The Productivity Mindset with Tim Ferriss

32:08I sense you have a similar belief in you're betting on, not on the horse, but the jockey. $120 ,000 is only$12 ,000,$10 ,000 checks. Yep, it's not a lot. I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities. What criteria do you use to figure out who gets that check? Well, also just as a side note, the reason I started trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is that I ran out of money. I got overenthusiastic and I broke my own rules. And I think the first check I wrote was for like 40K and immediately imploded. And I was like, oh, this is going to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of my best hits have been products that I would use personally that I could ideally be a power user of.

32:54And there have been a few exceptions, but by and large, they are addressing problems that I feel acutely or needs that I feel or wants that I feel very acutely. So for instance, Clear, how did Clear happen? back in the day it was called clear card and it was it was not widely distributed it was very little known and i wrote a blog post back when blogs were a big deal and my blog at the time became very popular and i wrote a huge piece on on how to expedite travel and a portion of that was about clear card i linked to their website and unbeknownst to me i was one of the largest drivers of traffic to their website.

33:35And then at some point, the leadership reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to do something? And that's how that relationship started. And I think I was the first advisor to clear. I mean, it was forever ago, so it must have been pretty close. I wish they were in more airports. They're just blown through JFK LaGuardia. It's a blast with them. Yeah, yeah. From an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also not based in Silicon Valley. And I don't think that Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Canada. I mean, come on.

34:05That was neglected. So I also, so there were a few things. It was like, is it a problem or a need or a want that I feel and understand? Is it something I can be a power user of? Therefore, it makes it quite easy for me to promote to my audience. Could they be users or customers? And then lastly, for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for geographies that were neglected. So I actually, I went hunting in Canada a lot. and works for comedy yeah yeah or for canadians i mean you look at some of the early experiences like stumble upon i was i became an advisor to stumble upon and who was the founder of stumble upon a guy named garrett camp stumble upon i put tons of time into he and i became close we worked really well together we enjoyed working together stumble upon ended up being a zero for me but why is that okay because i talked about the relationships and the skills right okay relationship with garrick camp what does he end up doing next co-founder of uber not too shabby and then i was one of three people who had helped him with stumble upon who became advisors to uber cab llc at the time which was i think 2008 oh my god by the way everybody said no to uber everybody That's amazing to me because one of the things I find fascinating about VCs is they kind of put their failures on their websites as a badge of honor.

35:32But it's mostly here are the companies we invested in that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by the way, we passed on Uber. We passed on this. We passed on that. You see less of that. You see less of it. And for me, I would say there's lots of luck. But I was also trying to approach it. a systematic way if you're focused on effectively the way i would think about let's say i cut a $25 ,000 check i'm like okay would i pay$25 ,000 just to develop these relationships and basically earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing if so then great go if not then think twice and taking that approach all of the skills and the new knowledge and the relationships snowball all over time.

36:19So I love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that was intimately connected with the people and the skills that came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again. So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills, and then even quote unquote failures, You don't know what act two is going to be, where it could go. Yeah. And then lastly, I would say one thing I did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now, but I had never heard of it, is I treated a portion of my total budget for that real world MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferriss fund in quotation marks, a portion of that for marketing budget.

37:04What does that mean? I invested in, I bought secondary. So I bought equity from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now, it ended up being very early, but to my mind at the time, they were overpriced, super expensive. But being in those deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity in those two companies allowed me to say I'm in these companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted in getting new deals. So I expected those to go to zero. That's marketing budget. But they ended up very unexpectedly working out really well. But I expected those to go to zero. And it was pure marketing budget.

37:51I've heard you mention a book by Sebastian Malaby, The Power Law. Yeah, great book. Tell us a little bit about what you learned from that book about investing in startups. That is a great book if you want to learn about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches I had already learned just by being in the trenches for whatever it was a decade before that book came out. I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money Than God, which is his book about hedge funds. That is an exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, oh my God, give that a read. Plus he's British and his take on everything is just.

38:34It's fantastic. It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way. Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that book and what people might miss about startups is, yes, it's a hits driven business. There's a power law distribution, meaning it's Pareto principle on steroids. you're probably going to have one or two or three startups that give you the vast majority of your lifetime earnings, at least as an angel investor who's not taking management fees. If you're an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping billion dollar plus funds, like sure, you're going to do great on management fees.

39:19VCs seem to do okay for themselves. It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart in how you approach it. But as an angel investor, I would say you need to have, if you're going to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy or philosophy around portfolio construction so that you don't run out of money. Right. It's like staking someone in poker. It's like you have to be able to sustain a string of bad luck. Right. And I would say that what Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs in the world of venture capital have done that over time. And there are a few things I would point out also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of people miss.

40:03Because why did it happen in Silicon Valley? It's like, sure, you can talk about Fairchild Semiconductor and I think it was the Traderous Eight or whoever it was and all of this. But why did that happen? Like, why, why, why? I'm always like, ask why three times and you get to something interesting. Part of it is that non-competes are incredibly hard, if not close to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean? It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely. So there's a lot of competition and a lot of knowledge sharing, sometimes to the chagrin of former employers.

