Tim Ferriss Is Evolving: Looking Within, Learning Self-Love & Pondering What Matters Most

If you think you know Tim Ferriss, think again – this is Tim like you’ve never seen or heard him before. A relentless experimenter and virtuoso of deconstruction, Tim has spent the better part of his adult life studying mastery and sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog and string of four consecutive #1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling books, which include The 4-Hour Workweek*,The 4-Hour Body*,The 4-Hour Chef*,Tools of Titans*, and his brand new offering, Tribe of Mentors*. Along the way, Tim became a prominent angel investor and philanthropist, named one of Fast Company‘s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune‘s “40 under 40”. He’s graced the main stage at TED and been featured in every prominent media outlet imaginable. His work hosting The Tim Ferriss Show podcast – one of the most widely listened to podcasts in the world with over 200 million downloads — led The Observer to call him “the Oprah of audio”. I’m willing to bet most of you are already decidedly familiar with this globally renowned polymath. Like you, I’ve followed his blog for years. I’ve read all his books and I listen to his podcast regularly. It’s an understatement to say that Tim’s work has been instrumental in helping me forge the life I’m blessed to lead today. For that I am forever grateful. Nonetheless, I never felt like I really knew the man behind the work. Who is the real Tim Ferriss? It turns out, Tim has been asking himself the very same question. Over the last year, he has endured much. The loss of some good friends matched by turning 40 has left him pondering his mortality. He walked away from tech investing, decamping Silicon Valley for Austin out of a desire to slow the pace of his frenetic life. And a very intense recent 10-day silent meditation retreat is emblematic of a redirected focus inward. Today finds Tim in a rather reflective and contemplative place. A point in time in which he is wrestling with his past, evaluating the person he wants to be, and deeply contemplating what is most important about life. Today we unpack the real Tim Ferriss. Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  I think we're all on different journeys. There are shared traits, perhaps, for many of us, and we hit different legs in different portions of our lives. So for some people, they start off, say, in the heart or in the gut, and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be. That's me. And then you have other people. Certainly, I would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason, or a combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on and put on this incredible armor

• 1:44Tim Ferriss?

  to protect myself and only realized in the last few years that when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things out, but you also keep a lot in.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  That's Tim Ferriss, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What's the news? How are you? How's it going? Are you ready for the holidays? Are you feeling grateful? Or are you anxious and stressed? You gotta remember gratitude is a practice. And I'm saying that to remind myself because for me, it's work. It requires focus. Gratitude requires intention and diligence. And I don't always do it well, but when I do, things just go better. They go smoother and it's more important than ever for me during the holiday season to have that in the forefront of my mind and to prioritize that as a daily routine, as a daily practice. In any event, my name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back.

• 2:58Rich Roll?

  Glad to have you. Grateful to have you. See what I did right there? I don't have to do this show. I get to do this show. See, I'm practicing. Did I mention I got Tim Ferriss on the show? Tim Ferriss? Yep. It's a big one, you guys. It's a good one, too. If you think you already know this guy, then I would suggest that you set aside whatever preconceived ideas you may have about Tim because this conversation reveals an entirely different side of this man. Tim, like you have never seen or heard him before because we go to some really intimate, personal, and emotionally vulnerable places with this conversation. New terrain for Tim.

• 3:41Rich Roll?

  We explore some areas of his life that he is currently wrestling with, what he is working on, things he has historically not discussed publicly. And I gotta say, I was really glad. I was actually honored to be a trusted steward for this exchange because it's delicate and because it explores a whole other side to this person. And I'm really proud of this conversation. It's exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have with him, that I've always wanted to have with him, and I'm just super excited to share it with you guys today. For the very few people unfamiliar with Tim, he would describe himself first and foremost as a teacher, quote, "a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk," unquote, as

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  the New York Times has described him. Tim is a relentless self-experimenter. He is a deconstructor of mastery and excellence who has spent the last 10 years sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog and string of four consecutive number one New York Times and number one Wall Street Journal bestselling books, which include The Four Hour Work Week, The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and his newest release, which just came out, just hit bookstores, Tribe of Mentors. And it's really great. You guys should definitely pick that up. In addition, Tim has been listed as one of Fast Company's most innovative business people. He made Fortune's 40 Under 40 list and has been dubbed the Oprah of Audio by The Observer and other media for

• 5:10Rich Roll?

  his work hosting The Tim Ferriss Show, one of the most widely listened to podcasts in the world with over 200 million downloads and counting. Got a whole bunch more I want to say about Tim and this conversation before we dig into it, but first.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  Okay, Tim Ferriss. I should say that on a personal level, over the years, Tim has been an extremely influential figure in my life, and his work has been immensely helpful to me. I've never met him in person before this podcast, but nonetheless, his books, his blog, and more recently, his podcast have in so many ways been instrumental in aiding my journey from disgruntled corporate attorney to what I get to do today. And I'm very grateful to him for that. So I've been patiently waiting to have this conversation ever since I started this podcast over five years ago. As much as I would have loved to have had him on a while back, I think there's something

• 6:15Rich Roll?

  about patience and timing and trusting that things like this work out when they're supposed to, because honestly, had this podcast taken place sooner, I just don't think it would have been the type of conversation that I really wanted to have with him, the deep and emotional type of conversations that I really like to conduct. And so, the timing on this is perfect, because Tim has been going through a lot. Over the last year, he turned 40, he lost some good friends, he moved to Austin from Silicon Valley. He recently completed a very intense 10-day silent meditation retreat, which we talk quite a bit about in the podcast. And all of these experiences have put him in a really interesting and reflective place in his life, a contemplative place, thinking about his past, about who

• 7:00Rich Roll?

  he is, about who he wants to be, and what really matters. And with that, I found within him this amazing willingness to be quite open and emotionally vulnerable about all manner of personal things. And as I point out in the conversation, for as many years as I have been following this guy and his work, I actually didn't really feel like I knew him. I couldn't escape this feeling that despite reading everything he wrote, I still didn't have any real sense of who this guy, Tim Ferriss, is. And I was always left wanting to get to know the real person behind the work and the success and the public persona. And today, we get to go there. We go there in a very meaningful, intimate,

• 7:42Rich Roll?

  connected, and powerful way. And I'm just so pleased that he was trusting enough to let me in. And I think that this conversation, even if you already think you know everything about Tim Ferriss, is going to leave you with an entirely new perspective on one of the most influential figures in our culture. And I think that's all I want to say about this. I'm going to let Tim do the rest. So, this is me and Tim Ferriss, in a way you have never before seen him. Enjoy.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Let's just dig into it, dude. So, uh, super happy to have you here, man. Really excited to talk to you. It's been a long time coming. I think, uh, maybe we first had emails, I think in like 2009 or something like that, and we haven't met until today.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's back a while.

• 8:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know you reached out to me, um, to, you asked me a few questions when you were working on Four Hour Body. Wish I didn't make the book, but that's okay.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  No, but I was stoked to even, uh, to even talk to you. And I think before we even get into it, um, I wanted to thank you, first of all, for writing your first book, this book for our work week. I have the original one here, um, which was super helpful and instrumental, uh, in helping me as I began this transition out of law and into what I get to do today. And I think on a very kind of practical, tactical level, figuring out how I was going to train for these crazy races and still make an income. And it was great. Like, it really helped me a lot. And, and so I appreciate you very much for writing that book. Um, and then secondarily, I wanted to thank you publicly for providing me the opportunity

• 9:33Rich Roll?

  to do a guest blog, uh, when Finding Ultra came out, which was really like, that helped me out a lot, man. And so I really appreciate that.

• 9:40Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Still gets a lot of traffic.

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  It was a little like, there was a little controversial aspect of that post, as I recall, but, uh, no, I appreciated it.

• 9:48Tim Ferriss?

  Anything called a superfood will, will polarize.

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, for sure. So, um, I think the thing that I kind of wanted to really get into, into it with you is this journey that you're kind of on currently. Cause when I think about you, I think about, um, you know, somebody who has, who has lived by this kind of rule of, of coming up with not just tools, but...

• 10:22Rich Roll?

  Kind of a roadmap for how you live. Like you're somebody who, and Jonathan Fields said this the other day, I listened to that podcast, like you're somebody who I've always looked at as a person who lives very much in their head, who is very intellectual in their approach to life. And it's reflected in the work that you do, this idea that you're dissecting and deconstructing, you know, how other people do things and applying what works for you into your own life. But I think like traditionally, when I've looked at your work, I've sort of missed the more emotional heartfelt approach to certain aspects of how to live. And what I'm seeing in you now is like a journey towards that, like an embrace

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  of that in a certain way that I haven't seen in you in the past. And I celebrate that. I think that's really cool. And that's something I'd like to hear a little bit more about.

• 11:16Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get into it. Thanks for having me, first of all. It's really nice to be here. And I think we're all on different journeys. There are shared traits, perhaps for many of us. And we hit different legs in different portions of our lives. So for some people, they start off, say, in the heart or in the gut, and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  That's me.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And then you have other people. Certainly, I would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason, or a combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on. As I did in childhood, I had some reasonably bad things happen to me as a kid that I don't really want to get into specifics over, but that encapsulates a lot for a lot of people. And put on this incredible armor to protect myself, and only realized in the last few years that, and when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things

• 12:27Tim Ferriss?

  out, but you also keep a lot in. And there were...

• 12:35Tim Ferriss?

  Certain ways that I'd handicapped myself very deliberately viewing emotion as a weakness, viewing attachment, emotional attachment in particular, as a weakness. My priority for a very long time was to simply hone myself as a, as an instrument of competition, basically, and to use that to validate myself, to prove my worth. And anything that detracted from that or remotely made me vulnerable, I viewed as something that should be disposed of. So that led me to the pro and con list, to the hyper analytical, to the, as close as

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  I could manage, Spock-like approach with a high pain tolerance to tackling different things in life. And that is just another way of accepting partial completeness, which ironically I wrote about in The Four Hour Body, which is arguably the most, I'm not gonna say clinical, that makes it sound really dry. I think it's a fun book, but it's very analytical.

• 13:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:43Tim Ferriss?

  And very quantified. And I talk about how people should question certain assumptions they've made about what they can or cannot do, such as, well, my, my parents are fat, I'm fat, that's just the way it is. And they accept that as a partial completeness and they never challenge that. But I myself never even thought of my longstanding lack of interest in emotion as a gap. Does that make sense?

• 14:04Rich Roll?

  Probably as a strength. Like, you know, from what I've heard in, in how you talk about your childhood, there's a lot of similarities with my childhood. I was somebody who was a very awkward kid, very much a loner, you know, not a, not by any stretch of the imagination, anybody who looked like they were gonna be an athlete, you know, eye patch, headgear, last kid picked for kickball, and, and really had a lot of difficulty connecting with friends and

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  classmates and as a result spent a lot of time alone. Then I discovered swimming and I and I feel like I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this. I feel like the relationship that I developed with that sport is similar to the relationship that you developed with wrestling at that time. Because I approached it as it was the first thing that I was actually good at, you know, and it was kind of this safe place away from school. And I realized very early and often that the more I put into it, the better I got. So that equation of being diligent and being devoted and working hard had very practical, real world results that were advancing my life in a very good way. But it was also a place where I could go and not have to deal.

• 15:30Rich Roll?

  It was it was like a not only a safe place, but a place away where I could just escape. So in some respects, I think I had a compulsive, obsessive, addictive relationship with it. And it was a means of not having to deal with some emotional stuff that I was going through. But when you become successful, when it's moving you forward, it's much more of a reason to continue to not look at that other aspect of your life because it's serving you.

• 15:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's there's a huge amount of overlap. So wrestling for me as a as someone born premature, I was very, very small until sixth grade. I mean, just gotten constantly on a daily basis kicked around. I was so small, I was such a small kid, I would I would generally not even opt to go out to recess because that was just like going out into the

• 16:25Rich Roll?

  Terrible.

• 16:26Tim Ferriss?

  The the open sky pen at like a federal prison. I mean, that was a dangerous place for me to be. I would just get dragged around and punched and so on. So I'd read books and that was the the cover that I used to sit on the step right outside of the door that went out to recess. And wrestling, which came to me really by luck because I was hyperactive. And my mom was told by other moms that kid wrestling would be a good way to drain my batteries. So I was put into wrestling and Then I think both of us realized that it was the one sport, since it was weight class based, that I had access to where I could end up being matched against

• 17:10Tim Ferriss?

  another equally puny nerdy kid and at least one of us got to win.

• 17:19Tim Ferriss?

  But to underscore something you said, which I think is very true for me as well is that particularly at that age, but for a long time in school at least, you have fairly siloed areas of life. I mean, you have academics and easy to measure, you do well, you do poorly. And then you have certain sports, particularly if it's an individual sport where you feel like you have some, this is another reason I gravitated towards wrestling, a semblance of control. There's so many things you can't control, but part of the reason I always ended up leaning towards individual sports, even though I did play soccer for a short

• 18:00Tim Ferriss?

  period of time. I played football for one season, which I did not like for a host of reasons. And wrestling, on the other hand, the, all the credit or all the blame was on you.

• 18:13Rich Roll?

  Lies on you. Yeah. I mean, swimming even more so.

• 18:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Rich Roll?

  It's the ultimate in self determinism.

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Rich Roll?

  Determinism, right? It's just you against the clock. I mean, you're racing against somebody else. I mean, in wrestling, you have your opponent, you have to anticipate what he's gonna do. And so that's a variable that you don't have in a sport like track and field or swimming. But, but it's very much that idea of like you get out what you put into it. And there's that equation, right? And you can like immerse yourself in that and that becomes an identity.

• 18:42Tim Ferriss?

  No, and I liked the controlling of variables to the extent possible. And as you get older, at least just projecting forward, if we fast forward the film and get into twenties, thirties, certainly forties now, where more and more of my friends have passed away, right? And the decisions you make in your personal life absolutely bleed over and affect other parts of your life. And the decisions you make in one area that used to be at least conceptually as a kid, really walled off and siloed, bleed over into every other. And

• 19:24Tim Ferriss?

  I think that many of our strengths in excess become or create glaring weaknesses.

• 19:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  So for me, it was this realization, and we could really dig into some of the tools that led to this realization, including supervised use of psychedelics, that led me to the conclusion that my current state of being was not only unsustainable in a lot of ways, but really not serving me. And that if I wanted to not just tolerate myself, which I think at best is what I did for most of my life, then I had to rewire quite a bit. And it involved going back and contending with some really old things.

• 20:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that many of the seemingly disparate behavioral challenges, or short-temperedness, or impatience with myself, or berating myself in my own head, or fill in the blank, it could be 20 or 30 things that I tended to view as inexplicable, separate behaviors, were in fact, all easily traced back to a handful of things that I protect, I think by necessity, protected myself against, or felt the need to protect myself against early on by walling off myself emotionally.

• 20:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, these strengths can be, can manifest as, as character weaknesses over time, you know, and, and I've had a similar journey. What's interesting about your, your journey is that you've, you've lost certain people in your life, and that's put you in a place of self-reflection that has opened you up to entertain new ideas and explore these areas that you're exploring right now. But you didn't have to have some kind of cataclysmic event in your own personal life. Like usually people reach that point of self-reflection when something has gone really bad, and you know, like they, they lose everything, or what have you. And you know, in my case, it's been a journey from self-will to surrender, a place of understanding that

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  That self-will is what is going to allow me to make my way into the world. Like, I think I've heard you say, like, you have a high pain threshold, a high pain tolerance. Like, I certainly do, right? And I've always considered that to be my armor, to be my strength. I know that I'm not the most talented person, but I can insert myself into a situation, and I know how to outwork the next guy. And I can bridge that talent deficit gap and inch my way up close to, you know, where I want to be by virtue of that characteristic. And I always considered that to be almost like a superpower, right? And it wasn't until I was struggling with drugs and alcohol, and that brought me to my knees, that I had to find a different way.

• 22:19Rich Roll?

  Because that self-will, I couldn't understand why that self-will wouldn't solve this problem. That in order to solve this problem, I had to let go of all of that and see it through a completely different lens, that lens of surrender, of completely letting go and allowing other people in, getting to a place of being willing to ask for help and then receive help. Because like yourself, you know, I didn't like myself. I loathed myself for a very long period of time and got to a place of perhaps tolerating myself, but never knew what it meant to experience self-love. And I'm still on that journey. But I had to go to an incredibly dark place in order to access that.

• 23:02Rich Roll?

  And, you know, it's a journey that I've been on since I've been 31. I'm 51 now. I still do it incredibly imperfectly, but it's brought,

• 23:14Rich Roll?

  it's brought ideas and a sense of understanding into my life that I never thought would be anything I would be interested in, that I would have repelled as a younger person. You know, a lot of woo-woo stuff and stuff like that. You know what I mean? That I know you have like an aversion to.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Rich Roll?

