Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond | The Tim Ferriss Show

[Music] hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is tim ferriss and welcome to another episode of the tim ferriss show i'm so excited to have my guest today his name is rich roll and i'm gonna start in an unorthodox way and that is by reading a tweet i don't really do this i don't know if i've ever done this but this is a tweet from october 2018 and i think rich is probably going to see where this is going just before his 52nd birthday here's the tweet i didn't reach my athletic peak until i was 43 i didn't write my first book until i was 44. i didn't start my podcast until i was 45. at 30 i thought my life was over at 52 i know it's just beginning keep running never give up and watch your kites soar and then there's actually another tweet within context so i've retweeted this for people who want to see it they can also find it of course at rich roll r-o-l-l i want to mention one more thing before we get to more of the bio and that is related to your first half iron man so this is an outside magazine and here's the quote in my first half iron man i barfed during the swim by the time i got off my bike my legs were so cramped up that i ran 100 meters for you yanks like me that's about 300 feet and just stopped it was dnf that means he did not finish my beginnings in triathlon were very humble but i loved it all right so i'm gonna give this in drips and drabs but let's let's start with paragraph one so now zooming out to present day with a little bit of retrospective at age 40 ritual like as i mentioned at ritual on twitter made the decision to overhaul the sedentary throes of overweight middle age and i might i may or may not be in that place just right now walking away from a career in law he reinvented himself as a globally recognized ultra distance endurance athlete best-selling author and host of the wildly popular ritual podcast which i highly recommend one of the world's most listened to podcasts with more than 200 million downloads and i'm going to modify the next paragraph a little bit rich has been named one of the 25 fittest men in the world by men's fitness and the guru of reinvention by outside magazine he's written a best-selling memoir finding ultra and has co-authored the cookbooks slash lifestyle guides the plant power away and the plant power way italia with his wife julie is it piat hyatt damn it i knew i had a 50 50 chance there it's a common common thing this is showing where the and how the sausage is made because a professional would have asked and in fact i highlighted her last name to ask you before we started recording but you know we live in don't worry uh just to get a few things mentioned and we'll mention them again at the very end ritual.com you can find all things rich related ritual on all social including twitter instagram and youtube except for facebook which is rich role fans rich welcome to the show thanks so much for having me tim it's it's really an honor to be able to uh join you for this and i'm really looking forward to the conversation to come so thanks for having me yeah absolutely me too and for those of you who can't see video at some point maybe you should check it out because we have the perfect yin yang color template here you have a rather disheveled tim ferriss in tan with white background and rich looking like a handsome devil with black clothing black background it's actually very striking i should request that guests do this in the future it will help viewers to keep them separate so let's let's really dive in here and i want to establish just a bit of background for folks and we're going to go all over the place so at age 40 right so you make the decision to overhaul dot dot but let's let's get granular and maybe we could focus on one piece of this life puzzle which is alcohol and could you speak to the role that alcohol has played in your life when it entered your life when you really realized that you had a problem let's begin there if you're open to it it entered my life uh near the end of high school and the beginning of college uh prior to that i was a very studious uh highly motivated person who was very goal driven and that grew out of i think in retrospect looking back on my life on a deep insecurity that i had because as a young person i was very much an introvert i had a lot of difficulty connecting with other people and making friends i certainly hadn't demonstrated any kind of like athletic talent or or ability i was the you know typical like prototypical kid who gets picked last for kickball and was very awkward and self-conscious and at some point along the way i discovered the the sport of swimming and we could talk about that if you like but that was the one thing where i kind of felt comfortable and showed some level of acumen at an early stage and when you're a young person and you experience just a little bit of encouragement or success you're going to kind of double down on that and that's what i did and i think there was something about being underwater in in almost a metaphysical sense or a psychological sense where i felt protected like it was almost like this womb where i was insulated from all of the confusing emotions that i had as a young person and so swimming really became my focus and i realized early that i wasn't the most talented kid but i had this capacity to suffer and to work hard and a willingness to go the extra mile and with that sensibility i was able to bridge the talent deficit gap to some extent to the point where by the time i was a senior in high school i was one of the better swimmers in the washington dc area where i grew up and the discipline that i learned in the swimming pool trickled into my academic pursuits so i was able to go from a kid who really had trouble learning and was sort of a sit in the back of the class kind of guy to being a good student and ultimately getting into a bunch of fancy colleges so so at 18 i really was in a situation a very privileged situation where the world was very much my oyster and anything was possible but i ended up going to stanford university i you know i went to the opposite coast and i'm sure there's some psychological reasons why you know i flew 3 000 miles away to go to college and it was it was you know the reason to go there was twofold i mean first of all stanford is stanford and it's this amazing academic institution but at the time in the mid and late 1980s it also had the number one nc2a division one men's swimming program they were like the most incredible team the most insane assemblage of olympic champions and world and american record holders and and the like uh and the opportunity to be a member of that team was like a dream that i couldn't even imagine for myself so here i am in this incredibly privileged situation where anything truly is possible but enter alcohol and alcohol was something that i first was introduced to when i was doing recruiting trips and traveling to colleges which is what you do when you're you know an athlete and trying to consider where to go to school and i had some experiences there that kind of really anchored in me from moment one that this was going to be a thing for me like i had that sensation that you hear about with recovering alcoholics where from the very first drink it was like this warm blanket that just i could wrap myself in and all my troubles and fears and insecurities just sort of vanished and for the first time i felt comfortable in my own skin and i just remember thinking this is the way that i want to feel all the time like i could go to a party and i could strike up a conversation or crack a joke or talk to a girl which were all things that were terrifying to me at the time and so i just felt like i had found the solution that i had been looking for my whole life you know this young person who felt like everybody else had a perfect road map for how to live and suddenly you know those answers that eluded me were being provided in the form of this substance and so when i got to stanford very quickly well quickly and gradually but i would say that i got more and more progressively more interested in like where's my next good time then how am i going to create a foundation for a happy successful life and a lot of those aspirations that i had about athletics and you know academic excellence soon became secondary to you know where's the where's the party tonight and it was just a situation where over an extended period of time like my my life began to degrade so it wasn't a situation in which i created cataclysms out of the gate that that derailed me because i could function and you're it's easier to do that when you're younger but i could function you know i could i could comport myself in a way where i could still get good grades show up for class still you know go out partying until two or three in the morning and show up for six a.m swim practice but over time like this is not a good recipe for for living and and you know i lived that way for a very long time until ultimately things got really dark and scary and you know i hit that bottom that you hear about with people in recovery what did any of the bottoms or dark moments look like if we could paint a picture of any example that comes to mind i mean first of all i would say that there was there was nothing like cool or rock and roll about any of it like it's just lonely sad and and kind of pathetic and and deeply embarrassing you know just you know i would i would drive drunk and like wouldn't remember where i parked my car and would have to wake up the next morning and try to figure out where where my car was when i was living in san francisco when i was fresh out of law school one time i woke up one day didn't want to go to my law firm job and like flew to las vegas and lost my wallet and woke up not remembering anything that had happened and trying to figure out how i'm gonna get home you know stuff like that that's just you know i was the guy who who you know was the last to leave the party and when you're in college you know maybe it's cute but when you're 25 26 28 um you know nobody's living that way anymore and you have to find other people to do that with and like you know so you you're surrounding yourself with like what they call lower companions and the parlance of recovery until ultimately there's no one left and you're just alone you know and i was a guy who would drink alone in my apartment or wake up in the morning before work and and have a vodka tonic in the shower like it was all very leaving las vegas and i was only 31 at the time but my disease had progressed to such a state where there was really only you know a couple things that were going to happen either i was going to kill myself kill another person or end up in jail or some kind of institution and that's really kind of what you know ultimately led me to getting getting sober and would you say kill yourself do you mean via alcohol poisoning or a car accident or via some deliberate suicide what do you mean by that i was never suicidal i didn't have suicidal ideation but my life was getting smaller and smaller and more lonely so if i was able to kind of maintain that lifestyle over an extended period of time i'm certain that i would would have reached a level of desperation where that would have seemed like a good idea why did you choose law why did you choose to pursue law it's a very good question you know right out right out of college i moved to new york city and got a job as a paralegal in a in a big law firm in in new york called skadden arps that's a huge one and that was you know a situation that should have told me immediately that maybe this wasn't the right path for me you know um but i think that that i chose it not out of some kind of deliberate idea that it would be something i would be interested in or show some proficiency in but more as a reaction to social and familial pressures like this idea of not really knowing what i wanted to do but hey i can always go to law school and society will smile upon that and i can put a nice suit on and have nice lunches and have interesting conversations with people and you know make a good living i mean my self-inquiry really didn't go any further than that and there was nothing about like my interests that would have indicated that law was a good path for me but i was so disconnected from myself that even asking myself that question at the time was anathema to to who i was but i'm a good student and i actually enjoyed law school i enjoy the intellectual pursuit and and all of that but the practice of law is very different at least in the corporate law firm context very different than the law school experience yes very knowing many people who went to law school i can uh through second-hand stories say that that seems to universally be the the of the perspective that people yeah but and if you if you love it like if if that's your thing then more power to you but i just remember walking the halls of of you know the various law firms that i worked at being confused that there seemed to be certain people that enjoyed it because i was just gritting my way through it thinking i'll just apply these tools that i learned in the swimming