#159: How to Optimize Creative Output — Jarvis versus Ferriss

This episode is a conversation/debate/trading of ideas between Chase Jarvis http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/05/26/the-tim-ferriss-show-episode-8-chase-jarvis-master-photographer/ (@ChaseJarvis http://www.twitter.com/chasejarvis) and yours truly. We discuss a little bit of everything, including: Optimizing creative output Systems thinking Quota setting Celebrating the small wins Success for type-A personalities Meditation techniques Absurdity The details of the struggles of creating a high level And much, much more... If you enjoy this conversation, we invite you to check out CreativeLive.com/30DaysofGenius http://creativelive.com/30DaysofGenius where you can get incredible videos from people like Richard Branson, Seth Godin http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Brene Brown http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/08/28/brene-brown-on-vulnerability-and-home-run-ted-talks/, and many more. It's free. Sign up now http://creativelive.com/30DaysofGenius. If you sign up by Friday, May 13th at 11:59pm PT, you are entered to win a mentorship from me, Chase, and 3 other high-level performers for a year. We will pick 1 winner on May 15, and I hope it's you https://www.creativelive.com/courses/30-days-genius-chase-jarvis. This podcast is brought to you by FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/tim. FreshBooks is a bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/tim tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. https://www.freshbooks.com/tim You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/tim and enter "Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/tim" in the "how did you hear about us section." This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate to answer that.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is used by a ton of the startups that I work with or advise. Many of the fastest growing. It is used by almost all of the contractors that I work with. It is the easiest way online to send invoices, get paid, track your time for invoicing, track your clients, so they get to the point of paying you, all that stuff that you could possibly find. And right now, you can get a free month of complete unrestricted use, and you do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, just go to freshbooks.com/tim and enter "Tim" in the "How did you hear about us?" section. You can, of course, customize it to fit your brand with your own logo and color. And FreshBooks shows you whether or not, for instance, a client has looked at the invoice. They can

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  send late payment reminders to your clients automatically, so you do not have to think about it or chase them down. And you can track your hours. You can do all sorts of things. There are mobile outlets. You take pictures of your receipts, and FreshBooks will organize them for you later. It is a great piece of software, and if you are in a small business, or maybe a fast-growing business that is feeling growing pains, and you need to streamline, then this is a place to look. Because certainly, for me, this has been a headache in the past, and it doesn't have to be a headache for you. So check out freshbooks.com/tim and try it out and see what you think.

• 1:44Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I use 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number-one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things. With 99designs, designers around

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  ...the world to compete, create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out.

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, Muskrats and Magui. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job typically to deconstruct world-class performers of various types and various worlds to tease out the tactics and so on that you can use. By popular demand, though, we are turning the tables, switching it up, mixing things about a bit. And this episode is a conversation, sometimes a debate, a trading of ideas between Chase Jarvis, world-famous photographer, and yours truly. It really focuses on, overall, how to optimize creative output. And there is a URL mentioned, which is creativelive.com/30daysofgenius, all spelled out,

• 3:20Tim Ferriss?

  creativelive.com, and then forward slash three zero days of genius, where you can get incredible videos from people like Richard Branson, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, Brene Brown, Jared Leto, goes on and on and on. One video per day. That is always going to be there. But if you sign up, which you can do at that URL, there is a sign up for free button you will see, by Friday, the 13th, that is, May 13th, Friday, before midnight PST, then you could win direct mentorship with yours truly, with Chase Jarvis and three other incredible folks. The episode itself focuses, like I said, on creative output. And we touch on systems thinking, how to use the question, what would this look like if

• 4:05Tim Ferriss?

  it were easy? We have, how can I set my quota lower so that I can feel like I'm winning? And using that as a precursor for winning. How to celebrate the small wins, even if you're not good at it. Lionel Richie anecdotes, can't do anything without that. Have we Succeeded despite or because of type A personalities. We have a discussion on that and how it pairs up with meditation techniques and practical tactics for dealing with the real world and the edge that you might create for yourself. Absurdity is a synonym for creativity and a lot of very nitty gritty discussions about the struggles, the battle. Even at a high level, perhaps especially at a high level, you just trade up in the types of problems that you have. How do you contend with those? How do you balance achievement with appreciation?

• 4:50Tim Ferriss?

  It goes on and on. So I hope you enjoy this episode and the URL again, not to miss, you should check it out, is creativelive.com/30daysofgenius. And without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Chase Jarvis.

• 5:18Tim Ferriss?

  All right, buddy. Again, welcome to the show. See if we can not bodge that. And we're just gonna hold each other for the rest of the show. So, how are you? I'm well. You good? I'm doing great, man. We're in San Francisco. Sunny San Francisco. It's 80 degrees today. I'm wearing a sweater because we were wearing the same outfit before we started. I end up with the same outfit as my guests all the time. How are you? You good? I'm fantastic. Yeah, I'm really fantastic. The podcast is crushing. It's funny how that as a side project, as a stress release valve, turned into the main focus. The thing. I mean, it was really intended just to be a creative outlet and kind of a sketchpad. I was guest number either two or three. You pitched it to me as an experiment, like, this is gonna be weird.

• 6:03Tim Ferriss?

  It might be bad. It might be bad. Quite probably will be bad, but I was so burned out after doing the last book, The Four Hour Chef, I just wanted something different. And also, along the lines of what Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has talked about before, to focus on systems thinking in his language, which is...

• 6:22Tim Ferriss?

  Planning projects that even if they are viewed as a failure by the outside world, give you skills or a network, something that helps carry over to your next project. So for me, I was like, "Well, even if the podcast fails, I'll get better at asking questions." And I'll get better, that's funny, at eliminating verbal tics, I say, as I sound like Porky Pig. Work in progress, folks. But yeah, it's just been a blast. And it's one of those rare cases where the thing that is now driving a lot of the creative ship for me is what I most enjoy doing.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Go figure.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, go figure.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  But is there a, well, not is there, I know the answer. The answer is yes. You engineered that, but did you engineer it so carefully? Like, did you know it was gonna be this perfect or this magical when you started? Or did you just start? Like, give us a little bit of your thought process. Because "baked in there" is the answer, but I wanted to...

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was told, it was not a disaster when it started. But if you go back and listen to like, episode one with Kevin Rose, I was nervous.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  You start with your friends.

• 7:22Tim Ferriss?

  I started with my friends and I was still nervous. And I remember, a couple of things happened in that first interview. Number one, I was just, I was throwing out the questions that I'd borrowed from other people I had seen interview. So one of them was like, "If you could be a breakfast cereal, what would you be?" And Kevin's like, "Oh, it's gonna be one of those interviews." And I'm like, "Ah, stop shaving my balls. I'm already nervous." And then, I was nervous and drinking wine. And so when I flash forward like, three quarters of the way through, I sound, and I was, completely drunk. So it's like, right out of the gate, I embarrassed myself.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Well, this is gin.

• 7:56Tim Ferriss?

  This is gin, we should be very clear. But what I did do is interviewed, or really just reached out to podcasters before starting to ask them a series of questions, which is what I do anytime I try to learn about anything, even if I don't launch, even if I make the decision to abort. And in this case, it became clear that almost everyone who launches a podcast quit after, say, three episodes. You look on iTunes, 300,000 podcasts, let's just say, and the vast majority have three episodes and then they go silent. They go dead. And it's because people get overwhelmed with editing. So I made the decision to do long form, long conversations, next to no editing.

• 8:37Tim Ferriss?

  And just that decision alone, I think, has allowed me to get to where I am in a necessary but not sufficient manner. Like, those small decisions that are made, and we were chatting about this before we started recording, but in response to the question that I've been asking myself more and more, which is, what would this look like if it were easy? Like, yes, you can try to make it perfect over here, but that might mean that you quit after three attempts. So, like, what would it look like if it were easy? And part of the answer was, next to no post-production.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I love it. Well, to describe a parallel track, Chase Jarvis Live, this particular show, is five or six years old now, and the original 50 episodes were only in Seattle, 100-person live studio audience, live only, no pre-recorded, also the same long format. And it was hard, and even then I'd made some decisions, some aesthetic decisions, one of which was making it black and white. Primarily, that was intentional so that it would be reductive and you're just focusing on the two people and the conversation. But then it was also like, oh, well, that saves all kinds of other problems because we can use mixed light and natural light and, you know, artificial light, and we don't

• 9:51Speaker 02

  have to solve for all this shit. So there's, I kind of tried to do it then, and this, what we're living right now, is an even easier version of that. And it's weird how, when you take out these things that are the blockers, how you can steamroll through something.

• 10:05Tim Ferriss?

  And not only that, but what I've come to realize... Maybe a little later in my life than I would have liked is that- You're like 26, what do you mean later in your life? That's true, 26. Been doing a lot of roids, that explains the lost hair. But, uh, it's a joke, folks. Not a very funny one, but the, uh, the point I was gonna make is that I think for type A personalities, I put us both in that bucket- Dangerously. Is, it is easy as a default to assume that if you're, if you don't feel like you're burning the candle at both ends, you're not doing a good job. And what I've realized is, yes, there's a place for hard work, if you've chosen the appropriate place to put it. However, if you're really focused on your unique abilities, right?

• 10:49Tim Ferriss?

  And really just honing in on the things that you are best at. And it doesn't mean you're best in the world, but just of the things that you do, you are best at this small piece. It's not, it shouldn't feel really, really hard and forced. And I think that, that, that leads some people who are really driven to veer away from what they're good at, to incorporate all this complexity that is comprised of things that they're mediocre at, or just so-so at. And I've just realized for myself, and the podcast is really, was the wake-up call for me, that it doesn't have to be so hard. Uh, and yes, there are times when you grind. Yes, there are times when like, I'll batch-record the podcast, which is another thing I do to make it sustainable. So I'll record, say I record on Mondays and Fridays.

• 11:33Tim Ferriss?

  Just decided as a policy, I'm gonna record on Mondays and Fridays. Then I'll do two or three on a Monday, two or three on a Friday. That's a month and a half of long-form interviews. And then I have the shorter ones. And all of that is intended to make it sustainable and consistent, and it allows me to focus on the pieces that I am best at. Uh, whereas if, if I had made other decisions based on what the crowds were doing, right? And I was told this when I started blogging. Like, you have to blog at least a half a dozen times before noon, or nobody's gonna pick up on your blog. It's not gonna become huge. You have to do this. It has to be this length, it has to be this, it has to be that. And when you ask those folks for like, for the evidence, or any, any supporting data, you know, well, how do you know that? Even just that question, you don't have to be abrasive about it. Like, how do you know that?

• 12:16Tim Ferriss?

