#95: Lessons Learned from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and More

Phil Libin (@plibin http://www.twitter.com/plibin) is the co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote https://evernote.com/. Evernote http://evernote.com has roughly 150 million users, and I personally use it at least 10 times a day. It is my external brain for capturing all the information, documents, online articles, lists, etc. in my life. In this episode, Phil and I cover a ton. Here are just a few examples: - Philosophical and performance systems: Stoicism, electrical brain stimulation, and more - Phil's favorite lessons learned from Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten) - Creating tech "for yourself" and Evernote's genesis story, leading to approximately 150 million users - The best toast in Singapore, the best hamburger in Tokyo, and why "Goat Simulator" is amazing. - Long-term (10,000-year) thinking and real versus imagined threats More importantly, he digs into his "a-ha" moments, and what you need to do bring your next big idea to life. Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim Enjoy!

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Well, we're just sitting in a perfect time.

• 0:12Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The Four Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning. So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out. Athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I've rerecorded this intro like 17 times because I saw my brother last night after a long hiatus apart and we drank, i.e. Tim drank way, way, way too much wine. So I've had some caffeine, I've had some coconut oil and pu-erh tea, and this one is gonna make it happen, folks, magic. Okay, onward. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is, like many others, it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, athletes, actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or anybody and everyone in between. And what I mean by that is teasing out the routines,

• 3:04Tim Ferriss?

  the morning rituals, the favorite books, the behaviors and habits that you can borrow to improve your own life in a professional sense and a personal sense. This episode, we have Phil Libin. Phil Libin is a friend. He is also the co-founder and executive chairman of Evernote. I use Evernote, as you guys probably know, every day. I mean, dozens of times a day. I used it to handle all of the brain dumps and organization of information and capture of information for my last few books. I also use it to create a paperless life, or as close to it as possible. And I was introduced to Evernote by you guys, on Twitter, actually. And I want to say 2008, maybe, 2009, when I was revising The Four Hour Workweek

• 3:48Tim Ferriss?

  and I ended up recommending Evernote in that, once I got hooked on the product. Then I got to know Phil, and then I became an advisor to the company, which is super, super cool. So I've been an advisor since, I want to say, 2008, 2009. And Evernote now has 150 or so million users. And it is your external brain, so you can use it to capture things online, so you can read them offline, you can use it to capture voice notes, photographs, scan documents with your iPhone, for instance, so that you can take a picture of a receipt, of a menu, of a contract, and then have it OCR'd, so that you can search the text that you just took a photo of later. Anyway, I could go on and on. ...on about it because I love the product. I can't, it's like Uber for me.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  I can't live without it. But in this episode, we cover so much more than just Evernote. But we do dig in, obviously, to the lessons learned. And speaking of lessons learned, Phil shares his favorite lessons learned directly from Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, and Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten. And if you don't know who he is, then you should look him up. We talk about philosophical and performance systems like Stoicism, electrical brain stimulation, which I know you guys are into. And if you want a ton on that, you can also listen to my Adam Gazali episode. But Phil is experimenting with brain stimulation for performance enhancement and just general well-being. And we'll talk about that.

• 5:15Tim Ferriss?

  Creating tech for yourself and the Evernote genesis story, they're very closely tied together. We have some frivolities, like the best toast in Singapore, the best hamburger in Tokyo, and why Goat Simulator is amazing. And then we talk about long-term thinking, long-term meaning 10,000-year thinking, and real versus imagined threats. We talk about artificial intelligence and a bunch of others. Now, most importantly, in general, across this episode, he digs into his aha moments and what he learned, in some cases, how they happened, and how you can make that happen for yourself. So Phil is an awesome guy, hilarious, and just an amazing, amazing executive. Now, when we recorded this, he was also CEO of Evernote.

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  But he has been looking for his successor for some time now. And in the meantime, between recording this and publishing it, he found that CEO. So you can just Google "new Evernote CEO," and you can get all the goods on that. In any case, you can find the show notes, all the links, the book links, et cetera, at fourhourworkweek.com and just click Podcast. So fourhourworkweek.com, click Podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy Phil Libin, and say hi to him on Twitter, @PLibin.

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  Phil, welcome to the show.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Hey, Tim. Good to be here.

• 6:38Tim Ferriss?

  It has been a while since we hung out and I've noticed the most conspicuous change is that the trademark beard has vanished. And I wanted to know how you decided to make that change because for as long as I've known you, I have sort of visualized in my head this beard that you have, which is, I guess, it's not really a goatee. It's not really a full ears-to-chin beard. It's more like a mouth frame. I don't know if there's a word for those.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Mouth frame. Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Man, had I thought of it as a mouth frame, would have shaved so much earlier.

• 7:16Tim Ferriss?

  You know, that's probably due to my lack of caffeine. But how did you decide to, or why did you decide to shave it off?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Well, I had it literally for 20 years. I hadn't shaved in 20 years. I had this beard. And when I grew it 20 years ago, I was, I was trying to look older. And, you know, 20 years later, I figured it was time to start trying to look younger.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  That works.

• 7:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And for those people who are familiar with Evernote, one of the questions that I've heard come up quite a bit is, and we'll get to what Evernote is, of course, but why green for the logo? The elephant, people eventually figure out, but why green?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Well, so logo is gray. It's, so it's an elephant, right? Because elephants, elephants never forget. Elephants have great memories. And the elephant is gray. And people ask, well, why is the elephant gray? And it's, well, because that's the color elephants are. And it's on a green background because that's the color that elephants are usually on when they're on grass. So it's not, it's not super elaborate.

• 8:20Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Or imaginative.

• 8:22Tim Ferriss?

  Natural habitat.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Natural, it is, it is, it is the iconic animal in its natural habitat.

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  And how, speaking of, of natural habitat, I'm not going to say iconic animal for either of us, but when did we first meet? I want to say it was in a coffee shop. But do you recall?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was at a, it wasn't a coffee shop. It was like a Filipino restaurant.

• 8:47Tim Ferriss?

  It was like a Chinese tapioca pearl.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Definitely involved tapioca. I remember, I definitely remember those tapioca involved, like in the outskirts of San Francisco. And it was like...

• 9:00Speaker 02

  I want to say like 1854 or something. It was a while ago.

• 9:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I think you're using the, right, the Egyptian calendar. It's probably 2000, I want to say 2007, 2008. It was early.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think we had, we had only recently launched and, and I think, I think I remember like you tweeted something to your followers about what you should, what app you should be using to maybe, maybe it's to write your next book. And then I think a bunch of people tweeted back Evernote and then people in my office saw it and got super excited. And then I think either you reached out to me or I reached out to you and then we got together for tapioca.

• 9:38Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what I remember is that I asked a number of questions. I was, I think I was updating the four hour work week.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:45Tim Ferriss?

  And I was looking to replace some of the tools. And so I would ask my followers on Twitter, what is the best tool for X? What is the best tool for Y? What is the best tool for Z? And Evernote kept on coming up and I was like, that's impossible. What is this Swiss Army knife of software? And I looked at it and I was like, you know, I really need an intro to this. I'm having trouble figuring out where to start, which I think is a common, a common stumbling block or hurdle for people to get over. And then we met up and I remember you took a photograph of the menu, which was on the wall. And shortly thereafter, we're able to search all of the text. And I was like, okay, I get it. And then I think I started with

• 10:27Tim Ferriss?

  de-paperifying or trying to remove the clutter of paper from my house at that time. So it's all the business cards, all of the legal paperwork, accounting paperwork. I just scanned it because I knew I didn't have to really organize it per se if I could search by the text that was scanned. And for people who don't know, I mean, this is, this was my first use case, but how would you describe Evernote? If you could just maybe give a brief synopsis of Evernote for folks? And now, of course, I mean, I use it 10 to 20 plus times a day. But for those people who are not familiar with Evernote, what is Evernote? And how did, how did you become involved? Or what is your involvement with Evernote?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Well, we started out as wanting to build your second brain. We wanted to make something that would just make people smarter. Let you remember everything, let you find all types of information, take notes, clip things from the web, put in documents. And it just kind of refined it from there. So we started out as this very general, you know, simple note-taking tool. And we've evolved to be what we think are kind of the essential everyday pillars of productivity. Evernote is the workspace where you get all your stuff done.

• 11:48Tim Ferriss?

  And what are the origins of Evernote? What's the genesis story?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  There was actually two teams that were working on similar concepts. So there was a team of people that were headed up by this guy named Stefan Pachkov, who is this sort of eccentric genius inventor entrepreneur, Russian-American guy. And he had a team of people that go all the way back to the Apple-Newton days. I don't know if you remember that.

• 12:16Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  This was actually the company that Apple pulled out of Russia to do all the handwriting recognition, other cool stuff on the Newton, like back in the late 80s. You know, way ahead of their time. And they sort of stayed together. They sold that company and they started another company and sold that company. And then they stayed together as this group, working on this idea of photographic memory, basically letting people remember everything, capture all information. In California, I was in Boston at the time and we had, I was just finishing up with my second startup. And my core team started thinking about, well, what do we want to do next? You know, we need to start another company. We don't want to have to go get jobs or anything. What are we going to do? And we thought, well...

• 13:00Tim Ferriss?

  Strategic unemployment, right?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. And our whole insight was, let's do something for us. You know, because our first two companies we made for other for other people, you know, our first company, we did e-commerce software for big stores and our second company, we did a security software for governments and banks and that was all fine, you know, we were lucky enough to be able to sell both companies, but like we're not, we're not a big retailer, we're not a government. So like we didn't really, we had to wake up every morning thinking, you know, what does the customer want, what does the customer want, what does the market want? And we got tired of that. We kind of said, well, screw what the market wants. Like, how about what do we want? Let's just build that. So we sat around thinking like, what do we really want? What do we love? And we batted some ideas around and our first idea is we said, well, you know, we love video games, like

• 13:45Speaker 02

  maybe we shouldn't make a video game studio. And we thought, well, you know, but there's already so many great video games that we don't have time to play. Like, there's already a giant stack at my desk. So, you know, we don't really, the world isn't really going to be that much better if we add more video games to it. So let's, let's think of something else. And this was 2007. So we thought about, well, all this new social stuff is actually kind of cool. Like, we like that a lot. Maybe we should build a social network. And we thought, now it's crazy because, you know, you can't compete with MySpace. Like, MySpace is fucking off in that market. You know, we're too late to do anything meaningful there. So we gave up on that. And then we said, well, what about productivity? Like, all the productivity tools around us just feel old and crappy and out of date and largely

• 14:26Speaker 02

  irrelevant. What if we make the new version of that? And that we kind of fell in love with. So we had two different teams working on the same problem and we, I met step on early 2007 and we decided to join forces. We actually combined the teams and then recreated the company, kind of relaunched the company as a new entity in 07 and launched our first product in 08.

• 14:49Tim Ferriss?

  And what was the first use case, the first application of Evernote that really kind of made your eyes pop out? That, was there any, do you have any memories of particular aha moments with either applications that you guys came up with internally or applications and uses that your fans and users came up with?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny, you know, we were, we were getting going kind of right as Twitter was getting going. And so for a while, you know, I just had an alert for Evernote on Twitter and I could read every single time. Anytime anyone mentioned Evernote on Twitter, I would see it because, you know, it was only like, that only happened like a few times a day.

• 15:31Tim Ferriss?

  It was a few hundred people on Twitter.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So that was, that was easy. And so I literally knew every time anyone said anything on either the internet or Twitter about Evernote, I would, I would either get a Google alert or, or I would get the tweet alert. So I kept for a while, I actually knew like every single thing that anyone ever said publicly about us. And it was, and it was still only like a few things a day. So it was kind of a humbling thing. But I remember this one day, pretty early on, where somebody tweeted, two, two totally different people tweeted. One of them tweeted that they were a priest and they loved using Evernote to gather information to write their, their Sunday sermon. And I remember seeing that and kind of thinking like, ah, that wasn't our intended use case at all.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Like, we didn't set out to make something that's good for the clergy. But, you know, it kind of makes sense. Like, when you think about it, like, yeah, if I was a priest and I had to come up with something relatively insightful and witty to say every week, I'd probably spend time, you know, researching and clipping and writing and like, actually, yeah, Evernote is kind of the ideal thing for that. So I remember thinking like, that's kind of a cool, unanticipated use case. And then later that day, some totally different person tweeted, not, not to the first person, just, you know, independently, that he loved Evernote because it made it easy to keep track of all of his sins so that he could efficiently confess every Sunday.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking like, yes, like now we're on to something. Like, we got both ends of the spectrum. We got, we got the priests, we got the sinners. We were like, we were like fully horizontally integrated.

