#413: Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins

Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins | Brought to you by NutriBullet http://nutribullet.com/Tim and ExpressVPN https://www.expressvpn.com/tim. "If you need to measure, you've failed." — Tyler Cowen Professor Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen https://twitter.com/tylercowen) has a personal moonshot https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/my-personal-moonshot: to teach economics to more people than anyone else in the history of the world—and he might just succeed. In addition to his regular teaching at George Mason University https://www2.gmu.edu/, Tyler has blogged every day at Marginal Revolution https://marginalrevolution.com/ for almost 17 years, helping to make it one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world. Tyler cocreated Marginal Revolution University https://mru.org/, a free online economics education platform that’s reached millions. He is also a bestselling author of more than a dozen books https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B001IXMRS6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-pages-popularity-rank&page=1&langFilter=default&linkCode=ll2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=a8c6f671ab8660a086f1f27e3499bb38&language=en_US, a regular Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AS6n2t3d_iA/tyler-cowen/ columnist, and host of the popular Conversations with Tyler http://conversationswithtyler.com/ podcast, where he examines the work and worldviews of thinkers like Martina Navratilova, Neal Stephenson, Reid Hoffman, and many more. His latest project is Emergent Ventures https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures, a $5 million fund to support entrepreneurs who have big ideas on how to improve society. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by NutriBullet http://NutriBullet.com/Tim. NutriBullet is the affordable, easy-to-use, easy-to-clean blender that was first recommended to me by entrepreneur Noah Kagan when I interviewed him for the podcast. Its signature blending process transforms high-fiber veggies, nuts, seeds, and fruits into silky, nutrient-dense smoothies (or protein shakes, savory soups, and dips) that are easy to digest and absorb. Now, the engineers at NutriBullet http://NutriBullet.com/Tim have created an incredibly convenient upgrade named the NutriBullet Blender Combo http://NutriBullet.com/Tim. This device is their most versatile yet, allowing you to effortlessly switch between single-serve and full-size blending—everything that you know and love about the classic device, plus all the performance and capacity you expect from a full-size blender. Don’t settle for blenders that leave your smoothies filled with chunks. Get the NutriBullet Blender Combo, and introduce your veggies and fruits to 1,200 watts. It easily gets the job done. And for you, my dear listeners, NutriBullet http://NutriBullet.com/Tim is offering 20% off of all products on its website. To get your 20% off, just go to NutriBullet.com/Tim http://NutriBullet.com/Tim! * This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN https://www.expressvpn.com/tim. I’ve been using ExpressVPN since last summer, and I find it to be a reliable way to make sure that my data is secure and encrypted, without slowing my Internet speed. If you ever use public Wi-Fi at, say, a hotel or a coffee shop (where I often work and as many of my listeners do), you’re often sending data over an open network, meaning no encryption at all. One way to ensure that all of your data is encrypted and can’t be easily read by hackers is by using ExpressVPN https://www.expressvpn.com/tim. All you need to do is download the ExpressVPN app https://www.expressvpn.com/tim on your computer or smartphone and then use the Internet just as you normally would. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I am recording, I figure I might as well record a video. What did you have for breakfast today, Tyler?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Smoked trout, green pepper, green grapes, and some cheddar cheese. Pretty close to my usual. It's an excellent breakfast.

• 0:15Tim Ferriss?

  Green grapes? Wow, I love this. All right, let me, uh, if you could tell me-

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Good for you. You know, this could be a question in the actual podcast, of course.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  It could, it could, yeah, it could definitely be a question. What, uh, why do you choose those items in that breakfast?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Uh, they, except for the grapes, they store pretty well. That's important. You can buy a week's worth at a time. Uh, the trout gives you protein. It's probably either good for you, or at least not bad for you. And it's not something you're tempted to overeat. Like, you just can't eat that much smoked trout in the morning.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  With smoked salmon, people can attack and not stop.

• 0:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, trout has a self-limiting function.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yet it tastes good, right? It's a funny utility curve for smoked trout.

• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let me, uh, let me just listen to that for a second.

• 1:30Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by NutriBullet. I have my NutriBullet about seven feet away from me right now. I'm gonna be using it for a bunch of stuff tonight and probably tomorrow night. NutriBullet is the affordable, easy to use, easy to clean, the easy to clean part is super important blender, that was first recommended to me by entrepreneur Noah Kagan when I interviewed him for this podcast. And specifically, what I asked him was, "What is the purchase that you've made in the last, say, six months for $100 or less that has had the greatest positive impact on your life?" And his answer was the NutriBullet. NutriBullet has sold more than 60 million units worldwide. You can start to do the math on that, it's pretty frickin' bonkers. And once you've used one, it's easy to understand why it became so popular.

• 2:15Tim Ferriss?

  With other blenders, cleanup can be a huge pain in the ass. NutriBullet makes it really, really, really, really simple. And if you're not familiar with the classic NutriBullet, it's effectively a single-serve cup that blends, and then you flip it upside down, you detach it, and you can drink it, eat it, chug it down, right there. So it is intended for, at least in the classic sense, smaller portion sizes. But give me a second here. So with NutriBullet, as I mentioned, cleanup is truly hassle-free. And their signature blending process transforms whatever you might have, high-fiber veggies, nuts, seeds, fruits, of course, into silky nutrient-dense smoothies, if that's what you like, that are easy to digest and absorb. I use them for nut butters.

• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

  I use the NutriBullet for soups of different types. I use it for all sorts of stuff. Now, the engineers at NutriBullet have created a convenient and upgraded version of the NutriBullet called the NutriBullet Blender Combo. This is their most versatile device yet because it allows you to switch between single-serve, as I was describing, and full-size blending. It's also a bit more expensive, of course, than the classic version, but it gives you a lot more. And from smoothies and protein shakes to savory soups and dips, the NutriBullet Blender Combo does it all. And there's a recipe book that comes with it. There's all sorts of stuff that you can play with. This next-gen NutriBullet gives you everything you know and love

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  about the classic device—yes, I'm reading copy in this particular sentence— plus all the performance and capacity you would expect from a full-size blender. Don't settle for blenders that leave your smoothies filled with chunks or anything filled with chunks that you don't want chunks in. Get the NutriBullet Blender Combo and introduce your veggies and fruits and whatever else you might have to 1,200 watts. It easily just smashes the living hell out of them and blends into whatever you would like to create. And for you, my dear listeners, NutriBullet is offering 20% off of all products on their website. To get your 20% off, just go to nutribullet.com/tim. That's nutribullet, N-U-T-R-I-B-U-L-L-E-T, dot com, forward slash tim.

• 4:28Tim Ferriss?

  If you don't have a NutriBullet in your kitchen, you are missing out. It does a lot in a very small package. nutribullet.com/tim for your 20% off.

• 4:40Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:23Tim Ferriss?

  and cannot be easily read by hackers or script kiddies or whoever, is by using ExpressVPN. And the onboarding process for ExpressVPN, meaning the signup flow, the use of the product, is one of the best I've ever seen in my life. All you need to do is download the ExpressVPN app on your computer or smartphone and then use the internet just as you normally would. You click one button in the ExpressVPN app to secure 100% of your network data. It's kind of ridiculously simple. And as many of you know, I only recommend brands that I have researched and vetted thoroughly. For me, of the many VPN solutions out there, ExpressVPN is one of the best on the market, and I use it personally. Here are a few reasons why.

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  First, privacy. ExpressVPN does not log your data. Lots of cheap or free VPNs make money by selling your data, believe it or not, to ad companies and so on. ExpressVPN developed a technology called Trusted Server to prevent their servers from logging your information. Second, speed. Many VPNs slow your connection down or make your device seem sluggish, just to a crawl. I've been using ExpressVPN for a while now, as I mentioned, and my internet speeds are blazingly fast. I don't even notice it. Honestly, I forget that it's even on. So, that includes when I connect to servers thousands of miles away or during travel. I can still stream HD-quality videos with zero lag.

• 6:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 7:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 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

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So, learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, I would consider my guest today one of those, to tease out the habits, routines, thinking processes, practices, et cetera, that you can hopefully emulate or test in your own lives. My guest today is Professor

• 8:57Tim Ferriss?

  Tyler Cowen, C-O-W-E-N. That is Cowen. And his personal moonshot is to teach economics, or economics, we'll clear that up in just a moment, to more people than anyone else in the history of the world. And he might just succeed. In addition to his regular teaching at George Mason University, Tyler has blogged every day. At Marginal Revolution for, I want to say, more than 15 years now, that's incredible, helping to make it one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world. He's co-created Marginal Revolution University, a free online economics education platform that's reached millions and will no doubt reach millions more. He's also a bestselling author of more than a dozen books. This man is an overachiever, a regular Bloomberg columnist and host of

• 9:39Tim Ferriss?

  the popular Conversations with Tyler podcast, where he examines the work and worldviews of underrated thinkers like Martina Navratilova, Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite writers, Reid Hoffman, and many more. His latest project is Emergent Ventures, a $5 million fund to support entrepreneurs who have big ideas on how to improve society. You can find him on the web, marginalrevolution.com, conversationswithtyler.com, I highly recommend checking out, and on Twitter, @TylerCowen. Tyler, welcome to the show.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim. Happy to be here.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  And there are so many questions I want to ask. We have so many friends, or at least I would say fans of your work in common, like Ryan Holiday, and you have been suggested and requested as a guest on this podcast for a very long time, indeed. Let's start with my first question slash area of confusion. As you may have noticed, even in the introduction, I pronounced it differently several times. Do you say economics or economics?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Probably I'm not consistent, but I don't think of myself as doing economics. I think of myself as doing a funny kind of philosophy with the economy as the topic. So, my goal isn't really to teach economics, it's to improve my own ways of thinking, and maybe people will learn some of that as I go along.

• 10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Why use, and I will flip-flop here, why use economics as the vehicle? What makes that interesting or useful for examining thinking?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  I'm stuck with it at this point, right? So, I think the most efficient way of learning at the margin for most smart people is travel, and I try to travel a lot. But I don't necessarily try to talk other people into becoming economists. When I was a young kid, I was a chess player, and I was very good at chess, then I quit chess, and I took up economics. And that has made sense for me as a career. But in a way, I'm not emotionally that wedded to economics, right? I think of anthropology as a more fundamental way of thinking about humans. And economics indirectly is parasitical on anthropology. And we should all be doing more anthropology and travel.

• 11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain what you mean by parasitical on anthropology?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  So economics, the core insights are about incentives, right? The law of demand, price goes up, you buy less. That makes perfect sense. But in anything but the simplest contexts, you have to ask, how do people even understand what the price is? So if a mother says to her kid, oh, don't do that or you won't be allowed to play outside. You know, what is the real price? Does the kid really not get to play outside ever again? They get to play outside even more the day after? Who knows? It's about how people understand, how they communicate with each other. And that is a kind of anthropology, sociology. Economics is embedded in those broader social sciences. So in my view, you need to be broad, read a lot, travel a lot, kind of be a bit crazy.

