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0:05:45 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the
0:05:50 Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field
0:05:55 imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply
0:06:00 and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast
0:06:06 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past one billion
0:06:12 downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites
0:06:18 from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these
0:06:22 super combo episodes, and internally we’ve been calling these the super combo episodes,
0:06:28 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:06:34 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have
0:06:39 transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got
0:06:44 lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode, just trust me on this one, we went to
0:06:51 great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find
0:06:59 that and more at tim.log/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:07:06 First up, retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal,
0:07:12 former commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008,
0:07:19 and bestselling author of Risk, a user’s guide. You can learn more about General McChrystal and his
0:07:26 work at McChrystalGroup.com. Why one meal a day? Do you actually eat one meal a day?
0:07:32 I do, and people ask me why. Is it some zen connection with something? And no, what happened
0:07:39 was when I was a lieutenant in Special Forces many, many years ago, I thought I was getting fat,
0:07:45 and I started running, and I started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that
0:07:52 my personality was such that I’m not real good at eating three or four small discipline meals.
0:07:59 I’m better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that’s dinner. And so what I
0:08:04 do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done, and then sort of reward
0:08:08 myself with dinner at night. What time do you usually eat dinner? Whenever I’m finished work,
0:08:12 and it would be like 8 or 8.30. There’s a challenge when you work really long hours,
0:08:16 because suddenly you start to eat very late, and then you go directly to bed, and that you
0:08:21 feel like you’re sleeping with a football in your stomach. And do you drink coffee earlier in the
0:08:26 day? I’m just thinking with the workout in that many hours, a lot of people would fade. How do you
0:08:30 prevent yourself from fading? Yeah, I have a tendency. I’ll drink coffee. I’ll drink other
0:08:35 beverages to water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days your body
0:08:40 just says, “Eat and eat right now.” And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office
0:08:44 in Afghanistan, and I’d grab a handful of those. And other times, I might be out doing something
0:08:49 physical in the military, like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, “Eat pretty
0:08:53 quickly or you won’t keep road marching.” And I’ll do that. Let me ask a couple of routine
0:08:59 questions, questions about routine. And then, I’d love to maybe go back in history a little bit.
0:09:06 The working out, do you work out every day? I do. What type of exercise and why?
0:09:10 When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant,
0:09:15 and as I mentioned, I started getting fat. And I had a first sergeant in my parachute
0:09:19 infantry company that liked to run. So we would do loosening up exercises and then we’d run.
0:09:26 So I started running, and so for the first 20 or so years, I ran. I had one period when I was a
0:09:31 captain, when I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week. Didn’t vary, didn’t take days off, wore
0:09:38 lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make. As I got older,
0:09:41 and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries, predictably,
0:09:48 what I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I’ll lift weight the next day,
0:09:53 I’ll bike when I’m home and have that capable so I can round out. But for me, it’s very important to
0:09:58 do something literally every day. I’ll only take a day off when I’m forced to because I’ve got some
0:10:03 weird schedule thing that makes it impossible. What does your weight training, your resistance
0:10:08 training workout look like? I will start at my home if we’re at home, and I go down to my basement,
0:10:14 I do four sets of push-ups, as many as I can do for four sets, and I alternate that with a series
0:10:21 of abs exercises. So I’ll do starting with a set of sit-ups, and I’ll do 100 sit-ups, and I’ll flip
0:10:26 over, and I’ll do three minutes of a plank, and then I’ll do some yoga that I learned for about
0:10:31 two or three minutes, and I’ll do another set of push-ups, and then I’ll go to my next abs thing,
0:10:37 which is a crunch-like crossover, and then I’ll do a two and a half minute plank, and then I’ll do
0:10:42 more yoga, slightly different, and I’ll do another set of push-ups, and then I’ll do my third set,
0:10:48 which is crossover sit-ups, and I’ll then do a third plank of two minutes, I’m decreasing each
0:10:54 time, then I’ll do some more yoga, and then I’ll do my fourth set of push-ups, and then I’ll do my
