Dec. 23, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| With the Christmas season upon us, let's recap the year today, | ||
| both for the wider world as well as the great community that we've built here at the Rubin Report. | ||
| Note I did say Christmas season there, not holiday season or winter spectacular or whatever else the PC crowd wants us to say these days. | ||
| The fact is that the wide majority of people in the United States do celebrate Christmas, and whether you celebrate it or not, there is goodness to be had in the spirit of the season, like being kind to your fellow man. | ||
| When someone wishes you a Merry Christmas, that is not an affront to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or the cycle of the planets. | ||
| In many cases, probably most cases, wishing someone a Merry Christmas is more of just an acknowledgment of the holiday season rather than some sort of religious edict. | ||
| Of course, by the same token, if you're offended that someone wished you Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, perhaps your offense meter is out of whack too. | ||
| The point is that it's the end of the year and 2016 has been particularly divisive, so let's try to find some joy in one another and wish good tidings even to people who weren't that good to us this past year. | ||
| On the world front, 2016 will go down as one of the craziest years ever. | ||
| Donald Trump becoming the next President of the United States was clearly the biggest story, but England choosing Brexit instead of staying in the European Union, as well as the continued humanitarian disaster in Syria, will all have major impacts as we move into 2017 and beyond. | ||
| More than anything else though, 2016 taught us that at least here in the West, the power is still with the people. | ||
| In both Trump's win and the Brexit vote, the vast majority of the media, the elites, the establishment and the money was on the other side. | ||
| Yet despite this, the people rose up and changed the course of the world with their votes. | ||
| You may not like the results of either of those two events, and you may not be happy with the electoral college or with the tactics of the Brexiteers, but you have to acknowledge that there is something amazing in the ability of people in a Western democracy to truly control their own destiny. | ||
| Most people on Earth would give anything to have this much control over the system that they live in. | ||
| In fact, the revolutions which swept throughout the Middle East over the past few years were done with the hopes that the people could one day have as much sway over their leaders as we have in the West right now. | ||
| While these revolutions haven't worked out as planned, the seeds of freedom have been planted, and even if Egypt, Libya, and obviously Syria aren't as free as we want them to be, the ideas of freedom have taken root. | ||
| Thanks to the internet, most of us now walk around with the world in our pocket. | ||
| We're connected in incredible ways, changing the world right in front of us. | ||
| No longer do we have to get our information from only a few sources. | ||
| Now any and all of us can be a source of information all over the globe. | ||
| Of course this low barrier to entry creates other problems, like who can we actually trust, but I would always veer on the side of having access to more information than less information. | ||
| Just look at how the mainstream media has reacted to the Trump win. | ||
| Did they offer us any real introspection and re-evaluate their tactics and methods? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Instead, they doubled down on identity politics and name calling. | ||
| And at the same time, the mainstream media told us that anything not sanctioned by them is fake news. | ||
| When the very people who invented fake news are warning you about fake news, well, you know the tide is beginning to turn. | ||
| The issues that I've tried to highlight over the past year, from the importance of free speech to having honest political discourse, really encompass everything which moved our world in 2016. | ||
| The stifling of free speech by using cries of racism and bigotry shut down honest conversation about relevant topics like Islamism and immigration. | ||
| There's a direct line from that stifling of hard but important conversations that led us to Brexit and Trump. | ||
| Couple the inability or unwillingness to have difficult conversations about important issues with the hyper-partisan fighting that we now have where people literally drop friends and family members over political disagreements and you have a toxic stew. | ||
| Having honest conversations without resorting to demagoguery will be Trump's biggest challenge and it's one that I hope he will succeed at. | ||
| We know that Trump's good at winning, but will he be gracious enough to understand that his win isn't just for himself and his supporters, but also for the people who voted against him, even if they're still shouting about it right this very second? | ||
| I really believe that if Trump focuses on the economy and infrastructure, if he doesn't get us involved in unnecessary military conflicts, and if he unleashes the tech sector, that we could have another American Renaissance. | ||
| These are huge ifs amongst many other ifs, but right now if you root for Trump to fail, then you root for our country to fail. | ||
| More important than anything else, if we had been able to have more honest and enlightened conversations in 2016, then perhaps the world would feel a little more sensible than it does right now. | ||
| You know, it's funny, we don't like when people discriminate on the basis of religion, which is simply a set of ideas, but we have no problem when people discriminate based on political affiliation, which also is just a set of ideas. | ||
| Tolerance of different opinions will be our biggest national challenge in 2017. | ||
| Accepting that not everyone agrees with us all the time, and not only is that okay, but it's actually preferable, will be something that we all have to put into action in this coming year. | ||
| We had our share of groupthink in 2016 because everyone seemed to go into their little bubbles. | ||
| Hopefully 2017 is where we burst them and we see what happens. | ||
| Joining me this week is Tim Ferriss. | ||
| Tim is no stranger to talking to people from every walk of life and from every corner of the globe. | ||
| His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over 100 million downloads and he's chatted with people from Sam Harris and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner. | ||
| He's been described as the Oprah of podcasting and his new book, Tools of Titans, is a compilation of some of the best habits he's learned from his various guests. | ||
| It seems fitting to veer into the end of 2016 as an interviewer interviewing an interviewer. | ||
| If 2016 was the year of outrage, then let's have 2017 be the year of the conversation. | ||
| Joining me this week is an author, an entrepreneur, a speaker, and a master of all kinds of cool | ||
| Some have called him the Oprah of audio. | ||
| Tim Ferriss, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| The Oprah of audio. | ||
| How do you like that moniker? | ||
| Well, it must be the striking resemblance that we have. | ||
| I'm flattered by it. | ||
| I think that I couldn't ask for a more flattering moniker, although I think it still remains to be seen if I can live up to that. | ||
| But yeah, it's been a trip in audio, my experimental career in audio. | ||
| Have you ever given your audience cars? | ||
| Has everyone gotten a car yet? | ||
| I have not done cars yet. | ||
| I've done t-shirts, mushroom coffee, and a handful of other lower ticket items. | ||
| Sometimes sardines, canned sardines, but not yet cars. | ||
| Haven't made my way up to the cars yet. | ||
| Yeah, sardines, very good for you. | ||
| And we're going to talk about some of the things that you've given away and some of the ideas that you push amongst your crowd. | ||
| I was feeling undue pressure to ask the right questions this week. | ||
| I think I'm all right at this, but I thought, all right, Tim Ferriss. | ||
| I think you're fine. | ||
| He's known as asking good questions. | ||
| So the first question, I'm gonna go broad with you for number one. | ||
| For the person that's watching this that has no idea who Tim Ferriss is, if such a person exists, what would you say is, what is the mission of Tim Ferriss? | ||
| Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter who runs experiments with the help of some of the world's top performers. | ||
| Could be scientists, could be athletes, could be entrepreneurs, CEOs, etc. | ||
| And then writes about the results so that readers can have the Cliff Notes version. | ||
| That is really the gist of it. | ||
| Not all of my experiments work out as planned, which make for entertaining reading and tragic injury on my part in some cases. | ||
