#572: In Case You Missed It: January 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This is a special inbetweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from last month. It features the first 15 or so minutes from each conversation in one place, so you can easily jump around to get a taste for the episode and guest. See it as a teaser. Something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, you can of course find the full episodes at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap. Please enjoy! P. S. If you have any feedback, please let me know on Twitter (@tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss) and mention me and @TeamTimFerriss https://twitter.com/teamtimferriss, plus #experiment, so that we can easily find it. *** Timestamps: Rich Roll https://tim.blog/2022/01/04/rich-roll/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 00:02:06 Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 00:19:06 Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 00:34:21 Michael Gervais https://tim.blog/2022/01/14/michael-gervais-2/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 00:47:01 Michael Schur https://tim.blog/2022/01/19/michael-schur/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 01:00:32 John List https://tim.blog/2022/01/26/john-list/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 01:15:32 Sue Flood https://tim.blog/2022/01/28/sue-flood/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap: 01:30:45 *** Full episode titles: #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond #562: Dr. Michio Kaku — Exploring Time Travel, the Beauty of Physics, Parallel Universes, the Mind of God, String Theory, Lessons from Einstein, and More #563: Sarah Silverman — The Joy of Being Alone, Becoming Your Own Best Friend, Insights from Therapy, and More #564: Performance Psychologist Michael Gervais — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities #567: A Rare Podcast at 30 Below Zero — Sue Flood on Antarctica, Making Your Own Luck, Chasing David Attenborough, and Reinventing Yourself *** For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on, that you can apply to your own lives. This is a special in-between episode. I haven't done one of these in a while, and it is a first-of-a-kind experiment on this podcast. It is a recap of the episodes from last month. So we're pulling snippets from all the episodes from last month. It features the first 15 or so minutes from each conversation in one place, so you can easily jump around to get a taste for each episode and each guest. I want to know what you think, because if this works, fantastic.

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  If it can be improved, fantastic. If it's terrible, not fantastic. Please let me know. So, look at it as a teaser, something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, then you can jump into each of the episodes, or any of the episodes, at tim.blog/podcast. But I recognize you've got a lot of demands on your time, and this is an easy way to provide a buffet, a sampler of sorts. And then you can choose, pick and choose your favorites. So, please enjoy, and again, send feedback. If you think other formats would work better for this, or you have other ideas for experimental formats for the podcast that I could play with, please send it on Twitter to @tferriss, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, and @teamtimferriss.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  Good luck spelling that. If you're a long-term listener, I hope you can at this point spell that. And just #experiment for now, and that'll help us find it. But you can send feedback on Twitter, and as always, thank you for listening.

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so excited to have my guest today. His name is Rich Roll, and I'm going to start in an unorthodox way, and that is by reading a tweet. I don't really do this. I don't know if I've ever done this, but this is a tweet from October 2018, and I think Rich is probably going to see where this is going. Just before his 52nd birthday, here's the tweet. "I didn't reach my athletic peak until I was 43. I didn't write my first book until I was 44. I didn't start my podcast until I was 45. At 30, I thought my life was over. At 52, I know it's just beginning. Keep running, never give up, and watch your kites soar." Then there's actually another tweet within context. So I've retweeted this. For people

• 2:50Tim Ferriss?

  who want to see it, they can also find it, of course, @RichRoll, R-O-L-L. I want to mention one more thing before we get to more of the bio, and that is related to your first half Ironman. So this is in Outside Magazine, and here's the quote. "In my first half Ironman, I barfed during the swim. By the time I got off my bike, my legs were so cramped up that I ran 100 meters, for you Yanks like me, that's about 300 feet, and just stopped. It was DNF." That means he did not finish. "My beginnings in triathlon were very humble, but I loved it." All right, so I'm going to give this in drips and drabs, but let's start with paragraph one. So now, zooming out to present day, a little bit of retrospective.

• 3:36Tim Ferriss?

  "At age 40, Rich Roll, as I mentioned, @RichRoll on Twitter, made the decision to overhaul the sedentary throes of overweight middle age, and I might, I may or may not, be in that place just right now. Walking away from a career in law, he reinvented himself as a globally recognized ultra-distance endurance athlete, bestselling author and host of the wildly popular Rich Roll podcast, which I highly recommend, one of the world's most listened to podcasts with more than 200 million downloads." And I'm going to modify the next paragraph a little bit. Rich has been named one of the 25 fittest men in the world by Men's Fitness and the guru of reinvention by Outside Magazine. He's written a bestselling memoir, Finding Ultra, and has co-authored the cookbooks/lifestyle

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  guides, The Plant Power Way and The Plant Power Way Italia with his wife Julie, is it Piatt?

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Piatt.

• 4:28Tim Ferriss?

  Damn it, I knew I had a 50/50 chance there.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  It's a common, common thing. You're not alone.

• 4:35Tim Ferriss?

  This is showing where the, and how the sausage is made, because a professional would have asked, and in fact, I highlighted her last name to ask you before we started recording. But, you know, we live in

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Don't worry.

• 4:46Tim Ferriss?

  And just to get a few things mentioned, and we'll mention them again at the very end, richroll.com, you can find all things Rich-related, Rich Roll on all social, including Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, except for Facebook, which is Rich Roll Fans. Rich, welcome to the show.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me, Tim. It's really an honor to be able to join you for this, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation to come, so thanks for having me.

• 5:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, absolutely. Me too. And for those of you who can't see video, at some point, maybe you should check it out, because we have the perfect yin yang color template here. You have a rather disheveled Tim Ferriss in tan with white background, and Rich looking like a handsome devil with black clothing, black background. It's actually very striking. I should request that guests do this in the future. It will help viewers to keep them separate. So let's really dive in here, and I want to establish just a bit of background for folks, and we're going to go all over the place. So at age 40, right, so you make the decision to overhaul, dot, dot, dot.

• 5:53Tim Ferriss?

  But let's get granular, and maybe we could focus on one piece of this life puzzle, which is alcohol. And could you speak to the role that alcohol has played in your life? When it entered your life? When you really realized that you had a problem? Let's begin there, if you're open to it.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  It entered my life near the end of high school and the beginning of college. Prior to that, I was a very studious, highly motivated person who was very goal driven. And that grew out of, I think in retrospect, looking back on my life, on a deep insecurity that I had because as a young person, I was very much an introvert. I had a lot of difficulty connecting with other people and making friends. I certainly hadn't demonstrated any kind of athletic talent or ability. I was the typical, like prototypical kid who gets picked last for kickball and was very awkward and self-conscious.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  And at some point along the way, I discovered the sport of swimming and we could talk about that if you like, but that was the one thing where I kind of felt comfortable and showed some level of acumen at an early stage. And when you're a young person and you experience just a little bit of encouragement or success, you're going to kind of double down on that. And that's what I did. And I think there was something about being underwater in almost a metaphysical sense or a psychological sense where I felt protected, like it was almost like this womb where I was insulated from all of the confusing emotions that I had as a young person. And so swimming really became my focus and I realized early that I wasn't the most talented

• 7:41Speaker 04

  kid, but I had this capacity to suffer and to work hard and a willingness to go the extra mile. And with that sensibility, I was able to bridge the talent deficit gap to some extent, to the point where by the time I was a senior in high school, I was one of the better swimmers in the Washington DC area where I grew up. And the discipline that I learned in the swimming pool trickled into my academic pursuits. So I was able to go from a kid who really had trouble learning and was sort of a sit in the back of the class kind of guy to being a good student and ultimately getting into a bunch of fancy colleges. So at 18, I really was in a situation, a very privileged situation where the world

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Was very much my oyster and anything was possible. I ended up going to Stanford University. You know, I went to the opposite coast and I'm sure there's some psychological reasons why. You know, I flew 3,000 miles away to go to college. And it was, you know, the reason to go there was twofold. I mean, first of all, Stanford is Stanford and it's this amazing academic institution. But at the time, in the mid and late 1980s, it also had the number one NCAA Division One men's swimming program. They were like the most incredible team, the most insane assemblage of Olympic champions and world and American record holders and the like. And the opportunity to be a member of that team was like a dream that I couldn't even imagine for myself.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  So here I am in this incredibly privileged situation where anything truly is possible, but enter alcohol. And alcohol was something that I first was introduced to when I was doing recruiting trips and traveling to colleges, which is what you do when you're, you know, an athlete and trying to consider where to go to school. And I had some experiences there that really anchored in me from moment one that this was going to be a thing for me. Like I had that sensation that you hear about with recovering alcoholics where from the very first drink,

• 9:45Speaker 04

  it was like this warm blanket that I could wrap myself in and all my troubles and insecurities and fears and insecurities just sort of vanished. And for the first time, I felt comfortable in my own skin. And I just remember thinking, this is the way that I want to feel all the time. Like I could go to a party and I could strike up a conversation or crack a joke or talk to a girl, which were all things that were terrifying to me at the time. And so I just felt like I had found this solution that I had been looking for my whole life. This young person who felt like everybody else had a perfect roadmap for how to live. And suddenly, you know, those answers that eluded me were being provided in the form of this substance.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  And so when I got to Stanford, very quickly, well, quickly and gradually, but.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  I would say that I got more and more progressively more interested in like, where's my next good time than how am I going to create a foundation for a happy, successful life. And a lot of those aspirations that I had about athletics and academic excellence soon became secondary to, you know, where's the, where's the party tonight? And it was just a situation where over an extended period of time, like my, my life began to degrade. So it wasn't a situation in which I created cataclysms out of the gate that derailed me because I could function and it's easier to do that when you're younger, but I could function. I could comport myself in a way where I could still get good grades, show up for class, still,

• 11:20Speaker 04

  you know, go out partying until two or three in the morning and show up for 6:00 AM swim practice. But over time, like this is not a good recipe for, for living and, and, you know, I lived that way for a very long time until ultimately things got really dark and scary. And, you know, I hit that bottom that you hear about with people in recovery.

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  What did any of the bottoms or dark moments look like? If we could paint a picture of any example that comes to mind?