0:11:00 fourth, which is a flutter kick, 60 flutter kicks followed by static, then I’ll do my fourth plank,
0:11:05 which is now a minute and a half, and then I’ll come back, and I’ve only do four sets of push-ups,
0:11:10 so the last time I don’t do push-ups, I then do one more set of the crunch-like, and I’ll flip
0:11:16 over to my last plank, which is one minute, and then I’ll do some final yoga, and that’ll take me
0:11:23 about 45 to 50 minutes, then I’ll leave my house and go to the gym, because my gym opens at 530,
0:11:28 it’s three blocks from my house. I assume we mean am. Yeah, so I can do all this from 430, I get it,
0:11:34 if I get up at four, I can do all that from 430 to about 525, 25, go down to my gym, and then when
0:11:41 I get to the gym, I do four sets of pull-ups, alternated with incline bench press, alternated
0:11:49 with standing curls, and then in that, I’ll also do these one-legged things, balance exercises,
0:11:54 as the break between them, I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot, and I’ll do a few
0:12:01 other things in that, and I can do all that in 30, 35 minutes, so by 615, 620, I can be done at the
0:12:08 gym, head back home, get cleaned up, and then start work. Ready to rock and roll. Yeah, and why is
0:12:13 exercise important to you, both when you are overseas and at home? Maybe the reasons differ,
0:12:20 but why is that routine ritual important? I think it’s several things. There’s a certain self-image,
0:12:27 you know, I think that if I was struggling with my weight, or if I was not as fit as I wanted
0:12:31 people to perceive me, and I couldn’t perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would
0:12:36 suffer, and particularly over life now, whenever I’m injured, and I have a slight period, it bothers
0:12:41 me a lot, so I think that’s part of it. Second is the military. There’s an expectation. If you are
0:12:47 not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that Chris and I were in, if you can’t do those
0:12:51 things physically, you don’t have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly
0:12:57 and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization is going to go down. When I
0:13:03 was left Ranger Battalion Command in 1996, and I went off to spend a year at Harvard, and I remember
0:13:06 one of my non-commissioned officers said, “So what do you do at Harvard?” I said, “I’m going to study.”
0:13:12 He says, “You’re going to work out?” And I said, “Yeah, presumably I will.” And he goes, “You know,
0:13:17 you come back here with a PhD, but you’re out of shape. We’re going to have a word for you and it
0:13:25 ain’t going to be doctor.” And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day.
0:13:31 I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day, I’d go,
0:13:36 “Well, I had a good workout.” No matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out,
0:13:40 it came out about 1.30 in the morning. I found out about it. I made a couple calls.
0:13:44 I knew we had a big problem and I went, put my clothes on and I ran for an hour,
0:13:51 clear my head, stressed myself. Didn’t make it go away, but that was something that I do
0:13:57 in those situations. For me, I try to wave diversifying my identity in a way so that if
0:14:01 everything else is suffering, if I’m losing it, everything else for factors outside of my control,
0:14:09 at least the bar doesn’t care. Stan, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people?
0:14:15 I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton Myrer called Once an
0:14:20 Eagle. It’s a story of two characters, both who entered the military right during the First World
0:14:26 War, and it follows them up through the Second World War and, in fact, into the post-war years.
0:14:32 On the one level, it’s a little simplistic. There’s one who is wealthy and ambitious and
0:14:36 somewhat unscrupulous, and the other who is a Nebraska farm boy who wins a Medal of Honor and
0:14:41 thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, etc. But it’s actually more complex than that because it takes
0:14:48 us through a whole career with all the nuances of army life, the difficulties of peacetime service,
0:14:53 slow promotions, and then the challenges of war and their personal side as well.
0:15:00 And I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I serve,
0:15:04 because I thought it was a good window to them that the military seems like the day you’re living,
0:15:09 but it’s really a life, it’s a career, and it’s going to have an arc and it’s going to have ups
0:15:14 and downs and left and right, just like your personal life is. And so I found that really valuable.
0:15:20 I’d love for you to just talk about your experience with Major Barato. I think it was
0:15:25 your first meeting. If you could talk about that a bit, I think it seems to be a key turning
0:15:30 point for you. Yeah, it really was. Several things happened. I had entered West Point and I was from
0:15:35 an army family and I had expectations of myself, but my first two years at West Point were difficult.
0:15:43 I got in a lot of trouble for discipline, my own immaturity. I didn’t do well academically because
0:15:47 I didn’t know how to study and I didn’t study very hard. I really didn’t take West Point very
0:15:52 seriously and it was also heavy on math and sciences and so that was not my strong suit.
