#694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes)

Brought to you by Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim ultra-high-quality dog food, AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Sam Corcos (@samcorcos http://twitter.com/samcorcos) is the CEO and Co-founder of Levels http://levelshealth.com, an a16z-backed startup that shows you how food affects your health using continuous glucose monitors and other biosensors. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim, ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess! I want to give my pooch, Molly, the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. But most healthy dog foods are an expensive, frozen mess. They’re a hassle to thaw and serve, and the prep work eats up time I’d rather spend hiking with Molly. Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim solves my problem with air-dried, high-quality dog food I can store and pour right from my pantry. ​The magic behind Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim is in their proprietary air-drying method. To lock in nutrients, they gently dry the meat, low and slow. Unlike other dry brands, which are filled with hyper-processed grains and synthetic vitamins, Sundays for Dogs https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim uses only all-natural poultry and USDA-grade beef. And meat makes up 90% of their recipes. The other 10% are fruits and veggies, ingredients you’d find at the farmer’s market, not at the pharmacy. Get 35% off your first order of Sundays for Dogs by going to SundaysForDogs.com/TIM or by using code TIM at checkout https://sundaysfordogs.com/tim. Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend. * This episode is also brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. Go to shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim. * [05:08] Delegation implementation and common mistakes. [11:07] Recommended reading for delegators, delegatees, and all humans. [13:26] Building a company culture that treats people like adults. [15:01] Tools for performance and communication accountability. [20:39] Why Sam considers Loom the “most important” tool in the kit. [24:18] Friday Forum. [27:17] Acclimating the recording-averse to Loom. [30:40] Organizing Loom recordings for later search and use. [36:35] Common challenges of sourcing and properly utilizing EAs/chiefs of staff. [43:19] Novelty-seeking and board games. [44:35] Vetting, pairing, and onboarding EAs and chiefs of staff. [48:38] News and social media sobriety. [55:20] Why does new employee onboarding take a month at Levels? [1:00:59] What most delegators wish they’d known as newbs. [1:04:57] Loom security and privacy concerns. [1:08:10] From to-do list to calendar. [1:13:17] How Sam skips the to-do list entirely. [1:16:49] General schedule and repeating items. [1:18:22] Scheduling stress reduction. [1:21:59] Selecting books and hosting themed salon dinners. [1:37:03] Calendly and related social hurdles. [1:38:42] Using email proactively. [1:41:23] The underrated power of hotkeys and shortcuts. [1:44:42] Scheduling spontaneity. [1:48:23] Calendar course correction. [1:49:59] How Sam utilizes multiple EAs. [1:51:58] Improvement growth for intermediate delegators. [1:58:56] The Working with Sam user manual. [2:04:20] Memo culture over meeting culture. [2:11:55] Fighting organizational entropy. [2:14:12] Raised secularly, what does Sam get out of theology? [2:22:54] The perils of postmodernism. [2:26:35] Network theory and relationship management. [2:39:33] The investor-swaying juice cart moment. [2:41:22] Metabolic health and the Levels mission. [2:45:29] Who is Levels hiring right now? [2:46:37] Physical over philosophical minimalism. [2:51:37] Why Sam has a travel-sized copy of the US Constitution. [2:55:21] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors 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 https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/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/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs. Ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess. I want to give my pooch Molly the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. I've tried tons of different options, but most healthy dog foods are an expensive, frozen mess. I've tried them, it's a disaster. They're a pain in the ass to thaw and serve, and the prep work eats up time I'd rather spend hiking with Molly, let alone the cleanup. So, there's a lot that goes into it, and I was looking for other options. Sundays for Dogs solves my problem with air-dried, high-quality dog food I can store and pour right from my pantry, no mess at all. The magic behind Sundays for Dogs is in their proprietary air-drying method. To lock in nutrients, they gently dry the meat, low and slow.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  And unlike other brands, which are filled with hyper-processed grains and synthetic vitamins and so on, Sundays for Dogs only uses all-natural poultry and USDA-grade beef. Meat makes up 90% of their recipes. The other 10% are fruits and veggies, ingredients you'd find at the farmer's market, not at a pharmacy. Sundays for Dogs, and I've worked out a special deal just for you, my dear listeners, get 35% off of your first order of Sundays for Dogs by going to Sundays, that's plural, sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or by using code TIM at checkout. That's sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or by using code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. One more time, that's sundaysfordogs.com/tim, or code TIM at checkout.

• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

  Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.

• 1:38Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies, and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide, and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in The 4-Hour Work Week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious, and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO,

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way.

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

  If you have questions, this is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 3:28Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 3:38Speaker 02

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

• 3:51Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an old-school Tim Ferriss conversation in the sense that we go all the way back to many of the tools, many of the principles from the Four Hour Work Week. And that includes virtual assistants, delegation, processes, massive elimination, minimalism for maximum leverage, all sorts of great things. And this time I was in the student's seat because my guest today has mastered, I think it is fair to say, so many facets of everything I just mentioned. And it was a pleasure. To take so many notes myself to follow up on. His name is Sam Corcos. You can find him on Twitter at Sam Corcos, C O R C O S.

• 4:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sam is the CEO and co-founder of Levels, an A16Z-backed startup that shows you how food affects your health using continuous glucose monitors and other biosensors. Fascinating company, incredibly, incredibly practical technology, easy to use, easy to learn from, changes your behavior, changes your life. Check out Levels at levelshealth.com. But first, please enjoy this incredibly practical, incredibly tactical conversation with Sam Corcos.

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sam, nice to see you.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  You too.

• 5:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I have been looking forward to this because I know how organized and systematic you are. And for people who didn't see what came before this, I asked you, as I ask many of my guests, what would make this a home run or time well spent? And you said, well, I know that is one of the questions you like to ask based on my research. So let me open my notebook and you had answers. And one of them that we can mention is an ambitious goal, but I think it's an achievable goal, which is to make this one of the most comprehensive tactical guides to delegation. And within that, there'll be a lot of process and I have a lot to learn. But let's begin at the beginning. When did you start taking delegation seriously?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Well, so true story. It came from reading your book almost exactly 10 years ago. And I posted an ad in Craigslist for an EA. I had nothing for her to do. I just knew from reading your book that this is a skill that I need to develop. I ended up hiring Lori, who's been working with me now for 10 years. She showed up. I thought, okay, what do we do now?

• 6:19Tim Ferriss?

  What now?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  What now? I made it my mission to find things that I was doing that I could hand off to her. And some of the most common things that Lori does for me now are

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Probably the most helpful one is during the course of the year, when I see something that makes for a really good Christmas present for somebody, I'll just send her a note and say, hey, get this for my brother for Christmas. And then, you know, November comes around and there's the scramble to think like, oh, man, what do I get for Christmas? And she says, well, you already purchased these 11 things for all these people. It's like, oh, cool.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, she wraps them and she sends them. So it's pretty easy.

• 6:56Tim Ferriss?

  Problem solved.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:58Tim Ferriss?

  So for our work week, Craigslist, Lori, and 10 year anniversary, pretty remarkable, on a whole lot of levels. When you first began working with Lori, what were some of the mistakes that you made? Or if this is easier, broadly speaking, because you've seen so many examples of people attempting to delegate, you've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You've tried a lot of different things, but what are some of the more common mistakes that people make? Or if we take a step back, why people don't delegate in the first place, perhaps?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I've seen a lot of them. I think probably the first and simplest one is people have tried and they had a bad experience. And a lot of it comes from a lack of experience from the person who is doing the delegating. But sometimes it's just a bad match. We work with a lot of EAs at levels and we probably have to rematch maybe 30% of our, of our EAs, just because there wasn't a fit. And a specific example of that was Zach, our head of legal. We paired him with an EA, really didn't see any improvement there. And so we asked him how it's going. He said, it's fine.

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  Everything's fine. It's fine.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. So we decided, all right, let's rematch. Maybe we'll find somebody who had a legal background in the Philippines.

• 8:24Tim Ferriss?

  So rematch, just so I'm clear on terms, doesn't mean that you're matching that person with another person in the organization. It means let's find an alternate option.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Let's just find a different person to be your EA. A whole new process, different people, different background. And then the second time around, it was night and day difference. She understood all the terminology and his output easily doubled and his stress levels just really dropped. He was able to manage his time, had way more time for deep work. And it really just improved his satisfaction. So I would say that's a big one is just don't, if you have one bad experience, don't assume that you can't have a good one. Other reasons, one is imposter syndrome is another one. I'm reminded of a recent conversation I had where somebody was struggling to delegate. And one of the things they said is, well, who am I to tell them to do this task that I don't want to do?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  And I find reframing is usually a good way to do it. One would be if I delegated this to you, how would you feel? And they said, well, I'd be really great because it shows that you trust me enough to do this task. And I said, well, by not delegating this to that person, you're actually stunting their career growth. And you're not giving them that opportunity to prove themselves. And so those sorts of reframes can be helpful. That's another very common one. Have a couple more notes here.

• 9:47Tim Ferriss?

  So I want you to refer to the notes. I want to plant a seed.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Great.

• 9:50Tim Ferriss?

  Which is where we're going to go shortly. So I like to zoom in, zoom out. Just to talk about some of the things that make levels different, right? Some of the characteristics that make the company different in terms of process, tools, principles, et cetera. So we don't have to go there right now, but what other line items might you have?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. So another one is people feel like they don't have enough for a full-time person to do.

• 10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. I feel like this is very, very common.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  It's very common. They're like, what would I even have them do? And usually when you really push them and they finally get one, they say, why have I been waiting so long?

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  This is so much better. But a big part of it is remember that they are working for you to help you be more productive. And where a lot of people struggle is they end up creating busy work when it's really not useful for either person to be doing work that is not adding value. So if you find yourself in that situation, just say, hey, I only have 20 hours of work this week. Read these books, take a vacation, something that they can do. It's like, hey, do anything else other than create more work for me. That's really the way that the relationship needs to go in order for that to be effective.

• 11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any, we're going to bounce around a lot and we are going to zoom out to the company level in a second. But read these books. Are there any books that you strongly recommend or require as reading for?

• 11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Two groups, people in the company, so employees, and then EAs of people who work in the company, or your EAs.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  We don't have a required reading list for the EAs. We have a strongly recommended reading list for a lot of people at the company.

• 11:38Tim Ferriss?

  What does the strongly recommended reading list look like?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  So we actually, we have a team book club every month where we read these books. And we've been around long enough to where we've recycled some of them and they've come back up. Some that really come up a lot are No Rules Rules, which is the book on Netflix culture. Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership is another one, which I know you're familiar with.

• 11:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, indeed.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Another one that I know you're familiar with is Nonviolent Communication, which really should just be required reading for all people.

• 12:04Tim Ferriss?

  For all humans, for all humans.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have found one sticking point with that book is the title. I recommended it to a friend who had the exact situation that this book was meant to solve. And he said, well, the problem I'm dealing with doesn't involve any violence. It's like, no, no, no, it's not the point. It's really, it's about non-threatening communication. It's about how do you have these conversations without triggering that fight or flight mentality?

• 12:28Tim Ferriss?

  Great framework, not the best branding. If you were, I'm going to explore this a little bit more, and there may not be much to explore. But if you were to have your EAs read books that you think would aid them in their capacity in being a remover of obstacles, a smoother and creator of process, perhaps, are there any that would come to mind? Maybe those same books, who knows?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  It would probably be something process oriented.

• 13:00Tim Ferriss?

  Like the Checklist Manifesto?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Something like that?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Exactly, something like the Checklist Manifesto would be a really good choice for that, where it's like thinking about process.

• 13:09Tim Ferriss?

  I've been thinking about rereading that myself. I actually had that book face out on one of my bookshelves for several years just to remind me, keep it simple, stupid. Like you don't need to, it doesn't need to be improv jazz every day.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Definitely. It's a short read, too.

• 13:25Tim Ferriss?

  It is a short read. All right. So company level, levels.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:29Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the things that might surprise people out there who have image A of what a startup or a company looks like?

• 13:37Speaker 03

  It'd probably be a lot of things. We're trying some pretty radical experiments in organizational design. For example, we're building in public. All of our investor updates from the beginning of the company, from day one, are public on our website. All of our team, all hands, weekly, are public on our website. We're super transparent. There's a phrase that we took, I think this might be from Netflix, which is treat people like adults. And I would say a lot of our values as a company are really downstream of treat people like adults. When thinking about company culture, what that means, I really think that it means it is the set

• 14:21Speaker 03

  of assumptions you can make about the other people around you that you work with without having ever interacted with them before. If you can make the assumption that they are not going to gossip, that they are going to close the loop on your communication, so you don't have to set reminders for yourself. All of the things-

• 14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Can you give me an example of that?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So closing the loop would be something like when you deliver something, you then send them a message saying, I completed this task. And so it just, the more of these open loops you have, where you have, where you feel like, hey, did you ever finish that thing?

• 14:55Tim Ferriss?

  Exhausting.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  It's exhausting. Exactly. And so just closing the loop on that. And some of these are very simple-

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  So the assumption is people will carry something to completion, once you have assigned it. Couple of questions just on those two as examples. So I feel like treating people like adults is one thing, but there are a lot of gossipy- Mean spirited, unreliable adults in the world. So probably like mature competent adults. Right. And are there tools that you use to remove some of the need to have follow up? Or is it just assumed that people will have their own set of tools like an asana or something else? I'm just wondering how much the toolkit enables you to help treat others like responsible adults.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  There are definitely tools that can help. I would say that a lot of it is really just a commitment to following through.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right. These are, these are the expected outcomes slash responsibilities slash commandments of being a responsible adult. This is just table stakes for the culture that we're building here.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, like we have a memo internally, which is I think also published externally. Most of our strategy memos are published externally, but it says that a lack of communication is a lack of performance. And this is something that I think a lot of people mistake is they say, well, I did my job. I just didn't communicate well. And they say, well, you know, sure, I can always improve my communication. And they feel like it's not an important thing. And we've really taken that to say, okay, well, your communication is part of your performance. So I don't care how well you think you did on this task. If you failed to communicate it while it was being done, and you failed to close the loop to let the people know

• 16:38Speaker 03

  that it was done, where you're accountable to, that is a failure of performance, not a failure of communication. It's like a separate category.

• 16:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's like an ancillary minor component. It is an integral part of the entire puzzle of performance.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  For sure. And I would actually add to the tools for the gossipy part as well, that we record all of our meetings. So there's just a setting on Zoom you can set at the organization level of just default record. And so we have that on. And we tell people it's default record, not mandatory record everything. But over time, people get used to it and you just record more things.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  How do you explain that to them?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  We have a memo. Yeah.

• 17:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think Bridgewater.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Did this, Ray Dalio's outfit, although he's not operationally involved much anymore, I don't think. But what was the, in the memo, what was the gist of explaining? Why it's not a surveillance state?

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the gist of-

• 17:36Tim Ferriss?

  Or the reason for it being a surveillance state?

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, the gist of it is that the intent of recording is that it is way easier to just get first person information. So if, let's say, me and an engineer have a call and we're working through a problem. And somebody else also needs context on it. Your options are, okay, every person who could conceivably need this information needs to be in this meeting in real time, right now.

• 18:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or you translate in some clumsy fashion and things get lost, or here's a recorder.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Or here's the recorder. This is literally what we said at the time that we said it. There's no misinterpretation, there's no anything. It's just, it is what was said at the time it was said. And there have been many, many times where that has been a useful resource. We've actually taken this a step further recently where we now default share all meetings, including one on ones. That doesn't mean that you're required to. If something comes up, if you say something you didn't mean to say, this is not meant to be like a gotcha thing. If you say something and you say, hey, I don't want this shared, then you don't have to share it. There's a process for auto sharing that you can just stop one of these recordings from being shared, which is totally fine.

• 18:48Tim Ferriss?

  What is the logic on the one on ones being recorded?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  So the one on ones have been recorded for a long time. It's the recent change, which was in-

• 18:54Tim Ferriss?

  I see, it's the sharing.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Was the sharing. Yeah. It's because the intent is that it's a forcing function to prevent gossip. One of the things that we took from Netflix is whenever somebody says something to somebody else in a maybe a one on one context where it feels like gossip about somebody else. The auto response you're supposed to give is, oh, well, what did they say when you told them about that directly? And if you don't get a good answer, that's a problem. And they have enough, from at least what I've read in the book, enough antibodies in their organization to prevent that from becoming commonplace. The nice thing about recordings is that it is the forcing function. That one-on-one, unless you say otherwise, is going to be shared with the team.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  And many times, the EAs will tag people who are in, related in the conversation. And you'll get to see gossip is what I would maybe describe as chronic inflammation of an organization. And it turns chronic inflammation into acute inflammation, which is, hey, what the hell? I heard what you said in this meeting. What was that about? And you say, wow, you're right. I'm sorry.

• 20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Here's the chapter on clearing conversations and 15 commitments of conscious leadership.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 20:08Tim Ferriss?

  Let's roll up the sleeves and get this over with.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. And like, those things can become like chronic problems for months, even years in some cases. And recording them at a minimum, if you end up getting to the end of the conversation and you say, hey, can we not share this conversation? Cause I feel like I need to talk to person X about some of the things that I said here before they see this. At a minimum is a forcing function for that. So it's really helpful to just create those reinforcement mechanisms.

• 20:39Tim Ferriss?

  So for people listening, we are going to come back to delegation and many aspects of delegation, but all of these things tie together, right? They're, they are interdependent pieces. And I feel like they're also as loathe as I am to use this word, but I do use it occasionally, which is synergistic, right? These, these have a multiplicative effect in some respects. Let's talk about one tool and neither of us have any vested interest in this company or this tool, Loom, because I had used Loom occasionally. And then I saw your use and your company use of Loom, which took it to levels I could not even previously imagined. So how, how is this used?

