Ep 63: Hedge Funds, Investing, and Optimizing Lifestyle (Mark Hart, Raoul Pal)

This is an experimental episode. It's a roundtable discussion with two hedge fund experts: Mark Hart and Raoul Pal. It digs into investment, physical training, and more -- all as tools for improving quality of life. How far can you push and improve yourself? These gents tackle this question every day, and it makes for a fun conversation in this episode. All show notes and links can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast Bio -- Mark Hart: Mark Hart is the founder of Corriente Partners, an investment fund focused on placing long/short equity trades based on macroeconomic themes. Mark launched his first hedge fund as a junior partner in November of 1998, and in 2001 launched Corriente Partners, where his macroeconomic framework led him to first question the security of the mortgage and housing market. Managing his portfolio accordingly, Mark earned a sizable return on his positions during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis - one of the single best performances of that downturn. Bio -- Raoul Pal: Raoul writes and publishes The Global Macro Investor, an elite macro economic and investment strategy research service for the worlds leading hedge funds, pension funds, banks and sovereign wealth funds. He is also an advisor to government organisations and a consultant for several family investment offices globally. Raoul has 24 years experience in the financial markets working for investments banks such Goldman Sachs (where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in equities and equity derivatives) and founding and managing a macro hedge fund for GLG Partners, ones of the world's largest hedge fund firms. Raoul recently co-founded Real Vision Television, the worlds first on-demand web TV channel for finance. Additionally, Raoul is the author of “The End Game" which is one of the most read financial articles in the history of the Internet.

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 shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just sitting at the buffet table.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for visiting the fine sponsors of this show who keep it free for all of you. 99designs is your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I've used them for years. Go to 99designs.com/tim to see some of the competitions that I have run successfully, including one for the cover of The Four Hour Body, which later hit number one New York Times. So, visit 99designs.com/tim. If you would prefer some business mentorship, go to Shopify.com/tim, where you can find out how you can get an all-expense-paid trip to Necker Island, which is the private island of billionaire Sir Richard Branson, to get mentored by Sir Richard himself, yours truly, Seth Godin, and many others for an entire week.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, Shopify.com/tim.

• 1:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim Ferriss, and this is an experimental episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It's a little noisy. I'm at the Facebook offices in Menlo Park, California. Just got out of some stuff. But I wanted to get this out to you. So, this particular episode is me in conversation with two financial experts, two hedge fund experts. And those two names are Mark Hart, and I've had a lot of experience and time with Mark Hart. Mark is the founder of Corianti Partners, an investment fund focused on placing long-short equity trades based on macroeconomic themes. He's done a ton, including, basically...

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  Earning a sizable fantastic return on his positions during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which was one of the single best performances of that entire downturn. He's really good at spotting patterns and I've done some work with him, which we'll get into. And then there is Raul and he is the owner of Real Vision Television, from which this interview is pulled, among other things. But he writes and publishes the Global Macro Investor, an elite macroeconomic and investment strategy research service for many of the world's leading hedge funds, pension funds, banks and sovereign wealth funds. He does a lot more than that, of course, but I'll try to keep these introductions short. He is also the author of The End Game, which is an article that turned out to be one of

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  the most read financial pieces in the history of the internet. It's a fascinating conversation between the three of us about business, lifestyle, investing, all of the above. And for those of you who are interested in Real Vision Television, which includes all sorts of names that if you're involved with finance, you might recognize Rick Rule, Mark Hart, Kyle Bass, Mike Novogratz, the list goes on and on and on, really reversing the dumbed-down trend that you see in mass media for discussing investment and finance. And it usually costs $400 a year. If you use the code TIM, T I M, then you can get it for $300 a year. I get no profit participation in this. I'm just doing it because I had fun doing this interview. I make nothing from it.

• 3:18Tim Ferriss?

  In any case, without further ado, please meet both Mark and Raul and myself in this conversation. Thanks.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  So Tim, Mark, thanks very much for getting this all together. I think it's going to be fascinating. Mark, you did a first ever masterclass and you talked a lot about not only your trading philosophy and how you do things and how you look at markets, but you broadened it out into how you look at your life and lifestyle and how you broaden your knowledge base. And one of the people you mentioned was Tim. And I said, well, it'd be fascinating to find out how Tim and you have interacted and we can all have a joint conversation to see what we can all learn from these kind of things, because a lot of people are fascinated behind those concepts, because people don't look at their lifestyle as much as they look at their career and stuff like that. So, I don't know, Tim, do you want to give a little bit of background about yourself and Mark, just also for people who don't know about you, yourself as well?

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, I have been in the Bay Area, San Francisco, related area for about fifteen years, and I really have two primary careers, I suppose. One is as a teacher and author, so I've written books, all of which sound like scammy and for commercial products. So, The Four Hour Work Week, Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Chef, we could talk about the titling some other time, but the books, really, the common theme across all of them is trying to deconstruct world-class performers and look at how the anomalies replicate unusual results over and over and over again, whether that's in the CEO sphere, or in the, say, Olympic-level professional athletics sphere, or looking at accelerated learning and so-called

• 4:58Tim Ferriss?

  prodigies in that arena. How can someone pull tools from those people so that they can replicate results people usually associate with some type of God-given talent? And there are different types of analyses we do for that. The second career is really startup angel investing and advising. So, I was a seed level and still am advisor to Uber, Evernote, investor in Twitter, Facebook, about thirty-five companies total up to this point in time. So, those are the two areas where I spend a lot of my energy. Fantastic. Mark?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Well, I'm a hedge fund manager. I've been involved in the hedge fund world for probably sixteen years, running my own funds for thirteen, almost fourteen years. And as we'll go into, all the specifics, I've run several different types of funds, but typically my focus is on macro. You know, it's interesting to me, you know, we had our interview a few months ago, and did mention Tim as a big influence on me, and specifically how that came to pass. I was on top of the world, and then I sort of crashed down to the bottom in two thousand nine, had some really bad times.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  And it's about that time I read a book called The Art of Learning by a guy named Josh Waitzkin, who's become one of my closest friends, and absolutely brilliant man. And Josh was this world-class chess player, world-class martial artist, and the book was about his learning process. So, I felt like I needed some help on process. And I reached out to Josh. Turned out, he did some consulting with hedge funds on process. And, and he agreed to, to work with me and my team on my process. And he suggested that we bring Tim into the fold as well. I didn't know Tim before, but Tim has written these books, The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Work Week

