Tim Ferriss On Generosity And Dealing With Difficult People (Pt 2)

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1:45Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:35Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the second part of this. I thought I'd give some other Tim Ferriss facts here as I kick off the intro to the second half of the episode. Number one, you may have picked this up in the first episode, but I'm recording here at the Painted Porch. The Painted Porch bookstore would not exist without Tim Ferriss because he's the guy I called when I was thinking about doing it. The producer of Tim's podcast is someone who I am very fond of who helped research. I think he started as my research assistant on Ego is the Enemy. Hristo was my research assistant for many years. And then Tim poached him.

3:22and I was very happy to allow that to happen because he's just an all-around stand-up fantastic guy and he was destined for bigger and better things. So there's a fact there. And then little-known encounter, Tim and I were both talking at the NextWeb conference in Amsterdam. This would have been in 2013. We're sitting down, we're having dinner or something, and he says, hey, what are you working on? And I said, you know, I'm working on this book about stoicism. And Tim had published maybe one of the first articles that I ever published anywhere other than my own website, Stoicism 101, Philosophy for Entrepreneurs.

4:01And that had helped kick off the book. And Tim was very interested. He said, you know, let me read it. And I sent it to him. I think if I'm remembering it right, I emailed it to him. And he came down the next day and said, hey, I'm doing this thing and I want to buy the rights to the audiobook of The Obstacles Away. which he did and used his enormous Tim Ferriss platform and helped kick that book off, made it a success. And he also did the same for The Daily Stoic. And he also did the same for Ego's Enemy. I don't know if you heard about me from Tim Ferriss, but there's a good chance that you wouldn't have heard of me at all had Tim not been such an early and generous booster of all of my stuff.

4:47So I feel really grateful. And I was really excited to have this conversation. He came out to the studio. And then one other person that Tim has poached for me, that's very dear to me, my former assistant, Lonnie. Tim stayed at my house at my ranch out here in Austin when I was, I guess this would have been, when would this have been? 2016, 2017? He was, I guess it would him in early 2017 he was thinking about moving to austin he was here for south by he wanted somewhere to stay outside of town so he stayed at my house and while he was shopping for houses and he needed some help with some stuff and my assistant lonnie pitched in and now lonnie has worked for tim almost uh ever since then so tim is a great identifier talent or i guess i'm pretty good at identifying talent.

5:35And Tim uses me as a feeder system, which I think one of the roles of a boss or a person in life is to help people go on to bigger and better things. And so I'm very happy for them and all their success. Lonnie was out here recently, actually right before Tim did his episode. Anyways, here's the second half of my conversation with the one and only Tim Ferriss. His podcast is about to exceed a billion downloads, which is just absolutely insane. You can follow him on Instagram at Tim Ferriss. Follow him on Twitter at T Ferriss. He's on YouTube, Tim Ferriss. And then if you haven't read The 4-Hour Workweek or The Tools of Titans or The 4-Hour Body or The 4-Hour Chef, any of his books, you are really missing out.

6:21He signed a bunch while he was here. Great author, great dude. Always thinks about things in a really unique way. and he's someone who's changed my life, not just professionally, but personally because I have put so many of the things he talks about into practice and that's why I was excited to have him on the podcast and I'm excited for you to listen to this episode.

6:49I have a question about stoicism for you. All right. I figure, given where we are, this is the right venue. Okay. Of, this is a big question, so if nothing comes to mind immediately, choose whatever floats to the surface. Of all the stoic writing that you've digested, all of the stoic writing that you've done, all of the lessons and case studies that you've researched, there are certain things that people glom onto in a not negative way, positive way, but there's things that are, I would say, predominantly memorable, right? This is true for my books as well. There's certain things that people tend not to miss.

7:31Yes. Right, so like in the four-hour work week, funny enough, one of the things that people always remember is the guest chapter by A.J. Jacobs about outsourcing his life with virtual assistants. But they tend to miss, and this is going to lead into my question, the filling the void chapter. Because they're like, oh, good problem to have, ha ha. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll worry about that when I get there. And then people really fuck it up badly and can end up in existentially pretty difficult places. What are some of the things that are really valuable that you wish people paid more attention to?

8:03Ooh, that's a great question. By the way, I was sitting out in front of Newark Airport like maybe a year ago. Just smoking your corncob pipe? No, just sitting there, just not waiting inside the airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sitting there and like a car pulls up and AJ gets out with his whole family. I was like, what the fuck is this? Like, what are the chances? And I go, what are you working on? He's like, oh, I'm pretending I lived during colonial times. Like he spent a year of his life dressing like George Washington. Like, oh no. Yeah, he was living by the constitution. That's what he was doing.

8:35He has the most patient wife in the world. Like the year of living biblically. Yes. Also an amazing book. So good. He's amazing. But okay. Okay, so I wouldn't even fault the audience for this necessarily. I would fault myself. My initial read on, like, we see what we want to see when we're looking for stuff, right? Or we see what we need to see at that point in our life. And so my early takes on stoicism, I would say were primarily about what it could give me, right? How it can make me more resilient, how it can make me stronger, how it can make me smarter, you know? how it could make me more successful.

9:18Like I took, I was looking at stoicism through what it's been for lots of people for thousands of years, which is a form of self-help, right? And of course I understood that he's talking about virtue, he's talking about common good and all these things. But I would say it wasn't until later that I understood. So the cardinal virtues of stoicism are courage, self-discipline, justice, and wisdom. But if you really think about it, The key virtue is justice because it renders, it decides whether any of the other ones were worthwhile or not, right? So like courage - I can't wait to hear this. Courage in pursuit of the wrong thing or a cruel and selfish or whatever thing, right?

