#173: Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers

Chris Young is an obsessive tinkerer, inventor, and innovator. His areas of expertise range from extreme aviation (world-record goals) to mathematics and apocalyptic-scale BBQs. Above all, he is one of the clearest thinkers I know. In this interview, we discuss a great many things, including his wild story and lessons learned from rainmakers like Bill Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates, Gabe Newell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell, Neal Stephenson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson, and many more. More topics we tackle: How he managed to get jobs working for the best in the world...despite having no credentials. Advice -- and incredible questions -- from self-made billionaires. Why raw foodism isn't always what it's cracked up to be. How geniuses show disappointment and ensure you correct yourself. The "emoji egg" breakfast. And much more... If you only have 5 minutes, I highly recommend listening to Chris's secret to working with hard-to-reach people. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're seeing appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, The Graveyard Book, Vagabonding, or more than 180,000 audio

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  ...quiz, which only takes two to five minutes and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this

• 2:51Tim Ferriss?

  at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on the show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 4:04Tim Ferriss?

  Wakka, wakka, wakka, you sultry savages. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are from the worlds of chess, entertainment, military, politics, athletics, business, or otherwise. And this episode is a fun one. It took place in my home, on my couch with tea, and it involves lessons from tinkers, geniuses, and billionaires. And the interviewee is Chris Young. And we talk about quite a few things, what he's learned from people like Bill Gates, Nathan Mervold, and perhaps a name you don't recognize, but in many ways, the most impressive to me, self-made billionaire Gabe Newell. And if you don't know who he is, you should learn all about it, and we will get into it.

• 4:49Tim Ferriss?

  Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, although saying it that way doesn't do justice to the work that he puts out, which is incredible, "Snow Crash," and so on. We'll touch on that. And questions, above all, we focus on good questions. We focus on better thinking. And we focus on, for instance, how geniuses and people who run, for instance, the number-one-ranked restaurant in the world, express disappointment. How do they express disappointment and ensure that you correct yourself? How has Chris managed to get jobs working for some of these people who are the best in the world, despite no credentials, at the time that he got the jobs? And how do you, of course, create apocalyptic barbecues? Very important question.

• 5:32Tim Ferriss?

  We'll get into that and risk having the entire neighborhood burn down. I don't recommend you do that, of course. I would never suggest such a thing. But the story makes for a good time. And we're going to get into it. So please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Chris Young. And we'll take you from extreme aviation and world-record goals to mathematics, biochemistry, and everything in between. So, fuck it. I left myself with no out on this one. Enjoy.

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  Christopher, welcome to the show.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Thanks, Tim. Excited to be here.

• 6:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, man.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Very cool.

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's been not too, too long since we've hung out. I mean, we saw each other in Seattle and that was sans Matt Mullenweg.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm actually impressed you remember any of that. There was a bit of drinking.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not to, not to point fingers, but I'd say whenever we hang out, there's always some form of drinking that seems to sneak in.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  It might be a chef thing.

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  It might be a chef thing. But before we get to the chef thing, and I suppose this is related, but you have a myriad of obsessions that, that strike me as interesting. And we're going to get to those. But since we were talking about the drinking and Seattle, one particular incident that I thought was very telling of your personality and kind of hilarious was this dinner that we had for a few people who had won prizes to be brought to Seattle to have this incredible dinner. And there was a family with a bunch of kids and the mom was talking about making smoothies. And just as before we started recording, I said, you don't need to feel that you have to censor yourself, not that that's what you do anyway. And I just remember after she had finished this like heartfelt

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  description of her, her smoothies, vegetable smoothies, you said, well, you know, vegetables are trying to kill you. And you went into this diatribe about vegetables. Can you elaborate on why, why that is the case?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Sure. So the, the idea, I think I probably said something to the effect of, you know, salad's a silent killer, which

• 7:36Tim Ferriss?

  Salads, right.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Which is actually not originally my idea. It's the, the great food writer Jeffrey Steingarten had a, had a brilliant article about this. But anybody who has sort of a biology background, this makes some intuitive sense. It's just one of these things we don't stop to think about. If you're a plant, like you're not looking to get eaten. Like, that's not a good outcome for you. Uh, and so you, you can't run. So you do all sorts of things to evolve some protection against all these predators running around trying to eat you. So it turns out if you're stuck in the ground and you can't run, you're going to evolve this really elaborate chemical weapon system that when a pest or a disease or a critter

• 8:19Speaker 02

  basically starts to gnaw on your roots or gnaw on your stalks or gnaw on your leaves, none of which are the part that you want to have eaten, you're going to try to poison them. Um, and so a whole bunch of things like fava beans, you know, if you eat them raw, people die every year from eating too many raw fava beans. Uh, apple seeds have trace amounts of cyanide, not enough to be an issue for a human, but for, for pests, sure. Even when a fruit bruises and it sort of turns out unsightly brown, that's a cascading enzymatic chemical reaction designed to create a bunch of molecular compounds that prevent spoilage. So there's all these people that think eating raw vegetables is like this inherently healthy, somehow more pure act of eating.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  And it's like, no, you're eating mostly a bunch of toxins and poisons and things that like, they may not affect you because you're a pretty large mammal, but mostly they're not that great for you. Like spinach, I think was the example I used that people think of Popeye and that you get all this iron from spinach. Like, it's part myth, there's just not that much iron in spinach compared to many other plant foods. But also, raw spinach contains a ton of oxalic acid, which actually binds iron. So people eat a lot of raw spinach, they end up with an iron deficiency.

• 9:35Tim Ferriss?

  And that's what produces that sort of, uh, not cotton mouth feel, but that mouth feel.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Um, you know, spinach is very mild in this, but, uh, uh, sorrel, which is, is a relative, it has this, this prickly, uh, if you've ever eaten rhubarb, rhubarb's very high in it. And if you eat raw rhubarb that hasn't been cooked down in a bunch of sugar with a bunch of jammy strawberries, um, It's a pleasant vegetable, but it's not as amazing as people think it is. And it also can leave you with this cottony mouth, especially if you eat it raw, which I remember doing as a kid, and it wasn't that great.

• 10:09Tim Ferriss?

  Now, imagine in the same bucket, you have, now, some of these might be from legumes or otherwise, but phytic acid and saponins and all these various anti-nutrients.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Kidney beans are another thing where you really need to cook them. And actually, you're best throwing out the water you cook them in. One, you're going to fart a bunch less because you're basically diluting down a lot of the oligosaccharides that you can't digest. But also, you're tending to dispense with some of the more water soluble compounds that aren't very good for us.

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  So, the science, you bring a lot of science to the table. Take me through getting to math and biochemistry. Did that come before or after food and cooking?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  It certainly came well before professionally doing it. The cooking thing was something I always did as a kid. It was just not the kind of thing that somebody growing up in the 70s and 80s was like, "Oh, that's a good career choice." Like, no. Like, growing up in the aspirational middle, middle class, like, becoming a chef was not a good career choice. You were not encouraged in that direction in, like, late 1980s, heartland America. Science, I think, was always interesting to me. It was stuff that I gravitated towards, but it wasn't the kind of thing that I had a natural aptitude, to be quite honest. Taking math, for example, the highest grade I think I got in a mathematics class all the way up through high school was a C minus.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I think partly because I had a chip on my shoulder about it, and partly because mathematics as it existed at the university level, once you got beyond, like, the weed-out classes, like, that bears no resemblance to what I had seen throughout high school and junior high and elementary school. And so, I think I partly got the degree to be able to say, "See, it really was the teachers, not me." And partly because I actually discovered it was actually really elegant and fun and interesting, because you were sort of playing these mental games of, like, what would the world be like if volume no longer has a physical meaning and stuff like that.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  I sort of took university in a very indirect approach where I just took things that were interesting to me, or I took them because a particular professor was teaching them and that that person was always interesting in doing cool ass shit. It happened to be that like after seven years and I kind of looked around and said like, what do I have enough to have a degree in? And it was like, oh, well, I kind of have enough to have a degree in pure mathematics and I kind of have enough to have a degree in biochemistry and I kind of have enough to sort of have a degree in history and so I maybe I should apply for those.

• 12:50Tim Ferriss?

  Historical, mathematical, biochemistry?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 12:54Tim Ferriss?

  What was your first gig out of college? And it always strikes me when I'm having these conversations with friends, it gives me an excuse to ask like the 20 questions that would seem utterly weird and creepy if I did it in like a normal conversation over wine, but I have no idea. Like, what was your first job out of college?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Cook. So, how's that happen? So, this goes back to, you know, the year 2000 and I was starting to pursue a PhD and what I or what I hoped would turn into a PhD in an area called biomolecular structure and design. So specifically, it sort of tied together mathematics and physical chemistry and cancer research and computers and a whole bunch of stuff I was kind of sort of interested in. But I also sort of, I had like a whole bunch of chaos going on in my life with crazy girlfriends, one in particular. So like, you know, academically, I was getting burned out and in the meantime, my personal

• 13:55Speaker 02

  life was sort of cratering in a super awkward and painful kind of way. And I remember somewhere around September, actually October 2001, so after September 11th, I just remember like my life totally imploded like in the course of about a week where like things were going really poorly for my research. The, the, the principal investigator on the project who was at was really like displeased with my work and part of that was I, I'd made some bad choices about the project and part of it was like I was completely distracted about what was imploding in my personal life. And so it was just sort of one of these, fuck it, I'm going to walk away from it with no clear idea of what the hell I'm going to do.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And I'd always cooked, like, I enjoyed cooking and I was reading a bunch of, I was actually cooking my way through the French Laundry cookbook and I was diving into Harold McGee, both of which I discovered around that time.

• 14:55Tim Ferriss?

  Been a while, that's the, the science of cooking?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the, the on food and cooking, the science and lore of the kitchen.

• 15:02Tim Ferriss?

  On food.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And so like, that book was fascinating to me. It was just like, this stuff is so awesome. How did I, you know, and I was one of those books I just discovered randomly browsing at Barnes and Noble.

• 15:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's a lucky find.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just like, this thing's cool.

• 15:14Tim Ferriss?

  And just as a, as a quick pause, for people who've seen the Four Hour Chef video, like the book trailer, the movie trailer, we shot it at Chef Steps, which is in Seattle, which, which Chris is certainly a strong heavily involved with, this at least we'll get into it. But the placeholder that we used for the Four Hour Chef book, because we put it in in post-production, was

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Harold's book.

• 15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Harold's book.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Yep. It was about the right size.

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was perfect size.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  So, like, all of this stuff was going on and it was like, I have no idea what I'm gonna do. I'm basically walking away from my, from, from my, my grant funding. And, like, I've gotta get my head back together because of bad relationship. And so I just decided, like, I enjoy cooking, so I'm gonna get a job as a chef while I figure out what the hell I'm gonna do with my life. Like, that was kind of as far as the master plan went at that point. And so, like, I wrote up letters to all of these chefs that had restaurants that, as far as I could tell, were kind of important restaurants in Seattle, with like, my academic CV being like, I am looking for a job. And remarkably, like,

• 16:20Speaker 02

  some of them actually called me back. I think mostly to see, like, if I was having a laugh.

• 16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Which of my friends was pranking me?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Basically. It was like, this ought to be good for a laugh. And it was a, it was a chef named Tim Kelly at the Painted Table, who called me up on a Friday and he was like, I got your letter. And, you know, now is not really a good time for you to come work for me at the Painted Table. Like, he quit the next day. But I have this friend, Bill Belikas, he cooked for David Boulay. He, with your science background, you and him would probably get on great. You should call him up and tell him that I sent you and don't take no for a fucking answer. Just show up with your knives and start, start cooking for him. So, like, I called William Belikas up. I'm like, uh, Tim Kelly said I should call you and definitely come work with you. And

• 17:09Speaker 02

  He's like, this was a Friday. He's like, great, when can you be here? This was what I realized, like, he just needed anyone who was willing to work for free. So I showed up at 3 o'clock with, like, I'd gotten a knife bag. I had a couple knives at that point. They were reasonably sharp. And like, they immediately put me to work doing some really menial, like, pick a bunch of thyme, cut down some shard. And like, I apparently did it mostly right. I was just incredibly slow. And at the end of service, like, you know, William was really gracious. He sat down with me in the dining room. He had a glass of wine. He offered me a glass of wine. And he's like, you know, now's probably not really a great time. I'm not sure I have all the work for you.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  And like, being very earnest, I was, I was like, I totally understand. Is there anybody in town you'd recommend would be a good place for me to work? I'm really, I'm really like, committed to doing this. I really want to see what it's about. And what I didn't realize at the time was like, that was probably the perfect thing to have said to William, because William had an enormous ego. And he was just not going to be capable of bringing himself to say anybody else in town was any good at all. And so you could just see him sort of sputtering and, well, really, there's no one. Like, I think I'm probably the right person to teach you. So why don't you come back on Tuesday? And that was kind of it. Accidental Jedi mind trick. Yeah, that was the, that was the accidental Jedi mind trick. And then it was just, like, I showed up. And I kept showing up.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  And like, I didn't get paid for a while, so my credit card was getting obliterated. But that's how I got into it. And I discovered that professional cooking is really a mental illness. You either have it or you don't. And like, within months, I was like, I have to do this. There isn't really a choice. And that, we're off to the races. That was your therapy? That's like the coping mechanism? That was totally my coping mechanism. It like, played into all of my introverted antisocial behaviors to basically like, lock myself up on a Friday and a Saturday in a kitchen. Because like, I could feel like I was out and socializing, but I didn't actually have to be out and socializing. So it was great. And like, the next eight years were a cultural black hole for me.

• 19:21Tim Ferriss?

  So we're gonna, we're gonna jump around, as is my want to sort of create a podcast that's as hard to follow as Memento. I want to talk about, just paint, paint a visual picture for people, because, so we flash forward quite, quite a, quite a long ways. Talk to me about the massive pigs rotating around a fire. No, it's fire rotating around a pig. Can you explain the spectacle to people, please? Just provide some, and how that came to be?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  So, I'll try to explain the spectacle, and then I'll try to give the, why do we do these shenanigans? So, essentially, there's the concept of like rotisserie meat, and usually you rotate the animal in front of the fire. And what you're doing is actually solving a very pragmatic problem, which is you have this big, giant, pig-shaped object. And the fire can bring heat to the surface much, much faster than that heat can diffuse and percolate through the meat itself. And every sort of weekend warrior bad cook has experienced this problem at some point, where like you char the outside and the inside is still raw.

• 20:26Tim Ferriss?

  Black and blue.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  And if you do something the size of a large animal, like, that phenomenon is exacerbated exponentially. And so by rotating it, what you do is you bring a bunch of fire to one side, and it starts heating up. And then before it overcooks, you rotate it into the shadows where it rests, and the heat diffuses through. And over sort of this dizzying number of cycles, you sort of time average out the temperature, so you get a crispy surface and an edge-to-edge evenly cooked animal. And we call this like rotisserie. It turns out the physics are totally symmetrical, that you can rotate the animal in front of the fire, but you could also rotate the fire around the animal. And aside from the idea that that's just sort of appealing on its own merits, it actually solves some practical purposes, that like by forcing wood or coal around really, really rapidly, you're forcing

• 21:12Speaker 02

  a bunch of air through it, and air drives the combustion faster. And so the coals get hotter, and the hotter they get, the more intensely they glow. And because you're dealing with radiant heat, and radiant heat sort of goes by the fourth power of the temperature, the hotter you can get it, like, the more intense the sear, and the more just radiant, radiant energy you're dumping out, and everybody gets a suntan, and it's just awesome. And you're flinging coal everywhere, and bits of fire, and like, dogs are hiding, and children are like, running around. And it, it's this post-apocalyptic wasteland, kind of like Mad Max just came through and charred some animals. So like, why wouldn't you do this? And is there a name for this? What is a? Well, so this was the inverted rotisserie spit. And

• 21:57Speaker 02

  How much space does this take up? Well, the first one, which I think is the one you've seen some of the photos of, had these two columns that were eight feet tall stuffed with anthracitic coal that we, that's a whole story in itself of how you get anthracitic coal. And, you know, they were spinning around at about 36 RPM on a cement mixer base around a pig that was sort of vertically suspended. It'd been spatchcocked in half and was vertically suspended and sort of Great word, that one. Spatchcock? Yeah, it's, it's just flayed open on this sort of medieval like torture device and we're spinning this fire around it. It Kind of looks like a dissected pig. Yeah. Or not a pig. Well, that's definitely a dissected pig, but a dissected frog, like sort of split open and Yes.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Flat. And, and you've got the fire rotating around it really rapidly.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  That was actually at my friend Neil Stevenson's backyard and this is the annual tradition. And I'll come back because there's the origin story part to this. So footnote, later reference, Neil Stevenson of? Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Seven Eves, a whole bunch of other stuff that I haven't read. Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  So Have I read more of his stuff than you have? I've only read one of his book and it's his most recent one because gliding features in it and I'm the reason. Okay, we'll come back to that. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, that's also how I met Gabe Newell. Well, this is the second time I met Gabe. I'd cooked a dinner for Gabe, but that was kind of it. And Gabe was at that party, saw the spectacle and goes, "Well, that's fucking awesome. So we totally need to do that at my house for our Christmas solstice party, but can you make it bigger?" And so for Gabe's house, we scaled it up two stories tall. We had a chain of hams and pineapples hanging off this, this giant I-beam and gantry crane. And I think it was about 20 foot tall columns that were spinning around this thing.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  And that was called the tornado of fire.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I've decided that this podcast is more like the movie Snatch than Memento. All right. So like the cast of characters.