• 7:00Speaker 04

  at the time, since then, The Four Hour Chef. Read The Four Hour Body, which absolutely blew me away. And Tim and Josh started to implement, you know, various processes for me and my team. And while it didn't necessarily, it wasn't, I wasn't able to necessarily turn my hedge fund performance around, although I'm still managing money. It completely changed my life, completely changed my outlook. And, and so, you know, when you suggest the possibility of bringing Tim on and interviewing him, I thought it would be great. And what I thought was particularly interesting is, you know, in the hedge fund industry, my peers, I mean, these are some of the smartest people in the world and some of the most driven people in the world.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  And they put enormous, you know, effort into what they do. And yet, most of them have never even considered putting any, the same sort of effort into kind of improving their quality of life.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  So, I thought it'd be great for some people in the financial world to, you know, see Tim and to get a sense of, you know, really what, how far you can improve yourself, how far you can take things.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Something that would be interesting is, so Tim, I'd love to think, because I've heard Mark's mindset, but you went in to see this troubled hedge fund manager who's having a tough time. How did you evaluate the situation? How did you think you could help him? What tools did he need to do things with? And how did you, how did you go about that process?

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Well, I think there, there are a number of ways to try to, say, improve the performance of the company, a group of people, or even a single person. And in this particular case, of course, the, the landscape of macro investing, hedge fund management is not a landscape that I'm going to understand as well as someone like Mark. But if you look at it almost like rally car racing. So that's, I'm fascinated by rally car racing. I've done some experiments there. But you have a racetrack that is basically designed to kill you. It's not intended to be as safe as possible. The, the terrain, the path is somewhat known, but the terrain is unknown. It could be raining, it could be sleeting, and

• 9:09Tim Ferriss?

  Mark knows where he wants to go. But I can help potentially improve the car itself. So the vehicle, which is the physical body, upon which everything is predicated. So people tend to have this sort of Cartesian separation of mind and body. But at the end of the day, you have certain levels of neurotransmitters that are produced at a certain rate, depleted at a certain rate. And that is the rate-limiting step in your mental performance. So if you want to have better levels of working memory, sustained attention, and so on, you can optimize those by optimizing the car, i.e. the body in this case. And you can use exercise to, say, improve a production of brain-drive neurotrophic factor and all of these things that are very, very interesting.

• 9:54Tim Ferriss?

  And then you can also look at process. So I think Josh is one of the best in the world, and Josh is a very dear friend of mine, at looking at repeatable process. So what are the daily habits and the ways that you approach turning your effort on or off, say, for productivity and recovery throughout the day that you can tweak? So that would be driving the car. So we can look at the process of, instead of having the shifter down here in a normal H-pattern that you might have, maybe we should elevate that, just like they do in rally cars, so that it's closer to the steering wheel. And how can you do the equivalent throughout the day? And that might be incorporating different types of sets of questions that you apply to certain scenarios.

• 10:38Tim Ferriss?

  It might be deciding beforehand, for instance, with a lot of my startups, when you scale to a certain point, you're going to encounter the following types of problems. So how do you plan for that type of crisis management in advance so that you're not reactive, so that you can be analytical when most people would be emotional? And those are some of the tools in the toolkit that I would usually try to bring to bear in a situation like that. And Josh and I have very complementary approaches, which is part of the reason that we enjoy hanging out so much and working together.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  And so, Mark, so Tim walks in and says, "Okay, this is what you need to do." How did you take that on board? And then how did you engage with that process? And kind of then start to see the benefits flowing through? And how did that change you?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Well, you know, initially, what I tried to do was incorporate forty different new processes into my life, you know, diet, exercise, meditation, all kinds of things. And it wasn't particularly successful. And I peeled it back a little bit and started to implement sort of one process at a time. You know, nailing breakfast was a huge one for me.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  What do you mean by nailing breakfast?

• 11:48Speaker 04

  I mean, having a perfect breakfast. It's what's going to fuel you for the day. It's what's gonna, you know, it nourishes you. It's something you always have time for because it's the beginning of the day. Nothing's gonna run over and block it out. So, you know, nailing breakfast, nailing your morning routine was the, really the first key. Everything from that, you know, built.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Started to implement, you know, there are a variety of things I did. I got into martial arts. I'm, you know, pretty much addicted to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And both Josh and Tim are, you know, expert, you know, really world-class martial artists as well.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  But part of that was even, okay, breaking down the workouts. The times, you know, what time of the day are you going to be the most productive, the most creative? You know, usually it's after your mind is cleared. How are you going to clear your mind? Well, you know, your normal conscious mind has thousands of thoughts running through it constantly. But, you know, the key is accessing the subconscious mind where you're really doing your thinking. So how do you create these periods of time when you can best access that? So maybe it's breaking up your workout into two workouts a day that are half the length. Maybe it's implementing a five or 10-minute-a-day meditation. And then it's structuring your workday so that you're not answering emails during your

• 13:11Speaker 04

  most productive time. And then it's self-tracking.

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  And a lot of it starts with establishing a baseline, so knowing where you are. And I think that, just to give a very common example of where people get themselves into trouble, if, like most people, you take these extremely elite thinkers in the form of top hedge fund managers who have annual checkups once a year. And they make decisions based on the results of these blood tests that may come back in range or out of range. And typically, the way that even a concierge medical service works is you have this checkup, you get back your blood values. Uh-oh, this is high, this is low. Here are two or three medications to correct these following things. And you realize a few things very quickly.

• 14:00Tim Ferriss?