  But I see you tiptoeing around the edge of this. And I think that that is very exciting for you. And I think that if you continue to pull on that thread, the self-discovery and the personal growth that you're going to experience is going to blow your mind.

• 23:48Tim Ferriss?

  I hope so. I feel like it's already coming. I mean, I feel like

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  a few things that some people listening might identify with. Well, first, may I drink this PD elixir?

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  So we have Pu'er tea here from our friend Colin Hudon of Living Tea.

• 24:09Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just gonna take a dramatic

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Tim Ferriss?

  pre-story sip of Pu'er tea.

• 24:18Tim Ferriss?

  So good.

• 24:19Rich Roll?

  It is good, right?

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So a few things that people may resonate with and you might also identify with, because we do have a lot of shared DNA, a lot of overlap. All right. So the pain tolerance. I think that embracing a high pain tolerance or developing it was also a coping mechanism that I used to silence my inner voice. Because it was so merciless and such a demon on my back that at any given time, if I scored, just even metaphorically speaking, 99 out of 100, the only thing that mattered was the one

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  thing that went wrong. And how could I be so stupid, or so lazy, or so inept, or so blind to get that one thing wrong? And the immersion in physical pain through wrestling, through the training that goes into it, through the cutting of weight, which is just atrocious, I think was a coping mechanism that I used to silence that. And as you've experienced in your life,

• 25:31Tim Ferriss?

  high tolerance is not always a good thing. And so I ended up being introduced to really strong stimulants in high school, ephedrine hydrochloride combined with caffeine and aspirin and the whole nine yards, things beyond that. And they were tools that I also realized I could take in tremendous quantities compared to other people, which I viewed as a superpower. Maybe.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Now, there are superpowers.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  That's a different kind of pain tolerance.

• 26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and so the, what I thought was a gift ended up becoming a major handicap and ultimately addiction for me that really has only been kicked, at least for the time being, in the last few years, I mean, relying on stimulants of different types. And the, the realization that I had this partial completeness and a lot of blind spots and also unresolved facets of myself did come from some really, really tough periods. I mean, there were, there were many of them, but one in particular was several years ago

• 26:46Tim Ferriss?

  at the end, the very end of a four and a half year relationship. And she was, I mean, she's a beautiful human being. We're still friends to this day, but she was as opposite on the emotional spectrum or on the sort of empathic, self-compassion side of the spectrum compared to me as you could possibly imagine. I mean, she, she felt everything that everyone was feeling, including herself, all the time. I mean, she was just one of those super empaths, which is, which is actually sometimes crippling for people. And it's hard for them to walk down the street in San Diego City because they just, they seem to genuinely feel everything that's going on.

• 27:31Tim Ferriss?

  They're so open.

• 27:32Rich Roll?

  Almost like a full-body synesthesia.

• 27:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, right.

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  My wife calls it the divine feminine.

• 27:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so this, this woman experienced that and it was such an odd combination that worked for us, meaning our, our very distinct opposite sides of the coin for a long time, until it didn't. And I didn't have the vocabulary or...

• 27:58Tim Ferriss?

  Even like conceptual schema to understand why she did certain things the way she did it. And it was because I just, I didn't have the ABCs of emotion in myself.

• 28:10Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 28:12Rich Roll?

  Cause it was so locked down.

• 28:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was so locked down. It was so locked down that I didn't realize it was even a thing. If that makes any sense.

• 28:21Rich Roll?

  Well, I think, you know, it.

• 28:22Tim Ferriss?

  It just seemed irrelevant and unpredictable and.

• 28:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Like this is not productive. This is not moving me forward. And, and my way works because look at all these books that I've written and look what I'm doing out in the world. And I, with my, you know, character makeup, I got into Princeton and I did. So there's no reason to be self reflective about it because you're succeeding in the eyes of culture and society. Right?

• 28:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right. But I would say almost never in the, in my own eyes. There was always I could have, there was always something I could have done better. There was always something I screwed up. And it was a, it was a fear of losing that kept me moving more than any joy of winning.

• 29:06Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 29:06Rich Roll?

  And never being able to just like experience joy and gratitude for the things that you have been able to accomplish.

• 29:13Tim Ferriss?

  That has been, that has been a practice that I've worked on in the last few years in particular.

• 29:19Rich Roll?

  Is there a fear of losing it that accompanies that? That it's all going to go away or just not being able to be happy with it?

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we could, we could answer that as Tim of say two years ago or Tim of today.

• 29:35Rich Roll?

  Tim of two years ago.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  Tim of two years ago, Tim of five years ago, especially.

• 29:43Tim Ferriss?

  Felt tremendous amount of obligation to a lot of people and to support a lot of people. And to prepare to support even more people. And I felt like I had to build a war chest just for that. So it was not a love of money. It was not a, uh, love of achievement. A lot of it was a fear of letting other people down or.

• 30:07Rich Roll?

  It's a lot of pressure.

• 30:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Causing pain of some type for people I love and.

• 30:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'm past that at this point. I mean, very fortunately, I've had a good string of luck and successes. So it's put me in a position where I can support other people. But the fact of the matter is, I realized, I'd say, two years ago, but especially in the last six months, very recent, that, and this is the part that would make my Tim of five years ago, just like vomit a little in his own mouth, which is, I'm not going to mince words. I still have trouble saying this, like, self-love is not an indulgence. It's

• 30:57Tim Ferriss?

  not a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite. Even if all you want to do is feel successful and take care of the people you love the most, to really take care of them, you have to, as I've heard said, put on your oxygen mask first. And if you don't do that, like, you, you are also shortchanging your ability to care for other people completely. And that's been a very, very much 180-degree about-face for me. Because for a long time, I was like, I don't

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  need to care for myself. Like, that's, the word keeps coming back to me, which is self-indulgent. Like, is this self-indulgent? Like, who cares?

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  But ultimately, it's really self-flagellation, right?

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Rich Roll?

  Because you can't, you can't transmit something you haven't got. So, in other words, you can't love another unless you love yourself. And you can't be the best teacher, or servant, or human being. You can't convey the best version of yourself if you don't carry that resonance for your own being.

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  You know, one thing, I didn't actually think of this until right now, but I think another big change in my life in the last two years has been getting my dog, getting Molly. My first dog is an adult. I've always felt...

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  Like half of a human being without a dog, I just have a very keen connection with canines. And I got Molly two years ago, two and a half years ago. And she's such a loving dog, such a fast learner.

• 32:47Tim Ferriss?

  And such a good mirror. I mean, I began to see my flaws in a way I'd never seen them before because I would get impatient or upset if I was training her for something. And

• 33:00Tim Ferriss?

  five minutes later, when I would reflect on it, when I did, I'd be like, what the hell is wrong with me? What am I getting so wound up about? This is a dog, has no malice, doesn't is is nothing but eager to please.

• 33:15Tim Ferriss?

  What are you so wound up about? And it, I think, has taught me in some ways how to love, period, which has helped me to relate to myself in a gentler way.

• 33:29Tim Ferriss?

  So that's also been an incredible gift.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  When you had this realization, was there a certain person that you reached out to initially? Or how did you begin the, you know, in the Tim Ferriss way of, you know, trying to unpack this aspect of

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Rich Roll?

  who you are and how to move forward? Like, who were the people that you dialed up?

• 33:58Tim Ferriss?

  I, there were a few things. Number one is I

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  tried to observe changes in friends of mine who are similarly hardwired. And there are a lot of people out there, type A driven people who are really brutal with themselves. And very good at achievement, very poor at appreciation, particularly when it comes to anything they've done. And a friend of mine, PhD in neuroscience, really tough on herself.

• 34:31Tim Ferriss?

  Recommended a book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock. And just the title alone, I was like, oh, God. I think I

• 34:39Rich Roll?

  It's an amazing book.

• 34:40Tim Ferriss?

  Downloaded it on Kindle right away and promptly ignored it for a few months. And then eventually I was in the pit of despair at some point. And have suffered from bipolar disorder for decades now, which has is no big surprise when you look at my code from having sequenced my full genome. They're like, oh, yeah, this thing here, like 20 out of, from one to 10, you're 20. But

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  at one dark point, picked up that book, actually not that far from where we're sitting right now. When I was in Malibu at a friend's place and read 20, about 20 or 30 pages. The first night and just remember thinking to myself, wow, like this is exactly the medicine that I need. And for those who don't have any context, I mean, Tara's amazing. She has a very tough.

• 35:35Tim Ferriss?

  She's traveled a hard road. She's had some really difficult experiences in her life. And after digging into that book, I then had the pretext of the podcast to use to reach out to Tara and say, would you like to be on the podcast? And all of my conversations on my podcast are pretty selfishly, or at least self-interested in the sense that I'll use it as an excuse to get someone like Tara on the phone for two hours and then just do a therapy session.

• 36:01Rich Roll?

  Of course, it's the greatest. And don't think I'm not going to do that with you before we're finished here. Go ahead.

• 36:08Tim Ferriss?

  And I began to explore tiptoe around the walls of this, this sort of new structure or to tiptoe along the boundary of this new world that I hadn't explored. And that extended to Sharon Salzberg. And reaching out then via other friends to say, Jack Cornfield, who's not been on the podcast, although I would like to have him on at some point. And also looking to how my listeners responded, like, did it resonate? Did it repel? Not that that would determine whether I proceeded or not, but it was reassuring to me and very.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  Reinforcing to see how many people seem to need this, including folks at the top, top, top, top, top of the game. I mean, whatever game that might be. You name it, investing, tech, sports, culinary world, doesn't matter.

• 37:07Rich Roll?

  You had, on some level, you had a little bit of a fear like, oh, you know, my crew is not, is gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna get weirded out by the fact that I have someone like Sharon on.

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't, it wasn't so much a fear. It was a hypothesis. It wasn't a hypothesis. It was more of an, I wonder what will happen when I put this out. And I expected maybe the, hey, we want more interviews with billionaire set would, would come back with a, come on, man, like,

• 37:41Tim Ferriss?

  this is okay, but you can do better. And this is not what I come here for. And maybe-

• 37:45Rich Roll?

  That wasn't the response.

• 37:47Tim Ferriss?

  That wasn't the response. I expected the woo woo folks to opt in because that's what woo woo folks do with woo woo stuff or things that they perceive to be woo woo friendly. And what ended up happening was, yes, the woo woo folks were very publicly supportive. And then all of these secretly pained people who felt like they were uniquely damaged, reached out to me and said, fuck, man, like, I had no idea that you went through all this stuff and like, I've dealt with so much of this and I, I feel like I can't talk to anyone about it. And thank you. And that has been something that's prodded me to continue to explore it, at least publicly. Privately, I was gonna do it no matter what.

• 38:30Tim Ferriss?

  But that has been a real driver for me in wanting to be much more public about all this. It's also the reason why, and this was not an easy decision, after being invited to speak on the TED main stage the first time this past year.

• 38:51Tim Ferriss?

  As context, when you do a TED Talk, the way it usually works, as I know now, is you have people who labor over their talk for months and months and months and months. They rehearse it thousands of times, and it's finally honed and ready to go when they step on stage. I did that, and then a week, about a week before TED, right before the last final rehearsal, which is done via video conference with Chris Anderson and the other people at the top of TED, I scrapped the entire talk and pulled an all-nighter and put together a new one, because I had this very safe, very solid talk that I felt would do well.

• 39:35Rich Roll?

  What was the subject of the original talk?

• 39:37Tim Ferriss?

  The original talk was the stuff that is my default go-to, just competitive analysis.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  More Tim living in his head.

• 39:47Tim Ferriss?

  More Tim living in his head, or just using prefrontal cortex to figure out workarounds and non-obvious solutions to different types of competitive problems. Perfect audience for that at TED. Fantastic. And then I found out that the talk would be in the opening session, and it would be broadcast to movie theaters, so hundreds or thousands of movie theaters. And I had this real, unexpected, I'm not going to call it a panic attack, but like an existential, coming-to-Jesus moment in the afternoon, before, the day before this rehearsal, where I just thought to myself, "What the fuck are you doing?"

• 40:27Tim Ferriss?

  Like, you have a moral obligation, if you're going to have that platform, to use it for something, and you're going to get up and talk about like some incremental human-guinea-pig shit. And that is why I ended up scrapping it and then doing the entire talk on my close brush with suicide in college, and the safety nets and approaches that I'd created to avoid self-destruction, because I felt like...

• 40:55Tim Ferriss?

  I had to. It just felt like something I had to do.

• 40:58Rich Roll?

  Do you think that you're describing it as a moral obligation, which sort of contextualizes it as a response to some external pressure? But it feels to me like it was more like an internal dissonance. Like, this is not authentic to where I'm at right now and the message that I really want to express.

• 41:18Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's exactly it. And when I say moral obligation, I don't view it as externally imposed at all. I feel, and I have felt this way for a long time, that with great audience comes great responsibility. And what are you going to do with it? And I know people who really abuse it or are really reckless with it and give out advice that can kill people regularly and don't add any caveats or qualifiers, which I think is hugely irresponsible. And I just felt like this was a saisho desai go, as they say in Japanese, like first and last.

• 42:02Tim Ferriss?

  So this is probably the only chance I'm going to get. Because why would they give it to me twice? To get on the main stage and do this? So, yeah, we're going to do it. All right.

• 42:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's vulnerability writ large, like as large as it could possibly be written, right? And a sense of being completely exposed.

• 42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and for people who weren't at TED, which is the majority of people, it's a very intimidating crowd. So there's also a part of me that felt to get on stage and tell people like Jeff Bezos my recipe for success was kind of preposterous. And I was like, okay, well, if I can't out-success them, like, let me not out-fail them, but completely zig instead of zagging. And what astonished me was...

• 42:54Tim Ferriss?

  A number of things. First, right after the rehearsal onsite, which I was devastated they didn't record because I completely nailed the rehearsal. And I was like, so do you sometimes just use the rehearsal? They're like, no, we didn't even record that. And I was like, oh my God, because of the lighting, the cameras, everything ready.

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  Ray Dalio, who's the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, $160 billion under management, Bridgewater Associates, came up to me and wanted to thank me for the rehearsal because his son had struggled for so long with bipolar disorder and had learned a lot. And we talked for about 10, 15 minutes. The next day, when I got up and I gave the talk, very, very nervous, gave the talk and got off stage and didn't really want to talk to anybody. Because in that room and given the lights, it just felt too quiet.

• 43:48Rich Roll?

  When you were delivering?

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  When I was delivering it, it was very hard for me to read at all.

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  Can't read, yeah.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  How people were responding.

• 43:55Rich Roll?

  Because unless you're, unless you're telling jokes, you don't, you can't tell.

• 43:58Tim Ferriss?

  Even if you're, even if you're telling jokes, the acoustics and so on in the room are such that it's very hard to tell what's going on. And so I got off stage and I really just wanted to be by myself and just let out a long exhale and decompress because I'd done it. And even if it failed in the room, which I felt like it had, I hoped that it would do a lot of good once it went up.

• 44:18Rich Roll?

  Did you have a sense of catharsis, though?

• 44:20Tim Ferriss?

  I did, I did. So I did have a huge sense of catharsis, but I didn't really want to go out and see anyone because I thought that it had flopped in the room.

• 44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Nonetheless, I was really happy that I did it. So the way I was thinking of it was, I mean, I ended up not killing myself due to coincidence. I mean, we could get into it if you want. But I mean, the fact that I'm here today is a, it's a miracle. Because it wasn't, it's not like I talked my way or thought my way out of not pulling the trigger. It was just dumb luck in a bunch of respects. And I felt like if that talk, once it got released, Acted as an intervention for even one person, great. I'm happy to be embarrassed in front of 100, 1500 movers and shakers. Doesn't matter to me. But what ended up happening is I did a book signing the next day in the same building.

• 45:13Tim Ferriss?

  And hundreds of people came up to tell me about. And this audience, keep in mind, anybody listening to this, like this, the audience at TED, it's just the who's who. It's a nutty, intimidating crowd. And hundreds of them came up to confess about having had close brushes with suicide, or to having chronic depression, or to having children who had committed suicide, or had been handicapped and felt entirely alone because of similar feelings. And I would say at least a third of the people there at some point, because I came out the first day, first session, first day. And I was there for the rest of the week. I'd say probably a third of the people there came up to me with some personal story.

• 45:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I think that that decision to be vulnerable in that way is like a huge move towards becoming a fully integrated human being. And I think that, you know, speaking from my own personal experience, as somebody who's enjoyed your content for a long time, I feel like I and probably a lot of other people were just waiting for you to tell us who you are. You know, because I think for a long time, it's like, I'm getting a lot of great information from the Tim.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  Prescriptions.

• 46:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like I held this stuff, but it's like, but who is this guy? Like, I don't even know that I really know who this guy is. Like, and I know that I personally, I was like, I want to know more about you. You know, and I felt like that armor was was up so hard that you didn't, you weren't ready for that, or you didn't feel comfortable with it. Or maybe you just thought, well, that's not part of what works for me. Or that's not how I want to live, you know, publicly. But when you made that decision, it's not surprising. I mean, first of all, it's very courageous to like get up and do that. And then to have that experience of being embraced, it was like, I think everybody else, like your, your fans, people that follow you, there was a collective exhale. Like now we can really embrace this guy because we have a better understanding of who he is.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  And that's, that's a really powerful thing.