• 24:05Tim Ferriss?

  So we have Boris the Bullet Dodger. All right. So Gabe Newell.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Gabe is man of few words, self-made billionaire, collection of thousands of knives.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  I believe it's an enormous collection. I don't know how many.

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, we'll get back to Gabe later because I want to leave that as a teaser. So it's origin.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I met Neil Stevenson when I was working with Nathan Mirvold at his invention lab, Intellectual Ventures. That's where we were writing Modernist Cuisine. And Nathan had just founded a lab that was supposed to like invent cool shit. And so like this guy Neil Stevenson showed up, who apparently is really famous, but I had no idea who he was. And I would like sit next to him. And I remember coming by being like, because I was, this was like the first book I was writing. I was trying to figure out how to be like a writer. And so I remember coming up to him and be like, I understand you're a writer or something. He's like, I understand you're a chef or something. And that was kind of the basis for our friendship is like neither of us cared about like our background. And so, but we did enjoy drinking

• 25:09Speaker 02

  a bunch of, of English ale and we had to sit over at his house and, and just chat with him. And he had bought, just had bought a new house. It was like this sort of mock Tudor mansion that sits on Lake Washington. And every summer, the first weekend in August in Seattle, we have Seafair Weekend. We're like, it's Fleet Week and there's a bunch of jet boat races and the Blue Angels come to town. And this basically all happens right over Neil's house. And Neil's this very quiet, introverted, likes things, very mellow kind of guy. And he's like, well, since basically the entire neighborhood is going to be terrorized for a weekend, we might as well just make a party out of that. And so he, he coined the

• 25:50Speaker 02

  idea of having an annual loudness fest. And that year he was redoing his backyard. So his backyard sort of looked like this, looked like Beirut after like a surgical airstrike had just happened to his yard. So it wasn't like a big deal that we dug a six foot by six foot, by six foot deep pit in his backyard and turned it into a jacuzzi to sous vide cook a 300 pound pig. And like each year after that, for the next five years, like each year had to be like more over the top, more outlandish, more ludicrously dangerous. Dangerous in the sense of maybe the neighbors' houses will burn down. Maybe somebody will be killed by spalling concrete.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Maybe somebody will just be burned to cinders because like we're cooking with magma. That kind of thing.

• 26:38Tim Ferriss?

  Neil's a surprisingly fit dude. I mean, because you think writer, you think sedentary, but true, true or false. Actually, no, I'll let you tell the story.

• 26:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I have to have him on the podcast at some point, but he does Victorian era exercises?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  That is what I have. He does that and he does various forms of what he calls Western martial arts involving sword fighting, where they really try to accurately recreate the way it was, would have been done. And on what I understand is fairly limited information. And so, yeah, no, Neil, I think, takes physical fitness like absurdly seriously. And so it's, it's one of the things that makes him like just awesome and interesting as a person to hang around with of, you would think of him as this overly nerdy sci fi writer and like, that's totally true. He's a huge nerd.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  But he's also fascinated by all of these physical activities.

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  What did your path look like from the cooking job that you last described to Heston Blumenthal?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  That was a very, very short hop and a very lucky one. But what isn't appreciated is when I started working for Heston, nobody had really heard of Heston.

• 27:57Tim Ferriss?

  So can you paint a picture of Heston? Maybe at that, I don't know if it's.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Today, you know, Heston is a world famous chef and rightly so. More famous outside of the US, I think, than inside the US. But he's arguably the most famous chef, except for maybe Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver, but certainly at that same level in the United Kingdom and Australia. There would be no modernist cuisine without Heston. There would be frankly, no Noma without Heston. Heston was really the.

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  Noma considered the.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Best restaurant in the world today.

• 28:31Tim Ferriss?

  Copenhagen.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  There's this, you know, the Fat Duck is basically that restaurant between El Buoy in the early 2000s and Noma, really starting in the, in the, in the last six or seven years. In fact, Renee went through, through the Fat Duck kitchens and the El Buoy kitchens. So the, the path for me was, was actually pretty straightforward. I think after about nine months of cooking in Seattle, it was a very small, high-end restaurant, not terribly busy, but it was small in the sense of very few people on staff. There was about four or five of us. And so the good news was like, you had to do everything, which is fantastic when you're trying to learn to be a cook, because I had no formal training. It was like, it was all on the job. And in a bigger restaurant, you, you sort of compartmentalized

• 29:17Speaker 02

  down and you can spend a year just doing the same stuff over and over. It's like any startup, right? Right. And so, you know, by being a small, a, a small restaurant that was just trying to stay afloat, like you did everything and there wasn't time to think, for anyone to think about whether you should be doing that. But by the end of nine or maybe 10 months, I'd realized I was really not going to learn anything more here. I had sort of maxed out the learning curve. And around that time, my- How did you know you'd maxed out the learning curve? What were the symptoms of that? Boredom, I think, on a certain level of I was doing, I was finding myself repetitive. I was finding, like, I'd set little tasks for myself at that time. Like, if it was

• 30:01Speaker 02

  shallots, and I had to get through a bunch of brunois, I had to get a box of very fine dice. If I had to get that done, I would try to time it, you know, be able to do a shallot as flawless as I could in, say, 10 seconds of salad, or a whole box in 15 minutes, or, and I realized, like, those games weren't really that interesting anymore, because I wasn't able to advance. It was about as fast as I was, is going to get. Or I was repeating them over and over and there weren't new challenges. And I also found myself-

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Struggling with William because I was wanting to push to do more or to try new things on the menu. And, you know, he was really pushing back. And in retrospect, I realized those were the, those were actually just the limits of that business. They couldn't take more on. They couldn't afford to do necessarily more ambitious things. You know, his job was to keep the lights on and make sure he was balancing the bills. And that's a very really hard challenge in any restaurant. And so that was sort of to me, the signal of I need to move on somewhere. There was a bunch of other stuff going on, I think, in the background of I'd gotten a book from Michelle Bra called Essential Cuisine that came out that year in English. Essential.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Essential Cuisine. Michelle Bra was a three star chef in Europe. And I think if you talk to a lot of chefs that came up in the early 2000s, we'll all point to that, especially at the high end, we'll all point to that book as being like, holy fuck, what was this? Like, nobody had seen. Spelled the last name? B R A S. B R A S. And just, I remember looking at it and being like, I don't know anybody in Seattle doing food that looks anything. I don't know anybody anywhere doing food that looks like this. You know, and I thought about wanting to go cook at that restaurant, but A, I didn't think I was remotely good enough. And B, I didn't speak any French. So that wasn't going to make it any easier. But it had me thinking about I needed to move on. I needed to see more. And I knew I wasn't seeing this, this kind of stuff here. And

• 32:02Speaker 02

  so how did I know it was time to leave? There was realizing that I wasn't really getting any better or learning new skills in the restaurant, but also because I was like, all of my disposable income was going into buying more cookbooks. I was realizing what I wasn't seeing. Right. You were seeing the. It gave me the big, the potential context of the world. And so about that time for Christmas, actually, my girlfriend, her mother gave me an anthology of food writing in 2002. And there was an article in it called The Gastronauts. And it was talking about this conference in Italy that chefs and scientists got together and were collaborating to try to invent the future of cooking. And in particular, they had Harold McGee talking

• 32:45Speaker 02

  about this chef with a name that nobody had heard of from England called Heston Blumenthal, who was really trying to apply science in his kitchen to do better food, to do more delicious food, to understand the whys of cooking. And I was like, that, that sounds perfect. So I wrote a letter. I mean, is sort of antiquated as it sounds, I wrote a letter and I actually faxed it to them.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And said, like, I've heard about your restaurant. I'm a chef cooking in Seattle. I'd love to come over to eat and stag, basically apprentice for the weekend in your kitchen, just to see. And they said, sure.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  So I flew myself over shortly after Valentine's Day 2003. Is it typical that a restaurant just says sure to a request like that? It's actually surprisingly common if you ask in the right way. Now, if you go to a restaurant that's oversubscribed, if you go to like the hottest restaurant, there's a line of people they can choose from and they're going to choose the best because that's their recruiting ground. But in retrospect, I don't even think it's a good decision as a chef to go there unless you're already established because by the time a restaurant gets that famous where there's a line of stagiaires out the door, it's a machine. It has to be. Everybody's coming there expecting to get the greatest hits, get the experience. And so it's very risky for a restaurant to basically allow a stagiaire much freedom at all.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  So what turned out to be perfect was the Fat Duck had just become a two. I actually thought it was a one star when I applied, but it had just gotten its second star. I don't know that I would have had the guts to apply if I'd known they were a two star. And they didn't have that many customers. And so I didn't really feel like I was overreaching. And that was the bit of luck is it turned out this was about to become one of the best restaurants in the world. It was, there was some dumb luck and timing here. But to sort of finish the story, I flew myself over by myself because that was all I could afford. And I remember being very confused about like the geography of England because the Fat Duck is actually west of London Heathrow,

• 34:53Speaker 02

  near a town called Maidenhead. It's actually a tiny little town in the Thames River called Bray.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  So I booked myself in a hotel in like west London, stupidly, and I'm like jet lagged and I get to the hotel and I check in and by that time I need to drive right out to the restaurant. And this is like my first experience driving on the wrong side of the road. And I think the statute of limitations are up because I also had to drive myself back that night after a lot of wine and that. Also inadvisable. Inadvisable. The wheel did not look better for it.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  But I got out to the restaurant and I they sat me at a table of one under stairwell. And the restaurant is this 600 year old pub. The ceilings are about seven feet tall, very unassuming, not what you expect for this, this, this fine dining room. It was like you're in someone's living room. And I think the best way I could describe the meal that night starts with the, the, the dish that it actually starts with to this day, the first dish you get is the liquid nitrogen poached green tea sour. And so I'm sitting at this very minimalist white linen table. Nothing else is sitting on it. And before they take your order, before anything else, the waiter wheels over a garret on one of those trolleys up to your table, has a cauldron, technically a doer bowl of liquid

• 36:09Speaker 02

  nitrogen boiling away at 200 degrees below zero Celsius. And he picks up a whipping siphon and dispenses what looks like a dollop of shaving mousse onto the end of a spoon and then knocks it into that, that cauldron of liquid nitrogen and turns it over and baste it for exactly eight seconds and then strains it out and dust it with some green tea matcha powder and hands it over to you on a little, a little chilled plate and asks you to pick it up and eat it all in one bite. And it looks like this little meringue. And when you bite into it, or at least for me, it was just fantastic. The, the shell sort of shatters crisply like glass and then it gives away this, this luscious

• 36:52Speaker 02

  mousse that's racing with the acidity of lime juice and the astringency of a bit of green tea. But the coolest part is you get this puff of, of smoke out your nose. So you look like a smoking dragon.

• 37:05Tim Ferriss?

  There's a video of, of me experiencing that for the first time in your lab.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:10Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, if you search Tim Ferriss chef steps, I'm sure it'll pop up somewhere.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  And so like it sort of, you know, twists your mind like, what is this? But, you know, the purpose was actually, it turned out totally reasoned out. It was, if you've ever had orange juice in the morning after brushing your teeth. It tastes awful. And it's not because the orange juice changed, it's because your mouth changed. And flavor is this idea that's actually constructed by your brain from all these sensory inputs. And so if you take orange juice, which is acidic, and you drink it after you've had a mouthful of alkaline toothpaste, it neutralizes that acidity and it tastes awful. And if you're trying to be the best restaurant in the world, you kind of want a level playing field. So the lime juice in that green tea sour is designed to neutralize any toothpaste residue.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  And the green tea provides these astringent polyphenols to cleanse all the soft tissue because maybe you had a cigarette, maybe you had a packet of chips or something before you came to the restaurant. So it's basically mouthwash that's this surprising entertaining delight. And the rest of the meal like totally did my head in and just blew me away because not only was everything whimsical and fun and gorgeous to look at, but everything was delicious. And so at the end of that night, I walked back in there. I was like, I will work for free for as long as you will let me work here. And what I didn't know is at the time, they like had no money, they were going bankrupt. And so they were like, sure.

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  You said the magic words.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yes. So I got back to the hotel that night and I called my girlfriend back in Seattle. Exactly. I said, great news, Dawn. I've just accepted a job at the Fat Duck. I'm coming home in a couple of days. I need to pack and I'm back here in a month. And all I got was, I can't talk about this right now. Click. And she's my wife now, so it didn't work out that badly. But you can kind of imagine how that went.

• 39:04Tim Ferriss?

  She is high tolerance, high built-in tolerance for Chris Young traits, I guess.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  It's a job requirement.

• 39:15Tim Ferriss?

  What do you learn at the Fat Duck?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Everything. Heston really became my mentor as a chef. I worked for him for five years. I initially worked for him as an unpaid stagiaire and this was like back in the day when some of the chefs were like just out of prison and things like that. And it was transitional, like we were moving definitely.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Most of the chefs were way above, above that, but there was a few chefs that were still flaky. And so I remember literally a chef just, they'd hired him and he didn't show up for work. And they're like, somebody's got to be on that station. So congratulations, you're, you're running that section now. And that was like getting promoted for me, like I am, it was at that time, like at best, sort of a farm team. Getting promoted to the majors. It's like, have fun. I got my ass handed to me every day. For the next three months. I remember I was the first to arrive at the restaurant at 6:30 in the morning. Or seven, depending on the day. And the waitstaff, the chefs had all left the kitchen. The waitstaff was having to throw me out at the end of the night because I was trying to get ahead of my prep.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Not because like I was like this really diligent guy, but because I needed every bit of extra time because I sucked compared to everyone else. I didn't know how to be fast enough yet. I didn't know how to organize my mise en place list to do things.

• 40:35Tim Ferriss?

  Mise en place, getting everything.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Getting everything.

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  In the right place.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  You have this.

• 40:38Tim Ferriss?

  Prepped.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Enormous clipboard of all the things you have to get done that day. And if you don't put that puzzle in just the right order. You're not going to get the job done in time. And then you're going to have a, you're going to go down bad and you potentially pull everybody else down with you. And so you will be hated. And so it was like, I didn't want to be like that hated.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  You don't want to be the private.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Like I was already the American. So I was already at a total disadvantage.

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You don't want to be the private pile from Full Metal Jacket.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Totally that. And so like it was put in the extra effort, but that's one of the things I really learned was.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  People see that. And if you're busting your ass and if you're not slacking and if you're just not totally incompetent. People are going to build you up, at least if you're in a good place. If, if, if you're not in that kind of place, you should probably leave. But people built me up over time. And by the end of those three months.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  You know, Heston, I had not become anything close to the best line cook, not even, not even at the same caliber, but I did have a knack for solving problems that nobody else could solve. And that's when Heston was like, you know, I've always wanted to have a kitchen that works on the new ideas. I've always wanted to have a place that's away from the pressures of service, where we develop the things, we experiment, and where we can afford to fail without affecting the customers. And with your science background, why don't you move to England full-time, Chris, and build that up? And that was, that was my opportunity. So it was like, walk through that door, right? This wasn't that hard.

• 42:03Tim Ferriss?

  What types of problems were you able to solve that led him to?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  So there were, there are two things. So one was our stock. We made an unbelievable number of different stock. And Heston was kind of this no holds barred, we're going to go for the last 0.1% of perfection on everything. And stocks come from meat, and meat is really expensive. And we were doing things like roasting down entire legs of animals, decanting off the juices as they accumulated to create these unbelievable decadent rich jus to go with the, for the various sauces. And not only was that time consuming and labor intensive, but like, it was ludicrously expensive, like just totally insane. Like you could take to, talk to most Michelin star chefs, and they'd be like, that's crazy

• 42:53Speaker 02

  talk. Like, nobody does that. Well, we did. And I remember being like,

• 42:58Tim Ferriss?