0:15:59 So by the end of my sophomore year, I wasn’t ready to quit, but I was having a crisis of
0:16:04 confidence. I had gone through some things. I had applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet,
0:16:08 which they let a small number each year. And in the spring of my sophomore year for that summer,
0:16:13 they said, “You can’t because your record is, your lack of discipline is bad enough.
0:16:19 You can’t go to Ranger School.” And I was really crushed. So I went that summer and I went off to
0:16:24 training and whatnot. They sent me around the army to do different things. And I came back that fall
0:16:28 and we had changed tactical officers. Now, I’d had a nice tactical officer the first two years,
0:16:33 but I don’t really think, I mean, he tolerated my two years of problems.
0:16:37 And is a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something like that?
0:16:42 A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain or a major for each company,
0:16:46 which has about 120 cadets in it. And they don’t live in the company. They’re not there every day,
0:16:51 but they are responsible for the company. So they have an office a couple hundred meters away and
0:16:56 they’re responsible for overseeing the cadet chain of command on discipline and they’ll come down
0:17:01 and inspect things. And they’re also mentors and whatnot. And so after the first couple years,
0:17:07 I came back and I expected to have this new tactical officer, my first in briefing and
0:17:12 counseling. He brings each person in together. I expected him to look at my record and then
0:17:15 give me the riot act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot.
0:17:21 And I sat down with him and he’d been, he’s a special forces officer. He sat down and he goes,
0:17:25 “Well, I’m looking at your record here.” And he says, “I think you’re going to be a great cadet
0:17:32 and a great army officer.” And I literally said, “I think you got the files in this place because
0:17:37 this is Stan McChrystal.” And he said, “No, no, I got it.” He goes, “I’m looking at you. You know,
0:17:42 you’ve gone outside the boundaries a couple of times.” He said, “But your peer ratings are really
0:17:47 good. My peers were reflecting confidence and whatnot.” He says, “I think you’re going to do great.”
0:17:54 And it was amazing. It was transformational because sort of like that kid in elementary school,
0:17:58 where suddenly they start to say, “You do have high potential. We just got to pull this out.”
0:18:05 And I had also started seriously dating, now my wife of 38 years, dating her then. So after my
0:18:10 first two years of my mis-spent youth, I’d say, I suddenly was dating someone seriously. So I had
0:18:15 this tack who believed with me, I was going to settle down more because I was dating one person.
0:18:22 And I could sort of see the end. And for me, West Point was this dark tunnel you went into just to
0:18:27 go be an Army officer. If it could have been done in a weekend, I’d have been happy to do that.
0:18:32 I didn’t bask in the West Point experience. I just wanted to be an Army officer. And West
0:18:36 Point seemed like the best place to do it. And suddenly I could see, it was two years out,
0:18:41 but I could see the reality of it. Here was a special forces combat veteran who was telling
0:18:47 me he thought I’d be good for that world. What effect did that have on you? Well, I think it
0:18:52 caused me one, you don’t want to let somebody down who’s got faith in you. If somebody doesn’t
0:18:56 have faith in you, they say, I think you’re a screw up. You go, well, okay, if I screw up,
0:19:01 but you know, but if somebody says, no, I really have trust in you, I trust you’re going to do
0:19:07 really well. It gives you a new sense of loyalty to someone. You don’t want to let them down. Plus,
0:19:13 he’s now put on the table in front of everybody. You can do this. It’s up to you. He didn’t say it
0:19:20 that way, but it was clear. That’s what he’d done. So it changed my opinion for lots of reasons,
0:19:24 this being one of my grade point average skyrocketed my last two years and I finished on
0:19:29 the Dean’s List and all which was for me nosebleed territory. But it was a lot because of the way
0:19:35 people around me just started shaping my expectations. The question of selection and training is
0:19:40 really fascinating to me for all of these different stages in a military career or a
0:19:44 sort of private sector career. If you had, and this may be a difficult question, but if you had, say,
0:19:50 100 athletes, civilian athletes, and I say athletes just to take the physical component
0:19:55 largely out of it. This question came from reading about the nine week Ranger course
0:20:03 at Fort Benning, I guess. So if you had 100 athletes and had eight weeks to train 20 of them
0:20:09 for combat, how would you select them and how would you train them? Very interesting. And just as an
0:20:14 aside, the young man, the Yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read is in his final
0:20:20 week of Ranger school now. So he’s lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he’s a specialist
0:20:26 in second Ranger battalion. So he read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it.
