#448: Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster

Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster | Brought to you by Laird Superfood http://drinklmnt.com/tim, Theragun http://theragun.com/tim, and Thrive Market http://thrivemarket.com/tim. "Brad, they can’t kill you and they can’t eat you. Suit up." — Len Fassler Brad Feld (@bfeld https://twitter.com/bfeld) is the author of two new books: The Startup Community Way https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Community-Way-Entrepreneurial-Ecosystem/dp/1119613604/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and the second edition of Startup Communities https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Communities-Building-Entrepreneurial-Ecosystem/dp/1119617650/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. He has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group https://www.foundrygroup.com/, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars https://www.techstars.com/. Brad is a writer and speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship. He’s written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution https://www.startuprev.com/ series and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts https://www.feld.com/ and Venture Deals https://www.venturedeals.com/blog/. Brad holds bachelor of science and master of science degrees in management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brad is also an art collector and long-distance runner. He has completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim. Founded by big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reece, Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim promises to deliver high-impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim offers a line of plant-based products designed to optimize your daily rituals, from sunrise to sunset. My favorite two products are their Turmeric Superfood Creamer and Unsweetened Superfood Creamer. I put one of them in practically everything. Both can really optimize your daily coffee or tea ritual, and a $10 bag will last you a long time. For a limited time, Laird Superfood http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim is offering you guys 20% off your order when you use code TIM at checkout. Check out lairdsuperfood.com/tim http://lairdsuperfood.com/tim to see my favorite products and learn more. * This episode is also brought to you by Theragun http://theragun.com/tim! Theragun http://theragun.com/tim is my go-to solution for recovery and restoration. It’s a famous, handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. I own two Theraguns, and my girlfriend and I use them every day after workouts and before bed. The all-new Gen 4 Theragun http://theragun.com/tim has a proprietary brushless motor that’s surprisingly quiet. It’s easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Go to Theragun.com/TIM http://theragun.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today, starting at only $199. * This episode is also brought to you by Thrive Market http://thrivemarket.com/tim, which saves me a ton of money and is perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market http://thrivemarket.com/tim is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can find all types of food, supplements, nontoxic home products, clean wine, dog food—just about anything. Members earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I personally saved $39 on my most recent order. Go to ThriveMarket.com/tim http://thrivemarket.com/tim to give Thrive Market a try! You can choose the membership model that best fits your lifestyle. They have affordable one-month and 12-month options. When you go to ThriveMarket.com/tim http://thrivemarket.com/tim, you can receive up to $20 in shopping credit. Start a risk-free membership today http://thrivemarket.com/tim, as you can cancel for any reason within your first 30 days for a full refund. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be seen appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night, I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level. Helps with performance,

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing. And the all-new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet. It's easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing. And you really have to feel the Theragun's signature power, amplitude, and effectiveness to believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So, I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun. That's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. Try Theragun risk-free for 30 days. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun. With an OLED screen, that's OLED for those

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  wondering, that's Organic Light-Emitting Diode Screen, personalized Theragun app, and incredible combination of quiet and power. So go to Theragun.com/Tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. Or you can watch the videos on the site, which show you all sorts of different ways to use it. A lot of runner friends of mine use them on their IT bands after Long runs, there are a million ways to use it. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So check it out. Go to theragun.com/tim. One more time, theragun.com/tim.

• 2:35Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25 to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for anything you can imagine, really. Whether it's keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, whatever, you can sort by that. You can find all types of food. You can find supplements. You can find non-toxic home products, clean wine, dog food, just about anything. And let me give you a personal example of just how much you can save. So my last order, I ordered Primal Kitchen Mayonnaise, which is made with avocado oil. It's delicious. Justin's Almond Butter.

• 3:20Tim Ferriss?

  And the first was 25% off. The Justin's Almond Butter was 30% off. Rao's Homemade Marinara Sauce, which is awesome, 26% off. All said and done, at the end of my shopping, I saved $39 on my order. So members, and I'm a member, can earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I'll come back to that. And through Thrive Gives, their one-on-one membership matching program, every paid Thrive Market membership is matched with a free one for a low-income family in need. And you can try Thrive Market a few different ways. They have the monthly membership, which is $9.95 per month. They have the 12-month membership for $5 a month,

• 4:04Tim Ferriss?

  which is billed at $59.95. And right now, This is exclusive to you guys. You can get up to a $20 shopping credit when you join today. Now, remember that I save $39 on my orders. So basically with one or two orders, I pay for the annual membership, which is pretty sweet. So go to thrivemarket.com/tim to give Thrive Market a try. You can, like I said, choose between the membership models you'd like to test out. If it doesn't work for you, you can cancel for any reason within 30 days for a full refund. And on top of that, you will make back your membership and savings, as I have, or they give you credits to make up for the difference. So it's really

• 4:43Tim Ferriss?

  win-win-win all around. And I would suggest you check it out. Go to thrivemarket.com/tim. You can receive up to $20 in shopping credit. That's thrivemarket.com/tim for up to $20 in shopping credit, plus all of the other great stuff that I mentioned. One more time, check it out. Thrivemarket.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 6:05Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, and I am thrilled to have a friend as a guest today, Brad Feld, on Twitter @B Feld, F E L D. Brad is the author of two new books, The Startup Community Way and the second edition of Startup Communities. He has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. I've been reading his writing forever, it seems. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital, and prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars. He's written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals, two of my favorite blogs out there, which really are, I think, timeless and a lot of the lessons that are

• 6:48Tim Ferriss?

  taught. Brad holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aka MIT. Brad is also an art collector and long-distance runner. He has completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states. Brad, welcome to the show. It's nice to have you.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Tim, thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.

• 7:10Tim Ferriss?

  I can't wait to dig in. You and I have had a number of conversations, and I have never failed to take notes and learn, and this is no exception. This is just a selfish indulgence on my part yet again on this podcast. I thought we'd begin with your first off-grid vacation and the genesis of how that came to be, if you wouldn't mind rewinding the clock and coloring that in for us.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's, let's start with something really calm and relaxed and easy. So, I'm married to a woman named Amy Bachelor, and we've been together now for almost 30 years. The first off-grid vacation I took was a result of a moment in time where Amy said to me, "I'm done." And I thought she meant that she was done with the week because it had been a really shitty week for me. But she was actually saying very quietly, "You know, I've had enough of living this way with you."

• 8:18Speaker 00

  This is mid 2000, so we're in the middle of the deflation of the internet bubble. It has not crashed yet. It crashed in 2001, but it's definitely deflating fast. And in sort of the arc for me as an investor from about 1996 to 2000 was unbelievably intense on the rise up. Like, you know, if you sneezed, you made money. The stupidest ideas were successful. And then that all continued until one day that was no longer true. And so, middle of 2000, I'm traveling all over the country because I invest all over the country.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  I'm doing my best to sort of keep everything together. I'm trying to save what is a portfolio that I have that's falling apart very, very quickly. Several companies that I co-founded along with a lot of companies that I was on the board of or an investor in. And Amy and I were literally just seeing ourselves on the weekend. So my week would start on Monday morning. I'd get up early, usually four o'clock Colorado time. I'd go to DIA. I'd take the 6:00 AM United flight to the Bay Area. I'd spend Monday all day in a partner meeting at the firm I was at then, which was during that period of time called SoftBank Venture Capital or SoftBank Technology Ventures, ultimately became called Mobius Venture Capital.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  And, you know, I'd stay the night. Tuesday, I'd spend all day in the Bay Area. And then I was co-chairman of a public company on the East Coast in New York and purchased. So I take a red eye usually on Tuesday night or Wednesday night, spend a couple of days in New York. Maybe on Friday, go somewhere else and eventually come back home.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Crash for the weekend, just out of exhaustion. Catch up on whatever I could catch up on and then sort of Amy would patch me up and send me back out Monday morning. And I'd do it again, week after week, for a lot of weeks. Um, this particular Friday that this started, she and I had planned a vacation to friend's house, a longtime friend of mine, a guy named Warren Katz and his wife Alana Katz, who had been my seventh employee in my first company. And Warren and I had been making, been, you know, entrepreneurial friends forever from when I lived in Boston and just good personal friends. And they had a house in Newport in addition to Boston. And so I met Amy in Boston.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Black car must have picked her up at the airport, came and picked me up at whatever company I had been spending the morning at. We took the car out to Newport and I was on the phone the entire time. And I'm on the phone like having these conversations that with the benefit of hindsight were ultimately futile. Every conversation that I had during that period of time, none of them had any positive impact of meaningful way on the outcomes of these companies. And, you know, I probably in between calls, I looked over at her and said, hey, sweetie, nice to see you. Looking forward to the weekend. We get to our friend's house, probably around three. Our friends are ready for a beautiful summer evening in Newport. And I'm still working, right?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  I'm on telephone calls, I'm dealing with, you know, my email, I'm doing whatever. And eventually it's six o'clock and we go to dinner. And we go to dinner at some restaurant and I, you know, by this point, I'm sort of trying to be in the moment a little bit, but without really realizing what's going on. And about, I don't know, we order 10, 15 minutes into dinner, just as salads are being served, I get another phone call and I just pick up the phone and I walk out. I'm, I'm smart enough to get away out of the table and go outside and I talk on the phone for a while and I come back and they're having dessert. And, you know, you kind of know when you're in a relationship and you're fucking up, right? Signals are not that hard to read.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Um, but, you know, we went back to our friend's house and, you know, by then we sort of, you know, had another, you know, whatever, a little more time together and then eventually go to bed. And we're crawling into bed and Amy says very quietly to me, she says, I'm done.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And I responded, yeah, this was a brutal week. I'm tired. God, everything's so hard right now. All these companies, blah, blah, whatever. So glad this week is over. I'm looking forward to having a weekend with you. She says, no, that's not what I meant. She, she says, you're not even a good roommate anymore. She says, I love you. I think you're awesome, but I don't want to live this way and I don't want to watch you do this to yourself. And I had enough wisdom. This is in my, about thirty-five, have enough wisdom to know not to go to bed or not to roll over when your, when your wife says that to you.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  So, you know, we talked for about an hour and I kinda, I'd like to say I talked her off the ledge of being done. I, I said to her, you know what? This weekend, no phone, no computer. I'm done. I gave her my phone. I gave her my computer. I said, put them in your bag. Between now and when we leave here Monday morning, I'm not going to do any work. I'm not going to think about work. And I just want to spend time talking about what we need to do differently, what I need to do differently. And, uh, you know, after about an hour, like, all right, things are calmed down and, you know, we're, we're kind of starting to doze a little. And, you know, I, I knew better than to sort of nudge her and say, you know, so any action happening tonight?

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Because, you know, like, all that was going to generate was, was more laughter. So we, we go to bed. Uh, we, we wake up the next morning and we go for a walk. And I said, look, I know that you're not happy with the dynamics here, but I don't want to split up. I love you. You're the person I was put on this planet for. I think I was the person you were put on this planet for. I've got an engineer's brain. Just give me some rules. And she looks at me and her first response is, ah, I don't want to give you rules like that puts it on me and that's not romantic. And then she sort of snaps into focus and she says, you mean I get to control you? And I said, I said, yeah, yeah, just give me some rules.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  And all right, so we walk a little bit more and she says, all right. The first thing I want you to do is I want you to keep track each day of how many hours you work and I want you to report them to me. Now, she knew that this was pressing a gigantic red button in the middle of my forehead. And it's what our significant others do, right? It's in what we do to them. Like, you know, the biggest point of pain or the biggest, you know, trigger of your significant other, if you have one, and they know of yours. And she was doing that and she was doing it on purpose. My first company, we kept track of time in five-minute increments. The software consultant, it was. And every day, and we, and this was 1980s, so we kept track on a piece of paper. So for seven years, I ran this company for seven years.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Every day, including weekends, I had like a paper grid that I filled out. Nine, 10 to nine, 25, and then a code for, you know, which client I worked on, and then a one-sentence description of what I did, just like lawyers do. But we did day in, day out. And when we sold that company, I said, I am never fucking doing that again. I'm never doing something where I have to keep track of my time again. And so my first reaction was, no, I'm not going to do that. And she looked at me and she says, you said I could make the rules. So, we ended up having an amazing set of conversations that weekend. Didn't solve anything, but there were two things that came out of it. One was a bunch of tactics, and I'll talk about one in particular in a second.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  But the other was real clarity for what was wrong. And it wasn't hard for her to say it and articulate it. And it wasn't hard for me to hear it, but it had to be said and it had to be articulated. And the specific thing that was wrong was my words didn't match my actions. And that has become a foundational part of my relationship with Amy and a key part of how I try to live, although we're human, we make, you know, I make mistakes, I screw up plenty, but I try to have my words match my actions. And in the context of the relationship,

• 16:40Speaker 00

  I'll use the phone call as an example. This is before, you know, we had iPhones before there was even on your cellphone caller ID, you just saw a phone number. And you actually, I think, had to have like a caller ID special thing on your home phone. And so somebody would call me on my cellphone and I'd be in the middle of a conversation with her. We'd be at the middle of dinner. We'd be in the middle of a movie or we'd be in the middle of name your other, you know, thing that two adults do. And my phone would ring and I'd answer it. No matter what was going on between us, no matter what sort of the interaction was, because I prioritized the random person who was calling me over

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Amy. Yet my words were, Amy, you're the most important person in my life. Being with you is the most treasured thing I have. I like to be with you more than anything else. Oh, sorry, I gotta answer this phone call. And you could do it with phone calls, you could do it with emails, you could do it with work, you could be, you know, I was late to every single thing we ever did because I just had one more thing to do before I went to the dinner that we had scheduled for the fancy night out or whatever. So when she said to me, your words don't match your actions, and then gave me an example, that really snapped into place and that's been foundational. The other part of it was, and this is a thing I've learned about, Amy, I don't have much of a temper. I suppress

• 18:03Speaker 00

  my anger and frustration. I'm like, I'm Mark Simpson and I just push it down to my toes. And I have lots of other ways to process it, some that are not particularly healthy, which I expect you'll probe me on at some point. But I don't have much of a temper. It takes a lot to get me to react with anger, external anger. Amy has a temper. And I learned early on in our relationship that there was no value in trying to win when her temper started to escalate. It was, you know, mutually assured destruction. She'd just keep escalating. I'd escalate, she'd escalate, I'd escalate, she'd escalate. I might eventually like lay on the ground like a, like your dog that says, you know, just pat me on the stomach, I give up, I yield.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  And in this particular moment, she said, uh, the reason I'm so angry right now is I'm scared. I'm scared for you. I think you're killing yourself. I don't think you're having fun. I don't think you're enjoying what you're doing. I don't think you're creating enough space for you. And I'm, she didn't say I'm enabling that, but that would be the language we'd use today. And so from that came this idea of basically a quarterly vacation off the grid. So each quarter since 2000, we take a week, Saturday to Saturday, and we just go off the grid. And I'm fortunate that I can take four weeks of vacation like that a year. And now we screw up some, sometimes we don't end up doing it or end up sort of being on or off.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  It took probably a dozen times before it wasn't a terrifying experience. The process literally of turning off my phone and leaving my computer at home. When we got on a plane and went somewhere for, for a week of vacation was so incredibly anxiety producing. The challenge that I had for the first couple of days of disconnecting from the momentum of my work life and shifting into this open space and time in front of me with the person I love the most was so hard to do. But it was so worth it, you know, three or four years later, the muscle that was built was four times a year.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Uh, I kind of just say to the rest of the world, fuck it and disappear for a week. And as far as I can tell, you know, all of those fears that I have, oh, by the way, there's a lot of anxieties that one has when they go away, right? If I'm not here for this meeting, this bad thing will happen or this will happen, or I won't sell this stock, or I won't, you know, be, I won't close this investment, or I'll miss this new opportunity or whatever, right? I'll pick your business anxiety. Well, yeah, all those things happened, but none of them were significant. They weren't meaningful.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Relative to the meaning and the value of being able to spend this time with Amy and with me, the two of us together, doing what we wanted to do rather than doing what the rest of the world wanted to do.

