Advice From A Billionaire | Keith Rabois Actionable Advice | Maximus Podcast

And then there's a concept that they teach in the military, which I think is really important, which is eaters don't get to have a bad day. So even though you are human, you suffer, you know, the same issues that normal people do. You don't get to show it. Like the obligation, which you get paid for as an executive, as a leader, is to always have a good day and try to, try to remember that.

Welcome to the Maximus podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Cam Sapa. As a clinical psychologist, medical school professor and CEO, I specialize in helping men be better in mind, body, and masculinity. On this podcast, I interview extraordinary men as a clinician would, hearing their come up stories of how they became the men that they are today, and having them share their secrets of actionable advice on how to look, feel, and perform your best. All right, we are back with legendary operator and investor Keith Rabois, who joined us on part one where we talked a little bit about making the man and Keith's rise to the position that he's in and all the lessons that he learned along the way. So here in part two, we wanna focus a little bit more on what I call actionable advice, which is habits that contribute to health and performance.

That.

Can be applied by our followers who are interested in, achieving similar levels of health, productivity, and success. So one of the things that we had talked a little bit about in part one was, you know, your focus on work ethic. What would you say is the secret to working hard without burning out?

Well, I think the key is impact. I think most people who connect the dots between their activities and output are very happy and satisfied. I think if you're just measuring input, but you're not producing value and you're not seeing the benefit of your labor, I think it's very frustrating psychologically. So I think it's that's the key ingredient. It's not the number of hours committed. It's that do you actually produce success by working?

And how do you advise people who the output of their success may be a long time way? Obviously as an investor, you may not see a return or how that investment turns out for many years.

Well, I think output doesn't have to be measured empirically. You can feel whether you're having impact with a founder, whether their eyes are sort of grok what you're saying, whether it helps them clarify their thinking, whether they appreciate the meetings that you're having. So you don't need to see liquidity events and return on capital to know whether you're having impact in people's lives or people you're promoting. So for example, let's say you are running a company or organization and you hire people and you can see some of them improving. Let's say some of them are improving so fast that you're promoting them, expanding their scope of their responsibilities. That's showing impact. So I think all of there's always things you can look for that show progress. And as long as you're feeling there the progress in a sustained way. I think that it's very exciting actually to invest in more work. Let's put this in like an athletic context. If you're practicing all the time but you're not getting any better at a sport, that can be incredibly frustrating. On the other hand, if you're practicing whether it's golf or basketball but you feel the improvement, you see the improvement, even if it's just you see the arc on your shots look more impressive or you feel more comfortable shooting particular shots of basketball or your teammates respect you more. All of those are positive feedback loops even before they might show up in your score on the course or your team's winning and losing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a great parallel to psychology here. We talk about successive approximation when you're training, whether it's quite frankly a human being or a dog, to do any sort of behavior. You don't teach someone to do a very complex overnight. You get them to just approach and then reinforce that and do the next step and reinforce that. And so you can measure, I agree very much, progress along the way. Speaking of productivity and burning out, I had a question that I've been dying to ask you, which is you are notorious for not taking vacations. I didn't even talk about that publicly. How do you recharge your batteries instead?

Well, so, I mean, certainly as an entrepreneur and as a certain as an entrepreneur, that was true from, call it like 2000, 2013. As a VC, I do take vacations. Venture capital sort of hasn't been flow cycled to it's very predictable schedule. Right. And B, at the end of the day, I'm almost never responsible. Like all I am is a consigliere advisor. Right. It's never my decision. So, I do take vacations now, which is probably a very different mentality. But as an entrepreneur, I was always charging ahead trying to achieve. There's always something more I could do for my company. There's always some crisis, personal crisis, professional crisis, something going on in the organization that I could use some tuning. So it felt like reckless to really be taking a vacation. so I think relaxing, reading, truthfully for me, like a Saturday that's unscheduled completely can be incredibly recharging. Truthfully, it doesn't happen that often, even now as a VC, mostly because I have, like, other people in my life, and there's almost never a day that there's absolutely no requirements. But those are actually the true recharges when you can wake up in the morning and, like, 8:00 AM and have no obligations for the entire day and just decide spontaneously what you want to do that day. That's actually the most invigorating, actually for vacation for me is actually stressful these days, even though I take more of them, I have to plan it, organize it, we're usually on somewhat of an itinerary, so it's actually not that relaxing in many ways.

Fair enough. Yeah, I'm actually a huge fan of this idea of micro breaks, even if you're not taking multi-week vacations. which obviously in the startup realm is a rarity by necessity. But there's a lot you can do. I certainly working with founders of my private practice, tell them, take an hour out of your day at the very minimum. You can see you go work the rest of the hours, but if you can't take an hour for yourself, you're not prioritizing correctly. And ideally the same.