  What would that, so just, just to, just to try to put a fine point on it. So when you say absurdly expensive, like what do we, what would something like that look like?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Oh, thousands of pounds a week for a restaurant that really couldn't afford to be doing that because we didn't have enough customers.

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Even if you did have enough customers, it's still nuts because you don't have that kind of margin to do that. But we did. Like, because it was better. Like, we would do it. And I remember, we would serve the pieces of meat for family meal. And guess what? Like, the lamb still tasted like lamb, and the beef still tasted like beef, and, and the veal still tasted like veal. And like, my chemist brain kicks in, is like, we haven't gotten everything out. Like, as, as nice as it is to have like, the lamb stew for, for staff meal, which, which made the Irish contingent happy. Like, that's not a good thing for the restaurant. And so I was like, you know, I think we can do a better job here by grinding the meat up to increase the surface area of volume. And let's use a pressure cooker because increase the temperature, we can extract more. And

• 43:57Speaker 02

  So I did a bunch of experiments like in between service and I was creating some of the stocks that Heston was like these rival anything we're doing and I'm doing it with a fraction of the meat. So as a restaurant, we ended up buying a $36,000 pressure brat pan. It was like a giant scale commercial pressure cooker and hiring a chef that just did that full time for all our stocks and sauces and we paid it back. I think within the first six months in terms of the savings and we shifted all of the production over. So like that was one thing. That was a very process or anything. It was very transparent to the customers. But about the same time, Heston was starting to spend time with Ferran

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Adria and Albert Adria from El Buoy and they were just starting to do something they would become famous for in about a year, these caviar, these little edible caviar that they were making from melon. And the way they were doing it is they were taking a seaweed-based hydrocolloid, technically alginate, and they were mixing that hydrocolloid into melon juice and dripping it into a calcium bath that caused it to set up. And it was like little faux caviar that tasted like melon. And so this, I think, went on the 2004 El Buoy menu and Heston had seen it and they were very secretive about it. Like, well, you take product X and you mix it with product Y and this is what you get. So Heston came back and was like, you know, how is that done? And I sort of reverse engineered it and

• 45:24Speaker 02

  figured it out. And so those were the kinds of little things that I started kind of getting a reputation for, even though I was like in many other regards, like nowhere near the caliber of the other chefs in terms of like raw cooking abilities. And so that kind of gave me my opening.

• 45:39Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you are one of only a few friends that I enjoy asking seemingly innocuous questions of because I get pretty much the same pattern. And I see this with you, I see it with a number of friends, like Matt Mullenweg, another mutual friend, and then we have Eric Cressy, who trains a lot of professional baseball players and whatnot. If I ask him about deadlifts or any type of tear I might have on the inside of my leg. So I just want to, I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's like a mini novella, but this is usually how it works, is I'll send you a text. And it will be something like, hey, if I wanted to cool down the water in my bathtub

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  to 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 45 degrees, I'm looking at this, this, and this option. What would you do? And usually the response is along the lines of, let me think about that. I might think about A or B. And then I remember it went radio silent and then a day later I got this email. Ice baths and such is the subject line. And I'm just gonna read part of it. So I did a little bit of thinking about this and some quick math to confirm my intuition. TLDR, buy a small ice maker. Heating and cooling water is a pain because the water has the highest specific heat amount of energy required to change the temperature of one gram by one degree Celsius of any common substance. Your bathtub holds something like 50 gallons. Assuming your cold tap water comes out at 50 degrees Fahrenheit and you would like a

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  bath at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, then you need to pull about 4.44 million joules of heat energy out of the water to drop the temperature. Adding ice is by far the fastest, most efficient way to do the job without resorting to any kind of nonsense. Direct injection of liquid nitrogen would be fun. 29 pounds of ice should do the job nicely. Better yet, if the ice is cubed, it'll melt quickly and chill your bath within 10 minutes or so. Kind of the similar surface area approach you would use for the Jew. You could go high tech and get an immersion chiller of some kind. They'll do the job eventually, but it's gonna take a while. Then this is, this is the part that I like. And it just goes on and on. Your typical domestic electrical outlet is limited to 15 amps, which works out to about 1800 watts of power. Drawing any more and the fuse is going to blow. Physics being the bitch that it is, immersion chillers are only about 40% energy efficient at best.

• 47:49Tim Ferriss?

  This means that even a $4,000, 1800 watt laboratory, it goes on and on and on and on. So have you always had this degree of OCD?

• 47:58Speaker 02

  OC, obnoxiousness?

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  OCD, not obnoxiousness. I like it because you've harnessed it for the, for powers of good.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  How do you know I'm not working on evil?

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. Well, I, not, not usually forces of evil. And I'm going to retrieve, I have a yak milk bone that my dog is chewing and making a lot of noise with. Molly, I'll give you one of these later. So I'm gonna retrieve that. But has this, has this been a trait present since you were a little kid? Or when did that start?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I think on some level, yeah. I, I am terrible at things that I am not interested in. If I'm interested in it. It's one of these things where I will devote almost all my time. I will completely obsess about it. And I actually don't have a very good off switch, which can make me pretty difficult to deal with sometimes. And as I think back like in elementary school, junior high, high school, things that I was interested about in like high school was a great example. I was super into desktop publishing and zines and like, like reading Raygun and early, early issues of Wired and be like, I want to do stuff like that. Like I obsessed about it and learned everything about it and knew who was doing what.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  But like math at the time, who gives a rat's ass? And like, even though it was like super bad for my college admissions process, like that didn't motivate me. So I think I've always had the, I like to obsess on stuff where I can just keep going deeper and deeper. And, and on some level mastering or at least understanding what mastery is about in that, in that area. But it's totally driven by whatever's interesting me at that time.

• 49:41Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get converted to being interested in math? Like, was it a particular teacher?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was a combination of that. So I was briefly at the University of Vermont. It's, it's not where I finished my degree, but I started there mostly because it was very far from New Mexico where, where high school was and I wanted to get the hell out. And also because their admissions policy was basically, do you have a, for an out of state, like, do you have a pulse? Like, can you pay out of state tuition? Yes. Okay, welcome. I took a whole bunch of classes, but somehow I ended up signing up for calculus one, which was like, in retrospect, like totally insane. There was no reason to believe that was a good choice at all. But there was a particularly good, uh, it was actually a grad student teaching it.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  And somehow it made sense. A lot of it was, a lot of it's thinking, you know, calculus is often about, uh, can be thought of in terms of the math of motion and stuff. And so I found I had this knack for being able to think things through and visualize stuff very well in terms of movement or process, or I can manipulate three dimensional objects really well in my head. And that, like, I don't know that that necessarily makes you like well qualified for calculus, but somehow that and my unique. Background made it work for me. And I was, I just remember being shocked, like, I got an A, which was like, super weird. I was like, wow, I have no idea how I did that. But it was enough that I kind of wanted to keep going. And the further I got in it,

• 51:11Speaker 02

  the more interesting it got. And the more I discovered there was really interesting, creative problems that I could solve with those kind of tools. And now it started to make sense for me. It's like, it wasn't for its own sake. It was the fact that, oh, these are tools that allow me to solve and do these other interesting things. And so it was like, okay, I want to learn this because I want to be able to do those kinds of things. And this is like, the stuff you need to know to be able to go do that.

• 51:36Tim Ferriss?

  What books, if any, have you gifted the most to other people?

• 51:41Speaker 02

  So I think a lot of them will probably be in the cooking space. I've definitely, maybe on food and cooking, I've gifted that a lot. There, I mean, my career starts with that book in many ways. And, you know, there would be, there, there wouldn't be any of this modern cooking movement without Harold's book, I don't think. And there certainly wouldn't be modern cuisine that, that made a big, paid a big role in my career without that book. So I've gifted that a lot because I think it's relevant. And I think for a certain type of individual, it's this kind of book that every time you open it up, you see something, you're like, oh, I didn't even know that was there. That's super cool. And you read something and go, wow, that's, the world's like, way more interesting than I thought. I think I've gifted Michelle Bra's Essential Cuisine quite a bit, although

• 52:26Speaker 02

  it's hard to do now because I think it's out of print in English and quite expensive. The other book I've found myself gifting a lot lately is a out of print book on thermodynamics called The Second Law. And it was written by an Oxford physical chemistry professor named P. W. Atkins. And that book is just a phenomenal, casual, infographic laden read on how the world works from an energy perspective. And I've found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand. How to do something, how to make something work, whether something's even possible. It's frequently my bullshit detector when somebody's trying to convince me some technology or some idea has merit.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  I very quickly come back to just sketching out the kind of thing I did for that email where it's like, let me just see with knowing nothing about the subject, if I can just sketch out the basic ideas of the energy of how much energy is going to be involved or consumed, or like if I assume limitless capacities, does this make any sense ever? And so many things that sound good, like just don't pass muster as soon as you start looking at the world. That way you're like, well, that's clearly just a waste of everybody's time. And we should just stop and go do this, this thing over here, which like, at least you're not having to invent new physics or violate the laws of physics to go do it.

• 53:47Tim Ferriss?

  How much mathematics background do you need or physics background do you need for that book to be readable?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  None.

• 53:55Tim Ferriss?

  None. Great.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  You know, like you've got to be interested and curious in it. So some people's eyes will glaze over, but it's meant to be a popular site. Like I did like the hardcore math laden, um, physical chemistry, but very like, I have to go look up the math for some of that stuff now. Very, I'm very rarely doing math that's much fancier than like division. It's the concepts and just basically saying like, okay, like energy's got to be conserved or efficiency is like, what is the maximum theoretical efficiency this could ever work at? So does like the idea of a hundred mile per gallon car even make sense on the face of it? It's like, no, that's never going to happen unless we get rid of air. So those kinds of things, you don't actually need that much fancy math, but it's useful

• 54:41Speaker 02

  just to have the concepts of thinking about this is how this weird thing we call energy actually works and what's possible in this world and what's not possible.

• 54:51Tim Ferriss?

  Do you read any fiction?

• 54:54Speaker 02

  I do, though it comes in and goes in phases. So like, I think most recently, I read Neil Stephenson's Seven Eves and like mostly because I made a very, very minor contribution to a sub-theme in that book. And I found like, I actually enjoyed that a lot, but mostly because it was like competence porn.

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  So Neil likes to go on these big rants on about how some aspect of technology works. And if you know Neil, it's usually because like, he fell into that hole and dug pretty deep and then came back with all the, because he knew all these experts with this understanding. And so he'll go on for pages and pages and pages explaining like how you would actually attach a nuclear reactor to a comet. And you're like, it's basically engineering porn. It's like, oh, this is how you would do it. So like, if I'm ever in that situation, now I know.

• 55:49Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah, he did that in Cryptonomicon with some of the tunneling passages.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  And which I loved because I think you and I and a lot of our mutual friends are hardwired to get a crack hit from that type of detail.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  We like knowing how to do something and get stuff done because I suppose that some of what I liked about cooking and what I like about engineering and the types of stuff I do now, you're like changing the world. You're making something happen and it's not very abstract. Like it's very concrete. And that's for like my brain somehow that like that's just really satisfying. And so books that tap into that competence porn.

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was looking at the Facebook feed of a guy named Alex Honnold. So he interviewed him for the podcast. I'm not sure if it will have been published yet when people hear this, probably so. He's the most famous free solo climber in the world and has many, many speed records. And there was a post that he put up about stress and anxiety. And the point he makes is one of the things I love about climbing and being in the mountains, it's an immediate return environment. You make decisions, you have an impact, you reevaluate, you make more decisions, et cetera. In other words, the sort of delayed return environment being tied to anxiety. So it strikes me that on a very human level, it would be fulfilling

• 57:15Tim Ferriss?

  to have that type of immediate feedback and ability to iterate that you have in engineering or cooking.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  I tend to gravitate towards things where it's actually weird. Like, the day-to-day provides very tangible feedback. The goals can actually take years to accomplish. But I find I don't have the staying power for projects where there isn't a fairly fast feedback loop running on some level that tells me if I'm even going in a good direction. If it's just totally ambiguous, or you just can't know, I really struggle with that. That's hard.

• 57:54Tim Ferriss?

  See, you talked about writing the letter to Heston, and then your Jedi mind trick on the gent earlier. You've also worked with Nathan Mervold, as we mentioned, later directly with Bill Gates. How do you end up working for these people? I mean, if you had to try to tie together some kind of pattern, is there one?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Well, so food definitely ties it together. I mean, quite explicitly, I met Nathan because he was a guest at the Fat Duck. Seattle is home for him, and Seattle was kind of sort of home for me before the Fat Duck. I ended up going to University of Washington. That's where I did my degrees, and it was as home as anywhere. So Nathan was fascinated by cooking. He was particularly fascinated by the science behind cooking, and that was a shared passion. And we struck up a friendship over that, so...

• 58:44Tim Ferriss?

  Who is Nathan for people who don't know?

• 58:46Speaker 02

  So Nathan is many things, depending on who you ask. But the definition I will give is Nathan was my co-author on Modernist Cuisine. Nathan was, you know, there would be no Modernist Cuisine without Nathan. He's most famous, I think, for being the first Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. He's more controversial today for being the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, an invention company to some, a giant patent troll to others. I think the truth is, some are much more in the middle.

• 59:17Tim Ferriss?

  And let's look at the lessons learned. I mean, and you can pick and choose from whether it's Nathan, Bill Gates, Heston. Are there any lessons or expressions that really stuck with you that come to mind? And I'll buy you some time just by giving a personal example. Like I had a professor at Princeton who had a huge impact on me. And there were really only a few who did at that university, despite the abundance of riches that they have. But Ed Shau, Z S C H A U, who taught high-tech entrepreneurship, I believe he was the first or one of the first computer science professors ever at Stanford, partially because just like that cook didn't show up, effectively the same thing happened. And they're like, can

• 1:00:00Tim Ferriss?

  any of you guys teach what is this? Computer, computer science? We don't know what that is. Who can teach this? And he's like, I'll teach it. Sure. And that's, that's how I got the gig. And went on to take a number of companies public, become a congressman, be, he was a competitive figure skater, like fascinating guy. But at one point, I remember I was trying to get into his class and it was already full. It was oversubscribed. And I said, I'll do anything. I kind of sent the similar letter, but it was a letter. I sent him a letter. I guess it was an email through some basic terminal that we had at the time. And I said, I'll do anything. I'll clean the erasers in between classes, whatever it takes. I just, I'll sit on the floor. I don't even need a chair, et cetera. And at one point, you know, I actually did like clean up afterwards. And he said to me, he

• 1:00:44Tim Ferriss?

  goes, Tim, he's like, don't get too good at the menial stuff. Or you'll keep doing it. And I was like, oh, that's actually pretty profound. So anyway, I was.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's, there are definitely some. So I've been really, really lucky. It's more intentional now than it was then. But to have ended up with some profound mentors in my life. My father was, was absolutely my first one. I grew up in a family business. I think, you know, today that gives like, I am so glad for having like, had a lot of visibility into that at a young age, because now like, I need to do that. And everyone's looking to me for that. So.

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  What was the business?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  His was advertising research. And that also has proved fortuitous of just having really thought about how advertising actually works, how brands are built, what's good advertising, what's bad advertising, how marketing is put together, these kinds of things. That's like enormously practical when you're running a company because it's a big part of like your job. Even if you're not doing the work, if you're the CEO, you need to have some sense of like what this is all about. So there was many other aspects. My dad was a mentor, but certainly giving me visibility at a very young age into just how he thinks about running his business was helpful. With Heston.

• 1:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  Were there any specifics that your dad gave you or any particular thing that he showed you that stuck with you?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  I think there's two things. So one, I remember something he said to me. I probably was a freshman or a sophomore in high school. I would have been Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I distinctly remember him saying, you know, not needing to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn't even been invented yet.

• 1:02:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great thing to say.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  And it's like totally true. My career, like there was never a job description for what I did. I made it up and got some, somebody agreed that that was

• 1:02:42Tim Ferriss?

  A thing?

