The Tim Ferriss Show: #701: In Case You Missed It: September 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

This episode is a recap of the previous month's episodes of The Tim Ferris Show, featuring short clips from each conversation. The podcast explores topics such as managing ambitions, creating open space in schedules, scheduling tasks and managing email, prioritizing opinions, the personalities and motivations of successful individuals in finance, and the importance of positioning in decision-making for long-term success.

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00:30:00 - 00:48:02

The podcast discusses the importance of considering the cost and potential outcomes of investment decisions, as well as the need to be adaptable and well-positioned for different scenarios. It also explores the concept of mental models as tools for overcoming cognitive biases and gaining different perspectives on problems. The Stoic practice of premortem is mentioned as a helpful approach. Edward Debono's work is briefly mentioned as well.

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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, Arthur C. Brooks, author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Build

the Life You Want, the art and science of getting happier, with co-author Oprah Winfrey.

The reverse bucket list is something I do, oh boy, to ever do it.

And it took me too long to figure this one out.

When I was 50, I'm 59 years old, when I was 50, I found my bucket list from when I was

40.

Now, it was a classic thing.

On my birthday, I would make a list of my desires, my ambitions, and I would imagine

myself, visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things, and it would fire me up and

make me, well, kind of feel like a loser, quite frankly, because it was lowering my

sense of satisfaction I subsequently found out.

And I looked at that list from when I was 40.

I checked everything off that list, and I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40.

And so I thought, I'm a social scientist, so I thought to myself, obviously, I'm doing

something wrong.

What am I doing wrong?

And basically, this is the problem.

This is a neurophysiological problem, and a psychological problem all rolled into one

handy package.

I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more.

And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear

off in like a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your halves divided

by your wants.

Haves divided by wants.

That's the model.

So, you know, it's like, I'll slow down because I know people watching you and like, I'm

gonna write that down.

Haves divided by wants.

You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently

and securely by wanting less.

I thought to myself, hmm, so what does that mean?

And the answer to that, what does that mean, is I need a reverse bucket list.

Not that I'm not gonna get nice things in my life, but like, I'm gonna be consciously

detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out.

So on my birthday now, my 59th birthday a couple of months ago, I wrote down all my ridiculous

ambitions and desires of money or whatever, power, ambition, admiration, all these things

that I want from other people that we all want because we're human and Mother Nature

wires us to accumulate the rewards that will help us survive and pass on our genes.

I got it.

I know how evolutionary psychology works.

And I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals, but I do not

want to be owned by them.

I want to manage them.

I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me.

I want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive

manager, the bumper of tissue right behind my forehead.

And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying,

maybe I get it and maybe I don't, but I'm going to cross it out as an attachment and

I'm telling you, Tim, I'm free.

And so you find that to work.

The exercise...

It works.

It does not because you don't care about it, but because you're not attached to it in the

same way.

You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire or a ghost in your head.

You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing

that ambition in a different part of your brain.

Next up, Sam Corkos, CEO and co-founder of Levels, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup

that shows you how food affects your health.

The thing that almost always happens is they have this long to-do list and they say, all

right, here's what I want you to do.

Take everything on this to-do list with the dates that you think they'll get done by,

which is usually this week or next week.

And I want you to just put them on your calendar with the amount of time you think it's going

to take.

And then we'll have another follow-up call next week and we'll see what happens.

And then we have the call and then they say, this process doesn't work.

They say, why is that?

I said, well, I tried to move it over there, but there's enough space in my week to fit

all these items.

Yes, that's the point of the exercise.

There literally is not enough time.

Your time is finite and the number of digital items you can add to it to-do list is infinite.

You are working with the wrong constraint, which is like the amount of items you can fit

in a database row, as opposed to the number of things that you can fit in your finite

time of your calendar.

And so we then work on, all right, you probably need slack during the course of the day.

Usually like 50% is a good target because things come up.

Oh, I see.

Not the tool slack, but-

Yeah.

But-

Space, extra space.

Mm-hmm.

You need extra space in the day.

And so we work on things like, for me, I process a lot of email.

And when you say you need space in the day, could you just briefly say more about that?

Because the way I'm hearing that is that you have 50% of your time open.

Now is that, for instance, like tomorrow you would have 50% of your time open or does that

mean that in advance of scheduling other things, like three weeks from now, each day

is 50% open?

It's generally 50% open just fully.

Got it.

And as you get better at it, I would say I'm probably at 25% open because I've been doing

this for many years, at least five years, probably longer, to the point where I can

estimate how long it will take me to do something with maybe 90% accuracy.

