Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast Yes I Know, I say, I have an extra special guest every week. This week, I have an extra extra special guest. Tim Ferris, best selling author of numerous books, including The Four Hour Workweek, host of the Tim Ferris Podcast. He's got a bajillion downloads on that. He's written five number one best selling books, including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot of buzz. He co created this with another gaming company
called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of his books or conversations or ted Talks or what have you. I find him to just be such a thoughtful guy. He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment, the Tim Ferriss Experiment, where he's constantly trying to figure out how his body works, how his psychology works, how his emotional world works, and has tried a variety of different things and sort of fastidiously documented what does and
doesn't work for him. That's what led to his productivity book, The Four Hour Workweek, It's what led to his health and fitness book, The Four Hour Body, On and on. He just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out does the AB test, figures out what works and what doesn't. I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferris.
Thanks for having me well here.
It's nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I don't have to explain how this rolls. What I want to do is I'm excited about your book. I know you have a new game out that we want to talk about. But I have to start by delving into your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelors and East Asian studies from Princeton. What were the original career plans?
So that was after a major switch. So the original career plan was actually neuroscience. So oh, no sentence major And there are a few reasons I wanted to focus on that. I have Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and hereditary bipolar and so on.
So wait, we could have a whole nother discussion on neurodivergency. And I was kind of fascinated by a lot of what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage and operate around whatever deficits you're working with. Some deficits come with separate surpluses. But how significant were all these deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology of just navigating life?
Well? The depression piece was a huge challenge for most of my life, and thankfully that has changed with a couple of different approaches and different tools. And that's one of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was someone in the Department of psychology but within the focus of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time, and I was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because he was focused on the role of serotonin in sleep
and mood regulations of the neurobiology of depression. He also, and this was early days, he had an interest in psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my interest in psychedelic compounds goes back a very very long time. That would have been nineteen ninety five ninety six, but I couldn't personally do I realized and it is important and it is necessary at this point in time. The animal testing on rats.
He used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies, but I couldn't euthanize these rats after doing various tests, and it wasn't actually torture of any type. I just couldn't. I couldn't be hands on with that at the time, so I switched to East Asian studies, but with a focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in the realm of let's just say cognitive neuroscience, but more
on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to be a research subject in a bunch of his studies, no kid, yeah, just to see what that was.
Like at the time. Had he already won the Nobel and like I think it was one to oh two.
So no, not yet, not yet. So this was super early days, still very well known on campus. But I guess it would have been Greenhall. They were pretty boring, to be honest. The tasks hitting space bars or something to indicate when you see a flashing green box in the upper left hand corner of one of these very old school monitors. But that was one of the ways that I earned whatever was five dollars an hour pay for something.
Was he ever in Princeton I kind of remember he was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California, so.
Maybe yeah, he bounced around, but at that time.
Princeton, huh, really really interesting. So I get the transition. I guess if you're going to pick some space related to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that.
Yeah, and I had been an exchange student. My first real trip outside of the US was as an exchange student at age fifteen to Tokyo, Japan, amazing where I went to a Japanese school for a year.
Are you fluent it all?
I am? Yeah, I still speak read less so right, because you really have to practice that to keep it up. I can still speak and read Japanese. And then got a couple of others.
I have a friend, Noah Smith, who is physics and economics like a killer double major, and he's spent summers in raves Kyoto says, Tokyo, you have to go when that must have been fascinating at fifteen, that has to be a little overwhelming.
Yeah, it's a fascinating very for someone who grew up on Long Island.
And that's why you're an East Hampton kid, right.
Yeah, And at that point only spoke English, very alien. That has the benefit of being incredibly alien but incredibly safe. And the additional benefit that people tend to speak, if they speak at all, terrible English, which means you have to learn Japanese. Huh So, in contrast with a lot of if you go to Spain or if you go to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian because people are going to default English, that just doesn't really happen in Japan.
So not mentioned the fact that I got there before smartphones, so I couldn't just escape to texting with my friends. I was stuck.
It was or to use Google Translate to actually talk to.
Me didn't exist. Yeah, you were stuck, and that was a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason. Actually, another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had the one of the strongest, if not the strongest, East Asian studies programs for at that time, I was most interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would have taken even if I had majored in neuroscience.
Huh So you graduate in two thousand, I'm kind of fascinated that very quickly you start writing The Four Hour work Week, which was published in seven like that is a shockingly short period of time. You're in your twenties when you're selling what essentially becomes one of the top selling books of seven I mean it was on every bestseller list. I don't have to tell you this, but
I want listeners to understand. So the first question is, what on earth motivated you five years out of college to say I think I'm going to write a book.
Yeah, so, I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything. This is a commitment I made to myself after graduation, longer than an email ever. Again, that was the promise because my senior thesis I felt almost killed me. So I didn't want to write anything. But one of my professors at Princeton who really changed the trajectory of my life, a professor named ed shaw Z Scchau were still in touch. He was a former competitive figure skater, took companies public,
one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He did everything taught at Harvard Business School, etcetera, etcetera, ETCETERA real polymath, renaissance man, and he taught a class called high Tech Entrepreneurship, which was electrical engineering four ninety one. But you didn't need to be an engineer. I wasn't and that class is what convinced me to move west.
Keep in mind the timing. This was just before the dot com inclusion to chase my riches and engage in tech, and in two thousand and one, after that startup I joined had imploded, I started my own company and I was bootstrapping it. I didn't raise any outside financing, and so Ed asked me to come back and talk to
students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year to do this short lecture to students, and in one of the feedback forms after years of doing this, one of the students, who was not being serious, put in his additional comments, I don't understand why you're teaching a class of undergrads and graduate students. Why don't you just
write a book and be done with it. And I had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time, so I would get these half baked ideas for chapter titles or content or whatever, and I couldn't get to sleep, and I would just jot it down and the notes from the classes as I was teaching, which changed over time to track my experiences, and these insomnia Middle of
the night notes formed the backbone of something. Sent it to a mentor of mine who was an author and unbidden without asking me, was like, I think this is a great idea. Here meets so and so meet so and so introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping in mind now looking back twenty eight or twenty nine, publishers meaning imprints said no, and then Crown bought it for next to nothing.
I love all the examples. I'm a big William Goldman fan, whose book and Ventures in the Screen Trade Amazing introduced the phrase nobody knows anything into the popular culture. And he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars, all the studios passed on Raiders? Was it paramount that passed on et because hey, we have this other alien adventure called Starman, nobody remembers today, and.
You could go to other you can go anywhere fields Starbucks, everybody passed on Starbucks.
Quid Games. The author couldn't get it sold for ten years, ultimately had to sell his laptop because he was so broke. I love the John Wick story. You have, like this top action hero could not get Hong Kong Gun Fou made in Hollywood ended up funding it himself along with I'm trying to remember the other actress who kicked money and it's now a two billion dollar franchise. So the best selling book that all the imprints passed on not
a surprise at all. It is a throw everything against the wall business model and we don't care and we'll see what sticks. And they missed this.
Yeah, it's it's a hits driven business in some ways, very similar to the angel investing later, I mean sure, type of kind of parallel distribution. And what's been wildest about Four Hour work Week, which is really a book on increasing per hour output, which is why it found a toe hold in tech and then the first New York Times coverage had Mark Injries and the famed entrepreneur
and now venture capitalists talking about it. He wants to work eighty hours a week, but he wants to get each of those hours to produce ten times as much and that's the basic underlying theme of the book. So what's wild about it is almost all the tech tools that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even in twenty seventeen, when all of that stuff was irrelevant,
the principles, the frameworks and so on. It ended up being on the Amazon Top ten most highlighted books of all time list.