Yeah, no, that makes tons of sense to me. Um, actually one of the interesting things about being on the East Coast now that we moved to Miami is I wake up in the morning, and I have a few hours to either read, work out, and enjoy like sort of a leisurely breakfast before 10:00 AM, which is when the West Coast is really, even the first people on the West Coast really aren't online until 7:00 AM. So I have this window where I can concentrate, where I can relax, work out without feeling stress. On the West Coast, if I would do a 7:00, 10:00 AM workout, you know, my brain was already firing like, okay, this workout ends exactly this time. I need to be on email. I need to be in the office. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So even during the workout, I wasn't relaxing. Now, when I go to a workout at seven or eight o'clock, East Coast time, I'm rarely in a rush. So I'm just peacefully recovering from the workout, enjoying the workout and training, then grabbing breakfast and then showering and saying.

Okay, now I'm ready for prime time. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting too, 'cause the Chinese have this model of like 9:96 working from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, six days a week. And as workaholic as that is, they still have realized the benefit of taking one day off because even if all you care about is productivity, I think it's hard if you're literally working 9 to 9, seven days a week without any breaks. You know, the human body sort of has its limits.

So, no, that was my schedule as an attorney. It was basically something of my dot. Yeah. And so, you know, And in pre your micro break, the way I would take a micro break when I was really consumed as an attorney was I would go Sunday morning, walk into the office instead of Uber or taxi, actually taxi, and then I would grab a bagel, grab a New York Times, the printed edition, and just leisurely eat the bagel and scan the paper in the office before I was ready to really focus on drafting my brief or going to the library to do research. And that allowed my brain to kind of relax a bit, adjust a bit. Mm-.

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of which, I love how you kind of started talking about kind of your early morning workout, breakfast. I mean, you're known for being very productive and prolific. Can you kind of share your routine of like, I know there's no typical day, but in terms of the key elements that, you know, help enhance your health and productivity?

Absolutely. So, I start in reverse engineer from sleep. so the most important thing is to get approximately eight hours sleep. So I start with what time do I need to go to bed so that I can get eight hours sleep confidently with high conviction, and then we'll go to bed from there and then build the schedule around sleep. So then I have to retrofit in, when do I want to work out and train so that it doesn't interfere with my sleep, when do I want to eat so that it doesn't interfere with my sleep. When do I want to see friends? So it doesn't interfere with sleep. Kind of build using building blocks. Obviously, as a venture capitalist involved in a lot of companies, have a lot of board meetings. Those get scheduled almost a year in advance. You have these big blocks of chunks of time, three, four hours scheduled way in advance that you're kind of also building your professional schedule around. And then the next level for me is building in, I believe in kind of training every day with no excuses. And so it's building in the workouts and the schedule thoroughly, exhaustively so that the work meetings are scheduled around the workout commitments. But then, and then everything just kind of comes together. I love that, by the way.

It reminds me of a colleague of mine, Dr. Neil Fiore, has a similar method. He calls it the unscheduled method, where, you know, you do basically the, the opposite of most of the executives I know where, where work is priority number one, and they try to squeezed everything in at the end, which doesn't happen half the time. Sounds like you're literally doing the opposite. You go, sounds like from what you were saying, sleep, then exercise, then friendships, relationships, and then, you know, your work meetings sort of get scheduled, which makes total sense to me if you really.

Care about sort of prioritizing your health. Yeah, I mean, what we teach founders, what I've always taught founders is go to a whiteboard, write down your top three priorities. They can go back to your Google Calendar and compare your actual allocation of time from the last month or quarter against those three priorities and they typically don't map very well. So I sort of since sleep is number one, relationship, friends or working out, being fit, healthy is number two, making sure that my priorities map and the best way they can make sure they map is to make sure I allocate enough time before allowing my EA to consume the rest. And so, yeah, we sort of structure it that way. It works pretty well. I think there are things that I found difficult in Venture to schedule and use a calendar appropriately for, for example, it's called thinking time.

Yeah.

So it's very important as a VC to think. That tends to get crowded out of my calendar, unfortunately. That was better as an executive. in scheduling thinking time. So what I would do is typically, for example, on a Sunday, go into the office with a lightly scheduled meeting, like maybe one or two at most. And the rest of the time was for brainstorming, thinking, spontaneous conversations with colleagues. That doesn't work as well in venture because Monday typically is a very busy day in venture. So you're seeing a lot of emails. There's a lot of debates usually on a Monday, presentations by founders. so Sunday is very difficult to have pure thinking time in venture. And typically I like to allocate, if I'm not going to do work for part of the week, it's typically Saturday. And so I found that venture, it's harder to find that free, free form thinking time. And that's probably the biggest sort of mistake and challenge I have in my own scheduling.

Yeah, that's a great tip. Let's dig into some of the health behaviors that you mentioned, starting with sleep, since that's priority number one or almost like the foundational Um, besides getting eight hours of sleep, tell me a little bit about some of the things that you do to optimize sleep. Like, I know you're an investor in eight sleep, the mattress company, any supplements that you may take that enhance sleep.