• 21:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to ask a few follow-ups about the quarterly off-the-grid vacation. Was the, let's just call it one-year withdrawal process, I mean, was it, I use that term deliberately, was it just a psychological heroin-like withdrawal process after which you were more relaxed? Or were there changes that you made to the format or the timing or what you did that helped to reduce the anxiety of taking the week off the grid? And for people who are wondering what that means, just to underscore what you said, that's no work, no email, no calls, no web surfing, no news. It is off-grid.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it took more than a year to detox or to, you know, to get into a place where it was like flipping a switch. Today, it's, I have a ritual, right? My ritual is on Friday night, I turn on my email responder. My email responder usually says something like, "I'm taking a week off the grid, I'm not checking email, when I get back, I'm archiving all my emails, so I will not see this email. If you want me to see it, send it to me again after, you know, day X, which is usually Tuesday, not the following Monday, because I come back to Monday and 75 people send me emails first thing Monday morning, you know, it's like, okay, now I'm just dealing with last week."

• 22:20Speaker 00

  And, you know, not surprisingly, the whatever, pick the number, I don't know, 1,000 new emails a week or whatever, couple thousand new emails a week, that come in, you know, it's, it's kind of nice to just start Monday morning with nothing in your inbox. It took me a while to figure that out. So for, you know, the first couple of years, I, I would put a vacation reminder up, but I'd come back to this onslaught and I'd live again the previous week. So it wasn't as though I got to not experience that week in the rest of my world. I had to go live it again on Monday morning. And by the end of the day Monday, all of the things that happened over the week were again in my head versus if I just deleted the week, yeah, some of them were important

• 23:02Speaker 00

  and they'd surface again, but the vast majority of them were not important, just cognitive dissonance, overhead I didn't need. Second was cheating. Every hotel has a computer connected to the internet. It's, you know, it's really

• 23:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sneaking into the refrigerator at midnight to have the ice cream.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Right. And like, you know, that's cheating.

• 23:26Tim Ferriss?

  The best diet ever.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Cheating in a way that undermines everything you're trying to do for yourself. Right. So on Wednesday, it's like, ah, just go check and see. And boom, the whole, everything you've just done is, is in terms of your own mental adjustment and mental health is gone. Independent of whether or not Amy catches me cheating, in which case then I'm actually cheating on her. Which is, you know, kind of like not the contract that we had. Do your words match your actions? No, that's the foundational thing. So there's like getting through that. Then there's the, I only have this one thing I have to do this week. Right. This one really important thing that had that just can't wait the week.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  In 20 something years of doing this, I don't think there's actually ever been one of those. I mean, I've made them up, right? And I've, I've had plenty of them that have distracted me. But I don't actually think there has ever been really one of those. If there really was one, you'd move your vacation. Right. You'd move the week to another week and say, look, I really, you know, we're on the road show for taking this company public this week. And I have to be involved and I can't be off the grid. Okay. Well, let's move the week. So, you know, there are a lot of things like that that took making mistakes. Like it wasn't like, okay, good, cool. Let's just go do this thing. It's a commitment I made to Amy and a commitment she made to me to build this into our life.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  In a way that would be successful and healthy for both of us.

• 25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular pattern to your scheduling? Do you try to do it the first week of the quarter or the last week of the quarter? Is there any pattern to that at all?

• 25:10Speaker 00

  There isn't. Some years we sit down, my birthday is December 1st and I have been for a number of years. I used to do it privately, now I do it publicly. I write a post that's version, you know, it's called V, whatever my age is. So I turned 54 last December. So I wrote, you know, B Feld V 54. And the year before I wrote B Feld V 53. And oftentimes around that, we'll sit down and we'll look at the next year and we'll, we'll try to get ahead of, you know, the calendar nonsense and just block out some weeks. Um, but they're not four weeks that are necessarily just convenient for me because, you know, Amy has a professional life. She's on the board of Nature Conservancy.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  She's on the board of Wellesley College where she went to school. You know, she's got some other responsibilities, um, you know, that are part of the schedule. So some of it is just navigating our collective schedule. Some of it is also when we need it. So there are moments where we'll have it, you know, and it's a month from now. And we'll look at each other and say, we're, you know, we're fried. We need a break. And I would say even in sort of this moment of, you know, the COVID crisis and the dynamics of work, our entire schedule from March to December, we just deleted. We said, we're not going anywhere in 2020. Other people can, but we're not, we're just going to stay home.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And I don't know when I'm going to leave my house again, but it's certainly not going to be in 2020. And therefore all of this stuff that's a trip here, a trip there, a thing there, a thing there, none of that matters. So let's look and think what tempo we really need so that we can maintain, you know, the intensity of our normal life pace. We have learned by the way, that Saturday to Saturday is the trick. We used to come back on Sundays. It didn't, you know, that didn't give us enough gear downtime. And, and we used to leave on Sundays and leaving on Sundays just meant that the weekend, you lost that front end weekend. If you left, you know, first thing on Saturday was when it starts, even if we don't go anywhere, a lot of times we just stay home. Right? So it doesn't have to be that we go somewhere. It's just enough space.

• 27:23Tim Ferriss?

  It just gives you a more gradual off-ramp, on-ramp and on-ramp, or on-ramp and off-ramp, excuse me. The next question I have for you, maybe related, may not be related, but there's a line here that I have in my notes, "They can't kill you and they can't eat you." Can you provide some context for this, please?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Sure. It's one of my favorite professional moments ever, maybe one of the most important ones ever. That line was said by Len Fassler, who is my, one of the two guys that bought my first company. Two guys were named, Len Fassler and Jerry Pock were partners in a company that was called Ameridata, which ultimately was a public company, got bought by GE Capital. Len is my closest mentor. He's the person I've learned the most about business from over my career. He's in his late 80s. He's just spectacular, spectacular

• 28:19Speaker 00

  human on many, many, many dimensions. We had co-founded a company in 1996. So Len and Jerry bought my company in 1993. GE bought their Ameridata in 1995. And Len and I started with two other people, Raj Bhargava, an entrepreneur I've worked with a number of times, and Steve Mags, who also had had a company bought by Len in 1996. And that company was a company that bought web hosting companies. We did a consolidation of web hosting companies that really was one of three companies that created a category called application service provider.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And ASP was a precursor to software as a service, or SaaS. And there was like a rise up at the end of the 90s, and then a complete collapse in 2001, 2002. And of course, you know, 20 years later, software is delivered on the web, online. That was essentially the business that we were, we had created. We just didn't, in the end, we didn't execute it correctly. We bought a bunch of companies, I think about 25. We went public in 1999. We had a peak market cap of right at $3 billion back when a market cap of $3 billion was a big market cap for a tech company. Company was called Interliant. And when the

• 29:45Speaker 00

  internet bubble burst, we had mastered that we built about a $200 million a year business. So, pretty sizable company, 1,500 employees. And Len and I were co-chairmen. So, we didn't run it. We had a CEO who ran it, but he was full-time. I was part-time because I was also a partner at the time Mobius. We mastered the art of losing $5 million a month. So, we had built this company and basically we'd grown incredibly fast, most through acquisitions, some organic growth. But we didn't have a cost structure that worked. And so, as a business, we had lots of real estate leases for data centers. We had lots of equipment leases. We had lots of OpEx. And basically, $5 million went out the door every day. And

• 30:30Speaker 00

  for a while, that was fine because capital was freely available and the only thing that the market cared about was growth. And so, we were handsomely rewarded for growing incredibly fast, independent of the fact that we had mastered the art of losing this money. Now, there's another company about the same time as us that had another company people may have heard of called RackSpace. And Graham Weston, who's the CEO of that company, we knew of each other, but we didn't have a relationship. And Graham ended up, we became friends years later. And he said, "Our problem was that we'd mastered $5 million of loss a month. He'd only mastered a million." So, when everything reversed, he was able to get to cash flow breakeven. We weren't. So, we're now on the downside of the utter collapse

• 31:14Speaker 00

  of this business that at a moment in time had been the most successful thing I'd ever been involved in. And I was a co-founder, so I had a huge amount of personal value tied up in the stock that then was every day vanishing. We were doing layoffs, we were selling pieces of the business, we were just trying to survive this complete collapse. And I was trying to survive it in the midst of flying across the country every week, having 20 other companies that I was involved in that were all falling apart at the same time, or at the same timeframe. And when I would go to New York, I would stay at Len's house. I had an apartment in the city, but a lot of the office was in purchase, so a lot of times I would just stay in purchase because that was where, it was just easier.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And I have such a vivid memory of waking up for breakfast at his house, because he didn't really have breakfast. So I'd wake up, and I'd like take a bagel, and I'd cut it in half, and I'd put it in a toaster, and I'd put cream cheese on it, I'd make a cup of coffee, and then eventually he'd sort of wander in, and we'd go to the office. And this particular morning, I was so fried, and just so despondent, and I just knew it was gonna be another utterly shitty day. I don't remember exactly what was in front of me that day, but whatever it was, it was gonna suck. I'm sitting at his little kitchen table, he's got this beautiful house in Harrison, this little tiny kitchen table in the corner, and I'm chewing on a bagel, I didn't even

• 32:38Speaker 00

  bother toasting it or putting cream cheese on it this morning, just like gnawing on it like, you know, a depraved dog or something. And he comes in, and he sneaks up, he just comes in behind me, puts his arms around me, you know, like in that big hug somebody gives you from behind. And, you know, Len's short, he's like 5'5", it's like Yoda, like a Jewish Yoda with, you know, ear hair and stuff. And he just kinda hugs me from behind with this sort of heavy hug, and he then grabs me on the shoulders from behind, and he says, "Brad, they can't kill ya, and they can't eat ya. Suit up."

• 33:22Speaker 00

  And like, he, he didn't need to be doing any of this work, right? He could have said, fuck it, I don't want to do this anymore. Why, why are we doing this? Like, he was, he was in that thing till the end. Uh, he felt an obligation to do the work even as it was all falling apart. Even he didn't need the money. He was doing it because I'd asked him to do it with me, that sort of thing. But that moment of, I'm at the absolute bottom of this, but I've still got shit to do. And him just sort of saying, just suit up, let's go. Uh, was, was a powerful moment for me. And, and you know, I've, I've had many, many other up and down experiences since then. Um, but ultimately, you know, they can't kill you and they can't eat you.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  And now some people may argue that depending on where you're from and where you live and what you've had to deal with in your life. Uh, but in the context of, you know, the US in business, entrepreneurship, trying to create things, you know, those things are true. They can't, they're not allowed to kill you and they're not allowed to eat you.

• 34:21Tim Ferriss?

  Good, thank you for explaining the backstory. And I, there, there are so many other bullets that I don't want to take you through every turn of the roller coaster.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Thanks so far for like the first 30 minutes being Brad Feld's version of misery.

• 34:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, just like putting the cat in a, in a pillowcase and wagging against a tree. That's usually not what I do on my podcast, but I, I, it is leading somewhere. Uh, I do promise that. And I'll just, I'll just provide maybe a quick montage that we don't have to go into the details of necessarily to get to a question. So even, uh, now people might be inclined to think, well, Brad, you know, he, he has this illustrious bio, he has all these successes. I guess when it's bad, it's really bad. And when it's good, it's really good. But there are also stories about, for instance, some of your best investments like Fitbit, where even in the midst of this meteoric rise, you have these emergency board calls

• 35:16Tim Ferriss?

  and potential product recalls and product recalls, all for the right ethical reasons, where you're puking into a garbage bin after phone calls and having these really difficult experiences and visceral reactions.

