The Tim Ferriss Show: #683: In Case You Missed It: June 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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Hello, boys and girls.

This is Tim Ferris.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class

performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you

can apply to your own life.

This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the

last month.

It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a

feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to

one of those episodes.

View this episode as a buffet to wait your appetite.

It's a lot of fun.

We had fun putting it together.

And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably

right below wherever you press play in your podcast app.

Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there.

Please enjoy.

First up, Simon Coronel, world champion of magic and illegally classified alien of extraordinary

ability by the U.S. government.

When I joined Accenture, I realized I had this sort of flash forward to going, yeah,

I'm young and idealistic.

I'm going to join for a couple of years, then quit and do something, you know, that leads

me towards something, whatever, I don't know.

And I just had a sudden flicker of like, wait a minute, I've heard this story.

I've heard how this can go.

And then very common you blink and you're 40 in middle management and wondering where

the decades went.

And I kind of sensed, wait, that could be me.

You never know who you are until you're there in the moment, until you're faced with the

actual trolley lever, right?

You don't know which what you'll do.

And so I went on this round the world pilgrimage with all my remaining savings at the time.

It was the first time I came to America to see the Magic Castle, to see Vegas and all

the Cirque du Soleil shows and all the stuff I'd heard of.

And this is before Accenture.

This was in the months.

Because I realized it was going to be a while before I had free time.

I was going to go into this high pressure corporate environment.

And I did it as kind of a almost creative pilgrimage to kind of, I thought it was like

almost injecting inspiration into intravenously to kind of keep that fire burning stockpile

some fire.

Exactly.

And I saw my sock where they can't find it and drag it into the corporate drudgery.

That was sort of the mind, the other mindset at the time.

And I think that was good because I did have a sense I wanted to do something, but I didn't

know what or when.

And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning a, you know, okay salary, I still

lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings.

I deliberately didn't buy a car, even though I could have afforded one.

And instead I spent the money on trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting

and everything and building savings.

I didn't live extravagantly because I kind of had a sense, whatever's next, I don't

know what's next, but it's going to be good to have a stockpile of savings.

And then I realized that the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was fear and enthusiasm

battled and fear kept winning.

I'm like, I want to leave and do something cool and do the thing and go full magic or

something.

But it's scary.

I don't feel ready.

And then finally, after sort of three more, I was at the company for five years and after

three years longer than I intended to be, just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs

and the stability.

And one day finally, some pieces clicked together in my head.

There was an actual moment where I realized I'd read an article by a palliative care nurse

about her observations on people's end of life regrets.

And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing,

didn't try the thing, always wanted, never found out.

And I realized, yeah, I don't want to die that way.

I want to know, even if it fails, at least you know.

So I was, okay, number one, I have to try the thing.

Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready, enough savings and enough like career

contacts, enough good magic material or whatever.

And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never going to feel ready.

And so number three, if there's no right time, then sooner is better than later.

And I started drafting my resignation letter.

Like it was one of those rare moments.

Normally life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was.

There was ABC.

It was a simple equation, was an algorithm.

I'm like, yep, that logically checks out.

All right, fuck, I guess I'm doing it.

Next up, Jake Muse, CEO of Maui Newi Venison,

which provides incredible nutrient dense food

while balancing the Axis Deer population of Maui.

The biggest risk we have every single night is safety.

And it became so critically important to have the right people and the right personalities

that we had to build a system to measure those personalities.

And that's in the recruiting vetting process.

Oh yeah.

So how do you measure this things?

Humility.

Yeah.

So we created essentially a scorecard.

It has six questions per category.

So six for humility, six for work ethic,

six for emotional intelligence.

Questions like, do the energy they bring every night,

is it consistent as in it positive?

So we talk about body language and emotional intelligence

and all these different things within these questions.

And I'm happy to provide this thing.

And we use it in three ways.

We give it to the person on the second interview

and we're hiring somebody.

So we say, here's the HHS system.

This is the only thing you're accountable to in your first month.

And two things happen.

They read it and they go, or actually they just don't call back.

And I've made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past,

where you get past this honeymoon phase

and people turn into grouches.

And it's just, there's people, first of all, he's involved.

And I remember a guy that we were going to hire

that was on a brilliant electrical engineer.

He wanted to quit his job, come work with us

because he heard about the seven and seven schedule

and thought it'd be the best thing ever.

And then he read it and he didn't call me back.

I really wanted to hire him and I called him back and I said,

any reason you didn't call me back?

He's like, I have terrible body language

and I'm not willing to quit my job

and take the chance within the first month

that I get fired for bad body language.

