How to Secure Financial Freedom and Maximize Productivity | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

1. 0:00 – 4:32

   Format Intro and 5-Bullet Friday

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      Optimal minimal At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I give you alchemy? I'm a cybernetic organism with living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which has been a longtime sponsor because I've seen it help so many different businesses, hundreds and thousands of businesses of yours as listeners, and even including some guests on this show, such as WordPress lead developer and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than 1 million people have used to successfully launch and run businesses. LegalZoom has been helping people take care of their dreams and legal responsibilities, got to protect those dreams, folks, for more than 16 years. They're not a law firm, but they have the resources to keep you on the right path, including advice from their network of independent attorneys all at your fingertips. Whether you want to take your business to the next level or take control of your family's future with an estate plan, for instance, that's actually one of the places I started with LegalZoom's looking at wills and so on related to estate planning. LegalZoom has options so you can take care of the things that matter most. Go to legalzoom.com and get special savings when you enter Tim, that's capital T-I-M, in the promo box at checkout. Special savings. What does that mean? I'm not sure. Mystery savings. Could be 1,000%, could be 1%, could be 10%, could be 27.5%. I don't know. So go to legalzoom.com and get special savings when you enter Tim in the promo box at checkout. That's legalzoom.com and use promo code Tim. This episode is brought to you by WordPress.com, my go-to platform for blogging and creating websites. WordPress.com, which I've used for ages now, is the online home for this podcast, tim.blog forward slash podcast, my blog, and all of my standalone book sites. So whether you're looking to create a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on WordPress.com helps others to find you, remember you, and connect with you. WordPress is designed for non-technical businesses and bloggers. That's me. I am not getting nitty gritty in the code. You do not need experience setting up a website. They take care of the technical side, so it's easy to get your site up and running. Their customer support team is available to help 24 hours a day, and not just Monday through Friday, but also weekends. And if you look at the bigger picture, 28% of all websites run on WordPress, which is mind-blowing when you consider it, and plans start at just $4 per month. Listeners of this podcast can receive 15% off any new plan purchase. So go to WordPress.com forward slash Tim to create your website and find the plan that's right for you. That's WordPress.com forward slash Tim for 15% off a brand new website. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is going to be a bit of an anomaly, an experiment, and instead of my usual long-form interviews where I deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their habits, routines, favorite books, and so on, I will share some details from my own life and decision-making and so on based on questions that have been upvoted by subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday. What is 5-Bullet Friday? 5-Bullet Friday is a free newsletter that I send out every Friday that includes the five coolest things I've found or explored that week. It can include what I'm reading, books, articles, gadgets, tech workarounds, any type of experiments that I'm doing, favorite purchases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this newsletter has proven to be very, very popular. More than a million people subscribe. It has more than a 60% open rate. For those of you in the email world, you know that is absolutely astonishing. So people do look forward to this. It's free. It will always be free. So if you want to check it out, and there are also exclusive meetups, opportunities to ask me questions and so on, check it out at tim.blog forward slash friday, tim.blog forward slash friday. And it's super short, five bullet point email with lots of fun stuff every Friday. Something

2. 4:32 – 8:44

   Top Health Markers and Peter Attia's Guidance

   1. TFTim Ferriss4:32

      to help you get a little morsel to chew on for your weekend. So let's just jump right into it. Question number one. Hi, Tim. What are the top five health markers to check and watch regularly? This is a very tough question to answer because so much of it would be predicated on your personal situation, biochemistry, family history, and so on. I'm not going to totally dodge, but I will say, and I'm paraphrasing here, the words of much wiser doctors that I work with. However, above the age of 40 or so, I want to say with a 70% or greater likelihood, you are going to be killed or you're going to die from one of four things, cancer, stroke, heart attack, or neurodegenerative disease or complications thereof. Looking at family history, you can pretty quickly figure out which are the primary candidates. In my case, it's heart attack and neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's and so on. Therefore, many of the things I do, both track and preemptively or preventatively treat, are going to be related to heart attack, cardiovascular disease, or neurodegenerative disease. All right, so that would dictate, say, the use of curcumin, like I think it's called Theracumin, something like that, for instance, or on the heart attack side, looking at other things. But I want to refer everyone to tim.blog forward slash attia, A-T-T-I-A. This will take you to episodes featuring Dr. Peter Attia, who is one of the best MDs I know, and I know a lot of MDs. He works with many, many name brand folks as a concierge doctor you would recognize. Has very credible, uh, background. He is exceptionally evidence-based. Also former ultra-endurance athlete, swimming 25-plus mile swimming races and things of that type. So he understands and appreciates the implications and also trade-offs of, say, longevity versus performance, which are very often at odds. Does that mean you want 100% of one and none of the other? Probably not. So how do you navigate that blend? In any case, specifically, if you go to tim.blog/attia, look at episode 65 because he answers this question in great detail. And I may be getting some of this wrong, but I'm looking at the show notes, and here's what I see listed under medical terminology. Uh, APOE genotype. All right, this can be indicative of your predisposition to things like Alzheimer's. LDL particle number. All right, particle number is a critical piece of this. Lp little a. Then next we have OGTT. That stands for oral glucose tolerance test. Then you have IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor one. Uh, desmopressin and a few other things are listed here. Uh, and, uh, very frequently, if you're talking with, say, Peter, uh, at least the way that he and I often do things using either intermittent fasting or extended periods of fasting, say, three contiguous days per month, and then longer periods a few times per year as a purge fast, as discussed in my episode with, uh, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, who was introduced to me by Peter. Uh, this can be used as a, a, a, a plausible preventative measure to counter cancer, which is not one of my most likely candidates to kill me personally, although it certainly is for a lot of folks. And going between phases of, say, hypertrophy, meaning muscle building and performance optimization, uh, alternating that with periods of autophagy, uh, which you can help trigger this type of cellular self-cleaning through things like fasting, among others. Uh, exercise certainly plays a role. All right. So long story short, I defer to Peter Attia. Go to tim.blog/attia. Check out episode 65 specifically, and this question is answered as his first question from y'all.