• 35:31Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to use that as a segue to a blog post. And this is a pretty recent blog post from 2020, but this is quoting from that blog post. I'm officially DSM five, 300.3 obsessive compulsive disorder. If you know me, you know that I'm a counter arranger and checker with some washing, mostly hands tossed in for good measure. My magic number is three. So there are few, this is a multi parter. I apologize. It's a sloppy way of asking questions, but you have spoken regularly since 2013 about your struggles with anxiety and depression. Two questions. Why is your magic number three? And why did you begin in 2013 to talk about these struggles?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Well, let me answer the second one first. I discovered depression in my mid twenties. And I'm sure I had been depressed before, but I didn't have language for it. I was always anxious. That anxiousness translated itself in a, often in a very positive way, right? It created focus, it created intensity. It was linked to need for achievement, but there was always anxiety and the anxiety manifests itself in lots of different ways. In my twenties, I had three things happen simultaneously. So I, you know, I'm one of those kids growing up, you know, my dad was a doctor, my mom was an artist. We grew up in Dallas, Texas, you know, we had plenty of resources.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  It was an interesting place to be in the seventies and eighties. I think there were 2,000 kids in my high school, 15, I don't know, 1500 kids in my high school, some big number. And four of them were Jewish. So, you know, I had funny holidays and I, I had some moments that were not great moments, you know, as a, as a Jewish teenager, sort of surrounded by people who weren't. But generally I had a very easy teenage years. My parents were very supportive, loving, challenging in different ways and different times, but very much there for my brother and I. I went to college. MIT is a place that is a, a daily assault on your self esteem.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  So you show up, you're, you know, you're at the top of your class in high school and you've done well and everything and you think you're really good at stuff. And I remember, you know, a month in, everybody has to take physics as a freshman and, you know, get a test a month in and I knew I didn't do well on the test and, you know, I got my grade, I got 20. Right, this kid never made Twenty, that's out of a hundred. Yeah, I got twenty. Right, and I never got, I mean, maybe I got a B in some English thing somewhere. Like, I thought I was really good at physics. I got a twenty. What do you do when you're seventeen years old at college away from home and you get a twenty on your first physics test? I went in my room and I cried for an hour. Like, I closed the door and I cried. I didn't know what to do. Like, how do you even process it? Turns out, class Ave on that test was thirty-two.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  So I actually got like a B minus C. Like, who the fuck gives the first test so that the class Ave is a thirty-two? MIT, like, that's what they do. They just, they, they make you very aware that you are, you know, there's a ten percent of the people there are off the charts, but they make the other ninety percent very aware, yeah, you're smart kids, but you're gonna have to work hard. So, you know, college, I was successful. I'd started a company. It was successful. Uh, I, I married my high school sweetheart, not Amy. I was in a PhD program at MIT at a very young age while running my company. Right, externally, like, everything looked awesome. And then three things happened in fairly short order.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Uh, remember, I'm anxious all the time, so I have incredible amount of anxiety that I'm carrying around with a bunch of things. The three things that happened in order were, one, my marriage blew up. Uh, so, public failure. Two, I got kicked out of the PhD program because I was a lousy PhD student. I was running my company and I wasn't taking it seriously. And three is, I was incredibly bored of my business. So my business, while it was succeeding, was not stimulating me in any way, shape, or form. And these three things tipped me into a very deep depression. When that happened, I had incredible shame.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Shame at all levels. Shame that I was depressed. Fortunately, my PhD advisor, who to this day is still, you know, a wonderful substitute paternalistic figure for me, a guy named Derek von Hippel, connected me with his therapist, who was a classical Boston psychiatrist. Turned out that OCD at this time was not well understood. It was just starting to be better understood. Fortunately, I got diagnosed with that. So, you know, the treatment that I had, which was both CBT and medication, was highly effective. Cognitive behavioral therapy, certain type of therapy where it's, you know, you think about therapy with like, you know, sitting in a couch, you know, laying on a couch with

• 40:30Speaker 00

  your back to the therapist is one type of therapy. This was the sort of conversational therapy, but it was actionable around certain things. But I really understood that I was having a major depressive episode and the thing that had triggered it was my inability to manage my OCD. But on top of all of this is this incredible shame, shame of all those dimensions. I couldn't tell anybody I was taking medication. Oh, my God. Like, if anybody knew I was taking medication, how awful would that be? So I go through that phase. In my 30s, 9/11 triggered another really intense depression that lasted about three months. I was in New York. I'd taken a red eye to New York the night before the towers

• 41:11Speaker 00

  fell. So I woke up as the towers were falling, literally. I was in midtown, so I was never really in harm's way, but I was terrified. And that depression was kind of in plain sight, right? That was at the tail end of the collapse of the internet bubble. So kind of everybody in my business world was completely a mess. And now all of the United States is a mess for a couple of months because we're all struggling with, we've been attacked. We've had friends die. What does this mean? Da, da, da, da, da. I know. These were not my only depressive episodes, but these were the ones that were extended, profound, lasted more than a couple of weeks that I could really, that I really was in the midst of. And in 2013, I had another one. And this time, it was a result of a bunch of things

• 41:56Speaker 00

  that happened in 2012. And they started with me running a 50-mile run, 50-mile race in April. Of 2012. So I overtrained. I trained a lot. I was working a lot. My business world was going very well between Foundry Group and Techstars. Had a very healthy relationship with Amy. I had lots of things, but I was working really hard. And I did this 50 mile race. I trained a ton. I did the race and I didn't take any time and recover. I just kept going. And a bunch of things happened, including a near fatal bike accident at the end of the summer. We had one of our dogs die. Sounds like a country music song sometimes. I ended up with a kidney stone

• 42:38Speaker 00

  that I had been ignoring and just avoiding. Oh, never mind that blood comes out when I pee. No big deal. I'm sure that'll go. I just ate something wrong. And on and on and on. And sort of in the end of this, at the end of 2012, I was physiologically exhausted, just completely kaput. And I had this kidney stone surgery, which had a very big kidney stones. They had to actually do surgery to get it out. I kind of took most of December off to recover. I thought I was fine. I'm like, okay, let's get back to it. And I went to CES in Las Vegas Computer Electronic Show, which is the second week of January. And literally within two weeks of getting into Vegas, getting to my hotel room, I'm in bed with a pillow over my head and I

• 43:21Speaker 00

  know I'm totally screwed. Like I've got, I'm in a depressive episode. In 2012, several, and then also in 2013, several entrepreneurs committed suicide. And there was a little bit of conversation around that, but not a lot. Aaron Schwartz is probably the first of the stream. And there was like a pop of, oh my gosh, this person, you know, how could this have happened? And then sort of it would drift away. And in this moment, I wasn't ashamed anymore. I had been open about my struggles with depression to my friends. I was blogging all the time about my life. There were various motivations, a lot of it to be that I think by writing versus I thinking some other way.

• 44:05Tim Ferriss?

  Brad, can I pause you for one second? Please don't lose your train of thought. But when you say I wasn't ashamed anymore, was that because you had been discussing it with friends? Was it because the half-life of shame just decayed over time? Because that's a really... That is not an incremental change.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  No, it's a good thing to interrupt with. So in my 30s, I was still pretty ashamed of being depressed, but I realized I was depressed out in the open. But atomic on to my 40s, and when we started Foundry Group, we made a commitment to each other at the beginning that we would be available to each other, emotionally available to each other as partners. And our effectiveness of that, how well we've done at that has ebbed and flowed over time. I wouldn't say that, you know, we are perfect at that and it's been awesome and it's never had trouble. But that was a thing that was an important part of my own value system from the beginning is I had been in this partnership at Mobius where some of the partners were emotionally accessible to each other, but many of them were not.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  And there was a lot of bullshit and there was a lot of stuff that was not great through that. So we started in 2007 with that framing. During that period of time, all four of the original partners had plenty of ups and downs and we had lots of conversations about it. And so I gradually became less uncomfortable talking to people in a professional context about it. My closest friends that were outside of a work context, people like Warren, other friends like my first business partner, a guy named Dave Jolke, many people like that who supported me through some of these depressive episodes, even if they weren't totally tuned into what was going on with me. As we got older, we had longer conversations around them.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And then one person in particular really changed how I approached it, which was Jerry Colonna. And I know you know Jerry and he did a great podcast with you not too long ago.

• 45:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the coach with the spider tattoo.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  So Jerry is one of my closest friends. I regularly refer to him as my soulmate. He and I have known each other going back to the mid 90s. I knew Jerry when Jerry first started working with Fred Wilson, when they started their firm Flatiron Partners. I knew Jerry much better than I knew Fred. And Fred and I got along and hung out, but I was really close to Jerry and we did some deals together and. It wasn't really till the late 90s, almost early 2000s, when Jerry was kind of departing that Fred and I started to really engage with each other at a deeper personal level. And there was some point along the way where, you know, where all three of us are very close. And Fred said something to me like, you know, when I was partners with Jerry,

• 46:42Speaker 00

  I couldn't handle both of you. And when Jerry finally disappeared for a while, I could handle you. And, you know, there's some, he said it in jest, but it was, there's some element of it in terms of the emotional engagement. So I'm sitting with Jerry, this is before I'm depressed, but, you know, as, as we're sort of going through things, maybe 2010, 2011, and we're having these conversations about how full of shit most of us are all the time. And, you know, he's coaching now and, you know, he's really pulling out of, of people without having to do a lot of magic, because his magic is right up front. Not the bad, the real. And, you know, in this conversation that we're having, you know,

• 47:27Speaker 00

  we talked very quickly about depression and he's been depressed and I've been fortunate that I haven't had the suicidal attempt and really the suicidal ideation activity that he's had. But, you know, the, the depth of the depression is something that we, we talk about pretty openly. And I don't remember exactly what the words were in that moment. Again, this is 2010, 2011. But he said something to me that caused me to change my mode with the founders that I was working with, and the, and the leaders that I was working with, where I was already, I think, pretty emotionally accessible to them. But I still think many of those relationships are power relationships, right? I'm the investor, they're the CEO.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  So therefore, the level of comfort that they're going to have being open about how they're actually doing at any moment of time varies a lot. And Jerry's point to me was, you Brad can be a better leader by just being you. And letting go of your constraints around how you present. You already don't have many constraints around how you present yourself. Like, I always think I've been a pretty, I am what I am, and I try to talk about it very openly. But he says, "You're holding back on this dimension." Right? The fact that you don't ever say, "You take medication," you're holding back. The fact that you don't talk about, you know, therapy, you're holding back.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  So I carried that with me, and when I had this depression in 2013, I immediately went back into, I hadn't been to therapy since I was in my twenties, I immediately went back into therapy. And I remember the day that I had that therapy session, which was, you know, the first therapy session with a new therapist is kind of worse than the first day at school, at a new school, just kind of sucks. And, but I wrote a blog the next day, and I'm like, "You know what? I'm just gonna write about how I'm feeling. Like, I don't want this extra layer of pressure on myself." Interestingly, there was a very strong, mostly positive feedback loop that came out of that. Some negative. Definitely people like, "Why are you saying this? The bad guys are gonna get you." People that didn't understand why I'd say something like this. "Why would you expose your weakness?"

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Plenty of, you know, look, when, when, I remember when Fred and I started blogging in 2004 timeframe, lots of people said, lots of VCs, lots of our peers said, "Oh, they must have way too much time on their hands to write blogs. Right now, everybody writes blogs." But it's kind of the same thing. It's like, "Nah, you know, I don't really care what anybody else says about it. This is, this is gonna make me feel better to let myself let go of this shame. And I'm gonna let go of this shame in an active way, and if that's helpful to the people I work with and the people that I support, that's a good thing." And the other side of it, the positive feedback loop is, during this period, three, four months, you know, I don't know the number, 50, 100,

• 50:17Speaker 00

  people whose names listeners would recognize, well-known entrepreneurs, well-known investors, some, a few well-known public figures that I didn't know, reached out to me for one reason or another. I did a few interviews, you know, because then all of a sudden, Inc. Magazine wants to write an article about entrepreneurs in depression. "Okay, fine, Jerry and I are in that article together." Like, there's a little of that going on. But I had a bunch of emotionally intimate conversations with very successful people, many of whom said I was the first person they were having a real conversation with their own struggles with depression with. And that didn't make me feel... Necessarily better, but it made me feel that what I was doing had value.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  And that created a positive feedback loop, which over time essentially obliterated the shame, didn't just make it go away, it obliterated it. It's like, no, we're human. This is part of the human condition. We can either deal with it or not deal with it. And I'm fine dealing with it. And then of course, you know, the, if you look at the evolution of Jerry and if you read his book reboot, like just understanding that if one wants to have, put your adjective in, like it doesn't have to be better, more satisfying, more successful. I don't care what you fill in the blank with, but make it a positive word. Knowing yourself and continuing to scrape away all the cruft and continue to

• 51:43Speaker 00

  recognize that we're all flawed and being willing to keep going deep on ourselves. And to the extent that we can do that without fear, without shame, that is even more satisfying. And I think that was sort of it all clicking into place for me, which is all right, I'm going to die someday. I hope that I have more good experiences than bad experiences between now and then I probably will, right? Because in the Warren Buffett words, I won the genetic lottery, right? I'm a white male in America. I happen to be in my mid 50s. I got plenty of resources, like probably lots better than worse for me. And so I should be aware of that and try to use that as a force for good in the world on whatever dimension I can.

• 52:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood, founded by one of the kings of big wave surfing Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reese. Laird Superfood delivers high impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. I just had a bunch of their products this morning, about an hour and a half ago. I love their turmeric superfood creamer and the unsweetened superfood creamer. Both can really optimize your daily coffee or tea ritual. So I combined it with Pu'er tea. A $10 bag will last you a long time. I basically use the Unsweetened superfood creamer like powdered MCT oil. So if I'm doing intermittent fasting or any number of things, I will use that. And I use it at least I'd say four or five

• 53:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 53:56Tim Ferriss?

  to see my favorite products and learn more. Again, that's Laird, L-A-I-R-D, superfood.com/tim, and use code TIM for 20% off of your order. LairdSuperfood.com/Tim, promo code TIM.

• 54:12Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned that Jerry's magic is upfront. By that, do you mean the questions that he asks? Or does that have a different meaning?