• 12:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'm all for, I'm all for the right kind of crazy. I, I, I think we will be examining and exploring some nooks and crannies that would qualify as, if not crazy, at least weird. That's the hope, part of the hope for this conversation. And I want to come back to something you said or referenced, which was playing chess as a kid. So in the course of doing some research for this conversation, I came across something that said you also played for money. What did playing chess and/or playing chess for money teach you? What did you take away from those experiences or what impact did that have on you?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Well, this may sound trivial, but first it taught me I could win. And second, it taught me I could lose. And those are both very important lessons. And it also taught me I needed to be honest with myself about why I was either winning or losing. And that there were real stakes here. So I learned that like at age 10, 11. Uh, that was a great background. And chess is not forgiving of excuses, right? It cultivates what I now call meta rationality. And you can't lie about how well you're doing, not, not in the medium term. You have a numerical rating, it's pretty accurate, right? You win or you lose. You can't say the sun got in my eyes more than once.

• 13:53Tim Ferriss?

  So you have you have many phrases that no doubt we will be digging into or terms. Could you elaborate on meta rationality, please? Or give other examples of meta rationality?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  A person is being meta rational when he or she understands how smart or well informed he or she is in a given topic area. Meta rationality is very hard to come by, in my view. So people typically do not defer to the views of experts when they ought to. Sometimes the expert might be wrong. If you're just but if you're just playing the odds, the expert is probably right. So people are far too confident about too many things they shouldn't be so confident about. Meta rational people, who are essentially impossible to find, but at the margin, we can be a bit more meta rational. They know to whom they should defer or how to find out the right answer.

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  And as someone who is self admittedly or self described hyperlexic, a consumer of, it would seem, vast quantities, but certainly on some level curated quantities of information.

• 15:05Tim Ferriss?

  How would you think about, as an example, because you've also written for the New York Times in 2013 about pandemics, to fight pandemics, reward research? Now, one could argue that we're a little behind the eight ball with respect to current circumstances. But as we're recording this on Monday, March 2, how do you yourself think about, for instance, parsing information and sources related to something like COVID-19? And I know that I'm using shorthand, but the the virus is is sort of awkward to say. So I'll just use COVID-19 as a placeholder for for this particular coronavirus that we're contending with.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  The returns to understanding how to build a good Twitter feed are very high.

• 15:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And right now, many of us should be building coronavirus Twitter feeds, right?

• 15:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And following a number of people like Helen Branswell. And then people need to trust you, so the returns to being ethical and keeping confidences are high. And then other people will tell you things, if you're at all known. And then you need to be metarational and judge, you know, which of them you should listen to more. Some of that might happen through WhatsApp. And then, just at the end of the day, not to get too caught up in your own narrative, you need to be suspicious of stories. You can, there's like the panic story, there's the "it's all going to be fine" story. Probably the truth is somewhere in between. But dominant moods or emotions tend to seize hold of us, even if we're very smart. And often, smart people go wrong, because they're just better at feeding more information into their chosen mood. And then they're likely to screw up.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  So it's this very careful balancing act across many dimensions.

• 16:49Tim Ferriss?

  How do you cultivate metarationality?

• 16:56Tim Ferriss?

  Particularly when, hopefully taking into account incentives. Because what I've noticed, for instance, is that

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  among the friends I've spoken to, who I all consider, from the perspective of an IQ test at least, intelligent, pretty far on the right, that they're, the conviction with which they believe this is serious or not serious often corresponds in some fashion to how inconvenient or convenient it would be, or how much of a financial sacrifice believing it is serious and requires, say, self-quarantine or something like that would, would cost them from a business perspective. How can one cultivate the ability to remain

• 17:45Tim Ferriss?

  Metirational during times of duress or panic like this. And I know that's a very jumbled question, but I think you can probably get what I'm grasping for.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Maybe a certain bit of obliviousness actually is useful. So you want to be plugged in, but also somewhat detached. And so caught up in your own thing, your whole, what did I have for breakfast this morning routine? When am I going to get to shoot baskets next? That it actually distracts you from too much emotional involvement. So Peter Thiel sometimes says you sort of want to embody opposites in yourself in some ways. So this extreme involvement in the processing of information, but also a fair amount of detachment. Maybe is the best you can do if you can achieve that.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I think the returns to detachment have gone up a lot with Twitter. So Twitter is fantastic, but most people use it badly and they hate it and they criticize it and they waste time on it. But if you just use it as a truth generating mechanism and use Twitter search and mostly ignore politics on it, it's wonderful.

• 18:50Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of how you have used Twitter?

• 18:55Tim Ferriss?

  In that fashion, what would be? What type of truth might you type of try to generate or identify through Twitter? And how would you go about it?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Right now Twitter search is mostly better than Google search. So take a topic you're interested in, which in this case could be coronavirus, right? And just type it into Twitter search every morning or every evening and see what pops up. And then you're not restricted to who it is you follow, which is always going to be limiting. You'll sample different opinions, see how people respond. You'll be led places by happenstance. That's fantastic. We didn't have that 15 years ago.

• 19:32Tim Ferriss?

  One of your most popular, if not the most popular post of yours in 2019 on your blog. Was how I practice at what I do. I believe that's the name of the blog post. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 19:46Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  To quote that blog post, you wrote, "Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been, 'What is it that you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?'" If you don't know the answer to that one, maybe you're doing something wrong or not doing enough. Could you elaborate on that, please?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Well, say you're a social scientist, or you're a writer, or you give public talks. You are out there in some way all of the time. But if you look at people like, say, what Kobe Bryant did, or what Martina Navratilova did, they practiced to an extreme degree, and that's how they got better. Martina was not world number one player until she had an intense regime of proper practice. Kobe, the older he got, he realized he needed to practice more, whereas a lot of top stars actually practice less, and they coast on reputation, and they have a guaranteed contract. So just every day, you want to be reading, you want to be talking, you want to be thinking, you want to be exercising, and do it, you

• 20:49Speaker 01

  know, at an intense a level as you can, and just try to do that all day long, and that's practice. And, you know, one hopes it will make you better. It's not for you to say, but, you know, that's the hope.

• 21:00Tim Ferriss?

  How do you practice your scales? What does scales look like for you?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Writing out large quantities of material, much of which I never use or publish, writing out different points of view, which are not my own, is also a way of practicing. Trying to talk to a very diverse set of people. In my case, not just academics, not just people I went to high school with, say. Listening to highly complex music, I think, is a way to keep your mind active. Periodically, reading serious fiction, I think, is something people stop doing after they hit a certain age, maybe 30 or 40. But it forces you to be open to the complexities of how humans actually are. I recommend that, too.

• 21:46Tim Ferriss?

  If someone listening were a nonfiction purist, say they quit at 20 and had not been reading fiction since, are there any particular fiction books that you might recommend for someone to use as their reentry to the world of complex fiction or fiction overall?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I would have to know their biography, but I would start with Harold Bloom's book, The Western Canon, which has a list and surveys a lot of his favorite works, a few of which are nonfiction by the way. And dig in there and just find what you love and pursue it. I think the greatest writer is Shakespeare. It's not necessarily for everyone. And if you did not grow up writing and reading English, it's probably not for you. But that would be one start, the Henriade, you know?

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  When you say complex music, what does that mean to you?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Indian classical music, I think, is phenomenal and grossly underrated. And it really forces you to be in a complexity mindset. Beethoven late string quartets, Bach, The Art of the Fugue, atonal music, Arnold Sternberg. Some of the stuff people don't like and curse at and think has wrecked music. I'm all for it, pretty much. It's just really, really hard.

• 23:00Tim Ferriss?

  The sophistication of the hand percussion in classical Indian music, I don't know much about other instruments, but the sophistication of the hand percussion, speaking as someone who's become very interested in hand percussion in the last few years, is mind blowing. It is unbelievable how well developed the system of hand percussion is in classical Indian music, just as one example.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  It could be the best music in the world. And I wonder if it's not related to Indian preeminence in the world of tech.

• 23:37Tim Ferriss?

  That is definitely one I'll have to chew on. I like that as a thought exercise at the very least. You spoke to your writing and your writing practice. What does your daily writing practice look like? If it is indeed daily, I'd make that assumption, but perhaps you're batching your writing. What does your writing process look like?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  It is daily in an almost religious manner. I write on Christmas Day, I write on Sundays, I write columns, blog posts. I like to quit writing before I get tired of writing. That way I'm hungry to come back the day after. And the real enemy in writing is days where you get nothing written. If you write something every day, I don't care how much or how little it is, it's going to add up and over time you'll get more done each day. So just make it an absolute rule. The really important thing, it may not be writing for everyone, but just do it every day, get better at it every day, don't take any excuses, do it.

• 24:32Tim Ferriss?

  What does your routine and setup look like? What time of day? What are the ingredients that for you constitute a writing session? What are the characteristics?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I love having multiple offices to create variance in my physical environment, but usually I start at home. I have just an ordinary sofa next to a very good stereo and a lot of CDs, some being Indian classical music. And I just sit on the sofa and lean against the armrest. I don't even know if I'm comfortable, but I'm so used to it. And I just write and I end up back there at the end of the day and in between I'm at, you know, one of my two offices. Or if I'm on the road, you know, I'll write in a hotel room. I've gotten very used to writing other places. I enjoy the change of pace. Somehow forces you to think new thoughts a bit.

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do it first thing in the morning? Does the time of day vary? What does the timing look like?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Almost always it's early in the morning. The first thing I do in the morning is check my email and eat breakfast, right? But after that I try to get to writing pretty quickly. So I think a lot of people peak between, say, 8:15 a.m. and maybe 11:30, 11:45. And those are my core writing times, most, but not all days.

• 25:46Tim Ferriss?

  And when you check email...

• 25:51Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any rules or tactics that help you to avoid getting consumed or pulled into the vortex of email to the extent that it overtakes your writing time? How do you think about that?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Well, keep in mind, responding to emails is writing too. I once said to Patrick Collison, "My business model is responding to my email." So I respond to a lot of email. I don't respond to it the second it comes in necessarily, and I certainly don't in the morning. But there'll be a few things, if only because of time zones, where I do respond immediately. And email is how people are going to tell me things often. So if I respond, I develop more and better relationships. You could say I'm a fan of getting somewhat drowned in your email, but I think here's part of it. I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are

• 26:47Speaker 01

  writing me. And if I had too many not smart emails, I would feel I was doing something else wrong with what I'm writing.

• 26:54Tim Ferriss?

  What will be the, what will the symptoms be of you having crossed the line into overexposed or having made mistakes in your writing? I guess besides the email, but are there, will you know? Will the indication be just a change in the ratio of smart to not so smart email? Or are there other ways that you would recognize you've gone astray with your writing?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Maybe too many people asking me to do political things would be a sign that I had done something wrong. That mostly doesn't happen. The people emailing me being less smart or less to the point, that mostly doesn't happen. So I think I get a pretty large number of very good emails each day or WhatsApp messages, and I like that. But you have to reciprocate, right?

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. With your, with your writing, do you do your drafting, first drafts?

• 27:52Tim Ferriss?

