Tim Ferriss Opens Up: What I Do In A Day, Unfair Advantages & The "Barbell Strategy"

Episode 576: Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with Tim Ferriss ( https://twitter.com/tferriss ) to talk about his latest lifestyle experiments and how to spend a perfect 24-hours. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Tim’s "What's next?" framework (7:22) Creativity gyms + why money doesn't buy happiness (12:11) Book Recommendation: The New Toughness Training for Sports (15:51) Tim Ferriss's perfectly optimized day (23:06) The art of podcasting (32:03) From selling supplements to published author (38:42) Law of Category (42:23) Barbell strategy for Youtube (54:12) What would it look like if it was easy? (56:14) What is Tim's unfair advantage? (59:47) What silly story are we telling ourselves? (1:02:23) Stories about Naval — Links: • Tim’s blog - https://tim.blog/ • Tim’s books - https://tim.blog/tim-ferriss-books/ • “The New Toughness Training for Sports” - https://tinyurl.com/nhh6m4px • “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” - https://tinyurl.com/2bmz43ve • 1,000 True Fans - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ • Blue Ocean Strategy - https://tinyurl.com/5739vvry — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this episode, where's the camera? This is, this episode's not for you. This episode's for me. I've been listening to this guy for a long time. I've read his books. I, I used to gift, your, your book was one of the most gifted books I had for like a long time. Maybe the first 10 years of my career. And I would say, you're about to, I'm giving you the four hour fever. They're like, it's called the four hour work week. You're going to read this and then for four hours, you're going to question everything in your life. I call that the four hour fever. It's normal. Don't worry. Call a doctor. It'll last beyond four hours.

• 0:38Shaan Puri?

  And so today, I have like a bunch of things that I think maybe the audience wants to know. Honestly, I don't give a shit. I just wanted to ask you the questions that I want to know.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  I think that's the key to a good podcast.

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, um, one of the things I wanted to know is you talked about this space where you're like, I'm thinking about what's next. I've been there. I sold my company. What's next? I have a lot of friends that are in that spot. Yeah. And what's the, what's the approach? Because it can be paralyzing to have a thousand options.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04Shaan Puri?

  Especially when you have a track record. You have a track record of success now. That almost adds some difficulty to the, to the, to the answer of what's next. Cause it's gotta be good. Can't be, can't be something tiny, right? How does Tim Ferriss approach the what's next question?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it can be tiny in a sense, right? I mean, let's just, I'll answer your question, but let's just note that the podcast started as, I'm going to try this for six episodes. That's tiny.

• 1:28Shaan Puri?

  So did this podcast, by the way. This is a, this is a tiny.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  So I think that, to quote Seth Godin, who is really wise beyond even what people would expect. And he, and he walks the walk. He's a real operator who has authored a contrarian. That's not contrarian. It's an unorthodox life for himself. And I have a lot of respect for Seth and, you know, he said, big things, the big dreams, changing the world. Those are easy to hide behind. He's like, but doing the smallest thing possible, the next action, you can't hide behind that. Right. It's, it's a, it's a pass fail.

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  Say that again. So big dreams aren't easy to hide behind.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. But when you make something small, do six episodes.

• 2:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  If you don't do six episodes, you failed to do six episodes. But if it's like, I'm going to change the world and do this and blah, blah, blah. Great. But like, you know, not to, not to like quote everybody in the world, but like kind of David Allen GTD style. Like, okay, great. What's the next physical action?

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Okay, now you have a report card.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  That I can give you because you've just made yourself accountable to me in a way to like, do this thing that is very discreet. And so this, I don't underestimate the small things. I think the big visions can be helpful at times and I could give examples of that, where it's been helpful for me. But to answer your question in terms of choosing the next thing, I'll say upfront, I don't know what my next thing is right now.

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  But how do you approach that? How do you approach figuring it out?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are a few ways. So the first is I make, I suppose, a menu of things I would like to try.

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Which is often a thing, a list of things I would like to learn. Like I just returned from three days overseas with a game designer prototyping games.

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  And.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  Board games or?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sweet.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  And that's something I'm trying.

• 3:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  We'll see. And the, there's a lot that goes into even choosing the things on that list, but.

• 3:29Shaan Puri?

  And do you have a box on the menu, like the part of the menu where it's like, and we have like, Sea Urchin, that's, you know, do you have the weird box where you're like, let me think of some non-obvious?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I try to do weird stuff.

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  No, no, because there's tons of stuff that I could do that would be straightforward or predictable or reliably profitable. That's the, that's the most seductive.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying they're bad options, but like, I could make a course.

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I could, I'm, I know I could execute that and make it do really well.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I know that.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I know I could potentially create some type of membership platform or mastermind or something like that. And I think I would enjoy some of these things.

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  However, let me come back to the criteria. So whether I'm coming with my list, I'd go for weird. If there's something weird, that is a huge.

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  Plus.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Kind of, yeah, that's like a turbo boost for inclusion.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  You're not bending to the social expectations or norms.

• 4:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Those are the weird things. That's why they seem weird. And chances are, if those end up on your list, either they're easier for you than they are for other people, or you're going to have the enthusiasm and therefore endurance to do it longer.

• 4:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Harder, more intensely, with greater purpose than other people. Those are all huge competitive advantages. Not that this, not that all of life is a competition, but. To stand out in a crowd.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  You need to be.

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  The weird ones are like the immigrants. It's like you got here?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Shaan Puri?

  If you made it here, you already have shown some amount of, there must be some strength that got you onto this list.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 5:08Shaan Puri?

  Because you had a negative filter associated with it.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you just come from better, like more resilient or risk-taking genetic stock. Right. If I could invest in like first or second generation immigrants, if I could just choose if, if I could only choose certain filters, I would be very.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  I've said that I've been like, I love Mormons. I love, if you're from the Ukraine, I'm listening. If your name is Dimitri, love it. Tell me more. What, what's your idea? Come closer.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the, the short synopsis of how I choose projects is I look for projects that can be successes even for me long-term, even if they fail short-term. What that means is projects where by any external measurement or perception, they can be a failure. However, in the process of pursuing those things, I develop or deepen relationships or develop or deepen skills that are durable.

• 6:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  And those then snowball.

• 6:04Shaan Puri?

  Something like that.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Those snowball.

• 6:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Right. Cause if I do like five, four projects, they all fail, but I am developing relationships with the type of people I want to develop relationships with. I'm developing new skills and then I start to bridge all those things and I'm paying attention. I'm taking good notes. My experience is eventually you win.

• 6:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Whatever that happens to mean. That's kind of it, honestly. Outside of that, I would say these days, some getting, getting old as fuck and all that is energy in, energy out. Like, does this, do I have more energy doing this or do I have substantially less?

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And that's a product also, not just of what you're doing, where you are, who you're interacting with. I pay attention to that stuff because I could do something that people might see as frivolous, archery or something. I could, I could pick a whole ton of them that seem like wastes of time, but that's like plugging my iPhone into the wall. It's like, oh, now I have a hundred percent charge. Instead of 20% charge, there's a lot more that I can do with this phone.

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And just because I plugged it into the charger in the circus fun house doesn't mean I have to use it for the circus fun house.