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Um, a little of that. Some of it's the questions. I mean, Jerry has a well-known superpower, which is that people start crying in front of him in a group right away. And people that would never imagine that they'd start crying, right, and let their emotion out, let their emotion out. And one of the things that is so fascinating is he's not really trying to do that. What he's doing is he's, he's locking in on the person in the moment and being fully present for the person he's talking to. He's then instinctively locking in, I'm using that word on purpose, on what is going on with them. And not so much what the, the

• 55:02Speaker 00

  surface level stuff is, but two or three layers down, you know, what's really at their core, what they're really afraid of, what they're not saying, what they're not acknowledging to anyone, but especially to themselves.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  And he opens that door quickly. Doesn't take four years of therapy to open that door. He opens that door in the first 15 minutes. And all of a sudden, the door's open. You don't have to dance around it for four more years. And when the door opens, I mean, some people run away. It's terrifying. But for most people, they've already committed that they're going to do the work. They've already said, I want to be here. And so when that door opens, all the barriers just sort of crumble all at once. And he is so good at that, one-on-one, but especially in a group setting, but doing it in a way where everyone feels like they're part of the experience, rather than he's singling you out.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  It's not like you're in Harvard Law School, waiting for the professor to point at you next, you know, to talk about the case and explain what happened. Or Harvard Business School, or whatever, wherever they do shit like that. I didn't go to Harvard, so I got to make stuff up about Harvard. But it's everybody in the room is all of a sudden teleported to this place where they're both empathetic to the person who is engaging intensely with Jerry, but it's reflecting on them. It's allowing them to let their door crack open a little. And then he stays with it. And he stays with it, not in a hostile way, not in an aggressive way, not in an attacking way, just in this Jerry way. I don't have a label for it.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  That, at least for my experiences with him, take people to a place where they realize, wow, okay, what is important to me? Very, very quickly.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's very good at honing in, and he skips a lot of the foreplay, which is, I find refreshing. Some of the questions he's posed to me, or had me pose to myself, have really stuck with me. One being, how are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want? And then you were talking about things being said, you know, what is, what is not being said, or what is being said that you are not hearing, or that is not being heard? You know, these types of questions are really, I've found, really, really fruitful.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  The one about how are you complicit in the conditions that you've created, right? It's so powerful to reflect on. It's a conversation that Amy and I have been having for 30 years, right? I work too much.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  I work a lot. I work, you know, I create time and space for myself. I used to travel all the time. I could complain about it, but how am I complicit in creating those conditions? Like, I have completely, I mean, you do too, right? You have the freedom to do what you want to do, where freedom is a very American word, in some ways, very poignant word in this moment. But as, again, white men with resources, we have a lot of freedom relative to many other people, most other people on planet Earth. When I find myself in a modality that I don't want to be in, working too much, or not having time and

• 58:25Speaker 00

  space for my relationship, or fearful of something, or whatever, right? In a relationship with a company, with a founder, with work, with a friend, that's not healthy for me, what is my responsibility? What is my role in creating those conditions? And a lot of times when I look at that, and carve out the time to look at that, there's a tactical, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore. I don't want to do that anymore. I'll stop doing this. That's tactical. That's different than going into it and saying, all right, I can change that. I can fix my schedule. I can delete some things. Why am I doing this? What is it satisfying

• 59:06Speaker 00

  in me? And is that thing it's satisfying, a good thing or a bad thing? And is it a wanted thing or an unwanted thing? And man, even with things that seem so obvious from the outside to, you know, my best friends, I don't see them. And I think that's true for many people, right? We're in complete denial of how we're creating those conditions that create our unhappiness. Create our happiness, that's good, but create our unhappiness, create our limitations, create our, put whatever box around and put a negative sign in front of it. And he, again, he is good at poking.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Through that, not touching it and tapping it and but just barreling into it and saying, "All right, here we are in this box. Let's talk about all the mess that's in this box."

• 59:56Tim Ferriss?

  There's something also very special about, I haven't interacted with Jerry in a group environment, but in small group environments, particularly, and this is what often happens when people self-select to interact with someone like Jerry, is someone will break the ice and really express vulnerability, which gives you permission and sort of greases the skids for you to do the same. So in some respects, you might anticipate that that being forthcoming and vulnerable in a group environment would be harder, but I think for a lot of people, it's actually easier. So I do think there is something to that.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  It's a good insight. I mean, it's probably one of the reasons why group therapy is a thing. He and Reboot, his company Reboot, have done, they started off doing CEO retreats, and then he and I, I hosted a number of VC retreats. I don't know how many we've done now, five or six. And we do them, I have a separate building on our, we have 40 acres just on the edge of Boulder, and I have a separate building I call the Carriage House. And it's two stories, and the upstairs is perfect retreat space, and the downstairs is like a place you could have, you know, nonprofit fundraisers or dinners or whatever. And he and the Reboot team would would take over the space for four days. And my only

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  request of the people that came is that they don't come to the house. They don't bother, you know, I have a sort of like, here's the area around my house specifically, but you can wander the land, you can wander the property, you can go sit by the swimming pool, you can do whatever. We have a fire pit. They do a fire ceremony at the end of the thing. And I would typically go for a day. The first one, I went for the first three days, and it's a four-day-long thing. And my observation, having now been to Three or four days of a couple of CEO ones and a couple of the VC ones and then having gone for between a meal and a day to the rest of the VC ones.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Everybody shows up with their armor on and you know, imagine a bunch of VCs showing up to a four day thing like this and, and they've got their armor on or CEOs, either one. And you know, the beginning of it is a little group bonding and a little bit like recognizing that you've got your armor on. But because it's so fast, you very quickly realize that your armor is just making you uncomfortable and sweaty and it's weighing you down and it's hard to sit. So you start taking your armor off. And then somebody just takes their armor off and goes for it. And after that first person does it, the next thing that happens is everybody stands up,

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  takes their armor off, throws it out the window and then you're off to the races. And I've seen this happen every single time and it usually happens within the first couple of hours and it's remarkable.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  And I think of you as having a very kind of rule-based engineering mind. How do you choose? You can answer either of these. How did you choose your therapist when you got back on the horse and decided to get back in that game? Or what do you say to someone? Let's just call, let's just assume it's a technical founder, right? Someone who has kind of an engineering mind. They ask you for advice as to how they should choose a therapist because there is every possible flavor of therapist on the spectrum, every possible style. What are your thoughts for yourself and when you went back to choose a therapist or for someone asking you how they should choose or find a therapist?

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  You reminded me that I never answered why three is my magic number. Um, we'll come back to that. So I've, I've chosen two therapists. I chose a therapist in my twenties and I chose a therapist in my late forties. And here's how I chose a therapist each time. A person who I had immense respect, admiration, love for.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Recommended their therapist or a therapist they knew well that they thought would be good for me and they did it with no strings attached. So in the first case, in my twenties, it was Eric Von Hippel's therapist, my PhD advisor's therapist. And I probably didn't,

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  I was in such a bad spot that I probably couldn't have done an evaluative process. I just needed some help. And I had had one prior bad therapy experience, which was before my first wife and I split up, we went to, she was going to a therapist, or she'd started going to a therapist, and then her therapist, or she suggested that I come and we do couples therapy together, which I have subsequently learned is a terrible idea if one of the partners has already been seeing a therapist. And we had one session, and I don't know, word malpractice is loaded, right? I felt attacked for the entire 50 minutes by her therapist.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  And that was it. Like, we didn't go back and like, our, our relationship was probably already done before I went to the therapy session, or certainly was done before I went to the therapy session, just hadn't got to that point. So I already had a bad experience. With Eric's therapist, the other thing is, his name was Dr. Mogul, and I thought for an entrepreneur, that was the perfect name for a therapist. And, but I was in, I was in shape where I didn't, I was in a place where I didn't have evaluative criteria, I couldn't have done anything. But he was, he was well suited for me. He was what I needed in the moment. So I got lucky in some ways. But it was because Eric knew me well enough, and I trusted Eric, and so that worked. The second time, my therapist was recommended

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  to me by Jerry. And it was a friend of Jerry's, not a therapist of Jerry's. And I said to Jerry, I want to do therapy again. I'm not really sure what I want this time around, but I want a longer term relationship. The first time I done it for four years, I said, I don't know whether this is a four year thing or a 20 year thing, but I want somebody who can have a 20 year relationship with, because I'm in a place in my life, I think I was 47. I know I'm in midlife. I know stuff is shifting. I know my hormones are shifting. I know what matters to me is changing. I know I can't run a seven minute mile anymore, even if I'd like to. I want somebody that I can sort of navigate through this next phase with. And I said, and I don't

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  want a psychiatrist. I really want, you know, it's Boulder. I want somebody who has, you know, classical training, but I want them to be, you know, earthy, crunchy, hippie, Buddha-y, whatever. I said, I want that in my life at this stage. And he said, I got the perfect person for you. And it was a, you know, classically trained psychologist named McAndrew. His last name is his first name and his first name is last name, which, which got me a hello. And he, there's a school in Boulder called Naropa that was one of the very first alternative schools in the country, may have been the first one that was Buddhist.

• 1:07:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  And very famous from the 1970s, a key part of Boulder. And McAndrew teaches at Boulder, so he was a Naropa professor. Jerry may still be, has for a long time been chair of Naropa. And, you know, you kind of go on his website and he's a, for high achievers, for entrepreneurs, for people that are, you know, athletes, serious, again, serious high achievers. And you read it and it's like the mix of high achiever and Buddhist. And it kind of jumped off the page at me. And my response was, yeah, okay, what the fuck, I'll try this. And it's been great. By the way, when I say it's been great, like I've had plenty of really crappy sessions. I've had plenty of moments where I didn't want to go. You know, I've gone through phases where I

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  passively avoided things. Oh, I'm too busy. I need to cancel this one. I'll see you in two weeks. Like lots of my own shit getting in the way. And, and McAndrew's just very, very patient through all that. Back to your question, I have recommended many, many people now to him, not to him as a therapist, but to him as a referrer. So, one of the things that I find as a really useful thing is, and then comes from my experience here, if you are thinking about getting therapy and you don't know where to go and you're scared or you're sort of stuck or you're, you know, you just don't know where to start, finding a friend or a colleague that has done therapy, asking them if you could talk to their therapist to have their therapist

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  refer you to one of their colleagues. Most therapists will do that for, will do an hour session or a 50-minute session with the idea that they're not your therapist, but they're trying to make a few referrals for you. The other place, if you have a good doctor, that's, you know, a general practitioner who you, you feel comfortable with, most general practitioners will have a network of a couple of therapists. And one of the mistakes I think people make is they feel like whoever they get referred to first is the person that they should work with.

• 1:09:15Tim Ferriss?

  Their homework assignment.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  And that's the key. It's not that. It's what you're really doing is you're shopping. And you're asking even the people you're talking to, who they think you should talk to. Now, if you're in incredible distress, you might just land with a person. But if you're in a place where like, I really want to make progress here, asking the referral to the referral is a useful technique. Last comment I'd make on this, therapist and coach are totally different things. And it's really important to recognize that, especially for the entrepreneurs or, you know, business people listening to this, coaches are really valuable, totally different thing than the therapist. And there's a lot of value actually in having both a coach and a therapist, especially if you're leading something and you're looking for how to get better

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  at leading something while understanding yourself better.

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  What is the role of therapist versus coach for you? Is the therapist the salve and the coach the whip?

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's good. Like looking for monopoly pieces, right? The, here's how I describe therapy and here's how I describe coaching. For therapy, I pay somebody, or my, you know, if you have insurance, your insurance pays somebody. You pay them to sit and listen to you for 50 minutes.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  You're going to, in my case, I go to Planet Brad. And if I want to talk for 50 minutes uninterrupted, he has to listen to me.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  And, you know, it gets pretty boring talking for 50 minutes and having somebody look at you all the time. Sometimes it's not, but if you do it week after week after week, eventually things start to shift. And the therapist is guiding you to go deeper, to explore and understand what's actually going on, and what's at the root cause of what's going on, and how your lived history is impacting your current behavior. And on and on and on, right? So it's really very much you showing up and the therapist over a long period of time, helping you deconstruct

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  yourself across all dimensions, but with you as the central focus. A coach, and that word deconstruct is important, because it's deconstruct and presumably reconstruct in ways you want. If anybody's ever done any kind of athletics, it can be junior high school athletics, you had a coach. And that coach helped you train. And that coach helped keep track of what was going on. And that coach gave you exercises. And that coach had an emotional relationship with you as he or she tried to help you become better

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  at whatever your craft was. And really, the coach is focused on you and your craft, whereas the therapist is focused on deconstructing you and your lived experience. There are many other pieces of that, but that's generally how I think about it. Self and the whip is kind of okay. I mean, the coach is the whip, right? The coach is the one saying, come on. But a really good coach is also, you know, there's part therapy. And I mean, Jerry talks about, you know, to be a great, and the reboot way is a combination, their methodology as coaching firm, is a combination of two things. One is radical self-inquiry. And the other is practical skills development.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  And I think this is what's unique about reboot is you can't have one or the other. If you just have radical self-inquiry, that's therapy. Go to therapy. Right? If you just have practical skills development, you're probably not going to get that much better. You can read books, you can go to seminars, you can do online courses.

• 1:13:04Tim Ferriss?

  Or you might get really great at doing the wrong thing.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Really, really great. I like that. Really great at doing the wrong thing. It's the intersection of those two. Or really great at doing something that you fucking hate. Right? Well, you hate this, but you're really great at it. So, but I'm not doing any radical self-inquiry, so I'm not going to acknowledge that I really hate it. So I'm just going to be miserable all the time. That's, that's no way to live.

• 1:13:26Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned CBT earlier. I just wanted to give note to one book for anyone who wants to explore CBT. Certainly you can find a good summary on Wikipedia, but there is a book called The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT, subtitle Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy by Donald Robertson, which I found to be quite interesting. So for people who are curious about CBT, as I am, that is a, that is a good resource. I want to ask you, and we're going to get there, about Boulder. Why Colorado versus the Bay Area, for instance, after Boston? But I first want to ask you, first, just to knock this out of the way, number three. Why number three?

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  So, here's how OCD works. We all have obsessions and compulsions. It's just normal way our brains work. The problem is when you have an inappropriate linkage between the obsessive thoughts and the compulsive behavior. So you have an obsessive recurring thought, and you then execute a compulsive behavior that has no correlation to it, but it's your effort, you know, as a person with OCD to try to control your environment. Examples would be, and this is why one of the, the things that people with OCD have is they're, they're known as checkers or counters, right?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  They count things, they're constantly checking things, they're arranging and ordering things. And people will say, I have OCD when they're like orderly and clean. Orderly and clean is not OCD. It's only if, if the thing isn't orderly and clean, my mother will die. Right? If I don't eat this carrot in three bites, I will lose a client.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  If I don't straighten all the cigarettes so that they're parallel to the street as I walk from my apartment to my office in Boston while touching all the signs with my right hand, my wife will have an affair. That's OCD. On top of it, you know, just that last example, the absurdity of it is, most people with OCD are very germophobic and very, don't like dirt, right? Wash your hands a lot. And so the whole idea of trying to straighten all the cigarettes on the street and touch all the dirty signs on the way to the office is just stupid. But, but that's what it is.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  And you have this immense cognitive load in your head that's around this anxiety. And it's really all just this effort to control your, one's environment. The trick to OCD is breaking the link. So we still have obsessions, we still have compulsions. My favorite number is three. I don't know why. However, it became my number. And so I had to do everything three times. When I got home, when I got to my apartment at night, I had to turn the lock three times before I walked in the apartment. I had to close, jiggle the door handle three times when I closed it. I had to turn the lock three times when I closed it. When I took a shower, I had to turn the shower on, off, on, off, on, off before I could get in. And then I have to turn it on, off, on, off, on, off after I got out.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  And then after I got out, because three is my magic number, I'd have to turn it on, off, on, off, on, off again. And if I, and on and on and on. If I didn't do something three times, here's when my engineer brain kicks in, I had to do it nine times.

