Jocko Podcast 50 w/ Tim Ferriss: Darkness & How to Stay on the Path

2016-11-23T23:05:16Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @tferriss @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening 0:03:57 - Tim Ferriss Introduction 0:09:50 - Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide" from Tim Ferriss's new book, "Tools of Titans" 1:15:08 - Tims additional thoughts on getting out of the Darkness 1:16:41 - How to Stay on the Path and not get distracted. 1:30:31 - Always searching instead of enjoying what you have. 1:36:51 - Is there a Job that would NEVER be outsourced? 1:40:22 - What would Tim do if he were to die in 18 months? 1:44:21 - Helpful Relaxation Activities 1:50:54 - Work that is relaxing and therapeutic . 1:56:48 - Back Up Plans? 2:02:26 - Biggest misconceptions about Tim Ferriss 2:06:23 - Falling short in leadership. 2:19:34 - Entrepreneurship, the "cool" thing. Tims peeves. Posers, fakers, and being an entitles rookie. 2:32:11 - Cool Internet, Onnit, Amazon and Jocko Store stuff 2:36:57 - Extreme Ownership Muster 2 2:37:50 - Closing

AI summary of episode

Hey, do you ever get, like, you know, like entrepreneurship as like this, the trendy thing to do, do you ever get annoyed when you see like, potent poses, you know what, you know how they subscribe to all the things. But to take that, that notion to the extreme, if you got, diagnosed with a horrible disease, and I try to think of a better way to ask you this question, which isn't like, majorly depressing, because this is, but if you got, you're going to have to diagnose with a disease that was going to kill you in a year or 18 months, what would you do with those months? Maybe it was about money, you got enough money now, or something, something along those lines, and kind of at the same time, you know, he says, he says something like, you know, just imagine being able to spend all this time with your family. How are you going to get, how you're going to get stronger, how you're going to get faster, how you're going to get smarter, how you're going to get better. But if we're, if we're defining leader as someone who can put forth a vision or an objective or catalyze a movement and move attention in people in one direction, I feel like I'm quite good at mitigating the risk of that, because for instance, people think that the haters, this is a very popular word on the internet, and not all critics are haters, of course. You know, the working, 20 hours a week, like that's kind of be coming to like, you know, a Gary Vee, how you grind it. When I write a book like this, which is just a monster, and like you said, kind of a choose your own adventure book, but two crappy pages a day. The second reason I put that in is to remind myself, if you feel like external, if you feel like external circumstances or external actors, meaning people, or stack in the deck against you, or trying to bury you, or try to defeat you in some fashion, you are the seed. When I figure out, for instance, with archery blank bail practice, and I'm like, oh my god, it's just like dry firing with a pistol to fix your like casting or healing. Most people would think that I'm just like speed reading poetry and watching every movie on like 28x forward with subtitles. You know, I like, you know, like a rock star anymore. If it, you know, if the business doesn't work and you end up, you know, you're going to come back in and about what are you going to do? He's a very close friend and he said, and this is his words, no mind, but he feels like I am one of the best people on the planet at getting people from zero to 80% of a skill as quickly as possible. Like, yeah, when we talk about this book, it's going to be going by. You know how it feels like, anyway, that it's kind of become like a trendy thing to be an entrepreneur. What, what I've realized I accidentally did then, and now I always do, is much like, and I think you think don't care another way that maybe you could phrase it is not being preoccupied by it, right? I just do that, because I always see people in the world that treat those other people like they're not people. And some people at the publisher were like, it's way too unrealistic two hours a week and I was like, four. All this information kind of distilled down into nice little digestible pieces like a reference book that you can look at, which actually, Now we're going in the question zone. Yeah, Shay and I had spent a couple of days together in toss, and which just for those people who don't have any context, he's also raised church of laudity, saying, you know, more men, you talk, and so I was like, cocaine in horse, which is the nature of my podcast. So that, that I think is my homework that, and deficit that I've been working hard to correct for the last few years is getting better at managing people who do not necessarily come to that mindset at all times, which I think can be a big problem when it's at a control. I don't think that most people are going to pick up the book and say, oh, I'll cover the suicide section. I mean, I, I don't, I'm not going to go into it now because I talked about my podcast all the time that that stuff is ineffective and you, you actually have to lead people and you. Now, the thesis, I'm going a little bit out of order here, but the thesis was important because I had a meeting with my thesis advisor, who had his own research agenda, and as is very common in academics, professors will utilize the help of students at times to integrate things or research things for them, slave labor, slave labor, and he dropped a pile of 50, 60 pages of original Japanese research. When I look at it down and people have always asked me, are you going to do marks or early on the, I'm going to do marks or early on the podcast? And it's very similar to what I tell people like, hey man, you know, do you just do lift weight, sprint, surf, go get outside, get into your body. I felt like if I, in a sense, didn't participate, there were a hundred other people in line who were going to step up and write a check. And I'll tell you specifically, like, oh, things are going bad at work, fire me. Anyway, so yeah, babe, I don't think you'd actually like, I think you'd be disgusted with my recommendation. And little things in the world that they think are the most important, great, you know, things in the whole world. When you're trying to figure out five different dishes going at the same time and timing everything, you don't have any slack to think of other things. And I think when you set, when you wrote that in the book right there, I think it's a powerful thing. It's like saying, I mean, now we kind of have this emergence of like the grind. So to propagate a toolkit that enables people to be elite problems all of us instead of accidental haphazard problem creators has been my goal for at least the last five years explicitly teaching people how to learn, so they can teach people how to learn. So you just have to ask, like, over 1,000 people who do X, how many are going to get the outcome that is being showcased. Whether it's sunk cost, Valice, you've put X amount of money or time into something and therefore you continue to put good money after bad, because you feel like you have to make it back the same way you lost it. Something like that, or sometimes I'll just walk in, I'll be like, all right, it's a Friday.

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 50 with echo Charles and me, Jockel, William. Good evening, I go. Good evening.
[00:00:14] To be or not to be.
[00:00:18] That is probably the most famous of all of Shakespeare's lines.
[00:00:29] And in fact, it's so famous that it's often unfortunately used as a punchline.
[00:00:37] Use as a joke to be or not to be. It becomes easy to forget what Shakespeare is actually talking about.
[00:00:55] He's talking about death and more specifically in this case he's talking about suicide.
[00:01:08] And Prince Hamlet, the character that delivers that famous line, who's often called insane,
[00:01:17] but who himself says, I am essentially not in madness, but mad in craft, meaning he is playing the role of insanity to further his own objectives.
[00:01:35] Not everybody even agrees on that point.
[00:01:40] But here's what Hamlet does say, to be or not to be that is the question.
[00:01:52] Whether it is no blur in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
[00:02:01] In other words, he's talking about is it worth it to suffer through the problems we have in life and he goes on or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing.
[00:02:19] And them, meaning should we fight against the pain of life, this sea of troubles and in that fight should we choose death, which is the only alternative to life.
[00:02:43] And he goes on to die, to sleep no more.
[00:02:51] And by a sleep to say, we end the hardache in the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to.
[00:03:04] So he's saying that death lets you escape all these hardships of life and these thousand natural shocks.
[00:03:17] And he finishes it out.
[00:03:19] It is a consummation to felt me to be wished for to die, to sleep.
[00:03:34] And he's saying that that is what we should wish for to die.
[00:03:41] And that is this most famous of Salila queues is about killing yourself.
[00:03:50] It's about to aside.
[00:03:56] Now we have a guest on today.
[00:04:00] And this is a guest who I've come to know since I sort of debuted in the world.
[00:04:10] And in fact, this guest happens to be the person that actually debuted me to the world that brought me into the world.
[00:04:20] His name is Tim Fers.
[00:04:23] In September of 2015, he interviewed me on his podcast, just prior to the release of my book Extreme Motors.
[00:04:34] Now, at the time, I was certainly a Tim Fers listener.
[00:04:41] I'd read the four hour work week.
[00:04:43] I'd listen to a bunch of his podcast, but I hadn't listened to all of them.
[00:04:47] And I think I had kind of the broad view that most people have of Tim.
[00:04:56] The human guinea pig, the investor, the author, just you know Mr. Smart Successful Healthy Guy, who's out there enjoying the fruits of life.
[00:05:12] And with all that stuff in my mind, there I was in the first interview I had ever actually done with anybody ever.
[00:05:22] And it's a set up.
[00:05:25] This set up is it's an interesting set up going into this for me, right?
[00:05:30] We're alone.
[00:05:31] I don't know Tim.
[00:05:33] I'm not the most open person in the first place.
[00:05:35] I don't know Tim.
[00:05:36] We meet two hours before.
[00:05:38] Now, we're in his house alone at a table.
[00:05:41] And the interview starts going kind of jocquish pretty quickly.
[00:05:44] And I start going a little bit heavy on some stuff.
[00:05:50] And at one point, Tim asked me about books that I've read and I brought up about face.
[00:05:58] And then I brought up Corn Mac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
[00:06:04] And I described how I liked that book because it captured the darkness, not just the darkness of the world, but the dark nature of human beings in the world.
[00:06:21] And Tim, after I described that darkness,
[00:06:26] he said something along the lines of like, hey, jocco, I struggle with this.
[00:06:35] How much should I voluntarily expose myself to darkness?
[00:06:41] Because I've had my own ups and downs that I contend with.
[00:06:47] And then he kind of took that question from there and from that personal level.
[00:06:52] And he really quickly transferred it into something that was more about the world than about humanity in general.
[00:06:59] But the initial question that Tim started to ask, it wasn't about the world.
[00:07:09] And it wasn't about humanity in general.
[00:07:13] The question that Tim was asking was about Tim.
[00:07:19] And I didn't catch that during the interview.
[00:07:23] I went right over my head, but when I listened to the interview, I caught it.
[00:07:27] And I heard that, but in this guy that we all see this happy, go lucky exterior.
[00:07:38] Kind of a solid image of mental and physical and spiritual strength.
[00:07:47] There was some darkness in there.
[00:07:51] And Tim and I were going back and forth a few weeks ago.
[00:07:56] And he said something to me, you know, I'm not sure if I'm aligned with the types of guests you normally have on your podcast.
[00:08:05] And thinking back instantly did that moment.
[00:08:10] I said, oh no Tim, you definitely are.
[00:08:16] Because you are a person, you're a human.
[00:08:21] And this is a podcast about human nature.
[00:08:24] And despite all the success you've had, you've had some challenges in your life.
[00:08:30] You've had some dark times and you still do.
[00:08:32] And we all do.
[00:08:35] And people ask me about suicide.
[00:08:42] I mean, most of the time it's some indirect messaging or some messaging through Facebook,
[00:08:47] but people will ask me about suicide, whether they're having those thoughts.
[00:08:51] And I haven't really addressed it directly.
[00:08:56] Because even though it's suicide has definitely impacted my life,
[00:09:03] directly in some awful and horrible ways that I'll never forget.
[00:09:14] But I don't have that same level of knowledge.
[00:09:24] So today we do have that level of knowledge.
[00:09:30] And we're going to dive into it.
[00:09:37] So without further ado, Mr. Tim Ferris, welcome to the show.
[00:09:45] And thank you for coming on.
[00:09:47] Thanks for having me on.
[00:09:51] Now, I don't even want to play around here.
[00:09:54] I want to get right into it.
[00:09:56] I want to get this hard stuff done.
[00:09:58] I want to talk about this book that you just put out.
[00:10:01] It's called Tools of Titans.
[00:10:03] And in this book, and I just got done telling you this, you know,
[00:10:07] I looked and found the blog post that you would originally written.
[00:10:12] That's named a very Tim Ferris name in my opinion.
[00:10:16] It's some practical thoughts on suicide, right?
[00:10:19] Only Tim would think about practical thoughts on suicide.
[00:10:23] So, and you sent me the book and I had found that blog pass and posted
[00:10:28] and I'd read it.
[00:10:29] But when you sent me the book, I saw that you had put it in the book.
[00:10:32] And I think that was awesome for you to do that to put it in this book,
[00:10:35] so that people have access to it.
[00:10:38] So I want to get into this piece of it right now from the book.
[00:10:44] And here we go.
[00:10:46] Some practical thoughts on suicide.
[00:10:48] In this chapter, I'm going to talk about suicide.
[00:10:51] And why I'm still on this planet.
[00:10:56] It might seem dark, but the objective is to give hope and tools to those who need them.
[00:11:01] It is a much larger number than you might imagine.
[00:11:06] I kept the following story secret from my family, girlfriends, and closest friends for years.
[00:11:12] Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me, woke me up,
[00:11:17] and I decided that it was time to share everything.
[00:11:22] So, despite the shame I might feel, the fear that is making my palms sweat
[00:11:27] as I type this, allow me to get started.
[00:11:31] Here we go.
[00:11:32] So you had some serious hesitation on putting this out there in the first place.
[00:11:36] I did.
[00:11:37] It sat and drafts between six and nine months with fits and starts,
[00:11:42] because I had a lot of doubt about my motivations for putting it out.
[00:11:49] The good that it might do, the bad that it could have indirectly,
[00:11:53] that I couldn't foresee and for seeing consequences.
[00:11:56] And just the embarrassment and also the fear of how my family would respond.
[00:12:00] So there was a lot, there were a lot of factors that kept it in my drafts
[00:12:05] for a very long time.
[00:12:07] And then this story that you tell here is the story of what made you finally decide
[00:12:14] to talk about it in the public forum.
[00:12:16] And what happened was a guy came up to you and said,
[00:12:20] you were at an event, a guy comes up to you and says,
[00:12:23] hey, can you sign this for my brother?
[00:12:25] It would mean a lot to him and you give him the hate, no problem.
[00:12:30] You're kind of noticed that there's something odd about the way the guy is acting,
[00:12:35] you sign the book and a little while later, as you're leaving,
[00:12:40] he comes up and he says, you know, I got to talk to you.
[00:12:44] And you say, hey, got to leave, but what do you got?
[00:12:46] Let's go walk with me.
[00:12:48] And you find out that this guy's younger brother,
[00:12:53] who you would just sign the book for, had recently killed himself at the age of 22.
[00:13:02] And this guy told you, people listen to you, Tim.
[00:13:08] Have you ever thought about talking about these things about suicide or depression,
[00:13:14] you might be able to save someone?
[00:13:19] And then you say here in the book, I didn't know what to say.
[00:13:23] I also didn't have an excuse on bonnones to him.
[00:13:28] And I had every reason to talk about suicide.
[00:13:32] Some of my closest high school friends killed themselves,
[00:13:36] some of my closest college friends killed themselves.
[00:13:41] And I almost killed myself.
[00:13:51] And you held that in for a long time.
[00:13:54] There you were a public figure, you hadn't ever talked about this.
[00:13:59] Now, as I said, for me, I certainly have brushed up against suicide,
[00:14:07] starting with my best friend when I was a kid, a kid named Jeff.
[00:14:14] And I had joined the Navy and I was in seal training, and I got wet.
[00:14:19] We had kind of grown apart.
[00:14:21] And I talked about this when I was on your podcast.
[00:14:25] I grew up with in a rural area in New England.
[00:14:29] And there was a lot of hippies and just kids, you know, dead heads and whatnot.
[00:14:34] And I didn't go in that direction, but my really good friend did.
[00:14:38] And he ended up getting heavily involved in drugs and booze and everything else.
[00:14:43] And he got involved with the girl.
[00:14:44] And when they broke up, he killed himself in a horrible way that I'm
[00:14:50] going to talk about.
[00:14:51] But I got word of it.
[00:14:54] I was going through seal training.
[00:14:55] And I get word that disc kid, you know, that I was such good friends with, killed himself.
[00:15:04] And then on top of that, now we go 1993.
[00:15:10] And again, one of my best friends in the seal teams.
[00:15:15] And I got absolute stud of the individual of a human being, an incredible athlete,
[00:15:23] quarterback at the Naval Academy.
[00:15:25] By the way, record holder at the Naval Academy, just a hilarious guy, leader of men, just incredible human being.
[00:15:37] They're an ultimately grisored.
[00:15:41] He got murdered along with a female naval officer named Cario Neal.
[00:15:48] They got murdered both of them.
[00:15:51] By another Navy officer who also went to the Naval Academy, who then killed himself.
[00:15:58] So murder suicide.
[00:16:00] And I'll tell you what, anybody that knew gris, I mean, this was just devastating.
[00:16:09] This damn near broke my heart.
[00:16:15] And then most recently, in December of 2012, another seal that I knew, who was the commander of the seals in Afghanistan.
[00:16:32] On deployment in Afghanistan, goes to a meeting, gets down to the meeting, goes to his room, shoots himself in the head, kills himself.
[00:16:49] No suicide note, no strange behavior, no indicators, nothing.
[00:16:57] And like I said, this guy was in my sister, both of you, and it's the old team too.
[00:17:01] I mean, just a great guy, respected seal and boom, gone.
[00:17:12] And I guess that's why I feel strongly about truanning to bring you on and talk to you about this, because I know you felt it.
[00:17:21] Personally, you're talking about it.
[00:17:23] And personally, I actually have never wanted to go myself before.
[00:17:28] Now, I will say there are times in my life where I, where I cared less about living than other times.
[00:17:36] And it certainly in combat, I definitely accepted that I could die.
[00:17:41] And I was okay with it.
[00:17:42] And there's probably times in combat where I crossed the line a little bit towards the just straight, bring it on.
[00:17:48] Let's do this. But I never seriously had that, you know, that fall.
[00:17:56] But it's something I know is out there, like I said, I've, it's brushed up against me, it's crushed me.
[00:18:04] And when you say in this book that you almost killed yourself, and we'll talk about what got you there, and how you ended up there.
[00:18:15] But how real is that feeling when it hits you?
[00:18:22] There's nothing realer.
[00:18:24] I think that the, the delusion or the set of delusions that you find yourself in seem as real as this table that we're sitting at.
[00:18:33] As real is anything you see or hear.
[00:18:36] And the voices in your head that internal dialogue, the self-talk, is a powerful thing.
[00:18:42] It can be powerful and constructed ways and it can be powerful and extremely destructive ways. So for me, it felt permanent, it felt inescapable.
[00:18:52] It felt concrete.
[00:18:55] I felt like I had a column of evidence exhibit A through Z to indicate that I would be better off killing myself.
[00:19:02] So it wasn't a desire to, it wasn't a desire to end my own life.
[00:19:05] It was a desire to stop suffering and stop causing the suffering of others or what I perceive to be inflicting on my loved ones and family members and so on.
[00:19:16] And feeling trapped, I think above all, it's feeling trapped and feeling alone.
[00:19:21] Like you are flawed and in being flawed, you are unique.
[00:19:25] And you should just be just be sent back to the factory and that equals taking yourself out.
[00:19:31] Extremely real though. It's definitely it was as concrete as any emotion or any object or any interaction that you could imagine.
[00:19:39] And it's got to be weird now and you say this.
[00:19:44] Like you're looking back at this now.
[00:19:46] And of course, this is so easy to see.
[00:19:49] And go, you know, I was not thinking straight.
[00:19:53] And right now you can tell it's not real.
[00:19:55] Or those problems that you perceive, you could tell that they weren't real problems.
[00:20:01] They weren't unsolvable problems.
[00:20:03] They weren't worth ending your life over.
[00:20:05] But you get trapped in there.
[00:20:07] And I think in particular, you do get trapped.
[00:20:09] And in my case, there were, say, five or six different events that happened roughly at the same time that caused me to spiral.
[00:20:18] And as I spiraled, I got to a point where I felt like I would never contribute anything meaningful.
[00:20:24] To other people or to the world because I was so handicapped by this pessimistic dark view of the world of myself.
[00:20:34] And I was like, well, if that's the case, why go through all this pain to try to solve these various problems?
[00:20:42] When completely, and like you said, and retrospect, it's ludicrous.
[00:20:46] I mean, it's ridiculous, but at the time it seemed anything but why not just control all the things?
[00:20:53] Control all delete.
[00:20:55] Let's just shut this computer down.
[00:20:58] You know, I got, I get to see this a little bit right now.
[00:21:03] You know, I got kids.
[00:21:05] And you know, I got teenage daughters.
[00:21:07] And little things in the world that they think are the most important, great, you know, things in the whole world.
[00:21:12] I mean, literally like a dress or a pair of shoes.
[00:21:16] It's okay.