• 11:48Speaker 04

  First of all, I would say that there is, there was nothing like cool or rock and roll about any of it. Like it's just lonely, sad and, and kind of pathetic and deeply embarrassing, you know, just, you know, I would, I would drive drunk and like, wouldn't remember where I parked my car and would have to wake up the next morning and try to figure out where, where my car was when I was living in San Francisco, when I was fresh out of law school. One time I woke up one day, didn't want to go to my law firm job and like flew to Las Vegas and lost my wallet and woke up not remembering anything that had happened and trying to figure out how I'm going to get home, you know, stuff like that. That's just, you know, I was the guy who, who, you know, was the last to leave the party. And when you're in college, you know,

• 12:31Speaker 04

  maybe it's cute, but when you're 25, 26, 28, you know, nobody's living that way anymore. And you have to find other people to do that with what they call lower companions in the parts of recovery until ultimately there's no one left and you're just alone. And I was a guy who would drink alone in my apartment or wake up in the morning before work and have a vodka tonic in the shower. Like it was all very leaving Las Vegas. And I was only 31 at the time, but my disease had progressed to such a state where there was really only a couple. Things that were going to happen, either I was going to kill myself, kill another person, or end up in jail, or some kind of institution. And that's really kind of what ultimately led me to getting sober.

• 13:17Tim Ferriss?

  And would you say kill yourself, do you mean via alcohol poisoning, or a car accident, or via some deliberate suicide? What do you mean by that?

• 13:26Speaker 04

  I was never suicidal. I didn't have suicidal ideation, but my life was getting smaller and smaller and more lonely. So if I was able to kind of maintain that lifestyle over an extended period of time, I'm certain that I would have reached a level of desperation where that would have seemed like a good idea.

• 13:44Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose law? Why did you choose to pursue law?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Right out of college, I moved to New York City and got a job as a paralegal in a big law firm in New York called Skadden Arps. And that was a situation that should have told me immediately that maybe this wasn't the right path for me.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  But I think that I chose it not out of some kind of deliberate idea that it would be something I would be interested in, or show some proficiency in, but more as a reaction to social and familial pressures. This idea of not really knowing what I wanted to do, but hey, I can always go to law school and society will smile upon that. And I can put a nice suit on and have nice lunches and have interesting conversations with people and make a good living. I mean, my self-inquiry really didn't go any further than that. And there was nothing about like my interests that would have indicated that law was a good path for me.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  But I was so disconnected from myself that even asking myself that question at the time was anathema to who I was. But I'm a good student and I actually enjoyed law school. I enjoy the intellectual pursuits and all of that. But the practice of law is very different, at least in the corporate law firm context, very different than the law school experience.

• 15:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, very knowing many people who went to law school. I can, through secondhand stories, say that that seems to universally be the perspective that people.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, but and if you if you love it, if that's your thing, then more power to you. But I just remember walking the halls of, you know, the various law firms that I worked at, being confused that there seemed to be certain people that enjoyed it because I was just gritting my way through it, thinking, I'll just apply these tools that I learned in the swimming pool about suffering and pain tolerance. And I just thought everybody was having that internal experience. I'm sure many were, but there seems to be some people that seem to enjoy it. But I just know that the more that I kind of looked around, certainly with respect to the partners, that it was clear to me that I didn't really want that life. And yet I felt very stuck in that career path and unsure about how I could ever get out of it and do anything else.

• 16:01Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to spend, just for people listening and also for you, Rich, so you don't think that we're going to spend too much time in these waters, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about turnarounds, techniques, pattern matching, all sorts of things. But I do want to spend a little bit more time on this chapter, or maybe the chapters shortly after this point in time. What was the straw, what were the straws that broke the camel's back with respect to alcohol and seeking help?

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Well, there were a couple important inflection points, one of which was getting two DUIs essentially in a row with ridiculously high blood alcohol contents, looking at jail time, my boss finding out at the law firm and being on the precipice of getting fired. That's a whole rabbit hole, you know, sort of chaotic disaster that I weathered. Another one was a marriage, or I should say like a wedding that went awry. I got married and that relationship ended on the honeymoon, which is a whole crazy story.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  That is inextricably linked to, I mean, I was sober at the time, but it's very much linked to my alcoholism. So there's big events like that, but I think those situations created such a deep level of shame inside of me that I wasn't able to shake alcohol in the wake of those experiences because I didn't have the emotional tools to process them. So I continued to drink for a while. I mean, the wedding was really, you know, the nadir of the whole thing and a reasonable person would have woken up and gotten sober at that time, but I needed to medicate myself through that emotional shitstorm until one day I basically woke up

• 17:45Speaker 04

  and I was hungover, but it wasn't like I had reaped any kind of chaos the night before. But it's just that moment of realizing like I've had enough, like I can't live this way anymore. It's just so lonely and desperate and it only leads in one direction. And I think that's what it takes for anybody who has experience with addiction, particularly substance addiction. You have this sense, like you asked me earlier on, Tim, like when did I know I had a problem? Like I knew I had a problem very early on in my drinking career, but that's very different from the willingness to do anything about it. Like I harbored this notion that this was a problem for me, but you're also protecting it because you want to be able to keep doing it. And that's what leads to, you know, this sort

• 18:29Speaker 04

  of double life where you're hiding your behavior from other people and deluding yourself into thinking that they don't know what's going on. But ultimately you realize like everybody knows what's going on. And on some level, it's a process of stripping away those layers of denial until you can really face the objective truth of what you're doing. And that's a very terrifying thing. And so that's kind of what was going on inside of me until this day in 1998, where I was like, okay, I've had it. Like I'm, I'm ready to really take this seriously and do something about it.

• 19:06Tim Ferriss?

  My guest today is Dr. Michio Kaku. You can find him on Twitter @MichioKaku. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, co-founder of String Field Theory, and the author of several widely acclaimed science books, including Beyond Einstein, The Future of Humanity, The Future of the Mind, Hyperspace, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and his latest bestseller, The God Equation, subtitle, The Quest for a Theory of Everything. So we will have no shortage of things to discuss. He is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning, the host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Exploration, and a host of several science TV specials for the BBC and the Discovery and Science channels.

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  We will link to all of his social, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, in the show notes, but you can find him quite easily @MichioKaku in most cases. And Dr. Kaku, welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, glad to be on.

• 20:03Tim Ferriss?

  I thought I would start by rolling the clock back to your childhood. And my understanding is you did not come from a wealthy family, far from it, but that you certainly found time to build things. And I was wondering if there were any notable examples or examples that come to mind that you could share with the audience.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Well, you're right. Ever since I was a child, I knew that my parents were locked up during World War II in a relocation camp in California. Their assets were frozen. They were penniless when they were released from jail. And just because they were, you know, Japanese Americans, even though they were citizens, they were both citizens of the United States. They were both born in California, for God's sake. So when I was a child, I realized that if I was to do anything in this world, I would have to do it myself. So when I was eight years old, something happened which completely changed my life. I still remember, everyone was talking about the fact that a great scientist had just died.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  And on the evening paper, all they showed was a picture of his desk. That's it. There's a picture of his desk with an open book. And the caption said, "The greatest scientist of our time could not finish this book." Well, I was fascinated by this story. Why couldn't he finish it? I mean, he could ask his mother, right? He could go to the library. I mean, he could just look it up. What was so hard that a great scientist could not finish that book? Well, I went to the library and over the years, I began to find out this man's name was Albert Einstein. And that book, that book was to be the Theory of Everything,

• 21:56Speaker 05

  the God Equation, an equation perhaps no more than one inch long that would allow us to quote, "Read the mind of God." Well, I was hooked. I had to know what was this Unified Field Theory, the Theory of Everything, that was supposed to summarize all the laws of nature into such a compact form. So when I was in high school, I said to myself, "This is it." I want to be part of this great search for the Theory of Everything. So I went to my mom and I said, "Mom, can I have permission to build an atom smasher in the garage? A 2.3 million electron-volbetron electron accelerator in the garage?"

• 22:38Speaker 05

  She kind of stared at me and said, "Sure, why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage." Well, I took out the garbage and I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, so much wire that we had to wind it on the football field in my high school. And the atom smasher consumes 6 kilowatts of power, all the energy that my house had. Finally, it was ready. I plugged it in. I heard this huge crackling sound as 6 kilowatts of energy surged through my capacitor bank. And then I heard this pop-pop-pop sound as I blew out all the fuses in the house and the whole house was plunged in darkness.

• 23:23Speaker 05

  My poor mom, you know, she come home from a hard day's work and then she say to herself, Why couldn't I have a son who plays baseball? Why can't he play basketball? And for God's sake, why can't he find a nice Japanese girlfriend? Why does he build these machines in the garage? Well, yeah, because of these machines, I went to the National Science Fair. I won a grand prize. And I met the physicist who built the atomic bomb. I met Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. And he offered me a scholarship. That if I could get into Harvard, he would fund it. Well, I got into Harvard and yes,

• 24:04Speaker 05

  true to form, he financed a scholarship so I could go and fulfill my dream. Well, when I graduated from Harvard, he offered me a job. A job at Los Alamos Labs, Livermore Labs, designing hydrogen warheads. But you see, I had a different scenario. You see, for me, the hydrogen bomb was puny. It was not powerful enough. I wanted to work on the biggest explosion in the universe. The Big Bang. That is, the God equation set into motion the expansion of the universe itself. Now, that's for me.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  So I respectfully declined this very generous offer. But I said to myself, I want to work on the theory of everything. An equation no more than one inch long that would allow us to summarize all the laws of the universe into one compact form. I said to myself, that's for me.

• 25:09Tim Ferriss?

  I must ask, how did your patron, this person who paid your way through Harvard, respond when you declined his job offer?

• 25:18Speaker 05

  Well, the war in Vietnam was going full blast. He knew that a lot of his young recruits could not get a job because they were going to go into the military. And that's what I did. My draft board pretty much told me that I would go to Vietnam. And so I basically volunteered to go into the military, hoping to be part of Signal Corps. That as I figured, I could use some of my physics education in order to support telecommunications of our troops. Unfortunately, they put me in infantry. I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, where I learned how to go through machine gun fire. I went to Fort Lewis, Washington, where I learned to fire machine guns.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  In fact, I fired the entire United States Army's infantry, the whole slew of weapons fielded by the United States infantry. I fired them all. So I said to myself, yeah, I have to serve my country. What can I do?