• 7:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  You get to transfer it to other things. So that's, that's also something as a fundamental currency that I pay a lot of attention to.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you two related things on that. Last night I was at dinner with, I think a mutual friend, Joe.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yebia.

• 7:29Shaan Puri?

  Yebia, founder of Airbnb. And he was saying, he's like, oh, what are you in town for? I was like, I'll do a couple of podcasts. And we were talking about, he's like, okay, so what's like, what's like a win? You know, like, why, why do you do that? You fly to town, you leave your kids, you, you make an effort. What are you looking for out of these? I said, well, I just want to leave with more energy than I came. And really I want the guests to feel that way too. Like, at the end of the day, like, what is the only way I can guarantee a success out of this is if you walk out of here feeling energized rather than drained from this conversation. And if that's a, it's, I've, I've been using that heuristic and it's so powerful to use the kind of like, where's my energy after activity? And how am I leaving the people around me? Also, is, you want it to be mutually beneficial in that way.

• 8:09Shaan Puri?

  The second thing he said was, that I thought you'd find interesting. I was like, um, we were going through this exercise I do called the perfect Tuesday. So I was like, life is not really about these peak experiences. Like, yes, those like going and seeing like, there's the total eclipse happening. Go and see this total eclipse. Apparently it's like a totally emotional experience. If you're there, I think it's happening in Dallas this weekend or whatever. There are those moments, but they're few and far between. Most of your life is just like Tuesdays, just normal Tuesdays over and over again. And so put a lot of effort into thinking like, what's a dream average day for me? And then try to live that dream. And so we were talking about it and I asked him, I said, like, how close are you to your perfect Tuesday? He's got all the resources in the world, right? Sold Airbnb, they went public. It's, it's a super success.

• 8:50Shaan Puri?

  And one of the things he said, he goes, that's a great question. I go to the gym for my physical, my, to get my, like, to physically fulfill myself. And then I work, which is great. And I feel productive and useful to the world. And I have my family, which is love. He's like, but I don't really make time for creativity anymore. He's like, he's a designer by, by trade. And he's like, I would need like a creative gym. He's like, I, I feel like if I, if I sat down and I started sketching, it'd almost feel like I'm wasting time. Like, it's like, what am I doing here? I found that really interesting. And I feel like you do a good job of kind of making time for the things, even if they're not. Societal norms for what people do.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I try. Yeah, I try to do it for sure.

• 9:31Shaan Puri?

  Do you have your version of a creative gym?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was like playing the drums earlier today. So from a like financial perspective, that can be wasted. But the financial stuff, and we can talk about it, it's very useful for certain things. I mean, money only has a certain utility. It's kind of like, yeah, you can eat until you're full, and then you can eat until you're stuffed, and then you can eat until you're sick. But like, at what point do you stop eating? There is a point beyond which food ceases to serve any positive function, right? And then, like, things in excess kind of become their opposites. So you have to be very careful with money and other things, you know, alcohol, power, fame, they can distort a lot of things.

• 10:14Shaan Puri?

  How do you keep that in check? It's hard to keep some of those things in check.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I just know too many rich people now to think that money fixes the inner game, or the most problematic kind of psychological challenges that people have. It doesn't at all. It can fix a lot, like, money can fix money problems. But that's just one category of issue. And it's incredibly useful as a vehicle for other things. But I find a lot of folks very uncreative about how they use money. So I do, I would say, make time for the creative gym, more so in the last handful of years, but time with concept

• 11:00Speaker 01

  artists, doing concept pushes, building fictional worlds, playing the drums earlier today, had an art teacher, Stan Prokopenko, who runs proko.com, amazing teacher, came out, and we worked on a whole bunch of different aspects of drawing and live charcoal sketching and shading and so on. One could make the argument that isn't entirely off base, that Must be nice. Great. You have all this time. You can kind of do what you want to do. But I will say also that when I have been at levels of peak performance professionally,

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I usually have a creative outlet of some type. It may not take the form of charcoal drawing. That's a bit on the nose as far as creativity goes, but like jujitsu is creative. Right? It's like going to the jujitsu gym and learning how to operate in that free flowing environment. That's very creative.

• 11:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  So if you're working on anything that requires a level of extreme present state awareness and improvisation and experimentation, like you're in the creativity game.

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  So there are a lot of ways to do that.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  I got a book recommendation from you.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I haven't seen that.

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  This book is all.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Few decades.

• 12:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I'd never even heard of this book.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  It's an old book.

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  This book is called Toughness Training for Sports and it's by Jim Lohr. Do you remember anything from this book? You probably read this a long time ago.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I read that when I was probably 15 or 16 and I do remember that there is an inventory. There's an assessment in there. It's two or three pages long and you're intended to give that to your coaches, peers, teachers, people around you, effectively for like a three, what I would call now a 360 review of different factors that affect mental toughness.

• 12:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And I did that when I was 15 or 16.

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  This one, right?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Oh, there you go. Yeah, there we go. It's the competitive adjective profile. Yeah. So there's, there's, I found this book incredibly helpful and later had Jim Lehrer on the podcast, did some training with him and a tennis pro with tennis. And having that 360 review from a mental toughness perspective was incredibly helpful to me. It provided me with a level of.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Awareness that I I couldn't have developed on my own.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  And.

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  One of the things it talks about is basically, if you haven't read the book, it's like, there's talent you're born with. There's skills which everybody else understands you practice. And then there's performance.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:48Shaan Puri?

  And there's a gap between talent and skill. That gap is called practice. There's a gap between skills and performance. And that's basically your toughness training. It's the, and he calls it, I think, the ideal performance state. And it's like, if you ever played sports, you know this, which is like, some games you're off. Oh, I just wasn't fully locked in. I was, I just wasn't, I didn't play up to my potential. So like, what causes that versus those days when you get in flow state, or you're just totally dialed in, and you kick butt out there. And it's like, well, that's because you were in your ideal performance state. This is not just for sports, obviously. Like, this can be for, you know, how you show up as a dad at home. It could be for work. It could be for this podcast. How do I show up in my ideal performance state? Do you do things to be in your kind of ideal performance state?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I do. I do. I would say that also, just to highlight a few other things in here. I haven't looked at this in a very long time, 20 plus years, but it discusses at length, stress and recovery, and deloading phases, and periodization, and awareness. And there are all of these different checklists and assessments, different assessments that you might use after a given training session, and stress evaluations, and so on, all of which helped me to become more aware of cause and effect in what I was doing. So I had a, I had a fantastic, I mean, my best season by

• 15:13Speaker 01

  far after reading this book. And there were other factors that played into it. In terms of ideal performance states, I've become less focused on optimization, overall, I would say, just because so much of it just does not fucking matter at all. And the amount of-

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  Breaking news, Tim Ferriss, optimization.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a place for it.

• 15:34Shaan Puri?