[00:21:18] We can get you some more shoes or whatever.
[00:21:20] It's you get to see a glimpse of what you're talking about just with any human, any human anywhere that even in a workplace where someone's going through some problem that work.
[00:21:29] And they didn't get the report turned in on time.
[00:21:32] And they're acting like it's the end of the world.
[00:21:35] And it's actually the end of nothing.
[00:21:37] And actually, in many cases, means almost nothing.
[00:21:43] Almost nothing.
[00:21:45] I'm gonna go back to the book.
[00:21:48] So you say to Silas, which is the guy that had come up and asked you to sign the book, you come up and say, you say, look, I'm sorry for your loss.
[00:22:00] And then you had sort of the internal talk once again with yourself.
[00:22:07] And you say, I'd failed his brother bank being such a coward in my writing.
[00:22:13] How many others had I failed these questions, so am in my mind.
[00:22:18] And then you look at Silas and you say, I will write about this.
[00:22:22] I promise.
[00:22:24] That's probably when you made your first decision to get this dress going actually.
[00:22:31] You said, and with that, I got into the elevator.
[00:22:34] And I added my own phrase on here and you should have had to be edit this.
[00:22:37] But you said, and with that, I got in the elevator and I added and headed down.
[00:22:44] Because the next part of this is called into the darkness.
[00:22:48] And you've got a great quote in here that I'd never heard before.
[00:22:53] The quote is, they tried to bury us.
[00:22:58] They didn't know we were seeds.
[00:23:02] And I think that's an awesome quote.
[00:23:06] They tried to bury us.
[00:23:07] They didn't know we were seeds.
[00:23:08] And I can tell you that I didn't bury these thoughts and these feelings.
[00:23:16] And I'm thinking back, I'm just trying to kind of deconstruct where my attitude came from and all the stuff.
[00:23:24] And I think that when I grew up, I listened to some things that may, that just pull those seeds right out of the ground.
[00:23:30] Like they were playing his day.
[00:23:31] When you grew up listening to kind of music that I listened to, just dark heavy music.
[00:23:35] That's saying about this stuff.
[00:23:39] And I'll tell you there's one of the best pieces of music that you can hear on this subject.
[00:23:46] And I don't even know it's dark.
[00:23:48] But Henry Rollins on an album called Lifetime, there's a song called Gun in Mouth Blues.
[00:23:57] And I saw him perform it many times live.
[00:24:01] And it took me through those emotions.
[00:24:05] You'd go on YouTube and try to tell him it doesn't deliver the way it was when I was a kid.
[00:24:10] When I was 14 or 15 years old and I got a guy on stage, a grown man, to me at that time, who was 25 or something.
[00:24:16] Whatever Rollins was at that time.
[00:24:18] And he's singing about that.
[00:24:19] And so for me, I'm thinking of myself, well those seeds weren't buried for me.
[00:24:23] They were out, right?
[00:24:25] I was thinking about that, but I wasn't like I was okay with me.
[00:24:28] You know what I'm saying?
[00:24:32] And a lot of the music that I listened to back then talked about that stuff.
[00:24:38] So I didn't bury those seeds ever really.
[00:24:42] And I'm wondering, is that something that you did?
[00:24:46] Obviously you put the quote in here.
[00:24:48] But how do you see yourself?
[00:24:50] How did you bury those seeds?
[00:24:54] So I included the quote for a few reasons.
[00:24:58] The first is effectively exactly what you alluded to.
[00:25:03] So these internal demons, these self-doubt, these self-criticisms,
[00:25:10] I felt were a huge weakness.
[00:25:14] And so to compete to whether that's in sports, academic, otherwise, I kept that all in.
[00:25:21] So I actually grew up on the same music or similar music.
[00:25:25] But I was listening to Slayer, I was listening to a lot of dark music, which I can still appreciate the double bass and so on and
[00:25:33] Slayer album.
[00:25:34] But for me, because I never, I never choose to express any of that.
[00:25:38] I had no release valve.
[00:25:40] So it actually fed, I think, in a way, this type of self-loading.
[00:25:46] And it could have been biochemical in the first place.
[00:25:49] I don't know, or bio-francline.
[00:25:51] And I mean, my family, at least on one side, has a history of extended depression and schizophrenia and so on.
[00:25:57] Skits are fringeless, but so maybe it started there.
[00:26:00] Who knows?
[00:26:01] I don't know what the origin is.
[00:26:03] And so I included that quote as a reminder of two things.
[00:26:07] A, when you try to suffocate or bury or disregard these thoughts and emotions, as opposed to
[00:26:13] content with them or deal with them in some fashion, they are seeds.
[00:26:18] And you're pouring fertilizer on them when you try to neglect and avoid them.
[00:26:23] The second reason I put that in is to remind myself, if you feel like external,
[00:26:29] if you feel like external circumstances or external actors, meaning people,
[00:26:36] or stack in the deck against you, or trying to bury you,
[00:26:41] or try to defeat you in some fashion, you are the seed.
[00:26:44] So you can recover from that.
[00:26:47] And there's strength to be found in the struggle.
[00:26:50] So I included it for both of those reasons.
[00:26:53] Yeah, that's, and I've talked about that before this idea of battling demons, right?
[00:26:58] And one of the things I, I said on the podcast, I want to earlier podcasts,
[00:27:02] I just said, don't let the demons ambush you.
[00:27:06] Don't let them sneak around in there.
[00:27:08] You got to bring them out.
[00:27:09] You got to, you got to bring them out and confront them and deal with them.
[00:27:12] Don't try and bury them.
[00:27:13] Bring them out.
[00:27:14] And so that's, that's very similar.
[00:27:16] And also, when you were a kid, this is, this is also interesting because you are an overachieverist.
[00:27:23] Kid, right?
[00:27:24] I was good in school.
[00:27:25] I was very, very small.
[00:27:26] I got the shit kicked out of me routinely up until about six, right?
[00:27:30] But you wrestled.
[00:27:31] You were a good wrestler, right?
[00:27:33] I did.
[00:27:34] Yeah, I got up to a national level towards the end of high school.
[00:27:37] I did not wrestle in college since it was title nine at Princeton where I ended up going.
[00:27:41] But I was a academically, certainly a high-gear.
[00:27:44] And I'll get a rest.
[00:27:46] And a really good wrestler, academically, I mean, you're going to Princeton, right?
[00:27:50] Right?
[00:27:51] So that's pretty much.
[00:27:52] And then you landed Princeton.
[00:27:53] By the way, that everybody's kicking ass.
[00:27:55] Yeah.
[00:27:56] Yeah.
[00:27:57] No, no, I, I, I had very sport parents did really well in school.
[00:28:01] Got to Princeton and realized everyone was at that level where I heard.
[00:28:04] And it's a different playing field.
[00:28:06] And, and is that one of the things you think that as you started thinking about this darkness?
[00:28:10] You're looking at these other people going, oh, they don't have that.
[00:28:12] I got a barrier because they're all smart as me and great athletes.
[00:28:16] And so I'm competing with them.
[00:28:19] And I don't want to have that chalk against me of saying, oh, you know,
[00:28:23] I'm a little bit sad today.
[00:28:25] That's bad.
[00:28:26] I'm going to be positive.
[00:28:27] For sure.
[00:28:28] I think that was part of it.
[00:28:29] On one hand, I enjoy competing.
[00:28:32] So having a much stronger competitors didn't bother me at all.
[00:28:35] I was actually pretty thrilled about it.
[00:28:38] But I did feel like two compete on this higher level playing field.
[00:28:44] It would not be who's me or help me to walk around the moaning my weaknesses at all.
[00:28:52] So I didn't.
[00:28:53] And I felt like particularly being the,
[00:28:57] the, going to that school was a real stretch from my entire family and extended family.
[00:29:02] I felt like I had to deliver and there was no pressure for my parents whatsoever.
[00:29:10] But I don't need anyone else's pressure.
[00:29:12] I can deliver plenty of that for myself.
[00:29:15] And I felt that a lot was riding on that.
[00:29:17] And the plan, of course, as many people might have in their lives is get good grades in high school.
[00:29:23] Go to a good college, get great grades in college, go get to a fantastic job and so on and so forth.
[00:29:29] So which led up to a lot of the catalyzing events later in college in senior year that really the,
[00:29:37] the straws that broke the candles back.
[00:29:39] Because I was, I wasn't always near the precipice.
[00:29:42] I mean, I was healthy for long stretches of time.
[00:29:45] Then I'd have maybe a depressive period, but it was manageable.
[00:29:48] Oftentimes coincided with winter.
[00:29:50] I don't handle that type of weather very well, which is part of the reason that I live on the West Coast.
[00:29:54] And did you, did you, were you self aware of that?
[00:29:59] A very, very, very, at the time, probably less aware of the weather, having the impact that it did.
[00:30:05] But you would literally say, oh man, I'm feeling down right now.
[00:30:09] This is one of my particular things. It'll be okay.
[00:30:12] Definitely.
[00:30:13] And it used, that's pretty introspective for a kid.
[00:30:16] Well, I spent a lot of time on my own head.
[00:30:18] And there are benefits that come from that.
[00:30:21] You can get very good academics. And then sometimes you're just your own resenemies.
[00:30:25] So being trapped in my head is not always the, the, the carnival that you might think it to be.
[00:30:32] Sometimes it is for sure, depending on what I've eaten or imbibbed as well.
[00:30:37] But that's a separate podcast.
[00:30:39] The, the, but I've learned to manage it and we're jumping a little bit ahead.
[00:30:45] But for instance, and we'll get to it.
[00:30:48] I'm sure, but the writing of the senior thesis, that was a major trigger for a lot of reasons.
[00:30:55] Now, for instance, you know, writing the book that's sitting in front of us,
[00:30:59] I flew a researcher from Canada to be with me almost 24, seven,
[00:31:04] while I was in the final six to eight weeks of writing this book.
[00:31:08] Why did I need him to come from Canada to be their in person?
[00:31:11] No, absolutely not.
[00:31:13] But I wanted another human around.
[00:31:15] So I wouldn't go red, red, red, red, red, red.
[00:31:19] And when you write seven hundred pages of books, my brother, you're going to end up,
[00:31:24] but a lot more likely, and up in the red book, you're in the normal room.
[00:31:29] So you're right that we do start getting into this.
[00:31:34] Let's talk about this.
[00:31:35] But can I, can I say one thing?
[00:31:38] One of the reasons, and you did give me a 20 to say this so unfairness.
[00:31:42] One of the reasons that I recommend your podcast so much is because you talk about the darkness.
[00:31:47] And you talk about how common it is.
[00:31:51] And I think the reason, for instance, out of the blue, one of my friends,
[00:31:56] super handsome guy, wealthy family, ladies thrown themselves out of high school,
[00:32:01] kills themselves out of the blue, no one expected it.
[00:32:04] And I think that when you find people in any circumstance who end up taking it to that point,
[00:32:11] it's because they think it is a rare flaw.
[00:32:15] They're the one in a thousand who happens to be so fucked up beyond repair that it's not worth continuing
[00:32:21] and by exposing and discussing the darkness, you realize,
[00:32:26] I mean, that's 50% of the people, or more, 50% of the time.
[00:32:30] It is extremely common.
[00:32:32] No matter what you think your defect is, anger, depression, you have plenty of people to keep you company.
[00:32:38] So, and it's crowded up there.
[00:32:41] That's crowded.
[00:32:42] So that's a great point.
[00:32:46] Let's go into this then when we go into what happened and some of the things that went down,
[00:32:55] this downward spiral is what you call it.
[00:32:59] And again, in here, I'm going back to the book.
[00:33:01] In hindsight, it's incredible how trivial some of it seems.
[00:33:06] And I put my note next, that's like, because you're detached from it now.
[00:33:10] And that's such a key thing I talk about all the time.
[00:33:12] We want to remain detached from things.
[00:33:14] We don't want to get wrapped up in the emotions.
[00:33:16] We want to stay back because when you detach from it,
[00:33:19] every answer is so clear when you're not wrapped up in it.
[00:33:22] This is this stuff that happened to you.
[00:33:25] Sure, was it challenging?
[00:33:26] Yes, did it suck?
[00:33:27] It was it hard?
[00:33:28] Yes, of course.
[00:33:29] But detached from it now, you're looking at it.
[00:33:31] You might literally be laughing at this stuff now.
[00:33:34] Oh, I do. I mean, I wrote it.
[00:33:36] And that's why at the end, there's this part.
[00:33:39] Towards the end, it's like many of you might be thinking,
[00:33:43] wait a second, a Princeton student got a really bad grade.
[00:33:46] Boofuck and who?
[00:33:47] Are you kidding me?
[00:33:48] Yeah.
[00:33:49] But that's the whole point.
[00:33:50] That's the whole point.
[00:33:51] Is that you don't, is that people, we don't detach, we get absorbed in this stuff and it becomes our world.
[00:33:55] So you get, I'm going back to the book.
[00:33:59] I include wording like impossible situation,
[00:34:02] which was reflective of my thinking at the time.
[00:34:05] And it begins senior year,
[00:34:07] slated to graduate in June of 1999,
[00:34:09] somewhere in the next six months,
[00:34:11] all these things happen.
[00:34:12] First, you fail to make it to the final interviews for McKenzie consulting.
[00:34:17] And at some other company,
[00:34:19] and you start losing confidence.
[00:34:21] So this is the first time you get kind of a little bit beat in your life a little bit.
[00:34:24] For sure.
[00:34:25] I was doing extremely well academically,
[00:34:27] and all of a sudden I didn't know what I was doing wrong.
[00:34:30] And just to provide a little bit of context.
[00:34:34] And it's like, this is like, I've this huge smirk on my face because it's so ridiculous.
[00:34:38] You know, in hindsight,
[00:34:40] but at Princeton,
[00:34:43] or any Ivy League school, really,
[00:34:45] there are only a handful of industries that recruit.
[00:34:50] Primarily, you find management consulting firms and investment banks.
[00:34:54] Why?
[00:34:55] Because they want to hire you and then use your pedigree, Princeton,
[00:34:58] so that they can charge their clients in the case of management consulting $500 now
[00:35:02] for photocopy.
[00:35:03] Right?
[00:35:04] It's not at all as exotic it might seem,
[00:35:08] but everyone is competing for those slots.
[00:35:10] And I didn't know it to do next,
[00:35:12] so I just decided being very driven in that way.
[00:35:15] I'm going to compete for whatever one is going after.
[00:35:17] Because I think I can beat them.
[00:35:18] Now, this is the first time that I really
[00:35:20] felt like, A, I got my ass handed to me,
[00:35:22] and B, this was important.
[00:35:24] If I lose a wrestling match,
[00:35:25] I know why I lost.
[00:35:26] Here, I didn't know what was wrong.
[00:35:29] So that unknown variable hit me reasonably hard.
[00:35:33] I can imagine that now you're doubting everything.
[00:35:37] And the wrestling match you go,
[00:35:38] hey, my conditioning wasn't good.
[00:35:39] Or hey, my takedown's one on point.
[00:35:41] And here you're just going to know what was wrong.
[00:35:42] I don't know what was wrong.
[00:35:43] Exactly.
[00:35:44] Something's wrong with me.
[00:35:45] And no one could tell me,
[00:35:46] even the people who interviewed me,
[00:35:47] they wouldn't give me the feedback.
[00:35:48] So that's point A.
[00:35:51] Very shortly thereafter,
[00:35:53] have a long-term girlfriend break up with me.
[00:35:57] Which again, in isolation,
[00:35:59] I think I could have weathered in a head weathered many times before.
[00:36:02] But I'm kind of reeling on my heels a little bit.
[00:36:05] And then my...
[00:36:07] Hold on.
[00:36:08] I'm going to go to the book here
[00:36:09] because you give some pretty good specifics on that.
[00:36:11] She breaks up with you because this is from the book.
[00:36:15] Because I became insecure during that period.
[00:36:18] Wanted more time with her.
[00:36:20] And was massively disrupted to her varsity sports.
[00:36:23] But my point is that these things compounded.
[00:36:26] You get insecure.
[00:36:27] And you think, why didn't they hire me?
[00:36:30] And then you look at your girl and say,
[00:36:31] well, I'll go to her for comfort.
[00:36:33] But I need more from you.
[00:36:35] And she's going, which all humans do,
[00:36:37] which is, oh, you want to throw yourself at me?
[00:36:39] I don't need you.
[00:36:40] Exactly.
[00:36:41] It was not only that, but...
[00:36:43] So she wakes up like you do.
[00:36:45] And I tend to go to bed when you do.
[00:36:47] And so I would want to have this late night.
[00:36:49] Conversations.
[00:36:50] And it screwed up her competition.
[00:36:53] I mean, it was extremely important.
[00:36:55] Or rightly so.
[00:36:56] She was a varsity athlete.
[00:36:58] So, exit stage left.
[00:37:00] Girlfriend gone.
[00:37:01] And then the primary piece of this.
[00:37:05] So, the in my mind that checkmate for a loss was the interactions that I had with my
[00:37:13] counselor or thesis advisor.
[00:37:17] And I was in the East Asian Studies Department.
[00:37:20] I started in psychology and then I moved from neuroscience to East Asian Studies to focus on language acquisition.
[00:37:26] And the senior thesis, just to put this in perspective,
[00:37:30] not every college university has a mandatory senior thesis.
[00:37:33] Princeton does.
[00:37:34] And it breaks a lot of kids.
[00:37:35] So, I'm not unique in this, but I thought I was a tiny.
[00:37:38] It breaks a lot of kids.
[00:37:39] When you say breaks, like, they don't graduate because they don't finish it.
[00:37:42] Or they just get emotionally, they go through total turmoil.
[00:37:45] But they're the above and what I realized after the fact is, a lot of kids kill themselves.
[00:37:50] Actually, at many of these top schools.
[00:37:54] And I'm sure other schools, but it's such a pressure cooker or the kids perceive it that way.
[00:37:59] I've got to feel old, call on kids.
[00:38:01] Regardless, it's such a pressure cooker for you, Tim.
[00:38:04] It's very, very common.
[00:38:09] So, it really does break a lot of kids.
[00:38:11] But it's generally, let's just call it, and it varies by department, but 60 to 100 pages, sometimes longer.
[00:38:16] And it can count for 25% of your four year or the secumulative departmental GPA.
[00:38:24] It is weighed very, very, very heavily.
[00:38:27] So, even if you've had straight days, it can really throw a wrench into the works.
[00:38:32] If you want to finish with a very strong GPA.
[00:38:35] Now, keep in mind, I had already been turned down for jobs.
[00:38:39] And this is, so they go together here.
[00:38:43] Lose my crutch that's keeping me up, which is the girlfriend.
[00:38:48] And then at that point, I am researching for my thesis.
[00:38:52] Everything's going fine so far.
[00:38:55] And I meet with the head of curriculum design for Berlitz International, which is near Princeton.
[00:39:01] Had a great dinner, and he said, it's really too bad you're graduating in X number of months,
[00:39:07] because we actually have a fantastic job for you that I could give you right now.
[00:39:11] You'd be a perfect fit.
[00:39:12] So, I think to myself, well, this is going to solve a few different problems.
[00:39:15] I don't know what I want to do.
[00:39:16] I'm not getting picked up by these other companies.
[00:39:19] Why don't I take some time off?
[00:39:22] And figure out the job, and then figure out the thesis.
[00:39:25] Now, the thesis, I'm going a little bit out of order here,
[00:39:28] but the thesis was important because I had a meeting with my thesis advisor, who had his own research agenda,
[00:39:36] and as is very common in academics, professors will utilize the help of students at times
[00:39:42] to integrate things or research things for them, slave labor, slave labor, and he dropped a pile of 50, 60 pages of original Japanese research.
[00:39:51] So, this is all in Japanese to integrate into my thesis.
[00:39:55] It wasn't fit.
[00:39:56] It was a round-pang in a square hole.
[00:39:59] It would be nearly impossible to put into my thesis, but I decided, all right, well, he's the advisor.
[00:40:03] He's tenured.
[00:40:06] This is mandatory.
[00:40:07] It's not optional.
[00:40:09] Then I figured out, oh my god, well, I could take this job, take your off, do a great job,
[00:40:13] and thesis, come back, problem solved them.
[00:40:16] So, I have a meeting with my thesis advisor to tell him that I'm going to do this,
[00:40:20] not realizing at the time also that his research needs of me, our time sensitive.
