Optimal minimal
this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking when I don't know. It is a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
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Hello, my frisky little kittens. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Timber show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines the habits the influences such as favorite books and so on that have made them good at what they do and the intention of course is to unearth the things that you can borrow that you can replicate in your own life ASAP and the guests range from chess prodigies to hedge fund managers to celebs to fill in the blank. And this time we have a fill in the blank which is a world-class entrepreneur Builder and investor. His name is navall ramakant Nepal is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He is a close friend has become an even closer friend because I am now an advisor to AngelList. He previously co-founded opinions which went public as part of shopping.com and vast.com. Also he is a very active angel investor not surprisingly and has invested more than 100 companies including more than a handful of
Corn so-called unicorn mega mega mega mega, I think I'll just say it again. Mega success is his deals include Twitter Uber Yammer Postmates wish some Tack and open DNS. Which Cisco just bought for 635 million in cash. There are many more and you can find many examples on his Angel list page, which is just angel that Co /ne of all if you want to see mine, it is Angel that Co forward slash Tim and Angel list is one of the most incredible tools for investing matching opportunities and investors that I've ever I've ever seen and it's very very disruptive to the Venture Capital space. There were I think around 10 people who are introduced to Uber way back in the day as investors and given the opportunity on AngelList. This was around 2010. I have led a couple of deals including ship s Hy P. You can check them out ship.com, which is I think around 40 x up in its
You a ssion from the first time that I put it on AngelList and made it available to people like yourselves who are accredited investors. So you can check out all of my startup deals at Angel dot CEO /tm. But let's talk about Nepal and why he's on the podcast the Vols on the podcast because he is a very deep thinker who is very good at asking questions and testing in other words questioning the obvious and that practice and the practice of being hyper-rational and other people are emotional has allowed him to be very successful in the world of investing but it translates to many other sectors of life and business and that is why even if you have no interest in early stage investing, I highly highly encourage you to listen to this much like the Chris sacca episode Nepal has had a huge impact on my own thinking about the world and startups and investing but not only money my time my energy and he's been very much a mentor.
In that capacity in many others. So I hope that my enthusiasm and enjoyment in this interview translates to the same for you. He is a treasure Trove of many recommendations and there you will probably take down a lot of notes, but you can find the links to the books and so on in the show notes in the show notes are at 4-Hour workweek.com forward slash podcast all spelled out 4-Hour workweek.com forward slash podcast. And without further Ado, please enjoy Duvall rava Khan.
Of all welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Tim. I have really been looking forward to this because I always enjoy sitting down in this somewhat artificial formal setting to talk with close friends because it gives me the opportunity to do something that would never work in say a dinner or sitting down which is basically have a unidirectional Charlie Rose experience of lobbing questions at you. So I'm actually pretty stoked to jump into it. The first thing that I wanted to ask is I suppose a pretty basic one. But when people ask you, what do you do? How do you answer that?
Oh very poorly I fundamentally at heart. I'm an entrepreneur and any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row. I'm pretty unhappy so by definition, you know, I like to do something different every day and I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing the idea that we repeat ourselves and we specialize in we pigeon hole ourselves is a modern invention created through specialization of Labor in the industrial revolution and hopefully as more and more people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We're going to be able to Define ourselves much more Loosely. So that's a good way of dodging your answer your question. Now, let me actually answer it. My day job is I'm co-founder and CEO of Angel list, which is kind of the world's largest platform for online fundraising and recruiting for startups. We're bringing Venture Capital online. We have lots of great lead investors it
Actually many micro Venture capitalists who can do deals on the platform and allows anyone who is sufficiently wealthy and sophisticated to invest behind them. And we also run a large market place for introducing talent to startups where we have over 10,000 companies recruiting now, we have hundreds of thousands of candidates who are looking to join great startups and we're making over 10,000 introductions Mutual introductions every single week that we candidates and startups. So that's kind of my day job, but the reality of what I do on a day-to-day basis, it's just completely different
now, it's just so you know, I wanted to to talk about two seemingly opposed. Maybe they're complementary characteristics of yours that I've observed the first I thought I'd introduce just vs via a a story. So we have a mutual friend who's a salty old polish trainer who I won't mention by name and you actually introduced me to him. He does a lot of incredible Olympic lifting
And he is one of the most aggressive intense human beings I've ever met in my life and of all of the people that he and I know mutually he's like Nevada that guy is intense that guy's intense. So why does why does he have that opinion of you? And do you agree with it? What is that?
Yeah, it's actually interesting. I think at my core level of I am an extremely intense person very competitive. I have this huge drive to win. I always want to be right. I usually research the hell out of any topic I get into and learn 80% of very quickly and I take nothing at face value. So I'm always kind of questioning and deciding and when I first met this gentleman who just like you he's transformed my life. Actually, he's made me healthier and fitter than I've ever been and he and I consider him incredibly intense I push back on him. I mean there were things that he said that I thought were smart that I could corroborate.
That I took as he had handed them and there were things that he had said that contradicted my own experience and reading and so I dismissed them. So I think he was little he might refer to me as being intense because I have my own point of view on everything or everything that matters that said, I've probably spent the last half decade of my life, like all of us who are getting a little older being much more introspective much more aware of my own foibles and trying to be a much calmer person and trying to be less stressed and more happy and more in the moment and part of that means learning how to control the intensity dial it up and dial it down and that's that's a contradiction that we all deal with that. We all want to be successful people. But we also want to be happy people and the two of those run in almost diametric opposite to each other and if you look at all the new wisdom the new wisdom is if you walk into an airport bookstore you open up Time Magazine, it's all about you must be like Elon Musk or Larry Page. It's all about
Success success extra pass and because we live in this mythology of anyone can achieve the American dream if you're not successful if you're not Tim Ferriss, then you're a loser and
we're terrible or if you're Tim Ferriss and you're not Elon Musk. You're also loser. Right? You're also
losing this fight. That's always there's always someone higher up the stack. So the success driven mentality drives you to unhappiness. And if you if you want to be successful surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are. But if you want to be happy surround yourself with people who are less successful. Thank you. So so this is the contradiction that we deal with all day long because we're also told that the American dream will bring you happiness and it will not I think a lot of us learn as we get older that happiness is internal happiness is a choice that you make in the descale that you develop and so how do you do that? And that's the fundamental contradiction and that's why our mutual friend can consider me incredibly intense and I better I hope you'll have him on the show Sunday because I think he has incredible wisdom to pass along. So that's where the intensity comes in the desire to
Successful and at the same time the non-intensity comes in which is a desire to be happy.
So let's call him. Let's call him Victor. We'll just call him Victor. So Victor my what I expect would likely happen. If I had Victor on this podcast is he would just spend 60 Minutes berating me and telling everyone how fat I was and uncoordinated think would be very hard to steer him away from the the beat Tim with Ali no leather routine. But yeah, he's a fascinating guy. So I'll have him on at some point the intensity. I'd love to ask just of some follow-ups about that because your brother Kamal is a great friend as well of mine and seems very different right. He seems almost the the sort of yin to your yang wrote a great book called love yourself like your life depends on it. Where did your intensity come from? I mean it we have you always been that way. Why do you think you have that intensity which not to say Kamal lakhs, but too much less.
Degree, of course.
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I mean the the genetics that Evolution or powerful thing and you could just say it's some basic variation level. Both of us were hit with similar adversities in life and our genes chose to respond very differently to see who would adapt their way out of the situation. So at the core level we are very different, you know, we had a tough childhood growing up make no secret of that and we just responded in different ways for me. It was all about winning and having a strong desire to win. I started out as a bookworm and then I had to transition into sort of being a combatant in the field of business if you will and now I'm sort of making my transition back into being a bookworm. I think everyone gets shaped very very early on in life. You're probably baked in terms of your core personality by the time you're 12 or 13 you hit puberty too jarring thing you sort of emergent to the world. You become
Adult you construct your ego you go out there to fight your files to do your things to become who you want to be and then at some point you get to where you are where you want it to be a close enough and you start realizing wait. It's not about external world. It's not about external accomplishment. I have to work on myself and I think my brother Kamal haven't gotten to that point as well. And then you sort of start working on the the inner being so I'm not sure I answered your question about where it comes from but you know, I think we all get shipped by adversity every great thing that is that I've ever done or accomplished, you know, according to external metrics or even when I look internally all the great things that have happened to be in my life that I consider a highly positive. They all started with something highly negative
what made your childhood difficult.
So what we're out we were we were immigrants so we came to this country when I was nine. My brother was 11. We had very little my mother raised us.
Single mom in a studio apartment. Where did you come from from India? And yeah, she you know, she went to she worked a menial job by day and then she went to school at night. So we were latchkey kids and sort of left to develop and learn on our own and a lot of growing up was watching the ideal American lifestyle that sort of from the other side of the window pane with my nose pressed against the glass and saying yeah, I want that too. And I want that for myself and my kids so I grew up with a very dark view of the world on the other side of the tracks and then kind of had to cross over and start trying to fit into this amazing life that is available to most but not all of them are all Americans
and where did you which part of India? Did your mother come from a bring you from and then where did you grow up in the u.s.
At that so we can yeah, we came from Delhi, which is a capital of India and here we landed in Queens New York and we grew up in Queens Village and Jamaica.
Kew Gardens we moved around a lot. We probably lived in nine or ten different places in the course of nine years. Well
and you mentioned combatant. I think that you are you're very very good strategist and combatant when need be and coming back to the intensity. I thought it was I'd never thought of it this way, but you you never hesitate to say what's on your mind. And so I could see how that would be interpreted by a lot of people who are used to sort of polite. Aha nod nod conversation. I remember when you and I were both invited to a dinner and there were a bunch of a lot of people neither of us had really met before around and we were standing in a group of a couple of people and I want or I walked up and I had a pretty unusual get up on I had this like turquoise long sleeve shirt, which I'd never wore. I don't know if you remember this. I said not even jeans on and then he's like brown unusual-looking dress shoes kind of look like
Her shoes and you're and you're like, wow, you look like a gay banker. And then this woman that neither of us had ever met started defending me and I was like, oh God, here we go.
Yeah, you'd be honesty thing is a core foundational value right now
fairness In fairness. I totally did.
Yeah and I think so. I have a couple of core foundational values and they're not things that I explicitly develop. They're just sort of you can look back after the fact and say oh, yeah, I won't compromise on those things. But now I realize how important honesty is and I was learned that from a couple of different places one is when I grew up I wanted to be a physicist and idolized Richard Fineman. I read everything by him Technical and non-technical that I could get my hands on and he said you must never ever fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. So that was that was a the physics grounding is very important because physics you have to speak truth. You don't compromise you don't
Negotiate with people you don't try and make them feel better because if your equation is wrong, it just won't work whatever you're doing. So, I think the Science Background is important in that a second is growing up in New York. I grew up around some really rough and tumble kids some of who were actually the Russian mob and I once had an encounter where I watch one of them threatened to kill the other and the one who would the would be victim, you know went and hid and then finally he let the aggressor into his house after the aggressor promised him. No, I'm not going to kill you. There there honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other they would take each other's word for things it sort of went up above everything and even though it was honesty in a mob context. I realized like how important that isn't relationships and then as they get older in life. I realized that a lot of happiness is just being present and whether you get this out of Buddhism or a cognitive therapy or or drugs or wherever you realize that to live in the
Moment is the highest calling. It's the source of all happiness. And when you're not honest with somebody else or when you even with hold something in your mind, what you've done is you created a second thought process you create a second thread in your head that then has to stay active keeping track of what you've said, which is what you're really thinking and that takes you out of the moment and it brings you unhappiness over time. You will not realize it at that moment itself, but it will create stress and distraction. So if you really want to be happy you have to be present and one of the core tenets of being present is to be completely honest at all times. There is a
great short book that had a huge impact on me on this topic called Lying by Sam Harris, which was just phenomenal because it explored the impact not just of lying in the way that most people think of it, but generally generalized deceit or even white lies that are intended to protect people the and just to come back to Fineman. Also Fineman is a
Director and a thinker who I've long idolized him. Anyways, surely you must be joking. Mr. Feynman to one of my favorite books and even for non-technical people. I think he's someone worth exploring and if you're not the reading type you could just search for a video think it was done on Nova ages ago called The Joy of finding things out which is just it gives you such a taste of Fineman and and the way that he not only I think questioned the so-called obvious or best practices, but also explore being a polymath right? I mean, even though he was a work world-class physicist. He was also an amateur Safecracker and Pick Up Artist and musician, you know, and in other ways really fascinating guy the you it seems like you have scratched your own itch in a lot of respects right with whether it was Venture hacks, like you had a pain point and you wanted to help other people understand what can be a very opaque black box which is venture capital and so on and so you provided
These how-to articles and so on that you would have liked to have had right and it seems like Angel list does angel list serve a similar function. I mean, how did AngelList come about?