Uh, love to hear it. Sure. So I think, you know, if one wants an introduction to the best, best habits and the importance of sleep, I'd start with Matthew Walker's book, why we sleep. I think 80% of everything you need to know, maybe 99% of everything you need to know is in that book. basic concept, though, is realistically you want consistency. So you want to go to bed as frequently as possible, but at the same time and wake up at the same time. And so, you know, that takes effort because people tend to spike, you know, on weekends or certainly pre-covid and quarantine. It's actually easier truthfully to have consistent sleep and quarantines. Probably the one benefit. It's like there's not that much going on, so there's not that many distractions. You might as well just go to bed at the same time every day. I found out actually a fair number of friends who used to struggle with this actually have adopted it pretty well. And I think hopefully it'll persist post quarantine and lockdown for them. So I tend to go to bed at the same time every day. The earlier the better. He has an outage in the book, which is a rough proxy of for every hour you sleep before midnight, it's worth two hours after. So I try to go to bed by 10, you know, et cetera, because it is more valuable. I do take a supplement from Thorne called Recovery Pro, which is both good for athletic training, recovery and sleep. There are other Thorne products that have some of the active ingredients you don't have to have the sleep recovery pro as a whole. Occasionally, I'll take magnesium as a supplement, and then I use a sleep drug that isn't of the Ambien class, which is disastrous. The Nesta Ambien, you should never take those unless you're maybe doing time travel, time zone travel, significant time zone travel. But I will occasionally, I do actually take this drug called Rozerem, which I think is quite healthy for people who struggle with sleep onset. and then once in a while, I'll take a cranberry supplement if I wake up in the middle of the night. So that's basically my sleep habits. I wear blackout masks, try to have blackout shades as quiet as possible. We do use a sleep mattress, which cools your core body temperature, which has been proven scientifically to improve your sleep. I tend to like the ambient temperature to be pretty cold, 65, maybe 66 degrees. And I think all of that fuses together to be pretty healthy. Try to avoid eating or working out anywhere near two to three hours before sleep. So I tend to try to eat dinner as early as possible. Again, quarantine much easier to do than before quarantine because you have control of your schedule. You're not really going out probably with people too often. Even in Miami, we're subject to curfew, which is a typical, typically Miami's a very late night city like New York City. But right now, it's perfectly fine to have dinner at 7 o'clock in Miami. So, I found that to be fine for my sleep schedule. I really don't like eating past 8 p.m. Sitting down because then it does, I think, affect your ability to sleep at.

10 p.m. Yeah, makes sense. And, a lot of these things have been well studied, whether it's in Matt's book or quite frankly in the scientific literature. I'm always astounded when I ask people about their use of sleep trackers and what they learned and they're like, oh.

I learned that caffeine and alcohol is bad for asleep.

And I was like, well, that's, that's.

A no-brainer I mean, like, yeah. So I strictly cut off caffeine by, like, two, 2 30. Yeah. During the day, alcohol definitely interferes with your sleep. If you wear any kind, if you use any kind of sleep tracker, you'll see the impact, particularly on deep sleep. I do drink red wine, which has some pros and some cons. You try to limit it, but the impact is real. So there's real trade-offs every time you consume alcohol.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, what other stuff do you just take on the basis of, you know, this is evidence-based and it's the best thing to follow? And is there anything that you got that or that you put into practice that you learned yourself through sort of trial and error that didn't come from a, you know, a book or an article?

Yes, well, sometimes the literature and the research follows like practices. So for example, I have a certain kind of training that I enjoy. I probably realized it was good for my body composition and my sleep before there was research that backed it up. So there's things like that. But fundamentally, I look at the upside and downside of a particular intervention. So it's like, what could go wrong? And if there's limited downside and potential upside, I'll probably adopt it. So, for example, there's a supplement produced by a company called Elysium Basis that might improve life extension and it basically reverses the decline in NAD plus production and that might cause aging. Probably doesn't cause too much downside and may allow you to live longer. So I adopted that. The research is mixed, but and certainly when I adopted it years ago, it was mixed. So, you know, I'll look at like, what's the downside? And the downside is small, then maybe I'll experiment with it. And there's an actual downside, then I might hesitate to wait for more compelling research.

Makes sense. I love how you think about it like an investor. Tell me a little bit about your physical activity routine. Obviously, you're known for being a Barry's Afficionado. How did you kind of come to your current routine and is there more to it than just going to classes every day?

So, no, I love Barry's Bootcamp. I think it's a highly efficient routine if one wants to be optimizing their time. So, they have a limited budget for exercise. They want the highest impact in their lives. I think Barry's is incredibly effective. You can turn your brain off. It's the only time of day I probably don't have my phone with me. I enjoy it. There's a community. I see friends there. I meet friends there. get exposure through new music and I have a highly efficient 50 minute workout. So that, that style of training called hit interval training is very good for improving your lifespan, your heart conditioning and your body composition aesthetically. So I think it works for most people. Yeah. So, yeah, for five years, been pretty addicted to it. I typically. Well, I absolutely do this training every day. Often more than once today. So I highly recommend it. I do sometimes do lift standard resistance training with like free weights. There are some limits. Various, for example, back squats and things like that are challenging to do pull-ups you don't really have the infrastructure to do pull-ups so there's some complimentary training I'd like to do. I used to do a little bit more performance training. So it's playing more soccer and basketball. There are some different exercises, things that you can do to improve your performance about soccer. I'm playing less basketball and soccer these days, so I'm doing less of that training. So I've substituted more into pure hit for the most part. And that's what I basically do every day.