| But generally speaking, I view myself as an experimentalist and a teacher, not primarily a writer. | ||
| And it is my job to push the extremes and do all of that heavy lifting so that my readers do not have to. | ||
| When did you get interested in all this? | ||
| Was there a point like when you were in high school or junior high where you always testing the limits of what you could do and trying to figure out what was next? | ||
| In a sense, I was starting probably around age 13, 14, and that was competitive wrestling. | ||
| I was put into kiddie wrestling when I was probably 10 by my mom. | ||
| I was very hyperactive, and other moms recommended that as a way to defuse things and drain my batteries. | ||
| But I was also very, very small. | ||
| I was born premature, and I was very small up until about sixth grade. | ||
| And in this case, you had weight classes. | ||
| So the 60-pound weaklings could battle the other 60-pound weaklings and someone could come out on top. | ||
| And as I moved further ahead and got better at wrestling, I realized there was a huge advantage in A, recording your workouts and training approaches, B, recording the technical practice, and C, getting very good at weight cutting. | ||
| So I actually become very, very good So you literally would not drink water, right? | ||
| it's not a healthy thing to do because it's primarily dehydration. | ||
| So you literally would not drink water, right? | ||
| Was it just a couple of days before and then right before the match, | ||
| you'd like down a whole ton of water? | ||
| Yeah, you dehydrate and then rehydrate. | ||
| So I would actually cut from my senior year 178 to 152 is 26 pounds twice a week. | ||
| And that was done between 12 and 18 hours. | ||
| To do that without having some type of organ failure, you have to get a good basic understanding of sodium, potassium, how all these things work together so you don't really, really damage yourself. | ||
| But I saw the rewards there from documentation and experimentation and then later just started applying that to everything. | ||
| Yeah, so in a weird way you were sort of, you were kind of like a scientist as a kid. | ||
| You were using your own body as the experiment and you were documenting everything and kind of seeing what worked. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And I actually went to high school with the son of George Plimpton, who I only really came to appreciate later as one of the first, I guess you could call them, fully immersive participatory journalists who would try to play a professional football game or box someone like a Sonny Liston for a few rounds and then write about the experience. | ||
| So this is not a new tradition. | ||
| A lot of people have done it, but I think that I was one of the first to at least popularize really taking the physical component Yeah, so the four-hour work week, I think, was really the first thing that put you on the map in a bigger sense. | ||
| You know, I saw you a couple weeks ago. | ||
| We had dinner. | ||
| I was worried about, you know, can I eat carbs in front of him or whatever? | ||
| You were very non-judgmental. | ||
| the principles are very flexible. | ||
| Yeah, so the four-hour work week, I think was really the first thing | ||
| that put you on the map in a bigger sense. | ||
| I saw you a couple of weeks ago, we had dinner, I was worried about, can I eat carbs in front of him | ||
| or whatever, you were very nonjudgmental, I appreciate that. | ||
| But for me, I've been building this studio for the last month, I have had one of the craziest months | ||
| in my 40 years on earth. | ||
| I mean, my eating habits have been terrible, I literally haven't been to the gym in a month, | ||
| I just have not had a moment to get any of that right. | ||
| So what would you say to somebody that's really, when you're in the thick of it, when life is actually just, | ||
| you're just thrown in the river and you just gotta go, you can't fight the current, | ||
| and it's for something that you wanna do, how would you recommend I manage some of this time | ||
| and stress and all this stuff? | ||
| Well, I would think there are a few different questions that I tend to depend on in situations like that. | ||
| So, for instance, I just completed a 700-page book in less than four months. | ||
| And that's, for me, unheard of. | ||
| All of my book projects have been three years. | ||
| How big is that font you're working with? | ||
| Yeah, the font, it was like four words a page laid out beautifully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the question that I returned to frequently was, what would this look like if it were easy? | ||
| Or what might this look like if it were easy? | ||
| And brainstorming seemingly absurd answers to questions like, what if I had to write this book in a week? | ||
| I knew I wasn't going to attempt to write it in a week, but what if I had to? | ||
| I had a gun against my head. | ||
| And you can generate ideas that fall outside of your current constraints that you've applied, if that makes any sense. | ||
| So in the case of building a studio, in the case of say, Recording my podcast, I very often am trying to prevent the, I think, very natural tendency towards complexity and sophistication, which oftentimes I think that whether it's building a studio or writing a book, and there are benefits to this, I don't want to discount the value of what I'm about to say, but I remember when I was writing my second book and I told an author friend of mine, | ||
| Well, I'm 90% done. | ||
| And he goes, well, congratulations. | ||
| You only have half left. | ||
| And sometimes it makes sense to put in that last 10%. | ||
| Other times it makes sense to actually get started and experiment with less than perfect. | ||
| And it's very context dependent. | ||
| But those would be a few. | ||
| meta kind of approaches that I would take. | ||
| And then you can also apply certainly things like the 80/20 principle to just about anything. | ||
| So you have Pareto's Law or the 80/20 principle, which you could look at it a few different ways. | ||
| So one is you could ask yourself, for instance, what 20% of the equipment or activities or infrastructure | ||
| gives me 80% of the output that I want? | ||
| In the case of a studio, right? | ||
| Conversely, if you've already been working on it for, say, a week and you have three weeks scheduled left, you could ask yourself, what are the 20% of gear or activities or personnel, for that matter, who are causing 80% or more of the emotions that I do not want? | ||
| And that could create a not-to-do list, or a for-now-omit list, like to-be-assessed-in-the-future list. | ||
| So those are some of the tools and frameworks that I would tend to use in a situation like that. | ||
| Or if I'm juggling, my real financial career is as a tech investor, and I stopped doing that about a year and a half ago. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, I have a portfolio of, say, 70 companies. | ||
| That's a lot to manage in and of itself. | ||
| So these are the types of questions that I will ask myself and people who are running these fast growing companies | ||
| very often. | ||
| How hard is it for you to delegate some of that stuff? | ||
| So 70 tech companies, there's a lot going on. | ||
| It's I would assume basically virtually impossible to really know the nitty gritty of everyone. | ||
| I'm sure you don't even wanna know the nitty gritty of everyone. | ||
| And some are probably more passion projects than others. | ||
| How easy is it for you to delegate some of that and have a core group of people to trust | ||
| that can advise you? | ||
| When it comes to the angel investing, I delegate very little. | ||
| I do have a small team who will work with companies on very specific aspects of, say, conversion optimization or user interface, things like that, based on my direction. | ||
| But I've also phased how I, at least historically, have done investments that I only have of those 70, say, Five to ten maximum who actively need my help at any given point in time. | ||
| And one of the signs that a company is probably going to do poorly is if they constantly want your input. | ||
| They should be spending a high percentage of that time having their own opinions and in building mode. | ||
| And if they're constantly, in a sense, procrastinating doing the work by asking for advice, then | ||
| you generally take that as a red flag because things are going to go sideways. | ||
| But I tend to phase things that I only have five to 10 active at any given point in time. | ||
| And then I have a, I would say a process that I impose on each of those initial interactions | ||
| so that I'm checking boxes. | ||
| And those require typically a fair amount of homework and introspection on the part | ||
| So I'm able to pace it in that respect. | ||