Yeah, so it's exactly that which is basically self-actualizing creating the product that you want. So the initial problem was entrepreneurs go out and raise money. It's complete Black Box. Nobody knows what to do. They do the most important negotiation of their life, which is the initial term sheet or initial deal with a venture capitalist and they have no information. So they need that information by I wish I'd had that information and that's where Venture hacks came from and then Angel list was well, okay, that's how you negotiate a term sheet. How do I get a term sheet? How do I find investors in the first place and for that we built a product and then a few years into Angeles development. It became very clear that the biggest problem in this environment is not how do I raise Capital? It's how do I get help building my business? How do I find great individuals to help me and how to recruit great talent.
I'm so we created both our syndicates product where you of course are one of our top leaders who invest in companies as well as we created our jobs product which helps companies find great engineers at the end of the day. We stand for Founder's we stand for underdogs. And you know, I it's funny you ask me the beginning. How do I describe what I do? I said, I'm an entrepreneur and in the back of my mind what Angel this does is it helps Founders fund other Founders and on the recruiting side, it helps Founders recruit and find other Founders. And in fact, when I look inside Angels itself, the company's only 30 people almost everyone in the company is a former founder or wants to be a future founder and is getting their training wheels on an angel this and then is going to go start a great company and we've had former Engineers from us go and start companies like instacart and cover and many more will come out of it. So at the end of the day it to me, it's all about Founders All About individual is all about the underdog and I think long-term and
Long enough time scale maybe it's 50 years from now movies 500 years from now, but almost everybody on this planet will work for themselves. The information revolution is reversing the Industrial Revolution. What the Industrial Age did was it allowed human beings the team up in mechanistic organized hierarchical ways to create factories and production and I think the information revolution is breaking down the communication barriers. It's saying the optimal size of the firm is shrinking from thousands to hundreds to dozens maybe even to one at some point and eventually every morning someone will wake up or every week you will wake up and on your phone or whatever the devices of the future you will get an alert with a various punch of jobs and contracts that you can choose from you'll look at them. You'll pick out which ones you like based on your social connections and how much they're offering you and how much it can build your profile and your future work and you'll do that work and then you'll be ranked on it. You'll be rated on it and then you if you want to take the
Next week off. You'll take the next week off. If you want to do two jobs at a time. You'll do two jobs at a time. But if in the future is all headed towards individual Brands, you can see how reporters on the New York Times now, they they build individual brands on Twitter that far exceed the brand they would will that they would build just under the New York Times you yourself. I mean, you're an individual brand there is no there's nothing else other than Tim Ferriss. Tim first doesn't work for CNN. Tim Ferriss doesn't work for Apple doesn't work for New York Times. You're an independent brand and your independent actor and I think the entire world is headed that way and so to me I was lucky enough to be a Founder early, but I figured out how hard it is. What are the parts of it that work the parts of it that don't and so now what makes me happy is to work on a platform that creates more Founders and helps those Founders because I think at the end of the day, we're all founders were all meant to work for ourselves. We're meant to be individuals were not meant to follow. We're not meant to be in hierarchies. We're not meant to go to nine to five jobs were.
Told what to do over and over and as soon as we get off the grid and self-actualizing become free the better off all of humanity
is now I mean, I think you people could also look at being a Founder is just being a Creator right? And I think there's the yes in my mind at least a misconception that you you find yourself. Whereas I think that a more constructive way or actionable way of looking at it as creating yourself right day by day habit by habit decision by decision. It's not some needle in a haystack that you have to go into the jungle and take drugs to find although with that's a separate conversation. I'm going to the let's talk about Founders for a second. But in the the startup context the one of the more common questions that people ask successful feces or investors is what do you look for in a Founder? So I'm just going to ask you that like what what are the things that you look for in Founders or the red flags that
And investment or a Founder.
Yeah. So number one intelligence. You got to be smart, which means you have to know what you're doing to sound level and that's a fuzzy thing. But you talk to people and you kind of get a sense of do they know what they're doing or not. Do they have insights? Do they have specific knowledge? Have they thought about this problem deeply it's not about the a just not how many years they've spent but just how deep is their understanding of what they're about to do. So intelligence is chi energy because being a Founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time and in the long run the people who succeed or just the ones who persevere so if someone runs out of energy or if they're doing this in some hesitating preliminary way with the looking for constant positive feedback, or if they're easily thrown off course, they're not going to make it to the end especially in the highly competitive startup context and then finally his Integrity because if you have someone who's high intelligence and high energy, but they're low Integrity what you've got.
The hard-working smart Crook and especially in the startup World things are very Dynamic the very fast-moving people are very independent. So if somebody wants to screw you over they will find a way to do it and fundamentally ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money if being ethical was profitable everybody would do it. So what you're looking for is a core sense of values that rises above and beyond the pure Financial incentives. So for example, if I'm talking to a founder and they offer to do something that is slightly unfair to another shareholder or employee or founder in exchange for making me happy. That's a red flag because if they can do it to them they can do it to me for sure and integrity is the hardest one to figure out because it requires longitudinal relationships and enter.
Exactly. So I've just become more hyper aware of that piece as time goes on but those are kind of the three things that I look for and then I would just say or thought, you know, I think that isn't really about success but it's more just about personal time is when you invest in somebody or you work with somebody you start a company with somebody you're signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them in your life. Right? And so you just have to make sure you actually genuinely like these people you don't consider work to have to answer a phone call or take a meeting or spend time with them if it's exhausting if they're downers there- if they're difficult no amount of money is worth it, you know you and I will both die with money in the bank and so it's not about money at this point. It's about do I want to spend my scarce time resources mental energy Spirit interacting with these people. My favorite Founders are actually the ones who I learned from. So every time they call me up because they need help with something I jump on it because
I know that walking around the block with them for an hour. I'm going to walk out much smarter
who are some that come to mind just offhand it really recognizing that there are many others you could name
there are tons, but just to give you a very recent example there these two basically kids Cory and Michael who started this company called one which now runs a product called after school and their young I think Corey was 19 when they started to come he might have been 17. How do you spell one mile? So any domain name of those new name of the company, but they have different products and Michael Callahan is is co-founder and these guys are just brilliant their young their kids, but the level at which they think about the depth to it that they put into social products is absolutely mind-blowing. Another one is Ryan Breslow. I recently invested his company start a company called bolt which does stuff in the financial payment space, you know, this founder has assembled a crack team of Engineers at a square in Twitter and stripe and he's done very little so
What is a very young guy and then when I asked to invest in his company or I was getting to know him. He reference check the heck out of you, you know at every every step of the way very professional very quick very thorough but he did more diligence on me than I did on him.
How did he how did he do that? Without being a pain in the ass to people, you know, because I know people for instance they're entrepreneurs. I shall not name who tried to pitch me and they have like 30 people. They just bombard 30 of my friends to try to get to me and it's a complete turnoff if they're just using a Brute Force. How did he do it the right way?
It wasn't Brute Force. He asked me for references. He also did his own back-channel. He was very quick. He was very transparent and then he actually compiled the feedback. He had gotten on me and gave it to me. Wow as if he as if he had done a peer review of me and he thought I should have the data and I was so blown away by his professionalism, especially for such a young person. He's just probably one or two years out of school, maybe a little bit more. So it's just certain people.
Will ascertain entrepreneurs you get the feeling they really care about what they're putting together every early move that they make the consider it as they're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper that they're going to build and you can see that right away a Founder who comes barreling in decides very quickly, you know treats it like a flip says well, you know, if I get a good offer, I'll sell this thing or I'll do whatever's pragmatic to make money. Those Founders are not in it for the long haul and you learn very quickly that all the returns in this business are made with the huge huge outcomes at least for an investor. And so you start becoming hypersensitive to these Founders who actually apply care and are very meticulous about how they go about things.
Yeah. I haven't had and granted you've been and I mean how many how many individual and fund based Investments have you made to date would you say if you had to guess
I lost track is probably north of hundred fifty.
Yeah it you have a lot more experience than I do of course, but I haven't had I don't think a single good.
From any company led by a Founder who's like well if the wind blows this way, then this if the wind blows that way then that they've always had a very clear vision of some type or some type of True North, right? Yeah. Yeah and this
industry you get paid for being right when everybody else is wrong. So unfortunate that means a lot of them run full speed and crash into a wall which is painful but they'll get up and they'll run against somebody at something else but you get paid for being right when everybody else is wrong. So if you're looking for how to operate based on what everybody else around you think's then you know, your you probably don't have what it takes that said these people are also very hard to separate from delusional crazy people, right? Okay. Yeah, those people who are completely mad. They're not paying any attention to the feedback from the environment and not dealing with reality and living inside their own fantasy. So it's very hard to tell a Madman apart from a genius in this environment.
Give me a give me an idea for
Reality show you could go out and like gather people from asylums or or homeless people and that's that for a very vocal and give them like a 10-minute training session and then unleash them on like VCS to see what the what the actual success rate would be. I mean, I bet the confidence or take I'll take them a long way. It's there are a lot of venture capitalists and Angel Investors flooding the current environment. What are some of the old wives tales or things that are repeated so often that a lot of people believe they're true that are completely false in your mind or dangerous.
Yeah. So I think the hardest thing in this business is that the great new companies always look really strange. They don't look very much like the previous companies so you can get very easily tracked into believing that there is a certain way of doing things and then you'll find huge exceptions down the road which will cost you dearly. So for example before Netscape came.
Long back in the mid 90s. It was believed that there wasn't much money to be made in Internet or Internet type products before Microsoft came along as believe that the money was in Hardware not in software before apple and a few other computer companies came along. It was believed the money was in mainframes and Enterprise and not in consumer before Uber came along. It was believed that the money was in all virtual and software and not in handling real world things like taxi dispatchers and dealing with unions and those kinds of things. So the conventional wisdom is always wrong and so as an investor if you have a failed investment in one space the worst thing you can do is write off that space and not make investment again. For example Sequoia Capital who's one of the best investors in the planet. They were investors in webvan, which was the fail grocery delivery service in the late 90s that blew up
so badly they skipped instacart or what do they
they did instacart that? I did a cigar that that is right makes the coil so great that
A saw their own blow up. They lost a lot of money they had egg on their face. They didn't care. They actually re-evaluate every opportunity on its own merits and they know that a lot of these things about timing. It might have been the right idea at the wrong time and they also know that each great business looks weird and there's no such thing as a perfect deal. So there are lots and lots of venture capitalist who miss out on the great companies because they're looking for the perfect deal and there is no such thing. So I think that anything that becomes conventional wisdom in this business gets blown up, for example, one of the piece of conventional wisdom is, you know, don't invest in married couples because if they get divorced the company blows up that said if you follow that advice you would have missed Cisco and you would have missed a bunch of other amazing companies that were founded by couples
then prom I mean
Eventbrite as well. Yeah. There's a long list the classic mythology is you should have a to founder company, but there have been plenty of great one founder of companies. There are plenty of great three founders of companies wasn't so Drip
Drop.