  And they're like, because so-and-so, Bill, Bob, and Harry and Jane told me that it was true. And it's like, oh, you realize, just because something's been repeated that often doesn't make it true. And you find the same thing in like, podcasting. You have to do this, have to do this, have to do this. And, uh, just to give one example- Since I'm all fired up on green tea is the audio quality. So, audio quality is important in so much as for 99% of the people listening, they're going to be in a subway, in a car, cooking. It has to be intelligible and it has to be loud enough. And make it stereo, or rather mono, so that you don't have like one person's voice in one ear and one person's voice in the other. As long as you do that, everybody except for audio engineers will be happy.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  So true.

• 13:00Tim Ferriss?

  But people will kill themselves who know nothing about audiovisual with like preamps and all of this gear and they'll become so overwhelmed, none of which I use, that they quit because they're like, "This is too complex for me." It's like, "What would this look like if it were simple, if it were easy?"

• 13:16Speaker 02

  So let's extrapolate just to some really concrete stuff. Like, what is the universal lesson? If you simplify it, it's easy. But presumably, there are folks out there who are writers and photographers and designers, and is there a maxim that transcends just "make it easy"?

• 13:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think there are compatible maxims. If there's something to transcend it...

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Transcend might not be it.

• 13:43Tim Ferriss?

  Am I making this hard? Am I making this harder than it needs to be? For instance, one of the best pieces of advice, just to get out of podcasting, and look at writing.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:53Tim Ferriss?

  Which I find infinitely harder than podcasting, although...

• 13:56Speaker 02

  We're podcasting right now.

• 13:57Tim Ferriss?

  We're podcasting right now.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  I'm not even trying. Are you trying?

• 13:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not trying. Although, I had so much mushrooms before we started. No, I'm kidding.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  You did hours of prep for this.

• 14:04Tim Ferriss?

  I did hours, hours of prep. The blank page is very intimidating for a lot of people. Unless they happen to be trained journalists who can churn out 1,500 words a day and have them be good, that's not me. But one of the best pieces of advice I got was from someone who told me this lesson in the context of IBM back in the day, when IBM was just the behemoth. It was 800-pound gorilla across several different industries, and their salespeople were known as being incredibly, incredibly effective. They smashed quotas. Now, how did they do that? One of the lessons that was taken away from IBM was that they made the quotas really low. That's pretty odd. Why would they make the quote as low?

• 14:49Tim Ferriss?

  Because they wanted the salespeople to not be intimidated to pick up the phone. They wanted to just build that sales momentum and then people would overshoot their goals. Translated to writing, I was told at one point, your goal should be two crappy pages a day. That's it. If you hit two crappy pages, even if you never use them, you've succeeded for the day. And alleviating that performance anxiety about putting down like 10 pages of good material, which inevitably, I think, you're going to fail at least once or twice a week, allows you to overshoot that goal and continually succeed and sort of build that confidence and momentum. So that would be an example of rigging the game so that you can win it.

• 15:34Tim Ferriss?

  It applies to diet, it applies to exercise, it applies to writing, it applies to podcasting. How can I make this easy? How can I set, in a way, the goal lower, the objective smaller, so that I can feel like I'm winning? Because I feel like the feeling that you are winning is a precursor to winning on a very large scale.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, to actually winning. The way I talk around on here is CreativeLive, for example, has a ton of momentum right now. It's like it's just growing, it's exceeding our expectations. I mean, we have very high expectations, but you can't underestimate the power of momentum. And two becomes four, four, I mean, just think about compounding interest. There's like, you're leaning into it and it's accelerating and the, maybe even the accelerating lot, a lot of accelerating returns, that's what I'm trying to think of. So is that a, I don't know, do you apply it to every part of it? Because you just touched on like writing and all that.

• 16:34Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I apply it to any type of behavioral change. And if you want to be more creative, you want to make more money, which is then, has many different component behaviors. If you want to sleep better, longer, deeper, whatever it might be, set of behaviors you need to change, right? Whenever I'm looking at behavioral modification... I think BJ Fogg at Stanford has done a lot of interesting writing in this department, where if he's trying to get someone to floss, he'll be like, "Start with your front teeth." It's like, "Don't worry about the whole mouth." He's just like, "I want you to floss, like, you have enough time to floss your front teeth." It's eight seconds. And eventually, you'll just be like, "Wow, I'm such a loser. I can't believe I'm flossing my front teeth. I'll just floss my whole mouth." And then you do it, and before you know it, boom, you're flossing your teeth, right?

• 17:15Tim Ferriss?

  But rigging it in such a way that you don't put it off, right? So, "Oh, you want to pick up an exercise habit? Five minutes on the treadmill. That's it." And it's like, if you get in there and you're like, "Ah, I'm not feeling it." You want to do that after six minutes? Great, you're done. You succeeded. You win. If you want to stay, you're feeling great, feeling a little froggy, as my gymnastics coach currently would say. It's like, great, then stay on for another 30 minutes. But like, understand, that's bonus points. You already won. And I think another way, a very close corollary to that, for creatives, particularly people who are like, "I need to win. I want to be number one. I want to..." Fill in the blank, like- I have no idea. Aggressive goal. I know you have none of that hardwiring, is celebrating the small wins.

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think I've been very bad at that historically. And my ex-girlfriend helped me develop a habit, which I think is a great habit. I have this jar, and it's going to sound super cheesy, but she labeled it "The Jar of Awesome." And it's a big mason jar, and it's just like, when something really cool happened, you're not going to remember it, like, three months later, and have that perspective to give you gratitude. It's like, write it down on a little piece of paper, like, every night, like, write down the things that were awesome that happened that day, however small they might be. Fold it up, put it in the jar of awesome. And then when you get into a funk, when you're feeling down, when you're feeling uncreative, whatever it might be, go through and read these pieces of paper, these little, like, self-made fortune cookies of goodness- That's awesome.

• 18:44Tim Ferriss?

  ...from this jar. It's a really easy habit that I think allows you to not only be creative, but understand that most people, and I know this isn't exclusively focused on creativity, but- Why do people want to be creative? Because they want to do good work. Why do they want to do good work? Because this, this, this. Why? Because they want to feel good about themselves and be happy. It's like, well, you can give yourself small doses of that throughout the process. You don't have to postpone that reward that you think you're going to get at the end. Because guess what? If you don't celebrate the small things, you're not actually going to be very good at celebrating the big things either.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, I don't remember. It's come up in this series of talks. The, somebody was talking about, was it? I think it was Neil Strauss talking about interviewing Lionel Richie. Like Lionel Richie, he just had a, I mean, had an epic year, you know? It had to be like 1983 or something like that. It was an epic year. He won the Grammy, sold a million albums, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, he considered himself climbing his way to the top of the music industry. And when he got there, you know when he told Neil, "Was up there? Fuck all. There's nothing up there." It was just, there was no one else on the mountain. And so it's just, obviously, the, you know, the takeaway is that it's, it really is the journey. It sounds trite, like you said, like a awesome jar, a jar of awesomeness. But if you can't actually celebrate your wins along the way, what do you got?

• 20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and the anecdote that I still remember to this day, and it just puts a lot in perspective, which was from Thich Nhat Hanh. So this was a Buddhist monk who's nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And he's, he's done quite a lot of writing. I think the first was "Peaches Every Step," or something like that, which was intended for internal use only. It was a guidebook to new monks who were attending his retreat center or monastery in Vietnam. But the point being, the anecdote that he talked about was thinking about this peach. So you really want this peach at the end of the day. And this is like your, your reward for a hard day's work, whatever it is. But if you're, say, washing the dishes,

• 20:46Tim Ferriss?

  and instead of being mindful, and I don't want to get too woo-woo and out there, but this, this does have a lot of practical applications. Instead of like being present with washing the dishes and doing it in a very conscious way, you're thinking about the peach you're going to have afterwards. When you're eating the peach, you're not going to be able to enjoy the peach either. You're going to be thinking about like your inbox, or whatever the hell it is that you're going to do after the peach. And so it's like... Really honing that, and I actually owe you a debt of gratitude, and I've said this before, but for introducing me to Transcendental Meditation and getting me to bite the bullet with that. And there are many different types of mindfulness practice that work very well. I think things like Headspace are very helpful as apps.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, great app, Calm.

• 21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Calm also very good. But celebrating the small wins, and mindfulness is one of the constituent attributes that you can develop that helps a lot with that.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  I love that. I'm gonna go to the meditation thing. I think it's, you provided the bridge, now that you're a professional interviewer with the podcast and everything, natural bridge, I'm gonna take it. One of the things that, I'll tell a short story here, which is, I don't remember where we were, we were in Seattle somewhere, or maybe not, but we were doing something, and he said, "Dude, you're like, you're killing it, and you seem really chill, what's going on? Like, what's different?" There's something different, and I was like, "Oh, wow, that's interesting you said that, I can't really think of..." Oh, actually, come to think of what's different is, I started meditating about, you know, six months ago or something, and I think you were like, "Hmm, are you okay? I think you checked my pulse." You made sure that I was still alive, and then we sort of, yeah, I don't remember if

• 22:17Speaker 02

  we laughed about it, or were, I just, there was a few minutes of introspection around, what does that mean? Is it the thing that has got us to where we are? Any amount of success that you could say either one of us had had? Is it because we're hardcore, type A grinder, like, gonna not fail at any cost type of people? Or is that something that's actually been an anchor all along?

• 22:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You were worried about-

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  We've succeeded despite it and not because of it.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you asked me, like, well, don't get all soft on me, Jarvis, do you feel like you, are you losing your edge?

• 22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  So, talk to me about, not, we'll get into meditation in particular in a second, but how about the mentality or the fear that some people who are hardcore or hard-charging consider themselves that type of a person? Tell me, or the people who are listening and watching, how that's not the case, or how it wasn't the case for you, or how you sort of played through that.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  This is, this is something I haven't fully answered for myself, to be quite honest, and I was just having an exchange- Well, I was talking on my podcast with Tara Brock about this. He wrote a fantastic book called Radical Acceptance. Terrible title, great book. That I think is a very digestible and approachable presentation of how you can implement a lot of what we're talking about. I feel like in the very worst-case scenario, when I'm meditating consistently, and for me, tell me if this is true for you, but for me, let's just say I haven't been meditating at all. Whatever, I'm just being an idiot, or life intervenes, I'm just not meditating for like two weeks.

• 24:00Tim Ferriss?