  Number one, if you were to take that test the next day, the values would be different. So you want to always confirm testing results. And you can apply this to many different types of thinking. Secondly, what you're interested in when you look at, say, blood values is not just a snapshot in time, because that's like trying to understand a World Cup game from one photograph. You want to understand trending. So you're better off having slightly less data, so lower resolution, but many snapshots so you can look at where you're trending, as opposed to trying to diagnose and treat based on a single point in time. And what that can do for you, for instance, in the traditional medical system in the United States, or conventional, I should say, you might be able to look at, say, your

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  uric acid levels, which is, in some cases, indicative of gout if it gets past a certain point. And you could be at the lower range of normal and be ratcheting up 10, 20% per year, but the doctor won't flag it as a problem until you've crossed into sort of gout symptomatic territory. But if you're taking those snapshots, you can catch it beforehand. And you can identify, say, dietary interventions. Well, perhaps we should reduce fructose. People tend to blame gout and uric acid on protein intake. Well, fructose has a huge part to play in that. But it all starts with establishing a baseline. So in the case of, say, a daily routine and a weekly routine, you could identify, and

• 15:25Tim Ferriss?

  Mark could identify, during his states of flow, and we could talk about what that means, but when he feels effortless production.

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  Like he's doing everything well on autopilot. What are the characteristics? What are the prerequisites or the correlates to that? What are the potential triggers, right? And it starts with journaling. Similarly, what are the 20%, say, of activities or people that produce 80% of the negative emotions and bad decision making? Let's start chronicling that. And once you start to identify those patterns, say, over a week of journaling, similarly with diet, right? So you could say, oh, well, you know, you're having a meltdown. This is not specific to Mark, but like, person X is having, they're getting very frustrated and angry at 11:30, but they're having coffee and a bagel for breakfast. Like, okay, well, this might be a very easy fix.

• 16:17Tim Ferriss?

  Just like a lot of people with IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, simply have a gluten sensitivity. It's not like they need any type of, they don't have a small intestine bacterial infection or anything like that. It's, it's just gluten. So, but it starts with, with capturing your baseline. And it's astonishing to me how I used to do this and how many people will change many variables without first establishing where they are. So that's, that's, the first step is, you know, where is the patient?

• 16:50Speaker 03

  And listen, it's actually a similar thought process to how we look at markets as well. It's the same state of analyzing. If you just have a snapshot, you don't really know anything about anything. What you need to understand is the history, where it's come from, where it's going, and looking at a whole range of different parts of it before you can understand what's going on, I guess.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  There's no question. But, you know, one of the really interesting things about what Tim does, I mean, you can take this, you can go as deep as you want. I mean, you could spend a lot of time and really tweak a lot of, a lot of, a lot of details. But, you know, this notion of 10,000 hours to mastery, I mean, the way I think of you is as a brain and body hacker. And, you know, how do you, how do you really shortcut that? And, and one of the things I thought might be interesting would be to actually point out maybe some of the Some of the easy hacks.

• 17:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sure.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  That people can use.

• 17:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, no, there's so many. And, you know, just to dispel some myths, maybe we could start there. Because the 10,000, I'm very familiar with the research upon which the 10,000-hour rule, coined by Gladwell, or at least popularized by Michael Gladwell, has been used. There are many, many ways to circumvent that in almost any skill. And I think that my, the way I study the anomalies rather than discard them as outliers, if that makes sense. And, you know, I remember at some point, because I'm a sort of amateur fan of finance and investing and whatnot. The angel investing is a whole separate story, very different from the public markets, certainly.

• 18:24Tim Ferriss?

  But I think there was at one point Warren Buffett was addressing efficient market theory. And he said, "Well, you could say yes, if you have 10,000 orangutans flipping quarters, like eventually you'll find like 10 orangutans who have flipped heads 100 times in a row. And statistically sure, you could point out that that doesn't necessarily indicate they have any skill at coin flipping, blah, blah, blah. But if they all happen to come from a particular place in Omaha, you might want to go see like what the zookeeper is doing." And so I look for, I look for particularly odd concentrations of anomalies. And you can find them in many different gyms. I happen to look at athletic performance a lot because, and I'm going to come back

• 19:08Tim Ferriss?

  to your point of easy tips, because many people in, say, the hedge fund world, or the, you pick, pick the sphere of elite performance that is non-physical. At some point, they decided that they were genetically predetermined to be able to do certain things and not be able to do other things. So they were always the fat kid, I'm just big bone, that's not something I can change. And so they are partially complete in that way. They're extremely world-class at optimizing for, say, reading technicals and trading in a certain fashion. Or predicting kind of doomsday scenarios and formulating positions accordingly.

• 19:49Tim Ferriss?

  But they've, in their mind, they view as one of the unchangeable aspects of themselves, strength, endurance, sleep, I've always had insomnia, whatever it might be. And by showing them, well, here's a 12-year-old high school girl who a year and a half ago had never been to a weight room and now she deadlifts 450 pounds for repetitions. Maybe you could do this. It offers them a glimpse into what is possible. And as an example of some of the very easy things that people could do, if you wanted to develop, say, a basic ability in Spanish, a conversational ability in Spanish, you

• 20:31Tim Ferriss?

  could look at someone named Michelle Thomas, M-I-C-H-E-L, and the original recordings and you could get to a basic level of conversational Spanish in a week. You could get to fluency in eight to 12 weeks, which is something that I've looked at very closely, language learning. I think you can become functionally fluent in almost any language in eight to 12 weeks. Another example would be breakfast, as Mark said, and specifically 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. And could it be 20 grams? Could it be 40 grams? Could it be 20 minutes? Could it be 40 minutes? Sure. The 30 within 30 is easy to remember. And the good program or protocol that you follow is better than the perfect program or protocol that you don't.

• 21:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I think this is also where a lot of top minds in finance fail, is they try to change too many things at once. And there's a decision fatigue that sets in when you're trying to acquire new habits. But, which is why when I start with someone who's very busy, very driven, I never start with exercise, personally. I try not to, because that is an additional activity that gets layered on top of their current obligations. But you have to eat breakfast, or you have to eat. You're going to, that is a default behavior and we're just going to swap in a new meal. So if you were to have, say... Lentils, you could eat them straight out of the can. If you want. Some spinach.

