#688: In Case You Missed It: July 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 coyote game dot com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind blowing. 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.

0:34Coyote game dot 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 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 because after all the podcast the books they can be quite long and that's why I created five bullet friday it's become one of my favorite things I do every week it's free it's always going to be free and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash friday that's tim.blog forward slash friday I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with.

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2:12So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.

2:32cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

2:44Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-betweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. 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.

3:13It'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.

3:35First up, Richard Koch, entrepreneur, investor, and author of the books The 80-20 Principle and Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It.

3:51Now writing a book called 80-20 Beliefs. And in order to do that, I've interviewed 50 people that I know very well and who I trust to tell me the truth and they trust to tell me some of the intimate things about their life, particularly what went wrong. And I asked them two questions, very simple questions. One is, is there any belief that has really made a big difference in your life that at any stage you have changed? So you used to believe X and now you believe Y. And 90 % of the people, or nine out of ten people, and it's a very small sample, but it's an extraordinary coincidence if they're all saying this, and it's not quite true generally, say that they have at some stage changed an important belief.

4:40And a belief, I'm not talking about something which is an academic belief, you know, where you might believe that one politician is better than another, or you might believe in green values, or you might not. I'm talking about belief that has made a big difference in your own life. and why has it made a big difference in your own life? Well, it's because you've acted in a certain way and that's generated certain results. So I ask people, what belief have you changed? And very often that, in fact, almost invariably, triggers a saying that I actually believed something which was not in my own interest and I call that a toxic belief.

5:20For example, a friend of mine who's about 60 years old, She looks a lot younger. We'll call her Sally, shall we? Sally had quite a nice life. She moved from England, which as you know is cold and rainy and horrible, to South Africa, which as you know is sunny and very nice, to Cape Town actually, which is the nicest place in South Africa, unless you happen to want to track wild animals. It's good for almost everything else. It's got wonderful beaches, got mountains, got very nice food, and it's quite cheap as well. So, you know, it's a good idea to go to Cape Town if you want. It's slightly dangerous now, but that's another matter.

6:01Anyway, she had a very nice life until the last five years. And in the last five years, catastrophe struck. Her husband was diagnosed in the very early stages of having Alzheimer's disease. And he decided that in order to give his wife, Sally, a chance, he would commit suicide. Obviously, you know, an awful thing and trauma, you know, for her as well. And then shortly after that happened, COVID happened. And COVID, you know, there are many hard luck stories about COVID. But the one which Sally tells is that she had two dogs and the dogs were very important to her, you know, and particularly important after her husband was gone.

6:47and she in in the covid regime in south africa she wasn't allowed to take the dogs out at any stage of the 24 hours of the day without risking imprisonment and having the dogs shot in other words you couldn't take them out to do their business or anything like that you couldn't take them out for any exercise and if the police stopped you they would quite likely shoot the dogs and put you in prison. So she decided that this was not a very nice society to live in any longer. She loved living in South Africa, but then she decided to do something about it. The point is, for the first 55 years of her life, she'd followed the lead of her husband and other people.

7:35She'd gone with the flow. The way that she explained it to me was saying, I believe, que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see. Que sera, sera. So in all, she trusted to fate, and fate was very good to her. When her husband had gone, and when the COVID regime in South Africa was so unpleasant, she decided that she could no longer go with the flow, and she took a very brave decision that she would up sticks, sell her house in Cape Town, and come and live as it happens in Portugal. And that has been enormously successful. It is absolutely, to come back to my earlier theme, it's transformed her happiness.

8:19By pure chance, she's met a guy that she's getting married to now. They are very happy together. And she's very, I mean, you can see that her eyes line up. She's really, really happy. Three or four years ago, she was in the depths of depression and sort of, you know, she was wondering whether she should follow her husband in terms of committing suicide. So it is possible, if you take charge, to actually do something. And that's why I hate this concept of the baseline happiness level. Because Marx said philosophers have tried to describe the world, the point is to change it. And similarly, your happiness levels.