3. 8:44 – 11:56

   Managing Contacts: Just-in-Time Introductions

   1. TFTim Ferriss8:44

      All right. Next, I'm going to answer, "How do you manage all of your contacts? You know so many people and how they are all interrelated. Do you have a specific system or software to help you?" And I'm going to answer this with a non-answer, which is no, uh, because I don't want to make it seem like I have all the answers and that I'm selectively picking those I have great answers to, which will create that illusion. So no, I do not have software for this. I wish I did, but simultaneously I am n- nervous, I suppose, creeped out would be another way to put it, by the amount of data Google, Facebook, and so on have, Apple included, and what they're able to correlate without any input from me. For instance, autocorrecting names I've been texting with or that I have off of what I perceive to be the Apple platform in my phone. Uh, or for instance, uh, Facebook in some way, uh, correlating based on the app use on the phone, people I've just added to contacts or been texting with or names I've mentioned with their suggested people you should know on Facebook. All of these things creep me out, so I don't think I put in enough data, uh, or detail into my contacts to make this, uh, easily solvable by software. Because even if you were to pull by area code, say I'm traveling to Texas, so I want to know who has a 512 area code, let's just say, so that I can ask certain people out to lunch or dinner. Well, people's physical addresses change more often than their phone numbers, uh, so that is not an accurate indicator. So the short answer is no. What I try to do with my contacts, because rightly I meet... You have, I suppose, inferred by the question that I know thousands and meet thousands of new people every single year. I try to simply know one or two people who are very strong in each given field, and through those people I can get to anyone I might need. In other words, I'm focusing on just in time introductions and contacts, not just in case contacts. And this is a corollary to something that Kathy Sierra taught me a long time ago, which was to focus on just in time information. In other words, knowing how to find the information you need when you need it, as opposed to just in case information. Good example of that would be reading business books, say, on how to sell your company when you're running a startup in the early stages, because you're going to take notes, promptly forget everything, and then have to reread that book at a later point in time if you ever pick it up again, and that is a sunk cost. So just in time information instead of just in case information, and just in time contacts vis-a-vis one or two highly competent people in each field versus collecting hundreds and thousands of business cards and figuring out what to do with them, which is a more reactive way to go about it.

4. 11:56 – 16:12

   Preventing Binge Eating: Systems Over Willpower

   1. TFTim Ferriss11:56

      Next question. "Have you or your guests any strategies to prevent or minimize binge eating during periods of stress?" Yes, and the last two weeks have been very stressful for me. I've had many crises pop up at the same time, and it has been very challenging. And I will tell you that the First rule is to eliminate from the home anything that you would binge eat, and this really underscores my belief that your systems trump willpower. You should rely on proper systems and restrictions, environmentally speaking, versus this thing that we like to think of as discipline or willpower, which is very fallible. And case in point, uh, I have come home from late dinners or, say, two glasses of wine during this period of high stress, landed home, gone into the pantry deliberately looking for things to snack on, any bit of chocolate, any bag of potato chips, anything that might remotely qualify as a cheat food, and instead I find mustard, MCT oil, athletic greens, protein powder, canned beans, not interesting whatsoever as late night cheat foods, and therefore I don't end up binging. When I violate that, for instance, uh, about six days ago, I was visiting a consumer packaged good company, and they gave me three amazing bags of, I'll say potato chips, but they're really tortilla chips made from different types of, uh, root vegetables and so on. Delicious. And came back one night, and what did I do? I had these three bags that are never in my pantry, and I promptly ate all three bags, 2100 calories of these tortilla chips, and they were delicious. Did I regret that? Yes. Did I feel guilty? Yes. Did I think less of myself for having done it? Yes. So keep it out of your house. If you have anything that is a cheat food in your house, remove it from your house. That is system over willpower, number one. Number two is get your breakfast right. So if you consume, for instance, what I would consider perhaps a, an ideal breakfast for many people, 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, which means you wake up, you have breakfast, and that could be, uh, say three eggs, three whole eggs. This is what Gretchen Rubin does as well, by the way, for those of you who heard her on the podcast some time ago. Three eggs, some spinach, could be microwaved, doesn't make a difference to me, but let's just say a little bit of spinach so you have that fiber, and then you also have some type of black beans or lentils or pinto beans, some type of beans, right? So you have three eggs, uh, lentils or beans, and then some spinach. The composition of that meal, the macros, so to speak, the protein load plus the fiber content will help to stave off any type of, uh, binge inclination for the rest of the day, and there's a very, very good chance if you just fix that meal, if you just dial in that as your new default breakfast, that you will consume, say, 15 to 30% fewer calories for the rest of the day. This is very, very common, and is also why if you have 100 pounds, 150 pounds, 200 pounds to lose, and many people have done this on the slow carb diet, and you can search how to lose 100 pounds slow carb diet for free case studies and instructions on how to do this with photographs. Uh, I will first ask that they do nothing other than change their breakfast. Why? It is a lead domino that then has many downstream effects that you could treat as independent decisions otherwise, but that would lead to decision fatigue. So why not look at all these decisions and ask yourself, which of these, if made or done correctly, would make the others automatic, irrelevant, or easier? And the answer is fixing breakfast. And there are other guidelines, but really those are two of the primaries. All right, next question.