[00:40:27] And he lost it.
[00:40:29] He basically said, oh, you're just going to cop out.
[00:40:32] And take all this time off school.
[00:40:34] Well, better be the best thesis I've ever seen in my life.
[00:40:37] And not so subtly saying, I'm going to thank you.
[00:40:41] If this is what you're going to do, I'm going to thank you.
[00:40:44] And I don't think I was misreading that.
[00:40:46] And I was completely bewildered, then really upset,
[00:40:52] meaning sad, depressed, then really angry.
[00:40:55] And I was like, you know what?
[00:40:57] This is bullshit.
[00:40:58] This is Princeton University.
[00:40:59] Focus on the undergrad. This should be a solvable problem.
[00:41:02] So I go to people in the administration.
[00:41:04] And I tell them what happened.
[00:41:06] And collectively, the response was effectively he wouldn't do that.
[00:41:10] Because once you have your immunity bracelet in the form of tenure,
[00:41:14] you're not getting voted off the island.
[00:41:17] And even people within the department would not pick fight with him,
[00:41:20] or even really seek to clarify it.
[00:41:23] And that was when I felt totally hopeless.
[00:41:27] And that was kind of the beginning of the end as I saw it.
[00:41:33] At that point, it's very important to note,
[00:41:35] I was not suicidal.
[00:41:37] I just felt completely trapped.
[00:41:39] And without options, I ended up regardless taking the year off.
[00:41:46] And that is where things got particularly dark.
[00:41:51] Because I went from being surrounded by students.
[00:41:53] Didn't have the girlfriend, but I was in a social environment
[00:41:56] to working for Berlitz, but what I didn't realize was going to be
[00:42:00] the set up, the logistics was working remotely.
[00:42:05] What does that mean? That means that I'm off campus now.
[00:42:08] With two of my friends, go to work every day, normal hours.
[00:42:12] And I'm left in a bedroom or a living room alone
[00:42:16] to try to work on my thesis and to do work for Berlitz.
[00:42:19] Completely solo.
[00:42:20] That is where the carnival in my head is a very dangerous thing.
[00:42:24] I'm outmatched.
[00:42:26] And we can keep going.
[00:42:30] Yeah, I mean.
[00:42:32] So the other thing that struck me as once that happens,
[00:42:36] now you also start to see your friends graduate graduate.
[00:42:40] And they're all done.
[00:42:42] They've gone.
[00:42:44] They've gone.
[00:42:45] They've gone.
[00:42:46] They've gone.
[00:42:48] Yeah.
[00:42:49] That was seemed to be a huge piece of it as well.
[00:42:53] And then I'm going to go to the book back to the book here.
[00:42:57] Your coping mechanism is to cover myself and sheets
[00:43:01] minimize time awake and hope for a miracle.
[00:43:04] No miracle arrives.
[00:43:07] One afternoon, as I'm wandering through a barns and noble
[00:43:10] with no goal in particular, I chance upon a book about suicide.
[00:43:16] That's right there in front of me on a display table.
[00:43:19] Perhaps this is the miracle.
[00:43:24] I sit down and read the entire book,
[00:43:26] taking copious notes into a journal,
[00:43:28] including other books listed in the bibliography.
[00:43:33] For the first time in ages, I'm excited about research.
[00:43:38] In a sea of uncertainty and hopeless situations,
[00:43:42] I feel like I've found hope.
[00:43:45] The final solution.
[00:43:48] The idea just appears in a book.
[00:43:54] Yeah.
[00:43:55] Then you go full tin ferris on this thing.
[00:43:58] Yeah, with the same enthusiasm and rigor and OCD
[00:44:02] that I tackle anything, I dove into that
[00:44:06] and went to Farson Library,
[00:44:10] Great Library.
[00:44:11] Princeton to check out as many of those referenced books
[00:44:15] possible to do my research.
[00:44:18] And one of them was not in.
[00:44:22] One of the key pieces.
[00:44:24] And so I made a request, put in a request to get notified.
[00:44:29] I was living, I think it was Lawrenceville,
[00:44:31] which is near Princeton at the time.
[00:44:34] And I think it's worth noting that I was pass the point of deciding,
[00:44:37] yeah, I was in planning.
[00:44:39] You say that in the book and I'll just read it.
[00:44:41] It's important to mention that by this point,
[00:44:43] I was passed deciding.
[00:44:45] The decision was obvious to me.
[00:44:47] I'd somehow failed, painted myself into this ridiculous corner,
[00:44:51] wasted a fortune on school that didn't care about me.
[00:44:54] So what would be the point of doing otherwise?
[00:44:56] To repeat these types of mistakes forever,
[00:44:59] to be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and my friends.
[00:45:03] Fuck that.
[00:45:04] The world was better off without a loser who couldn't figure out this basic shit.
[00:45:09] What would I ever contribute?
[00:45:11] Nothing.
[00:45:12] So the decision was made and I was in full on planning mode.
[00:45:19] In this case, I'm a dangerously good at planning.
[00:45:23] I have four to six scenarios all spaced out, start to finish.
[00:45:28] Or sorry, specced out, start to finish, including potential collaborators
[00:45:32] and covers when needed.
[00:45:34] So as you just said, as you just pointed out,
[00:45:37] you were full on Tim Ferris, research complete, decision made,
[00:45:42] going forward, figure out the best way to execute this,
[00:45:45] and make it happen.
[00:45:47] Oh yeah, yeah, I remember actually something that's not in there.
[00:45:50] I recall when I had the plans and then it was a matter of scheduling.
[00:45:59] And I was waiting for that last book to see if I missed any research before proceeding.
[00:46:05] But I had driven to Firestone, taken out these books, and was very lethargic.
[00:46:10] I remember I mean, this coincides with this type of deep depression.
[00:46:14] It was very tired all the time.
[00:46:16] And laid down on my van.
[00:46:19] My used minivan, hand me down for my mom.
[00:46:23] After going to Firestone and just slept for like three or four hours.
[00:46:26] And woke up and I was like, okay, let's just get this done.
[00:46:29] Let's figure it out and put it on the calendar.
[00:46:32] And the what prevented that, it was pure luck.
[00:46:40] I had forgotten that instead of using my Lawrenceville address,
[00:46:44] I hadn't changed my address with the registrar.
[00:46:46] So my mail was going back to my home address where my parents lived on Long Island.
[00:46:51] And so my mom gets this postcard in the mail.
[00:46:55] I mean, thank God this didn't happen a few years ago, would be the email.
[00:46:58] She wouldn't have seen it.
[00:47:00] And it said, in effect, good news.
[00:47:03] The book on suicide that you reserved is now available at Firestone, library for pickup.
[00:47:08] So I got a very nervous call from my mom, which I did not expect.
[00:47:12] Didn't interrupt plans.
[00:47:13] Did you, did you think your mom, did your mom sense it?
[00:47:17] Oh yeah, I could tell.
[00:47:18] I mean, her voice was very shaky.
[00:47:22] And I quickly tapped an instant and talked my way out of it.
[00:47:27] And I said, oh no, no, no, it's a friend at Rutgers. He couldn't get it at his library.
[00:47:30] So I made, I reserved it at Firestone.
[00:47:32] But it shocked me out of my self-imposed false reality.
[00:47:39] And it was, it sounds so odd to say, but it was the first time that I realized my suicide would affect.
[00:47:46] No matter how cleverly I laid it out, it would ruin the lives of people around me.
[00:47:53] Because I thought, well, let me figure out a scenario where I can make it look like a complete accident.
[00:47:57] It won't look like suicide.
[00:47:58] It'll just look like an accident old death.
[00:48:00] And I really, I really figured it out.
[00:48:02] And it didn't matter.
[00:48:05] It didn't matter.
[00:48:06] It didn't matter.
[00:48:07] I realized after that phone call that,
[00:48:10] Did your mom confront you with it?
[00:48:12] She asked me about it.
[00:48:14] And I was very fast to come up with the Rutgers lie.
[00:48:18] Did she say, like, hey Tim, are you okay?
[00:48:21] She did.
[00:48:22] And we love you.
[00:48:23] We love you, right?
[00:48:24] And it wasn't a 32nd conversation.
[00:48:26] It was a longer conversation.
[00:48:28] And there were follow-up phone calls.
[00:48:30] Props to mom for picking up on that.
[00:48:32] Yeah.
[00:48:33] Yeah.
[00:48:34] So that was dodging a bullet metaphorically.
[00:48:38] No, no, no.
[00:48:39] No, no.
[00:48:40] No, no.
[00:48:41] I'm going to go into this here.
[00:48:43] It's sort of you get through that.
[00:48:45] You kind of get through what you just said.
[00:48:47] You realize that this wasn't just about you.
[00:48:49] This was going to hurt everybody.
[00:48:50] And you can't go through that.
[00:48:51] And then you say, the very next week, I decided to take the rest of my year off,
[00:48:56] truly off, to hell with the thesis and focus on physical and mental health.
[00:49:01] That's how the entire sumo story of the 1999 Chinese kickboxing
[00:49:06] Sandsuit Championships came to be if you read the four hour work week.
[00:49:09] So you go on a full on year off just complete.
[00:49:13] Now my question for you on that is, what about normal people?
[00:49:19] Normal people, right?
[00:49:21] Normal people that can't take a full on year off.
[00:49:23] They got to find another way to get their focus off the what's going on in the brain at the work and get out of that carnival and focus on their mental and physical health.
[00:49:35] While they're working their job taking care of their kids doing whatever they have to do for sure.
[00:49:40] It doesn't normal person to go that off.
[00:49:43] Well, there are, I think a few strategies and tactics that I have used in
[00:49:48] continued to use.
[00:49:50] So it's critical that people understand.
[00:49:53] It's not like I sumited the mountain, slave the dragon and I'm done.
[00:49:58] This is a movie that tends to like Groundhog Day repeat itself,
[00:50:04] not necessarily that intensely, but if you are predisposed to periods of darkness as many people are,
[00:50:12] you need to develop coping strategies.
[00:50:15] And it's not so much the year off.
[00:50:18] It was a focus on other things, right?
[00:50:20] That helped.
[00:50:21] And there are a few.
[00:50:24] I mean, looking back on it now, I have a better toolkit.
[00:50:28] The first is, people talk about mind over matter, mind over body, mind over body this type of stuff.
[00:50:33] I think body over mind has extremely underrated.
[00:50:36] So if you can't get out of your head, get into your body.
[00:50:40] Number one, that is the number one.
[00:50:42] Get out and move and really things didn't change for me dramatically until I started
[00:50:47] oddly enough, getting punched in the head going to the toughest boxing gym I've ever seen in
[00:50:52] Trent and New Jersey, where I was the only guy not on work release.
[00:50:55] So I don't recommend that therapy for everyone, but you know, one broken nose,
[00:51:00] a lot of bloody sparring sessions later, I was feeling more like my old self.
[00:51:06] So if you can't get out of your mind, get into your body.
[00:51:09] And your body is very important.
[00:51:13] There are a lot of good biochemical reasons for this.
[00:51:15] I'll back that up to Tim Kennedy, who is an MMA fighter.
[00:51:18] Amazing.
[00:51:19] Good to snore some guy.
[00:51:21] He posted something on Instagram, a month ago or something like that, in Facebook and whatever.
[00:51:25] And basically he was saying he's addressing PTSD and that sort of darkness, right?
[00:51:31] And he basically said, look guys, get out, go work out, go push yourself.
[00:51:37] And it's very similar to what I tell people like, hey man, you know, do you just do lift weight,
[00:51:42] sprint, surf, go get outside, get into your body.
[00:51:45] So I think that's universally, I universally agree with that statement.
[00:51:49] So let me lay out a couple of super concrete recommendations.
[00:51:52] And I should say, in advance, I'm not a doctor.
[00:51:55] I don't play one on the internet.
[00:51:57] So you may need certainly there are many people who need medical interventions,
[00:52:03] whether it's pharmaceuticals or otherwise.
[00:52:08] In my case, a few things that very much help, with or without other adjuncts, cold therapy.
[00:52:14] So cold exposure, and this has been studied very, very effective as a supplemental or singular therapy
[00:52:22] for anti-depressive purposes.
[00:52:24] It's very, very effective.
[00:52:25] So I routinely, and when I'm home in San Francisco, for instance, even along the winter,
[00:52:30] I take short cold showers, pure cold showers.
[00:52:34] And Van Gogh, for instance, when he lopped off his ear, and was put into treatment,
[00:52:40] he had two ice paths every day.
[00:52:42] That was one of the treatment protocols.
[00:52:44] And it's been looked at quite closely in the last few years.
[00:52:48] It's a cold exposure one.
[00:52:50] So even if you don't get outside of the house, that's an option.
[00:52:53] You're going to take showers hopefully.
[00:52:55] Anyway, then you have, if you can afford it,
[00:52:59] I think a good test to have performed is comprehensive blood work.
[00:53:06] Look at micronutrient deficiencies in particular.
[00:53:09] So you could have, this is very common with depleted ground soil,
[00:53:14] selenium deficiency, zinc deficiency, copper deficiencies.
[00:53:18] These affect hormone production, and much more, and can be fixed relatively easily once you identify them.
[00:53:26] I have, for instance, one was deficient in selenium.
[00:53:31] What's going through to per se period, and he started eating Brazil nuts,
[00:53:35] very high in selenium content.
[00:53:37] And he called me a week later, and I feel like I'm on cocaine.
[00:53:40] Now, that's a dramatic example.
[00:53:44] And no, you shouldn't use cocaine to fix your depression.
[00:53:48] But blood work, I think it is, if you get your car checked more often than you get your body checked,
[00:53:55] you need to rearrange your priorities.
[00:53:57] Stoicism would be the next one.
[00:53:59] I find senacan, particular, moral letters to lukillus,
[00:54:05] Marcus are really as, people tend if they read both, either be full on Marcus,
[00:54:11] or really as guys, or full on Senacan guys.
[00:54:13] And there's not a whole lot overlap.
[00:54:15] I tend to read Senacan, but I will listen to, say, one of the letters,
[00:54:19] letters of lukillus every few days.
[00:54:22] And if I'm going through a top period, I will listen to a 50-minute letter,
[00:54:24] every day, in the morning, as I walk to say, get a cup of coffee.
[00:54:28] And what Stoicism helps to teach you at its core, I think, or what represents is an operating system for being non-reactive in high stress situations.
[00:54:42] And high stress is relative.
[00:54:44] High stress could be going to the DMV and waiting and lying for some people.
[00:54:47] But Stoicism is also not just something you read, it's a practice.
[00:54:51] So there's fear setting and fear rehearsal is very important.
[00:54:55] So the practicing the worst case is something that I'll do regularly for instance,
[00:55:00] taking a few days of every month to fast.
[00:55:03] I do that.
[00:55:04] Taking a few days every month or every quarter to sleep on your kitchen floor and a sleeping bag and eat oatmeal for a few days.
[00:55:11] And I realize, even if I have to quit my job, even if I get fired from my job.
[00:55:16] Because a lot of concerns for many people are financial, I'll be fine. Things are fine. Things are manageable.
[00:55:23] So I spent a lot of time defining the worst case scenarios, not just being vaguely afraid of bad things happening,
[00:55:30] and practicing them so that I build up some level of immunity and not immunity, but it's in the noculation.
[00:55:37] It's like getting a flu shot.
[00:55:39] Stress and noculation is what we didn't see the things we did the other day.
[00:55:42] So you go through hard training. You put all kinds of combat stress and it's not where you get any scenarios.
[00:55:46] And real life, you're kind of used to it.
[00:55:48] Well, exactly. And did one of my other favorite quotes and I'm probably not going to get the pronunciation right on this name.
[00:55:53] But Arca Locus, I think it is, says we do not rise to the level of our hopes.
[00:55:57] We fall to the level of our training.
[00:55:59] And that applies to a lot more of the military, applies to everything.
[00:56:04] So there's a few recommendations.
[00:56:07] I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some type of meditation or mindfulness practice, which can take dozens of forms.
[00:56:16] It can take the form of exercise.
[00:56:18] Anything with a repetitive motion or anything quite frankly that forces you to be present state aware.
[00:56:25] If you're performing Olympic lifting, I guarantee you're nothing about your to-do list.
[00:56:29] Yeah, or the argument that you had with the coworker. That's, you know, I think it was when I was doing a follow-up for the first podcast that I did with you.
[00:56:38] That's somebody asked me about meditation.
[00:56:40] And I was like, no, I don't meditate.
[00:56:42] I guess what I do do. Surf, jiu-jitsu, weight lift, all this other stuff.
[00:56:46] So that kind of falls into, again, I don't know because you say, do you meditate?
[00:56:51] My answer is no, I don't meditate. You don't see me sitting in a corner with my legs crossed indie and style chanting, right?
[00:56:57] I don't do that. Do I get those benefits that people talk about?
[00:57:01] Do I feel them when I'm on the jiu-jitsu mat or when I'm Olympic weight lifting or when I'm doing whatever these physical activities I do?
[00:57:07] I guess I do. I guess that's where it is.
[00:57:10] And I think my word that I go back to all the time is being able to detach already.
[00:57:15] Said, once a day is being able to detach from these situations, detach from these stresses that are there.
[00:57:21] And actually going back to the book here, you say,
[00:57:25] I return to Princeton, turn in my now finished thesis to my still sour advisor, get chewed up in my thesis defense, and I don't give a fuck.
[00:57:37] And I think that is a very powerful tool, that is a very powerful tool.
[00:57:42] And he had to go, me through all kinds of things.
[00:57:44] And I'll tell you specifically, like, oh, things are going bad at work, fire me.
[00:57:49] Go ahead, you're going to fire me, do it, bring it on.
[00:57:53] I'll find another job, I'll do something else, you know, even in the sealed teams, you know, in my book,
[00:57:57] I talked about this horrible situation that happened with the Fratur side.
[00:58:01] And that was the beginning of deployment.
[00:58:03] Well, as things continue to on deployment, more, it's not like the bad things stop there.
[00:58:07] Other bad things are going to happen.
[00:58:09] And what I knew was that I was doing the best job I possibly could do.
[00:58:13] And if you guys above me in the chain of command, want to come and fire me, bring it.
[00:58:18] And it wasn't that I actually didn't care, but I kind of told myself, I didn't care.
[00:58:22] And when you release yourself of that stress of caring, you can actually perform better.
[00:58:28] You perform better when you say, you know what, and we talk about with fighters all the time, fighters will be in an event.
[00:58:34] And maybe they have a hard match and they barely get through and then they go, you know what, screw this.
[00:58:38] I don't even care if I went and lose.
[00:58:39] They go out there and have the performance of a lifetime because they relieve themselves of that stress.
[00:58:43] So sometimes, not caring is one of the best antidotes for doing performing better.
[00:58:50] But it's very contradictory because you're saying, okay, I got to perform really well.
[00:58:54] So what do I do? I'm not going to care about it, but I want to perform well.
[00:58:56] But you got it. And I used to say this with guys would deal with girls, right?
[00:59:00] In the sales teams, you got the guys they're going through, you know, they're young guys, right?
[00:59:04] They're 20 years old, 22 years old. And so they get these relationship problems sometimes.
[00:59:07] You got to help them through that.
[00:59:09] And one of the things I'd say, listen, listen, but you know, they would be sad because they, whatever.
[00:59:14] And I'd say, listen, man, you got to not care.
[00:59:17] And then I'd say, you can't just act like you don't care.
[00:59:21] You have to actually not care. That's what you actually have to, you have to actually not care.
[00:59:27] And if you do that, you're good. And you can walk away.
[00:59:30] Because somebody asked me that the other day on Twitter, how do you get over, how do you get over someone that you love that doesn't want you anymore?
[00:59:36] And I was like, where's the luck? Walk away.
[00:59:40] Don't look back.
[00:59:42] Don't look back. You've got to not care.
[00:59:45] And I think when you set, when you wrote that in the book right there, I think it's a powerful thing.
[00:59:50] It is. And I want to look at the ingredients that led to that, or at least one of them.
[00:59:56] So a key component in that entire story is after deciding, after having the mom intervention,
[01:00:05] after deciding to focus on other things, getting the thesis done, but not staring at pages on the floor in my house by myself 12 hours a day.
[01:00:14] I, I was offered an opportunity. It was half joking, but from a friend of mine, I'd wrestled with who is going to be competing in the San Shownessinals, Chinese keep boxing.