  Who needs it?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  There's a place for it. There's a place for it. But it's like, are you taking a taxi from the start to the finish line of a marathon? Because it's efficient, I mean, like- Speed reading, poetry. Right. There's a, there's a, I suppose a cult of optimization that is peeling on a lot of levels, but it ends up being a hammer looking for nails and it gets applied to everything. And I think that that misses the forest for the trees sometimes. And I've been guilty of that for sure. So, but in terms of optimization, I would say that, let's take today as an example. So I had a great day today. Today was pretty uncrowded.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I had a few team calls, meaning employee calls earlier today. Typically those are on Tuesday, but it got shifted forward because I was traveling yesterday. Beautiful day outside here in Austin, which helps of course. Went for a walk, got a cold brew of coffee, had a phone call with a friend, came back, did a bit of work, knocked off a few emails or a couple of pending angel investments and deals of that type. And I had to get back to some lawyers and so on. That took 15, 20 minutes. Printed out some documents to prepare for a podcast that I recorded earlier today. And then did a seven minute, I guess it was about a seven minute cold plunge at 40 degrees, which is pretty chilly. Seven minutes continuous? Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And that'll, that'll wake you up. And I use that in part because I knew that we would be recording this late and I didn't want to consume too much caffeine early in the day and then consume way too much caffeine throughout the day and end up not being able to sleep since we're recording this at night. And also then had a little bit of titration with like a light green tea before recording my own podcast, after walking a bit, had some synthetic ketones, so beta hydroxybutyrate, which does help cognitive performance quite a bit. So it can act as a stand-in for me for more caffeine. So it's a blended, let's just say like tail end of the cold brew, green tea about 30 minutes

• 17:43Speaker 01

  prior, and then also the synthetic ketones about 30 minutes prior and light meals. So very light meals. If I have a lot of mental lifting to do, then I generally eat pretty lightly, mostly protein, a little bit of fat, small amount of carbohydrate. And here we are. That's the day. All right. I got a great night's sleep last night, which isn't always the case, but was the case last night. And for me, that is an optimized day. There's not a lot crammed into it. I'm not executing this sophisticated time management Tetris to be as efficient as possible. But I'm keeping the main thing, the main thing. Like

• 18:25Speaker 01

  the main things were team one-on-one calls, being physiologically and just literally, I guess, prepared in terms of documentation, research for podcasts that I recorded, and then being in a good state for having this conversation. That's it.

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It's like, you don't have to do a lot every day.

• 18:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's effect versus efficiency, right?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Effectiveness over efficiency.

• 18:53Shaan Puri?

  Efficiency would be more like maximum output per unit of time, regardless on what the output is directed towards. Is that right?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's if you think of effectiveness is what you do, efficiency is how you do any given thing. But doing something really well doesn't make it important. So.

• 19:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm a Tony Robbins guy. He calls it a majoring in minor things.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, majoring in minor things. Not a great way to go.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And I also fritter away time and lose days to bullshit, or I don't sleep well, and then I'm grumpy, and I have too much caffeine, and I have a shitty night's sleep. Like, I suffer from all that stuff.

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Human, I make mistakes. But if you're thinking about.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Projects as experiments using the criteria that I laid out before. And you're doing your best, you're gonna falter, you're gonna make mistakes, but to keep the main thing, the main thing, and you have a good rationale for why that main thing is the main thing. Over time, you tend to, you tend to perform pretty well and just ship a lot more than most people. Even if you go a month without doing anything, right? If you get fuck all done for a month, sometimes that happens to me, but I try, I would almost rather do that. And I guess my version of doing fuck all might not look like fuck all, but I would rather do that than rush into committing to something that doesn't meet my criteria

• 20:21Speaker 01

  because I'm uncomfortable not being busy. Right. Because that's how you end up over committing to things that longitudinally eat up years. Because you're comfortable not being busy. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, just, I mean, like, the best way to get what the outcome of busyness should be, which is, right, like, big effects of some time, or it could just be more joy, whatever, is, is not by engaging in nonstop action, right? It's by, in a sense, it's similar to my, my, my startup investing. It's like having very tight, very tight parameters,

• 21:05Speaker 01

  a lot of constraints and not breaking your rules. Right? It's like the equivalent of like blowing your bankroll in poker, blackjack, or in startup investing would be you have no, you have no real thinking around portfolio constructions, you, you don't have enough positive constraints. So you get over enthused about a ton of things, you put out all these bets too quickly, and then you lose all your money. Or you just can't play the game very long because you were never playing the long game to begin with. And in life, like that bankrolls your time. And that's nonrenewable. You can always make more money.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  I've heard you say something like, people who are on 24/7 or they're just like hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, grind, grind. You're like, that's actually a dangerous form of laziness.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, indiscriminate action.

• 21:59Shaan Puri?

  Indiscriminate action.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  It was a form of laziness. Yeah.

• 22:02Shaan Puri?

  When people are like, I need to do X and then like, first I'm going to do research or make a long list. It's like, that's fancy procrastination. Like, shouldn't you just, you don't need a list of 100 prospects, just call one. Let's start with that.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we all have our, our favorite pet forms of procrastination. Like, reading is one of mine, right? I have to be very cautious about reading. Love reading and no one's going to say, you should stop reading. Yeah. They'll be like, oh, so diligent doing so much homework.

• 22:28Shaan Puri?

  But so sophisticated he is.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  So sophisticated.

• 22:32Shaan Puri?

  I want to ask you about your book thing in a second, but before we do that, you said teaching. Teach me about the art of podcasting. You've been doing this for 10 years now.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:41Shaan Puri?

  You've done many a high stakes interview, whether it's pick your favorite famous person or baby person you admire. What can you teach me about the first five minutes of a podcast?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  First five minutes?

• 22:54Shaan Puri?

  Maybe five seconds. I don't know.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Beginning of a podcast.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the most important five minutes are the conversation I have before I start recording with someone.

• 23:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  So that would be putting them at ease to the extent possible. Right? My job is to make you look as good as possible. Every guest has final cut.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  So let it all hang out and we can cut whatever you want to cut. You'll get a transcript. Nothing's going to get published before you give it the okay.