• 26:19Tim Ferriss?

  Was there a conflict in your heart or mind having seen how your parents were treated in internment camps in serving this country? Was there any upset or any hesitation? I'm just wondering emotionally if there was anything there that's worth discussing.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  Not really, because I realized that what had happened during the war, well, let's face it, the United States was at war. And as a consequence, in wartime, people do strange things. And however, my parents' attitude was that, well, first of all, we have to make sure that it doesn't happen again. That if the war clouds start to rise again, we have to make sure that the locking up huge sectors of the population, 100,000 Japanese Americans were locked up, that it wouldn't happen again. But my parents also believed that you shouldn't have a chip on your shoulder. You shouldn't hold it against the country, because the country was, you know,

• 27:23Speaker 05

  very kind and generous, made my education possible. And so you shouldn't hold a grudge. And the thing to do is to contribute, contribute to society. And that's what I decided to do, to contribute to society, not have a chip on my shoulder, and do good.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  You've really, in some respects, I mean, you've created many careers for yourself, but you've combined technical skill and fluency with communication. And I want to focus for a second on the technical side of things because you mentioned that you asked your mom if you could build an atom smasher. And I think for a lot of people listening, they wouldn't immediately know what an atom smasher is. Were your parents technical? Did they have technical backgrounds?

• 28:09Speaker 05

  No, they barely got out of grade school with an education in, and as a consequence, they, they didn't have a clue as to what I was doing. They just knew that it sounded very scientific and it sounded important. And so they said, go for it. They were very encouraging. They said, go for it. Go as far as you can go.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Was there anything that sparked that initial curiosity in the sciences?

• 28:36Speaker 05

  Well, there was this mystery, you know? Curiosity is one of the great drivers of human behavior. Curiosity coupled with passion. Those, I think, are the two great ingredients that allow people to rise above poverty and rise above hardship. Curiosity and passion. So I had a curiosity. I had to know what was in that book. Now, today, of course, I can read that book. I know exactly all the different incorrect avenues that Einstein was looking at in a desperate search, which he failed ultimately to create a theory of everything. So curiosity is one thing that drove me, but also you have to have a passion. Curiosity by itself is not enough.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  You have to be able to pay your dues. You have to be able to sit down, learn the math, learn the physics, get up to a PhD so that you could become a professor. And so you have to have a passion that takes you all the way to the top.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  I've read in preparation for this conversation that you were fascinated with Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy as a child. I don't know if that's true. Please fact check me if that's incorrect. Did any particular sci fi stand out to you as impactful or cultivating that passion and curiosity?

• 29:58Speaker 05

  Well, yes, you see, when I was eight years old, I wanted to be like Einstein. But on Saturday mornings, I used to watch TV and I used to watch Flash Gordon on TV. And once again, I was hooked. I mean, starships, rocket ships, invisibility shields, cities underwater, cities in the sky. What's there not to love with Flash Gordon? But then, over the years, I began to realize that the two passions of my life, that is physics on one hand and the future on the other, were more or less the same thing. That if you understood physics, you understood what is possible, what is plausible and what is simply impossible.

• 30:43Speaker 05

  So when I read science fiction, I began to realize that if you have a background in physics, you can sort of put things into place. You know when certain technologies are going to go to fruition. You know when certain technologies will never happen. And it allows you to see into the future. So those are the two things that I do. On one hand, I work on the unified field theory, the God equation, the theory of everything. But I'm also a futurist. That is, I look to see what trends will take us into the next five, 10, 100 years, 1,000 years into the future. And so watching Flash Gordon really impressed upon me that if you know physics, you know the outlines of the future.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Not totally, of course, because we make mistakes. But you know what is possible, what is plausible and what is impossible.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  I have many questions to follow up that answer. And we're going to also veer into trends and a few related questions. And I'll ask you about physics of the future. But first, I wanted to go back to Harvard for a moment. And to ask you if it's true that for a stint at least, you studied philosophy. And if so, if you could describe that experience.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  Well, I was very practical. I knew that you had that plan B. If Plan A doesn't work out, what are you going to do for Plan B? You see, for Einstein, and I studied his life very carefully. In fact, even wrote a biography of Einstein. I realized that, well, he made enemies of his faculty. He would cut classes a lot because he knew the material already. He was way ahead of everyone, but he cut class. The professors hated that. So he got horrible letters of recommendation. So he had to go to Plan B, which is become a menial worker. He applied for a job selling life insurance. Can you imagine opening the door one day? And there's Albert Einstein trying to sell you life insurance.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  And he finally got a job as a low level clerk at the Platten office in Bern, Switzerland, from which he could launch the greatest revolution of modern times, relativity, which gives us the atomic bomb, gives us computer technology, lasers, gives us the power of the sun, in fact. And so he had Plan B and take a very low level clerical job. Well, I had to have Plan B too. So I said to myself, why not learn computer technology? Computers were just beginning to surface. And Stanford University was not too far away. When I grew up there, it was all apple orchards and alfalfa fields and farm workers. But yeah, Stanford was slowly rising.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  And you could learn how to program computers. And so I said to myself, that's what I'm going to do for Plan B. But I was also interested in philosophy. But I still remember a quote from Einstein and that philosophy, he said, is sort of like honey, that at first it's delicious and tastes great, but then you realize there's nothing really there. It's not going to show you the future. It just tastes good. And so he decided that, well, yes, he will learn philosophy. It'll guide him to a degree, but it's not going to pioneer new branches of science. Philosophy is how you sort of

• 34:08Speaker 05

  like look at the entire terrain of physics. So yeah, Einstein was a philosopher, but he realized he could not make a living doing philosophy.

• 34:21Tim Ferriss?

  My guest today is Sarah Silverman. You can find her on Twitter at Sarah S A R A H K Silverman. Sarah is a two-time Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress, writer, and producer. She currently hosts the Sarah Silverman Podcast and stars in the HBO Max animated series Santa, Inc., opposite Seth Rogen. She will next be seen opposite Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson in the feature film Marry Me. Other upcoming projects include TBS's Stupid Pet Tricks, an expansion of the famous David Letterman late-night segment, and the indie psychological thriller Viral, starring alongside Blair Underwood. Her memoir, called The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller, is currently being adapted into a musical with the Atlantic Theater Company

• 35:06Tim Ferriss?

  to premiere in April 2022. Silverman served as creator, executive producer, and host of the Emmy-nominated series I Love You, America, which streamed weekly on Hulu and saw her connecting with people through honesty and humor. On stage, she continues to be recognized as a force in stand-up comedy. Her latest stand-up special, A Speck of Dust, debuted on Netflix in May 2017 and culminated in two Emmy Award nominations and a Grammy Award nomination. Her additional film and television work includes Battle of the Sexes, I Smile Back, Wreck-It Ralph, Wreck-It Ralph 2, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Masters of Sex, and Bob's Burgers. You can find her on social, as mentioned earlier, on Twitter

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  at Sarah K Silverman and on Instagram at Sarah Kate Silverman. Sarah, welcome to the show. It's nice to finally see you.

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we would start with an unfinished story from my perspective, which came about when I had COVID and I was isolating and I was watching multiple episodes of comedians in cars getting coffee. And I watched your episode where you had coffee with Jerry and you were beginning to tell this heartfelt story. You said, I went through a terrible depression. I remember my stepfather says, what does it feel like? And then Jerry jumps in to say, excuse me to the waitstaff, can I get some half and half?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 36:29Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, really? Was it that much of an emergency? And then the edit cut to a different segment of the conversation. So I was wondering if it's possible for you to finish the cliffhanger because I was actually interested to hear the rest of that. I went through a terrible depression. I remember my stepfather saying, what does it feel like? And then you got cut off by the half and half.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Wow. Yes, I can tell you exactly. And you know, it's one of the few like very clear memories I have of that time. I depression came over me when I was 13. Like, I always say it's like as, as fast as getting the, you ever get the flu and from one moment to the next, you just go, you feel fine. And then you go, oh, oh my God, I have the flu. It was like that fast. It's just like a cloud covering the sun. And all of a sudden it's dark, you know? It lasted for a few years and it was the eighties and I was put on Xanax. That's a crazy

• 37:29Speaker 00

  story. And ultimately was just given more and more and more until I was 13 and taking 16 Xanax a day, four Xanax, four times a day.

• 37:40Tim Ferriss?

  Good Lord. Wow.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  It just doesn't even seem possible. It's, it's, it can't be legal to be giving a child that much drugs. My mom and my dad were kind of trying to come up with solutions and fix things. And my stepdad was the only one who just asked me what it felt like. And it was the first time I had to think about what it felt like. And I really came up with the perfect description, which is, it felt just like I was homesick, but I was home. So there was no way to satiate it. You know, there was nothing to hope for. There was no home to go to. I was home.

• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And that was where, if we place you in time, where were you at the time?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  206 County Road, Bedford, New Hampshire, 03110.

• 38:30Tim Ferriss?

  Can you think of or identify anything that led to that wave crashing over you at that time? Is there anything that you can point to that acted as a trigger?

• 38:39Speaker 00

  I remember the moment it happened, what was happening. I, you know, I was a chronic bedwetter and we had the eighth grade camping trip, which was a four day camping trip up Mount Cardigan. And I was the student leader and I cried the whole time and I had diapers hidden in my sleeping bag and I just felt humiliated and homesick. Nobody caught me with the, I slipped diapers in my sleeping bag so that I wouldn't pee in my sleeping bag. I was 12, 13, but I just was painfully homesick and I, I never enjoyed a moment

• 39:22Speaker 00

  of it. It was terrible. And I, I probably would have loved it anyway. It was humiliating. And we come home and I just want to go home and go into bed and I've got my giant backpack with all my stuff and everyone's getting off the bus and my mom picks me up. She was a photographer and she just was taking pictures of me like a paparazzi and I was begging her to stop. And it was just this very odd combination of being photographed and ignored at the same time.

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  That's when it happened. And there's a picture of it. I have a picture of the moment depression took hold of me.