40:38But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is still, to this day, right now, it would be the era of AI. If you want to be an AI, if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent, Silicon Valley is still the place to be. It's not true for everything, but it still matters. No doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not in terms of monetary returns. In terms of, and I'm delving into your space, in terms of time, energy, productivity, efficiency, what do you find to be the most productive, useful investments that you've made?

41:26There are quite a few. I would say anything related to mental health ranks very highly. And we could talk about some of the things that have benefited me. So I come from a family of people who have died from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder. I struggled with probably, I would say, three to four major depressive episodes a year for most of my life. That much? Wow, that's a lot. And each episode ranging on the length of a few weeks to a few months. I mean, that is a lot of time in darkness. and now I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode of a few weeks every two to three years those are two completely different human experiences how did you manage to actually manage this because there are people who suffer from depression and that's the word suffer and never find a way to get on top of it I'll mention just a few things in the order I might suggest investigating them one would be let's call it metabolic psychiatry so looking at the work of christopher palmer most recently out of harvard i've interviewed him on using diet to help mental health and fundamentally it tends to end up being some version of a ketogenic diet you can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting so let's just say what i'm doing today and what I do a lot of the time, which is only eating between like 2 p.m.

42:58and 10 p.m. That's an eight hour window. So you fast for 16 hours every day and your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would say within a week, you're pretty grumpy for a week and then you're fine. Then the next. So that was the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS and a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford. But this can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable. TMS standing for? Transcranial magnetic stimulation.

43:38So it's a type of brain stimulation. They take something that looks like a large hockey puck and put it on your head. It's non-invasive. And it feels like someone's kind of tapping your skull. and depending on if you're trying to address anxiety or depression or OCD the target can be different and if people investigate accelerated TMS in some studies with major depressive disorder complete remission in 70 to 80 percent of participants wow and you might need a booster once a year but compared to taking maintenance drugs every day with non-trivial side effects accelerated TMS is fascinating. I encourage people to check it out.

44:22There are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because it's - Like micro dosing of psilocybin or what have you? Microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature, and I've funded a lot of this science since 2015 with my foundation i put like double digits of my net worth into this uh philanthropically which tells you how much i believe in it the intermittent use could be once it could be a few times uh various compounds could be say psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder or different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder nyu's doing a lot of great work on that front or mdma assisted psychotherapy for ptsd i mean the results are very strong mind-blowing yeah i mean you you have complex ptsd people who've had let's just say an average length of diagnosis of 16 17 years which means many many interventions have failed who do two or three sessions with therapists for mdma assisted psychotherapy and they have effectively complete remission of symptoms that's amazing and it is i believe there's a psychotherapist named stanislav groff quite legendary in the space who says you know what the telescope was or is for astronomy what the microscope is for biology psychedelics will be for the mind really and i believe that these compounds and the study of these compounds which has become very, very, very popular and destigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some of these so-called incurable or intractable conditions, including things like anorexia and many of the things I already mentioned.

46:14Those would be three that I'd say have had a huge impact on me. And it seems boring. We could talk about it if you want, but exercise. I was waiting for you to bring that up because every study in the world says that's the miracle cure for so much psychological challenges. And it's not like you haven't written about exercise at all. Did a whole book on it. So, yeah, the exercise, I'll just mention two other things briefly. Cold exposure. And by the way, people have been using this for hundreds of years. Certainly in the Nordish countries. Oh, yeah. You know, forever. Yeah. Cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy, aka depression.

46:56And there is actually something to it. It could end up being after a few minutes when you shift from solely sympathetic nervous system activation, fight or flight, parasympathetic could be actually stimulation of the vagus nerve. Who knows? It's unclear at this point. But cold exposure matters like that. That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems to have some durability, which is wild. exercise people think of exercise and what you read about in the media a lot is like endorphins endorphins endorphins but that is not the full picture if you want to stave off alzheimer's parkinson's etc or let me just broadly say neurodegenerative disease exercise provokes the release for something called clotho k-l-o-t-h-o which people can investigate and it is critical in staving off or mitigating the onset and progression of these diseases.

47:49So you have clotho. Endorphins, sure, you have endorphins. You have endocannabinoids. Cannabinoids sounds familiar, like cannabis, right? So those can explain a lot, both in terms of anti-inflammatory effects of some types of exercise. The benefits are just insane. So I would say, follow Peter Atiyah's advice. He is credible, trained at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, in terms of zone two training. People can just look him up. Zone two training a few times a week, and then VO2 max training, say once a week, and some weight training. But if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all, and just the cognitive benefits, including the release of things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that is also just a non-negotiable.

48:36So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I have both in my family, yeah. So that's where I was going to, the exact question I was going to ask. You were never diagnosed. You just have a genetic predisposition, and you're trying to proactively just get way out ahead of it. I'm trying to get ahead of it, yeah. And unfortunately, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, just to use that disease as a an example. A lot of the interventions fail. I think some scientists would agree with this, not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because the interventions are too late.

49:12By the time people have really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms, it might just be too late. But there is an argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that late intervention is better than early intervention. So I just saw a piece in National Geographic yesterday that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to detect Alzheimer's risk sooner, as earlier as your 20s. So there is some sort of research going on in the space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive and individualized to take care of your preventative maintenance in advance of being diagnosed with this into your own hands.