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Put the walls down a little bit.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, put the walls down, general housekeeping, so they don't get distracted. Like if you need to take water break, bathroom break, pause, stop, you want to start a story over again.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  That's all totally fine. I'll keep an eye out for things that I think we might want to cut. Like if you accidentally mention your kids' names or something like that. So like, oh, this guy's A, done a lot. B, is actually looking out for me. C, has actually sat in my seat, interviewee seat, a lot. And I always ask, and like, nobody, almost nobody asks this. It's such an easy layup in terms of differentiating yourself. Ask interviewees, what a success would be like, what would? You look back at this. I asked my interviewee this morning about this. I said, six months from now, you look back and you say, I'm so glad I did that. Why? Like, what does success look like?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And even if they don't have an answer, they're so unaccustomed to being asked anything like that. They're like, huh. It's like being a good boyfriend. It's like, he cares. It doesn't even matter. If he brought me the water, it doesn't even, I could have got the water myself. But the fact that he did, he's thinking about me. He cares. Yeah. So I would say that that pre-record conversation is something I don't see very often. Like when I get- I didn't do it today. Well, yeah. I mean, and sometimes that's fine, right? It's like, I'm comfortable in this environment. Right. And we've had contact before. Yeah. But it's not always going to be the case. It could also be the case that somebody's very experienced, but they're rushed, right?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  They got in like an argument with their husband or wife the night before, and their publicist is frazzled and off their meds or whatever, and they're just running from thing to thing to thing. And then boom, they get plopped in front of a mic, or they get plopped in front of a computer, and they're like, okay, go. Yeah, you're talking to this guy named Tim. Okay, you need to give them an on-ramp, if you can, to decompress a little bit from that experience. Doesn't always work, but it's, it's worth the investment in my experience. So that's, even if I have to give up five, 10 minutes of the interview, right? Let's just say they have a hard stop at 90 minutes or 60 minutes. I will still give up that time. So that's, that's one.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  In the first five minutes, I would say, it depends a lot on the, the profile of the person. And I don't mean fame. I mean, have they been interviewed a thousand times?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  In a case where someone's been interviewed a thousand times, I want to ask them a question that shows I've done an inordinate amount of research. Right. So I'll ask them something that, for instance, I'll very frequently dig up. Like a deep cut. I've noticed you do this. Yeah, a third grade teacher or a mentor that helped them when they were at one school, when they were transitioning from one place to another, that got mentioned in passing in a profile in The New Yorker eight years ago. I'm like, who was so and so? Right. Tell me about so and so. And they're like, huh, okay. And that can get them off of autopilot.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Whether someone's been interviewed a lot or very little, I will often ask them beforehand, because there's a lot of prep that goes into it. If there are any greatest hits stories, I'm like, what are stories people respond really well to that stick with them, that people have brought up with you a year later, two years later? And they could be an academic, right? Academics talk to people, just not necessarily Tony Robbins or Edward Norton, but they're in front of people. So they'll, they should have probably some examples or anecdotes or studies, things that really stick with people. Okay, great. And I will then figure out a question or a cue, or I might even ask them to suggest one, to prompt talking about that.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And I will lead with that for two reasons. First is that I'm starting with something that my audience is likely to resonate with. Number two, I'm giving them a win. Right. I'm giving them a win upfront. And that is helpful oftentimes when someone doesn't know where the conversation's going to go. To that point, I always try to tell people where I am likely to start. And that's part of the pre-conversation. I'll say, I'm thinking about starting with this. Right. Because I don't want to cause anyone to stumble out of the gate or for us to get caught on our heels. This is probably where I'm going to start. Do you think that's a decent place to start? And if they're like, well, it's like some random thing I read on the internet that isn't true, I want to know that before we start.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And if they're like, oh yeah, yeah, that'll work. Great. Now I've planted that seed. Their brains working on that while we're doing the housekeeping, while we're talking about everything else. And then we start and it's usually pretty smooth, at least, you know, running out of the blocks. So those would be a few things that come to mind for the first five minutes.

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  That's a great answer. Very helpful to me because we usually do the show. It's me and Sam. And it's, that's the core of the show is me and Sam hanging out and our dynamic is very simple. It's a dude, have you seen this? It's like a random show. Like you do the random show. We do our, it's, that's very much like the core of our show. And we usually, if we have guests on, it's because we want them to do that with us.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  But then occasionally there's guests where actually it's scratching our own itch. I want, I really want to meet this person. I want to get to what they're really like. And I want to ask them the questions that I don't feel like I've heard from them in the same way that like, some people say you should write the book. You, you wish you could just read, you wish you could read. If somebody else had written it, you wouldn't write the book. That's the way I feel about when I do an interview like this. It's like, what is the question that I haven't heard in addition to the greatest hits? Cause you'd want to, you know, explore those a little bit together as well.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And it also depends on what you mean by good podcast, right? There's good for you or me personally, and then there is good for the audience, whatever the audience is, right? Depending on the show and I've gone back and forth on that, right? So sometimes I'll do a show for the audience every once in a while, right? I'll have a couple of Scooby snacks for myself, but I'll do something that is, is really for the audience. That is a risky approach.

• 29:40Shaan Puri?

  Seems safer, but it's actually probably riskier.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  You can get shaped by your audience and then become a bit of a like domesticated oxen, getting driven by what you perceive to be the preferences of your audience. But I have the Henry Ford maxim in mind, which is, and I'm paraphrasing here, but effectively people don't really know what they want or need, which includes you and me, by the way. But for that reason, rather than playing the speculation game, follow your own interest. And the risk there is that you end up playing inside baseball and really doing something that is not necessarily transferable to your audience.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  As far as I'm concerned, and maybe I just have the luxury of being a relatively early mover in podcasting, but if your goal is to do this for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes, or that's not the goal at all, but if your if your goal is to continue to continuing to have this amazing ridiculous job, which is just absurd, like this is a job, then you gotta play the long game. And part of the long game is, right, it's like training and recovery. So if you need to take a couple of episodes as recovery that are purely self-interested just for you, that's what you do. And I don't have any compunction

• 31:01Speaker 01

  about that. And the personal is the most universal also. So if, it depends on your audience size, of course, but with with the size of my audience, if something is bothering me, if something is really piquing my curiosity, if something's in my head at night and just won't go away, chances are there are at least, I don't know, few thousand, few tens of thousands of people who have the same thing going on.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Right. I heard this great quote from my buddy, how much has the world benefited that Tim Ferriss decided not to just keep selling supplements and to do like to do other things? Like, what would the world have been like had that not happened? I think that's a that's a great compliment.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, very huge compliment. Very kind.

• 31:43Shaan Puri?

  If you go from selling supplements, which makes a lot of money, it's like a very clear, direct payoff, and you could do good at it, to being an author, that's like, you know, not usually a good, it's not usually an upward career move, let's say. So why'd you do it?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  There are a few things I would say. So the first is that I didn't end up selling the supplement company until 2009. So whenever possible, I have things running in parallel. I do not view myself as a risk taker. Like, if anything, I would be

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  Risk reducer.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Risk reducer, like risk mitigator, for sure. Like, I'm very good at capping downside risk. And in this particular case, I already knew that from a

• 32:28Speaker 01

  From a, from an intellectual perspective, that sounds too pompous, but I'm struggling to find a better modifier. Let me put it a different way. My learning curve with the sports nutrition supplement world had flattened largely. I understood the basic mechanics. I understood distribution. It wasn't that interesting to me. And it was also an industry that was and still is marred by a lot of bad behavior.

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  And unbelievable tactics and in some cases, just outright deception. I mean, legal and illegal that I really struggled being associated with. And if we really flashback and look at what I thought I might end up doing as an adult, I always wanted to be a teacher in part because I had these amazing teachers that had a huge impact on my life, kind of saved my life in a bunch of ways. So I think I could have gone in a really bad set of directions and they helped prevent that. So I thought, when I get enough experience in life, which is not now, at that age, 29, but eventually it'd be really nice to be

• 33:36Speaker 01

  a teacher and have that kind of impact. So I thought ninth or 10th grade teacher. Still haven't done that. I mean, I've done some volunteer teaching, but I had been going back, I want to say since 2003, to Princeton to teach this guest's lecture, right? I was invited to come back and speak.

• 33:52Shaan Puri?

  I've tried to find these online many times, by the way.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  They're not online.

• 33:55Shaan Puri?

  I wish you had uploaded them.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not online. I don't think I recorded them. I might have recorded one or two. I'm not sure, but if I could find them, I'd be curious to see them. I'm sure I would.

• 34:03Shaan Puri?