Wasn't he a single founder
exit? I know you know, he didn't ya he recruited a co-founder and very quickly but especially the Enterprise space Oracle and Salesforce. I've been single founder companies and even the Dual founded companies you find that over time one of the founders leaves and the other one dominates. So in the jobs and Wozniak case and an apple jobs dominated same thing in Microsoft were Gates took over and Alan sort of went by the wayside. So it's not enough to say that, you know, it has to be two Founders. So any formula you layout is a set of guidelines that is probably going to be wrong. And so you have to actually this is very difficult, but you when you meet with a new company, you have to forget everything, you know, yeah and you have to shut up and listen
the instacart example Sequoia is really impressive to me now. I don't know if it were if it was handled by the same Partners. So who knows? I have no idea but the the nature of cognitive biases and for instance anchoring is something I've been thinking a lot about where
I'm not kind of by disposition or expertise a very good public markets guy like trading stocks. It's I make bad decisions. I get emotional or I Peg for instance a recent High per share price to a stock and then and then I've made this mistake where I'm like well when it gets up to X, then I'll sell but generally speaking not a smart idea right because you've sort of pegged and anchored this point. That just has no basis the stock. Doesn't it? You can't train the stock. Like I'm trying to train my puppies sitting next to be chewing on a marrow bone. Like it doesn't work that way what what books or people outside of the startup world have most improved your ability to invest and maybe maybe broadly speaking just resource allocate
Yeah, so this is a really good question. And so this is a very deep question that's going to have lots of answers. But at the end of the day, I think you have to work on your internal State until you are free of as many biases and conditioned responses as you can be and it will improve every aspect of your life including investing and I'm a bookworm. So I read enormous amount. I mean, I was raised essentially a library of the day care center. And so I've just read so much that I don't know where to start. But if you work on your internal State one of the things you start realizing is as an investor emotions dominate investors are very emotional, even though we act we pretend to be very rational. For example, you decide in the first five minutes of a meeting usually whether you would invest in the company or not. And if a company doesn't take your money in the first round you get annoyed with them or you feel like they crossed you then you have to undo that emotional state. So in the second round comes along you can still be a positive force and continue helping the company and maybe have a bite at the
The second time and these kinds of skills are extremely hard to build. They're not things you're going to build by by reading one book and then you're like, ah ha so I don't believe in the Epiphany theory of self development where you read some book. You have an incredible fit Epiphany. You read one phrase. You're like, okay, that's great. This changes my life and then you scroll it down on a piece of paper and you keep looking at her you put as a backdrop to your computer screen life doesn't work that way. What you kind of have to do is you have to build skills. And I think happiness is a skill and nutrition is a skilled diet is a skill investing as a skill self-awareness is a skill and skills get built up over decades with feedback loops and you just have to constantly keep working at it on so the books that have helped me a lot. I think there's a class of books that I would kind of put in the stoicism category and I know you've been a big advocate of these in the past and I sort of discovered them independently, but they were very influential so, you know, Seneca and
This Aurelius both standout meditations by Marcus. Aurelius was absolutely life-changing for me because it's the Personal Diary of the emperor of Rome and here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on Earth the time where that he lived in his writing his own diary to himself not expecting it to be published. And when you open this book you realize he had all the same issues and all the same mental struggles. He was trying to be a better person and so right there you figure out okay success in power don't improve your internal State you still have to work on that. And so that that that class of books is very influential. I like to pay attention to what I consider the rational Buddhists because a lot of Buddhism is drowned and mysticism and Hinduism and sort of worship this Guru or do this ritual. Its I don't pay any attention to that. But I pay a lot of attention to what I consider rational Buddhists where they can make the case very intelligently with reasoning along the way as to how you should train your mind to work or how you should observe your mind.
Sam Harris who you mentioned earlier is great jiddu krishnamurti, who's a lesser well-known guy, but an Indian philosopher who live turn of the last century is extremely influential to me. He's an uncompromising very direct person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all times. And so I've been hugely influenced by him. Probably the best book of his that I like is one called The Book of Life, which is sort of excerpts from his various speeches and books that are stitched together oddly enough Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy definitely and striking thoughts is a book. That is a good summary of some of his philosophy, but I could go on and on and on. I mean there are you have to read hundreds of these things who literally blogs the blogs are I feel underappreciated resource. We're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook were getting sort of bite-sized pithy wisdom. It's really hard to absorb and books are very difficult to read as a
Her in person because we've been trained we've got two contradictory pieces of training one is our attention span has gone through the floor because we're hit with so much information all the time. They want to skip summarize. Skip we want to get to the tldr cut to the chase too long didn't read. You know, what's a hundred forty character version was the Instagram version on the other hand were also taught from a young age that books or something. You finish books are something that are sacred that you treat books as a you know, when you go to school and you're assigned to read a book you have to finish the book so over time we learn we forget how to read books. Are we getting this contradiction where everyone I know is stuck on some book. Everyone is stuck up some books. I'm sure you're stuck on some book right now. It's like page 332 you can't go on any further, but you know, you should finish the book. So what do you do you give a reading books for a while your Kindle or your iPad or whatever you use or even your paper book is a stuck stay and that for me was a tragedy because I grew up on books and then I switched to blogs and then I
Twitter and Facebook and then I realize I wasn't actually learning anything. I was just taking a little dopamine snacks all day long. I was getting by little hundred forty character burster dopamine and then I'd retweet that see who retweeted my tweet and I get into an argument on Twitter and you know, it's a fun wonderful thing but it's a game that I was playing. I was actually learning anything
usually with startup L. Jackson
is yeah great character on Twitter. So I realized like I have to go back to reading books because when you're talking about solving old problems the older the problem the older the solution. So if you're trying to learn how to drive a car fly a plane absolutely you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created the Modern Age the solution is creating the Modern Age, but if you're talking about an old problem like how to you know, generally keep your body healthy how to stay calm and peaceful of mind what kinds of value systems are good. How should you raise a family these kinds of things the older Solutions are probably
And they withstood the test of time any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through a lot of people now, it may have some stuff in it that we now know to be true but the general principles are more likely to be correct. So if I want to learn the theory of evolution, which I kind of use as my binding principal whenever I'm trying to explain Any Human Action people read all kinds of blog posts and tweets and evolution. Everyone has a loose understanding how of how Evolution works but how many have actually read the Origin of Species and you can get it for five bucks on Kindle and it's a very easy read it's not a difficult read and you can read the actual source and you can see the source of the Brilliance and you can see how Darwin came up with stuff back then that we're still trying to figure out or statements he made that was still trying to prove out but there's very little that's incorrect in that book and it is as sourcebook. So I wanted to get back into reading these Source books and I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook and Twitter and these other bite-size pieces.
So what I did was I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or as bite-sized tweets or Facebook posts and I felt no obligation to finish any book. So now anytime someone mentions the book to me, I buy it at any given time and reading somewhere between 10 and 20 books. I'm flipping through them. So I'll see if the book is getting a little boring. I'll skip ahead. Sometimes I start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye and I'll just continue from there and I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book If at some point I decided to book is boring or if it's got pieces of it that are incorrect and I can't trust the rest of the information in there. I just delete it and I don't remember them at all. So I treat books now is other people might treat throwaway light pieces of information on the web and all of a sudden books are back into my reading library, and that's great because there's a lot of ancient wisdom in there
and you mentioned blogs being potentially a source of good information. If are there two or three blogs that you have particularly.
Or do particularly like that you could recommend to people.
Yeah. So blogs are great because now all of a sudden you have some incredibly smart people who before may have had Niche audiences or may not have you know, their full-time jobs not to be a writer so they can they have a voice now and the reality is books are long because that's the size you need to justify printing up, you know cutting up a tree and printing a physical object and sending it to bookshelf when reality a lot of the wisdom in these books is it can be encapsulated in a few pages, but you can charge somebody $20 retail for a couple of pages of info. So I feel like blogs are actually a very efficient source of information and there's some absolutely brilliant people out there that you should take advantage of now the problem is if you read enough information on the Internet or in books at all cancels to 0 and you're in you're probably give a lot more facts, but you don't have much more wisdom. So you do have to be careful with sources you get information from so one of the criteria use it
Somebody is a deep expert and they're talking about things but then they start making errors and rationality or judgment or clear biases start showing through then I basically put that blog or a put that book down because now I can't trust what they're saying
put it on Premiership probationary period
essentially because you have to you have to filter the information that comes at you. For example, you could read news articles all day long and all you that would end up happening is you would end up hyper stressed anxious individual and you wouldn't even know why it's some core level your brain would have been rewired to assume that every bad thing that's happening is happening next door instead of tens of thousands of miles away. So I filter my blogs very carefully. I have a long reading lips that I use of a couple of hundred blogs, but like a recent stand out as a Blog called melting asphalt. It's written by a guy named Kevin similar out of New York. I've never met him but I read his blog and it was mind-blowing. He just really digs deep into all these topics that we take for granted he figures
An orthogonal view point on it. He makes some nice observations, but very often who ended questions or no conclusions for this sort of meander off when typing me the topics to see explore your talk about like how the brain works how human cognition Works he'll go into topics. Like why do we dance, you know basic economics Theory leading to bad outcomes. I just highly recommend reading for anyone who is intellectually and scientifically curious and what I like about it is that a lot of times he doesn't feel the need to wrap up with a conclusion, right? It's very clear that he's exploring the space and learning like for example, you know, your blog is great for what I consider sort of these quick one off hacks or your greatest surprise The Twist, right? Same is going to tell you how to you know how to peel a hard-boiled egg instantly, by the way, I blew up one of my kitchen counter ahead. Yolk everywhere.
Yeah. Sometimes it turns if it stops soft boiled not a good idea
that what yes, that was my learning there. So
You know, everyone has their style but your style is very much. You have to have conclusion. I have not seen a tip first blog post that does not lead to an axe actionable conclusion because you've built your brand around being a fast learner lifestyle hacker. I feel like if I go into Tim's Blog the promise that I get is I can get 98% of the benefit by doing two percent of the work, which is very seductive. Where's Anton melting asphalt? What I know is going to happen. I'm going to have this massive exploration of a deeply interesting complicate complex topic with a couple of different hypotheses and no real conclusions. Yeah, which which I think is important
for people to balance out with the prescriptive sort of Scooby Snacks of how two solutions. I think it's important for people to be able to sit with uncertainty. I mean, I think that's why Richard feinman so interesting also to I mean training yourself to be a good scientist does not require a college degree or PhD it requires like you said not fooling
South and having good questions and sometimes you just have to sit with those questions and evaluate whether the right questions or the wrong questions or if there's a better tweak to that question. So it sounds like the melting asphalt author is kind of along the same lines of a Freakonomics, but without necessarily the
conclusions. Yes. And in that sense, I actually even like it better than Freakonomics. The original Freakonomics is fantastic. Don't get me wrong. But now they just have to fill a lot more volumes. Of course, the quality goes down but it still look Freakonomics is still great. Another one is you introduced me to this guy's a childhood hero of mine growing up Scott Adams. Yeah. He's the creator of Dilbert and he's completely self-made and he put together dilber through a combination of business judgment and hypnosis hypnotic techniques that he learned and writing techniques and public speaking techniques and he's very transparent about it. And so he has a Blog that Dilbert blog or a Scott Adams blog. I forget the exact name, but it has some absolutely brilliant posts and of course like with anyone who is trying to figure
World out from scratch and is an orthogonal thinker he's going to have some things that are completely wrong or very controversial so you get some Flack over that but there's some complete genius in there. He has a particular article a particular blog post called the day. You became a better writer and even though I am a very good writer and I've been writing a lot since I was young I still open up that blog post and I put it in the background any time in writing anything that's important. It's that good. Yeah. I use it. I use it as my basic template for how to write well and even think with the title the day you became a better writer. It's such a powerful title. Absolutely. And so he teaches you in one small blog post the importance of surprise the importance of headlines The Importance of Being briefed and directed not use an attitude and adverbs and using the active voice and not the passive voice, etc. Etc. And if you consider yourself to not be a great writer if you were not a 10 out of 10 right at already or nine out of ten already that that one blog post right there will change your writing style for
If you put your ego down and absorb it properly yeah,
Scott is Scott is great. He's also a great teacher. So I actually had my first real tennis lesson ever with Scott at his house and he got me up to, you know, playing a volley game with him in about 20 minutes. I mean is really outstanding I'm gonna have him on the on the podcast very shortly, which I'm excited about. Let me switch gears a little bit and ask you a couple of rapid-fire questions doesn't mean your answers have to be rapid fire, but I'll just throw out a couple to add some color and sort of connective tissue to what we're talking about. What are some of your biggest successes in the investing world just sort of greatest hits of
Nepal. Yes. I've thrown a lot of darts and yeah half of it is just showing up frankly. If you're the tech business. The best thing you can do for yourself is moved to Silicon Valley just like if you're an acting you probably think oh to Hollywood and if you're in finance, you used to have to go to New York called another and more options, so, I don't know.