0:20:30 It’ll be interesting to hear him after he comes out. If I was going to prepare people for combat,
0:20:36 if you assume that they can do the basic skills, they can shoot a weapon, they can do first aid,
0:20:41 they can do those things. If they can’t do those, obviously you’ve got to teach them the things that
0:20:46 are absolutely required. But if you assume that most people come out of basic training,
0:20:52 initial training with those technical skills, I’d spend times on things that do two things.
0:20:57 The first would be to push themselves. After World War II, when they talked to organizations
0:21:02 that had then been through combat, they said what of your training was a value and what was of less
0:21:09 value. They said long foot marches that forced them physically and really caused them to reach
0:21:14 down inside themselves like distance running was invaluable. And the second was live fire training
0:21:21 on courses that was as realistic as it could be. There was the stress, there was the sense of danger,
0:21:28 although they were set up to inherently be safe. That required it. To that I would add dealing with
0:21:34 uncertainty. I would try to put people in cases where they have to make decisions with absolutely
0:21:40 incomplete knowledge and they have got to live with the results of that and often it’ll be bad and
0:21:47 what do they do then? How do you simulate, oh actually this brings up perhaps red teaming,
0:21:52 maybe, maybe not. But how do you simulate, we’ll come back to that if I’m leading us in a weird
0:21:57 direction, but how do you simulate that uncertainty or role play that uncertainty? Are there good
0:22:02 ways to do that? There were a number of ways to do that to make tough decisions and whatnot. I had a,
0:22:07 when I was a regimental commander, a colonel of the range regiment, put together an exercise that
0:22:12 was designed to test them with uncertainty but also with a no-win decision. And so what we did
0:22:18 was we went to a battalion on no notice and we alerted them and we took a company of rangers,
0:22:23 put them on airplanes and flew them to Texas and then did a parachute assault and their mission
0:22:29 was to then move from the drop zone to this town and rescue a bunch of Americans who were there
0:22:34 working non-profits and whatnot. And they were then to police them up, bring them out to an
0:22:40 airfield and be extracted, pretty straightforward. And so they parachuted in and as they moved toward
0:22:47 this town, they’re told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, 10 or so, enough
0:22:51 they can deal with and they develop a plan and they deal with it. Once they got into that firefight,
0:22:57 I in fact reinforced that enemy with about 100. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a
0:23:02 firefight that they can’t extract from and very quickly they have wounded of their own.
0:23:06 And so now they’re in this situation and I’m playing higher headquarters, I’m actually on the
0:23:11 ground watching but I through my controllers, I’m playing higher headquarters and I say,
0:23:15 “All right, your mission is to get those students out of there, get them out and get them to the
0:23:21 airfield.” And they go, “Wait a minute, I’ve got 40 wounded. I can’t move my wounded. I can’t get
0:23:27 them and I’m not going to leave them.” And I said, “We sent you for the students, get them.”
0:23:32 And so they always try to work around. They try to say, “I need more aircraft, I need more forces,
0:23:36 something to take away the constraint.” And of course they say, “Nope, nope, nope, won’t happen.
0:23:41 You’re going to have to make the decision. You are going to pull these students out
0:23:45 and accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking faith with your comrades or you’re
0:23:50 going to stay there in which case you’re probably all going to get killed and the students are not
0:23:55 going to be rescued so you’re going to be a failure.” And we would do this and it was a fascinating
0:24:00 situation because you saw this moral dilemma on top of all the tactical dilemmas and then
0:24:05 afterward we would have these long after-action reviews where we talked about it and the fun
0:24:11 thing is there was no right answer. I’m really loving this example. What are you hoping them to
0:24:15 exhibit or what are you looking for in that a scenario like that? It’s hard to say. The first
0:24:21 thing I would say is you want them to be thoughtful. The first response from people was, “Okay,
0:24:25 the Ranger Creed says I’ll never leave a fallen comrade so I’m not leaving a fallen comrade.
0:24:28 We’re staying here, period.” And then you say, “Wait a minute. The President of the United
0:24:34 States sent you to rescue those American citizens. If we fail, then what’s going to happen is we are
0:24:38 going to have the loss of Americans and we’re going to have this embarrassment and all of these
0:24:43 things so the nation that is relying on you, you’re going to let down.” So what’s more important?