| It's very rare that I have more than five companies or five to ten, let's say, come to me in a given month with any type of time sensitive Yeah, so as a tech guy, how realistic is Silicon Valley? | ||
| they're generally pretty thoughtful about it. | ||
| And since I'm working in the venture-backed tech arena, the best founders and CEOs understand how to interact | ||
| with say a board of directors, and they would treat me not quite as a member | ||
| of the board of directors certainly, but they would understand how to best utilize my time | ||
| because they've done that with board members already. | ||
| Yeah, so as a tech guy, how realistic is Silicon Valley? | ||
| The show? | ||
| Oh, the show. | ||
| I think it's spot on in a lot of ways. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it's I think I think it is very accurate in a lot of respects, which is why I find it so funny, especially the second season, although a lot in the first season as well. | ||
| It is it is uncannily accurate in a lot of respects, and I don't take that as a bad thing. | ||
| I mean, Silicon Valley is a quirky Part of the world, but if it weren't quirky, it wouldn't be what it is. | ||
| It wouldn't be able, I think, to produce a lot of what it produces. | ||
| And it's a weird place. | ||
| It has its flaws and its foibles, but that's true of any location where you tend to have a mono conversation, right? | ||
| So if you go to Washington, D.C., and you have the mono conversation of Government and politics. | ||
| It's a weird, weird place. | ||
| You go to, say, Los Angeles, and you have, in many places, the monoconversation of entertainment. | ||
| That's a really weird, weird environment. | ||
| I would argue weirder in some ways than Silicon Valley. | ||
| In Silicon Valley, of course, it's tech, so you have just as much weirdness and eccentric behavior, to put it politely, as all of those other places. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure if you'll know the answer to this, but how monotheistic, monolithic, how about that? | ||
| Monotheistic would be something else. | ||
| How monolithic is sort of the political thing up in Silicon Valley, do you think? | ||
| Because, you know, over the election, there were all these articles written about Peter Thiel, he's the bad boy of Silicon Valley, he doesn't think like everybody else. | ||
| And it seemed odd to me that they were like, well, we can find one guy. | ||
| Now, I know he likes putting himself out there and he obviously I would say so. | ||
| I may be getting a little above my pay grade in terms of subject areas. | ||
| and all that stuff, but is the political group think they're as strong as it seems to be? | ||
| I would say so. | ||
| It's a very, well, I may be getting a little above my pay grade in terms of subject areas. | ||
| This is not an area of expertise for me, but there is such an echo chamber, I think, | ||
| in Silicon Valley in many respects, or just in the Bay Area, that it's easy | ||
| for everyone there to pat themselves on the back in a very aggressive, hyper-liberal/progressive way | ||
| and look down their nose at what they would perceive as the rest of America. | ||
| And it's it's obnoxious and sanctimonious in a lot of respects. | ||
| And it's also very, very counterproductive. | ||
| So It's, I mean, I don't know how far we want to go down the political rabbit hole. | ||
| We can do it. | ||
| But, I mean, there's part of me that feels like, you know, I'm probably, I'm going to get myself into trouble here, but it's a smugness that I think is part of the reason why, and this is someone speaking as, I would say, you know, very socially at least liberal person. | ||
| That smugness is part of the reason they got their teeth kicked in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They went in really underestimating the opposition and sort of carte blanche writing off everybody who was leaning towards Trump as stupid or ignorant or racist, even worse, or fill in the blank, whatever it might be. | ||
| And that created a huge blind spot, I think. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| A gigantic blind spot. | ||
| And underestimating the flaws in polling methodology. | ||
| I think was also something that from a rational perspective, if for instance, I mean, I know | ||
| my brother is effectively a PhD, he's finishing his dissertation in statistics. He called | ||
| Trump months before it happened. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah, he's absolutely going to win. And he is not, he would not position himself as | ||
| a conservative in any respect. Scott Adams, you know, creator of Dilbert also on my podcast, | ||
| called it kind of blow for blow how it was going to go down. | ||
| Yeah, same here. | ||
| Yeah. And it's, it's, I do think that just to get back to your question, that there is | ||
| there is a lot of groupthink in Silicon Valley. | ||
| a lot of groupthink in Silicon Valley. And the, the irony of that, I think is worth underscoring | ||
| And the irony of that I think is worth underscoring because it's supposed to be this think different | ||
| because it's supposed to be this think different place. And yet it has all of its own baggage | ||
| place. | ||
| And yet it has all of its own baggage and groupthink just like every other place that | ||
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and groupthink just like every other place that has a mono I do think that, just to get back to your question, that | |
| has a mono conversation. | ||
| And then you have someone like Peter Thiel come along and I've spent time with Peter. | ||
| He's not a close friend but I've had dinner, been at group dinners with him a number of | ||
| times and he's a smart guy. | ||
| So the first thing that I thought to myself when he came out in support of Trump wasn't | ||
| how could he do this? | ||
| It was, what am I missing? | ||
| What am I missing? | ||
| There's something I'm missing here. | ||
| What am I missing? | ||
| Because Teal is not... | ||
| I mean, certainly in my experience, a very impulsive short-term thinker. | ||
| That's just not him. | ||
| So, from the very outset, I was like, what am I missing? | ||
| Is there some 20-year long bet or short bet that he's making right now? | ||
| What aspects of this am I missing? | ||
| But yes, I do think there's a lot of groupthink in Silicon Valley. | ||
| Which is, it just creates blind spots and opens the door for then not only disruptive technology to say, try to cut off a Yahoo or someone like that at the knees, but it creates, I think, vulnerabilities in a political landscape and far beyond that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious because you prefaced all that by saying that you don't want to talk about something above your pay grade, which I think is an interesting way to preface that, you know, you obviously are thought of as a thought leader, but politics has become so toxic that I could sense you were choosing your words very carefully there because you don't want to upset, you know, anybody by slightly misspeaking or slightly misquoting someone or something like that. | ||
| What do you make of the general tenor of dialogue in the country right now? | ||
| I think it's ludicrous and self-defeating. | ||
| I think that everyone should reread Fahrenheit 451 because if some people might recall reading it in high school and they think of this tyrannical government that is forcing the burning of books, and of course some of their main characters, but you have these firemen who are in charge of burning books. | ||
| And what many people cease to realize if they reread that book, which they will rediscover, is that it was actually the people in the beginning. | ||
| Who started the burning of the books, books that would offend any minority. | ||
| And I don't mean that in a racial group, a racial sense, but a minority population began to be burned. | ||
| And this is this is very, very, very dangerous. | ||
| And I think a very slippery slope where you have effectively, and I've seen a number of people remarked to this effect, you have The majority of smart people who could discuss a topic and have the necessary uncomfortable conversation in a rational way, opting out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the personal downside is so high that it outweighs in the minds of these people who could actually catalyze a lot of good. | ||
| The collective long-term good is not sufficiently compelling to take an almost guaranteed short-term Or I should say immediate, not short term. | ||
| It could be very long term. | ||
| But immediate personal hit. | ||
| So I think it's terrible. | ||
| I think it's the biggest, the thing that scares me most in the United States right now is by far and away not what some leader from on high would necessarily do to us. | ||
| It is what we are already doing to ourselves. | ||
| and that is disinviting brilliant people from speaking at universities because they might | ||