[01:00:24] So that became a focus. That became a clear goal where I knew input in, output out, you know, garbage in, garbage out, good training in, probably good results out.
[01:00:35] Maybe I get knocked out, but there's always that chance.
[01:00:39] And the reason this is important, you don't need to have a large athletic event.
[01:00:45] What, what I've realized I accidentally did then, and now I always do, is much like, and I think you think don't care another way that maybe you could phrase it is not being preoccupied by it, right?
[01:00:57] And if you're an investor, let's just say you're not a full-time investor. How do you create that piece of mind? You diversify your portfolio.
[01:01:05] So you don't have all your eggs and one basket. You can do that in life in a number of ways.
[01:01:10] One of them is diversifying your identity. So the way that I had set myself up for failure is all of my worth was set up in whether this thesis would be a success or not.
[01:01:20] And then, were factors outside of my control that could affect that.
[01:01:24] What I try to do now, and I'd recommend this to startup founders all the time. Like, look, if your startup is the way you measure your entire worth as a human being.
[01:01:33] There are factors outside of your control that could tank it, macroeconomic, otherwise competitive, etc.
[01:01:37] You can't have it dictated by how well your company is doing that day.
[01:01:41] So, for instance, why don't I show you how to do a very simple deadlifting protocol?
[01:01:47] And therefore, as a result, even if your company is having the most difficult quarter imaginable, if you're putting 10 pounds on your deathlifts.
[01:01:56] It's just pounds on my max. Yeah, it does. That's a winning week. And so I try to have at least three primary goals, which would seem to distract me, maybe for someone who isn't predisposed to depression and darkness.
[01:02:13] You can have one singular goal. For me, having say three provides me with that identity diversification.
[01:02:21] It sounds like you're not going to pick goals that are counterproductive. I mean, you can run a good company and still increase your deadlift.
[01:02:29] How do I say? And work on your breath hold.
[01:02:31] Absolutely.
[01:02:31] There are all a couple of men who are all going to help.
[01:02:33] Exactly. They're all a couple of men who, and I should also say, this is going back to the meditation piece.
[01:02:38] So, meditation is terrible worth. I mean, it needs a complete brand overhaul. It's just ludicrous.
[01:02:42] It carries a lot of baggage with it. Another option for getting your monkey mind out of your head, so that you can function properly, is to, and we had a fun exchange on Twitter about this.
[01:02:54] But is to journal in the morning. And really, you can look at morning pages. I won't get into it now.
[01:02:58] But the stream of consciousness writing for three pages will very often show you how stupidly trivial your concerns are.
[01:03:08] It makes it concrete when you try to write it out and you're like, wait, that doesn't make any sense.
[01:03:12] Well, I'm going to take that one step further. You want to know what it actually does. Well, in my mind, what it actually does, when I'm writing something, because I now write for my own podcast, right?
[01:03:21] When you write, you are forced to detach from what you're writing.
[01:03:25] 100% forced to detach from it. So when I'm writing something, I'm going, you're looking at it. It's not in you anymore. It's out there.
[01:03:31] So that is a good way to detach.
[01:03:33] It's by writing something down. That's another thing that happens when you do pros and cons, right? Oh, I'm going to, I don't know what decision I'm going to make them or do pros and cons.
[01:03:40] Well, all you're doing is physically detaching, physically pulling those things.
[01:03:45] If those ideas out of your brain, putting them on a paper and now you're detached from them, and you can make a good decision.
[01:03:50] I hate when I agree with you, Mr. Timfer.
[01:03:53] Makes the internet so much less fun or you agree. But a few other recommendations, one would be, and this is something that I've used as a coping mechanism, often.
[01:04:05] If you can't make yourself happy and happiness as a word is really problematic, I think,
[01:04:12] and chasing it tends to mean you're not going to catch it, by the way.
[01:04:16] But if you are in a low state or a depressive state, and you can't figure out how to make yourself happy, just try to make other people happy.
[01:04:26] And it seems cliched, can I? But it's like, look, something is simple and this is something I do as paying for the coffee, for the person behind you and line at Starbucks.
[01:04:36] Can actually have a significant impact on the well-being that you experience in today.
[01:04:42] Something like that, or sometimes I'll just walk in, I'll be like, all right, it's a Friday. There's six people in the coffee shop. All right, round a coffee on me.
[01:04:48] It's such a simple thing to do, but cheapest therapy you will ever have.
[01:04:53] You don't know what I do. What's that?
[01:04:55] Kind of similar to that, but it's a little bit different.
[01:04:58] When I interact with some, let's say, I'm not a coffee drinkable, let's say I'm in a restaurant, but a 7-11, right? 7-11.
[01:05:07] I'm going in there, I'm going to pick up whatever bottle of water.
[01:05:10] When I interact with the person that's telling me a bottle of water at 7-11, who's making $8.25 an hour, I treat that person like a human being.
[01:05:19] Yeah. I treat that person like a human being. I say, hey, how's it going?
[01:05:22] Yeah, I just just bottle hard and thirst hot out there, isn't it?
[01:05:24] Hey, I hope you have a good day. I just do that, because I always see people in the world that treat those other people like they're not people.
[01:05:35] And I think that just dehumanizes you as an individual. So somebody that's clean and toilets and is coming out of the thing with the bag garbage and whatever, the hey man, how's it going?
[01:05:48] Everything cool? You know, they thanks something like that.
[01:05:52] I think those are important. And I definitely, the way you put it in the book is if you can't seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy.
[01:06:03] Very effective magic trick. Focus on others and set yourself totally agree with that one.
[01:06:10] Go into the J, the other ones you put in here is going to the gym move for at least 30 minutes.
[01:06:14] I tell this, this is like the solution to everything, right?
[01:06:17] Yeah. Oh, you got problems in your life? Go go to the gym.
[01:06:20] Cool. Go get a workout on the next night. Let's at least start there.
[01:06:24] I think those are those are super powerful.
[01:06:27] You give some specific recommendations that if you're not particularly prone to working out by yourself, a couple of recommendations that you're going to sound funny, but any kind of partner or group exercise.
[01:06:41] And you can take your pick. I think rock climbing is fantastic any kind of blaze system for instance.
[01:06:47] Any type of dance. I have to recommend dance on the jack.
[01:06:52] That's the best. I'm going to keep going here.
[01:06:57] We're going to the black hole here.
[01:07:00] Or it could be tie-boxing.
[01:07:02] Somebody with pads interact with their fucking human being.
[01:07:05] We like to say you're jitsu, you just involved the jitsu enough to get choked out on regular basis.
[01:07:14] No, you actually, you got a great list in here of practical, grimland defenses, what you call it. You know, you talk about, and these are all in the book that you put out.
[01:07:23] All these little tricks, they're not necessarily to combat depression.
[01:07:28] There are just things for people that maybe do better in their lives.
[01:07:32] Morning rituals. You got productivity tricks.
[01:07:37] You got how do you face things that you're afraid of. You got the jar of awesome. You got gymnastics.
[01:07:43] You got acro yoga, but I'm not going to talk about that one.
[01:07:46] But my point is you got a bunch of these things written about in the book, which I think is very helpful.
[01:07:51] Hey, I got to put this out there too, just because people are listening to this.
[01:07:55] If you're in that zone, 1-800-273-8255, suicide prevention line.
[01:08:05] If you're there, give it a call.
[01:08:08] 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
[01:08:12] Get yourself out, get through it, brother.
[01:08:15] And if you're prone to those cycles, also one of my very close friends who, by the way, extremely successful CEO.
[01:08:22] So material professional success does not make you immune to this necessarily.
[01:08:29] And that should be reinforcing and reassuring for people, meaning to say, the people you see on magazine covers.
[01:08:35] They might very well be fighting the same battle that you are, something very, very similar.
[01:08:41] And what this friend of mine did, extremely successful.
[01:08:45] I mean, top 1% by any measurement.
[01:08:49] And he got close to the edge, number of times.
[01:08:53] And he realized he didn't care about himself, but he cared about his promises that he made.
[01:08:58] So he made a non-suicide pact with his brother, because he knew that he would never break his word.
[01:09:04] It was brother.
[01:09:05] Even when he didn't care about himself at all.
[01:09:07] Which is another effective approach.
[01:09:09] I believe that. I know plenty of guys, at least in my old job.
[01:09:12] We definitely all cared more about our friends, our brothers and the seal teams.
[01:09:16] And we did about ourselves without questions.
[01:09:18] So that would be a powerful thing there as well.
[01:09:22] I'm going to take it to your little section here where you wrap this section up of the book.
[01:09:28] Back to the book.
[01:09:30] My perfect storm was nothing permanent.
[01:09:34] But of course, it's far from the last storm I'll face.
[01:09:38] And it will be many more.
[01:09:40] The key is building fires where you can warm yourself up as you wait for the tempest to pass.
[01:09:48] These fires, the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you build help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood.
[01:10:04] If you want the luscious green of life and you do.
[01:10:10] The gray part is part of the natural cycle.
[01:10:16] You are not flawed.
[01:10:19] You are human.
[01:10:21] You have gifts to share with the world.
[01:10:25] And when the darkness comes, when you are fighting the demons, just remember.
[01:10:33] I'm right there fighting with you.
[01:10:36] You are not alone.
[01:10:38] There was a large tribe around you and thousands of them are reading this book right now.
[01:10:46] The gems I found were forged in the struggle.
[01:10:52] Never, ever, give up.
[01:10:58] Much love to you and yours.
[01:11:02] Tim.
[01:11:07] Well, it would appear that once again, the podcast went into the darkness a little bit.
[01:11:21] And I think that's okay.
[01:11:26] And I think that having you on here, Tim, someone that certainly, like you just talked about, comes across as out would be happy and successful in loving life.
[01:11:37] And having you talk about these things and having you put them in the book is it real service to people.
[01:11:44] I think it's the most important thing I've ever written.
[01:11:47] Period hands down, end of story.
[01:11:49] And that's a bold statement.
[01:11:51] That's a bold statement.
[01:11:53] And I think the other thing is that people that aren't maybe necessarily in that boat, it's important that they learn to.
[01:12:01] So that you can recognize, look for signs, understand some solutions that you can give to people.
[01:12:09] And also remember that the darkness that seems all consuming.
[01:12:16] We've seen it time and time again.
[01:12:19] And it's not.
[01:12:23] It's not.
[01:12:25] It is not stronger than the forces of good.
[01:12:29] The darkness will subside and the light will win in the end.
[01:12:35] So hold on, fight on, drive on and look.
[01:12:43] Look into the distance out there somewhere and all that darkness.
[01:12:49] There is light.
[01:12:52] There's hope and there is renewal and rebirth and there is joy and there is this thing.
[01:13:02] This amazing thing, this crazy thing, this beautiful thing.
[01:13:08] This horrifying thing, this magnificent thing that we call life.
[01:13:18] Then it isn't easy.
[01:13:22] And it wasn't meant to be easy.
[01:13:27] But it is worth every second.
[01:13:34] It's a living.
[01:13:44] And with that, I wanted to make sure that I pointed out that this book, which is 700 and something pages long.
[01:13:58] Actually it's 600 after cutting about 65 pages on 20 pages.
[01:14:02] And this book is not.
[01:14:04] Anyway, this book is not about a book about suicide.
[01:14:06] This is a fraction.
[01:14:08] Was it five pages, eight pages, something like that.
[01:14:10] I just wanted to make sure that I covered the subject.
[01:14:14] I don't think that most people are going to pick up the book and say, oh, I'll cover the suicide section.
[01:14:18] No, they leave that for me.
[01:14:20] That's my job here.
[01:14:22] But the book, it's what it really is.
[01:14:25] It's a compilation of all the lessons that you've learned.
[01:14:28] Talking to all the people that you've talked to on the podcast, which is a wide range of different people.
[01:14:34] And you take in that and distill down for those people that go and listen to Tim Ferriss podcast and you go, man,
[01:14:40] One minute, I can't give this to.
[01:14:42] I give two hours.
[01:14:44] Two and a half hours.
[01:14:45] Who has two and a half hours now?
[01:14:46] You can get it on in 15.
[01:14:47] You can get it the distilled version, the peak knowledge there.
[01:14:52] And that's what the book is.
[01:14:59] All this information kind of distilled down into nice little digestible pieces like a reference book that you can look at, which actually,
[01:15:04] Now we're going in the question zone.
[01:15:06] By the way, hot seat, Tim Ferriss gets some roles reversed.
[01:15:10] First question.
[01:15:12] Can I say something for you?
[01:15:13] Yes, absolutely.
[01:15:14] So I just wanted to also note for people who might be listening to this and
[01:15:17] and thinking of themselves, well, I'm not prone to depression and I'm prone to these dark periods.
[01:15:22] The so-called coping mechanisms it would use to take yourself from bad to so-called normal.
[01:15:29] They are also the same strategies you can use to go from normal to better or from better to far better.
[01:15:36] They're the same.
[01:15:37] It's just shifting into a higher gear.
[01:15:40] That's a great point.
[01:15:41] And I use a lot of those strategies work out every day, wake up early, get after it.
[01:15:45] Of course, I read a lot.
[01:15:47] Right a lot.
[01:15:49] Okay.
[01:15:50] And you know what?
[01:15:51] I feel pretty damn good right now.
[01:15:52] How's that?
[01:15:53] How's that?
[01:15:54] How's that?
[01:15:55] I feel better.
[01:15:57] Yeah.
[01:15:58] And to just put a button in it also, I have with using these different approaches for this people, maybe listening to this and still feeling somewhat hopeless.
[01:16:07] The dark periods have gotten shorter.
[01:16:10] Then able to turn down the volume and the joyful periods, the zone-like periods, a productive periods, have become longer and brighter.
[01:16:20] And you can engineer that.
[01:16:22] It just takes a right toolkit.
[01:16:24] Love it.
[01:16:26] Uh.
[01:16:27] This is a good piece of the toolkit right here.
[01:16:31] Speaking of toolkit, tools and titles.
[01:16:34] Um, speaking of the book.
[01:16:36] This ties into it.
[01:16:41] The book is filled with all kinds of good ideas and enticing options.
[01:16:44] And they all sound really good.
[01:16:46] How do you take and pick the right path and not get distracted by all these other shiny objects that are out there, especially because the path is laid out and you think, oh, oh cool.
[01:16:59] That's all this looks really good.
[01:17:01] You know, I'm going to do this.
[01:17:02] Do what Tim Ferriss told me to do in this interview.
[01:17:04] And I'm going to do that.
[01:17:05] And then you get a weekend to it.
[01:17:07] And you haven't, you know, you get, it's hard.
[01:17:09] You realize that it's hard.
[01:17:10] You realize that you, you don't like doing that thing.
[01:17:13] And all of a sudden you go look for the next solution.
[01:17:15] And you end up jumping from solution to solution.
[01:17:17] And you never get any progress because you're too busy trying to chase this shiny object.
[01:17:22] How do you resolve that?
[01:17:23] Yeah.
[01:17:24] Is it, this is a common problem.
[01:17:26] Uh, you have, for instance, in the self-help world.
[01:17:29] You have seminar junkies.
[01:17:30] I don't really do seminars, but you have people who go to a different city.
[01:17:33] If you go to a different seminar every weekend, they get all hopped up on enthusiasm, take a lot of notes.
[01:17:38] They do nothing from Monday to Friday and they hit another seminar.
[01:17:41] It's like a junkie hitting, getting a, getting a dope hit.
[01:17:44] But they don't put in the work.
[01:17:46] So the way that you stack the deck is by understanding behavior modification in a few ways.
[01:17:54] And you don't have to do a lot of reading about this, but there are few unnecessary ingredients.
[01:17:58] One is, if you just look at the literature, do less than you think you're capable of doing.
[01:18:05] So what does that mean?
[01:18:07] If you are 100 pounds overweight and you are starting exercise after no exercise for 20 years,
[01:18:14] do not start off with five days a week of an hour of running on a treadmill.
[01:18:19] The pass fail threshold is too high.
[01:18:22] So you set it first, let's get you to the gym.
[01:18:25] That is priority.
[01:18:26] Number one.
[01:18:27] So make it five minutes of walking on a treadmill.
[01:18:30] Two or three times a week.
[01:18:31] Let's just say, of course my preference would be weight training, but makes an easy example.
[01:18:35] Anything beyond that is bonus points.
[01:18:38] When I write a book like this, which is just a monster, and like you said,
[01:18:43] kind of a choose your own adventure book, but two crappy pages a day.
[01:18:47] Best writing advice I ever got.
[01:18:48] Your throat, your quota is too crappy pages a day.
[01:18:51] Don't even have to use them.
[01:18:53] If you, if you have, if you put up two crappy pages a day, that is a successful day.
[01:18:57] And it takes away the performance anxiety and the procrastination.
[01:19:02] You've never flushed you want to floss front teeth.
[01:19:05] That's it.
[01:19:06] Get those, get those pearly whites in the front, done.
[01:19:10] I got an issue with that.
[01:19:11] Okay.
[01:19:12] If you break out the floss and you can't floss the rest of your teeth after you get down with your front ones, you got issues.
[01:19:17] Well, get in the game and floss all your teeth people.
[01:19:20] Come on.
[01:19:21] Oh, I think we got to get people there with the gingerbread trail.
[01:19:25] Maybe appropriate for the floss and conversation.
[01:19:27] But so the point is though, if you want to submit a behavior, you have to break that behavior down into a few pieces.
[01:19:34] One is just getting out the floss and starting.
[01:19:36] Then the other is finishing the different components to it.
[01:19:39] So if I can get someone to say five sessions as my general guideline,
[01:19:43] make it as easy as possible so that you submit the first five sessions.
[01:19:47] Do your front teeth generally people are going to do more.
[01:19:51] But you start there.
[01:19:52] Do it for five days.
[01:19:53] Don't do more call me.
[01:19:54] We're here.
[01:19:55] You're in shock.
[01:19:56] We'll send a drone.
[01:19:57] You're not just floss the rest of your teeth with shoes.
[01:20:01] His boots have big shoe.
[01:20:02] Lies his folks don't let him do it.
[01:20:04] So there's that.
[01:20:05] The other piece that is very underestimated is incentives.
[01:20:09] What I mean by that is actually a guest on the podcast, Derek Sivers, who's an incredible entrepreneur and sort of a philosopher program.
[01:20:16] Made millions of dollars donated to all the music education.
[01:20:19] He's a real character.
[01:20:20] But he said if information, if more information were the answer,
[01:20:23] we'd all be billionaires with six back abs.
[01:20:26] More information is not the answer generally.
[01:20:30] Of course there's good and bad information.
[01:20:32] But I'll give you a great example.
[01:20:34] This is kind of a ridiculous one, but it proves a point, which is I have a friend named AJJ.
[01:20:37] I'm a writer.
[01:20:38] And he wanted to get into better shape, but he never been in athlete.
[01:20:42] Never really worked out.
[01:20:43] Never watched his diet.
[01:20:45] But there he is.
[01:20:46] He's got one kid, another one on the way.
[01:20:49] And skinny Jewish guy, but he described his physique as a python that it's swallowed a goat physique.
[01:20:55] So it wasn't morbidly obese, but it does not look enough super hot.
[01:20:58] And he knew what to do.
[01:21:00] He just wasn't doing it.
[01:21:01] So he wrote a check to the American Nazi party for $1,000.
[01:21:06] And I believe it was his best friend.
[01:21:08] This is like merciless friend.
[01:21:09] He gave this check to me.
[01:21:10] He said if I don't lose 20 pounds by the end of the next month, something like that,
[01:21:13] I want you to mail this check in.
[01:21:14] Which would put his name, AJJ goes, known writer and Jew on the list of contributors for the American Nazi party.
[01:21:20] He lost the 20 fucking pounds.
[01:21:22] Is the punch line.
[01:21:23] And you can use sites like coach.me or stick STICK where you actually create an anti charity.
[01:21:30] So there's a nonprofit or charity you'd rather than doke than give money to.
[01:21:34] You can actually put money into escrow.
[01:21:36] And if you don't hit your goals and they have referees and judges and so on, that money goes to your anti charity.
[01:21:42] And it sounds so ludicrous. You could also do something simple like a betting pool.
[01:21:45] I know people who've never lost weight and they, let's say, five co-workers,
[01:21:50] each put on a hundred bucks.