So we take credit for it in the same way that some people might say where they were very thoughtful and did a lot of diligence. You know, some of it was luck. A lot of it was long, but I was in the first round investor in Twitter when I was first getting started. I was first trying investor in Uber when it was getting started Thumbtack Wendy low Flipagram. There's a couple of others I was early in post made so that she probably the first real investor in there after they got out of an incubator. There's a bunch of them that goes on on it's hard for me to draw the full the full list, but the fund that Iran is on track to return 10 or 20 times the capital that it had raised and my individual portfolio is up by you know dozens
of times. Congratulations. Once again, what about dumb luck dumb luck? Well, let's talk about dumb luck on the flip side. So what are some of the biggest mrs. Like deals you've passed on
Anti portfolio, I think it's is it Sequoia that has that or Excel the n-type? I think I think
Bessemer pioneered it but it's okay gotta it's a nice thing to do which is to keep yourself intellectually honest Warren Buffett. Also pioneered in a sense in that he goes on record at the annual meetings and talks about their biggest mistakes from the previous year. And then he literally look at the previous Endo meeting what he talked about and we'll go through and talk about what he said that was wrong. So to some extent he does these annual meetings to keep himself intellectually honest and in terms of biggest mistakes, I passed on twilio very early on and Jeff lost in the founders great founder and he gave me every chance to invest I passed on Pinterest. I've been sober man gave me every chance to invest are sitting in bed next to my at the time
fiance. I thought you're going to say next to bed. I was like, there's nothing like wow.
Yeah. Exactly. We were that close. Sorry been no no insinuation implied. Nothing implied. I was sitting in bed next to my fiance and Ben had just we'd help him a little bit with Angela sold another lat we were
Getting started and he was raising money from Pinterest and I saw the numbers go up month a month a month and I had a chance to invest the first time second time third time and he kept offering it to me and I was sitting in bed next to my fiancee and she was obsessively using Pinterest and she said I think you should do this as like, I don't get it, you know, it's images. It's like flickery who's going to use this. How's it going to make money? And so I passed on that but you know, I've got lots of stupid ones like that. I could have been advisor to you too. But the early days I help them out, but I didn't take any stock even though they were kind enough to offer it, you know, there's lots and lots of mrs. Square. I could have done the first round. I just thought it was too expensive even Twitter where I did my piece it is a much smaller piece than I was allocated because I thought it was too expensive
did the same thing like 2009. I was like this is never gonna work out but whatever puts the money in the the rule you mentioned Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett often talks about, you know, the two rolls of investing rule number one. Don't lose money rule number two pay attention.
Rule number one or something along those lines when you've made Investments That in retrospect you look back on your like I knew it I shouldn't have done that deal. What are the things that lead to you making those bad Investments or overriding your rules or intuition?
Yeah. I don't actually dwell on the bad Investments much because in the startup business is the exact opposite of Warren Buffett's value investing business. He's investing at a much later stage where you have a lot more data and you're putting much bigger amounts to in there and and you're betting that you're going to make a compounded return of Seventeen twenty thirty percent a year in the startup world. You're betting that 90% of these companies will go to 0 or just return your money and the remaining 10% are going to post huge multiples and markups. So the Twitter investment is probably now 400x Uber is probably up around 4000 X. So the return to the
Errors can be staggering and can overwhelm the losses in the portfolio. So you always focus on the upside. You don't really pay attention that much the downside and I would say most of my downside mistakes that I think about it mistakes of omission not mistakes of commission, right that's said mistakes of commission. Usually it's because you didn't have time to get comfortable with the deal you got caught up in the heat of it where someone was pushing you to make a decision very quickly. You didn't have the data you didn't have the the gut feel for it, but you just went ahead and did it because of fear of missing out. So I think that's actually the worst reason to invest because you fear of missing out but that said a great company will raise money very very quickly. So very often you just don't have that much time the mistake of commission that really gets me. Sorry the mistake of oh, yeah of commission that really gets me is when I waste my time, so I haven't really regretted making bad Investments that's part of the game and sometimes
You make an investment the company doesn't go that far the founder offers offers to return the money and I learned this from Ron Conway. Usually a great response to say, you know, what keep it land on your feet. Get your next job start your next gig I'll invest in that too. So it's not really about did you waste money because like I said your reputation matters and if it works out then you're going to make more than enough. The thing that I regret is signing up for advisory roles because they take up a lot of time and then you're working for the founder and they're calling you for help all the time. And then you realize well, you know, they offered me what I look like free stock but nothing in life is free and I don't really want to spend that much time with this person or even worse. They don't call you. They just feel guilty. Right like I'm getting all these advisory shares and haven't done anything for the company. So if I had to watch out for a mistake as an early stage investors guard your time carefully guard your time more careful than you got your money,
right the non-renewable resource versus the renewable.
Exactly
when youth so when you think of the word say successful who's the first person or people who come to mind for you?
Yeah, it's an odd answer because you know, most people think of someone as successful when they win the game and it's whatever game they're playing right? So if you are an athlete you're going to think of successful as someone who is a top athlete and wins that game or if you're in business and you're going to think Elon Musk or you know, someone of that sort or in my mind, I would have answered that question a little differently a few years ago. I would have said Steve Jobs because he created something or he was a driving force part of the driving force and the spearhead for creating something that has changed the lives for all of humanity. And that's the iPhone. You know, I think if Marc Andreessen is super successful not because of his recent Incarnation as a venture capitalist, which is an interesting one, but because of the incredible work that he did with Netscape, you know, he commercialize the
Browser Satoshi Nakamoto successful in the sense that he created bitcoin which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come. So in the classic sense, I consider those creators and commercialized successful and of course Elon Musk just because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology entrepreneurship, but that said to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely who don't even play the game Who rise above it. And those are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness that they need nothing from anybody else. So there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life some older gentleman that I like to kind of learn from and we mentioned our polish friend earlier. I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody. Yeah. He's at peace. He is at health and whether he makes more money or less money over the next person over from him does better or worse.
Than him has no effect on his mental state and bearing and historically I would say that the legendary Buddha or Krishna Murthy Who stuff that I like reading. They are successful quote unquote in the sense that they step out of the game entirely winning or losing does not matter to them. There's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour. And if you could literally just sit if you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy you are successful and I think that that is a that is a very powerful place to be but very few of us get there.
Do you have a current meditative
practice? I have a couple like most people I talk about doing it, but don't really do it all that. Well, I think meditation is like, you know, like a dieting or where everyone is supposed to be following a regimen.
Everyone says they do it but nobody actually does it the real set of people who meditate in a regular basis. I found are pretty rare and I've identified and tried at least four different forms of meditation. The one that I found that works the best for me is something called choiceless awareness or non-judgmental awareness where you essentially don't sit in the corner and don't stay quiet you walk around you're going about your daily business, but hopefully there's some nature around you're not talking to somebody else and what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you're in without making judgments. You don't say, oh there's a homeless guy over there but across the street you don't say you don't look at two people running by and say, oh he's out of shape or I'm in better shape than him or that person's better than me or this one's better or I should get a coffee. Whatever you just don't make any decisions. You don't judge anything. You just accept everything and if you do that I find if I can do that, even for 10 or 15 minutes walking around I end up in a very peaceful grateful state.
And so that one works well for
me and when when those thoughts come up, right when you see the guy with the bad hair doing you're like that guy has no no business having that unmanageable hairdo or whatever ridiculous thought comes to mind. What is the internal response to that?
What I do is for those of you who programmed I'm basically trying to run my brain in debugger mode. I'm trying to be very alert and watch my thoughts. You're not trying to judge anything including your own thoughts and you know, there's a great definition that I read that says Enlightenment is a space between your thoughts, which means that Enlightenment isn't this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner and a Mountaintop. It's something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be certain percentage enlightened every single day. So you want to create as much space between your thoughts as possible. And the way you do that is by being aware of what your thoughts are and why you're having them. So if I saw the guy with a bad hairdo able to pay I would look at that and I would at first I'd be like, haha. He has a bad hairdo and then I'd say well why am I laughing at him? Oh to make me.
Better about myself and why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair duo because I'm losing my hair and I'm afraid it's going to go away and what I find is that 90% of thoughts that I have or fear 90% or fear-based the other 10% of play desire based in as any to
very tactful way to put it.
Yeah, and I think many Buddhists will tell you that desire is just fear by another name. It's the other coin.
There's no I think we're talking about something else entirely. Yeah, there's this to yeah, there's this there's this cartoon are know if you know who Harry Crumb is he has all of these very sort of profane comic strips and was very famous and there's a great documentary about him as well. Wait Harry Crumb, I think that's actually a comedy but our crumb maybe I'm mixing it up in a case. Somebody can correct me in the comments. But there's this one cartoon of his I think it's a single cell kind of like The Far Side in its format and it's it's basically a drawing of people on the street in Manhattan and Every Man Has a thought bubble above his head with a vagina in and every woman thought bubble above her.
With a penis in it and just everybody walking
week. What it is is that that's why the Adam and Eve story is there right original sin is lost. It's the thing that makes you fall Out of Heaven the same way at maybe some of your readers have this read this book called Siddhartha, but it's a beautiful parallel story to the making the Buddha by Herman hash the great book. I highly recommend it. But even in that book, our protagonist is out there seeking Enlightenment and gets really close in the thing that drops him out of it is lust he meets a woman that he falls a he feels lustful towards and that's sort of slowly becomes his undoing into everything. But anyway, so to answer your original question when I'm when I'm doing the choiceless awareness form of meditation, which by the way isn't as far as I can tell it's not taught in any school. It's something that I discovered mostly by reading it enough of Christendom Ortiz book and piecing together what he meant because he's a very he's not he's not very clear speaker times or he is clear but in a very different kind of way and then I realized that okay. So the point of meditation is to clear your
Mind and the way to clear your mind is yes, you can sit in the corner and struggle with it, which doesn't really get to the outcome or you can do Transcendental Meditation, which is where you're using this chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts or you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. And as you watch them you realize how many of them are just fear based on the moment you recognize it is fear without even trying it sort of goes away and then after a while your mind quite and when your mind quietens you stop taking everything around you for granted you start notice saying the details of oh my God, I live in such a beautiful place. It's so great that a clothes on me. Yeah. I can go into a Starbucks and get a coffee anytime. I want how rich I am. I look at these people there, you know, each one has a perfectly valid and complete life of their own in their own heads. It's going on. So I sort of drops this it pops us out of the story the dream that we're always in the story that we're constantly telling ourselves, and if you stop talking to yourself for even 10 minutes or if you
Obsessing over your own story for even 10 minutes, you'll realize that we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that life is pretty good.
Yeah, totally agreed and for people who are looking for a little teaser on this I think a very good one is a lecture by Sam Harris called waking up and it covers his these the PHD in Neuroscience was all he's also been on the podcast if you just go to if you just go to four hour work week all spelled out.com for such as Vimeo that'll take you straight to a page that has a sample kind of trailer that people can check out Robert crumb was the name of the of the cartoonist just as a side note for people who are interested. He was very fond of women with thick legs and also fond of drawing weird, like electrical instruments in any case somebody to check out the what is a bad habit that you're working to overcome right now,
very good question. So I so this is something that I learned through our polish trainer friend Victor, don't leave.
Our habits are everything everything. I think that we are we are trained and have its full from when we were children including potty training and went to cry and when not to and how to smile and when not to and all these things become habits. These are all behaviors that we learn and that we then integrate into ourselves. And then what ends up happening when we are older is that where collection of thousands maybe tens of thousands of habits that are constantly running subconsciously and their internalized and then we have a little bit of extra brain power in our neocortex for solving new problems. And so you become your habits and one of them what really brought this to light for me is our friend our trainer gave me a routine to do every single day and before that I had never worked out every single day and it's a light workout. It's not tough on your body, but I did this work out every single day and I realized this the incredible stunning transformation that it had upon me.