pool about suffering and pain tolerance and i just thought everybody was having that internal experience i'm sure many were but there seems to be some people that seem to enjoy it but i just know that the more that i kind of looked around certainly you know with respect to the the partners that it was clear to me that i didn't really want that life and yet i felt very stuck in that career path and unsure about how i could ever get out of it and do anything else so we're gonna we're gonna spend just people listening and also for for you rich so you don't think that we're gonna spend too much time in in these waters we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about turnarounds techniques pattern matching all sorts of things but i do want to spend a little bit more time on this chapter or maybe the chapter shortly after this point in time what was the straw what were the straws that broke the camel's back with respect to alcohol and seeking help well there were a couple important inflection points one of which was getting two duis essentially in a row with ridiculously high blood alcohol contents um looking at jail time my boss finding out at the law firm and and being on the precipice of getting fired that's a whole rabbit hole you know sort of chaotic disaster that i weathered another one would was uh a marriage or i should say like a wedding that went awry i got married and that that uh relationship ended on the honeymoon which is a whole crazy story story that is inextricably linked to i mean i was sober at the time but it's very much linked to you know my alcoholism so there's big events like that but i i think you know those situations created such a deep level of shame inside of me that i wasn't able to shake alcohol in the wake of those experiences because i didn't have the emotional tools to process them so i continued to drink for a while i mean the the the wedding was really you know the nadir of the whole thing and a reasonable person would have woken up and gotten sober at that time but i needed to medicate myself through that emotional [ __ ] storm until one day you know i i basically woke up and it was i was hungover but it wasn't like i had you know i reaped any kind of chaos the night before but it's just that moment of realizing like i've had enough like i can't live this way anymore it's it's just so lonely and desperate and it only leads in one direction and i think you know that's what it takes like for anybody who has experience with addiction particularly substance addiction you have this sense like you asked me earlier on tim like when did i know i had a problem like i knew i had a problem very early on in my drinking career but that's very different from the willingness to do anything about it like i harbored this notion that this was a problem for me but you're also protecting it because you want to be able to keep doing it and that's what that's what leads to you know this sort of double life where you're hiding your behavior from other people and deluding yourself into thinking that they don't know what's going on but ultimately you realize like everybody knows what's going on and on some level it's a process of like stripping away those those layers of denial until you can really you know face the objective truth of what you're doing and that's a very terrifying thing and and so that's kind of what was going on inside of me until you know this day in 1998 where i was like okay i've had it like i'm i'm ready to really take this seriously and do something about it how old were you roughly then my math is is gonna fail me at this moment but 1998 yeah i was 31 31 all right and because it struck me as a curveball if you don't want to get into it that's totally fine but in my mind i envisioned this honeymoon just going down as a fireball due to some catastrophe that was alcohol induced but you said you were sober yeah are you willing to expand on that at all and if not that's fine yeah no it's so hard to describe this and have it make sense but essentially what happened was i had been drinking quite a bit i got engaged to this woman i was living in san francisco at the time she was living in palo alto and is from palo alto but in the kind of lead up to this wedding because we had gotten engaged i had taken a job in los angeles so we were living in separate cities and i think during that interim period when she got distance between me she realized like maybe this isn't the guy i want to marry and i had come clean with her about the duis and i think that was very scary to her so even though i had been sober for a number of months and and told her that i was committed to this path of sobriety i think you know in her heart of hearts she really wanted to get out of this relationship but she was unable to muster the strength to break it off herself and i think that she wanted me to break it off and so there was so much energy behind this impending wedding that was happening that it just kind of transpired without anybody hitting the brakes and i was trying to be conciliatory and say because i knew she was off and not present and something was wrong and i would say are you okay like what's going on how can i make you feel comfortable with all of this and it's a much longer story i go into detail about it in my book but essentially you know she she permitted the wedding to go through but then then didn't want to sign the marriage certificate that's a red flag right cause for pause yeah and you know the night of the wedding when we went back to the honeymoon suite that did not go well i'm surprised that we even went on the honeymoon but i think in my mind i was thinking i'm going to try to make this right and it's all going to work out like that was its own level of delusion and while we were on this honeymoon in a on a caribbean island it was clear that this relationship had had no future and ultimately we were able to have a conversation about it and she ended up leaving early and at that moment i was left with myself with no tools and having been sober for six months but unable to really process the the emotional devastation of having you know just basically had everybody that i cared about in the world with like 12 groomsmen in this wedding wedding in palo alto you know bear witness to a marriage that clearly wasn't gonna uh you know work out and it was really devastating to me so i ended up getting drunk on that island and really struggled to uh get sober again for quite some time after that so thank you for sharing that uh 1998 31 i've had enough how do you seek help or what do you what are your next actions after that so prior to that i had been court ordered to alcoholics anonymous so i had been to meetings but i wasn't doing it because i wanted to get sober i was doing it because i was compelled to do it and i think that's an important distinction um especially for people who who are struggling or have people in their lives that are struggling with a substance issue you want to help them you want to intervene and you can create you know interventions and things like that to get people into treatment but ultimately if that person is resistant to it or isn't interested in getting sober that's going to be a very tough hill to climb so willingness is like crucial so when i was attending those a meetings i i lacked that level of willingness it was more like i just need to get people off my back so i can go back to living the way that i want to live and why is everybody bugging me but in the wake of that wedding experience when my drinking got more and more dire my parents had reached the level of their tolerance threshold with me and basically my dad said listen we love you but we just can't continue to watch you destroy yourself like this and we can't have anything to do with you but if you're ready to get sober we're of course hear from you but until then um you know we're we're just we're not available to you however because they were so terrified of of all of this they had found an addiction medicine um psychiatrist in los angeles they said we have this guy you know it might be great if you go and see him so i started seeing this addiction medicine specialist and he knew you know he just rang my bell immediately and was like here's the deal dude you're an alcoholic and you need to go to treatment until you do that like nothing's going to change and your life's going to continue to be terrible and i would try to negotiate with him and say well i think i can do it in a.a so i was kind of in and out of a doing my own self-experimentation with trying to get sober but every time i would crawl back into his office and i was honest with him and i said yeah i relapsed again or this happened but at some point i made a deal with him because he was like are you ready to go to treatment i was like let me try one more time and he said okay and to his credit like i think that's a really interesting approach like you have to back off a little bit and allow people to have their process it's like inception like they have to come into this awareness on their own you cannot compel somebody to see themselves as as they really are and of course i relapsed crawled back into his office and because i was considered myself such a man of my word i said well i made a deal with you so okay now i'll go to i'll go to treatment and that's you know i called him after this one bender and i said i'm ready and he got a bed for me and i immediately go online and i'm researching treatment centers and i'm looking for the like the spa resort one you know that that's it that has really nice accommodations he's like no no no here's where you're going this place in oregon i got a bed for you like get on the plane today and that's basically how it began well what what do you think people tend to miss about this story whether they hear you telling this story or they read about it are there things that are important that people gloss over or that elements of this story whether we've heard them today or not that stand out to you is particularly important sort of on the road to recovery initiating recovery i think about this type of question a lot like what is what is what do people tend to glom onto as the really important parts what do they tend to maybe neglect to their detriment if they're aiming for recovery themselves uh does anything come to mind when i say all that you're talking like more broadly about addiction in general not my personal story i think i'm talking about i'm i'm weaving into it through your personal story so it could be your personal story but it could also be addiction in a broader sense because part of what is so interesting to me about you and your story is you've not only had the experiences that you've had but you have no doubt witnessed many people try to emulate the turnarounds of various types and you've seen some people succeed spectacularly you've seen some people fail spectacularly and then there's a whole spectrum in between right so that i think is extremely interesting and potentially instructive right yeah so you could answer this in in any way you like it could be from your personal story it could be from what you've seen or learned more broadly speaking about addiction and recovery yeah i think there's there's a lot that i can say about this i mean first with respect to my personal story if you google my name there's a lot of misguided narratives out there that me adopting a vegan diet is what got me sober or that uh you know ultra endurance training is what got me sober or keeps me sober and those are all wildly inaccurate i mean i was sober for almost 10 years before i made these lifestyle shifts i had a whole chapter in between where i created a foundation of sobriety so sobriety and addiction stand outside of those things and those other things have a role in my life but addiction and recovery are a very separate thing and that's the way that i i i kind of think about it and i think in terms of addiction and recovery more broadly i think it's important for people to understand that for somebody who is addicted it's not and who's you know behaving poorly or all the stuff that you know addicts do it's not a referendum on moral character it's like they're suffering they're suffering from an illness that wants to kill them and when they get sober we think of drugs and alcohol or gambling or whatever behavioral addiction that you know someone might have as the problem that has been eradicated but in truth the behavior or the substance is the solution to the problem like there's a level of psychic pain within a human being and they search out a substance or a behavior that gives them some level of solace like the substance or the behavior is the solution to the problem because it allows them to feel okay so that they can function in the world and it works for a while if it didn't work people wouldn't do it but what they miss is that it is solving a problem for them of course it progresses and then things go sideways and it's no longer the solution but that's how it begins and when you remove those behaviors and substances from those people they don't know what to do with themselves like they're like a live emotional wire without any kind of tools for addressing the underlying