Pod Insights Masters in Business The Productivity Mindset with Tim Ferriss About this episode Barry speaks with Timothy Ferriss, an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. He is known for his 4-Hour self-help book series — including The 4-Hour Work Week, The 4-Hour Body, and the 4-Hour Chef. He's written five number one bestselling books, including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new card game called Coyote. In this episode, they discuss trying to figure out how his body works, how his psychology works, how his emotional world works.
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Transcript 18,593 words · 11 speakers
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2:41 Speaker 03 This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
2:48 Barry Ritholtz? This week on the podcast, yes, I know I say I have an extra special guest every week. This week I have an extra, extra special guest, Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of numerous books, including The Four Hour Work Week, host of the Tim Ferriss Podcast. He's got a bajillion downloads on that. He's written five number one bestselling books, including Tools of the Titans. He also has a new card game out called Coyote, which is getting a lot of buzz. He co-created this with another gaming company called Exploding Kittens. You probably know Tim from some of his books
3:33 Barry Ritholtz? or conversations or TED Talks or what have you. I find him to just be such a thoughtful guy. He is really the chief scientist of his own experiment, the Tim Ferriss experiment, where he's constantly trying to figure out how his body works, how his psychology works, how his emotional world works and has tried a variety of different things and Sort of fastidiously documented what does and doesn't work for him. That's what led to his productivity book, Four Hour Work Week. It's what led to his health and fitness book, The Four Hour Body. On and on, he just tries a whole bunch of things, figures out, does the A B tests,
4:18 Barry Ritholtz? figures out what works and what doesn't. I thought this conversation was fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, my discussion with Tim Ferriss.
4:29 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me.
4:30 Barry Ritholtz? Well, it's nice to have a fellow podcaster in here. I don't, I don't have to explain how this rolls. What I want to do is I'm, I'm excited about your book. I know you have a new game out that we want to talk about, but I have to start by delving into your background, which is really fascinating. Bachelor's in East Asian Studies from Princeton. What, what were the original career plans?
4:57 Speaker 05 So that was after a major switch. So the original career plan was actually neuroscience. So I was a neuroscience major. And there are a few reasons I wanted to focus on that. I have Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and hereditary bipolar and so on.
5:13 Barry Ritholtz? So wait, we could have a whole nother discussion on neurodivergency. And, and I was kind of fascinated by a lot of what you have done seemed to be hacks to manage and operate around whatever deficit you're working with. Some deficits come with separate surpluses, but how significant were all these deficits to forcing you to come up with a methodology of just navigating life?
5:45 Speaker 05 Well, the depression piece was a huge challenge for most of my life. And thankfully that has changed with a couple of different approaches and different tools. And that's one of the drivers for the initial neuroscience. And there was someone. In the department of psychology, but within the focus of neuroscience named Barry Jacobs at the time, and I was interested in Barry Jacobs as a possible mentor because he was focused on the role of serotonin.
6:15 Barry Ritholtz? Uh huh.
6:15 Speaker 05 And sleep and mood regulations and the neurobiology of depression. He also, and this was his early days, he had an interest in psychoactive substances, including LSD. So my, my interest in psychedelic compounds goes back a very, very long time. That would have been 1995, 96, but I couldn't personally do, I realized, and it is important and it is necessary at this point in time, the animal testing on rats. He used cats for a lot of the circadian rhythm studies, but I couldn't euthanize these rats after doing various tests. And it wasn't actually torture of any type. I just couldn't, I couldn't be hands
6:56 Speaker 05 on with that at the time. So I switched to East Asian studies, but with a focus on mostly language acquisition. So I was still in the realm of, let's just say cognitive neuroscience, but more on the linguistic side. Danny Kahneman, I actually volunteered to be a research subject in a bunch of his studies.
7:15 Barry Ritholtz? No kidding?
7:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, just to see what that was like.
7:17 Barry Ritholtz? But at the time, had he already won the Nobel and like, I think it was oh, one, oh, two, something like that?
7:23 Speaker 05 No, not yet. Not yet. So this was super early days, still very well known on campus, but I guess it would have been Green Hall. They were pretty boring, to be honest, the tasks, hitting space bars or something to indicate when you see a flashing green
7:38 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
7:39 Speaker 05 box in the upper left-hand corner of one of these very old school monitors. But that was one of the ways that I earned whatever it was, $5 an hour to pay for some of my expenses.
7:49 Barry Ritholtz? Was he ever in Princeton? I kind of
7:51 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
7:52 Barry Ritholtz? remember he was at Princeton and then Vancouver and then California. So my, maybe
7:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, he bounced around, but at that time, Princeton.
7:59 Barry Ritholtz? Huh. Really, really interesting. So I get the transition. I guess if you're going to pick some space related to neuroscience, Asian studies can occasionally overlap with that.
8:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I'd been an exchange student. My first real trip outside of the US was as an exchange student at age fifteen to Tokyo, Japan.
8:20 Barry Ritholtz? Amazing.
8:21 Speaker 05 Where I went to a Japanese school for a year.
8:22 Barry Ritholtz? Are you fluent at all?
8:23 Speaker 05 I am, yes. I still speak, read, less so write, because you really have to practice that to keep it up. I can still speak and read Japanese and then got a couple of others.
8:35 Barry Ritholtz? I have a friend, Noah Smith, who is physics and economics, like a killer double major, and he spent summers in Raves Kyoto, says Tokyo you have to go, and that must have been fascinating. At fifteen, that has to be a little overwhelming.
8:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a fascinating, very for someone who grew up on Long Island and...
8:59 Barry Ritholtz? That's right, you're an East Hampton kid, right?
9:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, and at that point I only spoke English. Very alien. It has the benefit of being incredibly alien, but incredibly safe. And the additional benefit that people tend to speak, if they speak at all, terrible English, which means you have to learn Japanese. So, in contrast with a lot of, if you go to Spain, or if you go to Norway, good luck learning Norwegian, because people are gonna default to English. That just doesn't really happen in Japan. So, not to mention the fact that I got there before smartphones, so I couldn't just escape to texting with my friends. I was stuck.
9:38 Barry Ritholtz? Or use Google Translate to actually talk to people.
9:41 Speaker 05 Didn't exist. Yeah, you were stuck. And that was a huge, huge benefit. So that is another reason, actually another reason why I chose Princeton was because it had the, one of the strongest, if not the strongest, East Asian Studies programs for, at that time I was most interested in Japanese and Chinese, which I would have taken even if I had majored in neuroscience.
10:04 Barry Ritholtz? So, you graduated in 2000. I'm kind of fascinated that very quickly you start writing The Four Hour Workweek, which was published in 07. Like, that is a shockingly short period of time. You're in your twenties when you're selling what essentially becomes one of the top-selling books of 07. I mean, it was on every bestseller list. I don't have to tell you this, but I want listeners to understand. So, the first question is, what on earth motivated you, five years out of college, to say, "I think I'm gonna write a book"?
10:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I actually explicitly never wanted to write anything. This was a commitment I made to myself after graduation, longer than an email ever again. That was the promise because my senior thesis, I felt, almost killed me. So I didn't want to write anything. But one of my professors at Princeton, who really changed the trajectory of my life, a professor named Ed Shau, Z S C H A U, we're still in touch. He was a former competitive figure skater, took companies public, one of the first computer science professors at Stanford. He did everything, taught at Harvard Business School, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Real polymath, Renaissance man.
11:19 Speaker 05 And he taught a class called High Tech Entrepreneurship, which was Electrical Engineering 491, but you didn't need to be an engineer, I wasn't. And that class is what convinced me to move west. Keep in mind the timing, this was just before the dot com implosion, to chase my riches and engage in tech. And in 2001, after that startup I joined had imploded, I started my own company and I was bootstrapping it. I didn't raise any outside financing. And so Ed asked me to come back and talk to students about bootstrapping. So I went back twice a year to do this short lecture to students.
12:02 Speaker 05 And in one of the feedback forms, after years of doing this, one of the students, who was not being serious, put in his additional comments, "I don't understand why you're teaching a class of undergrads and graduate students, why don't you just write a book and be done with it?" And I had really bad insomnia for decades, including at that time. So I would get these half-baked ideas for chapter titles or content or whatever, and I couldn't get to sleep, and I would just jot it down. And the notes from the classes I was teaching, which changed over time to track my experiences, and these insomnia, middle-of-the-night notes, formed the backbone of something.
12:41 Speaker 05 Sent it to a mentor of mine who was an author and Unbidden, without asking me, was like, "I think this is a great idea. Here, meet so-and-so, meet so-and-so," introduced me to various editors and agents. Keeping in mind now, looking back, 28 or 29 publishers, meaning Imprints, said no, and then Crown bought it for next to nothing.
13:06 Barry Ritholtz? I love all the examples. I'm a big William Goldman fan, whose book, Adventures in the Screen Trade
13:14 Speaker 05 Oh, amazing.
13:15 Barry Ritholtz? Introduced the phrase "nobody knows anything" into the popular culture. And he talks about all the studios passed on Star Wars, all the studios passed on Raiders. Was it Paramount that passed on E.T.? Because, hey, we have this other alien adventure called Starman. Nobody remembers today. And you could go to other
13:37 Speaker 05 You can go anywhere.
13:38 Barry Ritholtz? Fields.
13:39 Speaker 05 Starbucks, everybody passed on Starbucks.
13:40 Barry Ritholtz? Squid Games, the author couldn't get it sold for 10 years. Ultimately, he had to sell his laptop because he was so broke. I love the John Wick story. You have like this top action hero, could not get Hong Kong gun fu-made in Hollywood, ended up funding it himself, along with, I'm trying to remember the other actress who kicked money in, and it's now a $2 billion franchise. So, a bestselling book that all the Imprints passed on, not a surprise at all. It is a throw-everything-against-the-wall business model, and we don't care, and we'll see what sticks. And they missed this.
14:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a hits-driven business. In some ways, very similar to the angel investing later. I mean, this type of kind of power law distribution. And what's been wildest about The 4-Hour Work Week, which is really a book on increasing per-hour output, which is why it found a toehold in tech, and then the first New York Times coverage had Marc Andreessen, the famed entrepreneur and now venture capitalist, talking about it. He wants to work 80 hours a week, but he wants to get each of those hours to produce 10 times as much. And that's the basic. underlying theme of the book. So what's wild about it is almost all the tech tools
15:01 Speaker 05 that I recommend and additional resources have expired. But even in 2017, when all of that stuff was irrelevant, the principles, the frameworks and so on, it ended up being on the Amazon top 10 most highlighted books of all time list.
15:17 Barry Ritholtz? Meaning from the Kindle version is what's so highlighted?
15:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, in 2017. So that would have been eight years later when all of the tech tools were just dinosaurs at that point, which has been, it's been cool to watch. So.
15:31 Barry Ritholtz? So, so I have, I'm thumbing through the book over the weekend. I read it way back when and I'm revisiting an old copy, which I should have brought in to have you sign. And my wife says, four hour work week. What's she, she's an art teacher, fashion illustration and design. She's like, what's that about? And I say, I know this is not going to be a conversation that's going to go anyplace productive. So I just say, the Pareto Principle. She's like, what's that? Well, 80% of the value we derive from most activities, clients, effort, whatever comes from 20% of whatever that data set is. And she's like, oh, is that true? I'm like, yeah, kind of. It really seems to be true. Okay. And I know immediately,
16:15 Barry Ritholtz? like, this is not her sort of book. But, and how grossly am I oversimplifying the four hour work week by just reducing it to Pareto Principle?
16:25 Speaker 05 I think if you had to pick one principle in the book, that's a good one.
16:28 Barry Ritholtz? That's it, right?
16:29 Speaker 05 To focus on. Now, it assumes a few things that sometimes get missed, right? So people can jump to strategy before they really interrogate their direction or reasons for doing something. So the definition phase of that book where you're really getting very clear on which target you are aiming for, I think is a. Might sound strange, but an often underemphasized precursor to then doing an 80/20 analysis. Because for 80/20 or Pareto Principle analysis, you're looking at which 20% of the inputs, roughly, right? It could be 10, it could be 1% are producing
17:11 Speaker 05 the outsized percentage of the returns. Now, that could be looking at your customers if you run a business, right? It could be looking at your physical exercise. What's producing the adaptations? That's a little trickier to do, but you can figure it out. You could look at it with medications, too. I mean, it's like there are a lot of ways to apply it. And Vilfredo Pareto noticed this in everything from agriculture and like pea production to wealth distribution. It applies all over the place. And actually, Richard Koch, K O C H, has written a lot on this subject under the moniker of the 80/20 Principle. But I'd say if you had to pick one principle, that's the one, sure.
17:53 Barry Ritholtz? Since we're sitting here in Bloomberg, I just have to point out it's very much true for your portfolio, the vast majority of your gains. And if you read some of the research by people like Besenbinder, Hendrik Besenbinder and Arizona State, it's not even 20% that's generating returns. It's 1% or 2% that creates the vast majority. So there's Pareto Principle, hyper Pareto Principle. But it's kind of fascinating that you use this as a way to hack your own productivity, effectiveness, comfort level, mental health. Like, you've applied this across a wide range of items. Have you ever found a space where it doesn't work?
18:36 Speaker 05 I haven't, to be honest.
18:38 Barry Ritholtz? It's just consistent everywhere.
18:40 Speaker 05 It seems to be practically a law of nature that a few things, the the critical few versus the trivial many. It's almost always a few things.
18:51 Barry Ritholtz? The critical few versus the trivial many. That is fabulous summation of that. I really, I really like that. So let's, let's stick with the book for a moment.
19:02 Speaker 05 Sure.
19:03 Barry Ritholtz? In the book, you have a lot of practices and tools and routines. I know some of them are still valid today. Some of them may or may not have, for lack of a better word, expired. What were the most important items you learned? What are the ones that people speak to you and say, hey, this resonated? This really had a big impact on me?
19:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, I would say the first is, let me zoom out and say that I, I went back and I looked at the book, which is always tough for me on some level because I, I published it when I was 29, right? I'm turning 48 soon. And so there's, there's a little bit of chest puffing and so on because I was completely unknown at the time, which makes me wince. But overall, the principles are still things that I apply all the time. But the tech tools, like using GoToMyPC, no, of course not. That's changed. That world has changed. But the principles and the frameworks, the exercises still apply. So there, I would say a few things get echoed to me a lot. One is the practice of fear setting.
20:10 Barry Ritholtz? Fear setting. Define fear setting for the audience.
20:12 Speaker 05 Sure, it's very simple. So fear setting is based on the, I think, accurate assumption that oftentimes we are taught to set goals or we have a framework for trying to set goals, like SMART, right? Specific, measurable, et cetera, with a timeline. But if you have the emergency brake on with some set of amorphous fears about starting a business, quitting your job, getting engaged, getting divorced, taking a vacation from your job or your business, whatever it might be, that... That is the kind of rate limiter. And what you can do, and people can find this for free. If you just go to watch my TED Talk, which has 12 million views now.
20:57 Barry Ritholtz? 18 tight minutes of here's what to do with your life.
21:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's well, it just focuses on this exercise of fear setting, which I still do probably once a quarter. And the basic idea is you take whatever you're considering that you haven't yet done because you have some degree of fear or apprehension. You write down all the worst things that could happen. Let's just call it a list of 20 in excruciating detail. Make them specific. Then you have another column, which is what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each of those things happening. Last column, if each of those happened, what could you do to recover or temporarily stop the bleeding? Right? So, okay, you try business after quitting your job, which by the way, I don't recommend. You can moonlight and do various things to hedge against risk. But then it doesn't work.
21:43 Speaker 05 Okay, can you temporarily Airbnb a bedroom in your house or your bed? Can you get a job bartending just to get back on your feet? Sure, of course you can. So when you start to do that, and then there's a separate page where you also write out the costs of inaction, which is a neglected step when people are considering what they're doing. They look at the risks of doing something, but they don't look at the risks of not doing that thing. So if you telescope out a year, three years, what are the financial, emotional, familial or relationship costs of not doing the thing you're considering? And when you then look at these things, which represent your thoughts trapped on paper,
22:27 Speaker 05 a lot of people are able to do the scary thing. So I would say that that one gets echoed a lot. And then this concept of mini-retirements. So engineering a way such that you can take four weeks completely off the grid or disconnected, which is very, very, very achievable.
22:45 Barry Ritholtz? Four weeks in a row or a week every quarter?
22:48 Speaker 05 Like three to four weeks in a row.
22:49 Barry Ritholtz? Wow, that's a lot.
22:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, and what that forces you to do also is upgrade your sort of systems and policies and automation in your life or in your business or even in your job by teaching subordinates how to do things autonomously. And the value of all those things outlives the mini-retirement. So I'd say those are two that come back a lot.
23:14 Barry Ritholtz? It's interesting that you're approaching, laying out the pros and cons and things that lead to fear in a new venture. I contextualize that a little differently. You and I have both interviewed Ray Dalio.
23:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
23:29 Barry Ritholtz? And Ray's great innovation and contribution to finance. Finance has this very much fake it till you make it attitude, never admit error. No, no, it'll be great. Don't worry. If it didn't work out this year, it'll work out next year. And Ray very much said, no, that's wrong. We're all gonna make mistakes. It's really important to learn from those mistakes. And I want to say he's the first guy that really put that out at all.
23:57 Speaker 05 Not to mention the transparency of having almost all meetings recorded accessible by anyone within his firm.
24:05 Barry Ritholtz? Which is kind of horrifying.
24:07 Speaker 05 They did some pretty wild stuff.
24:09 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, yeah.
24:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's a fascinating character.
24:11 Barry Ritholtz? Absolutely. But it leads to the question, what you're talking about is really a way to prep yourself for a fear of failure? Is that fair to describe it?
24:25 Speaker 05 Sure. Yeah. You know what? It's a fear of failure, but oftentimes it's this, it's the fact, you can't achieve, well, it's gonna be very, very hard to achieve your goals if they're not very specific and clear. Even if you fail partially, that's fine. You can still do great things. I think the parallel is that if your fears are unclear, nebulous, it's just a feeling in your gut, but you don't trap the specifics on paper, they're very difficult to overcome. They will still be a break in your life. It is just as important to address that as it is to address the goals, to identify those sort of sticking points.
25:08 Speaker 05 And I would also say that I think of risk for people as often ill-defined. And there are many ways in different contexts to define risk, but if we look at it as the likelihood of a irreversible negative outcome, very few things have a 10 out of 10 value in that category. And then if you look at, for instance, if you look at the, and I encourage people to do this in fear setting, it's like from zero to 10. Transient, recoverable, or permanent? What is the potential upside of doing this scary thing that you're considering doing? And then if you stay doing what you're doing, like what are the zero to 10 permanent transient
25:51 Speaker 05 risks or potential outcomes of not doing the thing? When you then see, oh, if I do this thing, there could be all of these potentially semi-permanent or permanent benefits. If I try it and fail, the downsides are transient and like three out of 10. It makes the decision much, much easier. And the decision is the hardest part. Once you commit, then it's just execution, risk, and implementation. And it's the decision that is the hardest part for most people.
26:19 Barry Ritholtz? It's amazing that everything you're saying is so applicable to public markets investing.
26:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:25 Barry Ritholtz? Because when people are in that panic mode, when they're fearful, oh, my God, we're down 15%. The world is going to come to an end. It's always, no, this is transitory. This is temporary.
26:37 Speaker 05 Yep.
26:38 Barry Ritholtz? How can you avoid making those permanent losses? How can you avoid those decisions that lead to really bad outcomes? And it's really understanding, hey, is this a 10 or is this more likely a 2, 3, 4 on that scale?
26:50 Speaker 05 And I can actually, I'll give something else in the investing world. If we're looking at when people neglect the other side of a coin, and this is not going to apply to like the super ultra pros, but a lot of people who participate in the public markets, they think about what to buy, right? What's a good buy at this moment? They don't think about hold period. They don't think about selling strategy. What will be the cues? What are the underlying sort of theses? If invalidated, that would mean they should sell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't have a structured way of thinking about selling. And similarly, it's like if you just think about your goal, but you don't have a structured way of thinking about fear and apprehension and so on, you're equally handicapped.
27:35 Speaker 05 So that would be an easy kind of copy paste comparison, I would say.
27:39 Barry Ritholtz? Huh, really interesting. You come out of college with Asian language studies and then you write a book on productivity and personal efficiency. How did you then pivot to angel investing and/or advising?
27:56 Speaker 05 So the pivot, I guess, was an overlap in a sense because the four hour work week, I was based in Silicon Valley for 17 years and I seeded the four hour work week at tech heavy events in part because it talks about an information, low information diet and selective ignorance and basically overcoming digital overwhelm. That's a component of the book. And that pain was most acutely felt by people in tech at the time. So my early adopters, plus the people I had access to were techies in the very early stages of figuring out how I would launch this book. And what that had as a side effect was developing relationships
28:40 Speaker 05 with various founders. And there were a lot of fans among CEOs and co-founders of startups.
28:48 Barry Ritholtz? Let me interrupt you just to remind people, the book comes out in 07.
28:53 Speaker 05 Yep.
28:54 Barry Ritholtz? This is before half of the companies that we think of as part of our daily lives.