• 17:09Tim Ferriss?

  Theologically integrated.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Theological horizontal integration. And that, that was when I was first confident that like, may, maybe we were, maybe we were on to something.

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  How do you personally use Evernote? And I think that the reason I keep drilling into this is because I remember my challenge was figuring out where to start.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the hardest. I mean, that's still the hardest thing for us is people don't know how to get started.

• 17:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I guess there are two questions, right? How do you personally use Evernote? I'd be curious to hear how you most frequently use Evernote. And then secondly, how do you solve that problem? Because this is not unique to just Evernote, right? There are many different products. Let's say Sugru, for instance, which is this kind of Play-Doh that hardens into rubber that you can use for repairing things, has a similar challenge. There are many different tools and products that face this conundrum. So the first is, how do you?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  I've got like multiple tubes of that at my desk right now.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you do? Yeah, it's great stuff.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  It's, uh, yeah. And like, cause I remember reading about it somewhere and immediately being like, oh, that's awesome. I need to get it right away. And then I got it and I got all these like packages that showed up at my desk. I was like, okay, now what? Like my glasses aren't actually broken, so I don't need it to fix my glasses yet.

• 18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Right. My iPhone case isn't broken, so I have to break it to use the Sugru or what else could I do, right?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:26Tim Ferriss?

  So with Evernote on a personal level, how do you use it?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  So I, you know, I live in it. I do everything in it. Mostly I use Evernote to run Evernote. Like we built it for ourselves and we're still building it for ourselves. So all of the day-to-day things that I need for my job are in Evernote. I primarily use Evernote for work stuff, but I primarily only do work stuff. Like I don't really have a work-life balance. So I used to have more hobbies and skills and I would use Evernote for them as well. Like I was, I'm a plausibly okay cook. And so I had a whole bunch of, you know, recipes and techniques in Evernote for that. I was, I was trying to learn Japanese at one point and I was using Evernote for that.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  But more and more, like everything that isn't work-related has sort of fallen away. And, but I just use Evernote for everything work-related. So everything I write, I write in Evernote. All of our meetings are captured in Evernote. When I want to know what people in the company are working on, I look at Evernote. Evernote kind of gives me an update about here's what all my coworkers are doing that are relevant to, that's relevant to my day. It's kind of become the essential, you know, multiple times a day productivity tool for me.

• 19:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm looking, well, I'm looking at questions for you in Evernote right now, which is very meta, but.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  And so that actually happens a lot. The first time that I did a, I remember the first time I talked to a reporter, you know, we did our very first like media tour. I went to like New York City to meet with some journalists, some reporters, you know, back in probably 2008. And I remember the first meeting I had, I don't even remember anymore who the reporter was, but he was using Evernote to take notes, you know, and he had been already kind of for a while. And so that was like, that was like, that was actually the first time I saw it kind of in the wild, was somebody using it to write down, you know, interview questions with me. And so there's like, there's all sorts of moments like that that I remember being just super cool. The first time I actually really saw it in the wild, like out in the

• 20:37Speaker 02

  street, it was also in, I think it was the same trip. I was in, I was in a Starbucks in Manhattan and was waiting in line to get a coffee. And there was a guy in front of me in line who was like, and he looked like an important lawyer or something. He was wearing, you know, he was wearing a very nice suit and he was holding his phone. He had a Bluetooth headset and he was holding his phone out in front of his face and he had Evernote on his, on his phone. And he was like jabbing his finger into like something in Evernote and he was yelling at somebody over the Bluetooth headset, like proving a point by like jabbing his finger into Evernote. And it was the first time I'd actually seen like somebody use Evernote that, you know, I didn't know, that I didn't have any connection with. And I was gonna like, I was standing right behind him. I was kind of gonna kind

• 21:20Speaker 02

  of introduce myself, but he looked really angry. Decided, I decided to just stand there meekly behind him.

• 21:25Tim Ferriss?

  So what did you, what did you think? Like, what was the self-talk when you saw that? Did that trigger any, any particular thought or feeling in you to see it in the wild for the first time?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  I thought like, at some point I should like work on a product to just like make people a bit more mellow.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I have built something that enables people to yell at each other that doesn't feel great. Maybe like, maybe we should build some kind of a, you should build something into the next version that chills people out.

• 21:53Tim Ferriss?

  A mindfulness timeout?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 21:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there is that somewhat related feature in, I think it's Siri. If you shake the phone, as if you're trying to sort of rattle its brains, it will, it might be Google Maps, I don't know which it is, but it's built into the iPhone. If you shake it, it will actually like ask you in some, in some way, I can't recall offhand, like what is wrong?

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think Google Maps maybe, that's like, it asks you if you want to submit like a, like a support request, or something like that.

• 22:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's kind of neat.

• 22:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  So, but, but, like, speaking of meditation, so another one is, I met, I met a group of monks, of Buddhist monks, at, with Plum Village. This is a Thich Nhat Hanh monastery. And, that's right, I went to, I went to hear Thich Nhat Hanh speak a few years ago. And I don't know, I didn't know anything about, about Zen at the time at all. It was just thought it would be interesting to kind of hear him. So I heard him speak, and he was there with sort of his entourage of monks and nuns. And it was all very, very good, very peaceful. And then afterwards, he, you know, as soon as he left, I was surrounded by, by the monks and nuns who were all saying how like, they just run, you know, they run

• 23:09Speaker 02

  the monastery in Evernote. And, you know, swapping use cases, and it was all really neat. And so that's when I actually thought, we should send someone over there to record some of their bells. So they have like these really beautiful, you know, ancient mindfulness bells. And I thought, okay, let's record them and actually kind of put them into Evernote as some kind of a anti-New York lawyer at a Starbucks yelling at somebody feature. But we haven't gotten around to doing that yet, but any day now.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. His first book, and I'm blanking on the name, I want to say it was Mindfulness is Every Step, or something like that. Pieces Every Step perhaps, which was really intended, almost like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, to be a notebook for himself and also his close confidants and new attendees or teachers at Plum Village.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  Which then later became a book. That was the first meditation book that really had a tangible, concrete impact on me, because the storytelling and the narrative was so, was so well done.

• 24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's return back to the early days of, of Evernote. When

• 24:20Speaker 02

  We could keep talking about, you know, Zen and Stoicism too, because

• 24:24Tim Ferriss?

  We, we, I think we'll talk about both. But what I, what I'd love to do, and maybe this is in between, maybe it's a bridge between the two is as a CEO, what CEOs did you admire or hope to emulate when, in the early days of Evernote? Because you have roughly how many users at the moment?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  About 150 million.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So that's a big number. That's a number that a lot of companies would aspire to, of course. And what we'll talk about maybe growth separately, but as a CEO, you know, what types of leaders or CEOs did you admire and aspire to?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there's so many that have been really generous with their time with me. I mean, that's really kind of the amazing thing about Silicon Valley is just how, kind of how open everyone's been. So I was able to spend quite a bit of time talking with, you know, with people who were just, who were just heroes of mine forever. So, you know, Jeff Bezos, someone who's given me kind of fantastic, fantastic advice and guidance. Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten is one of the most amazing people ever. Have you, have you ever talked to him?

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't. I would love to.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  You gotta, you should. He's, that guy's crazy and like, in a really good way, like very, very, very interesting. I know, you know, I know you have a, a big Japan connection, so.

• 25:43Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Yeah. That'd be a blast.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  But, you know, but I, I, I had a chance to, to, to very briefly meet Steve Jobs. I had a chance to, I actually spent quite a bit of time with, with Marc Benioff, who's been really, you know, excellent in terms of advice and guidance. So it's been, like, it's been pretty impressive. Probably the person that I kind of most want to be like when I grow up is Reid Hoffman. I'm just a huge fan of Reid and kind of the way that he thinks about things and how how thoughtfully he's organized his life and his companies. I'm just kind of very cool. So I'm lucky to actually be able to, you know, spend some time with these people from time to time.

• 26:30Tim Ferriss?

  I do agree. I was actually just chatting with someone about the differences between, say, New York and San Francisco, LA and San Francisco, and there are strengths and weaknesses to all of them. But the the the ability to wander into a coffee shop or otherwise just get in touch with the what you would think would be the Untouchables, the very, very well-known iconic figures, is something that I haven't seen in many other places outside of Silicon Valley. Just the openness and availability that those people express, even though they're at the, you know, multi-billion dollar in net worth mark. It's it's very, it's very unique. I don't know if you agree with that, but

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 27:17Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you think these people are so open to share? What makes the environment of Silicon Valley different? Or what makes the people who gravitate to it different?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know that it's, I don't know that this is unique about Silicon Valley. I think we just have a larger concentration, maybe, of people like this, but they probably exist everywhere. I just think, you know, almost everyone here who is, you know, who's successful, who's made, who's made it, quote unquote, who's well-known, like remembers doing it, him or herself.

• 27:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Like before they built this giant world-changing, multi-billion dollar thing, they hadn't done it either. And it isn't like it's not, it's all like in sort of the recent past as well. Like virtually everyone who you really, who you know, who I really admired like has gone from just being a normal person to bending the universe in a significant way in the last decade or two.

• 28:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  As opposed to, you know, in, in, in other places where a lot of, a lot of wealth is concentrated in people who, you know, sort of maybe have inherited part of it or who have kind of been in those circles for longer. This is very much a, you know, scrappy entrepreneurial, you know, a lot of, a lot of immigrant led communities and, and everyone remembers before, before they were important, they weren't. And that's, that's kind of a healthy thing.

• 28:41Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask you a little bit about the folks that you interacted with. So Bezos, for instance.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:49Tim Ferriss?

  He, he's a fascinating character on so many levels. I mean, he very methodically chose books, pitched that with Indy Shaw, had it turned down.

• 29:01Tim Ferriss?

  And then turned it into the everything store. And when they started, they had, as I, as I understand it, basically doors from the equivalent of Home Depot across two file cabinets as desks. I mean, that's how people started out.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:14Tim Ferriss?

  What, what did you?

• 29:15Speaker 02

  We did that on my first startup. We had, we, we, we made desks out of, out of, we made desks out of unfinished doors and, and, and what do you call those little construction horses?

• 29:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the sawhorses.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Sawhorses, yeah. That was our, our first desks were all, yeah, we just bought doors at Home Depot and put them on sawhorses. For no good reason. Turns out that's like harder and more expensive than buying cheap desks.

• 29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's really funny. I just built this, side note, pull-up rig out of galvanized steel piping and plumbing supplies and whatnot. And it's just, at the end of the day, it cost particularly if you factor in the labor, it's like, okay, it was a fun project, but probably would have been. Better use of capital just to buy a cheap rig, but still fun in its own way.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  One of these days, Tim, you have to like, you have to like, coach me to be able to do a pull-up. Like, I would like to do a pull-up once in my life.

• 30:10Tim Ferriss?

  I will absolutely help you do that, and maybe we can pull in Pavel Tsatsulin, who, like yourself, is originally from the former Soviet Union. Now, you were born in, I want to say St. Petersburg, but am I getting that right?

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Well, it was called Leningrad at the time, but yeah.

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  Leningrad. And do you, I'm not going to quiz you, but do you still speak Russian?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I do speak Russian, yes.

• 30:35Tim Ferriss?

  And with such a heavy, I'm not going to lose track of where we were with Bezos, but with such, I want to come back to that, but with such a heavy Russian component in Evernote from the early days, how did that affect the company culture or growth or anything?