problem that has fueled the addictive behavior for so long and you know the process of recovery is really about providing tools some tactical some strategic some practical and some very ephemeral spiritual that can be guideposts in helping people create new neural pathways and emotional relationships with how they engage with the world and that's a very slow non-linear process and that's why so many addicts and alcoholics you know have a lot of relapses in their story and relapses are always treated as failures but ultimately they're learning experiences because you're trying to reorganize your entire life in accordance with new ways of living that are very foreign to somebody who has been engaging in a behavior or addicted to a substance for so long so there's a saying in recovery like your emotional development gets stunted from the moment that you begin to use and when you remove the substance you're left with that young person uh you know at that stage of life and you have to treat that person with that in mind because they lack the tools that other people normal people take for granted and i think the more that we kind of understand this it allows us to have a little bit more compassion for the people that suffer and a way to kind of hold them in our hearts and a little bit more lightly when they slip up and you know do the thing because for people that don't have direct experience with this it defies logic like you're like how could you do that like after everything that's happened like you went and did that thing again like it's so difficult to understand so i think to the extent that we can peel back the layers of the onion and really understand what's fueling that behavior to begin with allows us to kind of you know be more compassionate to those people it's really well put and it it brings to mind for me something that a doctor named gabor mate said in a conversation i had with him which was i'm paraphrasing here but he said don't ask why the addiction asks why the pain right and very much in line with what you just said what is what is what is the addiction being used for and makes me imagine and i'm gonna take a leap here but i'll go in this direction i imagine that a lot of the questions you get about addiction are how did you stop right how did you stop how did you stop how did you quit how did you how did you negate subtract something but if that subtraction leaves a void of sorts where it leaves an unaddressed need or unhealed wound a few questions related to that if that resonates with you what do you what what was it that you ended up needing to address and what were some of the tools or resources or realizations that you found particularly helpful for that sort of additive piece first on on the subject of gabor like i i had him on my podcast and you know he he flips the table on you and and suddenly it becomes a therapy session which is like amazing you know like it's like that's exactly what you want right um and he was very helpful to me in addressing that underlying trauma piece and my resistance to really go there because i love my parents and i don't want to blame them and he was helpful in helping me understand this idea that like it's not their fault they're good people they parented you with the tools that they had but that doesn't mean that you didn't suck just because you weren't homeless and impoverished or abused in any particular way it doesn't mean that you didn't suffer some kind of trauma that ultimately is related to you know the behavior that you pursued later in life and i think you know to your to your other point of tools certainly yeah i mean i wasn't able to stay sober when i was a tourist in alcoholics anonymous because i was sitting in the back just waiting to get my court card checked that's very different from engaging with the true process of recovery and you know i'm a 12-step guy and you know the the whole you know alcoholics anonymous thing is is you know shrouded in anonymity for a reason so i don't want to get too specific about that other than to say that the the steps are the steps for a reason and it really is this incredible road map for unpacking a lot of that underlying pain and providing you with tools to redress it in a meaningful practical way that alleviate that burden and that shame and allow you to mature into somebody who can look somebody in the eye and show up when you say you're going to show up etc and a big piece in that is well there's there's lots of pieces but one of the crucial pieces is um doing an inventory which is the fourth step where you literally go through your life and you itemize out all of your resentments towards people institutions etc so that you do your resentment inventory you do a fear inventory where you itemize everything that you're scared of and you do a sexual inventory where you hold yourself accountable for how your sexual energy has created you know havoc in your relationships and i think the more comprehensive that inventory the more clear the picture is of how you have conducted your life and from that themes emerge where you see these recurrences of like oh when i'm in this situation i always behave this way or this type of person always makes me feel resentful and you can kind of go behind that and you get a better understanding of your fundamental blueprint which is revelatory frankly but that inventory is only helpful to the extent that it then allows you to itemize all of the people to whom you owe amends because you're carrying around with that shame this psychic burden of knowing that you have wronged people or screwed up situations or created chaos in other people's lives and reckoning with that and then addressing it by going to these people and figuring out how to make those wrongs right is a huge relief that is like a pressure valve release on a lot of that shame and the more that you engage in this process you kind of emerge from it where you can make peace with your past and it no longer holds all of that power over you and you can talk about it freely without it creating all of those challenging emotions that are so inextricably related to the errant behavior itself so that's a huge piece and that's something that i you know continue to practice all the time like it it's something that you return to constantly including the tenth step which is basically do it like a daily 10 step where you do a daily inventory of how you've conducted yourself where you might have gone wrong if you have to make any kind of like minor amends or adjustments in your life and then on top of that you know meditation is a step in the 12 steps so daily meditation is super important as well and there's a lot more in there but i would say those are kind of like the fundamental tools i am so endlessly fascinated by 12-step programs and i guess multi-step programs aaa specifically the story of bill wilson i find all of it just incredible also the sort of decentralized nature of aaa itself are you aware and i'll be honest that i i did just a very cursory search i didn't do a really dedicated search but are you aware of any good books or documentaries that dig into the history the tools of aaa are you aware of anything that comes to mind yeah i'm sure there are those things that exist i i don't know any offhand i know there was that movie that james woods did a while back where he played bill wilson but i don't know that i would recommend that one um i'm sure there are and there's plenty of kind of ancillary books around recovery like there's a book called a new pair of glasses that you know like sort of practical applications of the 12 steps for for people that are that are suffering um i don't know that there's the definitive history of of alcoholics anonymous or or the definitive documentary but i think your your point on decentralization is so fascinating like it was blockchain before blockchain you know like the way that the way that it's structured is is is truly remarkable that these guys like you know bill wilson and dr bob knew that they had to decentralize it in order to immunize it from any kind of external corruption or you know power dynamic that could um capsize the whole thing and the fact that it has not only you know sustained itself but grown over the many many years that it's been around is is truly miraculous and i think the case study yeah it's amazing it's really incredible it's a case study for how to structure an organization that's trying to do something good and not fall prey to you know the the lowest common denominator of human power dynamics that tend to you know fell even the best intentioned people who are trying to create something good and it's it's interesting that it hasn't been replicated to my knowledge in any other scenarios because i think there's so much to be learned about how it was formed and how it's continued to to not only survive but thrive the primary reason i ask is that it just seems like this very obvious jewel in plain sight if that makes sense and maybe it's the decentralized nature that makes it invisible to a lot of potentially direct study i don't know the reasons for it but it's just knowing a lot of people who are part or have been part of aaa and just being introduced through casual conversation to some of the facets of how it works i am really really fascinated by it and also for people listening who are thinking themselves god we're spending a lot of time talking about addiction and recovery what does this have to do with me i would just take a moment and say you know when people ask me what do you do i always kind of flub and don't really know how to answer it but i view myself i guess first and foremost as a student not necessarily expert but student of behavioral change and if you look at alcoholism if you look at other types of substance use slash abuse if you look at workaholism if you look at eating disorders i mean certainly now being over the last several years involved in a lot of scientific study related to different conditions nicotine addiction i'd i'd want to say this to glibly but they're they're they're very overlapping right so it's studying behavioral change in the context of something like addiction to alcohol i think transcends that and applies to many things in the same way that the training and discipline and pain tolerance that you cultivated through swimming then was applicable to your studying right uh so let's let's talk about the the physical turnaround because as you mentioned if i could just interrupt you can i just sorry to do that but i think there's one kind of final important point that i wanted to make about addiction i think you're correct like a lot of people might be listening and saying well i'm not an alcoholic or a drug addict and i don't know anyone in my life that is either how is this relevant but as somebody who's been kind of steeped in this world for for many many years and like yourself i've had many guests on my podcast to discuss this subject matter i've become increasingly more and more convinced that we are both very cavalier in how we define addiction like i'm a chocoholic or i'm a shopaholic so we kind of it's a throwaway phrase but at the same time we're also very very rigid in how we def we define it in that you know addiction is like heroin addiction or opioid addiction and alcoholism right but i think i'm becoming convinced that that addiction lives on this incredibly broad spectrum and it's a spectrum so broad that almost anybody can find themselves somewhere along the line so on the one hand you have you know the guy who can't pull the needle out of his arm but on the very far other side of the spectrum you have people who you know find themselves repeating the same you know tired self-defeating narrative about their life and can't get outside of themselves to see an objective truth about themselves or the person who is repeatedly in the same bad relationship time and time again or the person who is addicted to you know whatever it is like video games or social media scrolling i mean the social dilemma has really foisted this conversation onto mainstream audiences in a way that i think is is is allowing us to really think about addiction more broadly because of the devices that we all have in our in our pockets and so with that i think it's helpful to people to understand that there are tools available to help you decouple from whatever that thing is that is holding you hostage or or creating that obsessive-compulsive behavior that you can't seem to transcend you know despite your best your best efforts and the 12 steps yes like they are crucial and instrumental in helping people get off drugs and alcohol but they are very helpful to anybody you know just to be able to do an inventory of your life and to see yourself more objectively and to understand that you can you know redress these shameful incidents in your life because we all have them on some level um i think is really profound uh and and to the extent that we are talking about addiction in this broader context right now i think is super helpful because this is the you know this is an era in which you know more people have been become addicted than ever before with substances and and behaviors and so to have you know a a conversation about this