28:59 Speaker 05 Oh, well before.
29:00 Barry Ritholtz? Were, you know, there was no public Alibaba. I think that's before Facebook, certainly long before Uber goes, goes public and Shopify, a lot of these companies were, you know, barely a gleam in the creator's eyes.
29:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, they didn't, a lot of them either didn't exist or they were very, very early stages. So I launched the book. My main launch strategy was South by Southwest, this festival in Austin, Texas in 2007, which was also the same South by Southwest where Twitter basically went fully live and public in full promotional mode. And the other piece of the story of angel investing is that I mentioned in the previous segment, my professor in school, Ed Shao, his son-in-law at the time, Mike Maples Jr., was a very well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, had been an executive of various companies. And we became friendly.
29:57 Speaker 05 He wanted to lose some weight. I wanted to learn more about what he did. So we would have breakfast at this place called Hobie's and I would help him with his strategy for training and so on. At this point, also the four hour work week could come out of nowhere and hit the New York
30:12 Barry Ritholtz? Loan up.
30:13 Speaker 05 Hit the New York Times list, then went to number one and stayed on the New York Times list for four and a half years or five years or something.
30:18 Barry Ritholtz? That's insane. Are you aware just of how? Lightning in a bottle that is-
30:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's bananas. It's bananas. It's part of the reason I haven't wanted to go back and revise any of the writing. I'm like, I don't want to touch the butterfly and risk screwing it up. So he wanted to know how that happened. Like, what did I do? And there were things I did for marketing and PR and so on to help catalyze that. And in exchange, I'd say, tell me about your deals. What are you doing? I was always interested in investing. Eventually, after a few months, all of these factors combined, I asked Mike, and he was very generous at this time, if he might be open to me co-investing with him on some deals, very small checks. Like, I would put in 10K, so I wouldn't eat up much of the cap table. I would put in a lot of work to try to help these companies. And that is how the whole adventure started. I
31:08 Speaker 05 wanted to be the least expensive, most valuable person in terms of ratio on the cap table, so that those early founders would become my testimonials, basically, for future deals.
31:20 Barry Ritholtz? Very savvy.
31:21 Speaker 05 That's how the whole thing started. And I decided to treat it like I would treat going to business school. I looked at Stanford at the time, because I'd fantasized about going to Stanford Business School. I was like, okay, that's 120K over two years. I would have had to pay that out of pocket. So let me create the quote-unquote "Tim Ferriss Fund" for angel investing. It's 120K over two years. And I'm assuming that it's sunk cost tuition. It's going to go to zero. None of the startups are going to succeed. But if I can develop skills, learn a lot, and relationships that make it worthwhile, I will consider it a success. And that was the approach I took to doing it. And the timing was also great,
32:04 Speaker 05 because I started in 2007, 2008. 2008, for a few years afterwards, was effectively considered a dot-com depression.
32:11 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
32:12 Speaker 05 But that's when I met Toby, the-
32:15 Barry Ritholtz? Shopify?
32:15 Speaker 05 Shopify, when they had nine employees or 12 employees-
32:19 Barry Ritholtz? Wow.
32:19 Speaker 05 And became an advisor. That's when I started becoming involved with lots of companies at these very early stages, which ended up just to become these behemoths.
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33:02 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
33:44 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.
34:25 Barry Ritholtz? I love your concept of this is a sunk cost, it's going to zero. I think that's the absolute right approach with startups. And you hinted at something that I have to explore a little bit.
34:37 Barry Ritholtz? Anytime I throw money at a small startup, it's essentially, A, this is going to go to zero. But B, I really just want to invest in the jockey. I want to put money into this person who, hey, this is easier than burying a body. Like, those are the two things I would do for this guy. And a check, alright, I'll put a check into that. And maybe it works out. I sense you have a similar belief in you're betting on, not on the horse, but the jockey. 120K is only 12, $10,000 checks. And I have to imagine there were a lot more opportunities. What criteria do you use to figure out who gets that check?
35:17 Speaker 05 Well, also, just as a side note, the reason I started trying to figure out advising and doing those agreements is that I ran out of money. I got over enthusiastic and I broke my own rules. And I think the first check I wrote was for like 40K and immediately imploded. And I was like, oh, this is going to be a problem. But leaving that aside, all of my best hits have been products that I would use personally, that I could ideally be a power user of. And there have been a few exceptions, but by and large, they are addressing problems that I feel acutely, or needs that I, or wants that I feel very acutely. So for instance, Clear, how did Clear happen? Back in the day, it was called Clear Card.
36:02 Speaker 05 And it was, it was not widely distributed. It was very little known. And I wrote a blog post, back when blogs were a big deal. And my blog at the time became very popular. And I wrote a huge piece on, on how to expedite travel. And a portion of that was about Clear Card. I linked to their website. And unbeknownst to me, I was one of the largest drivers of traffic to their website. And then at some point, the leadership reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to do something? And that's how
36:32 Barry Ritholtz? That's awesome.
36:33 Speaker 05 that relationship started. And I think I was the first advisor to clear. I mean, it was forever ago, so it must have been.
36:38 Barry Ritholtz? I wish they were in more airports. It's blown through JFK, LaGuardia. It's a blast with them.
36:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, they've done. They, they, from an execution perspective, they've been excellent. Also not based in Silicon Valley. And I don't think that Silicon Valley is the only place to go hunting for great companies. I mean, look at Shopify, Ottawa, Canada.
36:55 Barry Ritholtz? For sure.
36:55 Speaker 05 Come on. That was.
36:57 Barry Ritholtz? Spotify and another one.
36:57 Speaker 05 That was neglected. So I also, so there are a few things. It was like, is it a problem or a need or a want that I feel and understand? Is it something I can be a power user of, therefore makes it quite easy for me to promote to my audience? Could they be users or customers? And then lastly, for a while, until this wasn't viable, I looked for geographies that were neglected. So I actually, I went hunting in Canada a lot. And.
37:23 Barry Ritholtz? Works for comedy.
37:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. Or for Canadians. I mean, you look at some of the early experiences like StumbleUpon. I became an advisor to StumbleUpon. And who was the founder of StumbleUpon? A guy named Garrett Camp. StumbleUpon, I put tons of time into. He and I became close. We worked really well together. We enjoyed working together. StumbleUpon ended up being a zero for me. But why is that okay? Because I talked about the relationships and the skills, right? Okay, relationship with Garrett Camp. What does he end up doing next? Co-founder of Uber.
37:57 Barry Ritholtz? Not too shabby, right?
37:58 Speaker 05 And then I was one of three people who had helped him with StumbleUpon, who became advisors to UberCAD LLC at the time, which was, I think, 2008.
38:09 Barry Ritholtz? Oh, my God.
38:09 Speaker 05 By the way, everybody said no to Uber. Everybody. Yeah.
38:13 Barry Ritholtz? That's amazing to me because one of the things I find fascinating about VCs is they kind of put their failures on their websites as a badge of honor.
38:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:24 Barry Ritholtz? But it's mostly, here are the companies we invested in that went belly up. They very rarely say, oh, by the way, we passed on Uber. We passed on this. We passed on that. You see less of that.
38:35 Speaker 05 You see less of it. And for me, I would say. There's lots of luck, but I was also trying to approach it in a systematic way. If you're focused on effectively, the way I would think about, let's say I cut a $25,000 check. I'm like, okay, would I pay $25,000 just to develop these relationships? And basically earn a graduate degree in whatever this startup is doing? If so, then great, go. If not, then think twice. And taking that approach, all of the skills and the new knowledge and the relationships snowball over time. So I love highlighting failures that I would put in quotation marks
39:17 Speaker 05 because they're actually just seeds and fertilizer for something that was intimately connected with the people and the skills that came right afterwards. This happens over and over and over again.
39:30 Barry Ritholtz? So I'm hearing relationship, I'm hearing tuition for skills. And then even quote unquote failures, you don't know what act two is going to be, where it could go.
39:39 Speaker 05 Yeah. And then lastly, I would say one thing I did quite differently, and maybe more people do this now, but I had never heard of it, is I treated a portion of my total budget for that real world MBA slash, you know, Tim Ferriss fund in quotation marks, a portion of that for marketing budget. What does that mean? I invested in, I bought secondary, so I bought equity from employees at Facebook and Twitter. Now, it ended up being very early, but to my mind at the time, they were overpriced, super expensive, but being in those deals was coveted. So having a little bit of equity in those two companies allowed me to say, I'm in these
40:24 Speaker 05 companies, which then helped bolster the reputation and assisted in getting new deals. So I expected those to go to zero. That's marketing budget.
40:33 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
40:34 Speaker 05 They ended up very unexpectedly working out really well, but I expected those to go to zero and it was pure marketing budget.
40:43 Barry Ritholtz? I've heard you mention a book by Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law.
40:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, great book.
40:49 Barry Ritholtz? Tell us a little bit about what you learned from that book about investing in startups.
40:57 Speaker 05 That is a great book if you want to learn about venture capital and angel investing. Most of the approaches I had already learned just by being in the trenches for whatever it was, a decade before that book came out. I was introduced to Sebastian through More Money Than God, which is his book about hedge funds. That is an exceptional book. And if you want some colorful characters, oh my God, give that a read.
41:22 Barry Ritholtz? Plus, he's British and his take on everything is just-
41:26 Speaker 05 It's fantastic.
41:26 Barry Ritholtz? It's so dry and so delightfully humorous in an unintentional way.
41:32 Speaker 05 Oh, it's so good. He's a wonderful writer and very skilled at explaining. So what I would say about that book and what people might miss about startups is yes, it's a hits-driven business. There's a power law distribution, meaning it's Pareto principle on steroids. You're probably going to have one or two or three startups that give you the vast majority of your lifetime earnings, at least as an angel investor who's not taking management fees. If you're an asset accumulator and you have many, many, many overlapping billion-dollar-plus funds, like sure, you're going to do great on management fees.
42:10 Barry Ritholtz? VCs seem to do okay for themselves.
42:12 Speaker 05 It's a pretty good business. You have to be smart in how you approach it. But as an angel investor, I would say you need to have, if you're going to be effective in the long term, some coherent strategy or philosophy around portfolio construction so that you don't run out of money, right? It's like staking someone in poker. It's like you have to be able to sustain a string of bad luck.
42:35 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
42:35 Speaker 05 And I would say that what Sebastian does so well is really detail how various MVPs in the world of venture capital have done that over time. And there are a few things I would point out also with respect to Silicon Valley that a lot of people miss, because why did it happen in Silicon Valley? It's like, sure, you can talk about like- Fairchild Semiconductor and I think it was the traitorous aide or whoever it was and all of this. But why did that happen? Like, why, why, why? I'm always like, ask why three times and you get to something interesting. Part of it is that non-competes are incredibly hard, if not close to impossible to enforce in California. What does that mean?