  In Word, in LaTeX, in email composition, I know some people who do that, in an actual WordPress editor, or in a blog of some type. How do you draft?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  I'm a software idiot, so if I'm writing a book or a column, I just use Microsoft Word.

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And I'm still struggling to figure out how it works.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  If it's a blog post, I type it into WordPress. And I do find, if I type into WordPress, I write different things than if I write on an open Word document. Recently, I've been trying Google Docs. It's better for collaboration, but it's disorienting for me.

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel permanent somehow. It feels like if a quasar explodes somewhere out there, the whole thing will go poof. And I'm nervous. But maybe that's good. It gets me to finish what I'm doing more quickly.

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you have written about your own 12 rules for life. I wanted to ask you about two of them, if you would be willing to expand. So I'll read them, but these are rules seven and 12, respectively. And I'll read both, and then you can dig into either. The first, number seven, learn how to learn from those who offend you. Number 12, every now and then, and I'm going to mispronounce things here, probably, read or reread Erasmus, Montaigne, Homer, Shakespeare, or Joyce's Ulysses, so that you do not take any rules too seriously. The human condition seems to defeat our orders, our attempts, excuse me, to order it.

• 29:24Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I would love for you to expand on either of those. You can choose whichever you'd like to talk about first.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Well, part of the brilliance of those writers I listed is they're highly complex. They force you or induce you to see human motivation as very complicated. They run against the grain of there being simple answers. And you really have to focus on them and give them full attention. So if you're dealing with them periodically, I think it's a good way to always stay fresh, if that's a true, open, honest engagement. Now, the people who offend you, I mean, Twitter's a great place to find them, right? People are so negative on Twitter, and either directly or indirectly, they're going to be negative about you, whatever it is you do, or are, or think. Someone's going to dump on it and trash it. Those are the people where you really need to look closely and say, what can I learn from this person?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Do not play a strategy which I call devalue and dismiss. Because you can point to flaws in their thought, right? Or their biography, like, oh, you know, say what they've done wrong, or they didn't say this right three years ago. And you can dismiss them. But they're at the margin, really, the ones you've got to learn from. Like, for me, that's Paul Krugman. You know, he puts down so many people. Sometimes he puts down views I hold. You could say it offends me, but, you know, I need to suck it up, you know, and just realize there's something I can learn from here.

• 30:45Tim Ferriss?

  What have you learned from Paul? What would be, or cultivated as a result of performing this practice?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Well, I would say a lot about regional economics. At the meta-level, I've learned a lot about how to communicate, sometimes how not to communicate. I understand a particular point of view much better, which I sometimes, but not usually, agree with. And he's one of the smartest economists out there, right? He has a Nobel Prize. Like, of course, my goodness, we should be learning from this person.

• 31:16Tim Ferriss?

  What are things that come to mind that you have changed your mind on in the last few years or the last year? Are there any positions or beliefs or otherwise that you've changed your mind on or come to think differently about?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Well, one thing that I'm finding really striking is the number of different countries that have had demonstrations, or sometimes even riots, about their politics. And those are sometimes countries such as Chile, which at least in regional terms are leaders are doing better than other places. Chile is actually seen declining income inequality, and yet millions of people in a not-so-well-populated country are going to the streets. So, the sense of discontent out there is higher than I had thought. And I don't feel I've thought that through properly yet, but I'm definitely changing my mind about the stability of current parties and regimes of politics. It seems to not quite be holding.

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  What are your working hypotheses with respect to why that might be?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I think one is the Martin Gury hypothesis, that in a world with the internet, we see everyone's flaws more readily. So you look at politicians, or for that matter, top thinkers on social media, mostly they're not very impressive. And again, you could play the devalue and dismiss strategy, but it means the citizenry ends up disillusioned. So the second point, I think, is that if you look at, say, the United States, it has not in every way covered itself in glory over the last fifteen or twenty years, and that disillusion's people around the world, yet they don't know where else to turn, because in my view, some version of Western liberal capitalist democracy is indeed the best system. People see China doing better, they don't necessarily want autocracy, so politics becomes more confusing.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  And then finally, I think we're seeing big shifts in the income distribution, where certain groups are seeing either stagnant or falling wages, and this heightens their anxiety, and then they too become dissatisfied in politics, but they're not sure exactly where to turn. They tend to turn to politicians who promise them free lunches, but that's probably bad.

• 33:32Tim Ferriss?

  How are you going to go about developing a better understanding or different perspectives related to this observation, for instance, in Chile? What do your next steps look like?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Well, the most likely next step is failure, right? Going to Chile would be one thing I would do. I've spent maybe five weeks of my life in Chile, which is not a lot, but enough that I have a sense of the place. I was recently invited back. I will try to find a way to get back, and then I will speak with people, but I also try to figure things out just by writing them down or writing them up. And if I just sit in the shower and sing, I don't really get anywhere. So I need to talk with people, or give a talk, or write something down. And that will probably be wrong, but that's like the draft that doesn't get out, and then it will get better, and like maybe sometimes it's okay.

• 34:29Tim Ferriss?

  What percentage of what you write would you say ultimately gets published on the blog or elsewhere? Just to give people an idea of what the pie chart to looks like with published, unpublished, and maybe there's there are other categories, but what percentage would you say end up getting published somewhere?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  It's hard to measure because the things I discard, I tend to rewrite them so much, whether I've thrown them out or just rewritten them. I'm not sure how to classify it, but I have many hundreds of pages of unpublished stuff, and it's going to stay that way in varying phases of completeness, but it was necessary to get to other things.

• 35:08Tim Ferriss?

  In 2000, I want to say 2003, so this is some time ago. Suspect things may have changed, but at the time, I read that you were watching television only in Spanish.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  That was correct then.

• 35:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. How long, how, for what period of time did you do that?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Oh, over a dozen years, and I still do it sometimes, but I found it a good way to learn Spanish, but a good way to have a window onto a group of concerns that I would not necessarily encounter in the rest of my daily life. So if you watch Spanish language news from Latin America or from Miami, but essentially from Latin America, you will just get a very different sense of what is important, what is interesting, what is dramatic, very different sense of the role of the tragic, how families fit together, the importance of children, really shakes up your worldview. But mostly, I wanted to learn Spanish, but I became a bit addicted to it, and I still do it when I have the time.

• 36:11Tim Ferriss?

  I listen to the Duolingo Spanish podcast sometimes for similar reasons, although it doesn't provide quite, it does in some cases provide that sort of contextual, temporal news, human interest, human interest element, but perhaps lesser than breaking news.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I loved Premier Impacto on Univision. I still watch that sometimes. It's at 5:00 PM. For me, it's Channel 14. It's just fantastic.

• 36:38Tim Ferriss?

  What do you find to be the benefits of focusing on language acquisition or?

• 36:48Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose cultivation.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Well, I only know two other languages is English, Spanish and German. They force you out of your comfort zone. They make you realize what an idiot you are. You're always learning something. You get windows into how other people think. I sometimes call it cracking cultural codes. Spanish is great because it opens up a lot of different countries to you. German has some of the most profound writing and music, philosophy and culture of human history. I wish I knew more. So I envy people who know many languages and people who have traveled, you know, to more and different places than I have. They're the people you should envy.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to ask you about one of your many books.

• 37:33Tim Ferriss?

  The Complacent Class.

• 37:36Tim Ferriss?

  Now, my, my, my read, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you've, you've argued that we've in some respects become a stagnant and cautious society. What does that, what does that mean? If I'm actually sort of interpreting things correctly and feel free to correct me.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  We innovate less, especially outside of the tech sector. Our incomes grow more slowly. We move around the United States at roughly half the rates we used to. We are now unable to pull off grand projects such as putting a man on the moon. Almost all of the spending of our federal government is now locked in and much of that, most of that going to the elderly. We're just a less dynamic society. People are crazy how they bring up their kids. No risk is to be allowed. People obsess over what kindergarten will my kid get into? If they don't get into that kindergarten, my goodness, all is lost. We are far more a society of credentials, which I regard as a huge negative.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  All of that and more.

• 38:39Tim Ferriss?

  What, what can one do? Is, is, are there any personal actions that you would suggest to

• 38:48Tim Ferriss?

  counteract or counterbalance in some fashion? Those societal trends? I mean, of course, that's more than just societal trend. There are actual government policies and so on. But what can the individual do if they listen to you say this and they agree with you?

• 39:05Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular practices or steps or recommendations that you could discuss?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So Steve Levitt, the Freakonomics guy, he wrote a great paper where he took some people and he looked at their major decisions. And for some of the people, a coin was flipped. And if the coin said they had to make a big change, they made the big change. And next post, the people who made the big changes were happier than those who did not. So of course, it depends on the person and on the context. But in general, read that Steve Levitt paper, think about the coin flipping, and more of the time, make the big change. Of course, it's a risk, right? But it seems on average, it pays off.

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Question for you, is the, now, those were big changes determined by the flip of a coin? Is that right?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 39:51Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. How much of the happiness with the big change do you think was from making the big change or being absolved of the buyer/seller's regret equivalent second guessing? In other words, a decision that you had to make on your own?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. But if it's only the being absolved that matters, well, treat me as the villain, and you are hereby absolved from responsibility. Just say Tyler made me do it, and go off and be happier. And the rest of society will do better as well.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the major decisions that you've made that have been extremely impactful in your life?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I decided that I would really focus on the internet and giving away my output for free, and mostly stopping doing peer-reviewed scholarly research, and devoting all my time to blogging and online essays and online education and my podcast. And that has gone phenomenally well for me.

• 40:52Tim Ferriss?

  When did you make that decision?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  In retrospect, it doesn't sound that scary. I started blogging, I think, 17 years ago. And the notion that I would do this every day for what is now almost 17 years, at the time, was extremely weird. And I was doing well in my other endeavors. It wasn't, there was some kind of failure that needed to be patched up. But I just thought, I'm going to do this. I'm not going to look back. At first, like, no one paid any attention. For years, I just kept on doubling down happily, you know, in my oblivious fog. And it worked out great.

• 41:27Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to push back a little bit on the oblivious fog. You're a smart guy. You're able to.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  You didn't say I was a meta rational guy. You said I was a smart guy. Maybe I should be offended.

• 41:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was going to meta rational next. That was my second compliment. What was your decision making framework for doing that 17 years ago? So that places us around 2003 roughly.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:54Tim Ferriss?

  How did you make that decision, which at the time to many very smart, I will use the word smart here, colleagues probably appeared absurd. What was your decision making framework? Or how did you think about making that decision?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure I had a decision making framework. I think in a way I'm dysfunctional as a decision maker at that level. I did it for a day. I enjoyed it and I just didn't stop doing it. In a very selfish, curious, greedy with information way. And it just became quickly impossible to turn that ship around. So I thought, well, I've got to do more of this. And I would hesitate to recommend my so-called decision making process to anyone.

• 42:44Tim Ferriss?