Both physically and mentally because I think to have peace of mind you have to have piece of body first. So that taught me the power of habits and after that I started realizing that it's all about habits. So at any given time now within a six-month period I'm either trying to pick up a good habit or I'm discarding a previously bad habit and it takes time. So for example, if someone says I want to be fit I want to be healthy, but right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat. Well nothing is going to work for you in three months can be sustainable. It's going to be a 10-year Journey at least and in the 10-year Journey, which is going to do is every six months or every three months depending on how how fast you can do it. You're gonna break bad habits and you going to replace them or going to pick up good habits. So I think it is all about habits. There is nothing else does
just going to add some color to what you said for those people who are curious. The the morning routine is it's basically a Mobility movement practice. It's not intended to give you a big burn or anything like that and you're basically taking your
To the end range of movement and I think what's very unique about it also and this is ties into the Laird Hamilton Pool training and so on that was in a previous episode is that you are you're you're controlling your breathing in a very particular way and holding your breath at certain moments. And I think that has a lot to do with the kind of present State value of that routine. But you know, I could be like that's just one man's opinion furthermore. I'd like to just add and since you're always so forthcoming in a valuable way with with pushing back. I'm going to push back a little bit or maybe just revise from my mind what you said about the three months versus 10 years. So if you're if you're fat you can make a tremendous. I think that people underestimate what can be done in a short period of time and they but they underestimate how quickly they can fall back into bad habits. Yeah, that makes us so it's absolutely right. So it's a long-term project because it's not a diet. It's a way of eating
For instance that's required to keep you from not being fat and the future right but you can lose say 20 pounds in a month and do it surprisingly easily. But like you said you have to sort of keep track of those habits and I think measurement is a really great way to concretize. That's probably not a word make concrete those little dunking these types of changes The Power of Habit by do Higgs actually very good book on this type of thing as well.
Yeah. So basically like examples of habits. I've picked up in the last 12 months or I'm still working on and I don't I'm kind of I'm one of these people who wants everything. I don't want to give up anything. So for example, if I want to stop eating bad foods if I want to lose weight by fixing my diet, I don't go around. I don't say these foods are bad. I'm not going to eat them and then suffer and then feel like I'm not eating tasty food instead. What I do is I do some combination of changing my taste buds to actually
Like the foods that are healthier for me and substituting unhealthy tasty foods with healthy tasty Foods so that it can sustain it forever. I'm not interested in anything that is unsustainable or even hard to sustain. I want my life to be effortless. So once I've created a good habit, it has to be the kind of habit that I can sustain with no effort the classic example for most people who have successfully lost weight in the last decade is most of them not all but most of them have been on some variation of a low sugar diet or a paleo diet or something where they're just or slow carb diet where they're just watching the simple carbs and if you stay in one of those diets for a little while what you realize is you lose your sweet tooth and when you when you drink like a sugary drink, it's an overwhelming amount of sugar. It doesn't taste good. So I think there are there are ways to fix your habits and do it in a very sustainable Gentle Way. So most recently I've started I've developed a lot more Japanese tastes and eating which has helped me a lot because now the food that I
And tasty and flavorful is actually not soft not curried not cream not carved and I find that kind of food sloppy. I find it hard to even look at
so so this ties into not interrupt but I was going to ask you and I suspect this is related what the what $100 or less purchases most positively impacted your life in the last six months and I think this might tie in
yeah, it's a Teppanyaki Grill. It's like a little tabletop Grill and what I learned was that for food the freshness and quality of the food going straight from the grill to your mouth is way more important than what you do with it. For example in most recipes and most restaurants. We sauce the heck out of everything and we creamed It and Weep over prepare it with over process it because it's sitting under a heat lamp for 10 minutes and by the time it gets from the cook to your plate to your mouth 15 minutes have passed and that's an eternity when it comes to food. Where's the Japanese? Teppanyaki style of cooking is you have a tabletop Grill and you have high Quality Meats and
Festivals and you slice them thin and you put them on top and they're cooked a minute later. And then it goes straight from the grill to your mouth within 5 or 10 seconds and literally all it needs a salt and maybe not even that and you can cook the vegetables in the oil from the meat and it's the best-tasting meal that I can imagine when I eat out now, I feel like I'm making a sacrifice on taste. So my meals at home taste better and they're very simple to prepare and the Really the hack is straight from the grill to your mouth because we're evolved as humans to eat cooking around the fire. We're not evolved this back to my Evolution as a binding Theory. We're not used to somebody going off and cooking the food and then coming to us 10 or 15 minutes later with the meat that's got cold in a plate but not to make it taste good. They put it in all kinds of sauces on top. So that is an example of a hack and that $50 grill that I bought is the best investment for my health that I've ever made
the next to know the brand offhand.
I think it's a presto tabletop Grill and yeah, you know, it's not it's not perfect because
Got the nonstick surface on it. And I would rather not deal with whatever chemicals are coming out of there. But it's a start it's same way you do this workout that we were talking about earlier. It's done with a light 20-pound pair of dumbbells, you know, which I bought a Sports Basement for 20 bucks. And the beauty is I can do that anywhere I am I can do that my hotel room I can do that my bedroom. I can do that first thing when I roll out of bed. So there's no overhead of going to the gym. So this new daily workout for me because it's only 20 30 minutes right in my living room takes me less time than the old model of getting into a car and going to the gym and working with a trainer because all the overhead that was involved in that model. So I think what you want to find is you want to hack in habits that are actually more pleasurable that are easier and the replace your bad habits or you're not as good habits. So the most recent ones that dropped caffeine for example, which was great. It was fantastic and I'm dropping hard alcohol altogether and even wine. I don't really drink much anymore. So those
To me almost unconquered able for anyone who's gotten used to drinking a lot. It seems like a really difficult habit to break but it is
breakable. So, how did you crack caffeine? And why did you feel the need to crack caffeine?
Well, I had a I had a health issue a few months back, which is a great wake-up call. I think at the beginning of this session I talked about how everything great comes from something bad. And so one of the definitions krishnamurti has definition of suffering that I really liked what he says suffering is that moment when you see reality exactly as it is when you can no longer run away from it when you can no longer deny it for example of a bad relationship with your wife you're in denial about the whole thing. You're always covering it up. You're always sort of escaping around it or putting a finger in the dike and making it work and then one morning you wake up and she leaves you and your Insight and your in suffering you're in pain and the suffering is there because now you can no longer deny that things are going poorly. There's no more denial. You're forced to face reality and when
For when you face reality that is when you will change. So I always look upon suffering as a teacher and that's hard to do when you're actually going through it. But when you're not, you know, that's how you should prepare yourself for it. So in this case, I actually had a bacterial infections what it turned out to be but it could have been a lot worse. So my internal state was bad. I was unhealthy and not feeling well so literally in one week, I dropped alcohol caffeine Dairy red meat, you know, when completely zero carb basically, I just switched entirely to meet solid water and all my bad habits disappeared overnight because my body was giving me a very tight feedback loop. Oh eat the wrong thing you feel terrible. And so that was a gift because when I'm 41, my body turns around tells me this is how you need to eat to be healthy. And if I ate perfectly then the symptoms were a lot less worse and I was a bacterial issue any biotics killed it, but it was it was actually amazing because outside of the issues that I was having from the health.
Mission I felt great I felt high energy. I felt clear-headed. I felt light of feet and light of mind and I became and I wasn't I was never before aware of what caffeine does to you. I think we those of us who drink a lot of coffee slide into it Without Really realizing what's going on. And once you stop caffeine for two weeks, I was really tired and sleepy but then I became aware caffeine is is a real stimulant it would but it would do is in the morning when I had my before I had my coffee. I would wake up like a zombie would be groggy and not quite functional and then I have my coffee and I would be functional but what happened is my heart rate would be slightly elevated and I would be slightly stimulated. It's absolutely a stimulant and then that would run for about six or seven hours until my next coffee and then it would slow down then I would crash and then I'll be low energy for the night. And when I was forced to drop caffeine, I realized how I was very consistent energy. I didn't get that stimulation boost at the beginning, but I also didn't get that crash.
The end and as we all know the candle that burns twice as bright Burns half as long. Yeah, so I decided that I no longer wanted to do that to myself. I did not want to overclock my body every single day of its life because I'm sure that leads to negative repercussions near the end of your life.
Let me add a couple of thoughts to a number of things you've said. So the first is with sugar Cravings just for people who want to cut back on sugar or simple sugars to things that are surprisingly effective for combating sugar Cravings particularly. If you've just gone on to a lower carb diet or slow carb diet for instance paleo keto whatever is number one. Make sure you're getting enough sodium make sure you're getting enough salt. So a lot of people who go on to a lower carb diet because each gram of carbohydrate can hold about 4 grams of water. They start shedding water. It's a diuretic and they start craving salt but they don't realize that says that they are start eating carbs again. And so what I'll do is I'll just sprinkle some like sea salt or whatever into a couple of glasses of water throughout the day and obviously, I'm not a doctor don't play one on the internet, but that's one the second is branched chain amino acids. So you can take a few grams of branched chain amino acids and your liver your liver will convert a small amount of that to Blue cose and you can get that hit
Without having to ingest carbs, which is kind of a neat trick. Also, it's a great way to maintain muscle mass and even gain muscle while on a low-carb diet. Also if you take it for a workout and then the last point I'll make before asking the next question is and I think this was actually also from krishnamurti. In fact, it was that sometimes it's easiest paradoxically to or ironically maybe counter-intuitively probably better word to change a bunch of behaviors at once. And so when you're adding behaviors, I think that it's often best to do one at a time and I think there's a lot of science to support this when you're subtracting behaviors are inputs, like caffeine sugar alcohol. It's sometimes easiest to subtract them all because they're interdependent right A lot of people are like, well I smoke and then I drink and then I eat a pizza right there all inter woven cues. So I think that a great way to say remove caffeine is to remove a bunch of those negative inputs at once and I did that by going
A three-day Meditation Retreat for Transcendental Meditation and that provided you know, the Friday Saturday Sunday necessary to sort of get over that initial hump, which was at the center for noetic Sciences. I think up in Northern California, but
we mentioned Chris Chris. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Yeah, I was gonna say I think you're spot on correct krishnamurthy is very uncompromising character. And for a lot of people he can be tough to read because he starts from such an extreme point of view that he doesn't even make sense to them. But one of the things that he talks about is that an internal state of Revolution and so you should always be internally ready for a complete change whenever we say I'm going to try to do something or I'm going to form a habit. I'm going to become something. We're sort of wimping out. We're just saying to ourselves. I'm going to buy myself some more times than just limp along when the reality is most of us when our emotions want us to do something. We just do it if you want to go approach that pretty girl or if you want to have that drink or if you want or if you really desire something you just go do it. And so when you go about saying, well, I'm going to do this or I'm going to be that you're really putting it off you're giving yourself an out. So at least if you're self-aware
What you can say is okay. I say I want to do this but I don't really because if I really wanted to do it I would just do it or I would commit externally to enough people all my friends and family and they would say hey I thought you were going to do this new thing. You had stopped smoking. I've stopped drinking what happened? Why are you drinking front of me? For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is literally go to everybody, you know and say I have quit smoking I did it I give you my word. I am done smoking. That's it. That's all you need to do. Go ahead. Go ahead. Right but most of us say that but we're not quite ready for it. So we know we don't want to commit ourselves that extremely so because of that, I think it's important to be honest with yourself and say okay, you know what? I'm not ready to give up smoking. I do like it too much. It's going to be too hard for me to give up. I'm not going to replace it. So let me set a more reasonable goal for myself, which is going to cut down to the following amount per week. And I'm going to commit to that externally and I'm going to work on that for three or six months and when I get there, then I'll take the next step as opposed to beating myself up over it.
I think you're right. And that when you really want to change you just change but most of us don't really want to change but I want to go to the pain just yet. So at least recognize it be aware of it and then give yourself a smaller change that you can actually carry out. Yeah, and
the other thing is if you if you want to change something and the the public pronouncement is a good example of this you need incentives, whether it's the carrot or the stick because self-control is really overrated and if you've had trouble making the change clearly the incentives haven't worked before they've been non-existent, right? So I'm reading a book right now for helping me train my puppy which is called Don't Shoot the dog and it's by Karen prior might be out of print but you can get it used and Karen prior. The title is very misleading because it's actually about behavioral modification and Karen prior used to be a dolphin trainer or a Marine Mammal trainer also worked with orcas. And so she would use a clicker this sound and then translated that
Dogs and she talked about superstitious behavior from dogs who say like every time you bend at the waist and say sit you think they're looking at your hand or listening to you, but they're actually watching you bend at the waist and and so they start sitting at weird times and you're like what the hell is going on and it's a superstitious behavior and how she's helped her friends who are humans do the same thing with say superstition about fencing competitions is one friend always needed his favorite. Not sure what the not rapey are both the whatever the hell the sword is the poker whatever that thing is gone and he when he forgot it at his apartment, he got to the competition had to use another one and was in this really superstitious negative state of mind and lost right? So he went through and identified with her help sort of the 15 superstitious behavior is he had associated with it and trained those things out of himself which led to a lot of performance enhancement, right? And also, it's a great book people's check it out. But where I was going with that is
Set punishments or rewards and a very easy way to do that is with betting pools. You can also use a tool like stick St. IC. Ke ke.com or dietbet.com. But for those people who want more check out the just search Stakes as ta ke s and the 4-Hour chef and there's a bunch of stuff online about how to set up those consequences, right
it absolutely works. So I started my first company that way I was working at this tech company called at home network and I told everybody around me my boss. My co-workers my friends I said, well, you know Silicon Valley all these other people are starting companies looks like they can do it. I'm going to go start a company. I'm just here temporarily. I'm an entrepreneur. I want to start a couple I told everybody and I wasn't meaning to actually trick myself into it wasn't a deliberate calculated thing. I was just venting talking out loud being overly honest, but I actually didn't because it was this is 1996. It was it was a much scarier more difficult proposition to start a company then
And sure enough everyone started coming up to me and says what are you still doing here? I thought you were leaving to start a company. Wow, you're still here. That was a while ago. You said that and then I was literally embarrassed into starting my first company.