Makes sense. I'm impressed that you actually do two a day sometimes that you don't hear about that too much outside of, like, you know, athletes.

Yeah.

Like, why, why do you decide to do that? And how do you prevent sort of over training, especially when you're doing hit?

So, yeah. So before COVID and quarantine, I was doing two a day, every day. So I would do at least 14 a week, sometimes a little more. Now more settled into about 10. So three times a week, I'll do two a day. Like today, I may try to. I'll feel that a little bit at the margin. One a day, I feel, is a little too easy. Two days, a little stressful. But I measure my HRV, which is your heart rate variability, which is a sign of recovery.

Yeah.

And if the, if the HRV, I use both an Apple watch and my sleep mattress. you know, kind of triangulate between the two. They measure it slightly differently, but I'll basically look for the higher the HRV, the more you're ready to basically rebound. And if it gets a little bit low, if it's below my normal range, I might back off a little bit and definitely only do one class. It's also a sign you might be getting sick, so you want to be careful when you see your HRV out of range. But if I get a higher recovery score, then I know like my body's ready, you know, to double down, it's totally prepared, chance of injury is less. There's some studies through a company like ROOP that has correlated changes in HRV with injury propensity. So, you know, that's the one feedback loop. There's another one that's more controversial called pulse wave velocity, which I really like, but the FDA seems to have cracked down on companies producing it. Personally, I found it to be the most efficient, most effective way of measuring my recovery score. Yeah. So I'm kind of looking for new products to ship it again. Right now, my widening scale used to have it embedded. It no longer does. The FDA made them turn it off. But fundamentally, I've tried to triangulate from things like that.

Are you looking at HRV while you're sleeping as the metric or including throughout the day?

So, that's why I use both the Apple Watch and my mattress. I don't wear my Apple Watch when I sleep. So, I get an HRV for my waking hours from Apple. And then I use my eight sleep mattress for my sleeping HRV. They're directionally similar. There's just a different scale. They tend to be higher during sleep. That's what I'm primarily using, but I use both.

Makes sense. Are there other key health metrics that you track? I know you mentioned, for instance, like your heart rate recovery over two minutes or your baseline resting heart rate.

So, I look at my resting heart rate. I think that is more interesting in if you're in a normal range, it's more, it's more it changes Deltas like. So mine runs low because I'm doing a lot of interval training, which is really good for reducing your resting heart rate. But it's not like the absolute number is quite as important as like, oh, it's a little high. Why? Yeah. You know what? What's causing that? And it can be something as silly as I'm traveling across the world. It's going to be it's going to remove from the normal zone for a little while until I adjust. It can be something like, I actually am getting sick and, you know, that's a really warning signal. I have a friend who moderately recently had COVID and the first thing he noticed was actually his resting heart rate went up before he had any other symptoms. So, I think it's early warning signal. It doesn't mean you have COVID, obviously, but you want to pay attention to it, you know, material changes. I do like a two minute recovery. So that's from Peak. And then after two minutes, how fast does your heart rate recover? Like with Delta. And the bigger the Gap, the better. If you only knew one thing about someone's health, you can only have one data point, give me that data point, and that's the single best metric you want. So that I do tend to optimize either compete on that to improve it as much as I can. And if I see that change both positively means I'm making progress in my workout program, and if it regresses, it means, you know, there's probably maybe something going on. Sometimes it's a function of just the training regimen. So when quarantine, for example, first, we first had lockdown in San Francisco in March, I had to adjust my training program because I couldn't take my normal Barry's classes. And so it actually did a fact and shop in my two-minute recovery, which started decaying. And I eventually figured out new techniques, new workout programs to try to modulate and rebuild, but it took a while. Unfortunately, in Miami, we have various classes so that I can rebuild my two-minute recovery back to normal, hopefully.

I love it. And is that something that people can do without an Apple Watch? Like, what do you try to do? Get your heart rate as high as possible, stop, and then see the Delta after two minutes?

Yeah. So basically, what you want to do is do something like a vigorous run, sprint, rowing, finish a pull-up on class, you know, at fairly high intensity, and then slow down. And then fortunately, your watch, if you have an Apple watch, will automatically calculate it for you, but you can do it yourself. You can measure your heart rate after two minutes. You don't need a fancy Apple watch, but it's convenient, easy, intuitive on app with an Apple product. But it can be almost any exercise as long as you're ending at a pretty vigorous level. So if you're going to do that, for example, resistance training, you're probably not elevating your heart rate quite enough unless you're doing maybe like squats or presses or something, and then maybe or burpees and finishing that way, that might be a good proxy, but typically you want to end at a pretty high level, like almost like your max for the workout and then stop and see what it cools down while you're stretching.

I love it. We should, we're going to do a challenge in our community and have people measure this and compete. I think it'd be a great, great group sort of exercise.

Send me screenshots for sure.