• 21:24Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe then you can just touch on a few other tools and then we're going to come back to EAs. And I think we'll probably start with sourcing and then move on to better delegation. But from a tool perspective, let's start with Loom, what it is, how you use it. And then maybe you can mention a few others.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Loom is probably. The most important business enablement tool of the last five years, certainly in my experience. It's a very simple tool, which is it's a low friction way to record your screen and then some sort of an async message. You have a picture of yourself, you can record your screen and it is really easy to record a loom.

• 22:03Tim Ferriss?

  And it is ready to share.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's pretty much instantaneously when you finish recording. So there's no lag time for uploading something to a sharing service.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Totally. And what's interesting about using this sort of tool is that anything that is in the form of content scales effectively infinitely in a way that in-person time or phone calls do not. Content scales, time does not. It's a pretty simple calculation. But what's interesting is there's a mental shift that needs to happen for people where it reminds me of in the, in the early days of radio. You maybe know some of the history of this. The first radio programs were just theater plays read out loud on the radio. Cause they didn't know what to do with this new medium. It made no sense. And then eventually they figured out instead of copying our old ways, we can create new patterns that amplify this even more. And I think this is where we are with a lot of these remote work tools.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Whereas in the past, pair programming was two people sit behind each other and you watch each other code and you talk and you're doing it at the same time. Or you have a really good programmer who's just doing his normal workflow, recording on a loom. And he's just narrating what he's thinking while he's doing it. And then the other person can watch it at two and a half X. They can pause it. They can rewind. They can take notes. You don't have to do this live. It's a piece of content. And then every engineer at your company forever into the future can see the same piece of content. And so there was a really interesting example recently where I shared something with somebody externally.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  And they were commenting on like, this is a failure because only 40 people watched this. And I said, this was an internal meeting. Could you imagine like if we had an internal meeting with 40 people in it? You would say like, that was a lot of information being transmitted. But there's this cognitive thing of like, well, if it's a piece of content, it needs to get like a million views or it's a failure.

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:59Tim Ferriss?

  So just out of curiosity, if you're open to saying, and you're open to saying a lot, but I understand if it's not everything. What was the loom of the 40 person meeting that was shared externally? Or why was it shared externally?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  The loom that was shared was one of our Friday forums. It was a

• 24:18Tim Ferriss?

  What is a Friday forum?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. That's our team all hands. We do it every week on Fridays.

• 24:22Tim Ferriss?

  And how large is the team now?

• 24:23Speaker 03

  The team's 40, 50 people.

• 24:26Tim Ferriss?

  40, 50 people.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. And so many people show up live, so they don't watch the recording. So that's fine. And then some people watch it after the fact. We also have a number of all of our memos. We also use Notion pretty religiously. Once you learn how to use the Notion database features, they're actually extremely powerful in the amount of leverage you can get from it. All of our memos have a summary loom at the top, any sort of meaningful memo. And so somebody will do a five minute walkthrough of something that they wrote. And many people just watch those looms. So that's another thing where people can share.

• 25:02Tim Ferriss?

  What is the format or the agenda for the Friday forum?

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Every meeting obviously has some intent. And I think it's important, where a lot of people fail is they lose the intent of the meeting. We even explicitly state this at the beginning of our Friday forums, which is this is the place where we celebrate the wins of that week. The first few minutes are highlights of the week. Then we have usually a special guest, which is oftentimes one of our members from the company who's had some really positive experience using our product. Then we do highlights from maybe the growth team, maybe highlights from the product team. So the goal is to have people feeling really good about the things that were accomplished during that week.

• 25:43Tim Ferriss?

  And how long is that?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  It's typically an hour. And we do at the end, maybe 20 minutes of personal updates, like personal highlights from the week.

• 25:52Tim Ferriss?

  And just for disambiguation for folks who may not be familiar with the company, members, you mean customers?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  And then if we double click on both Loom and Notion again, because I really feel, and I have doubled, tripled, quadrupled my use of Loom. I have a couple of specific questions. Where have people been doubtful employees of using Loom? And I think you gave me, and we can always clip anything out of this interview, right? But an example of a videographer, a video editor at one point, which I think is a good example. So maybe you could give that. And how do you make these easily searchable and findable? Because what I find is I use Loom most often in a one-off capacity, say, running through a Google Doc, and I don't want to add 75 different comments.

• 26:45Tim Ferriss?

  So I will use that as a way to give my verbal feedback and next actions. Saves a ton of time, or at least a ton of my time. So I'd love to know perhaps some use cases which will challenge what people might perceive as what is possible or not possible with a tool like Loom. And then I'd love for you to say a little bit more about why you use Notion instead of other options, like what the use case is predominantly. And I'm speaking as someone who doesn't really use databases. I don't really use spreadsheets much. I probably should, but I just don't at this point.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  I think one of the things with Loom, part of the assumption is that one of the rules that we really try to push people for is only ever do one take. Just do one take, because so many people, when they start using it as a tool, they stumble. I say, oh, man, I have to re-record it. And they'll do eight takes for something that really did not need to be. And so we really try to push people towards, if you're in a meeting and you stumbled over your words, nobody would care. And they also don't care that you did it in a Loom. So just relax. It's fine. A lot of my Looms, I have multiple minutes in a row of pausing of just thinking, what did I do here? And then in people's minds, it's like, oh, my God, this is so uncomfortable. I'm on a recording and there's this empty space.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  You know, what are they going to be thinking? But if you're in a meeting, that would be totally normal. And so one of the things that we do during our onboarding, I believe it's now week three of our one month onboarding for new employees, is the entire week, third week, is async week, where you are only allowed to do verbal and video recordings for communication. You're not allowed to write anything. You're not allowed to type anything. So if you want to say, hey, great job, you have to record an audio note and you have to send that, or you have to do a loom of yourself saying, hey, that was good work. Thank you. And then that's it. And just get used to that.

• 28:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do they send the audio note?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  So Loom also has an audio.

• 28:44Tim Ferriss?

  I see, audio only.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you, I think it might only be on mobile, but you can do an audio note on Loom mobile. And yeah, it's really, really uncomfortable for people. This is why the forcing function was we had to make this part of onboarding, because it was so strange for almost everybody.

• 29:01Tim Ferriss?

  So what would you say to folks? And then maybe we'll talk about the video example as another training tool. But what would you say to people who have the visceral reaction of, I'm very fast at reading. Video and audio memos are really slow. And I saw this meme going around with this guy standing on the street corner with this big sign over his head, sort of like someone who would ask for money, but it said, no, I will not listen to your three minute voice memo. So how would you address that concern that this is just going to end up taking more time during, say, an async week? And maybe that's okay, because you're really just trying to force people to get used to working asynchronously. But what are your thoughts?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  I mean, that's definitely the case. There is no perfect medium. The medium matters, depending on the message that you're trying to communicate. And so long form memos should be in writing, because you're going to skip over, you're going to find the parts that are relevant. Writing is a tool for thought.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  And doing these audio notes is a different tool to convey different types of information. And so I think the short answer is you should use the right tool for the job. A lot of people find that what they use loom for would be instead of sitting down at a blank piece of paper, they just record themselves with whatever thoughts they have for what will go into it. They send that to their EA, which maybe today would be chat GPT, but they send it to their EA who outlines it. And then it's just, it's a lot less painful to come into at least partially outlined piece of work rather than starting from a blank page.

• 30:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the blinking cursor.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Would you mind describing, since I've teased it excessively now, but the, the video editing example? And then how you make things searchable? Because for instance, I have a very small team, but at one point I was curious as to how people were currently tracking tasks and projects.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:58Tim Ferriss?

  Because people have a good amount of flexibility and there are pros and cons to that. We have used a lot of, say, Asana in the past, but some employees work differently and have different approaches. So I wanted them to capture a loom of their flow. And if you were to ask me right now, gun against the head, you have to find all of those looms within the next 30 minutes, I would be concerned for my safety. I might not find them. So the video example and then how you organize things or naming conventions, maybe I have no idea. Organize these looms such that you can find them later.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  So one of the things I would say is that I probably record, in fact, I know this to say, I probably averaged about 10 to 20 looms per day I record. And to be perfectly honest, I maybe share half of them. A lot of them, I just turn it on because maybe I'll want to use that information. It is costless to record a loom. And so if nothing happens, then nothing happens. It costs nothing. It costs me nothing to record it. It costs me nothing to not share it. The searchability, it has not been an issue for at least the looms that I record because they tend not to be things that I would share, they tend not to be things that I would come back to. They're more in the moment things. I would be willing to bet though,

• 32:15Speaker 03

  that over the course of the next, maybe six to 12 months, that as these AI tools continue to get better, search is the most obvious use case for this.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  And as far as I can tell, in the last, I don't know when this started, maybe month or two, Loom has already begun to auto title your videos based on, I assume, I'm not sure if it's AI, but some type of transcript.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. And so there will be a point in the future where you can say, hey, can you find me that video that I did with this specific person where we talked about this? And it'll definitely be able to find it. So I think some of that will just be solved.

• 32:52Tim Ferriss?

  So my laziness has a shelf life.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:56Tim Ferriss?

  The technology will catch up and solve my lack of process. I'm excited.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. But I will say on the other side, which is the searchability for the recording of tasks, this is what we use Notion databases for. So our EAs, every process that they do for somebody on our team has its own dedicated page in Notion. And that page has a linked database to a much larger database, which is all tasks that any EA has done for us. And you can connect those two together. There's something called a relation and you can relate those together and you can create a sub view within that. So imagine you have a task, that's a recurring task, task A. At the bottom, you can create

• 33:40Speaker 03

  a linked database that filters only for tasks that are related to that. And so in each of those entries, the EA will include a link to the loom of the date that they did the thing. And so if you want to see when's the last time somebody did this task, you can go to that specific task page and you can see, oh, they did it April 26th, they did it March 3rd. And you can see each time they did it and you can click on the recording and you can just watch them do it. And this is most useful, for one, it's just knowing that it's there. If you say, hey, did that get sent?

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's proof of work.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Proof of work. Did that get sent last week? You can go there, you can see that it is, and it's just reassuring to not have to reach out to them and make sure. The other is whenever there's a bug in the process where... This happens often. Somebody gets a message. You're like, that's weird because why would they get that? You can look at the process and you can see, oh, because they pulled the information from here and they didn't know that I was actually communicating with them over here. So they thought it was one of these kinds. And so you can just say, hey, I saw that you did this. Not a big deal. But next time, check both of these sources and see which one's most recent. And then they update the process and you don't have those issues as opposed to just ambiguously having it fail and not knowing why.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Easier to debug.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  Video.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. So there are so many good examples of this.

• 35:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'm open to more examples.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. There are so many good examples. So one of the specific tactical things that I always recommend for people for getting better at delegating is just workflow recording. And this is really as simple as when you sit at your computer, turn on a loom, and then that's it. Just do your normal work. And a specific example was Tony, who runs multimedia for us. He was doing a lot of video editing and Josh, who does our Friday forums as well. They do this whole process of video editing, of creating the slides, and almost everybody in their own role says, nobody else could do this. It's way too complicated. You have to pull from here. You got to pull from there. And I think almost everybody overestimates the complexity of these tasks. It's really just pattern matching. And if

• 35:51Speaker 03

  you record your workflow doing that-

• 35:53Tim Ferriss?

  True for most tasks.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true for most tasks. For multimedia, he was saying, well, how are they going to know what five items from this interview are the most interesting? How are they going to know that? And then how are they going to know to edit and cut those in this particular way? And then it turns out, you record yourself doing that two or three times, and then an EA can replicate that with 90% accuracy.

• 36:13Tim Ferriss?

  And this is with some type of casual running commentary?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sometimes not, Ethan. It's just doing it and just they can just see what you're doing. Okay, well, he went to this place. He went to that place. Almost everybody that does this is surprised at how quickly somebody can match whatever pattern it is that you're doing. There's a lot less secret knowledge than people expect.

• 36:35Tim Ferriss?

  So coming back to EA's and sourcing, how many EA's would you say work with you and your employees?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  I think I personally have- Four right now that just work for me doing my task. I think we have maybe 20 in the whole company.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So what are the options or the better options for sourcing EA talent? And the follow up, because I like to just put things in the hopper. So in gestate, when you talked about rematching, I'd be curious as to how you assess and decide when to kind of keep or cut someone if there's a process for that. I imagine it's not purely subjective feel, but I'd be curious to learn more about that. So sourcing, what some of the better options are, and then how you evaluate.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  There are several ways you can go about sourcing. I've always found the best way to do it is to work with an agency. We work with Athena. They're an agency out of the Philippines. They're really the higher end of agencies and they cost more. And so it really depends on how much you value that. Other options would be you can source them directly, which tend to be cheaper. I think Athena is $15, $20 an hour typically, and you can find talent for $5 an hour if you source it yourself.

• 37:52Tim Ferriss?

  How would you source that directly for people who were interested in the lower end?

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Upwork is a place where people often go to find them. There's also another agency that's sort of on the, they're on the cheaper side, which is Shepherd. My friend Nick is involved with them. They tend to be more like $5 an hour, but it requires a lot more overhead. So they don't have their own management team. It's really you and them figuring it out as opposed to having more of a structure around it.

• 38:19Tim Ferriss?

  And Athena came up numerous times for me in the last, I want to say, year and a half. And they were actually very, very helpful for sourcing my new chief of staff, which maybe at some point, whenever it makes sense, we could delineate maybe EA from chief of staff and what those terms mean. And in the case of sourcing through Athena, those are all full-time employees.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  How many of them are dedicated to one person as opposed to spread across multiple employees?

• 38:50Speaker 03

  We have this concept of an EA pool where it's just available EA talent for whoever needs a specific task done. Over time, They become more and more dedicated as a specific person needs more consistent resourcing, or as context becomes more relevant. We recently shifted one of our EAs to full-time on product support, who was in the EA pool, but we just have enough tasks now in product that it makes sense to have a single person with dedicated context on that. So I don't know the specific numbers. I would guess we probably have 15 dedicated and maybe five in the general pool at this point.

• 39:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 40:15Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 40:35Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about, and maybe it's 100%, say Athena/overseas, that type of EA or support staff versus those who are in the US or in other locations?

• 40:52Speaker 03

  One of the biggest challenges that often happens overseas is the time zone difference. The interesting thing about the Philippines specifically is that there's such a large contingent of people who work for US companies, that there's effectively a subculture of people who just live like America time zone hours. So that tends to be less of an issue, or at a minimum, there's significant overlap in lifestyle. I would say that it really depends a lot on what the tasks are that you need. And this actually does, I think, tie into the chief of staff question, which is there's this spectrum of declarative and imperative of what you would expect from somebody. And so declarative being, go write a growth strategy.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  And imperative is, here are the tasks that I need you to do consistently over some time period. And there's a spectrum between those two. And a chief of staff is somebody where you say, we have this problem, go solve it. Where an EA tends to be somebody where it's more consistent tasks, like scheduling is a common one, which I actually don't really do. I use Calendly. I think that's something that you can just offload to technology. But it's those sorts of things where it's more, I don't necessarily want to say routine, but that might be a better term for it, is things that happen consistently.

• 42:08Tim Ferriss?

  They're also very explicit.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:09Tim Ferriss?

  They're sort of discreet, well-defined.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Tasks.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. And they tend to be things that are done consistently over time. You really don't want a chief of staff to be stuck. I would describe it more like a gardening role. Chief of staff should not be the person who's doing a lot of the stuff that you're doing that's just sort of keeping the lights on. They should be somebody that you can trust to take on more meaty projects. Or in general, they tend not to be happy if they're in the role where they're stuck doing simple things like preparing meeting notes beforehand. That tends to be something that you would have somebody who's able to do that on a more routine basis. This was one of the learnings that I had working with Lori is that old saying, different strokes for different folks.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  And working with Lori for as long as I have, my worst nightmare is being stuck wrapping Christmas presents all day. I could not do it.

• 43:05Tim Ferriss?

  I find it pretty meditative. No, but I have a very high degree of, I find certain types of monotony very soothing. Find other types infinitely grating.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:15Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, different strokes for different folks.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Maybe I could do your wrapping. Exactly. And so I'm just relentlessly novelty seeking. I really struggle to do any task more than just a handful. I play a lot of board games. I can usually only play a game, maybe five or 10 times before I've figured out the strategy and then it's boring. It's just like a mastery thing of, okay, well, I already know how to win most of the time. And now it's just, how do I get slightly better?

• 43:41Tim Ferriss?

  Gamers find the goodwill closest to Sam and you will find a lot of overflow of perfectly good board games. I got it. Okay. How do you choose your board games?

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Mostly through recommendations.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  But what are the criteria the recommenders are using before passing to you?

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I really only play complex strategy games. So they tend to be the Euro style games. It tends to be games that if they come recommended from somebody who I know is a very serious board gamer, then I know it'll be good. So I'm playing Twilight Imperium on Sunday, which is like a full day long board game. So.

• 44:22Tim Ferriss?

  Sam's recreation. You know, I do love tabletop games. It's something that we could geek out on maybe over dinner. I'm, I'm very into it. I don't want to take us too far off script. So we're talking about EAs and Chief of Staff. Also, I mean, I think the degree to which things overlap. For me, it's always been important that like no task too small, no task too big, in part because the org size is so small. It's like I have three full-time employees. But let's come back to both, say, onboarding and how you assess performance and decide on pass, fail, go, no go.

• 45:05Tim Ferriss?

  With EAs, what is the process of vetting and pairing and onboarding look like?

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Onboarding is super important. People put a lot of time into recruiting. They'll put 50, $100,000 into hiring somebody. And then as soon as they start, they just like throw them into the deep end and hope for the best. And so having really good onboarding is super important to that attach rate of people really.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Being able to work effectively.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  Attach rate is, I guess, is that the same as retention?