43:17 Speaker 05 It means that knowledge travels very freely. Talent travels very freely. So there's a lot of competition and a lot of knowledge sharing, sometimes to the chagrin of former employers. But that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley is still to this day. Right now, it would be the era of AI. If you want to be in AI, if you really want to increase the likelihood of succeeding and you can raise enough money to pay for top talent, Silicon Valley is still the place to be.
43:47 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah.
43:47 Speaker 05 It's not true for everything, but like it still matters.
43:50 Barry Ritholtz? No, no doubt about it. So let's stay with the concept of return on investments. I'm curious as to one of the best or most worthwhile investments you've made, but not in terms of monetary returns. In terms of, and I'm delving into your space. In terms of time, energy, productivity, efficiency, what do you find to be the most productive, useful investments that you've made?
44:18 Speaker 05 There are quite a, quite a few. I would say anything related to mental health ranks very highly. And we could talk about some of the things that have benefited me. So I come from a family of people who have died from various types of addiction, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder. I struggled with probably, I would say, three to four major depressive episodes a year for most of my life.
44:45 Barry Ritholtz? That much? Wow, that's a lot.
44:47 Speaker 05 And that's that in each episode ranging on the length of a few weeks to a few months. I mean, that is a lot of time in darkness. And now I'm at a point where it's maybe one depressive episode of a few weeks every two to three years. Those are two. Completely different human experiences.
45:06 Barry Ritholtz? How did you manage to actually manage this? Because there are people who suffer from depression, and that's the word, suffer, and never find a way to get on top of it.
45:17 Speaker 05 I'll mention just a few things in the order I might suggest investigating them. One would be, let's call it metabolic psychiatry. So, looking at the work of Christopher Palmer, most recently out of Harvard, I've interviewed him, on using diet to help mental health. And fundamentally, it tends to end up being some version of a ketogenic diet. You can get a lot of those benefits by doing intermittent fasting. So, let's just say what I'm doing today and what I do a lot of the time, which is only eating between like 2:00 PM and 10:00 PM. That's an eight-hour window, so you fast for 16 hours every day. And your body adapts to that incredibly quickly. I would say within a week, you're pretty grumpy for a week, and then you're fine.
46:01 Speaker 05 Then the next, so that was the metabolic psychiatry piece. The second would be different types of brain stimulation, specifically something called accelerated TMS, which we could talk more about. People can investigate accelerated TMS, and a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford. But this can change people over the course of five days. It's remarkable.
46:27 Barry Ritholtz? TMS standing for?
46:28 Speaker 05 Transcranial magnetic stimulation. So, it's a type of brain stimulation. And they take something that looks like a large hockey puck and put it on your head. It's non-invasive, and it feels like someone's kind of tapping your skull. And depending on if you're trying to address anxiety, or depression, or OCD, the target can be different. And if people investigate accelerated TMS, in some studies with major depressive disorder, complete remission in 70 to 80% of participants.
46:58 Barry Ritholtz? Wow.
46:59 Speaker 05 And you might need a booster once a year. But compared to taking maintenance drugs every day with non-trivial side effects, accelerated TMS is...
47:12 Speaker 05 Fascinating. I encourage you to be able to check it out. There are a couple of different devices, but look for accelerated TMS and listen to someone like Nolan Williams. There's a lot of nonsense floating around. The last one I would say is psychedelic assisted therapies. And I say that last because it's
47:25 Barry Ritholtz? Like microdosing of psilocybin or what have you?
47:28 Speaker 05 Microdosing or macrodosing, meaning most of the scientific literature, and I've funded a lot of this science since 2015 with my foundation. I put like double digits of my net worth into this philanthropically, which tells you how much I believe in it. The intermittent use could be once, it could be a few times. Various compounds could be, say, psilocybin in the case of major depressive disorder or different types of addiction like alcohol use disorder. NYU is doing a lot of great work on that front. Or MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. I mean, the results are
48:04 Barry Ritholtz? Very strong.
48:05 Speaker 05 Mind blowing.
48:06 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah.
48:06 Speaker 05 I mean, you have complex PTSD, people who've had, let's just say, an average length of diagnosis of 16, 17 years, which means many, many interventions have failed, who do two or three sessions with therapists for MDMA assisted psychotherapy, and they have effectively complete remission of symptoms.
48:24 Barry Ritholtz? That's amazing.
48:25 Speaker 05 And it is, I believe there's a psychotherapist named Stanislav Grof, quite legendary in the space, who says, you know, what the telescope was or is for astronomy, what the microscope is for biology, psychedelics will be for the mind.
48:41 Barry Ritholtz? Really?
48:41 Speaker 05 And I believe that these compounds and the study of these compounds, which has become very, very, very popular and de-stigmatized, thankfully, will completely revolutionize how we think of neurobiology and psychiatry in treating some of these so-called incurable or intractable conditions, including things like anorexia and many of the things I already mentioned. Those would be three that I'd say have had a huge impact on me. And it's, it seems boring. We could talk about it if you want, but exercise. I mean,
49:14 Barry Ritholtz? I was waiting for you to bring that up because every study in the world says that's the miracle cure for so much psycho Logical challenges and it's not like you haven't written about.
49:27 Speaker 05 Exercise, yeah, did a whole book on it. So yeah, the exercise, I'll just mention two other things briefly. Cold exposure, and by the way, people have been using this for hundreds of years, but.
49:39 Barry Ritholtz? Certainly in the Swedish, Nordic countries.
49:43 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, for forever.
49:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy, AKA depression, and there is actually something to it. It could end up being after a few minutes when you shift from solely sympathetic nervous system activation, fight or flight, parasympathetic. Could be actually stimulation of the vagus nerve. Who knows? It's unclear at this point, but cold exposure. Matters like that. That is actually very reliable for mood elevation and seems to have some durability, which is wild. Exercise, people think of exercise and what you read about in the media a lot is like endorphins, endorphins, endorphins. But that is not the full picture. If you want to stave off Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera.
50:23 Speaker 05 Or let me just broadly say neurodegenerative disease. Exercise provokes the release of something called cloto, K L O T H O. Which people can investigate and it is critical in staving off or. Or mitigating the onset and progression of of these diseases. So you have cloto. Endorphins, sure, you have endorphins. You have endocannabinoids. Cannabinoids sound familiar, like cannabis, right? So those have, those can explain a lot, both in terms of anti-inflammatory effects of some types of exercise. The the benefits are just insane. So I would say. Follow Peter Attia's advice. He is credible, trained at Stanford, Johns Hopkins in terms of zone two training.
51:07 Speaker 05 People can just look him up. Zone two training a few times a week and then VO2 max training, say, once a week and some weight training. But the, if you didn't do it for the physical benefits at all and just the cognitive benefits. Including the release of things like brain derived neurotrophic factor. That is also just a non-negotiable.
51:28 Barry Ritholtz? So you mentioned both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and
51:33 Speaker 05 I have both in my family, yeah.
51:34 Barry Ritholtz? So that's where I was gonna, the exact question I was gonna ask. You were never diagnosed, you just have a genetic predisposition and you're trying to proactively just get way out ahead of it.
51:44 Speaker 05 I'm trying to get ahead of it, yeah. And unfortunately, a lot of the Alzheimer's treatments, as, just to use that, that, that disease as, as an example, a lot of the interventions fail. I think some scientists would, would agree with this, not necessarily because the interventions themselves can't work, but because the interventions are too late. By the time people have really elevated levels of amyloid plaques and tau protein and so on, by the time they have moderate to severe symptoms, it might just be too late. But there is an argument to be made. I mean, it's very rare that late intervention is better than early intervention, so.
52:23 Barry Ritholtz? I just saw a piece in National Geographic yesterday that was kind of fascinating. It may be possible to detect Alzheimer's sooner, as earlier as your twenties. So there is some sort of research going on in the space that's productive. You're talking about something much more aggressive and individualized, to, to take care of your preventative maintenance in advance of being diagnosed with this, into your own hands.
52:53 Speaker 05 Right. And by the way, all the stuff I just mentioned, that has helped me from a mental health perspective and physical perspective with insulin sensitivity and so on. Like, I just, I'm about to turn 48, just did my, I do blood testing at least once a quarter and my most recent labs are my best. Yeah, yeah, see.
53:10 Barry Ritholtz? I just went to Function Health. Yeah, are you familiar with Function Health?
53:13 Speaker 05 I don't know Function Health.
53:13 Barry Ritholtz? So Silicon Valley startup, they have come up with a way, it's not a healthcare company, it's a technology company, and they say, we want to take 100 data point screens of your blood and look at all these different markers to create a baseline. We do this twice a year. Your doctor looks at 15, 20 things normally.
53:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:35 Barry Ritholtz? They'll go 100, and by the way, depending on your genetic predisposition, check all these additional boxes for things like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia, et cetera. And so now you could check 150 data points and twice a year, especially if you're younger. All right, here's a benchmark and you're creating this ongoing, for lack of a better word, horizontal set of data. And when something sort of spikes or is out of the normal range, you have a baseline that you could go back and, and work. I, I literally did this Tuesday.
54:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, I can see that.
54:10 Barry Ritholtz? And I was like, oh, that's a lot of blood, isn't it? Like, can you leave me? A little? I got stuff to do later, but
54:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
54:17 Barry Ritholtz? that in order to do 100 different data series, they'd need a lot of different blood.
54:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, they need some blood. And I, I would say, I don't spend much money on stuff, but I do, I deliberately, some might say overspend on, on health. But what I was going to say is the, the metabolic psychiatry, the less so accelerated TMS, but I'll, actually I should pull that back. TMS also can be applied to something like Alzheimer's and psychedelic assisted therapies, the exercise, all of these, and the cloth I mentioned specifically within exercise. All of those should, in theory, help prevent or mitigate or delay the onset of, of some of these neurodegenerative diseases. So I am trying to get ahead of it. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be hyper personalized. Like these things
55:07 Speaker 05 have clinical data or published literature behind them. There's still a lot of unknowns, but you can do these things now.
55:15 Barry Ritholtz? So it's so funny you say hyper personalized. And I'm speaking to a buddy who's a psychologist. Hey, who do you have coming up on the show? Oh, this week I'm seeing Tim Ferriss. And he says, oh, I love Tim. He is, I love this line, he is the chief scientist of Tim Ferriss, the person. And I'm like, that is such a great way to describe it.
55:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's true.
55:40 Barry Ritholtz? You've basically created an entire business model around being the chief scientist of your physical health. Your mental health, even your genetic health. Was this ever part of the original game plan? Or did this just evolve over time?
