#683: In Case You Missed It: June 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

0:00Hey folks, Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas. It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8 ,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out. See some videos of gameplay at coyotegame.com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind-blowing. It takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

0:34Coyotegame.com. Now back to the episode. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday. my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time.

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2:26Can I ask you a personal question? Now I would assume at the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

3:01month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

3:34first up simon coronel world champion of magic and illegally classified alien of extraordinary ability by the u.s government when i joined accenture i realized i had this sort of flash forward to going yeah i'm young and idealistic i'm going to join for a couple of years then quit and do something that leads me towards something, whatever, I don't know. And I just had a sudden flicker of like, wait a minute, I've heard this story. I've heard how this can go. And then you blink and you're 40 in middle management and wondering where the decades went. And I kind of sensed, wait, that could be me.

4:15You never know who you are until you're there in the moment, until you're faced with the actual trolley lever, right? You don't know which what you'll do. And so I went on this round the world pilgrimage with all my remaining savings at the time. It was the first time I came to America to see the Magic Castle, to see Vegas and all the Cirque du Soleil shows and all the stuff I'd heard of. And this is before? This is before Accenture. This was in the month's, because I realized it was going to be a while before I had free time. I was going to go into this high pressure corporate environment. And I did it as kind of a almost creative pilgrimage to kind of, I thought it was like almost injecting inspiration intravenously to kind of keep that fire burning.

4:53Stockpile some fire. Exactly. Hide my soul in my sock where they can't find it and drag it into the corporate drudgery. That was sort of the mindset at the time. And I think that was good because I did have a sense I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what or when. And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning a okay salary, I still lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings. I deliberately didn't buy a car, even though I could have afforded one. And instead, I spent that money on trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting and everything and building savings. I didn't live extravagantly because I kind of had a sense, whatever's next.

5:27I don't know what's next, but it's going to be good to have a stockpile of savings. And then I realized that the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was fear and enthusiasm battled and fear kept winning. I'm like, I want to leave and do something cool and do the thing and go full magic or something, but it's scary. I don't feel ready. And then finally, after sort of three more, I was at the company for five years. And after three years longer than I intended to be, just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs and the stability. And one day, finally, some pieces clicked together in my head.

6:00There was an actual moment where I realized I'd read an article by a palliative care nurse about her observations on people's end of life regrets. And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing. Didn't try the thing. Always wondered, never found out. And I realized, yeah, I don't want to die that way. I want to know, even if it fails, at least you know. So I was like, okay, number one, I have to try the thing. Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready, enough savings and enough career contacts, enough good magic material or whatever. And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never going to feel ready.

6:35And so number three, if there's no right time, then sooner is better than later. And I started drafting my resignation letter. It was one of those rare moments. Normally life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was. There was A, B, C. It was a simple equation. It was an algorithm. I'm like, yep, that logically checks out. All right, fuck, I guess I'm doing it.

6:58Next up, Jake Mews, CEO of Maui Nui Venison, which provides incredible nutrient-dense food while balancing the axis deer population of Maui.

7:14the biggest risk we have every single night is safety and it became so critically important to have the right people and the right personalities that we had to build a system to measure those personalities and that's in the recruiting vetting process oh yeah so how do you measure those things okay humility yeah so we created essentially a scorecard it has six questions per category so six for humility, six for work ethics, six for emotional intelligence. Questions like, do the energy they bring every night, is it consistent? Isn't it positive? So we talk about body language and emotional intelligence and all these different things within these questions.

7:51And I'm happy to like provide this thing. And we use it in three ways. We give it to the person on the second interview when we're hiring somebody. So we say, here's the HHS system. This is the only thing you're accountable to in your first month and two things happen they read it and they go or actually they just don't call back and i've made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past where you get past this honeymoon phase and people turn into grouches and it's just there's there's people first man how he's involved and i remember a guy that we were going to hire that was a like brilliant electrical engineer he wanted to quit his job come work with us because he heard about the seven and seven schedule and thought it'd be the best thing ever.

8:34And then he read it and he didn't call me back. I really wanted to hire him. And I called him back and I said, any reason you didn't call me back? He's like, I have terrible body language and I'm not willing to quit my job and take the chance within the first month that I get fired for bad body language because we score them. If you're an A, we celebrate and figure out a way for you, reward you. If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements that you need to make within some of these categories. and if you're a C, we let you go on the spot. No questions asked. And you set that expectation up front.