i think is super important yeah i'm uh i'm really happy we're doing this and also the broad applicability of of concepts from the 12-step programs uh or aaa in this case like for instance i'd never heard this term but i wrote it down lower companions yeah i mean it's just such a perfect phrase perfect phrasing for what we all kind of intuit on some level but having a simple label for it it makes it much easier to wield kind of conceptually right and thinking about about your life you know we're gonna we're gonna get to the the physical piece because i have just selfishly many questions about that and i'm sure a lot of listeners will be interested in that and it's related let me throw out another mnemonic of sorts but it's it's a very short phrase that i'd love to hear you speak to in any way that makes sense mood follows action i love that one that was something that my first sponsor said to me very early on in sobriety i think i was complaining to him about some commitment i had made to sweep the floors or make coffee or something along those lines or or something that had happened to me that day that i was annoyed with and i couldn't see my way through and and he just said you know he just said mood follows action and what he meant by that is you can't you can't think your way into into the mood that you seek or the state of mind that you aspire to inhabit action is the only thing that can trigger that change state and i literally think about this every single day and it was validated recently in a podcast that i did with andrew huberman who i know has been on your show where he studied the neurochemistry of this and realized that behavior has to come first and thoughts perceptions emotions follow from that and when you think about that in the context of our daily lives like let's just use running for example like if you wake up in the morning and you're supposed to do a run because you're training for some race and you don't feel like doing it we all resort to that state where we think well i don't want to do it right now i'll just wait until i feel like doing it and then i'll do it then and when we when we engage that way we end up never doing it right like if you're waiting until you feel like doing something chances are you're probably never going to get to it but to take the action despite how you feel about it is the thing that catalyzes the state change and you know in my case or anybody who's a runner they'll tell you when they finish the run they're always glad that they did it they don't generally regret it and then they feel better and i think that that example is applicable to you know all areas of life so when did you turn i mean of course in the bio says at age 40 but why did you decide to turn the ship around physically after getting sober at 31 and emerging from that treatment center where i lived for a hundred days which is pretty long time to be in a treatment center and being told by the counselors that you have a very serious case of alcoholism the kind of case that we typically only see in lifelong drinkers like guys in their 60s it was impressed upon me that i really needed to get this right or you know i could i you know i was going to die like it was just that point was made to me very clearly and i was able to hear it and take it seriously and so i was super dedicated to creating this foundation of of sobriety because my life truly did hang in the balance and so that became my main priority for many years after that experience so i returned to los angeles i was going to multiple meetings a day i was doing like all the stuff and and building a new community of friends because i needed i needed new people you know i just i couldn't hang out or go to the places that i had had you know have been had been going to before um and with that was also you know unpacking the shame that i had about being this person who had all of this potential and all of these opportunities that i had squandered and i felt compelled to repair all of that and get back to becoming that person that i was before i started drinking and i did that with blinders on in my mind the best way to do that was to go back to the law firm and you know work my ass off and become a partner and you know get all the stuff so that the world would smile upon me and my parents would think that i was safe alcoholics anonymous is spiritual program and i was developing spiritually but i had not yet reached the level of maturity where i could really look inward and ask myself those fundamental questions about what it is that i actually wanted to do rather than thinking what is society expecting me to do but what is unique to me what gets me excited in the morning what do you think that you're here to express that is uniquely you like that just was not part of my you know mental process in in any way and so a lot of those addictive personality traits although i was not using substances anymore were channeled into workaholism and in turn some pretty unhealthy lifestyle habits so basically 80 hour weeks working as a lawyer and you know hitting the fast food drive-throughs on the way home and chinese take out for late nights at work and and the like and really despite the fact that i'd been this swimmer in college not exercising just not really attending to or taking care of myself physically and so over a 10-year period that accumulates such that by the time i was 39 i was about 50 pounds overweight you know never like an obese person or anything like that but just kind of like a heavy guy who looks like you know he works he works too much in a law firm and subsisting on junk food and just feeling progressively worse and worse lazier not energized not enthusiastic about my life and i think in the in the back of my awareness was this percolating existential crisis because i knew that this career path that i had chosen was really not for me and i could will myself into doing it but ultimately it was not only not making me happy it was making me more and more miserable like this square peg and a round hole kind of thing but i was too afraid to really look at that or think about how i could change that trajectory and there was so i guess what i'm saying is there was a confluence of of poor health uh on the one side and this you know spiritual existential crisis that i was harboring on the other hand and they essentially collided with each other shortly before i turned 40 when i had this specific moment of you know walking up the flight of stairs in my bedroom after a late night at the office and i had to like stop halfway up a flight of stairs like i was too winded to just walk all the way to the top and i had tightness in my chest and and you know kind of like i was had that sweaty pallor on my face from from a flight of stairs and thinking i'm like this person who would swam at stanford and would look in the mirror and see that person reflected back to me i realized that i was harboring a whole other level of of denial that i needed to look at and it was a scary moment because heart disease runs in my family my mother's father had been a champion swimmer and captain of the university of michigan swim team in the late 1920s and early 30s and and you know a guy who had an american record and somebody who he's a guy that i'm named after and in many ways like my doppelganger but he had died of heart disease at a young age and i had this flash where i realized if i didn't course correct how i was living that i was likely headed in his direction and would meet my demise probably sooner than he had because there was no mcdonald's and jack in the box when he was kicking around and it was so it was sort of like a second bottom that was very reminiscent of the day i decided to get sober like this very crystallized moment in time where it's almost like a window of opportunity presents itself like a a crack in the door or a line in the sand and you have this opportunity to to harness it take advantage of it and and take contrary action or not right and because i was so aware of how that simple decision of going to that treatment center had changed my life so dramatically that i was being once again visited by just such a moment i realized that i needed to take action swiftly because if i didn't kind of grab onto it immediately i knew it would just pass and become ephemera and so that was really the moment that that catalyzed kind of everything that that followed and even you know the fact that i'm talking to you today it all tracks back to that very specific incident what year are we talking more or less do you recall yeah this would have been let's see 2000 i was just about to turn 40 so 2006. okay did this coincide with something i've read you describe as complete financial dismantlement which sounds brutal doesn't sound pleasant was that around the same time before or coinciding that started a little bit later it was sort of precipitated by the crash in 2008 and it continued through uh years after publishing finding ultra like it was a very extended period of time of of being challenged to even put food on the table you know we i've all these cheat sheets in front of me of course and you know one of the one of the questions i like to ask as you well know you know what what is the best or most worthwhile investment you've ever made could be time money energy etc and you know i give various examples of this but it could be warren buffett talking about his best investment being investing in dale carnegie's speaking classes or anything at all and you have you have a couple here three decision to train for 2008 ultraman stepping back from the law to right finding ultra and then starting your podcast so we could focus on the first one but i want to if it's okay with you and feel free to redirect look at the second one stepping back from the law to right finding ultra when was that that you stepped back to do that i started writing it in i think late 2010 or early 2011. okay so the reason the reason i ask there seem to be these inflection points and right inflection could go multiple directions not only up but there seemed to be certain decisions that in retrospect just really make a lot of difference in direction how did you decide to step back from the law to write this book given the complete financial dismantlement and all of these various things going on at the time was it and was it an easy or hard decision um i think it was a little bit of both uh at that time i had already been scaling back on my law practice i was balancing training for these crazy races which we can talk about and becoming less and less interested in being a lawyer and at that time i was self-employed as a lawyer i i had made the step of getting out of the big corporate law firm hustle and had a couple different incarnations of of my practice being solo being with a couple partners etc so i had flexibility over how i was allocating my time and you know the four hour work week was actually really helpful at that time in helping me wrap my head around how i could straddle these both worlds and and still get things done so the truth is i had already begun to take my foot off the gas a little bit on on the law practice but the opportunity to write this book was such a remarkable occurrence that i could have never predicted happening in in my life and i just felt so grateful to even have the opportunity that was an inbound email or outreach of some type it's actually a really interesting story so what happened was i had been doing these races and getting some notoriety for it and some press and an article came out in the stanford alumni magazine and it had mentioned what i was doing and it it had also mentioned that that i had had this struggle with with alcoholism and have been sober for a while and somebody who i only knew very tangentially sent me an email and said hey i read that article i'm recently out of a treatment center like he was an alumni i'm recently out of treatment center and i'm the ceo of this company my board doesn't know like i need somebody to talk to like can we just talk and so i struck up a phone relationship with this person and was just trying to help him and you know guide him to make good decisions about how to conduct himself in early sobriety and at some point he said hey i know this book agent like you have such an amazing story like let me introduce you to this person and at that time i hadn't thought of writing a book it wasn't on my list of things that i was thinking of doing and that conversation with that book agent basically made me feel comfortable giving it a stab and it was kind of a charmed thing where i wrote a proposal i worked really hard on it because i recognized the unique and amazing opportunity it presented and that led to getting a book deal really quickly and so suddenly my life priorities changed because i was able to recognize that this could be a lever that would propel me into an entirely new universe of opportunities and trajectories with my career so prioritizing the writing of that book was like the most important professional commitment that you know i made at that time and and and really created the foundation for me me being able to do kind of all the things that i do now you do quite a few things and uh quite well