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  A thing. Which like I remember for like a long time, I was like super freaked out that people are going to realize like, no, wait, this isn't a thing at all. Why are we paying you? Like, we're just going to stop. Like, and, you know, the interesting jobs are the ones that you make up, I think. And that's something I certainly hope to instill in my son is like, don't worry about what your job is going to do, things that you're interested in. And if you do them really well, you're going to find a way to temper them with, with some good business opportunity. And that was the other thing he taught me was at some point, for as much value as you're trying to create in the world, you need to capture some of that value too, so that you can do more of that. And, you

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  know, I suppose today, I'm just trying to strive for that. So.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  He gave me a lot of freedom, too. You know, it was absolutely, he gave me the ability to take risks that seemed totally nuts. Like, the fact that I gave up, what to most people looked like giving up on nearly nine years of advanced education to go become a cook, like, to most people, like, I had gone insane. Like, that made zero sense whatsoever. Like, you're gonna throw away all your degrees, your PhD track to go be a cook? Like, what the hell is wrong with you? And he's like, "Go do it." Like, totally reasonable thing to go do. There was never that judgment on...

• 1:04:06Tim Ferriss?

  Did he also have an atypical career path?

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Um, somewhat, yeah, pretty atypical. I mean, uh, so, like, there's stories of my parents. My parents met when my dad was in the Peace Corps and my mom was teaching in a convent school in Grenada. She was no longer a nun, but, you know, jokes ensue here, she'd been a nun for seven years. And of course, like, being a nun in Grenada, not a bad gig. So, you know, that was formative for him. And, you know, he came from, I mean, I've literally seen the house he was born in, which had a dirt floor. Like, he was the alien in the family who had a perfect SAT, which got him into University of Chicago in a free ride. And like, you know, I think he was always striving to make that pay off.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  And interestingly, he never really took the traditional path, all the way to, he founded his own business, doing research for, came out of the ad world. And so, he started doing research for Fortune 100 brands globally. And he founded his business in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and made that work. And it was only possible because by 1990, you know, a fax machine and a million miles a year on American Airlines made such a thing possible. But it worked and it gave us, you know, that and my mom working as a nurse, paid the bills all the way through the 90s and gave us the opportunity to take a few more risks as I got into college and beyond.

• 1:05:29Tim Ferriss?

  How did your mom respond?

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Also supportive. That was, my parents... I think my parents had a pretty good sense of who I was and, you know, stubborn, obstinate. I think they knew that saying no.

• 1:05:40Tim Ferriss?

  You stubborn?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, I'm gonna do it either way, so they might as well be supportive of it because like, I've gotta go do this. I think they kind of thought it would have been a phase. I don't think they were.

• 1:05:54Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe it is, it's just a really long phase.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  It could be. Um, I'm nearly 40, I ought to grow up, um, pretty soon. But they, uh, they actually were reasonably encouraging me. They're like, you know, you're gonna learn a lot, this'll be interesting. And I think what was really good, and from their perspective was really good, they couldn't help me in that area. There wasn't, like, they could be supportive as parents. Um, they helped pay the credit card bill sometimes when it was getting outlandish and I was totally burning a hole in the ground. Um, but beyond that, they had no influence in whether I did well, is that it? There was, there was no net there, there was no, my parents had no influence in that world or couldn't pull any strings. So it was all self-earned, which I think they felt was really good for me. And, and I think it was, I think it was like incredibly helpful to have those be your

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  own achievements and not, well, did my parents make this possible for me?

• 1:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the lessons that, uh, that you took from, or things you learned from Heston? I mean, any specific instances?

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  A few things, but the, the biggest thing by far was Heston taught me what the standard of excellence really is. He always was pushing for the, the last bit of, of effort, always was saying, no, we can move the goalposts, we can do better. And he kept raising the bar on the team, on the recipes, on everything. And it was never, he wasn't, by the time I got there, I'd heard in the early days, uh, you know, there was, there was quite a bit of a temper about it. But by the time I got there, he didn't yell. Um, and, you know, he signaled disappointment in other ways, but he really pushed you, the team, everyone else, to strive for excellence all the time.

• 1:07:33Tim Ferriss?

  How did he signal disappointment in other ways?

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Well, I can, I can give you my, my one canonical example, which was, I remember I was on Gamager, I was doing, sending out one of the.

• 1:07:45Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain what that is?

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  That's, uh, it's the section, cold section in traditional kitchen parlance, but I was responsible for sending out several of the first courses that people got. So the red cabbage gazpacho, the famous quail jelly with, with, uh, truffle toast.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Forgetting now some of the things that were on the section. I would send out the pre desserts. And there was a few things on the a la carte menu that the Fat Duck had at the time. Because I had the deep fryer, I would have to do the pig's head tureen, I would do the radish ravioli. And some of these, it was actually a plus prepare the stocks and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was a wasn't the most technically demanding section, but it was a beast of Grand Central Station. It was Grand Central Station, and so it was a beast of a job in that regard. So I remember this would have been 2003. Early when I was actually still stodgy, that was before I'd founded the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen and had sort of earned a right to fuck up a little. I sent out a quail jelly that was for Suany, a VIP guest.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  And I'd remembered I'd gotten the orders in early during the afternoon that we were going to have some VIPs in. And I needed to prepare some of our VIP versions of the quail jelly. And so I prepared them, but it was actually, I didn't get to it in time. So I think I probably started doing it like 3:00 in the afternoon for like a 7:30 scene. Well, it hadn't set up. So there's a essentially the dish has a pea puree, very smooth on the bottom that sets a little firm. And then we set cubes of truffle and baby turnip into it. And then there was an intense quail stock that's cast that poured over it and allowed to set. And then we put a langoustine cream on top and we'd shaved some truffles and it's served with a little tiny bit of toast with truffle butter on it.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Black truffles and some radishes. And the order came on for it and I saw that they weren't fully set up. And I tried to float the langoustine cream on top anyway. And I sent them out to the pass, knowing that they they weren't perfect. Those things came back like a boomerang. Heston just came around the corner, holding them in his hand and just goes, Chris. He's like looking at me and then he's looking at the dish and he's looking at me and he's looking at the dish. And just not a chance. Puts it back and I just remember the withering look like if I ever did that again, don't show up again. Like, and I remember the lesson because he's like, we like, we can do something else. Like if it's not. Ready, we're not gonna send it out and just hope they don't notice that it's not that

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  good. Like, we'll fix it, we'll do something else, but don't try to slip by something that you know is below the standard. And it was like, you only needed that lesson once. That it's like, that wasn't the standard, and you know what the standard is, hold the standard. You know, ask for help, fix it, do whatever's necessary, but, but don't cheat.

• 1:10:35Tim Ferriss?

  That should be your T-shirt, "Hold the Standard."

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  I don't know that I need to be encouraged entirely in that behavior. Because there's another side to it, where you just become a tyrant about it. You try to push a team too far, you try to raise the standards too fast, and then you just end up, like, you turn into an asshole, basically, if you go too far.

• 1:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  So, you're managing people now, and we'll get to that, but just to, just to give people maybe a foreshadowing or a taste of things to come. This is something I struggle with a lot. How do you manage that fine line? Because I would like to think, and I do think that I have very, very high standards. Sometimes I think they're so exacting that they drive people insane. And to the extent that in the publishing world, I am considered a problem author, as they would say. Just because I don't, if something comes to the version of my past, like, okay, we're gonna put this on the cover, or this on the back flap, or this and this, and it's not to my standards, I just, I don't, I cannot allow it. But when I'm managing people, I, some people can handle

• 1:11:39Tim Ferriss?

  it, some people can't, but I do think there's a lot of onus on me also to decide how far is too far, and how far is not enough. How do you, how do you think about managing that?

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  I think I'm still trying to think about it and figure it out. On my good days, I think I manage it okay. On my bad days, like, I sort of feel like I had a personal failure, that I didn't manage it all that well.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  When it's especially when it's in the context of you're trying to do something really hard and you've got the whole company leveraged out on this working and you have as CEO or as you in case of your personal brand, you have total visibility into everything. And so that's the first thing is I try, on a good day, I will try to step back and say like, what context does this person even have? And have I provided appropriate context? If I provided appropriate context and they knew that context and they made a bad decision, it's an open question of whether you need to have a discussion of whether that was a bad decision or, you know, actually it's a bad decision, but given all the context

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  they had, maybe I would have made the same decision or I could have imagined somebody else. So increasingly, I try to find myself thinking about what context and visibility do I have and what do they have? And do I, am I basically being unfair because I'm operating from a greater set of information? Right.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  That still like means I screw up more often than not because I have a strong bias towards let's fix the problem right now. And that also usually can be quite ham handed where all I'm really training them to do is read my mind and try to guess what I want. And that's not going to work very well in terms of how we run the company or the types of products we need to do where I work with elite people. I work with people who are experienced and among the very best at what they do. And I will do a much better job and the team will much do a better job if we can take the time to set context and to basically, if there's a problem, say, let's look at how we can solve that differently rather than me just saying, we're going to do X. That said, there are times where like,

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  you need to take the scissors away because we're all running really fast and like we do not need to impale ourselves out of stupidity. So it's a dynamic thing and I'm still trying to figure that out quite honestly.

• 1:14:04Tim Ferriss?

  So you're holding the standard, holding oneself and others to a high standard. That's one thing that you got from Heston.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:12Tim Ferriss?

  What else comes to mind?

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Asking why, asking questions, challenging perceived or conventional wisdom. I've never seen somebody as curious about him who could talk to just about anyone else about whatever it was they did, what they were an expert, whether they were a psychologist or a sports trainer or an athlete or another chef or some food expert of some sort or a writer. He had this unbelievable ability to sort of ask them incredible questions and then sort of process it through his brain to have ideas that like I literally couldn't imagine having ever had that idea. And so I think that really put me on a path towards being, just really being curious,

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  wanting to understand what all these things were about and then using those as creative tools of how do I take those kind of ideas and apply them in my world?

• 1:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  What are, do any specific examples come to mind of a question he used a lot or just a particular commonly held assumption that he tested? And I'm of course thinking of the TV show where he did this quite a bit, which I enjoyed tremendously. We might chat about that, but anything in particular come to mind? I mean, and the reason I ask, so I'll give you just as context. So for instance, there are questions that some people are very well known for, but these are quite public facing, like Peter Thiel, right? Why can't you, why can't you hit your 10-year goals in the next six months? These kind of absurd forcing function type questions.

• 1:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  What is something, and I'm paraphrasing here, but like what is something that you believe that other people think is insane? Roughly that type of stuff. Question that I ask of experts very often is, you know, who is good at this, who shouldn't be? Who doesn't have the attributes, say of like a Michael Phelps who nonetheless is an incredible swimmer, whatever that might be? Any kind of long-held truths that you saw him test or questions that come to mind?

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Well, so there, you know, there's certainly a lot of culinary lore. I know he challenged and that influenced the techniques. I think the more interesting things were I don't remember a specific question. What I do remember were two specific things where Heston was remarkable at asking people in different ways, but getting to the same end result of like, what interesting thing are you working on? Like, why is that interesting to you? What's surprising about that? Is anybody else thinking about this? He had just this unbelievable ability to do it. And I can give a specific example. There was a psychologist at Oxford, Charles Spence, that Heston had a conversation with, who'd

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  done some interesting sensory research on juxtaposing temperatures. Like, Charles had created this little tool, this little instrument, that was basically like a radiator, like a home radiator. But uniquely, what it did is it was about hand-sized, and it would juxtapose hot and cold temperature right next to each other. And you would think that like, oh, you feel hot and cold kind of next to each other, you sort of get warm, right? But like, under certain circumstances, like, no, that's not what you get. You get really weird sensations because the brain is not equipped to process this contrast in temperature so closely placed together. And that was like, what Charles was doing research on. Somehow, and so Heston

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  dug into that, and why is that interesting? And why is that surprising? And then what I don't know how he did, I think that's what makes him uniquely Heston, was he came back with like, oh, well, wouldn't that be really interesting if somehow we could do that in a dish? What if, what if we could juxtapose two temperatures together somehow in a drink? And I remember him, this is right when I'd started working on new dishes, nominally as the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen. In fact, I don't even think we named it that yet. I think it was just Chris did experiments in a little shed in the back garden of the restaurant. I think that's what it was. And that dish became, it was one of these things of like, hey, I have this idea that we could make a drink somehow that would put hot and cold

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  together, like, go do something with that. And

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Like that was a super weird idea and I remember be like, you know, like, do you mean layered? Like, you know, cold on bottom, hot on top. He's like, no, no, no, they have to be vertical. Like they have to be vertically juxtaposed. I'm like, how the hell am I supposed to like? Like, what am I supposed to do with that? But at the end result, well, I actually developed hot and cold tea and using a technology called fluid gels and I juxtaposed a hot Earl Grey tea. At first it was tea and then Hessen came in. It's gonna be iced tea and it's gonna be Earl Grey tea and these are the flavor notes we need to get and this is, and essentially I'd shown that we could, we could basically put a divider in a cup and we could pour this hot liquid on one side and this cold liquid on the other. And because of the unique properties of this fluid gel, I could pull the divider out.

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  And if you whisked it to the table in a few minutes, the person could sip it and all the tea on the right side of their mouth would be piping hot Earl Grey tea and all the tea on the left side of their mouth would be ice cold and you'd get that effect. You'd get this, like your hairs would kind of stand back up and like the side of your face that had the cold liquid and it felt like as heavy as concrete and the side of your face with the hot liquid just felt like it disappeared. It was like a super weird effect. So like, perfect.

• 1:19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Want to feel like having a stroke but don't have the time?

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Basically, yeah. Have, have, have some fat duck hot and cold tea. But it was just that thought process. If you can have this conversation with a psychologist and have this inspiration for a dish where I might've had that same conversation and been like, oh, that's an interesting effect. But like I did, I don't think I would've drawn that path of here's the idea, here's what we can do with that. And he had this ability to talk to anyone and pull those ideas out. And you know, a lot of them failed. A lot of them went nowhere. But enough of them hit that you're like, wow, that's like actually super impressive. I don't see anybody else doing that. I see a lot of people copying. I don't see a lot of people finding those original sources for inspiration and doing something unique. And I think that really stuck with me and it's something I strive for in my work of, you know,

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  How do we challenge it? How do we question and do something that isn't copying, that's novel and that's inventive?

• 1:20:33Tim Ferriss?

  Let's flash forward to Chef Steps. How has Chef Steps changed over time? And what are some of the novel decisions that you've made? And could you describe what it is?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  So Chef Steps is a cooking technology company. Specifically, we make kitchen hardware that is controlled with mobile devices. But really, the way we think about it is we're building devices that allow us to augment people's intuitions in the kitchen to make them more successful. There's so many things in the kitchen where you're sort of thwarted in terms of getting the outcome you want because the technology sucks. So if you think about it like you use your oven and should I set the oven to 350 or 450 and is it going to be an hour or is it going to be 30 minutes? And like, why does it work in this one oven, but not in this other oven? And the answer is like, ovens totally suck as a technology.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  You're not even controlling the variables that really matter. And what really sucks about them, and frankly, every other tool we have in the kitchen, is that we have to translate our human desires into engineering parameters that we don't necessarily understand, even though that's not what we care about. We care about, I want a great roast chicken to have with my family, or I want to have this unbelievable experience of 72-hour short rib, or I want to cook some amazing vegetables. And it's like, sort of mind blowing to me that technology sucks that bad in 2016. So Chef Steps is a company that's trying to solve those problems. And we sort of realized that nobody else was going to do it. So we were going to have to build hardware. We were going to have to do artificial intelligence work. We were going to have to build mobile apps. We were going to have to combine it with content.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  And we were going to have to combine it with community because that was the only way we were going to be able to bring it to market because nobody else in the world knows how to sell a device like this. So like, I don't know that we fully understood that in 2012, but we sort of knew that we had to go on our own unique journey. And we knew we needed a lot of independence and not a lot of outside people telling us how we're supposed to build a company. And, you know, so I think Matt Mullenweg said it best when he, you know, we first got to, I first got to know him and he, you know, got to know a little bit about chefs. He was like, chefs test makes no sense to me. You know, I sort of felt like I was making progress when about a year and a half ago, Matt's like, well, it makes half sense now. I think in 2016, we now actually know how it makes sense and how we'll do the other job of running a business

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  of making sure we make money and we can keep growing. But it was this wandering path towards if we create a place in a culture where we can put people who are passionate about cooking and passionate about technology and passionate about inventing the future, but who, who are disciplined in experience and have a track record of getting shit done. And we create a culture that doesn't fuck them up or put them under a bunch of managers who don't know what the fuck they're doing, then we can create a company that nobody else could build. And that was really, we've evolved over the, over the years. We started out mostly as a bunch of guys putting shit on YouTube. And now, you know,

• 1:23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful videos.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  They're beautiful videos, but like, okay, how are we going to monetize that? Well, we're not going to monetize the videos, but they built us a community and that community steered us in the direction of what are the types of problems we can solve. And we sort of looked around and originally said, well, maybe we'll just do the software and let's see if we can get some hardware companies that get this vision and could do the hardware side of things. And that was just beating our head against a wall. So we're like, screw it, we're going to do the hardware too. There's a lot of hubris along the way.