• 47:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think I was even aware.

• 47:23Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think I was aware of holding anything back or consciously holding anything back. I just, I didn't even

• 47:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that.

• 47:31Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't even see it.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Didn't feel conscious on your part, just felt like, but it was still like that's how I was reading, at least to me.

• 47:37Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, sure. And yeah, it's been a trip. So I'm not convinced I fully know myself yet. Certainly a work in

• 47:50Rich Roll?

  You're not enlightened yet?

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Certainly a work in progress always, but yeah, I'm enjoying embracing a more extended palette of colors. And I've also come to realize that historically, I've, this is gonna be meta, but I've thought of thinking as this exalted tool that was consciously directed in a, in a very A, if A, then B, therefore C, sort of logical spreadsheet type of format. But

• 48:31Tim Ferriss?

  if you really dig into it and look at, say, Thinking Fast and Slow, or Blink, or any of these books that examine what we might consider intuitive decisions, or gut feel, how the subconscious drives a lot of our survival decisions. Thinking is in fact, a lot broader. So it's not as though what I've prized for so long, which is this very, well, thought to be uniquely human, I kind of doubt that, but ability to use the prefrontal cortex in this really analytical way is not at odds with, it is not the opposite of, say, meeting someone and having something in the pit of your stomach say, "No,

• 49:15Tim Ferriss?

  we don't like this guy." And in fact, there's, there's something to argue that this, like, first gen iPod that we have in the front of our brains is a relatively new addition to the party. The rest of it's been evolving for millennia, and one could even argue millions of years. And I've, I've undervalued that for a really long time, and I'm, I'm spending much more attention

• 49:43Tim Ferriss?

  Listening to that now, and I've just seen so many benefits in doing that.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  Does that make you uncomfortable because you can't quantify it in the same way?

• 49:56Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me less and less

• 50:01Tim Ferriss?

  less and less uncomfortable, put maybe a better way. I am more and more comfortable with using things without extremely clear labels. Because you can label something without understanding it, right? And trick yourself into believing that you know what something is just because you have the word for it, which I think happens all the time and causes all sorts of strife and confusion.

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm okay with kind of trusting in

• 50:33Tim Ferriss?

  the fact that by hook or crook, by some twist of fate, luck, who knows, seem to have evolved to get to this point and still be around, right? So there's like, there's something to it. As many bugs as I have in my software, like it seems to work for something. And I don't think that the conscious voice in my head is necessarily the unbugged part. Like, maybe that's the buggiest part.

• 51:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, your thinking brain is not always your friend.

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 51:04Rich Roll?

  It can get in the way. I was, I was listening to your most recent podcast with Tim Urban, who's like amazing.

• 51:12Tim Ferriss?

  Tim Urban's great.

• 51:13Rich Roll?

  So entertaining and amazing. And I love the part about when he's talking about AI and he's sort of describing this, you know, 700 page book and we're on page 699 and, and kind of drawing this analogy between humans and chimps and then humans and AI in the sense that.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  In the sense that like a chimp can look up in the sky and see an airplane, but he doesn't know it's an airplane, it's something up there. And there's nothing that you can humanly do, that's humanly possible, to get that chimp to understand what exactly that is and how it got there. Right? It's just not gonna happen because they don't have enough brain matter. And by extrapolating that to AI, the argument that AI will develop to a certain point where us as human beings won't be able to conceptualize what they're doing, because we lack the computing power to even understand what it is that's going on around us. And I was thinking about that, and I think baked into that, there's a lesson in humility for all of us. Because we walk around thinking that we are capable of understanding everything.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  If we just pin it down and think about it enough, or write it out, or dissect it, or deconstruct it, that we can wrap our heads around it. But in fact, that more likely than not is not the case. And so for me, like on a personal level, that provides like an ample place for wonder, you know? Or for faith, or for being comfortable with things that you don't fully understand. When that instinct comes up, or that intuition that's telling you not to do something, you don't have to understand it or deconstruct it. But I think it is important to heed it, or to try to validate it on some level.

• 52:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's also helpful. If you want to assess a... or arrive at a humble perspective, at least as it relates to human knowledge, which I think is important, so you don't make really egregious mistakes when possible. History, reading history is very helpful. And when you go back not all that far, I mean, you realize, all right, at some point in time... All of the powers that were the equivalent of all the smartest people and the top politicians of the day and scientists and so on, thought that the earth was the center of the solar

• 53:41Tim Ferriss?

  system or the center of the universe, right? You have like Ptolemaic astronomy and then Copernican and that was heresy. And then you have people who, again, at the very top ranks, thought the germ theory of disease was complete nonsense. And on and on and on it goes. And to think that we're finally, we have found ourselves in a place where no longer is that true. We've got everything figured out, is so ludicrous. There's just absolutely no historical precedent to suggest that that is the case. In fact, there's every historical precedent to suggest that, as some doctors say, 50% of what we know is wrong, we just

• 54:23Tim Ferriss?

  don't know which 50%. And I think that's generous. I've just seen too many weird things in the last few years especially, to think that we have even a small fraction that we have earned even like a 5% ability to say that we understand an equally small fraction of what we can perceive through our senses. I think that's, I mean, that's an aggressive statement in and of itself. Yeah. I mean, there's so much we don't know. And if you become somewhat comfortable with that, and you become a little measured with the strong

• 55:07Tim Ferriss?

  opinions that you hold, and try to ensure that you've earned the right to have those strong opinions, it's, it's hard for me to envision many downsides to that.

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  So does that help you kind of access the gray and everything? Like, how has that manifested? Like, that awareness, how has that manifested itself in how you sort of navigate the day?

• 55:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I've, I'm still a very, very hungry learning machine. I still love experimentation. But I'm also...

• 55:42Tim Ferriss?

  Increasingly comfortable with just not knowing how certain things work and exploring them anyway. And the tendency, I think, for all of us is to want to come to a placeholder conclusion, right? Like, until I have better data, I'm going to conclude that X behaves the way it does because of Y. And I'm more comfortable now just simply saying, don't know.

• 56:12Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 56:13Tim Ferriss?

  No idea. And for instance, I like debate. I'm decently good at it. I also enjoy competition based on just having practiced it for so long. I hate losing. And if I have someone at a public event, audience Q and A, and they want to just kick the hornet's nest and pick a fight-

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  It's their big moment.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Kick the hornet's nest and pick a fight on any number of a million subjects. I am totally, I'm much more comfortable now simply saying, I politely decline your invitation to argue about something that I have no right to argue over. I don't have any information to have earned an informed opinion. Next question.

• 56:59Rich Roll?

  Is that, how would you have handled that five years ago?

• 57:02Tim Ferriss?

  I would have dismantled it or attempted to dismantle it by just using rhetoric and questions to make them contradict themselves. And it's not that hard to do. I mean, you could easily do it. I mean, well, you don't have to be a trial lawyer to be good at this. But if you've, if you've had legal training, I find that it's very common that lawyers enjoy the sport of debates. Not always, but I've-

• 57:24Rich Roll?

  Specifically trained for it.

• 57:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I mean, I have lawyers in my family and it's like, there are certain dinners where you're just like, Jesus Christ, can we stop?

• 57:33Rich Roll?

  It's exhausting.

• 57:34Tim Ferriss?

  Like, we don't need to debate about the cranberries for 10 minutes. Like, fine, you win. Like, we don't have to, just let's move on.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  All right, here's all the family stuff. It's all coming up.

• 57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so for me,

• 57:49Tim Ferriss?

  I used to enjoy that sport, but the side effect, the really nasty side effect of playing that sport frequently is that you create the illusion of knowing things that you just don't know. Or you make someone look stupid who, and I'm not trying to make people look stupid, but if they, if they get really aggressive, they want to pick a fight publicly in a way that I think is unproductive. Like I historically have had no trouble just like cutting them off at the knees. And I'll still do that if someone's like, if, if it's, if it needs to be responded to. But if someone has an interesting idea, just because you've had more practice with juggling

• 58:29Tim Ferriss?

  logic in a way that allows you to beat them in a debate, doesn't make them wrong and you right.

• 58:36Rich Roll?

  What I see in that though, is a, is a maturation of, of a sense of self, right? Because you're, you've decoupled your self-esteem or your proclivity to be happy from the need to win an argument or to be right. Like in recovery, they say like, do you want to be right or you want to be happy?

• 58:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Like, and, and so that drive to like, well, this is competition. Like I have to beat this guy because you know, I, that's how I feel alive or how I feel good about myself, to make sure that I'm the alpha and I'm on top here.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  And I think it takes a, you know, somebody who really is self-assured in the best way to just not engage.

• 59:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  And not feel the need that they have to bite.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  And I, I think I've also realized that part of what I've tried to do, I should say, is pause for a microsecond. I don't always succeed. Between stimulus and my usual response, because my usual responses for decades have just cumulatively made me miserable or feel miserable. So I've tried whenever I'm like, okay, like, oh, all right. You want to fight? I'm good at this. Like you, if, if you're going to fight, I hope you're good. I hope you come armed and really well-prepared because this is my sport, right? Like that's how I've traditionally responded.

• 1:00:04Tim Ferriss?

  And net, net, I don't think that has been a huge level up in my sense of well-being and inner peace. So I've tried to in cases like that. Ask myself, even before going out, like if this happens, and it happens, you know, that type of thing can happen on a regular basis, what if I just did the opposite? Like, how can I win by, how can I win by refusing to engage? Or what other options are there that are just the opposite? They might completely flop, but let me try the opposite, whatever that is.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  Or even take winning out of it completely.

• 1:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:00:39Rich Roll?

  That doesn't have to be one of the parameters. I mean, that, what you spoke to right there is really, you know, one of the greatest benefits of consistent meditation practice.

• 1:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  So can we talk about the retreat a little bit?

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:00:54Rich Roll?

  You just, when, when did you finish this 10-day retreat? It was a couple of weeks ago?

• 1:00:58Tim Ferriss?

  A couple of weeks ago, yeah.

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  From hearing you talk about it on Jonathan's podcast, I mean, it sounded quite intense and transformational.

• 1:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 10-day silent retreat, for those who may not have experienced that, in this case at least, had a few conditions.

• 1:01:21Tim Ferriss?

  And some were flexible, some were not. No talking, 10 days long, so no talking, no reading, discouraged from writing, no music, no sense, very little eye contact. Most people opted not to make eye contact. And the silent piece of that, the not talking piece is by far the easiest.

• 1:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  I don't talk to purge thoughts. That's not how I do it. I do it through reading or, or to distract myself away from thought loops. I use either reading or writing, which, in my case, I didn't realize until I had those outlets taken away. And silent retreats, for the vast majority of people I've spoken to, are these revelatory, ultimately blissful experiences that teach them a lot about themselves. And then for...

• 1:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  As best I can tell, 10 to 15% of people who go in who have a lot of old experiences, in particular, trauma that they haven't perhaps thought of in 20, 30 years, those 10 days are going to be just a descent into Dante's Inferno and feeling like you are losing your grasp on reality because so many things are coming unwound and bubbling up from the surface and then just erupting through the surface in such a way that it feels like you have this torrent, this like waterboarding of past pain and trauma 24/7 that you can't

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  stop. And it got to the point for me where on day, say, seven, eight, nine, where much to my frustration and like tragic amusement, each day, there was one exception to the talking rule, at least consistently in the schedule, there was a Dharma talk. So every night, a teacher would get up and say, hey, in effect, here are some tools that might help with what we're trying to do. And you're waking up at 5:30 and the schedule from 5:30 to 9:30, outside of meals, is 45 minutes, sitting meditation, 45 minutes, moving to meditation, 45 minutes, sitting meditation, 45 minutes, moving meditation. That's it. Rinse and repeat until you go to bed.

• 1:03:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's it. Rinse and repeat. And the Dharma talk is after, let me get this right, I think it's right before dinner. I may be off, could be right after dinner, right before dinner, I believe. And it's instructional, but very often, it would start with something like the following on, say, day seven. It's been so nice in our individual meetings, every other day, you have about 15 minutes with a teacher to make sure you're not going through a complete psychotic break. And you're allowed to talk. And you're allowed to talk and they'll ask you how you're doing. And so, let's say a Dharma talk on day seven, the teacher would get up and say, you know, it's so lovely in some of our discussions to see how many of you are just settling into the stillness

• 1:04:25Tim Ferriss?

  and experiencing this deep peace. And in the meantime, I'm sitting there like going completely insane. Like my, my head is somewhere in between like The Cell, I don't know if people have seen the movie, and like Hostel, and like It's, I mean, it's not in a great place. And I'm just suffering through this like endless repeat.

• 1:04:47Tim Ferriss?

  Of past pain that I'd thought I had long since forgotten about or hadn't even really remembered in so long. And I genuinely thought that I was going to leave the retreat completely untethered and unable to function. It was that bad.

• 1:05:07Rich Roll?

  And that was on day six or something?

• 1:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  Day seven. So day six, I had this experience that was very odd. I also made this entire retreat a lot harder for myself by doing something they strongly advised against, which was fasting for seven days.

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  So I

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  Putting those two things together at the same time.

• 1:05:26Tim Ferriss?

  So I fasted the first two days, much in keeping with my historical pattern. I was like, all right, if I'm going to do a 10 day silent retreat, I'm probably not going to have a chance to do this anytime soon. So let me try to make it as deep as possible. And I fasted for two days going into it, at least roughly fasted very low, low calorie keto. So that on day three, the first day of the retreat, I could be at like two, three millimolars BHB in my blood. Fantastic. If that means anybody to anybody, great.

• 1:05:58Rich Roll?

  I love it. You're trying to turn this whole thing into an experiment.

• 1:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was.

• 1:06:02Rich Roll?

  It was like as if there wasn't enough, you know,

• 1:06:03Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I know, I know. Well, I did not anticipate like the unraveling of Tim Ferriss.

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  I thought I'd be fine because the fact of the matter is, as a writer, as someone who is effectively a solopreneur, I mean, I have a small team, but they're all remote. I spend most of the day not talking. And I was like, all right, well,

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  How hard can this be?

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Rich Roll?

  It'll be hard, but like, it's not gonna, it's not gonna dismantle me.

• 1:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it won't dismantle me. I really underestimated having the reading and writing removed.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like, wait, you just like get in bed and turn the lights out and you go to sleep?

• 1:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Rich Roll?

  How does that work?

• 1:06:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it was something else. So on day six,

• 1:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  I went really deep in a number of meditation sessions in the afternoon in particular, and it coincided with me getting out of the meditation hall. I was just getting claustrophobic. I couldn't stay in there. And I'd had a number of very difficult days, but it seemed in keeping with, you know, sometimes they call it the terrible twos, or whatever it might be, like the second day, third day, fourth day, routinely very difficult for people. Can you do any physical exercise? You can. Yeah, you can. There are people who were hiking, I was hiking at least once a day during one of the moving meditation sessions. Ultimately, I just had to get outside of the meditation hall. I could not sit in there for another session, at least that day.

• 1:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I went out and I found benches all over the property, up in the mountains, and would sit and do my meditating there. And I had these very, very deep experiences where I felt like I was going into, I was going into what you might consider a very altered state. And these parts of my body that have carried tension for as long as I can remember, like this to the left side of my sternum, like when I get tense or ang-, or not tense, when I get angry or overwhelmed, like there's this very, very specific tension that I feel to the left of my sternum in between the breastplate or the sternum and the heart, let's say.

• 1:08:06Tim Ferriss?

  And on my back, which was related to an injury I had about eight years ago, I tore my lat off my back, basically, which is not something you want to do. But this pain in my mid-back, in the thoracic area, and I'd had a really tough time every day with the sitting meditation. I had very intense back pain, which a lot of people did. And I was sitting there on this bench in this afternoon and using these tools from the Dharma Talks and various techniques that they were recommending. And it felt like I had ice water suddenly on this, that part of my chest and the back that, portion of the back that usually hurt. Really odd. I mean, I opened my eyes for a second because it felt like I literally had ice water on

• 1:08:49Tim Ferriss?

  my chest and my back. And then the tension in both areas sort of spread out and thinned and then dissipated. And my back no longer hurt for the first time in the entire retreat. And I was like, that's weird. Huh. And I just had this wonderful, wonderful meditation session. I felt fantastic. I mean, very joyful in certain ways. So what do you make of that? What I make of that, and what one of the senior teachers made of that, when I then proceeded the next day to just completely implode or explode, or both, depending on how you look at it, is that I'd finally removed that armor. And it just, it allowed a lot in and it allowed a lot out. And then it was just one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I mean, I literally felt

• 1:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  like I was going insane. But unlike, say, a strong guided psychedelic experience, there is no piece of you, at least there was no piece of me, that felt like there was an end to the ride. It wasn't as though I had some meta-awareness of being in an experience that would end in five or six hours. I just thought that I was going to a place that I would not recover from. That's terrifying. It was horrifying. And I, I will, there were a few teachers, but in particular, Jack Cornfield, who if they had not been there, I think there's a distinct possibility that you and I would not be talking. Book launch would have been canceled. None of this would have happened. I think I would have been in a really bad place. So when people

• 1:10:15Tim Ferriss?

  have asked me, "Oh, do you recommend it?" I'm like, "Uh, not for everybody. No, I don't." And you really need someone, I think, because at least for me, I didn't know what I didn't know. Right? I didn't, even if you had asked me, like, "Have you had trauma that you think might come up?" I'd be like, "No, I'm fine." And in fact, they did ask that. There was a questionnaire. And I was like, "No, I'm good." I didn't know what was under the surface, because I had forgotten or repressed, I have no idea what the proper term would be. And I mean, thank God, for instance, Jack was there, who is very well-known. I mean, he's one of five or six people, I would say, accredited with bringing Buddhist meditative practices to the West. And

• 1:11:00Tim Ferriss?