• 1:16:53Tim Ferriss?

  I love, like the combination of OCD-inflicted superstition.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Engineering and numerology. Alright, so, so what happens if I screw it up when I don't do it nine times? Got to do it 27 times, three times, three times, three. If you have ever had to do something stupid, that is, you know, stupid is the wrong word. If you ever had to do something, you're trapped, right? You can't go do the next thing. You have to do it 27 times. You get it right, because if you don't get it right, you're going to do it 81 times.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  And there's just some things in life you don't want to do 81 times in a row. So that's how three became my number. And for some reason,

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  you know, interestingly, I care a lot about symmetry. So in some ways, four would have been a better number than three. And obviously, two would have been an easier number. But somehow it ended up being three. So I just carried around with me. It's my magic number.

• 1:17:52Tim Ferriss?

  So if we're talking about links and breaking these these artificial causal links, let's talk about another what seems like a pattern interrupt. And that is your life dinners. Can you describe what these are?

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, this was another thing that came out of me and Amy's weekend in Rhode Island. So she said to me, as we're walking, I want to have dinner with you once a month, not a date night, but let's do dinner once a month. Let's do it on the first night of every month. And just, I just want a commitment for that. And now him and HOG, you know, I don't know whether I'll be in Boulder or Boston or New York or the Bay Area or whatever. And she looked at me and she said, do you have a calendar, an online calendar? Knowing full well, I did, of course. And, and, and I said, yeah, I have an online calendar. She says, does it have the ability for you to make a recurring calendar appointment?

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  I said, yeah, the online calendar lets me do that. She says, how about if you make an online recurring calendar appointment from 6:00 PM Colorado time to 10:00 PM Colorado time on the first day of a month and have it repeat forever? I said, okay, I guess I can do that. So we did that. And so every month, on the first day of the month, we have what we call life dinner. Now, 20 years of life dinners later, so what is that, 1,000 something life dinners, which is awesome, by the way. We, we have a little flexibility. There's, there are definitely nights where we, we will have it on the second or the third because something's going on. But we, we really commit to it. We used to go out to dinner. Now, a lot of times we just do it at home. Time of COVID, we for sure do it at home.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  We often, not always, but often start with a gift exchange. And the gifts could be trivial little things. Once she gave me a remote control fart machine. She's picked up a lot of jewelry and art from it over the years and books. One dinner, she gave me a Range Rover. So, you know, it's a full spectrum.

• 1:19:57Tim Ferriss?

  I really hope it was the same dinner that you gave her the fart machine. That would have been less popular.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  I think the Range Rover was to make up for the fart machine, but the fart machine was years earlier.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  And we sit down, and if you're a fan of software development and you know what Agile is, we essentially do, the first half is a retrospective of the previous month. And the second half is sprint planning for the next month. So, again, very deliberately not a date night.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  We have plenty of those. This is, let's talk, each of us, you go first or I go first, doesn't matter, about the last month and what happened and what was good and what was bad and what we were unhappy about and what we wish we'd done differently and what we regret and what we're really satisfied with and anything, just retrospective. This is powerfully interesting because we started to learn that if Amy did something that really annoyed me on the 21st of the month,

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  in the moment, I didn't have to react and cause us to have a three-hour personal meltdown on the 21st of the month. I could wait nine more days or 10 more days and it could be 11 more days. It could be part of our life dinner. And it gave us a marker for being able to resolve the conflicts that we would have with each other or express things, positive and negative, that we hadn't said in the moment. The forward sprint planning part of it is not go through the calendar for the next month, but talk about goals, aspirations, what we might want to do differently,

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  what we're feeling in the moment that's making us uncomfortable about the future, what we're not afraid of, what we're worried about happening in the future, what's causing us in the moment real anxiety about the future. And, you know, anybody out there has had any therapy or done meditation, literally just naming the thing oftentimes gets rid of a lot of the anxiety. Just labeling it, just calling it out and saying it out loud. Um, and so these dinners, sometimes the conversation, the life dinner part of the conversation might go five or 10 minutes and sometimes it might go three hours. And sometimes there was laughter and sometimes there were tears and sometimes there were both.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  And it's just such now 20 some odd years later, a comfortable way to re-ground ourself as a couple, um, roughly every 30 days in what is a very, very challenging and complicated world.

• 1:22:40Tim Ferriss?

  Nate, you mentioned earlier that Amy has a temper and in my relationship, I suppose I'm the one with the temper. Do you have any ground rules for the details here or communication style? Because certainly in any relationship where one person has a temper, at least in my experience, the delivery can matter a lot. Uh, do you guys, have you guys learned anything about sort of communication style when you're bringing forward grievances or anything along those lines?

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think we, we, we've learned a lot over the years because we, we used to not be very effective when we fought because we didn't know how. Any couple that says they never fight is totally full of shit, right? Because we're humans. And we, we learned, I think there's probably three things to pull out as I think about them in real time. The first is no violence ever, no physical violence ever in any scenario. Red line is the word, right? It's, it's just an uncrossable line, no physical violence.

• 1:23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Now by that, you, you mean like physical striking or you mean pounding the table? Anything like that? Just a physical manifestation of anger?

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a physical manifestation, pounding the table, throwing something, even if you don't throw it at the other person, a sincere threat of violence. Um, those things are not okay. It's pounding the table, eh, you know, but, but there's a big difference, I think, between pounding your fist on the table out of frustration, um, and doing it in a way that, you know, jerking someone's chair.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Right, I think pounding a fist on a table, eh, probably would be okay in our, I don't know what that's gonna be, but certainly jerking a chair, shoving the other person or whatever, completely unacceptable, not even sort of not acceptable, just completely unacceptable. Second is, don't shut down while it's happening. If you're the one that's being attacked by the angry person, it's extremely easy to shut down. And I find myself, by the way, in many situations that I have outside of my relationship with Amy, including work situations, when I'm experiencing someone who has what I think is extreme or inappropriate anger in a moment, I find myself shutting down. I can't, I don't know how to deal with it in the moment. And we've made a commitment to each other that you don't shut down in

• 1:24:58Speaker 00

  the moment, right? I don't storm off and slam the door and lock myself in the room. You sort of have to let it play its course.

• 1:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do instead, if I may ask? Instead of shutting down, do you have an alternative? So for people who might be inclined to withdraw into themselves and just kind of blank out like Wally shutting down, if they feel like they're being pummeled, how do you counter, what's the counter move?

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  It's a couple. One is I try to stay in the moment with the anger. And again, I think this is a function of trust, right? The more you trust the person, the more you can do this. If you don't trust the person, it's impossible to do this. And there's a spectrum. I completely trust Amy, 100%. So I know that she is angry at me, and I know that the anger will run its course. I also happen to know that when she's angry at me, she's usually scared for something that's going on around me or her. And so in a lot of ways, it's better for me to listen carefully to try to figure out what it is that's causing her to be scared, versus apologize for the thing that she's angry about.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  And so in the moment, rather than try to fix the problem that she's angry about, I try to bring my full attention to the situation to understand and ask questions, not in a Socratic and annoying as shit way, but you know, in an engaged, in engaged in the moment way to try to understand what's really going on versus trying to defend myself. I didn't do that. I didn't mean that. That's not what I said. That's not what I meant. Right? That kind of stuff, which is pretty natural reaction and really hard to hold back on, you know, especially when you're feeling falsely accused, which happens a lot when somebody else is angry at you. They don't understand the whole situation.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  They don't really know what's going on. And the third then, so staying deeply engaged then leads to the third, or the other tactic, by the way, I use is I try to use humor in those moments. We have lots of stories of us ending as, you know, where she gets out of an angry phase. I hate to make her sound like a terrible person. She's awesome. And she doesn't get angry very often. So it's not, it's not that I live huddled up in the corner of my house, waiting for the next outbreak. It's quite the opposite. But you know, in those moments where all of a sudden, you know, I'm jumping up and down with her in the air, laughing and making jokes about things and spinning in circles. Right? Or

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  I'm doing something silly and she can no longer keep being angry because I'm just being silly in this moment. But I'm being silly, not as a reaction. I'm being silly because I've kind of landed finally on what's got her stirred up. And it's spurted out. So it's kind of like, oh, that's the thing. Okay. Here, let's see how many potato chips I can stuff in my mouth now. And that's going to cause you to stop being angry or whatever, something cute. And then the third, and this is critical, is that when it's over, we both apologize. Not, it's not hers to apologize to me and me to apologize to her, but we both apologize. And it's a real apology. It's not a, "I'm sorry you got angry at me" kind of apology. Right? Which is not an apology.

• 1:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's always a winner.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Total bullshit, right? It's, it's just-

• 1:28:16Tim Ferriss?

  "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry you're responding so poorly."

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  It's, it's just simple. It's, "I'm sorry," and "I'm sorry," and hug, and, and you go on. Right? And, and I should also say, like, I get angry too. It takes a while. It doesn't happen very often. But I get angry too, and she, she does the same. Right? She reflects it back, engages fully, listens. Of course, I'm sometimes defensive. Of course, she's sometimes defensive. But you try to let that work its way out without disengaging. And then at the end, when it's calmed down, you apologize.

• 1:28:50Tim Ferriss?

  Do you guys take any, and maybe in the early days, it should be a better question for reflecting back on the early days, since I'm thinking of, say, me and my girlfriend, I'm thinking of couples who are listening to this, or partners for that matter, who might wanna, in some fashion, emulate this. Notes, taking notes, helpful, hurtful, otherwise? Do you have any thoughts on taking, taking notes? If there, if there's any sort of looking forward, planning, et cetera? Is it helpful to have notes, or do you guys prefer to do it all verbally?

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, for us, it doesn't. I, I think it can be very helpful. I think it's very, very individualistic. I am not a note taker. I just not. Yeah, I have a good memory, but I also, I have a memory that's a synthesizing memory versus a factual detail memory. And so, taking notes actually clogs up my ability to synthesize things. And so, I'm also a very good reader, and I learn by reading. So I've, I've sort of learned about myself, that the, you know, a lot of people say, "If you write it down, if you take notes, it'll cause you to remember it better." What I've found for many things, not all things, but for many things, it actually interferes with my ability to synthesize what's going on in the moment.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  For Amy, she is an extremely good, she has, she's, I did a memory, extremely good memory, which works to her advantage most of the time, because she'll remember the incident better than I will. But also works to her disadvantage, because it's often not the details of the incident that is the issue. And we've learned that remembering and keeping track actually gets in our way of synthesizing and figuring out what's going on. I think that's a function of a long relationship, too. And just very, very deep trust. I can imagine earlier in a relationship, or earlier in our relationship, that might have been helpful. The other thing which comes from that is a lot of people, and we see this in business

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  all the time, you see this in, hey, you read a book, you see it in someone's book, right? It's not that they make the point one time, they have to make the point three or four times. And sometimes you have to read the point three or four times before you actually understand the point. You know, there is, there is a reason that, you know, there's, there's sentence structure, paragraph structure, chapter structure in business books that can be tedious and result in the business book only needing to be about 20 pages long. But for many of us, we have to, you know, we have to cycle through a few times. And I think that's especially true in conflict. Because when you're confronted with conflict, the first thing that you see or respond to often is not the source of the conflict.

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  It is often not either the, the root cause, the thing that's even triggered it. And the, the person who's angry may be articulating their anger in a way they think resembles what's, what's going on. But you're probably not hearing what they're saying properly in that first moment, because you're trying to get oriented and dealing with your own fight or flight reaction. Especially if it's someone that you have a, you know, intimate trusted relationship with, if it's just some random person, different. And that sort of circuitous answer, for me, writing stuff down is not helpful, but I could see how for some couples, it is, I think the practice also, by the way, of, of the retrospective, right? Okay, you had the fight, you know, don't go off into your corners and each sit down

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  with your journal and write what just happened. But agree, agree to sit back down, especially early in a relationship, agree to sit back down in a couple of days, three days from now, you know, let's have lunch and let's talk about this. And between now and then, let's each, in our own way, think about, like, what was really going on and have those conversations. And I know that Amy and I have had many of those types of conversations. Over the last 20 years on our life dinners, on our week off the grid, like, you know, that that is part of the content. It's we're no longer talking about is our relationship going to work and why our relationship isn't working. We're talking about the next level of it, where, you know, we're actually exploring what's going on with each of us as individuals in these moments where things don't feel good, or when things, by the way, the other end of the spectrum, feel really good.

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  There's all sorts of stuff that I want to cover, and I think we're going to probably run out of time. I am going to come to the Colorado versus other options. But just very quickly, the digital Sabbath, going without email, without phone, from Friday night to Sunday morning. How often do you guys, what's your hit rate on on doing that?

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  Uh, 80% of the time.