Actually, somebody in our community had a question for you. They were interested in actually your resting heart rate. Is that something that it was always low or really through HIIT training and the other exercise that you do significantly decrease over time?

I think it significantly decreased, but I didn't start measuring until 2003. And I noticed it mostly in 2003 because I went to my new primary care doctor and you're gonna laugh as a doctor, but he was freaked out. That was the first time I met him and he took my resting heart rate and it came out like 39. and he's like, you're either a Lance Armstrong or you're dying. I can't tell the difference. And so he put me on a stress test on a treadmill immediately. He guessed I was probably not dying because I told him in the initial interview that I was playing four games of soccer a week. So he figured it was probably because I was in really good shape. But he was definitely very nervous. Now, it's no longer 39. It's a little bit low to mid-40s, which is still pretty low. But it's not like acute but he was terrified initially.

I think it's because unfortunately, physicians for the most part see very unhealthy folks, right? 70% of Americans are overweight, 88% are metabolically unhealthy.

They usually go to the doctor when something's wrong, not proactively. This is a proactive relationship. Now, he has my medical records for the last 17 years, so if he sees my heart rate, he'll see whether it's in a normal distribution immediately and know like, he shouldn't stress out if my heart rate's 42 today, whereas maybe one of his patients walks in with a 42 and he might get nervous actually.

Yeah, absolutely. So, we talked about sleep, we talked about physical activity. Do you think there's an equivalent when it comes to socialization or intimacy? I know you're trying to kill many birds with one stone with something like berries. Do you think there's a what's your equivalent for quality deep social interaction. Like I know one thing you mentioned before that you hated sort of going to meetups and other sort of things because it sort of lacked the quality and depth unless you're trying to do it for recruiting purposes. But I'm kind of curious when it comes to intimacy, what's optimal there?

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, the studies are pretty compelling that people who have solid friends, partners in their lives live better lives, happier, longer, et cetera. So I think it's important to have, you know, high quality friends. I actually allocate a significant amount of time to my friends. It's one of the most important things I do is really spend and devote quality time to a significant number of people around me. I filter them very carefully of like, you develop habits like as I'm discussing of, I think you are sort of the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So I'm very judicious about who those five people are, but I invest significant energy in keeping track with them, meeting up with them, scheduling them. I kind of have a running clock in my brain of, I haven't seen this person in a week. I haven't chatted with this person in two weeks. That's too long. Let's schedule something. I'm pretty proactive about it. If you interview any of my friends, just hear that. So I track it pretty carefully and love to invest time and energy with the most important people in my life, for sure.

And I know it's tough, especially as an investor, you probably have to sort of professionally network with many, many people. But when it comes to kind of close intimate relationships, there's a running joke in Silicon Valley about who's going to build the personal CRM, which I always joke in response, I'm like, your brain is the personal CRM, as you were saying. If you care about them, you'll naturally think about them.

Yeah, I agree with that actually, because I'm a strong believer in that it's deep connections and serious connections that are more important than weak connections. So I'd rather have five to 10 very important people in my life than 100 people. I'm basically introverted and this may or may not be obvious from a professional standpoint, but I actually like a lot of alone time and I like also quality one-on-one time with people versus large groups. Per my point about conferences and large events, I typically really don't want to attend those partially because they don't give me the energy, if anything, they deplete my energy, which is interesting. My partner is more extroverted so he can enjoy large groups of people. But I typically prefer actually really quiet times. Even there's a running joke that all my close friends are very introverted. He looks at us and he's like, do you guys ever chat with each other? Could you just sit there?

Just sit and read together. There you go.

Yeah, pretty much. That would be like heaven for me. If I can work out and read with my friends, friends and say very little, I could be thrilled.

I love it. Yeah, I feel like so much of, you know, when people talk about health optimization, they're always talking about usually diet, exercise, maybe sleep, and nobody, you know, talks about relationships and intimacy quite as much. And I consider it one of the five foundational pillars. And so I'm, it sounds like you actually prioritize it and really invest in it, which I hope people listening to this actually really take to heart that even if you're trying to be a successful entrepreneur and investor, I think one of the mistakes, quite frankly, that a lot of sort of founders and investors make is they don't invest enough in their social relationships. And then, you know, when they're, even if they're coming off an acquisition, they leave themselves sort of very bereft of, you know, investing in that part of ourselves.

Yeah, no, it's critical. It's been critical to my happiness, been critical to my success. I also have worked with a lot of friends over my career, over the last 20 years, and the combination has been very effective as well. But I definitely track in my brain and sometimes more explicitly the amount of time I was spending with friends and by friend to make sure that I'm a good friend and contact them proactively, that I can figure out what I need to do. I have to reorient my schedule around their availability. what's going on in her life. I try to do that where I can. So I think it's critical to at least mental happiness, if nothing else.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think that's, that's underrated. Is there any particular dietary plan, nutritional regime that you have?