• 30:56Tim Ferriss?

  If it did, I don't know if it did.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, I don't, I'm not sure that it had that much of an effect. You know, the original team on StepOn's side were mostly Russians. I, you know, most of the people with me weren't. There was a couple. I don't really think of myself as particularly Russian. I was eight years old when we came over, you know, I learned English by watching What's Happening reruns and reading Thor comic books.

• 31:20Tim Ferriss?

  I would have loved to have heard your English in the early days.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it turned out that, that, yeah, my colloquial English came from Thor. I wasn't the most popular kid in junior high school.

• 31:31Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of praise Odin talk.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  But it was good for vocabulary development. You know, forsooth.

• 31:38Tim Ferriss?

  Henceforth.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  And, but, you know, we just, we had a really great, we had a really great team. I don't think there was anything particularly, particularly Russian or not about the company. And certainly in Silicon Valley, there are, like, I think, I'm sure this must be true, that most people who work at Evernote are from somewhere else.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  You know, I think we probably have more than 50% people born outside of this country. There's just such a heavy immigrant, you know, community.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  And we just, you know, we pull people from all over. We want to get the best people from everywhere in the world to help us build a great product.

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of that process of building a great product, or maybe not, what advice did you go to Bezos for? Or what were some of the questions you asked him or pieces of advice that he gave you, if you remember?

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Okay, the last thing he told me, this was only just like a few days ago, but it's changed my life again. Like basically, every time I talk to Bezos, it like changes my life. The last one was was just recently, and it was kind of amazing, not particularly relevant to the topic at hand, but but super epically awesome. Anyway, so I've spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars. I'm like, Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. It was like on the Brady Bunch, right? Okay, just want to go to Mars. I thought this was like the best thing ever. At some point, if I structure my life correctly, maybe I'll get to go. Like, maybe like later on in life, I would totally agree to go, you know, to go one way, because I think it's just so important for humanity to to be able to do

• 33:15Speaker 02

  that. I was just all into Mars. And, you know, talked to Elon a couple of times and just was vastly inspired by everything that that that he's doing and what SpaceX is doing. And I was listening to Elon speak last week or two weeks ago or something, talking about Mars, and I was super inspired. And, you know, ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was kind of saying, oh, I like, I just got to talk to Elon, and I'm super excited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, Mars is stupid. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, once humanity, once we get off of, once

• 33:57Speaker 02

  we get off the planet, the last thing we want to do is is go to another gravity well. The whole point, like, the reason that this is so hard to get off the earth is to like defeat gravity the first time. Once we do that, why would you want to go to Mars? We should just live on space stations and mine asteroids, and everything is much better than being on Mars. And in like 30 seconds, he had like, completely changed the course of my life, where, because he's totally right. And I was like, what?

• 34:23Tim Ferriss?

  Was this like a midday conversation? Or was it like a late night after a few drinks conversation?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Um, it was after a few drinks. I'm not sure what time of day it was.

• 34:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great answer.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  So anyway, so now, so now I know that the future of humanity is to live on space stations and mine asteroids and hopefully I'll get to do that at some point. Other advice that I've gotten from him has been a bit more practical.

• 34:51Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, I'm not gonna, I'll bite. What other advice?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the best thing that he's been at in terms of like actually building the company is just, you know, it's just scaling issues. It's like, you know, how do you deal with things when you're, when you're at 20 people? How does that change when you're 200? How do you think about going from 200 to 2,000 to 20,000? It's all the, the kind of the, the, the growing pains, the life stages of the company. I mean, that, that's what really occupies most of my attention professionally now. This is also what Hiroshi Mikitani is fantastic at. Between, between Mikitani-san and, and Bezos, those are like, you just get everything that you possibly want to know about, about how to scale a company. And I've, I've, every chance I get to, to, to actually pick their brain at it, that's usually what we're talking about, when we're not talking about space stations and Mars and things like that.

• 35:39Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the biggest challenges that you've had in scaling Evernote?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Well, Mikitani-san says this really cool thing. He's got this law, it's like, he's called it like the law of three and 10 or something, which is basically that every single thing in your company breaks every time you like roughly triple in size. So basically like, because he was the first employee at Rakuten, he was there, he was number one, and now they've got, I don't know, 10,000 or something or more. He said, when you're like the first person, when you're just one person, like everything kind of works, you sort of figured it out, and then at some point you have three people, and now things are kind of different, like making decisions and everything with three people is like different, but you adjust to that. And then you're fine for a while, and then you get to 10 people, and everything kind of breaks. But then you figure that out, and then you get to 30 people, and everything's different, and then 100, and then 300, and then 1,000.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  So his like his hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly this like this these points of three and 10 roughly tripling every size. And by everything, it means like everything, like, you know, how you how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, you know, who actually makes decisions, like every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples. And his insight is a lot of companies get into huge trouble because of this. So when you're a quickly growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you you

• 37:11Speaker 02

  blow right through a few of these tripleings without really realizing it. And and then you turn around and you realize that like, oh, like, like, you know, we're at 400 people now at Evernote. And when I really think about it, I'm like, OK, we're 400 people now, but some of our processes and systems are we set in place when we were 30. So we kind of skipped like a few steps. And everything is like creaky and broken because of it, whereas you really have to like you really have to try to adjust. And so startups get in trouble because you you kind of blow through these these these these breakpoints really quickly. And so you should constantly be thinking about perpetually be thinking about how to how to reinvent yourself and how to tweak the culture. But then big companies get in trouble for exactly the opposite reason.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Because, you know, let's say you get to, you know, 10,000 people in your company, like theoretically, you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn't till 30,000, but you're probably not going to get to 30,000, you know, ever, or certainly not within a few years. Like, it may take, you know, a decade or more for a company to go from 10,000 to 30,000 people. But no one feels like waiting around for a decade or more to like reinvent yourself. And so big companies are like constantly pushing all of this like bullshit, like innovation initiatives, because they feel like, well, we have to do something, we have to do something. But they're not actually connected to any fundamental change in the company. They're they're just kind of floating around by themselves. So by having this mismatch between like when things actually change and when you feel

• 38:39Speaker 02

  that you should actually redo everything, small companies get in trouble, big companies get in trouble. And just being mindful about that is is super eye opening. So that that was maybe like one of the most actionable pieces of advice that I got. And this was from from Hiroshi Mikitani at Rakuten.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  So the, this is very interesting. The, the law of three and 10. Now, the, the tripling I get, where does the 10 come in?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Oh, it's because otherwise it'd be three and nine. It'd be hard to do the math.

• 39:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Just rounding up. He's basically saying like,

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Like three and then 10 and then 30 and then 100.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Otherwise you'd be, you'd be, you know,

• 39:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right, 9 and 27 and so on.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, who can, who can do that math? It's impossible.

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. The, um, have you ever, now, I know you, you like myself, have a fondness for Japan. Have you ever seen someone trained, previously trained on an abacus as a kid, do mental mathematics?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's so fascinating. I mean, because they put their, put their finger up in the air like they're moving beads. And I remember there was this kid on my judo team when I was in Japan as an exchange student for a year, who could do, he could multiply three-digit numbers. He could do pretty much whatever basic arithmetic you would ask him to do by using this sort of imaginary abacus. So fascinating.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, my grandmother was a, was a, was at a bookkeeper, was an accountant, uh, in, you know, in the Soviet Union. And, um, you know, she was all, you know, it was all abacus training for her. And I just remember, uh, I remember when I was a kid, like she would do math. And I, yeah, I completely remember just being blown away by like how that worked. Yeah, with the, with the imaginary abacus.

• 40:20Tim Ferriss?

  With, with, uh, Miki Tani-san's law of three and 10, i- in pragmatic planning terms, does that mean that you, as Phil at Evernote, would try to look ahead to anticipate when you would hit that tripling point? And then seek out the new tools and processes that you would need beforehand?

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'd really try to.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  But I also think like, so there's the whole tripling aspect, which I think is interesting. Obviously, this is just, you know, it's just a framework. It doesn't really capture every nuance. But then it made me think about another thing, which I think is maybe even more important as to like how the world is changing now. Like important changes happen like at times of of of change. It sounded like a tautology. That's not how I meant to say it. Let me put it this way. So people will often ask, people often say about a product like, oh, but that's, you're really asking people or companies to like change their ingrained behavior. Like, how long does it take to change your green behavior?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Like, we're saying, okay, email sucks, like email's dead. You have to get off of email, obviously. And a lot of people say, oh, but that's such ingrained change. Like, how long will it take a company to, you know, to fundamentally get off of email? And I've been thinking about it like this. Every time you change jobs, it's like a very good opportunity to reevaluate sort of what works, what doesn't work, and try to be a little bit smarter the next time around. Every time you have like a major life change, like you change jobs, or you move into a new house, or whatever, you know, you get married, like any, all of these stuff, all of these things kind of are really good opportunities, sort of take stock mentally and be like, ah, okay, we're gonna, I've always wanted to do this a little bit better. Now's the time I'm gonna do that.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  And so inside of companies, that's basically people changing jobs. And you can measure how long like a fundamental corporate change will take based on just the number of job cycles that it requires. So let's just say that like something as profound as like getting rid of email will take like three entire cycles of like people changing their, their, their, their job. Like, but, and this explains like why things happen at such different paces in like, in Silicon Valley versus in, on the East Coast versus in like Europe. Because the tenure, the average tenure of professionals, of knowledge workers, is, is really shrinking and is much shorter here than in lots of other places.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  You know, the average tenure of a Google employee right now is something like 1.1 years. Like, the average person at Google has only been in the job for a little over a year. They're changing jobs all the time. I mean, and at Apple, it's only like 2. something years. And at Evernote, it's a little bit longer, but not much. And so you're constantly having like, everyone is basically acting like a freelancer. Like, everyone is doing a job. They don't think they're gonna do it forever. They think they're gonna do it for a couple of years, and then they're moving on to the next one. And that's happening like crazy here in Silicon Valley, and it's starting to happen everywhere. And so if you, if like a big change, let's just say hypothetically, takes three job cycles. Well, if the average job cycle is like a year and a half, then, okay, you know, within

• 43:37Speaker 02

  four or five years, the company's like completely changed this fundamental thing. Whereas if you're in Europe and the average job cycle's like 10 years, it may take you 30 years to get there. So like, a change that's obvious here, within a few years, may take, you know, may take decades in societies where, that, where people are just staying on board for much longer. And, but something that takes like, something that takes four to five years in Silicon Valley, probably takes 20 years in Europe, probably takes like a year in China. It's like, that cycle in China is crazy fast and compressed.

• 44:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, really is.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  So how, like, how do you plan that? And more importantly, we at Evernote are building software. We're building products for modern knowledge workers. How do we embrace this? Like, how do we build products for these types of people? And it's a very different idea than, you know, than Microsoft Office. Like, how do you build something that is meant for people who have a really compressed job cycle, who think of themselves as freelancers, even if they're part of a company? And how do you make that great? Like, instead of trying to pass judgment on this and saying that's a bad thing and trying to hold it back, how do you actually embrace it and how do you try to make it more awesome? And that's, that's a big animating force of how we're thinking about things.

• 44:52Tim Ferriss?

  How different is the current Chinese version of Evernote compared to, say, the US version?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  It's the same.

• 45:02Tim Ferriss?

  It is.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's minor differences in, you know, like, payment methods and stuff like that. So we run, China is the only place where we run a totally separate version, so we, you know, we have a version of Evernote that we call Inshan BG, which basically, we kind of cloned ourselves in China. Everyone told us like, oh, you know, if you go to China, you're just gonna get cloned. So we said, all right, let's just clone ourselves. So we made a full clone of Evernote that we run ourselves, that's, you know, separate data centers, separate servers. And other than some minor things around how we interact with payment methods and stuff like that, it's exactly the same.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  I appreciate the separate data centers.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Well, that's important. That's important for, you know, for a bunch of reasons, for both for performance as well as for just sort of giving people a choice as to where they keep their data. So, yeah.