  What was the positive feedback loop on the daily experience that kept you going for years before it seemingly gained traction? What was it that appealed so much to you?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  For three or four years, like we had a few thousand readers, but it wasn't a thing and it hadn't taken off. It was fine. And when I started, I thought, oh, it would be awesome to have only 5,000 readers, like some kind of utopian dream.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  But I lost track of that and I just found I was learning things, having to write all these posts. Like, oh, I need to learn this. I need to learn that. And then when I would write on it, I would change my mind. So I thought, well, this is some form of progress. And again, just stuck at it. And then later, like blogs became a thing. And even though blogging has mostly disappeared, it's gone very well for us. We've played a kind of last man standing strategy. And we haven't seen that kind of cutback in readership.

• 43:43Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's it's it's lost some of its newness sex appeal, but I would be astonished if long form or even not so long form writing, as long as it is of high quality for considered of high quality for at least a few thousand people or even less. I don't see that going away anytime soon. And I know that there are other media, any other forms of media that

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  are more fashionable perhaps, but I'm certainly not concerned for the longevity of your readership. I think you'll be fine. How how have you thought about branching out from the written word and making decisions about that?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Well, I do now a podcast every two weeks. That's called Conversations with Tyler. And that keeps me very busy and dominates a lot of my reading time. You know, that's for free. It's not a business for me. It probably costs me some money. But I find I read much better when I'm reading their work to go and interview them. So next I'll be doing Philip Tatlock, the guy who writes on prediction and super forecasters. That will force me to get my thoughts in order on those topics. After that, I think it's Emily St. John Mandel, who wrote Station Eleven, which coincidentally is a book about pandemics and she has a new book out. I read fiction much better when I know I'm talking to the author himself or herself.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  When I interviewed Martina Navratilova, I had to learn a lot about the history of tennis. I read like 50 books on the history of women's and also men's tennis. That was fantastic. I wouldn't have absorbed them in the same way if I wasn't going to be speaking to her. So I'm just keep on doing these podcasts. Again, totally dysfunctional decision making on my part.

• 45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we'll see.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you could certainly have good outcomes with bad process, but I'm not totally convinced it's bad process.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  No, it's not bad, but it's not something I could explain or justify in terms of a model of rationality.

• 45:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's also low risk in the sense that, I mean, the max downside risk of doing this is is very, it would seem very low, whereas a lot of the benefits, as you said, putting a Putting an incentive and deadline in place so that you immerse yourself in these topics and worlds that you might not otherwise put so much energy into is certainly a benefit. How did you prepare for Neil Stephenson? Because I've read Neil's books, and for people who don't know, you have Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, you have many others, and these are not short books. These are, in fact, incredibly long books in many cases. How did you prepare for that interview?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  He was, in some ways, an easier-than-usual prep, because there are many Neil Stephenson books I already had read, which was a huge head start, just as you've read them. And then there were others that I simply cannot read, like Anathem, which I suspect is brilliant, but I'm just not a good enough reader, or not smart enough, or not something to get through it. It just loses me. And I've tried, at least twice, I tried again to prep for him, I couldn't read it. And it might be his best book. So I just had to put that one down, and I figure, well, this is Neil Stephenson, I'm just going to talk to him about stuff. A lot of the obvious, usual questions about science and the future and technology, and

• 47:09Speaker 01

  he'll just be interesting. So that was, I wouldn't say easy, but easier than many. Whereas people who know a very direct thing, like Emily Wilson, she was the translator of Homer's Odyssey. I had to know Homer's Odyssey really, really well, like, that's what she does. I can't just blah, blah, blah to her about, you know, what do you think of Peter Thiel and the tech stagnation debate? We talked 85% about Homer's Odyssey. That was one of my hardest preps.

• 47:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  She's wonderful, by the way, if you ever want to have her on, but it's really tough. I spent months of my life preparing for her, and it was over in an hour.

• 47:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, well, it's a better ratio than the Olympics, I guess.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:54Tim Ferriss?

  How are you preparing for the conversation about, well, I suppose it's not going to be limited to, but Station Eleven, if I'm getting that, that, that right, and pandemics? What do you, what is, what is, how are you thinking about navigating that conversation and preparing for it?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  I watch her on YouTube. I read all of the interviews with her I can find online. Her two main novels I will read twice, and her earlier, less well-known novels I've read once. And she's from Canada. I need to think about Canada, where she grew up in Victoria, what her literary inspirations are, ask her about those, reread books that she has read. Think, you know, I looked again at Michael Crichton's The Endromodus Train. She wrote a novel about a pandemic. Well, now I have to think about Boccaccio as well, right? And you just have to like dig deep into all your resources. Like, what have I got here? And we'll see how it goes. But she's a hard prep.

• 48:49Tim Ferriss?

  You, you have read, I mean, you and Patrick Collison are sort of birds of a feather here. For people who don't know, Patrick Collison of Stripe, in that you are voracious readers and consume more books than the next 10 people put together, than the next 10 high achievers put together, I think many would say. What are the books that you have gifted or recommended to people most that come to mind? I know that you have a huge sort of pantheon of options available, but what, what books have you recommended most to others? We, we had a couple come up earlier in terms of people who might be interested

• 49:31Tim Ferriss?

  in exploring fiction or complex nonfiction. What other books come to mind, if, if any?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  I'm very suspicious about recommending books to people because there's the risk they might listen to what you say. And if you're recommending to them the book that is not like the most valuable next book they should read, in a sense, you're wronging them. So.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  I don't give people books that often. One thing I try to encourage people to do is to read more about music and the arts. Not a particular book, but I say, take the creators you love, whoever, whatever they may be, and read about them. If it's the Beatles, great. If it's Beethoven. And really dig into what you might think of as your hobbies, but to read about them in an intense way. And just think about like Beethoven, how did he manage his career? Like, what were his productivity tricks? What did he do wrong? And think through some of the questions you've written and talked about at length, but in the context of your cultural heroes. If it's like, what do I tell people to read most often? You know, I am not myself religious, but usually I'll tell my non-religious friends they ought to go read the Bible.

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  It's a wonderfully deep and brilliant book. And most non-religious people, even most religious people barely know it. Or Shakespeare.

• 50:50Tim Ferriss?

  If someone said they said to you they wanted to become more meta-rational, if that were their stated objective, are there any resources you would point them to or practices?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Again, I'd like to know where they are starting from. But spend some time sitting down with groups of people you don't usually sit down with is my most likely recommendation. And that will depend on the person. So there's one colleague of mine, I'm telling him, you need to travel to some very poor countries and sit down and speak to some very poor in terms of income individuals. And that's what I think he should do. Obviously, if someone, say, grew up in the slums of Mumbai, that's probably not my advice, right?

• 51:42Tim Ferriss?

  What if they were well-to-do Manhattanites?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 51:48Tim Ferriss?

  Who felt like, who felt like they were, who felt like they were prone to confirmation bias due to various incentives they had. So they would, sort of, they've embedded themselves in a position, they have stories they've believed, maybe they're stories from their parents, who knows? Yeah, what's the, besides spending time with someone who is, from an income perspective, poorer, what other advice might you have for such a person?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Well, if you're a Manhattanite, you actually will be in proximity to a fair number of poorer people. But I find on average Manhattanites tend to think the world comes to them. And I suspect this is a delusion of sorts. Also, people say, oh, Silicon Valley's a bubble. Well, maybe, but people in Silicon Valley don't actually think the whole world comes to them. They realize they're in a very special part of the world. And I think if Manhattanites would realize that more, they would then just leave Manhattan. If only to the other boroughs. I mean, try Staten Island, right? Don't go to Paris, don't go to London. Try Staten Island, West Virginia, somewhere like Macedonia. And don't think all these things are already coming to you in Manhattan, because they're not.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  You're getting a super-filtered version of it. And you're just seeing more Manhattan. Nothing wrong with that. I love Manhattan. Grew up in New Jersey. But a lot of remedial work probably needs to be done.

• 53:18Tim Ferriss?

  What are you working on personally right now? Are there any particular

• 53:25Tim Ferriss?

  problems or

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  sort of personal development objectives that you've set out for yourself?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Well, I'm writing a new book, and it's on what do the social sciences know about spotting and evaluating talent? And I have a project, this emergent venture, as you referred to before, where there's a fund of money I give away to individuals who are talented, or I hope they are talented. So really, just trying to get better at that and trying to get better at communicating what I know or think I know to other people. And that's very hard. There is no single, really, go-to source on how to evaluate talent. People who have not yet succeeded, but maybe they will.

• 54:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just pausing to think for a moment here. What have you learned about interviewing? If you look at, let's just say, from either pre-podcast to right now, or first few episodes of the podcast to right now, what have you learned about interviewing, or how have you improved as an interviewer? And you can interpret that however you like, because there are many different types of interviewing.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I've improved. Hard for me to say. But I think getting people to talk about what they do, actually do, tends to be good. Getting people willing to be weird, getting people to be conversational, getting people to be engaged and passionate. The worst question is, please tell us about your latest book. I try to start with something super specific, something they're shocked that I might know about them, and then just, you know, dig deeper.

• 55:12Tim Ferriss?

  How do you get them to be willing to be weird?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Well, most of them are weird to begin with, right? So, that's like a big force on your side. Being weird yourself, like, relaxes the environment, it makes it non-threatening, just signaling you're not there to, you know, screw them over, that you want to be there to be weird with them, and that you're actually doing this because you enjoy it. And usually it works, not always. Some people just like clam up, they think they're going to get a government job someday. Try not to have them on, right?

• 55:48Tim Ferriss?

  What does weird mean to you? How would you define weird?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Well, in a sense, it's the weird that is truly normal. It's how people actually are, like what they really care about, think about. So, in a sense, you're getting them out of the weird. The weird is the stage presence we put on, and all the puffery, and unwillingness to say what you really think, because my confirmation hearing, whatever. So, once you stop seeing the weird as actually weird, I think that's also a help. It's like, this is natural, let's just do it. And most people respond to that, I think. But you do many of these yourself, right?

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I'm not convinced I know what I'm doing either. I somewhat selfishly have surrendered to following personal interests in interviews with the assumption that if I find it interesting, I have at least a guaranteed satisfied audience of one person. But I think I have a very particular personality that then imprints my approach to asking questions, but I'm okay with that. I don't have a desire to be anything other than who I am at the moment when it comes to asking questions at least.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Never have a guest on you don't care about, right?

• 57:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  That's a good rule.

• 57:07Tim Ferriss?

  That is a good rule. What other rules have you developed, if any?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  You mean in podcasting, conversing?

• 57:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Just get to the point immediately. The old saying, "Personality is revealed on weekends." I think you present a version of that in one of your books.

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  What does the person do on weekends? Probably the same as what they do on weekdays, but bring out that side of them, right? And just asking the person, in essence, "What are your open browser tabs right now?" It's one way of getting at who they are.

• 57:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And the browser tabs don't lie, right?

• 57:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. That is a great question. That is a really great question. So, part of the reason, not surprisingly, that I might be asking this, so that I can borrow and use in the future, but the future is now. So, here we are, a few seconds after you just said that. What are some of the open browser tabs on your computer?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Twitter is always open. WordPress for blogging is always open. Several sets of email, always open. WhatsApp, always open. And then, right now, I will have typically five or six tabs to specific articles, which at the moment are all coronavirus. That's atypical. Usually, they're more varied. But right now, there's two big stories. There's the election campaign season, which I hate following and don't really write about, and coronavirus. So, it's going to be coronavirus.