55:59 Speaker 05 I've almost always been that way, in part because I was born premature. I had a ton of health issues. Still have issues with thermal regulation, chronic sinusitis, all these things that.
56:12 Barry Ritholtz? Wait, thermal regulation being.
56:14 Speaker 05 Thermal regulation.
56:14 Barry Ritholtz? Always hot or cold?
56:15 Speaker 05 Can't handle hot. Well, the way that my body handles hot and cold is strange. So I can overheat very easily, as an example. The reason that's relevant is the one sport that my mom put me in that, thanks to her, that I could be somewhat successful at when I was a little runt. I was very small, until about sixth grade. Wasn't swimming, it was wrestling. Because the puny kid gets to go against the other puny kid. But I would overheat really quickly, which meant I needed to try to win quickly before I would hit my red zone. And that just catalyzed all sorts of bizarre self experimentation.
56:53 Barry Ritholtz? That's interesting.
56:54 Speaker 05 Learning how to weight cut to use like potassium sparing diuretic. The reason that I wanted to make Tim Ferriss Lab, this N of one set of experiments, was to win at wrestling. That's how it started. And then I realized, wait a second, you might be able to apply this stuff to the brain. And then in college, I started experimenting with all sorts of stuff. Nothing illegal, but lots of weird stuff that was, I was using kind of off label, like hydrogen, various no tropics and so on. And they did have an effect. Like they did have an effect on memory and cognition, things like desmopressin for short term memory for memorizing Chinese characters. Like that stuff worked.
57:35 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
57:36 Speaker 05 There, there's no biological free lunch with that stuff.
57:38 Barry Ritholtz? So why no free lunch? What's the side effect?
57:41 Speaker 05 You do pay, you do pay a price. I would just say a couple of quick tips for health tracking and so on. And I'm not a doctor, I don't play one on the internet. But number one, since you mentioned it earlier, is. I get blood tests done once a quarter at, at the very least. Now, why is that? Well, I want more frame, as high a frame rate as possible to look at trends. But separately, I want to catch things early if I need to catch things. But I would say that if you do infrequent blood tests, the risk is that you get one set of lab results back and you make a ton of big decisions based on those labs. Here's what I'll say, there are lab errors all the time.
58:22 Speaker 05 And if you're going to do consistent blood tests, consistent is, is, is the key. In other words, do it on the same day of the week at the same time.
58:31 Barry Ritholtz? Oh, really? I would not have guessed that.
58:33 Speaker 05 Because your testosterone has diurnal, like it has.
58:37 Barry Ritholtz? So they, the quest diagnostics as an example.
58:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
58:41 Barry Ritholtz? Don't eat, don't take supplements, don't take any meds, whatever's on your, your prescription list, stop the night before unless your doctor says, don't stop.
58:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, follow your doctor, but I'm saying if you measure.
58:51 Barry Ritholtz? Like you're saying Monday at 10 is more important than, how significant is that?
58:56 Speaker 05 Just be consistent because if you, let's just say you drink on the weekends and then you do your lab test on Monday morning versus doing it on Wednesday morning, some of your results might be different.
59:05 Barry Ritholtz? Of course, I mean, that's obvious.
59:07 Speaker 05 But no, that's, it's not obvious to people because then they might have after a weekend with birthday party with a friend and drinking, they have elevated liver enzymes like ALT or AST. Right. All of a sudden, doctor only sees it once a year, he has no idea of the context.
59:20 Barry Ritholtz? That's fair.
59:21 Speaker 05 Testosterone, all these things can vary tremendously and there are lab errors. So I would say before.
59:29 Barry Ritholtz? Plus you also just get the regular noise and range and sometimes you're low normal, sometimes you're high normal, but it's all, nothing is flatlined over time.
59:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's going to be normal variation. So I would just say that I'll keep it to one piece for now. Like really, if you're about to get on a bunch of meds, unless it's an emergency, look, there are emergencies that you need to deal with. But if it's like, okay, you have this problem, we're going to put you on this med for the next year, before you do that, do the test again, just get another blood test two days, two days later.
1:00:01 Barry Ritholtz? Second opinion.
1:00:02 Speaker 05 Just confirm it. And again, not a doctor, not medical advice, informational purposes only, blah, blah, blah. But there you go.
1:00:10 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
1:00:52 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.
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1:02:33 Barry Ritholtz? Dumb question. All the stuff you've done. Game creation is not on your CV. Why did you decide to create a game?
1:02:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, it seems like a total non sequitur. So a few reasons. Number one, I grew up feeling like I was saved by games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons.
1:02:54 Barry Ritholtz? Well, I know a ton. I have a ton of friends, many of whom are neurodivergent and D and D was a lifeline.
1:03:02 Speaker 05 Lifeline, lifeline. So I, I may be pretty squarely in the neurodivergent camp.
1:03:06 Barry Ritholtz? Do you still play?
1:03:08 Speaker 05 I don't, but here's why.
1:03:10 Barry Ritholtz? I, I know plenty of guys, 40, 50.
1:03:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:03:12 Barry Ritholtz? Weekly game, forget poker.
1:03:14 Speaker 05 It's, it's, it's too much of a commitment for me now. Initially, so I've always wanted to make a game that could help produce the magic and joy. And frankly, I mean, sort of the like cognitive training of D and D. I think D and D is just an incredible game. Kudos to, you know, TSR and Gary Gaiacs and everybody who's, who's created that game. It's unreal. But if you're going to be serious about D and D, it's like being serious about World of Warcraft. Like this is your new part-time job.
1:03:42 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah.
1:03:42 Speaker 05 I mean, it's many, many, many hours. So as someone now who's like everybody else, got a lot going on. Maybe I have a dinner with friends and we have an hour afterwards. There's no way we're going to play D and D.
1:03:54 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:03:54 Speaker 05 There's no way we're going to play a complex board game. I was curious to see though, if I could create something. And a lot of the, the podcast is interviewing people I might want to do something with, but that's unspoken. So I interviewed Alon Lee, who's the founder of Exploding Kittens.
1:04:09 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah.
1:04:10 Speaker 05 One of the most successful game development companies in the world. And I wanted to see if maybe kind of pulling from my childhood experience, I could create a game with him that would be easy to learn, hard to master, very, very fun for families, friends, whoever, kind of goofy, but also ideally, and this is yet to be proven, so just to be clear. I'm actually hoping to do a study on this, but that could also possibly be a type of brain training and cognitive training.
1:04:40 Barry Ritholtz? So you set the bar really low, right? Just easy to learn, hard to master, incredibly fun. Oh, with all sorts of cognitive benefits.
1:04:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:04:49 Barry Ritholtz? So, uh, you know, large, low target, start, start slow with your first game.
1:04:53 Speaker 05 Well, that's why it took two years to land on something.
1:04:55 Barry Ritholtz? Really?
1:04:56 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
1:04:56 Barry Ritholtz? That's a long time to build what's effectively a simple, I have a copy of this at home. And you guys also sent me a copy here. So I want to open this up and go over it with, but give the listeners a quick explanation of exactly what this game is about.
1:05:11 Speaker 05 Yeah. So the game Coyote, it's called Coyote because of the trickster deity association in a lot of mythologies. Also uniquely American Coyote, or North American, I should say. It's, it's, it's very much a sort of new America's animal. But the trickster piece is important. So Coyote is a game, you can think of it as rock, paper, scissors in a group on steroids with many different hilarious movements and gestures. And basically you can play competitively where it's last person standing wins, or you can play as a team collaboratively. There are reasons that we had both options.
1:05:49 Speaker 05 But the basic gist is it's a rhythmic game where you're going around in a circle and you're, each player's dealing out cards that make a sequence of gestures harder and more confusing and more hilarious. And you each get three lives and last person standing in competitive mode wins. That's it. So you can play, I have friends who've played with their like six-year-old daughters, even though the box says 10 years old. It's, uh, it's very challenging when it gets challenging. I guess it's 10 minutes a game roughly, probably. So pretty low lift, but if you want to get good at it, you can play it over and over and over and over again. Every game's going to be totally different.
1:06:34 Barry Ritholtz? One of the things I was kind of fascinated by watching the gameplay was it's a combination of words and gestures that you have to recall and do in order while there's the rhythmic noise going on at the same time that you're creating. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came up with this and, and what was it like collaborating with exploding kittens?
1:06:58 Speaker 05 We tried dozens of different prototypes before getting to this one and.
1:07:04 Speaker 05 We were kind of stuck because the question that I was asking myself was the wrong question. The question I was asking myself is what types of board games or card games do I enjoy? And that didn't get, I mean, your answers are only going to be as good as your questions.
1:07:19 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:07:20 Speaker 05 That wasn't working. We had done various brainstorming sprints in like LA, New York, Long Island, and then flew to Canada to spend time with the co-founder of Exploding Kittens. And we did our last sprint. I was like, okay, look, we've been at this for a while. We're either going to land on something or let's call it quits and just call a spade a spade.
1:07:39 Barry Ritholtz? So a little pressure on at the end.
1:07:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean deadlines, you know, the magic of deadlines. And expanded it to what games of any type have you enjoyed? And I, it might make me sound like a simpleton, but having drinks and playing rock, paper, scissors with your dumb friends is, I think, very entertaining. Side note, especially if you try to do it with water in your mouth. Try that with a friend. But.
1:08:04 Barry Ritholtz? What does water in your mouth affect rock, paper, scissors?
1:08:06 Speaker 05 When people laugh, they spit water all over themselves. So it makes it increasingly challenging, especially if people have had a few drinks. I'm not recommending everybody drink. So we started with that as this building block. It's like, okay, well, how can we make that group play? And then I was interested in the cognitive stuff, as I mentioned, and this is, look, I haven't proven this, but I think it's, it's quite similar. You're looking at like interference effects. There are things like the Wisconsin card sorting test, blah, blah, blah. And Exploding Kittens, they have an amazing track record. The whole company started with this game, Exploding Kittens, which was, I think, the largest Kickstarter of all time.
1:08:43 Barry Ritholtz? Wow.
1:08:43 Speaker 05 At that point in time, the leaders of the company are still game designers. So it's not a huge bureaucratic thing run by, no offense to middle managers, they're important, but it's like people who are managers versus makers. Like the people who run the company are still some of the best in the world at creating games, right? Elon Lee was involved with developing Xbox. He's been involved with creating entirely new genres of games. Just a genius at at creating games. So it's been a blast. Their team is awesome. They're scrappy. You know, it's relatively small, like they really punch above their weight class.
1:09:20 Barry Ritholtz? Still a startup nimble able to.
1:09:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, feels like a startup. Like what they do with the number of people they have is just astonishing. It's been awesome.