i will add uh you're welcome so you know we you i should say can i can i just say like really quickly sorry to interrupt you but like you have no idea how much that means to me tim like it really is meaningful that you said that because i look to you and the example that you've set and all the things that you have done in the world in such a remarkable fashion and you know i aspire to your level of of impact and influence and i just also so i wanted to thank you for that and thank you also for being a support to me like when the book came out you let me do a guest blog post for your site i think i pestered you and you know until you finally relented but that was extremely helpful to me at the time and i i r you have no idea how much i appreciate that oh thank you rich well it was my it was my pleasure and i i will say that a compelling story is a compelling story so i really appreciate the kind words and you're doing a hell of a job man i mean i i really admire the work that you're doing in the world and uh it's it's fun for me to be sitting here asking you four very thinly failed advice i've been very indirect so far but but thank you for that very welcome i figure just as a way of and we can go anywhere we want to go of course but we're recording this around the turn of the new year i am in the next year going to turn 45 and i've realized just in the last few years really that because i used to not at your level with within this kind of dynastic famed team at stanford for swimming which we might come back to at some point but had competed in as an athlete and when i competed i found it very easy to motivate for a lot of reasons right i mean uh but there's a lot of positive and negative reinforcement involved when you compete and then in the last let's just call it four or five years have continued to train but in a pretty lackadaisical ad hoc way right lots of travel going to gyms kind of figuring out what i'm going to do when i get to the gym no real programming to speak of and what i've realized in the last few years is what i was able to pull off for let's just say 10 years of decent kind of mediocre to high mediocre training is just not going to cut it moving forward metabolically or otherwise and i've trained before and having competed before and i have found a lot of shame around and and judgment around having let it slip if that makes any sense and nonetheless i have have really decided all right 2022 this is this is the year that i want to make some significant changes given the book given your podcast you have no doubt observed many people try to emulate what you've done to differing degrees of success what advice would you give to someone in my shoes it could be advice to me but someone who is considering this sort of doing a reboot given the sort of the sample set that you've observed over time or just from your direct experience well i mean i guess the first thing i would ask you tim is like why like why do you like what is going on what's beneath the kind of surface level aspect of this that you just shared like what is it that your you feel is lacking that would be fulfilled by you pursuing some kind of fitness goal is it just like oh i'm starting to feel lazy or i've slipped off or i don't feel the way that i'd like to feel right now or like i always like to ask that first because people are very casual and cavalier about saying i want to do this goal like i want to do this race or whatever and i'm always like why like why is that important why is that important to you right so that would be the first thing i would ask you yeah i have answers so the first i think overarching answer is mood follows action right so i know that when i am training consistently with a purpose of some type not just going to yoga a few times a week i can do that i can lift weights two or three times a week but training with a purpose i find just leads me to a a better mental psycho-emotional state more often than not it is the most reliable intervention so to speak so that would be part one part two and we'll we'll see where this goes but i really really miss the camaraderie of being on a team or striving towards a similar goal probably it doesn't have to i've never had that experience in a co-ed capacity so it doesn't necessarily have to be all men but that experience which i found challenging to replicate outside of sports would be another reason and you know i stopped doing judo and jiu jitsu and so on quite a while ago just because of the the number of injuries i'm okay with intermittent injuries they just take a lot longer to heal from now than they did when i was 16 to 22. or whatever so those those would be top of the list and i think that related to the first answer this like mood follows action i think that self and we could probably pick this apart i'm sure but like self-image also follows action like i just have i feel better about myself when i am training with some degree of focus and a goal of some type you know especially if it's time bound i just do very well with that and i haven't you know over coveted and everything else not to make excuses but i i have i have been very bad at doing that and still like i'm training a couple times a week but i've realized i'm barely skating by kind of like look fit with clothing on fit which is not not enough for me at this point i enjoy i should also say i just i really i do enjoy pushing myself physically right maybe not to the point like when i was much younger i would like go for training runs for or sprint workouts for wrestling or whatever and i would run until like the blood vessels would burst in corners of my eyes like i don't need to do that anymore i think that's kind of kind of silly for me at this point but that's that's a long-winded answer to your question no that was a that's a great answer and and just knowing enough about you to know how important like structure is to you like setting really measurable tangible goals and benchmarks like that's kind of how you operate and that's the easy part for you but i think the harder part is figuring out what vayne you know like what what is the character of the actual pursuit right and i would start with curiosity like what is it that is something you're interested in learning or exploring that might be something new that sits a little bit outside of your comfort zone but is intriguing enough for you to want to explore it like it's easy to say well you should do this race or you should try this or you should you know join a team but i think curiosity is really you know the most important piece like because if you're not interested in it if you're not if it's not something that's going to get you excited and have some ability to retain your attention and enthusiasm chances are like you're gonna get bored or you're you're just gonna you're gonna drop off so yeah starting with that i think is important because i could tell you you should do this but only you know what that might look like but i would suggest that spending time with that curiosity and then figuring out how you can pursue that learning curve in a in a challenging fitness context that also involves community or team building on some level because that's the other piece that you feel like you're missing and i i get that like i i miss that too you know and i do most of my training alone and when i do group runs i'm like i should do this more like this is so fun and yet i don't do it so i relate to that deeply but i think those would be good starting places like things that come to mind for me is some kind of adventure race you know or something where it involves other people and lots of different types of skill sets that come into play that is kind of scary but also experiential and potentially very fun yeah or orienteering something like that and i should also say that the the team or the team piece is also it could be a partner piece and i think fundamentally for me what that is is an accountability piece right because and i'm sure you experience this quite a bit too it's like it's not the it's not the bad i the pursuit of bad ideas i mean it could be but it's it's not the the pursuit of bad ideas or worthless tasks that will drown you it's it's like saying yes to too many cool-ish things not a handful or one truly great thing does that make sense right so this is like my major malfunction these days like like i am dying death by a thousand cuts these days because of like cool stuff that i want to do and say yes to to you know too frequently yeah so you can just drown in that stuff and if i don't have an anchor you need an anchor i need an anchor there needs to be a consequence to me being like ah i'm doing this [ __ ] on my laptop at 4pm and i'm going to push off this workout that's scheduled for 4 30. i want there to be a consequence to that and you know there are a lot of ways to set up stakes and consequences but a very easy way to do it is just train with somebody which is part of the reason why one of the most consistent forms of exercise i've been able to get in the last say six months is rock climbing because i'm going with a belay partner and if they show up and i'm not there it's just it's a real dick move yeah so adventure racing i was thinking orienteering possibly although that that you know i say that really knowing very little about it are there any other characteristics that you've been able to spot amongst just patterns of people making attempts at this over and over again yeah i mean the other thing i would point out is the tendency to indulge in a little bit of analysis paralysis you know like you could spend the next year trying to figure out what mountain it is that you want to climb or how you're going to get there and i have a sense that you know maybe this might be a thing for you and i think there's a lot of value in not overthinking things and just saying this is something that's interesting to me i'm just going to decide right now i'm going to do this thing and it's like six months from now and it's in the calendar and i have no idea how i'm going to get there but it's there you know and i think that that compulsion to want to know all the answers and how it's going to play out and all the steps you're going to need to take to get there can prevent us from moving forward in our lives and i think these situations in my experience are rigged such that you're not supposed to know all of those answers because you're rewarded for actually getting into action like it's tangential to mood follows action like action will lead you like the bricks get laid you know only two steps in front of you and you're not allowed to see the whole thing right like use iron man for example or triathlon like what bike should i get well you can go around that merry-go-round forever but ultimately the best bike is the one that's sitting gathering dust in your garage just do go do a race with that and you'll figure out all that stuff as you go and you know it's it becomes the more you do it the more emotionally engaged you get with it and then it these things tend to you know develop a life of their own all right i i have a very specific question for you came up before we started recording and i thought you know this is something i know very little about so you can you can safely assume that i can be a very effective stand-in for anyone in the audience who doesn't know what this is zone 2 training could you share your thoughts recommendations cautionary tales anything related to zone 2 training perhaps beginning with a definition because this is something that as you know dr peter tia has has spoken quite widely about what is zone 2 training well first of all like your conversation with peter on the subject matter and then peter i know has done like amas where he's dove very deeply into this topic are fantastic listens and everybody should check that out if they're interested in the subject matter because my version of explaining this will be a very lay person's experiential version of it compared to peter's very scientific and eloquent you know yeah exactly but yeah i'm a huge huge proponent of zone two training and i believe that my fidelity and adoration of the zone two philosophy is a cornerstone in how i was able to be successful in ultra-endurance triathlon in my mid-40s so zone 2 basically is a gauge of energy output in aerobic exercise that essentially is the state in which you are exerting yourself out of at essentially a conversational level you are in your aerobic zone where your body can make use of one of two sources of energy glucose or fat and it is the level of exertion that lives and breathes just beneath where you cross a certain threshold and go into a more anaerobic state which is dependent more or exclusively on glycogen stores for energy in endurance training zone 2 i think is absolutely crucial for success because it is the best way or the methodology that you leverage to create efficiency which is something that peter has talked about so most people when they go out for a run let's say they go on a run a 45 minute run like three or four times a week or something like that most people will go out and they will exert themselves so that they feel like they had a vigorous run like they'll run as fast as they can to you