Because we score them, if you're an A,

we celebrate and figure out a way for you to reward you.

If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements

that you need to make within some of these categories.

And if you're a C, we let you go on the spot.

No questions asked.

And you set that expectation up front.

Oh, so we set that in the interview.

They have to agree to this system coming in.

They're evaluated by their entire team,

including them doing a self-eval,

which is a part of the overall score.

They get to grade themselves.

And the team, are they sent on a test evening prior to hiring?

Or I guess they just know that once they start going out.

Yeah, so we call them tryouts.

But when somebody comes to try out with us,

which means we give them a month,

we hire them on, but we call them a tryout.

And at the end of that tryout,

which is typically a one-month period,

they get graded by their entire team.

And they know it's this really tense moment where...

How many people are on a given team?

Eight to 10.

Got it.

Yeah.

So it's a good average.

So if somebody...

Yeah, if somebody's got a bug up their ass about somebody...

Doesn't matter.

...if it's just one person...

It always ends up being a great average.

And it always ends up being a great measure of that person.

And it's been this extraordinary filter for hiring.

Asshole is the wrong word.

But when we figured out how to use that system,

we now grade every person at their first month.

We grade every single person quarterly, including me.

Every single person gets graded.

And there's questions on there like,

do they try or ask to do more than is required of them every day?

And it's been so amazing to see the mistakes I make in...

When we're hiring new people or moving people around,

like a great example is I moved a couple people

from a field position into a management position.

And then all of a sudden their work ethic score started coming down.

And it wasn't because they weren't working any harder.

It was I didn't do a good job defining to the team

what their new responsibilities were.

So they saw them sitting on a computer and doing these things.

And they're like, well, they're not in the field helping us.

And so it's just this amazing quarterly exercise

that just pulls out all of the tension within your teams

and creates framework for people to address those tensions.

And then ultimately what's amazing is to watch people grow.

How do you give feedback?

Let's say they come back and they've got a bunch of bees.

Yeah, so we we sit...

What's the big boss do?

Yeah, so we sit them down and we say...

Is that the royal wee or is it just you?

No, no, it's...

It's multiple people.

Yeah, it's me and like the two or three other harvest managers.

Got it.

Great example.

One of the questions we asked talks about

are they genuinely happy to see their teammates succeeding?

Because safety is such an important part of what we do

when we bring somebody in that's more talented.

We will just like a sports team moves the best people

into the best positions.

We immediately move people around positions

based on their skill sets.

So somebody has to be genuinely happy to train somebody

that may replace them in a role that they may enjoy more.

They used to be the right striker or whatever.

Exactly.

And they just got replaced.

And it's amazing to watch somebody that really wants to be there

because they find purpose and they really love the schedule

and they know the impact that they're having to our community

have to make the decision to be better for their teammate every night

to be like celebrating that person's growth

even though it's potentially coming at the cost of something that they enjoy.

So there's these...

That's hard.

Oh, this whole...

I have...

That's asking...

I mean, I'm not saying it's unreasonable,

but that I mean that's asking a lot of people.

I mean, I don't know if I would make honest with myself.

I think that'd be hard.

Here's the thing, it's been such an amazing exercise

with lots of iterations, right?

The first three iterations, I made so many grown men cry

and I felt so bad.

Was that your delivery or the measurement?

Where you just like...

Hey listen, fuck this.

It was the measurement was wrong.

It's sick or swim.

No, you're getting evaluated by your peers on your personality

and the value it's bringing to your team.

And you have to sit down quarterly and be told your humility is not good enough for this team.

I assume that the responses are all anonymized.

Yeah, everything's anonymized and then averaged.

For what it's worth, I've done what's called a 360 interview.

All right.

And I know people who as executives or founders have had these done.

And with that exception, myself included every time that I spoke to somebody who's experienced

this for the first time, they're like, I went and they sat in my car.

And I basically had like a nervous breakdown crisis of meaning.

What do I do?

These are names everybody would recognize.

But they were just like, holy shit.

Yeah.

The first time we did it with a large enough team that I included myself in it,

because we were just so small early on.

It was like, I think like the third iteration.

I was like, I need to be a part of this.

And I got all of the feedback back.

I was just like, oh my God.

But if we really want to build extraordinary teams, I realized my approach to some of our

conversations had to be so much better and nuanced to make them better.

It wasn't the right approach.

And you learn all of this.

You end up reading this thing like Braille after doing it.

I've done it like hundreds of times now.

Yeah.

And I mean, with repetition, I imagine it's like exercise, right?

It's like, okay, you're going to do plyometrics once a year.