0:24:48 Your personal promise or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot.
0:24:55 And it was this quandary that you’re looking for them to be more thoughtful than just this automatic
0:25:01 black and white reflexive, “This is what we do because that’s what we do.” Interestingly,
0:25:05 I didn’t have any of the companies leave the wounded. I’m not sure that wasn’t the right
0:25:11 answer and I couldn’t tell them afterward that it was but none of them left them but they agonized
0:25:16 over it. I mean, they tried everything they could but it was just good because I said, “Those are
0:25:22 the situations you’re going to be in. It’s never going to be easy, this or that.” That’s a great
0:25:28 example. So there’s some timeless principles, timeless practices. Obviously, things have evolved
0:25:32 in many different ways in the military, private sector, technology and so on. But if we’re looking
0:25:38 sort of in the rearview mirror, what military leaders come to mind who are most underrated,
0:25:44 in your opinion? That’s a great question because there are people who did things for which they
0:25:50 get huge credit and then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations. And
0:25:56 of course, I think Ulysses S. Grant is often underrated. He’s viewed as this mechanical basher
0:26:02 who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than
0:26:08 that. I think he took an army that was already maturing when he took overall command of union
0:26:13 forces but he understood the absolute truth that you had to destroy the army of the South.
0:26:19 Capturing Richmond was interesting but it wasn’t the real point. The problem was as long as you
0:26:24 had an existing army and that that was going to take a very focused effort that was going to be high
0:26:29 cost and you weren’t going to lower the cost by doing it more slowly. It was cumulatively had to
0:26:34 get it done. And I think he understood the political side of it much more than people give him credit
0:26:39 for. So I think he’s a huge one. There’s another and I’m going to embarrass to say I can’t remember
0:26:44 his name. There was a naval admiral between the First and Second World War who essentially championed
0:26:48 the development of aircraft carriers. There were people who championed the development of
0:26:54 air power and that was pretty obvious. But building aircraft carriers during that period when
0:27:01 battleships were still king was a dangerous sort of step out there. So I think those people who
0:27:06 push change when change is not otherwise automatically going to happen. For those people listening,
0:27:10 I’m sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will have the answer, be able to look up
0:27:15 that naval admiral. So please put them in the comments on the blog and then I will put it into
0:27:22 the post. So we’ll have that. Stan, do you listen to audiobooks when you work out? All the time.
0:27:26 It’s funny. I first used to listen to music and I get bored listening to music. So I started
0:27:32 listening to audiobooks because if you think about time management, what I found was I love to read
0:27:38 but particularly when we started the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have a long day. I’d
0:27:41 have good books. I’d go back to my hooch and I’d read about a page and a half and then I’d wake
0:27:46 up 20 minutes later with my head on the page. And so I realized I was going to have to get a
0:27:53 better way. So I started putting audiobooks on my iPod and I like history and I like biography.
0:27:57 And so I would put those on very eclectically and initially it was eclectic because
0:28:02 audiobooks weren’t that prevalent and so my wife would go to the library, she’d go everywhere she
0:28:06 could, get all these audiobooks, I’d download them onto my iPod on my computer and then put
0:28:12 them on my iPod. And so it was whatever was available. Later as more things became available,
0:28:18 I had a wider choice but I found that eclectic part really good. I learned to run with audiobooks.
0:28:23 My mind will stay collected on it when I’d lift weights and I also, just because I get
0:28:27 sort of fanatical about something, I have a little set of speakers in my bathroom.
0:28:32 So what I do is I go in the morning and I’m listening to one book there. I turn it on and
0:28:36 while I brush my teeth, while I shave, while I put my PT clothes on because my wife’s out in the
0:28:41 bedroom, I’ll listen to this book and then I’ll walk out of there to go work out and I’ll have my
0:28:45 iPod. I have another book and I’ll listen to that to know when I work out. Now it will take me
0:28:49 quite a while of shaving time to get through a book. Those two separate books are the same.