• 21:56Tim Ferriss?

  Could just eat raw spinach if you want, or microwave it, doesn't really matter. And two whole eggs every morning. If you were to do that, and I won't digress into all the details of why those three are a very interesting combination. But spinach, lentils, and eggs. You could prepare it in three minutes. If you have that breakfast within, say, thirty minutes of waking up, it's not uncommon if you have more than twenty percent body fat that you'll lose twenty pounds in the first month, particularly if you're a male. And that would be a very simple hack. So it's like, okay, that's your new breakfast. Try that for a month, don't change anything else, and you'll very typically see people lose fifteen to twenty pounds.

• 22:37Tim Ferriss?

  If people have trouble sleeping, they have lifelong insomniacs, as I was for a very long time. They feel groggy in the morning, even if they get a lot of sleep, or think they've gotten a lot of sleep. It's oftentimes from low blood sugar and not from the length of sleep or lack thereof. So you could have a tablespoon of unsweetened almond butter before you go to sleep. And you'll see a lot of people who are chronically fatigued fix just like that. And I diagnosed that for myself by implanting a glucose monitor in my side intended for type one diabetics that gave me a readout twenty-four seven that I could then correlate to my food journal.

• 23:19Tim Ferriss?

  I do all the crazy guinea pig stuff so that other people don't have to. And if you have to have a cheat meal, so let's say you're like, ah, I'm gonna go out with my in-laws, they're Italian, I'm gonna have to eat pasta, you know, I'm really trying to be good and I have to eat pasta. What can you do? Well, you could have a bit of vinegar. You could like have a tablespoon of vinegar before the meal, which will help to lower the glycemic index. So your insulin and glycemic or glucose response to that meal. There are all sorts of tiny little tricks and the key for me at least is finding the smallest behavior, the smallest change that will produce the disproportionately largest

• 24:03Tim Ferriss?

  result for someone so they continue to take my advice. That's it. I want to give them the minimum effective dose, just like medicine. I don't want to give you too little because you won't get any result. I give you too much, you're going to have side effects, societal, financial, otherwise, familial. But if I give you just the smallest thing, I say, "All right, look, I know you hate exercise, you don't want to do any of this stuff. I want you to do kettlebell swings, one set, once a week, in the following way. It's going to take three minutes. Kettlebell can fit in 12 square inches on the floor. That's all I want you to do, no more." And if I can use that as the gateway drug into the behavioral change that I want, then I can get them to do almost anything, once they start seeing the results. You want to put on 20, 30 pounds of muscle in a month? You can do it.

• 24:48Tim Ferriss?

  If you have, you know, let's just say if you're 170 pounds or more to start with. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to learn how to memorize a thousand digits, a string of a thousand random digits, you can train someone to do that in a week. And so these impossibles, once you take one of them and reframe them as a possible. So for instance, when I did genetic testing through Navagenx, 23andMe, et cetera, I have something called a nonsense allele for the Actin3 gene. All that means is I shouldn't be able to really produce fast twitch muscle fiber. So I'm doomed. Can't be fast, can't be strong, et cetera. Well, it turns out, when I took a muscle biopsy out of my, the side of my leg, my lastus, what is it?

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  The, yeah, vastus lateralis, I believe, and we analyzed it, I had a very high percentage of type 2A muscle fibers, which is trainable. Right? So I was able to basically renegotiate my genetic destiny, at least according to the current. State of the art testing. And so I always feel like outside of very few areas, maybe the law in some cases, reality is negotiable and that includes physical performance. And that's a great way to shock people into believing that all these other things are possible.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  The thing that I've looked at, that the thing I'm spending more time thinking about is time itself. Time is, I think, one of the hardest things to control because it's a concept we don't really know how to grasp and how to deal with. I think, how do you look at time and how do you control that element that gets people kind of breathless with the fear that I just can't do all this stuff?

• 26:30Tim Ferriss?

  I think of time as one of several currencies. So I think it's very easy to think of, and normal to think of money as a currency, because it is. But what is a currency? A currency is something that you trade for something else, right? So you use that money to purchase an experience or a possession, let's just say. Similarly, you have time, perhaps you have mobility as another currency. And time is non-renewable, whereas capital is renewable. So in the hierarchy of prioritization, you know, the time should take, past a certain point on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

• 27:11Tim Ferriss?

  Time should take, should become your number one priority and allocating that effectively. So I think that

• 27:22Tim Ferriss?

  if you don't have time, it's an indication of not having sufficiently clear priorities. I think that's it.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  And when I think about time, again, I'm not, personally, I'm less interested in can I cram more into a day?

• 27:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  It's how do I get the most, the highest quality of life?

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Out of the, out of the time that I've got.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So I think there are many different ways to approach it and there are many people who do, who do a lot of thinking in this area. I think, I think that there are a lot of contemporary thinkers in David Allen. There are a lot of, of course, you can go as far back, Ben Franklin and beyond, Marcus Aurelius. But I think Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, is a fantastic place to start. And the focus on

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Effectiveness over efficiency. So effectiveness being choosing your activities wisely. And then efficiency being doing those activities well. But doing something well does not make it important. And I think there's a lot of, it's very easy to conflate those two in a world where you are, you are, you are constantly hit with propaganda for the latest tools. But the principles are more important than the tools. And if you're, if you're a good artist, you can use a crayon or a piece of chalk or a paintbrush. But if, if you're constantly just devising the latest tool and you never develop those artistic skills, it doesn't matter.

• 28:53Tim Ferriss?