Meaning from the Kindle version that's so highlight.
Yeah, in twenty seventeen, so that would have been eight years later when all of the tech tools were just dinosaurs at that point, which has been it's been cool to watch.
So I have I'm thumb through the book over the weekend. I read it way back when, and I'm revisiting an old copy which I should have brought in to have you signed. And my wife says, four hour work week. What's She's an art teacher, fashion illustration and design. She's like, what's that about? And I say, I know this is not going to be a conversation that's going to go any place productive, So I just say the Parato principle.
She's like, what's that. Well, eighty percent of the value we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from twenty percent of whatever that data set is. And she's like, oh, is that true. I'm like, yeah, kind of really seems to be true. Oh okay, And I know immediately like this is not her sort of book, but how grossly am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just reducing it to Parado points.
I think if you had to pick one principle in the book, that's a good one, that's it right to focus on. Now, it assumes a few things that sometimes get missed, right, so people can jump to strategy before they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something.
So the definition phase of that book, where you're really getting very clear on which target you are aiming for, I think is a might sound strange, but an often under emphasized precursor to then doing an eighty twenty analysis. Because for eighty twenty or preto principle analysis, you're looking at which twenty percent of the inputs roughly right, it could be ten, it could be one percent are producing
the outsized percentage of the returns. Now, that could be looking at your customers if you run a business, right, it could be looking at your physical exercise, what's producing the adaptations. That's a little trickier to do, but you can figure it out. You could look at it with medications too. I mean it's like there are a lot of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo pareto notice this in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution.
It applies all over the place. And actually Richard Koshkoch has written a lot on this subject under the moniker of the eighty twenty principle. But I'd say, if you had to pick one principle, that's the one. Sure.
Since we're sitting here in Bloomberg, I just have to point out it's very much true for your portfolio, the vast majority of your gains. And if you read some of the research by people like Bessembinder, Hendrik Bessembinder in Arizona State, it's not even twenty percent that's generating returns. It's one or two percent. Yeah, that creates the vast majority. So there's pareto principle, hyper preto principle. But it's kind of fascinating that you use this as a way to
hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like you've applied this across a wide range of items. Have you ever found a space where it doesn't work?
I haven't, to be honest.
It's just consistent everywhere.
It seems to be practically a lot of nature that a few things, the critical few versus the trivial many. It's it's almost always a few things.
Critical few versus the trivial many. Yeah, that that is fabulous summation of that. I really I really like that. So let's let's stick with the book for a moment. Sure, in the book, you have a lot of practices and tools and routines. I know some of them are still valid today. Some of them may or may not have, for lack of a better word, expired. What were the
most important items you learned? What are the ones that people speak to you and say, hey, this resonated, this really had a big impact on me.
Yeah, I would say the first is let me zoom out and say that. I went back and I looked at the book, which is always tough for me on some level because I published it when I was twenty nine, right, I'm turning forty eight soon, and so there's there's a little bit of chess puffing and so on because I was completely unknown at the time, which makes me WinCE. But overall, the principles are still things that I apply all the time. But the tech tools like using go
to my PC. No, of course, not that's changed. That world has changed, but the principles and the frameworks, the exercises still apply. So there, I would say a few things get echoed to me a lot. One is the practice of fear setting.
Fear setting, define fear setting for them.
Sure, it's very simple. So fear setting is based on the I think accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught to set goals, or we have a framework for trying to set goals like smart, right, specific, measurable, et cetera,
with a timeline. But if you have the emergency break on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business, quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation from your job or your business, whatever it might be, that that is the kind of rate limitter and what you can do. And people can find this for free if you just go to watch my ted talk which has I don't know twelve million views now.
On eighteen tight minutes of here's what to do with your life.
Yah, Well, just focuses on this exercise of fear setting, which I still do probably once a quarter. And the basic idea is you take whatever you're considering that you haven't yet done because you have some degree of fear apprehension, you write down all of the worst things that could happen. Let's just call it a list of twenty in excruciating detail, make them specific. Then you have another column, which is what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each
of those things happening. Last column. If each of those happened, what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding? Right? So, okay, you try business after quitting your job, which, by the way, I don't recommend. You can moonlight and do various things to hedge against risk, but then it doesn't work. Okay, can you temporarily airbnb a bedroom in your house or your bed? Can you get a job bar attending, just to get back on your feet, Sure, of course you can.
So when you start to do that, and then there's a separate page where you also write out the costs of inaction, which is a neglected step. When people are considering what they're doing, they look at the risks of doing something, but they don't look at the risks of not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a year three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial, or
relationship costs of not doing the thing you're considering? And when you then look at these things which represent your thoughts trapped on paper, A lot of people are able to do the scary thing. So I would say that that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept of many retirements, so engineering a way such that you can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected, which is very very very achievable.
It's four weeks in a row or a week every quarter, like three to four weeks in a row.
Wow, that's a lot.
Yeah, And what that forces you to do also is upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in your life or in your business or even in your job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And the value of all those things outlives the many retirement. So I'd say those are two that come back a lot.
It's interesting that you're approaching laying out the pros and cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture. I can textualize that a little differently. You and I have both interviewed Ray Dalio. Yeah, and raise great in innovation and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much fake it till you make it attitude never admit error. No, no, it'll be great. Don't why if it didn't work out this year or work out next year? And Ray very
much said, no, that's wrong. We're all going to make mistakes. It's really important to learn from those mistakes. And I want to say he's the first guy that really put that out at all.
I have not to mention the transparency of having almost all meetings recorded, accessible by anyone within his firm, I mean.
Which is kind of horrifying.
They did some pretty wild stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a fascinating character.
Absolutely, But it leads to the question, what you're talking about is really a way to prep yourself for a fear of failure? Is that fair to describe it?
And sure, yeah, or you know what, it's a fear of failure, But oftentimes it's this, it's the fact you can achieve. Well, it's going to be very very hard to achieve your goals if they're not very specific and clear. Even if you fail partially, that's fine. You can still do great things. I think the parallel is that if your fears are unclear, nebulous, it's just a feeling in your gut, but you don't trap the specifics on paper, they're very difficult to overcome. They will still be a
break in your life. It is just as important to address that as it is to address the goals to identify those sort of sticking points. And I would also say that I think of risk for people as often ill defined, and there are many ways in different context to define risk. But if we look at it as the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things have a ten out of ten value in that category.
And then if you look at for instance, if you look at the and I encourage peo able to do this in fear setting, it's like from zero to ten transient, recoverable or permanent, what is the potential upside of doing this scary thing that you're considering doing? And then if you stay doing what you're doing, like, what are the zero to ten permanent transient risks or potential outcomes of not doing the thing? When you then see, oh, if I do this thing, there could be all of these
potentially semi permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it and fail, the downsize are transient and like three out of ten, it makes the decision much much easier and the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then it's just execution, risk and implementation, And it's the decision that is the hardest part for most people.
It's amazing that everything you're saying is so applicable to public markets investing, because when people are in that panic mode, when they're fearful, oh my god, we're down fifteen percent, the world is going to come to an end, it's always no, this is transitory, this is temporary. How can you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid
those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it's really understanding, Hey, is this a ten or is this more likely a two, three, four on scale?