  It takes me about five to seven days for there to be like a phase shift. Like, I meditate consistently, and it's kind of like, eh, what am I doing? Okay. That session was eh, meh, meh, meh. And then you drop in, and then you kind of shift gears, and things become very, very different. When I get to that point, in a worst-case scenario, I feel like I have half the anxiety and unnecessary stress, in a very stoic sense, right? I mean, I talk about stoic philosophy a lot, I read tons of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc. repeatedly. And, so I'm not allowing external factors to provoke an excessive emotional response. So like 50% less of all the negative manifestations of that. Stress, anxiety, dah dah dah dah.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Tony Robbins, I remember, said at one point, he said, "Stressed is sort of type A language for fear." And I was like, that's a pretty good one. And secondly, I'd say I get 80% as much done. That's a worst-case scenario. So it's like 50% decrease in all the negative. And at least 80% of what I usually get done. So that's at the low end, I think. That's like a worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario. Trying to look at it with slightly rose-colored glasses on, I would say that...

• 25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Meditating allows, helps me to be more effective, not just more efficient. Meaning, much of what I do when I don't meditate, I think is reactive, compulsive, dodging bullets or putting out fires. It's like, okay, great, maybe you cleared 50 additional email that day. Were those email important to clear at all in the first place? Maybe not. And I think that with meditation, I'm able to, or mindfulness practice, just because meditation is like a total big brand. It's got so much baggage. We'll go there. Yeah, but it allows me to step back, where I'm like, okay, no longer am I on like the front lines in a trench, having like grenades lobbed at me.

• 26:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'm actually like the general, looking at the battlefield and like the map of the territory, being like, okay, let's make some like high level decisions. Like, these guys shouldn't even be fighting over here. What the fuck are they doing over here? No. Like, alright, go over here. Call these guys out, we need more troops here. And, objective wise, we should be going after like this, this, this. Great. Whew, everybody, deep breath, execute. So, that's a bit of a whining answer, but I feel like, especially at this point in my life, I do feel like I could have benefited tremendously from it previously. Yeah. Even if it were just for the benefit that I find myself less likely to engage in addictive behaviors, like stimulants.

• 26:47Tim Ferriss?

  So, I have always loved coffee. I mean, tea at the weakest, right? When I was, when I was a, yeah, exactly. When I was a high school athlete, I got hooked on pre-workout supplements, you know, Fedorin, caffeine, ashman, all that stuff. And I think I did a lot of physical damage to myself by taking that stuff consistently, because it was sort of self-medicating, but also just really put me on like level 11 to, you know, in spinal tap parlance. But, when I meditate, I don't need those things as much, nor do I want those things as much. Yeah. So, I think it could have been very helpful, just from a health standpoint, if I'd started earlier. And, these days, you know, I'm 38, I feel like...

• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

  I want to pick my shots. It's like I'm no longer the athlete I once was. I'm not going to go out there like Joe Frazier and just like throw hooks all day long. It's like, no, I want to just, I want to have very surgical strikes. And to do that, you need to, I think, have just that general level awareness and not be a foot soldier.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just actually read a great quote from Maya Angelou, something about creativity. And it, for some reason, this is a tie-in to meditation, which is creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend, the more you have. And I find that there's this sort of compounding thing. You alluded to it in your meditation sort of recount right there, where it's just like, it's compounding, day one, day two, day three, it's like three, three, three. And then all of a sudden, it's four, five, six, seven, eight on a scale of one to 10. And I find that if I'm in it, boy, it's an accelerating sort of experience. An effectiveness, not efficiency, for sure. It is clarity.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  The way Jordan talks about basketball, like he sees the game in slow motion. That's what makes him different than most of the other players. I think that's the one that I've used on why I think meditation's powerful. Because I tend to see my life in slow motion, as opposed to the hyper-caffeinated like, gotta run from here, and I'm late to this in five minutes, and how busy feels so powerful because you're always doing and, oh, man, I'm so awesome.

• 28:58Tim Ferriss?

  No, I agree. And the creativity being an asset that grows the more you use it, the more you spend, I think is a very interesting concept. And what I've been focusing on personally in the last, say, three to six months, really trying to focus on is seeking out and creating the absurd. So I think that there's so much absurdity in life.

• 29:25Tim Ferriss?

  And as adults, we've kind of inculcated ourselves to be very serious. We're so serious and mature. And I think that is kryptonite for creativity. I really think that like taking life and yourself too seriously is just... Dangerous. It's like waterboarding your creativity. It just, it absolutely nullifies, or at least decreases it dramatically. So for me, I've been trying to not only seek out absurdity, which I think quite frankly is, in many cases, a synonym for creativity or creative. It's like just, if creativity is too nebulous, like people are like, "I've read six books on creativity, I'm still not sure what the hell it means." It's like, go for absurd.

• 30:07Tim Ferriss?

  Like, try to find the absurd and create the absurd. So, and on that note, Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers. Credible. Uh, hilarious writer also. Incredibly deep philosophical thinker, but it's embedded in this humor, like Cat's Cradle. You know, it's like, "No cat, no cradle." You know, it's just like, uh, that doing things kind of just for the hell of it. You know, for no good reason whatsoever, and making them as absurd as possible. I have created some very interesting opportunities for myself, some very unexpected opportunities for myself, just by doing things on a lark and doing things because they're absurd. Could be, could be just a... Can you give us an example?

• 30:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'll give you an example. So, on Instagram, like I try to put up, uh, at least a handful of photos a week that are just completely absurd with minimal explanation, just to see how the world responds. So it's like me testing out my, my dog's new dog bed, you know, with like little to no explanation. Or like yesterday, putting up this photo of myself with these ridiculous things called sunstashes, which got sent to me. And it's like sunglasses with these little bunny ears with like a chain that hangs down with like a bunny mouth over my mouth. So I took this photograph of myself with a Save Ferris shirt on, holding a kitchen knife and a bottle of wine, and just put that out there. And I was just like, "Let's see what the world does with that." And

• 31:38Tim Ferriss?

  How was it received? It was received, I mean, as to be expected with the internet. Like, there are a lot of people who don't know how to take anything non-literally. Yeah. Which, and I'm not sure how you would even take that literally. Uh, it was great. It was just like scratching my own itch to be absurd and just, uh, stir things up a bit. Can we use the word "play"? Play, for sure. And I think that another, and I know we're going all over the place here, but... I think that I've also revisited a lot of mythology in the last year or so. This is not, this, we haven't talked about this, but... For sure. Uh, I've become fascinated by... Minotars and shit, or what do you mean? Not, uh, yeah, potentially Minotars, but, uh, a lot of animal-related, say, Native American mythology.

• 32:22Tim Ferriss?

  Looking at, like, the coyote and the raven, or like, Inctomi, or these different trickster gods. I mean, I used to be a D and D head in all Fairness Dungeons and Dragons, for those who have not played with the graph paper. The twenty-sided dice. The twenty-sided dice, oh, so good. I still have all of mine. Nice. Uh, yeah, dodecahedrons and all that goodness, but, go gray elf. Anyway, the, the point being that there, I think that the, the masks people wear, and this is someone else's quote, but often tell us more about who they are than the truth, right? And the stories that persist for hundreds or thousands of years can tell us, even though they're fiction,

• 33:06Tim Ferriss?

  more about our sort of existential condition and humanity and human nature than any non-fiction book written on the subject.

• 33:16Tim Ferriss?

  And that's something I've been trying to explore, like, to discover truth through what people would consider non-truth, uh, in the form of mythologies, and specifically for me, focusing on these kind of trickster prankster gods, who are very, they're, I mean, very interesting characters. Because they're viewed on one hand as creators and one hand destroyers, but they, in many cases, kind of walk the line between the... This ordinary reality of human beings and this other world of mythology surrounding the gods and whatnot, but there's, as off the reservation as all of that sounds, I think

• 33:56Tim Ferriss?

  there's a lot of truth to be gleaned by looking at stories that have just persisted for hundreds of thousands of years. And that's informed a lot of my behavior.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a play component embedded in that for sure. Like it's make believe, and it made me, as you were talking, I reflected on my own life, and I have a list of 10 habits that I do every day, and I put, there's actually two words that I put in one habit, and it's play or make. And like I consider myself-

• 34:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where do you put that?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  I put it in an app called Habit List, that I track 10 habits. It's not a free app, so you have to be prepared to pay a dollar ninety-nine, which I've literally have said, "Yeah, check out this app," and like, "Oh, my God, it's a dollar ninety-nine." Like, literally, you paid twice as much to your coffee this morning, so get off your ass and fork up the dollar ninety-nine habit list. It's a good one.

• 34:46Tim Ferriss?

  So you put, now, make or play, are those two separate habits? Or do you put them in one line?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  One habit. And that's the part that I think is interesting, is we were talking about like creativity is sort of making something out of nothing, and then you gotta be careful not to take yourself too seriously, and that led us into play.

• 34:59Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of your other habits? Sorry. I'm holding back to protect this family program.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  No, this is great. I'll get to those in just a second, let me put a bow on this point. But the fact that play and make, for me, are interchangeable-

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  I look at making as a playful activity, even though basically the only job I've ever had is as a professional creative. And, you know, reflection on one of, someone you introduced me to, Charlie, who used to work for you, helped you launch the Four Hour Work Week, maybe, Four Hour Body. His book, Play It Away, which is about having, finding some relief in your day, 30 minutes to just go hit baseballs, or take a walk, or goof off, basically, and how that stimulates creativity. So I put those on the same thing, on the same level, and if I make something, say this show, or I will take some time out and actually go take some pictures every day, that making or goofing off, I lump those in the same thing, because it makes me a better human. You want to know some other habits?

• 35:52Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Make sure to drink 64 ounces of water every day.

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  64 ounces.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Which is not an incredible amount, it's just like-

• 35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Eight glasses.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, roughly eight glasses.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  And Kelly Stratt's got me salting that water, of course.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Kelly does that. Another one is eight hours in bed. I don't require eight hours of sleep of myself, but generally there's a strong correlation with if I'm in bed-

• 36:18Tim Ferriss?

  Bedtime sleeping.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  It's weird how those go together, right? Like, um-

• 36:24Tim Ferriss?

  I do the same thing with napping. It's not nap- it's not sleep for 20 minutes. It's lay down for 20 minutes. Because that, again, like rigging the game so you can win, it- if you lay down, you're like, "Fuck, I need to get to sleep. I only have 20 minutes. Sleep, come on, sleep." Like, you're never gonna get to sleep, and so- But if it's just like, lay down, you're gonna get 80% of the benefit if you just close your eyes and just relax for 20 minutes. Then you actually will oftentimes fall asleep.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  There you go, so that's my eight hours in bed. Eat clean. And clean, I have sort of an operative, whatever clean is right now, sometimes it's paleo, sometimes it's just no fake foods, like nothing with preservatives or whatever, and I is, you know, that I eat clean today, or it should be cleanly. But, uh, what else, what other, I'm questioning, what else is on my list here? Well, this isn't about me, it's you asked the question, you're now a professional interviewer as we do this.

