#259： Tools of Titans
Episode Stats
Summary
Tim Ferriss is the author of several New York Times bestselling books and the host of the popular podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. Tim s out with a new book called Tools of Titans, in which he distills the hours of interviews he s conducted with high-performing guests on his podcast to give readers the best tactics and strategies on how to live a successful and flourishing life. Today on the show, Tim and I discuss self-improvement advice, the survivorship bias, the common habits of high performers, and how to ask better questions so you can learn things more quickly. Tim also discusses his struggle with depression and what s worked for him and keeping it at bay.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So if you're
00:00:20.060
a fan of podcasts, my next guest likely needs no introduction. His name is Tim Ferriss and
00:00:25.140
he's the author of several New York Times bestselling books and the host of the popular
00:00:28.380
podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. Tim's out with a new book called Tools of Titans, which
00:00:33.020
he distills the hours of interviews he's conducted with high-performing guests on his podcast
00:00:37.160
to give readers the best tactics and strategies on how to live a successful and flourishing
00:00:41.580
life. Today on the show, Tim and I discuss self-improvement advice and the survivorship
00:00:45.680
bias, the common habits of high performers, and how to ask better questions so you can
00:00:50.140
learn things more quickly. Tim also discusses his struggle with depression and what's worked
00:00:54.300
for him and keeping him in the black dog at bay. This podcast is crammed with actionable
00:00:58.940
advice, so you'll want to take notes. After the show's over, check out the show notes at
00:01:03.480
aom.is slash ferriss. That's F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Tim Ferriss, welcome to the show.
00:01:17.200
All right, so you got a new book out, Tools of Titans, The Tactics, Routines, and Habits
00:01:21.260
of Billionaires, Icons, and World Class Performers. Basically, what you've done is you distilled
00:01:26.380
hours of interviews you've done on your podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, to get the best tactics
00:01:31.660
to help people live a flourishing life. And I love these sorts of books, like what successful
00:01:35.840
people do, the routines of successful people. But one of the criticisms that's levied at
00:01:40.780
these sorts of books and articles and things like that is that they can fall prey to the
00:01:44.620
survivorship bias, right? So for those who aren't familiar, the survivorship bias is if you
00:01:50.220
just look at successful people and look at what they did, you can get the assumption that,
00:01:54.680
well, if you do these things too, you too will also be successful. But you ignore the people who
00:01:59.720
did the exact same things but failed, right? Because you don't see the losers. How do you
00:02:04.580
respond to a criticism like that? Does that apply to the Tools of Titans or not?
00:02:09.500
Well, I think that survivorship bias is something I'm very acutely familiar with because of investing.
00:02:15.960
If you open Barron's and you look at the mutual funds that advertise, that is a common criticism,
00:02:21.520
right? That they just happen to be the monkey that flipped heads up 100 times in a row. But if you have
00:02:26.260
enough monkeys, you're going to end up with one of those. And how do you know? That monkey will go on to
00:02:30.920
write how-to books about how to flip coins. But it just was a probability that, of course, given the
00:02:37.420
sample size, you'd end up with something like that. So I'm very familiar with how people can confuse
00:02:42.580
correlation with causation. In this case, I think there are a few differences. The first is that
00:02:47.760
from the hundreds of hours and about 10,000 pages of transcripts, that is probably 50 or 60% of Tools
00:02:56.380
of Titans, the distilled tactics and routines and so on. The important portion is that I don't view
00:03:02.800
myself as an interviewer. The rest is all new stuff. Brand new tips from past guests and also new folks
00:03:08.420
like Jack Dorsey and so on. So there are a few elements that make it different. The first is
00:03:15.440
that I don't view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimentalist. So I've tried
00:03:20.980
everything in the book and I have replicated results to one extent or another. And I've also then been
00:03:28.140
able to look at how these habits have been used by my friends, colleagues, and fans over the last
00:03:35.080
several years. So I've been able to vet the, let's just call it top 1% of everything that has been on
00:03:43.020
the Tim Ferriss show to date. And the second piece of it is that many of these people, and I would be
00:03:53.340
the first to say, I think that it's not any one trick or hack, which is a word I try not to use these
00:04:00.480
days. But there's no one trick that's going to turn you into Jack Dorsey. But the fact remains
00:04:05.760
that once you're lucky, twice you're good. Three times something really interesting is going on.
00:04:10.480
Jack is someone who has a history of multiple home runs. Mark Andreessen, same story. These are people
00:04:18.300
who, if they're lucky, they are some of the luckiest people on the planet. But I have to think there is
00:04:23.580
actually an element of skill involved. And they have blueprints and recipes of their own. And in
00:04:29.620
the case of what's been included in the book, these are things that I've been able to duplicate
00:04:33.420
to some extent. So I'd say that's a big difference is I'm not looking at it from the sidelines.
00:04:39.480
I'm really an experiential learner and only want to give people stuff that they can apply.
00:04:47.480
Right. So you've vetted everything. You experimented. That's one of the ways you can figure out
00:04:50.680
if you can replicate it. Yeah, definitely. But I also would just underscore the fact that it's
00:04:56.700
a matter of not only finding habits and routines and so on that appear to work for someone,
00:05:04.320
but looking at, for instance, the sleep cycles and so on of these different models and finding
00:05:10.300
someone who is compatible with your own personality in life. It's very easy to say, well, hey, you should
00:05:15.920
wake up at 4.30 in the morning and do what A, B, C, D people do. But that may not, just because it
00:05:23.040
works for one person, just because it works for even many people does not mean it will necessarily
00:05:27.540
work for you. So there is some trial and error involved. But the good news is it doesn't take a
00:05:31.980
whole hell of a long time. Right. So we're not all jocos.
00:05:35.360
We're not all jocos. But for instance, there are certain things that you can test very quickly.
00:05:42.800
And I'll actually pull out one of your pieces of work. When I was trying to learn how to whistle
00:05:47.500
with my fingers to call my dog Molly back in the day, I watched your video over and over and over
00:05:53.920
again. And as you know, it sucks learning to do it in the very beginning. I mean, you look like
00:05:59.680
an idiot having some type of meltdown in the beginning. But over time, it takes just a few
00:06:05.540
days and then you'll have your first success. So the feedback loop is pretty fast as it is with a
00:06:09.700
lot of this stuff. Right. So as you interviewed people and as you went through the transcripts and
00:06:15.340
writing the book, did you find that there were common habits or tactics or routines of these people
00:06:21.800
you interviewed? There were a lot of them. Sorry for the police cars. I'm in New York City. It sounds
00:06:28.880
like I'm in Beirut, but hopefully you're not picking up too much of that. The common habits
00:06:34.100
and routines are many. There were a lot of patterns that I spotted after the fact. But here are a few.
00:06:41.520
So one would be that at least 80% of the people I interviewed, and this could be another type of
00:06:49.080
bias, selection bias, right? So that's survivorship. But this could be selection bias, meaning that I'm
00:06:54.660
inviting people onto my show who are more prone to, in this case, have some type of meditation or
00:07:00.460
mindfulness practice. But more than 80% have it or have had it. If you look at, say, Arnold
00:07:05.840
Schwarzenegger, he only did it for a year, but he did transcendental meditation. Then he explains that
00:07:12.220
it's had persistent effects for decades afterwards, which is a very interesting idea. And that was
00:07:17.520
transcendental meditation. But then you have Sam Harris, who does primarily, let's call it,
00:07:20.940
Vipassana meditation with some variation. And then you have other folks like Maria Popova of Brain
00:07:27.080
Pickings, who has listened to the same guided meditation, which is free audio from Tara
00:07:33.960
Brock, B-R-A-C-H. It's the summer 2010 smile meditation. It's about 25 minutes long. And she's
00:07:39.760
listened to the same audio every morning for the last several years and credits Tara with changing
00:07:44.960
your life. So there is the consistency of a mindfulness or meditation practice, but it can
00:07:51.880
take many forms. It could be what I just described, or it could be, say, listening to a song or a given
00:07:59.600
album on repeat, which a surprising number of these folks do when they need to focus or code, for instance,
00:08:05.020
or write or fill in the blank. Climb some of the toughest cliff faces in the world. In the case of
00:08:12.660
Alex Honnold, he listens to the last of the Mohican soundtrack on repeat.