• 58:30Tim Ferriss?

  What are you reading about coronavirus? This is of great interest to me. I've been tracking it very closely for a few weeks. And I know this is topical, but I do think that, in a sense...

• 58:48Tim Ferriss?

  There's a parallel to the expression, and I'm going to butcher this, and I'm afraid I don't know the attribution, but that adversity doesn't build character, it reveals character. And I do think that with the, let's call it threat on one hand, panic on the other, and they're not totally separate, everything going on with coronavirus, the challenges of parsing good from bad information, reliable from unreliable information, many of the frailties in thinking, or logic, or meta rationality that otherwise would go somewhat unnoticed day to day are becoming much more pronounced in a lot of people, and many of them, and

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  maybe present company included, are not aware just how those things are manifesting. So what are you, what are you reading, and how are you thinking about this, this particular coronavirus?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  We're speaking in very early March.

• 59:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  And it seems to me there are several distinct episodes. One is Wuhan, there's other parts of China, there's South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Northern Italy, Washington State, Princess Diamond cruise ship, and the different numbers from these separate locations, they don't really add up.

• 1:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  So I'm treating it like a Sherlock Holmes puzzle. How do we make sense of all of these collectively comparing them to each other? So yes, of course, there are data mistakes, but what's your theory of data mistakes where they all fit together? And I still actually don't find a way of making it add up. So I'm trying not to approach it as like a lecturer, like telling everyone, do this, don't do that, wash your hands, probably good advice, but as a kind of puzzle, and to stay open about it and see what it brings me, and also see which of the responses are the best ones. So far, Singapore is looking quite good, but you know, there's plenty of play left,

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  so to speak, and the United States, it seems, has let the coronavirus get into its healthcare system, and it did nothing about it for six weeks in what could end up being really a kind of huge crime of omission.

• 1:01:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You know, I'm struggling with, with where to go with this, because I recognize we have a large audience listening. How do you, how do you currently plan to?

• 1:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  Increase the resolution on those puzzle pieces or to continue informing yourself in such a way that the picture becomes clearer and not more difficult to make out. How do you think about information consumption?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  There's more data every day and I will write out the puzzles as I find them and try to think them through as I write them out and then get feedback. And I'm not sure where I'll arrive with this. One hopes, of course, it just goes away and the puzzles remain that puzzles. At this point, that's seeming a bit less likely than it had been. So I'm afraid to say, I think we're going to find out more than we want to know. I'm not really worried about that. Like, if it all remains unresolved, I can just go away and celebrate.

• 1:02:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Aside from, for instance, I mean Johns Hopkins has a very good daily newsletter, which I would consider reasonably uncharged, politically speaking. You had mentioned someone on Twitter who you follow and I'm blanking on the name.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Helen Branswell, she's Public Health in Toronto.

• 1:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that last name?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  It's B R A N S W E L L, I believe.

• 1:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other particular sources of information or other people you are following who you find to be reasonably level-headed about how they're approaching and analyzing this?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  There's four or five. I don't remember their Twitter handles by memory, but you know, they're in the list of people I follow. If you just go through that, it will be pretty clear which ones they are.

• 1:03:04Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And then I find by being out there, writing about it in an open, non-hysterical way, I'm just sent a flood of useful information. And that's arguably my main source. And I don't mean to say I trust it all, but you cross-check and you think and then you talk to people you know and you get a bit further.

• 1:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you, well, I'm also assuming then that this was your initiative, but why did you choose to create Emergent Ventures? How did that come about?

• 1:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  You have a million projects. Why have another one and why this one?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  There's a whole world of philanthropy out there, and I think it's one of the least well-functioning sectors of the American economy. You can't blame it on government. It's not, it's not that heavily regulated, right? So much of it is bureaucratic and risk averse and people doing the same things. And I thought, let's go back to earlier models of giving from the Renaissance or the 18th century, where in essence, there was no bureaucracy, one person who says yes or no. We don't ask anyone for a visa. We don't ask anyone about credentials. Do you have a PhD? Whatever. It's basically 1,500 words. Tell us who you are and what's your story and what you're going to do. And people can use that space

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  more or less as they wish. We ask them like, tell us one value that you consider to be a value. We have that question. And we've now had about 80 winners and we cut them a check, in essence.

• 1:04:43Tim Ferriss?

  How many, how many applicants are you vetting those 80 from?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I think it's about 800 now. So there are most, the rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I'm lowering it just by talking about the program, but we've had, even though it's only about a year and a half old, we've had people go on to, you know, start companies, successful ventures. People end up in high positions in governments. A lot are just travel grants for young people, people who are, say, from ages 15, 16 up to 20, who get to meet mentors. I hope it's changed the course of their lives. Those are often travel grants to Silicon Valley. But it can be anywhere, really.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  And there's two researchers at Dartmouth. They've created a kind of Wikipedia-like structure that now contains data about every Indian village, in essence. Not every village is filled in, but we have the capacity to create and store and use demographic data about every Indian village. This is a not-for-profit venture. I think it will greatly improve public health and policymaking in India in the future. There's a fellow who is starting a kind of charter city in Zambia with Zambians. So, many exciting things going on there. Young Indian woman, I think she just turned 18, starting a bus company. She's raised really quite a bit of venture capital. So for me, it's a very exciting, rewarding thing to do.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  I'm paid nothing to do it. The evaluator is me. There's no panel, there's no bureaucracy. It's thumbs up or thumbs down. And I think far, far more philanthropy should work this way.

• 1:06:29Tim Ferriss?

  What will success look like? Or how do you... And it could be just a subjective feel, but how do you determine whether this program has been successful over what period of time?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  So many people in philanthropy obsess over measurement. And they end up tending to do the same thing. So I'm actually at my margin, somewhat anti-measurement. I don't want everyone to be anti-measurement, but my view is if I need to measure, you failed. Right? So if I supported Malcolm Gladwell, right? When he was a kid. Well, could I then measure how many books he sold? I mean, I could try, but it's like, come on, it's Malcolm Gladwell. So if you need to measure, you failed. So that's my simple rule. You know, we'll see. I may never know.

• 1:07:22Tim Ferriss?

  Of all of the many, many, many, many... If you look at, rather, the posts you've put out, the classes you've taught, the books you've written, what are some of the views that you currently hold or still hold? Or perspectives that are most controversial, would you say? Meaning they just, they seem to kick the hornet's nest, wherever that hornet's nest may be. What are some of the views or beliefs that are most controversial?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  You know, in the world of 2020, where the two leaders of the two parties at the moment seem to be Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, I no longer know what is a controversial view, in fact. I used to know what my controversial views were. I think in general, we should do much more to boost the rate of economic growth, devote fewer resources to the elderly and much more to the young, and take more chances, and travel more, and learn other languages, and be much, much more interested in foreign cultures. I'm not sure those are controversial. They're obviously not controversial with a sliver of a particular demographic, but I'm not sure many people really mean them either.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  So, maybe my most controversial view is it's no longer clear what our controversial views are.

• 1:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  So, I would love to ask you, because it's, I think, easy to be intimidated by how much you do, and certainly seemingly do very, very successfully. You're able to digest sort of nonfiction pages in seconds and sort of aggregate data from disparate sources into coherent blog posts that influence millions of people ultimately, and so on and so forth.

• 1:09:26Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to try to offset that with a discussion, doesn't have to be long, but a discussion of a tough time or a failure that you've experienced, and specifically, if there is a favorite failure that comes to mind, meaning a failure you experienced which was very difficult at the time, or just a dark period that somehow set you up or contributed to greater success later, if that makes any sense.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yes, you know, I feel I've been very fortunate in life, and I think I have about the most even temperament of anyone I know. Like, I literally don't have unhappy days.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  It would be hard to say I've had zero in life, but I think I'm almost weirdly never unhappy in a way that's good for productivity, but maybe almost inhuman and to be a little bit feared or looked down upon or not thought well of. I think that's a better way to think of me than to hear my like story of failure, like a few years in graduate school, yes, I felt pretty lonely. I didn't have a girlfriend. I was like a nerdy kid. That was bad for me. I mean, that would be the best I could do. And that's like so cliched and kind of pitiful. I don't know, like the big life setback tale. Not sure what that's supposed to be.

• 1:10:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's a fair answer.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  That's a weird answer, but it's weirder than it sounds, I would just say.

• 1:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Have you always been even killed in that respect? Is it just out of the womb that was your, that was your, your programming? Or is that something that you developed over time?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Uh, both. I think that was my natural inclination. And just as you mature, you become more that way. But I've always felt pretty happy. I suspect my peak happiness is well below that of most people. Hard to prove that or measure that. But intuitively, when I see people very, very, very happy, it's quite strange to me. I feel gee, I've never felt this. Uh, but same when people are depressed. So I think, think my range is compressed, uh, in an unusual way.

• 1:11:39Tim Ferriss?

  So if for many people, they strive to feel happy, or perhaps more accurately to not feel unhappy, right? And much of their decisions, many of their decisions and behavior are kind of governed or driven by that. Are there any feelings that you prefer not to feel that come to mind? I mean, is, is there something for you that is analogous to unhappiness for other people?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Well, I feel guilty about my numerous shortcomings when it comes to behavior. So for instance, I think to eat animals raised under terrible conditions is wrong, but still mostly I do it. I've tried to improve. I've improved somewhat, but I'm reminded of that regularly by what other people do or write. And I just think that's wrong. I think I fall short. Uh, I guess at this point I have to conclude I'm too selfish to change it. So I feel bad about that. But it mustn't be that bad, right? And I feel bad that I don't feel worse about it as well.

• 1:12:45Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  You could always do more for charity, right?

• 1:12:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  That's another, it's like never enough, is it?

• 1:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  For people who wanted to develop a greater, a higher level of equanimity. Basically, if they said, I want to train myself in some fashion to be more like you Tyler, in so, in so much as I don't experience at least the, the acute lows that perhaps I experience. Would you have any recommendations for, for those people? Are there any particular,

• 1:13:25Tim Ferriss?

  any particular suggestions, reading, resources, anything whatsoever that, that would come to mind that you've seen help other people?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not going to say like, go read the Stoics. I mean, Ryan Holiday can tell you that.

• 1:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, Ryan, Ryan's got that covered. Yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I feel a bit the people in that position. It's like they want a kind of talisman, almost like a voodoo object.

• 1:13:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  And I don't know if they really want to be more detached and dispassionate, or they just want the talisman. And maybe my advice would be to think through, do you just want the talisman? That's fine. Don't feel bad about that. But like, there's a really cheap and easy way to buy the talisman, like buy one of my books, read my blog. That's free.

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Uh, and you know, pat yourself on the back and go away and forget that was your original motive. If you really want to do it, I don't know. Probably the fact that you're asking is a signal that it's someone more in the talisman direction.