50:01Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just mentioned that has helped me from a mental health perspective and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. I'm about to turn 48. I do blood testing at least once a quarter. And my most recent labs are my best. I just went to Function Health. Are you familiar with Function Health? I don't know Function Health. So Silicon Valley startup, they have come up with a way. It's not a healthcare company. It's a technology company. And they say, we want to take 100 data point screens of your blood and look at all these different markers to create a baseline.

50:38We do this twice a year. Your doctor looks at 15, 20 things normally. They'll go 100. And by the way, depending on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, et cetera. And so now you could check 150 data points and twice a year, especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word, horizontal set of data. And when something sort of spikes or is out of the normal range, you have a baseline that you could go back and work. I literally did this Tuesday. Yeah, I can see that.

51:18And I was like, oh, that's a lot of blood, isn't it? Like, can you leave me a little? I got stuff to do later. But in order to do 100 different data series, they need a lot of different blood. Yeah, they need some blood. And I would say I don't spend much money on stuff. But I do, I deliberately, some might say, overspend on health. But what I was going to say is the metabolic psychiatry, the less so accelerated TMS, but actually, I should pull that back. TMS also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's. and psychedelic assisted therapies the exercise all of these and the clotho i mentioned specifically within exercise all of those should in theory help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset of of some of these neurodegenerative diseases so i am trying to get ahead of it fortunately it doesn't have to be hyper personalized like these things have clinical data or published literature behind them.

52:19There's still a lot of unknowns, but you can do these things now. So it's so funny you say hyper-personalized. I'm speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week I'm seeing Tim Ferriss. And he says, oh, I love Tim. He is, I love this line. He is the chief scientist of Tim Ferriss, the person. And I'm like, that is such a great way to describe it. Yeah, that's true. You've basically created an entire business model around being the chief scientist of your physical health, your mental health, even your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original game plan or did this just evolve over time?

53:07I've almost always been that way in part because I was born premature. I had a ton of health issues. Still have issues with thermoregulation, chronic sinusitis, all these things that - Wait, thermoregulation being - Thermoregulation - You're always hot or cold? Can't handle hot. Well, the way that my body handles hot and cold is strange. So I can overheat very easily as an example. The reason that's relevant is the one sport that my mom put me in that, thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at when I was a little runt. I was very small until about sixth grade. It wasn't swimming. It was wrestling because the puny kid gets to go against the other puny kid.

53:48But I would overheat really quickly, which meant I needed to try to win quickly before I would hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts of bizarre self-experimentation. That's interesting. Learning how to weight cut, to use potassium-sparing diuretic. The reason that I wanted to make Tim Ferriss Lab this N of 1 set of experiments was to win at wrestling. That's how it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you might be able to apply this stuff to the brain. And then in college, I started experimenting with all sorts of stuff. nothing uh illegal but lots of weird stuff that was i was using kind of off label like hydrogene various no tropics and so on and they did have an effect like they did have an effect on memory and cognition things like desmopressin for short-term memory for memorizing chinese characters like that stuff worked right there there's no biological free lunch with that stuff so what are the why no free lunch what's the side you do pay you do pay a price i would just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking and so on and i'm not a doctor i don't play one on the internet but number one since you mentioned it earlier is i get blood tests done once a quarter at at the very least now why is that well i want more frame as high a frame rate as possible to look at trends but separately i want to catch things early if i need to catch things but i would say that if you do infrequent blood tests, the risk is that you get one set of lab results back and you make a ton of big decisions based on those labs.

55:26Here's what I'll say. There are lab errors all the time. And if you're going to do consistent blood tests, consistent is the key. In other words, do it on the same day of the week at the same time. Oh, really? I would not have guessed that. That's interesting. Because your testosterone has diurnal... So the Quest Diagnostics as an example, don't eat, don't take supplements, don't take any meds, whatever's on your prescription list, stop the night before unless your doctor says don't stop. Yeah, follow your doctor. But I'm saying if you measure your - But like you're saying, Monday at 10 is more important than, how significant is that?

56:04Just be consistent because if you, let's just say you drink on the weekends and then you do your lab test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning, some of your results might be different. Of course, I mean, that's - But no, it's not obvious to people because then they might have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like ALT or ASD. All of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year. He has no idea of the context. That's fair. Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously. And there are lab errors. So I would say before - Plus you also just get the regular noise and range.

56:41And sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal. but it's all, nothing is flatlined over time. Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like really, if you're about to get on a bunch of meds, unless it's an emergency, look, there are emergencies that you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay, you have this problem, we're going to put you on this med for the next year. Before you do that, do the test again. Just get another blood test two days later. Second opinion. Just confirm it. And again, not a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only, blah, blah, blah.

57:16But there you go. Dumb question. All the stuff you've done, game creation is not on your CV. Why did you decide to create a game? Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitur. So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends, many of whom are neurodivergent. And D &D was a lifeline. Lifeline. Lifeline. So I may be pretty squarely in the neurodivergent camp. I'm not sure. Do you still play? I don't, but here's why. I know plenty of guys, 40, 50, weekly games. Forget poker. It's too much of a commitment for me now.