00:08:17.520
So that's one. Another is that they, a very, very high percentage take sleep seriously and engineer
00:08:25.000
sleep as a very, very, very high priority. So for instance, Rick Rubin, legendary music producer,
00:08:32.440
you go down the line, Johnny Cash, Linkin Park, Eminem, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Kanye, Jay-Z, it's everybody.
00:08:42.360
It's just insane, his roster of artists. And he uses something called ChiliPad. So the ChiliPad is a
00:08:49.820
device that sits to the side of your bed and it circulates water through a very thin sheet that you
00:08:56.280
put under your own sheet and you find your ideal sleep temperature between 55 degrees and I want to
00:09:01.760
say 80 degrees. And this has been a life changer and game changer in a lot of ways for me and for
00:09:09.100
other people. So Kelly Starrett, who's a superstar CrossFit coach and trainer, among other things,
00:09:16.160
also credits the ChiliPad. And I had never heard of it before bumping into these two guys. And so
00:09:21.920
you're talking to people who are in the top 1% of what they do, completely different worlds,
00:09:26.780
yet they're both using this obscure device. And those are the things that I get really excited
00:09:31.740
about. Or if there's a book recommendation or documentary recommendation that is really obscure,
00:09:35.820
but nonetheless, pops up 5 or 10 or 15 times, like Poor Charlie's Almanac as a book recommendation.
00:09:42.740
I ask people in all of my interviews, what book have you gifted most to other people? Which is
00:09:47.800
actually, I think, in many respects, a better question than what are your favorite books,
00:09:52.060
which has a primacy and recency bias. People tend to think of what they read recently or something
00:09:58.400
they read a long, long time ago. And the Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger popped up
00:10:06.160
all the time, which is not what you would call a huge perennial bestseller or mainstream book at all.
00:10:13.780
So those are a few of the things that pop up. But there are many, many others. I mean,
00:10:20.780
the most consistent point, though, I would say is that they all have routines. And the specific
00:10:29.860
routine is not as important as having a routine. You have routines to make a lot of your day autopilot
00:10:37.840
so that you can preserve your decision-making hit points, so to speak, and avoid decision fatigue so
00:10:45.900
that you can conserve yourself for the stuff that actually matters. And those are usually meaning
00:10:52.340
the unique strengths that you bring to the table. Because all of these people, and this is a point,
00:10:58.940
one of the points I want to make with the book, because I don't just ask them about their ideal
00:11:01.920
days. I ask them about their darkest periods and toughest times and what they did as coping
00:11:05.920
mechanisms. All of these people, and maybe with the exception of a few mutants, but almost every
00:11:12.060
single one of them is a flawed creature with imperfections, walking around with a lot of
00:11:19.120
insecurities, just like everybody else, just like all of us. And that is really, really reassuring
00:11:23.320
to see that they've just been able to capitalize on and maximize one or two strengths and sort of build
00:11:34.440
Right. And with the routines, did you find that they were very mindful about how they created
00:11:39.320
their routines or was it more of an organic process in how they developed those routines?
00:11:43.900
Super organic. A lot of it is accidental and it mimics evolution in a lot of respects. I mean,
00:11:50.800
evolution is far from perfect. It's not just a model that keeps on improving, right? You have all these
00:11:56.760
weird mutations and accidents. Some of them work out, some of them don't. And that's true with many of
00:12:02.900
these routines. I'll give you an example. Mike Birbiglia, who's one of the most successful
00:12:07.440
comedians on the planet, he figured out a Jedi mind trick for himself when he was putting off
00:12:13.860
writing his last screenplay, which ended up becoming a hit movie. But he kept on procrastinating. He'd
00:12:19.200
put it off. He'd wash his car, do things in between, whatever it might be to postpone writing.
00:12:26.280
But he didn't do that, he noticed, with any meetings. When he had to, let's say, have a lunch
00:12:31.900
meeting with someone or a conference call. He was always early. And as an experiment, he took a
00:12:39.560
post-it note and he put it by his bedside. And it said, Mike, three exclamation points, you have a
00:12:47.080
meeting with yourself at 7am at whatever the cafe was to work on your screenplay. And for whatever
00:12:54.640
weird reason, for whatever quirk of human psychology, it actually worked for him. So
00:13:00.600
that is one of the, you could call it a crutch, but one of the tricks that he used to hold himself
00:13:07.200
accountable and get his screenplay written. I love that.
00:13:09.600
But that's, and also you'll find a lot of these folks, there are some who are just terminators
00:13:16.280
like Jocko, right? Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL commander. An extremely impressive guy in every
00:13:23.000
possible respect. But then you find the vast majority are very, very, very highly disciplined
00:13:28.520
in a handful of areas. And then they're, I'm not going to say sloppy, but just very human in others.
00:13:35.440
You know, Sam Harris, PhD in neuroscience, incredible thinker, one of the smartest humans I've ever met.
00:13:40.960
I asked him about his morning routines. And unlike, say, Jocko has a very codified morning routine
00:13:46.460
involving working out and waking up early and so on and so forth. Sam said, I'd love to give you this
00:13:51.500
picture of a well-oiled machine, but he's really stumbling out of the bedroom in search of
00:13:57.800
caffeine. And I may or may not have checked my email on my phone by the time I pressed the proper
00:14:03.920
button, you know, and which I also find very reassuring. So I would say that there are some
00:14:08.760
people who are very systematic and they're the product of training. So their routine is a reflection
00:14:13.740
of that, whether it's Jocko or certain athletes, let's say some super athletes.
00:14:18.180
Right. I think that's actually really useful to know, because I think a lot of the frustration
00:14:23.120
that comes with trying to be more productive or trying to get stuff done is like, you think you
00:14:26.980
have to come down with this perfect system, right? And design it top down. And then it never works
00:14:31.940
out and you get frustrated and you just like give up on the whole thing. But I like the idea of just
00:14:36.260
trying to figure it out organically, work with your quirks instead of working against them.
00:14:40.840
Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's expressed different ways by different folks. I mean,
00:14:44.940
you have Embrace Your Funk, which is Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy, but he's not really a prodigy
00:14:48.840
because he can take his learning framework and apply it to so many things. He's a world champion
00:14:53.260
in Tai Chi push-hands, first black belt under arguably the best grappler of all time, Marcelo Garcia,
00:14:58.760
and so on and so forth. So Embrace Your Funk. Then you have Chris Saka, billionaire investor,
00:15:04.940
encouraging you to be your weird self. And then you have someone like Dan Carlin, who is the host of
00:15:14.360
my favorite podcast of all time, which is Hardcore History. And he says, copyright your faults. And
00:15:21.220
in radio, he was heavily criticized for his voice and how he would peak. He was known as the guy who
00:15:29.100
would talk real low and then scream and throw it into the red. And he was coached by his supervisors
00:15:35.300
to change that. And later it became a really, really valuable trademark style of his. So copyright
00:15:42.980
your faults is another one that Dan Carlin says. And it's really, I think that if you were to look
00:15:49.540
at everything in Tools of Titans, you have different layers of abstraction and you use them all. So you
00:15:56.080
have, say at the top, value systems or philosophies or beliefs, right? So you'd have, say, Jamie Foxx,
00:16:04.980
what's on the other side of fear? Nothing. This is this phrase that he uses to instill confidence in
00:16:10.320
his kids. And it's the belief that past fear, generally there are little or no consequences.
00:16:18.640
In other words, if you really put your fear under a magnifying glass and run through some exercises,
00:16:23.760
there's nothing there. There's no there there. And you can de-risk a situation completely because
00:16:27.960
there isn't any real risk. Then you have the, and there are many such examples of just core beliefs
00:16:35.160
that then enable the tactics, right? So if, if, if say everything you want is right outside of your
00:16:42.200
sphere of comfort, let's just say that's one of your beliefs at the high level of abstraction.