10:04Courage in pursuit, like courage or discipline or what was it? Like if it's not rooted towards like making the world better or doing what the so-called the right thing, right? Their understanding of justice isn't like the legal system. It's like, what kind of person are you and what kind of code or values do you have? I think I came later to a more full understanding of what stoicism is asking of you as opposed to what it can provide you. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I'm just finishing this book now on Justice, which will be the third book in that series. So I've been thinking a lot about it more.

10:43But like almost all the Stoics were active in politics. Almost all the Stoics wrote books to share what they learned. Like there was this sense, the fundamental difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics, Seneca says, is that an Epicurean basically withdraws from the stresses and complications of life into the garden where they have fun and enjoy themselves and hang out with their friends. And a Stoic is involved in the polis, like in public life. and so I feel like my writing has changed and evolved and my focus on that thing has changed and evolved more. So I can sometimes tell when a fan is upset with me because they're at an earlier place in the understanding of stoicism, which I once was, and they're hearing from me now and they don't get, you know what I mean?

11:35It's hard for them to sort of reconcile the two or maybe just to take on both at the same time. It's like, they're like, I wanted you to give me advice on how I could be a better sociopath. You know what I mean? And you're telling me that I'm not supposed to be a sociopath, right? And that's the big one to me. I mean, I think I've seen this in your work and I've always admired it. This is something I was going to ask you. From the beginning, like before your books were successful, you were donating like a percentage of the profits of the 4-Hour Workweek. You've always been focused on not just capturing value for yourself.

12:10but I would describe you as a generous person. Thanks. I appreciate that. And to me, that's like a really key stoic virtue, right? Or that's part of that virtue of justice. But talking about that feels kind of judgy or self-righteous. Do you know what I mean? It's easier to go like, seven stoic strategies to be more productive. Yeah, it is. And I think there's, I mean, I've seen this with some of my writing as well, because it tends to be prescriptive nonfiction. And I think that one could make, to speak in the defense of the people who are focused on improving themselves, that people, and then borrowing from Arianna Huffington, at least I've heard her say this, that you should put on your own mask before helping others.

13:00You got to start there, totally. Like put on your own oxygen mask first. And at the same time, or not at the same time, to just add something to the donation. So since the first book, you're right, that a portion has been donated to different nonprofits or causes. Yeah. I mean, a lot of money at this point. Yeah, 5 % of the royalties of the 4-Hour Workweek, it's not a small amount of money. Yeah, it may have been, it may be 10, it may be more than 10. Oh, yeah, it was 10. Yeah, and that's been true for other books as well. I've far exceeded that. But the point that I was going to make is part of the reason I did that, and maybe this is a very stoic thing, is you could say there are a few different motivations for that.

13:49One is to do the right thing and to help things that I think are worth helping. Not just to help them financially, but to draw attention to them in ways that may exceed my own financial contribution. That's how I heard about DonorsChoose. Yeah. Because you were saying, I'm not donating 10 % of this to charity. You said a specific charity. It's very specific. What charity is that? Yeah. So that's one. The next is that I have just noticed as a pattern, and this could be false causality, but it's correlation at least, people who tithe in some way seem to be generally happier. Yeah. Now you could say, well, they're probably also in most cases highly religious, so couldn't it be caused by something else?

14:31It's like saying, well, people who do yoga are so much healthier and have better teeth, and you're like, yeah, but they also tend to be of a higher socioeconomic class so they can pay for better dental care, et cetera. So I understand the confounders here, but I will say that from a personal experience, so let's make this the third thing, is that if you give some amount of money away, it's almost like you've created a deliberate hole in the boat that is your finances. And what that does for me, at least, is it loosens my white knuckle grip on this thing called financial success because I've created an automatic release valve where some of it is disappearing.

15:11And as a practice, I think that has... You're not so precious with the resource. Yeah. Yeah. Like I am assuming from the outset there is enough, there is a sufficiency. I'm not saying abundance necessarily, but there is a sufficiency instead of a scarcity such that I can absolutely afford to give 10 % off the top to other things. And that that will be a net life quality multiplier, or at least positive for me as opposed to negative. And certainly, that's been my experience. Well, this is a chance we can test the theory of Aristotle. So Aristotle says virtue isn't this thing that you are, right, that you were born as.

15:58He says virtue is like playing the flute or building houses. You become a house builder by building houses. You become a flute player by playing the flute. And his point was like, you become a courageous person by doing brave things. And he says, you become generous by doing generous acts. So do you think generosity was something you learned? Was it like a skill that you acquired? Or do you think it was just naturally always what you were or it was easy? Like, do you feel like you've gotten better at it? Oh, yeah, yeah. I've gotten better at it. And I'm also, I try to be very surgical with it in the sense that I don't diminish automatically feel good let's just say philanthropy.

16:38I hate that word. Let's call it cause giving. The reason I don't like philanthropy is because

16:48it implies like biophilia, like Phil loving yeah, Anthropy, right? Like anthropology, loving humans. Yes. And I don't actually, I wouldn't say default love humans. I think as, as, as a species, we're kind of a disaster and invasive and very destructive. Is preserving the environment driven by your love of humans or is it actually the opposite? So if I'm working on say with Amazon conservation team, which is one nonprofit I've vetted and feel very good about from like capital efficiency operations standpoint, uh, that has nothing to, well, I shouldn't say it. It doesn't have nothing to do with humans, but it's also like preserving ecosystems.

