#111: Should You Start a 'Startup' or Build a Cash-Flow Business?

"I should be used as a mercenary, not a lifer." - Tim Ferriss In this episode, we have a change of pace... Expa (@expa https://twitter.com/expa) is a startup studio. It was founded by Garrett Camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Camp, who co-founded Uber https://get.uber.com/cl/?city_name=denver&utm_source=AdWords_Brand&utm_campaign=search|c|drivers|denver|country-1|city-24|keyword_Uber|matchtype_e|ad_87468345520|campaign_brand|group_uber%3Eexact|network_g|apr30newexactKWrestructure|restructure&utm_medium=kenid_e4d8fca4-05cb-4dc6-a476-93e2e4295523&gclid=CK22zKaXuMgCFQiPaQodikIMiQ. Every once in a blue moon, they put together a night of education. I was invited to participate. In this episode, I discuss the topic of startup design vs. lifestyle design. Some of you may be aware that I've been involved with various startups ranging from Uber to Facebook, Twitter http://www.twitter.com/tferriss and DuoLingo https://en.duolingo.com/, and other businesses that have grown to more than 100 million users and customers. Simultaneously, I have written many times about lifestyle design, and I've suggested that it should come before career planning. The question is, how do we reconcile these two different approaches to business? Should you focus on building your muse and creating cash-flow focused business to fuel your ideal lifestyle...or should you swing for the fences and bet it all on a startup that is equity driven? This podcast explores these topics -- and many more -- and aims to answer the questions that I think are under-examined. 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 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... 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 and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years, and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. 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. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. Mandatory disclaimer: Wealthfront Inc. is an SEC registered Investment Advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit Wealthfront dot com to read their full disclosure.

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:24Tim 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.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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 at low costs that were previously completely impossible.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  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 this 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 by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money,

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  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. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So, check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it.

• 4:24Tim Ferriss?

  They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 4:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hello Stoics and Epicureans and everyone in between. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I usually interview folks and deconstruct how they do what they do, whether they are chess prodigies, musicians, military strategists, Navy SEALs, music producers, athletes, you name it. In this particular episode, we have a change of pace. And this is a recorded session from Learning with Expa. What is Expa? Expa, E-X-P-A dot com. You can check it out. Co-founded by, among other people, the co-founder of Uber, is a startup studio. And they have a very unique approach to building startups. And I am involved as an investor and advisor.

• 5:20Tim Ferriss?

  So every once in a blue moon, they put together a night of education, a discussion of some type. And I was invited to participate. I was interviewed by one of the partners of Expa on startup design versus lifestyle design. So those of you who have perhaps some familiarity with my startup career have been involved with lots of startups, ranging from Uber to Facebook to Twitter and many others, Evernote, Duolingo. So lots of companies that have grown to 100 million plus users or customers. Simultaneously, of course, I have this other writing portion of my life, which reflects a lot of principles I hold close to my heart. Namely, that lifestyle design should come before career planning.

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that reconciling those two, i.e. should you focus on muses, which is described in the book and I describe it in this conversation, or cash flow driven businesses, right? Business in the very traditional sense to fuel an ideal lifestyle and many other things. Or should you focus on swinging for the fences and betting it all on a startup that is really equity driven? And this presents many, many different topics and questions for conversation that I think are underexamined, that are really important to look at, not only in Silicon Valley, but well outside of that. And I hope this applies to many, many of you listening. And certainly check out Expa. So

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  ...com and you can check out their Twitter handles and whatnot. It is a fascinating organization. And if you haven't already signed up for Five Bullet Friday, I implore you to do so. Every Friday, I send out five bullets, super, super short tidbits of hopefully awesomeness to send you on your way for the weekend. And it includes things like my favorite article of the week, my favorite purchase of the last week or two, someone new that I'm following on, say Twitter, that I'm finding very, very interesting, very, very small actionable bytes of information. So Five Bullet Friday, you can sign up for that. It's free and will always be free. Fourhourworkweek.com/Friday, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/Friday. Check it out, try it out for a week, and I think you will then look forward to it every week.

• 7:29Tim Ferriss?

  That's the idea, anyway. And without further ado, please enjoy this conversation on lifestyle design versus startup design and all of the inherent conflicts and existential dilemmas that many entrepreneurs face. Thanks for listening.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  All right, so let's get started here. So, as you know, Tim has a really great background. He's participated in all parts of the ecosystem, from building to giving tips to people who are builders. So he's a great perspective, and we're going to go through a bunch of different things today. Hopefully, we get off track, because I think Tim's off-track is actually the most interesting. So, let's start with something, you know, you guys saw that he had invested in a lot of great names. So, you invest in Twitter, you invested in Uber. Can you tell us a little bit about how you picked these companies?

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  I can. And I can also explain how I got started in angel investing, which I think is very much related. So, I began angel investing in 2007. I was having breakfasts and lunches with Mike Maples, Jr., and a very successful angel investor, now a very successful VC at Floodgate. And the Four Hour Work Week had just come out and was, as some people know, rejected 27 times or whatever it was by publishers, came out and then sat on the bestseller list for four and a half, for four and a half years straight. And his questions were related to his portfolio companies and marketing, PR, launch strategy, customer acquisition. And my questions were about the deal structure

• 9:02Tim Ferriss?

  of those angel investments, why he chose company A instead of company B. And we'd known each other for quite some time separately on a sort of physical training level. And over time, as I became more and more fascinated by the startup world, which I was completely unfamiliar with, it was very alien to me, the venture backdoor world, I asked him if I could co-invest alongside him in a few deals to test my risk tolerance and to see if I could actually add value to these companies. And the decision was made because I had fantasized about going to Stanford Business School for a very long time. When school on the East Coast always felt like I was sort of intended to go to Stanford, didn't make it. And realized

• 9:44Tim Ferriss?

  after several attempts to go to Stanford Business School, got pretty far through the process and then got disillusioned after having very theoretical classes thrown at me during tours, that I should create a real world MBA for myself instead. Since I would have paid 120 grand for Stanford Business School over two years, which is sunk cost, and then you hope to make it back later, given the things that you learn, the network that you build. I was like, well, what if I just created $120,000 Tim Ferriss Fund over two years, invested, assumed that I would lose it all, sunk cost, but that the network I built and the lessons I learned would be earned back manyfold after that period of time. And so I co-invested with Mike very early on. So in the beginning, I

• 10:27Tim Ferriss?