  And similarly, I think the, the deciding what is important, deciding what is, which is oftentimes what makes you the most uncomfortable, I think. And then you'd least want to do. A pretty good indicator. The general principles of, of thinking about prioritization remain fairly, fairly consistent, I think. And for me, and many of the top performers that I see in, say, just in the startup world, because it's a very exaggerated, it's a very, it's a, it's a world in which you can look at, every little problem gets magnified dramatically because of the velocity at which many of these companies are growing.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  So a small mistake turns into a very big mistake very quickly, which makes it easier to see. And for, for people who are growing at the rate of, say, an Uber, which is unprecedented in the history of startups. Or anywhere else, I can apply this in my own life. But if you have, say, five to do items, what is the one of those five that, if completed, renders the other four unimportant? Or that makes the other four easier to solve, easier to address? And, and trying to pick the lead domino in that respect and prioritize and allocate time accordingly. I think is just, is a very simplistic way, but effective way

• 30:20Tim Ferriss?

  to go about picking that. And I like to think of it as the lead domino that just knocks over the others. Or which, which of these decisions can I focus on that will prevent a thousand decisions in the future? And that's a very sort of engineer-like way to approach, say, Engineers or computer scientists have a general hatred of repetitive tasks. So if something needs to be repeated, they want to create a script or a program to run that. And you can do that by deciding what your decision-making framework is in advance. So those are a few of the ways that I think, very simple, but simple works. If the solution that you find is complicated, it's probably not the right solution.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  So, you know, Tim, I guess, and it gets back to what I was saying a little bit earlier. You've got people in the hedge fund industry and the investment industry. I mean, these are typically driven people, they're intelligent people, and they focus their efforts on their work. And it's satisfying, somewhat satisfying to extremely satisfying. What you and Josh Waits can have helped me do is access other parts of my life and parts of myself and do so very easily. Where the, I guess, the delta in terms of improvement is massive for very small amounts

• 31:49Speaker 04

  of effort. And I think that hedge fund managers particularly, they're the exact right people who are poised to kind of take advantage of some of the tools and some of the tricks that you employ. I mean, two things that really come to mind. You like to talk about like taking ice baths. I take freezing cold showers and it's absolute nirvana. Another thing that maybe you could talk about a little bit about is like lucid dreaming and using lucid dreaming to massively improve performance and improve that sort of conscious, subconscious brain connection. And maybe, you know, I know you've used lucid dreaming to train in wrestling in high school.

• 32:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I can talk about both. So the ice baths or cold therapy, and there are different ways to do it, you can use ice packs on the back of the neck, really came out of conversations I had with a former NASA researcher named Ray Cronice. And he had tripled his rate of fat loss, which he... He's an expert in thermodynamics. He measured everything very meticulously after becoming fascinated by how Phelps could eat, you know, 10-plus thousand calories per day. Why would that be? And he started looking at the effects of water exposure at different temperatures on caloric expenditure. Long story short, cold exposure can improve immune function, be very effective as an

• 33:19Tim Ferriss?

  antidepressant therapy. It affects hormones, including things like adiponectin, that then consequently lead to an increased rate of fat loss in many cases, you know, thermogenesis related to fat. And that was in the Four Hour Body. A lot of people kind of scoffed at it. It's now, since been in the New York Times, probably half a dozen times. I think it's just written about a month or two ago. And it's extremely effective, and it's an example, like you said, of something that takes next to no time. You take two bags of ice, put it in a tub, jump in for five minutes, and it can have a tremendous effect on you, not only for the subsequent, say, four to five hours where you feel like you're on cloud nine in many cases, where you're just, your mood and your

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  mental performance is highly elevated, it's not subtle, to the longer-term cumulative fat loss effects, which can be really tremendous, I mean, tripling your rate of fat loss just by a very short intervention like that. So that would be one interesting example. I've been looking at recently the opposite, which is using heat shock, so saunas, for increasing, say, growth hormone release in combination with types of exercise. So studying how the extremes impact your physiology is very interesting to me. But lucid dreaming is, lucid dreaming is a fascinating subject. So for those people who aren't familiar, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming and

• 34:45Tim Ferriss?

  you become conscious of the fact that you are dreaming. And it doesn't have to be anything woo woo. There's nothing woo woo about it. And they've demonstrated, I think it was at Stanford. They've proved that it existed by having people memorize before sleep, subjects, eye movement patterns. Because in REM sleep, your eye movement in the dream correlates to your physical movement when you're laying down. So they could do like, left, left, right, left, left, right, right. And they could do that, and they could track with an EEG or other tools, that they were in REM sleep and in fact sleeping. So they're like, okay, now I'm dreaming, just checking in with the researcher, you know, left, left, right, right, etc.

• 35:25Tim Ferriss?

  And when you develop the ability to extend your lucid dreaming experience, and there's a great book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Steven Le Berge, that makes it quite simple. But there are exercises that you implement throughout your waking day, which are called reality checks, where you'll look at aspects of reality that change very frequently in a dream state. So complex patterns, if you had, say, tiles that were laid a certain way longitudinally on the floor, you could look away and look back. And if it changes orientation, you're dreaming. If it doesn't, you're probably not dreaming. If you look at a digital watch display,

• 36:07Tim Ferriss?

  that will also, because you're constantly recreating the landscape in a dream, that will change if you look away and look back. And you start to develop, and this also pairs very well with something like transcendental meditation or vipassana meditation. But you get to a point where you can go into a dream state, no longer view sleep as a waste of time, a lot of people do. And you can further reinforce or develop your skills while you're sleeping. So the example that you referred to, you can get to the point where you're spending the vast majority of your REM sleep cycles, you know, awake in your dream. And what I did when I was a competitive wrestler, and, you know, I went to prep nationals and was an All-American in my weight class. But...

• 36:53Tim Ferriss?

  My, one of my idols at the time was John Smith, who was an incredible Olympian and competitor. Went on to then, I think it was Oklahoma State, and dominate as coach. Really pioneered low leg attacks. And I would, in my dream, because I'd watched so many videos of John Smith, I would train with John Smith. And there was a very direct transfer of skill improvement from the, from that state to subsequent practices, which is not that crazy, if you think about it, because there are many studies that have looked at, say, skiing aerialists. So, people who, different types of ski jumpers or divers. And looking at the impact of replacing a training session with visualization.

• 37:38Tim Ferriss?