It's like, I need to write a memo on this thing, it's going to take me three and a half

hours.

And I just know, because I've written so many of these, I just know how long it's going

to take.

And so-

It takes time to hone that, I would think.

Right?

If you ask most people, like, how many calories do you eat at lunch, they'll be like, six

thousand million?

I don't know.

That's right.

Seven calories?

But then, over time, you can calibrate it.

Okay.

Especially if you retroactively update your calendar as well, which is how long did it

actually take me?

And when you realize that your estimates were off, or they were right, you can start to

hone that skill.

So I always try to have people put it at 50% open space because something's going to come

up.

A friend calls you, something happens during the day, you get a message that kind of

throws you off.

The problem is that it's way easier to pull something in from tomorrow into today because

you had extra space than it is to have this cascading problem of just, like, disastrous.

It's like, then I have to push this to this day, then the next thing you know, you have

this Tetris game that you're playing a month out because one thing changed in your schedule

and everything breaks.

These concepts come from manufacturing, where you have this line, whatever the assembly

line is, you need to have slack in the system in order to be able to operate effectively

because something will come up.

And if there's one thing that comes up that breaks everything downstream, that's a real

problem.

And over time, as you get better, you can reduce that amount of slack.

But 50% is a pretty good goal.

So you have, like, my goal for today, I'm going to have a four-hour block where I'm

going to do X.

And then I have some time, for me, I know I need to process email or communications broadly

for at least two hours a day.

So I just have those blocks every day, they're just repeated.

So when I start scheduling things, I can't actually fit this in because it's not like

I can't do my email, because my role requires a lot of email.

And so it's just clear as day, I cannot do this on Thursday.

I can do it next week.

So from a process perspective, then, do you start with, I'm imagining not at this point,

but just so I get a really clear understanding.

Let's just say you're looking at next week, you have these recurring blocks, email, that's

already in there.

You may have other repeating blocks, and I would be curious to know what they are.

So let's bookmark that.

When you're looking at, say, the to-dos that will be converted into Calendar or not for

the next week, what does that process look like?

Do you start with a to-do list, and then that goes to your EA, and he or she tries to slot

them in for the anticipated amount of time?

What does that look like from start to finish?

Yeah, the answer is you just skip the to-do list step entirely.

So when I get a new task, a lot of my tasks effectively come in through email.

So I'll get an email, and this is also another thing that I worked with a couple of people

on who really, really struggled with email.

And the thing they struggle with is using their email as a to-do list, which is a very

common thing that people do.

The problem, it creates a lot of anxiety when you have this stack of uncategorized things.

It could be 15 minutes, it could be 50 hours, you have no idea until you open up each one

individually to figure out how much work it is.

And so the same process of translating your to-do list into your calendar, you can do

the same thing with email, which is, I worked with somebody recently where I said, all right,

let's open each email, how long is this going to take you to respond to?

These are like the chunkier ones, it's like 30 minutes, great.

Market is done, copy the link, and put that link in your calendar.

So you're going to spend this 30 minute block responding to this email.

What's the next one?

It's going to take me a full hour because I have to write something for them.

That's interesting.

So the clearing of the inbox then is really in some capacity scheduling the proper amount

of time to reply to these things.

So you're not looking at this undifferentiated stack of shit that you are opening multiple

times, marking is unread, going back to forgetting what you read, reading at the 17th time, whatever

that might be.

Yeah.

And it's a stress thing.

It is very stressful to have this list of things.

It's just an ambiguous amount of effort.

It is stress relieving to see, all right, I will do that on Thursday of next week.

I have nothing pending right now.

I have not dropped any balls because I know that anything that is time-sensitive that

needed to be done today is already done, and there's no ambiguous deadlines looming that

I'm not aware of because they're in my calendar.

And if you change it, this is where closing the loop is a helpful factor, which is if

you say, I'm going to block this off for Thursday.

You can tell that person, hey, I'll get back to you on Thursday.

And then if you have to move it, you now know that you can say, hey, something came up.

I'll get it to you on Monday.

And you can just keep them in the loop on that as opposed to just ambiguously dropping

the ball.

So for me, when I get a new task, it just immediately goes into my calendar.

So if somebody was to say, hey, can you write a memo on this topic so that this team has

context on it of where this has gone over the last year, I'll say, sure, how soon do

you need it?

I'll say, can you have it to me by Wednesday?

I'll go to my calendar and I'll block off two hours because I think that's about how

long it'll take.