00:16:46.300
Then you go one layer down and you have Chris Saka, who I just mentioned before, when he was working
00:16:50.660
at Google as a new hire, he would just walk into meetings he was uninvited to before they started or as
00:16:57.160
they were starting with anyone and everyone, including the wonder twins, Sergei and Larry,
00:17:03.020
the founders of Google. He would just walk in and sit down and they, they would ask eventually,
00:17:06.880
like, uh, why are you here? He'd say, Oh, I didn't realize I couldn't attend. I figured I would just
00:17:12.680
take notes for you guys. And the company was of a size at the time. It wasn't a tiny startup,
00:17:18.340
but they, they allowed him to do it. And then once he did it five, six, seven times,
00:17:23.040
he became a standard presence at these super high level meetings, which allowed him to
00:17:28.520
not only get promoted extremely quickly, but his learning curve was just a hundred X any of his
00:17:35.900
coworkers at the same level. Uh, so that would be then a tactic, right? And, uh, when you combine all
00:17:45.320
of those and you don't have to use all from one person, you end up with a really cool recipe that you
00:17:50.780
can test and test pretty quickly. Right. I love that. Well, so my favorite nuggets in the book,
00:17:58.080
um, weren't really the very specific tactics that people did, which those were cool. I love reading
00:18:03.460
this type of things, but the things I got the most out of the book were like the more abstract things
00:18:07.200
you were talking about, the big picture advice that you've been able to extract from your guests,
00:18:11.020
um, particularly about how to learn, how to learn. Cause it seems like most of your guests you've had on,
00:18:17.240
they've, they've thought a lot about how to learn, how to learn better. Um, so for example,
00:18:23.060
several of your guests, several of your guests talked about asking good questions. I think Tony
00:18:27.440
Robbins said the quality of your, of your life is the quality of your questions. Um, I like this idea
00:18:34.200
cause I think it connects with the, uh, four hour chef about this meta learning thing for sure. You've
00:18:39.180
seemed to develop a knack for asking questions that allow you to get to the most salient points in
00:18:44.760
something, whether it's learning how to do three gun shooting, um, play poker or even more abstract
00:18:49.980
things like how to run a business, et cetera. So what sorts of questions should someone be asking
00:18:56.740
if they want to learn something quickly? Um, I mean, are there questions you can ask that apply
00:19:01.780
across domains or does it depend on the domain? Oh, there are definitely questions you can ask that,
00:19:07.300
uh, apply across domains. Uh, so there are, I would say a few that come to mind, uh,
00:19:14.480
and the, this was the first book of all my books that I actually enjoyed writing. And the reason for
00:19:20.600
that is, is that the interviews themselves are my favorite part of the book writing process without
00:19:27.620
the writing interviewing experts and trying to tease out the concrete details of how you can achieve in
00:19:36.900
say three months, what might normally take three years or three decades. And the questions include
00:19:43.340
some of the following, I would, uh, find an expert, which is not very hard to do. And first in sports,
00:19:50.500
for instance, I would look probably for a silver medalist in the last two Olympics in your given
00:19:56.060
sport and your city name, just a simple Google search. And then I would ask a number of questions
00:20:03.720
like, who shouldn't be good at your sport? Who is good at your sport? And it doesn't have to be the
00:20:11.220
Olympic level, but who, who is in the top, say 10% of competitors, professional or amateur who are
00:20:18.800
not built for it. So that might mean in a world of ultra running, they're not built like a six foot
00:20:23.460
five spider. They are short and they weigh 220 pounds. That person by attributes shouldn't be good
00:20:30.800
at that sport, which means they compensate probably with an unusual or unorthodox form of training.
00:20:37.420
That is how you separate the nature versus nurture, uh, elite performers. You want to,
00:20:44.080
you want to separate that as delineate that as quickly as possible. The next would be if they're
00:20:48.800
a coach, have you been able to replicate your results and who, who are the, what separates the
00:20:56.040
fast responders from the slow or non-responders? And this is also fishing to determine how much of
00:21:02.300
what they've achieved can be attributed to technique versus some God given talent that you
00:21:09.180
won't be able to model. Then a lot of hypothetical questions come into play. And these, these hypothetical
00:21:14.720
questions are very often absurd and I, they're absurd for a reason. Uh, and that is that the,
00:21:21.240
the most powerful questions are very often those that seem impossible to answer. And it's not,
00:21:27.160
what is the sound of one hand clapping? It's not a koan, but you might use something like Peter
00:21:31.740
Teal's. Why can't you achieve your 10 year plans in the next six months? Right? Uh, you can't answer
00:21:38.080
a question like that using your normal framework and set of assumptions. So I would ask say an athlete
00:21:43.540
or it doesn't really matter. Angel investor could be anyone, but let's just use sports for the sake of
00:21:49.800
simplicity. If you had to train me for a state level or national level competition in eight weeks,
00:21:58.040
and you could say, I know it's impossible, but if, if you had a gun to your head or $10 million on the
00:22:03.080
line to win, you had eight weeks to train me, what would you do? And this is to try to figure out
00:22:09.700
the 80, 20, uh, the, is the 20% of the training that will give you 80% or more of the outcome that
00:22:17.360
you want. In this case, sort of competitive repertoire technique or conditioning, right?
00:22:23.620
Others would be, what are the most, what are the biggest wastes of time for novices? Where do
00:22:30.000
novices typically misspend their time? What are the things they focus on they shouldn't focus on?
00:22:35.260
And what are the things they neglect that they should, that they should focus on starting day one?
00:22:40.280
Um, and these are questions that, that really transcend any specific area. You could use it
00:22:49.140
for language learning. You could use it for business. You could use it for fitness. You
00:22:53.120
could use it for diet. You could use it for just about anything. That's awesome. And I like, it's
00:22:58.820
interesting. You said go for the second, the silver medalist. Is there a reason why it's just because
00:23:03.660
you couldn't get access to the gold medalist? Oh yeah. Let me explain that because the gold
00:23:08.900
medalists will be higher in demand. They'll be harder to get ahold of and they will be, um,
00:23:15.140
more difficult to convince, to help you. And silver medalists very frequently, there are some
00:23:21.180
exceptions, but they are athletes who are just as good as the person who won gold. Right, right,
00:23:26.000
right. They just happen to have a bad day. It's, I mean, any given Sunday with most of these sports
00:23:31.740
in the Olympics at the highest levels. Uh, and again, I mean, there's some outliers, but
00:23:35.900
silver medalist just makes it easier and cheaper to get advice, say via Skype video, which I've done
00:23:42.360
in the past with say people who took second place in world championships. And you can, you can certainly
00:23:47.340
go after the big dogs, but don't be shy about pursuing the second best because they're very
00:23:53.600
often as good as the person who took first place. And I've done that for learning to do surfing
00:23:59.060
pop-ups for instance, which I learned from a world-class competitor. I happened to be in
00:24:05.620
Berlin at the time where it was pouring rain and he was in Southern California and we did it via Skype
00:24:12.140
video. He coached me through doing surf pop-ups on the living room floor of an Airbnb in Berlin,
00:24:19.420
Germany. Uh, and it was, I think 80 bucks for the hour. I mean, it's just an incredible bargain.