17:29But where I was going with this is I've become better and better at investing in good vehicles for accomplishing things in a nonprofit capacity, just as I have in the for-profit investing world. The way I look at them is really the same. I also do some feel-good stuff where it's very individual. It is not attempting to scale, which is sometimes important, but more often this word that's thrown around and a somewhat casual way to justify all sorts of oftentimes greedy behavior on the part of rich people who don't want to donate money. Like Scrooge McDuck kind of stuff, Montgomery Burns, if you prefer.

18:17and uh i i do think that from a young age and i turned this off for a long time but like a very deep feeler like a very sensitive kid yeah so from a very young age and i i don't know if my parents encouraged this maybe i was just traumatized by like unicef commercials with the kids with like the flies in their eyeballs uh but from a very young age and my family i don't come from money right like my family didn't have very much money we had to make a lot of uh yeah we can get into it but we did not have a lot of money suffice to say uh and i i gave even when i was really young and by young i mean like i don't know six seven nine like a part of my life yeah wow if i got like a little bit of allowance or something i would give a little bit away yeah because it it felt like the right thing to do.

19:11But then there was a large period of time where I didn't do any of that. And I was like, hey, you got to take care of number one first. Kind of Gordon Gekko, let's solve this problem first and then I can do good later. And then for a host of reasons, I started to question that logic, both for personal fulfillment and for impact. Sure, your net worth might be scaling, but is it scaling inflation adjusted at pace with the the problems that are also compounding? Maybe not. So I think in a lot of cases, the answer is early intervention with less money is better than late intervention with more money.

19:50Certainly if that's true in medicine, it's very true with lots of the problems we see in the world or just causes that we want to further. So for me, I wrote this blog post, God, ages ago, back when I had hair. I mean, it was probably 2007 or eight. It's hard to believe that they're a thousand plus blog posts. I mean, I forget about that sometimes. That was an important bridge between the book and other things that I sometimes forget about in terms of connective tissue. But I wrote this piece called something like the karmic capitalist or principles of karmic capitalism where I laid out some of my early thinking on this.

20:26So I took a long hiatus from that type of thinking and have come back to it. But it is a practice. It is a practice. And I found your comment on justice as sort of the, this isn't going to be the best phrasing, but the sort of master determinant of virtue or lack of virtue when you're, right, the sort of parent virtue above others. Yeah. In a sense, I've been thinking quite a lot about mother qualities, right? So for instance, what is the rate limiter? which is slightly different than what you were saying. But if you talk to like Pavel Tzatzoulin about physical fitness, so he popularized kettlebells in the United States and really knows his stuff.

21:17And for him, it's like strength first. Like strength, if you look at longevity, if you look at healthspan, if you look at your ability to execute other things. He's like, before you worry about flexibility, before you worry about mobility, before you worry about endurance, strong first. That's the name of his company, in fact. and I'll say okay that's very even if it's inaccurate I happen to think it's accurate it's helpful to sit and think about that for a second and interrogate that concept and so to give you a window in I do Five Bullet Fridays newsletter every Friday goes out to a couple million people and I capture things as I'm out in the world that are going to later make it into Five Bullet Fridays so as we're recording this something that I'm working on are a few quotes that are compatible that all touch on the same thing, which is laying out a hierarchy of virtues.

22:15And they word it very eloquently. Maya Angelou is one. And she talks about courage as the mother virtue because all other virtues at their testing point. Yes. Right. Yeah. And that quote, that it's all, I think there's a C.S. Lewis version of that same quote. There are a bunch. And it's true, and I think I said this in the book I did on Courage, that courage is the essential version because you can't do any of the other things without courage. And it's true. It's just the absence of justice or the absence of it being the right thing immediately renders whatever it is worthless. Like, if you win the Medal of Honor for the Confederacy, you know, it's like there's something hollow about it.

22:56Like, there's a Lord Byron quote where he says, "'Tis the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage in its fall." Like what it is in pursuit of. Like there's so many lonely stands you could take. Those old timers love their rhymes. You got to start rhyming more. Well, that's a poem. But that was from a poem. But the point is like there's a lot of lonely stands you could take. Doesn't mean you can't do some stoic spoken word stuff. Anyway. If you're taking the lonely stand, but it's wrong, you know what I mean? Yeah. Or it's inactive. Like it's rendered worthless. Both of these are interesting.

23:31I mean, it's, I'm glad that you brought up justice space because now I can think about both of these side by side. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And if you have a common failure mode, right? It's like if something dysregulates you, if there are certain issues that seem to repeat, if you have certain patterns with your significant other, it's like, okay. Right. Is this, and because justice can also be, hijacked by the righteous mind. Of course. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Right? But it helps to have a list, like a checklist to run through. Anyway, I just wanted to say, I'm really glad you brought it up because now I have a completely different lens on a list that I might have automatically ordered with Courage at the Top, in a sense.

24:18I'll send you the book. I just sent it into the publisher like three days ago. You know what? I'm going to let people in on some inside baseball. So part of the reason, it's done. It's done, it's finished. It's finished. 100%. Okay, all right. Then maybe I can take a look at it because we've had this experience before. You've sent me finished books with pages ripped out. You're like, delete this page, delete this page. Yeah, if I get sent a manuscript, part of the reason that I'm just like, I don't read manuscripts is because I cannot turn off editing. And so I will do a full book edit that takes an absurd shit ton of time because I can't turn it off.

