The Evolution Of Tim Ferriss

so super happy to have you here man really excited to talk to you it's been a long time coming I think maybe we first had emails I think in like 2009 or something like that and we haven't met until today it was back a while yeah I know you reached out to me to you ask me a few questions when you were working on for our body which I didn't make the book but that's okay no but I was stoked to even to even talk to you and I think before we even get into it I wanted to thank you first of all for writing your first book this book for our work week I have the original one here which was super helpful and instrumental in helping me as I began this transition out of law and into what I get to do today and I think on a very kind of practical tactical level figuring out how I was going to train for these crazy races and still make an income and it was great like it really helped me a lot and and so I appreciate you very much for writing that book and then secondarily I wanted to thank you publicly for providing me the opportunity to do a guest blog when finding ultra came out which was really like that helped me out a lot and so I really appreciate thank you still gets a lot of traffic yeah there's a little like there was a little controversial aspect about those oh no I appreciated anything called the superfood will will polarize ya know for sure so I think the thing that I kind of wanted to really get into into it with you is this journey that you're kind of on currently because when I think about you I think about you know somebody who has who has lived by this kind of rule of coming up with not just tools but kind of a roadmap for how you live like you're somebody who in jonathan field said this the other day i've listened to that podcast like you're somebody who I've always looked at as a person who lives very much in their head who is very intellectual in their approach to life and it's reflected in the work that you do this idea that you're dissecting and and deconstructing you know how other people do things and applying what works for you into your own life but I think like traditionally when I looked at your work I've sort of missed the more emotional heartfelt approach to certain aspects of how how to live and what I'm seeing in you now is a is like a journey towards that like an embrace of that in a certain way that I haven't seen in you in the past and I celebrate that I think that's really cool and that's something I'd like to hear a little bit more about let's get into it thanks for having me first of all it's really nice to be here and I think we're all on different journeys their shared traits perhaps for many of us and we hit different legs in different portions of our lives so for some people they start off say in the heart or in the gut and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever might not suit me okay yeah and then you have other people certainly I would count myself among those people who for whatever reason or combination of reasons develop a lot of armor really early on as I did in childhood at some reasonably uh bad things happen to me as a kid that I don't really want to get into specifics over but that encapsulates a lot for a lot of people and put on this incredible armor to protect myself and only realized in the last few years that and when you put on really effective armor you do keep things out but you also keep a lot in hmm and there were certain ways that I had handicapped myself very deliberately viewing a motion as a weakness viewing attachment emotional attachment in particular as a weakness my priority for a very long time was to simply hone myself as a as an instrument of competition basically and to use that to validate myself to prove my worth and anything that detracted from that or remotely made me vulnerable I viewed as something that should be disposed of so that led me to the pro and con lists to the hyper analytical to the as close as I could manage spock-like approach with a high pain tolerance to tackling different things in life and that is just another way of accepting partial completeness which ironically I wrote about in the 4-hour body which is arguably the most like I say clinical that makes it sound really dry it's a I think it's a fun book but it's very analytical right and very quantified and I talk about how people should question certain assumptions they've made about what they can or cannot do such as well my my parents are fat I'm fat that's just the way it is and they accept that as a partial completeness and they never challenge that but I myself never even thought of my long-standing lack of interest in emotion as a gap does that make sense Oh probably as a strength like I you know from what I've heard in in how you talk about your childhood there's a lot of similarities with my childhood I was somebody who was a very awkward kid I'm very much a loner you know not a not by any stretch of the imagination anybody who looked like they were going to be an athlete you know eyepatch headgear last get picked for kickball and and really had a lot of difficulty connecting with friends and classmates and as a result spent a lot of time alone then I discovered swimming and I and I feel like I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this I feel like the relationship that I developed with that sport is similar to the relationship that you developed with wrestling at that time because I approached it as it was the first thing I was actually good at you know and it was kind of this safe place away from school and I realized very early and often that the more I put into it the better I got so that equation of being diligent and being devoted and working hard had very practical real-world results that were advancing my life in a very good way but it was also a place where I could go and not have to deal it was certain it was like us not only a safe place but a place away where I could just escape so in some respects I think I had a compulsive obsessive addictive relationship with it and it was a means of not having to deal with some emotional stuff that I was going through but when you become successful when it's moving you forward it's much more of a reason to continue to not look at that other aspect of your life because it's serving you the others there's a huge amount of overlap so wrestling for me as a as someone born premature I was very very small until sixth grade I mean just gotten constantly on a daily basis I was so small it was such a small kid I would I would generally not even opt to go out to recess because that was just like going out into the terrible the the open sky pen at like a federal prison I mean that was a dangerous place for me to be out just get dragged around and punched and so on so I'd read books and that was the the cover that I used to sit on the step right outside of the door that went out to recess and wrestling which came to me really by luck because I was hyperactive and my mom was told by other moms that kid wrestling would be a good way to drain my batteries put into wrestling and then I think both of us realized that it was the one sport since it was weight class based that I had access to where I could end up being matched against another equally puny nerdy kid and at least one of us got to win yeah but to underscore something you said which i think is very true for me as well as that particularly at that age but for a long time in school at least you have fairly siloed areas of life meaning you have academics and it's easy to measure you do well at you do poorly and then you have certain sports particularly if it's an individual sport where you feel like you have some this is another reason I gravitated towards wrestling a semblance of control there's so many things you can't control but part of the reason I always ended up leaning towards individual sports even though I did play soccer for a short period of time I played football for one season which I did not like for a host of reasons and wrestling on the other hand the aula credit or all the blame was on you lies on you yeah I mean swimming even more so yes it's the ultimate and self determinate ism yes determinism right it's just you against the clock I mean you're racing against somebody else I mean a wrestling you have your opponent you have to anticipate what yeah is gonna do and so that's a variable that you let you don't have in a sport like track and field or swimming but right but it's very much that idea of like you get out what you put into it and there's that equation right and you can like immerse yourself in that and that becomes an identity no and I liked the controlling of variables to the extent possible and as you get older at least just projecting forward if we fast forward the film and get into 20s 30s certainly 40s an hour more and more of my friends have passed away right and the decisions you make in your personal life absolutely bleed over and affect other parts of your life and the decisions you make in one area that used to be at least conceptually as a kid really walled off and siloed bleed over into every other and I think that many of our strengths in xsb become or create glaring weaknesses yeah for sure so for me it was this realization and we could really dig into some of the tools that led to this realization including supervised use of psychedelics that led me to the conclusion that Mike my current state of being was not only unsustainable in a lot of ways but really not serving me and that if I wanted to not just tolerate myself which I think at best is what I did for most of my life then I had to rewire quite a bit and it involved going back and contending with some really old things and that many of the seemingly disparate behavioral challenges or short tempered miss or impatience with myself or berating myself in my own head or fill in the blank it could be 20 or 30 things that I tended to view as inexplicable separate behaviors were in fact all easily back to a handful of things that I protect I I think by necessity protected myself against or felt the need to protect myself against early on by walling off myself emotionally mm-hmm yeah these strengths can be can manifest as as character weaknesses over time you know and and I've had a similar journey what's interesting about your your journey is that you've you've lost certain people in your life and that's put you in a place of self-reflection that has opened you up to entertain new ideas and explore these areas that you're exploring right now but you didn't have to have some kind of cataclysmic event in your own personal life like usually people reach that point of self-reflection when something has gone really bad and you know like they they lose everything or or what have you and you know in my case it's been a journey from self well to surrender a place of understanding that that self will is what is going to allow me to make my way into the world like I think I've heard you say like you have a high pain threshold a high pain tolerance like I certainly do right and I've always considered that to be my armor to be my strength I know that I'm not the most talented person but I can insert myself into a situation and I know how to outwork the next guy and I can bridge that talent deficit gap and inch my way up close to you know where I want to be by virtue of that characteristic and I always consider that to be almost like a superpower right and it wasn't until I was struggling with drugs and alcohol and that brought me to my knees that I had to find a different way because that self-will I couldn't understand why that self well wouldn't solve this problem that in order to solve this problem I had to let go of all of that and see it through a completely different lens that lens of surrender of completely letting go and allowing other people in getting to a place of being willing to ask for help and then receive help because like yourself you know I didn't like myself I loathed myself for a very long period of time and and got to a place of perhaps tolerating myself but never knew what it meant to experience self-love and I'm still on that journey but I had to go to an incredibly dark place in order to access that and you know it's a journey that I've done since I've been 31 I'm 51 now I still do it incredibly imperfectly but it's brought it's brought ideas and a sense of understanding into my life that I never thought would be anything I would be interested in that I would have repelled as a younger person you know a lot of woohoo stuff and stuff like hey you know what I mean that I know you have like an aversion to yeah but I see you tiptoeing around the edge of this and I think that that is very exciting for you and and I think that if you continue to pull on that thread the self discovery and the personal growth that you're gonna experience is gonna blow your mind I hope so I feel like it's already coming I mean I feel like a few things that some people listening might identify with well first may I drink this pds please elixir so we have party here from our friend Colin who Don of living tea so again take it dramatic yeah priest story sip of purity is good right all right so a few things that people may resonate with in might you might also identify with because we do have a lot of sure DNA have overlap all right so the pain tolerance I think that embracing a high pain tolerance or developing it was also a coping mechanism that I use to silence my inner voice because I was it was so merciless and such a demon on my back that at any given time if I scored just even metaphorically speaking ninety-nine out of a hundred the only thing that mattered was the one thing that went wrong how could I be so stupid or so lazy or so inept or so blind get that one thing wrong and the immersion in physical pain through wrestling through the training that goes into it through the cutting of weight which is just atrocious I think was a coping mechanism that I used to silence that and as as you've experienced in your life high tolerance is not always a good thing and it's I ended up being introduced to really strong stimulants in high school ephedrine hydrochloride combined with caffeine and aspirin and the whole nine yards things beyond that and there were tools that I also realized I could take in in tremendous quantities compared to other people which I which I viewed as a superpower maybe now you know there are superpowers the different kind of pain tolerance yeah and so the what I thought was a gift ended up becoming a major handicap and ultimately addiction for me that really has only been kicked at least for the time being in the last few years I mean relying on stimulants of different types and the the realization that I had this partial completeness and a lot of blind spots and also unresolved facets of myself did come from some really really tough periods and there were there were many of them but one in particular was several years ago at the end the very end of a four and a half year relationship and she was I mean she's a beautiful human being we're still friends to this day but she was as opposite on the emotional spectrum or on the empathic self compassion side of the spectrum I compared to me as you is you could possibly imagine I mean she felt everything that everyone was feel including herself all the time I mean she was just one of those super empaths which is actually sometimes crippling for people and it's hard for them to walk down the street and say New York City because they just they seem to genuinely feel everything that's right on there so host like a full-body synesthesia that's right yeah right my wife calls it the Divine Feminine right so this this woman experienced that and it was such an odd combination that worked for us meaning our very distinct opposite size as a coin for a long time until it didn't and I didn't have the vocabulary or even like conceptual schema to understand why she did certain things the way she did it and it was because I just I didn't have the ABCs of emotion in myself mm-hmm and because it was so locked down yeah so walked down it was so locked down that I didn't realize it was even a thing and it didn't if that makes any sense well I think you know it it just seemed irrelevant and unpredictable and right like this is not productive yes it's not moving me forward and and my way works because look at all these books that I've written and look what I'm doing out in the world and I with my you know character makeup I got into Princeton and I did that so there's no reason to be self-reflective about it because you're succeeding in the eyes of culture and society right right but I would say almost never in the in my own eyes mm-hmm there was always I could have there was always something I could have done better there was always something I screwed up and it was a it was a fear of losing that kept me moving more than any joy of winning mhm and never being able to just like experience joy and gratitude for the things that you have been able to accomplish that has been that has been a practice that I've worked on in the last few years in particular is there a fear of losing it that accompanies that but it's all gonna go away or just not being able to be happy with it well we could we could answer that as Tim of say two years ago or Tim of today it's not a Tim of two years ago Tim of two years ago Tim of five years ago especially felt a tremendous amount of obligation to a lot of people and to support a lot of people and to prepare to support even more people and I felt like I had to build a war chest just for that so it's not a love of money it was not a love of achievement a lot of it was a fear of letting other people down or it's a lot of