• 1:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, what is, could you elaborate on what you mean by talisman?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Emily St. John Mandel just tweeted, I think this morning, that there's this risk of a pandemic with coronavirus, and she wrote a novel about a pandemic that is really, truly horrible, kills most people in the world, and she can't understand why her book is selling so many more copies now. I suspect people want to buy it as a kind of protection against the worst-case scenario, like they feel they faced up to it, they own it, a bit they control it, I think I used the voodoo analogy a bit earlier, and thus they're a bit safer. We sometimes use comedy this way or see horror movies for similar reasons, and that's a talisman. You do it for a complex psychological reason, to process an idea and be done with it, and not necessarily to really incorporate what's there.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  And that's fine, I don't think we should look down on that, but, you know, if someone asks, I'm going to say, is this a talisman, or do you want the real thing?

• 1:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, what would distinguish those two within the context of the question I'm asking? So I'll, I will, just because you brought it up, mention, for instance, the Stoics. So I do think that, and we don't have to belabor this point, but the fact that I ask about resources, why would that indicate that I want a talisman, or I'm seeking a talisman, if I have found the regular review and practice of, say, Stoic principles to actually be of great benefit, much along the lines of cognitive behavioral therapy or something like that? So I do think that has impacted how I relate to the world and relate to others in the world. So I would say that that has tremendous practical value.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Sure, I'm pro-talisman, but I think, you know, it's like therapy, there's two reasons you might go to therapy. One is to feel you did something about your problem, and that could itself make you better. And the other is, your actual conversation with the therapist is useful. Both operate, there's nothing wrong with the talisman use of therapy, and with the Stoics, probably both operate. You know, great, the talisman actually makes the Stoics better. In fact, they're good for two things, not just one.

• 1:16:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I guess, I'd love for you to just elaborate on why that use that I described is...

• 1:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  Of the talisman.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Uh, variety. Well, that could be real learning, right? But the.

• 1:16:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  The version of the talisman use of the Stoics would be that ex ante, you feel a kind of personal and social anxiety that you haven't done enough to calm yourself. And maybe you're just never going to be that calm. But your meta-anxiety about not having calmed yourself. You can lower perhaps by buying and reading the Stoics. Maybe you'll forget what they said on a test three years later. But at the end of the day, you did something, you went through a process, you had a mastery over some part of your life. And you feel better and the anxiety is diminished. I think that happens quite often. In addition to whatever you learn from them.

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  Do you feel like you have uh, such talismans in your own decision making or behaviors or is that?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, sure. No, no reason to think I'm any different. And a lot of the books I read, maybe if I felt some anxiety, oh, there's this book out there, Tyler, you haven't read it yet. And I go read it. I'm not saying I learned nothing from the book, but part of the enjoyment is the alleviation of the anxiety, right?

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right, sure. Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  And too, too many books are like that. Like, I wish more of them had wonderful, incredible content.

• 1:17:56Tim Ferriss?

  How do you choose your guests for your podcast?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Uh, mostly the people I want to speak to and the people I wish to prepare for. So there'll be a lot of economics, uh, some public figures, uh, people who have written novels, just people who know a lot. People who are what I call infavores, people who are intense or curious. Uh, it helps if they're nearby, so I do all of mine face to face. A few of them are public events. So just like, can this be pulled off is a big question. Doing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that was a dream for me. I watched him when I was a kid play basketball and I saw his last game in the NBA.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  I had a chance to do Kareem. How could I not do that? Trying to get William Shatner now. Probably it will fail. I don't care how old he is. He's William Shatner.

• 1:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  Who are other people? Who are other people on your dream list? On your wish list?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Brian Eno, the British musician.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  I sent, I had an email forwarded to him and I'm still waiting for him to respond. He strikes me as the kind of guy who might respond seven years after the invite. Most people, it's like if you don't hear in a week, you figure it won't happen. This is Brian Eno. He could respond at any time with either a yes or a no.

• 1:19:12Tim Ferriss?

  For, for you, we talked a bit about the, the changes of perspective or changing your mind on, on anything. And you mentioned, I guess it was regional economics and we spoke about Chile. Uh, are there any new behaviors that have been particularly beneficial for you that you've only started in the last year or handful of years? Any particular new behaviors or habits that have had a non-trivial impact on your life?

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Uh, it's hard to tell. I've spent more time, uh, with weights as a form of exercise. I vaguely feel it's helped. I, I don't have any measurement I could cite for you. And, uh,

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  how have my behaviors changed in the last year? Eating smaller portions of food, which I think has helped. You know, my diet is just eat what you were going to eat, but eat two thirds of it.

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  And I've had the discipline to make that work. You don't have to fuss over what you're going to cut out, right? You just divide by two thirds. And, uh, just trying to be kinder to people. Again, I'm not even sure I'm managing to try to do it, but that's like always a priority or sometimes a priority.

• 1:20:31Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what does that look like being kinder to people? Or why, why did that become something of, of focus for you?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  If you can be encouraging in a non-trivial way, it can really mean a lot to people. And it takes several kinds of effort, this effort in the moment, but also the skill of how to sincerely have a sense of what would be the encouraging thing to say. And it seems to me that's greatly undersupplied in the world. And like some of the things that are undersupplied are just people telling other people what they're good at, which happens plenty, but really kind of accurate, incisive, this is what you're good at and why, greatly undersupplied. Supplying people, especially younger people, visions of what they could be, greatly undersupplied.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  But you also want to be better at it rather than worse, right? So making that more of a priority. And some of the grants I've given out through Emergent Ventures to younger people, I've also tried to give them a sense of what I think they could be. And I suspect that's more important in some cases than the grant. In a way, it's complemented by the grant. In a way, you're giving the grant so you can package it with this vision, and the vision will matter, and the grant makes the vision more vivid or more focal.

• 1:21:53Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Like they believe the vision because you spent real dollars on them.

• 1:21:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I only have a few questions remaining, really on my list, so to speak, but I would love to explore anything certainly that I may have missed. This may sound like a cliched question, and I'm sure that it's not going to be a new one to my listeners, but you think very deeply about a lot of things. If you could put a message, a quote, an image on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that were to reach billions of people...

• 1:22:38Tim Ferriss?

  What might you put on that billboard? Doesn't have to be super short, but is there anything that comes to mind? If you wanted to impart something, convey something to billions of people, what you'd say, assuming they all are able to read the same language, of course?

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Well, social context is so important for messages. So as we just were saying, if you communicate to people a vision of what they could be, it needs to be packaged with some real behavior on your part, probably, to have impact. And I also, as an economist, tend to think very often the market works. So if I just put up on a billboard, like Tyler says, do the right thing, I'm pretty sure that would be ineffective. And if you look at billboards we actually have, like what do you see on those billboards? The billboards I see, a lot of them are advertisements for insurance. Some of them are don't drive drunk. You see bail bondsman on billboards and suicide hotlines. So I guess I would study the market and pick one of those four things like,

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  you know, buy this insurance, bail bondsman, suicide hotline, don't drive drunk, after studying the actual market. Because I don't think I have some idea that's so scarce that if it's on the billboard with no supporting social context, that it will mean a damn. I'd say go with the market.

• 1:23:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, if we take, if we take, let's take a more technologically advanced example. If you could have something pop up on everyone's iPhone and stay there as the background for a day. Really, the point that I'm stretching for here is to get, getting large numbers of people to consider a statement or a prompt of some type for a period of time. So putting aside the billboard as form factor, is there, is there anything that?

• 1:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  You've got it. You can choose not to use it, but you have the option of imparting something via the background of everyone's iPhones for a period of time.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  The people with iPhones, of course, I worry about much less. But I would say this, I think the social returns to religion, on average, are fairly high. So, the religion most likely that people would accept in a particular area, I would want the message to be messages about that religion. So if it's the United States, that would often, but not always, be Christianity. Again, that's not going to work in every part of the world. But I worry, families are not having enough children, we're seeing depopulation in many countries, religious families have more children, religious people tend to be somewhat happier. So I would seek that the messages would make people more religious.

• 1:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  And you, yet you yourself are not religious, but I suppose that is, you wouldn't choose religion to make yourself happier because you have very few unhappy days. But you yourself are not a practicing religious person?

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  I'm agnostic leaning toward atheist, so definitely not religious, was not brought up religious, my parents were not religious. But I look at the data, it seems religion is the most effective way we have of carrying good ideas. And at the margin, I want to see more of that. I think also, I, you know, I don't do any drugs, I don't drink. So some people abuse drugs and alcohol, and religion there can help. So I don't have that practical reason for needing more religion also. So let's say 10% of people, you know, abuse drugs or alcohol. That's a pretty high percentage. And if you think the truly religious are less likely to, that's a big expected gain.

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this has been, this has been very fun for me. Is there anything that we have not explored that you would like to explore or discuss that I haven't brought up?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  How do you restore a lost focus?

• 1:26:40Tim Ferriss?

  How do I restore a lost focus?

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  I would say cold exposure, exercise, and having a routine that I do not deviate from. So, most often for me, if I feel a loss of focus, it is either physiological, so it is, there's, I'm not eating enough, I am low energy because I've had poor sleep for a period of days, something like that, almost all of which can be remedied by attention to basic elements of, of my routine. So I would say that, that, that's my answer. If, if I have deviated from routine, if I'm making too many decisions each day, that should be replaced with some type of default answer. What I have for breakfast,

• 1:27:32Tim Ferriss?

  what time I'm waking up, where I'm going to write or record, etc., that usually, or I shouldn't say usually, but often contributes to a feeling of being unfocused. So it's, it's when I abandon my

• 1:27:48Tim Ferriss?

  routines, some of the elements of which would be default meals and exercise, and also cold exposure for a second in the morning.

• 1:27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Restoring that order usually helps me.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Do you think cold exposure is partly a placebo or talisman, or you think cold exposure works?

• 1:28:08Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I, it, it depends in part what we mean by works. I, I would, does it?

• 1:28:16Tim Ferriss?

  Does it provide a jolt of adrenaline and other plausible physiological changes that seem to contribute to more alertness? Yes, I would say the answer is yes. Could be talisman, and if by talisman we really mean placebo effect or the desire to feel that we are doing something to address our problem rather than the actual efficacy of said approach, sure. I mean, I think placebo effect is everywhere. So, just as nocebo effect can affect things. But I can tell you that I find it personally helpful, but I do think there are some certainly obvious and then not so obvious plausible physical mechanisms that could improve alertness

• 1:29:01Tim Ferriss?

  when you put yourself into forty degree Fahrenheit water for a period of time.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  And do you fear ending up in an equilibrium where you say no to too many things? And how do you avoid that? Or maybe you just think it's not a risk?

• 1:29:16Tim Ferriss?

  What type of equilibrium do you mean?

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  So, we all are faced with many demands on our time, and we have to learn to say no. Give a talk here, visit this, you know, whatever. So, we become very good at saying no, but it's quite easy to say no once you're good at it. It's like, oh, an email comes, no, no. And you end up saying no too much, and you end up with too little serendipity in your life in a way you clearly would have had at age seventeen, or even twenty-three, or maybe twenty-seven. But how do you refresh the supply of serendipity and keep the habit of saying no to the things you ought to say no to?