• 1:33:25Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Four out of five, three out of four, four to five. Um, the it started, I didn't used to do it. I used to work, my work rhythm was that I would use half a day on Saturday to catch up, usually in the morning. And then I do a long run on Sunday mornings, usually, and then I'd work, I'd probably work another half day to full day on Sundays. And even, you know, even into 2013, I, you know, the number of hours per week, it's again, I stopped, thankfully, I stopped having to keep tracking the hours a week I worked. And about 2002, Amy didn't make me keep doing that for the last 20 years. But I would go through, you

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  know, phases where the total number of hours a week I worked probably diminished if you didn't count things like travel, and you didn't count things like all of those, you know, hour or two hour in front of your computer, just catching up on stuff, right, which is easy to dismiss that you're actually spending time working versus like, you know, living or rejuvenating yourself or taking care of yourself. Um, so, uh, when I, when I had this depressive episode in 2013, I had done plenty of, again, weeks off the grid. Amy said, why don't you take a day a week off? I just don't work a day a week. And by the way, when I was depressed, I was having trouble like getting out of bed.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  So it wasn't like that was a, that was a hard thing to agree to. It's like, yeah, that sounds great. And, you know, I'm, I'm not religious, but I'm, I'm culturally Jewish and of the Jewish tradition. I'm like, you know what? I know plenty of very successful religious friends, religious Jewish friends who take the Sabbath off completely, you know, Friday night to Saturday night. And so I just said, I'm going to apply the week off the grid to Friday night to, and I do it to Sunday morning because I found that if I got back on the grid Saturday night, that was kind of silly for my frame of reference, kind of defeats the purpose. And we kind of use sundown as the trigger, although it's not a hard boundary. And, you know, Colorado in the summer, sun doesn't go down till 8:30

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  right now. So, and I, we, we have a place in Alaska, sometimes when we're in Alaska, you know, the sun doesn't go down till two in the morning. Like, it's not quite the right trigger, but it's, it's kind of the point where I'm like, you know what? I've had enough. I'm done and I'll, I'll pick this back up on Sunday. And what I've found over, I've been now doing this for many years. When I go out of phase with it for any period of time, and I had a period at the beginning of the COVID crisis where I was spending a lot of my time working on stuff on the private sector side, but for the state of Colorado, you know, as we were dealing with a bunch of stuff on both the health side and the economic side and dealing with some stuff on the mental health side and just trying to rally a bunch of people in the private sector to help the state. And specifically, we have a fantastic governor in Colorado, Jared Polis, who's a very successful entrepreneur

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  and a good friend. And sort of in that period, I think I, I skipped three weeks, right? So I worked all day Saturday, all day Sunday. And by the end of the third week of that, I was broken. Like I could feel, I could feel I was done. Like I wasn't going to make it another week unless I took a break. And so in a lot of ways, in, in, it's helped me sustain a pretty heavy work intensity.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  Over a long period of time by really completely disconnecting for that 24 hour period.

• 1:36:46Tim Ferriss?

  For for some period of time, actually for a long period of time, I was doing screen free Saturdays to the best of my ability and I would use Google Maps for certain things, but outside of that really texting to coordinate meeting up with friends and Google Maps outside of that, it was browser free, laptop free. And you really do notice the gear shift, or I should say the gears grinding when that gets removed for any extended period.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  Here's the flip side of it that I think is so amazingly wonderful in some ways. I like to take naps in the afternoon, so I pretty much take a nap every Saturday afternoon. And I remember, this is a long time ago, I remember a Saturday afternoon and I I'm a big reader and I I just didn't feel like reading. And I had gone for a run and I had taken a nap. And I was kind of bored, which almost never happens to me because I fill up my world with stuff all the time, right? I don't allow myself the luxury of being bored because I always have too much to do, which is a whole nother version of it's basically boredom aversion, right? Like I don't want to be bored, so therefore I will find more stuff to do because I'm afraid of not having anything to do.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  That's in and of itself got some plenty of grist for the therapist mill. And I said to Amy, I kind of feel a little bored and she laughed and she said, isn't it wonderful? And it is really helpful to sometimes just sort of look out the window or, you know, sit in your backyard and feel like I actually don't have anything I have to be doing right now, other than be right here. And for many people in today's world, it's hard to do. And so I I've let that be part of it, which is, okay, I've got my day off on Saturday, here are the three books I'm going to read and I'm going to go for a run. I'm going to make sure I get all these things done and I'm gonna, that's not what it's for, it's for just. You know, take a deep breath, reflect and let the day unfold.

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned reading. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, all roads lead to Colorado in this question I keep promising. But you mentioned reading. I have a list here of some of your favorite books and I'm just gonna go through them real quick. And then ask a quick question on this. Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Piercig. Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. Neuromancer, William Gibson. And if I'm getting this title correctly, The Startup Community Community. Is that right? By Mighty Networks.

• 1:39:15Tim Ferriss?

  If we're looking at the first four, which are all fiction, and you are recommending one of them to someone who has been a nonfiction purist for a long period of time? Is there, is there one that jumps to mind as the starting point?

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  So let me, let me, let me resegment that a bit because they're, they're not all books. So Battlestar Galactica.

• 1:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't sure. TV show.

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  Battlestar Galactica.

• 1:39:39Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't sure if it was based on a book.

• 1:39:40Speaker 00

  No, TV show. So, but, but, but, but it's worth, it's worth touching on that. And then The Startup Community Community is an online community that I just started a couple, maybe 10 days ago from the time we're talking. That's part of the new book that I've got coming out at the end of July called The Startup Community Way. I've been obsessed about the idea of startup community since I wrote the first book around it in 2012, when the phrase startup communities didn't exist. And so, a thing I've wanted to exist since I wrote that book was a community for anyone around the world that was interested in startup communities, which is most entrepreneurs, but then lots of other people.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  And nobody had ever created it. So I just decided to create one and I'm using a tool called Mighty Networks. That's really quite interesting and well done. And, you know, in a very short order of opening it up to people. It's public, so anybody can join it. It's been amazing to see some of the conversations and, and the level of engagement. To your question of, of those three books. So Piercig's book is Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book I think anybody who makes anything should read. I recommend it to all entrepreneurs. I read it when I was in high school and I've read it every couple of years since. Probably read it every three or four years. I listened to it on tape, book on tape, once when I was training for a marathon, just to see if

• 1:41:09Speaker 00

  it sunk in in a different way, and it did. And while it's fiction, it's sort of fiction, memoiry philosophy. It's fiction like memoir is fiction, right? It's, it's, it's, uh, fiction's the wrong word for it. It's memoiry philosophy. And the essence of the book is the notion of what the definition of quality means, but using a series of different things that are happening to the protagonist, the narrator, who is the author, over his, a period of time where he descends into madness against the backdrop of classical philosophy. So it just, it just combines a bunch of things in a very powerful way that you don't get

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  the full value of it the first time, but it's, it's easy to move through. So, so I just, I think that's a book every human being should read. The, the two books I listed there, Snow Crash and Neuromancer, are important books because they essentially are the books that created, that presaged the context we have today. And Stevenson, you know, Stevenson and William Gibson are two of my favorite and two of the best contemporary science fiction writers. Neuromancer was first, it was written in 1984. And if you read it today, you kind of go, ah, whatever. But if you read it with, if you time travel back to 1984 and read it given our world in 1984, it will blow your mind.

• 1:42:38Speaker 00

  How he predicted, and you know, whether it's 2000 or 2010 or 2020, like just, just the number of things that he got right as a predictive force in our not-too-distant future. Not just technology, societal issues, humans against interaction with artificial intelligence, the dynamics of society, how politics work, how drugs work, long, long arc of things. Snow Crash is written in 1992.

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  So just, just before the worldwide web begins. And I think the technology part of Snow Crash is brilliant. But even more powerful is the geopolitical part of Snow Crash. And the geopolitical part of Snow Crash is so incredible against the backdrop of 2020 and nationalism. And the idea, for example, that states, if you had said to somebody a year ago, states in the United States of America are going to start closing their borders to other states. The person would say, you're fucking out of your mind. That if you were from Texas, you were not going to be able to travel.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  You're not going to be allowed into New York. Like, huh? And so, I mean, this book goes way more granular than that in terms of the boundaries, but it's, it's awesome. By the way, another book in that vein that I think is, is as good or better. A book also, the first book was written in the early 1990s, I believe, by a guy named Dan Simmons, is a book called Hyperion. It's actually four books, the Hyperion Cantos. And it takes place over about a 300-year period. And again, all of these things that are folded together, it's not just science fiction, but

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  it's AI versus human, it's religion, it's society, it's gender, it's augmentation, it's geopolitical, I'll overuse, right? But the idea of all of these things happening. And the first book is so wonderfully fun because it's written in the style of the Canterbury Tales. So it's a, it's a pilgrimage where the, the first book that's the setup for the whole series is the seven protagonists in the first book telling their stories as they're going on a pilgrimage that of course has a very meaningful climactic end that motivates you to read the second book. The reason Battlestar Galactica is on that list is I don't watch TV that's broadcast

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  TV. I didn't watch TV as a kid. My parents let Daniel, my brother, and I have one hour a day. I like to give my hour to my brother. I'd rather read a book. However, I like to watch TV that are series and I like to watch dramatic TV. And there's a few shows that are now classics that I missed the first time around that I watched in the last 10 years. And Battlestar Galactica or BSG is one of them, where it's a great space opera, but it's not about being a space opera. It's once again about humans and machines and the interaction between humans and machines

• 1:45:58Speaker 00

  and the dynamics of the evolution of our species, the human species and the machine species, call it whatever you want. And then everything that happens around all the boundaries of humanity and society as a result. And the reason I like these so much, and I put them so much at the top of the list for a, somebody who's not, who's a nonfiction reader, or anybody that just wants to dig in, is that the best part of science fiction is world building. And science fiction authors that get the world building right and really know how to do it, um, the books that they write, they write are just truly, truly incredible.

• 1:46:40Speaker 00

  And it's not even that you lose yourself in them, but they cause you to think about your own world in a totally different way. I'll give you two more contemporary writers to play with that are in this category. NK Jemison, who's a black woman, who's, you know, unusual in the world of science fiction, because I think most people think of science fiction as the domain of white men, um, has emerged as one of the absolute best world builders ever. And her ability to construct, uh, these engaging, incredibly complex, uh, narratives that

• 1:47:21Speaker 00

  don't just get you lost in the story, but cause you to really reflect on your own existence and what it means and what's meaningful or not meaningful about certain elements of it, off the charts. Uh, another person who's, who's become a close friend, I, I helped sponsor him when he was writing his first couple of books. Uh, he's now, I think on book eight or nine or 10, uh, that's, that's really emerged now, I think as a, a really great writer. I mean, becoming a great writer of any sort is a craft, you gotta do a bunch of it, as you know. And you write a bunch of shit, you write a bunch of shit, and then eventually it starts to be better and less shitty. And sometimes it's really good. And then sometimes you write something and it's not so good. And then you try again on the next thing you do is

• 1:48:06Speaker 00

  a guy named Elliot Pepper. And Elliot has become in a category called near term science fiction writers that guys like William Hurtling and Daniel Suarez are in, which are things that you can almost imagine are happening right now. Almost like just around the corner. And so it's so accessible, but then it's so provocative because of the thing that happens and the way it causes you to think and reflect back on how your current existence is. So there's some books for you.

• 1:48:36Tim Ferriss?

  Plenty to start with. I want to underscore a few that you mentioned. Snow Crash is a spectacular book. It's such a fun book to read also on top of it. And for world building, I just want to throw another book in if people aren't overwhelmed already, which is Dune. Frank Herbert, in terms of world building, it's a mind blower.

• 1:48:57Speaker 00

  It's classic, right? It's the beginning, the beginning of that genre.

• 1:49:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, I feel like you can learn almost all the leadership lessons you need from Dune. It is, it is just truly spectacular work.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  I'm going to toss one else on the, one other on the pile too, for fun, that's contemporaneously relevant for anybody that wants to explore how badly things could go in the time of COVID. If this turns into the dystopic future reality, rather than the optimistic, you know, everything goes away and we're back to normal magical thinking. It's a book called The End of October. It's written by a guy named Lawrence Wright. And it came out in April of this year, April 2020. And so he had to be done with it in February. So before, you know, the, the current pandemic probably had, in COVID, had probably very little to do with the book. It is so good and so terrifying and so real.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  On so many levels in terms of what we've dealt with and how we're dealing with it. And of course, he goes and tells the whole story, right? So it ends up in this dystopic ending, really, really dystopic ending. But, you know, the first 25% of the book is about where we are right now. And for anyone who likes, again, I put this in the category. It's, it's, it's not science fiction, but it's near term, right? It's, it was written about a global pandemic that could happen in the future. Oops, it got published as that global pandemic was starting.

• 1:50:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yuri, isn't it? Kind of spooky. Two last ones, just because you've, you're, you're definitely pressing all the right sci fi buttons here. Two more authors who are recommended to me that I've just fallen in love with. One is Ted Chiang, C H I A N G. He has two collections. The book Arrival, which I think is fantastic, was based on one of his short stories, which for a, a language obsessed person like me is, is just how language structures thought was brilliant. He has a new collection called Exhalation that I highly recommend to people. And then Ken Liu, L I U, The Paper Menagerie, which was gifted to me by Matt Mullenweg,

• 1:51:05Tim Ferriss?

  really accomplished tech founder, CEO of a company called Automatic, M A T T I C. You might see Matt Mullenweg, Automatic. In any case, both of those are short story collections. So you can dig in and you don't have to commit to a marriage of a reading marathon, which you might feel if you pick up Dune. I still recommend it, but The Paper Menagerie and Exhalation are easy ways to kind of play in the shallow end with, with deep meaning without getting overcommitted. Colorado. Why, why move to Colorado? You're in the tech game. You're a tech investor. You're a tech entrepreneur. It would seem that all roads, in fact, should lead not to Rome, but Silicon Valley.

• 1:51:50Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to be in the epicenter of all the activity and deal flow and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Why move to Colorado from Boston?

• 1:51:58Speaker 00

  It's a couple of reasons. One is, I think actually the word epicenter is a good one. I've never really wanted to be in the epicenter of anything. It's not, it's not my thing. I'm more of a loner than a joiner. I am more of a detached and a, or you know, disconnected from a sort of in the middle of kind of person. So I think epicenter is an interesting word to sort of underscore in the context of this. I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Amy grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. We met in Boston. We lived in Boston for 12 years. Boston was very good to both of us, but I like to describe living there

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  for 12 years as living there for 11 years and 364 days too many. It was never home. It never, it never ever felt like home to me. And you know, when you're in your college and you're in your early twenties, like the definition of home is tricky, right? Like, what does that actually mean? You know, what, what is home? When I was in college, I actually would say things like, after I get done with college, I'm going back to Dallas, which my parents would love, but I had zero interest. Once I got to like my third year of college of moving back to Dallas, I'm like, nope, that's not happening. We complained as a couple. We complained to our friends regularly about Boston and how, you know, we were going to leave and get out of Boston someday. And I think our friends just thought we were wrong.

• 1:53:21Speaker 00

  Like, yeah, whatever. We, we hear you, but whatever. You're not seeming to take action against that. And when I sold my first company, I was 28 and I told Amy that by the time I was 30, we'd be out of Boston. And we traveled a lot together and we liked to explore different places. And she said her requirements were ocean or mountains. And growing up in Dallas, I didn't have either. So I didn't totally get that, but I'm like, okay, well, not both, either, right? And she's like, either. I need one or the other. And you know, growing up in Alaska, she had both. And about two months before I turned 30, she said to me, I'm moving to Boulder and you can come with me if you'd like.