24:55And I actually, I'm not going to be an editor, but I think I'm a better editor than a writer. There's lower stakes. Lower stakes, right? I'm just like, yeah, we should definitely take out the appendix. Yeah, no, you don't really need your left toe. We can take that off because I don't have to actually deal with the consequences. But that level of detachment, which I have with very few things, it's helpful, right? Like when I'm looking for editors, I try to embolden them to be willing to say, yeah, we should lose your left toe. Yeah, well, I mean, whenever you've sent me your stuff, you always say something like, what's your least favorite chapter?

25:30What chapter would you cut? Right? Where's it too long? If you had to cut a chapter. You're never like, what do you like? No, I'm like, if you had to cut 20%, what would you cut?

25:42Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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28:37So to go back to generosity, the other thing I think I would point out, because again, it can feel very sort of first worldly where it's like we associate generosity and money. But of course, there's many ways to be generous, right? Like, can you be just like, I think we talked about competition earlier. It's so easy to live in a world where you think things are zero sum, right? And that if somebody else gets ahead, it means it's coming at your expense in some way. And I think even there, I've had to grow and I feel like I've changed, which is like, I now feel in some ways more excited when I help someone else succeed.

29:11Or if I open a door for someone than I do with my own stuff, right? And the idea of just – but that's a result of having helped people and experienced how wonderful that felt. Do you know what I mean? Before you do it, it feels like stupid. We can also paint it in a very maybe helpful, self-serving way, which is let's put generosity aside for a second, although it is one way to describe some of these behaviors. if you for instance well let me just put out an observation first which is i think that generosity is inversely correlated to wealth in the first world as as a as a percentage of what you possess i actually believe that from what i've seen like the more money people have the better they are at the money accumulating game the less they want to part with it sure and And that's probably how they accumulated in the first place.

30:16Right. And I think, look, I'm sure I'm guilty of that on some level. Yeah. Right. Like you have to value money to accumulate a bunch of it unless you're just, okay, fine. Like you got drunk and bought the Powerball and there you go, you have a few hundred million. That doesn't usually last very long. Right. If that's the case. But I'll put it this way. If you, and this is something we've been talking about a little bit earlier directly, but mostly indirectly. And that is, if you go into Starbucks tomorrow and you buy, you're paying for your coffee and you give the barista 20 bucks and you're like, I'm paying for the person or two behind me.

30:54Yeah. That act implicitly says, I have more than enough. Yeah. That is a very uncommon perception of reality in, say, the United States. Yeah. In a go, go, go. Sure. Accumulate capitalist society. Yeah. It is just, I think, very uncommon. Like, I have more than enough. Yeah. That is what that act says. I have extra. I have extra. Not only do I have what I need, I have extra, is what that says. Can you afford, forget about 20 bucks. can you give like five bucks and say like, hey, whoever comes in under five bucks. Yeah. If you can afford to go to Starbucks to buy your vainty Frappuccino with God knows what diabetes fuel in it.

31:41Your breakfast milkshake. Yeah, if your breakfast milkshake, you can probably afford to pay for someone's next small black coffee. And that is a non-trivial act as a sort of statement of self-appraisal. It sounds silly, but it's like try it. But you're reinforcing it. Actually, the beneficiary of that is you yeah yeah because you are like try it tomorrow you you are you are not just saying that you have enough you are acting as if you have like as they say act as if you are acting as if you have enough yeah and then it becomes truer to you at a more like cellular level and then so when yeah you hear about some natural disaster or somebody your employee asked for your raise or something you can go like i don't need to approach this from a scarcity mindset which is the default setting.

32:29I think of the human speech. I mean, we come from a place where there was never enough food, right? Survival was, we were always teetering on the edge of survival. And then depending on where you come, like more recently, you know, your grandparents grew up in the depression or you grew up as an immigrant in a poor country. Like depending on what that is, it's even compounding just the biological urge of like, never enough, save some, winter is coming, So you're practicing and teaching yourself. You're developing the virtue, as Aristotle says, by doing the thing. Yeah, and practicing gripping it lightly.

33:06And by the way, that small act of paying for somebody behind you, as an easy example, that transcends money. Yeah. Right? which is why I think, well, I tend to do better in crisis than I do with like the small paper cuts in life. Yeah, yeah, me too. So my work to do is with the little annoyances, often, very often human factors. This is where justice gets me in trouble. It's just the principle of the thing. You know, that's, oh boy, now Tim's about to really punish himself.

33:50but to the extent that I've made progress on the crisis side and to the extent that I've made progress on the paper cut side, I think it's through these little things. And those things compound and they become a habit. Well, it's important, you know. And it's a habit of thinking, by the way. Yes. The habit of action leads to a habit of thinking. And vice versa. And vice versa. You can probably give me the attribution. You're so much better at this than I am, but it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking and then to think your way into a new way of acting. This would be an example, I think, potentially of that.

34:24They're not mutually exclusive, but that would be an example. It's funny, right? The obstacle is the way, which is from this quote from Marcus Realist. He does talk a lot in meditations about how difficult circumstances, obstacles are fueled, whatever. But specifically that quote, I truncated, like I shortened it. I didn't include some of the beginning and I cut out some of the middle. But that fuller quote is about annoying obnoxious people it's about he says it's about the people who obstruct us right and i mean he opens meditations with he he was clearly perpetually annoyed with human beings and he would have had to interact with lots of them probably many of the worst of them right as his job what was what was what was his line that was like when you leave the house today expect that you will find people ungrateful rude entitled he's got the opening of meditations right like that That is for, to his credit, the first book is all about gratitude.