And I can actually, I'll give something else in the investing world if we're looking at when people neglect the other side of a coin. And this is not going to apply to like the super ultra pros, but a lot of people who participate in the public markets, they think about what to buy right, what's a good buy at this moment. They don't think about whole period. They
don't think about selling strategy. What will be the cues, what are the underlying sort of theses if invalidated that would mean they should sell blah blah blah blah blah. They don't have a structured way of thinking about selling. And similarly, it's like if you just think about your goal, but you don't have a structured way of thinking about fear and ap comprehension and so on, you're equally handicapped. So that would be an easy kind of copy paste comparison.
I would say, huh, really interesting. You come out of college with Asian language studies and then you write a book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then pivot to angel investing and or advising.
So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a sense because the Four Hour work Week. I was based in Silicon Valley for seventeen years, and I seeded The four Hour work Week at tech heavy events in part because it talks about information low information diet, and selective ignorance and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That's a component of the book, and that pain was most acutely felt by
people in tech at the time. So my early adopters, plus the people I had access to were techies in the very early state figuring out how I would launch this book and what that had as a side effect was developing relationships with various founders and there were a lot of fans among CEOs and co founders of startups.
Let me interrupt you just to remind people, the book comes out in seven yep. This is before half of the companies that we think of as part of our daily lives. Well before were you know, there was no public Alibama. I think that's before Facebook, certainly long before uber goes goes public and Shopify. A lot of these companies were you know, barely a gleam in the creator's eyes.
Yeah, they didn't. A lot of them either didn't exist or they were very very early stages. So I launched the book. My main launch strategy was south By Southwest, this festival in Austin, Texas in two thousand and seven, which was also the same south By Southwest where Twitter
basically went live in public in full promotional mode. And the other piece of the story of angel investing is that I mentioned in the previous segment my professor in school ed show his son in law at the time, Mike Maples Junior, was a very well known angel investor in Silicon Valley, had been an executive at various companies and we became friendly. He wanted to lose some weight.
I wanted to learn more about what he did, so we would have breakfast at this place called Hobi's and I would help him with his strategy for training and so on. At this point, also the for hour work we could come out of nowhere and hit the New York Time, hit the New York Times list, then went to number one and stayed on the New York Times list for four and a half years or five years or something.
That's insane. And so are you aware just of how lightning in a bottle that is?
Yeah, it's been as It's part of the reason I haven't wanted to go back and revise any of the writing. I'm like, I don't want to touch the butterfly and risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how that happened, Like what did I do? And there were things I did for marketing and PR and so on to help catalyze that. And in exchange, I'd say, tell me about your deals, what are you doing? I was
always interested in investing. Eventually, after a few months all of these factors combined, I asked Mike and he was very generous at this time if he might be open to me co investing with him on some deals, very small checks like I would put in ten K, so I wouldn't eat up much of the cap table. I would put in a lot of work to try to help these companies, And that is how the whole adventure started.
I wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person in terms of ratio on the cap table, so that those early founders would become my testimonials basically for future deals. That's how the whole thing started. And I decided to treat it like I would treat going to business school. I looked at Stanford at the time because I'd fantasized about going to Stanford Business School on like, Okay, it's one hundred and twenty k over two years. I would
have had to pay that out of pocket. So let me create the quote unquote Tim Ferriss fund for Angel Investing. It's one hundred and twenty k over two years, and I'm assuming that it's sunk cost tuition. It's going to go to zero and none of the startups are going to succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a lot end relationships that make it worthwhile, I will consider it a success. And that was the approach I took
to doing it. And the timing was also great because I started in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, two thousand and eight. For a few years afterwards, was effectively considered a dot com depression, right, But that's when I met Toby they shopify when they had nine employees or twelve employees, and became an advisor. That's when I started becoming involved with lots of companies of these very early stages which ended up just to become these behemoths.
I love your conce of this is a sun cost, it's going to zero. I think that's the absolute right approach with startups, and you hinted at something that I have to explore a little bit. Anytime I throw money at a small startup, it's essentially A this is going to go to zero, but B I really just want to invest in the jockey. I want to put money into this person, who Hey, this is easier than bearing a body like Those are the two things I would
do for this guy. Yeah, and a check. All right, I'll put a check into that and maybe it works out. I sense you have a similar belief in your betting on not on the horse, but the jockey. One hundred and twenty K is only twelve ten thousand dollars checks, yep, and I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities. What criteriay you used to figure out who gets that check? Well.
Also, just as a side note, the reason I started trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is that I ran out of money. I got over enthusiastic, and I broke my own rules, and I think the first check I wrote was for like forty K and immediately imploded, and I was like, oh, this is going to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of my best hits have been products that I would use personally,
that I could ideally be a power user of. And there have been a few exceptions, but by and large they are addressing problems that I feel acutely, or needs that I feel, or wants that I feel very acutely. So,
for instance, clear how did clear happen? Back in the day, it was called clear card, and it was it was not widely distributed, it was very little known, And I wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal, and my blog at the time became very popular and I wrote a huge piece on how to expedite travel and a portion of that was about Clearcard. I linked to their website and unbeknownst to me, I was one
of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And then at some point the leadership reached out to me and they said, hey, do you want to do something, And that's how that relationship started. And I think I was the first advisor to clear. I mean it was forever ago, so it must have been.
I wish they were in more airports. Just blown through JFK. Laguardi. It's a blast with them.
Yeah, yeah, they've done From an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also, not based in Silicon Valley, and I don't think that Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Cannabis. I mean, come on, that was neglected. So I also so there are a few things, was like, is it a problem or a need or a want that I feel and understand? Is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore, it makes it quite easy for me to promote to
my audience could they be users or customers? And then lastly, for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for geographies that were neglected. So I actually I went hunting in Canada a lot. And it works for comedy yeah, yeah, or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of the early experiences like stumble Upon. I became an advisor to stumble Upon. And who was the founder of stumble Upon, a guy named Garrett Camp stumble Upon. I put tons of time into he and I became close. We worked
really well together, We enjoyed working together. Stumble Upon ended up being a zero for me. But why is that? Okay? Because I talked about the relationships and the skills, right, okay, relationship with Garrett Camp? What does he end up doing next? Co founder of Uber?
Not too shabby.
And then I was one of three people who had helped him with stumble Upon who became advisors to Uber cab LLC at the time, which was I think two thousand and eight. Oh my god, by the way, everybody said note Uber everybody.
Yeah, that's amazing to me because one of the things I find fascinating about vcs is. They kind of put their failures on their websites as a badge of honor. Yeah, but it's mostly here are the companies we vested in that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by the way, we passed on Ober, we passed on this, we passed on that.
You see less of that, you see less of it. And for me, I would say, there's lots of luck. But I was also trying to approach it in a systematic way. If you're focused on effectively the way I would think about, let's say I cut a twenty five thousand dollars check. I'm like, okay, would I pay twenty five thousand dollars just to develop these relationships and basically earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing. If so, then great, go. If not, then think twice.
And taking that approach, all of the skills and the new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that was intimately connected with the people and the skills that came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again.
So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills. And then even quote unquote failures, you don't know what act TOO is going to be where it could go.