I'll block off two hours on Tuesday that I have open, and I'll say, cool, I'll have

a two-by-Tuesday night.

And that's it.

The calendar is the to-do list.

Next up, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable,

and Scott Patterson, author of Chaos Kings, How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the

New Age of Crisis.

Nassim, I have a question for you about a letter and then I have a question for you

about personalities, Scott.

So temperament may be another way to put it.

Is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first day at a trading job and put it

in your desk drawer?

I read this on the internet.

I don't know if it's true.

You can't believe everything you read, but it was from the Guardian, so I thought it

might be credible.

One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do that.

I wrote that, but not on the day I started, but I recommended that people, because you

feel relief when you do it, because then you can continue on your job without feeling

like someone's controlling you.

You've got the gun loaded.

The whole idea, the plan behind it, you thought about that problem.

So you write the resignation letter and you don't date it, right?

I'm very fascinated by your ways of thinking, the way that you've embraced different philosophies,

and you emailed me an aphorism in 2010.

And you can correct me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me.

This is, in 2010, here's the aphorism of the quote.

Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude

who hates it.

And then parentheses, artists, fragility is when you care more about the few who hate

your work than the multitude who loves it, and then quotation marks, politicians.

Have you always had that type of robustness or resilience against criticism?

Is that something that is inborn?

Maybe because I was never really someone who took and established ideas at face value.

So you necessarily have, you know, violate some norms, some thinking norms, and often

people protect those norms by, you know, attacking your reputation.

And I realized that while writing food by randomness, I say, hey, you're saying that

what I'm doing is random or using wrong models, it doesn't work.

So they attack your reputation.

So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was going to be under some kind

of fire.

And I decided that, no, my reputation is how a few important people or people who know

something about the subject view me.

And it's not like I don't care about my reputation, I only care about my reputation

in some circles.

And it was people I can talk to to try to explain what it's about and has worked out.

So if you have to go defend your reputation, and you're doing the right thing, it's too

much energy wasted, and it's not going to help.

Haters are not going to hate.

This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie Munger's, that you want to be the

most ethical person where people think that you're corrupt, or you want to be the most

corrupt person where people think that you're ethical.

Make your choice and use it as a guideline.

That's the same thing.

So, except that there's something in between is that there are some people I care about,

and I want them to not lose respect for me.

Of course, you start with your mother, your children, or whatever, your family members.

But there are also a lot of people on the planet, and I care about my reputation, but

in these circles, not with the general public.

So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions, which I've done over

a long life, and Mark, for example, has a lot of enemies, and they're going to pick

on something, and you don't care, so you're doing the right things.

And how do you know you're doing the right thing?

If people, you respect, approve of your action, not if the general public does.

So that segues to my question for you, Scott, which is in the process of doing all these

interviews and interacting with these various players on the field, and these sort of practitioners,

these investors, and so on.

Have you identified any patterns that you think, whether nature or nurture, that seem

to recur in people who are good at what you describe in the book?

I would say, I mean, across all three books that I've written, which are generally focused

on Wall Street trading hedge fund managers, I've met a lot of hedge fund managers over

the years, none like this guy, I have to say.

We'll probably come back to that.

But I'm not telling you, I don't want to be identified as a fund manager.

Yeah, that's true.

It's an identity thing.

Many are very focused on making a lot of money.

That's a very common trait.

I mean, Mark, he talked to me about how he grew up in the 80s.

He identified with the Reagan era.

It was a time, you know, Wall Street agreed is good.

He told me he's liked it.

I have a little degree to me.

Yeah, I did.

It was the 80s.

And he grew up in a family that was his father was a he was a minister in a church.

He was sort of a hippie, didn't believe in pursuit of wealth.

Mark took the exact opposite view that that was constantly something driving him was the

desire to make money.

A lot of other hedge fund managers I've met over the years, just they have that drive.

And it's something that many people look at these guys and think, you're worth a billion

dollars, you're worth two billion dollars.

And yet you're a maniac.

You go into work every day and just go crazy.

You drive all your employees crazy because you want to be richer than the next guy.

I don't think Mark has that quite that sort of insane level of greed, as some do.

I've met King Griffin, founder of Citadel, disciple of Ed Thorpe, who we talked about.

We might talk about later, Cliff Asnes, who is a stark enemy of your friend,

for initially, initially a friend.

Yeah.

And I have to say, Cliff is a nice guy when you when you meet him.

Not a nice guy, but his friends were not nice guys.