• 1:54:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's a strong hand.

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  We're married, right? And I'd sold my company. I was still working. I was doing lots of angel investments around the country. I was still, I was traveling a lot, west coast, east coast, Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, occasionally somewhere else. We had been to Colorado a lot. She'd lived here when she was in third grade and I had come here skiing as a kid some and then as a young adult some. And I, and we always, Colorado was just, you know, sort of the fantasy of it was a cool place. You know, the rugged, the rugged west is kind of a thing in our culture. Um, you know, independent of what you think about Atlas Shrugged as a book or Ayn Rand as a philosopher, like the whole idea of Goltz

• 1:54:46Speaker 00

  Goltz being in Colorado sort of stays with you, you know, and this, this idea that it's away from all the other stuff, right? So not, not the epicenter that kind of appealed. And we'd been to Boulder. Uh, we went to Colorado for a two or three week trip and we'd been in Boulder like on a December, January day that was like 50 degrees on the Pearl Street Mall and it's like beautiful winter day that was not really wintery. Kind of like, remember this, this is, this is pretty awesome. So she told me we were going. I had a staff job for the company that I worked for, so I could go anywhere. Uh, this was Ameridata. So, uh, it was easy for me to just relocate from Boston because I didn't have anybody working for me anymore. And, um, we flew out, we rented a house, we flew back, we told all our friends we were moving to Boulder, we packed a truck and we drove

• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  to Boulder. We knew one person, guy named Vern, and he moved away within a year. So we really moved out here not knowing anybody. Uh, 1995 and our view, our goal was nothing, zero to do with work. Our goal was to build a life here. Let's evaluate whether this is the place we want to build a life. And if it isn't, we'll try something else. And if it is, this is our place. And within six months, uh, we knew unambiguously that Boulder was where we wanted to build our life.

• 1:56:03Speaker 00

  We bought a house behind a state park in a place called Eldorado Canyon, behind Eldorado Springs State Park. We initially bought a piece of land with 40 acres and a house on it. Over time, we ended up buying the pieces of land around us and ended up having a little bit over 100 acres there. We lived there for 17 years. And eventually, as we got, started to get a little bit older, we've moved to the other side of Boulder, right on the edge of Longmont. We again have 40 acres and the land is an important point of the story, so I'll get to it in a sec. And now we're looking at the mountains rather than being in the mountains. And we have this real sense of expansiveness as we look at Long's Peak each morning.

• 1:56:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, we have two big golden retrievers and they just kind of run wild on our 40 acres whenever they feel like it, although one is old and not running so wild anymore. Today, I would be able to answer your question. When I was 30, I couldn't. Today, my answer is, I don't like cities. I don't like being around a lot of people. I can do it. I can put up with it for a couple of days. We had an apartment in New York for three years and I probably spent a week a month in New York, you know, between 97 and 99, not necessarily a consecutive week, but over the course of a month. You know, two days, three days, that was okay.

• 1:57:28Speaker 00

  Same thing with San Francisco, three days, San Francisco, then I just want to get out of there, can't stand it. But then, the peninsula, I spent an enormous amount of time on the peninsula during my SoftBank and Mobius time. I lived most of the time between 1999 and 2006, when I was coming out all the time. I lived at my partner Heidi Rosen's house in Atherton. I mean, it's a beautiful place. It's not my place. It's not where I feel at home. And I had formed, with Amy, I think the two of us formed it together, a pretty deep belief that it was important to pick the place you wanted to live and build your life

• 1:58:12Speaker 00

  around it, rather than go to a place that you felt like you should go to because there was an opportunity there.

• 1:58:21Speaker 00

  And I've had this very longstanding belief, partly because I've started and invested in countries all over the US, that you can create and build companies anywhere. That the ability to build startup communities and really vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems, not just are important and are you able to do them anywhere. It's actually an imperative that any city with any critical mass, 100,000 people, have a vibrant startup community. And one of the things that's been most powerful to me about Boulder, at least from the time period 1995 to probably 2015,

• 1:59:04Speaker 00

  so a 20-year period for me, maybe a little bit longer, was I was in a place that was big enough to be interesting. You know, 100,000 people or more, but small enough that I could get my mind around it. And what was going on as I tried to understand the dynamics and the characteristics of building a vibrant startup community. The last comment on why Boulder, and there's positives and negatives that I understand today, having lived here for 25 years, is both Amy and I are very socially liberal. And Boulder is a very socially liberal place. So in some ways, it was a very comfortable place to come. There's plenty of other socially liberal places in the country. And of course, being in Boston is very polyglot.

• 1:59:48Speaker 00

  So it's pretty easy to be socially liberal there. But growing up in Dallas, you know, not so much, right? Different dynamic. And I was aware of that. I was aware of the overwhelm that I felt when I was in Los Angeles. Just, you know, Los Angeles isn't a city. It's, I know somebody told me once the number of it's 80-something cities, you know, in one, in one thing called Los Angeles. Like, it's just overwhelming. In the same way to me that Manhattan is just overwhelming. And so... It felt like a place that could be very comfortable against that backdrop. Amy and I also have a house in Homer, Alaska, which is a town of 5,000 people. That's where she grew up until she was eight. And we used to go to Homer for a month every year. We still go to Homer, not as often, maybe every, every couple of years.

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  And it's again, a totally different, yet another thing to live in a town of 5,000 people. You know, that's 60 miles away from the next town that has 10,000 people in it. I like that so much better. The negative, uh, which I'm very aware of today is something that Amy and I started to label a few years ago as an enclave. We just started to use that word. And we realized that it's not a filter bubble. It's not that, but it's an enclave. It's a very privileged place to live. We built a house in Aspen a couple of years ago.

• 2:01:14Speaker 00

  And there was something that, uh, we had a house in Keystone, Colorado for a long time. I love running in the mountains. We love being in the mountains. There's something about Aspen that we were drawn to because of the restaurants and the, the town, but also the ability to, you know, be in the mountains and just be disconnected from it all. And we pretty quickly, we didn't realize it till after we, you know, had a place there and were, you know, living there on a part-time basis, that it was an enclave as well. Right? And a whole different level of enclave in terms of privilege and the dynamics around it. And while there are elements of that that are appealing, there are many elements of

• 2:01:54Speaker 00

  it that are very disorienting, confusing, and not necessarily healthy for the city. And I understand those things much clearer today.

• 2:02:06Speaker 00

  than I did even three or four years ago. You know, as I find myself living on the edge of Longmont, which is still a pretty comfortable place to live, but much more of a normal town than Boulder. I find myself spending more and more time away from big cities because of, you know, pre-COVID even, lack of travel and sort of reflecting on, you know, what and where I like to be. And then, most interestingly, how our technology today has changed all that. Right? You know, pre-COVID, if you had said to somebody, 90% of people who work in office buildings or 95% of people who work in office buildings are going to be working from their houses

• 2:02:51Speaker 00

  for the next three months. You know, the person would have looked at you and said, "Never gonna happen, impossible, can't happen. The technological infrastructure doesn't exist." Well, guess what? All those people that said it couldn't happen were wrong. We just lived that experiment and it worked just fine. Eh, worked just fine. You know, incredibly challenging for many people, super disruptive on many levels. For some companies, really negative. For some companies, really positive. But from a structural sense, you know, could one who likes to be physically disconnected from others still be digitally connected to society in a meaningful way? I think we just proved that the answer to that's yes. So that then changes again

• 2:03:35Speaker 00

  the importance or relative importance of place in terms of how you build your life and what you build your life around and where that place is. I'll end this rant with, there's a word that I learned from John Hickenlooper, who was our governor for a number of years, now running for Senate and is also an entrepreneur. He was one of the people that basically helped create the microbrewery industry and the idea of a microbrewery in the first place. I don't remember the first time I heard this word from him. I think it was one of his State of the State speeches. He used the word "topophilia." And topophilia is love of place. And I think to be truly satisfied, I almost said happy, but I don't think that's the right word. And I'm not sure satisfied is the right word either. So I don't, I don't have the right word,

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  but something that has that flavor as a human.

• 2:04:23Speaker 00

  You have to end up living in a place you have topophilia for, that you have a love of.

• 2:04:31Speaker 00

  Interestingly, if you can find a place that you have a love of, that the constraints of living in that place are lowered because of the way that our society works in a positive way, that gives you even more flexibility. If you're able to find places that are not as enclavey and are more inclusive and that have different dimensions of diversity, including being able to time travel to other geographies

• 2:05:13Speaker 00

  while still having that love of place for the people that you're interacting with. So it's not the physical love of place anymore that becomes the dominant. It's a characteristic and important one, but not the dominant. That gets even more interesting. And I think we're at the beginning of that shift in our society.

• 2:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about, I think I would be remiss, or it would be remiss, I'm missing my grammar. But if I weren't to ask you about something that's come to mind for me, because you and I have kind of chatted briefly about it, and that is complexity theory. And I'd like you to even just define that. But in the startup community way, well, maybe it's not in the startup community way, but I'd just love to hear how you think about applying complexity theory, defining it first, to life, to what you do, to problems.

• 2:06:05Speaker 00

  You've written a bunch of books, and I believe I own and have enjoyed all of your books.

• 2:06:11Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 2:06:11Speaker 00

  The thing that you know as an author is that a lot of times when you start working on a new book, you work on a new book for a while, and then you realize it's total shit.

• 2:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's every book I've tried.

• 2:06:23Speaker 00

  Right. It's not just partial shit, it's total shit. And that was the experience that my co-author Ian Hathaway and I had about a year into working on the Startup Community Way. We had started talking in 2017. We'd met each other. I liked Ian. We'd done a few things together around startup communities, talked about a few things, had a couple of long discussions. And he said to me, have you ever thought about writing a sequel? And I said, I hadn't really thought about it. He said, you know, I think the world of startup communities and all the people I'm talking to, like the book that, you know, the 2012 book, The Startup Communities was really helpful. And it was foundational for a lot of basic thoughts about building startup communities. But I know you, Brad, get the question, and I know I, Ian, even though I'm not deep in this,

• 2:07:06Speaker 00

  get the question of, you know, what now? Right? I've been at this for five years, or you're in a conversation with somebody in a city where their startup community has gotten to a certain level according to their framing of it, but they're really struggling with what to do to get it to the next level. So we decided to write a book that was a sequel. So we started writing the sequel. And we wrote, I don't know, I mean, a book like Startup Community Ways, 50,000, 60,000 words, probably write 25,000 words. And we had, we were both unhappy and it was hard. And we weren't, there was no rhythm. There was no cadence to anything we were doing. And Ian called me, he moved to Boulder for a while and then moved to London. And he called me or sent me a note and he said, I have come up with a framework to use to describe what the startup community way is.

• 2:07:50Speaker 00

  I said, okay. He said, what a startup community really is, is a complex adaptive system. That's all I said. I said, silence, and I said, 100% agree. So let me define that. And we have, in the book and in general, taken the liberty of, instead of calling it over and over again, a complex adaptive system, we're calling it a complex system. A complex adaptive system is a particular type of complex system. But for purposes of The Startup Community Way and for how people think about it, I think the idea of complex systems plenty, it doesn't have to be the exact, precise academic thing. Think of three types of systems: simple, complicated, and complex. A simple system is making a cup of coffee.

• 2:08:35Speaker 00

  Right? And I listened to Seth Godin's podcast with you recently, you know, which was from a long time ago, but for some reason it popped up and I wanted to listen to it. I love Seth and I listened to Madeline Aubrey's podcast with you and that really inspired me. And I went back and I poked through and went looking for some other podcasts of people that I, I knew and I really, I liked and respected and Seth was one of them. And he talks in the podcast, he'll talk about how he makes a cup of coffee and his obsession with a cup of coffee and how you make a cup of coffee. Making a cup of coffee is a simple system. There's a recipe, there's a set of rules. You can make a really shitty cup of coffee if you don't follow the recipe quite right, or if you're not good at the pieces of the recipe, but it's a pretty straightforward thing. Yeah, there's different types of coffees and there's different modifications to the recipe,

• 2:09:19Speaker 00

  but it's a simple system. You have an input and a deterministic output. You might not like the thing you taste when you taste the output, but it's a deterministic output. A complicated system, again, has a recipe or a playbook, but it's got a lot of different steps, and the steps can be done in different order. But you end up with a deterministic outcome. Doing your monthly, quarterly, or annual financial statements is a complicated system. Doing a financial audit is a complicated system. It's replicable. Building an airplane is a complicated system. It's really hard to figure out how to do it the first time, but once you've done it, you just keep doing it.

• 2:10:03Speaker 00

  A complex system does not have a deterministic outcome. You cannot predict the outcome from the starting point. And the inputs along the way generate outputs that become inputs into the system. There are lots of fun examples of complex systems, but the one that I think a lot of people immediately get is raising a kid. Because even if you don't have kids, you are a kid. And if, when you're born, the day you're born, your parents say, "This kid is going to go to Harvard, become a doctor, become a cardiologist, and we're going to follow the rules for how to do that." Chances are, the kid is going to be the opposite of that.

• 2:10:50Speaker 00

  Just because of natural, you know, human being kid, or they'll need a lot of therapy, one of the two. But there are many, many things that are complex systems. And the idea that you can apply a playbook, or a rulebook, or a recipe, or a sequence of steps that get a deterministic outcome... Doesn't occur. Interestingly, when we wrote this, and we had this aha, so we spent, you know, another year working on this. Now, I knew, we both knew a fair amount about complex systems and complexity theory prior. He had, Ian had been fascinated by this, which is why he landed on it. I had been fascinated by it going back to the 19, late 80s, early 90s, when I read a book, a book called Complexity by, and I'm going to lose the author's name. I want to say Marshall or Malcolm something, but it was one of the, the early books that

• 2:11:35Speaker 00

  came out of the Santa Fe Institute research and talked about Brian Arthur and the idea of increasing returns, you know, which are really just exponential curves, you know, talked about flocking behavior, talking-

• 2:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  M. Mitchell Waldrop, does that sound right?

• 2:11:49Speaker 00

  M. Mitchell Waldrop.

• 2:11:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Complexity, subtitle, "The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos."