1:09:29 Barry Ritholtz? I get a sense that because you're such a thoughtful person, anytime you enter a new sphere, part of you sort of floats above your body and says, what's going on in this space?
1:09:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:09:41 Barry Ritholtz? Um, I I've had that experience in publishing.
1:09:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:09:45 Barry Ritholtz? Like, wait, I don't understand the book industry. Why do they behave this way? So I have to ask you that question about the game industry. When you're looking at at gaming generally, what was your experience like going into not only an entirely new space that you haven't worked in in the past, but like, did you kind of look at the game industry and say, hey, this whole place is just wacky and so different from everything else?
1:10:15 Speaker 05 All of the above, and I treated doing something like the game as I treat the startups. So it's if I make no money on this, will the relationships develop and the skills and knowledge be something I would pay for, right? Would I actually?
1:10:31 Barry Ritholtz? Tuition.
1:10:32 Speaker 05 Exactly. Would I pay tuition for what I'm going to learn? And the answer is yes, right? Elon Lee, genius. The people like Splinkins, amazing. By the way, you want a scrappy creative team if you're going to deal with things like tariffs, by the way.
1:10:44 Barry Ritholtz? Are are do tariffs? I mean, I'm assuming these are manufactured somewhere outside of the United States.
1:10:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:10:51 Barry Ritholtz? Do you have to pay tariffs on?
1:10:53 Speaker 05 Oh, every every gaming company in the US pretty much tabletop game is getting smashed.
1:10:57 Barry Ritholtz? Really?
1:10:57 Speaker 05 Yeah. So you want people who are creative and can think outside the box for something like that. From the implications of something like that to contending with mass mass retail like Walmart and Target, for instance.
1:11:11 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, you're you're you're at Walmart, you're at Target, you're on Amazon. These are challenging retailers to get shelf space, quote unquote, from. How did that happen?
1:11:21 Speaker 05 Next to impossible.
1:11:23 Barry Ritholtz? And yet you hit, that's the whole, you hit for the, for the cycle Walmart, Target, Amazon, where else is, what's left?
1:11:30 Speaker 05 If I'm gonna do it, mind, you know, mind, this is my maybe one and only game. And if my name's gonna be on it, I need to be very happy with it.
1:11:37 Barry Ritholtz? So how did you guys manage to penetrate that?
1:11:39 Speaker 05 Well, I'll say first that what's not gonna work is if you are a sole inventor who comes up with the world's greatest game. A company like a Walmart or Target is not equipped, rightly so, to deal with thousands of independent game designers who don't understand retail, don't understand margins, don't understand supply chain management, don't understand net payment terms and returns and all of these things. So if you want to have a seat at the table, or even a chance to have a seat at the table, you need to, I think this is fair to say, partner with someone who already has shelf space and multiple SKUs, so that you can be added to the lineup. And that was another reason to partner with someone like an Exploding Kittens.
1:12:22 Speaker 05 And yes, you can do a lot online and the game is on Amazon. It's been exclusive at Walmart for the first few months. And then the social video plays, like you mentioned, went completely nuts and it's actually now past 300 million. So it just keeps going and going and going, the, the videos of people playing this game. But you can do a lot that is, say, direct to consumer via an Amazon or just your website or Kickstarter. But it's very easy for techies to underestimate just how incredibly powerful and widely distributed the Walmarts and Targets of the world are.
1:12:57 Barry Ritholtz? Sure.
1:12:57 Speaker 05 I mean, 90% of the US is within 10 miles of one of those or 15 minutes. It's, I mean, even the food security of the United States depends on these companies.
1:13:06 Barry Ritholtz? And you priced this at 9.99, less than 10 bucks, very reasonable. I'm going to assume at, if, if this game is as successful as you hope it will be and early indications. Are that it it can be. You come up with a second pack, a different focus.
1:13:25 Speaker 05 Expansion packs, something completely different. Maybe I try a more complicated like role playing game, something like that. Who knows? But in my case, right, with something like this, I'm used to kind of tiptoeing into things and testing the waters.
1:13:38 Barry Ritholtz? No, no, you're jumping in.
1:13:40 Speaker 05 This is job ban. I mean, even with, say, the four hour work week, it's like, how did I land on that title? I split tested all of the titles and subtitles on Google AdWords and then looked at the outlier that was many standard deviations away from the rest. And that was the four hour work week. So like, that's how I I don't like taking risks. I actually think of myself as a risk mitigator. But in this case.
1:14:01 Barry Ritholtz? I'm fascinated by that because you very much strike me as someone who has embraced risk his whole career while rationalizing the potential downside. I don't, I don't want to play pop psychologist, but, but you are not somebody, it's like, all right, I'm starting out as a studying biology. No, no, I'm pivoting to Asian studies. I'm living in Japan. I'm stopping what I'm doing to write a book. Oh, now I'm going to pivot to startups. That is not the life experience of a, someone who's risk averse.
1:14:35 Speaker 05 Well, I would, on one hand, agree with you. On the other hand, I would say, I think that most risks are incredibly overblown. I would put, I would, I would put risks in quotation marks and not to beat a dead horse, but if you're choosing what you do based on what you're going to learn, skills you're going to develop, the relationships you're going to develop or deepen. It's very hard to fail over time. So if, if you're able to be, and this applies to investing, obviously, but like long-term greedy.
1:15:05 Barry Ritholtz? Right. That's right.
1:15:06 Speaker 05 Not short-term greedy. It's very hard to lose over time. If you're choosing, let me be very clear. Ideally.
1:15:15 Speaker 05 Areas where you would pay tuition, projects where you would pay tuition for those things, with relationships or skills that can transfer outside of that one project, which I'm always doing. And if you do that, like with Coyote, okay, let's say, let's just say hypothetically, I don't think this is gonna happen, because I think the tariffs are just a bargaining chip for mineral access.
1:15:34 Barry Ritholtz? I hope you're right.
1:15:35 Speaker 05 And other things that'll be traded with China specifically.
1:15:38 Barry Ritholtz? That's my wishful thinking. I'm on the same page as you. Let's hope that this is just a negotiating tact.
1:15:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, otherwise, we're also like cutting off our nose to spite our face. I mean, it's so interdependent. So it's, it's, it's a bargaining chip. I don't expect that to continue. But let's just say that tariffs put every game company in the US out of business, except for one or two. Then will this still have been worth my time? Absolutely 100%, because I have no, I'm not getting an advance for this. I'm doing a profit share. I want, I want incentives to be fully, fully aligned.
1:16:11 Barry Ritholtz? I did the same thing with my book. I don't want to advance. I want to see what our upside there is. By the way, I really have to push back. This is just me, maybe there's a little,
1:16:21 Speaker 05 Push. I love it.
1:16:22 Barry Ritholtz? Maybe there's a little projection. You are not risk averse. You really aren't. And I love the way you've rationalized, or it's not an excuse, it's an explanation.
1:16:34 Speaker 05 It's like reframing it.
1:16:36 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, you, you frame this into, well, I'm gonna take this risk, but I'm hedged because my downside is I get skills, I get knowledge, I get people and, and relationships. So the worst case scenario is all these good things happen.
1:16:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:16:51 Barry Ritholtz? You are very much a risk embracer.
1:16:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. And, and also, if you look at my projects, it's, it's not a sequence of start, finish, start, finish, start, finish. It's more like a Gantt chart where things are overlapping. So you look at this game, it's like, yeah, I put a ton, I've been involved with every, every single possible aspect of this game. We playtested it with 100 plus families, blah, blah, blah. But podcast is still going. The books are still producing royalties. I still have angel investments. And therefore, I very rarely have all of my eggs in one basket.
1:17:25 Barry Ritholtz? So two last questions on the game before we'll get to our speed round.
1:17:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:30 Barry Ritholtz? First, this is obviously a low-tech card game.
1:17:36 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:17:37 Barry Ritholtz? Was this a purposeful decision to avoid screens to not create more screen time?
1:17:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, 100%. I would say if I look at the mental health of my audience, let's just call it 20 million people a month or something. Over the last 10 years, the degree of depression, anxiety nihilism is shocking to see, especially in my audience, which is typically antithetical to those things.
1:18:00 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:18:01 Speaker 05 Uh, maybe not depression, but very optimistic.
1:18:04 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, there's a little self-selection there. Hey, I have this issue. Tim seems to figure this out.
1:18:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:18:08 Barry Ritholtz? Let me work my way there.
1:18:09 Speaker 05 There's a little bit of that, but if you look at, let's just say, the writing of, you know, Derek Thompson, amazing writer at The Atlantic, who does a lot more.
1:18:17 Barry Ritholtz? No longer at The Atlantic. Now he has his own Substack.
1:18:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. That's right. He went full in on Substack and actually this piece, I think is from Substack, but it was effectively, I think it's simply Americans need to have more fun, but it talks.
1:18:29 Barry Ritholtz? The decline of partying in America.
1:18:31 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:18:32 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah.
1:18:32 Speaker 05 That effectively, I think it's something atrocious, like 1 in 25 families or people have social plans in person for any given weekend. And it's down for.
1:18:44 Barry Ritholtz? Is that right? That's amazing.
1:18:45 Speaker 05 And it's down for certain age brackets, 70% in the last 10 years. And I really feel like digital isn't inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison.
1:18:58 Barry Ritholtz? Yes.
1:18:58 Speaker 05 And I think that if digital excess is the problem, then analog is the antidote. I really feel like people need to interact with other humans. We're not evolved for pure screen time. We are not.
1:19:11 Barry Ritholtz? 100%, you're 100%. So last question on the game.
1:19:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:19:16 Barry Ritholtz? What are your expectations for this? How do you define success? And I'm going to prevent you from saying, I've already succeeded due to my collaboration and the whole experience. Hold that aside, what's your minimum expectations and what would surprise you to the upside?
1:19:30 Speaker 05 Minimum expectation is that this finds a small.
1:19:35 Speaker 05 Band of diehard lovers of the game. Everybody should read 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. Just go to KK.org, it's free. Read that. That would be super gratifying. But also, I always aim high. So I mean, I want this to be the best selling game at all of the major retailers. That's incredibly hard to do, by the way.
1:19:57 Barry Ritholtz? That's millions of units.
1:19:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, you're dealing with
1:20:00 Barry Ritholtz? Tens of millions.
1:20:01 Speaker 05 The UNOS and the behemoths of the space, right? So to do that is incredibly hard. That's what I'm aiming for. I think that the products, you know, the game can stand on its own two feet. Like, people do love this game. And the reason I like to do that is not because I want to set myself up for disappointment, but as I think it's Larry Page of Google has said, what people miss is it's very hard to fail completely. If I aim for that and I'm 50% short, I'm still, having had the excitement and the motivation and potential payoff of that huge a goal, it's still gonna exceed my expectations that I would have had a year or two ago.