He's also got a dark side.

Also, somebody extremely focused on being wealthy, very smart.

They're all extremely smart.

And I think that's in personalities.

That's I think one of the things that has helped drive my books is these are interesting people.

You know, a lot of them are mathematicians, scientists.

They come out of university with a different expertise in making money,

but then they apply that on Wall Street to making money.

So it's a combination of they have to be leaders.

They are extremely driven.

It baffles me because I'm not like that.

You know, I have a degree in English, and I think that's actually why

sympathize with Nassim's writing so much is I came out of a tradition that,

you know, I love the works of Dostoevsky and existentialism.

And, you know, one of my favorite books is The Rational Man.

And I came in to Wall Street and started reading about how there's this

belief that people are irrational and the markets are rational.

And they are predictable because of this.

And I thought that is just crazy.

You know, to me, I look at financial markets and I see black swans.

I see fear and greed.

That, to me, is what drives markets, not rational behavior, rational expectations.

What are some of the things that make Nassim different or unique in those you've interacted with?

I have some of my own questions and thoughts on this, but I would love to hear yours.

He mentioned his contrarian nature.

It's not a contrarian nature.

It's independence.

Oh, I love it.

I mean, people think I'm contrarian.

I'm with a conspiracy theorist on many of the things.

I'm against him on many other things.

Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem.

So to me, contrarian is an explicit rather than an attribute.

So the other thing is I thought it was going to be about me.

It should be about the idea, the precaution.

He's a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and not financial market.

That's just his thing that drives him.

He doesn't look at the stock market page every day like some people do.

He's...

No, you have to figure out who are people envious of.

So, you know, if you're in a hedge fund business and you have $500 million in a bank

and someone else has $600 million, it's going to be envious of that person.

I was always envious of people who had more erudition than me.

OK, so more erudites.

And you realize that that's what makes me tick.

Being envious is not good, you see.

But at the same time, if you figure out who you come to envy, it's not...

I don't believe in this.

They say, oh, people having enough.

There's someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who wrote Cash22.

A lot of interesting folks out there.

Yeah, he met a financier at the time for hedge funds.

And the financier said, what is it that about you, because he was an author,

a very successful one, what is it that distinguishes you from me?

You know, look, he told them, I know the meaning of enough.

So, in other words, you know you're upper bound.

And effectively, I don't play that game.

I say, you know, there's a meaning that I may am literally, and I say envious of

people who are erudites, like if someone knows Latin

very well, I'm envious.

If someone knows Sanskrit, I'm envious.

All right.

So, and I discovered that early on.

So, I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money on Wall Street,

but I didn't think it was worth the effort.

And luckily, it was a combination of the universe.

I had so much leverage, you know, was marketing and all that stuff.

So, the spillover on me was more than satisfactory.

So, I have knock on the wood a lot more than I wished.

Next up, Shane Parrish, the entrepreneur behind Farnham Street,

and author of Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results.

I'd love to get your help defining a phrase, just I suppose explaining a phrase,

then segueing into a conversation around mental models and cognitive biases and so on.

So, ordinary moments determine your position and your position determines your results.

So, what is meant by that line and what is meant by position?

So, the counterintuitive insight that I had about decision making from studying sort of

Buffett and Munger and Peter Kaufman and a host of other people who've influenced my

thinking is that they almost never find themselves out of position.

And if you want to think of it as position as your circumstances, they're never forced

by circumstances into doing something that they don't want to do.

And often, that means they look like an idiot in the short term, but in the long term, they

win. And if you consider Buffett, for example, as we've talked about, you know, he closes

down his partnership during a bull market in the 60s because he doesn't know how to

invest anymore. He's lost touch.

He can't find what worked for him.

He reopens it later in terms of Berkshire Hathaway.

Time Magazine, I think it was 1999, he's on the cover as being out of touch.

2001, stock market burst.

Right now, today, I think as of last quarter, he's got $150 billion on the balance sheet.

And so, what he's always doing is he's, everybody thinks he's out of touch and he

looks like an idiot, but he always wins because no matter what the outcome is, he wins.

If the stock market goes up, he wins.

If the stock market crashes, he wins because he's put himself in a position where no matter

what happens, he can take advantage of circumstances rather than having circumstances take

advantage of him.

And I think that that's a key element we don't realize.

If you put Warren Buffett in a bad position where all of his options are bad, it doesn't

matter how smart he is.

It doesn't matter how Warren Buffett he is.

Everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position and everybody looks like

a genius when they're in a good position.