5. 16:12 – 19:27

   What's Next After Tribe of Mentors: Creating Space to Listen

   1. TFTim Ferriss16:12

      What's next for you now that your book is launched? Uh, the book that is referred to in this question is Tribe of Mentors. Well, Tribe of Mentors, uh, thanks to all of you, thank you very, very much, ended up number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal, and it is in orbit, so it has reached escape velocity, and it is always my job just to get the flywheel spinning, and if the book is any good, it sticks. If not, then it doesn't. But this one appears to have stuck, and at this point, I view my job as saying no to a thousand things and creating space to listen. This is along the lines of what Tim O'Reilly has shared on this podcast, and if you haven't heard that episode, I highly recommend you check it out. If you're asking yourself, Tim who? All the more reason to go check it out. But creating space to listen, to really just exist and develop a higher level of perception. So I am focused on all manner of things to assist that, uh, such as testing a beta version of the Waking Up app by my friend Sam Harris, who's also been on this pod before, who manages to somehow speak in fully formed prose paragraphs, or blocking out time, whether that is, for instance, this weekend when I will be going to an Airbnb way out in the country here in Texas with no Wi-Fi, no reception whatsoever, or say more extended trips of two to three weeks with my family, which I do twice a year after reading The Tail End, an essay by Tim Urban on Wait But Why, which put the remaining number of hours as a percentage of the total that I'll spend with my family before they die, my parents specifically, into perspective, or, uh, blocking out an entire month to hopefully go off the grid without using any social media or electronics, which I'm in the process of planning. Now, why would I want to do this? I mentioned this in brief earlier, but Developing a higher sensitivity and ability to perceive. This can be helpful whether you are doing some explicit type of work, such as Cal Newport's deep work, say, which requires extended periods of uninterrupted time, blocks of time, or if you are simply trying to be more aware [smacks lips] and develop an awareness of how you feel, how you think, how you react in perhaps a Vipassana meditation respect, uh, so that your ability to parse life and be less reactive is, uh, developed over time, which is something certainly I'm paying a lot of attention to right now, especially given the number of crises that have hit in the last, uh, week or two, which has proven to me the value of this type of training and deliberately creating space to listen a la Tim O'Reilly. And that is O apostrophe R-E-I-L-L-Y, for those of you who want to check it out.

6. 19:27 – 23:19

   Every Day Carry and Travel Gear

   1. TFTim Ferriss19:27

      All right, next question is about EDC, every day carry. "What do you keep on your person as part of your EDC? [smacks lips] How do you carry it? How does it change during travel or other activities/events? Bonus points if you do a pocket dump." All right, short answer is I have a very unimpressive EDC when you consider my pant pockets. I don't like keeping things in my pant pockets, so I don't have much. I do use a Patagonia lightweight fleece vest oftentimes as my walking, uh, portable bag that I wear on myself. But the backpack is, is really the standard for me, and it travels with me almost everywhere that I go. And I have a number of different backpacks, including one made by Datsusara, D-A-T-S-U-S-A-R-A, made out of hemp, which was, or is, I should say, a company created by a reader after going through "The 4-Hour Workweek," which is fun. Uh, and in that backpack, there are a number of things that, uh, I travel with at all times, including the Rubz Ball, R-U-B-Z. Ball looks like a golf ball with little prongs on it. And that was introduced to me by Amelia Boone, four-time world champion in obstacle course racing, for use, say, before flights, after flights, uh, during any period of travel. And it alleviates tightness and pain, not just in the feet, but all the way up through the legs, the posterior chain, the hips. It unlocks more than you would expect. Uh, so that always travels with me. A headlamp. I always have a headlamp in a side pocket, very often Black Diamond. Sprayable zinc for bolstering the immune system, and melatonin, typically three-milligram tablets. Uh, and everyone from Art Devaney to Dominic D'Agostino are fans of melatonin use at different points. Voodoo Floss for self-care, different types of joint issues, created by Kelly Starrett, and you can Google that for more. [smacks lips] A journal of some type, very frequently The Five-Minute Journal or Morning Pages, but the Morning Pages paperback is exceptionally heavy, so I often ditch that. Earplugs, [sniffs] uh, most frequently Mack's silicone putty earplugs, so you can sleep on, say, your side without having foam poke into your inner ear. And then an eye mask of some type, and the SleepMaster eye mask is one I use very frequently. It also covers the ears on the outside as opposed to digging in with an elastic strap. The only caveat is that it can be very warm, so I also collect eye masks from various flights, and so on. If you were to look at what I carried some time ago, for instance, when I was writing "The 4-Hour Chef" and got really into prepperville and all of that, I would have had a multi-tool in my wallet. It would look like a metal business card with little nooks and crannies for a Phillips head screwdriver, say, saw edge, et cetera. [smacks lips] That was recently confiscated by the TSA, surprise, surprise. Uh, I would also have, uh, potentially a SureFire, uh, flashlight, tactical flashlight in my bag, and then I would have a paracord wristband or bracelet of some type. If you're wondering what you could use paracord for, the answer is almost anything, including bow drill, which is, is a bit of an edge case for all practical purposes. But you can look up bow drill if you want to see how to make fire using something like paracord that is woven into a bracelet. And you could also look up Tim Ferriss experiment Las Vegas escape [chuckles] to see some of the training I did with On Point Tactical and Kevin Reeve, where we

7. 23:19 – 27:26

   Financial Freedom: Debt Resources and Defining Wealth

   1. TFTim Ferriss23:19

      looked at getting out of zip ties, getting out of handcuffs, and all sorts of other craziness. So you can check that out at your leisure. But these days, I don't have a whole hell of a lot, uh, in terms of EDC. I suppose now that I live in Texas, I could go get my concealed carry, and that would add a whole new layer to paranoia, danger, and, um, potential offense. So there you have it, slash defense. All right, next up, we have, "Most valuable skills for financial freedom and being better with money?" Question mark. This is a super dicey question, uh, so I'm going to add a very important preamble, which is I am not a professional investment advisor, nor do I play one on the internet, so this is for informational purposes only. Uh, a lot of people take everything I say literally, and that is dangerous. So don't do that. Use your own brain. And much like the question of what are the fi- top five health markers to check and watch regularly, most valuable skills for financial freedom and being better with money is highly personalized. But what I would say is that if you are in debt, if you have a substantial amount of debt, I have found, for instance, or I've certainly heard from hundreds of listeners and readers that Dave Ramsey is very helpful. Some people are very big fans of Rich Dad Poor Dad by Kiyosaki, and the quadrant in particular in that book is something that many have found useful. Ramit Sethi, good friend of mine, R-A-M-I-T-S-E-T-H-I, is very adept and I think very smart in this particular arena. And if you want to look up automated finance system, Ramit, R-A-M-I-T, and then Tim Ferriss, he has a guest blog post on my blog that is very, very popular, has been very popular over the years and is worth taking a look at. So I do think that if you are in debt, those three places are good places to start. Beyond that, I can really only speak from personal experience, but financial freedom can entail a lot and can mean many things to different people. That could mean lack of debt. It could mean being able to do whatever you want, in which case the sky is the limit. Perhaps you need tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars if you want to buy that jet. It could mean financial freedom that you are free from financial worry. It no longer occupies 20% of your RAM at all times and being better with money. All right. I would divide being better with money into two different categories. And keeping in mind that for me, a good investment is one that increases your quality of life. Why otherwise would you invest? So if you say are invested in crypto and the percentage gains are very attractive, but you're a complete crackhead compulsively checking the charts every 15 minutes, is that a good investment? Well, that's a question for you to sit with. But if it progressively worsens your quality of life or consistently creates more anxiety than you had beforehand, is the marginal utility of the dollars you are gaining as reflected in that percentage enough to offset that with some type of lump sum payment of happiness or improved quality of life at the end? Maybe not, but this is something worth considering. Coming back to what I was saying though, I tend to think of money as getting rich, staying rich. So there are different tools in the toolkit for getting rich, different tools than in the staying rich category. And

