from all the past. Well that's not CGI. 1:24:59.439 --> 1:25:03.320 There's there's a lot of lower cost animation, yes, but 1:25:03.400 --> 1:25:07.839 when you think of say, Cinematic Animation and Studio Ghibli 1:25:07.840 --> 1:25:10.120 out of Japan, let's just say people tend to think 1:25:10.120 --> 1:25:15.600 of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and I think Korea is 1:25:15.600 --> 1:25:18.879 going to be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation. 1:25:19.280 --> 1:25:21.680 We'll see, we shall say we Lost in Starlight is 1:25:21.760 --> 1:25:24.760 a recent phave, and then I've got some weird ones, 1:25:24.800 --> 1:25:29.240 like there's a German language documentary on fasting that I 1:25:29.360 --> 1:25:31.519 found on YouTube. You can't watch it in the US, 1:25:31.560 --> 1:25:32.960 but you can use a VPN to. 1:25:33.160 --> 1:25:35.080 Pretend to say you could watch anything anyway. 1:25:35.120 --> 1:25:37.240 Yeah, you can use a VPN to pretend like you're 1:25:37.280 --> 1:25:40.000 in Germany. Then you can watch it and just use 1:25:40.040 --> 1:25:43.439 the automatic subtops. What's the name of that one, some 1:25:43.640 --> 1:25:46.000 long German name. I'm just getting started with it, so 1:25:46.120 --> 1:25:50.040 unfortunately I can't remember, but it's it's looking at specifically 1:25:50.120 --> 1:25:52.120 someone who did I want to say, a two to 1:25:52.240 --> 1:25:57.760 three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute who has 1:25:58.040 --> 1:26:01.519 fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I have some 1:26:01.600 --> 1:26:04.599 bones to pick with their approach, but I nonetheless find 1:26:04.600 --> 1:26:07.800 that they have such a huge data set really fascinating. 1:26:08.240 --> 1:26:12.240 So I'm looking at that one. And then podcasts. I 1:26:12.280 --> 1:26:16.559 found a new podcast recently called stem Talk, which features 1:26:16.600 --> 1:26:21.879 interviews with scientists mostly and I've listened to an interview 1:26:21.880 --> 1:26:27.000 with someone named Kevin Tracy tracee Y, who is a 1:26:27.280 --> 1:26:35.120 very widely cited scientist who's arguably the most credible researcher 1:26:36.200 --> 1:26:39.639 who has established a lot related to the vegas nerve 1:26:39.800 --> 1:26:42.519 and vegas nerve stimulation. There's a lot of bs and 1:26:42.520 --> 1:26:45.879 pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal 1:26:46.320 --> 1:26:49.000 amongst the noise. So I'm listening to a bunch of 1:26:49.000 --> 1:26:52.480 stem talk, different scientists on stem talk, and the interviewers 1:26:52.479 --> 1:26:53.280 are outstanding. 1:26:53.720 --> 1:26:58.880 It's interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic, 1:26:59.040 --> 1:27:02.920 but just ramping up since then. I want to say, 1:27:02.920 --> 1:27:06.479 it's become fifty sixty percent of my television viewing. It's 1:27:06.520 --> 1:27:07.560 amazing how. 1:27:07.439 --> 1:27:10.880 It's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find 1:27:10.920 --> 1:27:15.639 anywhere else. So I think there's a documentary. The name 1:27:15.720 --> 1:27:20.040 is something like Learning how to See or the Art 1:27:20.080 --> 1:27:23.800 of Seeing, and it's about David Hockney. Oh okay, and 1:27:24.000 --> 1:27:27.960 big spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it 1:27:28.040 --> 1:27:30.240 on YouTube, and I was not able to find it 1:27:30.280 --> 1:27:30.840 anywhere else. 1:27:31.120 --> 1:27:34.800 Huh. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell 1:27:34.880 --> 1:27:38.160 us about who your mentors were and how they helped 1:27:38.200 --> 1:27:39.000 shape your career. 1:27:39.680 --> 1:27:45.439 Early mentors Stephen Gorik. He was a martial arts instructor 1:27:45.479 --> 1:27:48.160 when I was probably twelve thirteen. Just from the perspective 1:27:48.160 --> 1:27:50.320 of physical and mental toughness. Because the class was all 1:27:50.360 --> 1:27:53.960 adults and then it was me. They did not take 1:27:54.000 --> 1:27:56.200 it easily on me, and I was very grateful for that. 1:27:56.240 --> 1:27:58.759 They weren't abusive, but they treated me like an adult 1:27:58.760 --> 1:28:01.920 who was training for for real, and I think from 1:28:01.960 --> 1:28:06.760 a toughness perspective, he always reiterated that I could do 1:28:06.840 --> 1:28:09.880 more than I thought I could do, much like my 1:28:10.200 --> 1:28:14.439 wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to 1:28:14.520 --> 1:28:16.680 this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to 1:28:16.720 --> 1:28:19.639 do amazing things and