| offer opinions or positions that would make students uncomfortable. That's the whole point. | ||
| How are you going to handle macro aggression in real life if you can't handle different | ||
| opinions from your own in an academic setting? It's ludicrous. | ||
| So that, yeah, I get pretty lit up about this because I think it's a very insidious problem | ||
| that is in some ways being viewed as a solution and it is certainly, I think, not beneficial | ||
| in the long term at all. | ||
| Yeah, you hit on a bunch of my wheelhouse stuff there, but I think the most interesting piece of that is that what you're saying is basically good people who could really change the world, who could change people's minds, get involved, that they're not because of the personal cost. | ||
| How can we unfurl that? | ||
| I mean, I've tried to bring on people here and get to some of this, but I know, and I can see it sometimes with guests, and I'm sure you can too, you get to a place Where they can't go any further. | ||
| There's a cost of them talking about something, even if they're an expert in that, where they go, now I'm veering past that red line and I could get into some trouble. | ||
| So how do we bring that back for those of us that want to have responsible conversations? | ||
| And open discourse. | ||
| Well, there's there's a word that I've been experimenting with creating odd words and inserting them into the common vernacular for about two years now. | ||
| One has made some rounds. | ||
| This is this is one I did just for fun. | ||
| But you'll you'll see where I'm going here. | ||
| So it's it's tell adultery and tell adultery is when A significant other or you watch a TV show that you've agreed to watch together. | ||
| You watch it by yourself. | ||
| That's, that's teledulgery. | ||
| So that, but that traveled. | ||
| Here's the important point. | ||
| So that term traveled all over the place. | ||
| And then we were, I was actually sitting in an airport overseas with my mom and she'd said, Oh, here's a funny word you would like. | ||
| And it was in a magazine and it was teledulgery. | ||
| This is where I'd created. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's a word that currently I think that It's very, if you look at the actors in this suffocation of | ||
| free speech or discouragement at the very least of open discourse, you have, I think, on | ||
| many sides what some people have called social justice warriors who throw around terms like | ||
| racist, sexist, bigot of many different types very loosely, and those terms can have lasting damage | ||
| even if there's no evidence associated with them. | ||
| So the accusation itself becomes the conviction. | ||
| And the term social justice warrior is not neutral in the sense that it sounds positive. | ||
| So there really isn't any linguistic punishment equivalent to, say, racist that would discourage someone from behaving in such a haphazard fashion and in a way that can destroy careers, marriages, you name it. | ||
| So the term that came up in a conversation with Eric Weinstein, really, really brilliant | ||
| mathematician physicist, was this term "bigoteer" that I thought of. | ||
| So bigoteer is clearly not a good thing. | ||
| It sounds terrible. | ||
| And it is someone who calls others bigots for personal gain. | ||
| And that personal gain could just be attention. | ||
| It could be absolving themselves of guilt. | ||
| It could be click-throughs. | ||
| It could be yellow journalism and irresponsible media just aiming for clickbait and click-throughs. | ||
| So I think that if bigotry were to become a real term applied to people who use these terms very loosely that it sounds silly but I do think that words are. | ||
| What we lack right now are effective words and labels to discourage this behavior. | ||
| So that's one that has come to mind is bigotry. | ||
| I don't think until we have some type of disincentive from behaving in a way that cauterizes or just stymies free speech that we're not going to get very far. | ||
| So humans just respond to incentives. | ||
| I don't think humans are necessarily bad. | ||
| We're just creatures that respond to incentives. | ||
| So you have to figure out how to set the carrot or the stick sufficiently to get the behavior you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you saying we're almost like every other animal on this earth? | ||
| That's exactly what I'm saying. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Well, I love the phrase bigotry and I've used it a little bit, but you know, we're going to try something as of today. | ||
| I'm going to use a little bit of what they call the Tim Ferriss effect, which is that when, you know, when you've had people on your show, usually their book sales go up or their clicks go up or whatever it is. | ||
| So we'll try a little something. | ||
| I'll push out bigotry from today going forward. | ||
| And let's see if we get a little Tim Ferriss effect on that, because you're right. | ||
| You say social justice warrior sounds like a good thing. | ||
| For someone that doesn't know really the underpinnings of what's going on there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it. | ||
| I'm up for it. | ||
| All right, so let's shift a little bit to your podcast because we are both creatures of the interview. | ||
| How am I doing so far, by the way? | ||
| You're doing great. | ||
| You're doing great. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| So did you always think of yourself as an interviewer? | ||
| What made you want to do the podcast in that form? | ||
| I always thought of myself as an experimenter and a teacher. | ||
| I always thought I was going to teach ninth grade, actually, because I was very much influenced by mentors at, I think, a very critical juncture. | ||
| Around that age, I think, ninth, tenth grade, kids make a lot of decisions they don't realize are going to take them down one promising path or down a bad path. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| The point is that I view interviewing as a tool in the toolkit for extracting specific details and tactics that I can then impart to my readers, who are, I guess, my students in this case, for replicating excellent results. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So I'm trying to tease out the cliff notes and interviewing, asking good questions, asking | ||
| good follow up questions, letting silence do the work at very specific points, is how | ||
| you extract that gold. | ||
| And without the ability to interview, well, I can't do the research that I need to do. | ||
| And the podcast, I never expected to do anything. | ||
| It was really a commitment just to doing six episodes so that I wouldn't quit. | ||
| I made that public pronouncement. | ||
| I would do at least six episodes so that I'd be held accountable. | ||
| And I wanted to work on improving verbal tics. | ||
| I wanted to improve the selection and follow up related to questions and to become a more active listener because I knew that even if the podcast cratered or I didn't like it and I quit, those were skills that would transfer everywhere else. | ||
| And this is something that I actually borrowed Ultimately, and really developed after Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, and he calls it systems thinking instead of goals thinking, but thinking of how you can win even if your project fails. | ||
| And the way you do that is by focusing on developing skills and relationships that transcend that and persist over time. | ||
| So that's that's really how I thought about it and why I got into the audio game. | ||
| But I was burned out on books. | ||
| I want to take a break from big books. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| Yeah, I hear that. | ||
| I'm curious on the follow-up question. | ||
| I got a follow-up for you, which is, how scientific is that for you? | ||
| So if you have a follow-up prepared, someone hands you the answer that basically you expected, do you always go to that follow-up, or how willing are you to go out there? | ||
| Because I find that to be a constant Battle, sort of, of me wanting to just have the natural flow of a conversation versus I also want to hit on certain things, I don't want to let them off the hook on certain things. | ||
| I let people hang themselves, that's my method, instead of shouting them down. | ||
| I think that's a little more of your method as well, which is what I'm doing with you right now, very subtly. | ||
| Oh yeah, no, I feel like an invisible midget is strangling me at the moment on my back. | ||
| You're naked choking me. | ||
| But no, the question I think has very personal answers. | ||
| And the reason I say that is if you study some of the people best known for asking questions, say Larry King. | ||
| So Larry King very often goes in doing next to no homework on his guests. | ||