  What's unique about Jack is that he's not just an experienced meditation teacher. He is also PhD in clinical psychology and has worked with veterans who've had limbs blown off and have PTSD. He's worked with adolescents who are cutters. He's worked with many different populations in the messy reality of like the real world and very real trauma, not just quoting scripture and telling you to, telling you, this is a fantastic opportunity to observe your mind. There's a, there's a point where that's helpful and then there's a point where that does nothing.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. But it helps you realize just how powerful those childhood experiences are. You know, it's reminiscent of, of the work of Gabor Maté, like in his work with childhood trauma and how that manifests later in life. He's in there, he's been on my podcast.

• 1:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's fascinating guy. Fascinating, fascinating guy. And yeah, yeah. So yeah, Timmy, Timmy got blindsided.

• 1:11:59Rich Roll?

  Well, not only like, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm glad you made it out of that. I'm glad Jack was there to help guide you. I also feel like there needs to be like outpatient, like some kind of structure to help you integrate back into the world, you know, once you get out of that experience so that you can make sense of it and, and, you know, take, take what has been given to you in a way that can benefit your life as opposed to just continue to dismantle and confuse you.

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think this will sound melodramatic, but I, I would suggest that people maybe think about it this way is consider it as, as a thought exercise going into neurosurgery. You're going to go in to have neurosurgery, to have some complicated procedure performed that usually goes right, but that very distinctly could go wrong. It's not, there is a non-trivial likelihood, 10, 15% that something could go catastrophically sideways.

• 1:13:05Tim Ferriss?

  You want to go into that with A, the most qualified practitioner practitioners you can possibly find on the planet, instead of feeling in a rush and just choosing a retreat. B, you want to have contingency plans. What if I get to the last day and I think that I'm going insane, right? If the suture bursts in my brain, or whatever it is, by analogy, what do you do? You just go home and go to work the next morning?

• 1:13:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's not what you do. You need to have a plan for that.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  You go to New York City and you launch a book.

• 1:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I will say, well, right after the silent retreat, there were a few intervening experiences, but then I went, I came straight to LA to speak onstage at Summit, the gigantic conference, which was complete sensory overload. But I will say that the main thing I took out of it was not any fixing. This is important to say. I don't think I fixed anything through the silent retreat, but I realized how, how much could be traced back to a handful of things that I had not reconciled within myself, and that that's the work. Like, that's the

• 1:14:20Tim Ferriss?

  work. For me, in 2018, it is figuring out ways, whether it is through, say, reading up and meeting, reading up on trauma specialists and different methodologies, and spending time with trauma specialists, perhaps even considering, with medical supervision, something like MDMA, for instance, as an adjunct therapy, not a primary. That's the work for 2018 for me. And everything else is secondary. I mean, everything else.

• 1:14:48Rich Roll?

  That's an amazing realization to come out of that with a sense of how important that priority is for you.

• 1:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, nothing, I mean, nothing else matters, because you could say, well, what about the people you love? It's like, yeah, but I can't, I've realized how incompletely I can give myself to them right now without dealing with this first. Period.

• 1:15:09Rich Roll?

  And so what's the daily practice right now?

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  The daily practice right now is not so much a daily practice. It's getting commitments on the calendar to do the things that I just said are number one, so that they don't get displaced by the noise and the static and the pretty cool opportunities that float through that I, in some lapse of judgment, say yes to. They need to be on the calendar. So immediately after the retreat, in the week following, I put things on the calendar prepaid for them, made commitments to other people to be certain places at certain times, so that they would not get displaced. So right now, it's really just girding my loins and waiting for that.

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You should do one of Sharon's retreats.

• 1:15:55Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's gonna be a while before I do another retreat.

• 1:15:58Rich Roll?

  Do another retreat, but I think it would be a little bit of a different kind of experience.

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it might be. And I had a great, well, great, people are like, "Do you have fun?" I'm like, "Not the adjective I'd use." I had a very valuable experience at Spirit Rock, but it was very, very difficult. And I think that at this point, and this is true with many different interventions, whether that's silent retreats, motivational seminars, conferences, plant medicine, there are, it is very seductive to get frequent flyer miles

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  on the interventions instead of doing the time and energy-consuming integration post-work.

• 1:16:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's less sexy.

• 1:16:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's less sexy.

• 1:16:55Rich Roll?

  But that's the real work.

• 1:16:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like, "Okay, now I'll show you, I'll show you the direction in which you need to push the boulder up the hill." But there comes a time when you're like, "Okay, I actually just need to put on my big-girl pants and like, push the goddamn boulder in the right direction."

• 1:17:08Rich Roll?

  The experiences are like the reveal of what the work needs to be or what it, what it needs to look like. But, you know, I have friends, I'm sure you do too. I mean, I have one friend, this guy did ayahuasca like 52 times in a year or something like that. Like, I don't, you know, God bless him. I don't know what that's about, but... At some point, it feels like, well, is that helping you? Or is that a distraction or a procrastination of the work that it's revealing?

• 1:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Rich Roll?

  That you then go and do? I don't know the answer to that. I don't have judgment on that, but.

• 1:17:44Tim Ferriss?

  I would say in the majority of cases, or chases, that might be actually a pretty good Freudian slip. But in the majority of cases, it is a way to put off doing the work.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Which, by the way, reading can also be, which I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying, since ostensibly I have a brand new book out.

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  And we're going to talk about that.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  But, no, no, no, no. But, but there, I've, I've, I, there's always,

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  if you have some degree of intelligence or just slyness, you can always find a seemingly justifiable way to put off doing what it is you should be doing. And as a writer, I feel really qualified to say this because most writers I know will do anything to avoid writing. I mean, it's like, oh, the plant's dying. Well, I can't possibly sit down and work on my new chapter if my environment contains a dead plant. I really need to fix that dead plant. It's like, oh, my shoes are dirty. Well, I'm going to need to get my exercise later in the afternoon and they need to be ready so that I'm not distracted later. So let me put off writing. The writers will just do anything to get out of writing. And that's human nature. It's not because writers are bad people.

• 1:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's not because, say, somebody listening is a bad person that they've maybe been a seminar junkie instead of going back to the notebook they filled up and actually putting next steps on their calendar. It's human nature. But for me right now, it's, it's about the work and holding myself accountable and.

• 1:19:24Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe surprisingly to some people, I am not a huge...

• 1:19:32Tim Ferriss?

  I don't have a high degree of confidence in willpower or discipline. I have a high degree-

• 1:19:37Rich Roll?

  It's surprising to hear that from someone like you.

• 1:19:39Tim Ferriss?

  I have a high degree of confidence in systems and accountability and loss aversion that creates the illusion of discipline and willpower. Right? So you could take somebody, let's just say, who's always had trouble losing weight. And I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna take photographs of you, really unflattering, first thing in the morning, after you've gone on a bender in your tighty-whities, in your kitchen. Now I own those photos. All right. I'm gonna also take 5% of your income, and if you don't lose 20 pounds in the next eight weeks, and keep it off for six months, not only am I gonna release those photographs onto the internet, post them on Facebook, everywhere your friends, family, colleagues

• 1:20:21Tim Ferriss?

  will see them, I'm also going to donate 5% of your income to an anti-charity that you would rather nuke than give money to, and you will be on the public record as having given $5,000 to whatever it might be. You know, the... Who knows? George W. Bush Presidential Library, or the American Nazi Party, it doesn't really matter. And, not sure they're a charity, but regardless, you get the idea, to an organization that you would just be endlessly shamed to be associated with, unless you lose this weight. And I guarantee you, with that why-to, people will figure out the how-to.

• 1:20:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty powerful external motivator.

• 1:21:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it doesn't have to be that intense, but I see no reason to... I see every reason to make your incentives compelling. And most people don't need more willpower or discipline, they need better incentives. So that's either a reward, or it's some type of punishment. And the punishment could be prepaying for, say, a certain number of-

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Training sessions with an athletic trainer that are non-recoupable. Maybe that's enough. For a lot of people it is. Even if they make a lot of money, for some folks, the idea of losing a few hundred bucks will drive them insane. So they will actually show up. Or having someone like working out with a friend who's gonna bust your balls, metaphorically speaking, gender neutral, whatever, if you don't show up to be their workout partner, maybe that's enough to shame you or guilt you into doing it. Great, use it. So in my case, to ensure that I won't lapse, because I procrastinate, sure.

• 1:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there are things I prefer not to do. And I can find very easily justified activities that look very sexy from the outside and worthwhile to dodge the things I need to do that are harder. And the way that I try to ensure I'll do those things, I put them on the calendar, I put down money, I book flights, I make all the plans, I hold myself accountable to other people, I tell my close friends maybe the details of the silent retreat and spend an hour of their time and mine explaining how important and critical this is for me and what I'm gonna do in December and January and February. And I know they're gonna follow up.

• 1:22:54Rich Roll?

  Have you made some of these crazy deals with your friends where they have license to, you know, post unsavory photos?

• 1:23:01Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't, I haven't done that, but, but I would if I felt like I needed it. But just the fact that I've dropped thousands of dollars on travel plans and blocked out my calendar and made appointments with various people and made effectively promises to people in my life very deliberately so that I know they will ask about it later. I will be ashamed of myself if I say that I've bailed. That's enough for me. That's, that's enough to make sure that I'll do it.

• 1:23:37Rich Roll?

  Well, I think this dovetails pretty nicely with the new book Tribe of Mentors, which is great, man. Like you describe it as a, you know, choose your own adventure. You can crack it open to any page, you know, and spend a couple of minutes and kind of set your intention for the day. And you did a beautiful job with it. So congrats on that. Thank you. I love it. And, um, you know, when it, when it got delivered here and I opened it up, I was like, how'd this motherfucker write a whole 700-page book like less than a year after the other? Like, what kind of robot is this dude? But then I did my own deconstruction of it. And I was like, oh, I can see how Wait a minute. he was able to do this. And yet that doesn't detract from the value of it, you know, which brings up this other issue that I know is kind of forefront in your

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  mind, this kind of marching order of, of reconceptualizing how you navigate, um, maybe not just your professional life, but all aspects of your life with this mantra of, you know, what if it were easy, right? Which is, and this is like another thing where I dovetail with you perfectly because coming from that self-flagellating, self-flagellating, you know, work ethic, you know, you gotta, like, if, if you, if you don't feel like you've just punished yourself to the core, then you didn't work hard enough on it. And it could be better if you just suffered a little bit more for, for the benefit of the end work product. That's how I approach everything. And ultimately, that's my enemy

• 1:24:59Rich Roll?

  because it prevents me from actually embracing, you know, the work. And, and so this is something that, that I've been struggling with and thinking a lot about as well. That idea of like, it doesn't have to be that way. Like, that's actually a lie that you're telling yourself. But the idea of it being easy is so uncomfortable. It's like, no, it can't. I could keep telling myself that, but that is not true.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a massive gear shift for me to ask this question, which I do a lot now. The "What might this look like if it were easy?" One substitution that people can use to ease into it if they're really uncomfortable with the easy part is "What might this look like if it were elegant?" So just fewer moving pieces, right? So if you have to trick yourself into trying it as an exercise in journaling, that's a good way to do it. The second piece of that is "What might this look like if it were fun too?" Because something can be easier, but still unenjoyable. And both of those things, it sounds so like, when you verbalize it, it just sounds so absurd.

• 1:26:07Tim Ferriss?

  But I've spent the vast majority of my life as someone who prided himself on a high pain tolerance, in effect, looking for things that were somehow socially rewarding, that involved a high degree of pain and a high degree of unpleasantness. And what ends up happening, at least what happened to me, is I went from

• 1:26:38Tim Ferriss?

  excelling in areas, or sports, or business approaches, that were rewarding and as a necessary tax-involved pain, to seeking things that were painful, which is, it's mistaking, it's confusing the causes and the symptom.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  Right, because you created that imprint at an early age. Like, this is how it works. Like, if I want to win this wrestling match, here's what I have to undergo to do that. And then that gets applied to every area.

• 1:27:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and I think where things get really mixed up and then can be tragic is...

• 1:27:21Tim Ferriss?

  Many things that involve some discomfort or pain can be productive, right? But not all things that are painful

• 1:27:32Rich Roll?

  are productive.

• 1:27:33Tim Ferriss?

  lead to anything productive, right? And you can just become a masochist without realizing it. And that's what happened to me. And I also felt like I could grasp complexity and juggle a lot more effectively than other people. So I was drawn to complexity because I felt I could win there. I felt like it was a, there was a high barrier to entry and that that gave me a competitive advantage. And

• 1:27:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, not to, sorry to interrupt, but like that, like when I was a kid and I was showing prowess as a swimmer, I sought out the 200 butterfly because that was the event that no one wanted to do.

• 1:28:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Rich Roll?

  It's sort of like looking for that world record that is like hidden or that just no one feels like tackling. Like, where's the easiest road to success? Well, I'll go to that one thing that's the, it's the hardest race. Everyone avoids it because it's so painful. That's where I'm going, right? It's very similar to what you're saying.

• 1:28:28Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. And then at some point, especially in the last year, I realized

• 1:28:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just fighting an empty jacket here. Like, who's my competitor? This is ridiculous. Like, I'm actually just fighting myself. And what might this look like if it were easy? And it started as a journaling exercise, which is one of the most common patterns in all the interviews I've done and travel mentors and tools, Titans and the podcast. Journaling, meditation and journaling are kind of the two

• 1:29:02Tim Ferriss?

  partners in a sense, they work together really well, that recur over and over again. And so I was journaling one morning on what might this look like if it were easy? Well, I've done it for many, many different things.

• 1:29:13Rich Roll?

  With respect to this book specifically?

• 1:29:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, I did it for the podcast, when I started the podcast. I had to ensure that there was next to no editing. I would do it with my friends in the beginning to make it less intimidating. I would allow wine, which didn't always turn out very well. It actually really ended poorly in the first episode in particular, but...

• 1:29:38Rich Roll?

  If that's what you needed to do.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I needed to do, just to like get the lawnmower started. I needed to grease the skids and make it as easy as possible. And you can always complicate it later, but if you start with the complex, the likelihood of quitting or abandoning it very quickly is high. Or not meeting a deadline, in the case of a book, for instance. And so in the case of this book, I never intended on writing it, first of all. I was just going through this crisis of meaning and had all of these existential questions on my mind because I turned 40, which in and of itself wasn't a big deal. But then the TED Talk about suicide coincided to the day, which was wild, with the 10th anniversary of the Four Hour Work Week. So people expected me to get up and talk about all these blueprints for success.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I did the opposite, which was surreal for me as well. And then all these deaths happened, including one of the mentors in the book, Terry Lachlan, who's had a huge impact on my life, passed away a few weeks ago. And...

• 1:30:36Rich Roll?

  That was an amazing podcast, by the way.

• 1:30:39Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. That was brutal. Man, that was a hard one. For those people who don't know, yeah, I recorded the last long-form interview with Terry before he died, and he actually sounded really good. He sounded really good when I... He was in the hospital, but he sounded really good when I had him on the phone. And his daughters felt like things were looking up. And I went on the silent tree, came back, and literally the first text I saw when I turned on my phone after 10 days and saw this barrage of notifications was, "Did you see the news about Terry?" And then a sort of crying emoticon from a friend of mine. I was like, "Oh, no." And I had to go back...

• 1:31:22Tim Ferriss?

  And rerecord the introduction because the introduction was this very upbeat like I'm so excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people da da da da and I had to change it all to past tense, which is brutal and all those things led me to want to reach out to people I respected, many of whom were further down the road, right? They were 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the best in various fields to ask them how they had navigated different things. And when I started reaching out to people as one offs, I realized pretty quickly that the answers were, it seemed like a missed opportunity for me to keep them to myself.