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, however, different companies have different definitions of attach rate. But yeah, it's like the ability to to work adequately with an EA. And so I think one of the most important things is setting super clear expectations early. Setting good process really helps as well. Something that we look for is proactivity. Somebody who goes out of their way to reduce your workload instead of somebody who creates work for you.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  How do you test for that? Can you test for that in the vetting process? Or do you have to kind of wait and see?

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, you might be able to test for it. I haven't. This is one of the the benefits of working with an agency is.

• 46:15Tim Ferriss?

  They get to know what you need.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and specifically, Athena was started by Jonathan from Thumbtack. And his whole thing is 10x delegation. So they have a whole internal training program to try to make them be more proactive as opposed to hiring somebody who is completely fresh and you have to teach them all of these things. So this is the the trade off of time. You can train somebody up and it would be less expensive, but it requires more overhead at the beginning. I think the nature of how you train them and how you set these expectations. One of the best ones, this is another tactic, is the playback, which is you set a task and you say, repeat back to me. And this is almost always done in a loom. Repeat back to me how you will do this task.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  And oftentimes, when you're just getting started with somebody, they'll propose how they're going to go about it. And it's completely wrong. And that's okay. You say, okay, that's good to know. This is how I want you to do it. And going forward for these kinds of tasks, I want you to do it over here. And then they repeat it back to you and you say, great, that's right.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any type of, I guess, threading for looms? How are you? Because this is, this is all frequently async.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's frequently async.

• 47:29Tim Ferriss?

  So how are you communicating these zoom, like not zoom? I'm definitely not the first person who's done that loom links.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  So you do it in threads, but it wouldn't be in loom specifically. You do it in emails or we ended up building our own internal communications tool because we're really not happy with Slack. Slack is it's a slot machine. It is the opposite of what you want in a workplace communication tool.

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  So what do you mean by slot machine?

• 47:53Speaker 03

  As in, it has the same dopamine loop as Twitter.

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  I see, I see.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  It's like you, you feel like you have to compulsively check Slack because it's like, oh, is there a new piece of information that I want to check? And there's a lot of data on this. Rescue Time did a study that I think most tech workers can't go more than six minutes without checking their communication tool. And a lot of that is because of Slack and they're just constantly checking. Like you're trying to write code, but they have this compulsive need to, oh, just check. Oh, there's new information.

• 48:28Tim Ferriss?

  Rescue Time, little known fact, way back in the day, one of my first ever angel investments.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 48:33Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred years ago.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great mission, great mission. I want to talk about information inputs.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:43Tim Ferriss?

  This may be a good place for a sidebar on this. So avoiding slot machines. News sobriety.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:52Tim Ferriss?

  Term I've used, which I think is probably quite similar is sort of the low information diet. But what is news sobriety and what does that mean for your day to day, month to month experience?

• 49:04Speaker 03

  I've been fully news sober for almost 10 years.

• 49:07Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  I read Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying. That really frightened me about the state of the media and convinced me, this was originally just a one month experiment. I said, for a month, I'm going to consume no current events in any form. No news, no television, no articles, no social media. And instead I'm just going to try a one to one replacement of reading books during that time period. And I read eight books that month, which was more than I probably read in the previous five years. Everything about my life was better. I physically felt different. I felt less anxious during the day.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  And it was interesting when you have that separation for long enough. And I have friends who are panicked about something that they heard. And I would find myself asking, but does that matter? And it's like, wow, I would have been in the same frenzy if I was paying attention. And it really doesn't matter. Almost none of these things are important.

• 50:11Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you, and maybe that is the answer, but I'm curious, since I've received this answer when implementing this to probably a lesser extent. The question of like, how do you stay informed? Aren't you worried that you're missing important things? Or some variant of that? I have my own way to respond to that, but I'm curious how you respond to it.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it is one of the coups of the news industry broadly, that they've managed to convince people that watching the news is what responsible citizens do. And much the same way that the orange juice lobby convinced people that orange juice is healthy because it has vitamin C, even though it's really almost indistinguishable from a can of soda. It's just they've convinced us that this is what responsible people do. They read the news and it's really trash information. I'm usually extremely bad at trivia night, which surprises a lot of people because I read a lot of books. But the reality is that my retort is that I just don't know trivial things. So I'm bad at trivia.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  It's always, you know, who's Kim Kardashian dating now? I have no idea and I really don't care. It's like, what place in the world had this thing happen? I don't know. If it was important, it'll eventually end up in a book that I will read. But it is exceedingly rare that an event happens that makes any difference to my day to day experience.

• 51:37Tim Ferriss?

  So practically then, and tactically, does that mean you have no social apps on your phone? What are some other features or lack of features that are a consequence of the news sobriety?

• 51:49Speaker 03

  So I don't have social apps. I have profiles on a lot of them. I used to have a problem with Twitter. And so I created some buffer, which is I don't have access to my own Twitter account. My EAs have access to my Twitter account. They have my password. If I want to post something, I send it to them and then they post it. And then I don't get that dopamine feedback loop of, oh my God, X number of people liked my post. Because also they don't care. There's no ego attachment from them on how well my post did. And so they will look at my notifications empirically and just say, hey, this might be something that you want to respond to. And they'll screenshot it and they'll send it to me and they'll say, hey, do you want to respond?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  All of my DMs on Twitter are managed by my EAs. All of my LinkedIn messages are managed by my EAs.

• 52:41Tim Ferriss?

  What are your rules for managing?

• 52:45Tim Ferriss?

  Any of those accounts? What are the criteria for flagging or not flagging?

• 52:50Speaker 03

  This is another one of the tactical things, which is semi automation, where there are a lot of things that you can do where people are often afraid to give access to somebody like an EA to manage their social media account. Because they think, what if they post something? Or what if they do X? But you can always semi automate, which is they take a screenshot and then they propose what they think you should do. And they'll say, I propose that you just like this tweet. Or they'll say, I propose you respond with this message. Or I propose that you respond with this message. And over time, you get better and better at teaching them what, it's like, you can just ignore that one. You just delete it. Or you say, oh, yeah, I actually know this person from this other place, which you can

• 53:34Speaker 03

  find in this other category of information. And I tend to respond with something like this. And over time, they get better to the point where I'm probably at like 95% of the messages. I just say, yes. It's very, very simple, but I don't trust them enough for them to 100% fully automate all responses to things. But their proposed recommendations are generally good enough now to where I just say yes to most things.

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  I want to highlight something. And you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong. I don't want to misrepresent. Well, I'll speak for myself, that I think it is frequent for people who want to maximize or optimize, fill in the blank, to look for areas where they can remove or reduce friction. But the opposite is really valuable. Where can you add friction such that your lesser self doesn't hijack your behavior? So that'd be a good example. And I don't have any social on my phone right now, except for Instagram, because I use it to interact with a handful of my friends. But by and large.

• 54:46Tim Ferriss?

  That is not a part of my life. It is used for mostly broadcast or communication, but it's one, it's largely one direction. And then someone on my team similarly will highlight sort of notable or interesting messages that I might want to respond to, and then they would typically respond on my behalf and I draft. Because I do not have high degree of confidence that I have, that my willpower can overcome teams of data scientists and gamification. Like I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight, so I'd rather just not go to the gunfight in the first place.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  Let's come back to onboarding for a second. Repeat back to me how you'll do this task and then you can iterate on that as an example. What are some other practices or mistakes either that you've seen in onboarding or ways that you guys have refined your approach to onboarding? Because I'll speak for myself personally, I've become, I think, much better at hiring over time, especially in the last few years. I still think almost certainly I'm very mediocre on onboarding. And there are a hell of a lot more books on hiring than there are on onboarding.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I've read a bunch of books on hiring, very little said about onboarding generally.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the biggest thing is people really want to jump into it immediately.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, by people, do you mean the people who have?

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Who joined, yeah.

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Who joined?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. They want to jump into it immediately. And we have an onboarding checklist in Notion. We have a template, we copy it for each new person that joins, and they have a set of tasks that they do each day. It's pretty well guided. I can share the template with you if you're curious.

• 56:26Tim Ferriss?

  That'd be amazing. I would love, I would love that. Is this for all employees or EA's specifically?

• 56:30Speaker 03

  All employees.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  All employees, okay.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  And there is a video of me at the start of each week, it's a loom, where I specifically say, hey,

• 56:40Speaker 03

  At this point, people usually want to skip onboarding and start jumping into their tasks. Don't do that. It's always a mistake. Really take onboarding seriously. Our onboarding process is a full month and we don't expect people to start producing for a month. It really does take that long for a lot of people to get fully up to speed. And we help guide them in more slowly. Read these books. Read this documentation that we have about how we built our culture. Especially for our case, because the way that we operate is very different than a lot of people's previous experiences. And so it's pretty jarring when you see a lot of the transparency of when your first one-on-one gets published to the rest of the company, it's pretty jarring. And so we try to ease people into these things.

• 57:24Tim Ferriss?

  You know, it's also going to be jarring is if you become a public company CEO.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 57:28Tim Ferriss?

  Things will have to change a bit.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably.

• 57:31Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, continue. Sorry.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. And over time, people get used to it over the course of about a month. I think the biggest thing is the cultural assimilation. In our case, has been the biggest hurdle over the course of onboarding is getting people reading the memos, practicing some of the things. One of the cultural values that we have is everything's written in pencil. But also you can change things here. And one of the things that we do is at the end of onboarding, everybody is required to update the onboarding process for something that was out of date. And then post to a channel confirming what they changed and just giving a list of what they changed. And it's pretty weird for people, especially those who come from larger companies.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Like when they've had, you know, the same onboarding process that the company's had for 20 years. And then they go in the actual files and edit it themselves. I'm a new employee.

• 58:24Tim Ferriss?

  Is there always stuff out of date or do you throw in like favorite with an OU? Just to see if people catch it.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  There's always something out of date. There are maybe 50 items in this and sometimes we deprecate an old memo and replace it with a new one. Or there's some new piece of information that came about that people add in. This ties into one of the concepts that I bring up a lot in the company is organizational entropy. Which is any artifact that you produce immediately starts rotting the moment that you have created it.

• 58:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's like driving a new car off the lot.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, the moment that anything is published in the company, you write a memo. It is already rotting. It is already going to be out of date. And so the concept of entropy is it is always increasing. And so the only way to keep entropy at bay is you have to add more energy into the system. So you have to create reinforcement mechanisms for any piece of content that you have. If you have a database of all your memos, you have to check them every once in a while to make sure they're up to date. You need to create more energy always has to go in, in order to keep things fresh and functional.

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the key, this is going to be a cheap question, and I recognize it in advance, some of the key modules of those 50 that people may not fully appreciate, maybe from the outside looking in, if they did a quick scan, are there some where you're like, you know, you should pay particular attention to any of these, or some that you might draw attention to? I ask people this quite a lot, authors, I'm like, you've had this book out for a year, what are you bummed people didn't pay more attention to? Right? That kind of thing.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  Some of them are very specific to the way that we operate, which is async week is a good example of video and audio only for an entire week, because we have to force people into that so you can get comfortable with it. Other things around just cultural assimilation and setting clear expectations, that might be something that is universally important. I think another one that probably under-invested in, at least for remote companies, is setting aside real committed time to talking to all the people that you will likely work with. Having a 30-minute interaction with somebody when you're in a remote company early on, has a huge impact on your ability to work with that person later on. It just

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  lowers the barrier for, hey, I need your help with something versus, I don't know who this person is, and I don't know what they're going to think about me. And so we really try to make that a priority within onboarding as well. And that's probably universal for remote companies. And we've been remote from day one.

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  So there is a tactical guide to working with EA is how to make delegation your superpower. This piece that in your very beautiful meticulously prepared notes, I gotta say, it's kind of my, my, my dream type of guest where you're like, wow, okay. I would feel very confident if you were drafting my responses for LinkedIn. It was very, very well put together. And like the flow, everything is well thought through. In this particular guide, and this can also be more expansive than the guide, I'm wondering what other recommendations around delegation you have received positive feedback from where people try something and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I didn't do this earlier, or I didn't think that was gonna work,

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  and it actually really worked. Anything that comes to mind?

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  The biggest one is using Loom and just doing workflow recordings. I've worked with a lot of people to help them get better at delegating. And the thing that I really emphasize is figure out how to reduce your perceived risk of doing this thing. Just lower the threshold for how much work you think you need to put into it. That's another one of the things-

• 1:02:10Tim Ferriss?

  Into what? Into training someone? Or, I see.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, just lower, lower your perceived risk. One of the reasons why people often fail to delegate as well is they make a lot of assumptions about how much effort's gonna go into it. It's like, oh man, well, I'm gonna have to like write a whole process doc and then just reduce your assumptions. And just say, all right, what is the simplest thing you can do? Do all of the work that you were going to do anyway, exactly the same as you were going to do it, and just turn on Loom and record it. And just try that. It's effectively zero effort, zero cost. And you can have a three hour loom and just share that with your EA and say, is there anything in here that you think you could do that would help me?

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  And almost every person that's done this is amazed at how many things come out of just a simple workflow recording like that. So just figure out how to lower the perceived risk of it. This is something that's different about remote versus in person is that when you're remote, remote first is a concept that I think GitLab came up with, which is whether you're in person or not, you have the same principles as you would if you were remote. And if you're remote first, everything that you do is on a computer and it is therefore necessarily content if you want it to be. And so typing at your keyboard could be content if you wanted it to. It's like a Twitch stream of your actual work as opposed to something that you're doing in the real world where you don't have that.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  If you're on a Zoom call with somebody, that could just be content in a way that it wouldn't be if you're going on a walk. So really leaning into what's possible with this remote work style.

• 1:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  Not just reading the stage play.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:03:54Tim Ferriss?

  Into the radio mic.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. If you really lean into what's possible with the everything is content model, the amount of leverage that you get is much, much higher. This is the shift is that people are not super comfortable with that yet. Like I've been working with Cosima who runs product for us and she's been just really getting used to, there's a lot of process.

• 1:04:17Tim Ferriss?

  Cosima?

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Cosima, yeah.

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Cosima, great name, great name.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's been trying to figure out how to offload some of the tedious things in product where it's like, make sure these things are up to date, shuffle tickets around, set reminders for things, which often is what product managers do. And we're figuring out how to offload those to our EAs so that the product people can spend their time doing higher leverage things like strategy and much longer term thinking. And it's been interesting to see how she's overcome this as something where she, it's really uncomfortable to just record yourself doing your work. That is a big hurdle for a lot of people is just turning Loom on for three hours.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  I wanted to ask you that. So to play devil's advocate slash myself, I imagine bringing on Nia.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is someone I don't know very well. And I would have, and I want you to disabuse me of this, or to at least to attempt, be like, if I do a three hour loom, I'm going to be getting into all sorts of sensitive stuff.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  And then maybe if I were to try to create another objection slash type of resistance, it would be, I'm just going to be doing probably a bunch of random stuff. I mean, people who've read my books and so on might imagine like every day is just this like surgical Tron race where I'm just threading needles and it's just this like masterful Iron Chef display of performance. It's not what it looks like.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Even on my best days, it's like, looks like I'm either staring, watching paint dry, or it's a lot of juggling different things. So I would be like, I'm not convinced this is going to be super helpful. And I might have concerns around privacy or security, or whatever it might be. I can't be alone. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I think maybe out of the box, you are probably much more embracing of like full transparency and public sharing than I am. But I would imagine there are some people who come from maybe a different company or a different experience who would have maybe similar thoughts. I'm not sure. But what would you say as my podcast guest slash involuntary therapist?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  I think a big part of the answer is that the worst case scenario is you turn on a three hour loom and then you delete it.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's not a live stream.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  No, it's not a live stream. That's the thing that people really struggle with is like, the first assumption is if it's recorded, it's going on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow. And then at some point, you just realize that it's not.

• 1:06:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's so stupid, right? It's just like, now that you say it, I'm like, yeah, duh. Like, it's so obvious.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Tim Ferriss?

  And yet, right?

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  It's like, worst case scenario, you delete it. Or even more realistic, you just don't share it.

• 1:07:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Like, it's like, eh, I don't know. I went over some weird things in there. I'm just gonna not share it. And then you don't.

• 1:07:06Tim Ferriss?

  Here's a technical question. Can you blur if, for instance, I've had this experience where I record a loom. It's a really good loom for an external party. And then I notice like, ah shit, like I have a tab or something open that displays some sensitive, or like my iMessage is off to the side, but I did a full screen recording. And it's like, eh, I don't want to compromise the people I'm communicating with in that way. Do you have the ability to blur or crop or anything like that?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  You can edit within Loom. I think they might have introduced a blur feature somewhat recently.

• 1:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  Or just a cropping capability. I'd have to check. That would be very useful.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, they might have it because they have an editor within it. If not, there's definitely like our EAs do this already. For our Friday forums, we sometimes have sensitive information in there that we don't want to share publicly. Sometimes it's the most common one is something related to a third party that they don't want shared. And so we still talk about it as a team, but then we cut the audio for that part and we blur out anything written about it. And so there's definitely a capability to do it. It's either done in Loom or it's done externally, but it's not that hard.

• 1:08:10Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we are going to weave back to Calendly because we were kind of joking slash seriously discussing how a lot of people get offended with this tool, but that is the micro level. I don't want to go immediately to tools, although people might think that's where we're going next. To do lists to calendar.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain this transition or what that means to go from to do list to calendar for you?

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  This is probably the single most important tactic in time management for me personally. I tend to be overly optimistic about how much I can achieve.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, can I pause for one second? So my ex-girlfriends have always found this hilarious because I'll be like, okay, it's Friday, it's 2:00 PM, we have a dinner at 6:00. Over the next four hours, I'm just going to do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. And my ex-girlfriends who I've been with for any period of time will look at me and they'll say, you're never going to get it all done. I've seen this before. There's no way you're going to get even half of that done.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Tim Ferriss?