  didn't really have a set of criteria. I think that's something you develop by practicing and figuring out what you're good at, what you're bad at predicting, what you can control, and then what advantage you have. So we might come back to this, but I think that for any type of investing, whether that's in the public markets, bonds, startups, you name it, commodities, or otherwise, art, you need to have an advantage. And that can be an informational advantage, which a lot of people in Silicon Valley have related to startups. It can be a behavioral advantage. I think that, for instance, Warren Buffett can emove- Emotionally detach himself in such a way that he is unmoved by market, massive market fluctuations

• 11:07Tim Ferriss?

  or the, the acts of the masses. So that's a behavioral advantage. You could have an analytical advantage. So you might be, say, a Renaissance Capital, very interesting hedge fund that just has massive computational and analytical ability. So that could be another one, like people who focus on, they say, technical analysis, looking at charts and whatnot. And in my particular case, I realized after a few investments that what I enjoyed doing, and I've been ridiculed for this by some VCs, not recently, but when I was getting started, was I'm only going to invest in products that help me scratch my own itch. So I don't understand many things, but I understand my own set of problems.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  And if I have a problem, at least that's a market, a guaranteed market of one. So I will invest in consumer-facing products that I would use to, to solve my own problem, address my own needs. I think wants are more monetizable than needs oftentimes, but that's, that's separate. And then as I started investing in, in more companies, I realized I want to invest in companies that are demonstrating traction. So they're not using me to create the fire, they're using me to pour gasoline on the fire. And usually that means going from, say, the 10,000 customer point to a million or a thousand to a hundred thousand.

• 12:31Tim Ferriss?

  And because that also overlaps with assets and skillsets that I already have, namely mass customer acquisition. And the other, a few other criteria for me would include thinking of my portfolio not themed along lines of, say, Twitter-related infrastructure plays or companies that depend on X, right? Like the Uberfication of blah, right? I'm not investing in 20 companies that are the Uberfication of fill in the blank. But rather, I'm investing in companies where I, every company I invest in can be helped by at least two companies already in my portfolio and they can help at least two companies in my portfolio.

• 13:12Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm creating this overlap, in a sense, like a Mitsubishi in Japan might, where I'm, instead of being vertically integrated as it relates to manufacturing and distribution and whatnot, it's integrated from a playbook standpoint, right? So whether that's launching city by city, whether that's subscription models, whether that's hard goods at retail that are dealing with, say, home shop, shopping network opportunities and direct marketing in channels that are not common to Silicon Valley companies, I want that type of knowledge transfer to exist and that's something you can engineer within the portfolio because that means that even if a startup fails as an investment, you can

• 13:56Tim Ferriss?

  still win by having invested in that company. So you put 25K in, it fails, but that 25K buys you a playbook that can then be transferred to a company that suddenly pulls one of these kind of hockey stick inflections. And then I would say other criteria would be listening to my audience. So if you look at, I've trained my audience to know what I am looking for in many different ways and what I find attractive. So if you look at my portfolio and some of my most successful companies, Shopify, I was the first advisor to Shopify, 2009, they just IPO'd, that was, that's been a massive win and I think it's just at the beginning stages. Found Shopify through my Twitter audience while I was revising The 4-Hour Work Week

• 14:38Tim Ferriss?

  and polling for e-commerce platforms. Then Evernote, same story, found Evernote through Twitter by asking my fans what I should use for X, Y, and Z and became an advisor in 2009. Duolingo, found Duolingo.

• 14:55Tim Ferriss?

  For no other reason than five or six people happen to be on their beta. And now Duolingo has 100 million plus users. So I find that my criteria are very simple. And when I deviate from that simple, I think simple is very undervalued. Because there are many people, whether those are VCs or otherwise, who have to justify their fees and so on by making things seem very complex. And I think the more variables you have, the more complex your model, the more likely you are to screw up. And in my case, I keep it extremely simple. And the challenge is not in coming up with a good thesis, it's in sticking to that thesis. Because you don't have to be right very often. I mean, let's just say that you, let's just say, people say, oh, there are 15 kind of

• 15:39Tim Ferriss?

  unicorn potential companies a year out of Silicon Valley or the US. You don't even have to get one of those per year. You could get one every five to 10 years and still make $100 million if you play your cards right. You don't have to be off, you don't have to be right often. You have to avoid fatal mistakes and bleeding chips. So it's a lot like poker in that sense. It's not just betting, but it's getting in, getting out, and then the bet size, among other things. And so those are a few of the things that I think about when investing.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  That was more than I thought.

• 16:10Tim Ferriss?

  Just thought I was like a monkey with a blindfold and a dart. There is some of that, too.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  He's good.

• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

  Whenever I do biotech, I get kicked in the nuts by the universe. That's the other thing I've learned.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it goes. Tim doesn't do biotech.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  I really feel a hankering for a kick.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  So now that we know that you like investing, and you have a point of view on it.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  You seem so surprised.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  All right, so I'm going to ask you a question that has to get asked. You brought this up on the phone. Are we in a bubble?

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  Are we in a bubble? So this is, this is a constant topic of conversation, for good reason. And I think the implicit question is, is there going to be a correction? Are we going to have a crash? And the answer is always yes. I think that people, investors in particular, have short memories. And just having gone through two of these, the cycles always exist. Now, the question then is, well, what will crash? How can you mitigate against the damage? The way I'm thinking about this myself, and I can only speak to my personal experience, is number one, My job has become more difficult as an investor and advisor.

• 17:19Tim Ferriss?

  There is a oversupply of capital, which has brought in fair weather investors and fair weather entrepreneurs, both of which are very dangerous to each other, respectively, among others. And when you invest in, say, a dot com depression, like a 2001, or even 2009, where people are freaking out after a real estate crash that then has this contagion across asset classes, you are investing in entrepreneurs who are the hardcore, the true believers, who cannot help but build whatever they're building. And I think that right now, the noise to signal ratio is so unfavorable for someone like me, my job has just become more difficult.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  That doesn't mean there aren't good deals out there. I think there are some amazing companies, some amazing founders, but a great company with terrible deal structure can be a terrible investment. And I think I'm very good at a simple approach to early-stage investing, and that approach has become very difficult to execute in the current environment. I do think that what's hard to grasp, for me at least, is identifying the tech companies that would suffer most. Well, actually, no. It's fascinating to look at counter-cyclical examples. What I mean by that is, if you look at, say, an Uber, and of course, I'm highly biased

• 18:47Tim Ferriss?

  because I advise it to Uber, but you could look at Airbnb, same way. If there is a massive public stock market, like a public equities correction, what could happen? Well, you might have publicly-held tech companies that are in that so-called tech basket that used to be isolated to like petfood.com, or webvan, or whatever, but now, the technology is so ubiquitous and infuses so many sectors, that if the stock market crashes, what might happen? One hypothesis could be that people who lose their jobs are going to need income, and they will want the flexibility of Working as an Uber driver, right? People will not want to put down the down payments and so on for

• 19:31Tim Ferriss?

  and monthly payments for a car. So if they live in a city, they might opt to use Uber X, for instance, Airbnb, same situation. So I think that there are some companies that you could argue would do even better in a down sort of equity market.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there were companies, if you look at historically, you have Google, right? That was after the dot com crash. I mean, while it was performing, Groupon, a lot of these performance based businesses that, you know, do well that way. So I guess let's switch gears a little bit because clearly you've done a lot of investing.