Yeah, and then lastly, I would say one thing I did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now but I had never heard of it is I treated a portion of my total budget for that real world MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferris fund quotation marks a portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean? I invested in I bought secondary so I bought equity from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now it ended up being very early, but to my mind at the time,
they were overpriced, super expensive, huh. But being in those deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity in those two companies allowed me to say I'm in these companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted in getting new deals. So I expected those to go to zero. That's marketing budget, right. They ended up working very unexpectedly, working out really well, but I expected those to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget.
I've heard you mentioned a book by Sebastian Malaby The.
Power lawyeh, great book.
Tell us a little bit about what you learned from that book about investing in startups.
That is a great book if you want to learn about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches I had already learned just by being in the trenches for whatever it was a decade before that book came out. I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money than God, which is this book about hedge funds. That is an exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, Oh my God, give that a read.
Plus he's British and his take on everything is it's fantastic. It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way.
Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that book and what people might miss about startups is, yes, it's a hits driven business. There's a power law distribution, meaning it's preto principle on steroids. You're probably gonna have one or two or three startups that give you the vast majority of your lifetime runnings, at least as an
angel investor who's not taking management fees. Right, if you're an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping billion dollar plus funds, like sure, you're going to do great on management.
PCs seem to do okay for themselves.
It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart in how you approach it. But as an angel investor, I would say, you need to have if you're going to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy or philosophy around folio constructions so that you don't run out of money. Right, It's like staking someone in poker. It's like you have to be able to sustain a
string of bad luck. And I would say that what Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs in the world of venture capital have done that over time. And there are a few things I would point out also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of people miss because why did it happen in Silicon Valley. It's like, sure, you can talk about like Fairchild Semiconductor, and I think it was the traitorous aid or whoever it was, and all of this, but why did that happen?
Like why why? Why? I'm always like ask why three times and you get to something interesting. Part of it is that non competes are incredibly hard, if not close to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean. It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely. So there's a lot of competition and a lot of knowledge sharing, sometimes to the sugar in of former employers. But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is still to this day. Right now it would be
the era of AI. If you want to be an AI, if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding, and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent, Silicon Valley is still the place to be. Yeah, it's not true for everything, but like it still matters.
No doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not in terms of monetary returns, in terms of and I'm delving into your space, in terms of time, energy, productivity efficiency. What do you find to be the most productive, useful investments that you've made.
There are quite a few, I would say anything related to mental health ranks very highly, and we could talk about some of the things that have benefited me. So I come from a family of people who have died from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder. I struggled with probably I would say three to four major depressive episodes a year for most of my life. And that's that, in each episode ranging on the length of a few weeks to a few months. I mean,
that is a lot of time in darkness. And now I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode of a few weeks every two to three years. Those are two completely different human experiences.
How did you manage to actually manage this? Because there are people who suffer from depression and that's the word, suffer, and never find a way to get on top of it.
I'll mention just a few things in the order I might suggest investigating them. One would be, let's call it metabolic psychiatry. So, looking at the word of Christopher Palmer, most recently out of Harvard, I've interviewed him on using diet to help mental health, and fundamentally it tends to end up being some version of a keutogenic diet. You can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting. So let's just say what I'm doing today and what I do a lot of the time, which is only
eating between like two pm and ten pm. That's an eight hour window, so you fast for sixteen hours every day, and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would say within a week. You're pretty grumpy for a week and then you're fine then the next So that was the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we
could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, but this can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable. TMS standing for transcranial magnetic stimulation, so it's a type of brain stimulation and they take something that looks like a large hockey puck and put it on your head. It's non invasive and it feels like someone's kind of
tapping your skull. And depending on if you're trying to address anxiety or depression or OCD, the target can be different and if people investigate accelerated TMS. In some studies with major depressive disorder, complete remission in seventy to eighty percent of participants. Wow, and you might need a booster once a year, But compared to taking maintenance drugs every day with non trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is fascinating.
I encouraged to be able to check it out. There are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because.
It's like doing of psilocybin or what have.
You, microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature. And I've funded a lot of this science since twenty fifteen with my foundation. I put like double digits of my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once, it could be a few times. Various compounds could be, say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder, or
different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. NY us doing a lot of great work on that front, or MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean the results are very strong, mind blowing. Yeah. I mean, you have complex PTST people who've had let's just say, an average length of diagnosis of sixteen seventeen years, which means many many interventions have failed, who do two or three sessions with therapists for mdmac's psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission
of symptoms. That's amazing and it is I believe. There's a psychotherapist named Stanis Lefgroff, quite legendary in the space, who says, you know, what the telescope was or is for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology, psychedelics will
be for the mind. Really, and I believe that these compounds and the study of these compounds, which has become very very very popular and destigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some of these so called incurable or intractable conditions, including things like anarexia and many of the things I already mentioned. Those would be three that I'd say have had a huge impact on me. And it seems boring We could
talk about it if you want. But exercise, I mean.
I was waiting for you to bring that up because every study in the world says that's the miracle cure for so much psychological challenges. And it's not like you haven't written about exercise.
Yeah, it did a whole book on it. So yeah, the exercise. I'll just mention two other things briefly, cold exposure and by the way, people have been using this for hundreds of years.
But certainly in the Nordish countries. Oh yeah, ye forever.
Yeah, cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy aka depression, and there is actually something to it. It could end up being after a few minutes when you shift from solely sympathetic nervous system activation fight or flight to parasympathetic. Could be actually stimulation of the vegas nerve. Who knows. It's unclear at this point, but cold exposure matters like that. That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems
to have some durability, which is wild exercise. People think of exercise and what you read about in the media a lot is like endorphins and doorphins and doorphins, but that is not the full picture. If you want to stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera. Or let me just broadly say neurodegenerative disease, exercise provokes the release of something called CLOTHO k l O t h O, which people can investigate and it is critical in staving off or
or mitigating the onset and progression of these diseases. So you have clotho endorphins. Surey of endorphins. You have endocannabinoids. Cannabinoids sounds familiar like cannabis, right, So those can explain a lot both in terms of anti inflammatory effects of some types of exercise. The benefits are just insane. So I would say follow Peter Attia's advice. He is credible trained at Stanford Johns Hopkins. In terms of Zone two training.
People can just look him up. Zone two training a few times a week and then Vio two max training say once a week, and some weight training. But the if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all, and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things like brain drive neurotrophic factor, that is also just a non negotiable.
So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
And I have both of my family.
Yeah, so that's where I was going to the exact question was going to ask, you were never diagnosed, you just have a genetic predisposition, and you're trying to proactively just get way out ahead.
I'm trying to get ahead of it. Yeah, and unfortunately, you know, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, as just to use that disease as an example, a lot of
the interventions fail. I think some scientists would agree with this, not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because the interventions are too late by the time people have really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms, it might just be too late, But there is an argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that late intervention is better than early intervention.
So I just saw a piece in National Geograph yesterday that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to detect Alzheimer's risk sooner, as earlier as your twenties. So there is some sort of research going on in the space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive and individualized to take care of your preventative maintenance in advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands.
Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like I just didn't I'm about to turn forty eight, just did my I do blood testing at least once a quarter, and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah.
I just want to function health. Yeah, are you familiar with function health?
I don't know. I function.