00:24:26.240
I mean, I just cut at least three months of headache off of my, uh, learning curve by doing
00:24:33.080
that. So it's, uh, it's, it's just sitting out there for people to grab for, for a lot of these
00:24:37.900
things. Have you ever had an instance where you've talked to someone who's a high performer, but they
00:24:41.740
weren't able to really give you any good insights because they had the curse of knowledge. Like
00:24:45.080
they couldn't really explain it to you because it just came down. They just, they took for granted
00:24:50.000
like these, these, uh, the very basics that you needed to get in order to get this skill all the
00:24:56.600
time. Yeah. This is very common. So I will never just go after the top performers, meaning in, in
00:25:03.800
certain areas, say in acting or in sports where the best people tend, or the most famous people tend
00:25:12.860
to have started at an extremely young age. Uh, they are not always, they are frequently incapable
00:25:20.160
of teaching novices or intermediates because everything they do is second nature at this
00:25:25.020
point. They don't remember what it was like not to know. So that means I have two buckets of
00:25:31.460
so-called experts that I'll go after. You have the people who are the best in the world,
00:25:35.600
and then you have the people who have made the most progress in a short period of time, which is why
00:25:42.480
in addition to asking who's good at this, who shouldn't be, I will ask which of your students
00:25:48.800
or which people are you aware of who have gone from zero to say national caliber in an, in an
00:25:57.020
unbelievably short period of time or just come out of the blue. No one knew them. And all of a sudden
00:26:01.480
they're a national champion or a world champion who comes to mind and I'll get that list. So at the
00:26:06.580
very least, even if someone can't teach me what they know, they can tell me who the outliers are
00:26:11.760
that I should study. And for swimming, let's say you might have a Michael Phelps, uh, who's going to
00:26:18.900
be impossible to get ahold of most likely. And then you might have someone like Shinji Takeuchi. So
00:26:23.160
Shinji Takeuchi is not a competitive swimmer, but went from not being able to swim to having one of the
00:26:28.760
most beautiful freestyle swim strokes on YouTube. And there was a point in time where the first
00:26:36.100
most viewed swimming video on YouTube was Michael Phelps. The second was Shinji Takeuchi for total
00:26:41.360
immersion method, which was just mind blowing. And Shinji went from zero to that in an exceptionally
00:26:48.340
short period of time, something like six or nine months. So he is someone I would, I would reach out
00:26:52.860
to absolutely. And, and, uh, that is often where the gems are and you can exploit that in a million
00:27:01.500
different ways. But if it's, if I'm looking at investing, if I'm looking at podcasting, I'm looking
00:27:06.100
at, uh, always separating out, separating out the experts I pursue into those two groups. So yes, if I'm
00:27:12.860
operating in the world of podcasting, all right, maybe I want to talk to say Ira Glass. Good luck.
00:27:18.200
Probably not going to happen, right? Of this American life. Maybe I want to talk to Mark Barrett.
00:27:22.200
At this point, also probably not going to happen. Really busy guy, really in demand.
00:27:27.320
But perhaps there is someone who just started, who through the grapevine, I figure out is getting
00:27:33.680
a million or 5 million downloads a month. And they started three months prior with no preexisting fan
00:27:39.920
base. Okay. Something interesting is going on. Even though they're not as big as Mark, they're
00:27:44.880
certainly not as big as this American life. Their, their zero to 60 speed is faster than both of
00:27:52.080
those examples. Uh, so I will really dig on that. I'll spend a lot of time investigating that person
00:27:57.620
and asking them questions if they're willing to answer them. Yeah, that's great. Um, one of the
00:28:02.640
questions that I love that's really stuck with me, uh, was from an interview you did with Peter
00:28:06.860
Diamandis. Is that how you say his last name? That's right. Diamandis. Diamandis. Uh, he says you
00:28:11.120
should always, if you're a businessman or you own a business, you should always be asking,
00:28:14.140
how would someone disrupt me? Um, and I don't think this, I think it's applicable even if you
00:28:18.940
don't own a business. I mean, you can just figure out like, how would I lose my job? What would cause
00:28:23.380
me to lose my job in my industry? Um, that could be a hard question to answer, right? You know,
00:28:30.280
Clayton Christensen, uh, the guy who wrote the innovators dilemma says that it's hard for successful
00:28:35.240
companies, uh, to figure out what's going to disrupt them because they don't, they can't see it coming.
00:28:40.680
So are there like questions that you can ask to help you answer that question? Like how
00:28:45.380
would someone disrupt my business or disrupt me? Uh, there, there's certainly ways you can go about
00:28:52.220
it. I think the, perhaps the best way to go about it, which is another pattern in this book. Uh, if you
00:28:58.220
were to talk to say, uh, general Stan McChrystal, so retired four-star general ran JSOC in, uh, effectively
00:29:05.320
all of special operations in Afghanistan and Iraq for a period of time.
00:29:10.680
Or you talk to Jocko or you talk to Mark Andreessen in the world of investing, or you talk to,
00:29:18.100
uh, as you pointed out, Peter Diamandis, there's a concept of red teaming and red teaming is so named
00:29:24.580
because it was an exercise that originated in the military, or at least I'm sure it exists in many
00:29:30.200
militaries, but in the U S during the cold war, you had the blue team, the U S and the red team,
00:29:36.180
the, the Soviets. And the, the objective was to take, say, I'm just making these numbers up,
00:29:45.160
but if you had a 50 person team in the Navy, you might take five of those people and designate them
00:29:53.440
as red team. And the other 45 have focused on say defensive plans. The other five would focus on
00:30:00.320
solely trying to determine how to defeat those plans or to penetrate, uh, a secure perimeter
00:30:08.000
or whatever it might be. And you can, you can do that with your friends. You can ask for help.
00:30:15.120
This is something I've had to learn repeatedly over the years. Like you don't have to just sit
00:30:19.820
in isolation and think yourself into a tizzy, trying to logic your way to miracles every day.
00:30:26.100
You can actually just sit down and like bribe your friends with pizza and beer and say, Hey guys,
00:30:31.640
I'm trying to figure this out. Uh, and get ideas, gather ideas from, from friends, ideally people
00:30:38.420
who are intelligent. But, uh, that would be one way of absolving yourself of complete responsibility
00:30:44.180
for figuring that out. Uh, and you could even couch it in a way that could become an opportunity.
00:30:50.080
So let's say you're in a, in a company and you're wondering how you're trying to determine
00:30:54.500
the most likely scenarios for you being fired, you being replaced or your division being made
00:31:00.360
obsolete, whatever it might be. In the process of trying to figure out how to take down the company
00:31:05.420
that you work for as an exercise, as red teaming exercise, you might actually come up with a fantastic
00:31:11.220
idea for, for a startup that ends up being hugely successful. This, this is, this is actually a common
00:31:18.620
Genesis story in Silicon Valley. Uh, so I think, I think red teaming is, is an incredibly powerful
00:31:25.100
concept and, uh, it's, it's part of what you could consider also. And this has come up a few times,
00:31:32.460
a SWOT analysis, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats analysis, and this would
00:31:39.100
fall in the weaknesses and or threats category. That's awesome. I mean, have you red teamed yourself?
00:31:44.040
Like, you know, how would someone disrupt Tim Ferriss Inc? Uh, well, I've red teamed myself
00:31:49.200
from a security standpoint. So that's a digital security and physical security standpoint,
00:31:53.640
just because I've, I've gotten to a point and this is just a price you pay with enough public exposure.
00:32:01.620
Let's safely assume that one out of every thousand people is just batshit crazy. So you have an audience
00:32:06.820
of a few million people. Well, you're going to have a small army of, of batshit crazy folks who may or may
00:32:13.580
not try to track you down and, um, they may or may not make death threats because they're completely
00:32:18.280
unhinged. They may or may not think that you're their long lost lover or brother or fill in the
00:32:24.620
blank and try to find you. So I've red teamed absolutely from a security standpoint, many aspects
00:32:32.080
of my life. Uh, and, uh, that, that has been extremely productive. You don't want to wait for other
00:32:38.640
people to identify your weak spots. Then you're in a very reactive mode. You want to proactively red team.
00:32:47.980
And that could be for home defense. It could be for digital hygiene. It could be as simple as talking to a
00:32:53.740
hacker like Sammy Kamkar, who created the fastest growing virus of all time, who also has a chapter in
00:33:00.220
Tools of Titans on what you should do to defend against people like him. It's like starting point.
00:33:05.480
Number one, put some tape or something over the camera on your laptop because it is child's play
00:33:10.740
for people like Sammy to hijack that and record you. It is so easy. It is laughable. I've seen it,
00:33:16.400
uh, and on and on and on and on. But, um, those are primarily the ways that I've red teamed. I've also,
00:33:23.300
uh, red teamed in the process of doing competitive analysis, uh, looking at, for instance,
00:33:30.960
when a book is launching. When I launched my first book, unlike Tools of Titans, which is coming out
00:33:37.340
in the most, the, the hardest possible timeframe. It is the most competitive month of the year,
00:33:44.300
meaning the holidays, uh, pre-holidays, pre, pre-Christmas, et cetera.