• 20:03Tim Ferriss?

  So let me, let me just add one more thing. So I think I always assume there's going to be a crash because that keeps me from losing my shirt. And I am in early stage investing for the long game. I'm going to do this for decades, so I'm in no rush. So that's the other thing. Coming back to the first question, what do I invest in? I invest in people who'd be happy to run their companies for 15 years.

• 20:26Tim Ferriss?

  Because if they're looking for a two to three year flip, there are too many things in the macro environment, completely out of anyone's control, or at least their control, that could obliterate any type of acquisition or IPO plans that they have.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  That's fair. So you started out, obviously, not just as an investor. That wasn't your first gig. Can you talk to us a little bit about your first businesses, I think called Brain Quicken?

• 20:50Tim Ferriss?

  Brain Quicken, yes. So Brain Quicken, I started out right out of college. My first job was, it took 32, I still have them, 32 emails to get this job. But I was hoping for something that was not a sales position, but I ended up in technical sales for a storage area networking company. So selling mass data storage to movie studios, to National Geographic Survey. I think that's the name of the company and so on. So at the time, mass data storage meant, you know, like 10 terabytes. Like, whoa, you know, 100 terabytes was just like winning the lottery. Now you can go to Fry's and buy that for like, you know, $700. But coming up with fiber channel and gigabit ethernet, you know, network attached storage, blah, blah, blah.

• 21:34Tim Ferriss?

  So we're competing against EMC and NetApp primarily. That company.

• 21:42Tim Ferriss?

  I joined that company in 99, 2000. So the implosion came shortly thereafter, you know, a year, year and a half later. And I saw the writing on the wall with the, the, the, the layers and, and waves of firings. I was like, okay, like if they just fired the entire inside sales team, chances of the outside sales team is not going to last very long. So I started this company and I remember specifically when it happened because there was a sort of a middle level sales manager who came in and he dropped this huge stack, like a hundred pages just of names and phone numbers. And he said, start smiling and dialing. And I was like, that's not the smartest way to do this. And I'm really getting tired of this job. So I started thinking about what I would start.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  And coming back to kind of the, the simplicity of the investing model, I was like, well, what do I need? What do I want? And what do I spend a disproportionate amount of money on? In other words, what am I pricing sensitive to? And I looked at my credit card statements and bank account statements and it was sports nutrition. It was sports related supplements and pills and potions and powders. And I had enough background, I was in neuroscience initially at, at Princeton and kept studying that even though I transferred to more like language acquisition and whatnot, that I knew what I wanted, which was a sort of neural focused pre-workout supplement. So I just went out and tried to find biochemists and so on, who would help me put that together.

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  And guilted my, all of my male coworkers, male, because women tend to be smart enough not to spend like a ludicrous amount of their income on pre-workout supplements. So the guys, not true. They'll blow all their cash on it. So I guilted all of them into like buying the first manufacturing run. And that's how I, that's how I financed the first manufacturing run. And I also realized pretty quickly, being that young at the time, whatever I was, you know, early twenties, that I should not meet people in person. I should do it all by the, via phone, because when they met me in person, they're like, you know, I looked like the Tom Hanks kid in Big in the suit. They're like, who the hell are you? Why should I take you seriously? And Started that company and I learned quite a few important lessons. Many of them were a direct result of not having any outside financing.

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  It was all bootstrapped. And I learned about margins, not only very literal sort of margins where I'm looking for a 7 to 10x markup, but the importance of a margin of safety. And there's actually an interesting book called Margin of Safety, which is about value investing for people who want to invest in other asset classes. I think it's Seth Klarman, Bauhaus, a very interesting hedge fund. But, so the margin of safety would include things like buying media. So I was buying advertising. This was in like the golden age of Google AdWords when I was just getting started. But also I was doing print advertising. And the feedback cycle was so slow that I might, I might expend, you know,

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  a fifth of my entire bank account to buy one ad. And then I had to wait four months to get the results. So what might you do in such a scenario? Well, I would reach out to a retailer, let's just say Acme Supplement Retailer, and I would negotiate. Negotiation is a lot about timing. So I'd wait until the inventory in a magazine was about to expire and I would hit five magazines and I'd say, "What do you have left as remnants base? I will give you one-fifth of RateCard." Right? And so I would get, say, well, let's just say I get a $10,000 space for $1,000 hypothetically, right? And then I would call Acme Retailer and I'd say, "Hey, I have a great opportunity. I just wanted to let you guys know. If you're interested, great. If not, that's fine. I'll call your competitor X.

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, I just bought this ad, RateCard, $10,000. And if you, if you pre-purchased $2,500 or $5,000 worth of product at wholesale, I will feature you as the exclusive retailer." So automatically I have guaranteed that I will not lose money on that trade per se. And then if I figure out that that works, that initial trade, then I can plow money in. Capping your downside. Like if you, if you can cap your downside, you can afford to do many experiments and the upside will eventually take care of itself if you're formulating good experiments. So those were some of the things I learned. And I think the meta-skill on top of that was negotiating. So whether it's, like, there are a couple of resources that really helped me. Secrets of Power Negotiating by Roger, I think it's Roger Dawson. Get the audio if you can.

• 26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Secrets of Power Negotiating. Getting past no as opposed to getting to yes. Getting past no is sort of a more realistic take. We're both very, very helpful, but I learned how to negotiate and deal make. And I think that those skills have translated to everything else.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  So you brought up an interesting point when you were going through your business. You said you learned a lot because you were not venture backed, you were bootstrapping that business. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the advantages or thinking through bootstrap businesses versus VC backed businesses? Obviously, being in Silicon Valley, we're all enamored with the VC backed system.

• 26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think that.

