The Four Hour Reinvention (Sit Down with Tim Ferriss) - Genius Network Episode #36

Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode you'll discover the four hour reinvention in this sit down interview and discussion with Joe Polish and Tim Ferriss. Tim is a podcaster, serial entrepreneur, New York Times best selling author, angel investor and advisor. Recorded live from the Genius Network annual event. If you would like access to the full feature video presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com that's geniusnetwork.com 36 four.

Hours ago it was around 11am and you are most likely on break, chatting with other members, checking email or returning phone calls. In that same four hour time frame you could have done a week's worth of work, gotten your body into magnificent physical condition, learned to be a master chef. If of course, that's only if you had all three of Tim Ferriss best selling books, the four Hour Work Week, the four Hour Body and the Four Hour Chef. Yet it took Tim only one hour to get into the Guinness Book of World Records on national TV by doing the most tango spins in one hour. We're going to try to do that in two minutes, me and Tim. Now imagine if he had four hours. Well, we don't have four hours with him today or even one hour with Tim who's an author, an angel investor, a speaker and now he's made himself a celebrity. But we do have 30 minutes with him and we're going to do some Q and A. So let's kick off the next four four hour block of time with the one and only Tim Ferriss.

Thanks buddy. How are you?

How are you?

It's good to see you.

All right, so we've, I don't know how many interviews we've done now at this point, but it's been a lot.

So I thought long and hard about what to get Joe as a gift and really racked my brain. I actually had to go all the way to China to find this for you. And you can see it says I love cool on the top, right? You can maybe open that up and then we can explain what this is. In the meantime, you all have a gift card. This is courtesy of yours truly. This is a $50 gift card to DonorsChoose.org and DonorsChoose.org is interesting for a couple of reasons. I've been an advisor for six or seven years along with Stephen Colbert and Michelle Obama is a supporter Oprah, a number of others and it is the only nonprofit ever to be on the COVID of the Fast Company, Most innovative companies in the world issue. So Just from the standpoint of looking at how they do what they do, it's worth checking out. But they are, I think, one of the rare nonprofits that operates like a lean for profit in the education space. So please enjoy. And that's that. What do you think?

Awesome. Let me. Before I open this, I can only. It says jock fashion, Vogue underwear. So this is going to be j.

Ok, so what's important to understand here.

What the hell is.

So stand up for a second.

Okay.

So it's kind of like a Speedo, but it only goes on one side. Oh, yeah.

I've actually seen you wearing this on. Yeah. When we went to Vietnam, that I.

Thought later at the pool, maybe you could give everybody a demo.

That was awesome. Wow. Thank you. You're welcome. It's one of the nicest things you've.

Ever done for me. You know, it's been coming for a while. I was like, how can I express my gratitude for all that he's done?

Wow. Wow.

Well.

You going to Burning man this year?

No, I live in San Francisco. That's like 50% Burning Man. All the. I have to leave San Francisco to get away from Burning Man.

So how many of you have been to Burning Man? Yeah, I've been twice. Explain that.

Burning Man.

Yeah.

Oh, God. Explain Burning Man. Burning Man. I won't go into the history of it. Burning man is simultaneously a place to see some of the world's best art. Simultaneously a way to see some of the world's top musicians perform for free. It's a way to do lots of illicit drugs for. Without getting caught. It's a way to meet very, very amazing people. Serendipitously, if you have a job or life you hate, it can become your saving grace once a year. It's all of those things and much more if you haven't been. I think going once is certainly worth the experience.

Yeah, that was actually well done. All right, so let's talk about how you do what you do. You went from your first investment to being an angel investor and ranked number six in the world in around five years. So tell that story and a little bit about your life.