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  And that's how the podcast started too, because I'd have these conversations over dinner with a friend and I'd be like, God damn, like this guy just blew my mind for two hours and it's gone, right? It's just this ephemeral experience that only I and he or she experienced and poof, never to be heard again. And it seemed like such a waste and I wanted to just try recording those. And similarly, when I started getting answers, I was like, you know, why not just put this in a book? And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. That was another thing that I've done in the last few years to really relieve unnecessary pressure that has been super helpful. I'll do things, but in the very beginning, I'll set the expectations

• 1:32:49Tim Ferriss?

  with any partners that it might not work out. And if it doesn't, I'll make them whole. Right. So you did, yeah, you did that with this book, right? You told the publisher like, I'll give the advance back. Yeah, it might not work. Like it's coming together. Yeah, if it doesn't, if it doesn't come together, I'll give you the advance back. And that's, now people who are your intelligent listeners who are paying attention may say, well, wait a second, Ferris, that seems like the opposite of holding yourself accountable, right? So there are But I will say there are times when I want to apply pressure. And then there are categories of activities in my life where I've historically applied too much pressure. And instead of just stressing the organism in a beneficial way, I'm just like sitting

• 1:33:34Tim Ferriss?

  in a tanning bed for 10 hours straight, which is not helpful.

• 1:33:37Rich Roll?

  Right. And the idea of writing a book is just going so deep into a pain cave that you may never resurface.

• 1:33:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you don't need to add salt to the wound. It's already going to be a difficult slog. And for the first few books, I really punished myself unnecessarily. I made it a lot harder than it had to be. And the consequences were pretty dire. I mean, my health would suffer, except for during The 4-Hour Body, I was walking the talk for that one. But for the other books, I really let myself deteriorate. And so for this one, I set the expectation. I was like, hey, I'm going to give this a shot. I'm going to try it the easy way. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Give it the advance back. Which puts my polisher in a bit of a pickle. I mean, it puts him in a bit of a tight position, but fortunately...

• 1:34:26Rich Roll?

  Have we set a release date for this?

• 1:34:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. I mean, thankfully, HMH, who had Mifflin, has been very patient with me. But I also delivered on the last book, which was set up very similarly in the sense that I wanted to try something new. I'm not sure, but if it works, I'm going to know very quickly. And I will buckle down and really get it done. And then we will just by the hairs of our chinny chin chin be able to publish and print and get everything handled. But yeah, and then it came together. So it's been... And every time that, every time something like that works for me, where I take, not necessarily the path of least resistance, but I don't automatically choose the path

• 1:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  of most resistance, and it works, it helps to reinforce me not punishing myself.

• 1:35:14Rich Roll?

  Right, like those neural pathways get reinforced a little bit.

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm just like, oh, okay, great. Like, I don't have to go into the gym and fracture every bone in my body every time. It doesn't make sense.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, see, this is, I really need to learn this. I'm facing, you know, writing a new book and I'm, and I'm blocked by, by fear and by that idea that inevitably this is going to be painful. Right? Like, I've already made that decision.

• 1:35:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:35:40Rich Roll?

  And this is not serving me. Right? And so reframing it and coming up with a different avenue to approach it, I think is important. So that was, that was super helpful to me to have you, to hear you talking about this. So regularly.

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one of the, one of the mantras that I've been, that word bothers me still, but one of the.

• 1:36:00Rich Roll?

  I love your aversion to like any word that is even in the slightest bit.

• 1:36:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think I've developed, you know, you can, you can experience adult onset allergies. So for instance, I love eggplant and two years ago I developed this allergy to eggplant, which sucks. And it's very severe, like my throat will close up. And that, that really bothers me, but nonetheless have developed this adult onset allergy. And I think I also developed a San Francisco induced adult onset allergy to, to a lot of woo woo stuff. And for those people who haven't seen Ultra Spiritual by JP Sears on YouTube. Oh my God. Just watch that and you'll, you'll kind of get it. If you've never had the experience, but yes, I'm a, I'm a stickler for words and certain words.

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think just carry a lot of baggage that require a lot of lifting to get around. Anyway. So there's a phrase, let me use that, that I repeat to myself a lot. And in the last two, three years in particular.

• 1:37:03Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the phrase is, don't retreat into story. So there are certain stories we all have that we tell ourselves. And some of the stories are very, very old, right? Like I am X, I can never Y. Oh, I always blah, whatever it is. Like this is all, this is going to be painful. Or I always fuck up whatever. There's these.

• 1:37:31Tim Ferriss?

  These stories, as short as they might be, as poorly as they might sell as a children's book, they're these short stories that we all have. And I've really tried in the last year and a half or two, and meditation does help a lot with this, to whether you use an app like Headspace or guided meditation from some, say Tara Brock or Sam Harris or whatever, or just TM or some type of seated meditation, to tell myself, and I'll put this at the top of my journal in the morning, if I'm using something like the Five Minute Journal, in all caps at the top, it's "Don't Retreat into Story." Don't retreat into story.

• 1:38:11Tim Ferriss?

  I might even, if I'm feeling myself starting to tailspin into some old pattern, I will go into my journal, I've never talked about this, and since I know I'll be using the journal each morning, I will, I will, I will put one of two things at the very top of each journal entry for the next, say, 15 days, before I can forget or procrastinate or not do it. One is, "Don't Retreat into Story." The other one, which is very closely related, is actually from Tony Robbins, who I've gotten to know in the last couple of years, who impresses me the more I get to know him, which is saying a lot, because, frickin' Tony Robbins.

• 1:38:50Tim Ferriss?

  Anyway, and that is, "State," and then an arrow to the right, "Story," then an arrow to the right, "Strategy." This is really important. So state leads to story, leads to strategy, because what, what I've noticed for myself is that if I wake up and I'm just in a funk, didn't get enough sleep, or I'm just maybe feeling the inner, the, the early symptoms of maybe going into a funk, for whatever reason, there are many things that can trigger it.

• 1:39:25Tim Ferriss?

  What I'll sometimes make the mistake of doing is sitting down and immediately trying to problem solve in a depressed, energetic or emotional state. And what Tony has explained to me is if you do that, the lens that you're going to wear is only going to allow you to see the problems and the negative. So you're going to sit down, you're going to try to, you're going to try to form a strategy from the outset, but you're going to have a negative state, a disabling story that you're telling yourself, and the strategy is going to be terrible.

• 1:39:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're trying to solve the problem with the mindset that created the problem to begin with.

• 1:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and instead, the state, story, strategy leads me to, that's one of the things, and not many things can get me to do this, because I'm very much an evening exercise guy, but that has encouraged me to, once again, go in the calendar and pre-book exercise with trainers. I don't, this is going to sound bad, but I don't need trainers, I don't, I've never really had trainers for what I do.

• 1:40:32Rich Roll?

  It's the accountability.

• 1:40:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's the accountability. So I will book myself for things that I would normally never do, like one-on-one Pilates classes, oh my god, puke, right? Which actually, done well technically, is pretty goddamn hard. It's like GST, the gymnastics strength training, in a lot of respects, but nonetheless, let me not defend my Pilates habit right now, but I will, I will say pre-book Pilates or acro yoga or some type of Olympic weightlifting in the mornings, at least say three days a week, and I'll book it out four weeks in advance, and I'll prepay, schedule everybody, and I know they are showing up, right? For me, mornings like 10 a.m., which I know is laughable, people, but like to make sure that I am up and ready, which means I will have to wake up probably at least nine, which is, which is an accomplishment for me.

• 1:41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Historically gone to bed like 3, 4, 5 a.m.

• 1:41:20Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:41:21Tim Ferriss?

  Which has not helped manage manic depression, by the way. But I'll get it on the calendar, and that will set my state, then I will have an enabling story, and then I'll set the strategies. It's a very long-winded way of explaining why I use two prompts at the top of my journal, and I'll pre-fill them very honestly. Number one, don't retreat into story. Number two, state arrow.

• 1:41:45Tim Ferriss?

  Story, era, strategy.

• 1:41:47Rich Roll?

  Two things on that. The first thing is, I have a mantra, a phrase that I use that's similar to that, which is mood follows action.

• 1:41:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Rich Roll?

  Right? Which is essentially saying, change your state, right? Like, if you take an action to change your state, then you are in a better position to tackle whatever difficulty you're in. But the idea that you're gonna try to solve your problem in the mood in which, you know, is perpetuating it is ridiculous. Or the idea that you're just gonna wait until you feel like doing something in order to feel better, like, that's never gonna work. But to get, and the second thing is, to get back to this idea of story, see that super woo-woo guy picture, black and white photograph?

• 1:42:30Tim Ferriss?

  I do, yeah.

• 1:42:31Rich Roll?

  That guy, super woo-woo guru dude.

• 1:42:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's like guru panting.

• 1:42:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. He, actually, he's an amazing consciousness. And he was here doing an event, and he addressed this very subject, and he did it in a very interesting way. In talking about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, he said, imagine a branch on a tree, and every knot on that branch is one of those stories. And over time, as we mature and grow, there's more knots. And we wed those knots, we create a narrative out of the series of these knots, and that becomes the story of your life. And for most of us, we go through our whole life without ever challenging those stories. But it's

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  all fabrication, right? It's all illusion. These may be things that happen to you. Your memory of those events may be skewed. But why is it that we choose these knots as being the defining, sort of character-defining events of our lives? And don't we have a choice to choose different things that happen to us over the course of our life to form a brand-new narrative that can tell a different story about who we are, that then projects, you know, into the future as behavioral change that could completely, you know, reshape how you live?

• 1:43:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And, no, it's a, I think it's a really useful framework for thinking about it. And furthermore, I would add that Maybe is, I alluded to with the journaling, for me, at least, changing the stories or creating new stories, much like exercise, it's not a one-time decision.

• 1:44:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's not one and done. This is a practice.

• 1:44:18Rich Roll?

  Well, that groove is so deep.

• 1:44:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:20Rich Roll?

  It takes a long time to...

• 1:44:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you have to practice it. So, I do that through journaling very frequently. And I'll have, say, prompts that I'll use with "I am..." and that is an opportunity each morning to practice new stories.

• 1:44:37Rich Roll?

  I like that.

• 1:44:38Tim Ferriss?

  And I found it very, very valuable, but you need to use repetition. Like you said, the grooves are, like, you've been playing the same goddamn track

• 1:44:52Tim Ferriss?

  tens of thousands of times. You need at least, at least, a few hundred repetitions just to get a toehold with this new story. And it does have a chance. It doesn't, you don't need to reach an equivalent number of repetitions, particularly since you're now consciously directing yourself. The quality of those reps is better and I think makes up for a lot of lost time. But you do need to take it as a practice. And for me, what that means, practice, I'll tell you what practice doesn't mean to me. Practice doesn't mean I'll do it when I remember to do it. Practice means I put it on my fucking calendar, because if it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist.

• 1:45:30Rich Roll?

  Doesn't happen.

• 1:45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Rich Roll?

  Getting back to the book, one of the parts of the book that's been really helpful to me and has spoken to me directly is the strategies around how to say no, you know, which is, I just, I'm terrible at, you know. And you seem to me to be somebody who's always been pretty good about boundaries. And I can't imagine the opportunities that are coming your way, you know, that you're probably constantly, you know, being fed. And I'm sure most of them, or the vast majority of them, are super cool things that would be really fun and awesome to do. So, let's talk a little bit about the power of saying no and how you think about what to say yes to.

• 1:46:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is a perennial topic. And it's a perennial topic and a perennial challenge because...

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Whether opportunities or problems, let's talk about problems for a second because I think the comparison will be helpful. There are many people who think, and I've certainly thought at different points in my life, if I just do X or achieve Y, my problems, these problems will all go away. And what you realize is, as you continue on this journey that is often meandering called life, you don't get rid of your problems if you achieve certain types of success. You just trade up. So maybe you had like, you know, the Corolla of problems, then you trade up and you've got like the used Mercedes of problems,

• 1:47:05Tim Ferriss?

  then you trade up and you have whatever the Porsche of problems. The magnitude and complexity can become really challenging. And the opportunities become themselves problems in the sense that, and many people listening might say, oh, come on, give me a break. Like this is such a, like a one percenter, woe is me story, but it's not. And I'll tell you why. Because, thank you very much. In, in the very, very, very beginning of your

• 1:47:46Tim Ferriss?

  career, I do think yes is default can be very helpful. But when I say the very, very beginning, I mean literally maybe one to two years out of college. If you go to college, you don't have to go to college, but let's just, from my personal experience, once you have an, even a vague glimmer of a notion of what you're really good at versus what you're bad at. And once you have a semi decent group of friends and colleagues and coworkers, the birthday parties, the going out for drinks, the conferences that may or may not piss

• 1:48:27Tim Ferriss?

  away three, four days of your life, these start to appear and they are the siren song. In my experience, that the, when I've encountered stagnation in my life, or felt overwhelmed, for the most part.

• 1:48:50Tim Ferriss?

  Sometimes it's due to catastrophe and huge problems. But very often, it's because I've overcommitted to the kind of sort of cool stuff. And then my calendar is so crowded. As Derek Sivers, who's one of my favorite entrepreneurs, would say, also just incredible philosopher, king of programming, and just eccentric guy in the best way possible. He would say that if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. Now, that's, at a very high level, that's helpful. But then you have to translate that to strategies and tactics. But I do think that before you can say no effectively, there are few assumptions or

• 1:49:32Tim Ferriss?

  first principles that are really helpful to accept, at least for me. Because, for instance, everyone, or not everyone, but a lot of people have heard of Inbox Zero.

• 1:49:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:46Tim Ferriss?

  And...

• 1:49:47Rich Roll?

  That's just never gonna happen.

• 1:49:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it sounds like a good idea, but...

• 1:49:50Rich Roll?

  Where are you at?

• 1:49:52Tim Ferriss?

  What ends up happening, if the inbox is everybody else's agenda for your time, and it's asymmetrical, it's very easy for people to send email, very time consuming, to respond, particularly if you're receiving more than you're sending. So if you look at my top left right there...

• 1:50:11Rich Roll?

  Yes. 373,950...

• 1:50:16Tim Ferriss?

  Unread.

• 1:50:17Rich Roll?

  Are those unread completely, or like, you read them, but you just mark them as unread?

• 1:50:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's completely unread.

• 1:50:23Rich Roll?

  So you haven't even looked at them?

• 1:50:24Tim Ferriss?

  Have not even looked at them.

• 1:50:25Rich Roll?

  So why even have like, that email account connected to your phone?

• 1:50:28Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's going to be... So I will...

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Are you constantly creating more and more secret, secret, behind the velvet rope email addresses?

• 1:50:37Tim Ferriss?

  There is that. But I'm also, this, I don't want to digress, we could certainly go into crazy tech conspiracy land, but if you want to talk about creepy, and there's a lot of creepy stuff that's been happening with recent upgrades, related to Apple and Google, as far as I'm concerned. And I do know a lot of people in tech, but when I upgraded my, this version of iOS, I had no mail set up, and it somehow... And I certainly did not input these changes, determined that I suppose through communication, my assistant's account should be automatically set up for notifications on my phone through mail. I did not manually do it.

• 1:51:22Rich Roll?

  Wow. Like password and everything.

• 1:51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So.

• 1:51:26Rich Roll?

  That's super creepy.

• 1:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  I consider that very creepy.

• 1:51:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Tim Ferriss?

  So, part of the reason I'm diversifying my digital identity in certain ways. But the point being, if you even decide to respond politely to all inbound, there will come a point, if you achieve 20% of what you hope to achieve, that becomes untenable, I think. Unless you have people sending you snail mail or something, maybe that becomes manageable. But one of the most important principles for me that has helped me to say no more effectively, and this is a principle, right, we're gonna get into the more nitty gritty, is that to

• 1:52:11Tim Ferriss?

  achieve the really big, good things, you are going to have to let a lot of small, recoverable bad things happen. No way out. And also recognizing a few other things that have been very helpful, that, and this is, I think it's Herbert Swope, or Swope's, who is the first recipient, I believe, of the Pulitzer Prize, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said roughly, "I can't give you one recipe for success, but I can give you the recipe for failure, and that is trying to please everyone all the time." Also, lip service, people have heard some variation

• 1:52:48Tim Ferriss?

  of that before, but the paired quote that I think of a lot is from Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, which was, "The people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter." So if you don't reply to someone in a day or two, and they get really, really, really pissed off.

• 1:53:11Tim Ferriss?

  I hate to say it, but like the people who have a lot of shit going on themselves and

• 1:53:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they understand.

• 1:53:17Tim Ferriss?