• 26:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'll make another book recommendation, Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. And so Derek Sivers is a really interesting sort of philosopher, king, programmer, polymath, who started CD Baby and then sold it. Worth checking out, but he views building a company as your opportunity to create a utopia. So your ideal version of the world. And he was bootstrapped until he sold the company.

• 27:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I think that they are fundamentally quite different. The way that you build, although the way you build them may be similar, the philosophy in mind, if you commit to building a bootstrap company is different to that of venture backed. The similarity is if you want to build a highly scalable business that produces a lot of cash flow, you should build it so that you aren't a single point of failure. So in that sense, if you read a book like Built to Sell by John Warlow or E-Myth Revisited, sort of assuming that you're going to be 100x the size and putting systems in place will allow you the flexibility to have an ideal lifestyle business. It will also set you up to sell the company, right? So I think that the build process can be very similar.

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  The difference is, and this has become very front of mind for me recently because I've had, I had a friend killed in a freak accident a week ago on Mount Kilimanjaro, hit by a bunch of rocks, came tumbling down the mountain, dead on the spot. Much, I mean, I think late twenties, early thirties. Another friend of a friend just died two days ago, freak bike accident. You are not guaranteed to have a lot of time on this planet. I mean, there are probably a more than a handful of people in this room who will die from like unnatural causes or early death. You're not all going to die from old age, I hate to say it. But I don't mean that to be a downer. I think this is a very important thing to keep in mind. And, you know, a lot of artists, I think it was in the Renaissance period, would use what's called a memento mori.

• 28:27Tim Ferriss?

  They would put a skull or a reminder in their pieces of art that took a long time to create to remind them of the fact that they would die. And that they should make the most of every moment. And the reason I bring that up is that I think lifestyle businesses or lifestyle design is very much present state focused or near term focused. And that VC backed can be very long term focused in a way that people focus on the, what I would call a deferred life plan. They're like, well, you know, like life sucks. It's going to suck for the next five to 10 years. But then I'll exit hopefully for fill in the blank number that they've kind of made up. And then I will be happy and everything will be great. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but I think there are, you need to understand the risks in taking that approach.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Do you think that that's, you know, necessarily true? I mean, it's a, it's a generalism, but I mean, there's definitely people, for example, who have done VC backed businesses that seem ridiculously happy and...

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  There are. I would say that they're in the minority and I would also say they're the same people that I would invest in during a dot com depression. Not in a boom cycle. In a boom cycle, you have a lot of folks who are looking at outliers that they see on the covers of magazines. And they're not thinking of the survivorship bias. And they're like, oh my God, that guy bet the farm and he did this and then he sold his company for a hundred million dollars. And they're like, well, it's kind of like looking at, looking at mutual funds that advertise in like barons. It's like, you're only looking at the two that survived. So you're not reading about like the tragic stories of failure when people throw caution to the wind and don't mitigate risk in that way. So I think the, there are absolutely outliers. But I would just say that the pattern or the vast majority that I see

• 30:08Tim Ferriss?

  are so fixated on the future that they don't pay attention to, for instance, and there are exceptions, we can talk about a couple of them, taking care of their physical self. Right? And even if you're purely interested in cognitive performance, mind and body, same thing. Is, is, is the best way to think of it. There's no sort of Cartesian duality in that sense or separation. If you want to perform optimally from a mental standpoint, you need to take care of the entire system.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  So that's a great segue into some of the things that I think you're more known for. You know, the four-hour series, you have a number of different approaches. You are known for life hacking or experimenting. What approaches have you seen that are successful and, you know, being successful in venture and all these other businesses? And then I have to ask you, do you actually work four hours a week?

• 30:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I've never been asked that before. I will, I will answer that. So the, I'll answer that first, just to get it out of the way. So the, the four-hour question, so the original title of the book was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit. And my publisher, which was the tongue-in-cheek name of the lecture that I gave at Princeton in this high-tech entrepreneurship class twice a year. Cause I was the only back, I was the only bootstrapped founder. They were all venture-backed. And, but lo and behold, no big surprise, my publisher, Crown, told me, they're like, you know, Walmart, not big on the drug dealing for fun and profit title. So you need to change the title. I was like, alright, that's fine. So I did a bunch of Google AdWords testing and ended up with Four Hour Work Week.

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Originally, it was the Two Hour Work Week, cause that's how much time I was spending managing Brinkweek in at the time. And they were like, two-hour work week, that's completely unbelievable. I was like, four-hour work week? And they're like, there you go, now we're talking.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  You guys heard it here first.

• 31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, now we're on the same page. And, but the, the Four Hour Work Week does have a factual basis. I mean, in like the two to four hours, whatever, that was, that was spent managing Brinkweek in at the time. The objective with that book, and for those of you who read it, you know this, but the, the objective is to control your most valuable non-renewable resource, which is time, so you can allocate it in the way that you would like, to optimize for X, whatever you happen to be optimizing for. So if you are, but if you can, and put it another way, it's about optimizing or maximizing your per-hour output. Once you maximize your per-hour output, you can choose to work the same number of hours, but get five to 10 times more done.

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  You can work less and spend more time on things that are more important to you, family, whatever it might be. Or you can work more. And there are a lot of people. I've connected with after four hour work being for our body, particularly people saying like the highest levels of finance were like, awesome, now I can work even more and crush my competition. Fantastic. And that's not a misapplication. So do I work four hours a week? I mean, I'm in a very fortunate position. I don't have, I mean, I don't have to do anything. So I choose to spend time on creating cool things that I think can have an impact of some type. And that's why, for instance, I feel like I can do that more effectively investing and advising than I can in starting my own venture backed company, which I've

• 33:17Tim Ferriss?

  never done. I have no plans to do because I'm a terrible, I just really shave against authority in any way. So it's just, I don't think I would be good at it. And I don't think I'm particularly good manager for that matter either. But the, in terms of commonalities across high performing CEOs and founders, not necessarily the same people, right? The CEOs are not necessarily the founders. But I would say, number one, there are many ways to skin that cat, right? So you can have like a Herb Kelleher from Southwest who's like, nice guy, give you a hug, like pat every employee on the head, or you can have Steve Jobs, not the nicest guy in the world. Very effective, but not very effective. And

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  some people could argue not very happy either. And Warren Buffett, same story, right? And he, he does not have necessarily the best relationship with his kids. And there's a great book called Making of an American Capitalist, which is sort of unauthorized, which makes it slightly more interesting in my mind, which is very, very good about Buffett. But I think that what they have in common at, at the core, despite different behaviors, different way of implementing it, from my perspective, is being effective instead of being efficient. And all I mean by that is they're very good at choosing the highest priority tasks that will render everything else easier or irrelevant, as opposed to just doing a lot of things quickly.