8. 27:26 – 32:56

   Tim's Barbell Asset Allocation and How It Came About

   1. TFTim Ferriss27:26

      I would say if you're looking at beating the market, so alpha, I don't do that in hands-off styles of investing. I have that very much on one side of my barbell. So I personally, partially by choice and partially by fate, have ended up with a very barbell-looking asset distribution. And if you were to look at what I have, you're going to have highly volatile, what most people consider highly risky class of investments, namely startups and cryptocurrency. That's going to be more than 50% of my total assets. And then you have real estate and cash or cash-like equivalents. And that's pretty much it. So on opposite ends of the spectrum, and we could debate whether or not real estate is risky. We could debate the benefits of cash if you also have to contend with inflation. But let's just keep it simple for the sake of this discussion and say that you have highly volatile, what most people would consider high-risk, high-reward categories like privately held startups and cryptocurrency on one end of the barbell, which is where I create my alpha. And then you have real estate, cash, cash-like equivalents, and things like, for instance, muni bonds and so on, where you would then preserve that alpha. Okay? So you create alpha, take it off the table, and then preserve alpha. Now, forget about the question of converting crypto into fiat or keeping it in crypto. Let's just keep it simple. So that is currently what my, say, asset allocation would look like. That is very, very likely to change over time. And I should address a couple of questions that likely come to mind. One would be, why on earth do you have more than 50% of your net worth in startups and crypto? And it is not because I had 100 units of assets and decided to put 50-plus percent of those units into crypto and startups. That would be complete insanity, I think, for almost anyone. It's because I started off with a very reasonable allocation. Some of you might remember that many years ago, 2008 or so, I created for myself a real-world MBA. Rather than going to a Stanford GSB or one of these graduate school programs of business, I decided to take the same amount of money over two years, at that point it was $60,000 a year for two years, and invest that into the Tim Ferriss Fund, in quotation marks, to try my hand at startup investing. In the very beginning, piggybacking and co-investing with people who knew what they were doing. And I assumed the network built, the skills developed, the knowledge acquired over that two-year period of time would Uh, benefit me more than the $120,000 which I assumed I would lose. Right? The assumption was much like tuition, that would be a sunk cost. And that then set me on this accidental career of being an early-stage tech angel investor and advisor. And that tiny sliver of my total pie chart at that time due to, uh, lucky/good investments and company selection has swollen to a, a gigantic percentage of the total pie chart with companies like Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba and so on. Uh, crypto very similarly, uh, has, has not, uh, necessarily risen as it would have had I gone in early with something like Ethereum. Uh, but has nonetheless doubled and so on over time, more than doubled. So compar- if you look at my cost basis, it was a very rational, well, semi-rational decision at the t- at the time to allocate what I allocated. But due to growth, uh, they now represent a very, very large percentage of my total holdings. And the crypto can be freely traded. The startups are locked up. All right? So I am unable to decrease my positions and balance those, uh, for the most part. And that is why my portfolio looks the way it does. I would not recommend my, uh, asset allocation to really anyone. Um, now this comes back to, uh, the question of financial freedom, getting better with money. If we're looking at the, the getting rich part, the building wealth for a less crass way to put it. Uh, building wealth, preserving wealth sounds a lot fancier, much more, uh, Rockefeller than nouveau riche so let's stick with that. All right. Building wealth, preserving wealth. The way that I have, uh, if we're assuming there's some aspect of skill involved and that I'm not just, uh, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky which could be the case, right? If you have 1,000 orangutans flip coins long enough as Warren Buffett would say-- Oh, actually Warren Buffett wouldn't say this. The, uh, efficient marke- market theorist folks would say this. If you have 1,000 monkeys flipping coins, eventually you're gonna find one or two monkeys who flip, you know, 50 heads in a row and then end up writing books about how to flip coins and so on. So maybe I'm that monkey. But, uh,