58:02Initially, so I've always wanted to make a game that could help produce the magic and joy. And frankly, I mean, sort of the like cognitive training of D &D. I think D &D is just an incredible game. Kudos to, you know, TSR and Gary Gygax and everybody who's created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to be serious about D &D, it's like being serious about World of Warcraft. Like this is your new part time job. I mean, it's many, many, many hours. So as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot going on. Maybe I have a dinner with friends and we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going to play D &D.

58:38there's no way we're going to play a complex board game i was curious to see though if i could create something and a lot of the podcast is interviewing people i might want to do something with but that's unspoken so i interviewed alan lee who's the founder of exploding kittens yeah one of the most successful game development companies in the world and i wanted to see if maybe kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I could create a game with him that would be easy to learn, hard to master, very, very fun for families, friends, whoever, kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this is yet to be proven.

59:16So just to be clear, I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but that could also possibly be a type of brain training and cognitive training. So you set the bar really low, right? Just easy to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun. with all sorts of cognitive benefits. Yeah. So, you know, low target. Start slow with your first game. Well, that's why it took two years to land on something. Really? Oh, yeah. That's a long time to build. What's effectively is simple. I have a copy of this at home, and you guys also sent me a copy here, so I want to open this up and go over it with. But give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly what this game is about.

59:56Yeah, so the game Coyote, it's called coyote because of the trickster deity association and a lot of mythologies also uniquely american coyote or north american i should say it's it's a it's very much a sort of new america's animal but the trickster piece is important so coyote is a game you can think of it as rock paper scissors in a group on steroids with many different hilarious movements and gestures and basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins or you can play as a team collaboratively there are reasons that we had both options but the basic gist is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in a circle and you're each player's dealing out cards that make a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious and you each get three lives and last person standing in competitive mode wins that's it so you can play i have friends who've played with their like six-year-old daughters even though the box says 10 years old it's uh it's very challenging when it gets challenging uh i guess it's 10 minutes a game roughly probably so pretty low lift but if you want to get good at it you can play it over and over and over and over again every game is going to be totally different one of the things i was kind of fascinated by watching the gameplay was it's a combination of words and gestures that you have to recall and do in order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the same time that you're creating.

1:01:34Tell us a little bit about how you guys came up with this and what was it like collaborating with Exploding Kittens? We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one and we were kind of stuck because the question that i was asking myself was the wrong question the question i was asking myself is what types of board games or card games do i enjoy and that didn't get i mean your answers are only going to be as good as your questions and that wasn't working we had done various brainstorming sprints in like la new york Long Island and then flew to Canada to spend time with the co-founder of Exploiting Kittens and we did our last sprint I was like okay look we've been at this for a while we're either going to land on something or let's call call it quits and just call a spade a spade so a little pressure on yeah yeah I mean deadlines you know the magic of deadlines and expanded it to what games of any type have you enjoyed and I it might make me sound like a simpleton but having drinks and playing rock, paper, scissors with your dumb friends is, I think, very entertaining.

1:02:43Side note, especially if you try to do it with water in your mouth, try that with a friend. But what is water in your mouth affect rock, paper, scissors? When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves. It makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had a few drinks, not recommending everybody drink. So we started with that as this building block. It's like, OK, well, how can we make that group play? and then I was interested in the cognitive stuff as I mentioned and this is look I haven't proven this but I think it's it's quite similar you're looking at like interference effects there are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test blah blah blah and Exploding Kittens they have an amazing track record the whole company started with this game Exploding Kittens which was I think the largest Kickstarter of all time wow at that point in time the leaders of the company are still game designers so it's not a huge bureaucratic thing run by no offense to middle managers they're important but it's like people who are managers versus makers like the people who run the company are still some of the best in the world at creating games right elon lee was involved with developing xbox he's been involved with creating entirely new genres of games just a genius at at creating games.

1:03:58So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome. They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small. Like they really punch above their weight class. Still a startup, nimble, able to - Yeah, feels like a startup. Like what they do with the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's been awesome. I get a sense that because you're such a thoughtful person, anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort of floats above your body and says, what's going on in this space? Yeah, totally. I've had that experience in publishing. Yeah. Like, wait, I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave this way?

1:04:34So I have to ask you that question about the game industry. Sure. When you're looking at gaming generally, what was your experience like going into not only an entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past, but... Like, did you kind of look at the game industry and say, hey, this whole place is just wacky and so different from everything else? all of the above and i treated doing something like the game as i treat the startups so it's if i make no money on this will the relationships developed and the skills and knowledge be something i would pay for right would i actually tuition exactly would i pay tuition for what i'm going to learn and the answer is yes right alan lee genius the people like splinkins amazing uh by the way you want a scrappy creative team if you're going to deal with things like tariffs, by the way.

1:05:29Do tariffs, I mean, I'm assuming these are manufactured somewhere outside of the United States. Do you have to pay tariffs on? Oh, every gaming company in the US, pretty much tabletop game is getting smashed. Yeah. So you want people who are creative and can think outside the box for something like that. From the implications of something like that to contending with mass, mass retail, like Walmart and Target, for instance. Yeah, you're at Walmart, you're at Target, you're on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space, quote unquote, from. How did that happen? Next to impossible.

1:06:07And yet you hit for the cycle, Walmart, Target, Amazon. Where else is, what's left? If I'm going to do it, this is my maybe one and only game. And if my name's going to be on it, I need to be very happy with it. So how did you guys manage to penetrate that? Well, I'll say first that what's not going to work is if you are a sole inventor who comes up with the world's greatest game, a company like a Walmart or Target is not equipped, rightly so, to deal with thousands of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins, don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms and returns and all these things.