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's talk for a second about Reid Hoffman, and then I want to come back to some of your personal productivity habits. But Reid, Reid is a very interesting, that's my laziest adjective I can use here. He's a

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  He's a compelling character. I've had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with him, and we're both involved in a nonprofit called Quest Bridge. And he is,

• 46:18Tim Ferriss?

  he is such a cool as a cucumber sort of philosopher king in the minds of so many people in Silicon Valley. What makes Reid unique? What are the things that make him, that draw you to him, or that, that, that you find fascinating about him?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I mean, well, before I like actually got to know him, I was, I was listening to him, I was reading, you know, his stuff. So, I mean, I was just attracted to the, to the ideas. Like, he just has a very, to me, it's, it's the exactly the right balance of kind of big picture, you know, philosophically oriented ideas that are really grounded and practical and that you can, you know, that, that you can apply. I really like the thinking behind LinkedIn and kind of what it represented. So it was the, it was, it was the strength of the ideas and having exactly the right mixture of kind of lofty and, and practical.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  What else? Are there any, or any particular examples that jump out at you, or any advice that he's given you, or questions you've asked of him?

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we talk a lot about about company scaling and we talked a lot, you know, he made a decision fairly early on that he didn't want to be the CEO of the company. And he brought in actually a couple of people. Jeff is the second person that he wound up bringing on and that's worked out great. And so I've talked to him a lot about, you know, what is that like? Like, how do you, what's the right amount of letting go? What is the, what is the, you know, the right amount of staying involved? How do you really think about that? And he's been kind of my main guide through this. I mean, there's been a lot of other people I've talked to as well, but Reed is kind of the person that I'm most looking to emulate. His thoughts around, you know, really starting with PayPal

• 48:12Speaker 02

  have been super influential. The best, I think.

• 48:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  I think the best thing that I've read from him is actually more recent. It was his last book, The Alliance, which really like has sharpened my thinking significantly around this exact idea that we just talked about, this idea of having a relationship between companies and employees that's more honest and that's about recognizing what the actual new realities of the world are and trying to embrace them. And he's writing this book really from a kind of an HR perspective. I really read it as a product design perspective.

• 48:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's interesting.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  I read it as how do we make products for this reality? And that's been, that's been really hugely influential. Plus, he's just a super nice guy.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he is. He has a very different energy from almost all the other folks in the PayPal mafia. And that's not to in any way denigrate them, but he has, he doesn't seem to have the same sharp edge that a lot of those other guys do. Obviously, he's very intelligent and has an extremely incisive intellect, but when you sit down with him, he has a much more relaxed energy, if that makes sense.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:25Tim Ferriss?

  To what would you attribute that? I mean, and

• 49:30Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, he does have.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I'd attribute that to like the extreme edginess and sharpness of the rest of those guys. Thank you. You put anyone in contrast with, you know, with the rest of the well-known people there. And like, everyone's gonna seem, anyone's gonna seem like you, Tim Ferriss, like in a room next to, you know, Elon and Roloff and Max and people like that is gonna seem super mellow and chill.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  All right, that's a good point.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  That's how that works.

• 50:03Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, you mentioned philosophy a bit earlier and you, you mentioned Stoicism.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  You mentioned it.

• 50:10Tim Ferriss?

  Did I? Maybe I, okay, maybe I sort of recursively incepted myself. The, Reed has quite a philosophy background, as I understand it. I think he, he studied philosophy at Oxford after his Stanford experience. Are you religious or philosophical? I mean, are there any particular schools of philosophy or trains of thought in religion that you have as a, use as a framework in your life?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  I'm not, so I'm not particularly religious, in the sense I'm not, you know, I'm not theistic. I, I am very interested in having a coherent philosophy of life, like a coherent structure that basically says like, here is, you know, here is why you should bother living and here is what you should try to accomplish. And here is, here's what it all means. And I think a lot of people, a lot of people come, come to that from a religious background. Some people come to it from a philosophical background or a practical background. But I think it's important, at least for me, to just, to, to think about overall structure and to have a coherent philosophy of life. So I've been, I've been looking for that for, for a while.

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  How do you go about looking for it and what, have you found any pieces of it?

• 51:26Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  You know, mostly just, you know, I read a lot and I kind of have been. I was a, you couldn't tell this by talking to me now, but I was kind of a strange kid growing up.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  I sort of became fixated by the end of the world as a kid. I remember, I don't know why, I remember the first, like, I was really, really intrigued and kind of obsessed as a little kid with this idea of how the world's gonna end. And the first movie I ever saw, I was six, it was in Russia, and my father took me to see this movie in a movie theater. That was a, I was this like little, like, super nerdy, impressionable, you know, six-year-old kid, and my dad took me to see this Japanese horror movie called Legend of the Dinosaur, which was about like dinosaurs, like, coming back to life. That's the most Japanese title ever, I love it. Yeah, Legend of Dinosaur.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And this was just like extremely bad parenting, like, seriously, I don't know what he was thinking. And, you know, and I couldn't sleep for like, for like a month afterwards, I was like too terrified to sleep, because it's like, I thought the world was gonna end, because dinosaurs were gonna come back and bite all of us in half. That's what Beetlejuice did to my brother, that's the second. Yeah, yeah. And I remember one, one day, like, I just, one night, I was, you know, lying in bed, I couldn't sleep, and I think my dad kind of got tired of me not sleeping. And so he came over, and I remember, you know, he sat on my bed, and he's like, hey, what, you know, what are you afraid of? What, like, what, what are you worried about? And I said, well, Dad, to be honest with you, I'm afraid that the world's gonna end, because, you know, dinosaurs are gonna come back and bite all of us in half. And he said, look, like, in hindsight, it shouldn't have taken me to see that movie.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  You don't have to worry about it, dinosaurs are definitely not gonna come back, the world is definitely not gonna end with dinosaurs coming back and eating us, you know, the world's gonna end in nuclear war. Thanks, Dad. Because that, you know, that's what everyone thought, I mean, this was like, this was, I don't know, late seventies and in the Soviet Union. And that's kind of what everyone thought, and then we moved to the US, and that's what everyone thought here, and so I've been kind of thinking about, like... What is the meaning of life? And what is like, what happens when things end? And if things are gonna end, like, what's the purpose of having a purpose? And I just, you know, read a lot of Thor comics and then went on to maybe, you know,

• 53:46Speaker 02

  somewhat more serious things in high school and in college and got into that. And I think I'm starting to piece things together. I think I have a generally sunnier disposition towards life. And I think I have inklings of what meaning is. But I'm not sure I know completely. I am more recently, I've been reading a lot of Stoicism stuff. So you said Marcus Aurelius and a few others. So I think that's like, that's gonna be the new trendy. I'm calling it right here. This is gonna be the new trendy thing in Silicon Valley. Like Zen was sort of like last year's thing. The new Zen is gonna be Stoicism. It would have gone like Zen and then macarons and then Stoicism. It was like a diversion into pastry.

• 54:25Tim Ferriss?

  Did you say macaroons? What was the second one?

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Macarons, yeah, fancy macaroons.

• 54:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow, macarons. That's taken it to a whole level.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Maybe like toast, like artisanal toast is also big. So maybe it goes like Zen and then artisanal toast and now, and then Stoicism. But you're gonna hear more and more about Stoicism being like the hip new philosophy coming out of here.

• 54:43Tim Ferriss?

  I agree, I agree. I've been trying to do my part with the proselytizing of Stoicism, which in and of itself is kind of ironic. But the artisanal toast, if you ever go to Inokashira Park in Tokyo, they have an artisanal toast coffee shop set up in the park where they have panda faces burnt into the sides of the toast that you can buy. It's fantastic.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Panda faces and artisanal are not two concepts that go together usually, but in Japan they can pull it off.

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on a second. So what image would it have to be if not pandas? Or is it imageless? Does it have to have some type of like brand on it? Or how do you envision artisanal toast?

• 55:25Speaker 02

  I think it just has to be, you know, like perfectly toasted. I don't, you know, it shouldn't be, it should be a no logo.

• 55:30Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, it's like the 15 minute pour over of toast.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  That's right. Well, the best toast, best toast in the world is in Singapore. It's kaya toast. So you get like, you get these thick slabs of, of, of toast. Um, spread with butter and kaya. Kaya is like this, like sweet coconut spread. And then you dip it into really runny, soft boiled eggs. And you have, uh, pulled coffee. So this coffee that they pour over like six feet, uh, in front of you. Ah, it's the best.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  Over six feet? Is it like a Game of Thrones pour from across the room, like Chinese style?

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. So you get this like really aerated coffee. Uh, sweet toast dipped into runny eggs. Best thing ever.

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just imagining this Willy Wonka like chocolate, uh, or chocolate colored coffee waterfall. That you put stick your mug into. I'm not sure that's the proper image, but it does give me some ideas. So the, uh, let's step outside of Evernote for a second. What are the most used apps on your phone? Besides Evernote?

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Um, well, so basically, so to me, Evernote doesn't really feel like an app. Like I use, you know, I use like, I think of, you know, email, messaging, you know, web and Evernote. That's kind of like the same order of things. Uh, it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't even feel like I'm using an app when I use it. I'm just, you know, I'm just using it. Uh, I use, you know, so I use a bunch of the messaging apps, um, really kind of to test them out, to sort of see, see how things are going. See what's, see what's impressive, where are the good ideas coming from? But again, even there, they don't really feel like, like apps. In fact, this is probably the thing. It's like, things that I use all the time, I don't think of as apps. Like I don't think of Uber as an app. Like I use Uber quite a bit.

• 57:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Um, doesn't really feel like an app to me.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Is it a utility or what is the, how do you compartmentalize app? What is that? What does that feel like when you do use an app?

• 57:29Speaker 02

  It's like a service, I guess. Um, so I, one of my, one of my product hypotheses is that apps are, like apps are going away. The concept of an app is going to become a lot less important in a few years than it is now. It's like this, this whole idea that you like page through screens of stuff to pick something you want to use, like that, that, that's a short term concept. It's only, it's only going to be, have been with us for a decade or so, and then it'll vanish. And it'll be replaced with this concept of just, you know, experiences, services. So, you know, Amazon, I mean, I use the Amazon app. I don't think of it as an app. I use Netflix, but that's not an app. Like one, things that have just become these like permanent fixtures in my life, they're fixtures, but they're not, they're not apps. And I use them, I'll use them everywhere. I'll

• 58:13Speaker 02

  use them on a phone. I'll use them on the web. I'll use them on my watch, you know, at some point, and my glasses, whatever. In terms of like discreet apps that I use on the phone, a lot of games, I, I, I mostly just like all of the specific small things on my phone just tend to be games that I'm trying out.

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  What are your favorite games?

• 58:31Speaker 02

  I go through them pretty fast. Like right now, like, you know, for the past couple of days, I've been playing Radical Repelling, which is, you know, what it sounds like.

• 58:44Tim Ferriss?

  Repelling, like rappelling down the side of a rock face?

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you like rappel down the side of a rock face and you get power ups and try, try to avoid running into spikes and like drink cans of highly caffeinated beverages that give you bursts of energy. It's, it's very, it's very much like real life. Before that, I was kind of into Goat Simulator. So Goat Simulator on iPhones, pretty good. It's the best, it's definitely the best goat simulation that you can get on your iPhone.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  And do you use these games to decompress? Have you always been a gamer?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have. I usually play, I used to play a lot more like computer games. Now I don't have quite as much time. Although I did recently start playing Elite Dangerous, which is-

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  Elite Dangerous?

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Elite Dangerous. Yeah, it's, it's probably the greatest game, maybe thing ever made.

• 59:37Tim Ferriss?

  Elite, like Elite Force, but then dangerous, the adjective?

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes, it's a space game. Just came out and amazing. And, and, and like, like Jeff Bezos, it basically envisions a, a world where humans are everywhere in space, but, but mostly living on space stations, mining asteroids, not really going down to planets. So sort of two, two factors for that.

• 59:59Tim Ferriss?