pressure yeah causing pain of some type for people I love and I'm past that at this point me very fortunately I've had a good string of luck and successes so it's put me in a position where I can support other people but the the fact of the matter is I realized I'd say two years ago but especially in the last six months very recent that and this is the part that would make my Tim of five years ago just Crane like vomit a little in his own mouth but Jesus I'm not gonna mince words I still have trouble sayings like self love is not an indulgence it's not a nice to have it is a prerequisite even if all you want to do is feel successful and take care of the people you love the most to really take care of them you have to as I've heard said put on your oxygen mask first and if you don't do that like you you are also shortchanging your ability to care for other people completely and that that's been a very [Music] very much an hundred and eighty degree about-face for me right because for a long time I was like I don't need to care for myself I that's the word keeps coming back to me which is self-indulgent like this is self-indulgent like who cares ultimately it's really self flagellation right because you can't you can't transmit something you haven't got so in other words you can't love another unless you love yourself and you can't be the best teacher or servant or human being you can't convey the best version of yourself if you don't carry that resonance for your own being and you know one thing I didn't actually think this until right now but nothing another big change in my life in the last two years has been getting my dog getting Molly my first dog is an adult I've always felt like half of a human being without a dog I just have a very keen connection with canines and I got Molly two years ago two and a half years ago and she's such a loving dog such a fast learner and such a good mirror I mean I began to see my flaws in the way I'd never seen them before because I would get impatient or upset if I was training her for something and five minutes later when I would reflect on it when I did I what the hell is wrong with me like what am I getting so wound up about this is a dog has no malice doesn't is is nothing but eager to please what are you so wound up about and it in it I think his has taught me in some ways how to love period which has helped me to relate to myself in a gentler way so that's also been an incredible gift when you had this realization was there a certain person that you reached out to initially or how did you begin the you know in the Tim Ferriss way of cut you know trying to unpack this aspect of yeah who you are and how to move forward like who are the people that you you dialed up I there were a few things number one is I try to observe changes and friends of mine who are similarly hardwired and there are a lot of people out there taipei driven people or really brutal with themselves mhm and very good at achievement very poor at appreciation particularly when it comes to anything they've done and a friend of mine PhD in neuroscience really tough on herself recommended a book called radical acceptance by Tara brach and just the title alone I was like oh god I think I so the amazing book downloaded it on Kindle right away and promptly ignored it for a few months and then eventually I was in the pit of despair at some point and the heaviest e2 suffered from bipolar disorder for decades now which has is no big surprise when you look at my code from having sequenced my full genome they're like oh yeah this thing here like 20 out of from one to ten year twenty but at one dark point picked up that book actually not that far from where we're sitting right now when I was in Malibu at a friend's place and read 20 but 20 or 30 pages the first night and just remember thinking to myself wow like this is exactly the medicine that I need and for those who don't have any contacts to make thar is amazing she has a very tough she's traveled a hard road she's had some really difficult experiences in her life and after digging into that book I then had the pretext of the podcast to use to reach out to Tyra and say would you like to put the podcast and all of my conversations on my podcaster are pretty selfishly or at least self-interested in the sense that I'll use it as an excuse to get someone liked are on the phone for two hours and then just do a therapy session of course it's the greatest don't think I'm not gonna do that with you before we're finished here go ahead and I began to explore tiptoe the walls of this this sort of new structure are to tiptoe along the boundary of this new world that I hadn't explored and that extent to Sharon Salzberg and reaching out then via other friends to say jack Kornfield who has not been on the podcast although I would like to have him on at some point and also looking to how my listeners responded like did it resonate did it repel not that that would determine whether I proceeded or not but it was reassuring to me and very reinforcing to see how many people seem to need this including folks at the top top top top top of the game I mean whatever game that might be you name it investing tech sports culinary world you had you know on some level you had a little bit of a fear like oh you know my crew is not he's gonna they're gonna they're gonna get weirded out by the fact that I have someone like Sharon on I wasn't it wasn't so much a fear it was a hypothesis it wasn't a hypothesis it was more of an I wonder what will happen when I put this out mhm and I expected maybe the hey we want more interviews with billionaire set would would come back with a come on man like this is okay but you can do better and this is not what I come here for and not wasn't the right that wasn't the response that wasn't the response I expected the woohoo folks to opt in because that's what woohoo folks do with woowoo stuff for things that they perceived to be friendly and what ended up happening was yes the woowoo folks are very publicly supportive and then all of these secretly pained people who felt like they were uniquely damaged reached out to me and said [ __ ] men like I had no idea that you went through all this stuff and like I've dealt with so much of this and I I feel like I can't talk to anyone about it and thank you and that has been something that's prodded me to continue to explore at least public privately I was gonna do it no matter what but that has been a real driver for me and wanting to be much more public about all of this it's also the reason why this was not an easy decision after being invited to speak on the Ted main stage the first time this past year as context when you do a TED talk the way it usually works as I as I know now is you have people who labor over their talk for months and months and months and months they rehearse at thousands of times and it's finally it finely honed and ready to go when they step on stage I did that and then a week about a week before Ted right before the last final rehearsal which is done via videoconference with Ted and Krys Anderson and and the other people at the top at Ted I scrapped the entire talk and pulled an all-nighter and put together a new one because I had this very safe very solid talk that I felt would do well what was the subject of the original talk the virginal talk was the stuff that is my default go to just competitive analysis and more Tim living in his head more Tim living in his head or just using prefrontal cortex to figure out workarounds and non-obvious solutions to different types of competitive problems perfect audience for that at Ted fantastic and then I found out that the talk would be in the opening session and it would be broadcast to movie theaters so hundreds or thousands of movie theaters and I had this real unexpected not gonna call it a panic attack but like an existential I coming to Jesus moment this in the afternoon before the day before this rehearsal where I just thought to myself what the [ __ ] are you doing like you have a moral obligation if you're gonna have that platform to use it for something and you're gonna get up and talk about like some incremental human guinea pig [ __ ] and I that is I end up scrapping it and then doing the entire talk on my clothes brush with suicide in college and the safety nets and approaches that had created to avoid self-destruction because I felt like I had to I just felt like something I had to do and do you think that you just you're describing it as a moral obligation which sort of contextualizes it as as a response to some external pressure but it feels to me like it was more like an internal dissonance like this is not this is not authentic to where I'm at right now and the message that that I really want to express know that that's exactly at night when when I say moral obligation I don't view it as externally imposed at all I feel and I can and I have felt this way for a long time that the with great audience comes great responsibility and what are you gonna do with it and I know people who really abuse it or are really reckless with it and give out advice that can kill people regularly and don't add any caveats or qualifiers which i think is hugely responsible and I just felt like this was a sideshow they psycho is the same Japanese like first and last so this is probably the only chance I'm gonna get because why would they give it to me twice to get on the main stage and do this so yeah if we're gonna do it all right yeah it's it's it's vulnerability writ large like as large as it could possibly be written right and yeah a sense of being completely exposed yeah and for people who weren't at Ted which is the majority of people it's a very intimidating crowd so there's also part of me that felt to get on stage and tell people like Jeff Bezos my recipe for success was kind of preposterous I was like okay well if I can't out success then like let me not out fail them but completely zigged instead of zagged and the what astonished me was a number of things first right after the rehearsal on-site which I was devastated they didn't record because I completely nailed the rehearsal and I was like do sometimes just use the rehearsal they're like no we didn't even record that I was like because it the lighting the cameras everything ready yeah the Ray Dalio who's the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world hundred sixty billion dollars under management Bridgewater associates came up to me and wanted to thank me for the rehearsal because his son had struggled for so long with bipolar disorder and had learned a lot and we talked for about 10-15 minutes the next day when I got up and I gave the talk it's very very nervous gave the talk and got off stage and didn't really want to talk to anybody because in that room and given the lights it just felt too quiet it mean when you were delivering when I was delivering it was very hard for me to read yeah yeah how people were responding because unless you're and unless you're telling jokes yeah you don't you can't go even if you even if you're telling jokes that coup sticks and so on in the room or such that it's very hard to tell what's going on and so I got off stage and I really just wanted to be by myself and just let out a long exhale and decompress because I had done it and even if it failed in the room which I felt like it had I hoped that it would do a lot of good once it went up did you have a sense of catharsis though I did I did so I did have a huge sense of catharsis but I didn't really want to go out and see anyone because I thought that had flopped in the room nonetheless I was really happy that I did it so the way I was thinking of it was and I ended up not killing myself due to coincidence I mean we could get into it if you want but I mean that the the fact that I'm here today is a it's a miracle because it wasn't it's not like I talked my way or thought my way out of not pulling the trigger it was just dumb luck and a bunch of respects and I felt like if that talked once it got released acted as an intervention for even one person great yeah I'm happy to be embarrassed in front of a hundred and you know Oh fifteen hundred movers and shakers doesn't matter to me but what ended up happening is I did a book signing the next day in the same building and hundreds of people came up to tell me about in this audience keep in mind anybody listening is like this the audience at Ted it's just the who's who it's a nutty intimidating crowd and hundreds of them came up to confess about having had close brushes of suicide or to having chronic depression or to having children who had committed suicide or had been handicapped and felt entirely alone because of similar feelings and I would say at least a third of the people there at some point excite I came up the first day first session first days and I was there for the rest of the week I'd say probably a third of the people there came up to me with some personal story yeah well I think that that uh that decision to be vulnerable in that way is like a huge move towards becoming a fully integrated human being and I think that you know speaking from my own personal experience as somebody who's enjoyed your content for a long time I feel like I and probably a lot of other people we're just waiting for you to tell us who you are you know because I think for a long time it's like I'm getting a lot of great information from Tim for a script like I know this stuff is like but who is this guy like I don't even know that I really know who this guy is like and I know that I personally I was like I want to know more about you you know and I felt like that armor was was up so hard that you didn't you weren't ready for that or you even feel comfortable or that or maybe you just thought well that's not part of what works for me or that's not how I want to live you know publicly yeah but when you made that decision it's not surprising I mean first of all it's very courageous to like get up and do that and then to have that experience of being embraced it was like I think everybody else like your your fans people that follow you there was a collective exhale like now we can really embrace this guy because we have a better understanding of who he is and that's that's a really powerful thing yeah I don't I don't think I was even aware I don't think I was aware of holding anything back or consciously holding anything back I just I didn't even yeah I'm not surprised to see it didn't feel conscious on your part they just felt like but it was still like that's how I was reading it Lee sure sure and that's been a trip so I'm not convinced I fully know myself yet certainly working you're not enlightened yet yeah certainly work-in-progress always but I'm enjoying embracing a more extended palette of colors mm-hmm and I've also come to realize that historically if I've this is gonna be met up but I've thought of thinking as this exalted tool that was consciously directed in a very a if a then B therefore C sort of logical spreadsheet type of format but if you really dig into it and look at say Thinking Fast and Slow or blink or any of these books that examine well we might consider intuitive decisions or gut feel how this a conscious drives a lot of our survival decisions thinking is in fact a lot broader so it's not as though what I've prized for so long which is this very well thought to be uniquely human I kind of doubt that but ability to use the prefrontal cortex in this really analytical way is not at odds with it is not the opposite of say meeting someone and having something in the pit of your stomach say no mm-hmm we don't like this guy and in fact there's there's something to argue that this like first gen iPod that we have in the front of our brains is a relatively new addition to the party the rest of its been evolving for millennia and one could even argue millions of years and I've under value that for a really long time and I'm spending much more attention listening to that now and I've just seen so many benefits in doing that does that make you uncomfortable because you can't quantify it in the same way it makes me less unless less and less uncomfortable put maybe a better way I am more and more comfortable with using things without extremely clear labels because you can label something without understanding it right and trick yourself into believing that you know what something is just because you have the word for it which I think happens all the time and causes all sorts of strife and confusion so I'm okay with kind of trusting in the fact that by hook or crook by some twist of fate luck who knows seem to have evolved to get to this point and still be around thank rights so there's like there's something to it as many bugs as I have in my software like it seems to work for something and I don't think that the the conscious voice in my head is necessarily the unbagged part right maybe that's the buggiest part yeah your your thinking brain is not always your friend right it can get in the way I was I was listening to your most recent podcast with Tim urban who's like amazing entertaining and amazing and I love the part about when he's talking about AI and he's sort of describing this you know 700 page book and we're on page 6 99 and and kind of drawing this analogy between humans and chimps and then humans and AI in the sense that in the sense that like a chimp can look up in the sky and see an airplane but he doesn't he doesn't know it's an airplane it's something up there and there's nothing that you can humanly do that's humanly possible to get that chimp to understand what exactly that is and how it got there right it's just not gonna happen because they don't have enough brain matter and by