00:33:50.700
For the four hour work week, I looked at historical book scan numbers and tried to identify soft spots
00:33:56.820
where there were fewer competitive threats and the total, the absolute number of total copies required
00:34:05.620
to say hit the New York times was on average lower. And that happened to be April. Uh, so there are ways
00:34:13.680
that you can look at how to disrupt others and then you can look at how others might disrupt you.
00:34:19.140
So for instance, this is a, uh, role playing version of red teaming, but you can do it yourself,
00:34:27.700
which is Neil Strauss, eight time New York times bestselling author has also interviewed every
00:34:32.520
celebrity imaginable for Rolling Stone and the New York times when he edits his own books. And this is
00:34:38.420
in his profile. He edits with three passes the first time he writes it for himself. Uh, or I should say,
00:34:46.100
uh, he writes it first for himself and then he edits it for himself to be fun for himself,
00:34:51.940
gratifying in whatever way he wants to be gratified. Then he writes it or edits it rather for his fans
00:34:58.340
so that he answers his fans questions, the follow-up questions or the doubts or the confusing points
00:35:04.880
that his fans, his diehard followers, uh, will focus on. And then third, he edits for his haters.
00:35:11.880
He tries to identify if I hated Neil Strauss and wanted to take this down, wanted to find a
00:35:17.760
contradiction, wanted to cherry pick some things that I can make him look like an idiot. How would
00:35:22.100
I do it? And he run, he walks through his own writing with red ink and figures out how to defend
00:35:28.740
against that preemptively. That is absolutely a form of red teaming. You're just doing it yourself.
00:35:37.940
and by the way, side note, just for those people who, uh, want to find or trying to improve their
00:35:45.100
writing, which by the way, along with asking questions, that's your thinking, how you write
00:35:50.500
and ask questions. That's how you think. So if you want to improve the clarity of your thinking,
00:35:53.420
which applies and helps everything, of course, if you don't have a professional editor to review
00:36:00.340
your stuff or a professional writer or a very good writer, which many people will not actually find a
00:36:06.220
lawyer. Find a friend who went to law school because they have been trained to find a amorphous
00:36:11.980
or nebulous language, which reflects unclear thinking, unnecessary words, which can compromise
00:36:18.420
the clarity of a message and so on and so forth. They're actually very, very good at helping with
00:36:24.580
Yeah. I went to law school. I graduated from law school and my legal writing class was probably
00:36:28.040
the most useful class I took there because I had to learn how to do those things.
00:36:32.520
Totally believe it. Yeah. And, uh, you see that pop up a lot in, uh, Tools of Titans,
00:36:37.800
like Chris Saka. A lot of people don't realize he has a law degree. I mean, a great number of
00:36:42.140
these folks have law degrees who don't use them because they are both good at writing and putting
00:36:49.520
on paper, clear thought and negotiating. And those skills also are a meta skill that apply to just about
00:36:58.000
Yeah. I think it's interesting. There's a lot of like internet writers who were once attorneys,
00:37:01.260
like Jonathan Fields, who used to be an SEC attorney, Gretchen Rubin, uh, for happiness
00:37:07.080
project was, you know, she worked on the Supreme court. Um, yeah, it's, it's a pretty useful skill.
00:37:13.720
So, I mean, you've interviewed a lot of, you know, well-known high performing folks. Um,
00:37:18.240
who's the most impressive, but lesser known guest you've had on the show?
00:37:23.080
Oh, that's a toughie. I mean, because lesser known, of course you have the Jamie Foxx's and
00:37:30.960
Lesser known. Yeah. It's all relative, but it's like, yeah, it's like, it's like your,
00:37:34.540
your mom wouldn't know who they are, right? Everyone knows Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everyone
00:37:40.480
I would say, uh, the first person who comes to mind, God, there's so many because I deliberately,
00:37:46.640
I'd say more than half of the guests I seek out are exactly that profile, but I would say
00:37:51.040
two people come to mind right off the bat. Derek Sivers is one, uh, entrepreneur, but very
00:37:57.800
understated, uh, lives a very austere. I wouldn't say austere Spartan kind of monkish life, despite the
00:38:06.060
fact that he sold the company for $24 million and gave it all to a charitable remainder trust,
00:38:10.640
which helps support music education among other things. Uh, philosopher, king of programming and
00:38:18.260
entrepreneurship, just a fascinating, fascinating guy, uh, who has a lot of rules for his life.
00:38:24.080
And I've seen him in action. So he actually walks the talk. There are a lot of motivational type
00:38:28.240
folks that I just can't stand because what they say on stage and what they do in their lives are,
00:38:32.740
are completely incompatible. And Derek is not that he is. What you see is what you get. What
00:38:38.320
you hear is what he does. And he has a lot of rules, uh, which are, which are very easy to
00:38:42.520
remember and very useful. For instance, uh, I asked him what advice he would give his younger
00:38:47.220
self and it's a rule. He's still a guideline. He still follows, which is don't be a donkey.
00:38:52.260
So what does that mean? Uh, don't be a donkey is a reminder to not to try to do multiple things
00:38:59.140
at once. And it's a, it's a, an allusion to Buridan's ass, which is a fable of a donkey that's
00:39:07.400
standing halfway between water and hay. And it looks left and right, left and right, left and
00:39:11.160
right. Can't decide whether to eat or drink first. And it dies in the middle. And, uh,
00:39:17.880
that was his answer because as a 30 something, Derek felt like he didn't want the world to tell
00:39:23.840
him what to do. He didn't want to have to over-specialize and paint himself into a corner.
00:39:26.860
Why can't I do these 10, 10 things at once? I have a lot of horsepower, a lot of endurance.
00:39:31.540
I can do it. And you end up traveling one millimeter in a million directions and making
00:39:37.520
no real progress on anything. So he taught himself to do one thing at a time and you can
00:39:42.560
get everything done. You just can't do it at the same time. You sequentially focus on
00:39:46.060
one thing for say six to 12 months, and then you move on to the next. And to remind himself
00:39:51.360
of that, it's just don't, don't be a donkey. And, uh, he also has a very simple framework
00:39:57.800
for making decisions. Uh, in the beginning it was say yes to everything before he was
00:40:03.160
a musician. He went to Berklee school of music, ended up founding CD baby much later. But in
00:40:07.200
the beginning he said yes, yes to every gig, say yes to everything in the beginning. And
00:40:11.760
he ended up saying yes to an acoustic guitar gig at a pig show. I'm not making this up in
00:40:17.860
like rural New England. He went and he treated it like he was playing Madison Square Garden.
00:40:23.440
And that piddly little pig show led to an entire career as a musician, basically.
00:40:30.060
Later, once he had a little bit of success, it came down to hell yeah or no. Basically,
00:40:35.000
if it's not a hell yeah with a hundred percent excitement, oh my God, how could I not do that?
00:40:40.980
Then it's a no. Because once you've had a little bit of success and it doesn't require very much
00:40:45.240
in a digital age, you're the amount of inbound noise, uh, and the, the amount of kind of cool
00:40:51.680
offers and invites that you will get in a month is more than you could say yes to in a year.
00:40:58.200
Uh, and when you get to that point, what's going to kill you, what's going to make you
00:41:01.860
fail, what's going to make you overwhelmed, what's going to make you flame out is, is not
00:41:07.440
the bad opportunities. It's going to be a mountain of kind of cool, interesting stuff that you commit
00:41:14.220
yourself to, which then doesn't leave you the bandwidth to pursue the one or two hell yeah
00:41:20.300
opportunities that you create or come across maybe once a year. The other person who came to mind
00:41:25.260
right off the bat was, uh, a palliative care physician, which effectively means a hospice
00:41:32.580
physician, someone who helps people die named BJ Miller. And BJ Miller has helped about a thousand
00:41:38.120
people die. He's a young guy. He is a triple amputee. He, during college had lost his limbs in an
00:41:49.060
electrocution accident. They were burned off three of his limbs and his take on the world is, is just
00:41:56.080
very, very unique. Uh, and he is, he, he really helped me to, to understand his approach to helping
00:42:12.320
people pass to through the end of life to death. And it, what I liked about it in part is that
00:42:19.900
it, it was not, uh, compatible with a lot of the listicles you see, like the, the eight regrets of
00:42:27.700
the dying or whatever these lists end up being, which are all the usual things you would expect.