• 40:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's kind of incredible that you have that locked in the amber in a way. You have that moment captured. And part of the reason I'm asking is I do not have a clear vision of when the depressive episodes that I've experienced started. I know that it seems to be congenital. My dad has had extended depressions for as long as I can remember. I don't know when my experience of that started, right? In retrospect, it kind of seems like it was ever present. But what I'd love to do is actually flash forward to something I read in a piece from a few years ago in The Guardian, because I'm curious about How this has kind of lent itself to your life. I read that your mom always said,

• 40:49Tim Ferriss?

  "Be your own best friend."

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  This was at the very end of a Guardian interview, I suppose. And the paragraph reads, "As we say our goodbyes, Mary the dog trots off down the corridor to pay some visits, and Silverman asks if we can hug. I mentioned that she seems happy, glowing, in fact. Why? This is going to sound obnoxious, but Mom always said, 'Be your own best friend,' and I really, really mastered that." And it goes on. Could you just elaborate on that? Because I think this is one of my lifelong quests, is to get to that point. I would love to hear you just speak more to that. And maybe just describe how your mom instilled it, and also how you practiced it, if that was something that you explicitly practiced.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  I kind of went from, I was serial monogamous. I wouldn't go out on a date with a guy without at least putting two years on. Like, I just, maybe out of politeness, or, you know, I like, there was one relationship, I just completely lost myself. My partner fell in love with this independent woman, and I became a completely dependent, codependent. You know, I got out of that relationship so emotionally atrophied, I forgot who I was. I forgot, I remember, I just kept saying, like, "I don't know how to be." And that was really scary for me. And I think from then on, I really got, it became really important to me to be alone and enjoy

• 42:16Speaker 00

  that. And I became, I loved it. I would come home and go, "What do you want to do tonight? Me?" I love hanging out with myself, but I also love television. I said recently on my podcast, I had to kind of admit, I always say how much I love being alone, and I do. But I'm constantly being kept company. Got the TV on, I'm listening to Horst Stern, I've got, I guess when I listen to music, I think that's, it takes me to a new place that, that isn't just company. But it's, it is a comp.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  I'm trying to use the word. It's mind comp.

• 42:54Tim Ferriss?

  No, um. Rebrand, rebrand.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  I did actually practice. I lived in this apartment building for 14 years. I just moved into my first house since growing up in New Hampshire. But I would walk in from the apartment building and there were mirrors um by the elevator. And I'd make myself look in the mirror and give myself a thumbs up. And even though it's silly, because it's silly, I guess, it always made me laugh. It just makes me laugh. So it's nice to have kind of inside jokes with yourself. I also became very comfortable talking out loud when I'm alone. When you first try it as an experiment, you really have to like break through a wall. Like it feels so odd and now I'm so comfortable doing it. But oftentimes.

• 43:43Tim Ferriss?

  Are you talking to yourself or other people, the world in general? What, what do you?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  I just talk out loud. I think, I think just creatively, just as a human, I'll be saying my half of a conversation I'm imagining or, or just be in conversation with myself. You know, I mean, I think when someone has a dog, they feel comfortable doing that. But essentially that isn't talking to yourself. You're talking to another living thing, but remove the dog and there's, there isn't a big difference in that.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Conversation and.

• 44:17Tim Ferriss?

  In the conversation.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I, I got really comfortable talking out loud, so much so that I, I've had boyfriends that are like, what? No, nothing. I wasn't talking to you.

• 44:27Tim Ferriss?

  Talking to myself.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  But I, I feel like I get a lot out of that, just talk, because we are always have this kind of inner monologue going on. Do we? I don't know. I, I think we do, you know, we're, we're always thinking something. Meditation is trying to clear that out. So we must be always have something in our heads.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Was that something that you always had, that feeling of enjoyment or being at ease with yourself? And you just had to resurrect it after getting lost in that relationship? Or was it something that you were kind of building from the ground up afterwards?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  My friends always made fun of me because I, I have the opposite of FOMO.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  One of my best friends, John, he loves telling the story. I was living in West Hollywood and all my friends lived on the East Side and I just never saw them because I it was I couldn't even imagine getting in my car and going to a bar to hang out. I don't know why. I don't just I just I like staying home. I love watching TV. It's not very intellectual, but I it's really my joy. There was a birthday party for two really close friends, not even a block away. And I didn't make it. And he was just like, you're unbelievable. But when I do go out, I am social and I love talking to people and meeting new people. And I am a people person, but I just really love.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  I love being alone and I I've had friends, especially now, really annoyed with me that I'm not connecting with them. And I feel busy because when I have free time, I want to take a nap or watch TV or snuggle with my dog. And I love my friends and I do drop the ball a lot. I have a lot of friends that say, why is it always me calling you? And I feel terrible because I love them and I think of them and I I keep track of them, you know, on social media, whatever. This is this is asshole excuses. I'm really not good at staying connected.

• 46:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's makes me think of friend Jason Fried talking about the opposite of FOMO as JOMO, the joy of missing out.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 46:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's yeah, that's his that's his take.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  I mean, there's nothing better than someone cancelling plans for me.

• 47:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm Tim Ferriss, author, entrepreneur, angel investor, and now TV host. I've spent my entire adult life asking questions, then scouring the globe to find the answers. On this show, I'll share the secrets of pioneers who have faced their own fears. We'll dig into the hard times, big mistakes, tough decisions, and how they got through it all.

• 47:23Tim Ferriss?

  The goal isn't to be fearless. The goal is to learn to fear less.

• 47:31Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to Fearless. I'm your host, Tim Ferriss. And on this very stage, we'll be deconstructing world-class performers of all different types to uncover the specific tactics they've used to overcome doubt, tackle their hardest decisions, and ultimately succeed on their own terms. So imagine yourself standing 127,000 feet above the earth, trying to set the free-fall world record. Or stepping onto the field for the Super Bowl, or perhaps attempting to take gold at the Olympics. If you were nervous or if you had to prepare for that, who would you turn to? Who would you ask for help? In less than a decade, my guest has built a very impressive client roster that includes Olympic gold medalists like Kerry Walsh Jennings, teams like the Seattle Seahawks, and the US Armed Forces. Please welcome to the stage, Dr. Michael Gervais.

• 48:29Tim Ferriss?

  The step has gotten me. You guys ready for a show? Yeah! All right. We are going to begin with a video, so let's roll that.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  128,000 feet above the ground, Felix Baumgartner stood at the edge of space, preparing to do what none had done before. And then, when the moment was right, he took a step, leaving the capsule behind and beginning his 24-mile fall to earth. Along the way, Baumgartner reached a speed of 833 miles per hour, becoming the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. After falling four and a half minutes, Baumgartner deployed his chute and floated to the earth in the desert of New Mexico.

• 49:26Speaker 07

  That was not me. That was not him. That was me. No, it wasn't me either. Yeah, that was Felix Baumgartner, who jumped out of space from 130,000 feet from the stratosphere on the Red Bull Stratus program. What was that like? Helping him through a fear that would allow him to go to a place that no other humans been. And when he jumped, to jump from 130, 127,000 feet to jump and possibly go through a double sonic boom, where some of the brightest minds were not sure if his limbs would make it through that sonic boom. What was his primary fear? Well, he could die. Well...

• 50:07Speaker 07

  Kind of... This guy calls himself a professional? What are we doing? But, okay. Good answer. What did the work look like? So he needed to be in a spacesuit for X number of hours, five to six hours. And he became claustrophobic. He could no longer be in the suit. For, I think at that time it was like 30 minutes. And so he had to rip off the helmet and get out of it. And so they scrub, they were scrubbing the project. It was done, because if the person can't be in there for 30 minutes, then it's not gonna work, period. And then, so they asked me to come in and see if I could help him move through that experience. And it is possible to extinguish fear. It is dangerous.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  And many people don't make it through it. And he wanted it. And he wanted it with all of his faculty about himself. And he really was gonna do the work. Because it mattered more for him to go for it and die than to play it safe and never experience his potential. And what does extinguishing phobia look like? I knew you'd want to talk more about that. Yeah, oh yeah. So how do you extinguish phobia? There's good science, there's two main ways that as approaches. Systematic desensitization and flooding. And so it is possible to extinguish, you know, a fear response to something that you have. And so how do you do it?

• 51:35Speaker 07

  There's this, I don't know how much in the weeds you want to get with it. It's good in the weeds. Yeah, okay, so flooding as a concept is that if somebody has a fear response to whatever it is, that you and that person agree that you're going to put them in that environment and not let them leave until they extinguish the fear. Until they have a new hard, a new wiring of the response to the stimulus. Once that flooding of emotion takes place and the circuitry is going haywire and they're not reinforcing the response by exiting, you force them to stay in that environment, hook or crook, that a new pattern emerges. And so that's the essence of it, that's pretty radical. Now-

• 52:18Speaker 07

  It's like the Indiana Jones into the pit of snakes approach. Yeah, that's exactly right. Now, now maybe he's cured. But so what happens for all of us in fear basers responses? So say it's a mouse or whatever it might be, or public speaking or whatever it is, is that mouse comes across the countertop and tension and then exit. So then thinking over time, and if that happens again, tension and then exit. And then over time, just thinking about a rat or a mouse on a countertop, you, and you would just want to get away. So there's that looping behavior of tension and exit. And so it's possible to re-circuit it, but it takes time. And flooding, the counterparts of flooding is systematic desensitization. Just like building up a tan. Yeah, yeah, and you can do it two ways.

• 53:03Speaker 07

  You can do it in reality and you can do it in imagination. And so there's a set of protocols that you would walk somebody through, backfill them with some strategies on arousal control and thought management.

• 53:16Speaker 07

  So arousal control is breathing techniques or whatever. And then thought management is increasing awareness of one's thoughts. So you can guide and adjust and play with your thoughts maybe at one point. And so you backfill the mental skills. Those are mental skills for them. And then walk them through an experience where they'll list the triggers of the fear that they're walking into from zero to 100, or zero to 10. And then you systematically put them into those environments, either in imagination or in reality. I did both. But they can't leave stage three until they brought their heart rate down to rewire the fear response. So that's the long, the really long answer to it.

• 53:53Tim Ferriss?