they all reference back to him. 1:28:20.280 --> 1:28:23.559 Then Ed Shall who was that professor in high tech 1:28:23.640 --> 1:28:28.479 entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly or 1:28:28.520 --> 1:28:32.840 pretty directly, although they wouldn't have expected it, informed later 1:28:32.920 --> 1:28:37.400 what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing non 1:28:37.400 --> 1:28:40.880 fiction writer who staff writer for the New Yorker. He's 1:28:40.960 --> 1:28:44.960 got least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country, 1:28:44.960 --> 1:28:48.679 I think, And he taught a class at Princeton's seminar 1:28:48.880 --> 1:28:52.040 called the Literature Effect, which was on nonfiction writing and I. 1:28:52.040 --> 1:28:54.160 To literature of fact name. 1:28:54.120 --> 1:28:58.120 Yeah, and that class in terms of thinking about structure, 1:28:58.240 --> 1:29:01.519 how to structure writ which by the way helps you 1:29:01.520 --> 1:29:03.640 structure your thinking. So all of my grades and my 1:29:03.680 --> 1:29:05.400 other classes went up when I took that class. It 1:29:05.439 --> 1:29:10.400 was no kidd wild to see. And I'm sure there 1:29:10.439 --> 1:29:13.880 are many more. I mean right after graduation, Mike Mables Junior, 1:29:13.880 --> 1:29:16.320 in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing. 1:29:16.479 --> 1:29:18.400 That's a good starter list. 1:29:18.280 --> 1:29:20.719 For Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I'm very lucky. 1:29:20.920 --> 1:29:23.360 Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? 1:29:23.360 --> 1:29:24.439 What are you reading right now? 1:29:25.640 --> 1:29:29.839 Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic, 1:29:31.000 --> 1:29:35.360 which is by Marcus Seneca. In this case, meditations by 1:29:35.360 --> 1:29:38.080 Marcus are released as well, so Letters from a Stoic 1:29:38.120 --> 1:29:44.960 by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world. 1:29:45.000 --> 1:29:52.360 I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very, 1:29:52.479 --> 1:29:57.080 very very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too, 1:29:58.040 --> 1:30:01.439 although that might sound odd applied to Stoicism, So Letters 1:30:01.479 --> 1:30:05.280 from a Stoic I would say. Vagabonding a book by 1:30:05.360 --> 1:30:09.639 Ralph Potts. I think the subtitle is the Uncommon Art 1:30:09.720 --> 1:30:12.439 of Long Term World Travel, which is really it's a 1:30:12.439 --> 1:30:14.200 book on long term travel, but it's a book on 1:30:14.400 --> 1:30:19.320 it's a philosophical treatise too. That's a great fun read. 1:30:19.760 --> 1:30:22.160 Those are those are two phaves that come to mind. 1:30:22.680 --> 1:30:27.400 One More Awareness by Anthony Demello. I believe the subtitle 1:30:27.479 --> 1:30:31.040 is the Promises and Perils of Reality. It's just about 1:30:31.080 --> 1:30:35.679 becoming more aware, so taking yourself out of the automatic 1:30:35.680 --> 1:30:37.600 loops that we all have and adopt from parents and 1:30:37.640 --> 1:30:40.120 so on. Really good book. It's like one hundred and 1:30:40.120 --> 1:30:42.360 twenty pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading 1:30:42.400 --> 1:30:46.799 right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve, 1:30:46.960 --> 1:30:51.320 which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned and 1:30:51.520 --> 1:30:54.360 about it's all about the Vegas nerve research related to 1:30:54.439 --> 1:30:55.599 vegas nerve stimulation, etc. 1:30:56.080 --> 1:30:58.920 What's the book that you've given most as a gift 1:30:59.040 --> 1:31:00.800 and why the. 1:31:00.800 --> 1:31:04.400 Books I've given most is a gift includes some of 1:31:04.400 --> 1:31:06.519 the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone 1:31:06.560 --> 1:31:08.639 were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house, 1:31:08.800 --> 1:31:12.960 I have shelves. Each shelf just has fifteen copies of 1:31:13.000 --> 1:31:14.080 these books and. 1:31:14.240 --> 1:31:15.000 Take one with you. 1:31:15.160 --> 1:31:17.400 Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would 1:31:17.400 --> 1:31:20.519 say that's idea. It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing 1:31:20.560 --> 1:31:25.240 for someone like me, so the same yeah, yeah, it's very, 1:31:25.360 --> 1:31:29.280 very very esthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony de Mello. 