  So yes, please continue.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I've worked with a lot of people on our team, people who are friends of mine through this. And the thing that almost always happens is they have this long to do list. And I say, all right, here's what I want you to do. Take everything on this to do list with the dates that you think they'll get done by, which is usually this week or next week. And I want you to just put them on your calendar with the amount of time you think it's going to take. And then we'll have another follow-up call next week and we'll see what happens. And then we have the call and then they say, this process doesn't work. I say, why is that? So, well, I tried to move it over there, but there isn't enough space in my week to fit all these items.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Yes, that's

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  That's the point of the exercise.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  The point of the exercise. There literally is not enough time. Your time is finite and the number of digital items you can add to a to-do list is infinite. You are working with the wrong constraint, which is like the amount of items you can fit in a database row as opposed to the number of things that you can fit in your finite time of your calendar. And so we then work on, all right, you probably need slack during the course of the day, usually like 50% is a good target because things

• 1:10:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. Not the tool slack, but

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, but Space, extra space.

• 1:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  You need extra space in the day. And so we work on things like, for me, I process a lot of email.

• 1:10:40Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say you need space in the day, could you just briefly say more about that? Because the way I'm hearing that is that you have 50% of your time open. Now, is that, for instance, like tomorrow, you would have 50% of your time open? Or does that mean that in advance of scheduling other things, like three weeks from now, each day is 50% open?

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  It's generally 50% open, just fully.

• 1:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  And as you get better at it, I would say I'm probably at 25% open because I've been doing this for many years, at least five years, probably longer, to the point where I can estimate how long it will take me to do something with maybe 90% accuracy. It's like, I need to write a memo on this thing. It's going to take me three and a half hours. And I just know, because I've written so many of these, I just know how long it's going to take. And so

• 1:11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Takes time to hone that, I would think, right? If you ask most people, like, how many calories do you eat at lunch? They'll be like, 6,000 million? I don't know.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Seven calories? But then, over time, you can calibrate. Okay.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Especially if you retroactively update your calendar as well, which is, how long did it actually take me? And when you realize that your estimates were off, or they were right, you can start to hone that skill. So I always try to have people put it at 50% open space because something's going to come up. A friend calls you, something happens during the day, you get a message that kind of throws you off. The problem is that it's way easier to pull something in from tomorrow into today because you had extra space. Then it is to have this cascading problem of just like disastrous. It's like, then I have to push this to this day, then next thing you know, you have this Tetris game that you're playing a month out. Because one thing changed in your schedule and everything breaks.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  These concepts come from manufacturing where you have this line, whatever the assembly line is, you need to have slack in the system. In order to be able to operate effectively because something will come up. And if there's one thing that comes up that breaks everything downstream, that's a real problem. And over time, as you get better, you can reduce that amount of slack, but 50% is a pretty good goal. So you have like my goal for today, I'm going to have a four hour block where I'm going to do X. And then I have some time for me, I know I need to process email or communications broadly for at least two hours a day. So I just have those blocks every day, they're just repeated. So when I start scheduling things, I can't actually fit this in because it's not like I can't do my email.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  This is my role requires a lot of email. And so it's just clear as day, I cannot do this on Thursday. I can do it next week.

• 1:13:17Tim Ferriss?

  So from a process perspective, then do you start with, I'm imagining not at this point, but just, just so I get a really clear understanding. Let's just say you're looking at next week, you have these recurring blocks of email that's already in there. You may have other repeating blocks and I'd be curious to know what they are. So let's bookmark that.

• 1:13:39Tim Ferriss?

  When you're looking at, say,

• 1:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  The to-dos that will be converted into calendar or not for the next week. What does that process look like? Do you start with a to-do list? And then that goes to your EA and she tries to slot, he or she tries to slot them in for the anticipated amount of time? Like, what does that look like from kind of start to finish?

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, the answer is you skip the to-do list step entirely. So when I get a new task, a lot of my tasks effectively come in through email. So I'll get an email. And this is also another thing that I worked with a couple of people on who really, really struggled with email. And the thing they struggle with is using their email as a to-do list, which is a very common thing that people do. The problem, it creates a lot of anxiety when you have this stack of uncategorized things. It could be 15 minutes, it could be 50 hours. You have no idea until you open up each one individually to figure out how much work it is. And so the same process of translating your to-do list into your calendar, you can do the same thing with email, which is, I worked with somebody recently where I said, all right, let's open each email.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  How long is this going to take you to respond to? And these are like the chunkier ones. It's like 30 minutes. Great. Mark it as done. Copy the link and put that link in your calendar. So you're going to spend this 30-minute block responding to this email. What's the next one? That's going to take me a full hour because I have to write something for them.

• 1:15:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's interesting. So the clearing of the inbox then is really, in some capacity, scheduling the proper amount of time to reply to these things. So you're not looking at this undifferentiated stack of shit that you are opening multiple times, marking as unread, going back to, forgetting what you read, reading it the 17th time, or whatever that might be.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's a stress thing. It is very stressful to have this list of things. It's just an ambiguous amount of effort. It is stress relieving to see, all right, I will do that on Thursday of next week. I have nothing pending right now. I have not dropped any balls because I know that anything that is time-sensitive that needed to be done today is already done. And there's nothing, there's no ambiguous deadlines looming that I'm not aware of because they're in my calendar. And if you change it, this is where closing the loop is a helpful factor, which is if you say, I'm going to block this off for Thursday, you can tell that person, hey, I'll get back to you on Thursday. And then if you have to move it, you now know that you can say, hey, something came up.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  I'll get it to you on Monday and you can just keep them in the loop on that as opposed to just ambiguously dropping the ball. So for me, when I get a new task, it just immediately goes into my calendar. So if somebody was to say, hey, can you write a memo on this topic so that this team has context on it of where this has gone over the last year? I'll say, sure. How soon do you need it? Say, can you have it to me by Wednesday? I'll go to my calendar and I'll block off two hours because I think that's about how long it'll take. I'll block off two hours on Tuesday that I have open and I'll say, cool, I'll have it to you by Tuesday night. And that's it. The calendar is the to do list.

• 1:16:48Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. What do you have in your calendar as repeating items? And we don't have to go through all of them necessarily, but I'm curious. This could not only be professional company obligations, but say, personal items that you block out, right? Exercise any number of things. So you have email processing. You have, I imagine, the Friday forum.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:15Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the other repeating elements that you can block out weeks in advance?

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Mondays are my meeting days. So I tend to stack all of my meetings on Mondays. It's common for me to have like 14 hours of meetings on Mondays. I just get them all done with, so I don't have anything else during the week. Fridays, I often have meetings as well, but they tend not to be the recurring ones, other than maybe the Friday forum or some, maybe the book club, which I think we do monthly on Fridays. So Mondays are a lot of my recurring team meetings. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are almost always just open. I tend to leave Wednesdays as a, like a sacrificial anode of.

• 1:17:54Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  As in like when somebody says to me, hey, I was trying to book time on your calendar, but you're booked for the next two months. Then I start sacrificing some of my Wednesdays to allow for meetings to be scheduled. The term comes from how stainless steel works where it's covered in something. I think it's zinc in that case. And how it works is the zinc starts to get deteriorated before the steel does. So it's, you're sacrificing a different material in order to keep the steel working well.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it. Any personal stuff that comes to mind, like self-care stuff? Or is that sort of on automatic in some other way? Or taking a backseat?

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  You know, I've tried doing meditation. I did the Sam Harris waking up one. I didn't notice any benefit. I did it for, I think, a month. I think I'm just might. My stress levels by default are pretty low. So it could be something.

• 1:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  Has that always been the case? How much of that is by the way you've constructed your life versus innate temperament? Do you have any idea?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  I think it is some of it's innate temperament, but a lot of it is how I've structured my life.

• 1:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  What are other things you have done to reduce the ambient chronic levels of stress? Slash metaphorical?

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  Metaphoric metaphorical, I should know which it is by now. Inflammation. You're using that on the organizational level. Like, what are some of the other crux moves? Or decisions or fill in the blank that have helped with? What you're describing?

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  One of the biggest ones is news sobriety. And I think that encapsulates a lot more. One of my personal philosophies is that I do not allow others to impose upon my attention. And so if I am getting information, I would like to seek it out. And I don't want other people to take my time against my will. Or tell me what I should be thinking or focused on, whether I want to or not. That's been a big challenge is I think almost everyone underestimates how impactful even seemingly trivial information is of like seeing a plane crash. On the news will make you fear planes subconsciously. It is a is an availability bias problem. You can know the statistics and you can say that it's safer.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  But in your mind, if you see it happen or you see something on the news, you assume that it is representative of the world. And it's really hard to beat. Now, there's a really good book, Factfulness. I don't know if you've heard of it.

• 1:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  I have heard of it. I haven't read it.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really good book, which really just goes over. There are so many things that are getting better. And yet, almost everyone thinks that those things are getting worse.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So it's a numeracy enhanced version of angels of our better nature.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Angels of our nature, for sure.

• 1:20:32Tim Ferriss?

  Always fuck that title up. I don't know if it's a problem with the title or if it's a problem with my brand. But yes, that's the one.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Okay. So there's the new sobriety. Makes sense to me. This has been my experience as well. Like, we are not designed, or I should say, not evolved to take on all of the tragedy in the world all the time. It's just, we're not biologically capable. We're certainly not ideally suited to handle that on an ongoing basis.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think people really underestimate the physical impact that it has. Like, taking maybe an extreme example of, there is information that can affect you physically. Example is, you're walking through the jungle and a tiger jumps out in front of you. Your body will physically change based on that stimulus, right? That's a fight or flight response. Adrenaline, all kinds of stuff that is bad for you.

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Chronically bad.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Chronically bad for you. The same exact thing happens when people watch the news or they see things that make them anxious. And they say, well, it's just information, but that's not a neutral thing.

• 1:21:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  It really does have an impact.

• 1:21:37Tim Ferriss?

  If it bleeds, it leads. I mean, there are a lot of expressions like this in the news game.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:21:43Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So the many implications, the multifaceted payoffs of new sobriety. What else? I feel like there's more.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  I do a lot of walks. I try to read at least two books a week and I do most of those as audiobooks, just going on long walks.

• 1:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  How do you choose your books?

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  A lot of them are through recommendations. I host these salon dinners, maybe roughly once a month. And one of the questions that I always ask people is, the intros are always your name and the last book you read. And so that's sort of my hack for getting good book recommendations. And I just, I add them to my wishlist on Audible. And then, uh, one of my new rules over the last couple of years is I will only purchase a book if it is the next book that I'm going to read. Because I found that.

• 1:22:31Tim Ferriss?

  I'm a chronic violator.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Of this.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  I just found that stacks of books that I have committed to reading that I have not read felt like a betrayal of my own commitment to myself.

• 1:22:43Tim Ferriss?

  You know, there's a Japanese word for this.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  The stacks of books and this like guilt and obligation that it elicits. Tsundoku.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:51Tim Ferriss?

  Tsundoku is the word for it. It's a thing.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I just realized, I'm just gonna put them on my wishlist. And then when I feel like reading a book, when I finish whatever book I'm reading now, I go to it and I scroll through it. What am I feeling like right now?

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  You know what? A biography feels really good. I'm gonna download that. So my wishlist is probably two, 300 books. So I have a pretty deep backlog.

• 1:23:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right. All right. We are gonna come back to the slons because this underscores something for me that has proven very important also. But before we get to that, so you have a backlog of 300 books. How do you choose the next book? It's purely recommendations because those are all recommendations.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you decide? And are there any books that have been particularly sticky in your mind in the last handful of years?

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  The answer is it's purely based on feeling.

• 1:23:47Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:48Speaker 03

  I used to read a lot more books optimistically of like, I should read more about that. Even though I don't really want to, I just feel like I should.

• 1:23:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  And it's usually a slog and my rate of reading is way lower when that happens. And so I now, when I finish a book, I go through and I'm just, I'm glancing through the titles. It's like, you know what? I do actually want to read a book on complexity right now. I'm gonna do that. That sounds really interesting. Or I do want to read this science fiction book that I've been hearing about.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  So it's more of full body yes type of situation.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And all of those books were added to the list because I thought at one point that I would be interested in it. And then things change. Maybe I'm not interested in it anymore. And so, yeah, it's just like in the moment, right now, what do I want to read? I found that to be something that really also keeps the velocity up of the books that I want to read.

• 1:24:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Any books that have stood out in the last while? Could be from 10 years ago. It doesn't really matter. Like books that have had a

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Tim Ferriss?

  made a substantial mark. Doesn't have to be practical. It could be a fiction book, although sometimes fiction is practical. I'll just say that as a sidebar.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  Anything come to mind?

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  One of the books that I I find myself frequently coming back to is The Lean Startup.

• 1:25:03Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. Eric agrees.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  It's a classic. I probably reread it every one to two years. And every time I facepalm, like, how did I forget this? We should obviously be doing this. There are a lot of books like that. Another one that I frequently come back to is Nonviolent Communication. It's a similar book. Every time I read it, it's just like, I need to be doing more of that. There's a whole series of them. I keep track of all the books that I read on on Goodreads. So.

• 1:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So you may share some of those. And certainly the ones that you've mentioned, we'll put in the show notes. The Salons.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me more about this and also how EA's help with this, if they do help with this. And for people listening, we are going to come back to answer the question, what on earth Sam use for EA's for? Which is a very fair question. So this is a way of edging back into that territory. But one of the biggest upgrades in my life in the last few years has been seeking to add the positive before trying to remove the negative. And this hints at a bias that I've had for a very long time as someone who's hyper vigilant, that I very often look for problems to solve. And we're rewarded throughout life for being good at

• 1:26:20Tim Ferriss?

  solving problems in school and so on. But just removing friction does not a great life make. And so I've, in the last few years, blocked out Extended trips with friends, extended time off the grid, extended time with very vigorous physical activity or sports, and block that out in advance. And I find that is an inoculation against a lot of the stress that can seem pervasive if you don't have things like that to offset some of the weight of the world, of the job, of being a human, et cetera. So the salons are super interesting. What do the salons look like? What does the format look like? And it looks like you have a document showing people how to host salon dinners. So yes, if we can put those in the show notes, that would be great.

• 1:27:05Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about the salons and then how EA's helper don't help.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  I've been hosting these for a long time, like well over 100 of them at this point. The salons I like to host, they tend to be really intellectual. And so there's a topic that is usually just something that I am personally very interested in.

• 1:27:26Tim Ferriss?

  What would be some examples? I mean, it's like death. We're going to talk about death.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, death is one of the salon dinners that we have planned later this year is on death. We had one.

• 1:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's all the rage.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had one a few weeks ago that was on the epistemic commons, on this challenge of sense-making collectively as we have these different versions of the truth of the world that continue to separate. Our ability to just agree on what is real as a society is becoming harder and harder over time. We did one shortly before that on expression of love. That was a really good one. And so they range from deeply intellectual to more personal and experiential. We had a really good one a little while back on human connection and friendship. I always curate the group in some way

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  to make sure that there's some interesting set of diversity that would make the conversation interesting. So if it's something that's more political, I make sure that maybe half of the group has one point of view and the other half has another. Or in the human connection and friendship salon, I wanted to make sure that I had people represented from many different social groups. Some people who are very wealthy, some people who are not, people who have different life experiences. I always try to make sure that people don't. Signal anything at the beginning. So the intros are always just your name and the last book you read. And that tends to lead to a much better conversation. And what almost always happens, we did a salon a while back on globalism and nationalism. And it was

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  in New York. And it was about 12 people. I curated the group because I know who all these people are. And it went particularly long. It was a very good conversation for at least three hours. And at the end of this dinner, one of the people, I won't throw them under the bus, but he said, So this is all well and good, but we're just a bunch of New York Democrats talking about this. Where are all the Republicans? And I happen to know that six people there were Republicans. And I just waited. And each person was like, I'm a Republican, I'm a Republican. And he was just flabbergasted. But I thought we were agreeing on this stuff. It's like, Yeah, yeah, you were.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the rules for the dinner? Is it one conversation?

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And could you explain just what that means for people who may not have been exposed to this? Because it really is

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:29:50Tim Ferriss?

  Alien, or just, I'd say uncommon, right? At most group dinners, at most group dinners, like the opposite, 12 people splits off into maybe three or four pods, having different conversations. So this would be the opposite.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's pretty well, good moderation is super important.

• 1:30:10Tim Ferriss?

  Are you moderating?

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  And I'm a ruthless moderator. I found

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  What are the keys to ruthlessly moderating? Or what are, do you have any key phrases? Or do you give people a warning in advance? You're like, Hey, I'm pretty full contact referee here?

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  Sometimes I do. Like, there have been friends of mine who I know are going to be conversation monopolizers.

• 1:30:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  And so I, I tell them

• 1:30:33Tim Ferriss?

  Impromptu TED Talk givers?

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I'll tell them sometimes in advance, like, Hey, I'm going to invite you to this. But I don't want you to talk at all for the first 30 minutes.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  And I need you to do that, or I can't have you come to this. It's never been an issue if you're just really upfront about it. And it can be awkward, but just set the ground rules very clearly in advance. Which at the start of the dinner, you just say, all right, the rules are no phones at the table. We have one conversation at the table. If things get off topic, I'm going to bring it back to the conversation. And so there was a period, this would have been, I don't know, five, six years ago, when blockchain was like the thing everyone, now it's AI, but back then it was blockchain. I remember.

• 1:31:13Tim Ferriss?