know for that period of time so that when they're finished they feel like oh i got something out of that zone two is a level of output that is quite a bit beneath that level of exertion because when you're doing that kind of mindlessly like i'm just going out for a vigorous run most typically you are in what is called the gray zone you're going too hard and too fast to really develop that aerobic capacity and engine and efficiency but you're not going hard enough to develop speed and the anaerobic kind of capacity that you're looking for for those really fast shorter bursts and in that gray zone which is where most average people live and breathe you can get to a certain point but you will very quickly plateau and really never go beyond that zone two is a is a certain kind of discipline because it's asking you to hold back zone two is the level of output where like basically you can get up and do it every day and quite often you complete the workout and you feel like you didn't do anything and you you have this impulse to want to go faster so you have to hold back from doing that but essentially what it does is it as peter talks about develop helps you develop a greater mitochondrial density in your muscles and in ultra endurance this is absolutely crucial because there's nothing about ultra endurance that is fast it has nothing to do with threshold power or speed or any of that it's truly the ability to efficiently persist so the prize doesn't go to the fastest guy it goes to the person who slows down the least and when you kind of live in this zone two place where you're training you know for long periods of time developing this capacity what you're doing is you're building this foundation of endurance from the ground up and the way that you kind of calculate your zone i mean peter talks about this i go in for proper lactate testing i'm on a bike and i get my finger pricked as the watts go up and you get this heart rate zone in this watt zone wherein you understand like this is the level of exertion required to like be right in the sweet spot of all of this when i began training for these races my zone two like case uh when i was running was like 10 minutes a mile or 10 30 or something like that but by rigorously adhering to this without doing any interval training or any tempo work over a two year period i got to the point where i could run seven minute miles at the same heart rate so the same amount of energy output but that level of increase in speed not by doing any speed work but by literally creating efficiencies and developing that mitochondrial density and ultimately what you're also doing is training the body to metabolize fat for fuel which is your you know all-day source of energy like you literally will never run out of it um so in my experience training the body to metabolize fat for fuel has really been it's an n of one an experiential experience that i've had but it's really much more about how you're training than what it is that you're eating or when you're eating it like i've just found this training to be the best way to get into that place of of the body learning how to you know metabolize fuel in that way so that you can literally continue to go for as long as you want and there are and certainly i'll link in the show notes to the conversations with peter etia that that go uh probably deeper than that so i think it's technically it's great it's great it does get technical but peter knows his stuff i'll i'll provide some links to that for people who want to to dig in i would you chopped it out and then put it at the end and i went immediately to the end to like listen to all right so for people who haven't heard this episode basically the first maybe was the first question and we launched into the cellular metabolism involved with zone 2 training and mitochondrial density i thought you know maybe that 20-minute appendix should be put at the end as an appendix just so that we can get people in the door right so we're not having people do calculus on their way into the club maybe on the way out but it is a great section so we'll we'll link to that uh in the show notes at 10. blog podcast question for you and this may be a dead end but i'm just curious have you explored using ketone meters as you have adapted and increased your mitochondrial density through zone 2 training and the reason i'm asking is i'm wondering if you've noticed for instance because this is something i track but without the zone 2 training in the case of say a two or three day fast how quickly my body will go to will shift over to say you know 0.7 millimolars or something like that get to the point where i feel like i am in ketosis just subjectively through cognitive sharpness you know mental acuity generally have you played around with that at all or seen a faster switchover no i've never i haven't i haven't yeah yeah i don't have any experience with that would make sense though that would make a lot of sense how often how frequently is it necessary to do zone 2 training i'm sure it's highly individual but just painting with a broad brush to begin to accrue some of the benefits that we're talking about i think peter answered this question and i i believe he gave a window of something like three months or something like three to six months um i would say that this is not like the way to hack yourself to success because it requires a significant uh investment in time like you you have to play the long game to really reap the the huge benefits of this type of training it's not an overnight kind of thing i started to realize gains maybe around six months into it but i didn't really garner the full you know buffet of of what it was availing me for a lot it took two years like basically is what i'm saying like the longer you do it the more efficient you become and then the longer you can go the further you can sustain a certain level of effort and these adaptations are like not overnight but i think it's like when you're looking at like it's not like what are you gonna do this year but like three years if you're on like a three-year plan i think really doubling down on this philosophy there's just there's so much benefit to it but it depends on what your goal is too what is my goal i'm in the process of figuring that out i have to i have to dig into that curiosity we were talking about earlier and uh certainly part of that will be know thyself still working on that aren't we all i think i've been in the gray zone side note for like two years which is probably has some explanatory power so there are three things at least three things but three things i would love to hear you speak to and i'll let you you mentioned buffet so i'll throw out three and then you can pick whichever one you want to tackle first so one is sleeping in a tent two is taking a full month off the grid every year and then number three is your daily architecture so not committing to certain things or focusing on certain things up to 12 noon uh which which one of those would you like to dig into i mean we could go any direction you want i mean we could start with the tent let's start with the tent yeah so uh i've been sleeping outside in a tent for a couple years at this point i think a little over two years and i absolutely love it it's really been beneficial to my sleep and it's something that started from a frustration over my increasing inability to get restful slumber and the impetus like kind of original impetus was my wife likes the bedroom warm i like the bedroom cold i'm sure a lot of people can relate to this relationship dynamic and no matter how much we would try to compromise to you know make it good for both of us julie would always be bundled up under a ton of covers and i'm sleeping on top of the covers like sweating and then neither of us sleeps and we get up and and we're not happy we have a flat we've been in my house i have a flat roof on my house and one summer evening we did a sleepover on the roof with the kids and we have a flat wall where we would project movies and we're like eating popcorn and we all just kind of slept on the roof that night and in sleeping bags and i woke up the next day just feeling amazing like from the outdoor air and the cool like desert air of los angeles and i was like i can't remember the last time i slept so well so i told julie i was like i'm just going to sleep on the roof again tonight and it really began from there and i just fell in love with being out there's something about being outdoors that just agrees with me in the kind of cool evening air but i would wake up covered in like like condensation like completely wet so i was like all right i got to get a tent so then i got a tent the tent was on the roof then it got windy i moved the tent to the ground but i've really just enjoyed it and as i get older like i'm so protective of my sleep and it's so important to me that i get those eight hours because i know what it feels like not to get them and i it still eludes me quite often like i i really struggle with this but it's been a huge benefit in the quality of my sleep and i enjoy it people always ask like well you know they think i'm having like some kind of fight with my wife or something like that like we have our quality time i promise you like everything is fine in my marriage we've been together for a very long time it's all good um and i also think it's been a cool kind of stoic practice because i i live in a really nice house and i have nice things but i actually prefer to sleep in the tent and there's something about that where it gives me comfort like if everything went terribly wrong and i lost everything like i know that i'm happy sleeping in a tent and i don't really need that much ultimately and that that's been really kind of nice in cultivating a little bit of a minimalist sensibility about how i live so you decided being blown off the roof while you're sleeping is probably not a good idea i second that do you have mountain lions around those parts we do and i i i go running in all the trails all around you know where i live in the santa monica mountains i know they're there i've never seen one but they're definitely there where our property is fenced so i feel okay but yeah i mean for they're they're there they're real but yeah we'll see i remember this experience in northern california up by napa i went on this hiking trip and everybody at the same time got the feeling that they were being watched and i was like yeah we should probably pay attention to that mountain lions everywhere uh what yeah forgive me but my a i want to know b my my listeners will be annoyed if i don't ask so you you you did a lot of trial and error with tent and setup and everything else what does your gear look like currently after two years of trying it out yeah well i'm actually at a at a turning point with all of this i've been sleeping in like a north face tent uh that i've had for a while but the these tents tend to only last like maybe four or five months at most because the sun just beats them up and then they turn into like tissue paper so i'm constantly getting new tents and finally i was like this is ridiculous so i just bought like a proper canvas like glamping tent and we haven't constructed it yet i'm having a deck build i'm gonna make it like kind of like a cool outdoor structure so that's the next chapter in all this but for the last two years it's been a series of you know basically you know small tents in the backyard i have a mattress in there so i'm not sleeping on the ground and tons of blankets which is part of the appeal like there was frost when i woke up this morning it was great i slept fantastic last night but a key thing that i have been using for a couple years is gravity blanket which i absolutely love i don't know if you've had any experience yeah i have one upstairs so what why what is the gravity blanket and why do you find it helpful gravity blanket is a a weighted blanket there's different types of them but essentially they're quilted with like uh i don't know sand in them or different types of of heavy materials so and they come in different weights so i think mine is like a 25 pound blanket so imagine that experience of being at the dentist and you're getting an x-ray and they put that like lead mat on your chest and think is that a pleasant experience for you or an unpleasant experience for you and when i think about that i kind of like it like there's something about it swaddling clothes yeah it's like i'm being protected you know it's like telling my my sympathetic nervous system that i'm safe and i believe i could be wrong but i believe that that was the original use case for the gravity blanket to treat people with autism who have trouble calming down and it had this impact of like soothing them and that's certainly you know been my experience using it and i i love it you use it at night yeah you put that on top of your blankets all right so tent check uh any other modifications that you've made to your tenting experience that come to mind uh no i mean i wear an i have an eye mask um but just type of eye mask of course the tim ferriss i forgot what i got i gotta ask the mindfold i like the mind fault oh mindfuls are great yeah yeah all right check all right