Transcript

#701: In Case You Missed It: September 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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1:42 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So now question. No it is. My cybernetic organism living tissue over metal enter scale. Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life.

2:18 This is a special in between episode which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we Press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to Tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there.

2:53 Please enjoy. First up? Arthur C. Brooks. Author of the number one New York Times bestseller.

3:03 Build the life you want. The art and science are Of getting happier. With co author. Oprah Winfrey

3:12 Reverse bucket list is something I do, oh boy to ever do it. And it took me too long to figure this one out. When I was Fifty. I'm fifty nine years old. When I was fifty I found my bucket list from when I was forty.

3:28 No, it was a classic thing. And on my my birthday, I would make a list of my desires and my ambitions. And I would kinda imagine myself, visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things, and it would fire me up and make me Well, kinda feel like a loser, quite frankly, because it was it was m it was lowering my sense of satisfaction, I subsequently found out. And I looked at that list from when I was forty and I checked everything off that list and I was less happy. Oh no at fifty than I was at forty. And so I thought I'm a social scientist. So I thought to myself, obviously I'm doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? And basically

4:02 This is the problem. This is A neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package. I was making the mistake. Of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in

4:18 Like a minute. comes when you understand that your satisfaction Is your haves divided by your wants? Halves divided by wants. That's the model. So you know it's like I'll slow down because I know people watching like let me write that down. Halves divided by wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more. Or permanently and securely by wanting less.

4:42 I thought to myself, Hm. So what does that mean? In the answer to that, what does that mean? is I need a reverse bucket list. Not that I'm not gonna get nice things in my life, but like I'm gonna be consciously detached from them.

4:54 By going through the exercise of writing'em down and crossing them out. So on my birthday now. My t fifty ninth birthday a couple of months ago. I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever power. Ambition.

5:10 Admiration all these things that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and mother nature wires us to to accumulate the rewards that'll help us survive and pass on our genes. I got it. I know how evolutionary psychology works. And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals, but I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them. I don't want them to be. like phantasms in my limbic system managing me. I wanna move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive manager, the bumper of tissue right behind My forehead.

5:44 And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying maybe I get it and maybe I don't But I'm gonna cross it out as an attachment. And I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free.

5:55 And so you find that to work. It works. It does not because you don't care about it. But because you're not attached to it in the same way. You've made the decision. To have it not be a rootless desire, a ghost in your head. You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain.

6:17 Next up Sam Corcos CEO and co-founder of Levels. And Andreessen Horowitz backed Startup. That shows you how food

6:26 Affects your health. The thing that Almost always happens. is they have this long to do list.

6:36 And I say, All right. Here's what I want you to do. Take everything on this to do list. With the dates that you think they'll get done by. Which is usually this week or next week. And I want you to just put them on your calendar with the amount of time you think it's gonna take.

6:47 And then we'll have another follow up call next week. And we'll see what happens. And then we have the call. And then they say, This process doesn't work. I say, Why is that?

6:57 So well, I tried to move it over there, but there's enough space in my week to fit all these items. Like Yes. That's that's the point. This is the point of the exercise. There literally is not enough time. Your time is finite. And the number of digital items you can add to a to do list is infinite. You are working with the wrong constraint. Just like

7:17 The amount of items you can fit in a database row. As opposed to the number of things that you can fit in your finite time of your calendar. And so We then work on

7:28 All right. You probably need slack during the course of the day. Usually like Fifty percent is a good target. Because things come in. But space, extra space. Mm-hmm. You need extra space in the day.

7:41 And so we work on things like For me, I process a lot of Email. And when you say you need space in the day, could you just briefly say more about that? Because the way I'm hearing that is that you have fifty percent of your time Open.

7:55 Now is that For instance, like tomorrow you would have fifty percent of your time open, or does that mean that in advance of scheduling other things, like three weeks from now? Each day is fifty percent open. It's generally fifty percent open. Just Fully. Got it. And as you get better at it, I would say I'm probably at twenty five percent open because I've been doing this for many years.

8:16 At least five years, probably longer, to the point where I can estimate how long it will take me to do something with maybe ninety percent accuracy. It's like I need to write A memo on This thing.