1:31:29.520 --> 1:31:32.200 For sure, I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book 1:31:32.520 --> 1:31:35.479 Letters from a Stoic, hundreds of copies of that book 1:31:36.479 --> 1:31:38.720 back in the day. Now there are a million copies, 1:31:39.080 --> 1:31:40.920 or I shouldn't say a million copies. Now there are a 1:31:40.920 --> 1:31:44.519 million different books on the subjective psychedelics and psychedelic history, 1:31:44.520 --> 1:31:47.920 psychedelic science. But How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollin. 1:31:48.160 --> 1:31:51.880 For a while, I had that in my room because 1:31:51.920 --> 1:31:54.400 I got early galleys of that book and have since 1:31:54.439 --> 1:31:56.839 ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with with Michael, 1:31:57.400 --> 1:32:02.640 who's amazing. But uh. Other Wise, I also gift my 1:32:02.720 --> 1:32:06.040 friends who are nonfiction purists, who are too busy to meditate, 1:32:06.120 --> 1:32:08.680 too busy to read fiction. I tend to give them 1:32:08.680 --> 1:32:12.479 books of poetry because I'm like, you need to slow down, 1:32:13.520 --> 1:32:15.880 and if you feel like you can't meditate for ten 1:32:15.880 --> 1:32:17.519 minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour 1:32:17.520 --> 1:32:21.880 a day. That type of that type of logic leads 1:32:21.880 --> 1:32:26.080 me to give them a very short collection of For instance, 1:32:27.320 --> 1:32:31.160 there's a new translation of roomy Poetry, relatively new, called 1:32:31.360 --> 1:32:38.240 Gold by Halle Eliza Gavori is her name. Who's incredible. 1:32:38.280 --> 1:32:42.880 She's based in New York City and native speaker. Also, 1:32:42.920 --> 1:32:45.200 who's able to go to the source material? So Gold, 1:32:45.439 --> 1:32:49.920 which is a new compilation of short, roomy poetry that 1:32:50.040 --> 1:32:53.240 is well translated. Unlike a lot of versions you might find. 1:32:53.760 --> 1:32:55.360 It's like one hundred pages. And I'd just say to my friend, 1:32:55.400 --> 1:32:58.280 I'm like, look, don't read this a dizy. Just read 1:32:58.439 --> 1:33:03.320 one before you go to bed every night. And those 1:33:03.360 --> 1:33:06.000 are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years. 1:33:06.080 --> 1:33:10.040 That sounds really interesting. Our final two questions, what sort 1:33:10.080 --> 1:33:13.160 of advice would you give to a recent college grad 1:33:13.840 --> 1:33:19.040 interested in a career in fill in the blank writing, podcasting, 1:33:19.840 --> 1:33:24.559 seed investing, game design. What would you tell them? 1:33:25.200 --> 1:33:29.559 If it's nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one, 1:33:29.600 --> 1:33:32.160 are you really sure you want to do that? It's 1:33:32.640 --> 1:33:35.040 not don't assume it's a good way to make money, 1:33:35.040 --> 1:33:39.160 because generally it's not. But I would say, also if 1:33:39.160 --> 1:33:41.759 it's a recent grad out, so if you're gonna write nonfiction, 1:33:42.479 --> 1:33:45.040 probably go do something interesting before you try to write 1:33:45.080 --> 1:33:48.599 something interesting. That would be my advice. That's what very fair, 1:33:48.680 --> 1:33:53.519 That's what John McFee does. That's what many folks have done. 1:33:53.520 --> 1:33:56.559 It is like I get some life experience doing something 1:33:56.640 --> 1:33:59.559 first and then write about it. Would probably be my 1:33:59.600 --> 1:34:06.960 recommend in the realm of investing finance, I would say 1:34:07.240 --> 1:34:16.400 that probably ensure you have an informational, behavioral or network 1:34:16.600 --> 1:34:21.479 meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do, unless 1:34:21.479 --> 1:34:24.040 you're going to do something like low cost index funds, 1:34:24.040 --> 1:34:26.200 which I think actually are a great idea for a 1:34:26.200 --> 1:34:29.320 lot of people, and I myself also invest in very 1:34:29.360 --> 1:34:30.639 very low cost index funds. 1:34:31.439 --> 1:34:33.719 That's your core you could build, you know, that's your tree. 1:34:33.800 --> 1:34:35.400 You could throw some ornaments around it. 1:34:35.640 --> 1:34:39.160 Yeah, exactly. I want to like keep your risk capital 1:34:39.479 --> 1:34:41.960 and your retirement capital separate. 1:34:42.479 --> 1:34:44.479 What do you know about the world today that would 1:34:44.479 --> 1:34:48.280 have been useful to know twenty five years or so 1:34:48.320 --> 1:34:49.560 ago when you graduated. 