[01:21:52] And whoever changes their body composition, ideally rather than a scale, right?
[01:21:57] But using a Dexa scan for instance, gets the pot at the end.
[01:22:02] And it is incredible.
[01:22:03] How hard people will work to not lose a and then be lose money.
[01:22:08] I know two guys who worked at Google both fatties at the time.
[01:22:12] And one of them is since last more than I want to say 80 pounds and run a few marathons.
[01:22:17] But it started with a commitment to go to the gym together.
[01:22:20] And if anyone missed the session, they had to pay the other person a dollar.
[01:22:24] These people who make a hundred thousand plus a year, no problem.
[01:22:27] And it worked is the, is the funny part.
[01:22:30] But incentives.
[01:22:31] Whenever you're like, how can I change this behavior?
[01:22:33] You need incentives.
[01:22:34] So give your, give your close friend who you know would love nothing more than to see you humiliated.
[01:22:41] Pictures of you, your like fat ass, bum just making this up.
[01:22:45] But like whatever in like your tidy whiteies.
[01:22:47] And if you don't lose X number of pounds by a Y point time, those go on Instagram.
[01:22:51] And a story like you will lose the weight, I promise you.
[01:22:54] But there need to be incentives.
[01:22:57] Humans are incentive driven machines.
[01:23:00] And so those that when we're now we're trying to narrow all this information.
[01:23:05] Do you pick one, do you set a certain amount of time?
[01:23:07] Like, okay, I'm going to stick with this program here.
[01:23:09] Candlebell swings at night, right?
[01:23:10] I'm going to do 75 cattle bell swings at night.
[01:23:12] Do you say, I'm going to do this regardless the outcome.
[01:23:14] And I think you did this with podcast too.
[01:23:15] You said I'm going to do eight podcasts or six podcasts.
[01:23:18] I'm going to record them regardless of a hate it doesn't matter.
[01:23:21] I'm committing to it.
[01:23:23] So that's sort of a way to avoid distractions on other things as well.
[01:23:27] Definitely.
[01:23:28] And I think it's a different aspect to that.
[01:23:30] So the podcasting was a goal.
[01:23:34] But I always try to set goals where you can win even if you fail.
[01:23:39] So these are goals that have side effects that carry over.
[01:23:42] And Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, talks about this until it's tight.
[01:23:45] Actually, he calls it systems thinking.
[01:23:47] And in the case of podcasting, he did this with blogging.
[01:23:50] I asked myself, what can I take out of this in terms of skills and relationships,
[01:23:54] even if it bombs as a podcast?
[01:23:56] I can get better at asking questions, which means getting better thinking.
[01:23:59] I can start to minimize my verbal ticks.
[01:24:02] Both of which will help me to do research for books later.
[01:24:05] And on down the list, there were maybe ten different things.
[01:24:10] I would benefit from even if the podcast failed.
[01:24:13] So six was this critical mass.
[01:24:15] I tend to do things in terms of sessions five or six times.
[01:24:18] That's usually my experimental minimum.
[01:24:21] But for a period of time, let's just say behavioral modifications.
[01:24:24] So cannibal swings or film the blank.
[01:24:27] Some kind of dietary intervention.
[01:24:28] I'm going to start with intermittent fasting.
[01:24:31] Okay, so I'm going to fast 16 to 18 hours a day.
[01:24:33] I've done up to 10 days.
[01:24:34] But let's just say I'm starting with 16 to 18 hours a day.
[01:24:37] A fasting.
[01:24:38] Then I will measure things.
[01:24:40] It's a very, I don't want to scare people off, but scientific approach.
[01:24:43] Like you have to know what effects something is having.
[01:24:45] So you can do that objectively.
[01:24:47] Zero to 10.
[01:24:48] How do I feel?
[01:24:49] Or you can look at things like number of reps.
[01:24:52] Waits lifted.
[01:24:54] I mean, I'm up.
[01:24:55] I have my mug of tea in my get after a jocomug.
[01:24:59] Approved.
[01:25:00] I got.
[01:25:01] If I had an unapproved egg.
[01:25:02] Look at all these knives on the table.
[01:25:04] But I have this one of my training logs right here.
[01:25:07] I've had these training logs since I was 16.
[01:25:09] So I like to treat most of my behavioral experiments.
[01:25:12] Exercise experiments.
[01:25:14] Dieter experiments as a two-week experiment.
[01:25:16] And that's the minimal effective dose that I'll use in cases like that.
[01:25:21] And I'll always do the fewest number of things possible.
[01:25:24] So let's just say you have your readable like this or any other book.
[01:25:27] I think I take the opposite approach.
[01:25:29] I'm unfortunately probably bad.
[01:25:31] I'll just go as many as I can possibly get it done.
[01:25:35] So for those of you who don't know,
[01:25:37] Jocco is a cyborg.
[01:25:38] He's a robot.
[01:25:39] But no, I'm actually just an idiot.
[01:25:42] Poorly program for robot.
[01:25:45] But the reason here's how I think about it.
[01:25:49] When I'm looking at goals or I'm looking at behaviors,
[01:25:52] I ask myself, all right, I'm really enthusiastic.
[01:25:55] I've the list of 40 things that I might do.
[01:25:58] Which of these, if done well,
[01:26:01] will make the others irrelevant or unnecessary?
[01:26:04] I'm looking for a lead domino.
[01:26:06] Which of these will make all of the rest irrelevant,
[01:26:09] meaning I don't need to do them or easier?
[01:26:11] And that is how I choose the behaviors or the goals to focus on.
[01:26:16] And then once I have those, just so I can control my variables
[01:26:19] to the extent possible.
[01:26:20] So I'm changing my diet and six different exercise routines
[01:26:23] and my sleep all at the same time.
[01:26:25] I may not know which is contributing to higher reps in the kettlebell swing.
[01:26:29] Maybe the kettlebell swing is killing me,
[01:26:31] but because I fixed my diet.
[01:26:33] I'm actually recovering properly.
[01:26:35] So you don't have to dig it to that level.
[01:26:36] BJ fog, F-O-G-G is done some very interesting work in this area.
[01:26:41] But I would say, honestly, you want to get good at training yourself
[01:26:45] and try.
[01:26:46] I think this is going to sound ridiculous.
[01:26:48] And it gives kind of ridiculous.
[01:26:49] Take a dog training course or train a chicken.
[01:26:53] Chickens are the most interesting because they don't respond
[01:26:56] to negative reinforcement.
[01:26:57] But maybe that's not Jocco's way.
[01:26:58] You need something you can like hit with a lash.
[01:27:00] I don't know what that would be.
[01:27:02] What do you choose?
[01:27:03] Or warrants.
[01:27:04] Or warrants.
[01:27:04] So if you train a chicken, clearly not,
[01:27:09] I didn't even know that was actually a thing.
[01:27:11] Well, so it is a litmus test.
[01:27:14] There's a couple that I'm blanking on their name right now,
[01:27:17] who trained more than 1,500 species for espionage purposes at one point.
[01:27:22] And they started as marine mammal trainers.
[01:27:24] So they were training dolphins, orcas, etc.
[01:27:26] And you can't just roll up a newspaper and bat or gun hit it on the head
[01:27:29] for a lot of reasons, but it doesn't work.
[01:27:31] So they have to use a positive reinforcement.
[01:27:34] And we really get into the weeds with this.
[01:27:37] But they also use a reward marker, which we're a bridge,
[01:27:41] which is a clicker in this case.
[01:27:42] Or a whistle.
[01:27:44] The indicate when the animals get closer to the desired behavior.
[01:27:46] So in the case of a chicken, you could teach it to say turn counterclockwise
[01:27:49] or turn clockwise to take a certain number of steps and then come back to you
[01:27:53] to receive feed.
[01:27:55] You're only using feed.
[01:27:56] But one of the quotes that I really liked from a trainer was
[01:28:00] you shouldn't be allowed to have a child until you've been required to train a chicken.
[01:28:05] And there's a lot of truth to that.
[01:28:07] But it's just operant and classical conditioning.
[01:28:09] I could really go down the rabbit hole. There's a great book called Don't Shoot the Dog
[01:28:13] about this type of training.
[01:28:15] But I digress that the point of being understanding that we're all incentive driven
[01:28:19] I think is very important.
[01:28:21] And then trying to work on one or two things at a time because you're only doing it for two weeks
[01:28:27] in the way that I, the mental model that I use, and then you're assessing things.
[01:28:31] And which, by the way, is why I generally recommend if we're talking about diet.
[01:28:36] So someone who needs to lose 100 or 200 pounds and I've had the chance to interact with a lot of these people.
[01:28:41] And they've lost that way.
[01:28:43] I will put them on a diet that has their three criteria that I use when I'm trying to say you
[01:28:49] design a diet for an intervention for someone.
[01:28:52] Number one, adherence.
[01:28:55] So if 100 people like to do it, will I have the highest percentage of compliance possible?
[01:29:01] And you could tell people, hey, the best work I've ever seen for losing weight is taping bowling balls
[01:29:05] or hands and doing a windspirant, somebody down a stadium stair.
[01:29:08] Well, not too many people are going to stick with that.
[01:29:11] So you look at the adherence, then the effectiveness, doesn't produce the desired result.
[01:29:16] And then the efficiency of last in terms of is it, is it time economical, right, among other things?
[01:29:24] But the point being, a lot of folks give me shit on the internet.
[01:29:26] They're like, what?
[01:29:27] Slow carb, beans, that'll make your intestines explode.
[01:29:30] And I'm like, hey, if your intestines explode, you're training yourself to be weak.
[01:29:33] You need to fix your regimen. But like, be, you could throw a thousand people into strict paleo or strict veganism.
[01:29:39] Whatever your religion happens to be.
[01:29:42] And one out of a thousand are going to make it.
[01:29:44] Whereas if you use the gateway drug of say slow carb diet, which is more can be net will leisure work with.
[01:29:49] In two weeks, let's say someone who weighs 300 pounds and has 100 delus, they'll probably lose between five and ten pounds in the first ten days.
[01:29:58] So treating as a two week experiment, they now have the positive reinforcement and the results that will lead to a credibility for me,
[01:30:05] where I can drive them to do more ambitious things.
[01:30:07] And step by step, that can then lead them to strict, say paleo or whatever.
[01:30:12] But when you have to start with the good program you practice is better than the perfect program you quit.
[01:30:17] You see this in exercise all the time.
[01:30:19] People come hot out of the gate and they quit four days later.
[01:30:22] Yeah.
[01:30:23] Really, I don't want you to talk about earlier, for me is prioritizing the next few weeks to talk about the extreme ownership.
[01:30:28] You know, what's the biggest impact you're going to have?
[01:30:30] Make that thing.
[01:30:31] Take that thing to the top of the list and start working on that one.
[01:30:33] Yeah.
[01:30:33] You all done.
[01:30:34] Yeah.
[01:30:34] Totally.
[01:30:35] All right.
[01:30:37] Next question.
[01:30:38] All right.
[01:30:39] There was a friend of mine that was older than me.
[01:30:41] And he was always looking for the right girl.
[01:30:44] And the right girl to settle down with and to marry and have kids and all that stuff.
[01:30:50] And it never seemed to happen and the reason it never seemed to happen is because he was always looking for perfection.
[01:30:57] Always looking for perfection.
[01:31:00] And I told him that you know, profession doesn't exist.
[01:31:07] And I also had another buddy of mine that was when you were like surfing.
[01:31:13] And he was always looking for like the next good time.
[01:31:17] Always looking for you.
[01:31:20] You're looking for happiness, right?
[01:31:21] And one time we're surfing and I go, bro, you keep looking around for happiness.
[01:31:26] This is it.
[01:31:27] This is it, man.
[01:31:28] We're surfing.
[01:31:29] This is happiness right now.
[01:31:32] Do you ever feel like you're searching too much and looking for something?
[01:31:44] Instead of enjoying what you have.
[01:31:47] Ten years ago I would have said yes.
[01:31:49] Right now I feel like I've found a few things, meaning realizations.
[01:31:55] And I view my job as testing things on the fringe and reporting back.
[01:32:04] It's like half.
[01:32:07] If no botanist might be eaten by cannibals plus a little bit of athletic stupidity.
[01:32:15] And really trying to find the things that the extremes, so I can inform the mean.
[01:32:20] And as an experimentalist or an experimenter, I view that as my responsibility, my job.
[01:32:26] And I've also replaced a number of words in my life.
[01:32:30] So we used happiness because it's just the easiest reference point for a lot of folks.
[01:32:36] I think that the better word is excitement.
[01:32:41] So I chase what excites me.
[01:32:44] Now that's a razor's edge.
[01:32:46] You gotta be careful with.
[01:32:47] But when I say excite, it means I wake up excited and I go to bed exhausted.
[01:32:52] Basically is what that means.
[01:32:54] And I've also realized that there are things to optimize and their things to saver.
[01:33:03] And I don't have a lot of trouble with that.
[01:33:06] Most people would think that I'm just like speed reading poetry and watching every movie on like 28x forward with subtitles.
[01:33:15] Just a cram in as much Mr. Robot as I can or whatever.
[01:33:18] And no, I feel like I am increasingly better at the appreciation portion of the equation.
[01:33:27] The achievement I've always been, I wouldn't say hard-wired for but very well trained for.
[01:33:32] I'm good at putting goals in the sights and achieving those goals.
[01:33:37] But if you're constantly looking for the next thing, whether it's the next goal or it's the next girl or it's the next high,
[01:33:46] then you are never going to be operating in the present tense.
[01:33:50] Was there something that you said 10 years ago if I would ask you this, you would have probably been on your heels a little bit?
[01:33:55] Is there something that happened or you said, you know what, what did I just, you know,
[01:33:58] did you get home from a trip one time and say, what did I just do or what, what did I just do or what,
[01:34:02] I can tell you what I can tell you.
[01:34:03] I can tell you that it was, so this is related to something that Robert Rodriguez,
[01:34:11] who's the director, producer, writer, musician, everything's fascinating guy.
[01:34:15] Also huge, I didn't realize how big he was.
[01:34:17] So since city, good on the list, right, he has a lot of hits.
[01:34:22] And he said, I always find it funny and a paraphrasing here.
[01:34:26] But he's one of the longer chapters in the book.
[01:34:29] He said, I always find a funny one, filmmakers come up to me, brand new filmmakers and they say,
[01:34:33] nothing went the way it was supposed to go.
[01:34:35] Like this happened and that happened and shit broke and then we missed this shot and
[01:34:39] I don't know.
[01:34:40] And he said, they don't realize that that's their job that nothing is going to work.
[01:34:44] Like if you're the director, your job is nothing's going to work.
[01:34:47] So at one point, I was feeling maybe excessentially scattered.
[01:34:53] I was like, well, I'm trying all these different things and doing all these different experiments.
[01:34:57] And one of them I'm going to figure out my thing.
[01:34:59] And then at some point someone just said, no, your thing is going meta.
[01:35:04] Like your thing is doing these types of experiments.
[01:35:07] And what I realized is my one thing is learning things quickly.
[01:35:16] And whether that is cooking or sniping or thinking something.
[01:35:22] And then the vaping of taking some sniping courses, that's the separate story.
[01:35:26] Rally car racing, whatever.
[01:35:28] Right, tango doesn't matter.
[01:35:31] That the approach to deconstructing these things and learning them quickly compounds.
[01:35:35] So if I get better or want to get better the next, doesn't matter what the subject area is.
[01:35:38] So that's my one thing.
[01:35:40] And it just gave me great peace of mind.
[01:35:42] Hey, you don't need one thing in a traditionally defined sense.
[01:35:46] Maybe your thing is as I have found, you know,
[01:35:50] being a human-geny-picking, trying to train people to be better learners is my one thing.
[01:35:55] And that made me feel more confident in this sort of experimental approach.
[01:36:01] I don't have 10 year plans.
[01:36:02] And I used to that used to bother me a lot.
[01:36:05] I no longer remotely bothered by that.
[01:36:09] Because I have two week experiments and I have six month projects.
[01:36:13] And if I do my, we actually talked about this and you've written about it.
[01:36:18] But rather than worrying about the next 17 promotions, you just do what's in front of you.
[01:36:23] In my case, it's a book project.
[01:36:25] If I do an exceptional job, I knock out of the park with this one thing.
[01:36:29] Opportunities will present themselves that I couldn't have conceived of six months ago.
[01:36:34] And then it's just a matter of paddling for the waves.
[01:36:37] But yeah, but I'm a lot better at appreciation than I was a long, say, 10 years ago.
[01:36:44] Because a 10 years ago, it didn't matter how, how one lighted what I won, what I accomplished.
[01:36:49] I was always obsessing on the next thing.
[01:36:52] I never took the time to actually enjoy it.
[01:36:55] Good lesson.
[01:36:56] All right.
[01:36:57] And this is almost down the same line of thinking.
[01:37:00] So we, I kind of see you as the king of outsourcing, right?
[01:37:04] But for me, my whole life, I was doing a job that I absolutely loved.
[01:37:11] A job that I wouldn't outsource to anybody.
[01:37:15] Ever.
[01:37:16] And I feel like I was really lucky and even right now, I got to do this podcast.
[01:37:20] You know what?
[01:37:21] I love doing this podcast.
[01:37:22] And people have sent me, hey, we can help you, you know, set up for it and help you.
[01:37:27] You know, I, I would read books for you and give you notes.
[01:37:30] I'm like, no, I don't want you to help me read books and give me notes.
[01:37:33] I'm doing that.
[01:37:34] That's what I'm doing.
[01:37:35] So is there a job that would satisfy me?
[01:37:40] Would satisfy you that you said it?
[01:37:43] Well, let me ask you this, what jobs do you do that you took?
[01:37:46] I owe this thing.
[01:37:47] I'm not going to let anybody else do it.
[01:37:48] The podcast, for instance, my favorite part of bookwriting without the bookwriting.
[01:37:52] It's fantastic.
[01:37:53] And nobody is trying.
[01:37:56] I don't have some like suit who's paid to manage the bottom line.
[01:38:00] It was with no creative bone.
[01:38:02] His body trying to tell me how the podcast should be run.
[01:38:05] It's fantastic.
[01:38:06] So I think that the podcast I could see doing indefinitely.
[01:38:10] And there are many things like that for me.
[01:38:12] I mean, I could see doing, well, I'll give an example just because I have to take the opportunity to talk about
[01:38:18] Tang and on the jack of podcasts.
[01:38:20] Just a shafie or not.
[01:38:21] We'll have it this out.
[01:38:22] So the reason I stopped doing it, I mean, I got to, got to the World Championships.
[01:38:27] But the reason I stood up with what?
[01:38:29] I was a semi-finalist of the World Championships.
[01:38:32] I don't even know.
[01:38:33] I can't imagine what the World Championships in Tang and on the other hand.
[01:38:38] I don't think it's a dance book.
[01:38:39] How do you attack the other people?
[01:38:41] Like how do you get them out of the arena?
[01:38:44] How do you deal with it?
[01:38:45] What happens?
[01:38:46] It's, well, it's very delicate.
[01:38:48] So this points are something?
[01:38:50] Yeah, their judge is so.
[01:38:51] And it's just like, like, a diving competition.
[01:38:54] It's a zero to ten or something.
[01:38:55] But the point being, I stopped because I left an environment in which it was highly competitive.
[01:39:01] I went from Argentina where there are dozens, hundreds of World Class dancers to the US,
[01:39:06] where there's just our, there's like a handful of right.
[01:39:09] Oh, it's, it's, it's Bob again.
[01:39:11] Okay.
[01:39:12] Great.
[01:39:13] So the, the, the one thing, honestly, is teaching people to test assumptions and become better learners.
[01:39:23] That's it.
[01:39:24] That's my thing.
[01:39:25] So that's the one thing.
[01:39:26] That's the constant through all the books through the podcast.
[01:39:30] Don't believe everything you think detached to your word right?
[01:39:35] Assess and test the assumptions and get better at getting better, ultimately.
[01:39:42] That's it for me.
[01:39:43] But I, there are many things that I do now that I could see doing for a very, very long decades for sure, including the podcast.
[01:39:49] Good.
[01:39:50] The other podcast, we, we were talking about this earlier.
[01:39:52] The great thing about the podcast is, is that you can do whatever you want.
[01:39:57] Oh, yeah, it can be three minutes long, it can be three hours, it can be 30 hours long.