You're going to be very, very, very sore.

Yeah.

And you might even hurt yourself.

But it was amazing to see what happened is we built this system because we knew we had to go

from like eight people to 45 in a really short period of time to hit our mission goals about

a year and a half ago.

And I had made poor hiring decisions in the past and they were mostly

personality-based or they were, that person was operating amazing when I was around.

But the minute I left, they turned into a different person.

And then there's this he said, she said game.

Yeah.

This completely erases all of that because it's anonymous team scoring and the manager

doesn't have a unweighted vote on whether that person stays around.

And what ended up happening is that HHS program started attracting people.

They started hearing about this accountability process to ensure.

You're attracting better fits.

Oh, yeah.

So coming back to, so you're not saying, hey, fuckface, in like the fourth, fifth,

10th, 20th iteration.

Yeah.

What's the language that you use if somebody has growth opportunities?

So it's great.

It's really specific to which of the 18 categories they're struggling in.

Right.

But like, how does the meeting start?

Okay.

So we sit down and we were going to give them paper and we say like, okay, you're a B minus.

Yeah, Tim, we put a 250 panel on your back.

You crumpled into an origami crane and you couldn't get up.

So you're a B minus.

And then we celebrate first some of the categories that they're doing really well in,

like some of the categories that point to professionalism or energy or all these different

things.

We celebrate right away because they're each one of the 24 segments have different scores

within them that have been averaged throughout their team.

And then we address the ones that they're like a C in.

Got it.

So they're not cut if they have a C in a particular review point.

It's the average.

Yeah, got it.

So the C average, it's been amazing to see that system work.

I've let go several people that were Cs that I would have never let go.

I wouldn't have known to let them go.

Like wouldn't have known that that was the impact they were having on the team at large.

It just would have never come out.

Yeah.

I would love to.

You mentioned, I think you offered to maybe share the question.

So we'll put that in the show notes as well.

Yeah.

Tim'd up log slash podcast because I'm incredibly curious to check it out myself.

It just, at least at face value, it seems like a very elegant solution to a lot of problems that

can seem like fragmented, separate problems you have to address in different ways.

And again, like I'm just a system builder and by no means is it perfect.

But I've heard lots of people speak to how important these different personality traits are

and how they reward them.

And more importantly than the C or the A's, being able to like say to somebody,

this incredible combination of like humility, work ethic and emotional intelligence

is making your whole team better.

And your whole team is telling you your extraordinary ethic things,

being able to reward and compensate somebody for that and have a measure to do so.

We say compensate.

So let's say they have, because I know this is getting the weeds a bit,

but I feel like that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding.

So how many questions were there again?

There's 18 questions, six on humility, six on work ethic and six on emotional intelligence.

And they get this like A, B or C for each of those questions.

Yeah.

So they get, it's graded one through seven.

We just did it because it was seven days of the week.

And we talk about like being at excellent every day.

So it's one through seven.

And then we add up all the scores, which is 126 total.

And they get a percentage.

So if they're in 87, we give them a B plus.

Which is the average for the total.

Which is the average.

How do you reward or compensate the A's?

If they're in their first six month of employment and they get two A's or A pluses in a reward,

we give them a raise based on that contribution.

And then we celebrate with the team like, not always an A this last quarter.

We make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having.

And it's already was so interesting.

They already all know, but to not have framework to reward them for being amazing people

has always been this fuzzy place for me where I couldn't reward or compensate that person

for being an extraordinary individual that was making their whole team better.

Because it didn't fit into what the classic hard skills define as like,

they're a great shooter or they're a great driver or one of these different things.

And every single one of those A plus people are most highly skilled people as well.

They just, when you operate with a certain level of humility,

you are more willing to learn and you learn faster.

And every single person that's come through a program that was like a B minus or a C that was

like highly skilled and made the choice not to get better at these like,

but I very much consider skills just weighted themselves out.

It's been really cool to see people grow and like, you're in this camp and you see these guys with

a lot of them will take their score up above their bed and they'll like look at it in the morning

and say like, I was a B minus in this thing. I need to bring more consistent energy every night.

Like we've got guys that go up and down and up and down and they're like,

okay, I'm going to be trying to be more consistent. Like they know what they're working on.

Next up, Maggie Spivey Faulkner segment from Heresies, a new format that explores the unconventional

and unorthodox. Maggie is an anthropological archaeologist and practitioner of indigenous

archaeology. American middle-class culture is ruining America.

America, middle-class culture is ruining middle America and every and all.

It's ruining everything. It's ruining literally everything. Yeah. I mean, we export ourselves.