  Well, the book kind of grew out of that, right? Like you basically represented your lifestyle.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the notes from that, because every time I spoke, it was twice a year, Ed Shao, the professor, high tech entrepreneurship invited me back because I had the harebrained idea of doing everything bootstrapped. And all the other guest speakers had these venture backed companies and some of them were huge. I was small fries by comparison, but I was doing it my way. I was taking a different approach. So I came back and twice a year, a lot happened in my life at that point. I mean, it was trench warfare, dog years, right? It's like, if you ask anyone who's had the manic depressive experience of being involved with crypto, it's like, what does the last year felt like? And they're like, 17 years?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And it's similar, I think, when you're running a company in the early stages. It's like two months ago, it's like a lifetime. It's like Obama, when he left office.

• 34:57Shaan Puri?

  Went from black to gray hair.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, look at me, right? No hair. So I would say that that desire to teach and the positive feedback, really positive feedback I got from workshopping the lessons and principles and so on in this class led me to conclude a few things. Number one, I really enjoy teaching. Number two, teaching in that format in front of 20, 30, 40 students didn't scale. Now, I think scale can be a dirty word and dangerous and overly seductive for a lot of folks, but it wasn't going to enable me to reach a lot of people. And then I was done from an identity perspective with the supplements. So looking for something new.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And I had an author friend of mine, this is a shortened story that could be really long, but effectively say, you should write a book and start introducing me to agents and editors, even though I didn't want that. Right. Right? I was just looking for feedback and suddenly I had all these intros. And so I was like, ah, okay, well, let me start having these conversations. I'd also, at that point, returned from a year and a half or about a year and a half of this global walkabout, which I chronicle some of in the book, right? Argentina and this, that and the other thing. And I came back and I was like, okay, what next? Right? I'm not motivated to really go into hyper growth mode with this company.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  This isn't going to be my thing for 10 years, 20 years. So what next? And that coincided with these intros. Yeah, the book was eventually accepted and there was an offer made, but a lot went into it, right? 20 some odd, 26, 29 rejections from publishers and so on. But I knew the material worked, right? I had the confidence because I'd workshopped it. With a live crowd, which is huge. Over and over and over and over again. I knew it worked. Right. And I frankly love experiments. That's the way I model my whole life. So I viewed the book as an experiment. I was like, at the very least, it's like an MBA. It's like, all right, it's like a.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  A break from whatever I was doing that looks acceptable like on a resume slash like career trajectories. It's like, all right, let me try it. And

• 37:13Shaan Puri?

  It's a great mask for unemployed, right? I'm writing a book. I'm getting an MBA.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, great mask for unemployed. And, and then everything went bananas.

• 37:24Shaan Puri?

  Well, you did the podcast that way too, right? Experiment. You were like, I'm going to record, I forgot, six episodes and like, you, you built yourself a golden bridge. If you wanted to retreat, you're like, hey, I'm going to try this. I'll do six. It's either going to be a wonderful six episode series or it's going to be the next thing, but like, I'm going to just portion off this experiment versus making a huge commitment.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Give yourself a graceful exit. I mean, framing it for yourself, but also to other people, whatever you do as an experiment gives you a graceful exit.

• 37:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  It's so simple, but it's such a psychological, it's such a strong form of psychological leverage that I think very few people use. Right? They're like, my next thing is this. And I'm like,

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  Oh, totally. I felt that before. I felt that pressure to have an answer.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  I want to ask you about a different, a couple of your like principle, core principles that I have found very useful. I want you to unpack them. One is the law of category. Can you explain what is the law of category and maybe how you used it?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Sure. The law of category is, is taken directly from a book called the 22 immutable laws of marketing. The law of category in brief is

• 38:35Speaker 01

  a description of the power of creating new categories. So rather than trying to be the best in a crowded category, trying to be the only in a new category. That's where Amstill Light comes in. The, the first light imported beer. Okay. There you go. Or in the US, let's just say low cost airlines, Southwest. Right? And there are a million examples that you could find. The law of category is also, I would say, an encapsulation of something that might be called the blue ocean strategy versus the red ocean strategy. So there's a book called The Blue Ocean

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Strategy. I would also recommend that people read in combination with this chapter from the 22 immutable laws of marketing, the law of category. I think I put it in either Tools of Titans or Tribe Mentors. I liked it that much. I went through all the brain damage of getting permissions to include it. And those two pair well with an article you can find for free. You can read it in 15 minutes called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly on KK.org. You can find that. And they're all driving at the same thing, which is positioning and differentiation and trying to figure out

• 39:52Speaker 01

  how you can be the first something. Now, sometimes that turns into a bunch of hand wavy, smoke and mirrors nonsense, like we discussed earlier. But at least as an exercise, it's worth considering because, for instance, one of the questions I was going to ask you, which you can answer, or we can just use it as a sample question, was when a diehard fan of your show is talking to someone who does not know the show, how would you ideally like them to describe the show? Right? And that is a question of positioning. Because branding, it gets turned into this huge

• 40:32Speaker 01

  process with flow charts and tons of agencies and companies and this and that. And sure, I'm sure there are people who are very sophisticated with their approach. But at the end of the day, for me, brand is what people consistently associate X with. X could be you, X could be the show. Right? How do they describe it?

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  That's it. That's your brand. I mean, just like a brand. Like, where does the term brand come from? Like, brand on cattle, right?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  From that perspective, I think it's very useful when you're considering doing a new project. It's not how can I be the best competing in the same way against people doing the same thing? That is not the frame. And even if you end up emulating other people or borrowing best practices, I think it makes sense to start with examining the law of category and thinking about blue ocean approaches, which is why, for instance, with my podcast, we're now at the 10th anniversary. And I don't, I don't really see a viable path forward for me that is heavily video focused.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Even though I think there are going to be some significant taxes to pay for that. Podcasts have a huge discoverability problem. Yes. And a huge, long-term surfaceability problem. And YouTube offers a solution in the form of, what is it? The second largest English language search engine in the world. Right. And I understand why it makes sense for a lot of people to harness that as one engine for growth. Makes a lot of sense. But it's crowded. It's really crowded. By anyone's definition, it would be a red ocean and it's definitely going to get redder.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And for that reason, maybe I make the decision in six months, you know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna go whole hog. Let's see what happens. Right. Right? But I don't have, I don't have a really high degree of enthusiasm for that right now. And enthusiasm is important, right? Which means I'm not going to have the endurance compared to someone like Chris. Right. Right? Williamson of people are like, who is this Chris? And furthermore, I feel life, the threads of life pulling me in other directions. So. Doing it half-assed would be the worst thing I could do. Like, doing it six out of 10 would consume resources and not be particularly effective. Right.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  So I'm trying to decide if I want to take a barbell approach with podcasting on some level, which I've experimented with. Explain that. What's the barbell approach? Well, a barbell approach could be applied. I mean, this is a term I'm borrowing. I don't know if he originated it from. Taleb? Yeah, Nassim Taleb, when he talks about investing, right? Like, super risky stuff and then really boring, let's just say, fixed income or S and P 500 or something, right? Like, super boring stuff and really risky stuff where you have a cap downside but potentially huge upside in his set of games. It would probably be some type of, like, black swan option, right, position, and then nothing in between. That's it, right? And you could apply that to exercise. You could apply that to many different things.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  As I'm applying it, I would say, within the format of podcasting, you would have no video whatsoever. That would be on one end of the spectrum. And I've done that. I've experimented with walk and talks, where I have a headset on and I'm recording with someone and we're talking and getting exercise and it's great. I feel better because I'm not sitting down for three or four hours or whatever the amount of time might be. And I love it. I love doing it. So I think that there's a possibility, doing that with a lot of enthusiasm and joy and curiosity, I might be able to make up for the lack of video with those elements. And I would probably do higher frequency also.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Right. Because of that. And then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I might actually, for instance, tomorrow, like, we'll have a nice video setup tomorrow. And I have effectively a studio. It's no wraparound immersive avatar LED screen, but it is, it's a nice studio setup. It's what used to be considered really nice. It's what you. Until we saw the craziness. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't call it cinematic, but it's high-quality video. Right.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  And probably shy away from stuff in between.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  And we'll see.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  I'll see. This barbell principle applies to so much, right? Investing, you talking about it with a project, how I could approach a project. We, me and Ben have been talking a lot about how we do this with our network. It's like, man, we're meeting so many people, but like death by, death by a thousand Zoom calls. Like I just, I'm not going to do it.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  So what am I going to not talk to these people? Like, no. And so we decided there's a barbell approach, like a bunch of random texts where there's no obligation for either side to reply. It's just like, hey, thinking about you or hey, check this out. That's it. Quick texts. Spend a half day or full day together. I'm, I'll fly to you. Let's have a good time. And we started doing this and oh my God, it's like,