You know, that's a great question. I wish I could say I have, like, the secret or I figured it out. I read, you know, all the research, and it's so. conflicting. Absolutely. What I basically netted out to is, you know, a bit of moderation of everything. Yeah. I can't figure out for heads or tails what I really should be doing. And I do believe that intermittent fasting is generally good for you. I think you can debate whether, you know, 16 hours once a week, twice a week, three times a week, whether you really need to do more or less. I think. But I think the evidence is pretty compelling that that 16 hour fasting at a minimum, which is pretty convenient, you know, not too painful mentally and, you know, physically is a pretty good thing. So I try to do that occasionally. But as far as true diet, also when you're training a lot, you don't want to go in an extreme diet, probably at the same time. Like, so, for example, the amount of weights I'm lifting, I don't think I should be going low carb. I need, I need, like, some carbs, and so. I probably have less strong opinions on this than many people. Certainly, insulin spikes are bad, no doubt. And so avoiding things that cause insulin spikes are absolutely beneficial in all kinds of ways. Turns out though, what causes an insulin spike for me may be different than you versus my friend. And so then you have to figure out, well, what causes the insulin spike for you, some people can eat bananas without an insulin spike. Other people have no insulin spikes. Some people can have pizza, some people can't. So there's starting to be more products and services in the market that will help you figure out what works for your body. And I think those are good things when they become more mainstream. I think, you know, I'll probably learn that maybe I can, maybe I shouldn't be having bananas even though I enjoy bananas. Maybe I should not be having pizza even though I enjoy pizza. Some people can actually eat chocolate chip cookies without an insulin spike and I'm very jealous because I never have chocolate chip cookies. I'd say the only dietary habit that I really am fairly consistent about that has been productive is I almost never will have dessert, even in business meetings. I sort of adopted something I actually learned from Vinod Khosla is I basically will have blueberries for dessert, like a bowl of blueberries. So I can stay for dessert in a business context and socialize. But I don't have to basically poison myself with sugar because most desserts are incredibly have a lot of extra calories and have a lot of sugar. So I've substituted that and I've been very consistent for like 20 years on the no dessert rule. Yeah. You know, people, a lot of some of my friends like to try to torture me, you know, you know, Daniel, various desserts in front of me and they're like, oh, you're sure, et cetera. But I'm pretty resistant. It takes a lot to get me to have dessert.

It's a great rule. And, you know, one of my colleagues at UCSF, Dr. Robert Lustig has written extensively about how sugar is essentially toxic. I think people, because of the ubiquitousness of it, fail to appreciate both sugar and alcohol actually in terms of how bad they are. It's not that you can't eat it. I always tell people, but just don't fool yourself that it's a healthy thing. It's like, sure, it's a vice and you know, you can make that sort.

Of personal choice, but don't believe a.

So, you know, it's a great choice.

But, yeah, it's a great point. Yeah, that's. That's basically my only, like, clear evidence unequivocal is reduce sugar as much as possible and shoe extraneous calories from dessert.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I used to actually have three bananas in the morning because, you know, when I was doing a lot of sports, and I was like, oh, fruit's not bad for you. Until I talked to Peter Atia one day, and he's like, I haven't touched a banana in years. so I definitely am in the berry camp, which is one of the few fruits I eat nowadays, along with baobab, which is actually a super healthy super fruit. It's one of the few fruits that's been generally unmodified from ancient times because it's not farmed or cultivated. There's just giant trees in Africa that have been around for thousands of years.

So it's as a- yeah, I highly recommend blueberries. Fanatical and Addicts Blueberries. People can always tell, you know, whether I've been involved in the preparation of an event. If they're serving blueberries, there's no doubt that I was editing that menu very carefully.

Excellent. All right, Maximus followers, you gotta find a signature fruit, preferably in the blueberries.

I joke with one of my closest friends that his biggest character flaw is he doesn't like blueberries.

There you go. Hopefully, he'll jump on that train.

One day, I'm working on it. It's been like eight years so far, and I'm failing.

Indeed. Last health behavior I wanted to ask you about, since we talked about diet, exercise, sleep, and intimacy, is focus. And this is one I particularly wanted to hone in on just because, you know, I think we live in the age of digital distraction. and I obviously was promoting dopamine fasting heavily last year in terms of just to kind of increase the public recognition that addictions aren't just the substances, but we can absolutely be addicted to internet, social media, devices. And in fact, my observation, they're bigger time sucks, in fact, than most of the other sort of common addictions that we see. So I'd love to hear your point of view in terms of how do you maintain your focus Or do you have a particular productivity system that helps you get through what you do in a day?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a strong believer in focus. So I cannot tolerate multiple browser tabs being open. It drives my husband crazy because he loves browser tabs. And I cannot use his computer. If we're trying to plan a trip or a vacation or a wedding, He has all these browsers and my brain just starts going crazy as soon as I see his computer. So we have to go grab my computer and because he'll go crazy if I start closing his problem. I used to start closing all his browser tabs on him. So we have big fights over browser tabs. That's like the number one issue in the relationship. But I need the focus. Problem though. Yeah, it's a big problem though. Like we literally cannot share like computers. But in any event, I basically like my desk at work and at home is always perfectly clean. There's nothing on it because I don't want my brain to get distracted. So like I visually eliminate clutter. My house is always perfectly clean because I don't want anything out of place because my brain just doesn't process stuff well that way. What I'll do at dinner, most of my friends are on this page, but When when we're out at dinner, I have an absolute rule. You can't check your phone. And I get furious at people if they pull out their phone. I will actually kick them out of like invites to future dinners if they pull out their phone. Yeah. So I really like there's an occasion like a casual dinner. Like we're getting like a burger after a workout or something. But any sit down dinner, I'm like notorious for like thou shalt not open their phone unless you're like dying or like your significant other is dying. And so I try to eliminate that, but then there's times a day when I don't mind. As we discussed, sitting in an Uber, I think it's perfectly fine to consume social media. Or I wake up in the morning often and I'll relax by reading Twitter and just see what's going on in the world. I can get a quick feel for what's going on in politics, in technology, in sports by scanning Twitter. So I like having an espresso or green tea, ice green tea in the morning and reading Twitter as a way of waking up my brain acclimated to what's happened overnight while I was sleeping. So I think that's perfectly a fine use of social media. But I'll typically, when I want to dial into something, when I want to do real work, I try to eliminate as many distractions as possible. I love it.