9:07Oh, so we set that in the interview. They have to like agree to this system coming in. They're evaluated by their entire team, including them doing a self-eval, which is a part of the overall score. They get to like grade themselves. And the team, are they sent on like a test evening prior to hiring? Or I guess they just know that once they start going out. Yeah, so we call them tryouts, But when somebody comes to try out with us, which means we give them a month, we hire them on, but we call them a tryout. And at the end of that tryout, which is typically a one month period, they get graded by their entire team.

9:44And they know it's this like really tense moment where. How many people are on a given team? Eight to ten. Got it. Yeah. So it's a good average. So if somebody. Yeah. If somebody's got a bug up their ass about somebody. Doesn't matter. It's just one person. It always ends up being like a great average and it always ends up being a great measure of that person. And it's been this extraordinary filter for hiring. Asshole is the wrong word. But when we figured out how to use that system, we now grade every person at their first month, we grade every single person quarterly, including me. Every single person gets graded.

10:22And there's questions on there like, do they try or ask to do more than is required of them every day? And it's been so amazing to see the mistakes I make in when we're hiring new people or moving people around. Like a great example is I moved a couple people from a field position into a management position. And then all of a sudden their work ethic score started coming down. And it wasn't because they weren't working any harder. It was I didn't do a good job defining to the team what their new responsibilities were. So they saw them sitting on a computer and doing these things and they're like, well, they're not in the field helping us.

10:57And so it's just this amazing quarterly exercise that just pulls out all of the tension within your teams and creates framework for people to address those tensions. And then ultimately what's amazing is to watch people grow. How do you give feedback? Let's say they come back and they've got a bunch of bees. Yeah. So we sit. What's the big boss do? Yeah. So we sit them down and we say, is that the Royal we, or is it just you? No, no. It's multiple people. Yeah. It's me and like the two or three other harvest managers. Got it. Great example. One of the questions we asked talks about, are they genuinely happy to see their teammates succeeding?

11:34Because safety is such an important part of what we do. When we bring somebody in that's more talented, we will just like a sports team moves the best people into the best positions. We immediately move people around positions based on their skill sets. so somebody has to be genuinely happy to train somebody that may replace them in a role that they may enjoy yeah they used to be the yeah like right striker or whatever exactly got replaced and it's amazing to watch somebody that really wants to be there because they find purpose and they really love the schedule and they know the impact that they're having to our community have to make the decision to be better for their teammate every night to be like celebrating that person's growth even though it's potentially coming at the cost of something that they enjoy yeah so there's these that's hard oh this whole like i have that's asking i mean i'm not saying it's unreasonable but that i mean that's asking a lot of a lot of people i mean i don't know if i would be honest with myself i think that'd be hard here's the thing like it's been such a amazing exercise with lots of iterations right the first three iterations i made so many grown man cry and i felt so bad what was that your delivery or the measurement were you just like it was just the mess and fuck face it was the measurement was wrong sink or swim no you're getting evaluated by your peers on your personality and the value it's bringing to your team and you have to sit down quarterly and be told your humility is not good enough for this team i assume that the responses are all anonymized yeah everything's anonymized so and then average For what it's worth, I've done what's called a 360 interview.

13:14And I know people who as executives or founders have had these done. And without exception, myself included, every time that I spoke to somebody who's experienced this for the first time, they're like, I went and they sat in my car. And I basically had like a nervous breakdown, crisis of meaning. What do I do? Like, these are names everybody would recognize. But they were just like, holy shit. Yeah. The first time we did it with a large enough team that I included myself in it, because we were just so small early on, it was like, I think like the third iteration, I was like, I need to be a part of this.

13:51And I got all of the feedback back. I was just like, oh my God. But if we really want to build extraordinary teams, like I realized my approach to some of our conversations had to be so much better and nuanced to make them better. it wasn't the right approach and you learn all of this you end up reading this thing like braille after doing it i've done it like hundreds of times now yeah and i mean with repetition i imagine it's like exercise right it's like okay you're gonna apply metrics once a year you're gonna be very very very sore yeah and you might even hurt yourself but it was amazing to see what happened is we built this system because we knew we had to go from like eight people to 45 in a really short period of time to hit our mission goals about a year and a half ago and i had made poor hiring decisions in the past and they were mostly personality based or they were that person was operating amazing when i was around but the minute i left they turned into a different person and then there's this he said she said game that like this completely erases all of that because it's anonymous team scoring and the manager doesn't have a unweighted vote on whether that person stays around and what ended up happening is that hhs program started attracting people they started hearing about this accountability process to ensure you're attracting better fits oh yeah so coming back to so you're not saying hey fuck face in like the fourth fifth tenth 20th iteration yeah what's the language that you use um if somebody has growth opportunities let's call them uh it's really specific to which of the 18 categories they're struggling in right like how does the meeting start okay so we sit down and we we're going to give them paper and we say like okay you're a b minus yeah tim we put a 250 pound l on your back you crumpled into an oregon crane and you couldn't get up so you're a b minus and then we celebrate first some of the categories that they're doing really well in.