So Silicon Valley startup they have come up with the way it's not a healthcare company, it's a technology company, and they say, we want to take one hundred data point screens of your blood and look at all these different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice a year. Your doctor looks at fifteen twenty things. Normally
they'll go one hundred plus. And by the way, depending on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. And so now you could check one hundred and fifty data points and twice a year especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark, and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word, horizontal set of data, and when something sort of spikes or is out of the normal range, you have a
baseline that you could go back and work. I literally did this Tuesday, and I was like, oh, that's a lot of blood, Like, can you leave me a little? I got stuff to do later, but that in order to do one hundred different data series, they need a lot of different blood.
Yeah, they need some blood. And I would say I don't spend much money on stuff, but I do I deliberately. Some might say overspend on health. But what I was going to say is the metabolic psychiatry the less so accelerated TMS. But actually I should pull that back. TMS also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's and psychedelic
sisted therapies. The exercise, all of these and the cloth that I mentioned specifically within exercise, all of those should in theory help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be hyper personalized, like these things have clinical data or published literature behind them. There's still a lot of unknowns, but you can do these things now.
So it's so funny you say hyper personalize them. I'm speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week, I'm seeing Tim Ferris, And he says, oh, I love Tim he is. I love this line. He is the chief scientist of Tim Ferris the person. And I'm like, that is such a great way.
To describe it.
You've basically created an entire business model around being the chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original game plan or did this just evolve over time.
I've almost always been that way, in part because I was born premature at a ton of health issues. Still have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sunny sitas, all these things.
That wait thermal regulation.
Being can't handle hot well. The way that my body handles hot and cold is strange, so I can overheat very easily. As an example, the reason that's relevant is the one sport that my mom put me in that thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at when I was a little runt. I was very small till about six grade. It wasn't swimming, it was wrestling because the puny kid gets to go against the other
puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant I needed to try to win quickly before I would hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts of bizarre self experimentation, interesting learning how to weight cut to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The reason that I wanted to make Tim Ferriss lab this end of one set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That's how it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you might be able to apply this stuff to the brain.
And then in college I started experimenting with all sorts of stuff, nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that was I was using kind of off label like hydergen, various note tropics and so on. And they did have an effect, like they did have an effect on memory and cognition, things like desma pressing for short term memory, for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked. There's no biological free lunch with that.
Stuff so well, I know free lunch.
So you do you do pay a price. I would just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking and so on. And I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. But number one, since you mentioned it earlier, is I get blood tests done once a quarter at the very least. Now why is that? Well, I want more frame as high a frame rate as possible to look at trends. But separately, I want to
catch things early if I need to catch things. But I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests, the risk is that you get one set of lab results back and you make a ton of big decisions based on those labs. Here's what I'll say. There are lab errors all the time, and if you're going to do consistent blood tests, consistent is the key. In other words, do it on the same day of the week at the same time.
Oh really, I would not have guessed that.
Because your testosterone has diurnal it has.
So the quest diagnostics as an example, don't eat, don't take supplements, don't take any meds whatever is on your your prescription list. Stop the night before unless your doctor says don't stop.
Follow your doctor. But I'm saying if you're.
Saying is more important than just how significant.
Just be consistent because if you let's just say you drink on the weekends and then you do your lap test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning, some of your results might be different. I mean, but no, that's it's not obvious to people because then they might have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like altier ASD all of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year, he has no idea of the context.
That's fair.
Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously and there are lab errors. So I would say before.
Plus you also just get the regular noise and range and yeah, sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal. But it's all nothing is flatlined over time.
Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like, really, if you're about to get on a bunch of meds and let's it's an emergency. Look, there are emergencies that you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay, you have this problem, We're going to put you on this med for the next year. Before you do that, do the test again. Just get another blood test two days later. Second opinion, just confirm it and again not
a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only. Blah blah blah.
But there you go, dumb question. All the stuff you've done game creation is not on your CV. Why did you decide to.
Create a game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitor. So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons.
Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends, many of whom were neuro divergent, and D and D.
Was a lifeline, absolutely lifeline. So I may be pretty squarely in the neurodivergent camp.
Do you still play?
I don't, But here's why.
I know plenty of guys forty fifty Yeah, weekly game. Forget poker.
It's it's it's too much of a commitment for me now. Initially, so, I've always wanted to make a game that could help produce the magic and joy and frankly I mean sort of the like cognitive training of D and D. I think D and D is just an incredible game. Kudos to you know, TSR and Gary Gayax and everybody's who's created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to be serious about D and D, it's like being serious about World of Warcraft, like this is your new part
time job. I mean it's many, many, many hours. So as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot going on, maybe I have a dinner with friends and we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going to play D and D. There's no way we're going to play a complex board game. I was curious to see, though, if I could create something, and a lot of the podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with,
but that's unspoken. So I interviewed Alan Lee, who's the founder of Exploding Kittens, one of the most successful game development companies in the world, and I wanted to see if maybe, kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I could create a game with him that would be easy to learn, hard to master, very very fun for family's friends whoever kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this is yet to be proven, so just to be clear, I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but
that could also possibly be a type of brain training and cognitive training.
So you set the bar really low, right, just easy to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun, oh with all sorts of cognitive benefites. Yeah, you know, low target with your first game.
Well that's why it took two years to land on something.
Really Oh yeah, that's a long time to build what's effectively as simple. I have a copy of this at home, and you guys also sent me a copy here, so I want to open this up and go over it with but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly what this game is about. Yeah.
So the game Coyote. It's called Coyote because of the trickster deity association and a lot of mythologies. Also uniquely American coyote or North American, I should say, it's very much a sort of New America's animal. But the trister piece is important. So Coyote is a game. You can think of it as rock paper scissors in a group on steroids, with many different hilarious movements and gestures, and basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins.
Or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are reasons that we had both options, but the basic gist is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in a circle and each players dealing out cards that make a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious, and you each get three lives, and last person standing in competitive mode wins. That's it. So you can play. I have friends who've played with their like six year old daughters. Even though the box says ten years old.
It's very challenging. When it gets challenging, I guess it's ten minutes a game roughly, probably so pretty low lift. But if you want to get good at it, you can play it over and over and over and over again. Every game is going to be totally different.
One of the things I was kind of fascinated by watching the game play was it's a combination of words and gestures that you have to recall and do in order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the same time that you're creating. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came up with this and what was it like collaborating with Exploding Kittens.
We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one, and we were kind of stuck because the question that I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question I was asking myself is what types of board games or card games do I enjoy? And that didn't get I mean, your answers are only going to be as
good as your questions, and that wasn't working. We had done various brainstorming sprints in like La, New York, Long Island, and then flew to Canada to spend time with the co founder of Exploiting Kittens, and we did our last sprint. I was like, Okay, look, we've been at this for a while. We're either going to land on something or let's call it quits and just call a space a space.
So a little pressure on it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean deadlines, you know the magic of deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type have you enjoyed? And it might make me sound like a simpleton, but having drinks and playing rock paper scissors with your dumb friends is I think very entertaining. Side note, especially if you try to do it with water in your mouth. Try that with a friend.
But what does water in your mouth affect.
When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves, So it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had a few drinks. Not recommending everybody drink. So we started with that as this building block. It's like, Okay, well, how can we make that group play? And then I was interested in the cognitive stuff as I mentioned, and this look. I haven't proven this, but I think it's
it's quite similar. You're looking at like interference effects. There are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test blah blah blah, and Exploding Kittens. They have an amazing track record. The whole company started with this game, Exploding Kittens, which was I think the largest kickstarter of all time.