• 34:47Tim Ferriss?

  And whenever I find, for instance, a big red flag for me, if you find a founder who has many, many, many side projects, I've never had one of those work out. If they have like 15 side projects they're passionate about, they don't know how to pick a lead domino that will help topple all of the others, that will produce a good ROI for themselves, for their employees, for their shareholders, investors, et cetera. And I think that, I'll give a non-tech example. So I was just interviewing a few days ago, this guy named Jocko Willink. I imagine probably none of you have heard of him. J-O-C-K-O Willink, W-I-L-L-I-N-K. One of the scariest human beings I've ever met in my life. He entered the Navy SEALs

• 35:30Tim Ferriss?

  at 170 pounds, now weighs 240, is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, trains top MMA fighters, but was also the commander of the most decorated special forces unit in Iraq. But if you look at what made him very good at what he does, among other things, it was being able to take something seemingly complex to the people reporting to him, simplify it, and then he was able to detach himself in a way so that from his outside perspective, he could identify of these six emergencies, what the most critical emergency was, and to tackle that first. And I think that good CEOs have that ability, and it just takes practice. But I think oftentimes the most important thing is whatever makes everybody the most uncomfortable.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  So you talked a little bit about CEOs and founders, and you made a subtle distinction and said, sometimes a good founder is different than a good CEO. Can you talk a little bit more about that, you know, what the distinction would be?

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, quite frankly, you'd probably be better answering this, or many people in this room, but not every founding CEO makes a good, say, growth stage CEO. I mean, there are some people who are just brilliant product developers. And so one of the green flags, instead of a red flag for me, is when I find a startup that's growing quickly without any type of paid acquisition or advertising, and I have...

• 36:58Tim Ferriss?

  Say people from my network who reach out to me since I'm public about these investments to offer them an amazing business development opportunity or partnership or whatever and they say, "That's great, not the best timing, we're just going to focus on product for now." Perfect. Those companies turn out best for me, up to this point. And a lot of CEOs get pulled from a tactical sort of technician level of crafting product, working on UI, working on A, B, C, D, and E, and get put into a managerial role as the company expands, and they're just not good at it. Or they don't like it, which often leads to them not being good at it, because they don't want to dedicate their sort of mental resources to it. So that would be, that'd be one example. There are many, though.

• 37:42Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you have that, then you have, you have different stages, then you have pre-IPO, IPO. All of those stages can require a different skill set. And it's rare, not impossible, but rare that the founding CEO makes it all the way, or wants to make it all the way to running a public company for X number of years.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  So you brought up being happy at a point when you're talking about the habits, when you were talking about lifestyle design.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Steve Jobs.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  How do you factor that in? How do you advise everyone here to think about that? Because I think a lot of people, the characterization of Silicon Valley is, you know, work really hard, kill it, 100 hours a week, you know, grind kind of thing. How do you think about that yourself in your own life?

• 38:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that you can, you can kill it and work 100 hours a week and be, and feel a general sense of well-being. Happiness is a troublesome word, so I actually try to avoid using, or avoid using happiness and success, because I think they're so overused, they tend to not have a clear definition. So you end up chasing the specter, and that's very dangerous, because you realize, say, five years later, that you've been chasing your tail without a clear outcome in mind. What I would say is that I think the opposite Of happiness isn't sadness, it's boredom for most people in this room. So if you kind of semantically continue that analogy, you'd say, well, if happiness isn't a good word, what's the opposite of boredom? I should chase that excitement.

• 39:07Tim Ferriss?

  So I think if you chase what excites you, that's easier to grasp onto, easier to define. And the side effect of that is feeling what people would characterize as happy. So that's, that's how I think about it. And whenever I found her, it's usually because I'm looking at it a different way. So I would say chase what excites you, and that tends to be the cure-all for a lot of these other issues.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  So you talked about good CEOs, good founders, habits. Are there any folks that you look at and say, these guys are killing it, they're doing the right thing that people should look out for?

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  There are many, many people who impress me, and every person has their strengths and weaknesses. I'm very impressed by Marc Andreessen would be one. I think he's just very good at filtering opportunities and decisions based on his ability to project into the future and identify things that could be extremely large. I think he's very, very good at that and has a certain prescient ability. And as a result of that, he's good at ignoring a lot of noise. So thinking of sort of not just current market size, but eventual market size, right? I mean, not to beat a dead horse here, but I think Uber's another great example, right?

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's where it's like, people are like, oh my God, the black car industry, that's only this big, right? X million people, X, you know, Y million number of rides. It's like, well, what if the technology significantly expands that market? And I think that is lost on a lot of people. They look at current comparables without looking at how that technology can affect broadening the market or use cases, right? So it's like, oh, we thought it was just black cars, but then there's Uber X, and then there's food delivery and buh buh buh buh, and now it's this sort of mesh of logistics that can be laid on top of anything.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Other people who impress me, I mentioned Jaco, because I don't want to limit it to tech. I think that unfortunately, in every world, whether that's tech, military, or otherwise, people develop a very narrow evaluation of leadership. And in fact, I think where you can differentiate yourself and establish those competitive advantages that I talked about earlier, is by borrowing from worlds and industries that are completely outside of what is considered normal. Like the echo chamber here, like as an experiment, ignore tech for a week. Look for leaders who are effective outside of tech and what tactics and strategies you can borrow from them. Because I guarantee you, 99% of the people you're surrounded by or competing against are not looking at any of those examples.

• 41:45Tim Ferriss?

  So I think that you could look at someone like Rick Rubin, for instance, music producer. And I did a podcast with him, you guys can listen to it, but very, I mean, he's worked with everyone you can imagine. I mean, Johnny Cash, Eminem, Jay-Z, Slipknot, I mean, it's just like everybody. Metallica, it's an incredible roster. And he is very good at making sort of calm, big-picture decisions and guiding artists. So as an investor, I find that very interesting. Because investors are almost producers in a way. You're taking these raw materials and trying to mold it into something more effective, that can scale more rapidly, etc. It's not that dissimilar. So I think Rick Rubin is a very interesting example.

• 42:30Tim Ferriss?