• 2:11:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so that, that book I read, I remember laying on my couch in my apartment on Bay State Road, reading that book and just sort of, it must have been 1990 or 1991, and, and just, you know, having my mind blown. Like, it was just like, yep, yep, yep. And, you know, Game of Life, Conway's Game of Life, and sort of all the stuff that, from that, around emergent behavior, contagion, positive and negative feedback loops, words that we throw around, and many people, by the way, throw around as though they know what any of it means, but then don't act in any way whatsoever that reflects what those words mean. I was always fascinated with it. If I have a regret in terms of engagement, I regret that after I sold my first company, I didn't go figure out how to get involved in the Santa Fe Institute, because I think it would have been super stimulating to me

• 2:12:38Speaker 00

  based on things that I like. We went really deep on complex systems, but in the end, we came up with a book that uses the notion of complexity and the idea of complex systems as the fundamental core for understanding how startup communities grow and evolve, and differentiating very clearly a startup community from an entrepreneurial ecosystem, because they're very different things. And what does that mean? And especially, what does that mean over a long period of time? Because, again, if the inputs are becoming the outputs, et cetera. I mean, the thing that, that today to this moment is, is kind of baffling to me in a horrifying and wonderful way. We are living in the middle.

• 2:13:22Speaker 00

  Of a crisis like none other I've experienced in my life. That is the essence of a complex system. And the COVID crisis is not a crisis, right? It's a health crisis. It's an economic crisis that was generated by the health crisis. It's a mental health crisis. In the US now, we have a racial equity crisis. By the way, none of these crises are new. And the intersection of these things is part of the essence of the complex system. Each of them on their own are complex systems. You do not have a deterministic outcome. There is not a playbook to follow. There is not a set of things that we can do, that if we do them in the proper sequence, all will be good and we will finish.

• 2:14:07Speaker 00

  And in fact, the whole idea of finishing, and in some ways, the idea of defining good at any moment of time is temporal, because all the things we're doing affect everything else we're doing. And back to this notion of, I love contagion in this context, right? There is an idea of positive and negative contagion. And COVID is obviously extreme negative contagion. But in business, we talk all the time of positive contagion. The whole idea of a viral loop, you know, for anybody that runs any business that's consumer facing is positive contagion. And if you scale it up to society, that's what we're talking about in the startup community way. I mean, literally, that's what we're talking about. You can scale it up to that level, or you can scale it down, you know, to how the startup

• 2:14:50Speaker 00

  community in Birmingham, Alabama is growing and developing in positive and negative ways.

• 2:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can't wait to check it out. I've watched these communities, vibrant communities pop up in some of the last locations I would expect, like for instance, Ottawa, Canada, when Shopify, which was certainly one of my most successful investments, although I was an advisor as opposed to an investor. You've seen how one company with the graduates slash alumni and the factors that made it.

• 2:15:26Tim Ferriss?

  Such that it could develop this vibrant ecosystem are really fascinating. And I mean, you've made the point before that, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but you have many people out there who are trying to create the next Silicon Valley by looking at the current Silicon Valley. But what on some level they should be looking at are the initial conditions, say 60 years ago, that provided the opportunity for all of these emergent properties to form what we now think of as Silicon Valley, right? But you can't architect it based on the current view. So I'm looking forward to the startup community way.

• 2:16:06Speaker 00

  Thanks. That last statement is exactly correct and super important, right? Your Ottawa example and your Shopify example is an example of what we refer to as entrepreneurial recycling. And the idea is that over time, it takes a long time, right? As you have success in a geography, in a city, in a startup community, all of a sudden entrepreneurs have a new resource, which is wealth. And if they care, if they have topophilia, if they care about their city, and it's not just the entrepreneurs, it's also many of the early employees. And in fact, many of the not so early employees end up with wealth and an understanding of how economic wealth gets generated by creating something where nothing previously existed, right?

• 2:16:49Speaker 00

  Before Shopify existed, there wasn't a thing called Shopify. It was the product of a couple of founders and then a team and then more people and then more people and more people and eventually, you know, today, an incredibly valuable company. Those people then reinvest not just their wealth, but their expertise into new companies in that community. And that recycling then follows generations. The first generation of it's interesting. The second generation, so when some of those companies become successful and those entrepreneurs

• 2:17:27Speaker 00

  and employees and people that work for them and leaders recycle their time, their expertise and their money, it continues to expand. And if you go back to the initial conditions of Silicon Valley, that happened a lot over a long period of time. And I would argue that a line that Ian and I like to use is that even Silicon Valley today couldn't recreate Silicon Valley.

• 2:17:52Speaker 00

  It would be, it would be by definition, a different thing. And that's the essence of a complex system. You are creating a new and different thing. And understanding the initial conditions. And understanding the inputs. And not necessarily focusing on the people. Or the activities themselves, but the connections between all those things. And how that then influenced where things went. Is powerful and I can't not say this because it's a fundamental part of my. Uh, what I call the bolder thesis around startup communities is that you have to take a very long term view. Like to say, I used to say you have to take a 20 year view from today. Uh, or you have to take a 20 year view. Now I say you have to take a 20 of you from today. Literally, you always have to have a long term view.

• 2:18:38Speaker 00

  From the moment in time you are at. It never can get shorter. And then, you know, one day you die, you're not part of it anymore. But that's okay, because the next generation of people are taking that long term view.

• 2:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's been cool to watch. I mean, you've been involved for so much longer than I have, but let's just say since 2007, in my case. What has happened with the distribution of these tools and cloud infrastructure where you have. Say a Shopify where someone could look at Ottawa as a liability. Ends up being this enormous strength in terms of talent retention because they're not. In an environment like Silicon Valley where everyone at Facebook is getting. Poached by people at Google and Apple and fill in the blank and that type of kind of talent poaching.

• 2:19:27Tim Ferriss?

  And musical chairs of talent is so prolific, whereas if you are the game in town. And you are the, the promising rocket ship in the form of say Shopify in Ottawa, your ability to retain talent is. Infinitely better than a lot of the companies who are dealing with a more. Cutthroat dense environment. I mean, you might even say the same of say a Duolingo in Pittsburgh. Although Pittsburgh certainly has Carnegie Mellon and incredible talent recruitment. If you're looking at a technical talent, so it's, uh. It's been really cool to see.

• 2:20:02Speaker 00

  I think, I think, I think an important part of that, Tim, is that I don't know the Shopify founders well enough, but my guess is they're not playing a zero sum game either. Right? If they're long term enlightened. They're playing a positive sum game. Where what they're not trying to do is be the only company in town. They're not trying to be the only Dementon.

• 2:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  They've seeded, I mean, they're, they're very active investors in Ottawa. Like they're, they're definitely a rising tide raises all boats.

• 2:20:32Speaker 00

  And that's, that's such a powerful moment, right? Think about that though, in the community, right? In the absence of that, if you have a city where one company is trying to dominate, that won't be a successful startup community.

• 2:20:46Speaker 00

  If you have a city where the dominant, successful startup is enabling and investing and helping make that city better and really stoking the innovation engine of the city. That's awesome. And so, you know, again, great example, because you, you totally described the essence of it. Now, in 2007, I don't know anybody that talked that way. And I remember when we started Techstars and Boulder, people like Boulder, why would I ever go to do a thing in Boulder? Right, nice mountains.

• 2:21:17Speaker 00

  And, you know, today, if you look at, at Boulder as a startup community, you look at Denver as a startup community, they're connected, but they're two distinct things. You know, the amount of that positive feedback loop, that entrepreneur recycling from companies like Zayo and Rally Software and Data Logix and SendGrid and now Twilio after they bought SendGrid and on and on and on. I mean, it's, you know, the, the characteristic of the health of the cities is that much stronger because of the investment of the entrepreneurs back into the innovation cycle of their city.

• 2:21:57Speaker 00

  And it's really not that distinct from, you know, a hundred or whatever, 150 years ago, as, as cities were starting to really be developed. And the people in the cities who had generated economic wealth. Continue to invest in the institutions in their cities. Right? The schools, the museums, symphony, the cultural institutions. A lot of cases, the actual business institutions, the sports teams. Right? Mark Cuban owning the Mavericks is an investment that he makes in Dallas. I mean, it's a satisfying investment for him, but it's, he didn't make an investment in a sports team, not in the city he loved. He did it in the city he loves.

• 2:22:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Michael Dallin Austin, certainly also true. Brad, I feel like we could talk for 17 more hours and maybe sometime we should, but I think for around one, we've covered a lot of ground. And I'll certainly link for everyone listening to everything we've talked about in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. You're going to search Feld, F E L D, and it'll pop right up. People can find you at Feld Thoughts, Feld.com. There's Foundry Group, FoundryGroup.com. For the social, is Twitter the best social location for you at B Feld?

• 2:23:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, Twitter's fine. If people tweet at me, I'll, I'll respond to them, you know, totally fine. My email's pretty easily discoverable. So just [email protected].

• 2:23:19Speaker 00

  People have things they want to reach out directly about. I'm always happy to get email.

• 2:23:23Tim Ferriss?

  You may get a few emails.

• 2:23:25Speaker 00

  I'd actually rather, I'd rather get emails than the random tweets. So I look forward to my, I look forward to the Tim Ferriss flood of emails.

• 2:23:35Speaker 00

  Just put in the subject line TF, so I know who to be annoyed with. I'm, I'm just, Tim, I'm just going to forward them all to Seth Godin. So, so we're good there. So anybody, anybody that wants to get an email to Seth Godin, just send it to me or Jerry Cohen. I'll send some to Jerry randomly. Maybe I'll toss Fred in for good measure.

• 2:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Fred, can you handle this for me? Subject line forward TF. What the hell is going, what? I have Tim Ferriss to blame. That'll really besmirch my good name. Well, Brad, this is, this has been a lot of fun. You know, I want to ask one last question, which is one of my favorites. Doesn't always, sometimes a difficult one to answer, but if you could put a message on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get something out to billions of people, let's just say it could be a word, could be a sentence, could be an image, could be a question, anything, a quote, anything non-commercial, what might you put on that billboard?

• 2:24:27Speaker 00

  I would say, can I have two billboards? One in the Bay area and one everywhere else?

• 2:24:32Tim Ferriss?

  You are allowed to have two billboards.

• 2:24:36Speaker 00

  I think my billboard for the world would probably be breathe.

• 2:24:42Tim Ferriss?

  I like that.

• 2:24:43Speaker 00

  Just breathe. Another billboard, which is not probably the Bay Area billboard, but for place, there's plenty of places would be some version of don't believe your own bullshit.

• 2:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe it's a sequence, breathe, or don't believe your own bullshit, and then 30 seconds later, breathe.

• 2:25:03Speaker 00

  And then, you know, I come back to they can't, they can't kill you and they can't eat you.

• 2:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, that's a good one.

• 2:25:12Tim Ferriss?

  Which one for Silicon Valley? Would it be the don't believe your own bullshit?

• 2:25:17Speaker 00

  I'll let them choose.

• 2:25:20Speaker 00

  It would probably have a dot com at the end of it, so.

• 2:25:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, what a world. Amazing, beautiful world, full of delight and suffering and everything in between. And I appreciate you being a companion on the path and sharing your own struggles and your own lessons learned, Brad. So thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:25:46Speaker 00

  You're welcome. And Tim, I appreciate you a great deal for both all the things you do, but also investing your energy and bringing things like this out for other people to the extent that anything is useful anywhere. I think you have, you're a master of your craft, and it's wonderful to, it's wonderful to watch, and it's an incredible honor to participate.

• 2:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, Brad. Well, I look forward to our future conversations, hopefully more than a few. And to everybody listening, I will have show notes. As mentioned, to everything we've discussed at tim.blog/podcast, just search for FELD, F E L D, and it'll pop right up with all the goodies, including links to the new books, Startup Community Way and the second edition of Startup Communities. And until next time, breathe, experiment well, be safe, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

• 2:26:50Tim Ferriss?

  Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com.

• 2:27:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25 to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for anything you can imagine, really. Whether it's keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, whatever, you can sort by that. You can find all types of food, you can find supplements, you can find non-toxic home products, clean wine, dog food, just about anything.

• 2:28:13Tim Ferriss?

  And let me give you a personal example of just how much you can save. So my last order, I ordered Primal Kitchen Mayonnaise, which is made with avocado oil. It's delicious. Justin's Almond Butter. And the first was 25% off. The Justin's Almond Butter was 30% off. Rouse's Homemade Marinara Sauce, which is awesome, 26% off. All said and done, at the end of my shopping, I saved $39 on my order. So, members, and I'm a member, can earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I'll come back to that. And through Thrive Gives, their one-on-one membership matching program,

• 2:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  every paid Thrive Market membership is matched with a free one for a low-income family in need. And you can try Thrive Market a few different ways. They have the monthly membership, which is $9.95 per month. They have the 12-month membership for $5 a month, which is billed at $59.95. And right now, this is exclusive to you guys, you can get up to a $20 shopping credit when you join today. Now, remember that I save $39 on my orders. So basically, with one or two orders, I pay for the annual membership, which is pretty sweet. So go to thrivemarket.com/tim to give Thrive Market a try. You can, like I said, choose between the membership models you'd like to test out. If it doesn't work for you, you can cancel for any reason within 30 days

• 2:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  for a full refund. And on top of that, you will make back your membership in savings, as I have, or they give you credits to make up for the difference. So it's really win-win-win all around. And I would suggest you check it out. Go to thrivemarket.com/tim. You can receive up to $20 in shopping credit. That's thrivemarket.com/tim for up to $20 in shopping credit, plus all of the other great stuff that I mentioned. One more time, check it out, thrivemarket.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns, and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day,

• 2:30:24Tim Ferriss?

  muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night, I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back, and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages, in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level. Helps with performance, helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back. To feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing.

• 2:31:05Tim Ferriss?

  And the all-new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet, it's easy to use, and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing. You really have to feel the Theragun's signature power, amplitude, and effectiveness to believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So, I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun, that's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. Try Theragun risk-free for 30 days. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun with an OLED screen, that's OLED for those wondering, that's organic light-emitting diode screen, personalized Theragun app, and incredible combination of quiet and power. So go to theragun.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today.

• 2:31:50Tim Ferriss?

  Or you can watch the videos on the site, which show you all sorts of different ways to use it. A lot of runner friends of mine use them on their IT bands after long runs. There are a million ways to use it. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime, and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So check it out. Go to theragun.com/tim. One more time, theragun.com/tim.