| The rationale being that the guest has no familiarity. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| The audience has no familiarity with the guest and he wants to start from where they are and asking the basic questions. | ||
| Then you have, say, James Lipton of Inside the Actor's Studio. | ||
| He has every question scripted in advance and he never deviates from his order of questions. | ||
| Period. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| He knows the answer in some form to every question he's going to ask. | ||
| So you have them on the opposite ends of the spectrum. | ||
| In my case, I don't necessarily have set follow-up questions, but I do have a handful of questions, which I've borrowed from other people, that very often can turn a mediocre answer or a decent answer into a great answer with a few extra details and layers. | ||
| So you might have somebody ask them a question, they respond, and then you say, what did you learn from that? | ||
| Super easy follow-up question you can ask almost any time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How did that make you feel? | ||
| That's another really easy one that is kind of a layup oftentimes. | ||
| And I don't go in with a completely set agenda. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| When I was interviewing Margaret Cho, a comedian, I thought we were going to talk about... We've got her next week, so this is going to be good for me. | ||
| Oh, she's awesome. | ||
| She's awesome. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| So we were talking about the craft of comedy and so on, and handling hecklers and so on. | ||
| You should ask her about that. | ||
| But we ended up bringing it up and touching on addiction in comedy, drug addiction specifically. | ||
| And that took us to a really interesting place. | ||
| And if I had been stuck on script, we wouldn't have explored it. | ||
| And that ended up being just an incredibly fertile ground for discussion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I try not to be too fixed, but I do have my pet questions that I like to ask, as we all do. | ||
| Yeah, have you ever been offended by a guest? | ||
| That's one of the things that people ask me a lot, that how can I sit with someone who maybe is against gay marriage and I'm gay married? | ||
| How can I sit with them and even if I hear their rationale and they're not being mean to me specifically, how can I tolerate that conversation? | ||
| And to me it's like, I may not like it, but I do have to, the whole point of an interview is to try to understand why someone thinks. | ||
| Has someone ever said something that truly offended you? | ||
| I'm sure they have. | ||
| Nothing's jumping to mind. | ||
| But I'm sure that that's the case. | ||
| And it makes me think of a bit of advice that I got from Stephen Dubner, author of Freakonomics, or co-author at least. | ||
| He collaborates with Stephen Levin. | ||
| And this, I kind of went into a few different aspects of this in Tools of Titans, but he said it's very important to put away your moral compass in the beginning when you're trying to problem solve, especially when you're collaborating with other people. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you absolve yourself of moral decisions and judgments, but initially, | ||
| if you want to generate as many possible solutions, including non-obvious solutions or lateral | ||
| thinking solutions, that you want to take the constraints and assumptions that you live | ||
| with all day long and try to set them to the side. | ||
| When I'm interviewing someone, let's say, it could be Glenn Beck, right? | ||
| I live in San Francisco. | ||
| If I'm interviewing Glenn Beck, if I'm interviewing, well, let's just say General Stanley McChrystal or Jocko Willink, so both from extensive military backgrounds versus someone who might view themselves as a extremely, let's say, hyper progressive slash liberal pacifist, Well, they're going to have opposing viewpoints on a lot of things, but I view my job as extracting politically neutral or apolitical routines and habits and so on that people can use. | ||
| So one of the mistakes I think that we as humans tend to make is that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| We say, well, I disagree with so-and-so on X, so I'm going to I'm going to assume they have nothing to offer me. | ||
| And that's a huge mistake and it's a very costly mistake. | ||
| So whenever I'm talking to someone, I have some of my friends I disagree with vehemently | ||
| about let's say nine out of ten of their core beliefs. | ||
| Let's just call them political beliefs. | ||
| But as long as they will engage in a debate and not try to shut it down with name calling | ||
| and nonsense, if they're willing to dance with that and spar and admit when they've | ||
| changed, if they are able to absorb new information and consider new evidence and change their | ||
| viewpoints accordingly, in some cases. | ||
| I have no problem spending time with those people. | ||
| And in fact, I think one of the biggest mistakes we were talking about echo chambers in Silicon Valley is that if you surround yourself with people who hold all the same opinions that you do, Well, you're going to get very comfortable with comfort, but it's not going to force you to consider, say, devil's advocate positions that are diametrically opposed to your own. | ||
| And I think that's an incredibly valuable practice. | ||
| And some of my friends are the first people to call BS, even in a group setting at a dinner, like Naval Ravikant. | ||
| I love the guy. | ||
| And I feel better. | ||
| I feel every conversation we have, I come out of having improved in some way. | ||
| He'll be the first person to call me out if I throw out some position or strong stance | ||
| without evidence and rationale to back it up. | ||
| Yeah, so and don't you relish in that? | ||
| I mean, I think I think most people truly do and somehow We've sort of been tricked or dumbed down to the point where we think if anything goes a little against us That we have to lash out and that's so not that's so not fertile ground for for growth No, I agree. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things I try to do at least once a week, but preferably much more than this, is to be the weakest person in the room at something. | ||
| I want to be in the room and it's going to lead me probably to feel insecure, maybe insufficient, but whether it's training in a sport or picking up a new skill or sitting down in a room where people are discussing Could be anything, molecular biology or politics, where I feel like I'm in over my head. | ||
| And that is how you average up. | ||
| And I think you also average up by surrounding yourself with people who can intelligently debate and not just use rhetoric to try to corner people, but to actually go toe to toe with logical arguments at least based on their own assumptions. I think | ||
| that's if you want to become smarter, and by the way, like the race doesn't go to the, well, the | ||
| fittest in this situation means most adaptable. And I think that is is the cornerstone of | ||
| everything else. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of this new idea that everyone seems to think that they have to have an opinion on everything? | ||
| Like, if you look at Russia right now, whatever is going on with Russia and the election, we don't have to get into the minutia of it, but it seems to me that people who I've never seen talk about Russia before, who I don't think are particularly informed or smart, Everybody's got an opinion and must share that opinion. | ||
| I'm for the free speech part. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| But just this idea that everyone always has to share everything. | ||
| Yeah, I mean they probably couldn't place Russia on a map. | ||
| So the great gift and curse of the internet is that everyone has a voice. | ||
| Now that means every smart person has a voice. | ||
| Also means every idiot has a voice. | ||
| More and more, and this is in part because I go out of my way to expose myself to people who know more about many, many domains than myself. | ||
| I find myself, it's not pleading the fifth, it's different. | ||
| I will say, I don't think I'm qualified to have an opinion on this. | ||
| I say that in the last few years, the frequency of me saying that has just skyrocketed because I don't want to have a strong opinion where I can't back it up. | ||
| So I think that it's fine to have an informed opinion, but there's informed confidence and then there's uninformed hubristic stupidity. | ||
| So I would hope that people would lean more towards the former and away from the latter. | ||
| But alas, in a media culture where The eyeballs and ears tend to gravitate to the most outlandish argument imaginable. | ||
| It seems that that tends to get a lot of the attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you ever tempted by that click portion of this? | ||