9. 32:56 – 40:04

   Investing Principles: Capping Downside and Unfair Advantage

   1. TFTim Ferriss32:56

      if we assume there's some element of skill, the way that I've thought about it is number one, uh, capping downside first versus evaluating upside and looking at the minimal downside. And this is borrowed from a lot of folks including, uh, some, uh, famous names you might recognize. Warren Buffett for instance, uh, who's a-- would be considered I think by most a value investor although Charlie Munger has certainly informed their, their later investment styles. Uh, Paul Tudor Jones, uh, of hedge fund fame. Uh, and this is actually a quote that I took from Tony Robbins' book, Unshakeable, uh, which is, which is very good or Money Master the Game, also very, very good. "Is this truly the hard trade?" This is from Paul Tudor Jones paraphrasing. "Is this truly the hard trade?" Question mark. Meaning something others can't easily replicate. Does this really have asymmetric risk reward? Is it a five to one or a three to one? That means for every dollar he is risking, is there the potential or expectation of a three or a five dollar ROI? What's the entry point? What are your stops? Right? These are all really, really good questions. And the downside risk, capping the downside risk is also something that for instance Richard Branson does and when he started, uh, Virgin Atlantic, uh, negotiating a lease with Boeing so that he could return the plane or planes if it didn't work out. So even these people who are viewed as inveterate risk takers, people who throw caution to the wind are in fact determining how to limit their downside right up front and then looking for asymmetric risks. So in the startup world, uh, that checked the box. You can put in 25K max. You know your maximum that you can lose because you're not using leverage or anything else. 25K is the maximum you can lose and yet there is the potential if you, uh, focus on an unfair advantage, and we'll come back to that, that you could have 100 to 1000X return. And the startup world much like, uh, publishing, book publishing, music, these are hits driven businesses, uh, in that you are betting on companies or books or musicians or albums that you hope will return the fund. They will return all of the other losses that you will incur, uh, with your other bets. And, uh, I do very well with those types of decisions. They are binary. They are not day trading. They are certainly not, uh, considering buying or selling on a regular basis, uh, at which point you become very susceptible to Mr. Market. If you wanna look up Warren Buffett Mr. Market. Uh, that is who I am in the public markets so I do not play much with publicly traded equities for instance even though that might be part of my portfolio later. Uh, instead I like to do a ton of research upfront, make a binary decision, am I in, am I out? And then I'm stuck and that being stuck is actually a benefit. It is a constraint that works for me in this case because I can't make sell decisions at the wrong time. It is out of my hands. Uh, that does not suit everyone's intestinal fortitude. It just happens to suit my weird psychology. Uh, the unfair advantage I mentioned I would come back to is really only playing with a stacked deck. Uh, so I do not make investments in startups where I cannot materially impact directly the value of that company or from the selection standpoint when I have, uh, unless I have a significant informational advantage. And when I lived in Silicon Valley, I was there for 17 years, I lived in the middle of the switch box, and I made every effort to ensure that I was in the hub of information flow. So I knew about things, uh, weeks, months, in some cases, years in advance. And that enabled me to make better decisions, uh, as to where I should allocate the Tim Ferriss Fund in the first two years, certainly, which worked out very, very well. And had some great teachers who have all talked about their approaches for investing on this podcast. Uh, Naval Ravikant, incredible. So you can go to tim.blog/naval. You can go to tim.blog, uh, /... Let's see. Actually, it might not be a forward slash. But if you look up Mike Maples, M-A-P-L-E-S, he's another one who's been very, very consistently good, and so on and so forth. All right. So this is a long answer, but for financial freedom, uh, first understanding how to get out of debt or how to manage debt. Uh, I use very, very little debt in my life. Uh, some people are very comfortable with that. I am not. And being better with money is in part not being afraid of money and also, uh, learning how to take small steps and moderate actions with limited downside rather than being paralyzed by, uh, any insecurities or fears you might have about money. Uh, so a book that I think holistically can help with that is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. It has nothing directly to do with money, but it does have everything to do with how you might interact with money. Uh, the last thing I would say is, uh, coming back again to financial freedom, is, uh, to correct a misconception about the spectrum between full-time employed and entrepreneur. Uh, there is the erroneous belief or the false dichotomy that, that these things exist completely separately. In other words, that you c- you're either a nine-to-fiver or work for someone else, or you quit that job and f- chase your dreams and you're a full-time entrepreneur. Uh, I don't recommend, in most cases, that you make that black-and-white leap. In fact, it makes much more sense to moonlight, to side gig on, say, the weekends or Saturdays for a period of time so that you can both assess and evaluate your ideas for a company, uh, but also assess and evaluate your own abilities as an entrepreneur to, for instance, structure time that is otherwise unstructured, to set your own rules and policies instead of having them set by someone else or some type of company environment. Uh, and not everyone is suited to the uncertainty that you face as an entrepreneur on an ongoing basis. And there's nothing wrong with that. Uh, it's, it comes down to accurately assessing your strengths and weaknesses, uh, which certainly applies to investment. And guess what? It's all investment. Investment of money, time, energy, attention. These are all investment decisions. All right. I covered the asset allocation and why you should never copy me. [chuckles] And, uh, let's go to the next. All right. [clears throat]

10. 40:04 – 43:46

    Having Children: An Undecided Question

    1. TFTim Ferriss40:04

       "Hi, Tim. I know this is a bit out of your normal focus, but I'm curious, do you have a philosophy about having or not having children?" Uh, this is one of the undecided categories. Uh, so hopefully my, my somewhat non-answer will be reassuring to people who are in a similar place. But, uh, I'm conflicted about this, uh, because on, on one hand, if we're talking about investing and betting, let's just say, if I look at the divorce rates in the United States and the damage that can be done, certainly based on talking to my friends who are the, the children of divorced parents, by divorce, uh, I wouldn't bet on marriage, the institution, uh, to support, uh, or rather to have a fantastic outcome. If I were betting on, uh, on partnerships the way that I would bet on startups, I wouldn't bet on partnerships, period, uh, long term, whether they are within the confines of marriage or have some other arrangement. Uh, so, so there's a lot of hesitancy on my part for all of those reasons. Uh, the-- There are other ways to look at this, of course. There, there are friends of mine who are either divorced or are probably headed towards divorce, and I would ask them, uh, if the only way they could have their kids was to get married knowing they would absolutely get a divorce, would they still have their kids? And the answer is invariably yes. Now, is this confirmation bias at this point? Probably. It, it would be very hard for any parent with a heart to say, "Absolutely not. I would unwind the clock and not have my kids." I've yet to meet anyone who has said that. Um, and then there are folks, uh, for instance, Jerzy Gregorek, the Olympic weightlifting champion, who's 63 right now, I believe, and I would consider one of my mentors. He's in my TED Talk if you're interested to learn more about him, uh, tim.blog/ted. But, uh, he has said to me, uh, privately, I don't think he would mind me sharing this, but he's like, "Eh." 'Cause I asked him how I should think about kids, and he said, "Well, you know, if you're a guy, you get past the age of X," I think he was saying like 45, 50, "and you don't have kids," he's like, "that's just weird." [chuckles] So he is very direct. He's like, "You just go crazy inside your own head if you don't have kids by that point." And, uh, I, I think the simplicity that is actually really profound in that the fact of the matter is I may get to a point where my biological imperative, the Darwinian evolution that has led me to this point, being alive on this planet in this particular period in time, uh, to want to have kids or feel the need to have kids, uh, despite any arguments to the contrary. And, uh, at that point, I might say, "Fuck it," and, uh, pull the trigger and have kids, although I recognize that [laughs] it's not always that simple, and a lot of men assume that the fertility, uh, piece of the equation is problematic if the woman has problems. But I will tell you right now, given the trending that I have seen in morphology and motility in, uh, sperm among men and decreases in testosterone and everything else due to factors we can cover another time, uh, that it's never quite or very often not as simple as people would like to think, uh, and that the fertility problems experienced by couples are very much, uh, are very often attributable to the men and not necessarily the women. All right. Next.