• 1:23:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, there's the fine line between the necessary irrational exuberance and confidence needed to actually kind of step off the cliff and build the wings on the way down.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  And really good.

• 1:24:10Tim Ferriss?

  And hubris that all make you self, yeah, implode. The, the question I had was Q-stage left reappearance of Gabe Newell.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  How has he influenced the trajectory or you and the company? And who, who is he? Maybe we could start.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Well, so Gabe Newell is the founder and I think he calls himself CEO, managing director of something or other, Valve. I mean, to us, Gabe's just Gabe, but.

• 1:24:37Tim Ferriss?

  What is Valve?

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  Valve is the biggest software, so Electronic Arts, I think Electronic Arts is actually the biggest software company, but Valve essentially is by far the most unique company in the video game space. A string of huge hits that redefined what video games could be. They then basically realized they needed a better way of distributing games to get their control of their intellectual property back from like publishers in the early 2000s and they built Steam. And Steam is, I believe, the biggest online marketplace for video games and that's what's really made Valve a force to be reckoned with.

• 1:25:11Tim Ferriss?

  So it's like the iTunes of video games?

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  Yes, it was really the iTunes before there was an iTunes for video games. But Valve was really a company that has gamers at its heart and focuses on solving problems for video gamers or people that create video games and they built an entirely private unbelievable business that has some very unorthodox ways of operating where nobody's your boss, nobody tells you what to work on, you've got to figure that out for yourself and sort of self-organize. And now they're doing unbelievable work in the hardware space, particularly in virtual reality with the HTC Vive, which was really technology developed by Valve.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  And so I think what Gabe did for us, aside from being incredibly hands-off, was two things. One, he gave us access to capital in a very unusual way that allowed us to be in control of our own destiny. And he did very, very little beyond that except occasionally asking us questions about what types of problems we are solving, how we might think about a certain problem, but this would be very, very general. And based on the types of things we would feedback of, we're thinking about this or we're trying to solve this problem, he kind of made a decision whether he was going to keep extending capital. And we've kind of, he's kind of gone on this journey with us, but we see Gabe in a business capacity once or twice a year.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  We usually have a talk for 15, 20 minutes and he might ask a question like, How are you thinking about hiring people? Like, how do you hire people? Or how do you interview people? Or like, what's the role of content creators in the kitchen? Like, how does that work? And he'll just ask questions like, in the early days, it would totally randomize us. We'd be like, does Gabe mean like, we should be doing virtual reality for the kitchen? Like, no, he didn't mean that. It's usually whatever he's thinking about. And he's just kind of seeing like, how is our team thinking about this? What are the types of problems we're solving? And, you know, do they make sense to him?

• 1:27:07Tim Ferriss?

  Can you talk about the unusual way in which he's given you capital? Or is that not something you talk about?

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  I can simply say he's, you know, he's described himself as acting as a bank. Gabe does not own any of Chef Steps. He does not control how we run the company. Chef Steps is 100% owned by Chef Steps. He's made it possible for us to make some pretty big bets. But he's also basically made it, you know, kept us hungry. So essentially, he's, he's provided us a very, very favorable loan that we're welcome to pay back whenever we want. And that doesn't have any terms that sort of turn it into, I'm secretly going to control your company. Like, he was always clear, you guys have to own your work.

• 1:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  So Gabe has infinite levels of opportunities in front of him. So why, why would he, why would he take the, the time, energy, just bandwidth to do that?

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  So I really wish there was like some super awesome answer I could give you here. I will tell you how I know Gabe and how this all went down. I first met Gabe because I auctioned off a dinner that I would, that I would cook at.

• 1:28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, dinner?

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I auctioned off a dinner at a charity called Friends of the Children. And Gabe's wife, Lisa, purchased that dinner. And so myself and a couple colleagues from Modernist Cuisine at the time, because that's where I was working then, we cook dinner at Gabe's house. And like, apparently the dinner, according to Gabe, the dinner was awesome and fun. And we had liquid nitrogen. And he's like, I, this is like the, one of the best dining experiences I've ever had. And I know a lot of people in the world of food and lots of things. I don't know anybody that talks and thinks about food the way you guys do. And as he said, like, that was kind of it. Like, I didn't see Gabe for a very long time after I was there. He thought, I thought it was just, they were pretty nice. I didn't really know who Gabe was. Actually, I had no idea who he was. And it wasn't.

• 1:28:56Tim Ferriss?

  Seems to work out well for you. Who people are.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  It wasn't a particularly like insane house. Like, it was a nice home, but like, it didn't. You know, suggest anything other than Gabe was a reasonably wealthy guy who was pretty interesting and unusual and, uh, and low key. And then I met him again because he's also friends with Neil Stephenson. And so I did that, that event. And so those were my two meetings with Gabe prior to the third meeting where Grant Crilly from Modest Cuisine, Ryan Matthew Smith, who was the photographer on Modest Cuisine, and myself, plus a college friend of mine, Ed Starbird, we'd sort of started up a company called Delve that was a consulting company that went on to become the company it is today, which

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  is Chef Steps. And like, we were self-funding this and like rapidly running out of the not a lot of money we had. And so we were going to do a cookbook. And because of Modest Cuisine, a lot of publishers wanted to talk to us. And we sort of went, well, we'll, we'll give them the physical book, but we want to do stuff with the digital stuff. And we kept hitting this roadblock of like, publishers were smart enough to say, we want the digital rights, but like, they had no idea what they wanted to do with it. They were just smart enough and greedy enough to like, we should totally ask for them. So we're like, well, Gabe does a lot of stuff in, in like, digital video game publishing. We should ask him like, how he'd approach this. And so we just asked to meet with him and we went over to Valve

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  and we're like, we're doing this, we're trying to do this book deal and we're like, getting hung up on the digital publishing rights. And how would you like, suggest we might think about this? And he goes, well, I don't know anything about the book publishing world, but I do know a lot about the video game publishing world. And it's a terrible idea for creators to give their intellectual property away. Why would you do that? And we're like, because we need the money? He's like, what if I gave you a quarter of a million dollars right now? And we're like, and he's like, no, I'm serious. And he pulls out his iPad and he sends me an email right there. It says, I will give you $250,000, Gabe. And the money showed up the next day and we're like, okay, well, I guess we're not doing the book.

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  And that was it. And so it sort of incrementally came from there. But it wasn't like Gabe's like, you know, the only and so a month or so later, I think we had dinner. And this was like how naive we were. We had dinner at Cantaloupe in Seattle because it was like super good at the time and Jason Freiny was was the chef there and we're like, we should go there. And Gabe's like, I thought Cantaloupe sucked. And we're like, no, no, it's really good now. So we took him to Cantaloupe and we're chatting, we're chatting about the culinary world and he's just sort of trying to understand how our world works and asking us questions like how we're thinking about our business. And so Gabe goes, if I give you $100 million,

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  what would you guys go build that by building it, like, there's no value for anyone copying you? Like, I'll give you an example, like Intel, like when they go build a new chip fab, it's like billions and billions of dollars and there's no value in anybody else copying it because not only they have to spend like even more billions to catch up, but like they have to spend way more billions to basically learn everything else Intel knows about this. And then they have to be like 10x better for anyone want to switch. So it's like, it's just a waste of everyone's time. I sort of laughed that off at the time because like I had no serious answer to it. And really, over the next two and a half, three years, that was us answering that question of like, what's worth spending $100 million on in the kitchen space? I mean, the kitchen's crazy valuable.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  Cooking's crazy valuable. What can we go do that that like that makes sense? And he was patient enough for us to go on that journey before we're finally like, okay, we totally know how to answer that question now. We're going to go do this kind of stuff. And he's like, that makes sense. I'm on this train.

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like he's also, I mean, I've only sat in on one short meeting you guys had, and this isn't anything confidential, but seems very good at asking questions that force you to hone in on what you are uniquely capable of doing. As opposed to trying to do two, three, four, five different things simultaneously, one of which is say, Cash flow motivated.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, he's never asked anything like that. In fact, he very strongly advised against premature monetization like that we would just go do stupid shit. And he also sort of advised against running around raising a bunch of money because it's a really low value use of our creative energies. But, but I'll rephrase your question. What Gabe's really good at, like, yes, that's all true. No, what he's really good at is asking a question where you realize that the way you answered it, you are an imbecile. Like, like, I have just gotten used to basically feeling like I am a complete moron and like, I can't believe I just said that. That makes no sense. Like, I moderately feel good now where I feel like I came out of a meeting and like, like,

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  like, Gabe isn't like mentally rolling his eyes from like the idiocy that I like that came out of my mouth.

• 1:33:51Tim Ferriss?

  And does that come about because he will question or ask questions to try to clarify assumptions and then by speaking it out loud, you're like, that makes no fucking sense at all what I just said?

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically that. It's his ability to sort of surface what the real issue is and be like, you weren't even looking at the real issue. The real issue is this.

• 1:34:09Tim Ferriss?

  You know who I think is good at that? I mean, I don't know. You've spent a fair amount of time with Matt Mollnweg. I think Matt's also very good at that.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Matt's another person where I basically feel like a complete idiot. I also think, like, I look to Matt and go, I don't know how you know that much. Like, I think Matt might be one of the best people I know at running a company and how he, how he builds people up. I aspire to be that good someday.

• 1:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I remember Matt asked me at one point, we're flying around, we went to a few word camps together because I use WordPress and you know, I've since become an advisor to Automattic, but that's relatively recent. And I was really worked up into a tizzy because there were a bunch of sites sharing PDFs of the four hour work week. It's this must have been really early in my career as such, like 2008 or so. It was like Rapid, what the hell was it? Rapid Share, I guess, or a number of these sites. And I was trying to talk to Matt about it and get his thoughts because of course he's Mr. Open Source, but he has a for-profit company also. So it's a very interesting set of philosophical decisions and business decisions. I was like, how should I think about this? And he's like,

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Ultimately, it came down to talking through it and be like, oh, you're totally fucking right. Like, the people who are going to download a shitty PDF version of this weren't my customers in the first place. They're never going to buy the book. It's not like they would have bought the book but then found it for free. And at the same time, I'm just getting free marketing dollars and maybe at some point they'll be converted over to wanting to sort of exchange value for the value that I'm putting out there into the world. And he was totally right. And I was like, okay, rendered all of this angst and all of these time-consuming, potential avenues irrelevant. I was like, wow, well, that's a load off my mind. The meeting with Gabe reminded me of an expression that you hear a lot here in Silicon Valley, which is, if you want money, ask for advice. And if you want advice, ask for money.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  It seems to have worked out. So Valve, the only thing, the only familiarity I really have with Valve is their employee handbook, which is a PDF that's floated around for quite a few years, which I thought was genius. Really. And it sounds so boring, but if people look it up, and I'll put it in the show notes.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  The only HR document you will ever knowingly want to read.

• 1:36:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. How has that affected, or how has, how do you think about building your company?

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:36:32Tim Ferriss?

  How is it different?

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  I think we're now getting to the point, how is it different? I think early on, there were, I'll say it this way, I tend to think that Valve, as a culture, is Gabe's personal reaction to everything he really didn't like about the Microsoft culture. And Gabe was a very early and important employee at Microsoft. So Valve was sort of like, these are all the things that I think are why Microsoft is not going to do well in the long term, and we're going to get them right here. And he built Valve that way. And Valve employee Joe Ludwig, I remember asking me, like, how much of Chef Steps' culture did we copy from Valve just because that's what, like, Gabe told us to?

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  And I'm like, well, Gabe never told us to copy Valve's culture. He never particularly encouraged that. He did encourage us to think in certain ways that I think are going to bring you to those decisions. But in a sense, Microsoft culture came from Bill and Nathan. And I worked for Nathan for five years, and I worked on projects that reported to Nathan and Bill for another year after Modernist Cuisine was done. And I can tell you, in my estimation, the Microsoft culture came from those guys. And I was just as primed, when I was starting Chef Steps, to have a reaction to everything I didn't like about those cultural sensibilities of running a business. And so Chef Steps, much like Valve, is partially a reaction to

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  those are the things that I didn't think worked very well for running a company that's supposed to get the best, most innovative, most interesting work out of people. What are the things that don't work? At least for you? For me, I, so especially when you're in the invention or innovation phases, traditional goal-oriented management is not incredibly helpful. You're basically anointing this class of people whose job it is to tell these incredibly creative people what they shouldn't shouldn't be doing, and trying to judge them by some arbitrary metric. Like, that's a waste of everybody's time. And anybody who's really good isn't going to tolerate it for very long and will leave. Now, conversely, you can get really, really flaky creative people

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  who never get anything done, and like, you'll tear your hair out. Well, don't hire those people. We pretty much exclusively learn to hire people that are, have a demonstrated track record of doing incredibly creative, innovative things in whatever domain was relevant to their job. And they had a proven track record of they've shipped stuff, they've got stuff done. And we're like, well, that's like, highly predictive, we think, of like, you'll be able to do the same here. And if we have people like you, we don't need to manage you. Like, you know how to use your time better than we do. So it's your choice how you spend your time. You're free to make good choices, and you're free to make terrible choices. And if you make enough terrible choices, like, your team may ask you to leave because nobody wants to work with you. And if you make lots of good choices, we're going

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  to trust you to make more good choices. And so that sort of leads you down the road of of flatness.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Where you run into some challenges is when you're working on a shorter timeframe because you don't have infinite amounts of money, or when you have to sort of really align everyone pretty tightly towards a common goal of we need to ship, we need to pull six teams together to make this product ship and to monetize it and to not flub the launch. That's where we're definitely seeing there are struggles with flatness. The conventional wisdom is we should basically create a hierarchy to do this. I'm kind of fighting that right now because I think that's a short-term gain and a long-term disaster. I totally agree there needs to be structure. We need to have people that can clearly signal that they're being trusted to lead, but we don't want to make that permanent.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  And I think this is another thing we've learned from Valve that I think is fundamentally a pretty good lesson, which is people tend to want to keep working on the things that made them successful in the first place. That's antithetical to innovation and invention, and if you're a small startup company where like your advantage is speed towards doing something nobody else is doing, that's not a very good structure for finding those opportunities. And I tend to believe that for the type of business we are over the coming years, we're going to constantly have to reinvent ourselves. And the people that are really important today may not be the most important people to the company in five years when we might be about something totally different. The problem is if we anoint those people as special, senior managers, leaders, those

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  people will tend to want to keep working on the things that got them in that position, and that's not in the interest of the company, it's in the interest of them. And pretty quickly you have rent-seeking behavior and power politics and fiefdoms where the only solution for the company is to periodically come and just do this wholesale housecleaning of firing a bunch of people who used to be good because they've actually gotten in the way of the company. So we sort of took the attitude of like, let's just not create that structure in the first place. And that's why, even though we have the tension now, we're pushing out a very complex product where we have to hit a lot of things right, and there's a real emphasis on disciplined execution. Taking the short-term, easy way out of let's create a bunch of people who are managers of this process, like I'm totally convinced that that will fuck us up in a couple of years.

• 1:41:46Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any books or people who have most influenced how you make business decisions?

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  I think there's quite a few people. I'm always looking for perspective. I think Matt actually has influenced me a lot. I think there's people within Chef Steps, Michael Natkin, who's sort of as close as we get to something like a CTO. He certainly influenced me a lot on how to think about some of the technical decisions we make. In terms of other people that come to mind, absolutely Gabe and people like Jan Bernier over at Valve have influenced my thinking a lot. My father's influenced my thinking a lot. I read lots of business articles. There's some stuff, there's stuff that I think a lot of people in the Valley read that certainly I pay attention to it and I think about it and some of it I think is pretty right on. And I think other stuff is like super wrong-headed.