  So you've worked with some of the highest profile, most successful athletes on the planet, but it didn't start there. Where did you grow up?

• 54:01Speaker 07

  My roots are in a small town called Warrenton, Virginia.

• 54:05Tim Ferriss?

  Were you a happy kid, would you say?

• 54:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, I didn't know any better. I was like, it felt like being out in the, in the abundance of nature that, and I didn't have worries or concerns and I was just a kid trying to sort out how to be a kid.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  And then...

• 54:18Speaker 07

  Which is a great gift, like for parents. Like that's a really, I feel like that was an incredible gift that they gave me. So then dad started working into some corporate worlds and then punched over to California when I was young, it was fourth grade. So I had to figure out how to adjust from the farm to Northern California. And now I'm straight in the city. I was like, I was a hillbilly. I just was trying to figure out how to fit in, you know? And the fitting in is such a strong human need. And I do remember though, well enough, that I couldn't come home to my parents and talk to them about being picked on. And then finally I came home and so I said, "Dad, a kid after school said he's gonna chew me out." I said, "What is that?"

• 55:03Speaker 07

  And so, "Chew you out" is like, "Hey, we're gonna fight." Now, a hillbilly doesn't know what that is. So, so "Chew you out." So the next day, my dad, my dad, my mom and my grandmother were in our living room and they're showing me how to fight. As a, as a... So it was fantastic. And so, my dad knew how to fight.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  What was grandma's move?

• 55:21Speaker 07

  Okay, so grandma, I'm glad you picked up. Grandma was on point. So grandma, she says, it was like the last finishing touches. She says, "Make sure and check if they have a ring." "Okay, not a bad idea." And she says, "Cover yourself. Cover yourself." And I looked at her, I go, "What do you mean?" She says, "Well, have one hand to hit him and one hand to protect yourself." Good advice for a lot of things. Okay Grandma, yeah, so that was the family environment. How'd the fight go? What happened? Yeah, so here I am, I'm getting ready to go and I'm thinking like, do I go this way? What do I do? And I remember like, okay, it's going. I looked for the ring, no ring, I'm okay. We're dancing like we're gonna do something and I see my mom and my grandmother driving.

• 56:07Speaker 07

  And they parked right there. And I was like, okay, well, it's not gonna be that bad. And then I started to get embarrassed, like, my mom is here. Right. And so I think she started to scuffle and then the car drove off and she kinda saw that it was gonna be okay. It wasn't like, we're not gonna shank each other or something. And so, yeah, that was my welcome to California. Well, wait a second. So, did you guys get into it? Oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah. How did it end afterwards? What was the end result? So, I think when 10-year-olds fight, like, you try to throw some punches. This is what I remember. Tried to throw some punches, he tried to throw some punches. We end up wrestling, it went to the ground, all the other kids split it up. And then I got up and I was like, am I cool now? And so, and it was fine. It worked out just fine.

• 56:52Speaker 07

  What was your high school experience like? High school, I jumped down to Southern California. Same exact story from 4th grade. Same exact thing, but the guys were a little bit bigger.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  Fight Club SoCal. Fight Club SoCal. There it is. And I just didn't know their way. I didn't know their style yet about how to be, you know, in high school. I didn't even know how to be myself. And so, we show up, or I showed up, and I end up getting in another fight with this kid. Blood was all over the place. And I took off my shirt and I was like, dude, let's stop. You know, and he's bleeding out, let's stop. And so, I'll never forget that because he and I, David Hall's his name, he and I became great friends. Really great friends. He brought me in, showed me how the surfing culture works. And I surfed some of the biggest waves, you know, with him in high school. So, it ended up being a really cool transition for me. So, you mentioned not knowing yourself, or not knowing how to be yourself.

• 57:51Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so...

• 57:57Speaker 07

  I don't know when, I don't know exactly when people become the person that they're sorting out to become. But there is, there is a transition that that does happen for people. And for me, I was, I was very late in figuring out who I was. And so I was very, very busy early on in my life, up until this point and further through first year of college, where I cared so much, so much about what other people thought of me. I was consumed with it. I would, and, and so it's now, studying it, it's called cognitive dissonance, where it's almost nearly impossible to be in the present moment, because part of you is working on monitoring the way that you look, or you might be perceived by another person.

• 58:42Speaker 07

  And it's a really painful experience to be caught in the consumption of what another person might be thinking. You mentioned surfing. Was that a small, moderate, big piece of your life? The biggest. How did it fit in? Yeah. In, so younger, younger years, I had a reaction to being coached. And I didn't like the way it felt for another human to tell me yes or no, or give me approval, because I was already so sensitive to it. It's like my cup was full. Was that in surfing? No, not in surfing. That was in stick, traditional stick and ball sports. So I moved away from that, because my cup was already full. And to have another adult, you know, coach me or critique me in front of peers was just, it was just too much.

• 59:27Speaker 07

  And I think that's the case for a lot of kids. Sure. I don't think I was unique in that. I was an anxious, overly aggressive through compensation kid. You know, so I came from an anxious place. Did that ever affect your surfing? Yeah. The anxiousness that I felt while surfing actually kept me from pursuing it competitively. And so the idea, the thing I cared most about, and I had this other part of me that was just crippled by being consumed about what others were thinking, that I couldn't feel my feet, I couldn't feel my body, I couldn't access. What I knew that I was capable of doing. And so, any given day in free surfing, it was fine. And I was one of the guys, right? But then, as soon as the tent would go up, as soon as the judges showed up, as soon as

• 1:00:12Speaker 07

  the friends and family showed up, all of a sudden, my brain was overloaded with what could go wrong. Because that is the essence of what anxiety is. A consumption of what could go wrong.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  And you couldn't get there because you had this dominating anxiety.

• 1:00:27Speaker 07

  Anxiousness.

• 1:00:32Tim Ferriss?

  My guest today is Michael Schur. Schur. Schuur. Depending on who you ask. On Twitter, at Ken Tremendous. We're going to ask about that. Mike Michael created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy, The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the Peacock series, Rutherford Falls. He is also an executive producer on HBO Max's Hacks and Netflix's Master of None. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy award-winning NBC hit, The Office. His first TV writing job was at Saturday Night Live, where he spent seven seasons, including three, as the producer of Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  His new book is How to Be Perfect, subtitle, The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

• 1:01:22Speaker 08

  Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here.

• 1:01:25Tim Ferriss?

  I thought we would start with something we chatted about just a little bit before pressing record, and that is the Harvard Lampoon. I have this fascination with the Harvard Lampoon, and I would just love to perhaps offer you the mic to introduce the Harvard Lampoon to people and also describe how you entered the fray. How you actually became part of the Harvard Lampoon.

• 1:01:48Speaker 08

  The Lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in, I think, 1876. And it is this weird, satirical comedy magazine that has just been kind of plugging along for now almost 150 years. And there's a couple of interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving. Like, William Randolph Hearst was in The Lampoon, and so was John Updike, and so was George Plimpton, and... A million comedy writers in the, from like the eighties to the present, who have written for Letterman and The Simpsons and SNL and all these shows. Conan O'Brien was the president of the Harvard Lampoon twice, which is a very rare thing.

• 1:02:33Speaker 08

  So it's just this kind of weird little humor outlet that people who were obsessed with comedy kind of learn about at an early age. I learned about it from just noticing that it kept popping up when you would see certain movies that you thought were funny. Or like Doug Kenny wrote Animal House and he was on the Lampoon. And Jim Downey, who was a legendary comedy writer at Letterman, I think he was Letterman's first head writer and wrote so many of your favorite SNL sketches throughout history. He was on the Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college, that was like on my essay for Harvard was I want to come here because I want to join the Lampoon.

• 1:03:15Speaker 08

  So when I got there, that was like goal number one for me was joining it. And there's like an audition process. You have to write material. And then you get the pool of people gets winnowed down and then they accept a few writers every semester.

• 1:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  I have to imagine by the time you got there, certainly it was thought of almost as a feeder into these careers in comedy.

• 1:03:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  And therefore there had to be quite a wide funnel in terms of people interested in becoming part of the Lampoon. They can't accept everyone. What did the audition process look like? What constituted the audition process?

• 1:03:54Speaker 08

  The Lampoon is a pure, to the extent that it could be, was a pure meritocracy. It was there were artists, writers, and there were business people who sold ads. And if you were trying to get on as a business person, it was like, did you sell enough ads? If you did, you got on. If you didn't, you didn't. If you were an artist, you drew a bunch of pieces. You were critiqued and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff. Then they voted on who their favorite artists were. And same with writing. You wrote three pieces, comedy pieces of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down from the total number of people trying to get on to, you know, half that and then half again. And then they would bring, you know, six to eight people to the election and then vote however many that they wanted. They would vote on.

• 1:04:38Speaker 08

  This was part of the sales pitch, was that it was a meritocracy. So I decided to kind of test that theory because I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces. The first time I tried out, I submitted anonymously to the extent I could. I, I only wrote my, my first and second initials. So they didn't know whether I was male or female. They didn't know really who I was at all. And I got admitted, I, I made it past the first cut and I showed, they have like a cocktail party for people who make it past the cuts. And I showed up and they were like, oh, you're that guy. Welcome, congratulations. And I was like, wow, they really, you really was anonymous. Like they didn't know who I was, didn't care. They just were like, are these things funny or are they not funny? So then you did that again, you submitted three more pieces.

• 1:05:22Speaker 08

  You had got notes, there was another round of cuts and then there were elections and you just waited in your room for the full day, not having any idea what was going on. And then they would show up and say yes or no. And if the answer is yes, and then you got brought into this week long semi, not really hazing, it's kind of a parody of like a frat hazing week. But you spend a week like getting indoctrinated into the world of the lampoon and then you remember and everything is great.

• 1:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  The writing pieces, and this is rewinding the clock. So I recognize that this is asking a lot, but do you have any recollection with that paradox of choice situation where the topics are up to you? How you chose what you would write about? Are there any constraints, like 500 words or less, thousand words or less, is there?