8:59It's no use of them telling you about the baseline happiness level and saying, well, they don't say it, but they almost imply that it's inevitable. and you can't transcend that. So if you're an H, you're stuck between 6 and 10, depending on the weather and circumstances and whether good things have happened to you that day or whatever. But, you know, you can't go down to a 3. Or if you're a 3, you can't go up to a 10. But there are many cases that I know where people have actually transformed themselves. You know, I know someone who was incredibly miserable for a very long time. And why was he miserable?

9:35This person was miserable because he grew up in a very well-off, upper-middle-class family. He said he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And he expected that life would carry on in being easy. And, of course, when he left home and had to earn a living, he discovered that actually things were very difficult. Now, things were not quite as difficult as he imagined they were. I mean, for example, he started a very, very successful business. And he ran that business for six years. and made a lot of money from selling it. So when I was talking to this chap who I'll call Alexander, Alexander, I said, you must have got a degree of self-confidence and good feeling from your experience in starting and running and selling this business.

10:22And he said to me, you must be joking. Those six years were years of high anxiety. I was constantly firefighting. It seemed so difficult to me. It seems so difficult. And I said to him, well, you know, it didn't seem difficult observing it. And he said, well, actually, it's because I expected things to be easy. And you remember M. Scott Peck wrote a book which starts, life is difficult. This is one of the great things about life. If you understand this, you can transcend it because you anticipate that things are going to be difficult and you can take pride in sort of overcoming difficulties. but if you expect there are going to be no difficulties, obviously you're going to be disillusioned.

11:05And so paradoxically, this miserable-sounding philosophy which says life is difficult is actually a wonderful philosophy because it means that you can take pride in getting over difficulties. But when you're confronted with difficulties, what you do is like Alexander and say, it's too difficult, it shouldn't be this difficult. Then obviously you're going to be miserable despite objectively having a great success. Yeah, it makes me think of, and I wish I had the attribution, but happiness equals reality minus expectations in a sense. And this is also very reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius and meditations, of course, but how did Alexander, if he did, make the switch?

11:47Did he make the switch? He did make the switch, but it took him about 20 years. And he said from the time that he started business when he was in his early 30s, and from being age 40 onwards, then he got into a pretty dark place at one stage. And then he started going to 12 steps meetings, where people sit around and say, you know, I've had these difficulties, I've reconstructed my life, and I'm on the path to recovery. He also took some therapy and he also reflected on why he was miserable. And he did realize it was miserable because he expected life to be easy and it wasn't. Very often, having the insight into what a toxic belief is, is the first step to actually being able to overcome it.

12:37Very often, we don't realize what toxic beliefs we have. and therefore we suffer from them.

12:49Next up, Jack Kornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, and author of more than 20 books on meditation and mindfulness.

13:09The image that I like to start with is an archetypal one of the Buddha seated under the tree of enlightenment. The night of his enlightenment, before he was enlightened, the Indian god named Mara, who is the god of greed, fear, hatred, aggression, all of the forces of suffering appeared and said, what are you trying to do to the Buddha? And this is the way it appeared. He said, you have no idea what you're dealing with. And he said, let me show you this enlightenment stuff. And so he paraded before him all the most beautiful dancing dakinis and gilded chariots, the Lamborghinis of the time. And the Buddha said, you know, been there, done that.

13:55Thank you. Okay. And then he said, well, you have no right to be there. And he started throwing flaming arrows and swords and the Buddha lifted his hand and touched them all with compassion and they turned to flower petals. Cool. Then Mara said, you don't even know who you are. You don't know what you're doing. And there's no reason for you to be sitting here. And then Mara came basically in the form of doubt. And at that point, the Buddha put his hand down and touched the earth and said, will you bear witness to my right as a human being here, halfway between heaven and earth, to awaken to the way things are?