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Shaan Puri?

  I feel like I've cracked the cheat code of the relationship building that, that, that was otherwise felt very draining and overwhelming.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the barbell approach can be applied to a lot. I apply it all over the place. And another example would be, say, speaking engagements where I very rarely do speaking engagements, but it's either free, where I would maybe even pay to be in front of the audience.

• 46:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Cause the event and the audience is so interesting. Could also be a pro bono thing. Or

• 46:18Shaan Puri?

  Ultra premium.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Ultra premium, high, high watermark, like what, whatever company or organization paid me the most I've ever been paid. That's my new minimum.

• 46:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Like whoever is going to meet or exceed that.

• 46:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  That's it. And I will do probably

• 46:34Speaker 01

  two to six engagements a year. That's it.

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  You, you did this early on, I remember you had like your blog or I think it was just blog days and you did, you were like, everything's free. I'm going to give everything away for free. I'm not going to be a kind of online course slinger. Like most people who, once you get a little bit of following, it's like, hey, would you like half a million bucks? Would you like a million dollars? You could just sell this course. And then you, you were like, I'm either going to be all free or I'm going to be ultra premium. And I remember you did this, like, what was it called? The, uh,

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Opening the kimono.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  The kimono. Yeah. Open the kimono. It's like a $10,000 thing, but like a lot of us were happy and you'd be happy to pay that. Cause it's like, oh man, I've gotten so much free value and I have the means. And you're like, cool. I only need a small number of people, which might make it a more enjoyable event for me. Was that the kind of calculus there?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's free. It's free or ultra premium generally. I mean, that's how I try to approach things also because ultra premium gives you. A lot more margin for error. So you can afford to experiment, right? So it's a virtuous set of conditions that you can set in the beginning. And

• 47:41Speaker 01

  it also poses a creative problem that I enjoy. Like, setting the price, I set the price before I figured out the content of the I was like, all right, let me figure out the price. And then I want to figure out, and it wasn't just 10,000, it was like 10,000 if you apply and are accepted in the first like six hours or something. And then it got more expensive. Then it went to like 1250, then it went to 15,000. And then my creative challenge was, okay, how do I make this event? It's a two or three day event. And I was done more than a decade ago. It was a long time ago. I've only done that one event as far as paid events goes.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  And I was like, how do I make this event worth that amount of money? Like, how do I exceed the cost of this event? In the first two hours of the event? And then the rest is just gravy. It's a powerful question. That's a great question. Yeah. And that was, that was the challenge. And part of the answer was, I'm going to give people my actual book proposals for the first two books that lay out everything, like the marketing plans, all the nitty gritty, the sales pitch, and all sorts of details, because people were there for, I guess we would call now content marketing. Right, right. They wanted to know how to launch books. They wanted to know how I had launched these books. I was like, okay, let me just skip the conceptual overlay. I'm just going to show you exactly what I did.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Open the kimono. Opening the kimono. And, and then I did, I did an exercise. This was also to answer that question.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Very simple, where we had something like 120 people. I mean, we had tons of people apply. And we were trying to vet for assholes to omit them, right? So we had questions that were bear traps for assholes. Well, we wanted to make sure, I have an audience, I have a very enthusiastic audience. And the last thing I would want is someone to take out a second mortgage or max out their credit cards to come to some event, right? So first off, it was like, wire transfers only, we're not accepting credit cards. And I had, I had, but it's gonna sound weird, but like a warning slash lecture in text, which is like, I do not want you to go into debt for this.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  This has to represent, I can't remember what the percentage was, but like no more than X% of your current savings, excluding your retirement accounts.

• 50:13Shaan Puri?

  You gave them a stern talking to.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I had, I had a couple of questions about finances, because I really didn't want to have the guilt on my conscience of knowing that somebody after the fact, knowing after the fact that somebody went into the red or put themselves into a really compromised position to come to this event. And I do have fans who would do that. I remember one guy in response to one of the finance questions. He said, well, I appreciate you being my financial nanny. And if you want to, and if you want to come onto the tarmac to look at my jet when I come, you're welcome to. And I was like, and you're out. Thanks for that. You have done exactly.

• 50:52Shaan Puri?

  You passed the financial qualifier, but you failed the second test.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  I was like, you, you fell into the exact bear trap that I was setting for you. Thank you for disqualifying yourself. We do not need you in a small event.

• 51:03Shaan Puri?

  Financial nanny is good though. I like that. Maybe it's a good service we can have for people.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  So clever. Yeah. Financialnanny.com. So we had something like, let's call it 100 people. We had 100 people in the room and there was an attendee book with very short bios, maybe not even bios. And there were bios for everybody. And we had every single person stand up in the room. And I was like, this is going to take a little time. But like, bear with me, folks. I think this could be interesting. And I'd never done this before. So I didn't know how it was going to turn out. I said, everybody's going to stand up. They're going to say their name. They're going to have a brag.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Which is

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  Give them permission.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, don't give me some fluffy bullshit humble thing.

• 51:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Right. This is not the time or the place. Don't be like, yeah, I write books sometimes. And it's like a 10 times New York Times bestseller. Like, don't pull that stuff. Get up, brag. I'm giving you permission. I'm actually giving you a requirement. Then you have an ask, make an ask of the audience, and then you have a give. It's like something that you're really good at, or it could be anything. So get up and it's like a brag and ask a give. And I was like, everyone else is active this whole time. You are listening. And you're writing this stuff down. If somebody has an ask that you can help with, write their name down. And if there's a give that you want to discuss with someone, write their name down.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  And just doing those few things, the proposals, and then everybody's standing up. And like by the end of that day, people are like, okay, this is already 10x.

• 52:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  What I spent. This is amazing. And then it was just gravy from there.