• 37:18Tim Ferriss?

  This is about us.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Meditation AM and meditation PM. So I give myself 20 minutes every morning and 20 minutes every evening. And I don't hold myself to the 20 minutes, that's why it just says meditate. Sometimes when I come out of it and it's been 11 minutes, I allow myself to, I'll usually just sit there for another four or five.

• 37:33Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you meditate at night?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I try and meditate before dinner.

• 37:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Cause I almost never meditate in the afternoon or evenings. I just, I just kind of threw in the towel with that early on, but I do the mornings consistently. So before dinner.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I try and, and I track this behavior so I can tell you exactly what my percentage is for PM meditation. I'll do that right now. Uh, in the week of 3/27 in March, I was at 57% of the time. So, not all the time, right? Uh, versus the week of 3/13-

• 38:02Tim Ferriss?

  Almost a passing grade.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  71%. Yeah, I know. But again, the point is that I don't, I set the habit to just do the thing.

• 38:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  And, uh, let's see, I'll give you the rest of them. 0 to 1 glasses of red wine.

• 38:15Tim Ferriss?

  0 to 1, that's a lot of- That's a lot of self-control, sir.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  It is, and I've been doing this basically since, I mean, I think you probably know me as someone who parties reasonably hard. I'm not afraid to drink ten drinks.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  And starting in January 1st, I just said, you know what, I did the Januwagon, basically didn't drink anything in January. Felt amazing and my sleep was completely transformed. I was sleeping in a really different and much deeper way. And then January, or February, I said, okay, well, I'll just have a couple of drinks here and there. And now I'm in on this thing and I love it. So I'm probably drinking 90% less.

• 38:51Tim Ferriss?

  See, I don't do moderation very well. Some are either binary on or off, so I haven't done any booze this month.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  At all?

• 38:58Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 38:59Tim Ferriss?

  And, yeah, I have to eliminate. I'm not very good at moderating.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Well, we'll go have a drink after this.

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Go have a

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Visualizing gratitude.

• 39:09Tim Ferriss?

  Stiff kombucha.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Visualizing gratitude. I already said player make. And move my body.

• 39:17Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how does gratitude manifest?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Immediately following my morning meditation, I, and I put those things, I put gratitude and, what is it, visualizing gratitude. So I visualize some of the things that I want to happen in my day and in my life. And I usually do that immediately after. So when I'm coming out of meditation, I look, okay, great, I got my 20 minutes. What are some things I want to manifest? And these are just pictures that I think in pictures, as most people do. And I just picture some of the things having, in the process of happening, that I want, whether it's a great interview with Tim Ferriss. I picture us sitting here laughing, talking, oh, this is so great, we love it. And then I'll picture some success with CreativeLive, or some sex, some

• 40:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Some success with my wife Kate.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  But I'll just, you know, whether it's personal or professional, like what are some things I want to have happen? And then, oh, that was awesome. What are some things I'm grateful for? And it's usually a little bit of a reflection on what I just wanted to have. Man, I'm really thankful for all the things that Kate's taught me in my life. Or, you know, I got an elderly cat Dexter. You know, he's on his last, he's in a sort of end of life horizon. I'm really grateful for every day hanging out with Dexter if I'm at home. And that guy's, he's done a lot for me. And five or 10 things. And I sometimes write those down, sometimes just say them to myself, depending on what kind of time I've got.

• 40:41Tim Ferriss?

  There you go. Yeah, I have a similar routine, I mean, in the morning with... Give me the Tim Ferriss morning routine. Uh, alright. Bullet points. I'll bang through it. So, wake up. Uh, I have, this is my current morning routine. So, wake up, have the supplements that generally are absorbed on an empty stomach, better than not.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Feed the dog with some sardine oil on top of kibble. Molly? Molly. Awesome. She's so precious. She's great. Uh, she's getting big. And then, sit down, meditate for 20 minutes. Usually sit for 21 minutes because I want to have 20 minutes, but I usually fidget and like fuss with my legs and kind of crack my back and so on for the first minute. Then I'll have like a kind of three-minute decompress after that, where I just focus on the sounds and so on around me. Get up.

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  Set tea. Uh, I have a Breville, uh, tea, I guess, tea maker of sorts, 185 degrees. Then I will make tea with generally pu erh or oolong tea, plus turmeric and ginger. Uh, I will sit down with that, put some coconut oil, usually two tablespoons of coconut oil, which is about 60 to 65% medium-chain triglycerides. For some nice ketones to the brain, because keep in mind, I haven't really had breakfast yet. Sometimes I'll have a whey protein when I first wake up, if I'm training that day, or if I just trained the night before. Then, sit down with something called the five-minute journal or morning pages, and I will journal. And I'll hit the gratitude points, a few things that I'm grateful for that day.

• 42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Being sure to pick one that is a very small thing. And I picked this up from Tony Robbins, which is like, the cloud outside my window right now, or like, the cup of tea, or something very small, so that they're not all large things. Again, coming back to the celebrating little wins. And, uh, that will help me also prioritize for the day.

• 42:33Tim Ferriss?

  Or just get my thoughts on paper so that the monkey mind isn't rattling around in its cage.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:37Tim Ferriss?

  All day long, I can actually get something done. Then I will usually do some type of gymnastic warm-up.

• 42:48Tim Ferriss?

  Just for the joints, really, a few minutes of like-

• 42:50Speaker 02

  That's to move my body.

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Scapular circles, wrist stretches, a handful of like maybe planchleans and they're called, you know, cat camels. If those people who want to look this kind of stuff up. And some rotational stuff and then I'm off to the races. And I'm very often-

• 43:06Speaker 02

  How long does that take for you? Because people are like, "Oh shit, I've got three kids, this is totally undoable."

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, wake up earlier.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Wake up earlier, that's something I say-

• 43:14Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, look, it's just like, I am a lazy bastard, I... And look, in, to state the obvious, I'm in a very fortunate position where I can... I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, but it's like, you look at the person who wrote The Kite Runner. Alright, Khalid Hussaini, I think his name is. Full-time doctor, brutal schedule, he woke up an hour earlier. And he put pen to paper for like 45 minutes every morning and he wrote a book that turned into a massive iconic bestseller.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  And a movie and a, yeah.

• 43:43Tim Ferriss?

  And a movie and everything else, like you make the time, you're not going to find the time, you make the time. And, I should also say, it's like, I know people with three, four, five kids. Like Leo Babauta's Zen Habits, I know people who have like real jobs, people in finance, people who have like nine to five, you know, non-managerial entrepreneurial CEO jobs, who make it work really, really, really well. And you have to make time and I think that, I don't remember the, I think it was, I might be getting W.H. Auden? A-U-D-E-N, I want to say this is the quote, the right attribution, but like the routine,

• 44:23Tim Ferriss?

  in The Intelligent Man, routine is a sign of ambition, or something like that. And of course it applies to men and women, they're like, "Routine will save you." It's like, if you're trying to reinvent the wheel and reorder things every morning, you're dead in the water. It's not going to work, especially with kids.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Oh, as a creative, I used to fight any system, like, "Oh, it's just meant to keep me down." And then you realize that it actually makes your life that much better.

• 44:42Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, "No, I have a recipe." So it's like, that's why when you ask me like what my morning routine is, I'm like, "This is exactly..."

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  "This is the algorithm, right?" What's an algorithm? We use this word a lot now, like journalists use it a lot, like, "What the fu-" what is an algorithm? Algorithm is, and computer scientists, you can rip me apart here, but it's, it's a series of steps intended to produce a replicable result, right? And it's a recipe, in effect. And it's like, you need that in your routine. For like, my evening routine, I have the same, I mean, same thing. It's like locked down. I have a very particular evening routine. It's like my, my hot bath with Epsom salts, with ice bath alternating.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  This is gonna sound weird, but I've been in your bathtub.

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  It does sound weird, but yes. It, it fits a few people. It's not like we're-

• 45:22Speaker 02

  It's not a one-person-

• 45:23Tim Ferriss?

  We're not laying on top of each other in a standard-issue bathtub. Gazing into each other's eyes.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  You have an awesome tub, it's great.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  The rose petals were nice.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:31Tim Ferriss?

  No rose petals. But yeah, routine will save you. The crazier you are, the more neurotic you are, the more important routine is. Speaking of someone who I think is both of those things.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Me?

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. Me, me, me. You too. You just keep it on, you keep it under wraps better than I do.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  That'd be a little bit better. So, uh, evening routine, without going into detail, I just think it's interesting. Uh, you know, spent some time with Arianna Huffington. She's a really huge sleep advocate. And this sort of end-of-day routine, how powerful that has been. And she does the same thing, it's like, bath, and turn down all screens, hide those things 30 minutes before you need to go to bed. Um, I recently did a little video, that's not out yet, but about, I, like, eye mask, earplugs, stuff like that. I'm not a good sleeper. Game changer. And less drinking for me, it's been a really powerful thing. Any, what couple, sprinkle a couple of things?

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, other tweaks that I find helpful. Oh, I left make-my-bed-out-of-the-morning routine. I always make my bed in the morning. That was, I got that from some former Navy SEAL commanders, as well as, I think it's Don DePani, former monk. It's, it really sets the day off on the right foot. It seems weird.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  You accomplish a little thing and then you come-

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a minute. I don't like tuck it, it's not Four Seasons, like, but I have a large blanket that kind of covers the whole thing. It makes it look fine. But at night, and I bring it up because the night triggers thinking of the made bed. Because when you come back in, if you've had a difficult day, you come back in and like, your bedrooms just can complete disarray. I find that psychologically unsettling. It's just, it, it's not a good bookend to your day.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Versus you come into a space that's-

• 47:07Tim Ferriss?

  So, a couple of things. I have, uh, I think it's called a DOHM, I want to say it's the spelling, white noise machine. That is very, very, and if you search "sound machine" in my name, it'll probably pop up, but- I don't make it. But it's a small device, about yay large, and you can adjust the airflow. And it just provides a consistent background noise for sleeping. That's not so much my routine as the sleep setup. I also have a sleep mask, I think it's called the Sleep Master. Cheesy name, but it wraps over the ears as opposed to behind, like on top of the ears, which I find very uncomfortable. And it has Velcro, and it also basically buffers sound additionally.

• 47:48Tim Ferriss?