So maybe it's ruining the whole world. Let's just extend it. Let's get out there on a limb.

When I say that though, really, what do I mean? I kind of mean American modernism,

the type of America that's existed post-World War II, where we instill in people a certain

set of values. We've adjusted our culture. You tell your youth that to be a successful and

respected member of society, you leave home at 17 or 18, go somewhere where you don't know anybody,

go to college. And then if you're successful, you can start up a little nuclear family

out in a nameless suburb or a town that has the same amenities that every town has

and live a successful kind of the barian life, a little Protestant ethic in the spirit of

capitalism in there. This is a very particular cultural brand. And as we're no longer in the

heady glory days economically of what America was able to achieve after the world was destroyed,

and we were the only people that had working machines anymore, as some of those

pockets of fat have dissolved in the United States, we've been left in this situation

where you get extreme social isolation. You get kids that can't get into the Ivy League,

even though they feel like they're entitled to it. And then they go spend all their time online,

become incels, buy AR-15 and shoot up a school. And I think that it's because we've really moved

away from the idea of community in terms of being embedded in a place. There are other European

countries with economic issues. Look at Italy, look at Greece, but they don't have the same

end result because those people are still embedded in a community of people who care about them,

who interact with them. And you don't have this extreme social isolation. It's all cultural process,

in my opinion. A similar thing with, I think that leads a lot of people to these extremely

escapist drug addictions. And to Josh's point, I'm not talking about burning man,

right? I'm talking about the kind of drug issues I see in Worcester, Massachusetts. So

I think that this extreme adherence to that particular brand of the American dream has

ruined our ability to have a functional, I mean, things have just become quite dysfunctional in

the country because of it. So I'm trying to, again, refine the heresy what it is. So you said it was

American dream, then you said it was maybe more modern. Yeah, modernism. I'm thinking about the

hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people in China who have left their

communities, moved into the cities. And so is this what you're talking about? Or is it something

different than this? And the same thing is happening in India right now, where there are,

where the same kind of migration is happening of people leaving these little villages that are,

where they have a certain identity, they know who they are, they're moving into big cities,

they're going to college and beyond, they're mixing up, they're isolated. Is that what we're

talking about this as a general phenomena? Or you're saying that there's something else different

than this? Yeah, I think I do mean it a little bit more pointed than gradual urbanization due

to like change economically globally. I think there is a particular brand of the American version

of this. And honestly, the people who are most harmed by it, I think are young men,

young white men in America, they're feeling this sea change under their feet. There are more women

going to college than men for a decade now. Why in America? A lot of it is because men are just

not achieving dumb metrics that are kind of meaningless, like SAT scores and GPAs at the

same rate as women in the United States. I think that it's all American culture bounded, where

if you're failing to meet this high kind of this Billy Crystal standard from movies in the 80s and

90s of being able to strike out on your own with just a baseball bat, and an army duffel bag full

of stuff walking into New York City to like start your life, that you have failed. And I think people

are being told that they're literal failures, because they're not able to achieve this very

time constrained version of American success. And that a lot of the people who are doing some of

the worst things in the United States right now are people who have gone through that experience

of failure. And it's not necessary. I don't know that there's any analog to that type of failure in

modern China or India. And I'm pretty sure there isn't a version of that in Italy or Greece. You

live with your parents, you go to college, and then you move down the street when you get married.

Can I ask Maggie, how much of this is the stuff part, the part that you might call consumer culture?

We measure ourselves by how much stuff we have, and how good that stuff is, and the brands that

go with it. And then if you want that, you need cash. And to get that cash, you move to the city,

because that's where the job is that pays more cash. And then you just meet more people who

want the same stuff. How much of it is the stuff part of it? And how much of it is the

dream of making it big, like the fantasy of becoming the next Elon? And how much of it is the

leaving where you grew up to go to a new place? Because all those seem to be part of what you're

describing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the stuff is a major part of it, but I would extend

stuff beyond consumer goods and keeping up with the Jones's type stuff to meaningless achievements.

What's the real difference from getting a degree from the University of Georgia versus Emory

in terms of your life trajectory? Not that huge, but if you don't get into Emory,

and you have to go to Georgia Southern, suddenly that's like almost like a narcissistic injury,

where you have this hit to your ego you can never recover from. And it's just constant knocking

down of ego that injures people in this way emotionally. What I'm arguing is that those

standards are fucking stupid to begin with. They're not based in anything other than the

imagination of what we could achieve on the GI Bill in 1950. At a time where we had far fewer

people in the country, we had a far different economic outlook. And I really don't think it's

necessarily about leaving home, which I mean, for me it is. Personally, I'm coming from this,

again, from an outsider point of view. I didn't grow up in this type of culture,

but I'm surrounded by it all the time now. So it's all bound up with it. But I think it's more

this absolute, like you said about the constitution, the written constitution, this fiction we've

created, this fantasy of what you need to just have a basic, respectable life in upper middle

class America. It doesn't matter how much money you make even. If you're an underwater welder,

are you getting the same respect as someone who went to Cornell in upper middle class Boston?