• 1:06:12Speaker 08

  There were, I wish I remembered, they put a page limit on them, you know, because it's prose comedy. It's a kind of comedy writing that isn't done that much anymore. The closest analog that people might be familiar where there's something like the shouts and murmurs page in the New Yorker, like a lot of lampoon people have gone on to write shouts and murmurs pieces for the New Yorker. Prose comedy used to be much more common. Magazines used to have the humor, you know, PJ O'Rourke wrote humor for Rolling Stone and people would write humorous pieces for the New Yorker or for any number of different magazines. It doesn't really exist anymore, like many things involving print media. But the only one I remember offhand is I wrote a piece, speaking of The New Yorker.

• 1:06:51Speaker 08

  The premise was it was like a series of increasingly angry letters being written to you by The New Yorker because you hadn't re-upped your subscription yet. Because at the time, I'd been gifted a subscription as a freshman in college by someone, probably my dad, who thought, "You're a college man now. You ought to read an intellectual magazine." And then it lapsed and I started getting these like really angry letters that were like, you know, like, "What's the deal? What? How could you have betrayed us like this?" So you legitimately were getting these indignant letters from The New Yorker? Yes. That's incredible. I was, and, and, and they kept offering me the free tote bag if you re-upped. And I, I remember just continuously thinking like, "I don't want your damn tote bag, man. Like, leave me alone."

• 1:07:37Speaker 08

  So I wrote a piece that was like five or six in a series of letters asking you to re-up. They just got increasingly antagonistic and aggressive. So it was that sort of thing, and that would fit on one page. You know what I mean? Like, that's 500 words or 600 words or something. You know, brevity is the soul of wit, and so if your piece was too long, they would often hack it down and tell you to make it shorter and stuff. You're not talking about 20-page-long humorous short stories. These are like short little bursts. These are shouts and murmurs level bursts of, of humor. I'm sure Somewhere in a Box, Somewhere in My House is my original pieces that I submitted, but at least from my memory, they're long gone.

• 1:08:18Speaker 08

  You know, I was- Well, you know- Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say that that is one of the great things about comedy as a discipline, is that, you know, stand-ups will tell you that the reason they like being stand-ups frequently is because there's a vote. You write a joke and you perform it, and the audience votes immediately whether or not that joke is funny. And it's not quite as immediate in TV or movies or some other forms of comedy, but there is a sense of, you don't know whether you have gotten it right. And then you get a reaction from people that's visceral, that says you're on the right path, or you're not, or you kind of are, but you could spruce it up a little bit. That's what made Saturday Night Live so great.

• 1:09:01Speaker 08

  We would do a dress rehearsal at eight on Saturdays, and there would be a live audience, and you'd run the sketch, and then some jokes would work and some wouldn't. And then it would end at 10 and the show goes alive at 11:30. This thing would occur to you, which is I could either leave it alone, do nothing, and get exactly probably the same reaction that I got the first time. Or I can try to fix this. I can cut this joke that didn't work. I can try to write a better punchline. There was an immediacy to it that was weirdly comforting because sometimes you make things and like months and months and months go by and then they sort of float out into the universe. Comedy, very frequently, especially comedy for performance, is just, it's like a Roman Colosseum. You know, a bunch of people gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then it's up to you to figure out what to do next.

• 1:09:46Speaker 08

  So I really like that about comedy in general. There's not a lot of, you can certainly write jokes that don't work, that you still believe in, and you can cling to them if you want to, but you also know like, no one's ever gonna laugh at this. And if you're okay with that, that's fine. You can leave it in your movie or your show, but you at least have the information that you were looking for very quickly.

• 1:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, let's talk about SNL for a moment. I was gonna ask you about lessons learned at SNL, but there are a number of different ways I could frame the question. Another would be, how do you think you would be different had you not had the SNL experience as a comedy writer slash producer slash fill in the blank? I'm just curious, because I think I have read somewhere, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you, you think everyone or any comedy writer should sort of do a tour of duty, if possible, at SNL for a period of time. I'm sure a lot of more people would like to than can. But what were some of the lessons learned, for, for lack of a better way to phrase it?

• 1:10:48Speaker 08

  So many. I do believe that, by the way. I think that if everyone who worked in Hollywood had to work for one year at SNL, in general, things would be a lot better. So from a creative standpoint, the thing that SNL teaches you is to not be precious with your own material.

• 1:11:06Speaker 08

  You generally have about four minutes to do whatever you're gonna do. With rare exceptions, you're talking about four minutes. And so you write a sketch and it's five minutes and 38 seconds long. And you go in with a red pen and you just make giant X's under script. Like, cut this, cut this, cut this, this didn't work, change this. And after doing that every week for, you know, seven years, there's almost no joke or piece of writing that I could put into a script that I would think that cannot be cut. Like, it just trains you to say, anything can be cut. And if it improves what you're doing, then cut it. And I think that's a really hard lesson for some people to learn,

• 1:11:51Speaker 08

  especially when, depending on where those people, where people come from, what their backgrounds are. If you grow up in a system, I mean creatively grow up in a system that doesn't train you not to be precious with your own material, and then you achieve any kind of success, you are almost always way too precious about your material because you have this sort of personal belief that you, you did this alone, you figured it out, you cracked the code, and how dare anybody tell me to cut this or cut that? Or how dare the, these executives think that this is too long? And as a result, you can look around right now on your streaming service of choice, and you can find a lot of shows and movies where you think to yourself,

• 1:12:36Speaker 08

  that was about 25 minutes too long. Like, that, I liked it, it was good, but man, why was that so long? And the answer is almost always like, they just didn't get tough enough on their own material. So SNL is just ruthless about that. SNL is like a, Lorne Michaels has many aphorisms that he likes to dole out to you. And as you sit at his feet and he, he dispenses his wisdom. But one of the things he has been saying for, I think, about 50 years is, the show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 11:30 on Saturday night. And that, that ethos is, it sort of permeates everything and it reinforces this idea that you work on it and work on it and work on it until it's done and then you, then you're done.

• 1:13:21Speaker 08

  But the level of success you have with any individual sketch is a little bit up to whether or not, it's based on whether or not you are tough enough on your own material. So that's a great lesson. That's a really, really wonderful lesson for a writer of any kind to learn. Another thing it teaches you, and by the way, I should note, if you meet and work with anyone who went through the SNL gauntlet of fire, everybody has that same sort of attitude toward their own material. So when you're talking about an actor like Andy Samberg, so my friend Dan Gorn had created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Andy Samberg, we got Andy Samberg to star in it. Andy Samberg is a very, was a very well-known and beloved

• 1:14:02Speaker 08

  comedian and was pretty famous on his own right, thanks to his own work. And yet, when we would show him cuts of Brooklyn episodes in the early days, he would go like, "I'm bad in this scene. Cut me out of this. Cut this. Cut my joke here. It doesn't work. Cut this. Cut this." It's a very rare star of a TV show who will say, "Cut my material." You know, like, that's not, that's not the typical attitude for like, number one on the call sheet, star of the show, guy on the poster. Usually those people are like, "Wait, I want more. I want more. Put me in this more. Put my face on TV more." People who went through SNL judge comedy and material based on only like, "Is this good? Is it

• 1:14:44Speaker 08

  funny? Does it work? Is it fast? Is it quick? Is it enjoyable?" That's a wonderful trait in a producer slash actor. Amy Poehler's the same exact way. So everybody who goes through this system has this sense of like, "It's not about me. It's about the end product." And if the end product is made better by removing me, or removing scenes I'm in, or lines that I have, or jokes that I have, then remove them. We all win if this thing is better. So there are other ways you can learn those lessons. SNL is just a particularly blunt, force, trauma way to do it. It's a very intense, kind of like, sledgehammer to the head over and over again that kind of drills this idea into you.

• 1:15:32Tim Ferriss?

  This episode has something for everybody. It is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers, all different types, to tease out their learnings, their lessons, their tools that can be applied to your lives. And what makes today's guest so special is not only is he a world-class performer, but he spends time with a wide spectrum of other world-class performers studying world-class performing companies as well as executives and doing that through the lens of data. All right, so here we go. John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago.

• 1:16:15Tim Ferriss?

  His research has led to collaborative work with several different firms, many companies, including Lyft, Uber, United Airlines, Virgin Airlines, Humana, Sears, Kmart, Facebook, Google, General Motors, Tinder, Citadel, Walmart, and several nonprofits, and the list goes on. For decades, his field experimental research has focused on issues related to the inner workings of markets, the effects of various incentive schemes on market equilibria and allocations. Incentives are a big part of our conversation, how to use them in the family, how to use them in companies, how to use them in manufacturing, fascinating stuff. How behavioral economics can augment the standard economic model, early childhood education and interventions. He's created schools, so we'll talk also about that.

• 1:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  And most recently, on the gender earnings gap in the gig economy, using evidence from rideshare drivers. His research includes more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published books, including the bestseller he co-authored with Uri Ganesi, The Y-Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, and his new book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. You can find him on Twitter, @econ_4, the number four, underscore everyone, so @econ4everyone. We will put that in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, so you can click on that. And everything related to the new book, which we explore at some length and the principles within it, can be found at thevoltageeffect.com.

• 1:17:43Tim Ferriss?

  So without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and, for me, enjoyable conversation with none other than John A. List. John, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you, sir.

• 1:17:55Speaker 09

  Thanks so much for having me, Tim.

• 1:17:58Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I find your story endlessly fascinating, which means, of course, I have an embarrassment of riches in terms of materials and questions. We're never going to get through all of it. But I was struggling with finding a place to begin. There's so many options, but I thought I would just mention for folks, you have eight kids, is that right?

• 1:18:18Speaker 09

  That's correct.

• 1:18:19Tim Ferriss?

  Eight kids.

• 1:18:20Speaker 09

  Eight kids.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Your grandpa, dad, and brother, all truckers, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:18:27Speaker 09

  That's correct. Proud truckers.

• 1:18:29Tim Ferriss?

  Proud truckers. So I'm just adding a little bit of color here and there, because certainly we're going to get into many different nooks and crannies. I thought I would just start with asking you to describe what a clawback incentive is and how you have used clawback incentives with your kids. And incentives in general, what other incentives you have used. And then we'll, we'll use that as a jumping off point.