  I have these disposable, which I tend to reuse at least a couple times, 3M Construction earplugs. The orange ones? Uh, yeah, orange or yellow, yeah. They're really, really, they're great. They're powerful little... They're really powerful. And in terms of evening routine, I'll just throw out two things. So the first is definitely less screen time, and if you're gonna use screen, laptop, let's say, and then you use an app like Flux, which will change the wavelength of light that is emitted from your screen, so that it's... Matt, you use that, don't you? Matt's behind the camera right there, he likes Flux. He's like, "What's his orange green?" You're like, "Oh, yeah, Flux." So, yeah, tip for people like CEOs, don't let your designers work on stuff if they're using Flux past a certain hour, because the colors will be fucked.

• 48:32Tim Ferriss?

  This has happened to a number of people I know, but great app. And then the two pieces I would say is Hot Bath with Epsom Salt is just a must-have for me, and I'll very often listen to... Every night, Tim? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah, if I'm at home every night, and I will usually sit down and listen to a podcast or an audiobook.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll listen to Hardcore History, I'll listen to Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin Short, or I'll listen to any number of audiobooks. Now, so let's talk about the content of the audiobook, or TV show, or book, here's where I'm going. I find it, for me, I have experienced lifelong onset insomnia, and this seems to be hereditary. And males in my family almost all have onset insomnia, meaning they won't necessarily wake up in the middle of the night, but it takes them forever, me included, to get to sleep.

• 49:31Tim Ferriss?

  Typically because I'm running through the things I didn't do, the things I'm gonna do tomorrow, the problems I'd like to solve, the creative stuff I'd like to figure out, and I just can't turn off those hamster wheels. They're just constantly going. The way you turn those off is not by reading, say, a business book before you go to bed.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 49:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's just gonna pour gasoline on the fire. The way that I can hijack that process and enable myself to sleep is by focusing on fiction. So watching, say, a great TV series that I just finished binge watching, which is Black Mirror. It's a little dark, maybe not the best pre-bed stuff for everybody. But Black Mirror, or a book like The Baron in the Trees, which is a short story by Italo Calvino about this young boy who gets in a huge argument with his father and goes up into the trees and never comes down for the rest of his life. And it's a great fiction book, and it will pull you into this sort of surreal space of storytelling

• 50:31Tim Ferriss?

  that temporarily disables this problem-solving apparatus. And then I find it easier to get to sleep.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Interesting. Speaking of sleep, and you said it a couple times, I put a thumbtack in it a while ago and I wanna come back to it now, which is, the voices in your head.

• 50:49Tim Ferriss?

  They never stop.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  They never stop. Okay, but let's talk about controlling them for a little bit, because, you know, Brené Brown is a mutual friend of both of ours, talks about them as the gremlins. Arianna, who I already mentioned, talks about that annoying... is it annoying, what's the roommate? What does she say? Obnoxious roommate, like that's always sort of back there. And I think for both, you know, I find it almost a universal. People are at one end of the spectrum, high performers, high degree of self-confidence, maybe even actualized. They're like, that's just beating them up all the time. And on the other end, people who don't, you know, have low self-esteem. They're like, you're not good enough, you're not this, you're not that. And it's weird how we're all on this together,

• 51:32Speaker 02

  because regardless of where you are in your human journey, there's this voice inside of so many people's heads. I found that really interesting, and it does in part parlay into the meditation conversation we already had. But...

• 51:49Speaker 02

  You undoubtedly have voices in your head. And the reason I bring this up, because as people at home, Tim is so successful. He's got it made. He's got all these number one New York Times bestsellers. He's got millions of people that pay attention to him. You know, we love his podcast. I can't believe that he has voices in his head, too.

• 52:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  It's funny, but it's true.

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  No, the voices in my head just told me this great joke. No, I, I, I struggle a lot. I think that it's part of the human condition. And if, if people want a real snapshot of what like a day of, say, a bottom looks like for me, well, there are two posts. But one is called, if you search for anything along these lines, it'll pop up, "Productivity Hacks for the Neurotic, Manic, Depressive, and Crazy," and then in parentheses, "Like Me." That gives a pretty good snapshot. And then there's another one, which is, it's gonna sound very morbid, but I think it's just "Practical Thoughts on Suicide," and it has a very dark story from my past.

• 52:53Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that blog post is arguably, for me at least, the most meaningful and important thing that I've ever written, period. So I've had some very deep struggles. But we can separate between like, the deep, dark, downward spiral, uh, set of voices in the head, uh, which is like an angry mob that chases you down and like corners you in an alley. That's one type. But then there's the obnoxious roommate.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:21Tim Ferriss?

  Who's just like tapping you on the shoulder while you're trying to do anything. And who's, who's telling you that you're not, you're not trying hard enough. You're not thinking big enough. You're not doing this, you're not doing that, you're not doing this, you're not doing that. Now, it's not always a negative thing, right? So I think that the ego, for instance, and I don't wanna get too esoteric, but it's like, oh, ego's bad, ego's bad. I'm like, well, I'm not gonna miss it. It's 100% bad. I think that the dose makes the poison and that having some type of drive, and we're primates, you can read Chimpanzee Politics if you wanna real look into this. It's a great book. A lot of politicians read it, I'm not kidding, to like learn how to navigate the senate and congress and stuff. But the...

• 54:01Tim Ferriss?

  The way that we function in the world is positionally. So if you look at like positional economics, we're constantly comparing and contrasting. So to some extent, you're always going to have that voice in your head. Even if, I'm sure, and they might not admit it, but if we were to track down like the best-known Zen slash Buddhist slash mindfulness teachers, like I'm sure part of them is like, "God."

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Gary is like 10% better than me.

• 54:28Tim Ferriss?

  "Laurin Poche is so much better at meditating than me." "God, that guy, look at his robe, it's so clean and orange," or whatever. We all have it. And so I think that one refrain that I've been saying to myself, very literally, to my own obnoxious roommate, is, because I think there's like the observer, there's like me, then there's the obnoxious roommate, if that makes sense. I mean, we could talk about the id and all this stuff. "Waking Up" by Sam Harris is actually a great book that delves into some of this, and I'm not saying what I am saying is reflective of Sam's writing.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  But what I have tried not to do is what I would call retreating into story. And retreating into story for me is, I do something, let's think of a good example. Not known for my patience, I'm a pretty impatient guy. I like, like, I'm very, very aggressive.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  The trains run on time.

• 55:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, trains run on time. Like, "on time" means on time. It does not mean five minutes late. Like, "on time" is late. You know, I'm like one of those stern dad types with myself and with other people. And so let's say that someone doesn't meet my expectations, and I've hired them or contracted them, and I don't fly off the handle, but I have a very curt, abrasive conversation or send off this missive via email that is just clearly 20% unnecessary prickliness. And then it turns, then like their feelings get hurt, or they come out throwing haymaker like counter punches, and I'm just like, "God, I always do this." Okay.

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  And then I retreat into story, and it's like, "Oh, I always do this, remember the time I did this and did that? I am this, I am that." Like, that is a point for me to pause. Like, "I always," or "I am." Is I've learned to kind of time out.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  That's trigger feeding.

• 56:33Tim Ferriss?

  As much as possible, and I'm not perfect, but I'll be like, wait a second. Like, am I retreating into my story? Am I like taking that old record off the shelf that is like Tim's pessimism regarding, you know, self-image and anger? And it's like putting that on and just like rocking out to that? It's like, no, no, no, no, no, you can choose the record. Like, no, no, no, put that record back. And like if you're getting, I remember so, I read this, it's like if you're pissed off, like rather than saying like, oh, I'm pissed off. It's like, no, you're doing pissed off.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  You're playing pissed off.

• 57:06Tim Ferriss?

  You're playing, you're playing the role of pissed off. And retreating into story could also be like, oh, my God, so and so, they always blah, blah, blah. And I was listening in my bath, and this isn't quite nonfiction, but it was this, this old recording by Wayne Dyer.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Wayne's awesome.

• 57:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's just incredible delivery also. And one of the things, the things he said, I think it was like No Limit, Becoming a No Limit Person. It's kind of like a cheesy old recording, but I like those cheesy old recordings sometimes. And he talked about, in effect, like, people behave the way you teach them to behave. People treat you the way you train them to treat you. And so, taking the step back and using like the I always, I am, they always, they are, is just an, as a cue to help me to pause and be like, well, wait a second. Their reactions are outside of my control, but what can I do to train myself or them

• 58:08Tim Ferriss?

  to minimize this stress that I'm experiencing? But yeah, the voices, I mean, look, I think, I think that, to come back to the original question, though, that I struggle as much as the next person, but I'm trending in the right direction at getting better at not necessarily eliminating those voices, but recognizing them as the obnoxious roommate.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  I don't think those voices ever go, maybe if you're a monk, they go away, but just being able to have a set of tools. And that's really what I'm trying to tap into here for the folks who are listening or watching, is like, hey, you're not alone. These things happen to even wildly successful people.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  And, and here's a toolkit to not solve all your problems, but to get you moving in the right direction. It's, it's very helpful. Sweet. Now, I want to talk about. We've talked before about various books. We're not gonna talk about your books. We're gonna talk about your podcast, actually.

• 59:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm tired of talking about my book.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  As someone, you mentioned just sitting on the front lines of Ryan's book. You said the front lines a couple of different times on a couple of different things. I got to sit front lines on your podcast. It was one of your original, like, early guests, as we talked about. Kevin was your first guinea pig, I might have been your second or your third. You've become really good at it. You having fun?

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I'm having a blast. I'm having a really great time and there are many points at which that is an engineering decision. Because complexity will invite itself to your table every week. But you could do this, you could try this. And there are five people out of a million who are complaining very loudly about this. And you could do this. And like, there's so many temptations. As I think I'm probably a, what is it? Like a maximizer and not a satisficer, I think it is, in The Paradox of Choice, is another book. I'm a perfectionist.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  And so my inclination is to be like, well, I know like no one else is gonna notice, but I'm gonna notice. And so I want to put in like the last 2%. It's 98% there, but the last 2%. And that's gonna require another 10 hours a week. That's my inclination and I've, there's a place and a time for that, but it's less and less compelling to me. So the enjoyment, almost always, if I do the podcast and I find myself, for whatever reason, a little down or lacking in energy related to it, that's a problem. And I call an audible, sit down, I'm like, alright, what is causing me stress right now?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 1:00:45Tim Ferriss?

  And it's like, if it's sponsorships, it's like, okay, well, like, I'm happy to lose half of the sponsors. Just like, change the terms. If there's a term in our agreements that's causing problems, change it. And if they're like, we're gonna walk, it's like, okay. And the general rule in negotiating is like he who cares the least wins. And so, or she, right? But it's like, okay, then walk. And they're like, uh, oh shit, just called her bluff. Like, okay, we'll take your turn. Or if it's the programming, the scheduling, it's like, alright, well, maybe I'll use some type of meeting software. Like, I think there is a schedule once or something like that where people pick their own blocks that you could use to simplify the guest recruitment process. Maybe it's like, well, you know, we're constantly answering the same questions and like that's becoming a huge drag on time.