  Some of the people who are doing blockchain have pivoted into AI.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:31:17Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen the decks.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, there was a point when every dinner I did would eventually meander into blockchain, no matter the topic. And the one that was the most egregious was we did a dinner on the wine industry in San Francisco, which was really just an excuse for my friends who have vineyards to bring their nicest bottles of wine. It was fantastic.

• 1:31:36Tim Ferriss?

  I like how you put it on them.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It was great. And somehow somebody was like, well, something, something, something, wine on the blockchain. And you have to bring them back to the conversation. People will have their thing they want to talk about, but all the other people there came for the topic that you originally planned on. And so you have to be ruthless when things get off topic. And that specific tactical thing that I found to be helpful, I always have a notepad. And so I say, that sounds like a really good topic for a future salon dinner. So I'm going to make a note right now and I'll add that to the list.

• 1:32:09Tim Ferriss?

  And then you just draw a picture of a dick and then move on.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, but let's bring it back to the topic of this. And then maybe you call on somebody else to get their opinion.

• 1:32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, that was a.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  Big Lebowski.

• 1:32:20Tim Ferriss?

  Big Lebowski reference for people who don't get it.

• 1:32:24Tim Ferriss?

  What is the magic size? I have, I think a lot about group size. So you mentioned 12. That's a lot.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  That's the upper bound.

• 1:32:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Is, is there a sort of preferred size?

• 1:32:38Tim Ferriss?

  That you have found for yourself, or does the composition really make a small or a big group work? I'm sure that's a piece of it.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Tim Ferriss?

  But if somebody wanted to try to experiment with this, read the document, which we'll put in the show notes, and give a salon a shot, what size would you suggest they start with?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  The answer is not going to be very straightforward, which is that there's a bunch of dials that you have to balance. The best dinners I've ever done were six people who are all super engaged with the topic. That is like the perfect number, six highly thoughtful, deep people on the topic. I would say the problem is you always end up with something like a 20% attrition rate. And so if you invite six people, you might end up with four people. And four people you can do, but it's, it feels less like a salon dinner.

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe better for a board game.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it may be better for a board game. You can do it. It's just doesn't feel like it's an event. So I optimize, I try to get it to eight to 10 is how many I actually want to come. To get to that number, I tend to invite 12 and I usually end up with eight to 10. If you have a couple of people who are maybe not the most engaged or engaging, it doesn't throw a wet blanket on the whole event and you can kind of bring them in slowly. And so I found eight to 10 is really the number to shoot for that I think balances all those variables particularly well.

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  And in this case, because of the folks who are being invited, are you doing this yourself? Do you have EA's helping? Or is this more of a, a project that you take ownership of?

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I generally pick the topic. I always send out some explanatory text of motivating questions of what is the topic? I use ChatGPT for that. So like a recent example for the epistemic commons salon, I asked ChatGPT, I'm planning on hosting a salon dinner. I need five questions for this topic. Here are the issues that I think are relevant. Can you create some motivating questions for the dinner? And it nailed it first time. Almost every time it does, it's pretty remarkable.

• 1:34:49Tim Ferriss?

  And you have created the invitee list?

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  So yeah, I've been adding people to the list as I meet people, as I find people I think would be interesting people to have at these dinners. I just add them to a list. Once I come up with a topic and the motivating questions, I pick a date and then I tell one of my EAs to send out the invitations. The whole rest of the process is basically done by them. My only real involvement is I pick a topic and then she compiles all of the people that have opted in. And then it's usually 20 or so people, depending on where it is. And then I will curate who I think will make for the most interesting conversation from that list.

• 1:35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Question about the email invite, and this is going to be very granular. What does the language in that invite look like? And maybe it's too much time in Japan, but I'm like very sensitive to overly sensitive probably to a lot of social etiquette stuff, which will tie back to Calendly, so I don't leave that dangling as an orphan topic briefly. We'll, we'll touch on that. Is it, maybe not speculating is the best way to go. What does the email invitation look like? And then does it come from you or does it come from your assistant?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Tim Ferriss?

  Who is writing in your voice? What does that look like?

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  So the, the specific text of the emails in the Notion doc, so that'll be easy to share. I basically say, I'm hosting another dinner. Here's the topic. Here's where it's going to be. Here are the motivating questions.

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So it's first person in your voice.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sent from your account by your EA?

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  Yep, sent from my email by my EA. And at the bottom it says, sent on Sam's behalf by Sam's EA. The people then respond to it. Those get tracked. And I also, usually about a week before the event, when things have sort of finalized, my EA goes through everyone on the waitlist and sends them a note saying like, sorry, but there wasn't space in this one, but we hope you can join in a future dinner.

• 1:36:45Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  I find that's a nice, instead of just ghosting people, closing the loop on it. And very rarely, but occasionally somebody flips out and then I just remove them from the list and they don't get invited anymore.

• 1:36:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. If you don't, uh, don't not want that as 20% of your attendee base.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  It's not worth it.

• 1:37:03Tim Ferriss?

  Calendly. So since you are using your calendar as your fine tuned to do list, let's just say, that means your availability would seem to be much more predictable. What is Calendly? How do you use it? And how do you overcome some of the social hurdles that might be associated with it?

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Calendar is a, it's an incredible time-saving tool where you set times that you're available. It syncs with Google Calendar. And so when I have time blocked off to do things, it doesn't show up as an availability. And you set what hours you're available. And so people can just pick time on your calendar. This is why I think when I get a calendar link from somebody, I'm touched because they are allowing me to impose upon their attention. They're saying, I'm giving you access to my time whenever is convenient for you. That's a tall order to like, get that from somebody. For some reason, there are people who are deeply offended by it. And I really just, I really do not understand it.

• 1:38:08Tim Ferriss?

  It's not a small percentage though.

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 1:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a decently high percentage. So have you, have you found any way, just like the sent on Sam's behalf at the bottom?

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I think that's a contributing ingredient that helps that to work.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any ways you've been able to preemptively smooth potentially ruffled feathers with Calendly or not really?

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  I think the, the solution is just to slowly filter those people out of your life. I think that's kind of the answer. Like if, if that's the hill you want to die on, then like we'll be on different hills. It's okay.

• 1:38:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Makes sense. So we, we are, I keep teasing this, it's like after the next round of commercials, but we are going to come back to the, what you do with four EAs. But these are all interrelated. Briefly, a question on sort of higher level.

• 1:38:58Tim Ferriss?

  Principles related to inbox and then just the tactical question of how do you actually go through your inbox?

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Tim Ferriss?

  So the first is you talking about, and I'm putting words in your mouth, but trying to recap here, see if I get it right. Basically doing a version of repeating the task back to you, which is reducing the ability of unwanted or unhelpful or unactionable information to impinge on your life. So you can be proactive.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  However, you spend a lot of time in email. And for a lot of people, that is the arena that you enter that is full of everyone else's agenda for your time.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:39:39Tim Ferriss?

  So you can become very reactive. So I'm wondering how you think about using email proactively and not becoming overly reactive, getting pulled away from your priorities if you've set them.

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Tim Ferriss?

  And then I suppose the following question is just how you process email.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  I'm an inbox zero person. I try to hit inbox zero at least once a week, which is the, the practice of marking all emails that you've processed as done. So you get to the end of the week and you have processed all of your emails. It is definitely one of the holes in the strategy where I get lots of uninvited inbound information. I do have a process by which my EAs clear my inbox. I have a separate category called not important, where they go through and they just move all the things they don't think I need to see into that. And I check it every once in a while. And in the early days, every so often, they would flag something is not important that I actually should have seen. But at this point, it's like a 100% success ratio of them seeing my patterns.

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  And typically what I do is I turn on a loom as I'm going through the not importance. And I say, yep, these all make sense. Oh, this one should probably keep in because of this reason. This one we should pull in because of this reason. And then I just share that to them as feedback and then the process just gets better. It's probably the biggest hole of. People imposing upon my attention is something that I'm trying to work on a solution to. I know there have been interesting companies that have tried different things like you have to pay money to send somebody an email. I don't know if those ever took off, but that's an interesting strategy. It's like just adding some friction. It's like, yeah, if you pay me a hundred dollars, you can send me an email. That's okay, and I will read it. I will definitely read it if you pay me a hundred dollars to get an email. Sure.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  So the nature of processing email, I think the way to do it most efficiently, I use Superhuman as a tool. Hotkeys are probably the lowest hanging fruit for people to improve their productivity for almost no cost.

• 1:41:39Tim Ferriss?

  Now, how do hotkeys differ from keyboard shortcuts and Gmail?

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  The same idea. The thing is, most people just don't take the time to learn it. There are several studies on this that I can share with you, but it's like free productivity. You spend a handful of minutes, 15 minutes, maybe 10 minutes, one time, learning what hotkeys to use. And most people will see a 10 to 40% increase in productivity immediately for the rest of their lives. And yet, most people don't take the time to learn them. I get is, if you are not using hotkeys to process your email, to do, if you're in Figma, learn the hotkeys. If you're in Photoshop, learn the hotkeys. It's a free productivity boost for almost no cost.

• 1:42:21Tim Ferriss?

  And in the case of email, and you have Reply, Reply All, Archive, what are some other functions that you would access with hotkeys?

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  So, you know, Mark has done, I think one of the biggest ones is snippets, where you have pre-drafted messages. And this is something that it's really easy to see when, a good example, my co-founder, Casey, when she was struggling with email, I asked her to just record yourself doing email for however long it takes, and then I'll watch it and give you feedback. And this is the workflow thing where she just recorded, she shared it with me. And there were many points where I would say, hey, during this point, have you noticed this is the fourth time you've sent this exact same email? And you type it out every time? You should just create a snippet and you should just send it to them. You see this part here where you wrote a very long response?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  He was actually really just asking for a yes or no. You didn't have to provide much longer context. You could have said, yeah, that sounds good. If you need any more context, let me know. And that could have been it. You didn't need to spend 15 minutes on that. You could have just said, yes, and if you need more, let me know and I can give you more. So don't make the assumption that you have to spend 15 minutes on it. If you usually don't have to. And so just having that feedback loop is really helpful. And this keeps time back to Loom as a useful tool for this. But like being able to just see it. In a previous era, you would have just had a coach standing over your shoulder watching. And now you can do this asynchronously. I can watch it at two and a half acts. I can skip over parts that are not relevant. So it's a really big enablement tool.

• 1:43:56Tim Ferriss?

  And for the sake of clarity, to confirm inbox zero does not mean that you have handled all of the tasks or content associated with those emails. It simply means that you have either responded to them or moved them into another form factor like calendar so that you no longer need that email vestige. You can archive all that.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. It's reducing that stress that is created by having this ambiguously long list of potential tasks that you need to do. There's no way to see in an email that I need this from you by two o'clock today, or I need it from you next month. You have to go through every single one individually in order to get that information.

• 1:44:42Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So the question of the hour, what on earth do you use for assistance for?

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  I use it for a lot of things. Actually, I have a public Notion database of all of these tasks. I filtered for the ones that contain confidential information, but there's, I don't know, 40, 50 of them that are kind of examples.

• 1:45:01Tim Ferriss?

  Great. So we'll put those in the show notes as well.

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So some simple things are before every call, I send, two days before the call, I send links that provide more context for who I am, what the company does, whatever the thing is. And so two days before, they get that information. They also do follow-ups. So I have a Notion page called Sam's Calls, where before I jump on this call, I have all of my call notes stacked, and I have context on each one of them. So I open up my calendar, I go to the call, and then I open my notes, and it's your call with this person. Here's a screenshot of the email that you had with them setting up this meeting.

• 1:45:43Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Your EAs are creating all of this.

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  My EAs are creating all of this behind the scenes. I used to do it myself, but over time, I just trained the EAs to do it, so I don't have to do it. And it really just gives me a ton of leverage. So things like, almost nobody I know pays attention to their LinkedIn messages anymore. It's just a cesspool. But if you have an EA that you've trained to like, hey, filter out any random requests from DevShops in India, just archive those immediately. And if there's anything from these sorts of people, just send me a note and say, hey, I think you should respond like this. This is the semi-automation part. Same with Twitter DMs. I don't manage those. I get a screenshot whenever somebody that

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  they think meets the criteria that they think I should be talking to, and that's all managed by them. And so those are just a handful of examples of like, the ways in which I can get leverage on my time. Things that I used to maybe do myself, but at this point, I have so many of these tasks. Like another one that I have my EAs do consistently is I'm really diligent about tracking my time. This is, it's one of those interesting things where this is similar to Calendly. I get people who just aggressively negatively respond to the idea that you pay attention to where your time is going.

• 1:47:02Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's one that I wouldn't have expected.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  They're like, do you really need to optimize every 15 minutes of every day? Don't you have time for spontaneity? These are the common things that I hear. The answer is like, yeah, of course I have lots of time for spontaneity. I schedule it. It's like, this is a week. I'm not planning anything. Anything could happen, but I'm doing it on purpose, not by accident. And I don't know where that negativity comes from, but I certainly hear that a lot. So one of the things that they do is I have a set of categories that are things that I think that I want to do with my time. And so every 15 minute increment, I think weekly they go through and they update a spreadsheet of each block. And then they categorize it in one of these 10 categories. And then at the end of the month, I can see how I spent my time.

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  And it is humbling to see how often, what I think I'm spending my time on and like my stated priorities. It's like, oh yeah, I spent so much time doing recruiting last week.

• 1:48:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I thought I was eating lentils all month. Turns out it was 80% Snickers bars.

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's surprising even for like, I really try to be diligent about it. And even so, I think this ultimately comes from there's, there's an emotional cost to doing certain things that you don't like to do.

• 1:48:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think it's huge for me at least, physical too.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right. So how do you course correct? What does that look like? Are there certain tasks or types of work or interactions that you just categorically do not engage with now? Are there kind of no categories for you?

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  It's more that having the awareness. I was talking to somebody recently about this where we did a values exercise. And they came up with a set of values that they have. And then it's a bit of a trick question because then you say, all right, let's go over your calendar and how you spent your time. And they'll say, oh, my values are friends, family, this, that. It's like, oh, how'd you spend your time? It's like YouTube, Instagram. Did you notice how none of these things match? Like your, your actual priorities are consuming news, your actual priority.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  Is doing sports, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But empirically, your priorities are this. How you spend your time are your priorities. And that's a difficult thing for people to understand, but it really is like an epistemological problem where the example would be if you're an axe murderer, but you go your whole life and you never murder someone with an axe, are you actually an axe murderer? Like the act is what makes you what you are.

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  I think this is Ben Horowitz's book, like what you do is who you are. That is what it is. How you spend your time doesn't matter.

• 1:49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Your calendar is your priorities.

• 1:49:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, like it is the empirical record of your actual priorities. And almost everybody that I talk to, those two are not matching.

• 1:49:58Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. So for those people listening, they might think, well, four assistants, not to beat a dead horse, but I think it's maybe a semi dead horse that's worth beating a little bit more. They might think, why four? I mean, I imagine that one would be more than enough. What about, and this comes back to an earlier concern of maybe novice intermediate delegators. I consider myself a pretty experienced delegator and I still think about this and it causes me some hesitancy, underutilization. But could you give a few more examples of tasks and why it makes sense for you to have multiple people?

• 1:50:35Speaker 03

  Almost all of the tasks that I have them do are recurring ankle biter tasks. That would take me five minutes here and there. And the reality is they just accumulate. So part of it is that almost certainly I will be able to do it faster and more effectively. But this is a comparative advantage thing is if it takes me 10 minutes and it takes them 30 minutes, that's fine, because I have other things that I could be doing with my time that are higher value than these tasks. And so if I could be spending 30 hours a week on these tasks, it might take them 90 hours a week, 100 hours a week of effort to be able to do these tasks. But then I don't have to do them anymore and then I can do other things. And so the underutilization thing has really.

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  I certainly didn't start with four. I started with one and she's been great. And interesting thing about this is we're really leaning into remote is she's in the Philippines. We don't overlap very much in terms of time zone. I have still not communicated synchronously with her. All of our communication has been async in looms or in content or in some form of async manner. So that you can reference all of your previous conversations. I don't have any specific reason not to talk to her. It's just, we haven't needed to do that.

• 1:51:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. All right. So we'll make that list of tasks available. Where are the most common areas for improvement? Growth opportunities for people who are blue belt delegators. Right. So these are people who've been, maybe they've been working with an EA for six months a year. If they were to send you, you were just magically able to ingest with a port on the back of the head, like the matrix, a thousand loom interactions they've had workflows, et cetera. Much like you look to your co-founder's email flow. What do you think the most common types of advice would be? Or issues would be that you would spot?

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  For somebody who's a blue belt, which I don't know my belt. I assume that's

• 1:52:38Tim Ferriss?

  Blue belt.

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

  Medium belt.

• 1:52:39Tim Ferriss?

  It depends. It depends on the, the system we're talking about. But yeah, what I mean to say is intermediate.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. If somebody is intermediate, I would say that one would be creating a system of feedback loops. Cause one of the things that fails here, and this was a conversation I recently had with somebody on our team. We said that he just doesn't feel like he's getting leverage out of his EA, which is surprising because I see how much leverage he gets. And having a system where you keep track of all of the ongoing tasks. And I said, okay, cool. Well, if you don't need one, that's not a big deal. Obviously it costs us less money, but before we do that, let's go into the database and let's see all the tasks that this person is doing for you. And let's decide which of these we don't need. And he was had, he had something like 30 ongoing tasks. And so how about this one? He's like, no, I definitely still need that. How about this one?

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  Probably should keep that one. And like, we went through almost all of them. We, I think we eliminated two of them. It's like, okay, well. It sounds like you're getting a lot of leverage out of your EA.

• 1:53:38Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a strange question. Why would he be interested in having his EA do less? Did he feel like he was spending more time on managing them than the work product that was being produced? What is his incentive? How does he benefit from having this conversation?