Sure. So I wanted to talk today, broadly speaking, about reinvention and what that entails, because I feel like it's very easy when people have a certain degree of success in any field to become defensive. And I noticed that in myself where I was the four hour work week guy and I had these nightmares of talking about email autoresponders for the rest of my life. And it's easy to go from a proactive building position to a I need to defend what I have and that can relate to finances, brand reputation, et cetera. And I think that's a precarious, unproductive place to be. So I decided at one point in 2007 to explore diversifying my identity into angel investing. I'll try not to spend too much time on it, but I think that if you have just one brand or business or project, your entire self worth becomes dependent on the success or failure of that project and it ebbs and flows over time and that's a very, I think, dangerous place to be. So the angel investing started. I'll just give you the quick sequence. So I started off by putting in small amounts of money, meaning about 10k or so, into startups and helping them in ways that far outstripped any potential financial gain. And the objective there was to work with early stage startups and develop a reputation for being very highly value add. This will be important later. Once I had six or seven of those companies where I was never going to make my money back, so to speak, for the time I put in, I used references from them to then start investing and advising as a blended model in other potentially successful or later stage startups. Once I was able to then gather data from those, I was able to leverage that into say, getting to know early employees and founders at companies. Why is this important? Because you can buy stock or get equity at specific financing events or you can buy on what's called the secondary market. And typically that's when say an early employee is like, well, it's great that our CEO is getting rich because he took $20 million off the table because he raised 100 million. But I need to buy a house. How do I get some cash out of this situation? And he'll sell or she'll sell 10% of their stock and I want it to be the first person they called. So that's how I ended up in Twitter and Facebook. Once I had Twitter and Facebook I realized a separate thing which was, and you can apply this in many different areas so I won't spend too much time on it. But you have financial return on investment decisions and then you have what in my particular case, a marketing budget for my reputation as an investor. So 20% of my investments I never expect to make money on directly. What does that mean? That means I put 25k into something like Twitter. Even at a crazy valuation. If I'm able to get unique access that makes me a Twitter investor, which then Gives me better deal flow and a stronger calling card. I use that to then get better choices when I allocate my 80% for the strict financial return, if that makes sense. I would say last but certainly not least is invest. My recommendation would be invest in companies that solve a problem that you have. I've been ridiculed by a lot of venture capitalists. They're like, oh my God, you need to look at the total addressable market size and this, this and this and this, this. If you invest in things that solve a problem for you, it's very hard to go wrong. You will have failures. But I think it increases your batting average tremendously. So I was a pre seed money advisor to Uber. Great example. Evernote as the first advisor. These are all examples of products that solve a problem I have on a daily basis. I would encourage people not to get too fancy with doing due diligence in worlds you don't understand. For instance, every time I try to invest in something that's bleeding edge biotech, which I feel like I understand on some level, but I don't understand FDA phase trials intimately, I get kicked in the balls by the universe every single time. Just lose all of my money. So focus on something that fixes your problems. That's sort of the basic overview if you guys want to get an education in angel investing. My recommendation, and I'm an advisor to this platform as well. Oh, that's another thing. I advise platforms in positions where I will make very little money because I want exclusive access to the people who run those platforms. So if I need help at Facebook, Twitter, just go down the list and name any service you can imagine. Chances are I'm somehow formally involved with that company. So I can make any phone call I need to make. So that has a utilitarian benefit beyond just the strict equity return on investment. But go to angellist. I'm an advisor, yet another platform, Angel Co. And you can look at the investments that every one of these investors has made. You can look at the composition of the financing. You can look at the employees, the key hires. You can look at how much they're paying. You can look at the equity they're offering. New hires. It is such an education. You can see my entire portfolio at Angel Co, Tim. And you can really drill down and see where people have made good decisions, made bad decisions. You can just paper trade for a while and really get an MBA in early stage investing without spending a ton of money.

It's a basic question. I might have asked you this sometime before but you use the term platform. What does that mean?

What is a platform? Well, there are different types of platforms. So there are platforms that people use to market or promote a given product or service. Right? So people might consider their TV show that they're on or their blog or their email list a platform of sorts, something that you can sort of shout to the rooftops or from the rooftops from. Otherwise, platform is an architecture, technological architecture, typically, that allows people to en masse, perform some type of task. So Twitter would be, depending on who you ask, a microblogging platform. So you're limited to 140 characters. So they'll have a director of platform or chief platform officer. In the case of Shopify, another company that I advise, and I view that like a city state on the Internet or an entire nation. In the case of WordPress, they power almost 20% or maybe more than 20% of the entire Internet. So I'm an advisor to Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, and that's effectively like knowing the mayors of these respective territories. Right. And on the Internet, that's how you.