now thank you for indulging that inquiring minds want to know of course and you know for for people who uh want another example of this type of stoke practice different type of time frame but kevin kelly who's been on the podcast at least two times arguably the world's most interesting man he will sleep in his living room in a sleeping bag kind of surviving on as i as i recall uh instant oatmeal and instant coffee for maybe like a a week a year two weeks a year just as a little reminder that all is well everything's fine but i like the idea of sleep sleeping outside a lot more personally it's a daily architecture or weekly architecture just schedule wise seems like you rarely schedule certain types of things before noon your time could you speak to speak to that and perhaps just tell the genesis story like how and when did you begin doing that because that's contraindicated if you're doing 80 hour weeks right so there's a there was a transition yeah of course that didn't really become a possibility until i was i was self-employed and i think i started practicing it originally when i was writing finding ultra because i needed i needed quiet hours before work began to just be focused on that important thing and i've just built upon it from there so essentially i'm early to bed early to rise i go to bed like around nine and i generally get up around sort of five five between five and six and the early hours are are really protected as my own time so morning meditation journaling writing creative projects no meetings no phone calls like certainly like we're doing this podcast this morning so i'll make exceptions like we're doing this in the morning but as a general rule i try not to commit to anything outside of those practices for that initial phase of the day and so after i finish those practices then i i do my training in the morning and i try to get that done before i go into the work day how frequently would you say you succeed if you and i'm not to ever expect it to be 100 i'm just curious what you would say it looks like and when you get something because we were talking about the death by a thousand cuts earlier when you get really tempting stuff what do you do right like sometimes you make exceptions but if you if you made all the exceptions then the schedule wouldn't work right because i'm sure you have people right stuff earlier in the day so what's your what would you say your hit rate is and how do you contend with the the temptations i would say outside of situations where i'm traveling my hit rate's about 85 so that's high i'm pretty good yeah and also the people that i generally work with like all know this now so it's less often that i'm asked to do things during those hours because like because they know and i've gotten much better at just just not agreeing to do stuff uh conference calls zoom calls and stuff like that during that period of time but if somebody's in you know the uk or in a you know a very a radically different time zone like there's situations where it's like okay am i going to be the huge pain in the ass or am i going to just make an exception you know so make them do the zoom call at 11 pm yeah yeah like i'm too much of a people pleaser for that and that's the war that i'm always waging like the healthy boundary versus like the desire to be liked is is like the battleground in my head and so i'm pretty good about that the death by a thousand cuts shows up in in other areas of my life particularly like regarding stuff that isn't due or isn't going to happen for a long period of time like if it's far enough out on the calendar i'll pretty much agree to anything and you know and then and then that day arrives and you're like what am i doing i'm never doing this again and then the following week you're you know reaping the same thing so i you know that's that's like my mount everest right now and listen these are these are problems of of abundance they're the result of of you know working very hard to create something that is interesting to people and so you get offered cool stuff and i want to take advantage of all the cool stuff like i know what it's like to not have people interested in having me involved in cool stuff but at what cost right and yeah and it's really hard to do that it's like do you want to go do this amazing thing you're like 100 i do but what are you really trying to accomplish where is your focus you know vested and calibrating those opportunities against the things that are most important in your life and you know i have four kids like i have you know i have other responsibilities outside of my professional responsibilities that are important to me so i'm not always great at making those decisions but i think i'd like to think that i'm getting a little bit better well 85 percent hit rate's really good that's just for the pre pre noon thing that's not for like fielding all incoming you know stuff still that's a good protected zone that's a good protected zone you know i i've and no surprise to anyone just fascinated by how people think about scheduling and time i know that you've been doing some workouts with laird hamilton and gaby reese's place in the pool xpt and all that which is side note on sleep i have probably never slept better than after a really long workout with weights in the pool my god it's incredible it's just amazing and they have such unique lives and the way that they live their lives fiercely independently and i they came to mind also because i was thinking about rick rubin the legendary music producer has been on this podcast who also i'm not sure where he is now but often spends time with them and has his little corner in the pool where he does his workout but rick as far as i can tell basically doesn't schedule like 99 of life is unscheduled it's kind of like yeah like ping me and if it works it'll work and i really admire his ability to do that i haven't been able to ace that at this point hence the questions about all of this a month off the grid every year is this uh let's let's go to the genesis story for this and how and why this is a priority so you mentioned earlier on this this extended period of financial dismantlement that that we endured as a family and and it was a very painful extended period of time where i really struggled to figure out how to provide for my family in a meaningful way and it's now all solved and everything's great but i think there was a significant amount of ptsd that i experienced from that because it was very emasculating and scary for me yeah and now that everything you know once things started you know functioning properly and and and working a lot of my workaholism tendencies kind of came to the forefront and i became so focused on building this thing and protecting it and making sure that it was providing for my family that i started to kind of overlook the principles that put me in the position to create it in the first place like the adage of like all this wellness is making me sick like i was so you know like i was just working my ass off right and as you know doing this show and doing other things in your life like it's a lot more work than people think like it's a it's a grind and you can lose yourself in it and a couple years ago i i started tiptoeing up to burnout and instead of being excited to have conversations with my guests i was i wouldn't say i was dreading it but i was i was moving in that direction and that's not a relationship that i wanted to have with this thing that you and i both do that we obviously really care about it it should be a joyful experience and you know i hadn't taken a single vacation in like five years like no break it was insane so you know it was i was i was due for it and so i ended up taking a month off and i went to australia and it was incredibly nourishing and i was able to come back from that experience with a renewed and refreshed perspective and and relationship with with what i do and i just decided that this was going to be an annual thing so i'm getting ready to do i'm taking january off this year and i'm really looking forward to it like i i i need it and i think it's you know it's important to understand in a performance context that you have to periodize your life just like you would periodize your training like you need those fallow periods to recharge the battery and you have to live your life if you're going to have anything worthy to say about the human experience like if you're just constantly engaging in your profession and focused on you know what it is that you do and you're missing out on the other experiences and the richness of life then you're not really going to be carrying a meaningful resonance or vibration that's going to be helpful to other people let's go to pre-australia for a moment because no no vacation in five years and then i took a month off and it was great i feel like we're skipping a few steps what did the preparation slash self-talk logistics anything look like leading up to australia and if you want to mention this first we can mention this part first which is what did what did off really mean off didn't mean like completely like like leave the phone at home you know i would i i wish i could tell you that that's what i did i didn't do that that is an ambition for this experience though uh which is terrifying that i'm excited about so what are you asking specifically like the the yeah what type of what type of preparation is required now if if this current example meaning january coming up is is a better case study to take a look at i'm just wondering what the preparation looks like right so you have all of these various plates that you're spinning of different types and i i literally just got back a few days ago from from uh about three weeks off the grid so i'm fresh oh wow having just returned where i was in antarctica so i literally oh wow zero cell or wi-fi signal which was great because the possibility of backsliding is basically removed entirely unless you want to like sit in a tent by yourself with a satellite phone and try to make that work which some people did but i did not so i'm wondering what prep is going into taking a month off i'm much more interested in your experience in antarctica but yeah well you can talk about it i mean that's amazing like what were you why did you decide to go there and what was that about i have a friend uh matt mullenweg who very close friend he's been on the podcast once or twice he runs a company this makes it all the more impressive so he runs a company called automatic m-a-t-d-i-c which has something like 2 000 employees at the moment he had gone to antarctica i want to say i might be getting the numbers off but five or six years ago and had heard that a trip was being planned which would put a small group in antarctica for the totality the solar eclipse at the empire penguin colony which had never been observed before in this year to end of 2021 and that was the purpose of this trip he grabbed a number of seats made a reservation for a handful of seats five or six seats and then invited me some time ago and asked me if i wanted to go and i said yeah i absolutely want to go i mean when am i next going to have such an invite and ended up landing in chile spending a decent amount of time in chile they're very very very strict with kovid so you're getting daily covet tests you're being tr you install an app and you're legally required to identify your location and answer surveys every day you carry a mobility pass which is a qr code to go into any establishment that then interfaces with the database to indicate whether you are green or red so very very involved which it has to be because if if you have an outbreak in antarctica the whole operation is done right right and then off we went but i i it had been a while been a couple of years since uh well certainly since covid hit that i had spent multiple weeks completely off the grid which i i try to spend at least two to three weeks per year 100 off the grid meaning if there's an emergency someone can contact someone who contacts someone who can find a way to reach me but there's really no contact with the outside world otherwise and so in my case i'd love these experiments because and hence my interest in what you're up to also because you're forced to look at all of your systems right like if you're gone for a week you can come back and fire fight you can kind of allow things to go towards entropy and balls to get dropped and then fix it when you get back but with the with the amount that is going on i imagine in your life certainly in my life if you try to do that with three or four weeks it's just going to be a catastrophe so you have to set up systems and policies and update things and take a really close look at like okay well how are wires being approved how are these following things being handled oh they're being handled in this really labor-intensive ad hoc one-off way let's make a policy for that what should the policy be and uh all of those or many of those things outlive the vacation right which so that's an additional argument in addition to the periodizing of life right the fact that you are a biological system that does not have infinite amounts of neurotransmitters and cortisol and so like you really