So if you hadn't harnessed the power of Shame, you might still be clocking in and some type of corporate drone for all we know probably both
Scott Adams having a version of this where he would folded consistency bias to himself. So, you know, their biases can work for you. If you know the set of biases that are out there you can use them against yourself. And so Scott Adams had this thing when I think he was working for pacbell and he wanted to be a great cartoonist he would show up to work really early in the morning like 4 or 5 a.m. And he would go to the bathroom and he would stand in front of the mirror and he would repeat the himself for 30 minutes like a crazy person who say I'm going to be a great cartoonist. I am going to be a great cartoonist. I am going to be a great cartoonist and then he had programmed himself and yet to be
With his own pronouncements himself or would destroy his ego? So then he had to go and just do he did a lot of drawings is a little cartoony. So there are lots of ways to hack yourself every time you find a weakness about yourself. You can actually turn it to the positive you can use that to hack your own brain hack your own mind to get to where you need
that super hardcore with the mirror. I'm gonna have to talk about that. What is the the book that you have gifted most to other people or books
in the last year is probably sapiens by you all know of Hariri. I hope I'm saying is name correctly sapiens like Homo sapiens. Exactly. It's a history of the human species written by a professor of history in in Israel. It's absolutely mind-blowing. It's a very orthogonal view on humans. Clinically as we are and he starts out from the point of view that
sorry to interrupt. Can you explain orthogonal? It's very common in Silicon Valley, but society mean I know what that means
ortho.
Means it kind of comes out of left field. It doesn't it doesn't line up with your normal way of thinking kind of technical. It's actually a geometric term where something can be running on a different axis. So he basically comes at it from left field and he says let's take a look at human beings the species. Let's look at them like an anthropologist or zoologist will look at this animal and what's different about this animal and so he comes to some very very startling conclusions. He talks about how humans are the first animals that were able to tell each other stories and those stories that talked about things that weren't actually going on around them allowed humans to self-organize in for example, the Neanderthals were probably stronger than us physically, but you could only organized neanderthals by Blood. So you have a hundred of them who are related who could gang up maybe to fight a war but you could unite five thousand or fifty thousand humans under the banner of being Christian because we all believe this story. He talks a lot of Corporations or story religion is a story.
Even the you know, the fact that we're talking and I'm someone that you want to interview that's just a story in our heads. The reality is actually quite different. So he starts with that thesis that humans are these storytelling monkeys who then get out of control and he's basically documents the genocide of every other species in this earth or genocide or domestication by humans and then basically shows he doesn't use the word AI but we're sort of the first artificial intelligence as far as every other creature is concerned that over and the Earth and took it over as a resource and he comes to all these really interesting startling conclusions. Like he talks about how empires have never been overthrown from within instead the children of the losers get kind of brainwashed into thinking they're part of the victors. He talks about how every generation is a form of racism where they basically treat other people some class of people as dirty and polluted and not to intermingle with our kind and he talks any shows how in our modern society that's rich versus poor. So we think poor people should live in
Neighborhoods. We don't think they should go to the same schools. We don't we don't want our college educated children Marrying an oncologist kid blue collar worker, but then the biggest predictor of poverty or wealth is being born poor or being born wealthy. So it's kind of the racism of our times but I don't want to do the book Injustice. I just gave away a lot of copies and I feel like people should read it before that. I would the rational Optimist by Matt Ridley or in fact anything by Matt Ridley. I thought was really provocative in eye-opening poor Charlie's Almanac, which is the great one Charlie Charlie munger's book. Probably the best book on business quote unquote that I've ever read. I try not to read business books for the most part because they're very simple ideas wrapped up in a lot of pages. But yeah and definitely krishnamurthy is The Book of Life Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse meditations Marcus Aurelius. These are all fantastic
bumper solid the just as a quick note since I'm in dog mode.
On the homo sapiens versus neanderthals and you mentioned domestication one one theory that has some legitimate scientists subscribe to it is and I believe this is I originally read this in Scientific American I want to say but people could find this if they Google for it is that part of the reason Homo sapiens were able to dominate and drive out neanderthals is that they were able to domesticate wolves whereas neanderthals were not which is kind of a really fascinating idea and you can see that type of domestication taking place right now and people can just do a Google search where baboons have this truce with Ethiopian wolves in Africa, and it's so fascinating because when the baboons are forging for whatever the hell that Boons eat, they drive up field mice out of the ground and it makes it easier for the Wolves to hunt. So they've established this truce but it's it doesn't exist with other canines like
Feral dogs, for instance. It's super fascinating
actually related to that another great book that I would recommend is the Origin of Species Charles Darwin. Yeah, I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by Evolution anything else if you look at what religions are is religions are trying to basically explain how humans work on a large scale there are cooperating system for humans and their an ancient one and they kind of establish what a set of rules and boundaries then what kind of behavior you can expect and I think the modern religion if you're a scientist, you know, the closest thing to it is evolution where you can look at it and say okay, this is probably why most creatures behave the way they behave and so if you're going to read the Bible of evolution, you got to read the Origin of Species and what you'll find is that creatures like you're talking about are incredibly dynamic they exhibit incredible Behavior social cultural Cooperative the way they talk the way they sing, you know, for example species of whales are born that communicate with each other through
Long, but the but every song is unique to each pack and they're not born with that song. They learn it from their parents. They learn different songs for different communication and you realize how much complexity there is in the natural world and really has how little you matter and and that's and knowing how little you matter is actually I would argue very important for your own mental health and your own happiness. Usually when you see someone who's depressed they're trapped in their own mind and they're taking themselves far too. Seriously. Yeah,
Marcus Aurelius meditations not to beat a dead horse on that one is great for that and some of the some of the reminders that Marcus would read for himself in the mornings before going about the day like today. I am going to encounter ungrateful rude people in this this and this and then at the end of it all I will be dust and I will be put in the ground, you know for animals to consume or whatever which sounds depressing Until you realize how much perspective it gives you before you set out.
In the day, do you have a related to the books favorite documentary or movie?
You know, I generally don't watch movies. I considered it. I mean they're great and they're great for other people, but for me, they're just very low bandwidth. So because if you like an
pure pure cartoons is that you're more
of a cool guy. Well, I like cartoons like Rick and Morty. It's a great card
trick in Paris was amazing. Yeah.
It's really fun good for smart people to but I like to read Because I can read a lot faster than I can listen. And also when you know listening or watching or someone's talking to you like they're the egos enter into it. Where's the great thing about reading is you can read a hundred books, then you can absorb them all forget the source material and sound really smart
the
What words the case the sounding smart this
and I actually just before we get off this topic related to that. I recently read a book which I think a lot of people have been as a child, but it's called illusions by Richard Bach and it's a beautiful book and I would call it the you know, Siddhartha is about a character becoming Buddha ish and his journey to do that and Illusions is about a character becoming Jesus and is trying to do that and it's a very Messianic it's kind of got a Midwestern twist to it, but it has a lot of really great little mental tax for living your life. And one of them speaking of movies was to treat your life as a movie. So if you pick up a film reel that's a finished movie. That's kind of your life. It's a finished life because so much of it is out of your control that for all practical purposes is finished and then you sort of have to watch it one frame at a time to experience it. So the purpose of your life is to live it but now if you start living your life as if it's a movie and you're the star of your own movie because everyone's trapped in their own heads, right the things you care about are so different than the things I care about.
That for all practical purposes. We're living in two different worlds that intersect only briefly. So we reach living the movie of Our Lives. Now if you start treating the real life as that, you're walking around you're like, well, this is the movie of my life. You take a very positive view towards everything because you're like, well, I'm sitting here on a train and I'm acting all aboard when really the movie of my life something interesting would be going on in the movie of my life. I'd be talking to the person next to me. So why don't I just talk to the person next to me like and said, yeah, so it sort of helps you just keep your life moving along in a positive way because it's your movie you wanted to turn out. Well, these are all and even when you get pissed off at people you say oh, yeah, that's the villain awesome. The villain has entered the scene. This is the foil who now, I'm going to counterbalance again. So I'm going to learn something in the process and you know, let's see if this is the chapter where a win or a lose and then maybe a win later on down the road another way to think about it is that it also gets you to be more moral or ethical because if it's a movie that means there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people watching your movie. So what would the hero of the movie do with the hero behave badly or with the hero?
Well, hopefully the hero would behave. Well, there's no such thing as a part of the movie where the hero does something terrible in the audience kind of overlooks it so if you treat the world as a movie of your life and you treat yourself as the hero of that movie, it makes the world a much more pleasant place to deal with it.
Yeah, and it also engages you in a way that's very present state. Right? So one thing that I do, I don't think I've really talked about that sounds kind of weird but I will often basically behave like someone who has a what would Jesus do bracelet on but I'll do it for people friends of mine. Typically you have characteristics that I want to adopt. So Matt mullenweg for instance is so calm Under Fire. It means very hard to frazzle Matt. And so sometimes when I find myself getting anxious or wound up about something and I'll just ask myself like okay if this were like you said a movie and Matt were playing Tim Ferriss like but not what you do but not trying to be the spastic Tim Ferriss like what would he do and it's really weird
To when you become the observer in that way, which is a part of a lot of meditative practice. It allows you to be more effective. And what was another thing that I do which is kind of Hulk like is I'll just I'll talk about myself when I'm having some poor response or about to have a poor response and I'll be like, oh look at that Tim is angry like why is Tim so angry and and when I take that that's step back and I'll talk to you I think Phil libin about this kind of like third player game versus a first first person shooter. For instance when you take that step away from yourself to observe in a detached way. It allows you to pattern interrupt, right? So you're not reflexive.
We spend most of our waking lives dreaming. We think we're awake but we're walking around talking to ourselves if we verbalize those thoughts would be locked up right? It's not cool to walk around talking to yourself in public, but we talk to ourselves in our heads constantly and I consider that a state of dreaming and you know 90%
Hi We're Dreaming to ourselves and all I'm hoping is 5 or 10 or 15 percent of time. I'll catch myself dreaming. I'll realize that it's just some form of fear. And then I'll say to myself I'm awake wake up. And then I wake up and I observe the present surroundings and everything is fine. By the way. That's what I think Buddha means Buddha means the awakened one or that that's one interpretation of it. So maybe that was a fellow who was awakened most or all the time, but that doesn't mean you have to be asleep all the time. You just have to be awake a little bit more than you
normally are. Yeah a very very fun way to explore this for people who are allergic to the concept of meditation is lucid dreaming where you do reality checks and literally learn to distinguish between a dream state and a normal waking state but it requires doing these constant check ins because things for instance in a dream state will shift orientation like bricks that are laid down on the floor if you look away and look back at them. They'll almost always shift orientation. So people are interested in looking at that.