extrapolating that to AI the argument that AI will develop to a certain point where us as human beings won't be able to conceptualize what they're doing because we just we lack the computing power to even understand what it is that's going on around us and I was thinking about that and I think baked into that there's a lesson in humility for all of us because we walk around thinking that we are capable of understanding everything if we just pin it down and think about it enough or write it out or dissect it or deconstruct it that we can wrap our heads around it but in fact that more likely than not is not the case and so for me like on a personal level that allows me that that that provides like an ample place for wonder you know or faith or for being comfortable with things that you don't fully understand when that when that instinct comes up or that intuition that's telling you not to do something you don't have to understand it or deconstruct it but I think it is important to heat it or to try to validate it on some level I think it's it's also helpful if you want to assess a or arrive at a humble perspective at least as it relates to human knowledge which i think is important so you don't make really egregious mistakes when possible history reading history is very helpful and when you go back not all that far I mean you realize are at some point in time all of the powers that were the equivalent of all the smartest people and the top politicians of the day and scientists and so on thought that the earth that was the center of the solar system or the center of the universe right you have like Ptolemaic astronomy and then Copernican and that was heresy and then you have people who again at the very top Rank's thought the germ theory of disease was complete nonsense and on and on and on it goes and to that we're finally we have found ourselves in a place where no longer is that true we've got everything figured out is so ludicrous there's just absolutely no historical precedent to suggest that that is the case in fact there's every historical precedent to suggest that as some doctors say you know 50% of what we know is wrong we just don't know which 50% mm-hmm and I think that's generous mm-hmm I've just seen too many weird things in the last few years especially to think that we have even a small fraction that that we have earned even they have 5% ability to say that we understand an equally small fraction of what we can perceive through our senses I think that's and that's an aggressive statement in and of itself yeah I mean there's there's so much we don't know and if you become somewhat comfortable with that and you become a little measured with the strong opinions that you hold and try to ensure that you've earned the right to have the strong opinions it's it's hard to it for me to envision many downsides to that so does that help you kind of access the gray and everything like how is that manifested like that awareness how is that manifested itself and how you sort of navigate the day yeah I mean I've I'm still very very hungry learning machine I still love experimentation but I'm also increasingly comfortable with just not knowing how certain things work and exploring them anyway and the tendency I think for all of us is to want to come to a place holder conclusion right like in until I have better data I'm going to conclude that X behaves the way it does because of why and I'm more comfortable now to simply saying don't know I don't know no idea and for instance I like debate I'm decently good at it I also enjoy competition based on just having practice it for so long I hate losing and if I have someone that's a public event audience QA and they want to just kick the hornet's nest and take a fight a big mouth man yeah yeah I kick the hornet's nest and pick a fight on any number of a million subjects I am totally I'm much more comfortable now simply saying I politely decline your invitation to argue about something that I have no right to argue over mm-hmm I don't have any information to have earned an informed opinion next question is that how would you have handled that five years ago I would have dismantled it or attempted to dismantle it by just using rhetoric in questions to make them contradict themselves and it's not that hard to do I mean you could easily do it is I mean you don't have to be a trial lawyer to be good at this play if you if you've had legal training I find that it's very common that lawyers enjoy the sport of debate it's not always but I just specifically trained for yeah I mean I have lawyers in my family and it's like you there are certain dinners where you just like Jesus can we stop like we don't need to debate about the cranberries for ten minutes like fine you win like we don't have to just let's move on all right here's all the family stuff it's all coming so so for me I used to enjoy that sport but the side effect the really nasty side effect of playing that sport frequently is that you create the illusion of knowing things that you just don't know mm-hm or you make someone look stupid who and I'm not trying to make look people look stupid but if they if they get really aggressive they want to pick a fight publicly in a way that I think is unproductive like I historically have had no trouble just like cutting them off of the knees and I'll still do that if someone's like if if it's if it needs to be responded to but if someone has an interesting idea just because you've had more practice with juggling logic in a way that allows you to beat them in a debate doesn't make them wrong and you write what I see in that though is a is a maturation of a sense of self right because you're you've decoupled your self-esteem or your proclivity to be happy from the need to win an argument or to be right like in recovery they say like you want to be right or you want to be happy yeah like and and so that drive to like well this is competition like I have to beat this guy because you know I that's how I feel alive or how I feel good about myself to make sure that on the alpha and I'm on top here yeah and I think it takes a you know somebody who really is self-assured in the best way to just not engage yeah and not feel the need that they have to bite and I think I've also realized that part of what I've tried to do I should say is pause for a microsecond I don't always succeed between stimulus and my usual response because my usual response is for decades have just cumulatively made me miserable or feel miserable so I've tried whenever I'm like okay I think all right it's going to fight I'm good at this like you if you're gonna fight I hope you're good I hope you come armed and really well prepared because this is my sport right like that's how I've traditionally responded and net-net I don't think that has been a huge level up in my sense of well-being and inner peace so I've tried to in case like that ask myself even before going out like if this happens and it happens you know that type of thing can happen on a regular basis what if I just did the opposite like how can I win by how can I win by refusing to engage more what other options are there that are just the opposite they might completely flop but let me try the opposite whatever that is or even take winning out of it completely yeah sure that doesn't have to be one of the parameters I mean that what you spoke to you right there is really you know one of the greatest benefits of consistent meditation practice yeah for sure so can we talk about the retreat a little bit sure yeah you just went when did you finish this ten-day retreat it was on couple weeks ago yeah from hearing you talk about it on Jonathan's podcast I mean it's knotted quite intense and transformational yeah tend a silent retreat for those who may not have experienced that in this case at least had a few conditions and some were flexible some were not no talking 10 days long so no talking no reading discouraged from writing no music no sense very little eye contact most people opted not to make eye contact and the silent piece of that the not talking piece is by far the easiest I don't talk to purge thoughts that's not how I do it I do it through reading or or to distract myself away from thought loops I use either reading or writing mm-hmm which in my case I didn't realize until I had those let's take it away and Senate retreats for the vast majority people I've spoken to or these revelatory ultimately blissful experiences that teach them a lot about themselves and then for as best I can tell 10 to 15 percent of people who go in who have a lot of old experiences in particular trauma that they haven't perhaps thought of in 20 30 years those 10 days are going to be just a descent into Dante's Inferno and a feeling like you are losing your grasp on reality because so many things are coming unwound and bubbling up from the surface and then just erupting through the surface in such a way that it feels like you have this torrent that's like waterboarding of past pain and trauma 24/7 that you can't stop and it got to the point for me where on day say 7 8 9 where much to my frustration and like tragic amusement each day there was one exception to the talking rule at least consistently in the schedule there was a Dharma talk so every night a teacher would get up and say hey in effect here are some tools that might help with what we're trying to do and you're waking up at 5:30 and the schedule from 5:30 to 9:30 outside of meals is 45 minutes sitting meditation 45 minutes moving to meditation 45 minutes sitting meditation 45 minutes moving meditation that's a rinse and repeat so that about that's it rinse and repeat and the Dharma talk is after let me get this right I think it's right before dinner I may be off could be right after noon right before dinner I believe and it's instructional but very often it would start with something like the following on say day 7 it's been so nice in our individual meetings every other day you have about 15 minutes with a teacher to make sure you're not going through a complete psychotic but you're allowed to talk in you're allowed to talk and they'll ask you how you're doing and so let's say a Dharma Dharma talk on day 7 teacher would get up and say you know it's so lovely and some of our discussions to see how many of you are just settling into the stillness and experiencing this deep peace in the meantime I'm sitting there I'm saying like going completely insane like my my head is somewhere in between like the cell and I think people have seen the movie and like hostile and like it's I mean it's not in a great place and I'm just suffering through this like endless repeat of past pain that I'd thought I had long since forgotten about or hadn't even really remembered in so long and I genuinely thought that I was going to the retreat completely untethered and unable to function it was that bad and that was on day six or something day seven so day six I had this experience that was very odd I also made this entire retreat a lot harder for myself by doing something they strongly advised against which was fasting for seven days yeah so I've put in the settings I fasted the first two days just that much in in keeping with my historical pattern I was like alright if I'm gonna do a ten day silent retreat I'm probably not gonna have a chance to write this anytime soon so let me try to make it as deep as possible and I fasted for two days going into it at least roughly fast at very low low calorie keto so then on day three the first day of the retreat I could be I like to 3ml molars VHB in my blood fantastic if that means anybody did anybody call that you're trying to turn this whole thing into an experiment oh it was it wasn't enough you know I need to worry I know well I did not anticipate like the unraveling of Tim Ferriss right I thought I'd be fine because the fact of the matter is as writer as someone who is effectively a solopreneur I mean I have a small team that they're all remote I spend most of the day not talking and I was like well this is hard can this be gonna be hard but like it's not gonna it's not gonna dismantle me yeah I wont dismantle me I really underestimated having the reading and writing removed yeah it's like wait you just like get in bed and turn the lights out you go to sleep yeah how does that work oh yeah I mean it's it's yet it was something else so on day six I went really deep in a number of meditation sessions in the afternoon in particular and it coincided with me getting out of the meditation all I was just getting claustrophobic I couldn't stay in there and I've had a number of very difficult days but it seemed in keeping with you know sometimes they call the terrible twos or whatever might be like the second day third day fourth they're routinely very difficult for people can you do any physical exercise like you can yeah you can there are people who were hiking I was hiking at least once a day during one of the moving meditation sessions ultimately I just had to get outside of the meditation hall i could not sit in there for another session at least that day and I went out I found benches all over the property up in the mountains and would sit and do my meditating there and I had these very very deep experiences where I felt like I was going into I was going into what you might consider a very altered state and these parts of my body that have carried tension for as long as I can remember like this to the left side of my sternum like it when I get tense or Aang or that tense when I get angry or overwhelmed like this is this very very specific tension that I feel the left of my sternum in in between the breast plate or the the sternum and the heart let's say and on my back which was related to an injury I had about eight years ago I tore my lat off my back basically was just not something you want to do but this this pain in my mid back in the thoracic area and it had a really tough time every day with the sitting meditation I had very intense back pain which a lot of people did now sitting there on this bench and this afternoon and using these tools from the Dharma talks and various techniques that they're recommending and it felt like I had ice water suddenly on this that part of my chest and the back that portion of the back that usually heard really odd I mean I opened my eyes for a second because I felt like I literally had ice water on my chest in my back and then the tension in both areas sort of spread out and thinned and then dissipated and my back no longer hurt for the first time in the entire retreat I was like that's weird huh and I just had this wonderful wonderful meditation session I felt fantastic me very joyful in certain ways so what do you make about what I make of that and what one of the senior teachers made of that when I then proceeded the next day to just completely implode or explode or both depending on how you look at it is that I'd finally remove that armor and it just it allowed a lot in and it allowed a lot out and then it was just one Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest I mean I literally felt like I was going insane but unlike say a strong guided psychedelic experience there is no piece of you at least there was no piece of me that felt like there was an end to the ride it wasn't as though I had some meta awareness of being in an experience that would end in five or six hours I just thought that I was going to a place that I would not recover from that's terrifying it was horrifying and I I will there were a few teachers but in particular jack Kornfield who if they had not been there I think there's a distinct possibility that you and I would not be talking book launch would have been canceled none of this would have happened I think I would have been in a really bad place so when people have asked me oh do you recommend it I'm like not for everybody no I don't and [Music] you really need someone I think because at least for me I didn't know what I didn't know and I didn't even if you had asked me like have you had trauma that you think might come up I'd be like no fine and in fact they did ask that there's a questionnaire I was like I'm good mm-hmm I didn't know what was under the surface because I had forgotten or repressed I've no idea what the proper term would be and I mean thank God for instance Jack was there who is very well known him he's one of five or six people I would say accredited with bringing Buddhist meditative practices to the west and what's unique about Jack is that he's not just an experienced meditation teacher he is also PhD in clinical psychology and has worked with veterans who've had limbs blown off and have PTSD he's worked with adolescents who are cutters he's worked with many different populations in the messy reality of like the real world and very real trauma not just quoting scripture and telling you - telling you - this is a fantastic opportunity to observe your mind there's a there's a point where that's helpful then there's a point where that does nothing but it helps you realize just how powerful those childhood experiences are you know it's it's reminiscent of the work of gab or Mata like in his epic childhood trauma and how that manifests later in life he's there he's been on my podcast yeah he's fascinating guy fascinating fascinating guy and yeah yeah so yeah Timmy Timmy got blindsided not only like I mean yeah I mean I'm glad you made it out of that I'm glad Jack was there to help guide you I also feel like there needs to be like outpatient like some kind of structure to help you integrate back into the world you know once you get out of that experience so that you can make sense of it and and you know take take what has been given to you in a way that can benefit your