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  So I don't know that there's like any one person I'm looking to. The other thing I come back to is I try to look at the data and I really try to, I'm sort of prone to changing my mind a lot and it can feel random, but it's almost always because I'm seeing something in the data that I thought was true, but the data is saying it's not true. And so I have new information and I think the only rational thing to do when I have new information is change my mind. That can actually feel pretty randomizing to a team, so I'm trying to find ways to buffer that or to at least help them reach the point where they're changing their minds too without it just, you know, basically Chris has changed his mind. That's not a good outcome.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  So we tend to bias towards people who are pretty quantitative in their decisions, especially on the business side where we say, well, like let's listen to our customers. What is the data really telling us? What are they really telling us? And let's make sure we're not fooling ourselves with anecdotes.

• 1:43:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I've found two books very helpful for that. As someone who is, I wouldn't say particularly mathematically inclined or who got derailed by a bad teacher in 10th grade, if I want to point fingers, the

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  I support that finger pointing.

• 1:43:51Tim Ferriss?

  One, which I want to actually go back and reread or listen to, and I believe it's available for free on audio, is High Output Management by Andy Grove. And the other, which I think is helpful for Conditioning oneself or others, if it's kind of prescribed as reading for spotting cognitive biases and learning to try to trust the data is, it's a fun read too, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. So to shift gears just a little bit, I want to talk about goal setting. Of course, that's maybe an underlying layer upon which many other things are built, almost by definition. But can we start with gliding? What is competitive gliding and what are some of your goals there?

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  So competitive gliding is, there's different ways of doing it. But as I usually practice it, we're in gliders. These are big 15, 20 meter, 15 to 20 meter sailplanes made from carbon fiber fiberglass composites. And we're usually basically racing the sun. You know, we get all of our energy for competition out of the fact that the sun heats the atmosphere. That causes differential heating. You get thermals, which you see birds circling in and puffy clouds at the top of. You get sheer, you get winds that basically may be lifted up over mountains that create lift. We'll get mountain wave where the atmosphere actually starts to oscillate and we can surf that for hundreds,

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  if not thousands of miles.

• 1:45:24Tim Ferriss?

  So no propeller, no jet?

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  No propeller. We get towed up into the sky a couple thousand feet by another plane. And once we come off that tow rope, it's ours to go find energy. So.

• 1:45:32Tim Ferriss?

  So it's like big wave surfing, except you're on air.

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  And you can't see it and you have to look at the telltale. So our job is to basically read where the atmosphere is giving up free energy. The way a race will work is we'll call usually turn points. And so we might call, they might be a city, they might be an airfield, they might be a geographic feature. And these can be 100 miles apart, more, maybe a little bit less. And there's cylinders around them, usually turn cylinders, we call them, where you can sort of imagine these imaginary cylinders in the sky that are anywhere from five miles to maybe 20 miles around a turn point. And our job is to basically decide when to turn in those and get back to our home airfield. But the challenge is. You're given a minimum time on course.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  So we have to be out for, say, three or four hours. And if you come back early, whatever distance you flew gets divided by the minimum time, which obliterates your average speed. And if you come way over, you might have covered more distance, but your average speed also goes down. And so the very best pilots will usually time it pretty well to get back within a couple of minutes of that time over a four-hour race that might cover anywhere from 300 to 500 kilometers. And what you're really, you're covering enough of the landscape where the sky's going to change on you. You've got to decide when to start. That's, that's one of the other secrets is you get to, they open a, a start gate, but you get to choose when to start.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  And so there's a whole strategy and game theory behind when to do that. And the top pilots are all very good at this. So we call it start gate roulette, where like the top pilots will, will go out and be seen to go out and a bunch of the lesser pilots will follow them. And then they'll try to duck behind a cloud, get lost, come back and restart, and then follow all of those people who are essentially acting as markers out on course of where there's energy and where there's.

• 1:47:23Tim Ferriss?

  They're like the canaries in the coal mine.

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  They're totally the canaries. I have been that canary when I was not more experienced, where I was like, oh, look, he's going, I should just follow that, I should just follow that person. Like, no, I was being suckered. And what's really interesting about it is it's physically demanding. It's actually, you're getting a lot of sun, you're pulling, we might spend upwards of 30% of the time circling, but those circles are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.35, oh, sorry, 1.75 G-forces. Maybe occasionally you'll pull two Gs. You can actually pull a lot more to glider, but that's atypical in a race. But you might be pulling those G-forces of, of, you know, one and a half Gs for 30 minutes or more when you're dehydrated, when you're getting a lot of sun.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  So it's very, and you're changing altitude, which constricts and expands your capillary system. So you're, you're always having to pee or you're always dehydrated, depending whether you're going up or going down. So there's this big part of it where you have to manage your physiology for several hours. You have to be very disciplined in your decision-making because the difference between first and second or third might only be one, one and a half minutes. That's usually only three extra circles during a four-hour race where you might actually do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of circles. So. It's all about efficiency. It's do I need to make this turn or should I be going? And what do I think the atmosphere is going to be doing in 10 minutes?

• 1:48:52Speaker 02

  And where do I think it's going to be good and where do I think it's bad? So it's extremely strategic. It's also extremely tactical because you're still having to fly the airplane. And so you're flipping constantly back and forth between the fly the airplane. Because I might be in a climb with 10 other airplanes, a fraction of a wingspan. We're all circling together within inches. And so it's highly coordinated formation flying where it's like the rule is don't crash into the other guy. But we're also having to do all the mental calculations of when's it time to go? Where am I going next? And you're always trying to think well ahead of the airplane. And so I find that it's incredibly focusing. Like you have no choice but to be totally in the moment. And to be extremely focused on what you're feeling, the way the airplane's feeling,

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  what the right strategy is. And I just find that incredibly addicting. And the fact that you can take this technology and just by reading the telltales of the sky around us, find enough free energy to go fly at average speeds that approach 100 miles an hour and cover hundreds of miles of distance over beautiful mountains or desert floors where if you land, it's like you're going to be walking a very long time to the nearest road. It's just, it's amazing.

• 1:50:08Tim Ferriss?

  This is going to seem unrelated, but do you, how well do you typically sleep? Do you have trouble getting to sleep?

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  Most of the time, yes.

• 1:50:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. The reason I ask is that I am doing a lot better now for a host of reasons that I can say for another time, but I've always had onset insomnia. And so I've been attracted to activities like that where you cannot let, there's a huge penalty, you can do it if you let your mind wander or obsess on other things. There's an enormous penalty. And so I just find it to be a huge sort of stress release valve. It's almost like meditating to engage in an activity like that.

• 1:50:44Speaker 02

  For me, that's a big part of it. It's one of the few things that if I go off to a glider competition for a couple of weeks or where I go To go flying in in southern New Zealand, which I do every couple of years. I was there. I was there in November and it's it's as amazing as you would think. It's all consuming. My entire schedule starts revolving around flying and because competitions are usually held over multiple days, too. So it's about consistency. You know, if you're in first, the only place to go is backwards. And so it's all about low risk. Whereas if you're in fifth, it's you've got to be better the next day and take risks, but you might blow up and do horrible. It's it's the counterpoint to the rest of my life where it's very unstructured, can be very chaotic, and that's just part of how it works. Whereas this is sort of

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  extremely structured, extremely focusing and highly rewarding.

• 1:51:31Tim Ferriss?

  So what is your current? What are your current goals or biggest goal in gliding?

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  Uh, so the biggest goal is setting a distance record, a world distance record. So these days, the world record, I think, is over 3,000 kilometers. So about a 3,009, I think. And it was set in the Andes.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  And really, that's the only place left to set a record that big, because what happens is the prevailing winds flow from west to east and they there is a big, long mountain chain that runs up South America called the Andes. Those winds slam into and as they rise over it, they rise to a level where they become unstable. So they start to fall and it overdoes it in each direction. And so it starts to oscillate. And the whole atmosphere starts oscillating where you can climb into what we call a mountain wave. And you can climb up. I think the record's over 50,000 feet and there's people attempting for 100,000 feet. But once you get in that wave, you can surf it. You can run it parallel to the mountains. You may have to jump where the mountain where the mountain range zigs or zags. You've got to read what's going on. It's not as simple as just put the nose down.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  But you're flying at the red line of the airplane, like you fly even a knot or two faster and the whole wings get, you know, can will basically explode, which is bad. Well, you're doing that at this point. They're now doing that up the length of the Andes and back down where they're racing against daylight because the records have to be set 30 minutes before legal sunrise to 30 minutes after legal sunset. That's the time you have allotted. And if you're flying at the very limits of the airplane, you're limited by the speed of the airplane. So I commissioned an airplane called a Duck Hawk VNX built by this incredible genius Greg Cole in Bend, Oregon. And Greg was applying new technologies, new manufacturing techniques to

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  build an airplane that's about 40% faster than any other glider.

• 1:53:23Tim Ferriss?

  Significant jump.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  It's a significant jump, but it's possible because he wasn't, he was trying to optimize for a very specific problem and he was willing to use new technologies and try things that most people thought were a bit crazy. And either I'm crazy or, or, or not. And if, if it's the not case, then Greg's built an incredible airplane that, um, uh, that is capable of doing what no other airplane is capable of doing. And so this is going to take several seasons of training. Um, this kind of flying is highly technical. You, you really have to manage your physiology. You can go hypoxic because you're usually operating at 20,000 to 30,000 feet. So you're on oxygen. Um, you're solo in an airplane. It's minus 80 degrees Celsius

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  outside and you're dealing with winds that could be a hundred plus knots and

• 1:54:14Tim Ferriss?

  How much space is around you?

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  Uh, in the airplane?

• 1:54:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17Speaker 02

  I wear it is the best way to describe it. It's very snug. You feel the flex of the wings. You feel what the atmosphere is doing and you want to do that. And, uh, so the, the plan is in a few years to, is to start spending seasons down there, um, trying to do these big record flights. And there's both the airframe and then there's the possibility of sensorizing the airplane so that the airplane in certain respects can respond faster than a human can by automating the flaps, um, based on what various accelerometers and MEMS gyros are doing. So this is where people at Shaft Steps are like totally freaked out because I've been writing my own firmware for controlling my automated flaps.

• 1:55:03Tim Ferriss?

  Now, all right, so we were talking about like confidence versus hubris. What is compelling you to do that? Are there not other, because from what I've gathered, you're not a software engineer?

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:55:15Tim Ferriss?

  Coders. So do you have like such and such for dummies? And you're just putting together the firmware? Why would you do it yourself versus?

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  Two fold. So one, I'm lucky to be surrounded by a bunch of people who are in fact very good engineers. And I absolutely ask them for advice. And in fact, I even ask them for code reviews now because like this is a little bit bonkers. The other part of it, though, is twofold. One, I like to know how things work. I like to know how they're built. And while I expect I will need the help and assistance of other people to fully implement what I want to do, I want to be part of doing that. I want to know why various choices were made or what the trade offs are. Partially, it gives me confidence. Like, I'm used to working on my airplane. I'm used to understanding everything about how it's built. I'm relying on the software to do a lot of things to augment my abilities. I want to know how it's built. I want to know when it's going to do bad, might do bad things and when it basically

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  can't do bad things.

• 1:56:11Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good answer. You're talking about the the structure and required level of detail in gliding versus a lot of the rest of your life, at least, let's just say in the professional sense, which is unstructured. So I had a note to talk to you about the value of a less structured day. And I was hoping you could just elaborate on that because you seem to have both in your life.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  You need both, I think, or at least I suppose I need both to do some of the things I want to accomplish. In other words, absolutely no structure. There are certain types of things I'd never be able to accomplish. Gliding is one of them, but actually running a company requires a certain amount of structure. On the other hand, I spend a lot of my time inventing. And I don't think inventing is something that is very amenable to being structured. I think inventing, it's a bit like writing where some days you're prolific, some days nothing's coming. Sometimes weeks, nothing is coming and you start to get super nervous about deadlines that have come and gone and like you're avoiding your email and your cellphone because people are angry at you. But to those types of activities, they take the time they take.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  And I have basically found that I need to build part of my life highly unstructured. If I wake up when I wake up, if I stay up till three in the morning, reading something, working on something, that's all sort of grist for the mill that's just percolating there and in ways that I can't predict, but I've come to learn will come at a certain rate. That has, I've found in my career, allowed me to make certain leaps, figure certain things out, or come up with something where if I tried to force it or structure it, I would have taken a very predictable path because it was like, oh, well, we just need to solve this, this problem and this is how you do it versus you have this flash of brilliance where like, oh, this is what we need to do. And, and that, I just don't believe that kind of creativity is very amenable to structure.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  And so I try to have part of my life, even though it can be kind of insane for everyone else, where like, if I want to stay up all night, if I'm gonna get up late, if I have a meeting, it's gonna get canceled, it's just like, I'm not structuring my time. It's my time to do whatever I want with it, whatever rate feels right that day. And I've started to find I need to basically carve out very big chunks. The minimum chunk seems to be about half a day where like, don't expect me to be doing anything else because I'm not gonna guarantee it'll happen. I'm, I'm just busy letting myself enjoy life.

• 1:58:36Tim Ferriss?

  So what does that look like or what do you hope it will look like on say a weekly basis? So one of the, the not really epiphanies, but realizations I had a few years ago is that many of my friends who are highly effective human beings thought of batching certain activities on specific days of the week. In other words, it wasn't that they would check email, have meetings, set goals, brainstorm and journal and 15 other activities each day. They would batch certain types of tasks or unstructured time, right? And so for me, that means generally speaking, batch recording, audio on Mondays and Fridays,

• 1:59:19Tim Ferriss?

  unstructured time for just creation, whatever that happens to mean in a given week on Wednesdays from like nine AM to 1 PM. So even if I, my goal is to have sort of room to think and space, if I don't create that space in my calendar, it's very likely that it'll get overrun with other stuff. How do you, how do you think about that? Or are there certain rules, like if then, like you just said, like if I stay up late, then I will clear the decks and like send an email before I go to bed saying, hey, like wipe the decks up until this point in time?

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  So there's some of that. I haven't found that totally effective for myself, although I have to do some of it because I have a responsibility of running a company and I have, you know, I need to be available to certain people or it's just not being fair or it's impeding their effectiveness and their productivity. And I have definitely surrounded myself with types of people that are very complimentary to me, of people who are more focused on organization and being productive in a very specific kind of way. I tend to find that especially when I'm getting into something where I'm trying to solve a very specific problem, but it's open and in fact, I'm not even totally sure I can define what the problem is. Like I might need to carve out weeks where like the majority of my time is going to be

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  going into this activity that may or may not be productive and may or may not be a terribly good use of my time. It's just this rabbit hole that I kind of need to dig in. And so that tends to be one where increasingly I'm trying to find chunks of my life where I can literally carve out like I'm going to commit 20% of my time to basically attending to some of the details of, you know, being married and having a family, running a company, but I'm also going to allocate a huge amount of my, my free time, or I'm going to create a huge amount of free time to spend hours in days and even in some cases more than a week, just chugging away on this to see where it gets. And sometimes, you know, I come up at a zero, like that was a waste of time.

• 2:01:20Speaker 02

  But I've found over the last decade or so that those periods of time have turned out to be incredibly important for finding something that's insanely valuable.

• 2:01:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, and I, this is, maybe it's just rationalizing so that I don't go totally insane, but I've, I remember being a Coming to a similar conclusion related to writing because I became very frustrated once at a draft of a chapter where it was something like 10 pages and nine and a half pages were just garbage, I mean, complete garbage, but there was a kernel on like the ninth page of a few paragraphs that ended up becoming the beginning of a really strong chapter. And I was like, wow, that was a really big fucking waste of time. I can't believe that I only got a few paragraphs out of that. And the, one of my friends, who I guess you could view as a mentor of sorts, a very seasoned, successful writer said, no,

• 2:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  no, no, no, no, you're missing the point. Like you needed those first nine and a half shitty pages to get to the good stuff. You couldn't have started there. And I was like, oh, okay, that's at least a healthy way to look at it.

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  I basically totally agree with that. If there's no shortcuts, like I can look back on the evolution Shaft steps has gone through since 2012, or the evolution I've gone through since 99, 2000. And I can see all these periods where it was like, oh, that wasn't super productive, or I didn't accomplish what I'd hoped to accomplish with that. It's easy in hindsight to say, well, maybe you could have cut that out, or maybe you could have shortened this time scale to market or something like that. It's like, I don't, I don't think so. I don't think we would have had the thoughts or reached those. They come at a certain rate and all of those things in some way tend to lead into the, into that solution. There's so much of, there's so many people I read that it's focused on efficacy and being effective and managing your time and doing these things.