15:56Like some of the categories that point to professionalism or energy or all these different things. We celebrate right away because each one of the 24 segments have different scores within them that have been averaged throughout their team. And then we address the ones that they're like a C in. Got it. So they're not cut if they have a C in a particular review point. It's the average. Yeah, got it. So the C average, it's been amazing to see that system work. i've let go several people that were c's that i would have never let go i wouldn't have known to let them go like wouldn't have known that that was the impact they were having on the team at large it just would have never come out yeah i would love to you mentioned i think you offered to maybe share oh absolutely the question so we'll put that in the show notes as well yeah at tim.blogs podcast because i'm incredibly curious to check it out myself it just at least at face value it seems like a very elegant solution to a lot of problems that can seem like fragmented separate problems you have to address in different ways and again like i'm just a system builder and by no means is it perfect but i've heard lots of people speak to how important these different personality traits are and how they reward them and more importantly than the C or the A's, being able to say to somebody, this incredible combination of humility, work ethic, and emotional intelligence is making your whole team better.

17:27And your whole team is telling you your extraordinary ethics. Being able to reward and compensate somebody for that and have a measure to do so. When you say compensate, so let's say they have, because I know this is getting in the weeds a bit, but I feel like that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding so how many questions were there again there's 18 questions six on humility six on work ethic and six on emotional intelligence and they get this like a b or c for each of those questions yeah so they get it's graded one through seven yeah we just did it because there's seven days of the week and we talk about like being at excellent every day so it's one through seven and then we add up all the scores which is 126 total and they get a percentage so if they're an 87 we give them a B plus.

18:09Which is the average for the total. Which is the average. How do you reward or compensate the A's? If they're in their first six months of employment and they get two A's or A pluses in a reward, we give them a raise based on that contribution. And then we celebrate with the team like not always an A this last quarter. We make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having and it's already was so interesting they already all know but to not have framework to reward them for being amazing people has always been this fuzzy place for me where i couldn't reward or compensate that person for being an extraordinary individual that was making their whole team better because it didn't fit into what the classic hard skills define as like they're a great shooter or they're a great driver or one of these different things and every single one of those a plus people are our most highly skilled people as well they just when you operate with a certain level of humility you are more willing to learn and you learn faster and every single person that's come through our program that was like a b minus or a c that was like highly skilled and made the choice not to get better at these like what i very much consider skills just weighted themselves out it's been really cool to see people grow and like you're in this camp and you see these guys with their, a lot of them will tape their score up above their bed and they'll like look at it in the morning and say like, I was a B minus in this thing.

19:40I need to bring more consistent energy every night. Like we've got guys that go up and down and up and down and they're like, okay, I'm gonna be, try and be more consistent. Like they know what they're working on.

19:51Next up, Maggie Spivey Faulkner segment from Heresies, a new format that explores the unconventional and unorthodox. Maggie is an anthropological archaeologist and practitioner of indigenous archaeology.

20:11American middle-class culture is ruining America. America middle-class culture is ruining middle America and all of them. It's ruining everything. It's ruining literally everything. Yeah. I mean, we export ourselves, so maybe it's ruining the whole world. Let's just extend it. Let's get out there on a limb. When I say that, though, really, what do I mean? I kind of mean American modernism, the type of America that's existed post-World War II, where we instill in people a certain set of values. We've adjusted our culture. You tell your youth that to be a successful and respected member of society, you leave home at 17 or 18, go somewhere where you don't know anybody, go to college.

20:57And then if you're successful, you can start up a little nuclear family out in a nameless suburb or a town that has the same amenities that every town has and live a successful kind of the Barry in life, a little Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism in there. This is a very particular cultural brand. And as we're no longer in the heady glory days economically of what America was able to achieve after the world was destroyed and we were the only people that had like working machines anymore. as some of those pockets of fat have dissolved in the United States, we've been left in this situation where you get extreme social isolation.

21:51You get kids that can't get into the Ivy League, even though they feel like they're entitled to it. And then they go spend all their time online, become incels, buy AR-15 and shoot up a school. And I think that it's because we've really moved away from the idea of community in terms of being embedded in a place. You know, there are other European countries with economic issues. Look at Italy, look at Greece, but they don't have the same end result because those people are still embedded in a community of people who care about them, who interact with them. And you don't have this extreme social isolation.