00:42:32.340
Like, Oh, like having not spent another day at the office, like the usual cliched stuff. And you have
00:42:38.620
to wonder when you read those things, are these people saying what they feel? Are they saying what
00:42:43.320
they think they should want to say, or is it something else? And BJ, rather than for instance,
00:42:50.820
well, there are a few things that come to mind that, that I found very thought provoking. One
00:42:54.700
is when I asked him, what do you put on a billboard? And I ask all my guests this,
00:42:58.840
what would you put on a gigantic billboard if you wanted to get a message out to millions of people?
00:43:02.280
And he said, don't believe everything that you think. And I was like, Ooh,
00:43:05.340
that's a good one. And we could chew on that for an hour alone, just that one line. But other things
00:43:12.100
were, for instance, how he helps people grapple with the big existential questions,
00:43:19.840
the big say spiritual questions. And in short, the answer is he doesn't. Uh, he actually helps people
00:43:26.760
to consider the beauty of pointlessness and why that may not be a bad thing. In fact, it could be a
00:43:34.620
really profound, beautiful thing. And he will have them look at, for instance, uh, art books of
00:43:42.460
Mark Rothko paintings, or he would potentially have them do that to ponder something that is beautiful,
00:43:48.360
but without any explicit meaning per se. Um, and to, and to lose the addiction or attachment to
00:43:57.340
everything, having to have meaning or some predestination. I thought that was, that was
00:44:01.940
extremely curious and, and, and, and worth exploring. Or the fact that both he and a memory
00:44:08.440
champion named Ed Cook, and they're separated by thousands of miles, do something that I ended up
00:44:13.460
calling, uh, star therapy, which is when, for instance, in BJ's case, he's feeling overwhelmed
00:44:19.020
or anxious. Uh, he will look up into the night sky at stars and just consider the fact that some of the
00:44:31.640
light may have been emitted from those stars thousands of years before hitting his eye in that
00:44:37.220
instant, or that some of the stars he's seeing, so to speak, no longer exist. And pondering the
00:44:44.760
enormity of the cosmos and how we're, they blip on the screen, we are a, a blinking of a firefly
00:44:51.340
as Naval Ravikant would put it in the grand scheme. It puts a lot of our now realized trivial issues,
00:45:02.380
the guy who cut us off in traffic, the idiot we got into an argument with at work or on the phone,
00:45:08.540
whatever it might be. It makes all of that seem extremely ridiculous and laughable and is, is
00:45:15.740
incredibly antidepressant in its effects. And so I tried this and it sounded really woo woo and out
00:45:20.760
there. And I started doing it every night, even during book deadline when I was writing this.
00:45:26.500
Uh, and I attribute a lot of little things like that, which have some overarching philosophical
00:45:33.160
connection to allowing me to actually be relaxed for the first time putting a book together,
00:45:39.020
which has never been the case. Um, so Derek Sivers and BJ Miller are two who come to mind.
00:45:44.660
That's great. So, I mean, you've, uh, you've tried all the tips and all the, the tactics and advice
00:45:49.680
that you, you got from your guests. I mean, was there one piece that, you know, provided immediate ROI
00:45:55.580
as soon as you implemented it, like you noticed an improvement in your life right away?
00:46:00.400
Oh yeah. Yeah. There, there've been quite a few, but I'll, I'll focus on one. Uh, and that is, uh,
00:46:06.800
intelligent fasting and entering a state of ketosis. Ketosis for people who don't know what it
00:46:12.460
is. It is a state your body enters when you are starved effectively. So if you were stranded by a
00:46:19.960
plane crash, lost in the woods, after a few days, your body would shift from using carbohydrates
00:46:25.220
because you're not eating anything and you run out of stored carbohydrate, which is glycogen
00:46:30.240
to using your body fat. That's why you store body fat. And you, instead of using glucose,
00:46:36.320
blood sugar, you end up using predominantly ketones and the brain and heart end up working
00:46:42.220
extremely well, uh, among other tissues on ketones. So it turns out that entering ketosis through dietary
00:46:50.340
means or from taking supplemental ketones, which is a very new thing called exogenous ketones,
00:46:56.560
there are a range of different benefits. Uh, there's actually a foundation called the Charlie
00:47:02.940
Foundation that has looked extensively at how ketosis in many cases can reduce or eliminate
00:47:10.360
seizures in children. For instance, it's a very high fat diet. Uh, there are also implications for
00:47:16.980
anti-cancer effects and so on. But in my personal case, I, having grown up on Eastern Long Island,
00:47:23.800
I spend a lot of time there in the summers. It has one of the highest densities of what people call
00:47:28.380
deer ticks, black legged ticks in the world. And I contracted Lyme disease and I was, I experienced
00:47:35.360
very severe symptoms. It wasn't, it was diagnosed at a very late stage because I didn't get the bullseye
00:47:40.860
rash. I assumed I needed the bullseye rash, but turns out about 20% of the people who are afflicted do not
00:47:46.780
display this dermatological symptoms. So I waited until my speech was slurred. I was having trouble
00:47:52.600
remembering friends' names. I took five or so minutes to get out of bed because my knees and
00:47:59.220
joints were so swollen. Uh, I was operating at 10% capacity max for about nine months. I mean,
00:48:07.000
I really felt like I had dementia and severe arthritis. It was, it was the scariest health
00:48:11.840
experience of my life. I reached out to Dominic D'Agostino, who's a PhD, who's, who's in Tools
00:48:19.800
of Titans. His chapter is probably the third longest chapter in the book for this reason.
00:48:23.900
And he walked me through a process for getting into ketosis quickly and relatively easily
00:48:28.980
and some of his tricks. And once I hit using a device called the Precision Extra, X-T-R-A,
00:48:37.100
it's from Abbott Labs. It's a finger prick that allows you to measure your concentration of ketones
00:48:43.180
in the blood. Once I hit about 1.5 millimolars, which is not extremely deep ketosis, but it's
00:48:50.980
definitely ketosis. I'm using body fat. I felt like before Tim, my brain was 10 times faster. I had none
00:49:00.080
of the slurring. Uh, the swelling went down, almost everything autocorrected, which was very, very,
00:49:06.060
very odd to me. And that was after antibiotics, which were necessary. I used oxycycline. Uh,
00:49:12.960
and there's a lot of nonsense out there about Lyme disease folks. So find a proper MD, do not
00:49:18.120
go for every alternative bit of nonsense that gets thrown at you. Uh, so after a proper course of
00:49:24.380
antibiotics from a infectious disease specialist at Stanford, the, the ketogenic diet with supplemental
00:49:31.220
ketones was the only thing that got me back to pre-Tim levels of, of mental and physical performance.
00:49:36.900
And it was immediate. I mean, as soon as I hit 1.5 millimolars, boom, it was different Tim from 10%
00:49:44.360
to a hundred percent. It was just unbelievable to me. And you see that not only in people with Lyme
00:49:50.800
disease, but for instance, and these are anecdotal reports, but nonetheless, they're frequent enough and
00:49:55.040
consistent enough that I think there has to be something to it. People with early onset Alzheimer's or
00:49:59.740
Alzheimer's are frequently diagnosed partially using something called the clock test. So they draw
00:50:04.600
a clock face with one to 12 around the clock face in the right places. And as Alzheimer's gets worse
00:50:11.640
and worse, the shape devolves, the numbers start to disappear or go off of the clock face to the point
00:50:19.920
where then it just looks like chicken scratch. And you can look for, for instance, coconut oil, search
00:50:25.420
coconut oil, Alzheimer's clock test. And you will see people who completely reverse their, their
00:50:31.980
regression in three to four weeks of consuming say seven to eight tablespoons of coconut oil a day.