8:29 It's gonna take me Three and a half hours. And I just know because I've written so many of these, I just know how long it's gonna take. And so It takes time to hone that, I would think, right? If you ask most people like how many calories do you eat at lunch, they'll be like six thousand million? I don't know. Seven calories? But then Over time.

8:47 You can calibrate. Okay. Especially if you retroactively update your calendar as well, which is how long did it actually take me? And when you realize that your estimates were off. Or they were right, you can start to hone that skill. So

9:00 I always Try to have people. put it at fifty percent open space because Something's gonna come up. A friend calls you, something happens during the day, you get a message that kind of throws you off. The problem is that it's way easier

9:14 to pull something in from tomorrow into today'cause you had extra space. than it is to have this cascading problem of just like disastrous it's like then I have to push this to this day, then next thing you know. You have this Tetris game that you're playing a month out because one thing changed in your schedule and everything breaks. These concepts come from manufacturing.

9:32 Where You have this. line, whatever the assembly line is, you need to have Slack in the system. in order to be able to operate effectively,'cause something will come up. And if there's one thing that comes up that breaks everything downstream, that's a real problem. And over time, as you get better, you can reduce that amount of slack, but

9:50 fifty percent is a pretty good goal. So you have like my goal for today I'm gonna have a four hour block where I'm gonna do X. And then I have some time For me, I I know I need to process email or communications broadly for at least Two hours a day.

10:05 So I just have those blocks every day. They're just repeated. So when I start scheduling things I can't actually fit this in because it's not like I can't do my email. My role requires a lot of email.

10:17 And so It's just Clear as day. I cannot do this on Thursday. I can do it next week. So from a process perspective then

10:26 Do you start with I'm imagining not at this point, but just just so I get a really clear understanding. Let's just say you're looking at next week. You have these recurring blocks. Mm-hmm. Vmail that's already in there. You may have other repeating blocks and I would be curious to know what they are. So let's bookmark that When you're looking at Say

10:49 The to-do's that will be converted into calendar or not. For the next week. What does that process look like? Do you start with a to do list and then that goes to your EA and she tries to slot he or she's tries to slot them in for the anticipated amount of time. Like what does that look like from kind of start to finish? Yeah, the answer is you just skip the to do list step entirely. So when I get a new task, a lot of my tasks effectively come in through email.

11:16 So I'll get an email. And this is also another thing that I worked with a couple of people on who really, really struggled with email. And the thing they struggle with is using their email as a to do list. Which is a very common thing that people do. The problem It creates a lot of anxiety.

11:32 When you have this stack of uncategorized things. It could be fifteen minutes, it could be fifty hours. You have no idea. Until you open up each one individually to figure out how much work it is. And so the same process of translating your to do list into your calendar. You can do the same thing with email.

11:48 Which is I work with somebody recently where I said all right. Let's open each email. How long is this gonna take you to respond to? These are like the chunkier ones. It's like Thirty minutes. Great.

11:59 Market is done. Copy the link. And put that link in your calendar. So you're gonna spend this thirty minute block responding to this email. What's the next one? That's gonna take me a full hour because I have to write something for them. That's interesting. So the clearing of the inbox then is really in some capacity.

12:17 scheduling the proper amount of time to reply to these things. So you're not looking at this undifferentiated stack of shit that you are Opening multiple times, marking his unread, going back to forgetting what you read, reading it the seventeenth time, or whatever that might be. Yeah. And it it's a stress thing it is very stressful to have this

12:37 list of things. It's just An ambiguous amount of effort. It is stress relieving to see all right. I will do that on Thursday of next week. Mm-hmm.

12:46 I have nothing pending right now. I have not dropped any balls. Because I know That anything that is time sensitive that needed to be done today is already done. And there's nothing there's no ambiguous

12:58 deadlines looming that I'm not aware of because they're in my calendar. And if you change it, this is where closing the loop is a helpful factor, which is If you say I'm gonna block this off for Thursday. You can tell that person, Hey, I'll get back to you on Thursday. And then if you have to move it.

13:13 You now know that you can say, Hey, something came up. I'll get it to you on Monday. And you can just keep them in the loop on that, as opposed to just ambiguously dropping the ball. So For me

13:24 When I get a new task. It just immediately goes into my calendar. So if somebody was to say, Hey, can you Right. a memo on this topic so that this team has context on it of

13:35 where this has gone over the last year. I'll say, sure, how soon do you need it? Say. Can you have it to me by Wednesday? I'll go to my calendar.

