The Art of Manliness - #259： Tools of Titans

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.

00:01:16.020 Thank you, sir.

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 0.96

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 0.80

00:05:59.680 an idiot having some type of meltdown in the beginning. But over time, it takes just a few 1.00

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.

00:08:16.480 It's a good one.

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

00:11:29.180 routines and lives around maximizing those.

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. 0.88

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 0.89

00:32:13.580 not try to track you down and, um, they may or may not make death threats because they're completely 0.98

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 0.95

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 0.99

00:35:17.760 contradiction, wanted to cherry pick some things that I can make him look like an idiot. How would 0.99

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.

00:35:32.720 Right. It sounds like an attorney.

00:35:34.860 Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely.

00:35:36.520 Um, so you've interviewed a lot of,

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

00:36:23.280 proofreading.

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

00:36:56.700 everything.

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 0.98

00:37:07.080 project was, you know, she worked on the Supreme court. Um, yeah, it's, it's a pretty useful skill.

00:37:12.080 Yeah. It doesn't surprise me at all.

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

00:37:29.740 then Arnold Schwarzenegger's and stuff.

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

00:37:38.400 knows Tony Robbins.

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 0.99

00:39:07.400 standing halfway between water and hay. And it looks left and right, left and right, left and 0.99

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 0.83

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, 0.94

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, 0.98

00:45:08.540 whatever it might be. It makes all of that seem extremely ridiculous and laughable and is, is 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.93

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.

01:06:06.360 Yeah, we have.

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

01:08:11.760 stay manly.

01:08:21.960 Thank you.

01:08:35.800 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - December 09, 2016

#259： Tools of Titans

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