1:34:50.880 --> 1:34:52.840 Yeah, threw out a few. So the first would be 1:34:53.000 --> 1:34:57.160 from an investing perspective, you don't need to compete in 1:34:57.160 --> 1:34:59.559 the public markets. You can learn a ton through being 1:34:59.600 --> 1:35:04.320 around startups or even very on sexy private sector stuff, 1:35:04.400 --> 1:35:07.160 and you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So 1:35:07.200 --> 1:35:10.960 you don't have to compete against the citadels in the world, 1:35:11.040 --> 1:35:13.160 Like I don't want to do that, or the rentex 1:35:13.280 --> 1:35:16.400 or whatever like like that's bringing a knife to a gunfight. 1:35:16.400 --> 1:35:17.160 I don't want to deal with that. 1:35:17.880 --> 1:35:22.360 So I would say, also look for white space that 1:35:22.479 --> 1:35:27.240 you're you can create your own area where you're a pioneer, 1:35:27.520 --> 1:35:30.200 not going into well trod space. Yeah. 1:35:30.200 --> 1:35:32.519 I would also say invest in what you know. And 1:35:32.560 --> 1:35:35.719 that sounds so trite, but the first the first stock 1:35:35.800 --> 1:35:38.559 I ever bought was when I was in my teens, 1:35:38.600 --> 1:35:40.160 and it was I think it was in my teens. 1:35:40.160 --> 1:35:41.760 It might have been a little bit later, but it 1:35:41.800 --> 1:35:44.760 was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I 1:35:44.800 --> 1:35:46.760 was like, Oh, this is so fundamentally different, Like this 1:35:46.800 --> 1:35:49.120 is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew. 1:35:52.920 --> 1:35:56.640 So I would say that sort of investing from the 1:35:56.680 --> 1:36:01.200 perspective of watching main behavior on mainstream more than Wall 1:36:01.200 --> 1:36:06.320 Street is actually can be a really viable approach in 1:36:06.400 --> 1:36:09.120 the world at large. I would say for me personally, 1:36:09.280 --> 1:36:12.920 thirty years ago, I would have said, like, your current 1:36:13.040 --> 1:36:16.760 experience of mental health and the buggy code that you 1:36:16.800 --> 1:36:19.640 inherited from your parents, God bless them, but like you know, 1:36:19.680 --> 1:36:23.519 there are some bugs in the code, is not a 1:36:24.680 --> 1:36:28.240 sort of psychological death sentence, like you can actually change 1:36:28.240 --> 1:36:33.639 those things, because you can, you really can impact those things, 1:36:33.800 --> 1:36:38.240 and your living proof. I am living proof, and I 1:36:38.280 --> 1:36:42.559 would say that, you know, science, science is such an 1:36:42.600 --> 1:36:46.840 amazing tool, like the framework of science so necessary for 1:36:46.920 --> 1:36:50.519 not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially 1:36:50.520 --> 1:36:52.960 psychiatg I don't want to throw psychiatry into the bus, 1:36:52.960 --> 1:36:57.000 but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who's 1:36:57.000 --> 1:36:59.280 worth their salt will say something along the lines of like, 1:36:59.280 --> 1:37:01.000 fifty percent of way we know is wrong, we just 1:37:01.000 --> 1:37:04.160 don't know which fifty percent. And when I was growing up, 1:37:04.200 --> 1:37:07.160 I mean, there were so many definitive statements about like 1:37:07.880 --> 1:37:09.760 all right, you're born with this number of neurons and 1:37:09.760 --> 1:37:11.559 when they die, they die, and that's it. You can 1:37:11.560 --> 1:37:16.320 ever regenerate. These types of things totally false. And I 1:37:16.400 --> 1:37:22.960 feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional 1:37:23.680 --> 1:37:26.439 health will be overturned in the next five years. It's 1:37:26.479 --> 1:37:27.320 going to happen fast. 1:37:27.840 --> 1:37:30.320 Thank you, Tim for being so generous with your time. 1:37:30.479 --> 1:37:36.480 We have been speaking with Tim Ferris, author, podcaster, angel investor. 1:37:37.560 --> 1:37:40.280 If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out 1:37:40.320 --> 1:37:43.439 any of the previous five hundred and sixty we've done 1:37:43.880 --> 1:37:50.520 over the past eleven years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg, 1:37:50.680 --> 1:37:54.800 wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check 1:37:54.840 --> 1:37:58.400 out my new book How Not to Invest The Bad Ideas, 1:37:58.520 --> 1:38:02.759 numbers and behaviors that Destroy well How Not to Invest 1:38:02.840 --> 1:38:05.920 at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I 1:38:05.960 --> 1:38:08.000 did not thank the Cracked team that helps us put 1:38:08.040 --> 1:38:12.880 these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. 1:38:13.240 --> 1:38:17.040 Jean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. 1:38:17.840 --> 1:38:21.320 Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm 1:38:21.400 --> 1:38:25.560 Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on 1:38:25.760 --> 1:38:29.040 Bloomberg Radio.