Do you then create that position by having a handful of commandments?

And I'm making these up.

I'm not saying this is what Buffett does because I haven't tracked him as closely as

you have.

But for instance, I know someone who's of a similar cut from a similar cloth and he's

like, no short positions, no leverage, and he has four or five rules that he follows,

which means he doesn't always beat the S&P 500, let's say, but he's very rarely in a

position where he's a distressed seller or is forced into a bad position.

So he is able to play a very long game.

So I guess I'm wondering how you consistently create that type of position.

So let me talk about it in terms of finance and then apply it to something else that's

totally you would think it doesn't apply to.

So in finance, you can think of low debt, you can think of saving money, you can think

of always having dry powder.

It doesn't matter if you have the best idea in the world.

If you can't take advantage of that idea, you might as well not have the idea.

You have to be in a position to take advantage of the ideas that you have.

And you have to be in a position where somebody can't call you in at the exact

wrong moment because that's really expensive, as everybody sort of learned

during the great financial crisis and is now forgotten.

We seem to relearn these lessons over and over again.

But positioning applies to so many other things that we don't think about.

You can think about it basically as in your sleep, right?

Did you work out?

Are you healthy?

Are you eating well?

Are you investing in your relationship with your partner?

What position am I in in the moment that I get into a fight or argument or

disagreement with my partner or my spouse?

And we don't think about the position we're in at that moment.

But if you imagine that there's a patch of grass between you and them, is

that grass dry or is it wet?

Have I watered that for months, in which case the spark isn't going to let it on

fire or is this smallest little spark going to start this forest fire?

And the position that we bring into those arguments matters a lot in terms

of the quality of the outcomes that we get.

I'll give you another example.

We were talking about kids earlier and I assume a lot of people listening have kids.

One of my kids came home with an exam and he got a really terrible mark.

And he hands it to me.

He's like a teenager, so he like hands it to me.

He's like, I did the best I could, walks away.

And normally the conversation ends there.

And I was like, OK, well, now is not the moment that we're going to talk about

this because I know that this teenage attitude thing going on, but we're going

to circle back to this.

And so later that night, I was like, talk to me about what it means to do

the best you can.

And what he told me about the best he could was like, when he sat down to

write that test from 10 to 11, he focused all of his energy and all of his

effort on it.

He made the best decisions possible from 10 to 11.

But what he forgot or didn't really appreciate is what position was he in

at 10 a.m. when he sat down to write that test?

Did he fight with his brother in the morning?

Yep, he did. Did he eat a healthy breakfast?

Nope, he didn't. Did he get a good night's sleep?

Nope, he was up late.

Did he study?

No, he sort of half-assed it.

And so what happened was he was in a bad position at the moment he sat down

to write that test.

He was ill-prepared to write the test, but yes, he did the best he could in

that moment.

And so often we think about life in terms of how do I do the best I can in

this particular moment, rather than how do I put myself in the best position?

And part of that is like we're always predicting.

We're predicting creatures.

And so we're always trying to gauge what the outcome is and maximize

towards that outcome.

I want to go all in on Tesla.

I want to go all in on whatever because I want to maximize my return.

And what we don't think about is like, okay, well, what is the cost of doing

that? What if I'm wrong and how do I position myself for multiple possible

futures where what if my idea is not correct?

Can I still survive and can I thrive on that?

And if you look back and you sort of like look back at Carnegie and Rockefeller

and all these historical people who built these great businesses, including

Buffett, they always take advantage of a weakness in somebody else's position

when their position is strong.

Who else would you, and I know you mentioned a few names, but outside of

Buffett and Munger, who else would you put on your short list and not to make

you pick favorites?

I'm sure that you could give a very long list, but just off the cuff, if you had

to pick five to 10 people, let's just say, could be four.

But you know, let's aim for five or slightly more people who you really

respect as incisive, deliberate decision makers who would make that list.

So we have a mutual friend of all Ravikon.

He would be up there.

Patrick Collison would sort of be up there.

Cat Cole, who works at Athletic Greens, one of my favorite people.

She's always one step ahead.

She's amazing.

I think that there's very few people who are well positioned in everything.

Like if you look at somebody who's extremely good at one thing like Buffett,

that comes with extreme weaknesses, you can have a list of

exemplars in your head, almost of different people who are good at different

positions, but you have to pick what direction you're going and then what

positions do you need to be good at to be good in that direction.

And so for me, like I circle back to sort of like core things, which people

don't really think about, but they're core to everything we do in terms of like

health and relationships and friendship and purpose and community.