• 1:18:55Speaker 09

  The clawback incentive is an incentive scheme that actually reverses the way we think about traditional incentives. So in traditional incentives, I'm the chief economist at Lyft, the way I incent my workers there is I have them work really hard all year, and then at the end of the year, they receive a bonus if they do a good job. That's great. Now, what the clawback incentive is, is at the beginning of the year, I give them the incentive, but then I tell them, if they don't perform, I will take away the incentive.

• 1:19:36Speaker 09

  And the idea behind the clawback is, I want to, first of all, show them the money. And then, secondly, I want to invoke loss aversion. Loss aversion is something that psychologists have taught us goes as follows. If you own something...

• 1:19:57Speaker 09

  You really, really, really are hurt if you have to give it up. So the idea here is give somebody some money. That will induce them to work harder. And when they do work harder, everyone's better off because they get to keep the money. And my firm is better off because they work harder. Now, where I've used that, I've used that in Chinese manufacturing plants. I started a pre-K school about 12 years ago. I use that with the teachers. So at the beginning of the year in September, beginning of the school year, some of them get the bonus.

• 1:20:37Speaker 09

  And then I tell them, if your kids don't perform at the end of the school year, I will take some of it back. And lo and behold, what happens? They work harder and the kids learn more. Now, for my own kids, I've also done the same thing. Any good scientist will use his or her own kids as subjects. I'm no different than that. As you mentioned, I have eight kids. Two of those kids happen to be twins. So I have the perfect treatment and control group. Now, some things like my oldest daughter had a very hard time going potty on the toilet. So what do I do? I give her an incentive, let's say a doll or something else.

• 1:21:22Speaker 09

  And I tell her, if you go potty on the toilet, you get to keep it. If you don't, the doll is going to go and sit in a different room. And you're not going to be able to play with the doll. That's the clawback incentive.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  And what were the results?

• 1:21:38Speaker 09

  The results are just remarkable. Whether it's school teachers, whether it's workers in a manufacturing plant, whether it's students, whether it's my own kids, just across the board. What happens is if you use the clawback. People work harder and everyone's better off in the end because they're more likely to get the reward and you're happier because they've worked harder. So you're happy to give them the incentive.

• 1:22:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hearing of your kids and the twins in particular, I have to imagine an unfair share of the experimental load lands on the twins. But you can disabuse me of that notion if I'm missing. But could you describe other ways that you have used incentives with your kids? Any stories or examples that come to mind?

• 1:22:35Speaker 09

  So first of all, you're right that whenever I need a really good control, that will fall on the twins. But to be fair, I have enough experiments. I think about using experimentation to incent inputs. For example, when the kids are in third or fourth and fifth grade, I tend not to incentivize outputs because outputs are something that a person has a hard time controlling. But what they can control is the set of inputs. What I mean by inputs is how many books you read, or how many hours you spend studying. Those are

• 1:23:15Speaker 09

  things that the child, or the worker, or whomever can control. Things like how well you do on the exam. A lot of exams, for example, are graded on a curve. So you can't control how well other students do in the classroom. So it's not really fair to give you an incentive based on that kind of output. So my incentives roll from in the classroom, to on the baseball field, to on the soccer field. But it's all the time, it's using input incentives with my kids. Now with my workers, whether it's at Lyft, or I used to be the department chair

• 1:23:57Speaker 09

  here at the University of Chicago's Econ Department, there, I can't really observe inputs. So I have to reward outputs. And in the end, it's the organization is affected by the outputs, not the inputs.

• 1:24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example, and don't worry folks listening, I'm going to expand beyond the family system, but I like to start with something that many listeners will identify with and then will move in all sorts of directions. Are there any specific examples that you could give of incentivizing and changing behavior or molding behavior with your kids?

• 1:24:36Speaker 09

  So let's think about studying. When I think about a clawback, at the beginning of the week, I will tell them, if you work intensively for an hour each night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, you can keep this incentive that I will give you on Monday morning. Now, that incentive can be a pack of baseball cards for my boys. It could be a pass to the movies for my daughters. But the key is, give them the incentive early in the week, and then they will perform all week. For

• 1:25:16Speaker 09

  example, an hour of studying math every night is something that happens all the time in my household. Then at the end of the week, they end up keeping the incentive because nearly every time, they meet the goal.

• 1:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  So I have a question about the clawback incentive and harnessing the loss aversion. And part of why I was looking forward to chatting with you is that I think it's minimizing it to say sort of along the lines of, say, Freakonomics, and I know you've had a lot of involvement with Professor Levitt and have been featured regularly on the Freakonomics blog and elsewhere. There are many assumptions that we make or beliefs that we hold which turn out not to be terribly supported by data when you actually run experiments. And as an example, when I was doing prep for this conversation, I read about, I might get the specifics slightly off, but your examination of matching

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Donations with charitable organizations and asking them if matching works, the answer is of course, yes, do you have data to support it? No, not really. But looking at, say, one-for-one matching, you donate $1, we match $1, or one to two, one to three, and it turns out matching does work, but the ratio is less important than just the matching mechanism itself, right? It would seem. And we can certainly explore that more. And if I screw it up, please let me know. On the harnessing of loss aversion, you know, as an employer myself, or as someone who's hoping to have kids soon, I'm not gonna, probably not gonna catch up with you unless I adopt a lot.

• 1:26:57Tim Ferriss?

  But I imagine in my mind that workers will respond well when they are given a bonus at the end of their performance review period, whatever that is. But that over time, maybe in the long term and not in the short term, if people are given something that is taken away, that that might breed resentment, or some type of learned helplessness, where they'll just not attempt to put forth their best effort. Is that grounded in any of the data in any way? Or are there any side effects?

• 1:27:33Speaker 09

  When you think about using behavioral nudges, or you think about using behavioral incentives, one very important issue that you always need to recognize and keep in mind is, will it keep working over and over and over again? And then, secondly, does it have any side effects? So, in the case of the clawback, you could imagine that you run it one time, and it works. And then, when you try it a second and a third time, it depreciates. It

• 1:28:12Speaker 09

  really doesn't work that well. Or you could imagine that you hire a bunch of schoolteachers, like I did down in Chicago Heights, and give them the clawback, and within three months, they all quit, because they hate it. It's just too stressful, and it's too burdensome on them. Now, those are two very important considerations for any incentive that we talk about. What we've found so far... Is in terms of the depreciation, it does depreciate a little bit like most behavioral nudges, but not a ton. So on that side, you don't have to keep creating a new mousetrap.

• 1:28:54Speaker 09

  That the, the real mousetrap in the first one, the clawback, works reasonably well, and it has over time for a long time. Now, the side effect one is also sort of interesting because what you find is that many workers actually like the clawback because they view it as a commitment device. And what I mean by that is, you know, most things in life are, you have to exert effort today and you receive benefits in the future. So think about climate change, think about your own health. You don't really want to go to the doctor. You don't really

• 1:29:35Speaker 09

  want to go to the dentist because it's a cost now and the benefits are in the future. Think about why people drop out of school. You know, as a 16-year-old, there's a lot of costs now and the benefits aren't for a long time. As humans, we do a really bad job at those types of issues. And that's why we have problems like climate change and you don't take care of your health and too many people drop out. What's nice about the clawback is it takes that problem and turns it around because it takes the benefits from the end and brings them to the beginning. So you get the good stuff right away and that serves as a commitment

• 1:30:16Speaker 09

  device for many people. So some people in our experiments will actually pay real money to have the clawback, to get to use the clawback. In the end, there are some of course that hate it, but there are enough that love it that on that dimension, it actually turns out to be a doubly good incentive because you not only are better as the owner, but the workers like it more too.

• 1:30:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to a very special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, recorded at many degrees below zero. And my guest today, I met on the road. I did not expect to meet her, and I met her in Antarctica. Sue Flood. Sue Flood is amazing. Sue is a photographer and former BBC filmmaker. Her work has taken her and still takes her all over the world, but she has a special passion for the wildlife and icy beauty of Antarctica, which is where we met, as I mentioned. A Durham University Zoology graduate, Sue spent 11 years with the BBC Natural History Unit, working on series including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth with Sir David Attenborough, we talked quite a bit about him, before turning her focus to photography.

• 1:31:29Tim Ferriss?

  Her most recent book, Emperor, The Perfect Penguin, is absolutely spectacular, it's stunning, with a foreword by Sir Michael Palin, was published in September 2018. Check it out. At the very least, look it up online to see some of the imagery. She has appeared on screen for the BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic, been featured on the series Cameramen Who Dare, and has had her images in National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, GEO, and other distinguished publications. Her work has won many awards and competitions, including Travel Photographer of the Year, International Photographer of the Year, International Garden Photographer of the Year, and a Royal Photographic Society Silver Medal. In recognition of her photographic achievements, Sue was invited to meet Her Majesty the Queen during a special Adventures and

• 1:32:13Tim Ferriss?

  Explorers event held at Buckingham Palace. She has so many adventures to share, so many incredible stories, and it was just an honor and a thrill. Also a gasp, we laughed a lot to meet Sue unexpectedly in Antarctica, and I knew that we had to sit down and record this episode. You can find her online, sueflood, S-U-E flood dot com, Instagram, Sue Flood Photography, Twitter, Sue Flood Photos, Facebook, Sue Flood Photos. We'll link to all of those in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And now, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, and what was for me a very enjoyable conversation, a hilarious conversation with Sue Flood.

• 1:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for being here.

• 1:33:01Speaker 10

  I am delighted to be here.

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  In my cozy podcasting studio. And how would you describe where we're sitting right now? Why don't we start with that?

• 1:33:11Speaker 10

  Yeah, this is definitely not quite as cozy as I'd imagined. So we are sitting in the Weddell Sea at the most remote camp in the Antarctic right now. And we are sitting in a tent with a table made of snow and ice. And looking out the window, we can see a twin otter and some emperor penguins. So it's cool in every sense of the word.

• 1:33:37Tim Ferriss?

  It is cool on, on every level. And as I was mentioning before, we clicked, or I clicked record, I'm using the royal we already, that I've tested this gear in some very hot conditions, but never in very, very cold. So I'm watching battery very closely. Why don't we start, since you mentioned penguin, we're here, or the guests are here certainly, to see penguins. You are a penguin master of sorts. We'll get into that. Where does this word penguin come from?