And that's, I think, very much aligned with sort of the principles of dopamine fasting, which is trying to compartmentalize it.

Right.

Sounds like for you, you know, social media in the kind of that warm up, brain warm up time in the morning. is used or kind of in the in-between off times. But it sounds like, you know, you absolutely are kind of quote unquote dopamine fasting during meals, which is like focus on the meal, don't focus on your phones and don't distract yourself from the social engagement that's present there.

Even when I do, like we do date nights like with my partner and I'll try to put my phone sometimes in the other part of the house so I can't even get distracted with it. You know, try to put it away physically so I don't have a tendency to pick it up. Totally.

I love the anecdote, by the way, about the clean house and the clean desk. I think, you know, I joked that like two of the biggest influencers, Marie Kondo and Jordan Peterson, were admonishing people to clean their rooms about a year ago. But, you know, it's interesting, like one of my observations as a psychologist, I almost feel like you can almost tell someone's mental state by, you know, the state of how the changes in how they keep their room, like when they're stressed and chaotic. It's expressed almost externally in terms of, you know, how they keep their room and when things are nice and organized, then obviously they're kind of doing better in life. So I almost feel like it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. So my recommendation to people is always at least keep your desk clean because it's like your one professional refuge and it just helps you keep your focus a little bit.

Yeah, I found that to be very successful. I mean, if I'm in the middle of writing a complicated let's say brief when I was a lawyer, I might have index cards with different paragraphs, different precedent, like, you know, kind of displayed across my desk and then shuffle them around. So if you watch me in the middle of writing something complicated, you might see, like, papers on my desk because I'm kind of visually moving them around. But as soon as I've drafted it, that thing, that desk is immaculate. And even probably every night, it's probably immaculate. I probably won't even leave them out.

Awesome. And do you have an organizational system? Like do you use, you know, like a sauna or some task management software to-do lists or getting things done or anything of that nature?

No, I'm kind of old school, so I use these like sort of molecule notebooks. Like, yeah, we'll do a product promotion. This is how I organize my life. I take notes by hand. So let's say an investor pitch or meeting with a founder. And every morning when I wake up, I'll tend to rewrite my list of priorities or things that I've kind of look, kind of feel like plates I'm juggling. So for example, it can be as trivial as like, I need my car to have more gasoline or take it to the car wash or something. I'll write that down, take something to dry cleaner, write that down. So I have a personal list and a professionalist, a professionalist is like meetings I need to schedule, people I need to see, follow-ups I need to do. And then I have a personal list Just things that are kind of like hanging out there. And then I just check them off like, and that this is the only thing I use.

Yeah, amazing. You know, it's such a great example, by the way, and I hope my followers pick up on this. You strike such a beautiful balance between sometimes using very complicated technology like Apple Watch, you know, HRV in a eight-seat mattress. But when it comes to other things, it's like, yeah, pen and paper. is all you need.

I use the exact same pen every day for 24 years. I could only use exactly this pen. So, yeah, I'm a creature of habit. And then it takes a new product, new technology to be good enough or better to substitute. I mean, there's downsides to using paper, like search, for example, retrieving through search. Pretty difficult. Now, I happen to have a pretty good visual memory, so I can usually remember, you know, where in my notebook something is, what page it's probably on. So, but I really don't want to learn a new system unless it's clearly superior and very intuitive.

Makes sense. Now, I know we got a couple of minutes left, so I just wanted to ask a couple quick questions from the audience that they were burning to ask you. One of them was, that I think a couple of people wanted to hear your perspective on was what's your view on masculinity and kind of what roles it played in your life?

Yeah, you know, I mean, I hadn't consciously focused on it until we started having conversations. It was something that was just, I mean, personally, I always assumed was a positive thing and really how did it, like, put a lot of energies into dialing in degradation in masculinity in society. And then you highlighted a couple of empirical, you know, sort of interesting and very arresting piece of evidence. And then I realized that, you know, society has been undermining this for a long time and with catastrophic consequences. And so, you know, that's when I first really focused on it from an attention standpoint. I'd been pretty passe, let's say. I just assumed it was good, but so it hadn't played a lot of conscious part of my life until relatively recently, like let's say last year.