  And he chooses, for instance, to be relatively secluded. So what I've come to realize is, you can say yes, and in many ways, you have to say yes to get to a first tier of success in any field. And at that point, you have to take all these abilities that got you there, basically turn them on their head, to say no to a thousand or a million things, so that you can focus. And I find that very difficult. Still find it difficult, I'm not the worst person at it. But Neil Strauss, who's a seven-time New York Times bestselling author, like his systems that he's put in place to say no, or completely ignore, so he doesn't even see 99% of the inbound while he's on book deadline, is very impressive to me.

• 43:13Tim Ferriss?

  And he was a, and is still, a very effective journalist. And the fact that he can... Turn out high-quality work and doesn't believe in the existence of writer's block effectively is impressive to me. And he does that through systems and habits and processes. It's not magic, it's not any type of God-given talent. He's trained himself to do that. So those are a few people who come to mind.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  All right, let's open up to some questions. Kaya can give you the mic, just raise your hand. Ask Tim hard questions.

• 43:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, hard's good.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  He's ready.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'm ready, warmed up, warmed up with my gin tonic.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  How is your understanding of neurotneuroscience affected how you write?

• 43:57Tim Ferriss?

  So how is my understanding of neuroscience affected how I write? It hasn't much. I would say that the two, for me, are still pretty far apart. I think that they will be more directly connected at some point in time, but for now, I'm really just looking at millennia of human behavior and allowing that to inform how I write more than modern neuroscience. Although I might write about that shortly. I'm working on some stuff related to some freakish experiments in neuroscience that I would not inflict on any of you, but I will inflict on myself.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  So for instance, if you want people to use prescriptive information, how-to information, you have to understand behavioral change. So I could actually, so let me take that back. I might not look at anatomical neuroscience, but I might look at cognitive neuroscience. So work of, say, Danny Kahneman or others to identify how habits are developed and how I can avoid cognitive resistance to certain types of suggestions. But I think I look at behavioral change and the science related to that very closely. So if I want someone to, say, lose 100 pounds, trying to persuade them to do that with

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  the threat of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease doesn't work. It very clearly does not work. But if you're trying to say like, "Hey, six-pack, your ass'll look better in jeans," or like, "You'll have more sex," this, that, and the other thing, that really works. And so you use, say, changing breakfast, right?

• 45:39Tim Ferriss?

  You say, "Don't change anything, don't start exercising, I just want you to change breakfast." And then they lose 10 pounds in the first week or two. And that builds the credibility so that you can then sell them on the next step. And you never advertise the diabetes or whatnot. That is a side effect of you having used an effective Trojan horse in the first place. So I think of the sneaky Trojan horse that I can use to get people to do things they don't want to do when offered sort of conventional reasoning, if that makes sense, right? And that can be used for just about anything. Language learning can be used for weight loss, it can be used for quitting smoking. You have to use the right incentives. So I would say, I wouldn't say this is neuroscience per se, but if you look at,

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  this is in Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which was recommended to me by Barack Obama. So I took that book recommendation seriously. Great book. But looking at loss aversion versus desire for gain, right? So how hard will you work to make $100 versus losing $100? Or worse yet, getting robbed of $100? Well, it turns out that if you were to... The motivating magnitude of, say, losing $100 is only matched by gaining like $600. It's completely disproportionate. What does that mean? Use the stick. You know, in the US, it's like pat on the head, gold ribbon for 13th place or whatever.

• 47:09Tim Ferriss?

  But if you want to affect behavioral change in yourself, use punishment. It really works. Or humiliation, or embarrassment. And those are like really dirty words in the US. Because like, "No, kumbaya, happy, happy, we're all good." And that flies in face of the science. So it's like, "Oh, you want to lose weight? Like, take a photo of your fat ass from like six perspectives in underwear, give it to your most merciless friend and be like, "If I don't lose 30 pounds by this point in time, like, this is going on the internet. You will figure it out."

• 47:38Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  I think we got her question. Anyone else?

• 47:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sugar coating it doesn't help. The tall gentleman over there with the beard.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  You said it'd be kind of easier to monetize wants, not needs. And you kind of pointed at it there. Can you go a little deeper?

• 47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, so wants, not needs.

• 48:00Tim Ferriss?

  And how do I think about that? Well, I think what I was just mentioning ties into it perfectly. People don't need to have their ass look good in jeans. But for whatever reason, for whatever human like foible and defect, they will work harder for that than dying 10 years earlier from heart disease. Humans are just not good at many, many things, including sort of exponential versus linear thinking, long-term versus short-term. So I think that selling the want is like when in doubt, sell the want, not the need. Because I think when you say you need this, people also, this is my subjective take on it,

• 48:42Tim Ferriss?

  but they are sometimes offended or affronted because that seems very presumptuous, more so than if you're selling a want. So that's not hard data, but that's generally how I think about it. And also, it's, I think you can assign a higher value to wants in some cases than needs. I know that sounds funny. But it's more aspirational and more nebulous in a way. The market hasn't been set. The price has not been established for a lot of these wants as opposed to needs. So that would be my general take. Kaya, who's next?

• 49:20Tim Ferriss?

  You could just like find the drunkest person and hand them the mic.

• 49:25Speaker 06

  Just wondering on your podcast, who can be your top two favorite people you've ever interviewed in life?

• 49:32Tim Ferriss?

  So this is a tricky question. So favorite podcast guests and why? So I will say that as background, I started the podcast to be a break between book projects. It was not intended to be a thing for me or...

• 49:48Tim Ferriss?

  To be what it is now, which is, you know, 100 episodes in, etc.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  Every guest is invited on the show out of, first and foremost, self-interest for me. And that is the scratch-your-own-itch ethos that I kind of apply to everything. Because at least I know I'll enjoy the conversation, even if it falls flat everywhere else. Which comes back to the, like, real-world MBA investing, like, even if it fails, what do I gain? And, uh...

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  So, this seems like a dodge, but like, every guest has served a very specific purpose for me. Like, Brene Brown, right? Vulnerability, shame, etc. Seems totally out of place, but like, I was dealing with some shit that I wanted to sort out. So, Brene Brown it is. Uh, and, uh, you know, Jaco, this amazing name. Uh, so Jaco, uh, was sort of brought on the podcast for many reasons, but also because I feel like I'm a manual illiterate. It's like, I use my thumbs for the spacebar, and that's great, but it's like, if I had to fix a car, build anything, I'm probably a hopeless cause. Or like, stop someone who's hemorrhaging, like, apply a basic tourniquet, I wouldn't know how to do it. And, uh, that's become an issue for me, so, hence Jaco.

• 51:05Tim Ferriss?