[01:40:01] You can talk about whatever you want.
[01:40:02] No one's going to, just do what you want.
[01:40:04] And that's, and if you've written a book, the amount of other people that start to weigh in on that thing, it's, it's, it's, can be a little bit.
[01:40:12] That's not oppressive, but it's just, not as nice as, hey, I'm going to turn this on and do whatever I want, which is a good feeling.
[01:40:20] All right.
[01:40:21] And, and speaking of doing whatever you want.
[01:40:26] And I know that's kind of you set your life up, which is awesome.
[01:40:30] But to take that, that notion to the extreme, if you got,
[01:40:37] diagnosed with a horrible disease, and I try to think of a better way to ask you this question, which isn't like, majorly depressing, because this is, but if you got,
[01:40:45] you're going to have to diagnose with a disease that was going to kill you in a year or 18 months, what would you do with those months?
[01:40:58] So I roleplay this all the time, not, not because I wanted to dwell in the darkness, but this is part of the rehearsing, the worst case scenario.
[01:41:07] So not only do I rehearse this for myself, but I try to spend time around people who are going to die.
[01:41:12] And when I get back to the Bay Area, I actually want to volunteer in a hospice center to contend with that.
[01:41:20] There are few things.
[01:41:21] So I would get my affairs in order relatively quickly.
[01:41:24] They're already largely in order so that my family would be taken care of.
[01:41:29] And to be honest, and there aren't many points in my life where I could say this, I would largely keep doing what I'm doing, honestly.
[01:41:38] I think that I stopped, for instance, the tech investing about two years ago, because I felt like I was replaceable.
[01:41:45] I felt like if I, in a sense, didn't participate, there were a hundred other people in line who were going to step up and write a check.
[01:41:53] And that wasn't a unique opportunity, nor a unique skill that I held to hopefully put into the world to benefit people in some way.
[01:42:04] But the ludicrous experiments, some more practical than others, and the podcasting and so on.
[01:42:12] I feel like I'm putting out the best work that I can.
[01:42:15] And I think I'd keep doing it.
[01:42:18] I'd certainly end in the last few years, after reading an essay, I think it's called the Tale End by Tim Urban on Wait but Why about how effectively by the time you're 18 and leave the house.
[01:42:33] You've spent 80% of the total hours you ever spend with your parents.
[01:42:38] I've reorganized my calendar, my year to spend a lot more time with my family, meaning my parents and my brother.
[01:42:46] And I think I'd keep doing what I'm doing, honestly, until I slipped, you know, and up in a pile of dust, which is where we're all in and up.
[01:42:57] We're ahead sooner or later, exactly.
[01:43:00] And I was listening, I keep wanting to do this.
[01:43:03] I want to when I'm listening to certain podcasts, sometimes I want to just live tweet, like when I'm having thoughts about them.
[01:43:10] And I do with rogue and sometimes I go, man, I should just be live tweeting this, because sometimes when he had who do you have, when he had Sam Harrison,
[01:43:17] I was just, there were so many things that they were saying that were just hilarious to me.
[01:43:21] And I want to just live tweet, but when you had shake or a lawn, at one point, I can't remember his quote.
[01:43:28] This, when you got to this topic, and, you know, used, you know, of what you would do, and it wasn't the same question, it was, but it was somewhere in the same thing.
[01:43:36] Maybe it was about money, you got enough money now, or something, something along those lines, and kind of at the same time, you know, he says, he says something like, you know, just imagine being able to spend all this time with your family.
[01:43:47] And then you said at the same time, cocaine in horse.
[01:43:51] I was like, I wanted to live tweet down, like, that's cold.
[01:43:58] Yeah, Shay and I had spent a couple of days together in toss, and which just for those people who don't have any context, he's also raised church of laudity, saying, you know, more men, you talk, and so I was like, cocaine in horse, which is the nature of my podcast.
[01:44:17] It's a little thing, it's a little bit. That was another one I wanted to live through, because he was saying to some really classic lines, and so on as well.
[01:44:26] All right, normal day to day, okay?
[01:44:30] No imminent death that I just placed in what you're healed, my son. Thank you.
[01:44:35] Demons, notice, it seems like you've gone through your life, going from all these different hobbies you talked to.
[01:44:42] Talk about jiu-jitsu, you do wrestle, you did judo when you were in Japan. You're talking, we show up here, you're talking about archery, right? You got all these different things going on.
[01:44:51] For me, I've only had a couple things that have made me feel that way, that thing, right?
[01:45:00] Number one is combat. That's good as it gets.
[01:45:05] For me, jiu-jitsu is the next thing down. It's this empty brain, and just awesomeness, and surfing is up there too.
[01:45:13] Maybe jamming with my band, getting it on in that way.
[01:45:18] How come you're jumping around so much, and is there anything that you always go back to?
[01:45:25] So I jump around. I had a conversation about this with one of my very close friends, Josh Waitskin.
[01:45:31] So Josh Waitskin, for those who don't know, he's the inspiration for the book in the movie, Searching for Bobby Fisher. He was a chess, well, consider to chess prodigy.
[01:45:40] I take some issue with the name. He doesn't like that label either.
[01:45:44] Very good at learning just about anything. He's also the first black belt under a incredible jiu-jitsu athlete in teacher named Marcelo Garcia.
[01:45:52] Who is? A deco-finding chimes in it. When echo chimes that he's wasn't put out that, yes, Marcelo Garcia is the jiu-jitsu.
[01:46:03] Marcelo is one of the finest grapplers in the last 100 years for sure.
[01:46:08] Which by the way, makes him the best grapplers in the history of the world and the universe.
[01:46:16] Exactly.
[01:46:17] No, this is completely true. I mean, I've not to go down the Marcelo rabbit hole, but I had the opportunity to train with Marcelo and it's just another planet.
[01:46:29] It's actually a Josh invited me when I get out to New York, Josh, so they come on by the academy.
[01:46:35] I'm like, okay, I know where I'm going to be there. So when I'm going to get out there, he's like, oh, we got keys and everything.
[01:46:40] Yeah, just like surface. Oh, it's a fantastic school. It's a fantastic school. And he's applied his learning approach to jiu-jitsu.
[01:46:51] He's applied it to Tai Chi push hands. He was a world champion and he's applied to a handful of things, but not a lot. He's not as frenetic as I am.
[01:47:01] But we've we've been a lot of time together. He's a very close friend and he said, and this is his words, no mind, but he feels like I am one of the best people on the planet at getting people from zero to 80% of a skill as quickly as possible.
[01:47:15] And he's focused on the last 1% getting someone from 99 to 100. So he works with some of the biggest names in the finance world.
[01:47:24] And I think that people who are very under the radar to get them from saying, beating 99.99% of the competition to 0.99.
[01:47:35] And I think those are complimentary skill sets. But for me, the high that I get is different from the high Josh gets.
[01:47:41] The high that I get is taking someone for instance. I didn't learn to switch talk to this. I didn't learn to swim properly until I was in my 30s.
[01:47:48] For a host reason, I won't bore everybody with. I did a TED talk on why that is absurd as it is. But taking someone who hasn't hasn't been able to swim ever and getting them in two days to the point where they can swim say open water in the ocean for a half a mile, which is completely.
[01:48:05] These are completely possible for someone who has some athletic background. That's my eye showing someone that the impossible or what they thought was impossible is not only possible, but in a time frame that seems completely unrealistic.
[01:48:22] So I think that's part of the reason I jump around is in part to learn, but it's also being able to teach someone in a way that saves 100s of hours and just to see their head go.
[01:48:33] And you get that obviously then you get that satisfaction yourself when you try something for the first time. Oh yeah, yeah, there's nothing better for me.
[01:48:40] When I figure out, for instance, with archery blank bail practice, and I'm like, oh my god, it's just like dry firing with a pistol to fix your like casting or healing. It's the same fucking thing. Oh my god, you know, and then I get all excited because I'm piecing these things together or oh the way that you train someone figure out their eye dominance.
[01:49:04] If you're constantly missing basketball shots by like an inch, you probably haven't figured out your eye dominance. It's like, oh, then you shift your centerline slightly so you're raising the ball in a different way. Oh my god, it applies in the same way to bowling even though no one even talked about bowling.
[01:49:19] Those types of things get me very excited. I always thought I was going to be a teacher because I had these coaches and teachers in 9th or 10th grade who steered me from this very bad path onto a much better path.
[01:49:30] And a lot of my friends growing up, Long Island ended up overdosing, dying, my best friend growing up was one of them or drug addicts or alcoholics.
[01:49:38] And I got steered in this other direction and that 9th, 10th grade window is what I always thought I would go back and teach. So I love teaching. So that's why I jump around.
[01:49:47] But what creates the zone for me is partially just that aha moment is exciting for me. So I do spend a lot of my time looking for fertile ground. So it's a new skill set.
[01:50:03] But these skill sets compound. So like the better you get at learning any skill, the faster you learn subsequent skills.
[01:50:11] If I had to default to a few activities, I would say it's and I have to be trying to be smarter about this, but it's a physical activity with a component of danger.
[01:50:22] That's it.
[01:50:23] It's a physical activity with a risk with real stakes of sometimes. That could be rally car racing, just very physical. It could be jujitsu. It could be a different martial arts.
[01:50:35] They tie a kickboxing where I spent the most time outside of jujitsu and wrestling.
[01:50:42] Those would be the activities that that put me in zone.
[01:50:46] Binacessity because the penalties are so swift and so immediate and so severe.
[01:50:53] Strongly incentivized to not think of the alphry runs are going to hit when someone's trying to kick you in the head.
[01:51:02] Next one down the list here. Now I was with the friend of my new day.
[01:51:07] We were doing some work on his car. Just like body work.
[01:51:10] You're sanding and then you're polishing and then you're sanding again. You're polishing and you're painting, priming and all this stuff.
[01:51:16] And there's a certain level of detachment and sort of for lack of a better word like a zen mindset where you're doing this thing, but you're not doing it.
[01:51:27] It's the same thing with cleaning guns. You're cleaning guns. You're just there. It's just a very calming thing. You know, sometimes when I just need to relax and just clean my weapons.
[01:51:34] I think everyone kind of does that.
[01:51:36] But do you do that? Is there anything that you do that you do that put you in that say to mind of that just let's let you kind of relax?
[01:51:44] Oh absolutely. There are there a number of them. And I view them as medicine. I need consistent dosing of these things.
[01:51:52] The first you come to mind a swimming now that I do for fun, which blows my mind to this day because I've so terrified of it forever.
[01:51:59] But swimming laps, just a very repetitive left right left right that rhythm is hypnotic for me.
[01:52:08] Somebody asked me the other day like, oh, do you still swim? I said no.
[01:52:11] I surf but I don't swim like I swim enough my life has been swimming. And I don't swim on purpose.
[01:52:20] Oh yeah. So and the reason somebody said why it's it's and I said bored right.
[01:52:25] Maybe I need to revisit that. So that boredom is it can be a positive thing. It can be. So I find this is one of the reasons that I this is slightly this is different because you have to pay attention with this one.
[01:52:38] But dog training. I would I would really deep with the hog training.
[01:52:43] And for a lot of folks, it's really monotonous. Shaping a behavior at high level is extremely repetitive.
[01:52:52] And I find it therapeutic. I love it. So swimming would be one. And here's how I make swimming a little more interesting to me.
[01:52:58] With swimming, I focus on the efficiency of strokes per night. So you got a little challenge going on.
[01:53:05] I have a game or I will look at instead of say right left breathe and then breathing to the alternate side. So you're breathing every third stroke. I'll try to do every fifth stroke. And I have these metrics that I used to keep me motivated. That's the little scooby snack.
[01:53:25] But cooking I find something I always hated until maybe three years ago, more five or five years ago. I find also very present state forcing. It's a forcing function for me.
[01:53:41] When you're trying to figure out five different dishes going at the same time and timing everything, you don't have any slack to think of other things.
[01:53:49] So I don't I very rarely cook for one person, meaning myself, but having groups over. We had an entire pig for my birthday a few months ago.
[01:53:59] And a spatch cocked for those who don't know that is as you basically splitting it down the middle and then spreading it out like a pancake.
[01:54:07] And we just created this raging inferno in my backyard with a pig and fish and all this stuff and everybody was involved probably ten different people.
[01:54:17] And I was not the the commander and chief for that one. We had a friend who really knows what he's doing.
[01:54:23] But just one of the most relaxing experiences that everybody had had. Everyone came away from that after two days of being involved and they said it felt like a six month vacation.
[01:54:32] I think that this is a problem for me right in the military. You starting really early in the military. You eat for time. You eat for to get few fuel in your system.
[01:54:41] And I'm really not a good relaxed. Let's take some time prepare the meals sit around and eat it. I'm shovel it in so we can go to more stuff.
[01:54:51] I don't enjoy that enough. And I love eating. I mean, I love eating, but I don't ever just sit and relax and eat.
[01:54:59] I'm always in the game, like trying to get that food down so I can go and get after it's a more any kind of detailed practice for me where I have immediate feedback is a can put me into that zone.
[01:55:10] Shooting shooting steel. I was just shooting steel.
[01:55:14] Yeah, shooting steel. Particularly if I'm doing any type of drilling at close distance with a handgun.
[01:55:21] Although there are different types of feedback. For me, if I'm doing longer range, marksmanship, then I'm thinking more about a lot of my breathing and so on with pistols.
[01:55:32] If I'm using whatever, clock 34 and then P45, whatever it might be, the focusing on the subtleties of predicting when you're going to pull the trigger.
[01:55:46] The flintures and the sort of stutters and stammers that can affect the shot and then making an adjustment and then taking the next 10 shots.
[01:55:54] I just find that endlessly interesting isn't the right word.
[01:55:58] Yeah, endlessly focusing. That's another thing that the military kind of screwed up for me.
[01:56:03] Because shooting in the military on the best ranges in the world with unlimited ammunition and all, that's what your job and so you get in this mode where you're just loving it.
[01:56:14] And then you get in the civilian world and you go to the range and the ammunition costs money.
[01:56:20] Right? You're all angry about that. And then they say, oh, you can't shoot steel on this range and what about moving targets? What about, you know, I want things.
[01:56:27] And you just get used to, so you see it spoiled in the military a little bit. And there's some great civilian ranges out there as well that offer the same thing that I'm
[01:56:35] Loved to utilize. It's awesome.
[01:56:38] Good. All right.
[01:56:41] I like that. There's some kind of a dichotomy between Zen State and shooting, but it's all in Irish flute.
[01:56:48] My preferred. I'm kidding.
[01:56:50] Okay.
[01:56:53] Cool. All right. Now, here's here's another one. So when I retired from the Navy and got out and started the consulting business working and one of my risk of earth's friends.
[01:57:06] That was staying in the military for its.
[01:57:12] It's welfare program. Right. It's a paycheck. Right. And he, the guy wasn't, you know, he wasn't all fired up anymore, but he was in.
[01:57:18] And so he had a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. So he just staying in.
[01:57:22] He kind of looked at me when I was getting out and I said, yeah, man, I got those to pay too, but I'm going to go and get after it somehow.
[01:57:28] And he said, what are you going to do with it? If it, you know, if the business doesn't work and you end up, you know, you're going to come back in and about what are you going to do?
[01:57:35] You won't be able to get back in my mobile.
[01:57:37] And I said, bro, worst case scenario.
[01:57:40] Everything goes to hell.
[01:57:42] Guess what I'm going to be doing. I have an RV. I will be in my RV with my family. We'll be driving up and down the coast of California.
[01:57:49] Rating, you get two schools and training and I'll be surfing. And it's all good. And I won't cost me barely anything to do that. My retirement will cover. It'll be good to go.
[01:57:57] You got to back up plan like that.
[01:58:01] Let me, let me rephrase that. If you needed a backup plan like that, what would it be?
[01:58:09] This is one of my favorite topics. So I would say that I have an infinite number of backup plans.
[01:58:17] And the way I think about that is by doing what I call fear setting. So much like you just said, looking at my goals, the worst things it could happen,
[01:58:29] the ways I could mitigate that and the way I could get back to where I am now, if all hell struck at once, helps me to remove the fear of taking these steps that might paralyze me otherwise.
[01:58:42] The second part is by, say, practicing fasting, practicing spending no money for certain periods of time.
[01:58:50] I don't fear, I would say, the top handful of things that tend to stop people from taking what they perceive as risks.
[01:58:58] The other very important thing is that risk has a very specific meaning for me.
[01:59:06] And I realized really on that people talk about risk tolerance, taking risks. But if they don't define it clearly, it can end up being paralyzing and how nabulous it is.
[01:59:18] So for me, risk is very simple. It is the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome.
[01:59:24] That's it. So most things I do, even though people look out at this, oh my god, this guy's investing in speculative startups.
[01:59:32] One guy in an idea, man, he's a risk taker. I don't view myself that way at all. I view myself as if anything someone who's very has taken a lot of time to get good mitigating risk.
[01:59:44] I'm a risk mitigator. And in the case of say, speculative investing, I am only using money that I can comfortably afford to lose.
[01:59:55] And for me, back up plan, similar to yourself, through my dog and an RV, gets him into a note mail, sleeping bag, you know,
[02:00:06] somebody's right in my backyard. I don't know if I have some dirt bag collabs and hang out there.
[02:00:10] Good to go. Yeah, go hang out with my parents, get to see more of them. Go for run in the woods.
[02:00:16] While I'm trying to figure out the next step, and you had that attitude when you were taking more legitimate risk.
[02:00:22] Now, obviously, you're pretty good to go. But in the beginning, when you moved out to the west coast, you had to have the similar attitude of, because I know I did that that attitude for me freed me.
[02:00:35] Like, oh, worst case scenario, I lose everything. Cool. I'll still have my RV. It's paid for.
[02:00:39] Yeah. We're good. Yeah, totally. I had that attitude.
[02:00:43] I'm going to be surfboards and any other human should ever have.
[02:00:46] And knives and surfboards. I, we rolled deep. I, I, I, I, I, I had that realization early on. And of course, when I first graduated from school went out to the west coast.
[02:00:58] I did not have a lot of money. I remember when I came out to California for the first time for a job interview. I couldn't afford a hotel.
[02:01:04] I stayed at the Fair Text Kickboxing gym on the second floor, sleeping on a bunk bed with a tie instructor sleeping above me and watched my clothes in the sink.
[02:01:13] And I was happy. I mean, I was fully content. I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
[02:01:20] And, but let's not kid ourselves. I mean, when I first moved out, it was 1999.
[02:01:26] This is at the peak of the bubble. Rentable prices are out of control.
[02:01:31] And I was making 40 grand a year.
[02:01:34] I was pretty free tax. And yeah. And my, my office, my desk was in the fire exit. I mean, they, they was completely illegal. I was, I had, I had, I had a pretty slick setup, but it was very low budget.
[02:01:49] And, but, but really what I think freed me on some level is realizing, and this hopefully doesn't sound prickish or arrogant or whatever, but no matter what difficulties might befall me.
[02:02:03] Whatever unemployment might come my way. There are people with fewer resources with less education who have figured it out before and survived.
[02:02:14] So if dozens or hundreds or thousands of millions of people have figured this out, I'm going to come out the other end of be fine.
[02:02:23] And so that was very reassuring to me.
[02:02:27] That's, that that is a good one. And move to the next question.
[02:02:34] Any misconceptions about you that you want to clear up?
[02:02:40] Well, you, you, you actually, you actually confirmed a misconception for everybody.
[02:02:44] Tonight, you said, oh, well, you know, Jockel is going to train somebody. He's going to need to beat them.
[02:02:48] And that's like people always think that. And it's just so wrong.
[02:02:52] So wrong. So wrong. I mean, I, I don't, I'm not going to go into it now because I talked about my podcast all the time that that stuff is ineffective and you, you actually have to lead people and you.
[02:03:00] So that was a good misconception. You pile on. I'll have to. I'll now spend another five years trying to debunk that proved to people that I'm not a drill instructor with a lash.
[02:03:11] But it's good. Thank you.
[02:03:13] No, she had it, which was, was deliberate. I'm just done.
[02:03:16] Jockel is so effective at busting my balls on Twitter and then everyone takes it literally. I'm like, okay, well, I, it's opportunity. But the, so the first misconception.
[02:03:25] So the cocaine and horrors only twice a week, folks.