22:35It's just, it's all cultural process, in my opinion. It's a similar thing with, I think that leads a lot of people to these extremely escapist drug addictions. And to Josh's point, I'm not talking about Burning Man, right? I'm talking about the kind of drug issues I see in Worcester, Massachusetts. So I think that this extreme adherence to that particular brand of the American dream has ruined our ability to have a functional, I mean, things have just become quite dysfunctional in the country because of it. So I'm trying to, again, refine the heresy with the, it is. So you said it was American dream, then you said it was maybe more modern.

23:20Yeah, modernism. I'm thinking about the hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people in China who have left their communities, moved into the cities. And so is this what you're talking about, or is it something different than this? And the same thing is happening in India right now, where the same kind of migration is happening. of people leaving these little villages where they have a certain identity, they know who they are, they're moving into big cities, they're going to college and beyond, they're mixing up, they're isolated. Is that where we're talking about this as a general phenomena?

23:56Or you're saying that there's something else different than this? Yeah, I think I do mean it a little bit more pointed than gradual urbanization due to change economically, globally. I think there is a particular brand of the American version of this. And honestly, the people who are most harmed by it, I think are young men, young white men in America. They're feeling this sea change under their feet. There are more women going to college than men for a decade now. Why in America? A lot of it is because men are just not achieving dumb metrics that are kind of meaningless, like SAT scores and GPAs at the same rate as women in the United States.

24:46I think that it's all American culture bounded, where if you're failing to meet this high kind of this Billy Crystal standard from movies in the 80s and 90s of being able to strike out on your own with just a baseball bat and an army duffel bag full of stuff walking into New York City to like start your life, that you have failed. And I think people are being told that they're literal failures because they're not able to achieve this very time constrained version of American success. And that a lot of the people who are doing some of the worst things in the United States right now are people who have gone through that experience of failure.

25:27And it's not necessary. I don't know that there's any analog to that type of failure in modern China or India. And I'm pretty sure there isn't a version of that in Italy or Greece. You live with your parents, you go to college, and then you move down the street when you get married. Can I ask, Maggie, how much of this is the stuff part, the part that you might call consumer culture? You know, that we measure ourselves by how much stuff we have and how good that stuff is and the brands that go with it. And then if you want that, you need cash. And to get that cash, you move to the city because that's where the job is that pays more cash.

26:04and then you just meet more people who want the same stuff. How much of it is the stuff part of it? And how much of it is the dream of making it big? Like, you know, the fantasy of becoming the next Elon. And how much of it is the leaving where you grew up to go to a new place? Because all those seem to be part of what you're describing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the stuff is a major part of it, but I would extend stuff beyond consumer goods and keeping up with the Joneses type stuff to meaningless achievements. What's the real difference from getting a degree from the University of Georgia versus Emory in terms of your life trajectory?

26:43Not that huge, but if you don't get into Emory and you have to go to Georgia Southern, suddenly that's like almost like a narcissistic injury where you have this hit to your ego you can never recover from. And it's just constant knocking down of ego that injures people in this way emotionally. What I'm arguing is that those standards are fucking stupid to begin with. They're not based in anything other than the imagination of what we could achieve on the GI Bill in 1950 at a time where we had far fewer people in the country. We had a far different economic outlook. And I really don't think it's necessarily about leaving home, which I mean, for me, it is.

27:28Because personally, I'm coming from this, again, from an outsider point of view. I didn't grow up in this type of culture, but I'm surrounded by it all the time now. So it's all bound up with it. But I think it's more this absolute, like you said about the Constitution, the written Constitution, this fiction we've created, this fantasy of what you need to just have a basic respectable life in upper middle class America. It doesn't matter how much money you make, even. If you're an underwater welder, are you getting the same respect as someone who went to Cornell in upper middle class Boston? I don't know that you are, even if you're making double the money.

28:07So quick question for you, Maggie. And I'll just add a little backdrop. So Johan Hari is an author, if I'm getting his name pronounced correctly, he's written books about addiction and also depression, chasing the scream, lost connections. And he returns in a very compelling way over and over again to social isolation. And I suppose what I'm wondering is, as I look at cultures that I understand somewhat, like Japan, for instance, the schooling there and cram schools and test scores are even more determinant in a way of your future than say the SATs are in the US. However, and there are social isolation issues in Japan, but you have multi-generational households And you look at a place like Costa Rica, multi-generational households.