• 1:29:50Tim Ferriss?

  I do that through friends who have broad and diverse social networks, and they are known friends of mine publicly, so they have broad social interactions, and people will pitch them on things intended for me. I like my friends to feel there is a reputational risk slash gain to making introductions or suggesting introductions. And in that...

• 1:30:19Tim Ferriss?

  Using that approach, I have found that the introductions I end up agreeing to provide more than enough serendipity for me, and they come highly qualified and highly vetted. So I then rely on a sort of more perhaps systematic approach, or more tightly controlled approach to serendipity, which sounds like an oxymoron almost, versus looking for serendipity, say, in my inbox or Twitter feed. I do look at, I prefer to be able to opt into serendipity as opposed to feeling like I'm being waterboarded with serendipity.

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  I also get an absurdly high volume of inputs, so that could be reflective, as you said earlier, perhaps, that I'm making mistakes further upstream. But I'm not worried about equilibrium. I have more, more than enough intellectual stimulation at this point, and of a higher quality signal, for me at least.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  Do you worry that too many of your friends are highly successful people?

• 1:31:31Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, mostly because I was only referring to my publicly known friends. I don't talk, I don't talk about my non-public friends publicly, because I think that would be opening them to all sorts of problems that they don't want to have and I don't want them to have. So I don't worry about that. I have a lot of friends who are on the full spectrum socio-economically, and, you know, you were talking about addiction earlier. I mean, my best friend, growing up, was, oh, well, until a few years ago, a fisherman, very low income, and died of a fentanyl overdose.

• 1:32:11Tim Ferriss?

  So he would certainly not map, from a social or socio-economic perspective, on top of any portion of the Venn diagram of the public friends that I have. So I don't worry about it too much. I also historically travel a lot and have spent time among the homeless in San Francisco, for instance. I actually paid someone to give me a sort of day-long immersion tour of like the underground sort of economics and dynamics of homelessness in San Francisco. As you said, you don't have to go to Mumbai.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:51Tim Ferriss?

  You can find destitution and poverty and addiction right around the corner if you live in an urban center. So there are plenty of things that I would say I worry about. I do think I probably lean towards the worrywart side of things on the sliding scale, but I don't worry about all of my friends being in one place or being well-to-do or successful in quotation marks. I don't worry about that one.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:33:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Any other questions? I'm happy to field questions.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  What's your favorite movie?

• 1:33:29Tim Ferriss?

  My favorite movie?

• 1:33:33Tim Ferriss?

  I've watched different movies for different purposes. I would say that Princess Bride, The Princess Bride is very high up there.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:33:45Tim Ferriss?

  I think William Goldman is just a genius screenwriter. A lot of the movies that are my favorites are movies I've watched hundreds of times on repeat while writing.

• 1:33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Babe would be another one.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah, those are two of my favorite movies.

• 1:34:02Tim Ferriss?

  What's your favorite movie? Or some of yours?

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Ingmar Bergman movies as a whole would be my favorite part of cinema. Maybe Scenes from a Marriage being my all-time favorite of those, but just Empire Strikes Back is a favorite movie too.

• 1:34:17Tim Ferriss?

  So good, so good.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:34:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a great film. It's a great film. Amelie, another film I love. Spirited Away would be one of my absolute all-time favorites.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  I love Miyazaki movies, all of them.

• 1:34:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Spirited Away, I just think has, there's a lot of metaphor and just beautiful transformation in that movie that...

• 1:34:40Tim Ferriss?

  I find reveals itself as you watch it more and more. So I've, I've watched that movie a lot.

• 1:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  And those would be a few, those would be a few that come to mind. And then there are a bunch of flicks you might expect. I like, like the first Jason Bourne, The Bourne Identity and

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  It's a good movie.

• 1:35:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, Snatch, all these movies that I got hooked on a long time ago and haven't been able to give up. Casino Royale, I think is an exceptional film.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  You mean the later one, not the early David Niven one?

• 1:35:11Tim Ferriss?

  The later one, yeah, the later one.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 1:35:14Tim Ferriss?

  But I do enjoy film and fiction as a respite from the problem solving default that I think is a constant for me with

• 1:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  hyper rumination. And I think that's, that's very common in people who have suffered from, say, depression in the past, as I have fortunately no major episodes in the last five or six years, which I can attribute to a few things, talisman or otherwise. But, or would attribute, I suppose, in that case.

• 1:35:53Tim Ferriss?

  I think the ability to, for those people who are prone to hyper rumination, which can often take the form of obsession with the past in repetitive loops, in the case of depression or obsession with future scenarios, in the case of chronic anxiety, I think that, I think that film and fiction are, have high medicinal value.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  And let's say you could put your major commitments on hold, somehow freeze time in the life you're in, and take a year off and spend it somewhere. Where would you choose and why?

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  And then you just come back, you know, we put it on pause and you come back to the life you have.

• 1:36:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Does it have to be one location or can it be multiple locations?

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  It can be more than one, but you can't say everywhere, right?

• 1:36:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, it wouldn't be everywhere.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  So it could be, well, travel down the Amazon or, right, that's multiple locations. It has to be one kind of thing, one plan.

• 1:36:53Tim Ferriss?

  One plan. Uh, okay. I would, uh, if it has to have some theme, I would say, I would take a year, ideally with my, my beloved girlfriend, and perhaps a few close friends, if possible, to, uh, walk some of the pilgrimage trails around the world. So the, uh, I've, I've done a small portion of the Kumano Kodo in Japan.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  The Camino de Santiago is of interest to me.

• 1:37:27Tim Ferriss?

  But

• 1:37:30Tim Ferriss?

  extended, long-duration walking with a minimum of

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  necessities and material goods for that year with a minimum of inputs, I think would be, uh, be a tremendous way to spend a year.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  And how much do you think we're alike versus being different?

• 1:37:51Tim Ferriss?

  The two of us?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Two of us, yeah.

• 1:37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that's a great question. I, uh, there's a sort of an asymmetry of information here because I, I, I know less about you than I know about myself. My feeling is that we're quite similar. Yeah, there were, I, my feeling is that based on, I think we have many shared interests, uh, and intellectual interests, I would say that. I think you're imminently more qualified in speaking on most of these shared interests. But the, the topic of, of, of metarationality and metacognition, uh, which I realize are not exactly the same thing, but very interrelated, those are of incredible importance to me, and I think about them

• 1:38:38Tim Ferriss?

  constantly. So I think our, our avenues of inquiry and interests are very similar. Sounds like our hardwiring is very different, uh, just in terms of like the soft, the software that we have, I, I think is very different.

• 1:38:51Tim Ferriss?

  But, uh, I like those differences. I think the world doesn't need more than one of me, that's for sure. So, I really revel in the differences. I would say, uh, my impression, I'd like to hear your answer, but my impression is we probably have perhaps even more similarities than we realize. I mean, I do, I am a fan of alcohol and one might even say drugs on occasion, so we have that difference. But I think those may be largely cosmetic in some respect. So, what's your impression? What's your read?

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  I might be a bit more mono than you are. So, something like drugs, if there were a safe way to do it, and probably there is, I still wouldn't do it. I would figure it would distract me from a kind of program I've set for myself. Although I'm not religious, I think of my mental structure as somehow more like Protestant and mission-driven. I suspect you're more competitive than I am.

• 1:39:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Maybe. I've tried to be less competitive over time.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  I've never tried to be less competitive, whether or not I should, but I just think I'm less competitive to begin with.

• 1:40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. That could be true. That could be true. I've, uh, I think that many of my male role models growing up, sort of surrogate influences in that domain were coaches. And so I've, I think honed much of, well, honed makes it sound all positive, developed many of my behaviors and predispositions, some I'm sure I'm aware of and some certainly I'm not, through the lens of competition and receiving positive reinforcement when I win. So, that I think has been a huge blessing and provided a lot from the perspective

• 1:40:54Tim Ferriss?

  of achievement, but I do think that conditioning can be very problematic. So, I envy you being less competitive.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  What do you find of most value in religion?

• 1:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I, I think that...

• 1:41:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's sort of presumptive for me to say in a sense, because I don't consider myself religious. But...

• 1:41:28Tim Ferriss?

  I think a peace of mind with otherwise what would be considered unknowns. So frameworks for making decisions, rules that you don't have to come up with on your own, and an assurance of plans or certainties with things like death, for instance, which otherwise could be existentially overwhelming to many people.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  And you want to do these pilgrimages, right? That's striking. It sounds wonderful.

• 1:42:00Tim Ferriss?

  Say that one more time.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  But that you want to do all these pilgrimages, that's wonderful. But it's striking that that's your plan for the year. Is something almost defined by its religious nature.

• 1:42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, they are certainly, I think, for some people defined. The pilgrimages are defined by some, by their religious nature. I find religion endlessly fascinating, though I myself would not self-describe as religious. And I also find that...

• 1:42:34Tim Ferriss?

  I could perhaps get many of the same benefits of doing that if I walked the Appalachian Trail or one of these other long-defined paths. But I like the inbuilt

• 1:42:49Tim Ferriss?

  social interactions of stopping at inns or shrines, et cetera, with pit stops along the way for reflection.

• 1:42:58Tim Ferriss?

  So I would say that I am more a naturalist, or if I wanted to stretch and somebody said, "You have to choose a religion," maybe an animist of some type.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Well, Miyazaki, "If You Love Spirited Away," right? That movie resonates with you for a reason.

• 1:43:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. That I could still find tremendous value in pilgrimage and contemplate the deep meaning that these paths have had for people during very tumultuous, difficult times, or times, as all times are, of great uncertainty. I find that... I enjoy thinking about that, even though I wouldn't sort of...

• 1:43:43Tim Ferriss?

  I don't ascribe to any... Formal religious group.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  I took my daughter once to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. We had a fantastic time and the social resonance of it did truly matter for us.

• 1:43:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And not to get too, you can tear this apart, feel free, but I feel like there's a, there's a, there's a sort of a residue or a, an imprint that is made when you have thousands or millions of people traveling the same path that, whether it's just a story you make yourself or otherwise, there, there, I've, I've found my experiences on those paths to be quite non-ordinary. And that, that's, that, that could get into some pretty woo-woo, hand-wavy territory really quickly, but suffice to say, I just, I've, I've had very unusual experiences on, on some

• 1:44:44Tim Ferriss?

  of these, these pilgrimage paths. And I, I find that intrinsically interesting to explore.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  If you think about this interest in pilgrimages, the large number of guests or people written about in your books that you relate to, and then also your ability to quickly learn languages and master very idiosyncratic accents in, say, Spanish and German, I mean, do you have a sense in your own mind of how that all fits together? Like, what's your unified theory of you? Because those are three very striking things about you.

• 1:45:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  And maybe you've explained them somewhere that I haven't seen or heard, but this is my chance, so I'm asking you.

• 1:45:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so the, the, we have the pilgrimages, we have the language learning, and then the skill acquisition of sort of strange, idiosyncratic, eclectic things like horseback archery.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  But I, I have your book here, Tools of Titans, and your other books. There's so many different people you talk to or correspond with.