35:19But then when he gets to the actual book itself. But I still have a few things to say. But everyone else sucks. Like these 20 people who helped me are awesome, but everyone else fucking sucks. But even the rest of that quote, you know, he goes like, we're made to work with each other. He's like, these people don't know what they're doing. He's like, they can't implicate me in ugliness. And he's like, my job is to put up with them and work with them. Like, it's funny. like the famous part is like how shitty everyone is. That's what everyone remembers. But he catches himself halfway through that paragraph and it ends on a very positive note to be patient and generous and collaborative, you know?

35:57So it's funny, like we see what, we see the confirmation of like, yeah, people are that way. But what we kind of conveniently ignore is what he's saying we have to do with those people, which is be good to them. I have a top secret stoic life hack. Oh. giving some wording for the thumbnail and this is borrowed from a friend of mine i'm not going to name him because the way that he phrased it was would actually be much more offensive but he he's been i've observed a a visible difference in his state of ease in the world and i was like what's going on he's like oh basically i've just decided when i go out in the world that i'm going to treat everyone as if they have a debilitating disease that affects their like mental and emotional regulation yeah and it just makes it so much easier to deal with everybody it's like you're not gonna get angry at somebody if they're handicapped yeah right like how insensitive would that be yeah so when you go out it's just there you go folks the philosophical way i've heard that expressed is act as if no one else has free will and only you do which is which is like they They are programmed.

37:09There's some person pulling puppet strings, making them do all the things that are bothering you, frustrating. So they're utterly blameless and can't be held responsible for their decisions and actions, except for you. You do own what you do. And there is something about that that I think there's an element of truth to that. Or it's like, you know, act as if Adam Smith said, you know, Again, we think of Adam Smith as this ruthless practitioner or philosopher of capitalism. But he also writes a book called A Theory of Moral Sentiments about how we should be good people. But he basically says, act as if there's an impartial observer following you everywhere.

37:51Just going, hmm. You know, to everything that you do. A little hall monitor with a clipboard. Just like, could you justify it to that person? You know, and a lot of times, like, they're not God or anything. He's just saying, like, they're just watching. Like how much would you do, how much differently would you act if other people were watching? And it does kind of, I think, keep you honest. You would tip a little more. You'd be a little bit more patient. You know, you do all the things that you want to do, but you think you can get away with not doing. Here's another lead domino, let's call it, just to get fancy, that if tipped over, tips over a lot of other things.

38:29And I will likely be doing this in the next year, probably in the next quarter. And it's so straightforward. And I haven't tracked the author, so I don't know if they've been embroiled in scandal or something. There's no reason for me to expect that, but just in case, because I don't want to. Yeah, I mean, you talked about Scott Adams earlier. Can people just not be awful so I can use your work, which I like? Yeah, just for the snapshot in time. But I think it was Will Bowen, might be the pronunciation, B-O-W-E-N. In any case, it's the 30-day no-complaint experiment. Yes. i think this is the first blog post you ever it was a very early blog post and if you want to change your life you put a bracelet on could be a rubber band and every time you complain you switch to the wrist it's might be 21 days but it's three or four weeks and if you make a concerted effort to not complain at all for and you achieve a solid let's call it even two weeks yeah without switching that bracelet your quality of life will change completely uh if if you have some improvement let's just say yeah that can be gained which i would say is true for most people and it it's a forcing function for a lot of the stoic practices it should be a rubber band and then instead of switching you just have that i wonder yeah you know i i suppose you could do it a whole bunch of ways you could get like an opus day cat of nine tails might be a little awkward in said Starbucks if suddenly, bitch, it's like that.

39:58Samantha and I found that. So like, obviously we work together. And so, but we're not always together. So we would like get home in the afternoon or the evening and we'd be like talking about like work stuff, right? And we realized like our kids thought we were fighting because like we weren't mad at each other, but we were both complaining slash venting about stuff, right? And if you're a kid, you don't really understand what's happening. You're like, why is dad talking negatively to mom? And why is mom talking negatively to dad? none of the animus or the frustration was directed at each other yeah but it's the person we were communicating it to and so it was like we realized one we just shouldn't well like first off it's like okay let's not talk about work around the kids if that's how we're gonna do it and then second it was like this shouldn't be the everything's going great you know what i mean like at the end of the day we're actually quite happy with everything but we're just like picking the end we're picking to end the day by like ruminating on and complaining about all the things we don't like right we're not setting this angle this happened well and this happened well and what about this we're just using our limited time together to fucking curl garbage at each other yeah which is a very it's a very human thing of course it's a super human thing and i'll give just one tip if people pursue this exercise read the blog post because i thought about it much more completely when I wrote that, uh, the no complaint experiment, my name, it'll pop right up.

41:26And the book is great. I really, really found the book incredibly helpful. What is a complaint becomes important to define this before you embark on this experiment. You need to have some, some rules of play. And I would say one of the critical, one of the critical details that I at least implemented in my life because there are going to be times when you have to discuss something that is negative that sucks that it's just bad that is a problem but how do you prevent that from being categorized as a complaint you talk about what you're going to do about I'm not complaining but yeah yeah that doesn't work Like that's yellow card, switch your band.

42:16You talk about what you're gonna do about it. Yeah, right. Right? And you talk about like next actions, who's gonna own it, how you're gonna prevent it in the future. If you don't have that addendum, it is complaint. Do not pass go, restart. Well, I'm glad you said that because like sometimes I'll talk about like, you know, the Stoics were tried to be dispassionate. They tried not to complain. You know, they tried not to lament. They tried not to be angry. and people go, why didn't you tell that to the civil rights movement or something? You know, like, there's, they weren't, Martin Luther King wasn't complaining, right?