  How far away are we, do you think, from mining asteroids? Because I know there's, for instance, Planetary Resources, which Peter Diamandis is involved with, Brian Johnson is an investor, a couple of other folks, a lot of the sort of zero-gravity guys are involved with Planetary Resources, which is focused specifically on mining precious materials off of asteroids. When do you think we'll actually be fully in swing?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  It's really hard to say. I think like the most important thing to nail first is the reusable, like repeatable launch vehicles. And tourism is probably going to get us there before mining does.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  So I'm actually kind of a big fan of a lot of the space tourism efforts, like Virgin Galactic and a few others, just because I think, not because I think it's particularly great to, you know, send people into low orbit, I mean, that's fine. But I think like, we need to, we need to get the reusable rockets and launch vehicles going as much as possible, and that'll really unlock everything else. And I think like, so I think we'll have pretty good, repeatable, reusable launch vehicles within, you know, five years. But then how long does it go from there to asteroid mining? I don't know. That could be decades, especially since, like, it doesn't really make sense to mine asteroids and then ship the results back to Earth. Like, it probably makes sense to actually just move industry into space. So you should be mining asteroids and building things in space stations.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  And the only things that should be coming back to Earth is basically, you know, data. Like, we should be getting, you know, fast internet connectivity from space, and that's about it. Like, everything else should just be being made, you know, up there. So that's, but that's, you know, A, above my pay grade, B, I have no idea what I'm talking about, and C, probably a few decades away.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  So let's continue talking about things at least above my pay grade, but still might be within yours, I think. The, if you were looking at the end of the world, the things that could eradicate the human race from the face of Earth, aside from us leaving in some Elysium-type fashion, what would you, where, what would you put in the top sort of three positions as probable causes of human extinction? And would AI be anywhere in that list?

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Well, so probably not dinosaurs. So I think I've like, I've gotten over that.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  I, you know...

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  So I'm not afraid of AI. I really think the AI debate is a little bit, uh, it's, it's kind of overdramatized. And to be honest with you, I kind of find it weird. And I, I find it weird for several reasons, but including this one. It's like, there's this hypothesis like, okay, we're going to build super intelligent machines. And then they're going to get exponentially smarter and smarter. And like, so they're going to be basically be much smarter than us. And these like super smart machines are going to make the logical decision that like the best thing to do is to kill us. And that just doesn't like, I feel like there's a couple of steps missing in that, like in that chain of events. Like, I don't understand why the obviously smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Um, you know, like the smarter I get, the less I want to kill all the humans. Why wouldn't these like really smart machines not want to be helpful? Like, what is it? What is it about our guilt as a species that makes us think that like the smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans? Like, I think that actually says more about like what we feel guilty about than, than what's actually going to happen. And if we really think that like a smart decision would be to wipe out humanity, like it's maybe more useful to, instead of like trying to like prevent AI, maybe it's more useful to think about like, okay, what are we so guilty about? And let's like, let's fix that. Like, can we, can we maybe get to a point where we feel proud of our species and say

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  like, maybe the smart thing to do isn't, wouldn't be to wipe it out? I think there's a lot of like important issues that are being, I don't know, sublimated into the, uh, into the AI will kill all humans discussion that are probably worth pulling apart and tackling independently. Um, so yeah, I'm just like, I'm not, I'm not overly concerned about it. Um, I do think that it's worth taking seriously. Um, I think AI is going to be one of the greatest forces for good in, you know, in the universe that the universe has ever seen. And it's, it's pretty exciting that we are actually making progress, uh, towards it.

• 1:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  And what, so if not AI, what would you put at the top of the list? Does anything come to mind as, if the human race were to extinguish itself or be extinguished in the next, say, 20 years? What are the most likely causes in your mind?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there's, so there's, there's interesting groups, right? That work on this. There's all, there's the sort of the existential threats groups and, you know, they've got all sorts of, all sorts of good theories. I think it's extremely unlikely that the human race gets extinguished in the next 20 years. I think, I think there's like, you can basically isolate this into short-term risks, which are all self-inflicted. Like, there's a bunch of self-inflicted risks, like, you know, nuclear war, which is probably still, you know, a risk. Now, it's not going to wipe out all humanity, but it could, it could, it could set us back, you know, quite a bit.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  And there's other, you know, there's like, climate change is a serious issue, but it's not going to result in wiping out humanity. It might result in a lot of displacement and a lot of economic cost. You know, there's, there's global pandemics, which again, kind of by their definition, you know, a, a super flu isn't going to wipe out humanity, but it could be really bad. It could kill a lot of people. So there's a lot of these like, sort of self-inflicted risks, which I think it's important to get a lot better at, at dealing with. And then there's the real long-term stuff, which obviously at some point will wipe out everything on Earth. We're talking about, you know, millions of years or even billions of years, you know, asteroid impacts, you know, the sun exploding, supernova, that kind of stuff.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And the only real solution there is to, at some point, we do need to become a multi-planet species, so, you know, no, no big rush. We don't all need to like rush towards the exits, but it is, it is kind of neat to actually be working on things that will enable us at some point to, you know, spread out a bit.

• 1:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Steve, well, I think, among other people, I mean, Stephen Hawking has said pretty clearly, as I understand it, that for us to survive, we have to become multi-planetary.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or extraplanetary, maybe, at the very least.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think that's right. And, but, you know, it's also an interesting question is, what is, what is us, right? So it's plausible that, like, things that, that are, that look like biological human beings actually never live at scale outside of the planet. But other things we create, you know, other intelligences and consciousness that, that we create actually might, might actually be able to spread among the stars. And that's kind of cool, too. Like, I, I think that's an elegant idea.

• 1:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  There's a very cool science fiction short, it's an animated short, which is actually also very funny, I think it's about 16 minutes, called The World of Tomorrow, which is worth checking out. It digs into a lot of this. So, as a, as a side note, that's, that's a fun watch. You mentioned Netflix. Do you have any favorite documentaries?

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I have a bunch. You know, I really liked, there was one that I just saw a couple of weeks ago, that was really good. I think it was called The Gatekeepers. It was like, it was all the living heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli Secret Service, just kind of talking very frankly about, you know, about life, about, about, about war, about peace. And it was just kind of, kind of startling. You have these, you know, I think it was like eight of them who wound up running, you know, they were the top kind of military and spy people in Israel. And all of them, like, have, have gone, like, all of them were saying things that I think later in life, they've, they've all, like, moved much more towards

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  reconciliation and peace and, and dialogue. And it was just as fascinating, fascinating to hear. I watch a lot of, I watch a lot of science documentaries. So I was a big fan of the Neil deGrasse Tyson's, you know, Cosmos reboot. That was great. I, I watched all of, you know, the Carl Sagan version a while ago. The thing that I just saw yesterday, which I didn't actually watch, I just, I logged in, I, I signed into Netflix yesterday. And saw them promoting this, which didn't even know they made it, but this is a new documentary about James Randi called like an honest liar or something, which I've now got queued up. I think I'm probably going to watch that tonight. I'm a huge James Randi fan. And I didn't even know they made a movie about him, so I'm really looking forward to that.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  In fact, the very first, the very first things that I ever bought on the internet, like my first e-commerce transaction, I have a screenshot of it, was on Amazon, it was in 1996, and it was two books by James Randi. So like the, the first things I ever bought online with my, the first two James Randi books I ever read was also the first time I ever used Amazon. So it was like, it was like several important firsts for me that I've got, I've got a screenshot in Evernote. And I actually met James Randi afterwards and I had him sign my screenshot in Evernote. So the sort of five levels of dorkiness in there, but I'm pretty proud of it.

• 1:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Is this James Randi, the magician, or which James Randi?

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The amazing Randy, James Randi, the magician slash, you know, debunker slash skeptic.

• 1:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of in the same vein as Penn and Teller, would you say?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's sort of like, he's kind of maybe the, the father of all this, of sort of like the modern sort of pro-science and skeptical movement. But yeah, so, so a little bit, a little similar to Penn and Teller. Although James Randi doesn't do a whole lot of like magic debunking, it's more about science teaching and.

• 1:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  Quackery. I'm looking online here, it says he has a TED Talk called, it's Randi, R-A-N-D-I, and the title of his talk is homeopathy, quackery and fraud.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of, so a lot of stuff like that. And I haven't actually seen the documentary, so I don't know if it's any good. It probably is. I just, I remember seeing yesterday that it was on Netflix and going, oh, as soon as I have a spare two hours, I'm going to watch it. We should probably do it tonight.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite non-documentary movies?

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  Um, well, you know, the best movie ever made is, is The Empire Strikes Back.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I know it's your mug. So that's, that, that, is that your favorite of the Star Wars series?

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's objectively the best one. It's not really up for debate.

• 1:10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Was it the Tontons that pushed it over?

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Oh, it was so much, it was so much stuff. It's just, it's just, it's just a really good movie. Actually, I've seen it. I just, I watched it again recently, right? Because they just released like the digital versions of all, all six movies. And so I just watched the, the good three again.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just, it's just great. Everything about it. The middle, you know, the middle movies of trilogies are usually the best ones. Because they think like, the first movie, you know, the director is still like, trying to, you know, they're trying a little bit too hard, you know, they have to like prove themselves. And then by the third one, they've got to wrap things up. But the second one is like, the pacing is different. It's sort of the intermediate thing. It has this like sense of continuity, but also more to come. Like just everything about like that, the middle part usually is good. Like I think The Two Towers was the best Lord of the Rings movie and so on. But, but, but Return, but Empire Strikes Back in particular was just like, super strong. So, but I also watch, you know, I don't, I don't watch too much TV.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  I, I used to watch Top Gear, but I guess that's canceled. Yeah, so, and then, you know, I binge watched House of Cards and Game of Thrones. Although I haven't, I haven't watched the, the last season of Game of Thrones yet.

• 1:12:03Tim Ferriss?

  I just binge watched it this last week. It's good. I won't, I won't give any spoilers. It's, it's, it has a, very much has a herky jerky, upper and downer effect, which I think is very intentional.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think that's, the series is really good. I, I've read all the books and I know that last, the last season supposedly departs from some of the books a little bit. So I'm, I'm interested to see how that goes.

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  Do, well, actually, before I give the, the notebook question, not about the movie with that very beautiful woman and blanking on her name. Not that one, but actual physical notebooks.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, are you attracted to Ryan Gosling? No, that's my real question. No, the, the.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  He's dreamy.

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  He is dreamy. What book have you gifted most to other people? Or books?

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Um, probably, um, The Clock of the Long Now by, uh, Stuart Brand. Uh, is maybe the most influential books, maybe the most influential book on me. So it's, this is, um, so, you know, the Long Now Foundation.

• 1:13:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's with Danny, about the clock and Danny Hillis?

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, Danny Hillis and Stuart Brand, um, are kind of the co-founders. Uh, and then there's, you know, there's a lot of other people involved. And so this is the, this is the organization that's building a 10,000 year clock in like in the middle of the mountain. Uh, and they're also preserving like all human languages. It's, it's an organization that's dedicated to long-term thinking. Um, like, how do you actually make plans for, you know, 10,000 years? And it sort of sounds crazy, but, you know, but it isn't. And if we can't make plans for 10,000 years, then no one else is gonna. Um, and so, uh, Stuart Brand, who is just this amazing guy, I was lucky enough to actually, I invited him to speak at our last conference and he, you know, he agreed. So it was kind of amazing just to introduce him on stage.

• 1:13:57Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible guy. Yeah.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think he was creator, co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog way back in the day, for those people who remember.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Yep, the Whole Earth Catalog and, and, and the Well, like one of the first, you know, internet discussion sites and all sorts of stuff. Uh, and so his book is The, The Clock of the Long Now, and it just talks about, you know, the principles and the foundation. And it's a very short read, but in particular, there's one chapter of it, which is, for me, it was really like sort of life-changing. Um, I think it's called like The Layers of Civilization. And it basically just talks about, um, the six or seven layers of, of society and kind of how they interact with each other. And, uh, it kind of explains, like, it puts the structure of explaining almost everything that you'd ever wondered about in like just a few pages.