• 1:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  Let's put together like a guest prep sheet.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  FAQ.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  I didn't send you yours, by the way, I'm sorry.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's okay. You didn't have to prepare. And it's, so it has been a lot of fun. But to make it, to allow it to continue to be fun as it grows, requires some architecting.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Fair. Let's talk about your specific, some of your favorite questions. You've had some great guests on. Don't you just drop a couple of your favorite guests?

• 1:01:59Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, yeah, so...

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Do you not want to do that?

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'll totally do it. Like, The Tim Ferriss Show's been a work in progress and part of what keeps it fun for me is having a wide spectrum, right?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:02:10Tim Ferriss?

  So Jamie Foxx as an entertainer is, the guy's just amazing.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Hilarious.

• 1:02:16Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, so incredible. So we did that episode in his sound studio at home with like impromptu music and imitations and impersonations was just incredible. You know, all the way to the opposite end, and this is an episode that actually has not come out yet, but did an interview with BJ Miller, who's, so I like doing interviews with people that the audience will almost certainly not know.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  Like I did one with Patrick Arnold, who's like the world's most famous black market drug designer. Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, like he was the guy. And BJ Miller is a triple amputee who runs the San Francisco Hospice Project, or the Zen Hospice Project, excuse me, based in San Francisco. And he's helped roughly a thousand people die. And he's a young dude, but he's gone through some just incredible trauma himself. He's electrocuted at Princeton, actually, in an accident, lost three limbs.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that interview is deep and there's just, there's a lot to be gleaned from it. So that would be one that I really enjoyed and I'm just naming a few along the spectrum.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  My favorite thing about it is there's a philosophy that's the same as mine. Some people really fancy and famous that you can like, "Oh, what's it like to be that?" That's sort of weird people that everybody knows. And then people that no one would know, but you're like, "I know you're gonna find this person fucking fascinating."

• 1:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's like you have like the Arnold Schwarzenegger, where everybody's gonna know Arnold.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  Hopefully I get some stories out of him that people haven't heard, which was the case. But then you'll have somebody who say, very well-known in a tiny subset, not tiny, I mean, he's well-known anyway, but like Kevin Kelly, who's extremely well-respected in the tech world. An incredibly gifted writer, has an Amish beard, an incredible family. Like, I really look up to him because he's not only, he's designed an incredible life for himself. And he's one of the most astute, accurate technology predictors and forecasters, like as a futurist, I've ever seen anywhere. And I'm in Silicon Valley, there are very few people. Like, maybe Ray Kurzweil in a number of capacities, Kevin Kelly's right up there.

• 1:04:27Tim Ferriss?

  And so, I think he's the world's most interesting man. I like the real, the real version. So I did, you know, two or three-part series with him.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:04:36Tim Ferriss?

  Derek Sivers, another one, like the philosopher-king of kind of PHP programming, although he did a bunch of Ruby on Rails stuff, who built up CD Baby, sold it, gave it all to a music charitable trust for music education and then disappeared and now lives in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand. And it's like, okay, let's talk to Derek. One of my most popular episodes to date. And what's been really reassuring to me, or life-affirming, is that those episodes, like, there's still a place... If you put out good content, like good art, good craft, good work is the best SEO in the world. Like, it still works. People are like, "Oh, it's too crowded, there are too many podcasts, there are too many of this, too many photographers, too many..."

• 1:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  There's still a place. If you put out really good work, and I'm not putting this all on me, but it's like when... I have a guest who really performs. I mean, meaning they just like deliver super detailed tactical stories, anecdotes, routines, things that my listeners can use. It's like a Derek Sivers or somebody who has zero, next to no recognition compared to say, Jamie Foxx, can do as well. It's nuts in terms of the downloads and the listens. Like, that stuff spreads. And that's another thing that's just made me excited again to get back in the game of kind of creating some type of editorial work, is that. To see like, there's still, there's still a place. I was told when I started podcasting, whatever it was, a year and a half, I think it was

• 1:06:06Tim Ferriss?

  actually, I don't know, one or two years ago. "Ah, it's too crowded." "It's done." "No, you can't, it's too late." And you're gonna hear that all the time. When you do anything. Anything. "I wanna do this, ah, it's too late." "It's too late." "That ship has sailed." And it's like, no, you just have to be different and you have to be better. In some capacity, if you do that and you stick with it and you screw up like I did in the beginning, you get too drunk on multiple occasions, in like your first three episodes because you're so nervous, and it's super sloppy and people are like, "Dude, it sounds like your wine bottle has a separate mic on it, like, tone it down." And you keep it fun for yourself, like make it fun for you and you will find an audience. Has been the other thing I've learned. Like, if I wanna throw like chimpanzee screeches in the middle of a podcast as a transition,

• 1:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  just to see what the hell people do, you know, going after the absurd again, like this one listener actually said she freaked out, she was in a retail store, and she took her bag and threw it across the store because it was so loud. Still working on my levels. It's like, I can do that. You know, if I wanna make like weird Mogwai noises in the beginning of an intro. What is a Mogwai noise? Mogwai is like... You know, gremlins. But the gremlins are the bad guys, the Mogwai are the good guys. So like Gizmo. Yeah, Gizmo. Gizmo noises. That I can do that. And it's just like, it's giving me such a sense of freedom. Because with the books, and maybe you feel this way, maybe you don't, but like, I have so much... Work out there as a writer.

• 1:07:35Tim Ferriss?

  Number one, I've developed like tropes, or tricks, or frameworks that I've become a little reliant on as crutches. They work really well. I know how to get people to pull through a chapter and enjoy it with stories, even if there's dense material. But like, I feel like I'm getting a little stale, which is why I'm doing a writing workshop this summer, in fact, as a student. But the podcast is such a different element. It's like, okay, well, you've been a skier, but like now you're gonna be a swimmer, or you're gonna be an acro yogi. Okay, now you can start with beginner eyes again and fuck around. Sorry, I'm dropping the F-bomb out today.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Long Island.

• 1:08:13Tim Ferriss?

  Bring it, sorry. And that freedom to play, to make, to experiment, then infuses everything else that has kind of grown stale or less interesting to you. So it's like now my writing is more playful. It's great, man. I'm having a lot of fun with the podcast.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Those things are connected, by the way. Like, the amount of enjoyment and play that you're having is, there's a correlation, at least for me and many people I know, to great work.

• 1:08:38Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  So, one of the things you said is, great stories that maybe they haven't heard on some other podcast version of them. So, tell us a story here that is, that you really haven't told somewhere else. Doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be horrible, I don't know, it's like on command.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you a refining question related to that, while I answer your other question about questions that I ask on my podcast.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll give a couple of.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  So these are gonna be, these were two distinct things in my mind, we'll let them be.

• 1:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I'm going to, because I'm gonna buy you some, the question I'd like to ask is, what type of story? Give me like some categories, creative constraints. So questions, some of the questions I like to ask on the podcast, while you're gestating on that, are, if you could have a billboard anywhere, what would you put on it? And I'm sure I borrowed this from somebody else, like, I'm not making all these things up.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give your 20-year-old self, 30-year-old self, say 40-year-old self? But, but not just, the refinement I made to that, which I think is important, is place us somewhere. Like, where were you, what were you doing, and then give me the advice, because it's so contextually dependent. There are some other ones that are hit or miss, that I borrowed from, say, like Peter Thiel, you know, roughly. Like, what do you believe that other people think is crazy?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  That's his, like, classic interview question.

• 1:09:55Tim Ferriss?

  Interview question, right? And.

• 1:09:59Tim Ferriss?

  So I borrow from many, many different places. When you think of the word "success," who's the first person who comes to mind? And why? These are some standard questions. What book have you gifted the most to other people? So that's a question I can't...

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  I'm glad you didn't have many of these questions formulated when I was on your show. There are a lot of them that are hard.

• 1:10:15Tim Ferriss?

  They're hard. Some of them are hard. And the "gifted" is important, because if you ask someone, "What is their favorite book?" or "favorite books," there's a primacy and recency effect, meaning they'll tend to remember the most recent books they read. And they'll... Especially if they're caught on their heels, they'll just pick something that they read in the last year or two. Whereas if you ask, "What book have you gifted the most to other people?" usually it's an extremely short list, like two to four books, that are their go-to gift books. So those are a few. So stories I haven't told.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Stories you haven't told. Tell me a story you haven't told about a struggle with writing. Because I feel like there's a lot of glamour. I'm just continuing to name-drop other people here. Brené Brown talks about gold-plated grit. Like, "Oh, there was this time, shit got so hard, it was so real, but then I made it through, and everything is awesome." And they go back to the awesome story again. So you're just like... It's like, "Oh, I'm so vulnerable," for like a quarter of a second, and then I go back to... So I believe that people think of you first and foremost as an author in the sort of the guinea pig way that you framed yourself. But clearly, you've had a lot of hardship in there. And so talk to us about something that people wouldn't know

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  about that time period that might reveal something about you.

• 1:11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God. There's a story that comes to mind. I'm not sure what it reveals, but it would be very good.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  No, I'm not looking for good, I'm looking for honest.

• 1:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  This might be the closest I've come to like double-leg drop-kicking someone.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  I just pictured that.

• 1:11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Like lucha libre style. In the last few years. So this was probably 2011.

• 1:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  Because this was just like, I felt like I was at the breaking point. Like really physically, mentally, emotionally, just at the breaking point. I was at the last like 30% of The 4-Hour Chef. It's like a 700-page book. It was a monstrous book.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  That was nuts.

• 1:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  Thousands of photographs, hundreds of original illustrations.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  You did that class, The 4-Hour Life, but it was really in the launch of The 4-Hour Chef on CreativeLive. We should link to that somewhere on here.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was a really difficult time for me. It was a very complex project. It was a three-year project, in effect, that had been

• 1:12:34Tim Ferriss?

  compressed down to a year and a half. And I'm very happy with how it came out. We pulled it off, but there were some really big hiccups along the way. And one of the biggest challenges was publishing is still very archaic in a way. There's, there aren't, there are not fantastic digital tools for providing fast edits to really complex layouts. I know there are some options for like website review and things like that, but it's it's too labor-intensive compared to say, pen and ink on paper.

• 1:13:13Tim Ferriss?