life as opposed to just continue to dismantle and confuse you yeah I think this will sound melodramatic but I I would suggest that people maybe think about it this way is consider it as as a thought exercise going into neurosurgery you're gonna go in to have neurosurgery to have some complicated procedure performed that usually goes right but that very distinctly could go on it's not there is a non-trivial likelihood 10-15 percent that something could go catastrophic ly sideways you want to go into that with a the most qualified practitioner practitioners you can possibly find on the planet instead of feeling in a rush and just choosing a retreat B you want to have contingency plans what if I get to the last day and I think that I'm going insane right if the suture bursts in my brain or whatever it is my analogy what you do you just go home and go to work the next morning right no that's not what you do you need to have a plan you go to New York City and you launch a book like yeah I will say right after the silent retreat I there were a few intervening experiences but then I went came straight to LA to speak on stage at a jet somewhere at summit conference which was complete sensory overload but I will say that the main thing I took out of it was not any fixing this is important too to say I don't think I fixed anything through the silent retreat but I realized how how much could be traced back to a handful of things that I had not reconciled within myself and that that's the work like that's the work for me in 2018 it is figuring out ways whether it is through say reading up and meeting reading up on trauma specialists and different methodologies and spending time with trauma specialists perhaps you've been considering with medical supervision something like MDMA for instance as an adjunct therapy not a primary that's the work for 2018 for me and everything else is secondary mm-hmm I mean everything else that's an amazing realization to come out of that with a sense of how important that priority is for you yeah I mean nothing else matters because you could say well what about the people you love it's like yeah but I can't I've realized how in completely I can give myself to them right now without dealing with this first mm-hmm period and so what's the daily practice right now the the daily practice right now is not so much a daily practice it's getting commitments on the calendar to do the things that I just said or number once that they don't get displaced by the noise and static and the pretty cool opportunities that float through that I in some lapse of judgment say yes to they need to be on the calendar so immediately after their tree in the week following I put things on the calendar prepaid for them made commitments to other people to beat certain places at certain times so they would not get displaced so right now it's really just girding my loins and waiting for that yeah you should do one of Sharon's retreats I think it's gonna be a while before I do another retreat but yeah I think it would be a little bit of a different kind of it experience yeah yeah it might be and I had a great wealth great people and I go do have fun I'm like not the adjective I'd use I had a very valuable experience at spirit rock but it was it was very very difficult and I think that at this point and this is true with many different interventions whether that's silent retreats motivational seminars conferences plant medicine there are it is very seductive to get frequent flyer miles on the interventions instead of doing the the time and energy consuming integration post work yeah it's less sexy it's less sexy like that's the real work yeah it's like okay now I'll show you I shall show you the direction in which you need to push the boulder up the hall but there comes a time when you like okay I actually just need to put on my big girl pants and like and do push the guy and Boulder and yeah direction the experiences are like the reveal of what the work needs to be or what it's what it needs to look like but you know I have friends I'm sure you do too I have one friend this guy did ayahuasca like 52 times and he or something like that like I don't you know god bless him I know I don't know what that's about but at some point it it feels like well is that helping you or is that a distraction or a procrastination of the work that it's revealing yet you then go and do I don't know the answer to that I don't have judgment on that but I I would say in the majority of chase in the majority of cases or chases it might be actually pretty good for hints live but in the majority of cases it is a way to put off doing the work which by the way reading can also be which I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying since ostensibly we're gonna talk about but no no no but but there there's always if you have some degree of intelligence or just slyness you can always find a seemingly justifiable way to put off doing what it is you should be doing and as a writer I feel really qualified to say this because most writers I know will do anything to avoid writing I mean it's like all the plants die well I can't possibly sit down and work on my new chapter if my environment contains a dead plant I really need to fix it didn't plan it's like oh my shoes are dirty well I'm gonna need to get my exercise later in the afternoon and they need to be ready so that I'm not distracted later so let me put off writing and the writers will just do anything to get out of writing and that's human nature it's not because writers are bad people it's not because say somebody listening is a bad person that they've maybe been a seminar junkie instead of going back to the note book they filled up and actually putting next steps on their calendar it's human nature but for me right now it's it's about the work and holding myself accountable and maybe surprisingly to some people I am NOT a huge I don't have a high degree of confidence in in willpower or discipline I have a high to be surprising to hear that from someone like you I have a high degree of confidence in systems and accountability and loss aversion that creates the illusion of discipline and willpower right so you could take somebody let's just say who's always had trouble losing weight and I'm like all right I'm gonna take photographs too you really unflattering first thing in the morning after you've gone on a bender and your tighty whities in your kitchen now I own those photos all right and they also take 5% of your income and if you don't lose 20 pounds in the next eight weeks and keep it off for six months not only am I gonna release those photographs onto the internet post them on Facebook everywhere your friends family colleagues will see them I'm also going to donate five percent of your income to an anti charity you would rather nuke than give money to and you will be on the public record as having given $5,000 to whatever it might be you know they what who knows George W Bush Presidential Library or the American Nazi Party it doesn't really matter and not sure they're of charity but regardless you get the idea to an organization that you would just be endlessly shamed to be associated with unless you lose this weight and I guarantee you with that that why two people figure out the how to yeah I mean that's a pretty powerful external motivators yeah and it doesn't have to be that intense but I see no reason to I see every reason to make your incentives compelling and most people don't need more willpower or discipline they need better incentives so that that's either a reward or it's some type of punishment and the punishment could be prepaying for say a certain number of training sessions with an athletic trainer they are non recoupable mm-hmm maybe that's enough for a lot of people it is even if they make a lot of money for some folks the idea of losing a few hundred bucks right will drive them insane so they will actually show up or having someone like working out with a friend who's gonna bust your balls metaphorically speaking gender-neutral whatever if you don't show up to be their workout partner maybe that's enough to shame you or guilt you into doing it great use it so in my case to ensure that I won't lapse because I procrastinate sure I mean there are things I'd prefer not to do and I can find very easily justified activities that look very sexy from the outside and worthwhile to dodge the things I need to do that are harder and the way that I try to ensure I'll do those things I put them on the calendar I put down money I book flights I make all the plans I hold myself accountable other people I tell my close friends maybe the details of the silent retreat and spend an hour of their time and mine explaining how important and critical this is for me and what I'm gonna do in December and January and February and I know they're gonna fight some of these crazy deals with your friends where they have license to you know post unsavory photos I haven't I haven't done that but but I would if I felt like I needed it but just the fact that I've dropped thousands of dollars on travel plans and blocked out my calendar and made appointments with various people and made effectively promises to people in my life very deliberately so that I know they will ask about it later I will be ashamed of myself right if I say that I bailed that's enough for me that's that's enough to make sure that I'll do it well I think is dovetails pretty nicely with the new book tribe of mentors which is great and like you've described it as a you know choose-your-own-adventure you can crack it open to any page you know and spend a couple minutes and kind of set your intention for the day and you did a beautiful job with it so congrats on that I love it and you know when it when it got delivered here and I opened it up I was like this [ __ ] right up 700 Facebook like less than a year after the other like what kind of robot is this dude but then I did my own deconstruction of it I was like oh I can see how it I was able to do this and yet that doesn't detract from the value of it and which brings up this other issue that I know is kind of forefront in your mind this kind of marching order of Rican Sep schewe lysing how you navigate maybe not just your professional life but all aspects of your life with this mantra of you know what if it were easy right which is it and this is like another thing where I dovetail with you perfectly because coming from that self flagellation self-flagellating you know work ethic you know you got a like if if you if you don't feel like you've just punished yourself to the core then you didn't work hard enough on it and it could be better if you just suffered a little bit more for the benefit of the end work product that's how I approach everything and ultimately that's my enemy because it prevents me from actually embracing you know the work and and so this is something that that I've been struggling with and thinking a lot about as well that idea of like it doesn't have to be that way like that's actually a lie that you're telling yourself but the idea of it being easy is so uncomfortable it's like you know it can't I keep telling myself that but that is not true yeah it's it's a it's a massive gear shift for me to ask this question which I do a lot now the what might this look like if it were easy one substitution that people can use to ease into it if they're really uncomfortable with the easy part is what might this look like if it were elegant so just fewer moving pieces right so if you have to trick yourself into trying it as an exercise in journaling that's a good way to do it the second piece of that is what might this look like if it were fun too because something can be easier but still unenjoyable and wit and both of those things is sound so like when you verbalize it it just sounds so absurd but I've spent the vast majority of my life as someone who prided himself on high pain tolerance in effect looking for things that were somehow socially rewarding that involved a high degree of pain and a high degree of unpleasantness and what ends up happening at least what happened to me is I went from excelling in areas or sports or business approaches that were rewarding and as a necessary tax involved pain to seeking things that were painful which is not which is the is is it's mistaken this it's confusing the cause isn't in this symptom right because you created that imprint at an early a yeah this is the this is how it works like if I want to win this wrestling match here's what I have to undergo do that and then that gets applied to every air right and I think where it where things get really mixed up and then can be tragic is many things that involve some discomfort or pain can be productive right but not all things that are painful are per lead to anything productive there and you can just become a masochist without realizing it that's what happened to me and I also felt like I could grasp complexity and juggle a lot more effectively than other people so I was drawn to complexity because I felt I could win there I felt like it was a there was a high barrier to entry mmm that gave me a competitive advantage and yeah not sorry to interrupt I'd like that like when I was a kid and I was showing prowess as a swimmer I sought out the 200 butterfly because that was the event that no one wanted to do yeah it's sort of like looking for that world record that is like hidden or that just no one feels like yeah tackling like where's the easiest road to success well I'll go to that one thing that's the it's the hardest race everyone avoids it because it's so painful that's where I'm going right it's very similar to what you're saying for sure and then at some point especially in the last year I realized I'm just fighting an empty jacket here like who's my competitor is this ridiculous like I'm actually just fighting myself and what might this look like if it were easy and it started as a journaling exercise which is one of the most common patterns in all the interviews I've done and travel mentors and Titans and the podcast journaling meditation and journaling are kind of the two partners in a sense they work together really well they recur over and over again and says journaling one morning on what might this look like if it were easy well I've done it for many many different things with respect to this book yeah specifically you know for well I did it for the podcast when I started the podcast I had to ensure that there was next to no editing I'll do it my friends in the beginning to make it less intimidating I would allow wine which didn't always turn out very well it actually really ended poorly in the first episode in particular but that's what you needed to do that's why I need to do just to just like get the lawnmower started I needed to to to grease the skids and make it as easy as possible and you can always complicate it later but if you start with the complex the likelihood of quitting or abandoning it very quickly is high or not meeting a deadline in the case of the book for instance and so in the case of this book I never intended on writing at first of all I was just going through this crisis of meaning and had all these existential questions on my mind because I turned you turn 40 which in of itself wasn't a big deal but then the TED talk about suicide coincided to the day which was wild with the 10th anniversary of the 4-hour workweek so people expected me to get up and talk about all these blueprints for success I did the opposite which was surreal for me as well and then all these deaths happen including one of the mentors in the book Terry Laughlin who's had a huge impact in my life passed away a few weeks ago and that was an amazing podcast by the way thank you I was brutal man that was a hard one for those people who don't know yeah I recorded the last long form interview with Terry before he died and he actually sounded really good he sounded really good when I he was in the hospital but he sounded really good when I had him on the phone and his daughters felt like things were looking up and I went on the silent really the first text I saw and I've turned on my phone after 10 days and saw this barrage of notifications was did you see the news about Terry and then a sort of crying modicon from a friend of mine I was like oh no and I had to go back and rerecord the introduction because the introduction was this very upbeat like I'm so excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people thought it on I had to change it all the past tense which is brutal and all those things led me to want to reach out to people I respected many of whom were further down the road right they were 40s 50 60 70 s the best in various fields to ask them how they had navigated different things and when I started reaching out to people as one offs I realized pretty quickly that the answers were it seemed like a missed opportunity for me to keep them to myself and that's how the podcast started to big set have these conversations over dinner with a friend I be like god damn like this guy just blew my mind for two hours and it's gone right it's just this ephemeral experience that only I and he or she experienced and poof never to be heard again and it's it seemed like such a waste and I wanted to just try recording those and similarly when I started getting it just like you know why not just put this in the book and maybe it works maybe it doesn't that was another thing that I've done the last few years to really relieve unnecessary pressure that has been super helpful I'll do things but in the very beginning I'll set the expectations with any partners that it might not work out and if it doesn't I'll make them whole right and so