  They get it. So those are all just like operating principles. Then when we get down to strategy, you have on the simplest level, not responding outside of autoresponder. And so if we're looking at email, it's usually the most egregious offender. You can set up autoresponders that indicate policies, right? So something you might have something along the lines of, Dear all, I'm only able to respond to email directly related to projects I currently have on deadline. Unfortunately, I'm not physically capable of replying to all the email that I receive

• 1:53:57Tim Ferriss?

  due to cold intros and so on, which also gives people a little fucking slap if they're doing cold intros without asking first. Below are the answers to 80% of the email I receive. So be like, number one, I'm not doing any book blurbs of any type for for close friends, family or otherwise, zero. Number two, like I'm not doing any more startup investing of any type. ABC, here's a here's a link to an article that explains why and so on and so forth. Then it just requires the discipline to not reply. Even if someone's like, hey, I just wanted to check in. It's like, I know you got my autoresponder. Then then when you're responding, I mean, part of the one of my greatest, not greatest, it's not great in in the sense that I am great.

• 1:54:42Tim Ferriss?

  But one of my happiest realizations when I was putting together Trevor Mentors was as I got these rejection letters, these polite declines from people who are too busy to be in the book. I got one from Wendy McNaughton, who's a very famous illustrator. And it was so good. It was so beautifully brilliantly crafted that I loved her more afterwards than I did before. Keeping in mind, I'd just been rejected, like very clearly rejected. But it was so deftly done and I was bummed out. I was bummed out for a little bit. And then I remember I was with my my researcher sitting there and I think we might have had some wine. And I said, wait a second, you know, it'd be really funny is if I included the rejection letters because

• 1:55:25Tim Ferriss?

  we're talking so much about how to say no and asking people how to say no. And we paused for a second and then I realized, wait a minute. Why don't I just ask Wendy if I can include her email?

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  It's so hilarious. Yeah, it's right here. Like you can read that, but yeah, so she ends up in the book anyway.

• 1:55:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so she ends up in the book with her permission. I'm not printing anything without anyone's permission.

• 1:55:49Rich Roll?

  Everything that she did did not be in the book.

• 1:55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I ended up, yeah, I ended up including a number of these rejection letters that I thought were very, very well done. And there are criteria that well-done, well-done rejections check, such as it's not a punt. It's not, hey, I'm so busy right now, I just can't get it. Like maybe sometime soon, like two, three months. When really they just want to say no. And then I put it in my calendar, it'd fall up in three months and it wastes everybody's time.

• 1:56:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, being a people pleaser, like I make that mistake all the time.

• 1:56:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which, which I've also been guilty of, right? But this, so this is the, this is the email, very, very Wendy. So I included other examples from, say, Neal Stephenson, who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomica, this incredible, incredible fiction writer. Another from Danny Meyer, who's legendary restaurateur Shake Shack and many, many others. Different styles, right? So you have to find one that fits your personality, but you can borrow language and I'll, I'll point out some of the things that I borrowed from hers. Hers is really extensive because we know each other quite well and, and so on. But here it is. Very much suited to her personality. All right.

• 1:57:03Tim Ferriss?

  "Hi, Tim. Gah, okay. I've been battling with this and here's the deal. After five intense years of creative output and promotion, interviews about personal journeys and where ideas come from. After years of wrapping up one project one day and jumping right into promoting another the next, dot, dot, dot, I'm taking a step back. I recently maxed out pretty hard and for the benefit of my work, I gotta take a break. Over the past month, I've canceled contracts and said no to new projects and interviews." All right. So I want to point, this is Tim commentary. I want to point out, this is very common in these good polite declines. It's that they're making it clear it's a policy across the board and that it's not personal, right? And that may or may not be true, but at least the delivery is that it's a policy. All right, back to Wendy.

• 1:57:46Tim Ferriss?

  "I've started creating space to explore and doodle again, to sit and do nothing, to wander and waste a day. And for the first time in five years, I'm finally in a place where there's no due date tied to every drawing, no deadline for ideas, and it feels really right."

• 1:57:59Tim Ferriss?

  Here's another commonality that's coming up. So while I really want to do this with you, I respect you and your work and I'm honored that you'd ask me to participate. And as capital S stupid as it is for me professionally not to do it, I'm going to have to say, "Thank you, but I gotta pass." So another commonality is that people will say, "You know, I know I'll be kicking myself later. I'm sure this is going to be a huge success, but just for my sanity or my health, I have to politely decline this." Another thing that comes up a lot is people will say something along the lines of, "I would love to do this, but what you would get out of me will be so subpar and mediocre compared to what I might be able to give with a future project. I want to decline." Both just for my own benefit, but also because I think you'll get better results from other

• 1:58:43Tim Ferriss?

  people. All right. And she says, "I'm simply not in a place to talk about myself or my work right now. Crazy for a highly verbal only child to say. Hopefully we'll get a chance to talk somewhere down the line. I promise any thoughts I'll have for you then will be far more insightful than anything I can share with you right now. I hope this space created by my absence is filled by one of the brilliant people I suggested in my previous email. And really, thank you so much for your interest. I'll be kicking myself when the book comes out, Wendy." And she did send suggestions for other people. And a number of them ended up being in the book, including the very first profile, Samin Nosrat, who's an incredible chef. That is one hell of a great decline.

• 1:59:20Rich Roll?

  Right. But very different from like Seth Godin, who would just say, "Yeah, can't do it."

• 1:59:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sorry, not my thing.

• 1:59:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you know, so on some level, like she's going into, you know, quite a bit of depth into explaining why she can't do it.

• 1:59:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:59:37Rich Roll?

  Which might fatigue other people. If you didn't have a relationship with her already.

• 1:59:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. I think that is reserved, if I had to guess, that's reserved for people she knows.

• 1:59:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:59:48Tim Ferriss?

  Because it doesn't scale very well, but it really serves a purpose with the relationships that you value. And as a contrast, I'll read Danny Meyer's. So Danny Meyer is the founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, which includes many restaurants, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, Myelino, Shake Shack, et cetera. All right. Fascinating guy, really, really smart.

• 2:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  Did away with tipping in a bunch of his restaurants as a policy for a bunch of reasons with fascinating rationale behind it. So a real innovator in the food and beverage world. All right. So here's his, which was sent to my friend who tried to get the job done, who's super effective, my buddy Jeffrey, who helped a lot in The Four Hour Chef. So he asked Danny, because he knows Danny, and this is Danny's response to my friend Jeffrey. Jeffrey, greetings and thanks for writing. I'm grateful for the invitation to participate in Tim's next book project, but I'm struggling at this moment to make time ends meet for all we're doing at USHG. That's his business group, including my

• 2:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  ongoing procrastination with my own writing projects. I thought carefully about this as it's clearly a wonderful opportunity, but I'm going to decline with gratitude. Know the book will be a big success. Thanks again, Danny. Right. So that's very short.

• 2:01:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to highlight one line that you can just copy and paste, right? Like you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And that's, that's what's been so fun for me about realizing how little effort needs to go into this when you find something that works. It's like you just use the same language. So this line I've used a lot. You know, I thought carefully about this. So that's a really key phrase, right? It's not just, I don't like you, sounds stupid. It's like, no, I actually thought about this. I thought about, I thought carefully about this as it's clearly a wonderful opportunity, but I'm going to decline with gratitude. Period. Right? That's a really powerful, gentle way to do it. And there's so many ways that I've been rejected and continue to be rejected.

• 2:01:57Tim Ferriss?

  And you can take stuff from it. I remember, you know, I've been turned down even early on by Seth Godin for stuff, by who else? I mean, God, the list is really, really, really, really long. Guy Kawasaki, but they did it really well. Remember Guy at one point declined something. And this was just a year or two ago. Couldn't make it work. He's like, sorry, just can't make this work. All right. So you can be very brief. And in some cases, that's better because you don't want people to try to counter. And then you end up in an email exchange.

• 2:02:31Rich Roll?

  For like, yeah, like now I'm gonna have to have five emails over.

• 2:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  It just ends up being whack a mole.

• 2:02:36Rich Roll?

  Email with you.

• 2:02:36Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. So my preference is to not respond whenever possible. The only way to receive fewer email is to send fewer email, basically. And I remember Robert Scoble, who's a perennial figure in the tech world, who really helped with the tipping point for the four hour work week in the very beginning. And he did the math at one point because he was getting barraged by so many email. He was, he was a certainly perceived then and still is as an influencer who can really move the needle. And he said, I've realized doing the math that for every email I send, I get 1.72 in response.

• 2:03:12Rich Roll?

  Actually mapped it out.

• 2:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  That doesn't just, you don't have to be a mathematician to realize that is not favorable to sending more email. And in any case, so Guy said to me, like, hi, Tim. Sorry, I just can't make this work right now. I'll have to raise a glass from the sidelines and cheer you on. Guy.

• 2:03:30Rich Roll?

  Right. Which is great. So he's, he's being supportive, but he's being clear. He's creating a healthy boundary. It's all good.

• 2:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  And something I found very helpful, going back to the policy or categorical decline, which I think is very helpful, there are a number of ways to do it. So you can say, you know, just across the board, I'm doing A for my sanity, dah dah dah. You can say for A, B, and C reasons. It doesn't really matter what the reason is, by the way. This is, they've done all sorts of interesting psychological studies where they'll have, say, a confederate or someone involved with the experimenter go up to get in line in front of somebody for a copier, say, at an office. And they'll say, I'm sorry, can I, I really just need to use the copier. I'm in a rush or whatever. Even they wouldn't say I'm in a rush versus like, I really have to use the copier because.

• 2:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  And what came after because didn't really matter. It's like, because my dog is really loud today.

• 2:04:25Rich Roll?

  Because there was a because.

• 2:04:27Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. There was a reason. So I think that also works in declines. And so like due to A, B, and C, or A and B, I'm following a strict, this is one that I've used a lot because I was turned down by a famous investor for a. A lunch meeting and I know him really well and he's like, sorry, I'm following a really strict no meeting diet for the next month just to like catch up on everything that I've let slide behind. Because I realize that I'd much rather take meetings and drink coffee and like bullshit than do the stuff I really need to do. And I was like, wow, that's a really choice phrase, a no fill in the blank diet. So I started using that like, no, I'm sorry, I'm on a no conference called diet for the next month and people wouldn't even question it.

• 2:05:05Rich Roll?

  Just accept it.

• 2:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's amazing. So you can do that. That works really well.

• 2:05:09Rich Roll?

  I think this idea of no, you know, how to say no effectively and do it in a healthy way, you know, it extends so much further beyond how we navigate email, especially as, you know, we're, we're in this period of time where it's just, it's impossible to be bored. Like we're so inundated with stimuli and it's, it's so tempting to, you know, see what's going on on Twitter. And if it's not Twitter, it's Instagram or it's Snapchat or it's this or it's that. And it's like, before you know it, it's four in the afternoon and you're like, all I've been doing is looking at timelines. Like it's insane, right? And how do we, you know, so the, the saying no has to be applicable to all manner of, you know,

• 2:05:49Rich Roll?

  behaviors and, and thought patterns in order to like, you know, do what Cal Newport would call like the deep work. Like how do you, how do you cut out the noise, you know, make those decisions about where you want to invest your time? And like adhere to them so that you are actually doing what you're supposed to be doing.

• 2:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah. And in the case of digital tools and screens and social media, like every, well, almost every person listening to this is going to be so woefully outmatched by companies that are spending billions of dollars to do exactly what you hope to avoid, which is losing your focus. I mean, they're spending billions of dollars of R and D to ensure that you never maintain focus for terribly long because that is how they're economically incentivized. So let me give two, two tools that have helped me. One is just a tech trick and then one is a mental framework that I found super, super helpful. So the tech trick actually comes from Whitney Cummings, who's a really well-known comedian

• 2:06:54Tim Ferriss?

  and writer-director in Tribe of Mentors. And she learned this from

• 2:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  Blanking on who it was, but a researcher who used to work at Google. And it's turning your phone to grayscale. And if you, it's, it's wild how much of an effect this has. I was very skeptical. I was like, really? Like, I'm gonna cut back on my use of social media by changing it to grayscale? You can find how to turn your phone to grayscale in a million different ways. Just search, turn to grayscale, and then the model of your phone. But in my point, it's super, super simple. And I would say for myself and also readers who've tried this, based on feedback on social, the irony, right? That they, they are using social, and I'm certainly using social, say, 30 to 40% less just by changing my phone to grayscale. And

• 2:07:42Rich Roll?

  What is the psychology behind that? It's just not as like, it's just not pinging your dopamine receptors in the same way?

• 2:07:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's just like some neurological, like how much, I wonder if people were dieting, if they just had like the equivalent of Google Glass and could switch it to grayscale? Like, would they stop, would they, would they not overeat as much? I suspect probably, actually, they would eat less if they saw their food in grayscale, right? It's, I don't know the, the neurological basis for it, but it kind of intuitively makes sense to me. The, so that, that's one really easy trick that you can use. The second is a framework for saying yes or no to things. And that I found really helpful. I use all the time. Kyle Maynard, who's also in Tribe of Mentors, is a quad, congenital quad amputee.

• 2:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  What that means is he was born without arms and legs, effectively. His arms and mid upper arm, and his legs and around the hip. Nonetheless, he's in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, number one. So like, wrap your head around that for a minute.

• 2:08:48Rich Roll?

  It's just so insane.

• 2:08:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, wrestling, fully able-bodied people. He was pinned and beaten every match his first season. People were calling it child abuse and just crucifying his parents. Then he started to win. Then he started to dominate. And people called it unfair advantage, the same people.

• 2:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 2:09:07Rich Roll?

  Did he wrestle in college? Like, how far did he take it?

• 2:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  How far did he go? You know, that's a really good question. I don't know exactly how far he went. I mean, he can still wrestle. I know, because he almost snapped my knee in half when I won a demo. And I was like, okay, yeah, that's enough. I'm clearly like, I'm gonna get injured.

• 2:09:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I wrestled. Like, I was a pretty good wrestler. And he also, I just want people to have a little bit of background. Again, something to think about. So he is the first quad amputee without the aid of prosthetics to climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. There are able-bodied athletes who have died climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He military crawled the whole fucking thing to deposit ashes of a friend who passed away at the summit. The guy's a stud, and he spends a lot of time with like, special forces folks and all sorts of fascinating CEOs. And he was given this recommendation from a really high-level CEO, and it was, "When you're considering an opportunity, an invitation, maybe a prospective hire, could be anything, could even be an entree at a restaurant."

• 2:10:09Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to ask the server this question, it actually works really well.

• 2:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Rate it from 1 to 10, you can't use a 7. And I've been using this pretty much every day since I got this explanation from Kyle, because he said, "The 7 is a very slippery, kind of non-committal, semi-cool

• 2:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  value that he found corresponded to things he felt he had to do out of obligation, or guilt, or fear of missing out. One of the greatest ways, five years from now, 10 years from now, to end up in a place you're really unhappy with, is to let those be your drivers, right? However, if you take 7 out, 6, you can't justify doing a 6. That's a barely passing grade. So that's a no."

• 2:10:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so it turns a gradient into a binary.

• 2:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  It turns a gradient into a binary, and I've been using that for all sorts of things now. It's been great. And instead of making, another thing I've tried to do a lot in the last year, and did a company offsite, which is a fancy way of saying got like, three people together in one place, three or four people. To focus on what categories to say yes to or evaluate and what categories to say no to. So that it's not one off yes or no, one to 10 without seven. Instead of making a million one off decisions like categorically. For instance, speaking engagements, I basically do no speaking engagements. That aren't going to give me something evergreen.

• 2:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  I can then share with millions of people. So for instance, it's like tonight, I'm going to be on stage and I'm going to interview Terry Crews. And that'll be recorded.

• 2:11:51Rich Roll?

  You can use that on the podcast.

• 2:11:52Tim Ferriss?

  And that'll go on the podcast. But getting up and giving the same talk to small groups of people over and over again. I've, I basically stopped doing all of it. I really don't do that anymore. Because as seductive as it is, and there's, there's money to be made. I found it wasn't getting me closer to my personal mountaintop. Right. And for those people who find themselves maybe procrastinating or saying yes to a lot of sevens. There's a commencement speech you have to see. I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this, but there are a million commencement speeches out there. Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art is so good. And you can find it online. It's very easy to find, but Neil Gaiman, who's just the, the uber polymath of fiction writers.

• 2:12:36Tim Ferriss?

  The guy does everything and he has the most hypnotic voice imaginable also. Go watch Make Good Art, that commencement speech. And I just realized that a lot of these categories can be eliminated altogether. And if it's scary to eliminate them, you just make it a short term trial run. Right. So maybe saying, I'm never doing speaking engagements again for the rest of my life. That's too much of a commitment. That's more of a commitment than even I want to make. For this year, maybe that's too big. Okay, let's try for a month, see what the fallout is. Like no matter how appealing something seems, just say no for a month and then we'll reassess in four weeks. And see how you feel. This is a new thing for me too. Not what do the balance in the, the balances in the accounts look like.

• 2:13:19Tim Ferriss?

  Not the spreadsheet, like how do you actually feel about it? Like, are you glad you did it or are you stressed out that you did it? Super easy, it's not easy, but it's binary, right? Feel good, great, let's do it another month.