Wow.
At that point in time, the leaders of the company are still game designers, so it's not a huge bureaucratic thing run by no offense to middle managers. They're important, but it's like people who are managers versus makers. Like the people who run the company are still some of the best in the world at creating games right. Elon Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He's been involved with creating entirely new genres of games, just a genius at
creating games. So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome. They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small, like they really punch above their weight.
Clouds still a startup.
Nimbles feels like a startup. Like what they do with the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's been awesome.
I get a sense that, because you're such a thoughtful person, anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort of floats above your body and says, what's going on in this space? Yeah, I've had that experience in publishing. Yeah, Like, wait, I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave this way? So I have to ask you that question
about the game industry. When you're looking at gaming generally, what was your experience like going into not only an entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past, but like, did you kind of look at the game industry and say, Hey, this whole place is just wacky and so different from everything else.
All of the above. And I treated doing something like the game as I treat the startups. So it's if I make no money on this, will the relationships developed and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for? Right, would I actually tuition? Exactly? Would I pay tuition for what I'm going to learn? And the answer is c es right, a lot of late genius. The people Explainking is amazing. By the way, you want to scrappy creative team. If you're going to deal with things like tariffs.
By the way, do tariffs I mean I'm sure assuming these are manufactured somewhere out of the United States. Yeah, do you have to pay tariffs on?
Oh? Every every gaming company in the US. Pretty much tabletop game is getting really so you want people who are creative and can think outside the box for something like that. From the implications of something like that to contending with mass mass retail like Walmart and Target, for instance.
Yeah, you're you're You're at Walmart, You're at Target, You're on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space quote unquote from how did that happen?
Next to impossible?
And yet you hit. That's the whole you hit for the for the cycle, Walmart, Target, Amazon? Where else is what's left?
I'm gonna do it? Mind? You know, mind? This is my maybe one and only game and if my name is going to be on it, I need to be very happy with it.
And so how did you guys manage to penetrate that?
Well, I'll say first that what's not going to work is if you are a sole inventor who comes up with the world's greatest game, a company like a Walmarter target is not equipped rightly so to deal with thousands of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins, don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms
and returns and all these things. So if you want to have a seat at the table, or even a chance to have a seat at the table, you need to I think this is fair to say, partner with someone who already has shelf space and multiple skws so you can be added to the lineup. And that was another reason to partner with someone like and exploiting Kittens. And yes, you can do a lot online and the
game is on Amazon. It's been exclusive at Walmart for the first few months, and then the social video plays like you mentioned, went completely nuts, and it's actually now past three hundred million, so it just keeps going and going and going. The videos of people playing this game. But you can do a lot that is, say a direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website
or Kickstarter. But it's very easy for techies to underestimate just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and targets of the world are.
Sure.
I mean, ninety percent of the US is within ten miles of one of those or fifteen minutes. It's I mean, even the food security of the United States depends on these companies.
And you price this at nine ninety nine less than ten bucks. Very reasonable. I'm going to assume at if this game is as successful as you hope it will be, and early indications are that it can be, you can come up with a second pack a different focus.
So expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a more complicated role playing game, something like that. Who knows, But in my case, right with something like this, I'm used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters, and no, no, you're jumping in this each jumping. I mean, even with say the four hour workweek, It's like, had
I land on that title? I split tested all of the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords, and then looked at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from the rest, and that was the four hour work weeks. So like, that's how I don't like taking risks. I actually think of myself as a risk mitigator.
But in this case, I'm fascinated by that because you very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't want to play pop psychologists, but but you are not somebody. It's like, all right, I'm starting out as a studying biology. No, no, I'm pivoting to Asian studies. I'm living in Japan. I'm stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh now
I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the life experience of someone who's risk averse.
Well, I would, on one hand, agree with you. On the other hand, I would say I think that most risks are incredibly overblown. I would put I would put risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse, but if you're too using what you do based on what you're going to learn, the skills you're going to develop, the relationships you're going to develop, or deepen. It's very
hard to fail over time. So if you're able to be and this applies to investing obviously, but like long term greedy, not short term greedy, it's very hard to lose over time if you're choosing let me be very clear, ideally areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm
always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote. Okay, let's say, let's just say hypothetically that I don't think this is going to happen, because I think the tariffs are just a bargaining chip for mineral access right and other things that'll be traded with.
That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you. Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tack.
Yeah, I mean, otherwise we're also like cutting off our nose to spite our face, and I'm just so interdependent, so it's it's a bargaining. I don't expect that to continue. But let's just say that tariffs put every game company in the US out of business except for one or two. Then will this still have been worth my time, absolutely, because I have no I'm not getting in advance for this. I'm doing a profit share. I want incentives to be fully fully aligned.
I did the same thing with my book. I don't want to advance. I want to see whatever upside there is. By the way, I really have to push back.
This is just me.
Maybe this's a little question. I maybe there's a little projection. You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I love the way you've rationalized or it's not an excuse, it's an explanations.
Were reframing it.
Yeah, you've framed this into well, I'm going to take this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and relationships. So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen. You are very much a risk embracer.
Yeah. And also, if you look at my projects, it's it's not a sequence of start finished, start finished, start finished. It's more like a gant chart where things are overlapping. So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I put a ton I've been involved with every single possible aspect of this game. We play tested it with one hundred plus families, blah blah blah. But podcast is still going,
the books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments, and therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs in one basket.
So two last questions on the game before we'll get to our speed round.
Ye.
First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Was this a purposeful decision to avoid screens, to not create more screen time?
Yeah, one hundred percent. I would say if I look at the mental health of my audience, let's just call it twenty million people a month or something over the last ten years, the degree of depression, anxiety, nihilism is shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically antithetical to those things. Right, maybe not depression, but very optimistic.
Yeah, there's a little self selection there. Hey, I have this issue. Tim seems to figure this out. Yeah, let me work my way there.
There's a little bit of that. But if you look at let's just say, the writing of you know, Derek Thompson made it amazing writer at the Atlantic who does a lot more.
No longer at the Atlantic, now he has his own substack.
Yeah right, that's right. He went full in on Substack and actually this piece I think is from Substack, but it was effectively, I think it's simply Americans need to have more fun, but it's.
A decline of partying in America.
That's right. Yeah, that effectively, I think it's something atrocious like one in twenty five families or people have social plans in person for any given weekend, and it's down for is that right? That's amazing, And it's down for certain age brackets seventy percent in the last time ten years. And I really feel like digital isn't inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison. Yes, And I think that if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote.
I really feel like people need to interact with other humans. We're not evolved for pure screen time, we are not.
One hundred percent. So last question on the game, what are your expectations for this? How do you define success? And I'm going to prevent you from saying I've already succeeded due to my collaboration all the experience. Hold that aside. What's your minimum expectations and what would surprise.
You to the upside? Minimum expectation is that this finds a small band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody should read one thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly just got a kk dot org it's free read that. That would be super gratifying. But also I always is aim high. So I mean, I want this to be the best selling game at all of the major retailers. That's incredibly hard to.
Do a BYuT that's that's millions of units.