Am I working on something that I want to be working on?

Am I moving closer to my destination?

And is my destination the place I want to go?

And I think those questions are stuff that we don't really ask ourselves.

We're always so focused on like, how do we accomplish the outcome we want

rather than what are the key elements to this process that allow me to play

for a long time?

Am I going in the right direction?

And do I want to get to where I'm going?

So I am going to come back to just the broad question of how to incorporate

thinking about cognitive biases, if I'm saying that correctly, and or mental

models, not really, I guess those are different.

I'd love to have you let's begin there.

How would you distinguish or define mental models?

Then I'm going to go micro and then we'll zoom out.

So a great way to think about mental models is the source of all bad decisions

is blind spots.

Mental models allow you to see a problem through a different lens.

You can adopt a different persona.

A great example of a mental model is like, how would Tim Ferriss think about this?

And then I adapt what I know about you.

And I try to see the problem from your perspective.

And if I can see the problem from your perspective, now I've done the one thing

that actually gets me out of cognitive biases, which is the source

of all cognitive biases are basically we believe that what we see is all there is.

And we learn about this sort of in physics, right?

In grade nine, I think where you're standing on this train and you're carrying

this ball and the train is moving at 60 miles an hour.

And how fast is the ball moving?

Well, relative to you, the ball is not moving.

But if you're watching the train go by, the ball is moving at 60 miles an hour.

And so the source of all of our problems is that we only see that we're this person

on the train holding this ball.

And we can't see that there's a person outside who has a completely different

view into the exact same situation that we see.

So we can mentally use these tools to sort of accommodate how we can look

into the world from a different person's eyes or through a different lens,

be that biology or through thinking or through.

I mean, the most useful ones tend to be like, and then what?

Just asking yourself that simple question, I accomplish this.

And then what then what happens in version?

How do I avoid all these negative outcomes that I don't want to get?

And the Stoics, you've talked about this in the past.

The Stoics have been doing this for a long time.

They call it a premortem.

I think that those are just really helpful ways.

And what they're really doing is they're just allowing us to put a different

lens onto the problem and see it through a different light.

And by seeing it through a different light, we slightly reduce our blind spots

into the problem. Yeah, totally.

I've found I haven't read these in decades.

So caveat lector for anyone who picks these up.

But some of Edward Debono's work, I think he's originally Maltese,

but Debono's two words, but or actually he may just be a Maltese citizen.

I can't peg the nationality.

It doesn't really matter.

He wrote a book called Lateral Thinking.

He has another one.

I think it's called The Sixth Thinking Hats or something along those lines,

which similarly, very helpful just for forcing yourself as a portion of a

practice to look at the same situation with a different lens,

a different set of questions, a different perspective.

Last but not least, another unpredictable and entertaining

addition of The Random Show with technologist and serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose.

I'll mention something that's sitting outside.

I can see it from here that people might be interested in.

So I I've been and still am a fervent believer in cold therapy,

using ice baths as a means of controlling inflammation,

as a means of mood elevation that lasts on the mood elevation big time.

Unbelievable.

And generally, my approach has been to get a chest freezer of some type

and fill it with ice, etc.

And that works, but they get really disgusting really quickly.

And they all do that.

I bought one of the machines, the real pro.

Yeah.

And then you're stuck with this thing that is an eyesore and you don't know what

to do with it.

You can't move it.

I tried to sell it.

I couldn't.

Yeah.

So I ended up because I realized how significant a lever this is

for improving my quality of life just on a daily basis.

Like and I'll backstep for a second and just say one thing that I learned

from Tony Robbins to give him credit.

And I don't know if he came up with this, but is this sequence of state

story strategies?

So it's like, fix your state first.

Only then can you come up with an enabling story and only then can you

come up with an effective strategy.

If you're like feeling shitty and you're sleep deprived and you're kind

of depressed or anxious, whatever you try to come up with a strategy, meaning

how to fix something, you're not going to come up with a good strategy,

generally speaking.

So it's like, fix your physical state first, then you can come up with

an enabling story, then come up with an effective strategy.

So the state piece is very important.

There aren't that many ways I have found to change state.

Exercise is one, but it requires generally a fair amount of time.

Heat is also effective, but again, requires, say, it doesn't sound like

a much, but it's like 15 to 30 minutes, let's just say in a sauna, very effective.

Cold is the fastest.

It's just the fastest for me.

And I've gone without cold therapy because I've not wanted to get some huge

chest freezer or a pro model.