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, he is somebody who has the company's best interest in mind. And he just doesn't feel like we're getting X dollars in value from this person's tasks. And then we looked at each of the tasks and we looked at how much time each task takes. And the thing is they're happening behind the scenes. And so he didn't have a lot of visibility into it. And so this is one of the reasons why we actually internally, why we do the Friday forum is celebrating wins. Having artifacts to represent progress is actually really important.

• 1:54:28Tim Ferriss?

  And by artifact, you just mean some type of captured media generally?

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  It can be anything. It can be an image, something that shows progress over time. People need to feel that things are working and that things are good. If they don't, you just leave this void. The example of the person who felt like he wasn't getting leverage from his EA. He just hadn't looked at all the things that they were doing. They were all there. He could have found them, but they were all happening behind the scenes. And he forgot that the automation was even happening. And so just having that visibility and saying, okay, we ended that conversation going, you actually might need another one because you're already almost at the limit of this person's capacity. And we only eliminated two out of something like 40 tasks. Another one that I would say for people who are blue belt level delegators is really doing more in parallel tasking,

• 1:55:18Speaker 03

  which is anything that you are going to do anyway, just have your EA or chief of staff do it as well. But don't put them in the mission critical path. This is one of the failure modes that a lot of people have.

• 1:55:29Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give a concrete example of what that might look like?

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So let's say you have something that needs to be delivered on Friday and you were going to do it. But instead you hand it off to your chief of staff. Don't rely on what their output is to get that delivered on Friday. If you were going to do it yourself, just do it yourself anyway.

• 1:55:51Tim Ferriss?

  What type of task might that be? I'm just trying to imagine, because for instance, like if I had. A deliverable that required interacting with a team externally. Let's just say some marketing agency, if we both tried to pursue that task, it would become very, very confusing.

• 1:56:08Speaker 03

  I think an example would be you need to put together a slide deck for a presentation on Friday. And you can say, hey, you put it together and you don't want to show up in that meeting for like an hour before and realize the slides are bad. This is a thing that people often do is they delegate it and then they forget about it. When really you should just do it in parallel such that worst case scenario, you just throw out their version and give them feedback on it. And what people usually discover is that people do a better job on a first draft with almost no context than you would anticipate. You just give them maybe by loom, some instructions of, hey, I'm doing a presentation on this. Here are the messages to read through.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  It should look something like this, an outline, kind of like that. And then you see what they put together. And then if it doesn't work, you give them feedback. A recent example for us is one of our engineers, Marillo, needed to do a retro on a project that took him about three-ish weeks.

• 1:57:09Tim Ferriss?

  What is a retro?

• 1:57:10Speaker 03

  A retro is like a retroactive document that just says, here's how the project went. Here's what went well. Here's what went poorly. Here's what I propose for next steps.

• 1:57:19Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. It's the less morbid equivalent of a postmortem.

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's the same thing, just a less, less morbid title.

• 1:57:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:27Speaker 03

  And so he was going to do it himself. And I said, great, you should do it yourself. But also since we do daily async updates, so every day he posted a loom of his progress that day. I said, but also in parallel, ask the product EA to do their own retro from what they got in context from your daily updates.

• 1:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  And just so I understand, the objective of this is for people to become more comfortable Yeah. with delegating more responsibility.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. In the same way that turning on a loom, worst case scenario, you just delete it. It's kind of the same with parallel tasking. Worst case scenario, you just don't use what they came out with. And then that's fine. Like you were in the same exact position now as you were before. But oftentimes what you'll discover, like in the example I gave for the retro, he realized, wow, this is 80% as good as the one that I came up with. And I thought I had context that only I had. And so he said, thing I learned from that experience was I should put more information in my daily updates. So that I don't have to do any work next time. I just put a little bit more work into my daily updates. And then the entire retro can be done by an EA.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  And so it saves you a lot of time and you can build that confidence and you can give feedback. And oftentimes it only takes two or three cycles of that, doing it in parallel, before you can largely be hands off. And then they can eventually be in mission critical positions.

• 1:58:52Tim Ferriss?

  Very helpful and something I haven't tried. So I should try it. All right. My next question is related to a bullet for an interview, a prior interview you did, which, or actually no, it was not an interview, it was a podcast, Founder Dynamics podcast. And the, I suppose, synopsis for the purposes of our conversation is that this is an episode that gives a feel for what it's like working with you and how other people perceive you. And I recently interviewed Dustin Moskowitz, co-founder of Facebook, co-founder of Asana, current CEO of Asana.

• 1:59:33Tim Ferriss?

  And in prep for our conversation, they also did an immaculate job of prep notes. And they sent a number of different things. One of them I had not seen before, and I've had some interaction with Dustin over the years. Was a, in effect, I can't remember the title, but it's working with Dustin as a document. It's basically a user guide to Dustin and it lays out all sorts of things. His temperament, his preferences, the things he hates, his Enneagram type. And I found it very compelling to the extent that I'm probably going to create something like that because it could also be useful for external parties, contractors, agencies, who knows? Do you have something like that?

• 2:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  What form does it take?

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  Exact same format. We both took it from the same person. I don't remember. I think he referenced it in the podcast, but there's a specific person who popularized this and we largely use the same format. It's also part of our onboarding. One of the deliverables at the end of month one is each new hire writes their own user guide and it's been super helpful.

• 2:00:40Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So in that case, could you, just for people who have not listened to the Dustin episode or seen the document, what are some of the key ingredients in that user manual? And I wish I could give proper attribution to the person upstream. I can't recall the name.

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57Tim Ferriss?

  But we can put it in the show notes for folks.

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  For sure. One of the categories is just background. We do a little bit more work than is typical. We actually hire a writer to do what we call a spotlight where they interview this person and give like a whole rundown of interesting things about them until you read a little bit more about them. You learn what their hobbies are, where they grew up, all kinds of stuff. The more tactical things are like communication patterns. For example, for me, I really, really do not like being interrupted. And so my phone is by default.

• 2:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry about the last two hours.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I mean, like during the day.

• 2:01:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:01:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, like intra-day interruptions. So like I, my phone by default is on do not disturb mode pretty much all the time. It is often in airplane mode. And so when I'm working on things, I really, really do not like getting text messages from people, like anything urgent, because this is something that I've just come to accept about myself is that it takes a long time for things to get loaded into memory. And these constant context switching, this is why I load all of my meetings on Monday. If I'm in manager mode as opposed to maker mode, I have no issue context switching all the time. But if I'm trying to deliver something or I'm trying to write code and I get disrupted.

• 2:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you drop, drop all the balls.

• 2:02:19Speaker 03

  Yep, it's a real problem and it like, I feel it viscerally when I get pulled out of flow state. So I usually tell people that when you see a deep focus block on my calendar, unless it is a real emergency, don't text me, send me a note, I'll get to it at some point. Other people are exactly the opposite, which is they say, text me anytime and I like to be fast responder. That's my thing.

• 2:02:42Tim Ferriss?

  Gunslingers.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Yep. And there's nothing wrong with one way or the other, but just learning how to interact with different people. We found it super helpful.

• 2:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  What else would you say about what it is like to work for you or how others perceive you?

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  One thing that's, I would categorize as a misconception, which is that I'm extremely diligent and rigorous and disciplined. My default behavior is not disciplined. I've worked with some people like my former co-founder Todd Opowsky, who was in special forces and he wakes up at like four in the morning every day to work out for two hours and he's one of those guys and he just does it intrinsically. I schedule early morning meetings, like 8 a.m. breakfasts, because if I don't, I won't wake up. I will just, I will sleep until my first meeting and if that's at 11, then I wake up at 11 or I wake up 30 minutes before.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  And so I've created a lot of structure around me to make sure that I'm on the path. So some of it is reducing friction here, increasing friction there. If left to my own devices, I would spend all day on social media and YouTube and I would sleep in and I would not be able to do the work that I need to get done. And so there really is not this intrinsic capability to be super disciplined. It's around creating structures around me to force me to do the things that I want to do at some higher level.

• 2:04:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would say I'm very similar.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Big time. It's like the scaffolding is really important. Scaffolding is incredibly, incredibly important. Let's, we can always come back to anything that comes to mind related to that, but.

• 2:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  Memo culture over meeting culture?

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  What is the role of memos? And why are they important?

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  I think some of this is philosophical, which is people can debate this, but I do believe sincerely that writing is thought.

• 2:04:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 2:04:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you cannot write out your ideas, you do not have coherent thoughts. And a lot of people can convince themselves in a meeting where they're talking to people like, oh yeah, I made a really good point there. Or like, we came to a good conclusion.

• 2:05:00Tim Ferriss?

  Go back and read the transcript.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I did an experiment with this where I tried to figure out there's an emotional hurdle to blocking off, in my case, usually a full day to just like, all right, I need to write a memo on company strategy. Today's the day. Man, it's just so much effort to do that. What if I just had a call with somebody and I just spitballed all my ideas? And I tried it. I did this with my co-founder and we just like bounced back ideas for a couple hours. And then we pulled the transcript and we pulled the useful bits. And we had like two paragraphs of useful information from a couple hours of conversation. It's like, man, that was not helpful.

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  It's just writing is thought. And so I think where it comes down to is having a really thoughtful memo.

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  It's an artifact that you can reference in the future. It gives you these data points of what were we thinking at each point in time?

• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

  Why are they important? I understand the, maybe the function, right? But if we zoom out, what is the impact that these memos are designed to achieve?

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  We have a memo on.

• 2:06:15Tim Ferriss?

  A memo about memos?

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, it's about long form memos.

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  Turtles all the way down.

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's on long form memos and decision making, which is that some of this is just a personal preference, but I think there's some universal truth to it, which is that for me to have confidence that somebody is good at their job and knows what they're doing, you don't just get that for free. You have to earn it. And it typically comes from, in my case, a long form memo. If you join as a good example of this, Mike Haney or head of editorial, I wrote our first editorial strategy. And it was okay. It had some broad strokes of we're going to focus on this kind of content and not this kind. It was an okay strategy. And then we brought on Mike Haney, who was

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  from Popular Science Magazine. And his first task during onboarding, during his first month, was put together the next version of our editorial strategy. And it was easily 10 times better than the one that I came up. And it was just like, okay, we clearly hired the right person. Everything in here is better than what I came up with. So I trust him to make these decisions. And so we usually ask people, as one of their first tasks, especially if they're a functional leader, to put together a strategy of what is it that you're going to do? What are the strategic elements of your function? And convince me that I can trust you to do this effectively. And the only way to do that is in writing, having all of your thoughts written out. And some of these memos are pretty long.

• 2:07:45Tim Ferriss?

  And this is prose and not bullet points. These are full sentences.

• 2:07:48Speaker 03

  Some of these are 10, 20, 30, 40 pages. I think our longest memo is like 200 pages.

• 2:07:54Tim Ferriss?

  What was that about?

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was a big commitment. It was like a commitment of something that would have cost about $10 million.

• 2:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  And so I really wanted to make sure that this person knew what it is that they were doing.

• 2:08:06Tim Ferriss?

  And that's answering the question, what is it you're going to do? And why should I trust you, basically?

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Tim Ferriss?

  200 pages?

• 2:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Took him, you know, more than a month to write it.

• 2:08:19Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything to the uninformed criticism that if it took 200 pages, maybe the thoughts aren't all that clear?

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it was an incredibly thoughtful memo.

• 2:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  Like, it required a lot of context from areas that I did not know before. And I needed to be convinced that this was a good idea. And the thing is, people like 200, that's ridiculous. It took him about a month of like, full time effort.

• 2:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  Geez, you should be a professional writer. That's faster than me.

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, to be fair, like, it's not copy edited. It's not, there's a lot of scratch notes in there. It's, it's not intended for distribution. It's an internal memo. So.

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  What people often miss is that this one person's set of decisions, if it took him a month to come up with this decision, that is going to impact probably 20 or 30 people for the next couple of years. And if it takes him an extra week to make the right decision.

• 2:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  So be it.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Yep, by all means, take an extra week, take an extra month, and take however long it takes to make sure that this is the right decision because it has long lasting implications for the business. And so you kind of have to weigh these things on. You don't need to write a 200-page memo for something that's really trivial, but you still have to convince me that this is the right decision. And you can say, look, here's what we think, here's a comp that does it really well. It's going to take us one week to try it. It's like plausible, sure, great, go for it. But if what you're saying is, here's how I want to spend $20 million over the course of the next two years, it's got to be pretty convincing and it's probably going to be more than a couple of bullet points to convince me.

• 2:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any style guides or book recommendations that you provide to new hires? It could be junior, it could be senior to make them more effective written communicators, better writers?

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  We've tried, we've thought about it. The best style guide that we have is really just our existing memo structure. There's somebody, David Perrell, who does a writing course that we've talked about, maybe putting together something for like corporate writing, but he hasn't put that together yet. Hopefully he does at one point. There's definitely space for something that you can give to people in a corporate setting to help them up-level their writing skills. It definitely does filter people out. We've had people opt out of our interview process because of the requirement to do writing. And one could argue that those people might not be capable of the kind of thought that we need them to.

• 2:10:50Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, they'd be incredibly unhappy in the company also.

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  So for sure.

• 2:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  Good to opt.

• 2:10:56Speaker 03

  I very much view this is one of the failure modes that I think many companies find themselves in with recruiting is that it is fundamentally a matching problem, not a sales problem. And so I share a lot of information during the interview process of all of the reasons why you probably won't want to work here. And some people are super energized by those. Like I had an interview very recently where I talked about all of our one on ones are recorded and shared. In fact, this conversation that we're having in this meeting, like this conversation is recorded and will be shared with our whole company. And the response was, okay, can we delete this recording? And I don't want to be part of this anymore. It's like, great. Like we've now ended the process. And you know,

• 2:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  Best luck in your future endeavors.

• 2:11:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. And there's probably a place where it's a better fit, but this definitely would not have worked. And so, yeah, it's really about finding those, finding those points at which somebody will opt out of the process.

• 2:11:55Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular memos that have had a disproportionate impact, putting aside the memo related to the large investment that would be occupying dozens of people for several years? Which I recognize we've already covered as important. Are there any shorter memos that you think have had a wide ranging or long lasting impact that you're particularly proud of? Not necessarily that you wrote, that could be.

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's quite a few of them. I think one of them is an article you wrote on organizational entropy, just broadly on strategies for fighting it. And I think that was really helpful for a lot of our managers to just recognize. I was talking to somebody on our team who, this is a bad habit a lot of engineers find themselves in as well, where you get really deep into a project and then the code base gets kind of complex. And then you say, I just want to start over. And then you start over something smaller, which is lower complexity. But it takes you a long time to just get back to status quo. But now it's lower complexity. And then at some point it starts to get complex again. And you say, I don't know, let's just start over. It is almost always the case that what's happening is parts of the code base are rotting.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  And there is no mechanism for keeping the documentation up to date. And the assumption that a lot of people have is, once it's shipped, then it's done. But really, you've just created a new evergreen obligation for yourself. Every new surface that you add is an obligation to maintain, maybe forever.

• 2:13:23Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by surface?

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  As in, like, if you create a new screen on your app, you now have to maintain that forever, or somebody does. It's not just done, and then you have, you can move on with your life. You always have to have some process for saying-

• 2:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  This is your bonsai garden.

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You have to constantly come up with a process for, hey, this screenshot that we just made on this new website, this will be out of date next time we update our app. And so you have to create a process for, on some regular basis, maybe weekly, maybe monthly, check, is the current state of our app aligned with the screenshot of the surface? And then you have 50 surfaces, you have to check all of them to make sure. And if your conclusion is, that is too much maintenance, then the answer is, well, then you need fewer surfaces. And you need to figure out how to reduce that complexity of maintenance.

• 2:14:12Tim Ferriss?

  So, next, I would like to chat about your sabbatical briefly. And that may not be the term that you would apply, but you took a year off after your last company. And you said two things, theology and network theory. Why did you choose these two? And I understand these words separately, but honestly, I have no idea what network theory refers to. So, how did you choose these two? And then, could you please explain network theory? And what has come of that?

• 2:14:44Speaker 03

  I had a whole list of topics. Some of them ended up being much simpler or more shallow than I was expecting. One that was simpler, I had on my list-

• 2:14:51Tim Ferriss?

  Bigger calves. How can I get bigger calves?

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  One of them was getting up to speed on the state of AI. This was five years ago now. And the last time I had done it was maybe 10 years ago. And it was really hard. There were no libraries, there was no real tooling. And then, next time I get into it, a friend recommended the Fast AI course. And it was so easy. My goal was to create- To create something that can recognize images of cats. And it was literally the tutorial in Fast Day Up was to recognize images of cats. I had planned to do three months on this and I only ended up spending maybe a week on it. Cause I was like, I get it now. I see what this can do.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  And so theology was one that I became interested in because my-

• 2:15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Lots of books available.

• 2:15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I grew up, my father is Jewish and secular. My mother is like Richard Dawkins style atheist. And so I grew up not really knowing anything about religion. We went to temple every once in a while, but more as like a cultural thing. And if I'm being honest about it, I probably spent the first 25 years of my life generally condescending towards religious people. And then as I got older, I kept recognizing that these people who I knew were smarter than me were also religious, which was very strange. Because this would be a really big oversight.

• 2:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  A little cognitive dissonance.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like, how is this possible? And so I, my conclusion was that there's something about religion. It is more likely there's something I don't understand than it is all of these people smarter than me are missing something that I think is obvious. And so I spent a lot of time, I interviewed a whole bunch of my religious friends. I went to a Bible study class for 10 weeks. So a Christian Bible study and it was really, really interesting. I think the-

• 2:16:52Tim Ferriss?

  May I ask you a question?

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose Christian Bible study instead of Torah, Talmud, whatever it might be? Or something else?