Get away with all the shit you do, right?

No, no. You mean like my last challenge? No. I don't even know if you guys haven't joined the Nob Nom challenge, You should join. You've got two weeks left. That's no booze, no masturbating with 5,000 people being held accountable to do it. Why?

It's a longer story. Honestly, I can see the impact on your life. That would save you hours a week.

Exactly. People ask me, what do you spend your other 36 hours on? I'm like, so those would be the two primary categories, I think germane to a lot of the conversations that people here would have is platform from a personal marketing standpoint, what you use as your bully pulpit or your megaphone, and then platform in the sense of broader sort of technological playing field. Okay, awesome.

That was great. What do you think of this platform?

Beautiful.

The one we're on.

No, I know. I love the. It's the llama for contours.

This is. I am what we do at Genius Network here. Okay? So reinvention. You talked about that. So you reinvent yourself a lot. You've written a ton about it. How do you recommend people here in this room go about reinventing their own lives?

You know, I think that there are sort of two different modes that most people oscillate between. One would be operational build. So you've established what your direction is, what your Objectives are what your timelines are in your building, and then the sort of higher level strategic thinking and introspective existential questions. And I think that whether or not reinvention is appealing or even necessary can be brought about in a number of ways, typically by asking a handful of questions that I find very helpful. And I'm in a period right now where I'm trying to decide what is my next chapter look like. And I'm in the process of figuring that out, but I don't want to rush into another book. I'm not sure I want to do the four hour thing anymore. So I'm in the process of figuring that out. So certain questions that I'll ask that I find very helpful are, and some of you will recognize a few of these, if you can never retire, how does that change your priorities and your decision making? As we've heard a number of times today, are you sort of stockpiling capital and deferring life for a time in which the value of that capital will be the lowest it could possibly be for you? And if you can't ever retire, how does that change your decision making and your priorities? The second question that I ask quite a bit, and actually they're sort of paired off. So the first would be, if you had to take a job right now, you had to stop doing what you're doing and take a job that paid $50,000 a year, $40,000 a year, what would it be? If you were just optimizing for enjoyment and fulfillment, contentedness, what would that job or those jobs look like? 50 grand a year. That's the cap and look for. If you have a number of different industries or job titles or positions identified, what are the commonalities across those? And then taken a step further, if you had to pay $50,000 a year to do a job, what would that job look like? And again, what are the commonalities across the answers that you have to that question? And it's very easy, and I've seen this, to become seduced by money. And money is not a bad thing, but it's not the end all, be all. It's a medium of exchange. So you have capital and you exchange that for possessions or experiences. And it's easy to get caught up with keeping up with the Joneses. And that's a danger of the angel investing stuff, quite frankly, as you see people just making absurd quantities of money and you're like, he's smart, he's not that smart. I could do that. Why am I Not doing that, then it's very easy to get caught up in the torrent of capitalism and it's a very useful tool that makes a really shitty master. Those are some of the questions that I find very helpful.

Cool. So, email, when I first met you in 2007, you were such a huge fan of not sending out emails to all these ones you were collecting. So you've been rethinking email, and it's important. So what have you discovered since we focus here at Genius Network on ideas worth $250,000, what have you discovered that could be worth a quarter million or more to everyone here as it relates to the use of, of or non use of email?

Sure, I think that's pretty easy to answer. I mean, given how well a lot of people here are doing, you can just look at the opportunity cost of spending. Every excess hour you spend on trivial email or just poor email management is extremely costly. A few things. So these are very simple tactical recommendations, but a few assumptions or observations. And the first is that the average inbox number of messages that you have is growing year on year, 15 to 18%. Okay, so where does that lead you personally? Do your system scale. If your inbox is growing 15 to 18% minimum per year, where are you in five years? So take a look at your systems. The second, very closely related to that, is the observation that if, and this is actually from a friend of mine named Robert Scoble, for every email that he sends out, and they call him the human aggregator, he does a lot of number crunching. For every email he sends out, he gets 1.75 in return. So what are the implications? What that means is you don't need better ways of answering email. You need to answer fewer email number one. And that's more of a philosophical shift. I'd recommend reading stoicism letters from a stoic become okay with not responding to people. And there are ways to sort of mitigate the risks associated with that. Or you can limit the size of emails. So the first thing that a lot of people notice in my.