13:43 And I'll block off two hours.'Cause I think that's about how long it'll take. I'll block off two hours on Tuesday that I have open. And I'll say Cool. I'll have a two by Tuesday night. And then that's it. The calendar is the to do list.

13:59 Next up Nassim Nikolas Taleb Author of The Black Swan The impact of the highly improbable. And Scott Patterson.

14:09 Author of Chaos Kings. Make billions in the new age. Of crisis.

14:17 Yeah. Nassim, I have a question for you about a letter, and then I have a question for you about Personalities, Scott. So Temperament may be another way to put it. So th is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer. I read this on the internet. I don't know if it's true. You can't believe everything you read, but it was from The Guardian, so I thought it might be credible.

14:42 One thing is actually that it said I recommend people do that. I wrote that but not on the day I started. But I uh recommend it that people'cause you you feel relief when you do it. Mm. Because

14:55 Then you can continue on your job without feeling Like someone's controlling you. You've got the gun loaded. The whole idea of Flynn behind about about that problem. So you write the resignation letter and you Don't date it.

15:09 Ha ha ha. I'm very. Fascinated by your Ways of thinking. the way that you've embraced different philosophies.

15:18 And you emailed me an aphorism in two thousand ten. And uh you can correct me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me. This is in two thousand ten. Here's the aphorism or the quote. Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hates it. And then a parentheses artists. Fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude.

15:41 Who loves it, and then quotation marks politicians. Have you always had that type of robustness or resilience against criticism? Is that something that is inborn? Maybe because I was Never really someone who took

15:59 You know, establish the ideas at face value. So you necessarily have You know, it violates some norms, some thinking norms. And often people protect those norms by, you know, attacking a reputation. And I realized that uh while riding full by randomness, I say, Hey you're saying that what I'm doing is random, or using the wrong models, it don't work. So they attack your reputation. So I realized quickly

16:23 It was time. Yeah, my reputation was gonna be under some kind of fire. And I decided that no, my reputation is how A few important people. Or people who know

16:35 Something about the subject. You mean And it's not like I don't care about reputation, I only care about my reputation in some circles. And it was people I can talk to

16:47 To try to explain what it's about. And it has worked out. So but if you have to go defend your reputation And you're doing the right thing. It's too much energy wasted.

16:58 And it's not gonna help. Haters are gonna hate. This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie Mungers uh one of Charlie Mungers, is that Do you want to be the most

17:08 Ethical person. What people think that you're corrupt? Well you know, he's the most corrupt person. But you should think that you're ethical. Make your choice.

17:18 And use it as a guideline. It's the same thing. So except that the uh you know there's something in between is that there's some people I care about. And I want him, you know, to not lose respect for me. Of course you start with your mother, if you have your children or whatever your family members but there are also there's a lot a lot of people on the planet. And I care about marriage, but in these circles.

17:41 Not with The general public. So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions, which I've done over A long life. And Mark, for example, has a lot of enemies. And they're gonna pick on something and we don't care, so you're doing the right things.

17:55 And how do you know they're doing the right thing? It's people you respect. A prove. Of your action. Not as the general public thus. So that

18:05 Segue to my question for you, Scott, which is in the process of doing all these interviews And interacting with These various players on the field. uh these sort of practitioners, these investors and so on. Have you identified any patterns that you think, whether nature or nurture.

18:25 That seem to recur. And people were Good at what you describe in the book. I would say I mean across All three books that I've written which are

18:36 generally focused on Wall Street trading hedge fund managers. I've met a lot of hedge fund managers. Over the years. None like this guy, I have to say. We'll probably come back to that.

18:49 I'm not I tell you, I don't want to be identified as a fund manager. Yeah, that's true. Um It's an identity thing. Many are very focused on making a lot of money. That's

19:01 A very common trait. I mean Mark. He talked to me about how you know he grew up in the eighties. Yeah. Identified with the

19:11 Reagan era, it was a time, you know, Wall Street greed is good. He told me he's like, Did I have a little greed in me? Yeah, I did. It was the eighties. And he he grew up in a family that was uh His father was a he was a minister in a church. He was sort of a hippie. Didn't believe in pursuit of wealth.