| You know, we know very easily we could title our things differently and probably triple the clicks. | ||
| We could use misleading thumbnails. | ||
| I mean, all the games of the digital world that plenty of people are playing. | ||
| Have you ever been tempted to do any of that stuff? | ||
| You know, in the beginning, I mean, when I had my first blog, and if people out there want to laugh their asses off, they can look up, just Google Tim Ferriss' first blog. | ||
| It is the most hideous, disorganized, terrible mess you've ever seen on the internet. | ||
| It's really atrocious. | ||
| And at the time, I was told I had to mimic This person and how they did X. I had to do 12 posts a day before noon to have any hope of A, B, and C. There were all these arbitrary rules, and it was a Me Too game of mimicry. | ||
| So I did try listicles and all sorts of stuff that on some level works, but it wasn't me, and it had no evergreen value. | ||
| So I've been rewarded, thankfully, for trying to put together Really comprehensive material that lasts, not only lasts multiple years, but the real estate, if we're talking about print, let's say, actually goes up over time. | ||
| So my Google real estate appreciates over time. | ||
| And some of my most popular posts were written five, six years ago, and they still drive the majority of traffic to my blog. | ||
| So I have been tempted at points to do that, but ultimately, my fans I'm very fortunate, very smart, generally very well educated. | ||
| They are very vocal. | ||
| So if I try to pull any of those shenanigans, I get punished very quickly for that. | ||
| So it's good to be held accountable. | ||
| Yeah, I feel the same way. | ||
| So we're in good company, I suppose. | ||
| What about just sort of the general feeling right now that the media companies, Twitter and YouTube and Google, that there is some sort of censorship happening related to either algorithms or, you know, banning certain people like, you know, Twitter, for example, they banned Milo. | ||
| Uh, but you know, they'll have, you know, the alt-right Richard Spencer's on there and verified. | ||
| Again, you don't have to comment on the specifics of that, but just the general, like, these companies are so close to government right now, and this is our information highway right here. | ||
| This is toughie. | ||
| This is where I might use that line that I mentioned earlier. | ||
| I see. | ||
| You set me up with it. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not because I couldn't have an opinion, but I feel like I would have an obligation To actually sit down with people who work at Facebook, Twitter and these places because I know a lot of people at all these companies and have a real factual discussion about what's going on. | ||
| At this point, I do think at the very least if we're going to deal with banning or preventing certain types of people from voicing their opinions, there should be a consistent playing field. | ||
| It shouldn't be moving goalposts. | ||
| So the rules should be clear from the outset and they should apply to everyone and there shouldn't be one-off exceptions I think in most cases. | ||
| When we get into algorithms and what is rewarded and what is not, there are always unintended consequences of Uh, the best design, whether that is an algorithm or if there's an incentive structure, right? | ||
| I mean, if you incentivize any of your workers, let's say within an organization with certain types of sales quotas and bonuses and so on, there are always going to be sort of perverse side effects of those incentives. | ||
| That's always the case. | ||
| So I think that it's in a way it's, it's On one hand, rational and important that we have high standards for how people serve and curate data so that we're not proliferating fake news and that that can't be used as a weapon of propaganda in a very damaging capacity. | ||
| Simultaneously, I think it's unreasonable to expect that all these gigantic companies who are dealing with technology and platforms of a scale that is incomprehensible To most people who aren't sitting down and being shown what it looks like on some level by, say, an employee of Google, it's hard to even fathom what being Google means. | ||
| So it's unfair to expect them to get all the details right all the time. | ||
| It's an evolving system, so they're going to make mistakes. | ||
| And it's good to hold them to a high standard, but difficult to expect perfection as they try to improve it. | ||
| That I would put safely in the category of, I'm gonna reserve judgment until I have more information. | ||
| I think that was a pretty solid answer for reserving judgment. | ||
| I mean, you still gave me something there. | ||
| How do you decide who to trust? | ||
| When you're getting your information, you're talking to people from, I mean, in your case, quite literally every walk of life, probably, that there is. | ||
| How do you decide who or what, or what news organization or whatever else that you actually feel is doing a fair and partial job? | ||
| I don't trust organizations in general, but I will try to identify specific people. | ||
| And if I'm really trying to do triage, I will identify people in my circle of friends or in my network who may not be specialists in the domain that I'm looking at, whether that's cancer research or Fill in the blank. | ||
| San Francisco local politics and how to most effect change with a given proposition. | ||
| It could be super specific. | ||
| I will reach out to two or three of my friends who I think will have already tried to vet | ||
| good sources of information or simply good thinking. | ||
| So it could be people who are good at interpreting the information. | ||
| People who are acting as human aggregators and filters. | ||
| I'll almost go out immediately to those people. | ||
| For instance, I very frequently bump into people, because I'm reasonably involved with | ||
| both current and former military. | ||
| So I've spent time at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. | ||
| Certainly have a lot of friends who are former military and you bump into a lot of folks running around calling themselves Navy SEALs and a lot of them are Exaggerating what they've done. | ||
| There are some very, very legitimate folks, and then there are a lot of people who drive the legitimate folks crazy because all they actually did was pass buds, were never deployed, now they're running around selling Navy SEAL workout routines and getting book deals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So in a case like that, I will immediately go to two or three of my friends who are from that community and say, hey, sniff test, zero to ten, how much would you recommend I talk to this person? | ||
| So it's a very hands-on process. | ||
| I start from effectively a place of distrust with any mass media because the incentives | ||
| are not aligned with truth at all costs. | ||
| They just are not. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's I think the reality of the business models of many of these companies. | ||
| So even the individual participants, however much they may want to represent difficult or To divulge and discuss difficult truths or disincentivized from doing so because it may be so nuanced that only 5% of the target audience will take the time to understand it and discuss it. | ||
| But when you're trying to monetize on a CPM basis, the number of slideshows you can put on a website, then you run into a conflict very quickly. | ||
| Yeah, so that's an unfortunate challenge of trying to siphon news. | ||
| Another thing that I'll use, and I have no affiliation with this, there's a program called Nuzzle, N-U-Z-Z-E-L, and what that will do is it will aggregate the most shared stories from the people I follow on Twitter and it creates a digest | ||
| of say the top 10 stories that have been shared the most by the people I have already | ||
| selected to follow. And I found that very useful but it in at any point for instance right | ||
| now or near presidential elections really within six months on either side it's just 99 | ||
| percent noise. But at other periods it can be a very, very useful source of pre-filtered | ||
| information from folks I've already handpicked to follow on say Twitter. So for pattern matching that's | ||
| been very helpful for me. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because I expected and hoped that after the election we'd have like a little | ||
| bit of a lull with politics one way or another and it's almost like everything has just been | ||
| ramped up even more. | ||
| I'm curious, when you talk about, you know, picking some people that you trust and things like that, you are also from Long Island, and I've mentioned on the show a couple times before that One of my great joys over the course of the election is that I was involved in a group text with three of my old childhood from middle school friends, and we sort of reconnected over politics, arguing all the time. | ||