Yeah, I mean you're dealing with tens of the Unos and the behemoths of the space right, so to do that is incredibly hard. That's what I'm aiming for. I think that the products, you know, the game can stand on its own two feet, like people do love this game. And the reason I like to do that is not because I want to set myself up for disappointment, but as I think it's Larry Page of Google has said
what people misses, it's very hard to fail completely. If I aim for that and I'm fifty percent short, I'm still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential payoff of that huge a goal. It's still gonna exceed oh my expectations that I would have had.
Agre and just moving into a different space is its own rewards because it's so you know, it really exercises different parts of the brain than you normally get to play with.
It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which is why after the success of the Four Hour work Week bought me permission to write more books. I didn't do the three hour work Week. I didn't do the four hour work Week, Force, you know, the Single Mother's Soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author.
That's why I did the four Hour Body and everything on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a different category in the bookstore to see if my readers would follow me. And as soon as I proved to myself that was the case and to publishers, you know, when I hit number one year times and blah blah blah, then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so this is another way of testing that, you know, could I play in a completely different sandbox.
So before we get to our five favorite questions, I've pulled a few of your questions that either you asked on your pod or other people have asked you, and let's do this as a speed round in still right, tell us about one hundred or less purchase that has positively impact your life.
Be specific, Yeah, I will be specific. Now I'm going to put in one shameless plug, which is if people want to figure out this game, just go to Coyote
game dot com. Okay, back to our regular programming. Two things I would say that have impacted me in the last year would be there's something called the Alpha Ball, which is from Tune Up Fitness, and this is something you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back, for dealing with your IT bands, anything, and it's much better than a phone roller because you can really get into specific spots. It's very easy to use. You can use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor,
and it's small enough to travel with. So I'd say the Alpha Ball is one. Have that my luggage right now because I'm traveling. And then the other one is actually a meditation app called The Way and it's taught by someone named Henry Shukman, and it's more or less a zen type of meditation. Full disclosure. I ended up becoming an advisor to these guys because I ended up loving the app so much. But I use that once or twice a day, ten minutes each session, and it's teaching you sort.
Of a guided meditation.
Is that Right's they're guided meditations, but it's a sequence of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply outside of meditation, which is why like it so much. Let's say those are two that immediately come to mind.
So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas, learning new skills, and learning them quickly. What's your favorite cheek code for That.
Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the first place. So what I mean by that is, if you want to get the best golf coach in the world, you might not be able to afford it. You probably can't afford it. It's going to be it's a very common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved. It's going to be hard to get direct instruction from
somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose say almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and you look for, say not gold medalists, but silver medalists who are, by the way, frequently just as good. They say they yea, they just exactly, They just got ten minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You can get some of the people who are best in the world to teach you at a cost that is
next to nothing. So I would say that number one is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked about with the four hour workweek with business and entrepreneurship, like picking the goal first. The second is looking at frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot of people just dive into learning languages. Well, I think
that material beats method. In other words, like picking what you're going to learn very carefully is more important, at least in sequence than choosing how you're going to do it. A lot of people ask like, what's the best way to learn X? And I'm like, first of all, you should ask what should I learn? And you can look at word frequency lists and things like that, and for a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the one thousand or fifteen hundred most frequently used words. You can learn
that in a few weeks. Lingo Duel Lingo is outstanding. I mean, of course I'm biased because I invested in their first round we just.
Were in Paris three years ago, and Slim two years ago, Rome last year, and dual Lingo just for those basic phrases is amazing.
Yeah, it's great. I mean I've used it for Korean as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school. And that's a tough language, right, it's tough. The grammar's almost identical Japanese. I have a leg up there. But by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I think it's like learning how to read Korean fifteen minutes. There's a comic book that literally will teach you how to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading,
but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean. And like it's a bit of an exaggeration, I'd say probably takes an hour. But do u a Lingo is very well designed, and I have seen every possible language startup. My fans sent me that one. By the way, my fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they knew I was interested in e commerce. So a lot of my best deals have come from my my readers
and my listeners. But the duelingo came about because they were enclosed beta, and a number of my fans reached out and said, you have to try this really, and so I got access and I looked at it and I was like, oh, yeah, this is fundamentally different from everything else I've seen.
Give us an example of an unusual habit or just absurd thing that you love.
I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD go ahead, So I take a screenshot whenever I see five point fifty five on my phone, So I have hundreds of screenshots of typically five point fifty five PM. I just love repeating those specific repeating numbers. A lot of folks like eleven eleven, nothing against eleven eleven. I think that's that's perfectly fine. I'm just more of a five to five to five guy.
Those eleven eleven people, so they don't know what's up. It's all about. Have you seen the old style analog almost neon tubes that are clocks?
Yes, Like what happens.
When that rolls over to eleven eleven? Do you see something like that and just shrug and like, I.
Still find it pleasant. I like symmetry, So eleven eleven has the advantage over five five five that it is pleasingly symmetrical, like this old friend I used to have, Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome.
It's right. I was gonna say five to five is a palind drome, but it's not truly symmetrical visual, so
there is We were talking there divergent earlier. One of the things I kind of was shocked to learn in the ADHD world is why people will play a song over and over and over again because it tickles a part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional expressions that tend to be more difficult or absence, and it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that you haven't been able to get in the real world.
It sounds like the five five to five and the eleven eleven tickles a similar part of the brain.
Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is. I mean is why I mentioned archery, like I love archery, and for most people archery, yeah, I love archery and
also language learnning. For most for a lot of there's a lot of repetition involved and for many people, and I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more boring than going through conjugations or doing archery, which, by the way, if you're doing it at a high level, you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing over and over a year.
Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill. I mean the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people on five people, and so just extrapolate that out exponentially. There are a million variations. The same with chess, whatever, But it really doesn't matter each particular play move step is. You're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need. Even something like darts, but there are so many variations to your muscula shore, your your thought process. Is any
sport boring Hitting a tennis ballah? I mean, it's the same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion variations of what can happen.
That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing in one place shooting at the same thing thousands of times.
Right any sharp shooting darts.
Repetitive right now? I like the other sports too, like tennis. I would say that also confusingly, if people are interested in the accelerated learning stuff My third book, The Four Hour Chef, is basically a book unaccelerated learning disguised as a cookbook, so it gets into like how to learn, how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff. You can get a lot further. For instance, I think number one, adults can learn languages faster than children. Actually really with it.
If that is very inn opposite to accepted wisdom.
Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly than kids with a few constraints applied, just a couple of systems. I mean, I really think for a native English speakers, for say a Romance language or something that isn't too far flung like Chinese is going to be different. But eight weeks you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like pretty functional, if you were to carve out not three
hours a week. That's where kids have the advantage is that they're forced to do it all the time and they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have no job. But if you were to put in say ten hours a week and take it really seriously eight to twelve weeks, you could be.
Very functional, very fluent.
Yeah, Like you could get around and have like a conversation for ten to fifteen minutes with someone.
Wow. Let's jump to our favorite five questions we ask all of our guests, starting really simple, what are you streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime or podcast. What's keeping you entertained? Well?
I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight which absolutely blew my mind.
Just the Lost in Starlight.
Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation made my head spin. Because you don't, well, I think most people do not associate South Korea with animation.
You might think of it most of our low cost animation is coming from all the past. Well that's not CGI.
There's there's a lot of lower cost animation, yes, but when you think of say, Cinematic Animation and Studio Ghibli out of Japan, let's just say people tend to think of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and I think Korea is going to be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation. We'll see, we shall say we Lost in Starlight is a recent phave, and then I've got some weird ones, like there's a German language documentary on fasting that I
found on YouTube. You can't watch it in the US, but you can use a VPN to.