• 2:13:31Rich Roll?

  I like that, I like that. And on this idea of what if it were easy? You're doing this book launch tour right now. You're traveling around, all of these press obligations, et cetera. The podcast is still going on and then you just launch a new podcast. Like, I look at that like, for me to get like, one or two episodes up a week of this, like, it's a lot, even with help. So, I was like, oh my God, you got another pot? Like, have you automated that? Or like, how does that? Like, I would just be completely stressed out.

• 2:14:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I can explain. This is actually a really good example, I think, to tie in everything we've been talking about, or a lot of it. Alright, so, one podcast, done well, at least, takes a lot of psychic energy and time. I mean, it's to do anything well, I mean, takes a degree of focus that has an energy cost. So, The Tim Ferriss Show's been going now for a few years. Started off as a six-episode test. And when people come up to me now on the street, I mean, nine times out of 10, it's probably even more than that. It's like 19 times out of 20, they talk about the podcast. No mention of the books, which is, on one hand, really exciting and on one hand, kind of depressing. But nonetheless, that's it.

• 2:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I asked myself,

• 2:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  if I were to launch a podcast as a way to draw attention to the book, what might it look like? Because, I suspect, and I don't know for sure, but just based on observing charts for a long time now, that there is a high, there is a high degree of reward, on iTunes at least, for frequency of episodes.

• 2:15:20Tim Ferriss?

  And rate of new subscriber, uh, rate of new subscribers. So what if I launched a new podcast, same title as the book, Tribal Mentors, which effectively, because I don't have an audiobook version, since audiobook versions, by the way, don't count towards the bestseller lists. So why would you want to split your sales? It can always come later.

• 2:15:44Tim Ferriss?

  What if I effectively dripped out the audiobook version vis a vis a new podcast and put out one a day? Well, if I look at my current workflow for The Tim Ferriss Show, where I have two to four hour interviews, that's just not physically possible. Maybe it's physically possible, but I have to drop the entire book launch to do just that. Okay. What might it look like if it were easy? Well, I could look at my 11 questions, which are in the introduction to the book. I can read those questions and I could read the introductions of people who agree to read their own profiles.

• 2:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  And then my questions could be spliced in to each episode.

• 2:16:26Rich Roll?

  And then just have every, every one of these people that you interviewed read their own responses.

• 2:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. And I will mail them all the exact same mic if they need it.

• 2:16:35Rich Roll?

  Actually sending them the equipment.

• 2:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sending them the equipment they need. And it's good for-

• 2:16:42Rich Roll?

  It's still like a logistical thing to oversee.

• 2:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's a, what, what I have to in that case figure out, I just have to figure out the recipe. And then for people who hear the world algorithm, techies throw it around like it's some super complicated magical thing. It's really just a recipe. It's a, it's a series of steps, things that are executed to produce a predictable result. So if I can do that, and I've spent a lot of time, and I mean, this first realization came about, you know, around the formulation of the four hour work week and learning all the lessons that went into that. But if you can do it, we all like to think we're uniquely capable, that no one could say, check our inbox for us. But the fact of the matter is we do, whether they're sloppy or organized, follow certain rules and habits when we check our own inbox.

• 2:17:27Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, you can train someone to do a lot of that, certainly when it comes to soliciting. Or asking people if they want to opt in to record an episode that I will promote potentially to millions of people that will only take them 10 to 30 minutes and I will send them the equipment. And the deadline is fairly flexible. I can teach someone else, like an assistant or a researcher, to help me execute that very easily. So I just had to, I templatized the emails that would go out in a Google Doc. And then that combined with Evernote provided all the tools needed via Slack channel dedicated to this new podcast that could be used.

• 2:18:11Rich Roll?

  And you got mics coming by FedEx, coming and going.

• 2:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  I have mics flying out to people who need them. And then, but it's, it goes even beyond that. One of the most important things that I did in the very first episode is I gave myself an out. This is what I mean. And I think everybody should do this when they start podcasts, by the way. Give yourself a gracious exit option. First episode, I did what I didn't, well, I actually also did this for the Tim Ferriss Show. I said, hey, this is an experiment. If it sucks, I'm gonna stop. If you guys hate it, I'll probably stop. But I'm gonna do six episodes. This was before there were seasons of podcasts. So all of a sudden, people are coming out with seasons. I'm like, hmm, that's a curious idea.

• 2:18:56Rich Roll?

  I look at that and I'm like, they're just lazy.

• 2:18:59Tim Ferriss?

  But there's a

• 2:19:00Rich Roll?

  But they're smarter than I am.

• 2:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  There's a genius in it because then you can say, season's done. Huge success. Now I'm gonna stop.

• 2:19:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:19:08Tim Ferriss?

  As opposed to, Jesus Christ, this isn't working, it's really tiring, I'm gonna stop. So in the Tribal Mentors podcast, episode one, I said, this is, this is gonna be season one, it's gonna run for 10 to 15 episodes. What does 10 to 15 episodes equate to? It equates to the first two weeks of launch, coming out with one episode every day. So the Tribal Mentors podcast has been, last I checked, I mean, it was number one for several days, and it's been the top five, it's been in the top five podcasts of all the podcasts on iTunes for almost a week and a half now, maybe two weeks. And then I'm gonna get to 15, or whatever it is, and I'm done. And guess what? What might this look like if this were easy? It would also look like short episodes that I can combine into longer episodes to use on the Tim Ferriss Show.

• 2:19:52Tim Ferriss?

  That has sponsorships and everything else. And

• 2:19:58Tim Ferriss?

  And it also ties back to even the book, like the Tribe of Mentors. What does Tribe of Mentors do, among many other things, for me and the readers? What does it also accomplish? Which was a bit of a late discovery on my part, but I realized half of the people in the book would be almost impossible to get on the podcast. If the ask is-

• 2:20:22Rich Roll?

  I think you're undercutting yourself. I think most of those people in there would probably do your show. It might take a while to get the schedules aligned.

• 2:20:29Tim Ferriss?

  I will tell you, I'm not going to name names, but a lot of people in that book rejected, not rejected, politely declined to be on the podcast.

• 2:20:39Rich Roll?

  Right, I see. So then you can kind of come back to them with this.

• 2:20:41Tim Ferriss?

  But now, I come back with a super, well, relatively speaking, compared to two to four hour interview that has to be scheduled and calendars meshed and so on, a lightweight request to answer a few questions to be in this book. Now, many of them are, have seen the response to the book, which has been tremendous. I just found out today and it's number one Wall Street Journal business book in the first week, which is exciting. Thank you. And-

• 2:21:10Rich Roll?

  So now they're like, "Yeah, I'll do the podcast."

• 2:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. So they've seen, they did, I'm not going to say next to nothing, because a lot of them put a tremendous amount of time into their answers. You know, I mentioned Terry Crews. His answers just blew me away. He really got into it and gave really, really deep answers. But lightweight compared to doing a long podcast. Now that they've seen the return on investment from the profiles, I have 140 people who are primed to be on the podcast. That saves me a tremendous amount of effort over the next year. And what might this look like if this were easy book tour? Well, you know what I, and what might this look like if it were fun? Well, one of the things I've done in the past, which doesn't make anybody happy,

• 2:21:56Tim Ferriss?

  at least of which myself, is getting up at an event to talk about myself and the book that people have already bought to attend the goddamn event. It's so stupid and it's boring for people. I mean, maybe it's not boring. People seem to have had fun with it. But if I'm asking myself, what might this look like if it were easy? And what might this look like if it were fun? It would be me onstage interviewing someone like Terry Crews to get material that's not in the book, to record it, to then put it on the podcast. Fantastic.

• 2:22:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's uh.

• 2:22:29Rich Roll?

  That's ingenious.

• 2:22:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, so that's, that's how I'm thinking about it.

• 2:22:32Rich Roll?

  It's still like a lot of work, though. I mean, I'm still like, you know, what's a day like? How do you get through the day managing all the? I mean, you've got people working with you and helping you, and you systematize this stuff to a certain extent, but they're still like staying on top of like, okay, what's due, what's going up? When's that happening? All of that, like, that's.

• 2:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  There's a good amount of stuff. I will say that for a book launch, for instance, 90% of the work is the book itself. Because in, in today's world, you might be able to game the system if, if you want to use the black arts. There's all sorts of funny, all sorts of funny business that people use with book launches.

• 2:23:10Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 2:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, including things that I would call book laundering, all sorts of trickery that you can use to, to trick people for, say, a week. But that's about it. If your book sucks, it's toast. I mean, it's just not gonna last. It needs to stand on its own two feet. And so the vast majority, it's no mistake, for instance, that this book with the pull quotes, they're almost all now, it's antiquated in a sense because I guess 280 characters now for Twitter, but almost all of these pull quotes are gonna be less than 140 characters. That's not a mistake, right?

• 2:23:44Rich Roll?

  Easily tweetable.

• 2:23:46Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And, uh, but also the, the content itself, meaning in the, in the nitty gritty of the chapters. And then the, like, 8%, now we're at 98%, right? Then 8% is planning for months in advance. Not necessarily what you're going to do, but what you're not going to do. So I'll do a review of the last launch and see what pulled its weight and what did not. And categorically, no, to almost everything. For instance, Facebook Live, in almost every case, no. Will I promote your Facebook Live? No, unless you give us advertiser access. I mean, we can get into the nitty gritty, but it's like, no, we didn't see any return, and you want us to promote the interview that I'm doing on your platform? No, that defeats the whole purpose of being on. And

• 2:24:31Rich Roll?

  That's always a weird thing.

• 2:24:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and what I've noticed, and I were bouncing all over the place, but it's like with, with, I have not sent, people may not believe this, but I have literally not sent out a single email to anyone in that book saying, could you please promote? Zero. Because, my assumption is, I've sent them all copies.

• 2:24:52Rich Roll?

  They're doing it because they want the promotion.

• 2:24:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or, I mean, hopefully they like the book too, but it's like I sent them all

• 2:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  inscribed books that I spent a lot of time on, and that's it. And my assumption is, if they really like it, so that they would be comfortable sharing it, they'll share it. Right? If they're not comfortable sharing it, and I try to in any way pressure them into it, it's gonna create

• 2:25:20Rich Roll?

  Skeezy.

• 2:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it's gonna create a discomfort that fucks things up later, right? It's like if I'm playing the long game, and maybe I want to have them on the podcast later, like, doing that is, jeopardizes that. And last, like, maybe I could get them to promote, but they're not totally into the book. That's also a long-term loss. So I just let it ride. This is what I did with the last book, too. And fortunately, I mean, people have been super, super stoked. But, in any case, I don't want to get into all of, all of that stuff. But yeah, what would this look like if it were easy?

• 2:25:53Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I'm thinking for the next book, I might just, I mean, who knows? Maybe. But like, I have a couple of book ideas in my head, which is just my addiction to masochism, I guess. And I might just give them away for free, honestly.

• 2:26:05Rich Roll?

  That's sort of like what James Altucher does, doesn't he?

• 2:26:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:07Rich Roll?

  He ended up giving away a lot of books.

• 2:26:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, as long as I didn't allow that to give me permission to lower the quality, which I think is a, is a, is a tricky temptation if you're doing, giving away stuff for free. But it's like, you know, the most important thing I've ever written, I think, is a free blog post that I spent months on, which was the, some practical thoughts on suicide. I mean, tough, tough, but post, most difficult thing to publish I've ever published, but, you know, that was free. Took me months to get done.

• 2:26:42Rich Roll?

  So where you, you know, you mentioned earlier, like the personal mountaintop or the summit, like, you know, what is that for you? Like, where are you taking all this? Where's this adventure heading, Tim Ferriss?

• 2:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know. And that's part of the excitement for me. I really don't know. What I do know, I don't know where I'm going. And not to, I'll pull out another woo woo cliche, but the attribution I don't have, maybe you do, but not all who wander or lost. Like, I'm actually enjoying exploring right now in what is, to me, very new territory. For some people, they've lived with their emotions and experienced and explored them and felt them for their whole lives. It's not true for me.

• 2:27:32Tim Ferriss?

  So this is, this is a brand new tera ikageta for me.

• 2:27:37Rich Roll?

  What are the people closest to you saying to you about this? Like, are they noticing a change in you?

• 2:27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're everyone who's really close to me, without any prompting from me, without knowing anything about the silent retreat or whatever, will sit down with me for dinner or something and they'll say, "What's going on with you?" Not in a bad way. They're just like, "There's something different about you. What's going on?" And I feel really good. So I'm happy, I'm more than happy right now. And it's not a trade, but if we, if we looked at it that way, I'm completely happy, elated to trade knowing the destination for just feeling good. And that's where I am right now. And I will say also that

• 2:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  almost all of my most, if you want to look at it from a professional standpoint, like my most incredibly critical professional opportunities and decisions have come from slack in the calendar, right? So there are the must do things that are important, like we talked about, that, for instance, some of these things that I put on the calendar for the next month or two. But beyond that, because that's the most important thing, beyond that, after something like this, a book launch or a TV show launch, or whatever it might be, I leave a lot of the calendar open because I cannot, whatever I might plan, I assume

• 2:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Cannot take into account the incredible and fascinating things and people that will come out of the woodwork as a result of, say, a launch like this. So I just create the space for that. All of my best investments, if you look at like Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Alibaba, all this stuff, they all came from gaps in the system.

• 2:29:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, not through some crazy grand design, whiteboarding, how this is gonna go.

• 2:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  No, no. I mean, if it's, it's for me, and I had a conversation with Tim O'Reilly recently on my podcast, which was so much fun. For people who don't know him, you can just check him out. He's, he's considered, or he's been nicknamed the trend spotter in Silicon Valley, really good guy. And he spends a lot of time just sitting in stillness and just listening. And that's either gonna make some semblance of sense to people, or it's not. I won't try to really dig into it. But through meditation and other things, he's, for instance, on his one habit that has most positively impacted his life in the last year or so, is on his morning runs. He goes running every morning. He makes a

• 2:30:17Tim Ferriss?

  point every morning he goes on a run to stop and take a photograph of a flower. Right? And that's an example of just like stopping and experiencing some stillness. And then he'll just pause for a second and then continue on his run. And I'm, I think I've, I've spent so much time yelling at myself internally for so much of my life, there was very little stillness. And now I'm taking time. And look, I still have my monkey mind. I still have bullshit that bounces around my skull. And when I sit down and meditate, for those people who might be wondering, like, if I meditate for 20 minutes, I would say 19 minutes of that is just like to do list porn, stupid argument, imaginary hypothetical discussion

• 2:30:59Tim Ferriss?

  I might have. It's just nonsense. And then there are like 30 seconds where I'm like, oh, this is possible. Like this, this state of stillness is actually possible, however brief. And learning to, instead of constantly yelling at myself, just like pause. And I was walking through Washington DC a couple of days ago, in, during this crazy time, book launch with a back to back insane schedule, and going to an event with 800 or 1,000 people.

• 2:31:33Tim Ferriss?

  And I this is another thing I've never done before. I've been reading.

• 2:31:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man.

• 2:31:41Tim Ferriss?

  Certain poetry. It's precisely because it does not have an explicit purpose. I want to develop.

• 2:31:48Rich Roll?

  That's some serious counter programming.

• 2:31:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, like I want to develop a tolerance for that. And I came across. I've tried all sorts of poetry and almost all of it I've ended up rejecting. Like either like, don't get it. I just don't get it. Or it's too flowery or whatever. And then I found in English, most people say Hafiz, H A F I Z. He was born about 100 years after Rumi, who people may have heard of.

• 2:32:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hilarious. This guy's hilarious. Like some of his poetry is so funny. And so I've made it a habit. I've been traveling with this book, which is heavy, but I wanted a paperback. And reading one poem. A night, basically. And so I read one before I left the hotel and it talked about, in effect, just paying attention to stillness and the small sounds that make you feel better. And I was like, hmm, okay. Well, like, as I kind of intended tribal mentors to be, it's like, all right, I want, using the poetry, to just have a lens or a question or an idea that I can then put on and walk with for a few hours of the rest of the day. So I did that. I'm walking through DC and shit's going bonkers and there are like cars

• 2:33:05Tim Ferriss?

  blocking off streets because such and such muckety muck is driving down. Chaos. People seem pretty grumpy. And then there was this tree I walked by just full of these birds with this incredible bird song, right? And I was fairly agitated, like coming into it because I was sleep deprived. It's a very full week. I just paused for like 15 seconds. There's no downside to that. Just to like, and listen to these birds and be like, all right, despite all the bullshit going on right now and all the noise.

• 2:33:38Tim Ferriss?

  There's this in the middle of the city and it just that like one degree changed my state enough that then you telescope out an hour later after walking another mile, get to the venue and I'm in a really good mood. Right. That's all it took. So I'm trying to pay more attention to those tiny little gaps of stillness. Instead of just continuing to yell at myself, which has, has, has overall, it's produced a handful of wins, but it's, it's done a lot more damage.

• 2:34:06Rich Roll?