you did yeah you did that with this book right you told the publisher like I'll give the advance back yeah might not work like it's coming together yeah if it doesn't it doesn't come together give you the advance back and that's now people who are your intelligent listeners who are paying attention may say well wait a second Ferriss that seems like the opposite of holding yourself accountable right so there are but I will say there are times when I want to apply pressure and then there are categories of activities in my life where I've historically applied too much pressure and instead of just like stressing the organism in a beneficial way I'm just like sitting in a tanning bed for 10 hours straight which is not helpful and right the idea of writing a book is just going so deep into a pain cave that you may never resurface yeah you don't need you don't need to add salt to the wound like it's already going to be a difficult slog and for the first few books I really punished myself unnecessarily I made it a lot harder than it had to be and the consequences were pretty dire I mean my health would suffer and except for during for our for our body I was walking the talk for that one but for the other books I really let myself deteriorate and so for this one I set the expectation okay I'm gonna give this a shot I'm gonna try it the easy way and if it doesn't work doesn't work give it the advance back which which puts my polish in a bit of a pickle I mean it puts them in a bit of a tight position but fortunately I had a release date for this yeah yeah well yeah I mean thankfully you know HMH houghton mifflin has been very patient with me but I also delivered on the last book which was set up very similarly in the sense that I wanted to try something new I'm not sure but if it works I'm gonna know very quickly and I will buckle down and really get it done and then we will just by the hairs of our chinny chin chin Hill with the publish and print and get everything handled but yeah and then and then it came together so it's been um and every time that every time something like that like that works for me where I take not necessarily the path of least resistance but I don't automatically choose the path of most resistance and it works it helps to reinforce me not punishing myself right like those neural pathways yeah yeah just like oh okay great like I don't have to go into the gym and like fracture every bone in my body every time it doesn't make sense yeah see this is I really need to learn this I'm facing you know writing a new book and and I'm and I'm blocked by by fear and by that idea that inevitably this is gonna be painful right like I've already made that decision right and this is not serving me right and so reframing it and coming up with a different Avenue to approach it I think is important so that was that was super helpful to me to have you to hear you talking about this so regularly yeah one of them one of the mantras that I've been that word bothers me still but one of the I love your aversion to like any word that is it even in the slightest bill and I think I've developed you know how you can experience adult-onset allergy so for instance for instance I love eggplant and two years ago I develop this allergy to eggplant which sucks and it's very severe like my throat will close up and it that that really bothers me but nonetheless have developed this adult and said onset allergy and I think I also developed a San Francisco induced adult-onset allergy to to a lot of woowoo stuff and if for those people who haven't seen ultra spiritual by JP scooters on you tears oh my god just watch that and you'll kind of get it if you've never had the experience but yes I'm a stickler for words in certain words I think just carry a lot of baggage that require a lot of lifting to get out anyway so there's a phrase let me use that then I repeat to myself a lot and in the last two three years in particular and the the phrase is don't retreat into story so there are certain stories we all have that we tell ourselves and some of the stories very very old right IMX I can never why I always blah whatever it is I like this is all this is going to be painful or I always [ __ ] up whatever there's these these stories as short as they might be as poorly as they might sell as a children's book these short stories that we all have and I've really tried in the last year and a half or two and meditation does help a lot with this too whether use an app like headspace or guided meditation from something it's a terrible core Sam Harris or whatever or just TM or some type of seated meditation to tell myself and I'll put this at the top of my journal in the morning if I'm using something like the five-minute journal and then all caps of the tapas but don't retreat in the story don't retreat a story I might even if I'm feeling myself starting to tailspin into some old pattern I will go into my journal I've never talked about this and since I know I'll be using the journal each morning I will I will I will put one of two things at the very top of each journal entry for the next say 15 days before I can forget or procrastinator or not do it one is don't retreat in this story the other one which is very closely related is actually from Tony Robbins who have gotten to know in the last couple of years who impresses me the more I get to know him which is saying a lot because frickin Tony Robinson anyway and that is state and then an arrow to the right story then an arrow to the right strategy this is really important so state leads to story leads to strategy because what what I've noticed for myself is that if I wake up and I'm just in a funk didn't get enough sleep or I'm just maybe feeling the in the the early symptoms of maybe going into a funk for whatever reason there are many things that can trigger it what I'll sometimes make the mistake of doing sitting down and immediately trying to problem-solve in a depressed energetic or emotional state and what tony has explained to me is if you do that the lens that you're going to wear is only going to allow you to see the problems and the negative so you're gonna sit down you're gonna try to you're gonna try to form a strategy from the outset but you're going to have a negative state a disabling story that you're telling yourself and this strategy is gonna be terrible yeah you're trying to solve the problem with the mindset that created the for all right it began with right and instead the the state story strategy leads me to that's one of the things and not many things can get me to do this so I am I'm very much an evening exercise guy but that has encouraged me to once again go in the calendar and pre-booked exercise with trainers I don't this is gonna sound bad but like I don't need trainers I don't never really had trainers for what I accountability see count abilities so I will book myself for things that I would normally never do like one-on-one Pilates classes oh my god puke right like which actually done well technically is pretty goddamn hard it's like GST the gymnastic strength training in a lot of respects but nonetheless let me not defend my Pilates have it right now but I will I will say pre book Pilates or Accra or some type of Olympic weightlifting in the mornings at least say three days a week and I'll book it out four weeks in advance I'll prepay schedule everybody and I know they are showing up right for me mornings like 10:00 a.m. I know is laughable people but like to make sure that I am up and ready which means I will have to wake up probably at least nine which is just an accomplishment for me historically gone to bed like 3 4 5 a.m. Wow which it's not help meant minute manage manic depression by the way and but I'll get it on the calendar and that will set my state then I will have an enabling story and then also the strategies it's a very long-winded way of explaining why I use two prompts at the top my journal and I'll pre fill them very honestly number one don't retreat into Story number two a state arrow story arrow strategy to things on that the first thing is I have a mantra a phrase that I use that's similar to that which is mood follows action yeah right which is essentially saying change your state right like if you change if you take an action to change your state then you are in a better position to tackle whatever difficulty you're in but the idea that you're gonna try to solve your problem in the mood in which you know is perpetuating it is ridiculous or the idea that yours gonna wait until you feel like doing something in order to feel better like that's never gonna work but to get and the second thing is to get back to this idea of story see that super woowoo god picture at black-and-white photographic well yeah that guy it's super woowoo guru dude like guru Penta yeah yeah he actually he's an amazing consciousness and he was here doing an event and he addressed this very subject and he did it in a very interesting way in talking about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves he said imagine a branch on a tree and every knot on that branch is one of those stories and over time as we mature and grow there's more knots and we we Wed those knots we create a narrative out of the series of these knots and that becomes the story of your life and for most of us we go through our whole life without ever challenging those stories but it's all fabrication right it's all illusion these may be things that happen to you your memory of those events may be skewed but why is it that we choose these knots as being the defining sort of character defining events of our lives and don't we have a choice to choose different things that happen to us over the course of our life to form a brand new narrative that can tell a different story about who we are that then projects you know into the future as behavioral change that could completely you know reshape how you live yeah and at night it's it's a I think it's a really useful framework for thinking about it and furthermore out add that maybe is alluded to with the journaling for me at least changing the stories or creating new stories looks like exercise it's not a one-time decision right it's not one and done this is a practice well that groove is so deep it takes a long time to yeah you have to practice it so I do that through journaling very frequently and I'll have say prompts that I'll use with I am dot dot and that is an opportunity each morning to practice new stories right I like that and I found it very very valuable but you need to use repetition like you said their grooves are it's like you've been playing the same goddamn track tens of thousands of times you need at least at least a few hundred repetitions just to get a toehold mm-hmm with this new story and it does have a chance doesn't you don't need to reach an equivalent number of repetitions particularly since you're now consciously directing yourself the quality of those reps is better and I think makes up for a lot of lost time but you do need to take it as a practice and for me what that means practice I'll tell you what practice doesn't mean to me practice doesn't mean I'll do it when I remember to do it practice means I put it on my [ __ ] calendar so it's not on my calendar it doesn't exist happen yeah getting back to the book one of the parts of the book that's been really helpful to me and it's spoken to me directly is these strategies around how to say no you know which is I just I'm terrible at you know yeah you seem to me to be somebody who's always been pretty good about boundaries and I can't imagine the opportunities that are coming your way you know that you're probably constantly you know being fed and I'm sure most of them or the vast majority of them are super cool things that would be really fun and awesome to do so let's talk a little bit about the power of saying no and and how you think about what to say yes do yeah this is a perennial topic and it's a perennial topic and a perennial challenge because weather opportunities or problems let's talk about problems for a second because I think the comparison will be helpful there are many people who think and I've certainly thought at different points in my life if I just do X or achieve Y my problems these problems will all go away and what you realize is as you continue on this journey that is often meandering called life you don't get rid of your problems if you achieve certain types of success you just trade up so maybe you had like you know the the corolla of problems then you trade up and you've got like the use mercedes of problems and you trade up and you have whatever the porsche of problems the the magnitude and complexity can can become really challenging and the opportunities become themselves problems in the sense that and many people listening might say come on give me a break like this is such a I wanna career like well I got like I get 1% or woe-is-me story but it's not and I'll tell you why because thank you very much in in the very very very beginning of your career I do think yes as a default can be very helpful but when I say the very very beginning I mean literally maybe 1 to 2 years out of college if you go to college you don't have to go to college but let's just from my personal experience once you have an even a vague glimmer of a notion of what you're really good at versus what you're bad at and once you have a semi-decent group of friends and colleagues and co-workers the birthday parties the going out for drinks the conferences that may or may not piss away three four days of your life these start to appear and they hear the siren song and my experience that the the when I've encountered stagnation in my life or felt overwhelmed for the most part sometimes it's due to you know catastrophe and huge problems but very often it's because I have over committed to the kind of sort of cool stuff and then my calendar is so crowded you know as Derek Siver's who's one of my favorite entrepreneurs would say also just an incredible sort of philosopher king of programming and a just eccentric guy and the best way possible you know he would say that if it if it's not a hell yes it's a no all right now that's at a very high level that's helpful but then you have to translate that to strategies and tactics right but I do think that before you can say no effectively there are a few assumptions or first principles that are really helpful to accept at least for me because for instance everyone or not everyone but a lot of people have heard of in boxes zero and that's just never gonna yeah it sounds like a good idea but where you at what what ends up happening if the inbox is everybody else's agenda for your time and it's asymmetric or it's very easy for people to send email very time-consuming to respond particularly if if you're receiving more than you're sending so if you look at my top left right there yes three hundred and seventy three thousand one hundred fifty are those unread completely or like you read on but you just simply leon's you haven't even looked at them have not even so why even have like that email account I mean what did you know it's it's it's going to me so I let you concentrating more and more secret secret behind the velvet rope email address there is that yeah but I'm also this we ride on digress we could certainly go into crazy tech conspiracy land but if you want to talk about creepy there's a lot of creepy stuff that's been happening with recent upgrades related to Apple and Google as far as I'm concerned and I do know a lot of people in tech but when I upgraded my well this version of iOS I had no mail set up and it's somehow and I certainly not input these changes determined that I suppose through communication my assistants account should be automatically set up for notifications on my phone through mail I did not manually go like password and everything yeah so that's super I consider that very creepy yeah so part of the reason I'm diversifying my digital identity in certain ways but the the point being if you even decide to respond politely to all inbound there will come a point if you achieve 20% what you hope to achieve that becomes untenable I think in left unless you have people sending you snail mail or something maybe that becomes manageable but one of the most important principles for me that that has helped me to say no more effectively this is a principle right we're gonna get into the more nitty-gritty is that to achieve there are really big good things you are going to have to let a a lot of small recoverable bad things happen no way out and also recognizing a few other things that have been very helpful that and this is I think it's Herbert's whoa or swoops who is the first recipient I believe the Pulitzer Prize and I'm paraphrasing here be said roughly I can't give you one recipe for success but I can give you the recipe for failure and that is trying to please everyone all the time also lip service people have heard some variation of that before but the the paired quote that I think of a lot is from dr. Seuss this is what Ted Geisel which was the people who matter don't mind and the people who mind don't matter mm-hmm so if you don't reply to someone in a day or two and they get really really really pissed off I hate to say it but like that the people who have a lot of [ __ ] going on themselves and now they understand they get it so those are all just like operating principles then when we get down to strategy you have on the simplest level not responding outside of autoresponder and so if we're looking at email it's usually the most egregious offender you can set up autoresponders that indicate policies and it's so something you might have something along the lines of