Pretend to say you could watch anything anyway.
Yeah, you can use a VPN to pretend like you're in Germany. Then you can watch it and just use the automatic subtops. What's the name of that one, some long German name. I'm just getting started with it, so unfortunately I can't remember, but it's it's looking at specifically someone who did I want to say, a two to three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute who has
fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I have some bones to pick with their approach, but I nonetheless find that they have such a huge data set really fascinating.
So I'm looking at that one. And then podcasts. I found a new podcast recently called stem Talk, which features interviews with scientists mostly and I've listened to an interview with someone named Kevin Tracy tracee Y, who is a very widely cited scientist who's arguably the most credible researcher who has established a lot related to the vegas nerve and vegas nerve stimulation. There's a lot of bs and pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal
amongst the noise. So I'm listening to a bunch of stem talk, different scientists on stem talk, and the interviewers are outstanding.
It's interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic, but just ramping up since then. I want to say, it's become fifty sixty percent of my television viewing. It's amazing how.
It's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find anywhere else. So I think there's a documentary. The name is something like Learning how to See or the Art of Seeing, and it's about David Hockney. Oh okay, and big spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it on YouTube, and I was not able to find it anywhere else.
Huh. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell us about who your mentors were and how they helped shape your career.
Early mentors Stephen Gorik. He was a martial arts instructor when I was probably twelve thirteen. Just from the perspective of physical and mental toughness. Because the class was all adults and then it was me. They did not take it easily on me, and I was very grateful for that.
They weren't abusive, but they treated me like an adult who was training for for real, and I think from a toughness perspective, he always reiterated that I could do more than I thought I could do, much like my wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to do amazing things and they all reference back to him. Then Ed Shall who was that professor in high tech
entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly or pretty directly, although they wouldn't have expected it, informed later what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing non fiction writer who staff writer for the New Yorker. He's got least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country, I think, And he taught a class at Princeton's seminar called the Literature Effect, which was on nonfiction writing and I.
To literature of fact name.
Yeah, and that class in terms of thinking about structure, how to structure writ which by the way helps you structure your thinking. So all of my grades and my other classes went up when I took that class. It was no kidd wild to see. And I'm sure there are many more. I mean right after graduation, Mike Mables Junior, in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing.
That's a good starter list.
For Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I'm very lucky.
Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic, which is by Marcus Seneca. In this case, meditations by Marcus are released as well, so Letters from a Stoic by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world. I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very, very very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too, although that might sound odd applied to Stoicism, So Letters from a Stoic I would say. Vagabonding a book by
Ralph Potts. I think the subtitle is the Uncommon Art of Long Term World Travel, which is really it's a book on long term travel, but it's a book on it's a philosophical treatise too. That's a great fun read. Those are those are two phaves that come to mind. One More Awareness by Anthony Demello. I believe the subtitle is the Promises and Perils of Reality. It's just about becoming more aware, so taking yourself out of the automatic loops that we all have and adopt from parents and
so on. Really good book. It's like one hundred and twenty pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve, which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned and about it's all about the Vegas nerve research related to vegas nerve stimulation, etc.
What's the book that you've given most as a gift and why the.
Books I've given most is a gift includes some of the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house, I have shelves. Each shelf just has fifteen copies of these books and.
Take one with you.
Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would say that's idea. It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing for someone like me, so the same yeah, yeah, it's very, very very esthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony de Mello. For sure, I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book Letters from a Stoic, hundreds of copies of that book back in the day. Now there are a million copies,
or I shouldn't say a million copies. Now there are a million different books on the subjective psychedelics and psychedelic history, psychedelic science. But How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollin. For a while, I had that in my room because I got early galleys of that book and have since ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with with Michael, who's amazing. But uh. Other Wise, I also gift my friends who are nonfiction purists, who are too busy to meditate,
too busy to read fiction. I tend to give them books of poetry because I'm like, you need to slow down, and if you feel like you can't meditate for ten minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour a day. That type of that type of logic leads me to give them a very short collection of For instance, there's a new translation of roomy Poetry, relatively new, called Gold by Halle Eliza Gavori is her name. Who's incredible. She's based in New York City and native speaker. Also,
who's able to go to the source material? So Gold, which is a new compilation of short, roomy poetry that is well translated. Unlike a lot of versions you might find. It's like one hundred pages. And I'd just say to my friend, I'm like, look, don't read this a dizy. Just read one before you go to bed every night. And those are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years.
That sounds really interesting. Our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in fill in the blank writing, podcasting, seed investing, game design. What would you tell them?
If it's nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one, are you really sure you want to do that? It's not don't assume it's a good way to make money, because generally it's not. But I would say, also if it's a recent grad out, so if you're gonna write nonfiction, probably go do something interesting before you try to write something interesting. That would be my advice. That's what very fair, That's what John McFee does. That's what many folks have done.
It is like I get some life experience doing something first and then write about it. Would probably be my recommend in the realm of investing finance, I would say that probably ensure you have an informational, behavioral or network meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do, unless you're going to do something like low cost index funds, which I think actually are a great idea for a lot of people, and I myself also invest in very very low cost index funds.
That's your core you could build, you know, that's your tree. You could throw some ornaments around it.
Yeah, exactly. I want to like keep your risk capital and your retirement capital separate.
What do you know about the world today that would have been useful to know twenty five years or so ago when you graduated.
Yeah, threw out a few. So the first would be from an investing perspective, you don't need to compete in the public markets. You can learn a ton through being around startups or even very on sexy private sector stuff, and you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So you don't have to compete against the citadels in the world, Like I don't want to do that, or the rentex or whatever like like that's bringing a knife to a gunfight. I don't want to deal with that.
So I would say, also look for white space that you're you can create your own area where you're a pioneer, not going into well trod space. Yeah.
I would also say invest in what you know. And that sounds so trite, but the first the first stock I ever bought was when I was in my teens, and it was I think it was in my teens. It might have been a little bit later, but it was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I was like, Oh, this is so fundamentally different, Like this is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew.
So I would say that sort of investing from the perspective of watching main behavior on mainstream more than Wall Street is actually can be a really viable approach in
the world at large. I would say for me personally, thirty years ago, I would have said, like, your current experience of mental health and the buggy code that you inherited from your parents, God bless them, but like you know, there are some bugs in the code, is not a sort of psychological death sentence, like you can actually change those things, because you can, you really can impact those things,
and your living proof. I am living proof, and I would say that, you know, science, science is such an amazing tool, like the framework of science so necessary for not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially psychiatg I don't want to throw psychiatry into the bus, but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who's worth their salt will say something along the lines of like, fifty percent of way we know is wrong, we just
don't know which fifty percent. And when I was growing up, I mean, there were so many definitive statements about like all right, you're born with this number of neurons and when they die, they die, and that's it. You can ever regenerate. These types of things totally false. And I feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional health will be overturned in the next five years. It's going to happen fast.
Thank you, Tim for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Tim Ferris, author, podcaster, angel investor. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out any of the previous five hundred and sixty we've done over the past eleven years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check out my new book How Not to Invest The Bad Ideas, numbers and behaviors that Destroy well How Not to Invest
at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Cracked team that helps us put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. Jean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.