• 2:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know any.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  I don't know anybody, anybody like that, sitting in this room, that is about how to basically get there faster. And there are absolutely things in life that are amenable to going faster. But the really interesting stuff, the stuff where like, nobody else is doing it, it really is a breakthrough, or it is an invention, or is an innovation, or it's just a new piece of art, or whatever it is, it takes the time it takes and you can't force it.

• 2:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there's also, I mean, another way to, sorry to interrupt, but like another way to look at it is, like to optimize a process, there has to be a process. And if you're trying to connect dots that have never been connected before, or create the dots, there is no algorithm to tweak yet. I mean, other people might argue differently. And I think there are some tools that I found helpful, like the Edward de Bono six thinking hats type of stuff, but. Generally, you're just sitting there fucking staring at your navel a lot.

• 2:04:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  Waiting for an apple to fall in your head.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  You look totally useless. I'm working really hard, trust me. I'm actually okay with that. People, like thankfully you haven't asked this because I have no good answer of like, what's your creative process? I have no idea. Like, I could make something up. I don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about my creative process. I mostly focus on the, what are the interesting ideas that I'm having right now that seem worth pursuing? And for whatever reason, one may win out over another, or it pulls on me more strongly, and I just follow that. And that has like, served me super well. It's like, you keep meeting these people, you keep doing these things, and it's, I've just pulled on threads and follow where they go.

• 2:04:42Tim Ferriss?

  I want to hit you with some rapid fire questions. Number one, what is your creative process now? Please describe for the next 10 minutes, your creative process. What do you think of the word "successful"? Who's the first person who comes to mind? And why?

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  My father. Because I think he's actually had a pretty happy life. He has a family around him. He's achieved some business success. And he's done a lot of things that, he's created a lot of meaning for people. And so I admire that, the fact that he has created a lot of meaning for people in his.

• 2:05:17Tim Ferriss?

  How so? What type of meaning?

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  Um, I suppose I would answer it by, it depends on who we're talking about. I think in, I think in the world of his employees, a lot of the employees have been there for as long as the business is around. They find value in it. They find a meaningful thing to do with their lives. And the fact that there's been that loyalty to them, and they've clearly felt that it was a valuable issue of their time, that was meaningful. For his family, it's the fact that we're still a family, and that he's created meaning for me, and meaning for my brother, and my mother, and more broadly speaking, our extended family. We had, we had lots of exchange students, growing up, especially through high school, and they still come back and visit, and they're coming back with their families now.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  And they really attach a lot of importance and meaning to their time with my family. And that was really created for my father and my mother as well. So.

• 2:06:12Tim Ferriss?

  How did they create that bond? Or what were the, what were the ways, because that's unusual, that's unusual, right? It's atypical.

• 2:06:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess, I never thought it was that atypical, but because I think they were very inclusive and supportive of these people and made sure they had a memorable year and that they got to do fun things, fun things as a family, felt included in our family, and even after they'd left, you know, we'd stay in touch, we'd go on trips to Europe and we'd see them. And so, you know, I think that, you know, even 20 years later now, we're still having reunions, and I think that's created a lot of meaning for people in their life.

• 2:06:52Tim Ferriss?

  Other than your dad, if you had to pick a second person, dead or alive, doesn't matter, fictional or non-fictional?

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  Winston Churchill.

• 2:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  Winston Churchill, okay. Why Winston?

• 2:07:03Speaker 02

  So I think this, there's a great series of books, The Last Lion by William Manchester on Winston Churchill, and the third volume actually just came out a few years ago posthumously. But the first two, which really only got up to his life at the outbreak of World War II, like it didn't even touch on the everything that happened after World War II started. Like, I just remember being like, he was a bestselling author by 20, he'd fought in wars, he was, you know, one of the highest paid writers, he was an important member of parliament, all of these things, and you're just like, he was a fascinating individual. And I remember reading these, and I was probably in my early twenties, being just like, man,

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  I suck compared to this, I am way behind. So I think on some level, it was like, that's what historic level of success looks like. And like, as a history professor pointed out to me, you weren't born into the British aristocracy, so you're working with a deficit to begin with, which like, fair enough. But I think I've always looked at things like that as being like, of lasting significance, and I suppose that drives me on some level.

• 2:08:12Tim Ferriss?

  That description makes me want to see a celebrity death match claymation of Winston Churchill versus Ben Franklin.

• 2:08:19Speaker 02

  Oh, Churchill's totally taken Franklin down. He was a cripple then, and Churchill has him on mass by at least 5X. Plus, he's drunk.

• 2:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  He was a big unit, yeah, and he could hold his liquor. Do you have any superstitions? And the reason I ask is that I find it- In a way, a stress reduction for me to prize a handful of superstitions because I try to be so hyper analytical in other areas. Like, I don't like using red pens, for instance, which I think I picked up in Asia somewhere. They don't like using red ink for a handful of things. Cheersing with water, don't like it.

• 2:08:55Speaker 02

  I don't know if this qualifies as a superstition, but as much as I said, like, I'm about lack of structure and stuff, I certainly found as a writer that it was incredibly important for me to have certain things just so with writing. I would have a very specific ritual about driving to a very specific coffee shop, and I had to have sort of one or two very specific tables. If they were like filled, like, I'd sit there with my coffee, just sort of like leering at them, like, "You are taking my table, don't you know like that I'm trying to finish a manuscript."

• 2:09:31Tim Ferriss?

  "Excuse me, sir, do you know how I am?"

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  It was like, "I come here so much, this should be my table." So, that's one of these things where like, I actually really, really struggled to write if I broke that pattern. So, I don't know if it qualifies as a superstition, but I certainly found like, having the, you know, it's almost sort of like, you need to like, walk in a circle three times and, you know, have this particular mug, or none of the magic will work. Totally one of those. And so, if like, something would go missing, like, it was total freak out. Like, "I have to have that, or I'm doomed."

• 2:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  So, what, so you drive to the coffee shop?

• 2:10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  What were the characteristics of the table that made it the right table?

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  It was in a window, it was a two-person table. It sat in such a way that people weren't terribly intrusive when they were coming or going, like, you weren't constantly getting bumped. But there was a bit of activity behind it that sort of provided just this white noise that allowed me to focus. So, it was in, you know, it wasn't that table per se, it was that table in that particular coffee shop, like, worked where it was just the right balance between feelings among people, but without the distraction of people.

• 2:10:42Tim Ferriss?

  Do you listen to music when you write?

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  I will, and usually some pretty, a lot of techno, a lot of late 90s techno.

• 2:10:52Tim Ferriss?

  Like what?

• 2:10:52Speaker 02

  I might listen to like Paul Oakenfold, Live at the Road Jan in Shanghai. It's an essential mix and it's like, to this day, when I'm doing certain kind of work, it's put the headphones on and you know, it's SoundCloud and it's old essential mixes with Pete Tong.

• 2:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  How many pages of text that you were involved with in some capacity were in Modern Esquizze, roughly?

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Of the pages I wrote, I think I wrote around 300,000 words.

• 2:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  So how many, what does that break down to? I mean, that's like...

• 2:11:24Speaker 02

  Our pages had pictures and full...

• 2:11:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's like six full-length books.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  It was, it was a million, over a slightly over a million words for the, for the final book. And you know, it was 20, I think it was 2,400 pages. I'm, it's long enough now, I'm starting to forget, but it's 50 pounds of book.

• 2:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  When you did first drafts, was that on a computer or by hand?

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  On a computer.

• 2:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  On a computer. What program? Was it just standard Word?

• 2:11:50Speaker 02

  It was Word at the time, yeah. I, I experimented with some other things. I actually write, I write a lot with a program called IA Writer, because it sort of blanks everything out.

• 2:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  IA Writer, yeah, I've, I've heard about this.

• 2:12:06Speaker 02

  I, I enjoy that. I think there's like cooler, better stuff that I haven't even heard of yet, but...

• 2:12:11Tim Ferriss?

  Another one called Hemingway that a lot of folks have, have mentioned.

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  It's like, I find something that works and just leave it alone.

• 2:12:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's one called Scrivener that I've used for my last few books that I really enjoy. It's, the reason I like it is that you can lay out all of your chapters within a single window on the left-hand side, like a, like a vertical scroll, and you can move them around, dragging and dropping into, let's say, sections, and then you can have a split pane on the right side showing the text that you're working on, and then have your research notes below it, which I just found so incredibly helpful for the last two books. How do you edit when you, when you have, say, your first brain dump of stuff? How would you, what is your editing process like?

• 2:12:58Speaker 02

  There's like, what is my good editing process and then like, what is the battle I must fight? My tendency is to actually edit myself as I write and do a lot of polishing that really would be better served after I got the words out. My preferred approach and what tends to be best for me is I do my writing in the evenings and I do my editing in the morning. I like, I will usually wake up after having like written until three in the morning and then I'll wake up at like nine, nine thirty or ten or whatever. And I go back and look like, oh my God, this was incredibly indulgent. But you know, there's 9,000 words. So I'm going to be able to find some good nuggets here and I can start iterating on it pretty quickly. That, that works well.

• 2:13:41Tim Ferriss?

  Would you kick out 9,000 words a session?

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  Uh, on the, sometimes yes.

• 2:13:46Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit, man.

• 2:13:47Speaker 02

  That was usually all, that would usually get pared down.

• 2:13:50Tim Ferriss?

  How much meth were you taking?

• 2:13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a lot. I don't even remember. That could end up in, that might end up at something like 1,500 words when it's done. It's a, it'll be a lot of slop. Sometimes it'll be whole sections where it's just like, I'll leave it there and, and just picked up again. So it's a total mess at that point, but there's ideas to work with. I got the ideas down. More typical session would probably be 750 to 2,000 words, depending. The closer it was to 750, the user, the usually, the less work I had to do on editing, but often it would take three times as long as if I just barfed out 3,000 words.

• 2:14:26Tim Ferriss?

  The less grist for the mill to work with in the first place. What is your favorite documentary or movie? Or any favorites that come to mind?

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  So like, right now, I think I'm going through like a, an eighties nostalgia binge. Uh, I've been watching some John Hughes movies lately that I've been enjoying. I, I can't really.

• 2:14:45Tim Ferriss?

  Watching like, uh, what is it? Saving Miss Doubtfire or?

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  No, no, it's, it's, it's like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and, and stuff like that. Um, and Old John Cusack.

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  Movies that I've really, really loved, Pulp Fiction was like super. So I was living in Germany at the time as an exchange student. I was homesick and Pulp Fiction came out and I remember seeing it in German because everything was dubbed there. And Samuel L. Jackson sounds horrible as a German. Not funny, not Samuel L. Jackson. So I was lucky enough that I lived in Aachen, right by the hall, the border between Holland, Belgium and Germany. So I remember driving to a town called Herlen and seeing it in English. And it was like so great to basically just see some, this movie in English after I'd been like hearing nothing but German and was super homesick. So like that movie still stands out as a movie I love.

• 2:15:39Tim Ferriss?

  Documentaries, any documentaries?

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  So this one sort of between, I'd call this docudrama. It's partly documentary and it's partly not entirely true. The Right Stuff. I'm a pilot. I love flying. And that movie was just like, I gotta do this. Like, where do I sign up to get one of these rides? So

• 2:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  I need to see that. That's a great movie. I haven't seen that film in ages. What purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory?

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  So I'll give two answers. I bought a new electric tea kettle. I used to do, I used to have all the stove top kettles. Like even though I knew that it was vastly better, I underestimated how much better my life would be by having an electric tea kettle so that I can have like tea actually quickly and more or less on demand with very little fuss. So like, I think I paid, I think I have an Oxo clear, one button, nothing fancy tea kettle and it's flipping awesome. So much so that I've like now bought them at work too. So I can just have them everywhere. So that was great. And I don't remember exactly what the price is, but I'm going to go with it anyway. I bought, I bought,

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  bought the Wii DJ Hero for my nine-year-old son and me. And it's awesome because one, he loves it and loves doing it. But, but two, I totally won't let him win. I used to briefly DJ back with some techniques in, in, in college. It was like my way of going to a fraternity party without having to go to the fraternity party. Like I get paid to go DJ and do them. And so like, when we get to like the scratching competitions and stuff with Jack, like I totally can't let him win, but we have so much fun with that. So I think that might've been just over the threshold. But in terms of like make my life awesome and time to spend with my son, it's great.

• 2:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to teach a ninth or 10th grade class, what would you focus on? What would you teach?

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  Tough call. It's a toss up between Shakespeare, or I'd be really interested in doing a history of science class.

• 2:17:40Tim Ferriss?

  History of science.

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Tim Ferriss?

  So why Shakespeare?

• 2:17:42Speaker 02

  So I had a phenomenal teacher in high school that taught me to write, John Fitzpatrick. I think he passed away about a year ago, which is a bummer because I haven't seen him in probably two decades. But he taught a whole year of Shakespeare and I, and I signed up for it because as a senior, because I'd had him as a sophomore English teacher. And right when like every other teacher hated me or like just I was a pain in their butt, like he sort of mentored me and put up with a lot of my shenanigans or my laziness of turning stuff in. And he really pushed me to, to, to write. I mean, as a sophomore, I think I was having to write five, eight page, like real papers for him where you're really exploring literature.

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  So I signed up for him when he taught a year of Shakespeare in my senior year. And I particularly remember the comedies of just the discussions we had around it and the ideas and how actually funny they were and how humorous they were and, and, and how great some of the themes were. Totally blew my mind because like up until then Shakespeare's like this really

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  ponce English literature kind of thing to go do. And actually it was hysterical and they were a blast to read them. So I would, I'd want other people to experience that. I don't know if I could do it justice.

• 2:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  And the history of science would be option number two.

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, I, I suppose I do. I don't know that I do science. I do engineering now. I think a lot about science, but I love the ideas. I love the inevitable inevitableness of the ideas. I like the, how one idea built on another. And when you really have a great history of science teacher who sort of tells the story of how these things shaped culture, shaped the world. It makes science something more than just the formulas or the equations or the theorems or the ideas that you learn in a fairly dry science textbook. No matter how much they've art, art, made it artsy with sidebars and, and, and graphics. It's there were fact that there were people involved and it wasn't at all like, at the time, they might've been hugely controversial ideas.

• 2:19:44Speaker 02

  And it wasn't so obvious at the time that like, you know, The calculus was right, or that, you know, air was a thing, or that germs were a thing, and how much controversy and how much humanness there were around these ideas. I love that because I think I sort of see it on a day-to-day basis. When you're inventing stuff, it feels totally nuts at the time, and you're like, is anybody gonna like, think this was worthwhile?

• 2:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it also makes me think of a dinner I just had last week, which was an incredible rare opportunity, but I had a chance to go to a small group dinner with Jim Watson of Watson and Crick. And, I mean, he's gotta be, I don't know exactly, late 80s, maybe, maybe 90s, and completely lucid. And I was two chairs away, you know, I was one person separated from him. So, co-discoverer of the double helix, and, you know, turns out, I didn't realize this, but he has probably a half a dozen other discoveries that would have been anyone else's life work. And he has a collection of them.

• 2:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I, but I remember having, had a number of short conversations with him, and also overheard a lot of his fascinating conversations with other folks. And I remember thinking, you know, if this were 25 years ago, I could totally see this one encounter veering me off into becoming a scientist of some type. I mean, just that one encounter, could totally see it. By sort of meeting someone who embodies all the things that felt irrelevant when they were being thrown at me by someone who was...

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  Far lesser.

• 2:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Far lesser, and just not passionate or particularly interested in conveying it to me in a compelling way. What are your morning rituals? What does the first, you know, 60 minutes of your day look like?

• 2:21:36Speaker 02

  Uh, first 60 minutes of the day, so I'm not human if I don't have a shower. That's like, super, super important to me.

• 2:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you usually wake up? I know it sounds like it moves.

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  That moves a lot, so I, given my own devices, I probably naturally will wake up between 9 and 10 most days. I would naturally usually work till 3 or 4 in the morning. I'm... I actually experimented with like biphasic sleep in college and I would totally do that still if it didn't make me so unbelievably antisocial.

• 2:22:05Tim Ferriss?

  So what kind of biphasic sleeping?

• 2:22:08Speaker 02

  I would basically sleep from 4pm till 8pm and then I would work from 8pm till 2 or 3 in the morning and then I would sleep from 2 or 3 in the morning until usually around 8 or 9am.

• 2:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like the Argentine schedule. I was wondering how they survived. I was in Argentina and they would stay out until 4 in the morning, then go to work in the morning and I tried to match that and I was just like, how are these fuckers surviving? I don't get it. And then it's like, oh, no, no.