[02:03:29] It is, it is not disabling. That's a joke internet, by the way.
[02:03:33] So the, I'd say the biggest misconception is, and it's very understandable. Look, I mean, my book titles.
[02:03:41] I didn't expect the four hour thing to become a thing. So the four hour work week funny story behind that. The original idea for the title and I dozens, but the one that, that I ended up testing.
[02:03:51] First was the two hour work week, which was about the amount of time I was spending managing my company the time.
[02:03:57] And some people at the publisher were like, it's way too unrealistic two hours a week and I was like, four.
[02:04:02] That's so much better as a shit.
[02:04:04] Perfect. And it sounds like a product you'd see after like the spray on hair and before the rotisserie chicken at three in the morning.
[02:04:12] It sounds like a different word. So I get it. But the biggest misconception from people who have not read the book or books is that I advocate eyed on this.
[02:04:23] Okay. And that's not the case. I have no problem with hard work as long as it's focused on the right things.
[02:04:30] So I think of maximizing per hour output that doesn't mean I advocate dropping a bunch of acid and like watching your cat walk around the house for 12 hours a day.
[02:04:39] That doesn't do much good for anyone. So that's the biggest misconception.
[02:04:43] I have no problem with hard work. I just have a whole doing something well that shouldn't be done at all. I think that's a waste of skill and a waste of energy.
[02:04:52] That's the biggest, right? There are plenty of other ones.
[02:04:55] You know something to that you need to watch out for is just because you work hard doesn't mean that you're doing good.
[02:05:03] Right. There's a bunch of little sayings about that. But just because you're working hard, getting up early and and you think you're getting after it.
[02:05:10] You might be moving a lot for your not making any progress and there's a big difference there. And I think that's something that people need to watch out for as well.
[02:05:15] Right. So the for instance, I think the prioritizing execute.
[02:05:19] People need to.
[02:05:22] I think that's such an important starting point. Like what you do is infinitely more important than how you do something.
[02:05:28] If you have a list of unimportant to do is and you're killing it with the unimportant to do is that's that's still a chalking up to a loss.
[02:05:36] Yeah. And you're still losing my friend. You're still losing.
[02:05:40] For me, it's when people ask me about time management, I'm like, no, no, no. If you don't have time, you don't have priorities.
[02:05:46] So focus on the what should you be doing. And for me, you know, the effective executive by Peter Drucker is is the classic there.
[02:05:54] Don't worry about your apps and your email management and so on. Just like free to book that's a few decades old that just talks about prioritizing.
[02:06:02] So the the biggest misconception. Yeah, just the whole four hour stick that is my blessing and my curse forever.
[02:06:08] That part. There's another reason why this is my first book with that four hour and the title.
[02:06:12] Oh, hopefully it'll sell.
[02:06:14] We'll see. I also lost the Timothy and went to Tim.
[02:06:18] Just so I don't have to feel like I'm going to cast eyes by my mom every time.
[02:06:22] What made you know, Timothy on the first ones?
[02:06:24] I don't know. Sounded more official. I have no idea. I honestly have no idea.
[02:06:30] Awesome. All right. We're getting one more question here.
[02:06:34] You as a leader, right? There's actually millions of people that follow.
[02:06:42] Right? That listen to you. That respect or what you say.
[02:06:48] And they truly follow your lead. I mean, clearly they follow your lead.
[02:06:54] We saw this with the launch of or the release. What's it called when a book comes out.
[02:07:00] When my book came out. I think it was. Yeah, you would kind of predict it everything that was going to happen to a
[02:07:06] team. Like, yeah, when we talk about this book, it's going to be going by. And so people clearly follow you and listen to what you say
[02:07:16] as a leader. And I don't know if you foresee this off of that way, but you are a leader.
[02:07:24] Two questions. One, where do you think you fall short?
[02:07:28] And two, and more important, where are you trying to lead people? Yeah, these are good.
[02:07:38] So I haven't thought of myself as a leader, but I think that two terms sometimes get
[02:07:48] used interchangeably and I view them as very different. So as a leader, if I'm
[02:07:54] looking through that lens of myself, I think a very good at affecting national conversations and steering the attention of
[02:08:06] groups to one thing for sustained periods of time. I think I'm very good at that. And helping people to prioritize.
[02:08:14] If I were to view myself as a manager, I think I have many deficiencies. And one of them would be, and this has been a
[02:08:26] help in a hindrance as many things are. In patients, I have extremely high standards and hold myself to just
[02:08:40] be a ridiculous degree of expectation for perfection, which of course, I had leads to a lot of the problems we've talked about earlier.
[02:08:50] But on the flip side, I get a lot done in part, I think, because that is a driver.
[02:08:56] That can also damage relationships very quickly. And it can in a management environment,
[02:09:04] it can cause hurt feelings and people to not put forth their best because they feel like they are being
[02:09:10] criticized and not lauded for their successes. And in part that is because as an athlete,
[02:09:16] I really, and hopefully it doesn't sound weird, I don't really care for sounds. We're actually in sports and in business.
[02:09:24] My general feeling was, I remember mental early on, said something like this to be.
[02:09:28] He said, don't tell me about the good stuff, the good stuff takes care of itself, just tell me about the bad stuff.
[02:09:32] And that's always been my personal policy for myself.
[02:09:36] But that does not always translate well to team environments.
[02:09:42] So that, that I think is my homework that, and deficit that I've been working hard to
[02:09:52] correct for the last few years is getting better at managing people who do not necessarily
[02:09:58] come to that mindset at all times, which I think can be a big problem when it's at a control.
[02:10:06] But that would be the biggest deficit. But if we're, if we're defining leader as someone who
[02:10:10] can put forth a vision or an objective or catalyze a movement and move attention in people in one direction,
[02:10:20] I feel like I'm quite good at mitigating the risk of that, because for instance, people think that
[02:10:30] the haters, this is a very popular word on the internet, and not all critics are haters, of course.
[02:10:36] Important to be able to take criticism and feedback, but many people are thrust into a position
[02:10:42] where they have the opportunity to lead people virtually on the internet, which is a huge responsibility
[02:10:48] and I take it extremely seriously.
[02:10:52] Worried about, say, their detractors causing problems.
[02:10:56] It's not the detractors in my experience that can do the most damage. It's the die hard
[02:11:00] fans who get the message wrong. Who get the directive and misinterpret it.
[02:11:06] That is where you have to do damage control and to think ahead. So I think I'm quite good at that.
[02:11:10] As far as where I'm leading people, if I'm leading them anywhere,
[02:11:16] I've always, I should say always, but the last at least five years thought of my goal
[02:11:22] as creating a benevolent army of super learners effectively, who can teach
[02:11:32] in turn 10 additional people each the same skillset.
[02:11:38] So to propagate a toolkit that enables people to be elite problems
[02:11:44] all of us instead of accidental haphazard problem creators has been my goal for at least the last five years
[02:11:54] explicitly teaching people how to learn, so they can teach people how to learn.
[02:12:00] That's right. And part of learning is problem solving. So you're by definition, getting people who are good
[02:12:08] at dissecting problems, testing assumptions. That's where many people.
[02:12:14] Yeah, that's solid. I mean, that's obviously a really positive thing. I always talk about the fact
[02:12:20] that I want to help people learn how to learn. I talk about that all the time and I've said that before
[02:12:26] on the podcast. We'll teach people how to not not what to think, but how to think.
[02:12:30] Obviously, I'm not the same scale that you are in terms of volume of masses of people.
[02:12:36] But there's definitely some people out there that I think are following me in some way and that might be a strong word.
[02:12:46] But I always think that what I'm trying to get people to do if you're following me,
[02:12:52] I'm really trying to get you to follow yourself and lead yourself. I don't, I don't, you know, lead yourself.
[02:12:58] Okay, you see my path? That's cool. My path was good. I like my path.
[02:13:04] Now, forge your path. You know, figure out where you want to go. How are you going to get,
[02:13:10] how you're going to get stronger, how you're going to get faster, how you're going to get smarter, how you're going to get better.
[02:13:16] And I always think that those answers work best when they don't come from somebody else,
[02:13:22] but when they come from yourself. Absolutely. And I think also the teaching people
[02:13:30] how to learn, enabling my audience to learn how to learn. And when I say that, I mean,
[02:13:39] ten hundred times faster than would be expected in a lot of domains.
[02:13:44] That's only one leg of the stool. So let's say there are three legs. The other two would be teaching them
[02:13:49] to dissect and manage fear. And then the third leg would be teaching them to be emotionally aware and resilient.
[02:13:57] And then I think it's covered largely by stoicism. If you take it as a practice and not as something to passively
[02:14:05] ingest. Yeah. And I just talked about stoicism on my last podcast because somebody hit me up on Twitter and says,
[02:14:11] do you practice stoicism? And I was like, no, I just said no, because I'm pretty
[02:14:15] ters on Twitter. And the guy kind of wrote back, I don't want to say he was offended. And I don't want to rehash the whole story, because I just talked about it in the last podcast, but, you know, he said, hey, what's wrong with stoicism?
[02:14:27] And I never wrote back. I'm like, man, there's nothing wrong with stoicism. I get it.
[02:14:32] But for me to say that I practiced it or even that I learned it from studying the agents is not true. I didn't go to Princeton.
[02:14:40] You know, I didn't study when I was in high school. I wasn't an overachiever. I was an underachiever. I was a, I was a, I was a trouble maker.
[02:14:48] So I didn't learn anything about stoicism until much later in my life. My roots aren't my beliefs aren't founded on what I read. They're founded on what I lived.
[02:14:59] And that's just, it does it make sense? Yeah. When I look at it down and people have always asked me, are you going to do marks or early on the, I'm going to do marks or early on the podcast?
[02:15:08] And, and really all of you saying, there's like, look, Mark, as Rayleigh said this, thousands of years before I did.
[02:15:13] Awesome. And, but I, I would love this be all educated, but I wasn't. I was just, I went down the path that I went down and experience the things that I experienced in my life.
[02:15:24] And I came to the same conclusions that these ancients came to. So it's an interesting dynamic.
[02:15:32] No, it is. And I, I think it's worth noting also that if you find anyone who is consistently good at operating at a high level in stressful environments.
[02:15:45] The tools are the same. Exactly. I mean, if you read one of my favorite books, Musashi, historical fiction, fantastic book.
[02:15:54] It's all the same shit. You read that. Stoicism, stoicism, synicos, my real introduction.
[02:16:00] I didn't come into my life until 2004. So it was after graduation.
[02:16:05] For those of you that want me to do Musashi on this podcast, I'm not going to do it.
[02:16:10] Not going to do Musashi not. Tell you why. And if you've read it, you know, you can't.
[02:16:15] You gotta go through Musashi to get to the end. You gotta go through the whole thing to get the end.
[02:16:21] It is one of the best rewards in all of literature to get to the end. And the end, this is a, what's a how many pages of Musashi is in 100?
[02:16:29] It's massive book. And it's, and you have to read the whole thing. And it's all good.
[02:16:35] But it all comes. And it's literally, I think in my copy because I was laughing about this.
[02:16:40] It is two or three pages from the end of the whole book.
[02:16:43] It's where we get to the end of Musashi. Where you go.
[02:16:47] Damn, that just happened.
[02:16:50] The other pay off is so good. And the, oh, and I'm not going to do it on here.
[02:16:54] Because obviously, I have to give away the payoff. And so I'm not going to do that.
[02:16:57] And you have to go and read Musashi. It's, it's awesome. And the ending is just as good as it gets.
[02:17:05] It's as good as it gets. And it's historical fiction. But that happened. Oh, yes.
[02:17:09] Document it. Oh, yeah. And it doesn't get any better. So read Musashi for yourself people.
[02:17:15] Maybe I'll give us like a one year lead time. And then I'll do it one year.
[02:17:20] The five years episode one hundred. Maybe we'll do give people enough heads up. Episode one hundred. We'll go back and do Musashi. If you.
[02:17:27] And I'll give a spoiler alert at the beginning.
[02:17:31] Because Musashi is good when you get to the end and go, oh, yeah.
[02:17:34] Is that kind of like the matrix? What's that?
[02:17:41] Is there like a spoiler at the end of the matrix?
[02:17:45] Oh, does it kind of like a, oh, man. I got to watch more movies.
[02:17:49] I'm actually a more echo Charles movies.
[02:17:51] Highly recommend, babe.
[02:17:53] Vals of pig. That's good like a jacca.
[02:17:55] Did you watch that up once a time?
[02:17:57] I can't think you got some paper stories.
[02:17:59] Yeah, I do. So I tend to, when I write books.
[02:18:03] So then I don't feel isolated. I will generally, I write late at night.
[02:18:07] That's what I do. I sit this up. So I can do research in interviews on it.
[02:18:09] I'll do my writing generally between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.
[02:18:13] And so that I don't feel like I'm sitting in a cave by myself.
[02:18:17] And I will generally listen to the same track or same album over and over again for a given book.
[02:18:25] That's how I focus. And then I will have a movie playing on mute in the background.
[02:18:29] So that I feel like there are other people in the room.
[02:18:32] Now, at one point, I was like, all right, I've seen the born identity 5,000 times.
[02:18:37] I don't want to see it anymore. I have seen because I was for the first book.
[02:18:40] I've seen Sean of the Dead, which is the comedy 6,000 times.
[02:18:44] I don't want to watch that anymore.
[02:18:45] I'll just watch it on repeat. So I might watch a movie 5 times a night.
[02:18:48] Okay, let's go to Amazon Prime. And I pull it up and the first movie that gets displayed is
[02:18:53] Babe, that little pig and farmer hog it.
[02:18:57] And I put it on and I was like, oh, this is hilarious.
[02:18:59] All right, well, I'll pick a real movie after this. And then I was like,
[02:19:02] Good God, this is a fine film.
[02:19:05] And the run a good duck.
[02:19:09] Anyway, so yeah, babe, I don't think you'd actually like, I think you'd be disgusted with my recommendation.
[02:19:14] But I don't watch enough. I don't watch a lot of movies.
[02:19:18] I think you'd like Narcos, which is a mini series.
[02:19:22] I've heard of that one.
[02:19:23] That Pablo Escobar.
[02:19:24] Right. I've heard about that one.
[02:19:26] Then you're jumping into what, like, 30 hours of content?
[02:19:30] That is only, yeah, you're looking at that 20.
[02:19:33] Yes, then you're in the vortex.
[02:19:35] You know what? You don't want to watch that?
[02:19:37] Like when I'm 78.
[02:19:39] I'll watch Narcos. Put that on my list.
[02:19:41] Did you have any questions echo?
[02:19:44] Yeah, I have a question.
[02:19:45] Yeah, go Charles, try me then.
[02:19:47] For the second time.
[02:19:48] You know how, like, I'm going to go to entrepreneurship.
[02:19:52] Sure. You know how it feels like, anyway, that it's kind of become like a trendy thing to be an entrepreneur.
[02:19:58] Whereas a lot of times, like, you might even notice people.
[02:20:00] They don't know what they want to do. They don't know what problem they want to solve or product.
[02:20:05] They just want to be an entrepreneur.
[02:20:07] Because it seems like it's like this cool, the cool thing now.
[02:20:11] Do you find that to be the case?
[02:20:13] And if so, is that a good thing?
[02:20:16] Ah, yes.
[02:20:18] Entrepreneurship.
[02:20:19] I think that it is highly romanticized and it's easy to believe.
[02:20:26] All you got to do is drop out of college and the next thing you know, your Zuckerberg.
[02:20:30] Yeah.
[02:20:30] Any of a company with billions of dollars.
[02:20:32] But that's not how it works, folks.
[02:20:34] And so I do think that entrepreneurship is a mindset.
[02:20:41] You don't have to start a company to be an entrepreneur.
[02:20:44] And if you were to look at the Spanish equivalent, like,
[02:20:47] Embrender to like undertake.
[02:20:49] It is someone who makes something happen.
[02:20:51] And you can innovate with an company that is not your own,
[02:20:55] with an organization that is not your own or you can create a company.
[02:20:59] So someone who makes things happen at the end of the day.
[02:21:02] So who is it? Is it in a, are we in a boom cycle?
[02:21:06] I think if we're looking at tech entrepreneurship, absolutely.
[02:21:09] I think that there are certain experiences every human being should have,
[02:21:13] even if they fail.
[02:21:14] I do think that starting a business or enterprise,
[02:21:19] even if it's a side gig that they moonlight,
[02:21:22] is worth the education.
[02:21:25] But there's a huge survivorship bias out there,
[02:21:29] and it's a great learning. So you open a barren, so to say.
[02:21:32] And loan behold, you see all these mutual funds advertising.
[02:21:35] Oh my god, they've had incredible returns for 10 years straight.
[02:21:39] Well, maybe they're just, let me,
[02:21:43] mutual funds that happen to survive by luck for 10 or 20 years.
[02:21:47] They have to place the right bets of the 500.
[02:21:50] Well, the other 490 or no longer advertising.
[02:21:53] So you're getting a fall sample size.
[02:21:55] And you see that a lot with entrepreneurship.
[02:21:57] They don't talk enough about the failures.
[02:21:59] They don't talk enough about the vast majority who will fail.
[02:22:02] Is it good?
[02:22:03] I think that it's good for certain groups.
[02:22:07] It's certainly good for investors if they can play the game well.
[02:22:10] Because even if there are a thousand shitty ideas,
[02:22:14] that might mean if more people hire percentage of,
[02:22:18] say, high schoolers or college students or otherwise
[02:22:21] are going into entrepreneurship that you get next to five that change the world.
[02:22:24] At the end of the day.
[02:22:26] So I am a big fan of entrepreneurship,
[02:22:29] even though much like anything else that is perceived as high-risk.
[02:22:34] And therefore, treated sometimes with reckless abandon
[02:22:37] where people are throwing hail marries when they should be doing risk management.
[02:22:40] You're going to have a high fatality rate.
[02:22:43] And I don't view that as a bad thing.
[02:22:47] It's necessarily.
[02:22:48] But I do think that, and this is actually a question that Brian Johnson,
[02:22:54] who is a friend of mine, he started a company called Brain Tree,
[02:22:57] a sold for I think 800 million cash to eBay.
[02:23:01] And he settled.
[02:23:03] He said, he said, he's a little boy.
[02:23:06] He, he shows up in, in Tullstein's as well.
[02:23:10] But the question that he has because he's constantly flooded with
[02:23:14] various questions from entrepreneurs who want to make it
[02:23:18] at our million dollars.
[02:23:19] Oh, what should I do this?
[02:23:20] I do that.
[02:23:21] What about this idea?
[02:23:22] What about that idea?
[02:23:23] Is it an itch or is it a burn?
[02:23:26] And he's like, if it's just a little itch, don't do it.
[02:23:29] You're going to fail.
[02:23:30] Because for the other people out there, where it's a burn,
[02:23:32] they can't not do it.
[02:23:34] They're going to rip your face off.
[02:23:36] And that I think is a very good question.
[02:23:40] And the other one, which I think originally came from,
[02:23:46] I think about this now,
[02:23:48] a vendor holy fields first coach told him that he could be heavyweight
[02:23:55] or at the time, it probably cruiserweight champion of the world.
[02:23:59] And he asked a vendor if he wanted to do it.
[02:24:02] And he said, you didn't know he had to ask his mom.
[02:24:04] So he went back, asked his mom, yes, I would like to do it.
[02:24:07] He said, well, is that a, is that a dream or is that a goal?
[02:24:13] Those are two very, very different things.
[02:24:16] So I think that if you feel like you can't not do it or on the flip side
[02:24:21] as I would probably approach it, if you can look at it as a short term experiment
[02:24:25] where you're doing a phase one to see if you can develop any traction
[02:24:28] or get 10 friends to buy, whatever it might be.
[02:24:30] And you can cap the downside.
[02:24:32] I always think about this first.
[02:24:34] I don't think about the 800 million I might make.
[02:24:36] How can I cap the downside?
[02:24:37] Then by all means, you're taking in my opinion,
[02:24:41] the measured intelligent approach.
[02:24:42] Hey, yeah, throw a bunch on the wall and see if anything sticks.
[02:24:45] Yeah, because it's not really like the trend, the Fed,
[02:24:49] you know, that I mentioned, that's not really what it says.
[02:24:53] It's like saying, I mean, now we kind of have this emergence of like the grind.