1:06:46so if you want to have a seat at the table or even a chance to have a seat at the table you need to i think this is fair to say partner with someone who already has shelf space and multiple skews so you can be added to the lineup and that was another reason to partner with someone like an expletive kittens and yes you can do a lot online and the game is on amazon it's been exclusive at walmart for the first few months and then the social video plays like you mentioned went completely nuts and it's actually now past 300 million so it just keeps going and going and going the the videos of people playing this game but you can do a lot that is say direct to consumer via an amazon or just your website or kickstarter but it's very easy for techies to underestimate just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the walmarts and targets of the world are sure i mean 90 of the u.s is within 10 miles of one of those or 15 minutes I mean, even the food security of the United States depends on these companies.

1:07:50And you price this at$9.99, less than$10. Very reasonable. I'm going to assume if this game is as successful as you hope it will be, and early indications are that it can be, you can come up with a second pack, a different focus. Expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a more complicated like role-playing game, something like that. Who knows? But in my case, right, with something like this, I'm used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters. No, no, you're jumping in. This is jumping in. I mean, even with, say, the four-hour workweek, it's like, how did I land on that title?

1:08:28I split tested all of the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords and then looked at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from the rest. And that was the four-hour workweek. So that's how I, I don't like taking risks. I actually think of myself as a risk mitigator. But in this case - I'm fascinated by that because you very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't want to play pop psychologist, but you are not somebody, it's like, all right, I'm starting out as studying biology. No, no, I'm pivoting to Asian studies.

1:09:07I'm living in Japan. And I'm stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh, now I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the life experience of someone who's risk averse. Well, I would on one hand agree with you. On the other hand, I would say I think that most risks are incredibly overblown. I would put risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse. But if you're choosing what you do based on what you're going to learn, skills you're going to develop, the relationships you're going to develop or deepen, it's very hard to fail over time. So if you're able to be, and this applies to investing, obviously, but like long-term greedy, right.

1:09:49That's right. Not short-term greedy. It's very hard to lose over time. If you're choosing, let me be very clear, ideally areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you would pay tuition for those things with relationships or skills that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote, okay, let's say, let's just say hypothetically, I don't think this is going to happen because I think the tariffs are just a bargaining chip for mineral access and other things that'll be traded with. That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you.

1:10:24Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tact. Yeah. I mean, otherwise we're, we're also like cutting off our nose to spite our face. I mean, it's so interdependent. So it's a bargaining chip. I don't expect that to continue. But let's just say that tariffs put every game company in the US out of business, except for one or two. Then will this still have been worth my time? Absolutely, 100%. Because I have no, I'm not getting an advance for this. I'm doing a profit share. I want incentives to be fully, fully aligned. I did the same thing with my book. I don't want to advance. I want to see whatever upside there is.

1:10:59By the way, I really have to push back. This is just me. Maybe there's a little projection. You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I love the way you've rationalized or it's not an excuse. It's an explanation. It's like reframing it. Yeah. You frame this into, well, I'm going to take this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and relationships. So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen. You are very much a risk embracer. Yeah. And also, if you look at my projects, it's not a sequence of start, finish, start, finish, start, finish.

1:11:45It's more like a Gantt chart where things are overlapping. So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I put a ton. I've been involved with every single possible aspect of this game. We play tested it with a hundred plus families, blah, blah, blah. But podcast is still going. The books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments. And therefore I very rarely have all of my eggs in one basket. So two last questions on the game before we'll get to our speed round. Yeah. First, this is obviously a low tech card game. Was this a purposeful decision to avoid screens, to not create more screen time?

1:12:26Yeah, 100%. I would say if I look at the mental health of my audience, let's just call it 20 million people a month or something, over the last 10 years, the degree of depression, anxiety, nihilism is shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically antithetical to those things. Maybe not depression, but very optimistic. Yeah, there's a little self-selection there. Hey, I have this issue. Tim seems to figure this out. let me work my way there. There's a little bit of that but if you look at let's just say the writing of you know Derek Thompson made an amazing writer at the Atlantic who does a lot more.

1:13:01No longer at the Atlantic now he has his own Substack. Yeah right that's right he went full in on Substack and actually this piece I think is from Substack but it was effectively I think it's simply Americans need to have more fun but it talks The decline of partying in America. That's right. Yeah. That effectively I think it's something atrocious like one in 25 families or people have social plans in person for any given weekend and it's down for is that right that's amazing and it's down for certain age brackets 70 in the last 10 years and i really feel like digital isn't inherently bad but the dose makes the poison and yes and i think that But if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote.