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  You didn't notice where everybody disappeared.

• 2:22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they have like a two hour lunch, then they go home at 4:30 and sleep until 8 o'clock.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  So I should move to Argentina to go fly gliders is what I think the conclusion is I have here. It's socially acceptable there.

• 2:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  So you take a shower.

• 2:22:46Speaker 02

  So I take a shower. I will usually eat something. If I'm not feeling totally rushed for time, it's bacon and eggs. I'm particularly right now. There's a recipe on Chef Steps called the emoji egg, which is basically an egg cracked into a non-stick pan heated very slowly until it looks like the perfect emoji of a sunny side up egg. Like that, maybe a piece of toast and bacon is great. Yeah, if I, but, but there's a 50/50 chance that I'm just going out the door at that point. And the very next stop is espresso. We have very nice espresso machines courtesy of La Marzoka at Chef Steps and we keep the entire

• 2:23:26Speaker 02

  company caffeinated. We keep a world barista on the team. Everybody like our, our, our job training is if this whole thing doesn't work out with the company, everybody at Chef Steps is capable of being a barista. So I get to work.

• 2:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  You're in the right town for it too.

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  You're totally in the right town.

• 2:23:41Tim Ferriss?

  Well, actually, you probably have a lot of stiff competition.

• 2:23:43Speaker 02

  Well, we gotta raise the bar, but, but, uh, so I, I start the day like many people at that point. I will have a latte at work, usually a more traditional size of five or a six ounce latte. I don't like a ton of milk, but it's like, that's kind of the ritual of, okay, now I can start dealing with whatever I need to do.

• 2:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  If you did not have machines to help you make espresso.

• 2:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  How would you make a good cup of coffee?

• 2:24:09Speaker 02

  I'd make a tea.

• 2:24:10Tim Ferriss?

  You'd make a tea?

• 2:24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11Tim Ferriss?

  You wouldn't use a Chemex, Aeropress, any of that?

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  I have all that and I don't mind it, but it's, and if somebody else wants it, I'll do it. It's a bit fussy, but I gotta be kinda honest, like during my time at the Fat Duck, we had builder's tea, um, TP tips, just like it came in a giant garbage bag, basically stuffed with like really crappy like tea dust and that with a bunch of milk is just like milky tea. It's really satisfying in some sort of cringe-worthy way. And, and I have nicer tea than that at home, but it's still something about the ritual of make some tea. I steep it. I like a little bit of milk. And, and if I'm writing or something, I can drink gallons of that and not feel guilty. Like I'll need to go to the bathroom a lot, but it's really satisfying and it just like, that's my break. Every 50 minutes or so, I

• 2:24:58Speaker 02

  need to make another big mug of that.

• 2:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Builder's tea?

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  Builder's tea. It's, it's a British saying of like, so like the builders on a job site, at some point, they all get around and make a cup of tea. And this was like the cheap ass, like cheapest bulk tea you could buy. And because like the Fat Duck was a three Michelin star restaurant, which meant we made no money. That was what we had.

• 2:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's something that's-

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  For the staff. The customers, we had much nicer stuff.

• 2:25:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's something that surprised me when I was in the midst of working on the Four Hour Chef, which of course you were involved with, and realizing that in effect, the higher the quality of the food and drink, well, the food especially, served at a restaurant, the lower the margins appear to be. It's like the more expensive, the better the food, the harder it is to run as a business in effect.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  I guess I didn't tell the story of nearly going bankrupt at the Fat Duck. I mean, I was, I was there, so I, you know, it's not really my story. It has to be the story, but, but I'll tell it because it gives some context to this. So, we were a two-star restaurant and most two-star restaurants are really just a three-star restaurant that's going out of business. This was January of 2004. We were at Madrid Fusion, which at the time was like the biggest chef conference in the world. And we were unknown and like Ferran Adria was the biggest chef in the world at the time. Jockey, James Petrie, who was our pastry chef and I were basically prepping backstage all week for our demo. And all these chefs from all these restaurants in Madrid and

• 2:26:30Speaker 02

  around Spain were coming around watching what we were doing because like we were basically doing crazy stuff. We had liquid nitrogen, nobody had seen that. We were doing stuff with pressure cookers and vacuum pumps and all sorts of crazy stuff. And like in the background of all this, like Heston couldn't make payroll on Friday. And so there's like a ton of stress on his, from him about that. And like, you know, we were at this really lavish event and we were super well taken care of. Meanwhile, back in Bray, like couldn't pay the bills because there were no customers or not enough customers. And I remember we were out for lunch with Nick Lander from the Financial Times. He was their food critic. He'd taken us out to lunch and we were coming back to the conference and we were slotted,

• 2:27:15Speaker 02

  like last slot in the day. Everybody's usually gone by then, but because of all the craziness people had been seeing us do all week, there was a buzz going around of like, you've got to stay for this. You've got to stay for this. So Heston, I've got the order out a little bit. We basically give that presentation at like the 6:30 PM slot. Get a standing ovation from like the 800 chefs and attention. Ferran Adria jumps up on stage, throws his arm around Heston and says like, this is the most important chef cooking today. And we're like, like what just happened? This is amazing. Well, next day we go to lunch and it's, you know, we're chatting with Nick and all this and we come back and like, we think the restaurant's going to be done. Well, Heston gets a call from Rasheen, his assistant. And she's like, you

• 2:27:59Speaker 02

  know, I just got a very strange call from The Telegraph saying, what does it feel like to be the third chef in the UK to get their third Michelin star? And Heston's like, well, the guide's not out yet, not out yet. So somebody must be pulling your leg. And she's like, well, I thought that. So I hung up and I'd called the paperback and they confirmed a journalist was working on this story. So we're all kind of sitting in the car looking at each other like, well, this can't be true. And Nick just goes, you know, if it's true, let me be the first to congratulate you. And then right after Heston hangs up, Rashine Derrick Ballmer, who is the head of the Michelin guide, calls Heston's cellphone and is like, you know, I understand you're in Madrid. We usually like to come in and tell you in person, but congratulations, you've earned your third star. And so we're all gobsmacked. And what nobody knew that night is we had zero customers. The next

• 2:28:44Speaker 02

  day, the phone was ringing off the hook and three months later, we were voted best restaurant in the world. And that was actually really how close it came to basic total implosion. It was also, I think, a real lesson for me of one, you don't do this for the money. Like this, the fame and the celebrity and the TV shows and the books and all that. And future restaurants did eventually grow into a sizable empire for Heston. But that wasn't what motivated him. And I think that was really a big impression on me as well. It's like, this isn't why you choose to do things. And it is going to get to be a knife edge like this at some point. You have to have faith that it's going to work through onto the other side. I have no idea where that.

• 2:29:22Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, it's a great story. It also makes you wonder how many people who would have been the best in the world or recognized just missed it by that razor's edge, you know, like they.

• 2:29:33Speaker 02

  One day.

• 2:29:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Like the demo came a week after they already missed payroll and that was it. Like they couldn't do it. Which is why I think one of the dangers in a place like Silicon Valley is you see these exceptional successes lionized on magazine covers, but it's a lot like the survivorship bias you might see in like a Barron's or something where it's like you have all these amazing mutual funds that are advertising how well they've done for the last five or six years. And it's like, well, those are like the five out of a thousand who managed to get here.

• 2:30:04Speaker 02

  They're all gone.

• 2:30:04Tim Ferriss?

  By skill or luck, and you don't know. And it's easy to get sucked into that sort of fallacy when you don't see the bodies. But I guess on that note, just in terms of these lessons learned and looking at advice that you would give others then in turn, what advice would you give? Your, let's say, 25-year-old self, if you could place us where you were, what you were doing, or you could choose when you were graduating from college.

• 2:30:37Speaker 02

  Graduating college was a very diffuse thing for me. I think it was actually in 2003, I actually applied for my degrees because I needed them to get my British work permit. It was one of those, I'll leave the back door open because I'm technically just on sabbatical and I could always come back, even though I stopped going by 2001. I think the, so I don't know that like, when you graduate college is all that relevant to me. I think the more interesting question is what would I basically tell myself in my later twenties? I think the advice I would try to give myself is to dispense with a lot more of the ego and hubris. I'd ended up in a very influential position, in a very famous place, that felt

• 2:31:19Speaker 02

  like you were on top of the world, and that does go to your head, to have that success that quickly, that early, to be recognized for it, and then to have a string of other great things happen. You know, you're surrounded by people that are telling you, you're doing great stuff, how valuable this is, how important you are, and most of those people won't be around when that period is over, but it becomes very seductive, and you sort of keep aspiring to take that next step up the ziggurat. It's totally irrelevant. It's a total waste of time, but it will make you a giant asshole. I think that was something that it really took over the course of modernist and subsequent to modernist, and actually even founding chef steps for me to really grapple with and find comfort in the fact that I'm not really

• 2:32:04Speaker 02

  that interested in celebrity or those kind of accolades. They're nice to get, they're no longer motivating for me at all, and chasing those actually really made me a jerk, because it got me very focused on who is getting credit for what.

• 2:32:21Tim Ferriss?

  How did you make that leap? I mean, a lot of people would prefer to be in that or of that mindset, right? And not be seduced by the celebrity, et cetera. I mean, what was the...

• 2:32:32Speaker 02

  Because it had to be incredibly destructive. For me, I spent five years at the Fat Duck. I did a bunch of work I'm incredibly proud of, and there's many people I can still consider strong friends. But it was also realizing that I had created a future that wasn't tenable for me to stay for much longer. Because I was so hard-headed and so obstinate that it created a lot of friction between me and other senior members of staff, because I was pushing for something that I was convinced was right. But it basically made me very difficult to work with. And just because you're right, you're only going to get away with that so many times. And so that was sort of the realization that a restaurant like that is built on teamwork.

• 2:33:13Speaker 02

  And yes, some people can be doing really valuable work, and yes, some people can be exceptional or special, and they do get certain amounts of dispensation. But if that gets abused, you're not going to be in a tenable position. As soon as, basically, you've delivered your value, people aren't going to want to work with you for much longer. Working with people at Modernist, there was a lot of people on that team where very talented, exceptionally talented, very difficult people to work with. Everyone involved in that project was accomplished, was skillful, and had a pretty big ego to match and was pushing to do something exceptional. We all got the work done. At the end of it, nobody really wanted to do that again together.

• 2:33:57Speaker 02

  I was actually lucky enough that Grant and Ryan and I still wanted to work together after that. But if you look at most of the team, we sort of scattered to the wind. It was like, okay, the book's done. We don't want to work as a team with chef steps. One of the things that's really become clear to me is I work with 50 of the most exceptional people I've ever worked with. I'm amazed at what they do and what they accomplish. The worst thing in the world for me would not be able to, not being able to work with those people and see the types of things they can do. So I've really found a lot of my satisfaction is how do I enable other teams of people? How do I enable other people to do their best work? That's on a good day, how I feel about that. I mean, I have the same tension and struggles, I think, anyone does. It's not like you suddenly flip a switch and you're perfect.

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  It's more, I have seen how teams get blown up. I've been a participant in that. And that's really a long-term destructive pathway to be on. And at some point in my mid-30s, it was like, do you want to stay on this pathway? Or do you want to be able to do big ambitious things that take talented teams of people? Because if so, you've got to learn to basically check your ego so there's room for other people to do their best work.

• 2:35:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and something, I mean, I've struggled with this as well as also the shifting your focus from, and of course, not always getting it right, but from, from being right to being effective. And choosing the battles really carefully. I was chatting with a pretty well-known political advisor, not because I have any political aspirations, but he's become a friend of mine.

• 2:35:31Speaker 02

  I think there might be an opening for you this season.

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  It's not too late.

• 2:35:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God, yeah, who knows? Yeah, that's a whole separate wine necessitating conversation. But the, his advice to me, at one point, we were having wine and eating pizza on Cheetah. It was great. This was in Venice, California, not Italy. And I was telling him about the number, the multitude of places where I wanted to start initiatives, have an impact. And he just said to me, he's like, you know, You should, you should kind of think of this like a six shooter. He's like, you have six bullets. And he's like, you get to, you get six bullets each year, maybe every two years. He's like, what are you going to use them on?

• 2:36:18Tim Ferriss?

  And that's how I've started to think a lot about conflict resolution or just conflict in general. Like, is this the fight? If I only get to have six fights, like, is this one of the six? Am I going to spend a bullet on this? And it's tough. It's tough to follow your own advice when it comes to that stuff when you've been rewarded for so long for being a stubborn ass.

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  That is actually exactly the problem is when you're talented, when you are good at what you do, people will tolerate a lot of stuff as long as it serves their purpose or as long as it's useful. But you will get, you will get no runway as soon as that, that's over. And that's unfortunate because we're all going to hit rough patches. We're all going to hit patches where you need people to basically cut you some slack because you're not firing on all cylinders. If you're basically insistent on being right all the time and, and controlling everything, you're not going to get that slack.

• 2:37:15Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would you put on that billboard?

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  I think it would probably have to erect it outside of my high school.

• 2:37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  I think I might have to erect it outside of my high school and, and I think, I don't know exactly how I would art direct this, but it's going to be something to the effect of it all worked out anyway.

• 2:37:44Speaker 02

  High school was not a great time for me.

• 2:37:49Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. And just, just, this is the last question. Any ask or request of the people listening? Anything they should ponder, consider, do or otherwise? And then, then we'll get to where they can find you and everything you're up to, of course.

• 2:38:06Speaker 02

  I have two, I guess we'll call them call to actions. So one, if you're into cooking, if you're curious about how cooking works, come check out what we're doing at Chef's If you are interested in new tools, things like that, we have them. Also, if you're essentially an awesome engineer, whether a software engineer or a physical hardware engineer, or you're just amazing at something and you can relate it to cooking at all, we want to hear from you. We want to work with more people who are passionate about cooking and have skills worth adding to the kitchen. So that's, that's the

• 2:38:37Tim Ferriss?

  Where would they find? They can go to chefsteps.com.

• 2:38:39Speaker 02

  They can go to chefsteps.com. There's a jobs link at the bottom. If you don't see anything on there, you know, roll your own job description and tell us why we should basically take a serious look at you. We're, we've, we've hired applied mathematicians. We've hired musicians. We've hired a lot of unusual people that have found ways to add incredible value at chef steps. So we're pretty open minded there. And if you just want to basically find some awesome cooking content or inspiration for the kitchen or buy some pretty damn cool tools, that's another good reason to check it out. The other thing, gliding. I have tried to introduce several people to gliding. I haven't, I haven't yet to take you up, Mr. Ferris.

• 2:39:21Tim Ferriss?

  I'm, I'm up for it.

• 2:39:22Speaker 02

  But I've taken Matt up. I've taken quite a few and I've got a pretty good hit record of turning people into glider pilots. This sport could use more people. It's awesome. It's a blast. You, it is incredibly compelling. So check out the Soaring Society of America. And if you're, I don't know, in the Bay area, William Soaring is a phenomenal place to learn. There's a bunch

• 2:39:45Tim Ferriss?

  William Soaring.

• 2:39:46Speaker 02

  William Soaring. It's up near Sacramento, but there's a bunch of other good clubs around here. But I would encourage a lot of your listeners to check out gliding. It is a hell of a thing and it is a incredibly welcoming sport.

• 2:39:58Tim Ferriss?

  The Soaring Society of

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  Soaring Society of America, SSA.

• 2:40:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right. And there you have it. So where can people, if anywhere, say hello on the social media and whatnot? Do you participate in such shenanigans?

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  We do. So you can find chef steps on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, chefsteps.com, of course. And there's an app and there's probably a bunch of social channels like Instagram and others that I don't even know about yet.

• 2:40:27Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Well, Chris, it's always fun to hang and we will have more adult beverages in Seattle and elsewhere soon, I am sure. But I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks, Tim. It was fun. And for everybody listening, you can get links to everything that we talked about, all the goodies in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, as well as all the past episodes, if you want to hear my chat, which involves some tequila with Matt Mullinleg, for instance, then you can find that episode there as well. And until next time, as always, thank you for listening.

• 2:41:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 2:41:47Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their

• 2:42:31Tim Ferriss?

  own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? You can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't.

• 2:43:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:43:59Tim Ferriss?

  them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:44:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. This episode is brought to you By Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. The only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim and you can choose one of those two books, Graveyard Book, Vagabonding,

• 2:45:25Tim Ferriss?

  or more than 180,000 audio programs. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim and grab a book. Enjoy.