Is that why your family hates you, though?

No, my family loves me. I've spent a lot of time with my family. I just spent three months with my parents. There are a couple things. Look up four sentences or five sentences. Footer. Just Google that and you'll find a footer that basically says this email is is five sentences or fewer. Click here to find out why. And it gives you an excuse to send short emails. And it also encourages people to click through and read it themselves so that you don't feel obligated to send the Great American Novel in response to someone who just sent you the Great American Novel. Common problem number one, number two is become familiar with tools like Boomerang. Pay for the pro version. Boomerang is an extension you can use in Gmail and elsewhere. It allows you to do a number of things that are very important. The first is it allows you to schedule emails to be sent in the future. Okay, I'm sure everyone here has had the experience. You're like, okay, I'm getting anxiety, I need to clear out my inbox. And so you try to clear out the top 10 and you just get like instant message responses and you're like, the count's not going down, the count's not going down. This is very stressful. So if you know someone's constantly on email just waiting like a hawk to like pounce and respond with some nonsense, schedule it to be sent like a week out. And I have one friend actually, I'll talk about this more some other time. He has 75,000 plus unread email. He's a very popular guy. But what he'll do is if somebody doesn't really want to respond to email or whose email he doesn't want to respond to, the first time he responds it'll be like two days. The next time he responds he'll schedule it for like five days. The next time he responds, he'll schedule it for like 10 days. And eventually they're just like, fuck it and they stop emailing. Boomerang also allows you to schedule automatic follow ups. And there are a number of tools that do this. Nudgemail is another followup. Cc, I think is another nudgemail, I'm sorry, Boomerang I prefer because it will take that thread and you can say, ping me in and it'll have two days. One day tomorrow morning in one week. And then you can check another box that's if like no response, if unopened or regardless, this means all of the open loops that you might be keeping in your head or in your calendar follow up with so and so, all of those go away. It is a game changer. In combination with that, I highly recommend that people always process email offline. Okay, so what does this mean? This means that if you're using Gmail, you could use Gmail offline, certainly. Or you could use something like Thunderbird or some other email client like Outlook, process your email offline and then batch send. And this prevents that back and forth. IMING especially if there's a preview pane of some type. So Gmail is actually very poorly designed for this. So using Gmail offline or an offline client allows you to have that sort of left hand sidebar inbox view with a preview. And that will save you in and of itself. If you're processing 100 email, that alone will save you 10 to 20 hours. And if you assume that's on a weekly basis and you multiply that out over 52 weeks, I'd say almost everybody here will derive that kind of value from those tips. Awesome. Great.

Thank you. What are some of the most important elegant wealth ideas that you discovered since you wrote the four Hour Workweek which was a huge bestseller?

Elegant wealth ideas? God, I don't know. Well, I'll focus on the elegant part. There are so many people here who make so much more than I do on an annual basis.

You can talk about life hacks too if that's easier.