1:13:49I really feel like people need to interact with other humans. We're not evolved for pure screen time. We are not. A hundred percent. You're a hundred percent. So last question on the game. Yeah. What are your expectations for this? How do you define success? And I'm going to prevent you from saying, I've already succeeded due to my collaboration and the whole experience. No, I can give you a better answer than that. Hold that aside. What's your minimum expectations and what would surprise you to the upside? minimum expectation is that this finds a small band of diehard lovers of the game everybody should read 1000 true fans by kevin kelly just go to kk.org it's free read that that would be super gratifying but also i always aim high so i mean i want this to be the best-selling game at all of the major retailers that's incredibly hard to do by the way that's that's millions of units yeah i mean you're dealing with tens of the unos and the behemoths of the space right so to do that is incredibly hard that's what i'm aiming for i think that the products you know the game can stand on its own two feet like people do love this game and the reason i like to do that is not because i want to set myself up for disappointment but as i think it's larry page of google has said what people miss is it's very hard to fail completely if i aim for that and i'm 50 short i'm still having had the excitement and the motivation and potential payoff of that huge a goal it's still gonna exceed my expectations that i would have had and just moving into a different space is its own rewards because it's so yeah you know it really exercises different parts of the brain than you normally get to play with.

1:15:35It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which is why after the success of the four hour work week bought me permission to write more books, I didn't do the three hour work week. I didn't do the four hour work week for, you know, the sort of single mother soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author. That's why I did the four hour body and everything on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a different category in the bookstore to see if my readers would follow me. And as soon as I proved to myself that was the case and to publishers, when I hit number one New York Times and blah, blah, blah, then I could write about whatever I wanted.

1:16:12And so this is another way of testing that. Could I play in a completely different sandbox? So before we get to our five favorite questions, I've pulled a few of your questions that either you ask on your pod or other people have asked you. And let's do this as a speed round and let's do it i'll try to keep my answer shorter right tell us about a hundred dollar or less purchase that has positively impact your life be specific yeah i will be specific now i'm going to put in one shameless plug which is if people want to figure out this game just go to coyote game.com okay back to our regular programming two things i would say that have impacted me in the last year would be uh there's something called the alpha ball which is from tune up fitness and this is something you can use for soft tissue work for a sore back for dealing with your it bands anything and it's much better than a foam roller because you can really get into specific spots it's very easy to use you can use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor and it's small enough to travel with so i'd say the alpha ball is one have that my luggage right now because i'm traveling and then the other one is actually a meditation app called the way and it's taught by someone named henry shookman and it's more or less a zen type of meditation full disclosure i ended up becoming an advisor to these guys because i love i ended up loving the app so much uh but i use that once or twice a day 10 minutes each session and uh it's teaching you sort of a guided meditation Is that right?

1:17:51They're guided meditations, but it's a sequence of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply outside of meditation, which is why I like it so much. So I'd say those are two that immediately come to mind. So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas, learning new skills, and learning them quickly. What's your favorite cheat code for that? Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the first place. So what I mean by that is if you want to get the best golf coach in the world, you might not be able to afford it. You probably can't afford it. It's going to be, it's a very common sport.

1:18:32There are a lot of wealthy people involved. It's going to be hard to get direct instruction from somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose, say, almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and you look for, say, not gold medalists, but silver medalists, who are, by the way, frequently just as good. It's a tenth of a second. They just got 10 minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You can get some of the people who are best in the world to teach you at a cost that is next to nothing. so I would say that number one is picking coming back to that definition that we talked about the four-hour work week with business and entrepreneurship like picking the goal first the second is looking at frequency of use so for languages for instance a lot of people just dive into learning languages well I think that material beats method in other words like picking what you're going to learn very carefully is more important at least in sequence than choosing how you're going to do it a lot of people ask like what's the best way to learn x and i'm like first of all you should ask what should i learn and you can look at word frequency lists and things like that and for a language like spanish japanese whatever find the 1000 or 1500 most frequently used words you can learn that in a few weeks duolingo uh duolingo is outstanding i mean of course i'm biased because i invested in their first round we just were in paris three years ago Amsterdam two years ago, Rome last year.

1:20:02And Duolingo, just for those basic phrases, is amazing. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I've used it for Korean as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school. Yeah, that's a tough language, right? It's tough. The grammar is almost identical to Japanese, so I have a leg up there. But by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I think it's like learning how to read Korean 15 minutes, there's a comic book that literally will teach you how to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading, but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean and like it's a bit of an exaggeration I'd say it probably takes an hour but Duolingo is very well designed and I have seen every possible language startup my fan sent me that one by the way my fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they knew I was interested in e-commerce so a lot of my best deals have come from my readers and my listeners.

1:20:53But the Duolingo came about because they were in closed beta and a number of my fans reached out and said, you have to try this. Really? And so I got access and I looked at it and I was like, oh yeah, this is fundamentally different from everything else I've seen. Give us an example of an unusual habit or just absurd thing that you love. I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD. Go ahead. So I take a screenshot whenever I see 555 on my phone. so i have hundreds of screenshots of typically 555 p.m i just love repeating those specific repeating numbers i a lot of folks like 1111 nothing against 1111 i think that's that's perfectly fine but i'm just more of a 555 guy those 1111 people they don't know what's up it's all about have you seen the old style analog almost neon tubes that are clocks yes like what happens when that rolls over to 11 11 do you see something like that and just shrug and like i still find it pleasant i like symmetry so 11 11 has the advantage over 555 that it is pleasingly symmetrical uh like this old friend i used to have mike kim his name is a palindrome right i was gonna say 555 is a palindrome but it's not truly symmetrical visually exactly yeah So there is, we were talking neurodivergent earlier.