• 1:45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  And you manage to enter into their worlds in some way to draw them out.

• 1:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  Including on your podcast, of course.

• 1:45:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  So that's a skill.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  The pilgrimages and then the language with highly idiosyncratic accents done almost perfectly, I might add.

• 1:45:59Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thank you for that. I

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  But it's the mix of perfect and idiosyncratic that's unusual.

• 1:46:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say that if I had to come up with a unified theory of Tim, I've never tried before, but I'll take a stab at it and it might be very dissatisfying. And I appreciate the questions, by the way.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Well, this is what I've been thinking about.

• 1:46:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I

• 1:46:30Tim Ferriss?

  I think that much like you have been had certain software, perhaps since the beginning, that enables you to be to to handle the world with a certain degree of equanimity.

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  I think that my programming from the beginning has made me very sensitive to stimuli. I think that as a kid I was very, very sensitive, not in the pejorative sense that I got upset about things easily, but rather if I were a scale, I wasn't a pound scale. My senses were more of a jewelry scale or something like that jewel scale, excuse me. So when I was a kid, I had some terrible things happen to me and I may talk about those more on a future episode of the podcast, we'll see.

• 1:47:29Tim Ferriss?

  But suffice to say, I learned to it was safer and better to numb myself and desensitize myself operating in the world and developed a lot of habits. I think competition was one, high pain tolerance related to that, another, that allowed me to kind of bludgeon my sensitivity into submission so that I could achieve in the world. And I know this is a little long, but I'll wrap it up.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  No, this is great.

• 1:47:58Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, I think all of the things you described.

• 1:48:03Tim Ferriss?

  Reflect a slow rediscovery and reopening of those sensitivities. And I am definitely, at this point, an introvert who can perform for short periods of time as an extrovert, but I find it exceptionally energetically costly.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  I have a saying, it goes, "Introverts make the best extroverts."

• 1:48:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Because we're not really putting ourselves out there, in a way.

• 1:48:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Whereas the extroverts, there's so much social anxiety involved, like being on camera, being taped.

• 1:48:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. So, so I think that that sensitivity would, would, would be the unifying, the unifying, if it's a unifying theory, is just that I have, my perceptual aperture is by nature very wide, I have a very wide perceptual aperture. So I notice things like inflection in Mandarin Chinese, or inflection in Greek, or Turkish, or languages that I might just study for a few weeks while I'm traveling. I notice things that, for whatever reason, seem to only be noticed by a small percentage of, say, tourists in those places

• 1:49:25Tim Ferriss?

  who are actively focusing on a language. And I can find a walk of 100 miles extremely interesting because I notice, it's not dull to me, precisely because I notice so many things around me. But there are environments in which, if I'm noticing the details versus using these kind of 2D Simpsons-esque avatars for things, it can be very exhausting. So that's my best stab at answering your question.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  I very much hope you write and talk more about this, because I think it would be phenomenal.

• 1:50:04Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I expect I will be writing a bit more about it. And what about yourself? I mean, I know, I know, I'm just reflecting back a very good question, but I'd like to get some practice. What is, what is your unifying theory? The unifying theory of Tyler?

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  I think Tyler is quite curious, loves to collect information. I think in a way I'm more an information collector than economist or any other single thing. Very even keeled, maybe just somehow fundamentally difficult for those reasons, like hard to relate to. Definitely introverted, but sort of always game for the next thing. And I think what I take from religion is this Protestant notion of having a personal project that you're obligated to see through in a very serious way that I find quite American

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  and not really found in Protestantism elsewhere, or even kind of like the Jewish version of that, I'm not Jewish. But there's kind of a Jewish version of the American Protestant sense of obligation that I find culturally powerful and appealing. And, you know, I think not somehow being involved or engaged enough is my danger in many things. But there's a kind of thinness to myself, a kind of versatility, that I can grasp onto things or work with different people or make part of a project work that make me very productive and very flexible. And I can just kind of power through and keep on going and like just not ever stop

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  or feel the need to or need distraction. And when I do art, music, theater, whatever, to me, it's all piling on. It's not escape from something I'm doing that becomes too much. It's like intensification. So that's like part of my theory of Tyler, but I'm also convinced like we never know ourselves, right?

• 1:52:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  So we really don't. And that's part of the great tragedy of life, but it also makes life interesting.

• 1:52:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's part of the great tragedy and also, I suppose, part of the great incentive to find, find friends you can sit with who help you to discover more of yourself or develop more of yourself, not necessarily to compensate for being unable to know yourself completely, but.

• 1:52:41Tim Ferriss?

  Being a social creature and engaging with friends more deeply is a relatively new thing in my life, I would say, since regaining some of the sensitivities that I'd lost. So I find the, in a sense, the inability to know oneself completely a wonderful driver to facilitate more of those deep connections with others, at least for me.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:53:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and, uh, I...

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  I hope...

• 1:53:07Tim Ferriss?

  Go ahead.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 1:53:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I was just gonna say, I hope this, uh, I hope this is just the first of more conversations.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  I was gonna say exactly the same, so we are a bit more alike than we thought five seconds ago.

• 1:53:19Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing) I really appreciate you taking the time, Tyler. This has been great, and I appreciate you, uh, sort of pushing at the edges a bit and making me think, uh, which I always appreciate.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  And I will, in turn, think about this all more a great deal, and I hope you do too.

• 1:53:38Tim Ferriss?

  I will, I will. And, uh, people can find you at marginalrevolution.com, Conversations with Tyler, the podcast, which I definitely recommend people take a look at. They can find you on Twitter, @TylerCowen, and I'll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for people. You can find it very easily. Is there anything else you would like to mention before we wrap up?

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Just to thank you heartily, and, uh, 'til whenever.

• 1:54:05Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing) All right, thank you so much, and to everybody listening, and possibly watching. Thanks for tuning in. Watch out for your talismans. Work on your meta-rationality, and, 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? 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.

• 1:54:50Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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 ExpressVPN. I've been using ExpressVPN since last summer and I started using it as a full retail paying customer. I always test things before considering sponsors and I find it to be a super reliable way

• 1:55:35Tim Ferriss?

  to make sure that my data are secure and encrypted. Do you like how I said data are like a pompous ass? But I like to ensure that my data are secure and encrypted, but to do so without slowing down my internet speed. If you've ever used public wifi at say a hotel or coffee shop where I often work and as many of my listeners do, you're often sending data over an open network, meaning no encryption whatsoever. One way to ensure that all of your data are encrypted and cannot be easily read by hackers or script kiddies or whoever is by using ExpressVPN. And the onboarding process for ExpressVPN, meaning the signup flow, the use of the product is one of the best I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:56:20Tim Ferriss?

  All you need to do is download the ExpressVPN app on your computer or smartphone and then use the internet just as you normally would. You click one button in the ExpressVPN app to secure 100% of your network data. It's kind of ridiculously simple and as many of you know, I only recommend brands that I have researched and vetted thoroughly. For me, of the many VPN solutions out there, ExpressVPN is one of the best on the market and I use it personally. Here are a few reasons why. First, privacy. ExpressVPN does not log your data. Lots of cheap or free VPNs make money by selling your data, believe it or not, to ad companies and so on. ExpressVPN developed the technology. ...trusted server to prevent their servers from logging your information.

• 1:57:05Tim Ferriss?

  Second, speed. Many VPNs slow your connection down or make your device seem sluggish, just to a crawl. I've been using ExpressVPN for a while now, as I mentioned, and my internet speeds are blazingly fast. I don't even notice it. Honestly, I forget that it's even on. So, that includes when I connect to servers thousands of miles away or during travel, I can still stream HD-quality videos with zero lag. The last thing that really sets ExpressVPN apart is how easy it is to use. As I mentioned earlier, unlike other VPNs, you don't have to input or program anything. You just start up the app, click one button, and that's it. Super, super simple. And by the way, it's not just me saying all this about ExpressVPN.

• 1:57:50Tim Ferriss?

  You've got TechRadar, The Verge, CNET, and many other publications rating ExpressVPN as the number-one VPN in Zverd. So, consider protecting yourself with the VPN that I use and trust. Use my link, expressvpn.com/tim, today and get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's expressvpn.com/tim. Visit expressvpn.com/tim to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Nutribullet. I have my Nutribullet about seven feet away from me right now. I'm gonna be using it for a bunch of stuff, tonight and probably tomorrow night. Nutribullet is the affordable, easy-to-use, easy-to-clean, the easy-to-clean part is

• 1:58:34Tim Ferriss?

  super-important blender that was first recommended to me by entrepreneur Noah Kagan when I interviewed him for this podcast. And specifically, what I asked him was, "What is the purchase that you've made in the last, say, six months for $100 or less that has had the greatest positive impact on your life?" And his answer was the Nutribullet. Nutribullet has sold more than 60 million units worldwide. You can sort of do the math on that, it's pretty frickin' bonkers. And once you've used one, it's easy to understand why it became so popular. With other blenders, cleanup can be a huge pain in the ass. Nutribullet makes it really, really Really, really simple. And if you're not familiar with the classic NutriBullet,

• 1:59:15Tim Ferriss?

  it's effectively a single-serve cup that blends and then you flip it upside down, you detach it and you can drink it, eat it, chug it down, right there. So, it is intended for, at least in the classic sense, smaller portion sizes. But, give me a second here. So, with NutriBullet, as I mentioned, cleanup is truly hassle-free. And their signature blending process transforms whatever you might have, high-fiber veggies, nuts, seeds, fruits, of course, into silky nutrient-dense smoothies, if that's what you like, that are easy to digest and absorb. I use them for nut butters, I use the NutriBullet for soups of different types, I use it for all sorts of stuff.

• 1:59:55Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the engineers at NutriBullet have created a convenient and upgraded version of the NutriBullet called the NutriBullet Blender Combo. This is their most versatile device yet, because it allows you to switch between single-serve, as I was describing, and full-size blending. It's also a bit more expensive, of course, than the classic version, but it gives you a lot more. And from smoothies and protein shakes to savory soups and dips, the NutriBullet Blender Combo does it all. And there is a recipe book that comes with it, there's all sorts of stuff that you can play with. This next-gen NutriBullet gives you everything you know and love about the classic device

• 2:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  -- yes, I'm reading copy in this particular sentence -- plus all the performance and capacity you would expect from a full-size blender. Don't settle for blenders that leave your smoothies filled with chunks, or anything filled with chunks, that you don't want chunks in. Get the NutriBullet Blender Combo and introduce your veggies and fruits and whatever else you might have to 1,200 watts. It easily just smashes the living hell out of them and blends into whatever you would like to create. And for you, my dear listeners, NutriBullet is offering 20% off of all products on their website. To get your 20% off, just go to nutribullet.com/tim. That's nutribullet, N-U-T-R-I-B-U-L-L-E-T, dot com, forward slash tim. If you don't have a NutriBullet in your kitchen, you are missing out.

• 2:01:21Tim Ferriss?

  It does a lot in a very small package. nutribullet.com/tim for your 20% off.