Yep, fair enough. Another question from the audience that people were really interested in was, what's your advice for carrying yourself in professional settings when it comes to when to be diplomatic and when to be blunt?

That's a very good question actually, because it's not as intuitive So I think either poll is probably wrong. Right there are like I don't think you should be completely diplomatic all the time and completely blunt all the time. I think one of the key variables is is being direct going to be constructive and that depends both on your ability to communicate the power of the idea, concept, evidence, marshal that, as well as the recipient. Do they want to be improved? Do they want to be challenged? Or do they just not care? And so I think you have to sort on that dimension, if nothing else. Context may matter too. I mean, there are opportunities like at a dinner party, probably not the right opportunity to correct everything in a direct way. versus a one-on-one conversation where, you know, manager or mentee, Etc. So I think environment matters as well. So I think there are multi-factors but I, I think at the end of the day, your obligation to yourself, your obligation to your partner, your obligation to your friend, your obligation to your colleague is to figure out how to communicate correctly, powerfully, something if it's important. I think there's also a filter, by the way, on importance. You don't have to be something that's trivial you might not want to be direct about because it's not worth it. It's not like that fundamental. It's at some level filtering there is probably also useful, but fundamentally the goal is to provide value. And often an unvarnished conversation will be more likely to provide value than an oblique non-transparent conversation. Yeah, absolutely.

It's something I think about a lot. I mean, fortunately, in the context of Psychotherapy, you both have a trusted and confidential relationship. So you can be very blunt without having to, you know, skirt around the issue. But on the other hand, one of my life's mottos is it's more important to be effective than it is to be right. And so to your point, you have to kind of read the room, read.

The person that you're, you're with. I don't. Yeah, I think there's a, there's a metaphor there, which if I'm communicating an idea, well, a metaphor for basketball, but let me explain it slightly differently first. If I am trying to communicate an idea and you don't crock it, it's my fault, not yours. So I need to take on the obligation of figuring out how to powerfully, in a compelling way, communicate a concept to you and keep trying different ways and constructs and evidence until it resonates. It's not your fault for not understanding it. And I think that's the obligation and that's why Directives can help. But when it doesn't work, then you might have to find alternatives to get to the same output. So the metaphor from basketball is something, one of the best basketball coaches I've ever seen used to teach, which is when you throw a pass to somebody, it's your obligation to throw the pass so that the recipient can handle it. So don't blame the recipient for fumbling the pass. probably means you didn't provide it with the right spin, the right height, the right context. Right. So I think reversing the obligation leads to better outcomes in the first place.

Absolutely. Yeah. I call this radical responsibility. I think it's so useful, especially for Founders pitching investors. They, sometimes they walk away, they're like, oh, they just didn't get it. And I was like, that's your fault. So you should basically assume as such and revise your.

I, I teach people the first day as a law clerk, well, I teach all my colleagues that I've hired that work with me closely is don't let me make a mistake. Like it's not, it's not, it wasn't my responsibility as a law, my job was to convince the boss, the law clerk or the politician or the executive that I worked for, that they were making a mistake. So own the communication and own their persuasion. It's actually really invigorating too, when you realize that that's your responsibility as opposed to, oh, he or she didn't get it. Right.

And one last question, especially because we're living through one of the unique and most challenging times in societal history, both politically but also from a health perspective, obviously with COVID going on. So one of our community members was really curious, how do you keep your morale and motivation high during stressful, difficult times? And also, how do you do that when you're managing teams?

So I think clarifying the goals, being honest about what's ambiguous and what's not is rewarding when you're managing other people. Truthfully, being deprived of social interaction is not good for anybody. So I actually think psychologically it's bad for everybody, myself included. so I think connecting with people is pretty fundamental to psychological health. And so I think that was one of the mistakes, like sort of the government forgot about is like, you're really causing a lot of problems when you're isolating people. And so trying to stay connected to people as much as possible without being reckless about health was a first, first principle. And then there's a concept that they teach in the military, which I think is really important, which is eaters don't get to have a bad day. So even though you are human, you suffer the same issues that normal people do, you don't get to show it. The obligation what you get paid for as an executive, as a leader is to always have a good day and try to remember that.

Yeah, absolutely. That's such great advice too in terms of the responsibility that you have to others. Of course we have to engage in our self-care as we talked extensively about in this last hour. But yeah, I think we have to be at least diplomatic in terms of how we express it. So yeah, I don't believe in, what is it like radical honesty all the time. You have to be thoughtful about it.

Great.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, definitely.

Incredible pleasure to have you on the podcast. You're very generous with your time advice, especially digging into your whole history growing up and sharing so much of your personal routine because I think I think a lot of people want to emulate you and follow you in your footsteps. And while that may not be totally possible, I certainly think we can learn from the health and habits of successful people. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our community and to the public at large.

Great. It's been a pleasure.

Awesome. Take care.