00:50:38.520
What the hell is going on? That's weird, right? And well, coconut oil is, I want to say around 60%
00:50:45.580
generally medium chain triglycerides by MCTs as they're called MCT oil by weight. And MCTs are readily
00:50:54.600
converted by the liver into ketones. So the mystery just continues from there, but there seems to be a
00:51:01.140
plausible mechanistic explanation for all of it. So that one just blew my mind. I mean, the combination
00:51:07.000
of Dominic D'Agostino's recommendations from a dietary and supplement standpoint, plus some medical
00:51:15.720
recommendations from Dr. Peter Attia, who's also in Tools of Titans, plus gymnastics strength training,
00:51:20.860
and some really interesting exercises from coach Christopher Sommer, former national team coach
00:51:27.640
for men's gymnastics, completely just jumpstarted and revolutionized my body and health from every
00:51:38.220
level. And those did not take a long time. They were really, really rapid onset. So those are the
00:51:44.080
first few that come to mind. Was there a habit that you took a long time, like you struggled with it,
00:51:49.160
but you stuck at it because the payoff was substantial? Or did you just focus on the quick,
00:51:58.180
big, easy wins? Well, I'll tell you, here's my feeling about that. If a habit is really hard and you
00:52:06.520
keep dropping it, then you haven't structured your approach to the habit properly. So I'm not just
00:52:13.900
looking for the easy wins. Gymnastic strength training is a hugely difficult workout. It is,
00:52:21.460
in some cases, extremely unpleasant. The payoff is fantastic, but it's, I think for many people,
00:52:27.200
it'd be a difficult habit to establish if you approach it in a haphazard way. But if you have
00:52:32.600
timelines, if you have accountability to someone else, like a coach or training partner, if you
00:52:39.200
have incentives, for instance, if you have a betting pool where five of your friends, you
00:52:45.820
included, so five people each put in $100 and three months later, the person who you do before
00:52:51.880
measurements for body fat percentage and the person who's changed their body fat or their body
00:52:56.260
composition for the better, the most three months later wins 500 bucks, that social pressure and
00:53:03.180
heckling and so on is the type of incentive that you need to make a potentially difficult habit very,
00:53:11.980
very easy. You need a why to, not just a how to. This is one of the biggest flaws in books like this
00:53:17.180
is they don't give you any why to. They don't tell you how to implement it in any way. They just give
00:53:21.660
you the information and off to the races you go and then 99 out of 100 people fail. So I really
00:53:27.840
encourage people to focus on easy wins in the beginning or how you make a difficult habit easier.
00:53:33.560
And this is supported by research by people like BJ Fogg out of Stanford, who's done a lot of work in
00:53:38.400
his persuasion lab, where if you're going to floss or work out, I mean, flossing is kind of a funny
00:53:44.400
example, but let's say you want to floss, you want to learn to floss. Well, you should make it as easy
00:53:49.020
as possible. You should make the threshold for successful flossing as low as possible.
00:53:53.980
That might mean that you just floss your front two teeth every night for the first week. That's it.
00:53:59.380
If you want to do extra teeth, that's extra credit. But the only success threshold is the front two
00:54:05.260
teeth because the habit carving out a few minutes to make that part of your automatic routine,
00:54:12.700
taking something that is conscious and making it slowly subconscious so that it sticks,
00:54:16.680
like tying your shoelaces or brushing your teeth. That is the most important element first,
00:54:21.940
the adherence. If you want to go to the gym, all right, New Year's resolution, I want to gain 15
00:54:28.540
pounds of muscle. I want to lose 15 pounds of fat, whatever it is. First, you should realize gaining
00:54:32.700
muscle, that's a function of the gym primarily. Losing fat, that's 90% diet and you can treat it
00:54:40.540
accordingly. But let's just say you're focusing on the exercise component. What a lot of people do
00:54:46.300
is right out of the gate. They're like, you know what? If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it
00:54:50.400
seriously. And I'm going to go to the gym for an hour a day, five days a week. Okay. If you have no
00:54:59.080
pre-existing exercise habit, or you've fallen off the wagon and you haven't had one in a few years,
00:55:04.280
that will fail for 90 plus percent of the people who try it. No doubt. Because it's too demanding in
00:55:10.660
terms of time and it's too demanding physically, you'll most likely get injured. So what do you do?
00:55:16.900
You make it stupidly easy. I mean, really, when I say make it stupidly easy, I mean, stupidly laughably
00:55:22.480
easy. Like go to the gym two times a week for 10 minutes and do that for a month. What you're really
00:55:29.620
trying to chalk up is say five to 10 sessions and to make it a regular, repetitive, scheduled
00:55:37.920
activity. That's it. So for me, I do focus on the low hanging fruit and there are plenty of them,
00:55:46.840
but I also focus on making hard habits easy to comply with by setting them up in the way that
00:55:53.960
I just described. I'm very methodical about how I set that up. If you don't have a punishment or a
00:56:00.040
reward that is significant, you are not going to stick to your habit 99 times out of 100. It's not
00:56:07.440
just enough to know that in 20 years, you might have a decreased risk of cardiovascular event like
00:56:14.060
a heart attack. That's not enough. You need more. If you want to lose some fat, okay, great.
00:56:18.500
Give your most merciless friend some really unflattering photos of you standing there in
00:56:22.700
your tighty-whities. And if you don't lose 10 pounds by the end of month two, those go on the
00:56:27.380
internet. Trust me, you will figure out how to lose 10 to 20 pounds. You don't need more information.
00:56:32.820
That's actually another line from Derek Sivers is, if more information were the answer,
00:56:37.300
we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs. You need more than information. You need incentives.
00:56:44.180
Tim, one thing I've loved about your writing over the years, and you talk about in your book,
00:56:47.880
is you're pretty open about your struggle with getting in funks or depression even. You've had
00:56:53.680
some really dark moments in your life. And I think for men in particular, that's a hard topic to talk
00:56:59.400
about or to get help if they need to get help with depression. We'll send people to your stories
00:57:06.960
online where you've written about your funks and your depression. But what's worked for you
00:57:10.500
in managing the black dog of depression, as Churchill called it? And is it something you still
00:57:17.940
have to constantly work on even today? I'll answer the last part first. Yes, absolutely.
00:57:23.240
So I am prone to depressive periods. Every male in my family appears to experience the same pattern.
00:57:32.100
Don't know how much of it is genetic versus maybe exposure. But this is something that I contend
00:57:39.880
with. And like anything else, the way I try to view it really is, well, first and foremost,
00:57:48.240
I try not to over-dramatize it. So I think that it's very easy to label yourself. And there are
00:57:54.720
people, don't get me wrong, who need to have proper medical intervention. And many people fall into this
00:58:01.400
category for something like manic depression. But to loosely call myself, say, a manic depressive or
00:58:08.100
something like that is a dangerous habit. So I view my predisposition to periodic depression
00:58:14.980
as, let's say, if I had a bum ankle, and it's something that I learned to manage. Okay,
00:58:21.880
I broke my ankle. I have to cope. Maybe I have to ski a little differently than other folks.
00:58:27.180
Maybe I have to modify my workout routines that I'm not doing squats where my knees go over the
00:58:31.240
ankles. Okay, it's a manageable problem. And it could be anything else. It's like, hey,
00:58:37.520
Timbo, lost your hair. I have a lot less hair than I used to. It's like, all right, buy a hat.
00:58:43.080
Your head's going to get cold when it looks like a hatchling bird head. So get a hat and you learn
00:58:49.740
to cope with it and deal with it. Going to go out in the sun. Hey, pal, you're going to have to put
00:58:52.840
some SPF 50 on la cabeza or you're going to get fried. So you learn to contend with it.
00:58:58.140
And depression, I've tried to view very similarly, at least in the last few years. I've had some
00:59:02.120
extremely dark periods. I mean, there's a chapter in the book about suicide specifically. I think it's
00:59:07.820
the most important thing I've ever written and how I almost offed myself and the deconstruction of
00:59:13.020
how it almost happened, why it didn't happen, and my thoughts on how to prevent that type of thing
00:59:19.240
and how to cope. There are a few. I will say that arguably the most important elements are,
00:59:28.960
one, regular scheduled exercise with other people.