1:20:42 Barry Ritholtz? And just moving into a different space is its own rewards because it's so, you know, it really exercises the different parts of the brain than you normally get to play with.
1:20:51 Speaker 05 It's also easy to pigeonhole yourself or get pigeonholed, which is why after the success of The 4-Hour Work Week bought me permission to write more books, I didn't do The 3-Hour Work Week. I didn't do The 4-Hour Work Week for, you know, the sort of single mother soul or whatever. I didn't do these line extensions because I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a business author. That's why I did The 4-Hour Body and everything on athletic performance, because I wanted to be in a different category in the bookstore to see if my readers would follow me. And as soon as I proved to myself that was the case and to publishers, you know, when I hit number one New York Times and blah, blah, blah. Then I could write about whatever I wanted. And so this is another way of testing that. You know, could I play in a completely different sandbox?
1:21:35 Barry Ritholtz? So before we get to our five favorite questions, I pulled a few of your questions that either you asked on your pod or other people have asked you. And let's do this as a speed round.
1:21:46 Speaker 05 Let's do it. I'll try to keep my answers shorter.
1:21:48 Barry Ritholtz? Right. Tell us about a hundred dollar or less purchase that has positively impacted your life. Be specific.
1:21:55 Speaker 05 Yeah, I will be specific. Now I'm going to put in one shameless plug, which is if people want to figure out this game, just go to coyote game.com. Okay, back to our regular programming. Two things I would say that have impacted me in the last year would be, uh, there's something called the Alpha Ball, which is from TuneUp Fitness. And this is something you can use for soft tissue work, for a sore back, for dealing with your IT bands, anything. And it's much better than a foam roller because you can really get into specific spots. It's very easy to use. You can use it against a wall instead of laying on the floor and it's small enough to travel with. So I'd say the Alpha Ball is one. Have that in my luggage right now because I'm traveling.
1:22:39 Speaker 05 And then the other one is actually a meditation app called The Way. And it's taught by someone named Henry Schuchman. And it's more or less a Zen type of meditation. Full disclosure, I ended up becoming advisor to these guys because I love, I ended up loving the app so much. But I use that once or twice a day, 10 minutes each session. And it's teaching you sort of a
1:23:05 Barry Ritholtz? Guided meditation, is that right?
1:23:06 Speaker 05 It's a, they're guided meditations, but it's a sequence of practical skills that you're developing that you can apply outside of meditation, which is why I like it so much. So I'd say those are two that immediately come to mind.
1:23:19 Barry Ritholtz? So you've spent your whole career delving into new areas, learning new skills and learning them quickly. What's your favorite cheat code for that?
1:23:28 Speaker 05 Favorite cheat code is probably picking the skills in the first place. So what I mean by that is if you want to get the best golf coach in the world, you might not be able to afford it. You probably can't afford it. It's gonna be, it's a very common sport. There are a lot of wealthy people involved. It's gonna be hard to get direct instruction from somebody who's top of the field. But if you choose, say, almost anything, swimming, archery, whatever it might be, and you look for, say, not gold medalists, but silver medalists.
1:24:05 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:24:05 Speaker 05 Who are, by the way, frequently just as good.
1:24:07 Barry Ritholtz? Right. It's a tenth of a second.
1:24:08 Speaker 05 They just, yeah, they just, exactly. They just got 10 minutes less sleep than the other person that day. You can get some of the people who are best in the world to teach you at a cost that is next to nothing. So I would say that number one is picking, coming back to that definition that we talked about, the four hour work week with business and entrepreneurship, like picking the goal first. The second is looking at frequency of use. So for languages, for instance, a lot of people just dive into learning languages. Well, I think that material beats method. In other words, like picking what you're gonna learn very carefully is more important, at least in sequence, than choosing how you're gonna do it. A lot of people ask like, what's the best way to learn X? And I'm like, first of all, you should ask, what should I learn?
1:24:53 Speaker 05 And you can look at word frequency lists and things like that. And for a language like Spanish, Japanese, whatever, find the 1,000 or 1,500 most frequently used words. You can learn that in a few weeks.
1:25:06 Barry Ritholtz? Duolingo, uh, part of your...
1:25:08 Speaker 05 Duolingo is outstanding. I mean, of course, I'm biased because I invested in their first round.
1:25:12 Barry Ritholtz? We just were in Paris three years ago, Amsterdam two years ago, Rome last year. And Duolingo, just for those basic phrases, is amazing.
1:25:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's great. You can, I mean, I've used it for Korean as well to refresh my Korean, which I studied in school.
1:25:26 Barry Ritholtz? Yeah, that's a tough language, right?
1:25:28 Speaker 05 It's tough. The grammar is almost identical to Japanese. I have a leg up there. But by the way, like people, if there's a cartoon, I think it's like learning how to read Korean 15 minutes. There's a comic book that literally will teach you how to read Korean. You won't understand what the hell you're reading, but you'll be able to sound out phonetically Korean and like... It's a bit of an exaggeration. I'd say it probably takes an hour. But Duolingo is very well designed and I have seen every possible language startup. My fans sent me that one. By the way, my fans also recommended that I connect with Shopify because they knew I was interested in e-commerce. So a lot of my best deals have come from my, my readers and my, my listeners.
1:26:08 Speaker 05 But the Duolingo came about because they were in closed beta and a number of my fans reached out and said, you have to try this.
1:26:16 Barry Ritholtz? Really?
1:26:17 Speaker 05 And so I got access and I looked at it and I was like, oh yeah, this is fundamentally different from everything else I've seen.
1:26:21 Barry Ritholtz? Give us an example of an unusual habit or just absurd thing that you love.
1:26:27 Speaker 05 I like repeating numbers. Could be the OCD.
1:26:30 Barry Ritholtz? Go ahead.
1:26:30 Speaker 05 So I take a screenshot whenever I see 5:55 on my phone. So I have hundreds of screenshots of typically 5:55 PM. I just love repeating those specific repeating numbers. A lot of folks like 11/11, nothing against 11/11 and I think that's, that's perfectly fine. But I'm just more of a 5:55 guy.
1:26:49 Barry Ritholtz? Those 11/11 peoples, they don't know what's up. It's all about, have you seen the old style analog, almost neon tubes that are clocks?
1:27:00 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:27:00 Barry Ritholtz? They, like what happens when that rolls over to 11/11? Do you see something like that and just shrug and like?
1:27:07 Speaker 05 I still find it pleasant. I like symmetry. So 11/11 has the advantage over 5:55 that it is pleasingly symmetrical. Like this old friend I used to have, Mike Kim, his name is a palindrome.
1:27:22 Barry Ritholtz? Right. I was going to say 5:55 is a palindrome, but it's not truly symmetrical visually.
1:27:27 Speaker 05 Exactly, yeah.
1:27:28 Barry Ritholtz? So, so there is, we were talking, there was a diversion earlier. One of the things I kinda was shocked to learn in the ADHD world is why people will play a song over and over and over again because it tickles a part of their brain that is relevant to certain emotional expressions that tend to be more difficult or absent. And it, it makes that like, oh, you're getting that feedback that you, you haven't been able to get in the real world. It sounds like the 555 and the 1111 tickles a similar part of the brain.
1:28:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, it could be. I think for me, there's just something soothing about repetition. I don't know what it is. I mean, it's why, you know, I mentioned archery, like, I love archery. And for most people.
1:28:15 Barry Ritholtz? Archery?
1:28:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, I love archery and also language learning for most, for a lot of, there's a lot of repetition involved. And for many people, and I think this is fair, they cannot imagine something more boring than going through conjugations or doing archery, which by the way, if you're doing it at a high level, you are effectively trying to do exactly the same thing over and over again.
1:28:41 Barry Ritholtz? Isn't that true for any particular athletic skill? I mean, the variations multiply. You have basketball, you have five people on, on five people. And so just extrapolate that out exponentially, and there are a million variations, the same with chess, whatever. But it really doesn't matter. Each particular play, move, step is you're trying to optimize that and do precisely what you need. Even something like darts, but there are so many variations to your musculature, your, your thought process. Is any sport boring? Hitting a tennis ball.
1:29:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:29:18 Barry Ritholtz? I mean, it's the same stroke over and over again, but there's a bajillion variations of what can happen.
1:29:24 Speaker 05 That's true, which makes it interesting. With archery, you're standing in one place, shooting at the same thing thousands of times.
1:29:31 Barry Ritholtz? Right. Any sharpshooting, rifle, darts, go down the list.
1:29:36 Speaker 05 Highly repetitive.
1:29:36 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:29:37 Speaker 05 Now, I like the other sports too, like tennis. I would say that also, confusingly, if people are interested in the accelerated learning stuff, the, my third book, The Four Hour Chef, is basically a book on accelerated learning disguised as a cookbook. So it gets into like how to learn, how to shoot three pointers, language learning, all this stuff. You can get a lot further. For instance, I think number one, adults can learn languages faster than children, actually.
1:30:03 Barry Ritholtz? Really? That is very in opposite to accepted wisdom.
1:30:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, I absolutely believe adults can learn languages more quickly than kids with a few constraints applied and just a couple of systems. I mean, I really think for a native English speakers, for say a romance language or something that isn't too far flung, like Chinese is going to be different. But eight weeks, you can be conversationally pretty fluent, like pretty functional. If you were to carve out not three hours a week, that's where kids have the advantage is that they're forced to do it all the time and they have no choice. They have no mortgage, they have no job. But, but if you were to put in, say, 10 hours a week and take it really seriously, eight to 12 weeks, you could be very functional.
1:30:52 Barry Ritholtz? Very fluent.
1:30:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, like you could get around and have like a conversation for 10 to 15 minutes with someone.
1:30:58 Barry Ritholtz? Wow.
1:31:00 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
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1:32:53 Barry Ritholtz? Let's jump to our favorite five questions. We ask all of our guests, starting really simple. What are you streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime or podcasts. What's keeping you entertained?
1:33:06 Speaker 05 I just finished The Last of Us, which I thought was spectacularly well done, especially as an adaptation from a video game. I am very interested in Korean animation because I saw a film on Netflix called Lost in Starlight, which absolutely blew my mind.
1:33:24 Barry Ritholtz? Lost in Starlight?
1:33:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, the quality and the visual beauty of this animation made my head spin because you don't, well, I think most people do not associate South Korea with animation. You might think of Japan.
1:33:38 Barry Ritholtz? Isn't that where most of our low-cost animation is coming from over the past? That's not CGI?