11. 43:46 – 48:04

    Advice Over 40, Introversion, and Public Speaking

    1. TFTim Ferriss43:46

       You often ask your interviewees for their advice for a younger person, uh, or a younger version of themselves. What advice have you distilled from your guests or your own experience that would be appropriate for those over 40? And I'll keep this super short. Uh, this answer, or I should say this question and the assorted answers from guests are most represented in my last two books, Tools of Titans and especially Tribe of Mentors, where you see many, many, many, many different options. And with rare exception, the advice that would apply to those over 40 is exactly the same advice that, that these various guests would give to younger people, with the exception of, uh, perhaps risking it all in some capacity because you, you don't have mortgages, you don't have kids, right? So apart from the, "Hey, kid, you should try the crazy stuff because you have no mortgage, no kids, no real responsibilities," aside from that advice, which is really a small subset, maybe 10% to 15% of the answers, all of the rest of the advice applies. Uh, the reason I ask what would you-- what advice would you give your younger self, or what advice would you give a high school senior or a, a college senior, is that the people I'm interviewing feel qualified to give that advice. Whereas if I said, "What advice would you give to every 40-year-old?" and they're 35 or they're 45 or maybe even 60, they will be more reserved in, in the prescription of advice for those older groups than they, than they will be with the younger groups. And so it's, it's really a tactical decision on my part also just to get a more relaxed, less edited answer from these people. All right, next question. Do you think people who are introverted should practice, develop, learn to be more extroverted or just embrace being an introvert? You can do both. I would consider myself an introvert, uh, at least as defined by someone who is recharged by being alone or with very, very few people. And, uh, I've never taken the Myers-Briggs test, but I'm constantly told I'm an INTJ, second most frequent, um, I supp- well, the precise term diagnosis would be INTP. But, uh, certainly I would consider myself an introvert who has trained himself to, for short periods of time, be an extrovert, uh, and get up on stage and give speeches and so on. But I avoid large groups nearly all of the time, and even if I go to a large dinner party, I will frequently take five-minute breaks every half hour or so just to recharge and gather my bearings [laughs] . So I take a lot of bathroom breaks when I go to group events or conferences or anything like that. Uh, so you don't need to be more extroverted at all. It depends a lot on your goals, but there are certainly very introverted, uh, high performers with exceptional careers, both inside of companies as employees or intrapreneurs, and then outside of companies or in their own companies as entrepreneurs and even CEOs. You do not need to be a flamboyant P.T. Barnum, Steve Jobs type to be an effective executive at all. So it's, it's really, uh, dependent on your objectives. I will say that I agree with Warren Buffett, uh, that public speaking is one of the best investments you can make, some type of training course. I believe that he was part of Toastmasters, uh, or it may have just been a course he took in public speaking. But when you take the ability to communicate messages effectively to groups of people and layer it on top of almost anything else, you automatically put yourself into rarefied company. Uh, so public speaking I do think is a useful skill, uh, and in fact even a necessary skill, uh, depending on where your decision tree takes you in life. So that would be one addition. Uh, even if you are introverted, I would suggest getting better at some type and practicing public speaking. All right, next question. Uh,

12. 48:04 – 53:26

    Home Environment and Routines as Scaffolding

    1. TFTim Ferriss48:04

       how do you arrange the interior of your home, uh, example given, layout, items displayed versus stored furnishings, et cetera, to optimize your mental state and effectiveness? Is this a consideration? Yes, this is a major consideration for me, and, uh, I am not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I do spend a lot of time at home, and I would say just a few things are, are particularly important to me. I, I dislike clutter in any of my living spaces, like a living room, for instance. I'm in my living room right now. I have artwork up that elicits very positive emotions for me, and I have books up that elicit positive enabling emotions or memories for me. So for instance, I have, up on the wall, I have a photograph that Matt Mullenweg, my buddy, CEO of Automattic, uh, one of the lead developers of WordPress I took when we were traveling in Vietnam, and that is up on a shelf to remind me of that particular trip where I was able to say no and take time off the grid without any side effects or negative consequences that I can recall. Then I have a book from Jocko Willink. That is the, uh, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, uh, because I'm a fan of Jocko, and whenever I'm being a complete wimp, uh, with any decisions I need to make, ownership I need to take, or, uh, discomfort I need to face, then Jocko's on the shelf yelling at me there. I have The Ketogenic Bible, a book called Less is More, which is an anthology of writing on minimalism. I have The Essential Rumi poetry, a book called Braiding Sweetgrass, the novel Musashi, uh, two books on Musashi, actually, uh, Miyamoto Musashi, who is thought to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest swordsman in Japanese history, uh, a book called, uh, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, which I have a lot of positive association with, uh, Ray Dalio, Principles, and then Go boards and other things, uh, woodblock prints, and I- I'm listing off a few things here just so you have an idea. A photograph of, uh, an Olympic weightlifter in a training hall doing clean and jerk with several hundred pounds. The nameplate, in effect, it's a piece of fabric that was stitched into the back of my judo uniform when I competed in judo as an exchange student in Japan at age 15. So I unstitched that from my judogi when I was 15, and I've carried it with me ever since with my name and my school name underneath that, uh, and so on and so forth. A lot of wildlife, a lot of, uh, scenery. So I have panoramic shots of waterfalls and ponds in the Pacific Northwest, like Oregon. I have a photograph of a gigantic grizzly bear coming out of the water. [chuckles] I think it's called Majesty Rising, which is a photograph by Paul Nicklen, a National Geographic photographer who's just incredible and one of the few people I follow, one of the few photographers I follow on, uh, Instagram. Cristina Mittermeier as well, uh, would be, would be high up. But yes, I think a lot about what is placed around my home and what type of emotional states they prompt. Uh, so that is short answer to that. All right. Next question. Uh, "Productivity for non-type A people. Much of your advice and that of your guests seems to be aimed at people who thrive with setting and maintaining routines. Do you have advice for those of us who are ambitious but see routines as an undesirable daily grind?" Uh, yes, I do have advice, and it is not avoid routines. It is to reframe routines as something enabling. It is a positive constraint that allows you to avoid dis- decision fatigue and allocate your brainpower and the creative competitive advantages to the things that actually matter, which is not choosing what to have for breakfast in the morning or deciding which coffee shop to go to, et cetera. Uh, routines, and I think this is W.H. Auden, if I'm getting the name correct, uh, should be seen as a, uh, in the intelligent man be seen, that's of course people in general, seen in the intelligent man as a sign of ambition. Uh, so instead of seeing routines as an undesirable daily grind, uh, to reframe routines, rituals, if you prefer that word, as scaffolding around which you can craft your best life. Without that, every day is a free-for-all, and it's, it's effectively an unwritten script that you have to write every single day before you can even think about how to perform the script best. You have to write it, and that draws upon your very limited resources in an incredible draining way, in my experience. So my answer is not to get rid of routines, not to avoid routines, but to reframe them as the scaffolding, the reliable scaffolding around which you can then build your best life every day and utilize your unique strengths in, uh, the least wasteful way possible. All right. Uh, next question, and we only have four or five left here. All right, so the next question