42:48Like protesting an injustice and then activating a large group of people for a redress of those grievances. It's not passive. That's not a complaint, right? He wasn't like tweeting like, this sucks, it's not fair, right? Like he, it was so much more profound than that. So there's a difference between objecting to something or trying to change something and then complaining about it. And that's really – the Stoics are – and the complaint challenge, it's really about the – reveling in your impotence is the problem. You know what I'm saying? That's the title of my next book. A Middle-Aged Man's Guide to Life.

43:28Yeah.

43:31like like uh it is and it's important that we see the stoics as people who led social movements people who ran for office people who you know you have a little like acronyms for books because the title is long so you could this one could be r.i.p r.i.y.p but you could shorten it you can get fancy with some old-timey capitalization make it a little pseudo-german anyway but you know what i mean like there's a there's a difference between doing something about a problem and just lamenting a problem. Right. So this no-complaint experiment with the qualifier that I just mentioned will force you to think very carefully about what is in your control and what is not.

44:13Because if it's out of your control and you start to talk about it and it's negative, guess what? You're fucked. Now you have to switch your band and start over. So it is very much a forcing function. The other pro tip I'll give, if you're going to try this, delete Twitter from your phone. I would just, whatever you're doing right now, just delete Twitter from your phone. Like you just said quality of life improver right there. It doesn't matter what your resolution is for the year. Just start by doing that because it's not improving your life in any way. And by the way, it wasn't improving your life like a year ago.

44:44And now it's like a thousand times worse and more toxic. So it's just not good for you as a person.

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47:22There's no last minute trips to the store. Plus, the meals are delicious and easy to make. The best way to cook just got better. Go to HelloFresh.com slash stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. Yeah, if you want to control your outputs, control your inputs. Totally. Be very careful about what you put into your mind. And if you want to see what it can do to you, just see what it's cost to the richest man in the world.

48:05Like, it's not good for your soul. It's not good for your reputation. It's not good for your mind. I would say, too, like on the complaining thing, one of the things I try to work on is like, like if you run a company or business, it's not quite complaining what it's close to. Like, you kind of have to have a policy or you have to communicate inside your culture. Like, don't come to me with problems. Right? Because that's also a form of complaint. Like, this is wrong. It's like, okay, but you should have sat with it for five more minutes and come to me with what we're going to do about it. Because otherwise, like, imagine, especially a big company.

48:39Like, imagine someone has 1 ,000 employees. If 1 ,000 employees come to one person with their problem, that person is just going to kill themselves. Yeah, or if they come to multiple people, it just becomes this game of problem hot potato. Yes. And that's a huge waste of everyone's resources. Yeah. What are you going to do about the problem? What is the problem presenting us as far as options? And they might all be bad options, but it can't just be like, here's negative information. Do with it what you will. Yeah, I have a Google document that is like the commandments of sort of TFE, which is like Tim Ferriss Enterprises, right?

49:12Which is not the real name of my company, but it's just easy shorthand. And one of them is at the very top is if there is a problem, come to, and it needs to be discussed, you need to have at least two options that are ranked order. Yeah. And you can explain why you've chosen your top option. What are the other commandments? Or what are some of them? some of them relate to tactical, basic procedural things like calendaring, right? So this is going to put it in, like, it doesn't exist if it's not in the calendar. Yes, but it's more specific. So for instance, this is going to be very in the weeds, but people might find it helpful.

49:59So if someone or if I offer, say, make this up reviewing annual blood work with a doctor's office and you send them two times for a potential call they might take a few days to get back to you but if you live in a world where a lot is a lot is scheduled constantly you need to block out those potential times and in the entry in say Google Calendar I would have people put a question mark at the beginning of the entry that just means it hasn't been confirmed it's blocked but it hasn't been confirmed and if there's not a very unbended if there's if there's not an immutable policy for doing that things are going to get double booked things are going to get lost and it's going to get very messy and then you just create a lot of work you create more work for more people yeah so there would be say a commandment there's actually a separate google doc which is just calendar rules yeah like tactical this is how he likes calendar rules uh but what are more what are some general like philosophical commandments then.

51:04Let me think about this because I know that we have like two or three pages, but it's been a long time since I've been in that document. I have two. Let's hear yours, yeah. Buy me some time. I wrote down because I'm going to do a whole list, but my two, they seem related, but they're separate. So one, there's a sign in the kitchenette per se that just says a sense of urgency. Yeah, I've seen it. It was in the four-hour chef. Yeah, and so like you have to do things quickly. And related to that, my other rule is start the clock. So like, let's say it's going to take someone else like at a different, like to get back to us or process something or manufacture.

51:39It's going to take a month, right? So if we take two weeks dicking around, thinking about it, it actually takes six weeks, right? Like part of it we control is when we start the clock. Like when we hit the ball back into their court and it's their problem. So I am continually frustrated with and appalled by the waste of like, okay, if we like a bunch of there because we're doing it for Christmas, a bunch of signed books. If we don't get the books packaged and signed by Saturday at 9.30 a.m. because the shipping deadline is 10 a.m. for the post office here, then we might as well not fucking do it until Monday at four, which is the next shipping deadline, right?

52:19So we got to start like, we're adding two days to that clock by not starting it here, right? And so I find myself repeating like start the clock. Don't. if a video editor has to work on something, we want them to have as much time as possible. So start the clock by giving them the materials, the outline, all the things they need to start the clock. So that's one of my big things is just, and that's how I think about life, is like, I don't procrastinate. I start the clock. A book's going to take a year. I don't spend a bunch of time wondering if I'm going to do it, when I'm going to do it. I start the clock.