• 52:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think the easy thing to gloss over in that, it's like, cool, it's like, cool story, obviously. But the takeaway for me and for anybody listening is that, that question of, or the technique of, first I'm gonna set the price. Then I will ask myself how I can over deliver on that value or deliver in the first two hours. Where that was a no brainer transaction for them to do. That question led you to such a different result than if you had just said, what event should I do?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Shaan Puri?

  Average question, common question. And I feel like you have a lot of these powerful questions. And you've said something that questions are like a pickaxe for the brain.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:22Shaan Puri?

  It's how you dig the gold out of the brain. And I love that metaphor. I'm a collector of questions. I got a swipe file of like, 100 questions, mostly not, people think it's interview questions. These are questions that I need to ask myself.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  To get my brain to ask a better question, get a better answer. One of my other favorites of yours is, what would this look like if it was easy? Used it today for this interview. I was like, oh, great. I gotta do a great interview today. All right. Oh man, this could be difficult. There's so much content. What would this look like if it was easy?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  What was your answer?

• 53:53Shaan Puri?

  What would it look like if this was easy is me being genuinely enthusiastic and excited to meet you, you feeling that from me? And you walking out of here being like, oh, I actually had an interesting conversation. He didn't just ask me 10 questions, but maybe Sean said two or three interesting things that got me, got me like, because I know, like, what does Tim want out of a, out of an experience? If he learned something, it's probably a good experience.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Shaan Puri?

  Or if he heard one or two provocative things that he might think about later, that's like a useful use of an hour for you. And so I thought, well, I'm good at that. So let me just like not withhold those, which would be common in a podcast where I'm only going to ask you questions. Myself to make sure that you're at the time. But in this case, given that you have a platform, you've been so vocal in the past. I thought, oh, maybe I'll let myself do that because I think if I give Tim one or two nuggets that are interesting, he'll walk out of here feeling like it's a great experience.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. So what other, what, what other questions do you have on that list that you use a lot that maybe I haven't heard?

• 54:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'll give you a couple of them. Am I leaning in to my absolute strengths and unfair advantage as much as I could be? And what this really is, is I call it the theoretical max. I had a friend who had an app one time and his developer, his product manager was saying like, oh, the, the response rate on our push notifications is like 10%. And he's like, guys, if we just got that to 15%, then like the rest of our funnel looks great. And they're like, ah, we, we tried a bunch of baby tests, didn't work. He goes, go in there right now and just write, your Uber is arriving. And this app was not Uber and they sent it out and like 50% of people, oh, he goes, that's now the theoretical max. Don't ever do that again, but like, don't give me the BS that like, because before that they were like, people don't have them on.

• 55:32Shaan Puri?

  People just got, people are too numb. There's too many apps, too many notifications. They had all kinds of stories. And he's like, actually, let me just torch that BS real quick. And so the theoretical max question is basically, we, am I leaning in to my superpower or my unfair advantage to its theoretical max? And so like I'd ask you that, like, what is your unfair advantage?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  I ask that question to myself a lot. I try to edge into it a few different ways. I'll ask friends of mine, when have you seen me at my best? That's one. Or what do you see me do that is easier for me than for other people?

• 56:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  I think my unfair advantage is.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  At this point, I have a lot, just in terms of audience and platform and so on. But

• 56:26Speaker 01

  if we're talking about

• 56:31Speaker 01

  just what I can take with me, right? What I can walk out of here with, I would say it is

• 56:41Speaker 01

  an ability to ask

• 56:44Speaker 01

  unusual questions. Also ask the dumb questions when I'm trying to learn something from someone, from a book, from a video, it doesn't matter. Always asking these questions, these various questions. And then I can take whatever I learn.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And I suppose I could try to deconstruct this, but

• 57:07Speaker 01

  I consider myself a fast learner at this point. And if I can get to point X in six months,

• 57:15Speaker 01

  which is going to be usually pretty, pretty good. Sometimes super impressive, sometimes not, depends on the thing. But overall, on average, I'm going to learn things very quickly. Right. Because I have a method at this point. I can, if it takes me six months to get to point X, I can get almost anyone to that same point in three months or less. Because I realize I also had so many false starts and I tried so many things. It didn't quite work. I tried a lot of things that were common that turns out should be removed from the learning process entirely. I'd say those,

• 57:49Speaker 01

  those are what come to mind.

• 57:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. My first reaction, if I was Tim Ferriss, what would I say? I think my first reaction would be I can get, first it was, I can get any guest on my podcast really that I want. I mean, every guest is within reach. And you said, well, that doesn't really need to be about the podcast necessarily. Anybody I want to talk to is within reach.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:11Shaan Puri?

  That's interesting. That's not true for most people. And even if you are booking tons of guests or you're meeting cool people like you probably aren't at the theoretical max, you're not at the your Uber is arriving level of like leaning into that superpower.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Your mom is dead text message.

• 58:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so, but then even further is not only can you get in touch with them, okay, that's easy, but like you can go in and you can get people to open up the kimono because your reputation is I'm Tim Ferriss. I learned things, I've interviewed people, I deconstruct the things that they're great at, I ask them questions, people will come to you in an interview, ready to open up the kimono.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  So that's interesting. Another interesting thing is like you said, you went to go visit the game designer in Europe for three days. That's cool. That's kind of like throwing your weight around into your unfair advantages. Like you could probably pick up the phone and if somebody is the best game designer in the world, they would be honored to say that Tim Ferriss wants to come and learn my stuff from me. Fantastic. Please, I'll block out three days. That's cool. And how many more times could you do that? So I would start to have a little bit of a brainstorm around that. There's another question I find really valuable. And that is, what is, what is the silly story I'm telling myself?

• 59:22Shaan Puri?

  And it immediately puts you on the defensive because you're like, why would I tell myself a silly story? But we all are constantly telling ourselves silly stories. Why we can't do this, why that's going to be hard, why, why that's not going to work for me, why that will take forever, why this person is not responding to my thing, it's because of ABCD. No, actually, it's probably not, right? And so identifying the silly stories, it's like I'm a Harry Potter guy, I don't know if you read Harry Potter, but like there's the Bogart, right? The thing that will present itself as the thing you fear. And the way to get rid of it is the spell is ridiculous. You make it, you basically, if you're scared of spiders, you put the spider on skates and then it can't walk and then it's actually becomes funny instead of scary. The same thing can be done with, what are the silly stories in my life? As soon as you start to point them out, it's typically things that you've made real.

• 1:00:07Shaan Puri?

  But when you, when you sit down and you interrogate that, that story, turns out it was just as fictional as like an easily replaceable story that might be, might be better for you. And so, that's one that I ask quite often because it's the one that I hate. It's the question that I hate that like, that's the one I need.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I suppose if I could choose one question, the only question I could ask would probably be some version of that.

• 1:00:35Shaan Puri?

  You have it in mind what it would be or no?

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we're just, we're constantly, I mean, the, my favorite answer to the question that I ask most guests at some point, what would you put on a billboard? Favorite answer I've ever had was from a hospice care physician named BJ Miller, who's helped thousands of people to die.

• 1:00:55Shaan Puri?