13. 53:26 – 57:01

    Life in Austin and Finding Your 'Where' of Happiness

    1. TFTim Ferriss53:26

       is, "How is life in Austin? Have you designed or chosen a new house according to any changes you've wanted to make in your lifestyle?" Uh, I'll answer the first piece. Uh, Austin is great. I've-- Living in Austin has made me fall more in love with the city than simply visiting, and that was a concern. I wasn't sure what it would be like living here as an Austinite, uh, but it's absolutely spectacular, and I'm exceptionally, exceptionally bullish on Austin. Uh, so I've doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on this town. Uh, very, very, very big fan. I'll keep it short, but if you haven't visited, at the very least, live music capital of the US, fantastic barbecue, friendly people. It's, it's a great town, so I encourage everybody to check it out. Next questions. Uh, "What questions should a person ask themselves to determine their where of happiness?" I've talked about where of happiness and how I ended up at Austin for myself. Uh, the easiest way to determine, and just as context, people think about the what, what should I do, the who, who should I spend time with, the why, et cetera, of determining their optimal happiness. What job should I do? What type of people should I spend time around? And the where is very important. The geography, the city or state, place in which you put yourself, uh, determines a lot of these other things. Uh, my recommendation is to do an 80/20 analysis of your last calendar year. So I'm recording this in late February, but it doesn't really matter. Go back and look at your calendar for the last year. This should only take an afternoon, really. You can do it on a Saturday, for instance, or a Sunday. And go through and, uh, y- you, you will fill in two columns. The first column is the 20% of people or activities that produced, uh, peak positive emotional states most of the time, right? Peak positive emotional states. The, the 20% of, say, people and activities that produced 80% of the joy, so to speak. On the other side, you're gonna have the 20% of people or activities that produced 80% of the negative emotional states, the irritation, the frustration, the annoyance, uh, the anger, et cetera. And you're gonna make a list in that column. That's gonna be your not to-do list. All right? Uh, then you're gonna look at the positive, and you're gonna look for, uh, different locations that have a high density/ease of encountering those things. So for instance, I noticed in my own calculus that acroyoga correlated to a high degree of happiness for me. If I practice acroyoga a few times a week ... If you, if you wanna see what the hell that is, just look up acroyoga, like acrobatic yoga, acroyoga, Tim Ferriss on, uh, the YouTubes. Uh, you could also go to youtube.com/timferriss, and you'll see some video of this, including me putting, uh, Jimmy Fallon up on my feet. And, uh, I then looked on Facebook at different cities, and the acroyoga community in Austin, Texas, is gigantic. It's larger, at least based on Facebook, than the acroyoga community in the Bay Area where it was created, which blew my mind. So that was then one of the positive check boxes when I was looking for density/ease of things based on a calendar audit that have created, uh, a reliable degree of happiness and improved, uh, quality of life through doing that exercise. So that's what I would do. Next up,