14:33Can you say that one more time? Heaven and earth or heaven and hell? Between heaven and earth. We didn't get to hell yet. If you want to go there, we can go there later. Halfway between heaven and earth in this human form, be my witness that we human beings have the right to see clearly, not with delusion, not with doubt. And then Mara appeared again, and the Buddha just looked at Mara and said, I see you, Mara. I see who you are. And the minute he said that, clearly, Mara dissolved. Now, what people don't know in the Buddhist texts is that after his enlightenment, Mara came back to visit the Buddha quite a few times.

15:10You'd think there's enlightened retirement, but Mara's part of the game. And Thich Nhat Hanh has a really beautiful image about this where he sets the scene of the Buddha sitting in a cave. And again, the Buddha really is a stand-in for your awakened self, sitting in a cave, mouth of a cave meditating, and his attendant is there, and Mara appears, and his attendant tries to chase Mara away. And the Buddha says, Ananda, is that my old friend Mara? Set out some tea, let us sit down. And he says, is that you, Mara? And usually all that it takes is for the Buddha to say, is that you Mara or I see you Mara?

15:50And Mara looks and kind of sadly slinks away, if you will. So the first thing about anxiety is to acknowledge that it's entirely human, that there are cultural reasons for it and that there are physiological reasons, that we have fear and we have fear of loss and all of those things. And to be able to name it and say, oh, this is anxiety. It feels this way in my body. Your hands sweat, your breath stops, your heart. And it's hard to feel, it's unpleasant in the body. And then it has its thoughts. We'll get to those in a minute. And what you can do in naming bar, you can say, oh, anxiety, I see you, I feel you.

16:30So that's the first thing. And already you start to step halfway back from it as the witness. So that already begins to liberate you a little bit. And then the next thing is you can also say, thank you for trying to protect me. Because if you fight against the anxiety, what that is, is more anxiety. Oh my God, I got to rid of it. I hate it. But instead, it's almost like you take a little bow. Okay, Mara, I see you. Thank you for trying to protect me, because that's what it's trying to do. And you remember that statement from Mark Twain, where he said, my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened, right?

17:09So these are the stories. you meant sort of the advanced stories, say, thank you, Mara, I see you, thanks for trying to protect me. Then the next thing is to know that there's something called the wisdom of insecurity, that it's actually okay to be insecure. My monastic teachers would say, it's uncertain, isn't it? We could ask them all kinds of things, tell me about enlightenment, my teacher would laugh, he'd say, it's uncertain, isn't it? He wanted us just to get comfortable with uncertainty. And then what happens is when you realize that you can't know, that you come back into the present moment.

17:46And then the next thing to do with anxiety is ground your senses. Feel your feet on the floor, or maybe go out in nature, stand there with a tree, feel the roots of the tree, and imagine your own feet as roots into the earth. And notice the wind comes and the storms and all those things happen, but the tree is rooted, and it can stay there and you can be the same. You can let the storms of thoughts and fears and so forth arise. So that's another practice you can do. Then you can question your thoughts. And this is more beautifully spelled out by Byron Katie, for example, who has these practices of questioning your thought.

18:25It says, what if that thought isn't true? How can you know that thought is true? And if you look deeply, you can't know it. and you get to a place of realizing that your thoughts are tentative, they're a creation, and you say, thank you, thank you for trying to protect me, and again, you become the witness of those thoughts. Then a few more very simple things that you can do. You can find where you feel the anxiety most strongly in your body, and once you feel it, you can feel into its elements. Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Is it vibrating the earth, air, fire? So you really get close into it.

19:04You can ask it what stories it tells, because it'll have a story. And then you say again, not only thank you, thank you for trying to protect me, but you wrap it with kindness, with loving awareness and say, thank you. I know you're worried. I can respect you and hold you with kindness and compassion. And you know that that's not who you are. This is a part, it's something, it's common for human beings. You say, I respect this, and who I am is honoring you and so much bigger than who you are. And you feel yourself literally being both the witness, the grounded one, the I know you, I see you, Mara, and you become more the Buddha rather than the one who's caught by all these things.