  If you're going to be making hundreds of edits, like line edits and whatnot. So what would happen is I would get shipped these printouts, or they would get, actually, we would print them out in San Francisco, or wherever I happened to be, these two-page spreads. And then I would go through and I would hand-edit, make hundreds of hand-edits, copy it, because you do not want one single point of failure with one copy, send it back. They would then incorporate those changes into the InDesign doc.

• 1:13:44Tim Ferriss?

  And then repeat the process. Now, I had a really tough experience with this book packager who was hired to help with this. And when I would get the, the next round of edits, very often, only about seventy percent of my changes made it in. I would notice that. How are you tracking? So now, what do I have to do? You have to track it. I have to take out both versions, and I have to go through line by line, this is a seven hundred page book, and compare each to see what got missed. I missed. And I had to do this dozens of times. Uh, to the point where like my girlfriend at the time didn't believe me, and I showed her a couple pages, and she's like, "I feel like a sixth grader would do a better job with this. Like, I can't believe you're having to go through this."

• 1:14:28Tim Ferriss?

  You know, that book publisher's listening to this. No, no, and it wasn't the publisher's fault. I mean, the packager. The packager, "Hey, look, I'll just, at least I'm not mentioning you by name. So you should thank your lucky stars for that, because it was a fucking disaster." And I found myself at one point, I'd committed to, uh, so keep in mind, like, my job as a writer has become somewhat more complex as things have gone on, because when I wrote the four hour work week, that's all I really had to do. I mean, I was running my company at the time, but it was a few hours a week, and now, like, the- Four, to be precise. And the, then the four hour body, it's like, okay, now Tim's starting to do a lot of angel investing, make other commitments, advising, et cetera. The four hour chef, it's like, okay, now, like, the doors have been blown wide open. I have, I'll, like, a hundred

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  times more inbound than I did during the four hour work week. So I had made a commitment, this is getting to a story, made a commitment to speak at some event in Southern California, like, a year before it actually showed up. It's funny how those come back and back in the past, don't they? And then I'm, and so, I, I get back, like, fifty pages printed out, and I realize half the edits haven't been made. And at that point, I'm probably running on like four or five hours of sleep for a week, and now I have this speaking engagement to go to. And so I go down to Southern California, I do my speaking gig, that's fine, you know, I, I, I put on a smiley face and get it done. And, you know, be a good soldier, knock that out, then I have to go back and basically pull an all-nighter to work on these edits.

• 1:15:57Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm at this kind of rundown hotel, the hotel room is tiny, it's just like, the, the desk isn't big enough for me to spread stuff out to work on the, on the various spreads. So, uh, at that point, too, I was still using kind of like ephedrine caffeine ashburn stuff to like, keep the engines running, which is really horrible for you. Hard time. It's so bad for your adrenal system and everything. Which makes you extremely grumpy. And so I'm like running on nothing except for like the ECA stack. And I've just finished my speaking gig. It's like 2:00 in the morning and I'm working on all this stuff. And in the lobby, I remember very clearly the lobby in this hotel. Really high ceilings and it was a rundown, kind of shoddy place.

• 1:16:42Tim Ferriss?

  And the one light, there's one light on the ceiling that landed on one table. And I was doing all my work and the light goes out.

• 1:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  And it's like 2:30 now and I'm just like, oh my God, I'm not even close to done. I'm like 40% there. My God, okay.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  So I get up and I walk in the length of the lobby, which is a pretty big lobby. Couple hundred feet to the front desk. And there's like one poor guy who's working at 3:00 in the morning. The nighttime dude, yeah. And there's somebody checking in who's clearly like been traveling all day. Really rundown, not looking happy, some like bedraggled traveling salesman or whatever. Getting checked in and so I'm kind of like standing off to the side, like 20 or 30 feet away. I don't know why I'm telling this story. And, uh, and the guy, so the guy who's getting checked in, the guest, was like looking down at his phone. The, the employee behind the counter looks at me and he's like, gives me this like yes sir kind of head nod, hand wave. Which the guy checking in didn't see. So I say, well, actually there's just one problem.

• 1:17:44Tim Ferriss?

  I'm, I'm gonna have to pull it on there. I'm working on this thing. The light is out. Now the guy getting checked in now looks up and he's like, who the fuck is this guy? And he goes, hey, hey. I'm like, yes? And he goes, fuck you. And I was just like.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't know what to do. I was just like, I do I, do I kill this guy? Is this the devil, eh? Like, he doesn't look good at sprawling. Like, should I, should I just like fireman's carry him into the coffee table? And I didn't know what to do and I was like, old Tim would have attacked this person. Like new Tim, hopefully, like needs TM, hadn't done it yet, would, would do something. And I didn't know what to do, so I went.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Kissed him.

• 1:18:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I just said, I blew him a kiss and I was like, I'm not gonna attack him, but I hope he attacks me right now. So I will like literally, it will be like Discovery Channel, like hyena tearing apart a carcass. And then that'll be like the end of my career, or who knows, and start of a new career, maybe Charlie Sheen style. And so ultimately, the guy like was thrown off, I didn't know what to do. And then the guy behind the counter is like, oh shit, like what do we do here? I don't know how to manage this. So I was like, so I just walked back and like sat in the darkness, looking at all this undone.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  This is a sad, sad scene.

• 1:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  You asked about a struggle, so like I just like sat in the darkness, like trying to cool off. And I'm just like, let me let that guy leave, so there's no homicide. And I'm just sitting there looking at all these, all this undone homework and thinking to myself like, never again will I do it this way. It's like, never again will I sign up to do this this way. And that's.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  You haven't.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  And I haven't. Like, and that's, that was, you know, 2000, late 2010, 2011, book came out 2012. And I'm very, I'm very proud of the book, but it's just like, man, that was kind of the last nail in the coffin with respect to how I relate to a lot of big business stuff. And meaning, meaning like having a publisher who owns rights that inhibit your ability to do certain things with your own work.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  That's one of my favorite things about this show, a long time ago, starting it up, just there's no rules. No one owns it. Like I could do whatever I want. There's no like, beholden to no one, like you said, sponsor doesn't wanna play, like, uh, okay.

• 1:20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, goodbye.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  And now that, you know, you clearly have built yourself an amazing platform, so you've built on some freedom in your own.

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and the blog, you know, the blog, I have complete freedom. The, and the podcast, so the podcast is really, was the first

• 1:20:22Tim Ferriss?

  art project, which is really how I view it.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Tim Ferriss?

  In a long time for me. The first new art project where I could do whatever I wanted. People are like, I'm trying to listen to this with my kids and you say the F-bomb, you need to clean up your language. I'm like, you need to find a new podcast. Sorry. Like this has to be fun for me and I'm not gonna censor myself to like suit the Mr. Rogers program. It's just like not, this is not how this works.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  How important is that for you, uh, freedom, artistic freedom?

• 1:20:50Tim Ferriss?

  So, the freedom is, it's a tricky term. The ability to do whatever I want. Let me rephrase it. The ability to play in any way that I want, I enjoy. Having certain constraints, however, I think is necessary for me to actualize my highest creative potential. What's the constraint you put yourself for the podcast? So constraint could be, well, okay, you have an hour and a half. And if somebody can only do 30 minutes, you have 30 minutes.

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Constraints might be a form of training or practice. It's like, okay, for my first, say, 20 episodes, 30 episodes, they were mostly over the phone. Why? Because I can have all of my notes in Evernote, I can have all my questions in front of me. I can have a notebook for taking notes about things I want to come back to. You do that in person, it's not quite the same. It's very disruptive sometimes to do that. You know, if we're talking, I have a laptop here, it throws off things in our dynamics. So, practicing, deciding, okay, the next 10 episodes are all going to be in person. What are you going to do? You're going to have to change your method, you're going to have to figure out a new approach, you're going to have to maybe memorize more or not memorize anything, depending on who you talk to, right?

• 1:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  Like Neil Strauss does a incredible amount of preparation for his Rolling Stone or New York Times interviews. Tons of review, tons of research, and then he folds it up and he never looks at it during the interview, right? So like, testing different approaches. I might try his approach, then I might try someone else's approach. But constraints would be, for instance, ensuring that I talk about, there's something sensitive, it's not a gotcha show, but like, let's say there's a sensitive subject that I think will produce an answer or a story that'll be valuable to my listeners, has to be valuable, for sure. Value is the key. How do I navigate the conversation and like, ride the wave to get to that? That's a constraint, it's a requirement, right? It's weird, I do the same thing.

• 1:22:58Tim Ferriss?

  What's the one risky thing that I'm going to go to? Yeah. And so I know we're gonna talk a lot about masturbation later. The, the, the, or something like that, right? So it's kind of like, right meow, like, like Super Troopers? Yeah, right meow. So I decided I wanted to say masturbation, which I just did twice. And so I've checked that box. It's three times actually in the show. In this conversation, three times, fantastic. There is a thing with threes. So, uh, but the, with writing, for instance, just the form factor itself. It's like you have, you have to use words. And in The 4-Hour Chef, I changed that and I allowed myself to use visuals. But I would enjoy going back to text only. It's like, okay, like a John McPhee. And like, John McPhee is one of my favorite writers.

• 1:23:41Tim Ferriss?

  M-C-P-H-E-E, Pulitzer Prize winner, staff writer at The New Yorker. And where, where someone else might resort to a bunch of different diagrams. His thinking and his writing is so precise and so beautifully elegant. It's just unnecessary. In fact, it would detract because he's allowing the reader to create much higher resolution. Impressive, meaning impressing on the memory.

• 1:24:11Tim Ferriss?

  Imagery than, than would otherwise be possible on a printed black and white page. So it's like, that would be a very strong constraint. It's like, no, you can't use visuals. Only words, right? Or if I'm writing, sometimes I will notice that there's a word I use as a crutch. Or a phrase that I use as a crutch. "That having been said" is one of my crutch phrases. "That having been said, comma, blah, blah, blah, blah." Okay, you're not allowed to use it. Not allowed. Dashes, I like to use dashes. Oh, comma, I love a dash. Oh, they're so nice. I love a dash. Like M dashes. Yeah. We just love M dashes. So it's like, alright, you're not allowed to use dashes. Like, you can't use dashes and you can't use parentheticals. Clean up your fucking writing, you know? It's like, okay, that would be another, that would be another type of, of parameter. Or... Well, there's a million, and...