14. 57:01 – 1:02:04

    Podcasting Parents and Silent Retreat Pros and Cons

    1. TFTim Ferriss57:01

       "If for some reason or another you could record only one more podcast, who would you interview and why? They can be dead or alive." Uh, I would interview my parents, uh, because I would want to have that record really just for myself of having a long-form conversation with them and capturing their story and their wisdom. Uh, I don't think I would share that, uh, for public consumption, but just for me, which is actually a recommendation that I received from a name that I mentioned earlier in this podcast, Matt Mullenweg, one of the sweetest, smartest guys I know, uh, who's also been on this podcast talking about building companies. Uh, Automattic, his company, is worth more than a billion dollars at this point, I believe, and has a distributed architecture of 4 or 500 employees. It's really fascinating. In any case, he made that recommendation to me, and this is a good reminder to get on it. So thanks for that, Matt, and thanks for this question to remind me. Next question, "What are the pros/cons of a silent retreat?" Uh, the pros would be similar to some psychedelic experiences, uh, not that I would recommend those in any illegal context or in unsupervised fashion whatsoever. But when you do a 10-day silent retreat, which I made significantly harder for myself by fasting during, so I, I fasted for about seven days, two prior to ensure that I was keto adapted, five during, uh, for the first half of my 10-day silent retreat. It-- That type of experience shows you the breadth and depth of experience possible through meditation. So you will see the best, you will see the worst, you will be listless, then you will be, uh, uh, you will be not fatigued, you'll be restless, you'll want ... you'll be bouncing off the walls with no real clear explanation. Uh, you will have profound moments of peace and, uh, and thoughtlessness, where your ego seems to dissolve, and then you'll have times when, like me, right before I broke my fast, the only two thoughts in my head were fried chicken, calamari, fried chicken, calamari, fried chicken, calamari for like three hours. And then the next day it was like ass, porn, ass, porn, just thinking about porn basically for three hours, which s- might sound reasonably good. It was awful, uh, [laughs] particularly when you're trying to focus on your breathing or do something else other than think about such things. Uh, so it will show you the breadth and depth of the experience possible through meditation, and that can then inform your later practice. So when you have these perhaps rare or at least intermittent experiences of profound peace and feeling at ease with yourself and everything in the world, and perhaps even the dissolution of the self in the sense that you feel connected to all people, all things, that can be a very tantalizing epiphany, uh, beautiful, uh, experience that then motivates you to meditate later, uh, similar to the effect that psychedelics had on Sam Harris, PhD, who I mentioned earlier, uh, who then, uh, has, has passed on psychedelics, no longer uses psychedelics, but, uh, used that experience, that promise, so to speak, the light at the end of the tunnel, having the firsthand opportunity to do that through psychedelics, uh, to then drive his meditation practice, which is now very, very well developed and a lifeline for him that is available at any given moment, right? Uh, so those are a few of the pros of the silent retreat. Cons? All right. And not unlike a powerful psychedelic experience, uh, I would say out of 100 people, 10 to 15% are going to have a, as close to a psychotic break as one can imagine or an actual psychotic break, and that is terrifying. And I was in that 10 to 15% in the silent retreat, and I think I had a, a longer conversation about this with Uh, Dan Harris on his podcast, Ten Percent Happier, and also on a, an episode of this podcast, which should be out by the time you hear this, or it's coming up, uh, very, very shortly th- after this episode, with Jack Kornfield, uh, who was in fact the person who saved me and allowed me to return to having my feet on the ground well enough to leave the silent retreat after that 10-day silent retreat at Spirit Rock in Woodacre, California. So I would encourage you, if you want more details on that uh-oh, you didn't expect to be in that 10 to 15%, which you weren't even told in advance, but congratulations/uh-oh, you are in that 10 to 15%, and you can really be destabilized in a very serious way by such an experience. Uh, so I'd encourage you to check out Dan Harris's podcast with me for more on that. Or, uh, even better perhaps, is to listen to my very, uh, in-depth conversation with Jack Kornfield about exactly this. All right, two more questions.

15. 1:02:04 – 1:10:24

    Sketching, the 21-Day No Complaint Challenge, and Wrap-Up

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:02:04

       "Why have you not illustrated or sketched in your books? You've mentioned a few times that you dreamed of being, becoming a sketch artist. Why not experiment in your books?" And this is true. I was actually an illustrator through, uh, much of high school and part of college for paying my expenses, and then I just stopped. I was also the graphics editor of the Princeton Tiger magazine at Princeton when I was there, uh, and have designed all of the covers of my books with the exception of Tools of Titans, uh, then have had professional illustrators/designers come in to do the production versions, but I have drawn out all the covers of my books, uh, starting with 4-Hour Workweek. Um, the, uh, so there's no reason I couldn't do a 60-second sketch each day for, say, Instagram, but the books are the, are after the polish. I don't want to serve up my trial runs in a book. Uh, but many of the illustrations that you see in, say, 4-Hour Chef were in fact originally sketched out by me, and then, uh, the polish was thrown on for the production by, uh, someone who actually does that as a full-time job. But if you guys would like to see me do a, say, a 60-second sketch each day or, I don't know, 60-second Sunday or something like that where I throw up one drawing a week, uh, that would be a, a good way for me to get back into it. So maybe I'll do that. Let me know what you guys think. Okay, and the last question. "Tim, I'm a huge fan of how you constantly experiment and challenge yourself, so I'm asking you to push me and your other listeners to do a 30-day challenge." I am happy to do that, and in fact, it's the same challenge that I am assigning myself, and it's one that I've done before. This is not a 30-day. Make it easier. The 21-day no complaint experiment, and you can put this in your calendar. Certainly, there is an overabundance of negativity, complaining, and criticism on the internet, and we lose fact of ... We lose sight of the fact that it is really, uh, positive reinforcement and plotting what you want, uh, and not exclusively punishing or criticizing what you do not like or want that elicits change. You do need certainly at least both and positive reinforcement, and that goes for yourself and your inner monologue, your inner voice as well. So if you want to improve your life, and this has already been tested by tens of thousands of folks via the blog, if you want to tip the domino, uh, like we discussed earlier, that affects many, many other dominoes and increases your quality of life, uh, doing a 21-day no complaint experiment is a really, really effective way to go about that, and it also, uh, very quickly illuminates just how often most of us complain without any type of outcome or action coming out of it. So check it out. If you go to tim.blog/complaint, I created a redirect, so tim.blog/complaint, that will take you to a blog post which, uh, you will see is a little dated, so don't mind the discussion of switching to the Mac. That was some time ago. But the headline is Real Mind Control, and then subtitle, The 21-Day No Complaint Experiment. And, uh, it, it takes you right through exactly how to do it and exactly how I'm going to be doing it, uh, starting, uh, right meow. So check it out, tim.blog/complaint. That is the 21-day challenge that I would recommend to everyone, and that is it. That is the last question. Uh, so without dragging this out too long, I would say if you'd like to ask me questions directly, if you would like to see what I am finding most interesting in any given week, whether that's articles, gadgets, new apps, uh, elegant tech fixes and workarounds that a lot of my friends share with me, new investments, uh, you name it, really anything cool that I am experimenting with, that I've found, that I'm pondering, I send out five short bullets every Friday in 5-Bullet Friday. And you can sign up for free. It's always free, and it's fun. People love it. More than a million subscribers, 60-plus percent open rate, uh, on average. It's a lot of fun for me to put together, and people seem to be enjoying it, so check it out. You can sign up at tim.blog/friday. That's tim.blog/friday. And as always, until next time, thank you so, so much for listening. [upbeat music] Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is 5-Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And 5-Bullet Friday is 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 I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up [laughs] in the, uh, the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have 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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.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. 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Episode duration: 1:11:40