you're all I'm only able to respond to email directly related to projects I currently have on deadline unfortunately I'm not physically capable of replying to all the email that I receive due to cold intros and so on which also gives people a little [ __ ] slap if they're doing cold intros without asking first below are the answers to 80% of the email I receive mmm subject number one I'm not doing any book blurbs of any type for close friends family or otherwise zero number two like I'm not doing any more startup investing of any type ABC here so here's a link to an article that explains why and so on and so forth then it just requires the discipline to not reply even if someone's like hey I just want to check in it's like yeah I know you got my outer sponsor then then when you're responding I mean part of the one of my greatest that greatest it's not great in in the sense that I am great but one of my happiest realizations when I was put any other Trevor mentors was as I got these rejection letters these polite declines from people who are too busy to be in the book got one from Wendy MacNaughton is a very famous illustrator and it was so good it was so beautifully brilliantly crafted that I loved her more afterwards than I did before keeping in mind I just been rejected like very clearly rejected but it was so deftly done and I was bummed out I was bummed out for a little bit and then I remember I was with my my researcher sitting there and I think we might have had some wine and I said wait a second you know be really funny as if I included the rejection letters because we're talking so much about how to say no and asking people how to say no and we paused for a second then I realized wait a minute why don't I just ask one day if I can include yeah it's right here like you can read that but yeah so she ends up in the book and yes with her permission I'm not printing anything without anyone's permission but anything that she did not be in the book I ended up I ended up including a number of these rejection letters that I thought were very very well done and there are criteria that well done well done rejections check such as it's not a punt it's not hey I'm so busy right now I just can't get it like maybe sometime soon like two three months when really they just want to say no and then I put it in my calendar and fall out for three months and it wasted everybody's time yeah being a people pleaser like I make that mistake all the time which which I've also been guilty of right but this this is the this is the email very very Wendy so I included other examples from saying Neil Stevenson wrote Snow Crash and krypton nomicon this incredible incredible fiction writer another from Danny Meyer who's Reggie legendary restaurant or shake shack and many many others different styles right so you have to find one that fits your personality but you can borrow language and I'll point out some of the things that I borrowed from hers hers is really extensive because we know each other quite well and and so on but here it is very much suited to her personality alright hi Tim gah okay I've been battling with this and here's the deal after five intense years of creative output and promotion interviews about personal journeys and where ideas come from after years of wrapping up one project one day and jumping right into promoting and other to the next dot dot dot I'm taking a step back I recently maxed out pretty hard and for the benefit of my work I got to take a break over the past month I've cancelled contracts and said no to new projects and interviews alright so I want to point this is Tim commentary I want to point out this is very common in these good polite declines that they're making it clear it's a policy across the board and then it's not personal right that may or may not be true but at least the delivery is that it's a policy back to nd I've started creating space to explore and doodle again to sit and do nothing to wander and waste a day and for the first time in five years I'm finally in a place where there's no due date tied to every drawing no deadlines for ideas and it feels really right here's another commonality that's coming up so while I really want to do this with you I respect you and your work and I'm honored that you'd asked me to participate and his capital as stupid as it is for me professionally not to do it I'm going have to say thank you but I got a pass so another commonality is that people will say you know I know I'll be kicking myself later I'm sure that's gonna be a huge success but just for my sanity or my health I have to apply lis decline this another thing that comes up a lot is people will say something along the lines of I would love to do this but what you would get out of me will be so subpar mediocre compared to what I might be able to give with a future project I want to decline both the both just for my for my own benefit but also because I think you'll get better results from other people all right and she says I'm simply not in a place to talk about myself for my work right now crazy for a highly verbal only child to say hopefully we'll get a chance to talk somewhere down the line I promise any thoughts I'll have for you then will be far more insightful than anything I can share with you right now I hope the space created by my absence is filled by one of the brilliant people I suggested in my previous email and really thank you so much for your interest I'll be kicking myself when the book comes out and Wendy and she did send suggestions for other people and a number of them ended up being in the book including the very first profile Cimino Scott who is an incredible chef that is one hell of a great write decline but very different from from like Seth Godin who would just say yeah I can't do it yes sorry another thing on some level like she's she's going into you know quite a bit of depth into explaining why she can't do that's right which might which might fatigue other people I think you didn't have a relationship with her already that's right I think that is reserved if I had to guess that's reserved for people she knows right because it doesn't it doesn't scale very well but it really serves a purpose with the relationships that you value and as a contrast I'll read Danny Meyer's Danny Meyer is the founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group which includes many restaurants Gramercy Tavern the modern maialino Shake Shack etc all right fascinating guy really really smart did away with tipping in a bunch of his restaurants as a policy for a bunch of reasons with fascinating rationale behind us a real innovator in the food and beverage world all right so here's his which was sent to my friend who tried to get the job done who's super effective my buddy Jeffrey who helped a lot in the 4-hour chef nice so he asked Danny because he knows Danny and this is Danny's response to my friend Jeffrey Jeffrey comma greetings and thanks for writing I'm grateful for the invitation to participate in Tim's next book project but I'm struggling at this moment to make time make time ends meet for all we're doing at us Hg that's his business group including my ongoing procrastination with my own writing projects I thought carefully about this as it's clearly a wonderful opportunity but I'm going to decline with gratitude no the book will be a big success exclamation point thanks again Danny right so that's very short yeah and I want to highlight one line that you can just copy and paste right like you don't have to reinvent the wheel and that's that's what's been so fun for me about realizing how little effort needs to go into this when you find something that works it's like you just used the same language so this line I've used a lot you know I thought carefully about this Sutan that's a really key phrase right it's not just I don't like you sounds stupid it's like no I actually thought about this like I thought about I thought carefully about this is it's clearly a wonderful opportunity but I'm going to decline with gratitude period that's a really powerful gentle way to do it and there's so many ways that I've been rejected and continued to be rejected and you can take stuff from it I remember you know I've been turned down even early on by Seth Godin for stuff by who else I mean got a list is really really really really long Guy Kawasaki but they did it really well for a guy at one point declined something and this was just a year or two ago couldn't make it where he's like sorry just can't make this work alright so you can be very brief and in some cases that's better because you don't want people to try to counter and then you end up in an email just change I like yeah like now I'm gonna have to have five emails just being lakum email with exactly so my preferences do not respond whenever possible the only way to receive fewer email is to send fewer email basically and I'm a Robert Scoble who's Sofia a perennial figure in the tech world who really helped with the tipping point for the 4-hour workweek in the very beginning and he did the math at one point because he was getting bashed by so many email he was he was a certainly perceived then and still is as an influencer who can really move the needle and he said I've realized doing the math that for every email I send I get one point seven two in response that doesn't just you don't have to be a mathematician to realize that is not favorable to sending more email in any case so the guy said to me hi Tim sorry I just can't make this work right now I'll have to raise a glass from the sidelines and cheer you on guy right that's just great so he's he's being supportive but he's being clear yep creating a healthy boundary indeed is something I found very helpful going back to the policy or categorical decline which i think is very helpful there are a number of ways to do it so you can say you know just across the board I'm doing a for my sanity data you can say for a B and C reasons it doesn't really matter what the reason is by the way this is they've done all sorts of interesting psychological studies where they'll have say and a Confederate or someone involved with the experimenter go up to get in line in front of somebody for a copier say at an office and they'll say I'm sorry and I really just need to use the copier I'm in a rush or whatever even they wouldn't say I'm in a rush versus like I really have to use the copier because and what came after because didn't really matter it's like because my dog is really loud today because there was it because exactly there was a reason so that I think that also works in declines right so be like do to a B and C or a and B I'm following a strict this is one that I've used a lot because I was turned down by a famous investor for a lunch meeting and I know him really well and he's like sorry I'm following a really strict no meeting diet for the next month just to like catch up on everything that I've slide behind which I realize that I've much rather take meetings and drink coffee and like [ __ ] then do the stuff I really seems like wow that's a really chose phrase a no fill-in-the-blank diet so I started using that like a no I'm sorry I'm on a no conference called diet for the next month and people wouldn't even question it except it's amazing so you can do that that works really well I think this idea of no you know how to say no effectively and do it in a healthy way yeah it extends so much further beyond how we navigate email especially as you know we're in this period of time where it's just it's impossible to be bored like we're so inundated with stimuli and it's it's so tempting to you know see what's going on on Twitter and if it's not Twitter its Instagram or at snapchat or it's this or it's that and it's like before you know it it's 4:00 in the afternoon and you're like all I've been doing is looking at timelines like it's insane alright and how do we you know so this the saying no has to be applicable to all manner of you know behaviors and and thought patterns in order to like you know do what Cal Newport would call like the deep work like how do you how do you cut out the noise you know make those decisions about where you want to invest your time and like adhere to them so that you are actually doing what you're supposed to be doing oh yeah and in the case of digital tools and screens and social media like every per almost every person listening this is gonna be so woefully outmatched by companies that are spending billions of dollars to do exactly what you hope to avoid which is losing your focus I mean that they're spending billions of dollars of R&D to ensure that you never maintain focus for terribly long because that is how they're economically incentivize so let me give to two tools that have helped me one is just a tech trick and then one is a mental framework that I found super super helpful so the tech trick actually comes from Whitney Cummings is a really well-known comedian and writer director in tribal mentors and she learned this from blanking on who but a researcher who used to work at Google and it's turning your phone to greyscale mm and if you it's it's wild how much of an effect this has I was very skeptical I was like really like I'm gonna cut back on my use of social media by changing it to greyscale you can find how to turn your phone to grayscale in a million different ways just search turn to greyscale and then the model of your phone button I have one it's super super simple and I would say for myself and also readers who have tried this based on feedback on social the irony right that they they are using social I'm certainly using social say thirty to forty percent less just by changing my photo to greyscale and what's the psychology behind that it's just not as like it's it's not pinging your dopamine receptors yeah it was just like some neurological mmm like how much I wonder if people were dieting if they just had like the equivalent of Google glass and could switch it to greyscale they'd stop would they would they not overeat as much I suspect probably actually they would eat less if they saw their food and great skill right it's I don't know the the neurological basis for it but kind of intuitively makes sense to me the so that that's one really easy trick that you can use the second is a framework for saying yes or no to things and that I found really helpful I use all the time Kyle Maynard is also in tribe mentors is a a quad congenital quad amputee what that means is he was born without arms and legs effectively his arms and mid upper arm and his legs and around the hip mm-hmm nonetheless he's in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame number one so like wrap your head around that yeah wrestling fully able-bodied people he was pinned and beaten every match his first season people were calling it child abuse and just crucifying his parents then he started to win then he started to dominate and people called an unfair advantage the same b-boy and wrestle in college like how far did he take how far did he go yeah that's a really good question I don't know exactly how far he went I mean he can still wrestle I know most snap me in half when I wanted demo and I say okay yeah that's enough I'm clearly I'm gonna get injured and that I wrestled like I was a pretty good wrestler and he also I just hope people have a little bit about of background again something to think about so he is the first quad amputee without the aid of prosthetics to climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro there are able-bodied athletes who have died climbing Mount Kilimanjaro he military crawled the whole [ __ ] thing to deposit ashes of a friend who passed away at the summit the guy's a stud and he spends a lot of time with thanked Special Forces folks and all sorts of fascinating CEOs and he was given this recommendation from a really high-level CEO and it was when you're considering an opportunity and invitation maybe a perspective hire could be anything could even be an entree at a restaurant if you want to ask the server this question it actually works really well rate it from one to ten you can't use a seven mm-hmm and I've been using this pretty much every day since I got this explanation from Kyle because he said the seven is a very slippery can a non-committal semi-cool value that he found correspondent two things he felt he had to do out of obligation or guilt or fear of missing out one of the greatest ways five years from now ten years from end up in a place you're really unhappy with is to let those be your drivers right however if you take seven out six you can't justify doing a six that's a barely passing grade that's a no yeah so it turns a gradient into a binary it turns a gradient into a binary and I've been using that for all sorts of things now it's been great and instead of making another thing I've tried to do a lot in the last year and did a company off site which is a fancy way of saying got like three people together in one place three or four people to focus on what categories to say yes to or evaluate and what categories to say no to so that it's not one-off yes or no one did without seven instead of making a million one-off decisions like categorically for instance speaking engagements I basically do no speaking engagements that aren't going to give me something evergreen I can then share with millions of people so for instance it's like tonight I'm gonna be on stage and I'm gonna interview Terry Crews and that'll be recorded you can use that and that was on the podcast but getting up and giving the same talk to small groups of people over and over again I basically stopped doing all of it I really don't do that anymore because as seductive as it is and