| One of the guys was a huge Trump guy, one was a huge Bernie guy, one was somewhere in between, and then me, and I thought, these are people I trust. | ||
| I knew them from childhood. | ||
| I know where they come from. | ||
| I knew their families, celebrated holidays with them, all of that stuff. | ||
| Do you have a couple people in your life like that? | ||
| Who I have completely diverging opinions. | ||
| Well, diverging opinions, but also that you have, you have like the long history from childhood that you, that maybe you're outside of what you do normally that you can go to and be like, Oh yeah. | ||
| What do you think about stuff? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I just came back from a bachelor party for one of my oldest friends I've known since we were kids. | ||
| And, uh, Very eclectic group of guys who got to know one another before anyone was really entrenched in a given career or anything like that. | ||
| And it's very refreshing to have, I think and healthy to have those friends who really I don't have, there's no potential, or at least I don't think so, with these guys certainly not, any type of ulterior motive or professional motivation. | ||
| There's just none of that BS and noise and static and nonsense. | ||
| So yes, I do have those folks for sure. | ||
| Yeah, how do you deal with that part of it, that because of the nature of what you do and the public persona around you, people must want things from you all the time? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, they do. | ||
| It's a tax that I've accepted I have to pay, and I think it would be unreasonable for me to complain about it since it is a byproduct of public exposure, which I've opted into. | ||
| But it can be frustrating. | ||
| I mean, there are times when People will approach me and they'll try to butter me up for a few weeks. | ||
| It's always a tip off when I start getting a lot of unsolicited favors from someone who doesn't want anything. | ||
| And I'm like, I bet you're going to send me a book in two weeks that I don't want to read with the expectation that I'm going to give you a blurb. | ||
| I bet that's what's going to happen. | ||
| And lo and behold, that's exactly what happens. | ||
| So I've had to set policies. | ||
| That allow me to turn off entire categories of requests. | ||
| Like I don't do book forwards. | ||
| I don't do book blurbs. | ||
| I don't do fill in the blank. | ||
| I cross the board 100%. | ||
| Just don't do it. | ||
| And everyone's in a blue moon. | ||
| I'll make an exception for someone I know really well. | ||
| But it's very, very rare. | ||
| Or for instance, right now, like I'm not doing startup investing. | ||
| So if you think you're I'm going to come to a conference and talk to you about two or three things you found on my Wikipedia page to try to develop some rapport and then pitch me your startup at the end of the night. | ||
| Not going to happen. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I was going to hit you up because we're growing pretty rapidly here, but a little seed money, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| And that happens all the time. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, I've had people in San Francisco. | ||
| This is very unique to the Somewhat like Asperger's romanticizing nature of Silicon Valley, but I mean, I've had people, I'm sitting at a dinner with, say, a girlfriend, and they will literally come up, pull up a chair, sit down, and just start pitching. | ||
| Apropos of nothing, no intro, no nothing, I had one guy at South by Southwest. | ||
| I've had at least 12 guys try to pitch me while I'm standing at a urinal, which is not the right time. | ||
| Not a good time. | ||
| You gotta have a serious elevator pitch at that point. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't matter how good your pitch is, and it goes on. | ||
| But I would say it's a tax that I've had to accept. | ||
| But I'm much more cautious about any open-ended invite to have a conversation or a coffee or a dinner. | ||
| So if someone says, hey, can I introduce you to my friend Joe? | ||
| He wants to grab a cup of coffee or would love to come to dinner with us. | ||
| I'm like, OK. | ||
| If Joe wanted something from me, what would it be? | ||
| What would you guess? | ||
| And I want to know in advance. | ||
| It's OK to have a pitch, but I want to know what it is beforehand. | ||
| So that's how I think of it these days. | ||
| All right, well, let's finish up by actually talking Are you willing to talk about your new book? | ||
| I am willing. | ||
| Twist the arm, but I'll go for it. | ||
| Alright, let's see what we can do here. | ||
| So Tools of Titan, so this is basically the collection of the best ideas, the best practices that some of the most interesting people that you've talked to over the past couple years Yeah, I'll answer that. | ||
| And I would say also that Tools of Titans was really never intended to be a book. | ||
| It was just a notebook that I was compiling for my own use. | ||
| just the general theme with these heavy hitters, with these people who are doing it that we | ||
| all would want to emulate and be like and learn from, what is the general theme? | ||
| Yeah, I'll answer that. | ||
| I would say also that Tools of Titans was really never intended to be a book. | ||
| It was just a notebook that I was compiling for my own use. | ||
| So I was going back over my own notes to grab the most actionable routines and tools, gadgets, | ||
| anything that I could apply immediately and test from all these different guests. | ||
| And one of the themes, I would say that first it's split into three sections and this is how a lot of these guests think about their lives, healthy, wealthy and wise. | ||
| And the healthiest first, because the most Prolific thinkers and creatives in the book have also come to highly prioritize physical function. | ||
| And that manifests in a lot of ways. | ||
| But for instance, Rick Rubin, one of the most legendary music producers of the last 50 years, introduced me to something called Chili Pad, which I won't get too far into it, but allows you to very precisely set the temperature of the sheet that you lay on in your bed. | ||
| And it's It's been a complete game changer for me and many other people. | ||
| And that also came up with super athletes. | ||
| You find a lot of commonalities in the top 1% of multiple fields. | ||
| In other words, they have more in common, even though it might be chess, military strategist, black market chemist, you name it. | ||
| The top 1% in all those fields have a lot in common. | ||
| More so than they have in common with the B players in their own fields. | ||
| So that was really cool to see. | ||
| All of them, I would say, are very good at asking seemingly absurd questions. | ||
| So that is a commonality across the whole gang. | ||
| So you would have, say, there are a bunch of billionaires in the book, like the Reid Hoffmans and Peter Thiels and Marc Andreessen. | ||
| There are a lot of folks. | ||
| Peter Thiel, I think, is a very good example. | ||
| So he asks questions like, and I'm paraphrasing, but why can't you accomplish your 10-year plan in the next six months? | ||
| Right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Alright, that's a very bold question. | ||
| And if you're going to think on that, and as many people in this book do journal on | ||
| it and actually sit down and freehand on that question for three pages, let's just say, | ||
| then you have to temporarily put aside the constraints and assumptions that have led | ||
| you to where you are. | ||
| Because if it's your 10-year plan, you've set a time frame and sort of an incremental | ||
| approach that doesn't work at all if you're trying to cram it into six months. | ||
| So all of a sudden, you have to come up with these very, very potentially outlandish and absurd, unconventional answers. | ||
| And what I found also, and these two go together, is that, so for instance, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, I'm going to paraphrase this, but what people miss about really big, audacious goals is that it's hard to fail completely. | ||
| So you'll very often fail above everyone else's success, even if it's only a partial win. | ||
| So you find a lot of that, like Peter Diamandis, chairman of the XPRIZE is working on all these different exponential technologies and spends a lot of time with people like Ray Kurzweil, James Cameron and so on. | ||
| When entrepreneurs are pitching him to try to get investment, he will ask them, and I'm paraphrasing all of these, but if you had to 10X the economics of your business in the next three months, what would you do? | ||
| And if their response is, that's impossible, he responds with, I don't accept that answer, try again. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But to get unusual output and to find Paths that are unique, that are not well-trodden. | ||