Like, I don't know that you are, even if you're making double the money.

So quick question for you, Maggie. Yeah. And I'll just add a little backdrop. So

Johan Hari is an author from getting his name pronounced correctly. He's written books about

addiction and also depression, chasing the scream, lost connections. And he returns in a very

compelling way over and over again to social isolation. And I suppose what I'm wondering is,

as I look at cultures that I understand somewhat like Japan, for instance, the schooling there

and cram schools and test scores are even more determinant in a way of your future than, say,

the SATs are in the US. However, and there are social isolation issues in Japan, but you have

multi-generational households. And you look at a place like Costa Rica, multi-generational households.

And I'm wondering if that is a crux component of all of this, which it seems to be,

is there anything to be done in the US? Are there changes that you think we could make

culturally that would remedy some of the symptoms that you're describing?

Maybe celebrate people whose lives are happy, as that's the form of success that we should be

lionizing above meeting what is frankly like you said. You just said, oh, there's multi-generational

households in Japan, and there's this really toxic testing culture. If you think about it,

not to get too theoretical here, in an organismic way, where these different facets of culture work

like different organs in a system as a whole, like a body that forms a culture, very like

Durkheimian way of thinking about things, maybe you can pick pieces in and out there,

like you're explaining these other cultures that you have experience with. Somehow in America,

we've picked a set of organs that lead to a particularly toxic end, toxic individualism.

Individualism at all costs, really. We don't have a maternity leave. It's just like,

we don't have universal healthcare. There's stuff that just makes economic, even neoliberal sense

that we don't do because of toxic individualism. And I do think that if we started focusing on,

again, lionizing people who live happy lives, that live fulfilled lives, rather than ones who

meet this American archetype, Don Draper, that could lead to a lot of good change.

Josh, I think you had your hand up.

So I've reacted in a couple of different ways to this, Maggie. The first is, if you live in New

York City, you have a lot of politicians who come here to ask for your advice, and they quickly

pivot to asking for money, but it gives you a chance at least to hear from them. And I try to

ask them what's something true about your constituents that I wouldn't know. And one of

them said to me once, you think all my constituents want to move to New York City? They don't.

The problem is they don't have jobs where they want to live. So the first way I react to this,

I totally agree. And I think we are failing to your point, Tim, as a society, when we fail to

provide employment opportunities, meaningful work, a sense of purpose in the communities where people

actually want to live. And we should not assume that everyone wants to move to New York City and

work for Metta and live in a loft in Soho. Although even if you work for Metta, you probably couldn't

afford a loft in Soho. So that part I really react to, Maggie, and I agree with you. I probably

disagree with you slightly on part of it. If you look at places like Italy and China, just picking

two examples what you cited, probably their biggest problem going forward is a demographic one,

where they have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. So you pick two societies and held

them up, particularly Italy, is a place where things are going well. I would say a society

where people are sufficiently pessimistic about the world, that they're unwilling to have children,

and where they have repeatedly voted into office, someone like Berlusconi, let alone the person

they have now, probably aren't society as ours, hold up as exemplars of what our aspirations

should be. So I'm not sure I agree with you on that point. And then the third thing I'd probably

say is the maladies that you're describing, I think are real. I think that's a confluence of

things, though. I think one element absolutely is consumerism, one element certainly is social

media, dislocation, they're all combined. But if I had to come back to one, I probably would go

back to the point you made and where I started, which is we're failing to provide meaningful

employment, a sense of purpose, the capacity to support yourself and you support your family and

the community that you find meaningful. And we've assumed that's only one type of community,

and that's a failing as a society. Next up, Eric Cressy, President of Cressy

Sports Performance and Director of Player Health and Performance for the New York Yankees.

What are your go-to exercises? If you could only pick two or three, let's just say,

for the strengthening of the posterior chain and that hinging action, where would you go?