  Helped them to die, helped them.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Well, he didn't, yeah, he didn't euthanize them, but he's midwifing them through transition to death if they have terminal cancer or something like that. And his answer, he actually confessed to me, he got it from a bumper sticker somewhere, but the, his answer was, don't believe everything you think. That's it. Don't believe everything that you think. And having some method for cross-examining those beliefs, right? These thoughts we take to be true is, is really, really critical. So that's a good one. Yeah, I like that.

• 1:01:38Shaan Puri?

  I want to leave with one thing, which is Naval. You're friends with Naval. He's a fascinating guy to me. Never met him in person, only chatted online and whatnot. Really respect the guy, really admire a lot of things about him. Do you have any stories about Naval? Anything that you noticed early on or a moment you observed kind of like the wisdom or the, the sort of the insightfulness that, that he has?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Naval's one of my favorite people. He's, he's, he's very, very smart and hilarious and does not suffer fools gladly at all, which I like. You don't have to guess what Naval's thinking, which I deeply appreciate. And the first thing that came to mind is probably not the kind of example that you would expect, but it's actually the first time I met Naval. It's the first time I met Naval. I went into a coffee shop in the Mission in San Francisco and I ordered a coffee and I'm waiting at the counter and there's this very attractive girl standing next to me

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  and she's very friendly and smiles and I start talking to her and I'm kind of chatting her up, you know, hitting on her, hoping to ask her for her number and take her out and who knows, maybe dinner, maybe drink, who knows? And then I seen Naval walk up with this huge grin on his face and he's like, I see you met my girlfriend.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, damn. And he's like, Naval. And he just had this huge grin on his face. It was just like.

• 1:03:09Shaan Puri?

  Wow, what a good way to address it.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  She was just like totally calm. And then we, then we started talking and like, and we hit it off. And that was probably, God knows when that was. I don't know, 2008 or something.

• 1:03:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're like a man crush, actually. Move out of the way.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Face, facepalm. Yeah. And, and, and that was it. I, I, I just, I admire Naval for

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  his ability to

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  speak truth and ask uncomfortable questions. And he doesn't go out of his way to be rude, but he's, he's, he's,

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I think, less inclined, he is less inclined to the type of people pleasing that I'd say many people are predisposed to, myself included. Like, there are definitely times when I'm maybe too polite, or tell white lies to make people feel good, or whatever, like, normal human

• 1:04:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  social lubrication, right? Nothing major, but it's like, if, you know, if my girlfriend's put on a few pounds, she's like, do I look fat? I'm like, no, you know, like, I'm not gonna say, yeah, you look really fat. Not to say that Naval would say that. But he's, he's direct in a way that cuts through the noise and is very refreshing to me.

• 1:04:26Shaan Puri?

  Have you been able to pick up or learn anything from him in terms of whether it's, you know, tactical stuff on the investing side or?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Tons of stuff on the investing side. I mean, I think the site was way back in the day, Venture Hacks.

• 1:04:39Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  That he and Nivee co-authored. And I mean, that was basically the kind of Wikipedia Bible of angel investing and advising for, for, and inside game on venture capital. I mean, Naval is. Jedi level when it comes to early stage investing. Very technical. He just ends up in every deal you would ever want to be in. It's like, you know, the sort of, you know, Pinky in the Brain meets like Forrest Gump meets, you know, Siddhartha. You're just like, how is he in every cap table?

• 1:05:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  He's incredibly skilled as an angel investor. Yeah, we don't even have enough time. It can be hours and hours and hours of conversation to even begin to describe what I've learned from him there. And he's very curious. He's very interested and it's not at all limited to business. So if it's, you know, David Deutsch or other thinkers, he introduces me to a lot of eclectic thinkers from different disciplines. And his, his exploration is certainly not limited, as it is with a lot of people, to say, the sport of business or finance or investing. A lot of people are one trick ponies that way.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  He is not a one trick pony. So I admire that as well.

• 1:06:05Shaan Puri?

  I have a funny and of all story, which is I have a buddy who was doing some, like when Facebook launched its platform, my buddy made an app and it was like one of the silly apps. I don't remember back then, it was like people throwing sheep at each other and stuff like that. He was doing one of the like silly apps, but it was clear that, oh, Facebook platform, that's like an opportunity. And so smart Silicon Valley people were interested. My friend's sitting in Georgia and Naval's in San Francisco and he gets an email from Naval. Basically he found the contact us page or whatever and was like, hey, I'd love to meet with you sometime, you know, talk about your app. I'm a venture capitalist here in San Francisco. Friend doesn't know who Naval is, doesn't know what venture capital is, but it's like, okay, sounds interesting. He's like, oh, yeah, like, sure, I mean, I'm open to that. Next email is a plane ticket. Like, here's a plane ticket, goes out tomorrow.

• 1:06:50Shaan Puri?

  So friend's like, okay, girl gets on a plane, flies out here, meets Naval, meets him in his office. Naval asked him, he's like, he asked me questions for like 30 minutes. And he's like, I had no idea what the right answer should have been, but I'm saying whatever's my honest answers. Naval was like, hold on, goes into the other room, comes back, has printed out like a term sheet and says like, here, you know, I'll give you whatever, half a million bucks or something, whatever it is, like some amount of money for, you know, some percentage of your company. And my friend who's like 23 or something like that is just like, I don't know who this Indian guy is. I don't know any of the words on this page. My app is stupid. I don't know why he wants to invest in it. I don't really understand this. So he's like, I just don't feel comfortable right now. And he's like, and Naval at the time was like, you know, he's very, he's like, I think Facebook is going to be, you know, huge.

• 1:07:34Shaan Puri?

  I think it's going to be the platform where you do lots of things. You're not just going to talk to friends on there. You're going to be able to do XYZ. That's my thesis. That's why I want to invest in this. Cause my friend was like, honestly, this is kind of a stupid idea. Why you, this is not a business. And so he gave him that pitch. My friend was like, wow, that sounds awesome. I didn't even realize all that. I had stumbled into this goldmine potentially. So he's like, listen, man, I just, I don't understand what this thing is. I just need to think about it. And Naval's like, no problem. And so he's like, I go, and then by the way, that same week he meets Keith Roy, Max Levchin, a bunch of other people who are also giving him the same pitch, but in different flavors. Like Keith Roy was like, you should come work for us. He's like, I don't want a job. He's like, see all those people right there, all those programmers, they're going to put you out of business like, you know, tomorrow. And he was like, this is a stupid app. It's not a business to do it. Waste your time doing this.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  You're going to put me out of business that isn't a business.

• 1:08:20Shaan Puri?

  I live in my mom's bedroom. Like, what are you talking about? And so then he said, he goes, you know, the great thing about Naval though, is that he's like, like 15 years later, and now my friend's very, a very successful tech entrepreneur. He's like, I actually dug up that old term sheet. He's like, it was so fair. He's like, he could have taken advantage of me and I didn't know anything. And he's like, it was incredibly founder friendly and fair. And he's like, that told me a lot about Naval, that at that time, when a lot of people were in the heat of the moment about this kind of gold rush in that Facebook app days. And I was clearly a novice. He operated with very high integrity. And I thought that that said a lot about him.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that matches with my experience. I've always seen that in Naval.

• 1:08:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:08:59Shaan Puri?

  Right on. Well, Tim, thanks for doing this, man. I really, I really appreciate it.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, my pleasure, man. Thanks for taking the time.