No, I'll talk about wealth because I think wealth is a miss. It's an under examined word Success. Another one, terms that are used so often in so many contexts that they lose any specific meaning and therefore I think lead to a lot of sloppy, imprecise thinking. So I think wealth in a way is having a sustainable way of maintaining your capital and simultaneously appreciating everything that you have and do. I think it's impossible that you can have riches without appreciation. So you focus 100% on achievement. You can't have wealth without a commensurate sort of 5050 blend of appreciation with achievement. So I'll give a tip on that. And it's so simple actually one of my readers created something called the five Minute Journal. And you can just google it, you'll find it. Yeah, uj, yeah. And every morning grab your tea or coffee, whatever and just fill out these five minutes starting with three things that you're grateful for. And there's so much research, I'm not going to beat you over the head with it. You can look at all sorts of research into compassion, meditation and gratitude lists and exercise gratitude. Its impact on self reported well being. It's very high. There's pretty much nothing you can do that is higher. So that's number one is journal in the morning or use something like the five Minute Journal. And what I've realized for myself is this is a very personal thing. I think that a business can be optimized for maximal, let's say per annum income, but it can be maximized for other things as well. And one of my favorite philosopher kings in the world of entrepreneurship is Derek Sivers. And Sivers, I think it's just sivers.com or sivers co. He is definitely one of my role models. And he's a master programmer, just a virtuoso of programming, but started a company called CD Baby, sold it for $27 million. And that might not sound like a lot of money to some people here, but the way he's crafted his life is just fascinating. And he's a programmer, right? So he was very shy, didn't know how to overcome his fear of being extroverted. So I'm not kidding. He became a ringleader in a traveling circus. I mean this guy is a real character. And he has a book, I think it's just called Anything youg Want. And it's extremely short. I've read that book dozens of times. You should read it just in terms of again, not just effective solutions, but elegant solutions. The fewest number of moving parts, fewest number of complications. The guy is amazing. And for me personally, the way he views a company is it's an opportunity or a business to create utopia as you would like to see it. So for me I go and you know this and of course we could have a long conversation about this, but I go either super low end in cost, meaning free. I put out more than 500 blog posts for free. I do tons of stuff for free or very high priced, right? Like that event I did a couple years ago and it was $10,000 a seat. And because I've established so much goodwill and trust with my audience and the recommendations I give them, work and so on, I put up a. I remember talking to someone who ran events and this is many different events are run different ways. But in my particular case, events are a lot of work. And putting on the event was a lot of work. But what wasn't a lot of work was filling the event. I put up a 750 word blog post and the entire event was full 48 hours later. And it was about $10,000 a person. 200 seats, just like that. So I like doing extremely. I like doing free or extremely low cost or very, very high cost. And I find that the former maximizes my enjoyment of interacting with my audience and establishing goodwill and testing things and doing experiments, and the latter provides income with a minimum of headache. So those are a few things that come to mind.

No, that's sort of my model too. I do the same thing.

I just want to add one more thing. So investing I view investing as allocating resources to increase your quality of life or the quality of life of those people around you. So what I realized for myself, I hate public markets. So if I buy stock, I watch the charts like a crackhead. It is so unpleasant for me, so that if I'm defining investing in that way, it's defeating the purpose of investing. I think you need to find a form of investing of allocating resources that in and of itself does not create anxiety that negates a potentially positive outcome.

You're a smoked crack. Or you're just making that analogy to. You assume what it's like for someone to look at stocks like a crack.

It's an assumption. I've done plenty of drugs, but. But not coke. Not crack. Actually, let me rephrase that. That's crack.

You could do the four hour crackhead. I mean, there's no telling.

Big market.

Big market. Yeah. There's no telling where you can take this.

That would have to be a freemium.

You know. Oh, I do want to mention something that you talked about with the gratitude I have to shout out for Dan Sullivan. They have. Strategic Coach has an app that I use called Win Streak, where you just literally. It's a downloadable app, free. You can just write whatever you're grateful for. What are the wins? And do three of them a day. It's pretty awesome. Simple takes, but it programs your brain.

And it's getting yourself to follow the simple stuff. So I heard someone tell me recently, they said, intelligence is what it is. Wisdom is taking your own advice. They're like, wisdom is just taking your own advice, doing what you know you should be doing. And I was like, huh, that's really interesting. How many people here. How many people here think they should floss regularly? How many people here floss every day? Jesus. You bunch of overachievers. Yeah. Liars.

All right, so I can't imagine how someone doesn't. I mean, I have literally religiously got my teeth cleaned every six months minimum for the last 26 years. And I carry. I even have it. Look, I think I might have taken it.

You might be able to use that bathing suit for it.

I could. No, seriously. So what do you think of my wallet? My.

Hello?

I think I left it. Yeah, no, I literally. Because it wouldn't be.

So you floss?

I do know. I do have the cards, the dental.

I've hit the one place on the planet where, like, everybody apparently flosses. We could choose another behavior, whatever that is. Okay. You can use platforms, tools like lyft do lift. I mean, I was brought in by EV Williams, who's co founder Twitter, to invest in this company they incubated called Lyft, which is all about behavioral change. And there are different tools, but what tools can you use to take your own advice to do the things you know you should already be doing? Because I think that if you just focused on the stuff you already know you should do, and no new to do items whatsoever, you'd be very well served. So look at ways like this app like Lyft, that you can hold yourself accountable. Where I was going with that is that Lyft is the only thing that got me to floss regularly. I hate flossing. It's just like every time I do it, I feel like I got like mugged. I'm just like, my gums are like violently rioting back. But anyway, so this got me to.