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  Some of it, just very tactically, I knew a lot more about, I went to Sunday school growing up. So I knew a lot more about Jewish tradition. I knew a lot less about Christianity. The version of Christianity that was on my mind was like all the bad things. The crusades, the bigotry, all of those things. And what was fascinating going to this Bible study class was how the opposite it was of that. It was all about humility. It was about- Love and caring and just over and over and over again on all of these courses. And it was, it was a very different feel for religion than I was expecting.

• 2:17:41Speaker 03

  What came up, having talked to a whole bunch of religious friends, part of the reason why I also went to it is some of my friends were going to that church and they invited me. What was really interesting was this, one friend in particular changed my perception of what religion means to people. He is somebody who, I didn't know this because as long as I've known him, he's been very Christian. And he told me how he grew up an atheist. And when he was, I think 30, he was going through a bit of a midlife crisis, if that counts, quarter life crisis, whatever the, whatever the number is.

• 2:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, we never know.

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  Who knows? And he, uh, he did an exercise where he wrote down all of the things that he wants out of life, which is he wanted a community of people that shared the same values. He wanted to be married to somebody who shared this set of values. He, he just came up with this whole list and then had this realization, this is Christianity.

• 2:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  He was like, oh my God, the red doorknob or whatever.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  He was like, I just described Christianity. And so he went to a church and just immediately was like, this is it. This is what I've been missing my whole life was this. I talked to a lot of other people. There's this separation of the ritual, the.

• 2:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  May I ask a question about that? So did he end up, I've been looking for this. Now this could refer to the total package. It could refer to the values which may be separate from beliefs. Does that make any sense? Right? So did he go whole kit and caboodle, including the, the beliefs? Or was it more the combination of all the other facts?

• 2:19:19Speaker 03

  In his case, he just went, he's like, I'm just going to do all of it now. And it's an interesting thing. This dive into theology, as it almost always does, ended up taking me down a path towards epistemology as well. And

• 2:19:32Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define that?

• 2:19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, like what is truth?

• 2:19:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  Like, what does it mean for something to be real or truthful?

• 2:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or to have knowledge?

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so it's an interesting story because when I talked to some of my other religious friends, they say, well, that guy's not a real Christian because he doesn't actually believe in God. He came to it through ritual and community and practice, not through some like deep spiritual awakening. And what was interesting was how different religions, or at least the sample size that I have, which was about 30 people, a lot of the Catholics that I talked to, they had this deep connection to their community, to their rituals of going to church. But I was often surprised at how they could not even answer basic questions about their religion. Like, I remember the first conversation I had with one of my Catholic friends.

• 2:20:21Speaker 03

  I said, all right, let's talk about Catholicism. What is it that you believe? And she said, well, Catholicism is about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So, okay, so Father's God, Son is Jesus. What's the Holy Spirit? She said, I don't actually know. It was just

• 2:20:40Tim Ferriss?

  That might be okay. That might be totally fine, right? And it's like, I don't know how my microwave works, but I use it.

• 2:20:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right? I mean, and for that particular package, maybe that's okay. I mean, there's certainly other factions that would strongly disagree with that.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 2:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure.

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

  And I came across them.

• 2:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it was, it was interesting just to see how different people got different values out of religion. One of the most recent salon dinners that we hosted was on the bundling and unbundling of religion, which is a particularly fun one. It's basically how I've, over time, I started to realize the convergence of these bundles where I was at a dinner with some Burning Man friends and we all held hands to say gratitudes. It's like, this is like grace.

• 2:21:24Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of reinventing the wheel.

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, no, no, it's totally different. It's like, it feels very similar. This feels a lot like saying grace.

• 2:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a great video. It's an oldie.

• 2:21:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  The one that kicked it all off maybe called Ultra Spiritual by JP Sears.

• 2:21:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Way back in the day. Oh, it's basically alternating between new age hodgepodge spirituality and very clear monotheistic, like Judeo-Christian stuff. And it's like, same, same kinda.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:21:54Tim Ferriss?

  Or at least the attempt is made. So where did you then end up after this study? And then we're going to come back to the network theory. But what was the effect that that had on you? Or were there any sort of lasting changes of perspective or behavior or priorities or anything else?

• 2:22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the most interesting thing was this recognizing the separation of community ritual, that form of religion and the deep spiritual belief side of religion. And I hosted a salon dinner on this, as I often do. And I had what I thought was this unique insight. And of course, I brought all my friends who are way better read on this than I did. And I, I opened it with my thoughts around this separation. And one of my friends who was there was like, yeah, that sounds a lot like Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. And he explained it. It's like, yeah, it's exactly the same thing. And he wrote about this more than 100 years ago. I thought I had this unique insight and it was, it's something that's been known for a long time. I would say one of the things that came out of it more than anything was an appreciation

• 2:22:57Speaker 03

  and a deeper respect for the positive aspects of religion and what it does for people. I think the deep dive into epistemology also was pretty mind bending, where it caused me to recognize that, this is actually something that I'm still wrestling with, is that I really do not believe there is such a thing as objective truth. All truth is subjective. You can maybe asymptotically approach truth, but there is no such thing as objective truth. The only way to believe in that is to believe in some specific higher power. Where I struggle with it is that that path almost always leads to postmodernism and to really bad things. And so I struggle-

• 2:23:42Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define, just, what do you mean by postmodernism here?

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  Postmodernism, meaning like your truth is just as valid as anyone else's-

• 2:23:50Tim Ferriss?

  Just like complete moral relativism-

• 2:23:52Speaker 03

  Hundred percent moral relativism is exactly. It is postmodernism in a nutshell. It's like your truth is just as important and real as anybody else's. There is no truth, there is no commons that we can agree on. It's just purely individual truth is all that matters. That leads to bad outcomes. Just in every society that has these postmodernist beliefs, Marxism as an example, tends to lead to really bad outcomes. And so I'm still struggling to figure out how one believes that without leading to some really negative outcome.

• 2:24:25Tim Ferriss?

  One of my pet theories I've had for probably four or five years now, watching the development and ubiquity of say, social media and watching elections and watching very sophisticated disinformation, misinformation campaigns and how people, I don't want to say by and large, but a lot of folks have ended up in this post factual, you just can't know what is real, apathetic state. And some people certainly then kind of bleed over into nihilism for a lot of other reasons. But my theory, that's more the observation that leads to the theory, which is there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of religions. They may not self-describe the

• 2:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  people who lead these things, even if they're distributed or self-identifying, may not describe it as religion, but it's going to look like a duck and quack like a duck, but maybe it calls itself, you know, aquatic chicken. Okay, fine. But-

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  I think so too.

• 2:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  I think there's going to be a lot of sort of micro-religions that pop up and maybe not so micro.

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  And they'll fight and say that it's not a religion, but like the bundling and unbundling example is specifically, I brought up the example of all of my Burning Man friends. It's like you have committed to a bundle and you can call that bundle a religion, or you can call it something else. But it definitely rhymes with religion, whatever it is that you've bundled here.

• 2:25:49Tim Ferriss?

  I took a class, I've been meaning actually to get this professor on the podcast and I need to reach back out to him. I feel badly that I haven't done this. Professor Gager at Princeton, and he taught a class, I'm not going to get the title exactly right, because it was 12,000 years ago when I took the class, but it was something like religion, cults and magic in the Greco-Roman world.

• 2:26:11Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 2:26:12Tim Ferriss?

  Which very quickly gets to the challenge of labeling and has a lot to do with political powers that be, it has a lot to do with scale, size. And if it's five people just doing some, you know, Wiccan earth goddess thing, it's quite different from like 5 million doing the same thing. And raised a lot of very, very fascinating questions for me that I want to unpack with him. So theology, topic number one, network theory.

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  So this was another topic that I, I was particularly interested in more understanding from first principles. A lot of people know things that are tangentially related to network theory, like the Dunbar's number, 150 people. People have some general sense that, you know, having a strong network is good. And I wanted a better understanding from first principles. So it's both network and graph theory are sort of the two related topics. Network theory, in my experience, is the language that people typically use for interpersonal human networks. And graph theory is more math. I did a gratitude exercise maybe five years ago during the time off, when I, I just listed all the good things that have happened to me in my life. And I

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  think I listed 100 things was the goal. I think 97, 98 of them were because of somebody that I knew, not because of something that I did, which was really surprising. And so I decided I'm going to really put a lot more attention towards who the people are in my life. And so I, I set a goal, which I still have, of keeping up with 1,000 people that I care about every quarter.

• 2:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit.

• 2:27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:49Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds like a lot of people.

• 2:27:50Speaker 03

  It's a lot. I mean, it takes-

• 2:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose that number?

• 2:27:54Speaker 03

  Because it felt

• 2:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred was too easy.

• 2:27:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred was trivial. Ten thousand was way too much.

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  Basically, yeah. That's basically it. Like a thousand felt tractable, but hard. I probably haven't hit a thousand in a quarter in maybe two years, but I regularly exceed 500.

• 2:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like my cortisol has spiked so hard since you just mentioned that. Maybe I'm just more introverted. I don't know energetically how I'd manage that level of communication.

• 2:28:22Speaker 03

  So I think some of it is, and this was something that I learned during the process of really trying to be more intentional about who I spend my time with. One of my values really is friendship and people that I care about. And I wasn't prioritizing that to the degree that I thought that I was, given how important it is to my life. Pretty quickly, within, I don't know, some amount of time, I realized that the list that I had put together of the people I want to stay in touch with, not all of them wanted to stay in touch with me. And that was

• 2:28:53Tim Ferriss?

  It is a two-person dance.

• 2:28:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I don't think I'd fully appreciated that. Energetically, it was very hard because I was trying to force these people to want to spend time with me, and they clearly didn't.

• 2:29:05Tim Ferriss?

  Bill Gates, I'd appreciate it if you would reply to some of my letters. Thank you.

• 2:29:09Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so at some point, I realized, you know, I'm just going to change my list. I'm only going to have people on here who I think also want to spend time with me. So it's in both directions. And so if I keep reaching out and they keep canceling or ignoring, it's like, that's fine. I don't take it personally anymore. It's just, they maybe have kids now, they have different life priorities. It's 100% okay. And maybe in five years, we can be friends again. It's not a big deal. I used to take these things a lot more personally, and I just don't anymore. And so network theory is really Understanding why some of these relationships are more valuable in whatever way you choose

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  to describe value. Is it professionally valuable? Is it personally valuable? Whatever the thing is. And there are several categories that are especially relevant for interpersonal human networks. One, that is, it's a really underappreciated form of network centrality. It was called eigenvektor centrality. There's a famous paper by Paul Granovetter, I think, written in the 70s called "The Strength of Weak Ties."

• 2:30:16Tim Ferriss?

  Cool title.

• 2:30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a very important paper in network theory, which it talks about how much more important weak ties are than strong ties. How you are more likely to find your next job from somebody who is an acquaintance rather than a friend. How you are more likely to find your life partner from an acquaintance rather than a friend.

• 2:30:38Tim Ferriss?

  Is that because the close friends are so overlapping that there's the introduction of novelty is less likely?

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's what's known as a dense network. It is a network where all the people in the network know each other. And so, almost necessarily, you already know all those people and you already have all that information. So, if there was a job in that group, you would already know about it. And so, the second degree and the third degree, eigenvektors, like the nth degree outside of your network, are the people who you should really be thinking a lot more about. And that's where a lot of the value comes from. And so, eigenvektor centrality is, when I really understood this concept, I started shifting the way that I spend my time in building a network of, it is infinitely more valuable to have one

• 2:31:26Speaker 03

  friend who is in a different dense network than another friend in the same dense network. Because you suddenly have access, like knowing one person in the apparel space versus zero makes a massive difference. Because they probably know all the people in the apparel space. Knowing one person who's a professional basketball player is way different than knowing zero. Because they know all the people in pro basketball. And so, this is more thinking about it from a professional lens of, when you're doing fundraising or you're building a company. You never know where this value is going to come from. And so finding ways of creating this strong eigenvector centrality, as opposed to what most people think of when they think of popularity is what's called

• 2:32:11Speaker 03

  degree centrality, which is how many people you know. And like, if you're the mayor of a small town.

• 2:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  Or how many people know you.

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  Sure. This is a slightly different thing, but yes, that would be called diffusion centrality. Degree centrality is basically popularity. If you're the mayor of a small town, you have high degree centrality, but probably nothing beyond that. You are the most connected person in a dense network. Eigenvector centrality is how many people do the people that you know know? And so it expands really exponentially beyond what you would get from degree centrality.

• 2:32:45Tim Ferriss?

  So let me interject for a second to ask a question. I find that logically makes a lot of sense if you are trying to increase the surface area upon which opportunities and sort of serendipitous introductions slash information can stick. And in the last few years, I've taken a very different approach. I don't know the network theory terms for it, but I've looked at my calendar. Every year I do this, I do a past year review, look at my calendar and identify, among other things, the people who produced the peak low and high sort of emotional valence.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:33:29Tim Ferriss?

  So if I'm looking at the positive interactions that were disproportionately positive, and then the people I interacted with who produced very disproportionate negative emotional states, I cut out the latter or dramatically reduce to the extent possible. And then I try to increase the time with the people who are grouped in the former. What I find is that's a very small group for me.

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:53Tim Ferriss?

  So when I've had opportunities, and this is probably, life is about trade offs oftentimes, right? So when I have people offer to make introductions and I know that's going to consume a certain amount of time, the question that I ask myself is, like looking at your calendar, I'm like, okay, I know this could consume many hours, even if I don't want to engage, I will now have an open mode of communication with someone, which will have some bearing on like energetic cost. Am I willing to apply that time to this new person? Or would I rather apply that to people? With whom I would already want to spend more time in the sense that I'm like, these are your best friends. Do you spend as much time with these people as you would like to? Did you spend enough time or as much time as you'd like in the last year? For a lot of people, the answer is going to be no.

• 2:34:37Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm like, until I check that, I'm not going to look for new opportunities. Although I'm in a somewhat, I guess I accomplished maybe what you're describing through, say, the podcast, right? I've had 700 podcast guests in different fields. So it's pretty easy for me to find something.

• 2:34:52Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  As like a just in time introduction as opposed to just in case introduction. But I guess what I'm wondering is, at this point, you've hosted whatever it is, 100 salons. I would imagine you have at least one node, like a weak tie in.

• 2:35:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  Most places.

• 2:35:09Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:35:10Tim Ferriss?

  So what are the benefits, the potential benefits that come from 1,000 people a quarter? That just seems like at face value to me, like incredible overkill. But, but it might not be. I'm sure I'm missing something.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it depends on one's goals. And so I think one of the things that would be different is that your signal to noise ratio is going to be a lot better than mine. Because you are, through the podcast, you can get recommendations from people on future guests that are extremely high signal. Somebody's putting their social capital on the line to say, you should meet this person. And I think the, the nature of it is, I don't say yes to every intro. Oftentimes I'll say, I'm happy to connect with them, but I probably don't have any synchronous time available. So I'm happy to correspond by email.

• 2:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good phrase.

• 2:35:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't have any synchronous time available, but I'm happy to connect by email. And then people are usually okay with that. And if they, you know, they say, hey, could you connect me with this person? It's like, great. I didn't need a 30 minute meeting to do that. It's like, happy to. Sure. Here. So I think in my case, I'm 34, there's still a lot of building in terms of network. And so.

• 2:36:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're kind of primetime in a lot of ways.

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so there's a lot of new people and there are. I would describe them as vectors, but all of these different dense networks, there are many of them that I haven't even discovered yet that just through serendipitous meetings may end up becoming really useful. There was a specific example, which I probably shouldn't say for work reasons, but there was a serendipitous encounter through a friend who said that they knew somebody who was really into continuous glucose monitors. Could I meet them? And, you know, I had a breakfast slot open. I said, sure, happy to chat with them. Six months later, they reached out to me and ended up connecting me to a very important business contact that I had no idea that this person was in touch with. And it was like,

• 2:37:04Speaker 03

  wow, who would have thought? Yeah. And so you never know where these sorts of things are going to come from.

• 2:37:11Tim Ferriss?

  I'm glad we're talking about it because what's fascinating for me is not just how people do things because without understanding the logic that goes into it, even if you agree or disagree, it's very hard for me at least to make sense of the actions, right? I like to understand the logic behind it. I think it's, I mean, it's a cool systematic approach. I nonetheless have a lot of anxiety just thinking about it, but that's, that's also a me thing. Like I'm kind of notoriously unavailable. I get so exhausted. I mean, it's another reason I don't do many events of any type or public speaking, et cetera. I can get on a stage and do that, but if there's any dinner afterwards that where there's like

• 2:37:53Tim Ferriss?

  a hundred people in a room, I need two or three days to recover from that. It's, it's just not in my constitution.

• 2:38:00Speaker 03

  I get it. Yeah. I'm an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs. I'm a pretty deep introvert. And I think the way that I'm able to be protective of it is that I don't do things that I don't want to do. And like doing the Friday forums, my co-founder does them. And it's only because everyone said the CEO has to be the one who does it. But I said, look, I am not going to be able to do this every week. I can do it for two weeks, but then this is going to be super draining. And Josh likes doing this, so he should be the one to do it. Similarly, my co-founder Casey goes on a bunch of podcasts talking about metabolic health. I don't have the stamina to go on a bunch of podcasts with the same sort of

• 2:38:45Speaker 03

  talking points and really pitching the vision of metabolic health. That's not something that I can do consistently. And so this is, it comes back to the novelty-seeking thing. And so we had her do it and she's way better at it than I am. So I'm really protective of only doing the things that give me energy. And so like, people have asked me the question of, what is my superpower? That's a common question that you get. And my answer is honestly pretty pedestrian. It's just stamina. It's like, I have no issue, working 90, 100 hours a week really does not bother me at all. And I only realize that as an advantage, like, as I'm seeing other people struggle with this stuff. It's just, it's not that I can

• 2:39:27Speaker 03

  work more than other people. It's that I'm very protective of what I spend my time on. And I just want to do more because it's exciting.