It's really fascinating and can be proven a lab can just look for lucid dreaming 101 in my name talking to yourself or talking to other people what words or phrases do overuse or most ever use
orthogonal most of my vocabulary is built from Reading not from talking or listening. And so it makes it easy for me to sound smart because people and people are writing they will use a larger range of words and rather than when they're speaking. So I so wanted to hacks that I use is I try to use or I don't have a tri-axial do it effortlessly. This point is I use a written vocabulary while speaking and so that makes me sound smart. Even if I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. So that's a that's a good little hack. What phrases do I overuse? I don't know. Maybe we're all just habit Loop. So they've got to habits of a bunch of phrases. I definitely kind of overdue this looking at
Rethinking evolutionary context if I can't find evolutionary reason either of a medic or genetic for why someone is behaving the way they are why they're doing certain things that I kind of don't have a framework for it. And I discard that that hypothesis. Similarly Game Theory I think is ultra important if if you understand Game Theory, well just the just the rudiments of it. You don't have to go in any of the advanced, you know Nash equilibrium type stuff, but if you just understand prisoner's dilemma and iterated prisoner's dilemma and is a great book called the origins of virtue by Matt Ridley that goes through a lot of this then you have a very deep understanding of how humans negotiate and behave and transact and that helps out. We didn't talk about this but I'm positive you read this book Robert killed and he's influenced. Oh, yeah classic classic book. Everybody should read it memorize. It understand that the way that people influence other people is consistency liking Authority social proof scarcity and reciprocity and once you know that
That any time you try to persuade anybody of anything you can use those to your benefit, but you have to be very careful because there is a tendency when we're trying to persuade other people to be dishonest and when you're dishonest with somebody else you can be dishonest with yourself and we were just honest with yourself you're disconnected from reality. You're going to make poor decisions. You're going to drop out of the moment and you're going to be less happy and going to be wrong. So you have to maintain your honesty while doing it.
Well, they're tools right and they're also just principles of psychology that can be wielded for good or they can be wielded for horrible genocides and so on right I mean so you if you absolutely like Master propagandists, you could look at some of the nonprofit's out there right which use these principles, but for a greater good like charity water like DonorsChoose. I mean, they they take advantage of these and leverage them, but you could also look at Goebbels right and World War II and so it's not inherently good or bad. It's like a scalpel. It could be used to kill someone or can be used to perform surgery, right?
Yeah, I feel like there's 10 or 15 great skills that we should have all been taught in school. But instead we spend too much time memorizing the capital of Rwanda or or Alabama when we should be learning. Okay. What do we know about what works about dieting and nutrition? What do we know that works about happiness and peace? What do we know that works about persuasion? You know, how do you you know have a healthy relationship with someone? What is the meaning of values? Right? What are your options and values those kinds of things another very fuzzy topics. They're very hard to learn the very hard to teach but at the same time it's shocking how we essentially just ignore them in our educational process.
What did you go to college?
I did I went to Dartmouth.
Oh, that's right. I just talked to the alumni magazine. What did you study
their computer science and econ and I did a little bits of English physics history. I was actually recently got to do English and history and that Resident drive a taxi. I was very
Vicious so I switch the computer science and economics and but my real education frankly even before Dartmouth came from a magnet high school in New York called Stuyvesant, which is a magnet Math and Science school. That was absolutely brutal and eye-opening and educational but even before that I would say the real education begins in library begins with books. If you can learn to like to read you never need to go to school and learning to like to read I think is I think everyone can get there. It's just a you just have to think about two things one is don't feel the need to read anything. You don't want to read. Okay only read the stuff. That's fun to you because it's more important to form the habit and the practice and the enjoyment of reading and to Associated pavlovian Styles and they positive rather than negative. So if you're reading junk just read and then secondly don't feel the obligation to finish any book. Don't do not treat it like a linear tomore Treatise that has to be read in order and the way the author intended beginning to end. Feel free to skip
Runs your book, you know, you can start at the back. There are books that have literally started in the middle. I read, you know near to the end and then I put it down and it was a decent book and I'll learn something but I just didn't feel like having to start it or finish it and that Liberation that freedom just allows me to read
if you wanted to get someone hooked on the joy of reading. What would the book or books be like one or two that you would recommend just to suck people into the for the pure enjoyment of it.
It's highly genre dependent so it depends what you like just for you personally. Yeah. Yeah. So for me personally if I was going to read science fiction or if I like technology, I would read snow crash. So so yeah, it's old but it's brilliant Neal Stephenson predicts everything from Bitcoin to the internet to Virtual Reality to see the nation states to you name it encryption and I mean, it's such a powerful.
Powerful book it's sad that it still never yet committed to a movie. It would make a brilliant movie. So on the Sci-Fi that will recommend that I think graphic novels are underrated because there's some great writing in modern graphic novels V for Vendetta The Watchman Sandman. These are up there. These are works of art and they're very approachable because there's also a beautiful illustrations and expansive story lines that go with it. If you like history and science actually sapiens is great because a very easy read there's nothing difficult about it. You can just fly through it and the same way if you're looking for spirituality and internal awareness meditations and Siddhartha are the two places, I would start because they're both very light easy beautiful reads Siddhartha, even though it's been translated from the German is almost lyrical it reads almost like poetry. Yeah. It's a beautiful book.
So I'll add a couple of options for people just for the joy of reading if you're like God, you know, I'm one of those people who doesn't read books or I don't have the time for books or whatever.
It doesn't have to take a lot and from from my perspective. Also, one of the best ways to solve insomnia or get to sleep is to turn off your problem-solving brain by reading fiction before bed. And so I give a couple of recommendations if you like fantasy the Name of the Wind I've mentioned this before so good. You could try another one if that one doesn't grab you called The Lies of Locke lamora l OC ke Le mura, which is part of the gentleman bastards series and it's basically written as if the author had a little black book that he carried around and wrote down the most hilarious insults. He heard people saying and like every Bar for a year and then wove them into dialogue. It's fucking hysterical and then if you want something that is also very deeply philosophical but but just raw riously funny Zorba the Greek which is a classic is is just outstanding
after two others in there. This one's a hard to read but really fun most egotistical author of all time is the secret life of Salvador Dali by Salvador.
Dolly the title alone should grab you and give you a sense and then I'm blanking for sale, but we'd mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah, and I keep coming back to meditations is such an easy book guy almost recommend everybody start there because it will it will change your world view on what you think success means.
I think I think that's it. So meditation is an interesting one. It didn't grab me the first time that I read it and I feel like that type of material the philosophical deep stuff is like it's more like music than a generalizable textbook in so much as different types of music calm down different people some people like reggae some people like classical some people can listen to you know, Green Day or Nirvana because they associate it with the Positive time and for me, you know, Seneca was the fix that I needed at first and then I came back to meditations, right? So I think it's in part finding the type of
Teacher that works best for you.
I completely agree which is why I think the most important way to read is pick up a lot of books start reading them all put down any book instantly that doesn't grab you and you don't have fun reading and just keep going till you find something does speak to you. Yeah, there's so many choices out there which is
which is one of the huge benefits of using say a candle right now. I do love paper books, but because I like to be able to export my notes and highlights. I you that was really what sold me on the Kindle is I use it almost exclusively and what I recommend people do is just, you know, buy a few of these books and read the first 10 or 15 pages and if it does if you're not super stoked to continue and you're like, oh my God, like I want to eat dinner later because this is so awesome then move on to the next one and try it until you hit the jackpot like don't settle for pretty good
A lot of the great books actually start out strong. It's a misconception that you have to suffer through it until it gets good. Yes, that may be true for some especially the ones who were assigned to read in school, but snow crash for example starts
Very strong. Yep, surely you're joking. Mr. Feynman. It's all bite-sized little stories. You can skip around and read these great stories about the adventures of this curious character and you can learn about the inner mindset and external state of someone who was absolutely brilliant world-shaking Earth's shadow new brilliant, but also unconventional live their life the way they want. There's also a snot it's not quite a sequel that there's a follow-up book to surely you're joking. Mr. Feinman, which is also good if you like the first one and I love the title alone, it's called so what do you care what other people think
that's a great title. And yeah, everybody at the very least should try to find some footage of Fineman being interviewed like the joy of finding things out and that will that will be the gateway drug to get you to read surely. You must be joking. Mr. Feynman
speaking what one last thing on that I think reading is so powerful if you take away one thing from this podcast is figure out how to read and I say that because there are many skills and gifts that people have in life and the
Think about reading is you can use that to pick up any new skill. So if you learn how to learn it's the ultimate meta skill and I believe that you can learn how to be healthy. You can learn how to be fit. You can learn how to be happy. You can learn how to have good relationships. You can learn how to be successful. These are all things that can be learned. So if you can learn that is a trump card, it's an ace. It's a joker. It's a wild card you can trade it for any other skill. So so and that all begins with reading
a hundred percent agreed. So the we've been giving a lot of advice obviously trying to take our own advice is hard often times, but your look at if you look back to your undergrad self, so you got that you switch to computer science and econ and so on you're about to graduate if you had to go back and give that and of all advice you're already hooked on reading. So that seems to be covered. What advice would you give yourself?
Yeah, it's funny. I actually did this exercise recently where I sat down and I didn't write it because it was in my head but I did spend some time thinking about what is the advice I would give my 30 year old self and the advice was along the lines of chill out don't stress so much not so much anxiety. Everything will be fine and be more yourself. Don't don't try and do what you think Society wants or needs. Don't try and live up to other people's expectations. Self-actualize say no to more things protect your time because it's very precious, you know on your dying day, you will give everything everything you have for another day. So the discount rate the marginal value that extra day just goes up as you get older. So the advice was all along those lines was basically be yourself. Don't listen to other people. Don't don't worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you and then I said, well, what would my 30 year old self? I said to my 20 year old self and it turned out to be pretty much the exact same thing.
And one of my 20 year old self and sets my 10 year old self pretty much the exact same thing. So I think my 50 year old self is going to say chill out relax don't stress so much live in the moment. It'll all be alright, let's fear more love and you know and love people more, you know, love is one of those weird things like everyone wants to be loved. Everyone deeply needs to be loved. It's not something you can buy no matter of money or power will bring you true unconditional love but it turns out you can give love it's free to give so you can't necessarily get it, but if you can get in the mindset of what I'm just going to give it eventually in a long enough time scale you get what you deserve the universe has sends it back your way.
Yeah. Well, not only that. It's like if you don't how to make yourself happy try to make someone else happy and that is sort of a as you said kind of a recursive function, and I'm getting I'm using vocab. I shouldn't but it's a virtuous cycle.
Well Charlie Munger who's Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway and just a brilliant older.
He was a he's the his speeches are collected in Port Charles Almanac and they're worth reading but he was asked at one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting someone at basically asking what the lines of like, you know, how do I find a worthy made and he said be worthy of a worthy made? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You just work on yourself until you no longer need them and then they appear I think that's what it is a Zen saying this is when the when the student is ready the master appears what that basically means is you have to work on yourself and be ready and then you know good things will happen to you.
Well, not only that but when you prepare your mind right bye let's just say hypothetically reading surely. You must be joking. Mr. Feynman. It's almost like when when the when the students eyes are prepared the teacher becomes visible if that makes yes, yes you suddenly it's like buying a new car and then you see that new car everywhere. Well, it's not that everybody went out and bought the same car. You just have a new selective attention and you can hone that to be a useful selective attention.
Just a couple more questions. This is fun. We could go on for hours and hours like we usually do but just a couple more. What does the first 60 Minutes of your day look like if you have if you can completely have control of it. What is the first 60 Minutes of one of your weekdays look like
if I have control of it first, I tried not to wake up to an alarm clock. I think that's highly damaging. It's not something you're meant to do. Its Troy's the last bit of your sleep and peace. So it's better to wake up naturally. So it's ideally you get to bed and such a time that your eyes will roughly awakened at the right time and the simplest hack for that is sleep near a window or Skylight or something that will let natural light and and natural light is the ultimate gentle alarm clock that again going back to Evolution as a binding principal your evolved to wake up to the sunrise. So I think that is a nice way to wake up. Although in reality. I don't wake up that early so easier said than done then I do this
usually wake up. What would be what without if not the crack of dawn. When what time are you usually waking up on a good
this is embarrassing but I'm a night owl so I get up around 7:30. So it's not that I
love how you explain. That's your night owl I wake up late. I was talking to my one of the
One of the people helping with dog training and she's like, so what time do you wake up and I was really proud because I've been working on this and I was like I wake up at like 8:30 and she's like whoa, and I was like and I took that as like a pat on the back. I was like, I know I've been working on it. She's like no you wake up really late. Anyway, okay. So you wake up at 7:30. I
sleep underneath a skylight, which is deliberate. I put I always try and get an apartment or a house that has a skylight and I was trying to put my bed underneath it. Yeah, because if I didn't do that my teenage self used to wake up at 11 a.m. Yeah. So that's a quick way to get rid of that habit. Then I always like to do that light workout that I'd mentioned during the day it combines yoga stretching breathing dumbbells. I should be doing 30 to 40 minutes. I actually do 20 minutes. I shouldn't be distracted. But in the middle, sometimes I'll take a break and go and check email. I try to put my meditation actually in the workout. If I do the work out properly no music no distractions, and I'm just being aware of my thoughts and watching my mind as well. And because my body is busy at all.