  And they get to see the same, they see, they see gains in performance. And that's exactly what you're doing when you are dreaming, but you get the benefit of sort of a simulated kinesthetic experience. So, it's a fascinating tool that is really underutilized and underexploited. And it's fun. It's so much fun. Which, at the end of the day, it's like, look, like, what are we doing this all for? I mean, and you get to a point, when you're playing the game, and it is a game, we all choose the games we want to play. But it's like, you get to a point, you're like, okay, I've proven I'm really good at this. I'm able to meet my needs. I can certainly satisfy a lot of my wants. Like, what are these psychological states that I want more of? What are the psychological states that I want less of?

• 38:22Tim Ferriss?

  And the lucid dreaming is wonderful in the sense that it not only improves performance, it helps you develop present state awareness. And it puts you into a similar state if you practice lucid dreaming, because throughout the day you're doing these reality checks, what is that doing? It's like meditating for 15 seconds, 10 times a day. So, you develop a calmness and awareness of how you're feeling, so that you don't... Make emotionally based decisions that are bad for you. And that translates very directly to investing. Particularly for the stuff that I don't do much of. I mean, I tend to hold stuff for a long time in the private markets because that's my game that I've chosen to play because I know my lesser self will make bad decisions if I'm

• 39:05Tim Ferriss?

  allowed to play in some of the sandboxes that you guys play in. But certainly, all the more reason for, I think, people in the hedge fund world, if they're making daily or weekly or monthly decisions about positions and whatnot, to have a consistent practice so that they can become the observer of their emotional self.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  That's the question is, how do you know? Because you identified, you know yourself and you know you wouldn't be a good short-term trader, for example. But you know if you've got a longer strategic view, you're probably, that's your skillset. How do you learn that? Because that's a, a lot of people don't get this bit, when certain people are good at certain types of things. How do you understand what you're good at?

• 39:48Tim Ferriss?

  Test. You throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and you see what sticks and you see what you enjoy and you see what you dislike. In my particular case, I've actually, I've done, despite myself, done reasonably well in the public markets with a handful of stocks that I've bought. I mean Pixar was the first stock I ever bought. And then there's a point where I bought Amazon, and Amazon did really, really well. But in 2008, when everything was going to, well, seemingly, if you watch too much television, going to hell in a handbasket. And I spend, just by the very nature of, you know, the blog with 2 million readers per month or so, I'm online a decent amount to write and communicate.

• 40:31Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm exposed to a lot of this noise, this Chicken Little, the sky's falling hysteria, for instance, in 2008. And...

• 40:43Tim Ferriss?

  What I realized about myself is that if I can watch a chart of the value of my holding going up and down and Mr. Market is tapping me on the shoulder, asking, "Are you sure you want to hold this? Would you like to sell? I really think you should sell. But wait, wait, wait, it just went down. Maybe you should buy some more. You want to buy some more?" That monkey mind is very untrained in me. It is so poorly behaved and it's such a bastardly little saboteur in my mind. I need to create constraints that allow me to utilize my strengths while mitigating my weaknesses. And the way I do that is by investing in startups where I have an informational advantage,

• 41:26Tim Ferriss?

  where I have a product advantage, and I can also poll, say, you know, a million-plus people who are 20 to 40, 25 to 40-year-old males in metropolitan cities, primarily on the coasts, who have high disposable income. I can get a very good read on those things, do a lot of front-end due diligence, make a decision, and then I'm locked in. That protects me against second-guessing and making subsequent decisions that are going to sabotage the good work I did in the first place. But I learned that by trying different types of investing.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  So do you think maybe, you talked about journals before, which I think is an interesting concept because there's a certain intellectual integrity when you have to write it down and be honest with yourself. And I think a lot of people in investing aren't honest with themselves. I think it was Paul Tudor Jones would say to me that the thing that he learns about what makes a good investor is to have your time horizon and your investment horizon at the same. So your idea time horizon usually is, "I think the dollar is going to go up over three years. I'm going to put that trade on over two weeks." That's wrong because it's a big mismatch. And it's all of that intellectual integrity about what you're actually trying to do and who you are. And then it allows you to do that, I guess, to then focus exactly where you know your strengths are.

• 42:38Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, and I think that journaling is one example. I think has tremendous value,

• 42:46Tim Ferriss?

  especially if you don't view yourself as a writer. Because what writing allows you to do, and we could call it journaling just so people don't get intimidated,

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  it is allowing you to freeze your thoughts in a form that you can analyze.

• 43:02Tim Ferriss?

  You're not going to take the time to record yourself for hours and go over it. But you can write two pages every morning. And what I would encourage people to do, particularly if they're dealing with the stresses of a high-pressure trading environment or investment environment, is write down their fears and worries and explore those because it will clarify what they are. Sometimes they'll end up unfounded, which can remove them as an influence that could lead to bad decisions or impulsive decisions. Other times, it'll clarify ways that those risks can be mitigated. But when it's simply a five-second worry that is sort of on a loop, that repeats itself

• 43:44Tim Ferriss?

  every hour or two, you never get that level of resolution. So literally, have some coffee, have some tea, five to 10 minutes in the morning, just freehand, write about what you're worried about for the day, what you're fearful of. It's hugely pragmatic. It's not just a self-indulgent poetic exercise.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  So what do you do when you... So I've written that down and I've done it for a week. Now, how do I analyze that? And how long do I need to do it before I've got a decent data set to deal with? And what do I do with it when I've got it?

• 44:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so, okay, this is a good question. So I thought when I started doing this that the value would be in spotting the patterns, going back and analyzing. And there is value in that. But part of the value is you're taking these muddy, distracting thoughts and imprisoning them on paper so that you can get on with your day and act analytically and effectively without irrational concerns affecting your rational process.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  So you're just taking it out of your mind, plonking it over there for the time being?

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's it.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 44:51Tim Ferriss?

  And it's...

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Surprisingly effective, and it's so simple.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, some people do that at night, you know, if you've got that, you know, you've got the night horrors and you're thinking about something, writing it down.