• 2:39:34Tim Ferriss?

  So metabolic health, we have not really spoken much at all about what the company does, which is very much on purpose because we, as we had in our communication beforehand, wanted to focus this podcast on a lot of other areas. But since you also mentioned orange juice earlier in the conversation, can you tell the, if this is a sufficient prompt, the juice cart moment, this is an investor meeting, would you mind telling that story? It's a great story.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny. My, at the time, it was my friend Josh. We hadn't started the company yet. And we were thinking about, could this software with continuous glucose monitoring, could this be a business? And Josh, he went to a juice cart before the meeting. Every good pitch has some amount of theater to it. And so our idea was, we would go, we'd have a thing of juice, and while we're in the meeting, he'll sip on it. And then there'll be the big reveal at the end, like, actually, I can show you right now. And we would see his glucose go up. And so he went to a juice cart, he got the thing called Health Drink. It's literally called Health Drink. We have a picture of it. He's drinking it while we're in this meeting.

• 2:40:48Speaker 03

  And then this is a, you know, an early investor pitch to see if there's any traction there. And sure enough, 30 minutes in, we do the scan and he is just rocketed up like over 200 milligrams per deciliter. And he's like, whoa, wait a second.

• 2:41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very high.

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  It's very high. Yeah. You could just see it in the faces of the investors. They were just like, oh my God, that is, I want one of these. Like I need to get one of these for my wife. This is so cool. And so that was the first moment I realized there's some real magic in getting these feedback loops. Cause it's like, you think this is healthy. It's definitely not. It's mostly just sugar.

• 2:41:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to ask you to do the thing that you hate to do, but for the purposes, because I imagine there are people listening who might find the company fascinating enough that they would want to consider applying for a job or something like that. So could be 20 seconds, doesn't need to be long, but just metabolic health, the mission of the company, you can make it as short or as long as you'd like.

• 2:41:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Just to give people an idea of what you guys are doing.

• 2:41:47Speaker 03

  Totally. So we, Levels shows you how food affects your health using biosensors like continuous glucose monitors. The metabolic health crisis is a compounding problem. When we started this company four years ago, the diabetes rate was about 10%. It's now 13%. The rate of diabetes is increasing at an increasing rate. It's second derivative positive. There are 90 million prediabetics in the U.S. The CDC estimates that 70% of those people will be diabetic within 10 years. This is a, a very serious problem. The numbers are really frightening if something does not dramatically change. So what almost everybody learns is something that is in their diet.

• 2:42:31Speaker 03

  Oatmeal, ketchup, that they don't realize has sugar in it. They almost always discover something that is causing problems in their life that they didn't realize. And so the goal of wearing a biosensor where you're literally measuring molecules in your body, this is the ground truth. You don't have to trust Honey Nut Cheerios, which says it's, it's heart healthy. You don't have to trust them. You can just see it in your body and your own data and you can make your own decisions. That's the, the intent of the company.

• 2:42:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I should also mention to folks, because I've, I've used continuous glucose monitors a lot, and Levels is an amazing tool, and you will also often see things that are very counterintuitive, or at least not obvious at first glance, like something that perhaps at smaller quantities is a very healthy food, but at your normal intake quantities, even though it doesn't seem like a lot, it's the same amount your friends eat, actually provokes a huge insulin response.

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Or glucose response, I should say, both, but glucose is a lot easier to use as a measurement. And you might also find that, for instance, people might associate glucose with carbohydrates, but not always the case, right? Like, if, if you have a rockin', gigantic steak, maybe not so gigantic, depends on your personal profile, it's very surprising how also time of day factors into this.

• 2:43:59Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  And unless you have the information, which is different from data, right? I mean, you can be deluged in data, but not know how to interpret it, but with an interface like Levels, if you are able to actually get a graspable hold on the signals that matter, it's pretty shocking, I think, and immensely practical, how much you can modify your behavior.

• 2:44:24Speaker 03

  For sure. And very simple things, too, like going on a walk after a meal has a huge impact on your glucose response. And the thing that got me interested in it, I'm pretty thin, I'm pretty fit, I played sports in college, the thing that got me interested in glucose monitoring was the energy swings. It's crazy to think that I, I used to believe this, but I was convinced that what you eat, it's just calories in, calories out. What you eat does not impact how you feel, makes no difference. It's all just calories. And then I started wearing a glucose monitor, and I had my normal, healthy breakfast of orange juice and oatmeal. And I just went on this roller coaster and like around noon, I'm falling asleep and I see

• 2:45:09Speaker 03

  that I've crashed into deep hypoglycemia and just, it just clicks. You can read about this stuff, but when you see it in your own data, it's like, this is it. It's not caffeine, it's not sleep. This whole time, it's been the thing that I don't even like oatmeal. I was just doing it because I was told it was healthy and it's actually the source of a lot of my problems.

• 2:45:29Tim Ferriss?

  And on the walk piece, Marco Canaro is an amazing chef. Actually, he is the proprietor of one of my favorite restaurants in New York City, Hearth. And you can also get Brodo Bone Broth, which is spectacular, right next door, attached to Hearth. And he has really completely recomposed his body. I mean, he, over the last, let's say, let's call it 10 years, combination of different factors, but the use of levels showed him how much just walking around the block. I mean, we're not talking about half a mile, a very short

• 2:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  walk after eating. What an incredible intervention that was for having an impact on glucose levels. It's remarkable. So for people who might be interested, you guys looking for any particular types of folks at the moment?

• 2:46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we're always hiring engineers. So if you're a typescript engineer, front end, back end, my DMs are open on Twitter. So.

• 2:46:29Tim Ferriss?

  All right. That's the best way?

• 2:46:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:31Tim Ferriss?

  All right. DMs on Twitter. His EA's will be eagerly awaiting your DMs. Last thing I wanted to talk about, because people might be interested and I'm interested, so minimalism. And this is particularly interesting to me because it raises questions about why you're doing what you're doing, right? Do you like stuff, but it's more of a philosophical exercise? And then at some point, if, you know, you guys have investors, presumably, like, they would like to get a return on their investment, which means if that happens, then you would get a return on your equity, presumably. What happens then? It raises all sorts of questions about the philosophies or the beliefs behind these things or the guiding principles. So let's start with the physical stuff. What does

• 2:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  physical minimalism look like for you?

• 2:47:18Speaker 03

  It's never been like a philosophical practice for me. It's really just been pragmatic. I was what I think is now called a digital nomad for quite a few years and over time, just having stuff was really inconvenient. And so over time, I just had less and less stuff to the point where like all my stuff fits in that backpack at this point.

• 2:47:36Tim Ferriss?

  That is across from us in this recording studio.

• 2:47:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just don't have a lot of stuff.

• 2:47:42Tim Ferriss?

  So hold on a second. So does this exclude or include clothing?

• 2:47:46Speaker 03

  So I have this pair of pants. This is my only pair of pants.

• 2:47:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:47:49Speaker 03

  I have three shirts. I have 10 pairs of underwear. I have 10 socks.

• 2:47:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you must have tried a lot of pants and shirts then. What are we working with here?

• 2:47:57Speaker 03

  These shirts are definitely, these are definitely good. These are, these shirts are definitely quality. These are uh, the Calvin Klein modal is the material. They're super breathable. They don't get smelly. Yeah, these are great. The pants are ones that my wife picked out. I don't actually know what they are.

• 2:48:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's great. They made the cut.

• 2:48:17Speaker 03

  They did.

• 2:48:18Tim Ferriss?

  Or maybe there's some karmic debt and you just have to wear them now. I don't know.

• 2:48:22Speaker 03

  They're honestly, they're a bit too thin. And so whenever it gets hot, I feel like I'm glued to them. It's very hard to take them off, but yeah.

• 2:48:32Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. All right. So we'll stick with the shirt recommendation. What else is in your bag? Is there anything that wouldn't be obvious? I'm sure there's laptop and some cables and charging, et cetera.

• 2:48:43Speaker 03

  Yep. A lot more cables than you would anticipate. There's like six or eight different cables that I have to do to connect things.

• 2:48:50Tim Ferriss?

  Dongle City.

• 2:48:51Speaker 03

  Yep. I have, you know, standard toiletries. I think one that I keep with me that's maybe a little bit uncommon.

• 2:48:57Tim Ferriss?

  Throwing stars.

• 2:48:58Speaker 03

  No. I keep, I keep something with me. I call them my focus goggles.

• 2:49:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're kind of like horse blinders. So when you're on an airplane, I have the attention span of a goldfish. And so if I'm trying to work and the person next to me is watching Transformers, I'm just going to end up watching Transformers with no sound. And so having these just blocks my ability to see anything for a fill. I have them here if you want to check them out.

• 2:49:24Tim Ferriss?

  Would you mind? Just I want to see these things.

• 2:49:29Tim Ferriss?

  I might need a pair of these. Okay. All right. So, so here, why don't you sit down just so people can see this? Because this is also not a big bag.

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:49:39Tim Ferriss?

  This is substantially smaller than my bag, which does not contain all of my earthly belongings.

• 2:49:46Speaker 03

  There we go. I mean, obviously some of my stuff is in the hotel rooms, but.

• 2:49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:50Speaker 03

  These are my focus goggles.

• 2:49:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. You made these?

• 2:49:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Custom.

• 2:49:55Tim Ferriss?

  This is incredible. Okay. So what we got here, these are, okay. So for people, I'm going to put these on in a second. But for people who can't see them, so they're basically almost like.

• 2:50:06Speaker 03

  Glasses.

• 2:50:07Tim Ferriss?

  They're like shooting range glasses. You have basically created Inuit style sunglasses in a sense.

• 2:50:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:15Tim Ferriss?

  People can look up, but by painting something on the surface to create sort of a thin sliver.

• 2:50:22Speaker 03

  It's like, I took a little bit of masking tape over the middle. This is the third iteration.

• 2:50:27Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Put some masking tape in the middle.

• 2:50:28Speaker 03

  Spray painted.

• 2:50:29Tim Ferriss?

  And then you spray painted and then you put like kinesio tape or something?

• 2:50:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's just like a normal athletic tape. And it's just, uh, cause I've been trying with the spacing.

• 2:50:38Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 2:50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  These are pretty amazing.

• 2:50:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so they're good. I've tried different versions. So like one of the versions.

• 2:50:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was imagining actual pliners, which would be a little, yeah, it might freak out the families around.

• 2:50:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this also freaks people out.

• 2:50:52Tim Ferriss?

  That is amazing.

• 2:50:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so like it's, it's the perfect.

• 2:50:55Tim Ferriss?

  We'll definitely need a photo of this. This might be, I think this should be for the thumbnail for the episode. You should have these on. That would definitely get a couple of extra clicks.

• 2:51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:06Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Those are cool.

• 2:51:06Speaker 03

  This is a third version. The first version was just dots, just circles. But turns out with that form factor, you get really dizzy.

• 2:51:15Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds awful.

• 2:51:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's bad. So doing the slit works, but then it turns out this slit was a little bit too wide. So I just put some tape on it, but this is, this is the final form.

• 2:51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:25Speaker 03

  Of the focus goggles.

• 2:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, focus goggles for the win. Anything else you got in there? Any like runes that you cast to make critical company decisions?

• 2:51:36Speaker 03

  I keep my passport. I keep a copy of the Constitution in my bag.

• 2:51:40Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Just tell me more.

• 2:51:43Speaker 03

  It's the law, so it's a good reminder.

• 2:51:46Tim Ferriss?

  Don't break the law again. Don't break the law again. No, seriously, what is? I mean, I understand it's the law, but

• 2:51:55Tim Ferriss?

  most people also don't want to inadvertently or purposefully break the law, but they don't carry a copy of the Constitution. So what does that serve?

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  You know,

• 2:52:02Tim Ferriss?

  in your life?

• 2:52:03Speaker 03

  It's surprising. It takes like two hours to read it. It's a really short document and it is surprising how often it ends up coming up in a discussion or a debate. Like one recently related to the election, somebody was saying the Electoral College is unconstitutional. And I said, no, no, it's in the Constitution. It's Article two, Section one. They're like, no, no, it's not. It's like, I have a Constitution right here.

• 2:52:26Tim Ferriss?

  And there I go. Okay, fine.

• 2:52:29Speaker 03

  It was definitely, it's literally in the Constitution. It's definitely constitutional. Okay, well, it shouldn't be constitutional. It's like, fair enough.

• 2:52:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:36Speaker 03

  But like, it's definitely constitutional.

• 2:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  All right. How long have you had the Constitution in your bag?

• 2:52:45Speaker 03

  Uh, several years. Yeah.

• 2:52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is it just for smacking down people who are speaking mistruths in debates? Or there's got,

• 2:52:55Speaker 03

  Sometimes I reread it. It is a fascinating book, if you want to call it that, on organizational design. For all of its flaws, the United States is the longest standing republic in the world. And so when you think about that from a historic lens, a lot of the things that the people who started the country did were very thoughtful and interesting. And so all these ideas around checks and balances, some of it relates to company building. Some of it can be used as an example of what is not relevant from company building. So for example, when you're building a country, you cannot make assumptions about the positive intent of the other people in the country.

• 2:53:37Speaker 03

  So you have to create structures to manage when there are bad actors. When you're in a company, you can just fire those people. It's super easy. And so you don't need to create those same mechanisms. And so where a lot of people-

• 2:53:51Tim Ferriss?

  Also with, say, it depends on the company, but with Equi, you can also really help to align incentives in ways that are much harder on a national level.

• 2:53:58Speaker 03

  For sure. Like, you cannot assume if somebody is acting in a way that's not illegal, but is detrimental to the country, you can't, like, throw them out. They used to have exile as a punishment, which was really interesting. Ostracism was a punishment. It's just, all right, you can't be here for 10 years. That was a real punishment, that people would just vote and say, "We don't like him. He just has to go away." But you can't really do that in countries. You totally can do that in a company. And so this ties into when you're creating systems, you have to understand the people in the system, how they interact. So if you're building a company, the idea of treat people like adults, you can make a set of assumptions about all the people

• 2:54:41Speaker 03

  here are going to be honest. When people fill out engagement surveys, they will be honest. And if they're not, you remove them, as opposed to, well, what structures, maybe we add some anonymity, we add some backdoors, let's make some compromises because we have people that are not aligned. Or you can just say, no, all people are aligned, or they leave. You just don't have to create all this process that creates distrust and all these other problems that are downstream of that.

• 2:55:07Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So it sounds like, in a way, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but this is a sort of idea catalyst, thought catalyst-

• 2:55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:55:18Tim Ferriss?

  -related to organizational design?

• 2:55:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a reminder.

• 2:55:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right. Well, we've covered a hell of a lot of ground here. I think we've covered pretty much everything that I have in front of me. We could cover a lot more and keep going for hours, I am sure. Curious when you are going to announce the official formation of your Church of Sam. And is there anything you would like to mention that we didn't cover? Any closing comments? Anything you'd like to direct people to? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wind to a close?

• 2:55:51Speaker 03

  This might be something that you're sick of hearing, but I want you to know that your work has had an incredibly positive impact on a lot of people, myself included. So, thank you.

• 2:56:00Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, Sam. I really appreciate that. And I've really enjoyed this conversation. I look forward to our dinner. I'm definitely going to dig more into the theology, which is endlessly fascinating to me as well on so many levels. And for everybody listening, where's the camera? There's the camera. He shows you how often he has cameras. We're over here, Tim. We're over here. Oh, yes, camera one. To everybody listening, we will link to everything we've discussed, including much more, because Sam has been very generous with his making lots of documents available publicly. So, we will really have rich show notes for this episode at tim.blog/podcast as per usual.

• 2:56:43Tim Ferriss?

  And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, both to others and to yourself. Don't forget the last part. Compassion is incomplete if it doesn't include yourself. And as always, thanks for tuning in.

• 2:56:57Tim 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.

• 2:57:39Tim 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. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my

• 2:58:24Tim Ferriss?

  own ecommerce business. I tell that story in The 4-Hour Work Week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best ecommerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS system, or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all-in-one ecommerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've

• 2:59:08Tim Ferriss?

  reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all ecommerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the ecommerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. This is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify, that's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y, Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 2:59:54Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Sundays for Dogs. Ultra-high-quality dog food without the prep or mess. I want to give my pooch Molly the best of everything. This is especially true when it comes to the ingredient quality of her food. I've tried tons of different options, but most healthy dog foods are an expensive, frozen mess. I've tried them, it's a disaster. They're a pain in the ass to thaw and serve, and the prep work eats up time I'd rather spend hiking with Molly, let alone the cleanup. So, there's a lot that goes into it, and I was looking for other options. Sundays for Dogs solves my problem with air-dried, high-quality dog food I can store and pour right from my pantry, no mess at all. The magic behind Sundays for Dogs is in their proprietary air-drying method.

• 3:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  To lock in nutrients, they gently dry the meat, low and slow. And unlike other brands, which are filled with hyper-processed grains and synthetic vitamins and so on, Sundays for Dogs only uses all-natural poultry and USDA-grade beef. Meat makes up 90% of their recipes. The other 10% are fruits and veggies, ingredients you'd find at the farmer's market, not at a pharmacy. Sundays for Dogs, and I've worked out a special deal just for you, my dear listeners, get 35% off of your first order of Sundays for Dogs by going to Sundays, that's plural, sundaysfordogs.com/tim or by using code TIM at checkout. That's sundaysfordogs.com/tim or by using code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout.

• 3:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, that's sundaysfordogs.com/tim or code TIM at checkout. Upgrade your pup to Sundays for Dogs and feel great about the food you feed your best friend.