Gives me something to do then. I can actually be very meditative. So Ideal World, I would do that. And then I exit that state very peacefully then I'm usually on the computer on slack on email talking to my team working with them. Hopefully not a phone call. I did I really dislike phone calls and then I'll kind of leisurely, you know, either have a decaf coffee or a tea and then I'll head off to work. But that that combine workout meditation is really important and waking up naturally is very important. Actually the number one thing my wife and I thought about for a long time after we got married was that she would wake up to alarm clocks and she would set five six seven of them as little snooze is so every 10 minutes and she's a deep sleeper and I'm a very light sleeper. So every 10 minutes she has some alarm going off that she's sleeping through and I'm going absolutely berserk because I've been woken up in the middle of my sleep and I feel like my heart is racing and I'm sort of all stressed out. So finally she got a Fitbit which she wears on her wrist and that sort of Buzz
Heroic, and sometimes it'll wake me up sometimes not but it's not a jarring
weaker or it's not the auditory punch in the face. I could alarm
clocks were terrible for you. Anyone was waking up to alarm clocks on a regular basis. Like it will bring more peace in your life to break that habit then any more difficult habit that you might have to change
and an intermediate step. I haven't talked about this but it's had it sounds so funny, but it's had a huge impact on the quality of my mornings is I had the default kind of phone ringtone which was just a horrible like and then it and then it one of those horrible like fire alarm type sounds and Ice just switched it to Chimes. It's such a simple thing go into your ringtones and just change the alarm ringtone to something that sounds like wind chimes. It's a good intermediate
step. Well someone up there's pretty smart is going to at some point create and a thing you can put in your bedroom that will essentially create natural sunlight type light slowly and maybe add in
Them birds that are chirping and so on to wake you up very gently like a natural
Sunrise. There are lights that do that there are alarms but
will brighten up the room
with light. I always sleep with an eye mask. That's a whole separate conversation, but we'll save that for another time
if you guys actually there's actually some studies that show that if you are sleeping and you hear the crackling of a fireplace or the breathing of a dog the snorting of a dog that you will sleep better than if there was no noise whatsoever at the same time The Barking of a dog if there's a dog barking in the distance remotely, it will raise your anxiety level higher than the same amount of noise say made by a car or a siren and the and the reason is again Evolution where evolved to fall asleep by fireplaces with are domesticated animals around we're not evolved to sleep in a dark quiet room with absolutely no noise. That's actually not
Yeah, yeah, you're not you're not meant to sleep alone.
Okay, everybody don't sleep alone. I think
most people already working on that. There was everybody have a seat when I was it when I was in
Japan. I remember there was this story about a sumo wrestler and a lot of these guys can be prima donnas, but he had told his manager. He was one of the stars of the stable and he's like, I just can't sleep and I get bloody noses. If I don't have a different woman next to me every night. And so this guy's like damn it my like prize racehorses. He became a big issue. I will
explain everything related to that. When I grew up in India India, there's this concept of the extended family where you basically live with your tribe at all times. So we used When We Were Young we were grandmother's place in my aunt and my uncle's my cousins and my grandparents and everybody was there and it was a warm night. We'd go out in the backyard. We put all these comforters and these little cuts out and everybody would sleep in one giant pile of 15 people in any of the stars and also it was amazing and and two things were
Very great about it. One is the noise level didn't bother you. Someone's foot was in your face. It didn't bother you when its family and you're young like it all just works and you feel very safe and happy and the other thing is I think it really reinforced that me how important the the tried is and modern society gives us incredible flexibility and that we can get away from our crazy family members and we're not destined to die where we were born and do what our parents did so we have incredible freedom, but then coming with it is this tremendous loneliness that we try and cover up either through drugs or alcohol or partying or even trying to find a mission like putting putting people on Mars, but the reality is a lot of that loneliness just comes from being disconnected from growing up with your tribal environment. So it's important as you get older to figure out how to build your tribe that that is always around you and actually the more they're in your business the better like when I go to India and my grandparents house, it's impossible for anyone in there that house to be depressed their three dogs barking in and their seven cousins in your
Is your heart asking you, you know, did you eat enough to you want this like everyone is always in your business. So depression requires some level of privacy at least, you know, kind of that ya self illegal depression. Yeah, there's a chemical form of District depression that I am not familiar with and that is a real condition. But there is also kind of these the object loneliness that all of us can feel that comes from being disconnected from our roots and our roots are very tribal,
right and I think also speaking as someone who's had battles with depression before and for whose family it seems to be somewhat hereditary there a lot of males in my family who have depression. There's the question of nature versus nurture obviously, but it's very easy in a western kind of pharmaceutical focused culture to believe that you have a chemical imbalance there for say you're too lethargic to exercise as opposed to asking the question, which I like to ask is, you know, could the direction of the causality
The opposite right? I'm not exercising. Therefore. I feel lethargic and depressed right and just testing that and like you said it's like when you have a bunch of people around you and you have other things to do that require you to be interacting with other entities and an occupied. It's very hard to be self-absorbed in a way that spirals downward.
I think it's certainly one way that you can help not being depressed or lonely is if you constantly have other people's houses to go to and lives that you can step into and of course you don't get to make that choice because other people don't always invite you into their lives our houses. But what you can do is you can open your house to other people you can open your life to other people you can love other people even if they don't love you back. It's okay. It's real love is a one-way thing. What we what we call love mostly in modern societies attachment. It's not love. It's I'm loving you in exchange. You love me I do this for you do that for me. That's a transaction. But if you really admire someone for their values if you really love them for who they are.
It doesn't matter how they treat you you just treat them the way they deserve to be treated and then again kind of this is all Karma. It is karma is just people are very consistent with their actions and their behaviors and so over a long enough time period you get what you deserve.
Yeah, and for people who feel lonely out there to recommendations that I've seen help a lot of people including myself check out Couchsurfing consider becoming a host for Couchsurfing and take a look at acroyoga. If you're in a place where you can find a cure yoga practice, it is one of the most enjoyable awesome things. You will ever do two more quick questions. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Where would you put it?
I don't know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages that I like to send to myself at all times. One one message is really stuck with me when I figured this out was that what is desire and it desires a contract you make
Yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I don't think most of us realize that's what it is. I think we go about Desiring things all day long and then wondering why were unhappy so I like to stay aware of that because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time and I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realized that that's where I've chosen to be unhappy. So I think that that is an important one or even a simpler one is, you know, a lot of meditative. Like you said, you did a transcendental meditation course the give you a mantra the Mantra supposed to have actually no meaning maybe the universal Mantra, you know, that's been derived Through. The Ages is OHM where you kind of sit there and say, oh, I'm in your mind to yourself. It's strange. You can say to yourself all day long in your mind and I'll make you happier more peaceful. You start chanting it out loud. They'll lock you up
similar to I will be an
Isn't cartoonist likely I want to interview the guy who likes at outside the bathroom is like there's no fucking way. I'm going in there. I'm gonna get likely until Scott Adam
sets up, but ohm, ohm has no meaning I think but to me, it has a meaning and the meaning is just accept just accept in any situation in life. You only have three options you always have three options. You can change it you can accept it or you can leave it. Those are your three options. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you a change it but not changing it wishing you would leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. So it's that struggle that a version that is responsible for most of our misery. So probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head. It is just tell myself one word except so anytime I look at myself and I'm judging something. I just said except and it's only very very very few things that I will choose not to accept and if I don't accept something is for one of two reasons either am aware.
That this is something that it's just so important to me right now that I can't accept it. And now I'm going to put up with a mental battle for it or more likely I've just lost control of my thoughts. I'm no longer present. I'm Dreaming. I'm in the highly emotional state.
I need to do more of that myself and I'm sure that they're we could go on for a very long time and I'm sure we will continue to do this another time. But what ask if any or request would you make of people listening to this?
Well, I mean, I think I love books. I love to learn I want to be good at you know, everything that matters to me for my own reasons not to impose or show off anything to anybody else. So what I would ask you is, what is the one book that you've read that had the greatest influence on your life. It can be anything but with the realization that all knowledge
Is ultimately personal, you know, none of us should be we should never be taking our advice and thoughts and pre bundled beliefs and systems both Bruce Lee and krishnamurti were real Believers in this like Bruce Lee was you know, he set up a school of Jeet Kune do-- which was his style of fighting that he created and they said at the school and then he sort of had a realization that no, no all real learning is unique to the person who's doing the learning and you cannot be taught you have to learn for yourself. So he actually tried to dismantle the school. He decided that it wasn't the right way to go about because the act of teaching alone cause you to for me that a system and that system traps you from from thinking outside of the box and really self-discovery. So I don't I don't want to turn anything that I've recommended nor what people recommend to me as a prescription. This is how you should live your life. But what I would love to have is just a collection of amazing books that have great insight.
From people who have solve hard problems cool and and generally the older the book the better it is that's that's one of my criteria. So don't hesitate to recommend something that might be 500 years old.
And would you would you like people to put those in the comments on the blog post that's going to accompany this podcast will let you know on Twitter. What's your preference?
Yeah, I think either mechanism to comments would probably be ideal. So we have them all in one place, but just pick the one book that has most influence you it's probably it's probably dog-eared book that you read 5 10 20 times. It could be fictional. It could be whatever it could be embarrassing. It could be sexual. It doesn't matter. Obviously. It had an impact it moved you in some deep way you re read it over and over you probably have parts of it memorized. What does that book?
Awesome? So guys answer that question that the one book that's had the biggest impact on you that comes to mind and leave that in the comments. Just go to four hour work week.com forward slash podcast all spelled out.
Where I can just go to four hour workweek.com and click on podcast and then you will find this podcast or you just search of all ramakant Tim Ferriss podcast and this will pop up and leave it in the comments of all where can people find you on the interwebs and learn more about you and what you're up to
if you go to Angeles, which is an angel like, oh I'm on there is Angel ducko slashing of all, I have a Blog at startup boy.com, which is highly neglected. I haven't updated in years. But so am I older random stuff. Is there my Twitter account where I tweet every now and then some startup stuff some not that twitter.com slash in the wall. But the reality is you don't need to find me you need to fight we all need to find ourselves. So if I have something interesting to say you'll see it somewhere on the interwebs the internet's a great thing.
So I will I will encourage people to say hi to you on Twitter. So it's twitter.com /and of all in a VA El and it's especially awesome when the Volga
Really riled up about something. It's a full-on tweet war with someone very very often start about Jackson exact. It's great to watch and of all. Thanks so much man. This is been great fun. I always loved our walks. I love our walk and talks dinners will that we will have will find a substitute for the wine that might all usually be consumed but I really appreciate you taking the time and this is good fun.
Thank you. I really appreciate your having me and I'm happy to engage with people on Twitter. It's actually a great mechanism in medium for having conversations. So if anybody wants to talk on Twitter, let's go ahead and do that. I didn't Focus that much on startups and technology and all that stuff, which I know is really what I'm supposed to be talking about, but we can always continue that on Twitter
as well. There's no there's no supposed to and that mean a lot of people associate you with startups, but I think what it is important for people to realize or at least recognize my intention to be is that you're excellent at startup investing your
In that world, but the conversations that we have often Center on good thinking and asking good questions and I think that the good thinking and the good questions as part of what makes you very good at startup investing but that those two skills are transferable almost everywhere. So I wanted to explore non startup areas for two reasons number one to try to demonstrate that and number two because you talk about startups in so many other places and people should definitely explore more of what you have to say. And for those people interested. I'm also an angel list. I do all sorts of stuff and you can see all my angel Investments at Angel dot CEO for its Tim and let us know on Twitter if you'd like like us to do around to and explore other stuff, but until next time the Vol, thanks, brother.
Thanks Tim. This has been great.
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more.
Things before you take off number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email for me? Every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet. Friday's a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that have discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that check it out. Just go to four hour workweek.com. That's 4-Hour workweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.