it's a good idea to kind of phase in and phase out you know the other argument for me and there are many others of course i mean enjoying your goddamn vacation would be a great one too but in the case of someone who's self-employed or maybe even if you are employed you you develop and refine systems that then have durability and persist once you get back so so i'm just getting back in the saddle after multiple weeks literally i have only been in the u.s for a handful of days wow what an amazing experience yeah so i'm on the other side yeah that's cool yeah i think now i get where you're coming from i mean it's certainly been a situation of of putting systems in place and stress testing them i mean i have this amazing team right now when i went to australia the team looked a little bit different it wasn't as mature as it is at this point but now i've i've really invested a lot of time and energy in creating structure which was not easy for me as a sort of control freak who wants to do everything and be the bottleneck in every decision and every problem like i've lived in that that was big a big part of what was leading me towards this burnout was my refusal to kind of loosen the reins and empower people around me and that's been you know an education that i'm happy to say i'm now very much you know much more on the other side of which feels really liberating and having systems in place so that i can go away and i've got you know these people here who have their eyes on the prize and can take care of a lot of that stuff but it took many years to get to this place and i had to learn a lot of rocky you know lessons along the way yes and you definitely will make mistakes i think part of the calculus for me has been also expecting that you're going to allow small bad things to happen and being okay with that being okay with it right because you're never gonna get to like a hundred percent risk mitigation like shit's gonna happen so being okay with that sort of the the art of letting small things small bad things happen to get the the big good things done yeah well let me ask just a few more questions because we're coming up on on two hours shortly and uh certainly we can go anywhere we'd like and i'm not in any rush i wanted to mention one thing also when we're talking about or when you mentioned committing to things that are five six nine months out and then having the the day of reckoning when you look at your next month and you're like oh for [ __ ] sake what did i do to myself i want to say it's esther dyson who's well-known investor she's i want to say did cosmonaut training also later in her life in russia but she uses this heuristic i think i'm getting the attribution right where she'll ask herself if this were next tuesday would i want to do this thing and if the answer is no don't commit to it six months from now either uh i think kevin kelly actually borrowed that from her as well so question this is one that that uh you've you've heard before and know i ask a lot if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it what might it say what might you put on it could be image quote question line just uh metaphorically getting something out to many many many millions or billions of people i've been thinking about this because i know that you asked this question and my original thought was who are you but i've modified that i think a better question is who are you becoming and that's a question that i resisted asking myself for too long and as a result led me down some dark pathways or just distracted me from actualizing in a healthy way and i think our culture is set up to to distract us from that kind of self-inquiry and the reason that i add the word becoming is i think that it speaks to the fact that none of us are static like in every moment we are shifting and we are changing and every decision that we make every interaction that we have every word that comes out of our mouth is either moving us towards a better more authentic version of ourselves or away from it in the same way that that process is as an alcoholic either moving me towards a drink or away from a drink so i think in the context of becoming it's like we're always becoming we're always on our on our way to becoming something are you becoming a better version of yourself or are you becoming somebody who is moving away from you know what i would characterize as as your true essence and i think the more that we can inhabit that sensibility if we're in the habit of like thinking about these things i think it anchors us more in the present moment and allows for more conscious decisions about how we're investing our energy and how we're conducting ourselves or relating to the world or responding or reacting to the world around us i love that could you repeat it one more time it was not who am i becoming or is it what type of person am i becoming who are you becoming yeah who are you becoming that's a really good modification i mean it sort of leads you to telescope out right looking at whatever the current decisions and behaviors are it's like what does this look like in a year what does this look like in three years what does this look like in 10 years good time for me i'll put that on my mirror as my wake up reminder that'll be a good one to add what are you most excited about for the next year or what are you excited about it doesn't have to be the most but is there anything that comes to mind what am i most excited about that's a hard one or looking forward to in the next year i mean i'm looking forward to my break for sure uh we have another edition of voicing change coming out in the new year so i'm excited there's practical things that i'm excited about uh i think i'm but i think what i'm most excited about is this evolving shifting relationship that i have with the work that i do and this is something you've talked about a lot tim which is overcoming or transcending this disposition to make everything hard you ask this question like what if it was easy right and that's a very bitter pill for me to swallow because my whole life has been premised on this idea that if if i haven't suffered to create this thing that i haven't worked hard enough or that it doesn't hold value and i'm in this journey of of trying to let go and i've done that through systems and people here at the podcast but in other areas of my life to to hold the things that i care about more loosely and to approach them from that perspective of what if it was easy like i don't have to suffer to create like that is an illusion or a construct that i have created in my mind and affirmed over many years but deconstructing it i realized the fallacy of it and so trying to recalibrate my relationship to the world in which i am able to like navigate it more from a perspective of like grace and joy and allowing rather than gripping on really tightly is so counterintuitive yet also so liberating while also being terrifying so i'm not i haven't emerged from the woods on this yet like this is definitely like a you know a hill i might die on but this is what i'm committed to and this is part of the intention that i'm bringing into this month that i'm taking off and i hope to emerge from that a little bit more consolidated around that idea and in a place where i'm ready to practice it in a way that's more meaningful than what i have been able to do historically that is a good intention there is a book that i've been revisiting my kindle highlights of which is effortless by greg mcewen which is the second book following essentialism also by greg mcewen but it's a very nice reminder along the lines of of what you're describing because certainly my i shouldn't say defaults it's probably conditioned but my sort of out-of-the-box programming is very similar uh to yours it's like if i'm not suffering if i'm not redlining then clearly i'm not applying myself enough to whatever x happens to be which is just like so self-defeating in so many ways so it's it's a constant challenge however i i have found that uh to be a very helpful book so i have a tab open actually on this browser right now on top left to my to my kindle highlights of that book so speaking of books your books include your best-selling memoir finding ultra the cookbooks and lifestyle guides the plant power way and the plant power away italia which you co-authored with your wife julie yeah god over two pay it good lord i'm sorry julie forgive me people can find all things ritual ritual dot com on twitter at ritual are you most active on twitter instagram do you have a preferred social media probably more active on on instagram than twitter but i'm on both ritual on instagram as well we'll link to all of those youtube facebook etc in the show notes 10. podcast is there anything else that you would like to say any closing comments asks or requests of this audience before we before we wrap up i mean first of all thank you for having me it really is a privilege um and and i've been doing a lot of thinking around how divided the world feels right now and how broken it can feel there's just so much contention out there but when i think about kind of what we do like having these long-form conversations it just feels to me like there's never been a better opportunity to contribute in a positive way and you know i just want to encourage people to find a way to kind of transcend the predominant media narrative that seems hell-bent on pitting us against each other and to be more conscious about not just your media choices but how you carry that sensibility into the world in the manner in which you interact with other people because in my experience and i'm sure this is shared by you know most people like when you go out into the world it doesn't feel like what we're seeing on social media and on the national news like people are fundamentally good and we share so much more than what appears to divide us right now and i don't know you know i despair of the way that i hear these narratives being spun online and so to me it's almost a reminder of myself to remember that what you see there isn't necessarily a reflection of the world's objective reality yeah here here so true and uh that is also at least for me over the last few weeks that has been one of the best medications is the abstaining from these inputs that are very much designed to polarize right very much designed to upset so that's an incredibly good reminder and i really appreciate you taking the time man i've been looking forward to this it's landing this conversation is landing at the perfect time for me having just come back from this from this time off the grid with pages and pages of notes on what i hope to be big picture changes or additions or subtractions that of course are are great in theory fantastic well done chap you put it all down on paper but you gotta translate it somehow so this this uh this i think will be a nice push for me you have a very inspiring story you also have a very human story and you have not just the highlights but you have the low lights and the difficult times as we all do and you've been very vulnerable and forthcoming in sharing that full picture with the world and i think it's such a service uh it's such a gift that you do that so thank you very much for doing what you do rich i really appreciate it thanks man i really i appreciate that and i you know i think vulnerability is something that you know we can all use a little bit more of in this world and when i hear other people being vulnerable it gives me permission to be vulnerable and i think there's real strength in that so i appreciate that and i am happy to be somebody to hold you accountable for this next chapter i'm excited to see where you know how this is going to manifest but i would encourage you to just figure out something to latch on to so that you can you know get into action yep and not just ruminate and make more notes uh and if you need somebody to you know hold your hand to the flame on that i'm happy to be that guy right so don't spend the next year deciding which bike to ride i will i'll do i will i will do my best so getting something on the calendar for me if it's not in the calendar it's and if somebody else doesn't know about it it's it's probably made up so i will i will i will get something on the calendar and i'm looking forward to it i'm really looking forward to it i know i know it can be done right it's not it's not the first time out of the gate actually putting something together i'm just out of practice right and hot damn stakes and consequences if people prefer the term incentives great they really do work wonders so i'm looking forward to it and i've really enjoyed this conversation so thank you very much rich and uh to everybody listening we will have links to everything that we've discussed in the show notes at tim.blogs podcast you can just search ritual and it'll pop right up you can find him again at richroll.com and until next time be safe out there experiment often be kinder than you think necessary and thanks for tuning in you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 574,835

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast

Id: bR6JHIZKJdI

Length: 121min 52sec (7312 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022