there's there's money to be made I found it it wasn't getting me closer to my personal mountaintop right and for those people who find themselves maybe procrastinator saying yes to a lot of sevens there's a commencement speech you have to see I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this but there are a million commencement speeches out there neil gaiman 'he's make good art is so good and you can find it online it's very easy to find but Neil Gaiman who's just the Ober polymath of fiction writers the guy does everything he has the most hypnotic voice imaginable also go watch make good art that commencement speech and I just realized that you know a lot of these categories can be eliminated altogether and if it's scary to eliminate them you just make it a short term trial run so maybe saying I'm never doing speaking engagements again for the rest of my life that's too much of a commit that that's more of a commitment than even I want to make for this year maybe that's too big okay let's try for a month see what the father is like no matter how appealing something seems just say no for a month and then we'll reassess in four weeks and see how you feel this is a new thing for me to not what do the balance and the balances and the accounts look like right not the spreadsheet like how do you actually feel about it like are you glad you did it or are you stressed out that you did it super E is it's not easy but it's binary and feel good great let's do it another month I like that I like that and you know on this idea of of what if it were easy you know you're doing this book launch tour right now you're traveling around all these you know press obligations etc the podcast is still going on and then you just watch a new podcast like I look at that like for me to get like one or two episodes up a week of this like it's a lot it's a living with help so I was like oh my god another pot like how do you have you automated that or like how does that like I would just be completely stressed yeah so I can explain this is actually a really good example I think to tie in everything we've talked about or a lot of it alright so one podcasts done well at least takes a lot of psychic energy and time time I mean it's it's to do anything wrong I mean takes a degree of focus that has an energy cost so the Tim Ferriss has been been going now for a few years started off as a six episode test and when people come up to me now on the street I mean nine times out of ten it's it's probably even more than that it's like nineteen times out of 20 they talk about the podcast no mention of the books which is on one hand really exciting and one hand kind of depressing but nonetheless that that's it and I asked myself if I were to launch a podcast as a way to draw attention to the book what might it look like because I suspect and I don't know for sure but just based on observing charts for a long time now that there is a there is a high there is a high degree of reward on iTunes at least for frequency frequency of episodes and rate of new subscriber rate of new subscribers so what if I launched a new podcast same title as the book tribe of mentors which effectively because I don't have an audio book version since audio book versions by the way don't count towards the bestseller lists mm-hmm so why would you want to split your sales you can always come later what if I effectively dripped out the audiobook version visa via new podcast and put out one a day well if I look at my current workflow for a tim ferriss show where i have two to four hour and is that's just not never an I'm physically possible maybe it's physically possible that I have to drop the entire book lunch to do just that okay what might it look like if it were easy well I could look at my eleven questions which are in the introduction of the book I can read those questions and I could read the introductions of people who agree to read their own profiles and then my questions could be spliced in to each episode and then just have every every one of these people that you interviewed read their own responses that's right and I'll just mail them all the exact same mic if they miss you're actually sending them the equipment sending them the equipment they need and it's good still like a logistical thing to oversee it's a little but what I have to do in that case figure out I just have to figure out the recipe and then for people who hear the world algorithm techies throw it around like it's some super complicated magical thing it's really just a recipe it's a it's a series of steps things that are executed to produce a predictable result so if I can do that and I've spent a lot of time and I mean this first realization came about you know around the formulation of the 4-hour workweek and learning all the lessons that went into that but if you can do it we all like to think we're uniquely capable that no one could say check our inbox for us but the fact the matter is we do whether they're sloppy or organized follow certain rules and habits when we check our own inbox for instance you can train someone to do a lot of that certainly when it comes to soliciting or incur asking people if they want to opt in to record an episode that I will promote potentially to millions of people that will only take them 10 to 30 minutes and I will send them the equipment and the deadline is fairly flexible I can teach someone else like an assistant or a researcher to help me execute that very easily so I just had to I templatized the emails that would go out in a Google Doc mm-hmm and then that combined with Evernote provided all the tools needed via slack channel dedicated to this new podcast Thank You van used and and I got Mike's coming by FedEx coming and going and you got Mike's flying out to be blooney of them and then but but it's it goes even beyond that one of the most important things that they did in the very first episode is that gave myself an out this is what I mean and I think everybody should do this when they start podcast by the way give yourself the gracious exit option first episode I did what I didn't well I actually also did this for the Tim Ferriss show I said hey this is an experiment if it sucks I'm gonna stop if you guys hate it a probably stop I'm gonna do six episodes this is before there were seasons of podcasts all of a sudden people are coming out seasons like hmm that's a curious idea yeah so decide look at that and I'm like there's lazy but there's a but they're smarter than there's a genius in it because then you can say seasons done huge success now I'm gonna stop right as opposed to Jesus Christ isn't working it's really tiring I'm gonna stop so in the travel interest podcast episode one I said this is this is a season one it's gonna run for 10 to 15 episodes what is 10 to 15 episodes equate to it equates to the first two weeks of launch coming out with one episode every day so the tribe mentor is podcast has been last I checked I mean it was number one yeah it's like several days and it's been the top five it's been in the top five podcasts of all the podcasts on iTunes for almost a week and a half now maybe two weeks and then I'm gonna get to 15 or whatever it is and I'm done and guess what what might this look like if this were easy it would also look like short episodes that I can combine into longer episodes to use on the Tim Ferriss show that has sponsorships and everything else and yeah and it also ties back to even the book like the tribe of mentors what does tribe of mentors do among many other things for me and the readers what does it also accomplish which was a bit of an late discovery on my part but I realized half of the people in the book would be almost impossible to get on the podcast if the ask you're undercutting yourself I think I think most of those people in there would probably do your show it might take a while to get the skill I will tell you I'm not gonna name names but a lot of people in that book I rejected or not objected politely decline to be on the pod kaha I see so then you kind of come back to but now I come back with a supers wealth relatively speaking compared to two to four hour interview that has to be scheduled and have calendars meshed and so on a lightweight request to answer a few questions to be in this book now many of them are have seen the response to the book right which has been tremendous is found out today and it's number one Wall Street Journal business book in the first week which is exciting thank you and so now they're like yeah - yeah exactly so they've seen they didn't they did I'm not gonna say next to nothing because a lot of them put a tremendous amount of time into their answers I mean I mentioned Terry Crews his answers just blew me away he really got into it and gave really really deep answers but lightweight compared to doing a long podcast now that they've seen the return on investment from the profiles I have a hundred and forty people who are primed to be on the podcast and that saves me a tremendous amount of effort over the next year and what might this look like if this were easy book to her well I you know what I and what might this look like if it were fun well one of the things I've done in the past which doesn't make anybody happy at least of which myself is getting up in an event to talk about myself in the book that people have already bought to attend the goddamn event it's so stupid and it's boring for people I mean maybe it's not boring people seem to have had fun with it but if I'm asked myself what might this look like if it were easy and what might this look like I've ever fun it would be me on stage interviewing someone like Terry Crews to get material that's not in the book to record it to then put it on the podcast fantastic and yeah that's that's ingenious yeah yeah so that's that's how I'm thinking it's still like a lot of work though I mean I'm still like what you know what's a day like it how do you get through the day managing all the I mean you got people working with you helping you and you systematize this stuff to a certain extent but there's still like staying on top of like okay what's do what's going up when's that happening all that like that's there's a good amount of stuff I will say that for a book launch for instance 90% of the work is the book itself because in in today's world you might be able to game the system if if you want to use the black arts there's all sort of funny all sorts of funny business that people use with book launches it's crazy I mean including things that I would call book laundering all sorts of trickery that you can use to trick people for say a week but that's about it if your book sucks it's toast I mean it's just not gonna last it needs to stand on its own two feet and so the vast majority it's no mistake for instance that this book with the pull quotes they're almost all now it's antiquated in a sense because I guess it's two hundred and eighty characters now for Twitter but almost all these pull quotes are gonna be less than 140 characters that's not a mistake right easily tweetable yeah exactly and but also the content itself and meaning in that in the nitty-gritty of the chapters and then the like eight percent now we're at 98 percent right then eight percent is planning for months in advance not necessarily what you're going to do but what you're not going to do so I'll do a review of the last launch and see what pulled its weight and what did not and categorically no to almost everything for instance Facebook live in almost every case no will I promote your Facebook live no unless you give us advertiser access we can get into the Nitty Gritty but it's like no we didn't see any return and you want us to promote the interview that I'm doing on your platform no that defeats the whole purpose of being on and that's always a weird thing yeah and what I've noticed that were bouncing all over the place but it's like with with I have not said people may not believe this but I have literally not sent out a single email to anyone in that book saying could you please promote mmm zero because my assumption is I've sent them all copy they're doing it because they want the promotion yeah or I mean hopefully they like the book too but it's like I sent them all inscribe books that I spent a lot of time on and that's it and my assumption is if they really like it so that they would be comfortable sharing it they'll share it mm-hmm right if they're not comfortable sharing it and I try to in any way pressure them into it it's gonna create is easy yeah and it's gonna create a discomfort that [ __ ] things up later right it's like I'm playing the long game and maybe I want to have them on the podcast later okay doing that is in it jeopardizes them and lasts like maybe I could get them to promote but they're not totally into the book that's also a long term loss so I just let it ride this is what I did with the last book too and fortunately I mean people been super super stoked but in any case I don't want to get into all of all of that stuff but yeah what would this look like if it were easy I mean I'm thinking for the next book I might just I mean who knows maybe but like I have a couple of book ideas in my head which is just my addiction to masochism I guess and I might just give them away for free honestly he's sort of like what James Altucher does doesn't it yeah yeah getting my way a lot of books yeah I mean as long as I didn't allow that to give me permission to lower the quality mm-hmm which i think is a is a is a tricky temptation if you're doing giving my stuff for free but it's like you know the most important thing I've ever written I think is a free blog post that I spent months on which was the some practical thoughts on suicide in tough tough but post most difficult thing to publish I've ever published but you know that was free took me months to get done so we're you you know you mentioned earlier like the personal mountaintop or the summit like you know what is that for you like where are you taking all this we're we're just adventure heading Tim Ferriss I don't know and that's part of the excitement for me I I really don't know what I do know I don't know where I'm going and not to I'll pull out another way of cliche but the attribution I don't have maybe you do but not all who wander are lost like I'm actually enjoying exploring right now in what is to me very new territory that for some people they've lived with their emotions and experienced and explored them and felt them for their whole lives it's not true for me so this is this is a brand new terra incognita for me what are the people closest to you saying you about this like are they noticing a change yeah yeah they're everyone who's really close to me without any prompting from me without knowing anything about the silent retreat or whatever will sit down with me for dinner or something and they'll say what's going on with you not a bad read they're just like there's something different about you what's going on and I feel really good so I'm happy I'm more than happy right now and it's not a trade but if we if we looked at it that way I'm completely happy it elated to trade knowing the destination for just feeling good and that's where I am right now and I will say also that almost all of my most if you were to look at it from a professional standpoint like my most incredibly critical professional opportunities and decisions have come from slack in the calendar right so they're the the must do things that are important like we talked about that for instance some of these things that I put on the calendar for the next month or two but beyond that because that's the most important thing beyond that after something like this a book launch or a TV show launch or whatever might be I leave a lot of the calendar open because I cannot whatever I might plan I assume cannot take into account this the incredible and fascinating things and people that will out of the woodwork as a result of say mm-hmm I'll launch like this so I just create the space for that all of my best investments if you look at like Twitter Facebook Boober Alibaba all this stuff they all came from gaps in the system yeah not through some crazy grand design yeah whiteboarding how this is gonna go no no I mean if it's it's from me and I had a conversation with Tim O'Reilly recently on my podcast which was so much fun for people who don't know him you can check him out he's he's uh considered or he's been nicknamed the trend spotter in Silicon Valley a really good guy and he spends a lot of time just sitting in stillness and just listening and yeah that's either gonna make some semblance of sense to people or it's not I won't try really dig into but through meditation and other things he's for instance on his one habit that his most positively impacted his life in the last year so is on his morning runs he goes running every morning he makes it a point every morning he goes on a run to stop and take a photograph of a flower mmm yeah and that's an example of just like stopping and experiencing some stillness and then he'll just pause for a second then continue on his run and I'm sure I think I've spent so much time yelling at myself internally for so much of my life there was very little stillness and now I'm taking time and look I still have my monkey mind I still have [ __ ] that bounces around in my skull and when I sit down and meditate for those people who might be wondering like if I meditate for 20 minutes I'll take 19 minutes of that it's just like to-do list porn stupid argument imaginary hypothetical discussion I might have it's just nonsense and then there are like 30 seconds from like oh this is possible like this this state of stillness is actually