19:50Could you say a bit more about asking, for instance, in this case, the anxiety, what stories it tells? Maybe give an example, whether from your personal experience, someone else's, or just a hypothetical, what that might look like. Because it's the first time I've heard that, and that piques my curiosity. So it's a beautiful question, because one of the things that I've learned all over these years is that you can have, the Sufis call it a sobat, a conversation with the heart. And if you let yourself get quiet, it might be after a little walk in the woods or just sitting quietly, taking a cup of tea or something that you like to drink and letting yourself quiet down or meditating if you want to.

20:35And when you get quiet, you can have an inner conversation and there's information that's waiting there for you to ask. So for example, since we're talking about anxiety and you want to have a conversation with it, you can say to the anxiety, where do I feel you most strongly in my body? Okay, that's a pretty simple one. Then you can say, ask the anxiety, what is the thing you're most afraid of? Usually it will be something like loss, death, something huge. Okay. He said, okay, thank you. Get quiet and say, tell me the story you have about it. And then your anxiety will answer and it will say, well, if you lose your job, which we're afraid you will, you'll be out on the street, you'll be homeless.

21:25People will beat up on you. Then you'll be in the hospital or you'll become whatever. And there's a whole disastrous scenario. And you can say, yes, thank you. I hear your story. Then there's another interesting question. So all these are things you can ask, and if you're willing to ask and get quiet and listen, usually your body and your heart will answer. Then there's another really important question or two that you can ask. What is the most important thing I need to learn from you? And it will give you an answer. I want you to pay attention, or I want you to take care of your financial affairs so I don't have to worry so much.

22:03or I want you to make sure you have friends who know where you are, whatever it happens to be, or some bigger story. And then you can step out of the anxiety. And this is a really beautiful one. Get quiet and ask, what is my best intention of how I want to live this next month or this next year? If I only had a year to live, what style? How do I want to live this? Because anxiety also has time in it. And so you're sort of stepping out of time and say, all right, so my time's limited. How do I want to live? What is my deepest intention? And if you pause and ask, your heart will answer.

22:44Next up, John Romero, video game legend and co-creator of such groundbreaking games as Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D.

23:0013 games in one year. I know nothing about game development, but I imagine with a relatively small crew, that sounds like a lot of games. What do you think enabled you guys to do that, that maybe was not present for other people working on games who had much lower output? What were the ingredients or the approaches or the principles? Anything at all? Maybe just tolerance for sleep deprivation. I don't know. What were the ingredients that allowed you allowed you guys to do that? So the way that we could achieve this game development at such high speed back then was that when we got together as in software, we had already individually, other than Adrian, who just learned how to put pixels on a computer screen, But he was a fine artist on paper already for his whole life.

23:52Each one of us four had 10 years of game development experience, like all the time. And so we'd already made dozens of games each. Tom Hall, who was our creative director, he was a programmer, an assembly language programmer. He made tons of adventure games. He did action arcade games in assembly language. So he was already a very fluent programmer. John Carmack, of course, coded since he was a kid. I had coded since I was 11. So we'd been making games for 10 years, and the amount of games that we'd made was dozens each. And when you make that many games, that quickly, you learn how to scope. And scoping is basically defining exactly what that game should be and not adding to it.

24:42subtracting from it most likely if you're going to try and get it done. So scoping is like, this is the amount of time that I have. This is probably the kind of game that we can make and how big we can make it. Let's do that. And as you get closer and closer to that deadline, you start cutting things away that you don't need to hit that deadline. When we did it before meeting each other, when we did it on our own time, we set ourselves our own goals for finishing our own games. And we got really good at scoping. So when we got together and we saw what we could do together, we also scoped together how big those games should be.