  I would say that, uh, some of my favorites are very close friends of mine. I'll just, I'll just put it that way. Uh, Josh Waitzkin, who was the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, considered a chess prodigy, but really has a learning framework that he can apply to anything. Very soulful guy. Uh, I would characterize as extremely successful, but also very, um, self-actualized. And if we wanted to use happy, although I don't like to, I would describe him as a happy guy. Uh, I would say the people who are very, very highly successful and world-class in their chosen field, but also who can time out and like, chill the fuck out and enjoy the small things, those tend to be the people, tend to be the people I gravitate to, because I have trouble with the latter part of that.

• 51:49Tim Ferriss?

  Rick Rubin would be another example of that. Uh, I think Jon Favreau is a good example of that, the director. Robert Rodriguez, very good at it. Uh, so those would be a few examples, but, um... I get something out of all of them, otherwise I wouldn't have them on the show.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  This is about your experience as a solo entrepreneur. It seemed like a lot of it, and it's also a mini-bail, just straight up about my personal situation. So, I'm working on a side project, and I'm actually starting to really like it, but the conventional wisdom is that you need a co-founder and a team. I'm sort of looking for you to talk me into that, because I'm sort of just enjoying what I'm doing, and I don't want to start just looking around.

• 52:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let me dig. So, the question was, you know, I'm a solo founder. Solo founder, I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but I'm getting a lot of pressure or advice to find a co-founder and follow the Silicon Valley venture-backed script, right? I'd say that it depends entirely on what you want the outcome to be, right? And I find one year is hard because it's so close. I like three-year goals, and then ratchet that back to sort of next steps within six months. That's how my mind operates. But, read a book called, I think it's Small Giants or Little Giants by Bo Burlingam, and it's about companies that choose to be the best and not the biggest.

• 53:18Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's a good counter例 to the sort of common recipe used in Silicon Valley. And again, they're not different. It's like you're baking or making different things, or just recipes for different outcomes. But I think if you're enjoying it, if I were to project my experience, one way to very quickly not enjoy it is to have, if you say, well, I don't want to get into all this muck, but it's like, if you have a board, and then you raise a bunch of money, and you lose control of the board, or you fuck up your cap table, blah, blah, blah, it just complicates the purity of that enjoyment tremendously. I would also say, as a solo entrepreneur, without those shareholders and employees

• 54:02Tim Ferriss?

  to which you do owe a degree of loyalty and so on, you can opt out. You have the option to hit pause, or stop, or eject. And I enjoy personally that optionality, right? So, I will invest in venture-backed businesses, but I am not suited to building one myself. I really don't think I'm in a good position. I don't have a good temperament for that, right? And it's just like, hey, if you're going to be a chef... It's different, like being a cook is different than being a baker. It's like if you like to fold your underwear and socks and like everything really orderly, kind of American Psycho style, you're probably a baker. Like, that's me. I'm a baker. And if you're a cook, it's like, "Ah, like, let's try a dash of that and a dash of this, and like, taste as we go, and like, fuck it, let's like, throw caution to the wind and see what happens."

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's just not my style. I get too stressed out. So you just have to figure out, you know, what the best match for your personality is, and what version of utopia you want to create, which comes back to the Derek Sivers example. And even if you don't want to read the book, a lot of his material is on Sivers.org, which is fantastic. I really admire him tremendously for his willingness to not just talk about acting in a contrarian way that is true to himself, but actually implementing it and sort of shocking cases many, many times.

• 55:15Speaker 07

  You're back there. Hey, Tim, this is Jared Metabase. Question is, what have you changed your mind about in the last year or two?

• 55:23Tim Ferriss?

  What have I changed my mind about in the last year or two? That's a great question. What have I changed my mind about? The first that comes to mind, and feel free to follow up if you'd like, but it's on a medical front. I was knocked out of commission for about nine months with Lyme disease, and always really wrote it off because I grew up on Long Island where everybody gets Lyme disease, but I was just destroyed and was operating at like 10% capacity for a very long time. And I always also distrusted the diagnosis of chronic Lyme, even though it persisted for that long.

• 56:06Tim Ferriss?

  And what I've changed my mind about is antibiotics. Now, antibiotics are very important and have some really key applications, but what I've realized in discussion with people like Rob Wolf, for instance, some of you may know that name, R-O-B-B, you can check him out if not, very, very smart guy, works a lot in sort of the CrossFit paleo communities, but a very good understanding of biochemistry, is that the treatment...

• 56:34Tim Ferriss?

  Causes what you might call iatrogenic problems. So iatrogenic is a fancy way of saying you go to a hospital and the medicine or the treatment itself causes additional problems. So the antibiotics like doxycycline can screw up mitochondrial function. And if you screw up your mitochondria, guess what? You start exhibiting symptoms that seem identical to Lyme disease. But I think that the blame is placed on Lyme where, whereas the, in fact, I think many cases could be explained by the antibiotics. Now, the way I've addressed that is by experimenting with diet, specifically ketogenic diet, like Atkins diet, and fasting.

• 57:19Tim Ferriss?

  And those were the keys, I don't yet know the exact mechanism, that allowed me to return to my previous level of functioning after the antibiotics. So it wasn't just like probiotics, because that was the wrong target. It seems like the probiotics were the wrong target. It wasn't just destroying the gut biome, which is itself another problem, but it was the mitochondrial function. And taking supplements, whether that's like berberine, for instance, but really focusing on resurrecting that type of function. So that's something that was a big surprise to me that I've changed my mind on.

• 57:48Speaker 07

  Yes, another question. So I started a B2B SaaS company about eight years ago. And actually, my company was featured on your blog, actually, as one of the muses that kind of did really well. And I was able to automate the whole business, so I didn't have to work at all. Pretty much no time at all, really. And I think one of the things, I always had a lot of questions about what to do after you kind of got to that point, which I always felt like there should have been kind of like a follow-up to the before work, of like, you know, what you would do after they get into that situation.

• 58:23Tim Ferriss?

  What next, yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 07

  And I think one of the things that I've always wondered about is sort of some of the things that you may have experienced, let's say like loneliness.

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 58:32Speaker 07

  Working by yourself. But also, you mentioned like you don't like the whole, you know, like venture back, having a bunch of employees, probably because it ties you down. I mean, you have a lot more freedom when you're sort of by yourself. And I guess I'm curious how you've thought about, you know, I guess, having like kind of one, let's say like Elon Musk of the world, where they kind of focus on one big problem, versus let's say you're interested in a lot of different things, you know, how does that kind of, how do you think about those two things?