52:54What's your current, when do you write typically now? The mornings, like 9, sorry, like 8.45, depends on school drop-off, but let's say 8.45, if I'm still writing by noon, that's like a long day of writing. So it's like, it's very short concentrated windows. And if you do it day in and day out, it adds up. So if you start the clock, it adds up. If you don't start the clock, it hasn't started adding up. So I have a commandment that relates to starting the clock. and it really just relates to making faster decisions when you have, which is very often the case, incomplete information or information that might change.

53:38It's like if it's reversible or if it's an acceptable cost, i.e. acceptable loss, just book multiple things. If you think I might fly at this time and this time, but it's going to take like a week or two, don't try to hold that in your head. Just book both. And then you can cancel one and pay the fee. Yeah, exactly. Just, if it can be reversed or canceled at minimal cost, in some cases, it's at full cost. I'm willing to bear the brunt of that. In other cases, it's free. And it was a dichotomy in your head that you couldn't do both. Yeah, yeah. Then I want people to move quickly in part because working memory is so faulty.

54:26And even documentation can be very clumsy, right? With like a million Google Docs scattered all over the place or notes and people lose track of things. I mean, we do have basic infrastructure and tools that we rely upon like Asana and so on. But that would be another one. Effectively setting rules for people to make faster decisions and explaining what types of decisions would fall into that category is one. I have one that's, you better have a reason. And so by that, I mean like, let's say I see someone, they made an editorial decision or they made a content decision or they made a business decision or whatever.

55:04And I disagree. And that's just a fact of life. Like you can't preemptively weigh in on every decision. The whole point of life is you have to delegate decisions, right? And so people on your team make decisions. And I accept that I'm going to disagree with a lot of those decisions. where I get upset or where I will come to not be able to work with a person is when I go, okay, so you sent this out at this time or you did it this way. And I go, why? And they're like, oh, I don't know. Or, you know, like it's just how it came or whatever. Right. And if they're, if the decision, even if it's really bad, even if it costs a lot of money, even if I totally disagreed, even got a lot of people upset, if they're going, well, what I was thinking was, and then they have logic behind what they did, then we can have a conversation and be like, okay, I totally see that.

55:52Here's why I disagree. Here's how I want it to go forward. But what you can't do if you're making decisions that ultimately reach lots of people as like a media company does, is just unthinkingly do shit, right? And so one of mine is like, I'll respect your reason. I may disagree and I may correct that reason and I may override that reason going forward. but you have to have a reason for the decisions that you make which you'd think it would be everyone would always have a reason for why they do things but welcome to life they don't yeah yeah totally there's a there's a bunch i mean this is another procedural one but it saves a lot of time which is with rare exception because there are exceptions uh but with rare exception if If someone requests a meeting with me or a call, number one, for me, Zoom has introduced more problems than it has solved for me.

56:49Of course. Like phone calls on a cell phone are great. Yeah, I can walk, I can be driving. Exactly. I do not need to be sitting in my uncomfortable chair staring at a screen any longer than is necessary. So there's a hierarchy in terms of what I will and won't do. But in addition to that, if someone requests a call, the first thing is generally as a response will be, Tim would love to do this. He's currently heads down on some deadlines. Could you please just shoot over a couple of topics or questions to get the ball rolling via email? Yeah. And then if that leads after I've reviewed that probably on a one-on-one call with said employee, if that has been raised to my attention and there are criteria for that, then if we book a call almost always it's going to be 30 minutes yeah what's the smallest you have like a a maximum or a like a normal unit of time right like so i think people are too casual with hours right it's like hey i'd like to meet and they go okay and then they set it in the calendar for an hour and you've just said it's going to take an hour i mean if someone has requested a meeting with you which is what i deal with more than the opposite if you do if you have a 30-minute block, there's a good chance they can go to 45 if need be.

58:01But block it out on 30. I prefer calls that are used for decision-making, not problem defining. So pretty much always an agenda, even if it's just a few bullets, will be requested because Tim likes to be as prepared as possible. Something like that. Yeah, sure. These seem basic, but man, do these little things add up over time. And very small, repetitive tasks done inefficiently can cripple you as an individual contributor, especially if you are trying to block out extended periods of time to do things. So another yellow slash red flag would be, and this is not verbatim what's in the document, but let's just say that three things come up in a given week in a similar category.

58:53of a similar type that need to be turned around that week. That were not predicted. A system is broken. There needs to be a process fixed. That pattern of related fires, that urgency... Solve it further upstream. Should be solved further upstream. That then comes to... It might seem strange. Hopefully it doesn't seem strange. but a lot of the stuff in the 4-Hour Workweek I still lean extremely heavily on and the basic framework, I would modify a little bit, although the acronym you'll see in a second is a little less appealing. But in the 4-Hour Workweek, you have DEAL, right? Oh, how clever, deal, that works.

59:36Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation. In this case, I would say it's Definition, Elimination, Automation, Delegation. Unfortunately, that spells dead. But the idea is you need to be very clear if you're going to be trying to determine, say with 80-20 analysis, which I still use all the time, Pareto's law, to identify the few inputs that produce the disproportionately large outputs, you kind of need to know what targets you're aiming for. You really need to know. And that's definition, and there's a lot more to definition. If you're not clear on what you want, the likelihood of the universe delivering that to your doorstep with a bow on top is very low.