1:33:43 Speaker 05 There's a lot of lower-cost animation, yes. But when you think of, say, cinematic animation and Studio Ghibli out of Japan, let's just say, people tend to think of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. And I think Korea is going to be a powerhouse for high-quality feature-length animation. We'll see. We shall see. But Lost in Starlight is a recent fave. And then I've got some weird ones. Like, there's a German-language documentary on fasting that I found on YouTube. You can't watch it in the U.S., but you can use a VPN to pretend.
1:34:17 Barry Ritholtz? I was gonna say, you could watch anything anyway.
1:34:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, you can use a VPN to pretend like you're in Germany and then you can watch it and just use the automatic subtitle.
1:34:25 Barry Ritholtz? What's the name of that one?
1:34:27 Speaker 05 Ah, some long German name. I'm just getting started with it. So unfortunately, I can't remember, but it's it's looking at specifically someone who did, I want to say a two to three week supervised fast at the Wilhelmina Institute, who has fasted many, many, many thousands of people. I I have some bones to pick with their approach, but I nonetheless find that they have such a huge data set, really fascinating. So I'm looking at that one. And then podcasts, I found a new podcast recently called Stem Talk, which features interviews with scientists mostly. And I've
1:35:04 Speaker 05 listened to an interview with someone named Kevin Tracy, T R A C E Y, who is a very widely cited scientist, who's arguably the most credible researcher who has established a lot related to the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation. There's a lot of BS and pseudoscience and nonsense floating around. He is a real signal amongst the noise. So I'm listening to a bunch of Stem Talk, different scientists on Stem Talk, and the interviewers are outstanding.
1:35:38 Barry Ritholtz? It's interesting you referenced YouTube because mostly starting in the pandemic, but just ramping up since then, I want to say it's become 50, 60% of my television viewing. It's amazing how.
1:35:51 Speaker 05 It's also great for finding documentaries that you can't find anywhere else.
1:35:56 Barry Ritholtz? Right.
1:35:57 Speaker 05 So I think there's a documentary, the name is something like Learning How to See, or The Art of Seeing, and it's about David Hockney.
1:36:07 Barry Ritholtz? Oh, okay. Big fan.
1:36:08 Speaker 05 Spectacular documentary. It's grainy, but you can find it on YouTube. And I was not able to find it anywhere else.
1:36:15 Barry Ritholtz? Amazing. You mentioned one of your mentors earlier. Tell us about who your mentors were, and how they helped shape your career.
1:36:24 Speaker 05 Early mentors, Stephen Gorick, he was a martial arts instructor when I was probably 12, 13, just from the perspective of physical and mental toughness, because the class was all adults, and then it was me. They did not take it easy on me, and I was very grateful for that. They weren't abusive, but they treated me like an adult who was training for real. And I think from a toughness perspective, he always reiterated that I could do more than I thought I could do. Much like my wrestling coach in high school, John Buxton, who even to this day, many of his wrestlers have gone on to do amazing things, and they all reference
1:37:03 Speaker 05 back to him. Then Ed Shaw, who was that professor in high tech entrepreneurship in Princeton. There are other people who indirectly, or pretty directly, although they wouldn't have expected it, informed later what I did. For instance, John McPhee, amazing, amazing nonfiction writer, who, staff writer for The New Yorker, he's got at least one Pulitzer Prize for coming into the country, I think. And he taught a class at Princeton, a seminar called The Literature Effect, which was on nonfiction writing.
1:37:36 Barry Ritholtz? The Literature Effect, what a great name.
1:37:38 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that class, in terms of thinking about structure, how to structure writing, which by the way, helps you structure your thinking. So all of my grades in my other classes went up when I took that class.
1:37:49 Barry Ritholtz? No kidding.
1:37:50 Speaker 05 It was wild to see. And I'm sure there are many more. I mean, right after graduation, Mike Maples Jr., in terms of teaching me the ropes of angel investing.
1:38:00 Barry Ritholtz? That's a good, good starter list for anybody.
1:38:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a pretty good roster. I was very lucky.
1:38:05 Barry Ritholtz? Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now?
1:38:10 Speaker 05 Some of my favorites would be Letters from a Stoic, which is by
1:38:16 Barry Ritholtz? Marcus.
1:38:17 Speaker 05 Seneca.
1:38:17 Barry Ritholtz? Seneca.
1:38:18 Speaker 05 In this case. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius as well. So Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, for thriving in a high-stress, high-conflict world, I think that Stoicism, particularly as communicated by Seneca, is
1:38:36 Speaker 05 Very, very, very present and applicable and frankly fun to read too. Although that might sound odd, applied to Stoicism. So Letters from a Stoic. I would say Vagabonding, a book by Rolf Potts. I think the subtitle is The Uncommon Art of Long Term World Travel, which is really, it's a book on long-term travel, but it's a book on, it's a philosophical treatise too. That's a great fun read. Those are, those are two faves that come to mind. One more. Awareness by Anthony DeMello. I believe the subtitle is The Promises and Perils of Reality. It's, it's just about becoming more aware. So taking yourself out of the automatic loops
1:39:20 Speaker 05 that we all have and adopt from parents and so on. Really good book. It's like 120 pages. And then in terms of what I'm reading right now, I just started a book called The Great Nerve, which is by Kevin Tracy, that scientist I mentioned. And it's all about, it's all about the vagus nerve, research related to vagus nerve stimulation, et cetera.
1:39:40 Barry Ritholtz? What's the book that you've given most as a gift and why?
1:39:45 Speaker 05 The books I've given most as a gift include some of the books that I mentioned. And if you, if someone were to stay at my guest bedroom in my house, I have shelves. Each shelf just has 15 copies of these books and
1:39:58 Barry Ritholtz? Take one with you?
1:39:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, take, take, take whatever you like. So I would say
1:40:02 Barry Ritholtz? That's a great idea.
1:40:02 Speaker 05 It's fun. It's also very visually pleasing for someone like me. So
1:40:07 Barry Ritholtz? The same.
1:40:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's very, very, very aesthetically pleasing. So Awareness by Anthony DeMello, for sure. I've gifted hundreds of copies of this book. Letters from a Stoic, hundreds of copies of that book. Back in the day, now there are a million copies, or I shouldn't say a million copies. Now there are a million different books on the subject of psychedelics and psychedelic history, psychedelic science. But How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. For a while I had that in my room because I got early galleys of that book and have since ended up doing a bunch of collaborations with, with Michael, who's amazing. But otherwise,
1:40:45 Speaker 05 Also gift my friends who are nonfiction purists who are too busy to meditate, too busy to read fiction. I tend to give them books of poetry because I'm like, you need to slow down. And if you feel like you can't meditate for 10 minutes a day, you need to meditate for an hour a day. That type of, that type of logic leads me to give them a very short collection of, for instance, there's a new translation of Rumi poetry, relatively new, called Gold by Hala Liza Gavory is her name. Who's incredible. She's based in New York City and native, native speaker also, who's able to go to the source material.
1:41:28 Speaker 05 So Gold, which is a new compilation of short Rumi poetry that is well translated, unlike a lot of versions you might find. It's like a hundred pages. And I'd say to my friend, I'm like, look, don't read this A to Z. Just read one before you go to bed every night. And those are probably the most gifted in the last handful of years.
1:41:50 Barry Ritholtz? That, that sounds really interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in fill in the blank? Writing, podcasting, seed investing, game design? What would you tell them?
1:42:09 Speaker 05 If, if it's a nonfiction book writing, I would say, number one, are you really sure you want to do that? It's not, it's not, don't assume it's a good way to make money because generally it's not. But I would say also if it's a recent grad, if you're going to write nonfiction, probably go do something interesting before you try to write something interesting. That would be my advice. That's what, that's what John McPhee does. That's what many folks have done. It's like, get some life experience doing something first. And then write about it would probably be my recommendation. In the realm of investing, finance, I would say that.
1:42:55 Speaker 05 Probably ensure you have an informational behavioral or network, meaning relationship advantage with whatever you choose to do. Unless you're going to do something like low cost index funds, which I think actually are a great idea for a lot of people. And I myself also invest in very, very low cost index funds.
1:43:15 Barry Ritholtz? That's your core. You could build, you know, that's your tree. You could throw some ornaments around it.
1:43:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. I want to like, keep your risk capital and your retirement capital separate.
1:43:26 Barry Ritholtz? What do you know about the world today that would have been useful to know 25 years or so ago when you graduated?
1:43:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'll throw out a few. So the first would be from an investing perspective, you don't need to compete in the public markets. You can learn a ton through being around startups or even very unsexy private sector stuff. And you can get very, very wealthy doing that. So you don't have to compete against the citadels of the world. Like, I don't want to do that. Or the rent tax or whatever. Like, that's bringing a knife to a gunfight. I don't want to deal with that. So I would say also.
1:44:05 Barry Ritholtz? Look for white space that you're, you can create your own area where you're a pioneer, not going into well trod space.
1:44:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, I would also say invest in what you know. And that sounds so trite, but the first, the first stock I ever bought was when I was in my teens. And it was, I think it was in my teens, might've been a little bit later, but it was Pixar. Because I knew the world of animation. I was like, oh, this is so fundamentally different. Like, this is going to change everything. That's it. That's all I knew. And so I would say that sort of investing from the perspective of watching main behavior on Main Street more than Wall Street is actually, can be a really viable approach. And then in the world at large, I would say for me personally, 30 years ago, I would have said,
1:44:56 Speaker 05 like, your current experience of mental health and the buggy code that you inherited from your parents, God bless them, but like, you know, there are some bugs in the code, is not a sort of psychological death sentence. You can actually change those things because.
1:45:15 Speaker 05 You can. You really can impact those things.
1:45:18 Barry Ritholtz? And you're living proof.
1:45:20 Speaker 05 I am living proof, and I would say that, you know, science, science is such an amazing tool, like the framework of science, so necessary for not fooling ourselves. And within the world of medicine, especially psychiatry, I don't want to throw psychiatry under the bus, but within the realm of medicine, I mean, anyone who's worth their salt will say something along the lines of like 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%. And when I was growing up, I mean, there were so many definitive statements about like, all right, you're born with this number of neurons, and when they die, they die, and that's it. You can never regenerate, these types of things. Totally false. And I feel
1:46:01 Speaker 05 like many of our assumptions about psychiatry, psychology, emotional health will be overturned in the next five years. It's going to happen fast.
1:46:12 Barry Ritholtz? Thank you, Tim, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Tim Ferriss, author, podcaster, angel investor. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out any of the previous 560 we've done over the past 11 years. You can find those at Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Be sure and check out my new book, How Not to Invest: The Bad Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth. How Not to Invest at your favorite bookseller. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each
1:46:54 Barry Ritholtz? week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Baumann is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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