• 59:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so that's a multi-pronged question, right? So there's the what next if you create a lifestyle business? Then there's the how do I view the more scattered as a negative, has a negative connotation? Sort of the diversely interested entrepreneur versus the solely focused on one big problem entrepreneur? And just to address one thing you said, you know, the, the, the observation was that I might not like venture cat, venture backed companies for myself because it ties me down. Quite frankly, I just don't think I'd be good at it. So it's like, not my sport to operate in a managerial role in a company like that.

• 59:46Tim Ferriss?

  I just don't think I'd be good at it. As a mercenary for growth, yeah, I'm really good. You know, that's my key. So it's like, I should be used as a mercenary, not like a lifer, you know? I just, I'll shafe, I won't work well in that environment. So the, but to address the first, so you create a successfully, a successful muse business, or what that means is automated cash flow business. For me, and again, I come from a very risk averse family in general. I myself, I view myself as risk averse, which might come as funny to people. But I view, risk is an irreversible negative outcome. That's, that's how I sort of think of risk. So I want to satisfy as many levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs first from a financial standpoint,

• 1:00:31Tim Ferriss?

  and then I can focus on big problems. So for me, the segue from cash flow and bootstrap businesses to venture backed was perfect because I could try to fuel and help people who do have the skillset and the drive to work for a decade or more to build a company worth 50 plus billion dollars that affects. You know, many, many, hopefully hundreds of millions of people. And that is sort of my Archimedes lever is acting as an advisor and investor, right? Or using my audience to help the Global Literacy X Prize, right?

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  So I have developed these assets that allow me to affect change in these areas by assisting people who are leading that charge. So that's been my decision. Rather than starting one of those companies, I would rather use the tools and assets and megaphones that I have to try to amplify and accelerate 10, 20, 30 of those people.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  And, oh, singular focus versus like diverse interests? Again, I think it comes down to personality type. I don't have the ability to focus on one thing for a very long period of time. So what I choose to do is to find a basket of activities that each tie into a meta-skill. So in my particular case, right, whether I'm learning something really esoteric like Japanese horseback archery or looking at options, right? Derivatives training. I will, the approach I take to try, to trying to deconstruct that skill, identify top performers and codify sort of an algorithm or recipe that each of them are using and test assumptions.

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  That process is the same across all the skill sets. So my, I guess my singular skill is this development of meta-learning, the learning of how to learn faster, but I don't have the patience or wherewithal to focus on just one thing. And that's, that's maybe a weakness, but I've turned it into a strength by approaching it in that systematic cohesive way, if that makes sense. And then hopefully I can take that skill and transplant it to someone who's singularly focused on building a huge company that will hopefully positively impact the world. And they can apply that within the company itself, right? So that's, that's how I've been thinking about it, at least.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  All right, everyone, let's thank Tim. I think we're wrapping up here. Roberto, do you want to say a couple of things real quick?

• 1:03:05Speaker 08

  It's funny because I have the microphone, so I was going to ask one last question. Oh. Wrapping up. That's cheating.

• 1:03:12Speaker 08

  But you basically answered, I was about to ask, you said it's a green flag for me when a entrepreneur doesn't have 15 other side projects that are working, right? You have a lot of things. And I was basically, of course, a question of saying, hey, you're a pastor, you're a writer, you do podcasts, well, you do all these things, if you had to choose one of those, which one would you choose to focus on, right? Now you gave a very long answer on how you go about that. I was thinking about that question, but I'll have to hear that.

• 1:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  If I had to choose one, uh...

• 1:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  That is tough.

• 1:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  If I had to choose one, I would...

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's so tough. It would either be the podcast or writing. And the podcast is effectively my favorite part of writing without the writing. It's interviewing experts and getting their advice for whatever I want to ask them. That's fucking amazing. So, that is hard to give up. I could cheat and say it'd be the writing because that's already a component of it. Writing, though, in long form, I think, holds a very peculiar and unique position in the mind space of humans. It still does, and I think it's because of the immersive experience. So, rather than reading an article and having 15 notifications and 17 tabs vying for your

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  attention, you can immerse yourself in this long-form experience, and I think that's why books, when done properly, at least in nonfiction and prescriptive work, can have such tremendous impact. You can grab someone's attention in a world where that is the last thing they have to offer.

• 1:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  And it's the most fragmented.

• 1:05:00Tim Ferriss?

  But I would say...

• 1:05:04Tim Ferriss?

  I would say the interviewing. I just, I love trying to identify the commonalities across seemingly separate worlds, because there are commonalities, there are always commonalities. Like, the best people in 10 fields that seem to have nothing to, like, competitive eating, like, competitive wood chopping, you know, like, curling, poker-playing. You take the top 3 performers in those worlds, they will have more in common with each other than the people who are like, the 10th to 15th place players in each of those fields. So, I would say that. And I would also say, for those of you who haven't really dug into Expa, you should chat with these guys. I mean, the reason I find Expa so interesting, among very many others, this comes back to like, the side project-

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  Unpaid, unpaid.

• 1:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, kind of. Is, uh, is that, well, when you look at a studio model, right, and you're not taking applications, you have less distraction. You don't, you don't fall prey to the fear of missing out, the FOMO that drives such a spray and pray approach in the valley, which I think is extremely dangerous, because it fragments your attention, it fragments your allocation of resources, and whether that's people, and sort of man-hours, or capital or otherwise, right? So, you're, you're really, uh, developing companies as opposed to trying to collect products. And those are 2 very different things, right?

• 1:06:29Tim Ferriss?

  Because you can have the best product in the world, and it could change the world, but it doesn't, because it never gets to scale, because like, the cap table was screwed up, right from the get-go. Or, the team wasn't put together properly. Or, they brought in the wrong investors too early. Right? And you can avoid all those problems with the playbook, uh, or avoid most of the fatal problems with a playbook that I think you guys have developed and are continually refining at Expa. So, if you guys haven't, haven't talked to these guys, you should. It's very, very unique. I mean, I'm very protective of my time, and this is one of the places I've chosen to spend it, so. Appreciate it. Yeah. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Sid. Okay. Thanks, guys.

• 1:07:20Tim 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, for instance.

• 1:08:02Tim Ferriss?

  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 4hourworkweek.com, that's 4hourworkweek.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.

• 1:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  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 assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they 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

• 1:09:25Tim Ferriss?

  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, etc., can offer all of this 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.

• 1:10:08Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 1:10:52Tim Ferriss?

  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. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So, check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:11:36Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mock-ups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project, and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mock-ups and designs. You choose your favorite, and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it

• 1:12:20Tim Ferriss?

  and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.