I am also going to be getting a pro model, but they get all scummy though.

And then you got to put chlorine in them.

Yeah, this is all that.

It's a lot.

But I went on Amazon and I found something called the cold pod, which you set

up in like five minutes, you fill it with water from a hose, you put ice in,

and it works perfectly well as a cold plunge.

And I ended up buying Yeti Cooler to store ice in.

So I have a few days of ice and it's, let's see, what would it be?

It would be like if you were standing, maybe it's hip height and it's probably

three feet in diameter and you get in, you just kind of crouch in there.

And it works fucking great.

It works really well and it costs like a hundred and fifty or two in a box.

Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's a hundred bucks.

It's not crazy.

One hundred and sixty nine.

There you go.

And I've been really impressed with this thing.

It's very basic and even when it's been very hot outside, like you put in two

bags of ice and you let it sit for 20 minutes, it's going to get pretty cold.

It's not going to be 30 degrees, but it's probably going to be mid fifties,

depending on how much water you have in there.

Pro tip, the more water you have in there, the more ice you're going to need

to cool it.

So don't fill it all the way up to the top.

Fill it up like halfway and then add the ice.

And it's been a game changer for me.

It's a plastic trash can.

Well, no, it's not a plastic trash can.

It is props to ever made this shake because it probably cost

of like 15 bucks to build one of these.

Yeah, it's not a trash can.

I just to be clear, I mean, it's look, it's we're not talking about a fucking

Maserati, but here's what's nice about it.

It's very easy to set up.

It's not a trash can.

Because that makes it sound like it's like mid chest height and hard.

It's easy to pack.

You can actually travel with it if you want to travel with it.

So I would just say for people who travel with it.

Oh, it's super easy, man.

You like it folds up.

Yeah, it folds up.

You sit, stick in a bag and take it with you.

It's super easy.

Put it in your hotel room.

Yeah, the hotel loves 50 gallons of water spilling out.

So for those people who have perhaps heard about the benefits of cold therapy,

but have avoided it because it's too expensive, it's too time consuming,

whatever, this is a way to test it.

And I would just say this is a low hurdle way to test it out.

And I used it earlier today.

It's fantastic.

Changed my day.

So that's the cold bud.

And there are a bunch of other options that look basically identical.

I just went with the one with the best reviews.

Nothing fancy.

And now here are the bios for all the guests.

Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public

and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice

at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness.

He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular How to Build a Life column,

mega popular.

And Brooks is the author of 13 books, including the 2022 No. 1 New York Times bestseller

from Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life,

which is a book I've actually recommended in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday.

His newest book is Build the Life You Want, subtitled The Art and Science of Getting Happier

with co-author Oprah Winfrey.

He speaks to audiences all around the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being

within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations.

We cover a lot of ground.

He is a fascinating character with a lot of fascinating frameworks and practices that he

implements in his own life and certainly those that he's studied for his class and for many

other projects.

You can find him on Instagram at Arthur C. Brooks, on Twitter at Arthur Brooks.

This is an old school Tim Ferriss conversation in the sense that we go all the way back to many

of the tools, many of the principles from the four-hour work week and that includes virtual

assistance, delegation, processes, massive elimination, minimalism for maximum leverage,

all sorts of great things.

And this time I was in the student seat because my guest today has mastered, I think it is fair to

say, so many facets of everything I just mentioned and it was a pleasure to take so many notes

myself to follow up on.

His name is Sam Corkos.

You can find him on Twitter at Sam Corkos, C-O-R-C-O-S.

Sam is the CEO and co-founder of Levels, an A16Z backed startup that shows you how food

affects your health using continuous glucose monitors and other biosensors.

Fascinating company, incredibly, incredibly practical technology, easy to use, easy to

learn from, changes your behavior, changes your life.

Check out Levels at LevelsHealth.com.

The first guest is Naseem Nicholas Taleb, who spent 21 years as a risk-taker, that is,

quantitative trader, before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and in his words,

mostly practical problems with probability.

Taleb is the author of a multi-volume essay, The Inserto, and within that you find The Black

Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Anti-Fragile, The Bed of Procrustes, and Skin in the Game.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for first introducing me to The Black Swan.

These all cover broad facets of uncertainty. His work has been published into 49 languages.

In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written as a backup of The Inserto,

more than 70 technical and scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, genetics,

quantitative finance, statistical physics, medicine, philosophy, ethics, economics,

and international affairs around the notion of risk and probability.