00:59:33.680
Everyone's trying to implement mind over body. I think body over mind is a very interesting
00:59:45.440
alternative or at least complement. They are not separate. By exercising, you can increase relief of
00:59:50.960
brain drive, neurotrophic factor, BDNF, all of these various things. They're integrally linked.
00:59:56.720
So a regular exercise, ideally with other people, and that could take the form of a training partner,
01:00:01.900
like we discussed with some type of bedding component to ensure that that cohesion lasts
01:00:07.940
more than a week. It could be training in jujitsu. It could be tango or some form of dance. It could
01:00:15.320
be acroyoga, which is my current obsession and also explored. And that would be number one,
01:00:25.820
exercise, some type of vigorous physical activity at least three times a week, preferably in the
01:00:33.700
morning as a form of state priming, as Tony Robbins would call it. Cold exposure, I've found
01:00:41.680
exceptionally effective. And many people don't realize that this is nothing new, although it's
01:00:48.000
been clinically validated or at least supported by some studies now. Van Gogh, when he cut off his ear
01:00:53.980
and was sent to an institution, part of his prescription was ice baths twice a day or cold
01:01:01.520
baths at the very least. So I will routinely do Russian baths, or I have a standing fridge in my
01:01:08.400
garage that is full of ice bags, about two weeks worth. And I will regularly do ice baths for five
01:01:14.240
to 10 minutes at a time, which Rick Rubin, by the way, also does, which Wim Hof, who's in the book,
01:01:19.200
also does. Josh Waitzkin also does. And not necessarily for depression, but it is an incredible
01:01:25.540
mood elevator. And as Rick would say, after round five of hot, cold, hot, cold, nothing in the world
01:01:31.520
bothers you. Literally nothing in the world bothers you. It's incredible. So I would say cold exposure
01:01:36.800
is another. And the last that I'll mention, there are many different coping mechanisms I use, and I
01:01:43.840
don't want to claim that they work for everyone. But practicing gratitude, so developing routines
01:01:51.620
and journaling, for instance, the five-minute journal, which I use in the morning and at night,
01:01:58.120
list things that you are grateful for, appreciative of. It's very easy, I think, and this is part of the
01:02:05.440
reason you observe it so much in entrepreneurs, this type of what you might call manic depression,
01:02:09.060
is that people who are very goal-focused tend to be future-focused. And I've heard it said before
01:02:15.080
that depression is a focus on the past, or depression is being stuck in the past, anxiety
01:02:19.880
is being stuck in the future. If you are constantly looking for the next thing, you are never happy
01:02:25.780
with what you have. And if you're never happy with what you have, nothing you ever get will make you
01:02:29.360
happy, if that makes sense. So to counteract that as a therapeutic intervention, practicing gratitude
01:02:36.540
is extremely, extremely critical, at least for me. So I've taken steps, whether it's using the
01:02:42.580
five-minute journal or using something that an ex-girlfriend made for me called the jar of
01:02:47.780
awesome, which is just a mason jar with the jar of awesome on the side, believe it or not. And as
01:02:51.980
cheesy as it sounds, you each day write on a piece of paper something awesome that happened, you fold it
01:02:57.200
up and you put it in the jar so that when you are feeling dark, when you're feeling depressed, when you
01:03:00.800
feel like you're a complete failure, nothing is right, you will never be right, nothing will ever be
01:03:04.160
good. You can dig into this and review some of these pieces of paper. So those are offhand a few
01:03:11.980
of the things that have helped. And I am not beyond pharmaceutical intervention or certainly dietary
01:03:17.940
intervention, but pharmaceutical intervention. I do not take any SSRIs myself or anti-anxiety medications
01:03:24.160
per se, prescription medications, but I have recently, and this is something everyone should talk to their
01:03:30.760
doctor about, but started taking over-the-counter low-dose lithium. So lithium has a bad rap because
01:03:36.220
as a monotherapy when applied to certain disorders is used at say 1,300 to 1,500 milligrams, I'm taking
01:03:42.920
five milligrams of lithium orotate before I go to bed. And there's an excellent article in the New York
01:03:48.780
Times called something like, maybe we all need just a little bit of lithium, which is present in
01:03:55.720
groundwater. And it's been observed that, and I think I'm getting this list right, but reported
01:04:01.980
cases of suicide, homicide, manic depression, et cetera, are inversely correlated to ground water
01:04:07.520
levels of, guess what? Lithium. So when you look at the observational data correlated to geographies,
01:04:16.680
you can inversely correlate those. The more lithium, the lower all those things are. So I'm taking an
01:04:21.620
amount that is effectively getting me to the high end of that natural occurring spectrum,
01:04:26.180
if that makes sense. And the list goes on. I mean, it's not any one thing. It's the portfolio of
01:04:34.960
techniques that helps to catch me before I fall too badly. And when you have a portfolio of techniques,
01:04:41.140
if one, for whatever reason, falls by the wayside, perhaps you're traveling, you're not doing ice baths.
01:04:45.780
If you're only depending on one, you have all your eggs in one basket. So I have at least a handful
01:04:50.800
that I practice on a regular basis. And I'm probably leaving out one of the most important
01:04:55.260
morning meditation practice. And this is very critical. And you can start with something like
01:05:00.140
Headspace. You could start with something like the guided meditation that Maria Popova listens to
01:05:06.700
every morning, the 2010 Smile Meditation by Tara Brach. Or you could start with taking a course,
01:05:14.640
a transcendental meditation course, which is what Arnold Schwarzenegger did for a year.
01:05:18.580
And or at least what sparked a year of consistent meditation.
01:05:22.960
And the benefit of the course, I'm not going to hard sell TM because I don't think it's for
01:05:27.440
everybody. But the value of a course of any type is that you have the incentives, you have the social
01:05:33.780
pressure and expectations and accountability that you do not have necessarily if you're doing it on
01:05:38.220
your own. But I have found some apps like Headspace or Calm to be a very effective place for people to
01:05:44.580
start. I do think guided meditation is a very low hurdle for most people. And everyone can squeeze
01:05:52.520
in 10 minutes. If you have to wake up 10 minutes earlier to do it, then sacrifice 10 minutes of
01:05:56.720
sleep to get it done. But that would be yet another piece of the puzzle.
01:06:01.380
That's awesome. Well, fantastic. Tim, we've covered a lot of ground in a little over an hour.
01:06:06.940
I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your time. I guess people can find out more about the
01:06:11.660
book at... Where can they find that? TimFerris.com?
01:06:15.180
I would recommend that... I don't think I've touched that one in a couple of years. I need to
01:06:20.360
update it. So I would recommend people go to toolsoftitans.com. Toolsoftitans.com has
01:06:24.880
some sample chapters. It has all sorts of information on the book. It's a fun book. I had so much fun with
01:06:34.160
this. And just so people aren't intimidated, it's a 704-page book, but it's intended to be a choose
01:06:38.760
your own adventure buffet of options. Dip in, dip out. If any reader reads 100 pages, I'm happy.
01:06:46.620
I consider it mission accomplished. So you do not have to read the whole thing. Think of it like a
01:06:50.620
cookbook of sorts. But toolsoftitans.com is where they can find out all about the book. And it's
01:06:59.780
available everywhere. And I am at T Ferris, F-E-R-R-I-S-S, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S on Twitter. And
01:07:07.620
just TimFerris, two R's, two S's on Facebook. Well, Tim Ferris, thank you so much for your time.
01:07:12.180
It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much. My guest today was Tim Ferris. He's the host of
01:07:15.840
The Tim Ferris Show. And his new book is called Tools of Titans. It's available on Amazon.com and
01:07:20.160
bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his book at toolsoftitans.com. And
01:07:24.740
also just his happenings at 4hourworkweek.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is
01:07:31.440
slash Ferris, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
01:07:47.460
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
01:07:51.960
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. Our show is
01:07:55.900
edited by Creative Audio Lab here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you have any audio editing needs or audio
01:07:59.800
production needs, check them out at creativeaudiolab.com. As always, we appreciate your
01:08:03.740
support. Reviews on iTunes or Stitchers helps us out a lot, so please continue to give those.
01:08:08.100
As always, thank you again for your support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to