[02:24:58] We're hard and that's now that's kind of cool.
[02:25:01] You know, the working, 20 hours a week, like that's kind of be coming to like,
[02:25:05] you know, a Gary Vee, how you grind it.
[02:25:09] Oh, 20 hours a day, yeah.
[02:25:11] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:25:12] It's, it can work. I think that you just have to be careful with what I would suggest everybody do.
[02:25:18] And I'm not sure if it's still on Wikipedia, believe it is.
[02:25:23] Study cognitive biases.
[02:25:25] Yeah, humans get themselves into a lot of trouble with cognitive biases.
[02:25:29] Whether it's sunk cost, Valice, you've put X amount of money or time into something
[02:25:33] and therefore you continue to put good money after bad,
[02:25:36] because you feel like you have to make it back the same way you lost it.
[02:25:39] Or the survivorship bias that I talked about.
[02:25:42] You have, there's a big difference between correlation and causation.
[02:25:45] Things that happen at the same time and things that, for instance,
[02:25:48] and things that cause something else to happen.
[02:25:51] So you just have to ask, like,
[02:25:54] over 1,000 people who do X, how many are going to get the outcome that is being showcased.
[02:25:59] And if the answer is, I don't know, then you should be really careful about assuming that a leads to be.
[02:26:04] Right?
[02:26:05] And for me, it also comes back to the adherence.
[02:26:09] So if I'm trying to coach 100 entrepreneurs and if I'm talking to three entrepreneurs,
[02:26:14] it's very case by case.
[02:26:15] But if I'm talking to a class which I did for a long time,
[02:26:18] class of high-tech entrepreneurs, 100 students hypothetically,
[02:26:22] I want the advice I give them to apply to the greatest percentage of people in the class as possible,
[02:26:28] or to be usable.
[02:26:30] And if I say 20 hours a day,
[02:26:34] there might be one or two mutants who can do that and sustain it.
[02:26:37] The rest are going to flame out.
[02:26:39] And for me, in that environment, it's about finding first the good program you can follow,
[02:26:48] as opposed to the best program that will knock out 99%.
[02:26:53] But, environment dependent.
[02:26:56] Now for in Buds, okay.
[02:26:58] That might be a different situation.
[02:27:00] If you're training dogs for say military or police utilization,
[02:27:06] probably a different story.
[02:27:08] If you are looking for athletes for ultra-indurance competition,
[02:27:13] or 24-hour plus competitions, you are looking for mutants,
[02:27:17] make no mistake about it.
[02:27:19] But if I'm trying to encourage the greatest number of people to attempt out to
[02:27:24] partnership and succeed, then I'm going to adjust my advice accordingly.
[02:27:28] Hey, do you ever, I get a lot of sleep for instance.
[02:27:30] People are like, oh my god, that's Paris guys.
[02:27:32] Before I, you must get two hours of sleep a night.
[02:27:34] I've done all sorts of weird stuff with sleep deprivation.
[02:27:37] I've done polyphase, excleep, where I've done whatever it is,
[02:27:40] two to four hours a night for ages on end.
[02:27:44] But my default is 8 to 9 hours a night.
[02:27:47] I love sleep.
[02:27:48] I'm sorry, Jocca, but I didn't love it.
[02:27:50] Hey, do you ever get, like, you know, like entrepreneurship as like this,
[02:27:54] the trendy thing to do, do you ever get annoyed when you see like,
[02:27:57] potent poses, you know what, you know how they subscribe to all the things.
[02:28:01] And then they always want to talk about it and you use all the jargon, you know.
[02:28:05] I would say I'll tell you what annoys me more.
[02:28:09] I don't mind people who are blissfully unaware and extremely enthusiastic.
[02:28:15] Because quite frankly, oh, I shouldn't speak for everybody, but I think everybody's been there.
[02:28:19] Like I remember graduating in 1999,
[02:28:22] oh my god was I excited to get into tech and entrepreneurship.
[02:28:25] Yeah, I remember this fact, I kind of knew a friend of a friend who sold a company for someone,
[02:28:30] godly, someone money, three hundred four million.
[02:28:32] I was like, what?
[02:28:34] I got smart, but he's not that smart.
[02:28:37] Yeah.
[02:28:37] And it was a very exciting time.
[02:28:39] And I don't think in that, in that world that excitement can be undervalued, really.
[02:28:45] I think it's the fuel.
[02:28:46] I think it's a big part of the fuel.
[02:28:49] The people who bother me are the bee players who think
[02:28:54] they're Elon Musk or the or the once your lucky couldn't pull it off twice or didn't attempt.
[02:29:04] Once your lucky twice your good, the people who had good timing and now think they walk on water.
[02:29:09] Yeah.
[02:29:10] Like the kind of they start a course now, those kind of guys.
[02:29:14] Oh, they're really in different varieties.
[02:29:16] And I mean, I'd love to see them all around off a cliff like Lemming.
[02:29:20] And they make me absolutely insane because the best of the best of the best when you meet them.
[02:29:25] They don't act like Dix.
[02:29:27] Well, I should take it back.
[02:29:28] They're probably a few.
[02:29:29] But in general, they have nothing to prove.
[02:29:32] They have nothing to prove.
[02:29:33] Like more cellar car Cia, he doesn't walk around with invisible lats syndrome.
[02:29:37] Yeah.
[02:29:38] Like me and mugging people in the street.
[02:29:39] Are you kidding me?
[02:29:40] He could destroy all.
[02:29:41] He just doesn't.
[02:29:42] He's so far above it.
[02:29:43] He doesn't care.
[02:29:44] These are nice.
[02:29:45] Got to begin with.
[02:29:46] But yeah, the folks who walk around a lot of attitude in our country.
[02:29:49] A lot of attitude and are acting.
[02:29:50] Here's the description entitled.
[02:29:53] People who feel like the world owes them something.
[02:29:57] Those people make me insane.
[02:29:58] And there's a lot of instillate kind of value.
[02:30:00] That's part of the reason I stopped all of my early stage tech investing two years ago.
[02:30:03] I was like, I'm out.
[02:30:04] This is no fun anymore.
[02:30:06] For a lot of reasons, but that was one of them.
[02:30:08] I was like, I'm sick of sitting down people who have something sketched at on a piece of paper.
[02:30:14] And now they're asking for 20 million dollars or 20 million dollar valuation.
[02:30:18] I'm just like, what have you done?
[02:30:20] I, I, I, I, I, I, I.
[02:30:22] Good on ya, great plan.
[02:30:25] I know you want to change the world like everybody I've talked to today with your photo sharing app.
[02:30:30] Fantastic.
[02:30:31] What have you built before?
[02:30:34] Because you walked in here, like you're, you know,
[02:30:36] levitating because you walk on water.
[02:30:38] Then I appreciate the confidence slash arrogance.
[02:30:41] But what if you actually built the entitlement is what I can't stand.
[02:30:45] And, uh, one of my favorite answers I ask people a lot of the time me to if you could put anything on a billboard.
[02:30:51] What would your answer be?
[02:30:52] So there are a few favorites.
[02:30:54] Displund equals freedom.
[02:30:56] That's one.
[02:30:57] Another is no one owes you anything.
[02:31:00] No one owes you anything.
[02:31:03] It's from a multiple time world champion.
[02:31:05] And, uh, yeah, I think that, uh,
[02:31:09] by Huckercrick, a lot of the entrepreneurs and otherwise who feel entitled will get
[02:31:14] served humble by whether it's by competition or by the universe.
[02:31:17] So I don't have to do it myself.
[02:31:19] I was going to say I don't think this even has anything to do with entrepreneurs.
[02:31:22] You know, you just get people that are acting like that.
[02:31:24] People that are acting like that.
[02:31:25] Yeah, that's the way it is.
[02:31:26] Yeah, it's interesting.
[02:31:27] It is interesting.
[02:31:28] He that guy.
[02:31:29] Yeah.
[02:31:30] My brother, he goes to San Francisco.
[02:31:32] Sometimes I think he has a tech company.
[02:31:34] And they, he, he said it's interesting that it's this bad now.
[02:31:39] Like you have, like, groupies of tech entrepreneurship.
[02:31:43] You have fanboys of posters to be a business person.
[02:31:47] You know, I like, you know, like a rock star anymore.
[02:31:49] It's like, oh, my tech entrepreneur.
[02:31:51] Oh, yeah.
[02:31:52] I mean, it's a weird environment, but I, I'm very much of the opinion that as per
[02:31:56] versus it might seem, or as per versus it is on many levels and weird and unsustainable,
[02:32:03] there's good that will come from it.
[02:32:05] Yeah.
[02:32:06] The more entrance you have in the race, just like the more freaks and mutants you're going to find.
[02:32:10] And those people are interesting.
[02:32:12] Yeah.
[02:32:13] I'm so cool that I'm just going to wait until this blood and the streets and the games
[02:32:16] a little easier for me.
[02:32:17] All right.
[02:32:20] Echo.
[02:32:21] Yes.
[02:32:22] Anyone wants to support this podcast?
[02:32:25] How should they do it?
[02:32:26] They do by the way.
[02:32:27] If they do.
[02:32:28] Yeah.
[02:32:29] Twitter and whatnot, they do use the way.
[02:32:32] First off, support yourself as I always say, if you don't know, can't
[02:32:36] fair, say no, you know about this stuff.
[02:32:37] What I'm going to say anyway, supplementation.
[02:32:40] Talk about efficiency from time to time.
[02:32:42] I know.
[02:32:43] Shroom tech utilizes oxygen, more efficiently in your body.
[02:32:49] That's what Shroom tech sport is for.
[02:32:52] You already said that before?
[02:32:54] You said it before.
[02:32:55] Anyway, on it has a bunch of stuff that's on it.
[02:32:58] That's the supplementation that you want to engage in because you don't want to jump
[02:33:02] supplements.
[02:33:03] So on it.
[02:33:04] Doc on slash jockel.
[02:33:05] 10% off and supplement your wallet as well.
[02:33:09] And then of course the Amazon click through.
[02:33:12] Christmas is coming out.
[02:33:13] Christmas is going.
[02:33:15] Various birthdays.
[02:33:17] I'm not going to say when mine is, but it's soon.
[02:33:20] If you shop on Amazon click through our website, you can support this podcast in that
[02:33:25] way.
[02:33:26] If you're in the mood too.
[02:33:27] So yeah, you go to the website, doc op podcast.com.
[02:33:30] Click through and then do your shopping regardless of what you're buying.
[02:33:33] Whether or not you're buying Tim's book.
[02:33:35] Tools for Titans.
[02:33:37] Or doc date.
[02:33:40] Okay.
[02:33:41] You go buy some duct tape on there.
[02:33:42] You can buy tools of Titans.
[02:33:43] Yeah.
[02:33:44] You could actually use duct tape to make a handle and turn it into a kettle book as you
[02:33:48] actually use duct tape.
[02:33:49] It's a big book.
[02:33:50] You can get jockel white tea.
[02:33:52] Which is.
[02:33:53] When no.
[02:33:54] It's back.
[02:33:55] It's back.
[02:33:56] We're there.
[02:33:57] By the time this podcast release, I think we'll be there.
[02:33:59] We ordered a ton this time so you can get it.
[02:34:03] You can buy the book, extreme ownership.
[02:34:05] And if you don't have enough jocca.
[02:34:07] Jocca does make a number of cameo appearances in Tools of Titans.
[02:34:10] That is right.
[02:34:11] That is right.
[02:34:12] That is I am in Tools of Titans, which is awesome.
[02:34:14] And I appreciate you throw in me in there.
[02:34:17] Of course.
[02:34:18] And just a ton of other great information.
[02:34:23] I also got some mugs coming.
[02:34:26] You can buy mugs.
[02:34:28] They say they try to keep it simple.
[02:34:30] You don't have to say on it.
[02:34:31] They say get after it because that's really much the answer to everything.
[02:34:34] Yeah, and you can kind of tell like because it's going to be knockoffs potentially.
[02:34:39] There's like an official.
[02:34:41] It's been approved.
[02:34:42] Jocco.
[02:34:43] They're jocquoproof.
[02:34:44] Some people if they get bumper stickers, which I might mention a bit.
[02:34:48] But the envelope that comes, some of them are jocquoproof.
[02:34:52] That's all I'm going to say.
[02:34:53] Yeah, these mugs, these are manly mugs.
[02:34:55] I could fit probably at my entire fist in this mug.
[02:34:59] If you get chased by a cassowary, you could probably crack it skull with this.
[02:35:03] It's a very functional piece of porcelainware.
[02:35:07] Or whatever that may be.
[02:35:08] Or carbon fiber, maybe.
[02:35:10] That's what we do.
[02:35:11] What else?
[02:35:12] Well, of course we have the store.
[02:35:15] Jocco store.
[02:35:17] If you like shirts, if you wear t-shirts from time to time, hoodies, winter coming up.
[02:35:21] When you get to states, Australia might be different.
[02:35:24] But they have your hoodies.
[02:35:26] But yeah, shirts, if you like shirts and whatnot, check them out.
[02:35:29] See which one you like.
[02:35:30] And then if you buy one of those, that's a good way to support the podcast.
[02:35:34] If you're in the mood to do so.
[02:35:37] And as Jocco said, the mugs, I'm going to change the travel mugs.
[02:35:42] Okay.
[02:35:43] We're going to improve them.
[02:35:45] Well, we approve that.
[02:35:47] There you go.
[02:35:48] I like it.
[02:35:49] There you go.
[02:35:50] Boom.
[02:35:51] Yeah.
[02:35:51] But yeah, go in there and see what happens.
[02:35:52] So try to be a podcast.
[02:35:53] Yeah, you just try to Tim Ferriss's podcast.
[02:35:55] If you don't already, probably do.
[02:35:57] Most people do.
[02:35:58] Yeah.
[02:35:59] I'm just going to say, just past 100 million downloads.
[02:36:02] Well, first business interview podcast.
[02:36:04] I should do so.
[02:36:05] When are you going to start stepping up your game though?
[02:36:07] In a thorn.
[02:36:08] Every day I'm trying to step up my game.
[02:36:10] And the YouTube channel, which echo has now begun to engage in,
[02:36:16] which is appreciated by all of us.
[02:36:18] Me over here, I'm appreciating it.
[02:36:19] Yeah.
[02:36:20] So thank you for doing that.
[02:36:21] There's more videos coming out.
[02:36:23] Exerps.
[02:36:24] Yeah.
[02:36:25] So I do have to kind of disclose this claim,
[02:36:28] whichever.
[02:36:29] So I was going into a through a camera transition phase.
[02:36:34] So the excerpts.
[02:36:37] There was a small delay on that.
[02:36:39] But the transition phase is over and we're good to go.
[02:36:43] So we'll do more excerpts stuff.
[02:36:45] I want to make another disclaimer and disclosure,
[02:36:48] which is for those of you who see this on video.
[02:36:50] I apologize for shopping at Gap Kids for my shirt.
[02:36:53] These guys are fucking huge animals.
[02:36:56] And I wanted to feel more confident.
[02:36:59] Gap Kids.
[02:37:02] I like it.
[02:37:03] Anything else?
[02:37:04] That's it.
[02:37:06] Also, we did the Extreme Ownership Muster in San Diego, California.
[02:37:11] It was awesome.
[02:37:13] If you want to come and you're on the East Coast,
[02:37:16] you want to come May 4th and 5th, 2017,
[02:37:19] Extreme Ownership Muster,
[02:37:21] number two in New York City.
[02:37:23] Mario Grand Marquis.
[02:37:26] It's going to be awesome.
[02:37:27] And I'm going to tell you,
[02:37:28] I haven't said it yet on the podcast,
[02:37:32] because I wanted to give people the opportunity
[02:37:34] that we'll already in the game and we're tracking to get there.
[02:37:37] But it's going to sell out.
[02:37:38] It's selling really quickly.
[02:37:39] So if you want to come by now,
[02:37:41] Extreme Ownership Muster,
[02:37:44] you'll probably come to this one.
[02:37:46] Yeah.
[02:37:47] It's in my back here.
[02:37:48] Well, film on the on the first especially.
[02:37:49] You missed the first one, but it's all good.
[02:37:51] I don't know what it gets here.
[02:37:53] I won't even get into the apology in the explanation.
[02:37:56] I'm looking forward to number two.
[02:37:58] Awesome.
[02:37:59] Tim, you got any closing comments?
[02:38:03] Close in comment just to bring it back to the very beginning.
[02:38:07] If you're feeling alone with whatever doubts,
[02:38:10] challenges you might have, you're not alone.
[02:38:12] You're far from it.
[02:38:14] And honestly, at this point,
[02:38:15] that if I've learned anything from interacting with hundreds of thousands and millions of people
[02:38:20] on the blog through the podcast,
[02:38:23] all humans have the same problems.
[02:38:26] And at the very least, you have a large brotherhood in the sisterhood.
[02:38:31] Thousands of people at a minimum
[02:38:33] who are feeling going through the exact same thing that you are.
[02:38:36] So do not feel alone.
[02:38:38] And that's pretty much it.
[02:38:42] I would say there's some samples up.
[02:38:44] People want to check it out from tools of Titans.
[02:38:47] I was, it's surreal for me, but Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote the forward, which is incredible.
[02:38:51] He's in the book.
[02:38:52] And that's up.
[02:38:54] The introduction is up.
[02:38:55] How do you use this book?
[02:38:56] If you want to check that out,
[02:38:57] you can go to toolsoftitons.com.
[02:39:00] And if you want to continue this conversation,
[02:39:03] by the way,
[02:39:04] you can find all three of us out there on the interwebs.
[02:39:09] You can find us on Twitter,
[02:39:11] on Instagram,
[02:39:13] and you can even find us all that face book.
[02:39:16] He's a bookie, boh-ha!
[02:39:19] Echo is at Echo Charles.
[02:39:22] I am at Jocca-Willink,
[02:39:24] and of course Tim Ferriss is T Ferriss.
[02:39:28] Two hours and two S's on Twitter.
[02:39:30] Tim Ferriss on Instagram,
[02:39:31] and of course he's also on that face book.
[02:39:33] He's not hard to find.
[02:39:35] And to everybody,
[02:39:38] that's listening.
[02:39:40] I want to say thanks to Tim.
[02:39:41] Thanks to Tim for coming on.
[02:39:43] Thanks to Tim for actually getting me to do a podcast.
[02:39:46] It was you and Joe Rogan.
[02:39:47] You, as soon as you press record on our first one,
[02:39:50] you press stop.
[02:39:52] You looked at me and said,
[02:39:53] you needed to do your own podcast.
[02:39:54] And I was pretty packed for a time right then,
[02:39:58] because the book was coming out.
[02:39:59] But as soon as Joe Rogan said,
[02:40:00] I have you to tell me that.
[02:40:02] I was in.
[02:40:03] So thank you for making me do this podcast.
[02:40:05] Thanks for coming on.
[02:40:06] Appreciate all the support that you've been given me
[02:40:09] and Echo and the podcast and the book and everything else.
[02:40:12] Thank you.
[02:40:13] It's much appreciated to everybody else.
[02:40:15] That's listening.
[02:40:17] Thanks to you for listening.
[02:40:19] First and foremost to the.
[02:40:22] People out there in uniform military police firefighters,
[02:40:25] paramedics.
[02:40:27] By the nature of your very job.
[02:40:30] You are serving.
[02:40:33] All of us.
[02:40:35] So thank you for that service.
[02:40:37] And thank you for the freedom and security that you provide.
[02:40:41] You provide us and rest the people out there.
[02:40:48] The troopers out there that have your own battles around the world.
[02:40:54] Fighting against apathy, fighting against mediocrity.
[02:41:00] And fighting like we all do sometimes fighting against the darkness.
[02:41:10] You all remember.
[02:41:14] Remember that this isn't easy for anyone.
[02:41:20] Remember that anything worth anything is worth fighting for.
[02:41:25] Remember that the battle doesn't fight itself.
[02:41:30] You are the one that has to fight it.
[02:41:35] Remember that there's a price for victory.
[02:41:40] And that price is hard work and early mornings and late nights.
[02:41:45] And that price is unmitigated daily discipline in all things.
[02:41:55] In those times when you can't remember everything I just said.
[02:42:00] Just remember this one thing.
[02:42:03] To get out there and get after it.
[02:42:10] So until next time, this is Tim and Echo and Jockel. Out.