19:29 Mark to the exact I've said. View that That was constantly something driving him was the desire to to make money. A lot of other hedge fund managers I've met over the years just they have that drive.

19:42 And it's something that Many people look at these guys and think You're worth a billion dollars, you're worth two billion dollars, and yet you're a maniac. You s you go into work every day. And just go crazy. You drive all your employees crazy'cause

19:59 You want to be richer than the next guy. I don't think Mark has that quite that sort of insane level of greed as some do. I've I've met Ken Griffin Founder of Citadel. Disciple of Ed Thorpe who we talked about, we might talk about later.

20:14 Cliff Asnas, who is a uh Stark enemy of uh friend, initially. Initially a friend. Yeah, and I I have to say Cliff is a is a nice guy when you when you meet him. Not a nice guy, but as a friend I have friends who are not nice guys. He he's also got a dark side.

20:29 Also somebody extremely focused on being wealthy. Very smart. They're all extremely smart. I think that's And personalities, that's uh I think one of the things that His um drive my books is these are interesting people.

20:41 You know, a lot of them are mathematicians, scientists, they Come out of university with a a different Expertise and making money, but then they apply that on Wall Street to making money. So it's a combination of

20:54 They have to be leaders. They Or extremely driven. It baffles me'cause I'm not like that. You know, I've A degree in English.

21:03 And I think that's actually why sympathize with Nassim's writing so much as I came out of a traditional That You know, I love the works of Dostoevsky and

21:16 Existentialism and you know, one of my favorite books is The Irrational Man. And I came in to Wall Street and started reading about how there's this belief that people are rational and the markets are rational and They are predictable because of this. And I thought that is just

21:34 Crazy. You know, to me, I look at financial markets And I see black swans, I I see fear and greed. That to me is what drives markets, not rational behavior, rational expectations. What are some of the things that make

21:48 And that seemed different. Or unique in those you've interacted with. I have some of my own questions and and thoughts on this, but I won't I would love to hear yours. He mentioned his contrarian nature. It's not a contrarian nature, it's uh independent. So you've got to be in line with uh I mean, people think I'm contrarian. I'm I'm with a conspiracy theorists on many of the things. I'm against them on many other things. Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem.

22:13 Okay. So so to me a contrarian is is is an explicit explicit rather than uh attribute. So but the other thing is I thought it was gonna be about me. It should be about the idea, the precaution and He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and Not financial market. Drives him.

22:33 He doesn't look at the stock market page. You know, every day like some people do. He's No, no, you you have to figure out what people envy yourself. So You know, if you're in a hedge fund business and and you have five hundred million dollars in a bank and someone else has six hundred million dollars, you're gonna be envious of that person. I was always envious of people had more erudition than me.

22:54 Okay, so more erodes. And you realize that's that's what Makes me thick. Being envious is not good. You see? But at the same time If you figure out

23:05 Who you tend to envy? It's not I don't believe in this as you say, oh people having enough. There's someone you from East Hampton. The fellow who wrote Cash Twenty Two. A lot of interesting folks out there. Yeah, he met uh uh financier at the time for hedge funds.

23:19 And uh the financier said, What is it that About you? 'Cause it was an author, a very successful one. What is it? That

23:28 Distinguishes you from me. You know, look I told them. I know the meaning of enough. So in other words, you know your upper bound. And effectively

23:38 I don't play that game. I say there's there's meaning the I Mayum Literally and I Say envious people who are erudites. Like if someone knows Latin. Uh very well. I'm I'm envious.

23:51 Someone knows Sanskrit. I'm envious. Right. So th that's and I discovered that early on. So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money on Wall Street, but I didn't think it was worth the effort. And luckily with the combination of Universal I had so much leverage, you know, was marked on all the stuff, that's that the spillover on me was more than satisfactory. So I have knock on wood a lot more than uh than I wished. Next up

24:19 Shane Parrish The entrepreneur behind Farnum Street. And author of Clear thinking Turning ordinary moments.