1:22:17One of the things I kind of was shocked to learn in the ADHD world is why people will play a song over and over and over again, because it tickles a part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional expressions that tend to be more difficult or absent. and it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that you haven't been able to get in the real world. It sounds like the 555 and the 1111 tickles a similar part of the brain. Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is. I mean, it's why I mentioned archery. Like I love archery.

1:22:59And for most people - Archery? Yeah, I love archery. And also language learning for most, for a lot of, there's a lot of repetition involved. And for many people, and I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more boring than going through conjugations or doing archery. Which, by the way, if you're doing it at a high level, you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing over and over again. Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill? I mean, the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people on five people. And so just extrapolate that out exponentially.

1:23:38And there are a million variations, the same with chest, whatever. But it really doesn't matter. Each particular play, move, step is you're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need. Even something like darts. But there are so many variations to your musculature, your thought process. Is any sport boring? Hitting a tennis ball. Yeah. I mean, it's the same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion variations of what can happen. That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing in one place, shooting at the same thing thousands of times. Right. Any sharpshooting, rifle, darts, go down the list.

1:24:20It's going to be highly repetitive. Right. Now, I like the other sports, too, like tennis. I would say that also, confusingly, if people are interested in the accelerated learning stuff, my third book, The Four Hour Chef, is basically a book on accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook. So it gets into how to learn, how to shoot three-pointers, language learning, all this stuff. You can get a lot further. For instance, I think, number one, adults can learn languages faster than children, actually. Really? That is very inopposite to accepted wisdom. Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly than kids with a few constraints applied and just a couple of systems.

1:25:01I mean, I really think for a native English speakers for, say, a romance language or something that isn't too far flung, like Chinese is going to be different. But eight weeks, you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like pretty functional. If you were to carve out not three hours a week. That's where kids have the advantage is that they're forced to do it all the time and they have no choice. They have no mortgage. They have no job. That's right. But if you were to put in, say, 10 hours a week and take it really seriously, 8 to 12 weeks, you could be very functional. Very fluent. Yeah. Like you could get around and have like a conversation for 10 to 15 minutes with someone.

1:25:42Wow. Let's jump to our favorite five questions. We ask all of our guests, starting really simple, what are you streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime, or podcast. What's keeping you entertained? Well, I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight, which absolutely blew my mind. Lost in Starlight. Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation made my head spin because you don't, well, I think most people do not associate South Korea with animation.

1:26:27You might think of Japan. Isn't that where most of our low-cost animation is coming from over the past? That's not CGI? There's a lot of lower-cost animation, yes. But when you think of, say, cinematic animation and Studio Ghibli out of Japan, let's just say, people tend to think of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. and uh i think korea is going to be a powerhouse for high quality feature length animation we'll see we we shall see but lost in starlight is a is a recent fave and then i've got some weird ones like there's a german language documentary on fasting that i found on youtube you can't watch it in the u.s but you can use a vpn to i was gonna say you could watch anything anyway yeah you can you can use a vpn to pretend like you're in germany and you can watch it and just use the automatic sub what's the name of that one oh some long german name i'm just getting started with it so unfortunately i can't remember but it's it's looking at specifically someone who did i want to say a two to three week supervised fast at the wilhelmina institute who has fasted many many many thousands of people i i have some bones to pick with their approach but i nonetheless find that they have such a huge data set really fascinating so i'm looking at that one and then podcasts i found a new podcast recently called stem talk uh-huh which features interviews with scientists mostly and i've listened to an interview with someone named kevin tracy t-r-a-c-e-y who is a very widely cited scientist who's arguably the most credible researcher who has established a lot related to the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation there's a lot of bs and pseudoscience and nonsense floating around he is a real signal amongst the noise so i'm listening to a bunch of stem talk different uh scientists on stem talk and the interviewers are outstanding it's interesting you referenced youtube because mostly starting in the pandemic but just ramping up since then i want to say it's become 50 60 percent of my television viewing it's amazing how it's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find anywhere else right so i think there's a documentary i'm the name is something like learning how to see or the art of seeing and it's about David Hockney.

1:28:57Oh, okay. Big fan. Spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it on YouTube. And I was not able to find it anywhere else. Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell us about who your mentors were and how they helped shape your career. Early mentors, Stephen Gorick, he was a martial arts instructor when I was probably 12, 13, just from the perspective of physical and mental toughness because the class was all adults and then it was me they did not take it easy on me and i was very grateful for that they weren't abusive but they treated me like an adult who was training for for real and i think from a toughness perspective he he always reiterated that i could do more than i thought i could do much like my wrestling coach in high school uh john buxton who even to this day many of his wrestlers have gone on to do amazing things and they all reference back to him then ed shall who is that professor in high-tech entrepreneurship in princeton there are other people who indirectly or pretty directly although they wouldn't have expected it informed later what i did for instance john mcphee amazing amazing non-fiction writer who staff writer for the new yorker he's got at least one pillitzer prize for coming into the country, I think.

1:30:20And he taught a class at Princeton, a seminar called The Literature of Fact, which was on nonfiction writing. The Literature of Fact, what a great name. Yeah, and that class, in terms of thinking about structure, how to structure writing, which, by the way, helps you structure your thinking. So all of my grades in my other classes went up when I took that class. It was wild to see. And I'm sure there are many more. I mean, right after graduation, Mike Maples Jr. in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing. That's a good starter list for anybody. Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I was very lucky.