1:00:13So I've said before, and I remind myself of this a lot, that the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish. And definition then is step one. Then you have elimination, which is like what golden fetters or less than golden fetters do you have that are hindering you from efficiently trying to reach those objectives or address those things that you have defined? what are the activities, right? If we're doing an 80-20 analysis, right? The 20 % that produce the 80, well, that means hypothetically you have 80 % of that pie chart left that you should trim. Okay, elimination, getting rid of as much as possible.

1:01:00Because a lot of people skip that step and we're seeing it right now on steroids with chat GPT, like people doing a lot of meaningless bullshit very quickly. And like doing something quickly or efficiently does not make it important. so eliminating as much as possible especially if you're going to have a very lean team which I would suggest anyone should aim for even if you have a thousand employees so definition elimination automation, this is going to be using technology how do you do it more than so you'll do it once and you get yeah, setting a system or a policy, which could be very simple by the way, it could be having a virtual assistant or an assistant or an employee or maybe yourself where you have a recurring calendar reminder to do this thing so that it doesn't pop up in the middle of your week unexpectedly oh shit property taxes are behind oh wait a second some guy showed up at the farm saying that i'm whatever if you're sitting down and writing out your mortgage check each month you fucked up it should be automated right like that's something that can be automated so automation can be a something that is implemented manually yeah right like a i have a reminder every morning, which is like, do these three low back exercises.

1:02:14So I don't need to think about it. You're automating the willpower and the contemplation. Right. So then there's the automation and automation also, by the way, I was looking at some of the tasks that I've assigned to assistants in the past. We don't need to get derailed here, but I track a lot of the AI developments pretty closely and I do experiment with these tools. And I took the language that we had put in several asana tasks for people to manually do yeah and i looked at their response then we loaded the exact more or less like 95 percent identical language from that asana yeah task into chat gpt to see what the output would look like and it was like 90 percent there wow and it was instantaneous yeah no comms overhead wow and there are drawbacks sure i'm We don't have to get into them right now, but the technology is evolving so quickly.

1:03:11As soon as that stuff is really easily, elegantly, seamlessly integrated with OpenTable, integrated with Kayak or directly with airlines or the systems underlying reservation systems with, say, concierge services have access to it. They're not calling all the airlines individually to negotiate on your behalf. Once those integrations are there, I really feel like two of the places that are going to be massively disrupted and suffer economically from AI. There will be benefits, but will be, as two examples, India and the Philippines. Call centers, virtual assistants. It's going to be very challenging.

1:03:50But that's an example of some degree of leveraging technology and reducing interpersonal overhead. And then at the very end, you have delegation.

1:04:04and that process is something that I try to instill also in my employees in my team think these through in this order you don't need to be doing everything everything needs to get done that's your attitude towards them and that should be their attitude towards tools, systems if you're doing a lot of stuff because I am not going to keep an eye on all the balls that are being juggled if there are certain things that are being repeated come to me with a suggestion for a systems improvement. I don't want your life to suck. Yeah. So we've made a bunch of systems improvements in the last six months.

1:04:41And I think we will continue to do that. The most neglected step in all of that is elimination. For a lot of reasons. Well, I would say the most neglected step. Actually, maybe at the top of the funnel. Yeah, to me, and people miss it about the 4-Hour Workweek and why it's such an important book and why I do think its relationship to stoicism is so important. The subtitle of that book about lifestyle design, right? Like, what do you want your life to look like? Because maybe, I mean, maybe for some people, they do like to do that stuff. But if you don't think about Seneca's thing is like, if you don't know where you're sailing, no wind is favorable.

1:05:15If you don't know what you want your life to look like, then you can't do any of that stuff. Like for me, like I've said this, I just hired a new assistant and I was like, look, my ideal day is there's nothing in this calendar. Not like I'm not working. there's nothing in the calendar that i'm working all day on things i actually like doing i'm living my life and and so i now know from experience i don't like meetings i don't like phone calls i don't like things that take me away from what i like doing right and and that's family and work and so you've got to start with like what do you want your life to look at what what are you trying to design for what are you optimizing for and then there's all these great frameworks for being optimized, but you've got to know what's aimed at.

1:05:55A great forcing function for systems if you don't have a lot of practice, talking about practices, right? If you're trying to change your mode of thinking, your way of pattern recognition, your way of problem solving by acting first, consider doing a mini-retirement. That's minimum three, ideally four weeks off the grid, which doesn't mean you have to be in a canoe on the Amazon. Just take everything away. Yeah, it just means you are not allowed to fight any fires. Yes. If you just go on a one-week vacation or even a two-week vacation, you can let things turn into a blaze and come back and try to fix it.

1:06:33Three or four weeks, very difficult. Typically, that will force you to put in place policies, rules, systems, and ongoing types of delegation that will then persist past the point that you return. That's the whole intention. So that would be another recommendation for folks. if they seem to do a lot of ad hoc things, they're very busy, and they suspect maybe these things could be eliminated, maybe these things could be systematized, but they never seem to have the time to do it because they're just caught up in the day-to-day. And I end up there too, by the way. Then look out over the next six months or year, plan a mini-retirement.

1:07:12That will force a lot of things to happen. Yeah, we spent a month in LA this year until we had a pet sitter while we were gone at the house. And then it was amazing, right? because I mean no one died everything got taken care of and we were like oh wait you could have this while you're home too you know what I mean and you could just have the fun part right and so you got to step away and come up with something that operates while you're away and then you can go okay what part of this structure or infrastructure am I keeping because what's the point of the success if you're a miserable mess all the time right yeah dude this is amazing yeah thank you so much yeah super fun thanks very much

1:07:55Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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