24:28 Into extraordinary results. I'd love to get your help defining A phrase just I suppose explaining a phrase. Then segueing into a conversation around

24:43 Mental models and cognitive biases and so on. So ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your results. So What is meant by that? Line and what is meant by position. So the counterintuitive insight that I had about decision making from studying

25:02 sort of Buffett and Munger. and Peter Kaufman and a host of other people who've influenced my thinking. Is that they almost never find themselves out of position. And if you want to think of it as position as your circumstances, they're never forced by circumstances into doing something that they don't want to do. And often that means they look like an idiot in the short term, but in the long term they win. And if you consider Buffett, for example, is we've talked about

25:29 You know, he closes down his partnership. During a bull market in the sixties. Because he doesn't know how to invest. anymore. He's lost touch. He can't find what worked for him. he reopens it later in terms of Berkshire Hathaway.

25:42 Time magazine, I think it was nineteen ninety nine, he's on the cover as being out of touch. Two thousand one stock market bursts. Right now, today, I think as of last quarter, he's got a hundred and fifty billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so what he's always doing is he's Everybody thinks he's out of touch and he looks like an idiot, but he always wins because

26:02 No matter what the outcome is, he wins. If the stock market goes up. He wins. If the stock market crashes, he wins, because he's put himself in a position Where no matter what happens, he can take advantage of circumstances rather than having circumstances

26:17 Take advantage of him. And I think that that's a key element we don't realize. If you put Warren Buffett in a bad Position. where all of his options are bad, it doesn't matter how smart he is. It doesn't matter how warm buffet he is. Everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position, and everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position. Do you then create that position by having a handful of commandments? And I'm making these up. I'm not saying this is what Buffett does because I haven't tracked him as closely as you have, but for instance, I know someone who's of a similar

26:48 cut from a similar cloth and he's like, no short positions, no leverage, d he has four or five rules. That he follows, which means He doesn't always Beat. The

27:00 S P five hundred, let's say, but he's very rarely in a position where he's a distressed seller. Or is forced into a bad position. So he is able to play a very long game. So I guess I'm wondering How you consistently create

27:17 That type of position. So let me talk about it in terms of finance and then apply it to something else that's totally you would think it doesn't apply to. So in finance, like you can think of low debt, you can think of saving money. You can think of always having dry powder. It doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world. If you can't take advantage of that idea, you might as well not have the idea. You have to be in a position to take advantage of the ideas that you have, and you have to be in a position where somebody can't call you in at the exact wrong moment because that's really expensive.

27:47 as everybody sort of learned during the great financial crisis and is now Forgotten. We seem to relear these lessons over and over again. But positioning applies to so many other things that we don't think about. And you can think about it basically as in Your sleep. Right.

28:04 Did you work out? Are you healthy? Are you eating well? Are you investing in your relationship with your partner? What position am I in in the moment that I get into a fight? or argument or disagreement with my partner or my spouse. And we don't think about the position we're in at that moment, but if you imagine that there's a patch of grass between you and them, is that grass dry or is it wet?

28:24 Have I watered that for months, in which case the spark isn't gonna light it on fire. Or Is this smallest little spark gonna start this forest fire? And the position that we bring into those arguments matters a lot in terms of the quality of the outcomes that we get. I'll give you another example. We were talking about kids earlier and I assume a lot of people listening have kids.

28:47 One of my kids came home with an exam and he got a really terrible mark. And he hands it to me, and he's like a teenager. So he like hands it to me. He's like, I did the best I could, walks away. And normally the conversation ends there. And I was like, Okay, well, now is not the moment that we're gonna talk about this because I know Got this teenage attitude thing going on, but we're gonna circle back to this. And so later that night I was like, Talk me about what it means to do the best you can and what he

29:14 told me about the best he could was like When he sat down to write that test from ten to eleven. He focused all of his energy and all of his effort on it. He made the best decisions possible from ten to eleven. But what he forgot or didn't really appreciate is what position was he in at 10 a.m. when he sat down to write that test. Did he fight with his brother in the morning? Yep, he did. Did he eat a healthy breakfast? Nope, he didn't. Did he get a good night's sleep? Nope, he was up late. Did he study? No, he sort of half asked it. And so what happened was