• 1:14:45Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  So, uh, it's really affected me. I read it, you know, I read it when I was pretty young and, and, and like I've been kind of going back to it every so often. So The Clock of the Long Now. I've given it lots of times, definitely. Couldn't recommend it more highly.

• 1:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  That and I'd also highly recommend people check out the Long Now Foundation. It's it's an incredible group of people. Kevin Kelly's very involved as well and is a way to telescope out and even do thought experiments solo related to 10,000 year thinking, for instance. It's a really fascinating website to check out. They also have a bar at in San Francisco that I contributed to for their Kickstarter campaign.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  No, me too. I got one of the whiskey bottles.

• 1:15:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you did? I haven't I haven't been there yet.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Oh, it's beautiful. The interval.

• 1:15:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. The interval.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's at Fort Mason. Super nice.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've heard it's it's just gorgeous. Now, when I go to, whether it's a coffee shop or a bar, I almost always have a small Moleskine or Moleskine, I don't know how to say it properly, notebook with me. I have a lot of trouble separating myself from physical note taking. Do you use personally physical notebooks?

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  I do, yeah.

• 1:16:07Tim Ferriss?

  That was weird intonation on the question. Sorry. It sounded more like a statement. Do you use physical notebooks as a statement? But sorry to interrupt.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  I do. Yeah.

• 1:16:16Tim Ferriss?

  What do you use them for? And why don't you do everything digitally?

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Well, it is digital. So our partnership with Moleskine is is, you know, we can use a well, any notebook or Moleskine notebook just works particularly well since we've optimized our software for it. And you just write and then take a picture and evernote of the page and it automatically gets cleaned up and indexed and scanned and kind of put in context with everything else. And so just the best of both worlds. Like it lets you be discreet and unobtrusive and kind of take notes and then immediately have them available digitally for searching and. In reference and sharing, so it's, you know, we're trying to combine the best of. We're trying to give people great experiences without being pedantic about, you know, what has to be digital, what has to be physical. We really want, we really want to blend those

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  two things. I think the best products are made when, you know, you take into account the physical world, when you take into account, you know, how things feel like and how heavy they are and where you put your hands. And it's kind of the same if you're designing iPad software, or if you're actually designing a physical notebook. You have to think about these things and it's important for us to think about them and to try to make beautiful experiences that combine those things.

• 1:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  What types of things do you personally put into your physical notebook before scanning them into Evernote?

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  So there's a, there's a little trick. I guess, I haven't actually told this to anyone before. So here's how this works. You know how if you're in a meeting and you've got your laptop open and you're taking notes on your laptop, it's like the, like that's a little, that sort of creates a barrier between you and, and, and the other people and it sometimes feels like a little bit, like a little bit distant, a little bit intimidating.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  We actually make stickers that say, I'm, I am like, I'm not being rude, I'm taking notes in Evernote that you can stick on the back of your laptop to, to solve that problem.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  So, or you can use a phone, but if you use a phone in a meeting with someone, then it just kind of looks like you're not paying attention to them. Like all of the dynamics are that you're like texting.

• 1:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Distracted.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, even if you're taking notes. But if you use a notebook, if you like write in a notebook while you're talking to someone, they feel like, man, this person really cares about me. Like it totally like flips the odometer the other way. Like you are signaling like deep caring and interest if you just like scribble in a notebook while talking to someone. And so like, even if you're like, even if you're just like drawing, you know, houses and clouds and unicorns.

• 1:18:46Tim Ferriss?

  Like Big Lebowski style?

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like the key to like making it look like you are really like paying attention and connecting with someone is just to like have an open notebook and occasionally like nod and like write something down. So that's, you know, that works super well. So I would say when I'm in meetings. Uh, maybe like a third of the time, I'm actually like, you know, taking notes. Um, and what I'll do is I'll just write specific words or phrases that uh, I know if I see later will actually like pop the whole meeting into my head.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're writing down the cues.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly cues and and they're not even like necessarily the most important words. They're just, yeah, they're just cues. Uh, so like I made that I may write down like in this conversation, I may have, I may have like write down like, you know, Lebowski. That was important, but like that will, I know that if I saw that later and I saw that that was like on my timeline and never know it at the same time that I had this conversation uh, with Tim and you know, it's linked to you and all of our other stuff like that word will just trigger this, this memory and it'll, it'll come out. So I use it for that. I use it for, for, for queuing in a way that doesn't create this barrier between me and the other person. And in fact, not just doesn't create the barrier, it actually like, it actually makes us feel closer and it makes people think that uh, that uh, I'm really paying attention.

• 1:20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Which you are.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Which I am, yeah, all the time.

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  And the uh, process after that, I'd love to ask about how often do you then scan those into your Evernote? Do you use your phone to take the photograph? Do you tear them out and, and put them through a machine?

• 1:20:24Tim Ferriss?

  I, what normal people call scanner?

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  You always use your phone.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  I always use my phone, yeah. Uh, well, I use, I use the scanner, I use the Evernote scanner when I have like a stack of documents. Um, but um, if I'm for business cards and for, and for uh, handwritten notes, I always use my phone and it's important to do it as close as possible to the time and, and place of the meeting, cause then you get all, all the association. So, you know, basically before, before I get up, I'll just take a picture and then I know I have it, I know it's time stamped, it's, it's, it's, it's geo stamped, it's associated with a calendar entry, like basically everything works great if you do it right there. Uh, business card and, and handwritten notes. Uh, if you wait, you know, if you wait until you get to the office, like you, you lose all that context.

• 1:21:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right, I never, I, I, I'm embarrassed to say, I never even thought about that because you're, you're not only losing the context, you're creating false signals. Because you could be throwing it off and if you look into your calendar to see why that was associated with a given time, then you're actually creating. Conflict.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if I if I'm meeting with you, especially if it's in my calendar and I take a picture of, let's say I get your business card and I take a picture of that and Evernote, that'll automatically get all your contact info and look you up on LinkedIn and whatever. And then let's say I take some handwritten notes and I take a picture of that, the handwritten notes will be automatically titled in Evernote, you know, note from meeting with Tim Ferriss. And your business card will have your name and, you know, everything associated with it. So if I did it right there, I've got all of this stuff. And so the next time I search for, you know, the next time I, you know, write something about you or search for you, I'm going to get all that stuff coming up. And I'm going to see, I'm going to see my note, I'm going to see your contact info, and then I'm going to see

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  all of the, you know, any like business articles that have come out about you and any of our publisher partners. So it's like, if you do it, if you do it right away, you're just, you're really capturing a very strong signal that not only will you use like right there, but it'll make every subsequent access of this information richer.

• 1:22:29Tim Ferriss?

  When you think, you mentioned a couple of names earlier, obviously Bezos, Mikitani, Benioff, Hoffman. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind?

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Wow, I, I don't know. I don't know if my mind works like that.

• 1:22:49Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean?

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  You just said successful and I just like I did, I didn't, I didn't like pop into a, you know, into a person. I think I like, I immediately flashed on product, like the first thing, the first thing that popped into my mind when you said successful was iPhone. Kind of crazy. But yeah, I guess I don't really, I guess I don't really think of people as successful.

• 1:23:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's a very, that's a new answer. I like this. So let's explore that. Why, why the iPhone?

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Well, maybe it's more like, why not people? Because I guess I don't really think of success being as being like the most interesting characteristic of a person.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  I like, a lot of success is luck.

• 1:23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right, agree.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  In fact, I think that like, anyone who's been successful even a little bit has also been lucky.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Luck is not, and like, when I say luck, I mean luck. I mean like, random occurrence. I don't mean like, some like mystical, you know, you make your own luck, anything. Like, there's a strong element of fortune, of random chance, to personal success. And then, of course, there's also a ton of hard work and really having to, you know, maximize it.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  And so, tons of people deserve to be successful because they're super smart and interesting and work hard and they just haven't had the luck. So, to me, like, whether or not a person is successful or not, isn't the most interesting thing about that person. I really care much more about their ideas and, you know, how much, how interesting or fun they are.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  So, I guess I tend to think more about like, about things, about products that are successful, like, you know, like iPhone. And that's, that also has an element of luck, but much less. I think, you know, that's much more about really great design and smart planning and great execution and, you know, things that are, that are more predictive of and more interesting than applying that measure to people.

• 1:24:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's make it more general. And maybe this is, this will be an equally difficult or misdirected question, but which historical figure do you most identify with?

• 1:24:54Tim Ferriss?

  If any?

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Historical figure?

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  I don't know. You know, I don't... Okay, so...

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  I'm conscious, I want to be sensitive to not like sounding like I am, like I don't want this to come across as false modesty.

• 1:25:19Tim Ferriss?

  You're gonna give me Winnie the Pooh or what to where?

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thing is like, I actually don't think about myself that much. And I'm being serious about this, I get, in a very specific way, like I think, okay, so we've already established that I play a lot of video games, I don't know, I actually don't know if you do.

• 1:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'm actually getting, I'm reinvigorating my game playing as of a few weeks ago.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 1:25:44Tim Ferriss?

  I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I played, I was all Dungeons and Dragons growing up, yeah, that was, that was fundamental for me. Okay, so you know, it's like basically two types of games, and you're like, on like PCs and consoles, there's kind of first, first person games and third person games, right? There's like first person shooters and third person shooters, whatever. And like a first person game is, you know, you're seeing the game world through the eyes of your character, so you know, you're running around and shooting or whatever. And then a third person game, you know, and be like, like Grand Theft Auto or something is like, you're kind of, the camera's usually like in back of you, so you're, you're seeing yourself moving around and interacting in the world.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  So in one game, you kind of, in one genre, you sort of see how you look like in the world, and another genre, you just see the world, but you don't really see yourself in it.

• 1:26:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  And I think like, a lot of people play, like, they go through life, either in, like, playing a first player game, a first person game or a third person game. And I don't think there's like, any one of those is right or wrong, I just think if you look at, you know, for example, if you look at like, most politicians, like Bill Clinton, whatever you think of him, like, he's clearly playing a third person game, right? Like, he is aware of what he looks like, like, in any scene. And he's sort of optimizing for that and optimizing for, you know, how to like, do everything correctly, because he's seeing himself. And a lot of people are like that, and then there's other people who are clearly playing, you know, the first person game, where they're kind of oblivious about themselves in the world, they just like, they have things they want to accomplish, they know the way that

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  they want the world to bend, but they don't really have a perception of them. For better or for worse, like, I don't know, it always felt like, just, you know, going with the US presidents again, like, it always felt like, like, George W. Bush was probably playing a first person game. Where he's like a little bit less like actual visibility in his own head about what he looked like interacting with with the world. And again, that's like, obviously not a judgment at all about their political styles, or who you like or don't like, or whatever, just more about personality. And I really think that like, I'm fundamentally a first first person gamer. Like, I don't, I don't think about like, well, who do I identify with? Who am I most like? What do I look like in this scene? You know, what do I like? What do I look like from here?

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Like, how do I change my outfit? Like, those are things that that that interest me less than what's the world around me. And that that probably makes me weak at all sorts of things, where I should have better self-awareness. And it probably makes me stronger at other things.

• 1:28:20Tim Ferriss?

  Do you meditate or have a meditative practice?

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, I, I, I, I used to a lot more. So I went through a phase, you know, it's, it's required if you're going to live in Silicon Valley, that you have, you know, go through these things. So I went through a Zen phase a couple of years ago.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  The secular baptism.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Benioff actually got me into it.

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  TM or what type of meditation?

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  No, you know, I've never done, I've never done transcendental stuff. I'm actually kind of interested in the whole like mantra idea. I've never done that. So just Zen, you know, mindfulness and Zen. And I did it fairly actively for about a year or so. And, but I, you know, I mastered it. I won, I think. Like, I, I, the important thing is to try really hard to, you know, have a goal, set your mind to it. And, and, you know, and you too can master, can master Zen Buddhism. So, so I became a Zen master and, and, you know, now I'm onto other things. Now I'm onto Stoicism, which is also.

• 1:29:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now you're on to goat simulator.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm done. I've reached, you know, level 13 at, at being a Zen monk. And yeah, now I'm on to goat simulator.