Is your life so soft and cushiony that it needed to go to that level psychologically where.

That's my big problem. Floss. Yeah. No, I've got other stuff. I've got other stuff. No, no, that's why I have black water.

No, that's. That's good. It's like the little things, though. It's a great point. So what is a question I didn't ask you but would be worth at least $250,000 to everyone here if asked it?

How do you make decisions? It's a big question. I would read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Maybe it's the Other Way around, which was recommended. I was at a tech roundtable with Obama and he's like, you know what book all you guys need to read? I'm like, wow, that's what they need on the back of the book cover. But that's a tremendous book. And secondarily, I think Stoic Philosophy is one of the best operating systems conceivable for. Making effective and efficient decisions in high stress environments. So I would say stoicism. Stoicism and understanding sort of the separate pathways or systems that you use as human beings for decision making. Which would be Danny Kahneman's book.

Awesome. Okay, how about if we take a few questions from the audience for a few minutes? Anyone like to do that? Anyone have a question for Tim? Come on up to the mic.

Thanks again once again for the inspiration for the travel. You talk a lot of the different boards and stuff that you're on. You see a lot of what's going on in the future. And one of the things we've Talked about a lot of the last few days are, how do you 10x10 years from now, what are we looking at? What are we seeing? What's the mover and shaker for society? Ah, man, I wish. I do get asked about trends a lot. I just tend to see I'm not a good trend predictor. I am a good trend spotter when it's in front of me, which may or may not be good. I think that. I think that virtual immersion is going to be the next frontier. If you've ever read Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, I think that's where we're headed. I think that High Fidelity, the next generations of Second Life. If you look at AI companies like Vicarious, there will be a point in the not too distant future where this could be a recreation. And that brings up all sorts of crazy science questions that were previously relegated to science fiction. But I think that sort of three dimensional immersive environments, I don't see how that cannot be a huge component of almost everything we do moving forward. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. A.J.

I know you discuss a lot about nootropics. Do you currently take them and what kind of stack do you take? So nootropics are smart drugs. I don't take many, so I'm actually, if anything, trying to obtain almost all of my nutrition from whole foods at the moment. So I pop pills. Well, I do a lot more than that if I have some type of objective or test that I'm running.

You enjoy suppositories, I hear.

Oh yeah. Smart drug suppositories. Next generation. Yeah, it's coming along with the 3D. Might even be able to use those in combination, I don't know.

But.

But there are a few that I find interesting. I'm not using them currently. The brain is just so sensitive and there's so many feedback loops. There are many different perspectives on this, but I don't like to be too cavalier with smart drugs. I think that's dicey. There is a stat called Ciltep C I L T E P that you can find which can be sort of ad hoc'd with Forskolin, something called Forskolin and artichoke extract and a few other things that affects cyclical amp and a number of different aspects of your neurochemistry. But you know, my favorite smart drug is yerba mate tea. Yerba mate tea. And the method, the means of administration is really important. Right. So I think that it's very dangerous to say, like for instance, in the diet world, a Lot of people would be like, oh, slow carb beans. Okay, I'll get bean flour and I'll do this. And the composition is very important. So you could take coca leaf tea all for it. Then cocaine like ah. And then crack like ah. Probably not a good idea. Ostensibly. Right. The same sort of supply chain. And I think that with smart drugs, yerba mate consumed through a bombilla, like the bombilla, the straw with holes in it has this like slow titration effect that gives me four or five hours of effective working. However it. If I drink a cold, ready to drink yerba mate or use teabags instead of that traditional way of consuming it, I'm moving from coca leaf to cocaine and it's boom and then straight back down. But I find yerba mate spectacular personally. Is there a specific brand that you use? I like Cruz de Malta. Compalo. So there's Cruz de Malta from. I think it's from Argentina. And that has Palo, which like the sticks. And that makes it a little easier to navigate with the straw. Otherwise it gets too dense. Like there's Rosamonte which is also great. But it's just really, it's packed. It's like cement. I like Cruz de Monta. And get a container, either use a mug, don't get the one that's made out of like leather or wood. It'll turn into just a bacteria hotel. They get gross really fast. So there you go. Thanks. Yeah, of course.