  Not sustainable.

• 2:34:07Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 2:34:08Rich Roll?

  I just thought of the title for this podcast, like, uh, Tim Ferriss on, uh, Tim Ferriss on, on why poetry will save your life.

• 2:34:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah. And I think one thing I'd like to underscore. Cause I'm sure there are people out there and if I had to guess, I would say a lot of them are probably super driven, aggressive, 20 something males in, in a state of hormonal nirvana. Cause they're just like coursing with testosterone and everything else. It'll just allow them to run through walls, seemingly without any damage. I would say that what I'm talking about

• 2:34:59Tim Ferriss?

  is not mutually exclusive from like the aggression and the winning and the competition. Like you can actually have both. You don't have to choose one or the other.

• 2:35:08Rich Roll?

  That's the thing that scares so many people. They think if I start doing that, I'm going to lose my edge. Or that thing that I've imagined, that I've decided is the thing that gives me an advantage and allows me to do what I do in the world.

• 2:35:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, that's why a lot of, a lot of my friends, uh, haven't tried meditation. Cause they're, they're just, they're like, hey man, I'm, I'm really.

• 2:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  I'm worried that I'll lose that edge. It's the wording, that's the exact wording they use. Like, I'm worried I'll lose my edge and I won't be able to get it back. I give up, I'm too lackadaisical. If I accept too much, I'll become complacent. Now-

• 2:35:42Rich Roll?

  The counterpoint to that, you could put a really, you could put like a Machiavellian lens on that and say, imagine yourself in a negotiation and it's very tense and this person puts something on the table that offends you and you have that extra second to reflect and be present and to like, gauge how you're gonna respond to that. I mean, that is like a tactical advantage if there ever was one.

• 2:36:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, I mean, there are, there are definitely tactical advantages. Uh, and I, and I will say that if you, if you do a bunch of meditation and woo woo stuff, like there are probably times when you're gonna be like, "I'm so chilled out, I just don't really wanna do anything today." I'm not gonna lie, like, there are those moments. But I would say a few things to that. A, does it really matter?

• 2:36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Like, what are you striving for?

• 2:36:27Rich Roll?

  In the most like-

• 2:36:28Tim Ferriss?

  Like, on a macro level, like, what are you striving for exactly? Is it to ultimately like chill the fuck out and enjoy things? Maybe, on some, on some plane of existence. Secondly, just like you said, uh, there is a certain magic in not caring. And I think that when you incorporate some of these practices, which could be as simple as the morning meditation. If you're like, you know what? All this like feel-good stuff, don't really care about it. You can get some of the feel-good stuff as a side effect of, uh, uh, from just trying to be more effective by incorporating, say, morning journaling with the, uh, keeping in mind the state, story, strategy progression, right? And, uh, that,

• 2:37:15Tim Ferriss?

  I remember one of the best pieces of advice I ever received related to negotiation was, super simple. Someone said to me, "He who cares less wins."

• 2:37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Basically, if you have walkaway power, or the ability to just say no, so another, based on that in part, I also developed a rule for myself, which I follow, I have followed very, very, very consistently, which is, if someone tries to pressure me to make a decision quickly, the answer's no. If you want, if you want a knee jerk response, if someone's like, blah, blah, closing tomorrow, oversubscribe, blah, blah, blah, like, either yes or no now, like, I'm not gonna leave until you say yes to X, I'm like, then the answer's no, absolutely no. It's like, any on the spot decision that you want me to make, or forcing me to make, answer's no. And, uh, there's tremendous power in that.

• 2:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  And it's a muscle that you strengthen as you practice it, and you realize, like, oh shit, like, the world didn't end.

• 2:38:18Rich Roll?

  And it's not just, it's not that you don't care, like, it's more that you're not defined by the outcome, or you're not attached, you don't have an expectation around the outcome, like, you know that you're good outside of however this goes down.

• 2:38:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, uh, yeah, we could, we could keep going and going and going. I mean, there's so many things you can do. For instance, you know, I found out recently that Elon Musk went, I think it was in college, 30 days on $1 a day.

• 2:38:48Rich Roll?

  Did he really?

• 2:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  To teach himself that he could do it. Kevin Kelly, one of my, I would consider him a mentor, certainly, he's in the book. I mean, my, my vote, or one of my votes for the real world most interesting man in the world. Fascinating guy, he's got an Amish beard, built his own house, technology futurist, who can predict all sorts of crazy things that are coming down the line, even though he never went, or he dropped out of school. I mean, his story is just nuts. And, um... Kevin also at periods of time would go on extended backpacking trips. He still does. I mean, he's got to be in his seventies now. Travels with his kids quite a bit and his wife. And he'll go, say, a week of sleeping in his sleeping bag, just eating oatmeal and nothing else. That's it.

• 2:39:33Rich Roll?

  Saw my tent.

• 2:39:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:35Rich Roll?

  I sleep in that tent.

• 2:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and you do that every once in a while. I try to do something like that at least a few days a month. I almost always fast at least three days a month, contiguous days a month, which you do need to be careful with. You can fuck yourself up, so have someone qualified supervise you for stuff like that. But when you practice the removal of of wants, when you have a renunciation practice of some type or an ascetic practice of some type. Cold exposure also one of my favorites, although it's not really the same category.

• 2:40:13Tim Ferriss?

  You begin to teach yourself not or realize in some cases, not only can you survive, say, sleeping in the tent or going a week just having like shitty instant coffee and oatmeal and a sleeping bag. But for anyone who's gone from, say, the hustle bustle, grind, grind, grind to like a seven to 10 day hiking trip, how good do you feel after that? You don't just survive, you feel so revived from it.

• 2:40:40Rich Roll?

  It's actually like a path towards that thing that we're all seeking for. We're just doing it by pursuing the wrong avenues. You know, it's like through that simplicity and through that, you know, renunciation, even if it's just on a micro level, you can find a sense of self and a sense of calm and a contentedness that, that, you know, we're trying to get and all these other things that we're doing in our life and that continue to elude us.

• 2:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, another thing that I've done for the last two or three years now, which I do almost all the time, probably not on book lunch, but for, for most of the time, screen free Saturdays. So that doesn't mean, there are a few exceptions. I am allowed to use things like Google Maps or Uber or whatever I need to actually get around and survive. But no laptop, no social media. And I have a lot of things that come out on Saturday, pre-scheduled, right? So that I don't have to interact.

• 2:41:46Tim Ferriss?

  On Saturdays, but so screen-free Saturdays have been really helpful to also train me and to train other people to realize the world doesn't end.

• 2:41:57Rich Roll?

  It's amazing that we're in this place now where it's like, oh my God, a whole day on a Saturday when you don't work, that you're not going to look at a screen like this is where we're at.

• 2:42:05Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's, I mean, that's how we've been conditioned because a

• 2:42:11Tim Ferriss?

  fidgety, anxious populace clicking on things is a sort of economically productive populace for many of the companies who design these things and whose revenue models are predicated on advertising or contextual or native advertising that you don't even realize is advertising, but that is split tested so that you have salacious or scary headlines. It's

• 2:42:39Rich Roll?

  Does it feel good to be in Austin and out of that environment?

• 2:42:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, Austin feels really good. And I think, I think part of it was finding a better environment for the next chapters of Tim professionally and personally. I've always had a gravitational pull to Austin. I wanted to move there after college, just didn't get the job at Trilogy Software. And then I got an offer after

• 2:43:02Rich Roll?

  Trilogy, is that Joe Lemons?

• 2:43:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I went to college with Joe.

• 2:43:05Tim Ferriss?

  Joe, really?

• 2:43:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:06Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding. So you went to college then also with Mike Maples, who was his roommate?

• 2:43:10Rich Roll?

  Uh, I didn't know him. I knew Joe. I just have a vivid memory of Joe having this house in Palo Alto. It was exactly like those houses from the social network. And there were just dude, like code monkeys on all these computers and there would be, you know, he would throw these huge parties and all these people there. And I remember when he's like, yeah, I'm out, like I'm dropping out, like I'm, my, my market window is closing. And I was like, what are you talking about? This is like 1987 or something.

• 2:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, yeah.

• 2:43:41Rich Roll?

  I had, I thought he was out of his mind at the time.

• 2:43:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's done all right. And yeah, I don't resent the decision not to hire me. I was, I think I make a terrible employee, actually, so it's likely a good decision. But Austin's always had this pull for me. So I think that it gets really nice as I'm considering the next things I'm going to do to have friends who have nothing to do with tech.

• 2:44:10Tim Ferriss?

  And some of my best friends still live in SF. And I love those people, but it's very new for me to be in a place like Austin, where one of my best friends is a filmmaker. Another one of my best friends owns a jujitsu school. Another friend is a musician. And it goes on and on. So the inputs are so novel and new for me. I think that I'll have a chance to use parts of my brain that have been maybe neglected for a while, which will be nice. So I'm digging it. I'm really digging it. My pup likes, Molly pup likes Austin as well. Lots of green.

• 2:44:46Rich Roll?

  Well, cool, man. We gotta, we gotta land this plane.

• 2:44:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:49Rich Roll?

  I'm excited for you, for your new chapter. And it was, it was great getting to know you. And I'm, it's gonna be cool, I think, how this plays out for you as you continue to kind of pull on these threads emotionally. So, good, man. I appreciate you being open and sharing all that stuff today.

• 2:45:05Tim Ferriss?

  My pleasure. Yeah, my pleasure. And I would love to just say for, for people listening that a big part of me opening up in this way, which is getting easier, but it's not easy for me, is to hopefully help people or to minimize how isolated so many people can feel, which I felt for a long time, that I was somehow, if I ended up in a dark place, or in a dangerous place even, that I was uniquely flawed and there was no way out, and that I was suffering this alone, and that

• 2:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  other people were just fine, and I was a broken toy, and what's the point, etc. All this self-talk, again, the retreating into story, into these loops that can be really perilous and certainly punishing and can create a lot of suffering. You're not alone. And part of the reason that I ask all the people I interview in my books, the recent ones, anyway, about failures and so on, is to highlight the fact that, you know, most of the people we think of as superheroes are

• 2:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Walking flaws with tons of insecurities and neuroses who have somehow figured out how to build habits around one or two strengths. I mean, really. And I mean, you and I both know some really, really accomplished people. And they might not talk about it publicly and they don't have to, but like, trust me, with rare exception, I can't think of one, maybe one, but he's like a robot. Rare exception, they are all fighting battles that you know nothing about. And it's safe to assume also that everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about.

• 2:47:01Rich Roll?

  There's no question about it. You know, we, we project an idealized version of what these people's lives are like that we, that we idolize or, or that we, you know, sort of see on screens. They're just human beings, you know, and successful or not, there's no escaping the human condition.

• 2:47:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and there's a, you know, there's a, there's an expression in, you hear sometimes in startups or business, which is, A, don't believe your own hype. It might also be phrased as, don't believe your own press releases. And what I would say, just by analogy is, you know, if, if your Facebook feed or Instagram feed isn't a complete picture of your life, like, don't believe the, the story and the hype of all of your friends who seem to have the perfect lives on Instagram and Facebook. It's still, that's also just the highlight reel, right?

• 2:47:54Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 2:47:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, uh, yeah, someone needs to, I remember a friend of mine was saying, very successful friend of mine was saying, like, where's the Instagram feed of me, like, crying, eating Haagen Dazs at two in the morning, watching like reruns of Growing Pains? Like, you don't see that very much. He's like, someone needs to make that Instagram account, just to weigh out all the others.

• 2:48:14Rich Roll?

  I bet there is. I bet there's some people that are doing that.

• 2:48:16Tim Ferriss?

  There probably is one or two, but...

• 2:48:19Rich Roll?

  But I think it speaks to the power of, of, of vulnerability, you know? And this is, this is really what you're doing. Like, you're, you're taking this leap into, you know, sharing aspects of who you are and your story in a public setting, which is frightening and, and takes courage. But I think you're experiencing, you know, the emotional connection, the very real emotional connection that that creates with not just your audience, but those people who care for you, you know? And it's powerful, it's really powerful. And that is... That is how you can help other people heal.

• 2:48:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's my hope, man. So thanks for giving me a forum to have the discussion and thanks for bringing it out.

• 2:48:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, my pleasure, man. The book is Tribe of Mentors, available everywhere you buy books.

• 2:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  Available.

• 2:49:05Rich Roll?

  Pretty easy to, it's hard to escape Tim on the internet. You can actually go out of your way to not have him show up somewhere. But he is T. Ferris on Twitter, two R's, two S's, correct?

• 2:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, yeah. Tim Ferris, two R's, two S's as well on Facebook and Instagram.

• 2:49:20Rich Roll?

  Now, two podcasts.

• 2:49:22Tim Ferriss?

  Two podcasts. If you search Tim Ferris Podcast, you'll have a bunch pop up. If you go on the charts, you should probably see Tribe of Mentors, which is a shorter format. The episodes are 10 to 30 minutes instead of 1 and 1/2 to 3 and 1/2 hours, which are my usual in the Tim Ferriss Show. And you can find also a couple of sample chapters, a full list of mentors from Tribe of Mentors at tribeofmentors.com if you want to take a peek. A lot of good books out there, but I gotta give it a plug. You know, if you're, if you're looking for a gift book, I will say, very self-interestedly, of course, that I do think there's something in this for just about anybody. Because it's a choose your own adventure book, like you mentioned.

• 2:50:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it truly is. I mean, you could just pop it open anywhere randomly or intentionally and, and find good stuff.

• 2:50:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:09Rich Roll?

  It will, you know, continue to enrich you in mysterious ways.

• 2:50:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no matter, and regardless, I certainly wish everyone very happy, very safe holidays. And, you know, I'll, I'll close with one, one thought, which is actually borrowed from Gertrude Stein. I, I read her say this recently. I'll paraphrase, which is,

• 2:50:37Tim Ferriss?

  "The golden rule goes in two directions." And for those of you who need a reminder, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Also, do unto yourself as you would do unto others. So if you're going to practice kindness this holiday season, which I hope you do and beyond, start with yourself.

• 2:50:56Rich Roll?

  Beautifully put. Good talking to you, Tim.

• 2:50:58Tim Ferriss?

  You too, man.

• 2:51:04Rich Roll?

  So that was it. We did it. It's over. That was Tim Ferriss and I. What did you guys think of that? It was pretty intense, right? I thought it was really great. I mean, let's be honest, I'm just delighted that I was able to have that kind of conversation with Tim. An amazing experience for me, and I really hope that you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. Take a moment to let Tim and myself know what you thought of the episode on Twitter @TFerriss, two R's, two S's, and you know where to find me @RichRoll. Be sure to pick up a copy, or two, or five of Tribe of Mentors. It really is great. It makes for a phenomenal holiday gift. It's packed with just so much insight from this massive array of some of the most interesting, and amazing, and dynamic, and accomplished people on planet Earth.

• 2:51:49Rich Roll?

  Also, you can watch our entire podcast on YouTube, youtube.com/RichRoll. We filmed the whole thing. It's really great. If you enjoy it there and you want to see more podcasts on video, please subscribe to my channel and leave a comment there below that video. Also, please make a point of checking out the show notes on the episode page for this podcast, @RichRoll.com. Tons of links and resources enumerated there with many links relevant to today's conversation, including the people mentioned, the books mentioned, Tim's TED Talk. All of it designed to take your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. That really helps with the show's visibility. It helps extend reach. It helps expand the audience.

• 2:52:32Rich Roll?

  All of which in turn makes it easier for me to book the very best people for future shows. Also, I love it when you share the show with your friends on social media. Take a screen grab of the show, or a picture of where you're enjoying the podcast. That's always great. Share it on Instagram, whatever. Leave a review on iTunes. We also have a Patreon set up for those who would like to contribute financially to my work, and thank you so much to everybody who has done that. I have scheduled the next Ask Me Anything exclusive AMA video, interactive video content that I'm providing for my Patreon supporters. That's going to be on December 21st at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. But you gotta be a supporter on Patreon to join that.

• 2:53:14Rich Roll?

  So you can check that out if you are and put it in your calendar. Again, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @RichRoll. And if you would like to receive a free semi-weekly email from me, I send one out every week or two. It's called Roll Call. Five or six things that I found inspiring, informative, helpful, enlightening. Some articles I read, a couple of products that I've enjoyed, a documentary that I watched, a video that I found illuminating. No spam, not trying to sell you anything, no affiliate links, not any money being made on this, just good stuff. You can sign up for that in any of the email capture windows on my website. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show.

• 2:53:56Rich Roll?

  Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Sean Patterson for help on graphics. Bobby Sud, who filmed today's podcast and edited it. Thank you so much for that. And theme music, as always, by Annalima. See you guys back here soon. Until then, stay grateful. Practice that gratitude. Remember how I opened this podcast? It's so important, you guys. Keep it in the forefront of your mind, prioritize it, and watch your experience of this holiday season be transformed. Peace, plants, namaste.