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, oh, here's another one, like, that, that I noticed through writing that I then used to try to change my speaking. I noticed that I used "pretty" as an adverb. "Oh, that's pretty interesting." "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's, she's pretty smart." "Oh, yeah, yeah, he's pretty successful." And I was like, "Sloppy Ferris, so lazy." So what I forced myself to do when I was speaking is if I said "pretty", because they would sometimes slip out and I'd be like, "Ah." There it is again. I'd have to say "fucking" after that. So you'd be like, "Oh, yeah, she's pretty fucking interesting." And after you do that like seven or 10 times over like a two hour dinner, you're like, alright.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  Your brain just like cauterizes pretty right out of the conversation. So I love positive constraints, creative constraints, because it's just like in dance, for instance, in tango,

• 1:25:45Tim Ferriss?

  to improve your technique, you can take an arm away. So it's like, alright, you're used to being here, it's like, what happens when you take this arm away? You, all these other components that you're able to fudge because you had this crutch?

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Now they got it.

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  Now they're glaring problems. Or you take away this arm, alright, now you have to use your chest, you have to really change your signaling related to say, the lead and la marca, right? So I love those kind of constraints.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're, I think, self-imposed constraints with whatever sort of your medium is, whether it's photography or design, or I talked to Stefan Sagmeister, one of the top designers in the world, about an impetus, there's a, there's a style for this, I don't remember what it's called, but, oh, you gotta solve a problem, like you wanted to design a new drinking glass? Well, what is, what is the way that you can take some other unrelated object and design a drinking glass through the lens of this thing? Like, a tennis shoe, oh, what would a drinking glass look like if you thought about as a tennis shoe? Oh, would it have a different kind of sole here on the bottom, would it be lifted? Or, that's a constraint that can add fuel to your creativity, actually, I think that's a pretty powerful.

• 1:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that, just using the tango example, of like taking away an arm, or the writing example of taking away a word, or the podcast example of, for instance, I've done this as well, like, everybody always asks this guest about this, this, and this. I'm not allowed to talk about any of those, okay? Once you have, you use a constraint to do more with less, only then can you do more with more, I think.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that's how I've approached it. Once you are really good at bleeding the stone with very little, then you can make use of all of your resources. But until then, I think it's just gonna be a scattershot waste of energies sent in like one millimeter in a million different directions, as opposed to just like.

• 1:27:37Tim Ferriss?

  And being really good at picking your shots and using maximum leverage with all of your gifts. The way you do that is by taking these tiny components and be like, alright, I know you have these 100 things. I want you to do everything with this. That's it. That's all you're allowed. It's a fun exercise, too.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  I love, that was the original idea behind the iPhone for me as someone who was traveling all over the world with 100-person crews doing gigantic things like, what can I make with this one camera that's with me all the time?

• 1:28:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And like, I'm doing that right now on the blog where I'm experimenting with, well, for me, shorter-form stuff. So it's like, alright, alright, yeah, you write 23-page-long blog posts that are hopefully evergreen and get traffic for years and years and years, but like, what if you only have 500 words? Like, suck it up. You don't have time to give your Theresian preamble. Like, no, you're not allowed two pages to like, say hello. No, like, get to it, cut to it. And that's, that's, that's another exercise for me.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  So get with this ninja shit I'm about to pull here. We're at 90 minutes, which is one of my constraints.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  And, but that being said, I want to just finish with a couple of rapid-fire questions. So one is, if you could put a billboard up anywhere, where would you put it and what would it say?

• 1:28:50Tim Ferriss?

  I would put it...

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  I would put it on a footpath outside of the largest college or university in the US, and it would say, "You're the average of the five people you associate with most."

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's the first that comes to mind.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  And what's the book you've gifted the most? Not, not, not bought for people, or bought for yourself, or what's the book you've gifted the most? You know, you see how this is happening.

• 1:29:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, probably, I see where this is going. Yeah, the probably, uh, the Penguin Edition "Letters from a Stoic," which is a collection of Seneca's letters. I'm going to be making my own. Actually, I don't think I've even announced this, so.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Exclusive.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  I have, I've had original artwork and calligraphy. Done over about six months. And I'll be putting out at some point an edition of Seneca's Letters that's illustrated, which is, the artwork's amazing.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:29:53Tim Ferriss?

  So good.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  When are we gonna see this?

• 1:29:54Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, not sure. I'm just kinda like, I wanna do it right.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Sure, of course you do.

• 1:29:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I'm not in a rush right now, but it's gonna be, it's gonna be good. So probably though, if I was gifting it, Letters from Stoic. I just recently bought ten copies of The Baron and the Trees, that fiction book I was telling you about, just to have at my house. So when friends come over or visiting out of town, if they're looking for something to read, I'm gonna give them that book. Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman, about Richard Feynman, physicist, safe cracker, bongo player, Nobel Prize winner, amazing.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  I like that you threw bongo player in there.

• 1:30:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, he's a polymath and he's a playful trickster, but very smart and a genius teacher. So Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman is definitely up there. Those are the first few that come to mind.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  What's a thing that people don't know about you that they'd be very surprised if they found out in this podcast?

• 1:30:53Tim Ferriss?

  Very surprised.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Very surprised. Maybe, let's all put a constraint on it, something that you like that no one would think that you'd like.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Something I like? Oh, that's a good one, that's a good one. Trying to think of a surprise. Japanese antique saddles. A few years ago, I had a chance to go to Japan and study with the Ogasawara family, Yabu Same, which is Japanese horseback archery. Side note, the kinda superstar of that family is a young guy, very handsome, super smart. And his jacket, which was like a cheesy, kinda like eighties bowling jacket,

• 1:31:42Tim Ferriss?

  like that shiny material with like the, like the, tapers down to the cuff.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  The nylon cuffs?

• 1:31:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the nylon cuffs, but the back said, "Ogasawara Yabu Same, since 1157." I was like, oh my god, I want that jacket so badly. The point being... When you are doing horseback archery, the saddle is not designed to be sat upon. It is just hardwood. And it's an, the sole purpose of the saddle is to hold the stirrups. And then you basically are in a squat, like, let's just call it.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  Hovering.

• 1:32:16Tim Ferriss?

  Hovering over the saddle. And that's when you like pull off the arrows and shoot at these targets at full gallop while no rains. Like the horse is just let to sprint. And these saddles are gorgeous as a result because they're not covered. They're very, very minimalist. I mean, like you could pick it up with one hand like this, five to 10 pounds. And I have, so that was, I think, the four hour body. After the four hour body, my promise to myself was when I finished, I would allow myself to buy something Japanese that is at least 100 years old at auction. And I don't buy a lot of artwork at all. And then I thought, I was like, well, I'd like to get some armor. And I was looking at armor and swords. And then I said, you know what? Actually, I'm more interested in the saddles.

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  I was at your house once and you had a teepee in the front room. Do you remember that?

• 1:33:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do. I do still have a teepee. I have a, I have, yeah, like a.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Is that related to the saddle? Is it a leather and wood thing?

• 1:33:10Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. It's like, I do like earth tones.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  There you go, you do.

• 1:33:14Tim Ferriss?

  But no, the Japanese saddles are gorgeous. So I have two, I have two of those.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 1:33:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  Anything else that you'd ask that I haven't before we go?

• 1:33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Anything you should ask? Uh, nothing, nothing immediately comes to mind.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  We've covered some ground.

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  We've covered a lot of ground. Yeah, I would implore people to watch. People talk a lot about commencement speeches. And there are some great commencement speeches out there. But I suspect for a lot of people watching, yes, the Steve Jobs commencement at Stanford is fantastic. We've most, I think, in this certainly region of the world have seen the commencement. It's a very good speech. But for people who are fighting the good fight with what, anything they consider art, and that's up to you to define.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 1:34:07Tim Ferriss?

  But, but whether it's a show like this, whether it's CreativeLive as a company, whether it's writing and that just daily battle.

• 1:34:18Tim Ferriss?

  Podcasting, oil painting, anything, dance, doesn't matter. My favorite commencement speech is "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  Amazing speech.

• 1:34:28Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, I try to watch at least once a week.

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 1:34:31Tim Ferriss?

  And spoken also and delivered from someone who walks the walk. Just a master of many crafts, who is just incredibly gifted, incredibly warm. I had the chance to meet him very briefly here at the Castro Theater. He did a live performance. Just an incredible human being, and I would part, I suppose, on that note.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 1:34:59Tim Ferriss?

  Suggest everybody, check that out, and...

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  Everybody?

• 1:35:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if you like podcasts, I also have one of those. It's the T. Ferris Show.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Good, definitely. Anything else, any other coordinates? You're basically slash T. Ferris, with two Rs, two S's.

• 1:35:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, so at T. Ferris on Twitter, fourhourworkweek.com.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  Are you Snapchatting?

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not Snapchatting yet, I might eventually.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should.

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  I have a little bit of social media fatigue. I'm Instagramming.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  You're picking your nose, move your finger.

• 1:35:27Tim Ferriss?

  There we go. It does look like I have...

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  No, I look weird. Sorry for those folks.

• 1:35:35Tim Ferriss?

  There we go.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  We're Snapchatting.

• 1:35:36Tim Ferriss?

  So, yeah, at T. Ferris on Twitter, and then Facebook is Tim Ferris, two Rs, two S's. Instagram, Tim Ferris, two Rs, two S's. But I think if you really want to dig deep, currently what I'm putting the most energy into is the podcast and the blog.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  Super fun.

• 1:35:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  Super fun, thanks bud.

• 1:35:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, man, thanks, sir.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:36:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a great partner for creating and growing your business. It's a one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs, whether that's a logo, website, business card, or anything else. I use 99designs to get book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I also use them for banner ads, illustrations, and other things.

• 1:37:29Tim Ferriss?

  With 99designs, designers around the world compete to create the best design for you. You give feedback and then pick your favorite. You end up happy or you get your money back. It's very simple. You can check out a few of my own designs and those of yours, meaning Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, my listeners, you guys, will get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. That's 99designs.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is used by a ton of the startups that I work with or advise, many of the fastest growing. It is used by almost all of the contractors that I work with.

• 1:38:11Tim Ferriss?

  It is the easiest way online to send invoices, get paid, track your time for invoicing, track your clients so they get to the point of paying you, all that stuff that you could possibly find. And right now, you can get a free month of complete unrestricted use, and you do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month, just go to freshbooks.com/tim and enter "tim" in the "how did you hear about us?" section. You can, of course, customize it to fit your With your own logo and color. And FreshBooks shows you whether or not, for instance, a client has looked at the invoice. They can send late payment reminders to your clients automatically, so you do not have to think about it or chase them down. And you can track your hours. You can do all sorts of things. There are mobile outlets you take pictures of your receipts and FreshBooks will organize

• 1:38:55Tim Ferriss?

  them for you later. It is a great piece of software. And if you are in a small business, or maybe a fast-growing business that is feeling growing pains and you need to streamline, then this is a place to look. Because certainly for me, this has been a headache in the past, and it doesn't have to be a headache for you. So check out freshbooks.com/tim and try it out and see what you think. And until next time, thank you for listening.