• 45:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, get it out of your head.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  It's out of your head and then you can do it.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  You know, one of the interesting things that you and Josh had me implement was, you know, in terms of taking advantage of the subconscious mind was feeding myself questions or problems to deal with before I entered into one of these periods like sleep or meditation or exercise. Can you maybe, you know, expand on that? I don't know.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Or how that works.

• 45:34Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. I think that it is a wasted opportunity if, there are just sort of different levels of processing and that ranges, there are many different ways to frame this. You know, Daniel Kahneman, who wrote, you know, I think this is Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, talks about system one, system two. People talk about the conscious and subconscious. But if you look at talking about pattern recognition, a lot of the breakthroughs, the sort of lateral or oblique discoveries that people make that are non-obvious, they often happen in the showers, they often happen when listening to music, they often happen when daydreaming, they often happen in the middle of the night in a dream, et cetera.

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  And you can encourage that by prompting that level of processing with a question before you go to bed. And, which is why when I journal, it's typically, you know, five minutes first thing in the morning, five minutes before I go to bed. And I also do a little bit of sort of post-game analysis on the day, at the end of the day. But that's another, you know, very, very simple approach for allowing that, those idle CPU cycles. As we think of them as idle when we're sleeping, well, it's not totally accurate, to have a problem to chew on. You know, it's almost like when, you know, what some people are doing with distributed

• 47:02Tim Ferriss?

  technology now, where you might have, say, you're trying to borrow computing power to look at protein folding. And so Sony will make, you know, the PS3s in a distributed fashion, if people opt in, available for that type of like offline processing, when they're not in use for, you know, Call of Duty or whatever. So when you're not in Call of Duty, i.e. your job, you can assign a problem in a very similar way to an extremely powerful computer, which is your brain, to work on while you're asleep. And it doesn't always produce breakthroughs, of course, but it's a fantastic practice to get into, and it's also something that really doesn't take any extra time.

• 47:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's not an additive activity. It doesn't displace anything else.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  One of the things I wanted to make sure we got in this interview is a little bit about yourself, and specifically, there's an excellent book, probably read, Robert Greene's Mastery.

• 48:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  And, you know, in it, Greene says, you know, there are kind of three stages to mastery, and the most important is the first one, which is, you know, identifying your calling. I look at you, you're a world-class ballroom dancer, martial artist, you know, life coach. I mean, you seem to have mastered so many different things. You know, what's your calling? Where does this, where does it all come from? Is this cultivated?

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's definitely cultivated. I, so the calling, I think, is studying meta-learning. So the...

• 48:41Tim Ferriss?

  Teaching people how to learn or learning how to learn. What is, what is the framework that can be imposed on any skill? That is my calling is to study that, test that, research that, and then hand that toolkit to as many people as possible. And it's absolutely a learned skill. I remember when I was in, in high school, I had to leave my Spanish class because it was too hard for me. And I concluded I was bad at Spanish and I'm bad at languages. And a lot of people make these decisions in junior high or high school. They carry with them for the rest of their lives. You know, they have someone make fun of their singing. Oh, I'm a terrible singer. I can't sing. And they carry that for decades. And for me, that happened with language learning. And then I took, I took a year abroad in Japan as an exchange student.

• 49:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I had, it wasn't an optional activity. I had to learn Japanese. I was going to a Japanese high school. And I used judo textbooks. And I deconstructed ways of approaching characters so that I could learn how to read and write. And came back and I realized that, you know, I'd gone from Japanese one to Japanese level six at, at my high school in six months. And I was like, okay, well now I need to really reconsider this bad at languages conclusion that I reached. It wasn't bad at languages. It was that I had a bad set of instructions. I had a bad recipe. So I think my calling is to

• 50:00Tim Ferriss?

  master the art of meta-learning. Because a lot of people, there are people who will look at the various areas in which I experiment. So I was like, all right, he's taking muscle biopsies and implanting glucose monitors and spending time with black market chemists and like NFL combine trainers. And then he's doing the startup stuff. This guy's a jack of all trades. And on some level, that's true. But what's missed when they, they miss the layer on top of that, which is the meta-learning. There is a common thread and there is a common goal, which is figuring out what are the untested assumptions?

• 50:36Tim Ferriss?

  What are the best practices that I can test? That I can even attempt the opposite of? Like the deadlift, you know, perfect example. You have people who will say, well, you know, your strongest range of motions is from the knee ups, you want to do rack pulls and all this stuff. But you find someone like Barry Ross in Los Angeles, who's produced multiple world champions, and he pulls from the floor up to just below the knee, it's just a few inches, and then they drop the bar. And they do that two to three times, that's a full set. They do less than five minutes of total time under tension per week. And I put almost 120 pounds on my deadlift in like eight to 10 weeks.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  And it's the same thing on your recommendation. It's unbelievable.

• 51:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's insane. And I would encourage, and Socrates would say the same thing, this is not a new recommendation, but for people who really want to open their mind to what is possible in every sphere of their lives, particularly if you're male, but not exclusively, get extremely strong. Read, and I'm sure you can find it, people have talked about it online, but the effortless superhuman chapter in The Four Hour Body on the deadlift. Just get, you will not gain a lot of mass, probably less than 10 pounds, and you could add like 100 to 200 pounds on your deadlift. Do that, and the lens through which you view everything will be different. It'll be like looking at the Matrix.

• 51:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that one of my guiding tenets, if I had one, would be, quote from Mark Twain, which is, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. So when you've reached a cheery consensus of any type, it's time to be like, oh, wait, like, let me just time out and ask, what do we all believe is true? And run through and just ask, for each of them, what if the opposite were true?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  The question I wanted to ask is, so if you spend so much time analyzing, improving, when do you get to the state of equilibrium? Because otherwise, you end up with your monkey mind focusing on you and trying to tweak all the bits and pieces. When do you get to the point where you say, okay, you know, I've got to the kind of status quo, or is there no status quo? Is it all about constant improvement?