Well, what I mean, you believe in visualization and whatnot, right? Like sort of like you meditate every day.

I'm going to put a little gel polished sticker there.

I think if you do that with your, the little tea ceremony that you.

Well, when I meditate it's just a photo of your face rotating like. Yeah, it's very helpful.

That's awesome. No, you do, you do meditate twice a day now, right?

I meditate at least once a day. At least once a day. Twice a day if I'm feeling really gung ho. But in the morning, typically is when I meditate.

Awesome. Mr. Klein, so you made a mention.

To Snow Crash earlier. What are a couple of your favorite sci fi books? Oh man, these might sound boring. They're not that esoteric. I mean, I love Snow Crash. I'm not sure if Cryptonomicon would be considered. I love Neal Stephenson stuff. Some people think Cryptonomicon is too big and hard to wade through. I loved it. But Snow Crash, if you're going to do start with Snow Crash, Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, I think, is just one of the greats. And there's so much you can learn about leadership and life just by reading that book. The word grok comes from that book, by the way, if you've ever used it or heard it. Stranger in a Strange Land is where it came from. I think Dune is spectacular. The first book, just the sort of litany against fear of the Bene Gesserit and all that stuff is so awesome. One of the most believably detailed worlds I've ever seen in any fiction. I love Ender's Game. You know, there's been a lot of talk about it, and then the movie, of course, I haven't seen the movie, but there was a long time, maybe at least a handful of years, where on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page, the only book he had as favorite books was Ender's Game. I think that's a hell of a novel. Those are the first few that come to mind. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, of course.

Do you know Verne Harnish?

Yeah.

Hey, Tim.

How are you?

So I just want to publicly thank you for the single best idea I've ever, ever received in my life. And that was from you. And that was the upside down fire. I'm telling you, I'm like this hero now in building fires, and I didn't believe you. My son and I sneak off to our place up in Costa Brava to try this, and it's absolutely brilliant. Then number two is just swimming.

Oh, awesome.

So if you guys haven't read for our chef and got all of those kind of tidbits, what's your latest? Like, just this everyday kind of thing we all have to do that we've been, like, doing wrong. You got any wisdom?

Let me think. Well, thank you. First of all, if any of you aren't confident swimmers, please just read Search Total Immersion and my name and read the blog post. It's so empowering to become good at swimming if you're not good. Like, if you can't do 10, 20 laps without any stress, just read this post. You could take it to the pool and you'll be like, it's. It's not my method. It's just something I explained. You know, I think as far as party tricks go, getting familiar with basic probabilities is actually fun for parties. So there's a book called how to Lie with Statistics. And the reason to read that is not so you can lie using statistics, but so you don't get tricked, either lied to or misled. By journalists who don't actually understand probabilistic thinking. And humans are inherently very, very bad at this. And I remember I'm getting the numbers somewhat wrong, but if you have 200, like, if you have 100 people in a room, and it might even be less than that, like, what's the probability that two people will share the same birthday? And it's something like 50% or 60, 70%, but it's like, when you meet someone, what are the chances? And it's like, it's a coin toss. It's actually really very highly likely. And you're able to make much more informed decisions. There's a book called how to Measure Anything. It's a big honkin book. But if you're in a business and just want to be a more rational thinker and have fun stuff like that, that's worth a read as well.

Yeah, let's go to you and then we'll go. John, the last two questions.