possible however brief and learning to instead of constantly yelling at myself just like pause and I was walking through Washington DC a couple of days ago in during this crazy time launch with a back-to-back insane schedule and going to an event with an eight hundred or thousand people and and I this out is another thing I've never done before I've been reading and certain poetry it's precisely because it does not have an explicit purpose I want to develop it I want some serious counter-program not like I want to do a tolerance for that and I came across I've tried all sorts of poetry and almost all of it I've ended up rejecting like I either like don't get it I just don't get it or it's too flowery or whatever and then I found in English most people say how Fez HAF I see it was born about a hundred years after Rumi who people may have heard of hilarious this guy's hilarious like some of his poetry is so funny and so I've made it a habit I've been traveling with this book which is heavy but I wanted a paperback and reading one poem a night basically and so I read one before I left the hotel on it and it talked about in effect just paying attention to stillness and the small sounds that make you feel better and I was like hmm okay well like as I kind of intend to try but mentors to be it's like all right I want using the poetry to just have a lens or a question or an idea that I can then put on and walk with for a few hours for the rest of the day so I did that I'm walking through DC and shits going bonkers and they're like cars blocking off streets because such-and-such muckety-muck is driving down chaos people seem pretty grumpy and then there was this tree I walked by just full of these birds with this incredible bird sign right and I was I was fairly agitated like coming into it because I was sleep-deprived it's it's a very full week and it's paused for like 15 seconds there's no downside to that just like and listen these birds back alright despite all the [ __ ] going on right now and all the noise there's this in the middle of the city and it just that like one degree changed my state enough that then you telescope out an hour later after walking another mile get to the venue and I'm in a really good mood mm-hmm yeah that's all it took so I'm trying to pay more attention to this tiny little gaps of stillness instead of just continuing to yell at myself which has overall its produced a handful of wins but it's done a lot more damage not sustainable yeah I just thought of the title for this podcast like Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss on on why poetry will save your life it's yeah and I think one thing I'd like to underscore because I'm sure there are people out there and if I had to guess I would say a lot of them are probably super driven aggressive 20-something males and in a state of hormonal nirvana because they're just like coursing with testosterone and everything else it'll just allow them to run through walls seemingly without any damage I would say that what I'm talking about is not mutually exclusive from like the aggression and the winning in the competition like you can actually have both you don't have to choose what that's the thing that scares so many people they think if I start doing that I'm gonna lose my edge or that thing that I've imagined that I've decided is the thing that gives me an advantage and allows me to do what I do in the world yeah that's why a lot of a lot of my friends haven't tried meditation because they're if they're just there I came in and I'm really I'm worried that I'll lose that edge it's the wording that's the exactly winning that you it's like I'm worried I'll lose my edge and I won't be able to get it back I gave up two laxatives well if I accept too much I'll become complacent now the counterpoint to that you could put it really you could put like a Machiavellian lens on that and say imagine yourself in a negotiation and it's very tense and this person puts something the table that offends you and you have that extra second to reflect and be present and to like gauge how you're gonna respond to that I mean that is like a tactical advantage if there ever was one oh yeah I mean there there are there definitely tactical advantages and I will say that if you if you do a bunch of meditation and we would stuff like there are probably times when you're gonna be like I'm so chill that I just don't really want to do anything today I'm not gonna lie like there are those moments but I would say a few things to that a does it really matter like what are you striving in the most like like on a macro level like what are you striving for exactly is it to ultimately like chill the [ __ ] out and enjoy things maybe on some on some plane of existence secondly just like you said there is a certain magic in not caring and I think that when you incorporate some of these practices which could be as simple as the morning meditation if you're like you know what all this like feel-good stuff don't really care about it you can get some of the feel-good stuff as a side affective from just trying to be more effective by incorporating say morning journaling with the keeping in mind the state story strategy progression and that ever one of the best pieces of advice I ever received related to negotiation was super simple someone said to me he who cares less wins if you have walkaway power or the ability to just say no so another based on that in part I also developed a rule for myself which I follow I have followed very very very consistently which is if so if someone tries to pressure to meet me to make a decision quickly the answer's no if you want if you want a knee-jerk response if someone's like that's closing tomorrow or subscribe I don't know like like either yes or no now like I'm not gonna leave until you say yes to acts like then the answer's no absolutely no mmm and it's like any on-the-spot decision that you want me to make or forcing me to make answers now and there's tremendous power in them and it's a muscle that you strengthen as you practice it and you realize like oh [ __ ] like the world didn't end right and it's not just it's not that you don't care like it's more that you're not defined by the outcome or you're not attached you don't have an expectation around the outcome like you know that you're good outside of however this goes down yeah yeah yeah and yeah we keep going I mean there's so many things you can do for instance and you know I found out recently that Elon Musk went I think was in college 30 days on one dollar a day did he really to teach himself that he could do it Kevin Kelley one of my I would consider him a mentor certainly he's in the book I mean my my vote or one of my votes for the real world most interesting man in the world fascinating guy he's got an Amish beard built his own house technology futurist who can predict all sorts of crazy things that are coming down the line even though he never once already dropped out of school his story is just nuts and Kevin also at periods of time would go on extended backpacking trips he still does mean he's gotta be in the 70s now travels with his kids quite a bit and his wife and he'll go say a week of sleeping in his sleeping bag just eating oatmeal and nothing else that's it saw my tent yeah right yeah I sleep in that tab yeah and you do that every once in a while I try to do something like that at least a few days a month I almost always fast at least three days and months contiguous days a month which you do need to be careful with you can [ __ ] yourself up so have someone qualified supervise you for stuff like that but when you practice the the removal of of wants when you have a renunciation practice of some type or an ascetic practice of some time cold exposure also one of my favorites although it's it's not really the same category you you begin to teach yourself not or realize in some cases not only can you survive say sleeping in the tent or going a week just having like shitty instant coffee and oatmeal and a sleeping bag but for anyone who's gone from say the hustle-bustle grind grind grind to like a seven to ten day hiking trip how good do you feel after that you don't just survive you feel so revived from it's actually like a path towards that thing that we're all seeking for we're just doing it by pursuing the wrong avenues you know that's like through that simplicity and through that you know renunciation even if it's just on a micro level you can find a sense of self and a sense of calm and and a contentedness that that you know we're trying to get and all these other things that we're doing in our life and that continue to elude us yeah yeah absolutely I mean another thing that I've done for last two or three years now which I do almost all the time probably not on book lunch but for for most of the time screen free Saturdays so that that doesn't mean there are a few exceptions I am allowed to use things like Google Maps or uber or whatever I need to actually get around and survive but no laptop no social media and I have a lot of things that come out on Saturday pre-scheduled right so that I don't have to interact on Saturdays but so screen free Saturdays have been really helpful to also train me and to train other people to realize the world doesn't end mm-hmm it's amazing that we're in this place now where it's like oh my god a whole day on a Saturday when you don't work that you're not gonna look at a screen like you know crazy this is where we're at that's I mean that's how we've been conditioned because a fidgety anxious populace clicking on things is a economically productive populace for many of the companies who designed these things and whose revenue models are predicated on advertising or contextual or native advertising you don't even realize is advertising but that is split tested so that you have salacious or scary headlines it's a feel good to be in Austin and out of that environment yeah you know Austin feels really good and I think I think part of it was finding a better environment for the next chapters of tim professionally and personally I've always had a gravitational pull lost and I wanted to move there after college just didn't get the job at trilogy software mmm and then I got an offer after elegy is that Jolie mom yeah College with Joe yeah really yeah no kidding see what do you went to college said also Mike maples who's his roommate I know yeah I knew Joe I just have a vivid memory of Joe having this house in Palo Alto that was exactly like those houses from the social network it's like and there were just dude like code monkeys on all these computers and there would be you know he would throw these huge parties and all these people there and I remember when he's like out like I'm dropping out like I'm my market window is closing and I was like what are you talking about this is like 1987 or something yeah I thought he was out of his mind yeah yeah he's dead alright and yeah I don't resent the decision not to hire me it was but I think I make a terrible employee actually so it's likely a good decision but Austin's always had this pole for me so I think that it gets really nice as I'm considering the next things I'm going to do to have friends who have nothing to do with tech and that somebody best friends still live in SF and I love those people but it's it's very new for me to be in place like Austin where one of my best friend's is a filmmaker another one my best friend's owns a jujitsu school you know another friend is a musician and it goes on and on so the inputs are so novel and new for me I think that I'll have a chance to use parts of my brain that have been maybe neglected for a while she'll be nice so I'm digging it I'm really digging that my pop likes Molly pop likes Austin as well lots of green well cool man we got a we got to land this plane yes excited for you for your new chapter and it was great getting to know you and I'm it's gonna be cool I think how this plays out for you as you continue to kind of pull on these threads emotionally so thanks good man I appreciate you being open and sharing all that stuff today my pleasure yeah my pleasure and I would love to just save her for people listening that a big part of me opening up in this way which is getting easier but it's not easy for me is to hopefully help people or to minimize how isolated so many people can feel which I felt for a long time then I was somehow foul if I ended up in a dark place or in a dangerous place even that I was uniquely flawed and there was no way out and that I was suffering this alone and that other people were just fine and I was a broken toy and what's the point etcetera all this self-talk again the retreating into story into these loops that can be really perilous and certainly punishing and and can create a lot of suffering you're not alone and part of the reason that I asked all the people I interview in my books the recent ones anyway yeah about failures and so on is to highlight the fact that you know most of the people we think of as superheroes are walking flaws with tons of insecurities and neuroses who have somehow figured out how to build habits around one or two strengths I mean really and I mean you and I both know some really really accomplished people and they might not talk about it publicly and they don't have food but like trust me with rare exception I can't think of one maybe one but he's like a robot the rare exception they are all fighting battles that you know nothing about and it's safe to assume also that everyone's fighting about all you know nothing about there's no question about it you know we project an idealized version of what these people's lives are like that we that we idolize or or that we you know sort of see on screens they're just human beings you know and successful or not there's no escaping the human condition yeah there's a there's there's a there's an expression in here sometimes in startups or business which is a don't believe your own hype it might also be phrased as don't believe your own press releases and what I would say just by analogy is you know if if your Facebook feed or Instagram feed isn't a complete picture of your life don't believe that the story and the hype of all of your friends seemed the perfect lives on Instagram Facebook it's still that's also just the highlight reel and of course so yeah someone needs to I remember a friend of mine was saying very successful friend of mine who's saying I think where's the Instagram feed of me like crying eating haagen-dazs at 2:00 in the morning watching like reruns and growing pains like you don't see that very much he's like someone needs to make that Instagram account a way out all the others too but but I think it speaks to the power of a vulnerability you know this is this is really what you're doing like you're you're taking this leap into you know sharing aspects of who you are in your story in a public setting which is frightening and and takes courage but I think you're experiencing you know the emotional connection the very real emotional connection that that creates with not just your audience but those people who care for you you know and it's powerful it's really powerful and that is that is how you can help other people heal that's my hope man so thanks for giving me a forum to have the discussion and thanks for bringing it out yeah my pleasure man the book is tribe of mentors available everywhere you buy books they'll be easy to it's hard to escape Tim on the internet usually go out of your way not have them show up somewhere but he is T Faris on Twitter - ours - ah - s is correct that's right yeah Tim Ferriss - our stresses as well on Facebook and Instagram now - podcasts - podcasts if you search Tim Ferriss podcasts to have a bunch pop up if you go in the charts you should probably see tribe mentors if just a shorter format the episodes are 10 to 30 minutes instead of one and a half to three and a half hours which are my usual in the Tim Ferriss shell and you can find but also a couple of sample chapters a full list of mentors from tribal mentors at tribal mentors calm if you want to take a peek a lot of good books out there but I got to give it a plug you know if you're if you're looking for a gift book I will say very self-interested Lee of course that I do think there's something in this for just about anybody cuz it's a choose your own adventure book like you mentioned yeah truly as I mean you could just pop it open anywhere randomly or intentionally and and find good stuff you know it will you know continue to enrich you histories ways yes no matter and then the regardless I certainly wish everyone very happy very safe holidays and you know I'll close with one one thought which is actually borrowed from Gertrude Stein I read her say this recently now paraphrase which is the golden rule goes in two directions and for those of you who need a reminder do unto others as you would have them do unto you also do unto yourself as you would do unto others so if you're gonna practice kindness this holiday season which I hope you do and beyond start with yourself you do [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 101,188

Rating: 4.867979 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, tim ferriss, timothy ferriss, podcast, health, wellness, meditation, mindfulness, tribe of mentors, tools of titans, athlete, self-help, personal development, career, business, entrepreneur, tech, silicon valley, depression, psychology, psychedelics, life hack, productivity, addicition, writing, author, finding ultra, running, triathlon, swimming, wrestling, morning routine, tea, puerh

Id: S9qeJ5oKfbo

Length: 162min 47sec (9767 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2017