• 1:29:28Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you stop? What was the reason for stopping?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Um, I didn't, I didn't really stop. I just sort of, uh, uh, I, I, I think my, my, my commitment to it kind of waned. So for a while I was meditating about 20 minutes a day. Um, and it was good. It was like very, very clarifying. Um, I then became interested in, in, um, like what could we learn from that and what could we apply to different products? Uh, and then I realized that like, as I was meditating, I was actually just spending more and more of my time like thinking about the meditating, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. Like I was, I was treating Zen meditation as like a very goal oriented thing, kind of the opposite of what it's supposed to be.

• 1:30:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Uh, and then, um, then I, so then I started reading more broadly and, and got onto other things. Um, there's actually a product that, uh, I don't know if you've tried. Have, have you seen the, the, the Think?

• 1:30:20Tim Ferriss?

  No, what is that?

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  T H Y N C.

• 1:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oof, okay. Uh, okay. I see what they're doing there.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's sort of super awesome. And, um, if it works and I've, you know, I was very, so, so it's basically doing like direct brain stimulation through ultrasound. So you wear this device on your head and it, you know, it beams, uh, vibes into your brain and, um, gives you energy or in focus or calmness. And I, this totally tripped, like every bullshit filter I had when I first saw this, like got tripped. I was like, yeah, nonsense. Um, but actually like I read into it. I, I looked at the science and it seemed plausible. I was like, oh, this actually like, this, this isn't setting off like red flags for me in terms of just being pseudoscience. Uh, and so I thought, okay, this seems okay. Um, and then I actually got to try it a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  And my personal experience of it was great. Like I know it's just one person's experience. It's impossible to really say like what suggestion, what's placebo, what's real? But I had a really good experience with it. So I just, I just ordered it. I should be getting mine the next couple of days. And, uh, I'm actually really interested in this. And the, and this idea that like, you can actually have significant impact in how you think through meditation. Uh, and, but you might actually, actually be able to have very similar impact in the way you think through just much more direct application of technology, uh, which would be cool. So like if I was a robot, you know, how would robots meditate? It'd be something like this.

• 1:31:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm looking at it now and, uh, the placement, it looks like there's one.

• 1:31:51Tim Ferriss?

  There's one sensor or stimulator right where I would think it to be, which is kind of over the right eyebrow, so the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Is there another at the back? Or is that the only placement point?

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what you're seeing in those pictures is the hair is covering up the antenna. So what you do is you attach this flexible antenna, which you can kind of see, like there's like super hot models on the website.

• 1:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  Always helps, right?

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can see that.

• 1:32:21Tim Ferriss?

  They look very elven. They look like Legolas's cousin. Very elven.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  They're very elven, yeah. And so there's a contact point. So there's two different antennas, depending on if you're running the calming one or the energy one. And they go to two different places in the back of your head. And yeah, they kind of aim, they triangulate that way. And like I said, I'm actually super interested in this. I've talked to the CEO of the company. I talked to their chief scientist. I think it, like my current inclination is that it's legit, which is kind of amazing. But we'll see. I will do a lot more playing around with it. I should get mine soon. Next time, next time we're in the same time zone, I can bring it over and you can tell me what you think.

• 1:33:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to play with it. There is, it looks like transcranial direct current stimulation, which there is a friend of mine, if you don't know him, I should introduce you guys, named Adam Gazali, who runs the Gazali Neuroscience Lab at UCSF. And they do a lot of work with this type of technology. So I've actually been a subject and an experimenter in some of their research studies for TDCS. So I think there's a lot of promise. You just have to make sure you don't fry your brain into scrambled eggs accidentally.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, details.

• 1:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that TDCS could be.

• 1:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  This type of brain stimulation could be very interesting also, not just for the direct impact on, say, performance or subjective state of mind or emotion, but also for showing people what might be possible through meditative practice. In the same way that there's a neuroscience PhD and a friend of mine named Sam Harris, who's also on this podcast, who no longer uses psychedelics, but his early formative psychedelic experiences showed him what could be possible with dedicated meditative practice. And that's the tool that he now uses. So the interplay of all of these

• 1:34:26Tim Ferriss?

  different tools for expanding or honing consciousness is very interesting to me. Do you use Think mostly for calming or stimulating or both?

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  So I've only actually used it once. I don't own one yet. I've put in my order, it should be showing up soon. So I've had one direct experience with it, which was in London a few weeks ago. And I did the calming vibe and it was great. Basically, the woman that was putting it on me says, as you're using it, she said, "You should look for signs to see whether or not it's working." And I was like, "Okay, like what?" She goes, "Well, for example, can you think of some things that, like right now, if you think of them, they just kind of cause you to get anxious or stressed out or angry?" And I'm like, "Yep, done."

• 1:35:16Tim Ferriss?

  As a CEO, pretty easy.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. She's like, "Okay, good." So like in five minutes, like think of those things again and see how you make me feel. See how they make you feel. And I was like, "Okay." So I put this thing on, I'm controlling it with my iPhone, and I'm feeling relatively calm. And then like five minutes go by and I start thinking about these things that just cause me this like fundamental stress and anxiety five minutes earlier. And I was like, "Yeah, I'm cool with that. That's okay. Yeah, I can live with that. That seems normal. I think that's not a problem. And yeah, I'm comfortable with that." And it was just like, it was really impressive to me. And I know that could be like 100% suggestion or placebo. But like what I've read about it combined with with talking to the people that I know,

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  combined with direct experience, like it's definitely making me relatively sanguine about the the possibilities.

• 1:36:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, good word, sanguine. I always get out GRE'd by my guests on this podcast. It's an issue. I need to really need to get some flashcards. So, speaking of purchases, in the last, say, six to 12 months, could be whatever comes to mind, what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life?

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Hmm, $100 or less?

• 1:36:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's a start. It's a starting point. If if any purchase comes to mind that isn't completely out of reach of most people, then that's fine.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. Let me let me think about it. I'm definitely like, for some reason, my mind like goes to food.

• 1:36:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's fine.

• 1:36:58Speaker 02

  Um, so I have a, um, like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's weird. Maybe just because I'm hungry. It's like getting close to lunchtime. So like I'm thinking about, uh, I'm thinking about this amazing, um, hamburger that I had in Tokyo, uh, which was, but I can't really say that was that was that was that was life changing. It was good.

• 1:37:23Tim Ferriss?

  Or it's just, I mean, it positive, it does, it does sound like it positively impacted your life. What was, was there anything special about the hamburger that comes to mind?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  So there's this place in Ginza that makes smoked stuff, which is kind of unusual in Japan. They're not really a smoked food culture, but this place just makes like smoked everything, like smoked hamburgers and smoked olive oil and smoked soy sauce and smoked rice and eggs and just amazingly good. And they make like the world's best hamburger. Like my favorite hamburger in the world is in this place. And they also make amazing eggs. They've got these like beautiful, you know, orange in color, like totally fresh, you know, eggs that they can put on stuff. And last time I was there, actually about a year ago, I decided I would try to get them to put a fried egg on my hamburger. And this took like forty five minutes of like intense negotiation. They were like, they were very skeptical about like putting this egg on the hamburger like it had never been done before.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  And I was like, come on. And then they were like really kind of nervous about disappointing me like they weren't sure how to do it.

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, I'm cackling because this is so, so Japanese.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, about forty five minutes of like convincing them and then like exactly how to fry the egg and put on top. And so they finally did it and I had it and it was like, it was amazing because I was like the only way that you can improve like the best, the world's best smoked hamburgers to put like a perfectly fried runny egg on it. It was great, but they were very like, you could tell they were deeply uncomfortable with this whole experience. And then I went back there a year later and it's on the menu.

• 1:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  So it was like my contribution to Japanese cuisine.

• 1:38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Is it called the libin?

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  No, they didn't name it after me. I was kind of, I was kind of pissed.

• 1:38:58Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of, kind of bummed.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Tim Ferriss?

  The.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  I don't think they know my name, so.

• 1:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what is the, the man with no name? That's the, that's probably how you're listed on the reservation. The, they don't want to, they, they don't want to summon you to, to, to put them into more uncomfortable culinary situations. What, what was the name of the place? Do you recall?

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  It's called Ginza Enji.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Ginza Enji. N-G-E-N-J-I?

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  E-N-G-A-I.

• 1:39:24Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  And it's so good.

• 1:39:27Tim Ferriss?

  Ginza Enji, very cool.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably the best, the best sub hundred dollar purchase in the past, past year or so.

• 1:39:35Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Well, next time I'm there, I'll have to check out Ginza Enji. It's a very, it's a very rundown, cheap part of Tokyo for those people wondering.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Hey, it was significantly less than a hundred dollars. Even, even in Ginza, you can get a hamburger.

• 1:39:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think Ginza literally means like the golden throne or the golden seat, but it's a, it's a fancy neighborhood. The. Easy to get to, and I think that is also, correct me if I'm wrong, I might be getting this totally wrong, but the Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  It's in the same building.

• 1:40:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's in the same subway station building, right?

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  It's in the same building, yeah, it's right, it's like the same, yeah, it's right there.

• 1:40:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if anyone listening hasn't seen Jiro Dreams of Sushi, very well worth watching. What are your, now, just, it's actually a good segue, so that movie is chock full of routines, right? It's very methodical in that restaurant. What are your morning rituals? What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like? On a day that is one that you're free to design, sort of your ideal first 60 minutes?

• 1:40:44Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I don't know if I've had an ideal day in a long time. I mean, my actual day is, you know, I wake up and I, you know, I grab my phone. And, you know, I see, like, I see if there's any emergencies. Usually, you know, usually there aren't any, and then I.

• 1:40:59Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I don't really have a fixed schedule, so I, I don't have kids, so it's fairly easy to, you know, not, not wake up at any particular time, so I usually wake up like a couple of hours before my first meeting. Uh, maybe, maybe two to three hours before my first meeting, just so I have time to like, catch up on a little bit of work before, you know, before I head to the office. So if my, if my first meeting, you know, if my first meeting is at nine, I'll wake up at, you know, six, 6:30. Uh, but usually I try to schedule meetings, I try, I'm not like a morning person, so I try to schedule my meetings a little bit later, so. Sometimes I sleep late or something. And then I'll kind of walk around the house for, for 45 minutes, you know, drinking coffee and, and usually, you know, with my phone in my hand,

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  checking on various things, and, and it gets started slowly. What I would like is, um, um, I'd like maybe like.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  I would like to have my digest of the day be more automatic. Like, I would like to, you know, hear about like what's gonna happen, what do I need to know about? Uh, I'd kind of like, I've experimented with setting up various ways where I can maybe like, have an RSS feed that I could have read to me, or like something like that, and there's, there's, you know, I've had mixed success with that, but it'd be cool to, like, it'd be cool to work on something like that.

• 1:42:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that's the digest, like, your primer for the day to come?

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that would be, that would be kinda cool, cuz I find like at that time in the morning, like, I don't really wanna be making decisions, but it's a good time, and I definitely don't wanna be like talking to people. Uh, but it's a good time to, it's like, my brain is still spongy at that point, it's a good time to like soak in, like, okay, here's what's gonna happen, here's what I'm gonna need to start thinking about. Uh, that's, that's productive. I hate, like, I hate early morning meetings, those are, those tend not to go well for me.

• 1:42:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know the feeling. Uh, and, um, do you, do you have any particular evening rituals or ways that you prep for the next day that help you get off to a good start?

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  I don't anymore. I used to, so I used to back, so when I was meditating for about a year or so, I would try to meditate for 20 minutes, um, every day, um, in the evening, and then I just started like being too tired, so I would just fall asleep in the middle of it, uh, which, you know, isn't, isn't super good. Um, and so at this point, I don't really have any particular thing. I, I've, I've gone back and forth, like, I, I tend to try out a lot of the sort of faddish things. I've tried out the, okay, don't look at a screen for the last few hours, you know, just like read a physical book, or, you know, don't watch TV, or look at a laptop, so I've done that, but that didn't really seem to make much of a difference. Plus, I don't, I don't really have a trouble sleeping, like, I sleep pretty well. Um, so I don't, like, I don't, I think I'm just lucky, I'm just sort of wired up where, you know, when I go to bed, I fall asleep regardless of kind of what else I was doing.