These are grouped in The Technical Inserto. Inserto is spelled I-N-C-E-R-T-O.

Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering.

I believe he's retired. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle

disorder. In other words, the properties of systems that are in his phrasing anti-fragile.

You can find him on Twitter at NNTaleb, and that's N-N-T-A-L-E-B, also Fooled by Randomness.com.

The second guest is Scott Patterson. Scott Patterson is an investigative reporter for

The Wall Street Journal, currently based in Washington, D.C., working on climate and energy

policy. His new book is Chaos Kings, subtitled How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the

New Age of Crisis, a profile of the rise of black swan traders such as Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznegel,

as well as a survey of the many perils the world faces today and how we might fix them.

Scott has covered a lot. He's covered everything from Berkshire Hathaway to stock exchanges,

to high-speed traders, to financial regulators. His first book, The Quants,

describes the rise of mathematical finance and delves into its role in the 2008 financial

blow-up. Dark Bulls, his second book, tells how computer traders took control of the U.S. stock

market starting from the birth of computer trading in the 1980s to the explosion of

high-frequency trading in the late 2000s. You can find him on Twitter at Patterson Scott and

on his website, scottpattersonbooks.com. Lest you think this conversation is only about finance,

I want to emphasize that very refined thinking in the world of markets and investing really

reflects clarity of analysis and concepts that then lend themselves to a very clear

scoreboard. And for that reason, it is a fascinating arena within which you can refine

your thinking toolkit for many, many, many other things. And we talk about

many of these other areas where these things can be cross-applied.

My guest today is Shane Parrish. Shane Parrish is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind

Farnham Street and the host of the Knowledge Project podcast, where he focuses on mastering

the best of what other people have already figured out. And he has many, many top investors and

thinkers on his podcast. His popular online course, Decision by Design, has helped thousands of

executives, leaders, and managers around the world learn the repeatable behaviors that improve

results. Shane's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,

and Forbes, among many other outlets. He is the author of the brand new book, Clear Thinking,

Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. You can find him on Instagram at

Farnham Street, that's spelled F-A-R-N-A-M street, on Twitter at Shane A. Parrish, last name P-A-R-R-I-S-H,

and all things Farnham Street, including the Knowledge Project you can find at FS.blog.

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.

Keywords

Arthur C. Brooks, reverse bucket list, Cold therapy, ice baths, finance, decision-making, investing, cognitive biases, mental models, premortem, Leadership, happiness, health, risk, climate and energy policy, Personalities in finance, Irrationality of financial markets, Envy and success, Tim Ferris Show, Podcast recap, Managing ambitions, Creating open space in schedule, Robustness, Resilience, Reputation, Charlie Munger's philosophy, Scheduling tasks, Managing email, Using calendar as a to-do list

People

Arthur C. Brooks, Sam Corcos, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Scott Patterson, Charlie Munger, Edward de Bono, Tony Robbins, Shane Parrish, Tim Ferriss, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett

Companies

Amazon, Yeti, Berkshire Hathaway, Citadel, Guardian, Levels, Andreessen Horowitz, Tesla, Athletic Greens

Organizations and Institutions

Farnam Street, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, The Atlantic, NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, Time Magazine, Wall Street

References

Warning: Undefined variable $clean_references in /srv/www/podtranscript.com/app/podcast_episode.php on line 376

This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. 

This is a special inbetweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can easily jump around to get a feel for the episode and guest.

Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the first recap episode. For instance, @hypersundays on Twitter suggested that the bios for each guest can slow the momentum, so we moved all the bios to the end. 

See it as a teaser. Something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, you can of course find the full episodes at tim.blog/podcast. 

Please enjoy! 

*

This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world.

It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.

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Timestamps:

Arthur C. Brooks:00:03:15

Sam Corcos:00:06:31

Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Scott Patterson:00:14:20

Shane Parrish:00:24:34

The Random Show:00:35:43

Full episode titles:

Arthur C. Brooks — How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, Muscular Philosophies, Practical Inoculation Against the Darkness, and More (#692)

Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) (#694)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Scott Patterson — How Traders Make Billions in The New Age of Crisis, Defending Against Silent Risks, Personal Independence, Skepticism Where It (Really) Counts, The Bishop and The Economist, and Much More (#691)

Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More (#695)

The Random Show, Rare Drinking Edition — Affordable Luxuries, Brain Stimulation, Sampling the Future (and Some Previews), Recharging with Creative Experiments, Tokenizing Humans with a Bonding Curve, Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry, and Much More (#690)

*

For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.

For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors

Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

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