29:47 He was in a bad position at the moment he sat down to write that test. He was ill prepared. To write the test. But yes, he did the best he could in that moment. And so often we think about life in terms of how do I do the best I can in this particular moment, rather than How do I put myself in the best position? And part of that is like we're always predicting. We're predicting creatures. And so

30:11 We're always trying to gauge what the outcome is and maximize towards that outcome. I wanna go all in on Tesla. I wanna go all in on whatever, because I wanna maximize my return. And what we don't think about is like, okay, well, what is the cost of doing that? What if I'm wrong? And how do I position myself for multiple possible futures where what if my idea is not correct? Can I still survive and can I thrive on that? And if you look back and you sort of like look back at Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these. You know. Historical people who built these great businesses, including Buffet. They always take advantage of a weakness in somebody else's position when their position is strong.

30:50 Who else would you and I know you mentioned a few names, but outside of Buffett Munger. Who else would you put on your Short list. And not to make you pick favorites, I'm sure that you could give a very long list, but just off the cuff if you had to pick Five to ten people.

31:07 Let's just say. Could be four. But you know, but let's aim for five or slightly more people who you really respect as incisive, deliberate decision makers. Who would make that list? So we have mutual friend Naval Ravakan.

31:23 Uh he would be up there. Patrick Collison would sort of be up there. Cat Cole, who works at Athletic Ramin's. One of my favorite people. She's always One step ahead. She's amazing. I think that

31:37 There's very few people who are well positioned in everything. Like if you look at somebody who's extremely good at one thing like Buffett It comes with extreme weaknesses. You can have a a list of exemplars in your head almost of different people who are good at different positions.

31:53 But you have to pick what direction you're going. And then w what positions do you need to be good at to be good in that direction? And so for me, like I circle back to sort of like core things, which people don't really think about, but they're core to everything we do in terms of like health and relationships and friendship and purpose and community. Am I working on something that I wanna be working on? Am I moving closer to my destination? And is my destination

32:20 The place I want to go. And I think those questions are stuck that we don't really Ask ourselves, we're always so focused on like how do we accomplish the outcome we want. Rather than what are the key elements to this process that allow me to play for a long time. Am I going in the right direction? And do I want to get

32:38 To where I'm going. So I am gonna come back to just the Broad question of How to incorporate Thinking about

32:47 Cognitive biases, if I'm saying that correctly, andor mental models I'm not really. I guess those are different. I'd love to have you let well, let's begin there. How would you distinguish or define mental models? Then I'm gonna go micro and then we'll zoom out. So a great way to think about mental models is The source of all bad decisions is blind spots. Mental models allow you to see a problem through a different lens.

33:09 You can adopt a different persona. A great example of a mental model is like how would Tim Ferriss think about this? And then I adapt what I know about you and I try to see the problem from your perspective. And if I can see the problem from your perspective, now I've Done the one thing that actually gets me out of cognitive biases. Which is the source of all cognitive biases are basically

33:31 We believe What we see is all there is. And we learn about this sort of in physics, right? In grade nine, I think, where you're standing on this train and you're carrying this ball. And the train is moving at sixty miles an hour and how fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to you, the ball's not moving, but if you're watching the train go by, the ball's moving at sixty miles an hour. And so the source of all of our problems is that we only see that we're this person on the train holding this ball. And we can't see that there's a person outside who has a completely different view into the exact same situation that we see.

34:03 So we can mentally Use These tools to sort of accommodate How we can look into the world from A different person's eyes or through a different lens, be that

34:15 biology or through thinking or through I mean the most useful ones tend to be like And then what? Just asking yourself that simple question, I accomplished this, and then what then what happens inversion? How do I avoid all these negative outcomes that I don't want to get? And the stoics, you've talked about this in the past. The stoics have been doing this for a long time. They call it a premortem.