| You have to ask better questions. | ||
| So I'd say that's very, very common. | ||
| More than 80% of the people in the book also have some type of mindfulness practice, which could take the form of meditation, say using a guided meditation. | ||
| There's one that came up a few times, which is free, called the 2010 Summer Smile Meditation, which is by Tara Brach. | ||
| Super specific. | ||
| That one came up multiple times. | ||
| For instance, or people using Headspace in the mornings. | ||
| Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up using Transcendental Meditation for a year, twice a day, and then saw benefits for decades afterwards, which is really wild when you think about it. | ||
| Other commonalities, so I ask almost all the guests, what book have you gifted most to other people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are certain books that popped up over and over again that are maybe lesser known, like Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's right hand man, but who gets less Of the media spotlight because I think he quite frankly hates being in the spotlight. | ||
| He's pretty cantankerous dude, but incredible book that came up repeatedly with some of the wealthiest people. | ||
| Siddhartha by Herman Hesse came up repeatedly by some of the best musicians and investors Go figure, right? | ||
| So there are sapiens was another one that came up across the board repeatedly. | ||
| So these are the types of things that you spot. | ||
| There's some weird ones like males over the age of say 45, a very high percentage of them don't eat breakfast at all or only eat one primary meal per | ||
| day, usually early dinner. | ||
| That came up a lot. | ||
| So you have... | ||
| And that's totally against conventional wisdom, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's for the most part runs completely counter to conventional wisdom. | ||
| But if you look into the scientific literature, which I've done, even for females, it looks, it appears as though there's some data to suggest that as you get older, you actually consume protein, for instance, better in a single large bolus, a single large dose. | ||
| So rather than having like a body builder, a meal every four hours or whatever it is, even three meals a day. | ||
| If you're a 70-year-old, 80-year-old, you'll actually consume your protein more efficiently having the majority in one meal. | ||
| And go figure. | ||
| So it seems to correspond. | ||
| But there's a bunch of weird stuff like that that pops up over and over. | ||
| Have any of these titans told you something or given you some wisdom that you tried to put into practice and then were like, man, that does not work for me. | ||
| Well, yes, definitely. | ||
| And the good news is for every pattern, there's someone who will let you off the hook. | ||
| That's the good news. | ||
| So you can really, the objective is to create your own bespoke toolkit, right? | ||
| And for instance, There are a lot of people who wake up very early. | ||
| You have people like Amelia Boone, who's this incredible super athlete, Jocko Willink, a long list of folks who wake up at say 4.30 in the morning. | ||
| I've tried that, but I'm much better going to bed around 4.30 in the morning. | ||
| And so I would lean more towards, say, the BJ Novaks, you know, writers and comedians and so on who can't even really hit their groove until 11am. | ||
| That's more my speed. | ||
| But yeah, the waking up With the Amish, not my thing. | ||
| I can't really make that work for me. | ||
| Not anytime soon. | ||
| Yeah, so do you think some of this is just how you're hardwired versus how you can actually learn to train yourself? | ||
| Like something like that, I would guess that knowing you, you could probably overcome that if you put enough time into it. | ||
| You may not feel that that's worthy of putting time into, but how much is that battle between just the way you're hardwired in nature versus the desire to change yourself? | ||
| Well, I think you can. | ||
| The good news is that everything in Tools of Titans is intended to be a one-day or a one-week experiment, right? | ||
| So you can try it and as Bruce Lee said, something along these lines, he said, accept what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is uniquely your own. | ||
| So I've tried to do the morning thing and I'm just better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Going to bed late and waking up late. | ||
| And I'm okay with that. | ||
| I've accepted that. | ||
| I don't beat myself up over it. | ||
| There is definitely a hardwiring component. | ||
| I mean, some people need only three hours of sleep per night. | ||
| I know a bunch of these mutants. | ||
| The vast majority of people will do best on, say, seven and a half to 10 hours of sleep per night. | ||
| And I would say maybe 30% of the people I've spoken to that I've talked to about this will try to get some type of short nap in the, say, mid-afternoon, like between kind of 2.30 and 4 o'clock. | ||
| So there are certain personalized elements. | ||
| That are dependent on your genetic makeup or at least influenced by your genetic makeup. | ||
| But I mean, reality is more negotiable than I think people realize. | ||
| Even that stuff, you can override it if you want to for periods of time. | ||
| You can use something like polyphasic sleep and combine that with something called exogenous ketones, this powdered form of Alternate energy, basically. | ||
| You combine those two things, you could probably do like two, two and a half hours of sleep per day for a few weeks at a time. | ||
| And I've done that before in dire situations, but it's not something you want to try to sustain for months at a time. | ||
| Man, I should have talked to you about a month ago because I could have used it this month. | ||
| All right, I'm going to end this with the most softball question of all time. | ||
| If you had one book that you wanted people to go out and read right now, Go out and buy a book. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Digital, hard copy, whatever it is. | ||
| What book would that be? | ||
| I would have to recommend, not biased, I would have to recommend Tools of Titans because This is the first book I enjoyed writing and it is the first book that I have since writing re-read multiple times because the tools and tactics and recommendations are not just mine. | ||
| It's not me listening to myself. | ||
| This is the best practices of 200 world-class performers from every Come on, you think? | ||
| I know you're refreshing as we're talking. | ||
| As of right now on Amazon, I think it has 410 reviews straight. | ||
| I mean, it's five star average. | ||
| It's like 87% of giving it five stars. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You think I know you're refreshing as we're talking? | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Oh, oh, oh yeah. | ||
| I mean, don't get me wrong. | ||
| There's no author. | ||
| Well, I shouldn't say no author, no author I know who is immune to that during launch week for sure. | ||
| You haven't hit that level of peace yet, you know, of high level thinking yet, you know? | ||
| No, during launch week. | ||
| Yeah, every author is just like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser checking Amazon, if we're being honest. | ||
| But yeah, Tools of Titans is what I'd recommend. | ||
| It's, I think, very appropriate for all age levels. | ||
| Incredibly flexible gift. | ||
| There's something in it for everybody. | ||
| And it's really intended so you can sit down with a cup of tea or coffee and Alright, well you know what we're gonna do? | ||
| of time by the time you finish that cup. | ||
| So it's a fun book and very proud of it. | ||
| So if people feel so inclined, I would encourage them to check out "Tools of Titans." | ||
| All right, well, you know what we're gonna do? | ||
| We're gonna put the link to "Tools of Titans" | ||
| in the comment thing right down below. | ||
| And we will see if the Dave Rubin effect is as powerful as the Tim Ferriss effect. | ||
| I can't wait to see it. | ||
| And people can find retailers all over the world if they want, or Amazon and so on at toolsoftitans.com. | ||
| There are also some sample chapters forward from Arnold Schwarzenegger. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| So, yes, we will see. | ||
| We will see what happens. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| Well, listen, I think we did over an hour here, and I know you only have a four-hour work week, so I'm very appreciative of your time. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| My pleasure, man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks to Tim Ferriss. | ||
| You guys can follow him on the Twitter, at Tim Ferriss. | ||
| The link for Tools of Titans is right down below. | ||
| And thanks for watching. |
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