If you were to define it, what would you say was the innate personality trait or it factor that started you on your initial journey through all this experimentation and personal optimization that way back when? What was it about you that set you apart down this path? I think that it all started in high school. I was a competitive wrestler. That was what I was. Very hyperactive. My mom realized pretty early on, she's like, if I throw this kid into kiddie wrestling for three hours, he will leave me alone when he gets home and he'll go to sleep. So I ended up wrestling and I have lung issues. I was born premature. My left lung collapsed because the surfactant wasn't developed. And I have all sorts of respiratory and heat regulation issues. So I had to compensate for that to compete. If I wanted to have any hope of winning, I had to compensate. And the way I compensated was, number one, by trying to become very familiar with nutrition and training and just reading everything I could get my hands on. And then secondly was getting very, very good at cutting weight. And so that became a real science for me. And I got very good at it, which I don't think you should get. That's one of those things. It's like, you don't get good at it. It's so bad for you. But I got to the point where I was cutting 20 to 30 pounds twice a week to compete, and as a result, I was just a monster. It's not good for you, by the way. But to do that without having organ failure, you have to become really familiar with things like potassium and sodium and how your kidneys function and dandelion and all these interesting things. So what started me on that path was not, I don't think any particular personal characteristic or advantage. It was actually a huge, it was a disadvantage that I, I was effectively handicapped in the only sport that I could perform with any proficiency. So I had to try to find a non obvious workaround and that led me to tracking. It's like once you know thyself and if you have enough personal data, you can start to look at trends and what's possible and what isn't and start pushing the envelope and recording it. So that's why from that date forward I pretty much have every workout I've done recorded. I mean I still have the notebooks from that point in time because I was trying to track stuff.

Cool.

Thank you.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you, John.

Okay, so yesterday we talked about a little bit about pseudo celebrities and I'm just wondering how much success do companies see after being represented in something like your quarterly box or in your blog? I'm sorry, can you say the last part again? How much success do the companies see after being represented in your quarterly box or blog or quarterly box? I'm sorry I missed yesterday. I'd be curious to hear the pseudo celebrity part. I don't view myself as a celebrity by the way. There are many more people who are better known. It depends on the product. How much of an effect people see in terms of sales from being in my quarterly box which goes out to almost all the influencers I know in Silicon Valley, New York. So it's a good audience to hit. Is entirely dependent on the product. There are certain things like amrap bars. So the CrossFit, it's sort of a nutrition bar that was developed for the Paleo and CrossFit communities. I mean that just they made millions of dollars following that because it just broke them through this niche market into a wider national market. The blog, I mean if you google Tim Ferriss effect, there are a couple of articles written on it. But there are people who have compared my blog's impact to op ed pieces in the New York Times to long segments on the Today show and highly category dependent. But if it's something that I actually believe in that I get behind, I mean I've had single blog posts put books on the bestseller lists, but I've also had blog posts that go absolutely nowhere. So I think it's highly dependent on the product category and of course not everything clicks. But if it's something that I like and I Make the not so distant leap or assumption that if I like it, I'm a 37 year old male, maybe at least 20 to 40 year old tech savvy males in SF in New York, where I spend most of my time, maybe since I have so much in common with those people, maybe they'll like it. That's a pretty big number. And then if they like it, maybe women in the same kind of psychographic would like it. And suddenly you're at a number that's tens of millions of people if you expand far enough. So does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Yeah, no worries.

What is one of your favorite or most useful quotes or ideas that you could end with?

Well, this one is difficult to attribute to a single person. I was told I was actually left a voicemail by a mentor when I was somewhere between 12 and 15. And the quote was, you're the average of the five people you associate with most. And I think that's had the biggest impact. When I find problems in my life, it's because I've strayed from that guideline. And it's like Garrett was saying earlier, friends versus people you choose to be friendly with. That's not a minor distinction. That's a big, big distinction. And financially, emotionally, psychologically, you're going to be the average of those people you spend the most time with. So you have to curate very, very carefully. And it's not fun, it's not always pleasant, but if you want to be the one steering the car and sort of your journey through life, you have to take those steps and then the other, which I'm going to paraphrase here, but if you imagine anger as an acid, it does more damage to the vessel than whatever it's poured on. And so if you're the vessel, if you have a lot of anger and carry that around, it's doing far more damage to you consistently than it is to anyone that you expose to that or punish with that anger. And I'm an aggressive fighter. I get pissed. The Internet is a full contact sport. It just makes me insane. And I've had to work really hard not to get wound up. It's very, very easy. So just remembering, if you carry that with you, it does fall. And don't feed the trolls. Don't feed the trolls. That's the other way.

No, that's good advice. Well, it's always fun. Thank you, sir.

Of course.

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