Without a failure, looking at a deadlift and deadlift is a broad

categorization. You might have a trap bar deadlift or a kettlebell deadlift, something that in those

realms are going to be a little bit easier to teach. A lot of people go right to the straight bar

and some people just are not biomechanically set up to be successful with that. So we don't

necessarily go to that. Things like kettlebell swings, if you're ready for the patterning and

the higher velocity, I think a lot of people need to train power as much as they need to train

strength, particularly as we age. And that's a low-impact alternative to going out and sprinting

or jumping that isn't going to leave an Achilles on the floor. So I think kettlebell swings probably

have some merit in that discussion. Certainly various hip thrust opportunities have come about

in the industry from a wide variety of exercise selections there. I think some people probably

do better with them than others, but I do think there's a place for it. Anything in those worlds

are good. Single-leg RDLs as well. Romanian deadlifts. Yeah, something underneath that

deadlift umbrella. But at the end of the day, most of them are going to be deadlift derivatives.

Same thing with a kettlebell swing. It's a deadlift that you just execute quickly.

Why is power important as we age in addition to strength? And maybe you could differentiate the

two. So really think of power as just strength with a time component. It's how quickly we can

apply force. And you'll see powerlifting is really not powerful. It's slow movement.

Living lifting should be called powerlifting. Yeah, most of the athletes you see on TV are

really, really powerful. The guys that are running fast and jumping high, that's kind of an

in-person demonstration of power. But I think where power is tricky, we do know that it tends

to detrain fastest. Strength or aerobic capacity, they actually stick around pretty well. Assuming

you're not like a crazy high level of those things, you can probably train it if you're in an

intermediate to slightly advanced stage. You can probably train it once every 30 days and it's going

to power. No, I'm talking about strength and aerobic capacity. On the power side of things,

it seems like it starts to detrain in as little as five to seven days. So it's very important to

actually challenge it. And where it becomes vitally important as we age is this is the stuff

that protects you when you're older and you want to avoid falls. And we know that you fracture your

hip. For a lot of people, it's honestly a death sentence as terrible as it sounds because it

markedly impacts your mobility. We know that the cognitive decline after a loss of ambulation is

really substantial. So we see a lot of people that just tend to spiral after falls. Being honest,

my own father passed away a couple years ago after he fell down our several cellar steps and

fractured his clavicle. And it was very interesting, maybe in the context of the orthopedic relationship

to systemic factors, he kind of went through multi system failure. He was unhealthy, but a

clavicle fracture on a fall really kind of like pushed him over the edge on it. Would training

power have helped that? Probably not. But I think for a lot of people that, you know, wind up with

hip fractures and things like that, we have to be very mindful of how power could potentially

prevent it. So first, I'm sorry to hear that. And second, could you give an example of what type

of power training might be incorporated to help mitigate the risk of a fall, for instance?

It sounds terrible to say any kind of sprinting, you know, I'm not saying go out at age 80 and

sprint, but we do see people in those ages that play tennis regularly that are involved in things

that are higher velocity than involve change of direction. So I think a lot of it is remain

athletic into age. So what do we do with folks? We'll throw med balls. We'll do kind of

for people who may not get medicine balls, weighted balls that you're sort of throwing

against the wall or on the floor. Exactly. And relatively low risk for folks can be really

helpful. But I think people sometimes overlook how much they do. My grandmother is 99 years old,

and she's still golf. That's her version of power training. And she's, you know, she's got two new

hips and one knee and she's been doing great. Robocop on the golf course. Exactly. So I think

that's why it's really important. If you don't use it, you lose it. And it's a function of a lot

of things. That's mobility, that's strength. The power is probably the most important of the bunch

when we talk about aging. Everyone's going to get stiff as they age, but you don't want to be stiff

and weak slash slow. Last but not least, David Maisel, the founding chairman of Marvel Studios

and the founder of Mythos Studios. Are there any properties, caricatures,

stories that you're not thinking of pursuing yourself that you just hope someone excellent

out there makes into a film or some type of immersive world outside of its original format?

I love how you said film or some other type of immersive world. I think that's very savvy,

by the way. And we can get into that in the next discussion because I don't believe launching the

next universe is going to happen like Marvel did through theatrical film. I think it's going to

start with something else and most likely will because of the way the world has changed. So I

think the question and the topic as a tease for this next thing, when I left Marvel, I had to

figure out who I was from a person point of view, like with people still want to talk to me if I

wasn't running Marvel Studios, right? Would I still be able to go to restaurants and things

like that? Who my real friends were. And then from a business point of view, what would catch my eye?