• 1:34:08Speaker 10

  Oh, that's very cool. So I'm Welsh. I hail from North Wales, born in a place called St Tassif and living in a place called Llanfairwyr, near the edge of Snowdonia.

• 1:34:20Tim Ferriss?

  Rolls off the tongue.

• 1:34:21Speaker 10

  It certainly does roll off the tongue. And there's a community of people from Wales who settled in Patagonia in South America. And pen is the word for head and gwyn is the word white. So pen gwyn, white head. And it's thought that the first Welsh sailors who came over to South America, they saw Magellanic penguins, as they're now known, and called these birds pen gwyn, white-headed birds. But there is still a community of people who speak Welsh in Patagonia. So there is a connection between whales and penguins.

• 1:35:03Tim Ferriss?

  So wild.

• 1:35:04Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Tim Ferriss?

  I mentioned that as I was on my. I'm not gonna say first, I'm not gonna say seventh glass of wine, probably second and a half glass of wine. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And you can hear snow machines in the background. That's part of this audio verite. You mentioned

• 1:35:18Speaker 10

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:19Tim Ferriss?

  The aircraft. And this is a, what do you call this? A working camp? It's not exactly, is it a station? Is this considered a station?

• 1:35:26Speaker 10

  Not a station, but yeah, a working camp that is put up specially for the purpose. And that snow machine you hear is carting away some of the, let's say, waste that will be flown out back to South America, because we have to keep this place absolutely pristine. So everything, and I mean everything, bodily products get flown back out to South America to keep this place as beautiful as it can possibly be.

• 1:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a Burning Man with fewer bikinis.

• 1:35:54Speaker 10

  This is true.

• 1:35:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to have this conversation on tape because I recalled and I have this experience every once in a while, when you and I were trekking back from the Empire Penguin Colony, dragging our sleds behind us, which are attached to us at the waist. And you're telling me all these stories. And I thought, God damn it, I really wish this were being recorded. And it bothered me so much. But we've, we've spent a little bit of time together, certainly in close quarters.

• 1:36:29Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Tim Ferriss?

  Because we have the mountain tents in which we sleep. And then we have one structure right next to us. What is this even considered? It's almost, if people can imagine, this is not the best description, but a wine barrel laying on its side, cut it in half horizontally, and then you have the top half, you put it on top of snow, looks something like that. But what is this considered?

• 1:36:48Speaker 10

  So this is a structure called a weather haven. And it is absolutely fantastic, very strong, once you put it up, and metal hoops covered in a strong canvasy material. And that's our dining tent. And it gets very, very toasty in there. But then if you've got a nice warm sleeping bag, it's can be really toasty in your tent, maybe minus 20 or so the worst. But then you get into your nice warm sleeping bag and stick on your headphones. And the only thing to disturb the silence is probably my snoring heard throughout the camp.

• 1:37:23Tim Ferriss?

  And hopefully you have eye shades as well, because it is Incredibly bright here.

• 1:37:29Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Tim Ferriss?

  At the moment.

• 1:37:30Speaker 10

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:30Tim Ferriss?

  Twenty-four hours a day, which has been difficult to get accustomed to. I'm not sure if you ever do, but the light prompt, every time it would peep through my, the cracks in my eye shades, I would pop up thinking, oh, it is morning and check the alarm. And be like, no, it's one in the morning. It is technically the morning, but it's one or two in the morning. Let's pull a hard left. You mentioned this yesterday, and I thought it might be an interesting place to start the chronology. So this is gonna sound strange to people listening, but tell us about the very early days of your time on this planet and hips. What happened here?

• 1:38:09Speaker 10

  Wow. I was due to be born on Thursday, the 12th of August, and I was actually a day late, born on Friday, the 13th. And my poor parents were told that I would never walk. And I had a, my hips weren't formed properly, and they were told I'd always be in a wheelchair. So, you know, they were obviously devastated by that. And as a consequence, my poor dad had a lifelong aversion to Friday, the 13th. But they tried this revolutionary new treatment at the time to try and build this special frame to hold my legs in a certain position. And I was able to kind of recover.

• 1:38:51Speaker 10

  And so a couple of years later, I was toddling around and the fine physical specimen you see before you today. But you know, it's, I often think about how lucky I've been to not turn out the way they thought I would turn out.

• 1:39:06Tim Ferriss?

  And not long ago, as I understand it, correct my memory here, you came across that brace, which I guess is almost like a, almost like a retainer for your entire body, right?

• 1:39:18Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Tim Ferriss?

  It would fit, were there like stiff suspenders that would hold your hips in a particular position?

• 1:39:25Speaker 10

  It's a little X-shaped cross with hooks on the end of it. And it would hook over my shoulders and then hook under my backside to sort of hold my legs in a certain position. And my mom used to tell me it was just awful because they put me into this thing and I would just cry and cry and cry. But they were told that they had to do this to try and, you know, give me a chance to to possibly walk. So, and yeah, we, unfortunately, my father passed away recently and we were clearing out the house and. Found this little thing and my brother was saying, oh, check that out. And I said, no, I'm gonna, gonna keep it. And that's in my office, just as a constant reminder that I've been very lucky.

• 1:40:08Tim Ferriss?

  How much of it is a reminder of being lucky versus something else? Or maybe it's a combination, say, of overcoming adversity. I don't, it's a leading question, of course, that I'm asking. But I'm wondering if you could just expand a bit on why you would want to have that at the ready as a reminder.

• 1:40:26Speaker 10

  Never to take anything for granted is, you know, I feel like I've lived a super privileged life, not in any financial sense, but in a, my mom used to say, I've lived the life of five people. And I have my absolute dream job. It's what I've wanted to do since I was a kid. And I, as a child, I would watch David Attenborough on all these wildlife documentaries. And there were two people who really, really inspired me. One was David Attenborough. I remember seeing him crawling around in the Rwandan jungle with mountain gorillas and thinking, wow, that's a cool job. And then also my dad, my dad used to be in the merchant navy.

• 1:41:07Speaker 10

  So he would have all these amazing stories from Japan and China and Burma as it was. And, and we had this big campwood chest he'd brought back from being at sea with kimonos and hats and headhunter's swords from Borneo and all this incredibly cool stuff. And it was inspirational as a child. And, but yeah, I, I never dreamt I'd actually get to, to do this dream job of being a wildlife filmmaker, but I did.

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  And it wasn't quite as, as simple as just signing up, was it? As I understand it, there wasn't a signup sheet, so.

• 1:41:42Speaker 10

  Sadly not.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  So if we go back to then, the, the inspiration, so you have these figures, your father, David Attenborough, probably among others, but those two primary inspiring you.

• 1:41:53Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Tim Ferriss?

  When did you start and how did you start finding your way towards this job that you have now? What did the early chapter or earliest chapters look like?

• 1:42:04Speaker 10

  I had no idea how to go about it. I, I wrote to the BBC, to the Natural History Unit, as it's called, which is a special department in Bristol that makes all of the BBC's wildlife documentaries. And a very kindly producer there saw my letter. And bothered to reply. And of course, they get thousands of letters from people wanting to make wildlife films with David Attenborough, of course. But I went and studied zoology at university. So I went to Durham University in the UK. And this producer had said, look, you need to put something on your resume that will make us take a second look, because

• 1:42:45Speaker 10

  we get lots of people with their zoology degrees or their biology degrees or whatever. So I went, managed to get on to this really cool expedition to Australia. And I had to raise money to go on that. And that was working for the Queensland National Parks Wildlife Service. And for three months unpaid, diving on the Barrier Reef, doing these surveys for crown of thorns starfish, which were damaging the reef, whitewater rafting through the rainforest and bulging this path through the rainforest, and caving in the outback in Chillago. So this was all

• 1:43:21Tim Ferriss?

  Cave meaning cave diving?

• 1:43:22Speaker 10

  No, caving, going into caves into these like this limestone cave system. That was a character building experience. It's I don't like the dark and I don't like enclosed spaces. So that was a great mix. And then I also, I'd heard about a place called Bermuda Biological Station. And they had this three month work study program where you could volunteer and assist the marine biologists. So I managed to get on to that. And the three months became eight months. And it was really great experience being out there because I was able to use that time. And it was an unpaid position again. So I didn't have the money to do this, but I was racking up really useful experience. I got my food and my board and built up a

• 1:44:05Speaker 10

  credit card bill. And I was assisting the marine biologist, as I say, and then there was this team who came out from the UK. And they had been working excavating the Mary Rose and the Mary Rose was this was Henry the Eighth's flagship. So this incredible vessel that had been found and they had managed to excavate this ship. And they were now coming out, these specialists to dive on a wreck called the Sea Venture, which had sunk in sixteen oh nine. And so I volunteered in the days of snail mail to, could I possibly help them? And they took me on to go and help that team as well as working at the bio station.

• 1:44:48Tim Ferriss?

  Could I bookmark this for one second?

• 1:44:49Speaker 10

  Sure.

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  So don't lose your place.

• 1:44:51Speaker 10

  Okay.

• 1:44:51Tim Ferriss?

  I want to rewind to this letter that you sent. So they get thousands of letters. Do you recall at all what you said in this letter? I'm just wondering why, because it's not physically possible that the producer who received it replied to the many thousands of letters that were received. What did you put in that letter? Do you have any idea?

• 1:45:10Speaker 10

  Yeah, I, well, and I have his reply somewhere at home. So it was along the lines of ever since I was a child, I've watched David Attenborough's documentaries. He's inspired me to want to become a wildlife filmmaker. I'm going off to university to study zoology. I'd love to come and work for the BBC and can you give me any advice? That kind of thing. And this person, Mike Salisbury, he was, he's a really kind, generous guy and he, it's typical of him to bother replying. And he was the producer on a lot of the big Attenborough series. So things like Life of Birds, Life in Cold Blood, all these, actually, and that was with my friend Miles.

• 1:45:53Speaker 10

  But he'd worked on all these big key series and some of the older ones like Living Planet and so on. That was the question to him.

• 1:46:04Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I Send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 1:46:46Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.