1:30:55Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now? Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic, which is by Seneca in this case. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius as well. So Letters from a Stoic by Seneca for thriving in a high stress, high conflict world. I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is very, very, very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too. Although that might sound odd, applied to Stoicism. So Letters from a Stoic, I would say Vagabonding, a book by Rolf Potts. I think the subtitle is The Uncommon Art of Long-Term World Travel, which is really, it's a book on long-term travel, but it's a book on, it's a philosophical treatise too.

1:31:51That's a great fun read. Those are two faves that come to mind. One more, Awareness by Anthony DeMello. I believe the subtitle is The Promises and Perils of Reality. It's just about becoming more aware. So taking yourself out of the automatic loops that we all have and adopt from parents and so on. Really good book. It's like 120 pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve, which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned. And it's all about the vagus nerve, research related to vagus nerve stimulation, et cetera. What's the book that you've given most as a gift and why?

1:32:34the books I've given most as a gift include some of the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house, I have shelves. Each shelf just has 15 copies of these books and take one with you. Yeah. Take, take, take whatever you like. So I would say, that's a great idea. It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing for someone like me. So the same. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's very, very, very aesthetically pleasing. so Awareness by Anthony DeMello for sure I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book Letters from a Stoic hundreds of copies of that book back in the day now there are a million copies or I shouldn't say million copies now there are a million different books on the subject of psychedelics and psychedelic history psychedelic science but How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan for a while I had that in my room because I got early galleys of that book and have since ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with with michael who's amazing but uh otherwise i also gift my friends who are non-fiction purists who are too busy to meditate too busy to read fiction i tend to give them books of poetry because i'm like you need to slow down and if you feel like you can't meditate for 10 minutes a day you need to meditate for an hour a day That type of logic leads me to give them a very short collection of, for instance, there's a new translation of Rumi poetry, relatively new, called Gold by Hale Liza Gavori is her name, who's incredible.

1:34:12She's based in New York City. And native speaker also, who's able to go to the source material. So Gold, which is a new compilation of short, roomy poetry that is well translated, unlike a lot of versions you might find. It's like 100 pages. And I just say to my friend, I'm like, look, don't read this A to Z. Just read one before you go to bed every night. And those are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years. That sounds really interesting. Our final two questions. what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in fill in the blank writing podcasting seed investing game design what would you tell them uh if if it's a non-fiction book writing i would say number one are you really sure you want to do that it's not it's not don't assume it's a good way to make money because generally it's not but I would say also if it's a recent grad if you're going to write nonfiction probably go do something interesting before you try to write something interesting that would be my advice that's what John McPhee does that's what many folks have done it's like get some life experience doing something first and then write about it would probably be my recommendation in the realm of investing finance, I would say that probably ensure you have an informational behavioral or network, meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do, unless you're going to do something like low cost index funds, which I think actually are a great idea for a lot of people.

1:36:01And I myself also invest in very, very low cost index funds. That's your core. You can build, you know that's your tree you could throw some one of them and surround it yeah exactly i want to like keep your risk capital and your retirement capital separate what do you know about the world today that would have been useful to know 25 years or so ago when you graduated yeah i'll throw out a few so the first would be from an investing perspective you don't need to compete in the public markets you can learn a ton through being around startups or even very unsexy private sector stuff. And you can get very, very wealthy doing that.

1:36:41So you don't have to compete against the citadels of the world. Like, I don't want to do that. Or the rentex or whatever. Like, that's bringing a knife to a gunfight. I don't want to deal with that. So I would say also... Look for white space that you can create your own area where you're a pioneer, not going into well-trod space. Yeah, I would also say invest in what you know. And that sounds so trite. But the first the first stock I ever bought was when I was in my teens. And it was my teens might have been a little bit later. But it was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I was like, Oh, this is so fundamentally different.

1:37:20Like this is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew. uh and uh so i i would say that sort of investing from the perspective of watching main behavior on main street more than wall street is actually can be a really viable approach uh and then in the world at large i would say for me personally 30 years ago i would have said like your current experience of mental health and the buggy code that you inherited from your parents god bless them but like you know there are some bugs in the code is not a sort of psychological death sentence like you can actually change those things because you can uh you really can impact those things and and you're living proof i am living proof and i would say that you know science science is such an amazing tool like the framework of science so necessary for not fooling ourselves and within the world of medicine especially i don't want to throw psychiatry under the bus but within the realm of medicine i mean anyone who's worth their salt will say something along the lines of like 50 of what we know is wrong we just don't know which 50 and when i was growing up i mean there were so many definitive statements about like all right you're born with this number of neurons when they die they die and that's it.

1:38:45You can never regenerate these types of things. Totally false. And I feel like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional health will be overturned in the next five years. It's going to happen fast. Thank you, Tim, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Tim Ferriss, author, podcaster, angel investor. If you enjoy this conversation. Be sure and check out any of the previous 560 we've done over the past 11 years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check out my new book, How Not to Invest, The Bad Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth, How Not to Invest at Your Favorite Bookseller.

1:39:38I would be remiss if I did And I thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:40:10Thank you.