And what I'd say is because of Marvel within Disney and the power of the two together and

because of how well Kevin has run Marvel since, Marvel's gotten so big that the bar to launch

in the universe has gotten so high and so much tougher because now you're competing against

Marvel. So when I launched in 2008, Iron Man, we had DC as a competitor. We had the Marvel licensed

movies, you know, Fox with X-Men, Sony with Spider-Man. They were not just competitors,

they could use the Marvel brand. So they were like weird competitors. We were scared about

all these people. But in retrospect, we had a relatively open playing field because we didn't

have ourselves to compete with the version of Marvel today, which just dominates so much. And we

didn't have streaming. We didn't have as much social media, all these other distractions on people's

time. And it was tough, but it's like, you know, it's old saying like, how good we had it. You

know, we didn't realize it's still very tough, but now it's even harder. So something that goes

through the filter you're talking about has to be pretty special to hop into what we call

universe category or major, potentially new mythology. And I love to talk about that more

because it is something that a lot of people do ask about and a lot of people are focused on.

Obviously DC just hired a new person to run DC after 20 years of us being able to do what we

did at Marvel. David Zaslaw, when he bought Warner Brothers from AT&T, said, I want to copy

Marvel. I want to do what Marvel did. But we did that 15, 20 years ago. So it shows you even DC

hasn't gotten their act together in the same way. And that's a very well capitalized company with a

large number of properties. So it's very hard for a new universe to get created. I don't think it's

impossible, but it's got to be differentiated from Marvel so that there's a reason that it exists.

I think it has to be introduced in new ways that you sort of tease with new technologies and new

ways of storytelling. Probably has to be way more primal and visual. So it gets people's quick

attention. They can see what's there. I think it has to have great meaning, Tim. Marvel had a good

meaning in that it's great to be a hero. And I think people relate to something that they feel

is adding to their lives and somehow, whether they sense it or it's just subconscious. That's

what all mythologies from Greek and Roman onward have done or before even Greek and Roman mythology.

And it has to be something I think James Cameron with Avatar has probably done the best since

Marvel came out with big cultural moments. Now, he does things every 10 years, though, right?

But that was an original idea. I think the next thing probably is a legacy property,

but it's still like Marvel, it had history, but people could discover it together. So it was a

perfect combination. And I think people love to discover something with their friends and

idea of the new band or something in new technology, like there's just something great.

And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today comes from a very strange,

very mesmerizing, very exciting, and certainly unique world. That is the world of magic.

Simon Coronel, that's C-O-R-O-N-E-L, is legally classified as an alien of extraordinary ability

by the United States government for his skills as a magician and illusionist. Simon discovered

magic in 1999 as a first year student at Melbourne University. He then spent five years working full

time in management consulting while juggling his secret performance career. Now, flashing forward,

he's currently a jigsaw puzzle designer for the Magic Puzzle Company, which is incredible in and

of itself, and which also made the number one fact that is the most backed puzzle of all time on

Kickstarter. He is also a regular performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the importance

of that will be described in this episode. Simon has appeared twice on the hit TV show Pen and

Teller Fool Us. He has won more than a dozen international awards for magic, including being

crowned the world champion of magic in 2022 at FISM, F-I-S-M, the Olympics of Magic. And the story

behind that is incredible, which we also dive into. You can find all things Simon at simoncoronel.com,

that's S-I-M-O-N-C-O-R-O-N-E-L.com. He is one of a kind. I promise you that. And you can find more

on the Magic Puzzle Company at magicpuzzlecompany.com.

My guest today is a friend, Jake Muse. Jake Muse is CEO at Maui Nui Venison, a company he co-founded

in 2017 that works to balance invasive access to your populations on the island of Maui,

channeling that management into incredible nutrient-dense food. Maui Nui was selected for

Fast Company's top 10 most innovative companies in agriculture of 2023. And its venison has been

served in top restaurants across the country, including Alignia, which featured very heavily in

The 4-Hour Chef. It was a big section entirely, because it's so impressive. The French Laundry

and Cessan, where I just mentioned, I was one of the very first investors when it was a pop-up with

12 seats, something like that. Josh Skiens, everybody should check him out as well.

Prior to Maui Nui, Jake was executive director of the Access Deer Institute for 12 years,

part of a two decades-long project focused on Access Deer and their long-term management in

Hawaii. You can find them at Maui Nui. I'll spell that out for folks. M-A-U-I-N-U-I, venison.com,

and you can find them on Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, at Maui Nui Venison.