34:36 I think that Those are just really helpful ways. And what they're really doing is they're just allowing us to put a different lens onto the problem and see it through a different light. And by seeing it through a different light, We slightly reduce our blind spots into the problem. Yeah, totally. I've found I haven't read these in decades, so caveat lector for anyone who picks these up, but some of Edward De Bono's work. I think he's originally Maltese, but so De Bono's two words, but or actually th he may just be

35:04 A Maltese citizen. I can't peg the nationality. It doesn't really matter. He wrote a book called Lateral Thinking. He has another one. I think it's called the Six Thinking Hats or something along those lines. which similarly very helpful just for forcing yourself as a portion of a practice. to look at the same situation with a different lens, a different set of questions, a different perspective. Last but not least Another unpredictable and entertaining edition of

35:34 The Random Show With technologist and serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose I'll mention something that's sitting

35:46 outside. I can see it from here that people might be interested in. So I I've been And still I'm a fervent believer in cold therapy. Using ice baths as a means of Controlling inflammation.

36:01 as a means of mood elevation that lasts on the mood elevation big time. Unbelievable. And uh Generally. my approach has been to get a chest freezer of some type and fill it with ice, et cetera. And that works, but they get really disgusting really quickly and They all do, dude. I bought one of the machines, the real pro ones. Yeah, and then you're stuck with this thing.

36:27 That is an eyesore and you don't know what to do with it. You can't move it. Yeah, I tried to sell it, I couldn't. Yeah. Yeah. So I ended up Because I I realized how significant a lever this is for improving my quality of life just on a daily basis. Like and I'll back step for a second and just say one thing that I learned from Tony Robbins. To give him credit and I don't know if he came up with this, but

36:49 is this sequence of state story strategies. It's like fix your state first. Only then can you come up with an enabling story, and only then can you come up with an effective strategy. If you're like feeling shitty and you're sleep deprived and you're kind of depressed or anxious or whatever, you try to come up with a strategy, meaning how to fix something, you're not going to come up with a good strategy, generally speaking. So it's like fix your physical. State first.

37:17 Then you can come up with an enabling story, then come up with an effective strategy. So the state piece is very important. There aren't that many ways I have found to change state. Exercise is one, but it requires Generally a fair amount of time. Heat is also effective, but again requires say Doesn't sound like a much, but it's like fifteen to thirty minutes, let's just say, in a sauna. Very effective.

37:43 Cold is the fastest. It's just the fastest for me. And uh I've gone without cult therapy because I've not wanted to get some huge chest freezer or a pro model. I am also going to be getting a pro model. But They get all scummy though and then you gotta put chlorine in them. Yeah, it's a lot. But I went on Amazon and I found something called the Cold Pod, which you set up in like five minutes. You fill it with water from a hose.

38:10 You put ice in And it works perfectly well as a cold plunge. And I I ended up buying a Yeti Cooler. To store ice in. So I have a few days of ice.

38:22 And uh It's uh let's see. What would it be? It would be like If you were standing Maybe it's Hip height.

38:32 And it's probably three feet in diameter, and you get in, you just kinda crouch in there. And it works fucking great. It works really well. And it costs like a hundred and fifty or two hundred bucks, maybe, I don't know. Maybe it's a hundred bucks. It's not Crazy. Hundred and sixty nine. There you go. And I've been really impressed with this thing. It's very basic.

38:55 And even when it's been very hot outside, like you put in two bags of ice and you Let it sit for twenty minutes. It's gonna get pretty cold. It's not gonna be thirty degrees, but it's probably gonna be mid fifties, depending on how much water you have in there. Pro tip. The more water you have in there, the more ice you're gonna need to cool it. So don't fill it all the way up to the top. Fill it up like halfway, and then add the ice.

39:17 And it's been a game changer for me. It's a plastic trash can, dude. No, it's not a plastic trash can. It is props whoever made this shit, because it probably cost them like 15 bucks to build one of these. Yeah, it's not a trash can. I just to be clear. I mean it's look, it's we're not talking about a fucking Maserati. But here's what's nice about it. It's very easy to set up. It's not a trash can,'cause that makes it sound like it's like mid chest height and and hard. It's easy to pack. You can actually travel with it if you want to travel with it. So I would just say for people who travel with it. Oh, it's super easy, man. You like it. It folds up.

39:55 Yeah, it folds up. You can stick stick it in a bag. You can take it with you. It's super easy. Clean your hotel room. Yeah loves fifty gallons of water spill out of me For those people who have Perhaps

40:11 heard about the benefits of cold therapy, but have avoided it because it's too expensive, it's too time consuming. Whatever. This is a way to test it. And I would just say This is a low hurdle way to test it out.