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  I'm looking forward to getting the Think Machine and maybe using that to, to calm down a little bit before sleep. Um, but at this point, I don't have any, any kind of fixed, uh, routine.

• 1:43:57Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. For people interested in exploring the paths that you've explored for thinking about meaning, why we're here, purpose, et cetera. We touched on Stoicism briefly, but if you had to recommend, or yeah, if you had to recommend one to three books that you have found very thought provoking, what would you recommend?

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  So I would say, so The Clock Is Along Now, definitely.

• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  It's just like as, as sort of a, to set the stage for like how to think about things. It's, it's great. Excuse me. I think a book that really had a profound influence on me pretty early on was The Selfish Gene by Dawkins.

• 1:44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  And I think that was just reissued in like some like 25th anniversary edition or something that I just saw, which is sort of sad that it was 25 years ago that I read it. So that's definitely worth reading for just all sorts of like brain expanding ideas. And then, you know, for, in terms of philosophy, there's a really, there's a good introduction to Stoicism that I read about a year ago when I first started looking into this. I forget the author, but the title is A Good Life.

• 1:45:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that is a good synopsis.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  And yeah, it was pretty good. Like it wasn't, like the, the writing itself, I think it wasn't particularly, you know, shining, but it, it like, it, it captured the ideas and presented them in a fairly modern way, you know, pretty elegantly. So that was a good jumping off point to a bunch of other stuff. So I would like, if I, if I had to give three, I would say, you know, I'd say those, those three. But, you know, really, I think the important thing for me is to really try to have a coherent philosophy of life. And I think a lot of people like. A lot of people don't. They they sort of think it's like pretentious to pretend that you can have a coherent philosophy.

• 1:46:00Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that important to you? What does it allow you to do or help you do?

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Um, just kind of frames everything and they, you know, gives gives a reason for things. Like, I think this is well understood, right? Motivation. So if you're trying to just, you know, philosophy aside, right? You're just trying to communicate with people. You know, you're you're a CEO and you're trying to get people to do what you want. It's like proven that people, it's much more effective to give people a reason. Uh, and actually it turns out that like the reason doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that there is a reason.

• 1:46:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  So if you say like, "Hey, you should do this," it's like far more effective to say, "Hey, you should do this because, you know, X, Y, and Z." And it turns out that even if like the people don't don't even understand the X, Y, and Z, as long as they they've like heard a reason, it just like fits much more neatly into the brain.

• 1:46:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  Than than if they have it. So like having a reason just makes smart people far more productive and effective. Um, and that's just very true of me. Like, I want to have a reason for for things. I don't want to feel like I am doing things, um, you know, shrouded by this existential mystery. I want to think that, like, I want to have a structure to think about why I am making certain decisions and and and having like having a coherent philosophy, uh, makes that, you know, makes that possible.

• 1:47:21Tim Ferriss?

  So coherent philosophy is, would it be comparable in some ways to the Ten Commandments? Where it's like, if you're like, should I covet my neighbor's wife or not? I'm not sure. It's like, well, no, it says, "Do not covet thy neighbor's wife, therefore, decision made." And like, that's the reason. Is it sort of a, a, a, do you view it as a set of guidelines and a framework for kind of decision making in life for simplifying things? Or is it more than that?

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  So the the Ten Commandments. Wouldn't serve this purpose for me just because they don't actually answer the why. Like, they're actually like, the way the Ten Commandments are phrased-

• 1:47:53Tim Ferriss?

  They don't have the because, right.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Right, that's exactly, that's sort of like exactly the cognitively wrong way to do it. Those are just commandments, they're not, they're not explanations. Now, there's a lot of religious theory and thought about, about the why. So if you're a religious person and you want to base your life around Ten Commandments, it's probably possible, and it's probably possible to actually read quite a bit of, of, you know, other commentary that actually give, you know, compelling reasons. You know, if that's, if, if, if that's the, the most appealing thing. So I, I, I kind of prefer to have the why rather than just the, you know, the what. And I don't, you know, I don't have the exact answers, obviously, but I have, you know, I think, I think I'm getting, I'm getting like a better and better feeling that things aren't random, there is a purpose.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  And like, I can, I can work towards like making the world better in a specific way that, in which I want it to be made better. And, and that feels great, and that's, that's, that's much more motivating than kind of getting up and following orders, or getting up and, and not understanding why.

• 1:48:58Tim Ferriss?

  So is your intention then to communicate this to employees or partners? Or is this really something for your own internal use?

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I'm definitely, I'm pretty, you know, apprehensive about talking about anything that sounds like this to, you know, to employees. Like, the last thing I want is, you know, is to be imposing any kind of philosophical worldview on people. So, you know, if we're having off the record conversations over a few drinks, I'm always happy to talk about it, but yeah, this is not a, my, my, my mission in life is not to, to convince anybody of anything. I just want to have a structure for myself.

• 1:49:33Tim Ferriss?

  You don't want to be like Phil of the Branch Davidians, it's not your goal. The book that you mentioned, I, I looked up, the-

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  The Stoic Overview is by William Irvine, and it's a guide to the good life. And the subtitle is The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a good overview.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  It is. It really is. And it's not, it's not what I thought it was. Like, you know, I remember studying Stoicism in high school or whatever. And, uh, you know, I think I had all the wrong ideas about, about, about what it is. So it was actually, it was a very interesting read.

• 1:50:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, it's helpful because it disabuses people of the notion that Stoics are, I remember the description I heard at one point was, being a stoic is like being a cow standing in the rain. And it's like, no, it's not quite that, not quite that's, that's serious or devoid of positive emotion.

• 1:50:25Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have, I know we have just a few minutes left. If you could have a billboard anywhere,

• 1:50:33Tim Ferriss?

  what would it say and where would you put it?

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, this is like, have we talked about this? This is like one of my main goals in life.

• 1:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I don't think we have.

• 1:50:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Like, one of the main things that I wanna, that I wanna do is I wanna be on a billboard advertising whiskey in, in Japan. I wanna be on a giant Japanese whiskey billboard, like totally Bill Murray style. And, but this is like a serious goal of mine. I've been, I've been sort of like working towards it for a while. I've like, I've talked to the right distillers and, like, yeah, I think, like, I think there's a chance it'll happen.

• 1:51:04Tim Ferriss?

  We should make, we should make this happen. Yeah. Let me know if I can, let me know if I can help.

• 1:51:08Speaker 02

  Giant billboard of me like holding a glass of whiskey.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  In, you know, in Tokyo. It's kind of like, well, I even, I've even figured out what it's gonna say.

• 1:51:18Tim Ferriss?

  What is it gonna say?

• 1:51:19Speaker 02

  It's gonna be just, you know, so just imagine, you know, it's me with a big glass of whiskey and the caption will say,

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  Evernote helps you remember. Suntory helps you forget.

• 1:51:32Tim Ferriss?

  That is fantastic.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kinda, kinda feels like it needs to happen, right?

• 1:51:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Or you could have, you know, at this side of another one, you could say Evernote is forever. Suntory is for tonight.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Also good. You can have a whole series of these.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  You could. That's amazing. It makes me, it makes me think of the, the, the commercial shoot from Lost in Translation when he's, when the director talks for like three minutes and the guy's like, more energy or whatever. And he's like, I think he said more than that.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  One of my favorite movies.

• 1:52:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good. What's um, one of my favorite parts is actually an improvised part in that movie when he's waiting in the hospital waiting room and those ladies are all cracking up.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:18Tim Ferriss?

  Just such a good movie. Advice to your 30 year old self. If you had to give advice to your 30 year old self, what would it be?

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  Uh, like if I had a time machine or something?

• 1:52:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. If you had a time machine and could deliver advice to your 30 year old self.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Hey, if I had a time machine, I can go back. So I'm 43 now. So I can go back 13 years and talk to my 30 year old self. I would be like, uh, I'd be like, dude, don't worry about anything because in 13 years, you're gonna have a time machine.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Nothing, nothing else really matters.

• 1:52:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right. That's, that's, that is a good answer.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  I think I would say, so when I was 30, I was working on stuff that I didn't, I was working on my second company and I didn't like, I wasn't in love with it. I wasn't, I wasn't building it for my, for myself. I was building it for somebody else. And I think what I would have said is like, stop taking people seriously when they say you have to like worry about what, what the market wants and just like build what you want. I kind of wish I'd gotten started with that in my twenties rather than in my, you know, mid thirties.

• 1:53:27Tim Ferriss?

  So any other parting advice or do you have an ask or suggestion for everybody listening?

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  Well, um, you know, everyone should, everyone listening should obviously read every word of, of all of your books, you know, inside, forward and back, inside and out, especially, especially the chapter in the four hour body that's about me.

• 1:53:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. The Excel spreadsheet.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  That's right. Cause it just makes sense. Cause obviously you can't write a book about attaining the perfect body without having a chapter about me. So.

• 1:54:00Tim Ferriss?

  And in the updated edition that will be published in a year or two, we'll talk about your, your pull up quest.

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  My pull up quest is good. And no, there's actually a bunch more to say. You know, I've, I've lost, I think since the last time we've seen each other, I've lost about 50 pounds.

• 1:54:12Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Congratulations. That's a, that's a very, that's a sturdy, robust toddler right there.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  Actually, I just saw, um, I went on like Getty image search or whatever. I did a search for, for myself on, on Getty Images. And there's like, there's like eight years of like, you know, pictures of me. And it's like, I'm aging in reverse.

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's great.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

  Actually, like, it's kind of cool. Like, eight years ago, I'm like, I'm like, you know, 250 pounds, and I'm wearing a suit and tie, and I have a beard. And then just like slowly over eight years, like, first the suit disappears, you know, then the collar, and like, you know, the tie, the beard, you know, 50 pounds. It's like, I'm definitely in this localized minimize that kind of looks like I'm aging in reverse, which is kind of cool. So I'm just gonna assume that that's gonna continue forever. I don't, I don't see why it wouldn't. Um, but we'll see how it goes.

• 1:55:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's like Benjamin Button, but in real life.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:55:04Tim Ferriss?

  Curious case of Phil Libin.

• 1:55:08Tim Ferriss?

  That could be your, your memoir. Uh, where can people find you online? Uh, where can people connect with you on the social media?

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:19Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, where can they, of course, find out more about Evernote and give it a spin?

• 1:55:23Speaker 02

  Well, uh, so Evernote is just at evernote.com or your favorite app store. And I am, uh, on Twitter, I'm P. Libin, and, uh, also happy to chat with anyone via email or anything else. I'm Phil at Evernote. Um, my policy is, uh, I've been super lucky in, um, uh, just being able to get great advice from people when, when I ask. So if anyone actually wants to talk to me, my policy is I have to eat lunch anyway. So anytime anyone wants to come over for lunch, I'm happy to do that. So if anyone's in the area, send me a note and, uh, come on by for lunch if you actually, if you actually want to talk.

• 1:55:57Tim Ferriss?

  Your lunches may just become very exciting from this point forward. Well, Phil, you're always very generous with your time. You're always fun to hang out with. And, uh, there are many more topics we could discuss. So perhaps sometime we'll do a round two. People can let us know what other questions they might have for us to explore. And, um, I'm looking at these questions in Evernote. I'm thankful for the product. I've used it for all of my books since we met. I've used it for planning the TV show. I've used it for all of the planning around the podcast. It is, uh, it is my go-to sort of central repository for everything. So I want to thank you for that.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tim.

• 1:56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Of course. And, uh, I think we should have some whiskey soon and plan that billboard.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 1:56:46Tim Ferriss?

  All right, man. So, thanks so much. I will talk to you soon. Take care, Tim.

• 1:56:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:57:39Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? My answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The Four Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance.

• 1:58:21Tim Ferriss?

  It just covers all my bases, if I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my God, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning. For me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 1:58:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:59:41Tim Ferriss?

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