The first guest is Maggie Spivey Faulkner. She is an anthropological archaeologist and

practitioner of indigenous archaeology, currently working as an assistant professor in the Department

of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She also serves as an assistant chief of the

Upper Georgia Tribal Town of the PD Indian Nation of Beaver Creek, a state-recognized

Native American group in South Carolina. Her work focuses on using anthropological data

to upend harmful misconceptions of Native American peoples embedded in public policy,

science, and the public consciousness. Maggie was raised in a tight-knit extended family in

rural Hefseba, Georgia. She is an international fellow of the Explorers Club, a former junior

fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation

Graduate Research Fellowship. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Washington University

in St. Louis in 2018, and her AB from Harvard College in 2008. Joshua L. Steiner is a partner

at SSW, a private investment firm and a senior advisor at Bloomberg LP, where he was previously

head of industry verticals. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Steiner co-founded and was co-president

of Quadrangle Group LLC, a private equity and asset management firm. And before co-found in

Quadrangle, he was a managing director at Lazard. From 1993 to 1995, he served as chief of staff

for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He serves on the boards of Yale University,

the International Rescue Committee, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Kevin Kelly, you can find him on Twitter at Kevin, the number two Kelly,

helped launch and edit Wired Magazine. He's written for The New York Times and The Wall

Street Journal, among many other publications. You can find my most recent interview with him

at tim.blog.com. He's been on the podcast quite a bit and is arguably the most interesting

man in the world, but I'll leave that for another time. He is the author of the new book,

Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. It is a great book. I literally

have it in my suitcase right next to me here in my hotel room. Kevin is currently co-chair of the

Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock in a mountain that will take for 10,000 years,

and it's not made up. That is a real thing. He also has a daily blog, a weekly podcast about

cool tools, a weekly newsletter, Recommendo, which is a free one-page list of six very brief

recommendations of cool stuff. Last but not least, Noah Feldman, who will be my ongoing co-host.

At least that is the plan. You can find him on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman is a Harvard Professor,

Ethical Philosopher, and Advisor, Public Intellectual, Rigorous Scholar, and Historian.

Author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery,

and The Refounding of America. You can find my interview with him at tim.blog.com. His upcoming

book is Bad Jew, subtitled A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, which is currently

available for pre-order. My guest today is Eric Kressy. I've known Eric for quite some time.

You can find him on Twitter at Eric Kressy, C-R-E-S-S-E-Y. Eric Kressy, M-A-C-S-C-S,

is president and co-founder of Kressy Sports Performance with facilities in Palm Beach Gardens,

Florida, and Hudson, Massachusetts. He has worked with clients ranging from youth sports to the

professional and Olympic ranks, but he is best known for his very extensive work with baseball

players, more than 100 professional players trained at CSP each offseason. Eric also serves as

director of player health and performance for the New York Yankees. You may have heard of them.

Eric double majored in exercise science and sports and fitness management at the University of New

England and then received his master's degree in kinesiology with a concentration in exercise

science at the University of Connecticut. Kressy has published books and video resources that

have been sold in more than 60 countries. He regularly lectures both nationally and internationally,

and his research has been published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

He serves as a consultant to New Balance, Proteus Motion, and Athletic Greens.

Kressy has a blog and free newsletter at his website, erickressy.com, and has a podcast at

elitebaseballpodcast.com. You can find more about his training facilities at kressysportsperformance.com

and on social media, erickressy, on Instagram, Twitter, and elsewhere. We'll link to all of

those in the show notes at timdoplog.com. My guest today is David Maisel, and for those of

you who don't know the name, you will certainly recognize his work. You can find him on Twitter

at Maisel David. He is the founder of Mythos Studios and the former founding chairman of

Marvel Studios. In 2003, David pitched Marvel on his idea of Marvel financing and producing

its own movies in a connected cinematic universe. He went on to executive produce Iron Man, The

Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, The First Avenger, and the Angry Birds Movie.

In 2009, David arranged the sale of Marvel to Disney for a cool $4 billion. David is currently the

founder of Mythos Studios and IP Entertainment Studio. The Ecos Genesis Art Collection,

all one-of-one original handcrafted digital art, is the first offering in the forthcoming

Ecos universe. I'm very happy to share this interview because, to my knowledge, it is the

first time David has ever done a long-form conversation like this publicly where he talks

about the ins and outs of how deals are actually made in Hollywood, some of the inside baseball

of Tinseltown making very unorthodox career moves, and I had a blast with this conversation. I learned

a lot, had a ton of fun, took a lot of notes in the process, and got me thinking about all sorts

of things, and I hope that is true for you as well. You can find Ecos online at ekos.io. On

Twitter, you can find both Ecos at Ecos Genesis, spelled the same way, and at Maisel David.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five

bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little

fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter,

my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is

basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or

discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

all sorts of tech tricks, and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast

guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then

I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of

goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try

it out, just go to tim.blog.friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.friday,

drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.