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm very aggressive and very competitive. I think that, well, there's sort of a subtext to that question that I think is important, which is related to satisfaction or dissatisfaction. I don't think that seeking constant improvement and dissatisfaction have to go hand in hand. So I feel like if you're not getting stronger, you're getting weaker. If you're not getting younger, you're getting older. If you're not getting further away from death, you're getting closer. And there's no equilibrium? The biological system generally doesn't work that way. I mean, there are some forms of homeostasis the body seeks to achieve,

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  but I think that I'm constantly trying to improve. It doesn't mean I'm trying to improve everything, but I'm trying to improve something. And however, the lucid dreaming, some type of mindfulness practice, which can be jujitsu, it can be transcendental meditation, doesn't need to be staring at a candle flame in your mind's eye. That's not designed for everyone. Although you can use apps like Headspace or Calm, which are very effective for people who otherwise can't sit still for 10 minutes. When you develop, when you allocate time for some type of appreciation, that is how you reach equilibrium with the drive for achievement.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  And when you find someone who is solely focused on achievement and has not created the bandwidth or time or activities for appreciation, they're usually pretty miserable. And I mean, I'm sure you guys know a lot of very successful, financially successful people. Certainly, I know lots of very financially successful people who are utterly miserable. And I think the danger in pursuing that game exclusively is that you get to a point where you have all the money. That could possibly solve your problems and you realize that it doesn't solve all your problems. So you're solving the wrong problems. And that's why I think some of the richest people are the most miserable.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Because when people have less money, they can hold out with the hope that money will fix these intrinsically sort of existential or physical or emotional or psychological problems. But when you reach the pinnacle, then you're like, wait a second. I still have this whole set of problems. I thought that an extra X amount of dollars per year would have solved this. Lo and behold, no, you still have the work to do. So I think that, you know, developing a holistic set of practices that appreciates the full human, including the body, which is, it is your machine.

• 55:35Tim Ferriss?

  You can't just take care of the driver, i.e. the mind. Like, you need the Ferrari, so you should really care for it. But I think that the way you reach equilibrium or a sensation of balance is by having the appreciation and a set of activities and practices for that. And then a set of activities and behaviors for achievement.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think just one thing I'd add to it is, and I think something that you and Josh have taught me is just to love the process. So, you know, I mean, you're pushing, you're pushing, you're working, you're working, you're working, but you, it's not even stopping and smelling the roses, but it's enjoying the path.

• 56:17Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  And loving the path.

• 56:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, absolutely. And I think that it's perhaps cliched, you know, to say life is a journey, not a destination. But at the end of the day, I think from a very strictly pragmatic standpoint, you have to focus on the process because due to good or bad luck, you can get a, you can get a bad result after a very good process, you can get a great result after a very bad process. So your method of investing could be covering your eyes and, you know, throwing a dart at a dartboard with a list of companies on it, and you could get lucky and have a great outcome, but that doesn't make that a good process. And vice versa, you could do all the research in the world and there's some blind spot

• 57:02Tim Ferriss?

  that you couldn't have identified and you end up with a bad result. But the way that you, the way that you end up, I think, being proud of How you are building is by refining and trying to have the most perfect process possible. And that also, I think, prevents a lot of the

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  sort of depression and malaise that can come from bad outcomes, which are just part of the game.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, particularly in financial markets. What's interesting in financial markets is is losing, even if you lose only a small amount of the time, that losing part, the pain of that far outweighs the benefits of when you're actually making any money.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a really good book called, that I enjoyed anyway, called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, which looks at sort of the psychological dynamics of making and losing money and what happens when you personalize those or attribute to talent what should not be attributed to talent or lack thereof. But what I realized, for instance, when we were talking earlier about how I realized I was not well-suited for the public markets personally, if I'm the one doing the managing of that, is I realized that exactly that, that a small loss, the magnitude of that negative emotion was exponentially larger than even if I made five times that amount positively.

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  And as a result, I didn't have the stomach to invest enough where a reasonable rate of return would be meaningful to me. And I was like, on the pro and con list, that makes that ill-suited to my temperament and psychology.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  But like, you know, very oddly enough, you know, people might say, oh, well, you don't have the risk tolerance. It's like, no, no, no, I don't have the appetite for that type of risk. But I can do a binary investment in a startup where it's going to be zero or 10x or 100x, and I have no problem with that. I'm much more comfortable with that because

• 59:05Tim Ferriss?

  between the investment and the outcome, I'm prevented from making bad decisions.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right, because in private investing, you don't get the choice of marking to market. You don't have to worry about, you know, am I off, you know, am I losing 10% today, tomorrow, whatever it is. It's just like, I'm in it for the ride. I've made my decision. And the payoff is that, the loss is that, and that's it.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  That's it, right, exactly.

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  I think investing is a good metaphor for life. I mean, it's allocation. It's allocation of resources. And sort of bringing it back to what we were talking about earlier. It's a mistake to view your primary and only currency as capital. I think time and mobility, these all determine the actual value of your capital. Because if you don't have time, you can't exchange that money for experiences.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  The capital, your capital is your quality of life, I guess, in some way, shape or form. And all of those are the currencies that you trade for that?

• 1:00:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yes. Absolutely.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Great. Tim, well, thanks very much. And Mark, thanks a lot. I think it's been really fascinating.

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Absolutely.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Cheers.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Hope you enjoyed that chat, everyone. And if you'd like more on investing, hedge funds, finance, et cetera, et cetera, you might enjoy a number of the interviews that I have done for The Tim Ferriss Show, including Peter Thiel, who is a co-founder of PayPal, first money into Facebook, or Arnold Schwarzenegger on his real estate empire and how Twins became his most profitable movie, for instance, for him personally. And you can find all of that at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And then for Real Vision, Real Vision TV, that's what you just listened to, go to realvisionTV.com and if you use the code TIM, T I M, you can get $100 off. So it's not $400 a year, it's $300 a year. I don't make anything from it. I just think they're doing very interesting work.

• 1:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  So realvisionTV.com, code TIM. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you soon. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers. And I have used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge... Huge hit. And here's how it works. And you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt,

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  whatever, you go to 99designs.com. You describe your project and then, within a week or less, you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it. I have mentioned it before, including in the Four Hour Work Week as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So, check it out. And until next time, thank you for listening.