40:24 And I used it earlier today. It was fantastic. Changed my day. So that's the cold button. And there are a bunch of other options that look basically identical. I just went with the one with the best reviews. Nothing fancy.

40:41 And now here are the bios for all the guests. Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular How to Build a Life column, mega popular, and And Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 number one New York Times bestseller from strength to strength, finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life, which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter, Five Blood Friday. His newest book is Build the Life You Want, subtitle The Art and Science of Getting Happier. with co-author Oprah Winfrey. He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. We cover a lot of ground He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks and practices that he implements in his own life, and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many other projects. You can find him on Instagram at Arthur C Brooks.

41:49 On Twitter at Arthur Brooks. This is an old school Tim Ferris conversation in the sense that we go all the way back To many of the tools, many of the principals from the four hour work week. And that includes virtual assistance.

42:08 Delegation. processes, massive elimination, minimalism for maximum leverage, all sorts of great things. And this time I was in the student seat because my guest today has mastered, I think it is fair to say So many facets of everything I just mentioned. And it was a pleasure. To take so many notes myself to follow up on. His name is Sam Corcos. You can find him on Twitter at Sam Corcos, C-O-R-C-O-S. Sam is the CEO and co-founder of Levels, an A16Z backed startup that shows you how food affects your health using continuous glucose monitors and other biosensors. Fascinating company.

42:46 incredibly, incredibly practical technology. Easy to use. Easy to learn from, changes your behavior, changes your life. Check out levels at levelshealth.com. First guest is Nasim Niklas Taleb.

43:02 Who spent twenty one years as a risk taker, that is quantitative trader, before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and, in his words, mostly practical problems with probability. Taleb is the author of a multi volume essay, The Incerto. And within that you find the Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Anti-Fragile, the Bed of Procrusties, and Skin in the Game. Thanks to Matt Mollenweg for first introducing me to the Black Swan. These all cover broad facets of uncertainty. His work has been published into forty nine languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written as a back up of the incerto more than seventy technical and scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, genetics, quantitative finance, statistical physics, medicine, philosophy, ethics, economics, and international affairs around the notion of risk and probability. These are grouped in the technical inserto. Inserto is spelled I N C E R T O. Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. Believe he's retired. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder, in other words.

44:06 The properties of systems that are in his Phrasing anti-fragile. You can find him on Twitter at NN Taleb. And that's N N T A L E B, also fooledbyrandomness.com. The second guest is Scott Patterson. Scott Patterson is an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, currently based in Washington, DC, working on climate and energy policy. His new book is Chaos Kings, subtitled How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis. A profile of the rise of black swan traders such as Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel, as well as a survey of the many perils the world faces today and how we might fix them. Scott has covered a lot. He's covered everything from Berkshire Hathaway to stock exchanges to high speed traders to financial regulators. His first book, The Quants, describes the rise of mathematical finance and delves into its role in the two thousand eight financial blow up. Dark Pools, his second book.

44:57 Tells how computer traders took control of the US stock market starting from the birth of computer trading in the nineteen eighties. to the explosion of high frequency trading in the late two thousands. And You can find him on Twitter at Patterson Scott and on his website, Scott Patterson Books.com and Lest you think this conversation is only about finance, I want to emphasize that very refined thinking in the world of markets and investing. really reflects

45:27 Clarity of analysis. and concepts that then lend themselves to a very clear scoreboard. And for that reason, it is a fascinating arena within which you can refine your thinking toolkit for many, many, many other things. And we talk about many of these other areas where these things can be cross-applied. My guest today is Shane Parish.

45:55 Shane Parish is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnum Street and the host of the Knowledge Project podcast. Where he focuses on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. And he has many. Many top investors and thinkers on his podcast. His popular online course, Decision by Design, has helped thousands of executives, leaders, and managers around the world learn the repeatable behaviors that improve results. Shane's work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Among many other outlets.

46:26 He is the author of the brand new book, Clear Thinking. Turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. You can find him on Instagram at Farnham Street. That's spelled F-A-R-N-A M Street. On Twitter at Shane A Parish. Last name, P-A-R-R-I-S-H, and all things for them straight, including the knowledge project, you can find at fs.blog. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. Kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.

47:23 albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.