0:28:55 Two separate books. So I just finished a book on the South African gold and diamond trade,
0:29:00 Cecil Rhodes and whatnot up through the Bore War. It was fascinating and it probably took me six,
0:29:05 eight weeks of shaving time to do that. But then on these other books, I found that I go through
0:29:10 books very, very quickly. If you’re working out an hour, hour and a half a day, you actually go
0:29:15 through books much faster than I would if I just had reading time. And I always love to ask people
0:29:20 who read a lot or consume many books, even in an audio format, how do you choose your books? So
0:29:25 for instance, in this case of the diamond trade and whatnot in South Africa, why did you choose
0:29:29 that book? I go on audible.com and I buy this package deal where you get a whole bunch of credits
0:29:35 and I look at the history first and I look at what’s trending new just to see if what’s trending
0:29:44 new. I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that’s 20, 30, 40 years or big projects
0:29:48 like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam because they get a beginning,
0:29:55 middle and an end and challenges or biographies. And I will also do binge reading, meaning I went
0:30:01 through a period where I read about wailing and I read like five wailing books together. Or I’ll
0:30:07 read biographies or something about the founding fathers and I did seven or eight George Washington
0:30:13 and other founding fathers. And because they’re all, you know, mutually overlapping, it’s very
0:30:17 interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more interesting
0:30:22 because it’s filling in holes. And so I’ll binge on one subject for a while and then on another
0:30:27 subject. Oh, God, this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books.
0:30:34 So you mentioned the hopeless dilemma earlier where you should have engineered putting people
0:30:38 into a situation where none of the options are attractive. We’re here in Silicon Valley. A lot
0:30:43 of people fashion themselves warriors of one sense or another and they read Sun Tzu art of war
0:30:47 and they think of their business as very high stakes. But ultimately in the field,
0:30:50 I mean, you guys are dealing with life and death decisions. So I’d love to hear
0:30:57 in the cases where something goes wrong. So you make a decision, people go out on a raid,
0:31:04 there are more fatalities than expected. And you have to operate rationally and effectively the
0:31:12 next day. What would your internal self talk sound like? And then what would you say to the team
0:31:17 to get them ready for the next day? A little bit of historical context. If you think about it,
0:31:22 you can compare this earlier times of war. But the first part of after 2001, we were
0:31:29 worried about al-Qaeda, worried about Afghanistan. We went in it was turned out to be remarkably rapid
0:31:34 and relatively speaking low cost in terms of casualties and whatnot. And then Iraq,
0:31:39 actually the invasion turned out to be the same way. So there got to be this sense that,
0:31:44 okay, this isn’t that hard. It’s not going to take this long and the cost will not be hard.
0:31:49 We have a few fallen heroes and we celebrate them, but we don’t think it’s going to be a grinding
0:31:56 attrition. Then as we got into the difficult area after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and
0:32:02 2005, something different happens. One, we started to realize this was going to be very hard. And
0:32:10 every time we lost a comrade, they were not going to be the last. And that’s a different mindset
0:32:15 because then people start to make their personal calculation. They said, how long can I do this
0:32:22 before the roulette wheel hits me? And is it going to even come out right? If we pay all this price,
0:32:24 are we going to have a successful outcome? And that’s a different mindset as well.
0:32:31 What I found myself was, if you stay focused on the mission and everybody
0:32:37 understands the cost of that, when you have an outcome where people are killed or wounded,
0:32:43 if you let yourself freeze up with either the self-doubt that maybe you made a mistake or
0:32:52 this sense that there’s just no exit to this maze, then of course, I think it’s very difficult to
0:32:58 make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself locked up. In the summer of 2005, I had found
0:33:03 that we just couldn’t do what we had to do without bringing more of our force over. We had a third
0:33:08 of our force deployed all the time and then two-thirds back training and getting ready. And that was
0:33:13 about the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we had a period when we needed
0:33:17 two-thirds of the force in the fight. And mathematically, of course, because the last
0:33:23 thirds back on alert in the U.S., that’s not indefinitely sustainable. And just at the time,
0:33:28 we made the decision to do that, we started taking a bunch of casualties. And when you take
0:33:34 casualties in a very elite force, it’s not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that
0:33:41 nobody knows. It is Chris, who I have served with for 10 years, on the Godfather to one of his kids.
0:33:47 I’m married to his sister. I mean, that’s the effect. T. E. Lawrence writes about it as “ripples
0:33:52 in a pool that go out through these small communities, tribes.” And really, our forces were a tribe.
0:34:00 So suddenly, the effect of that can cause you to be even more impacted by. Ulysses S. Grant used to
0:34:06 say that he didn’t visit hospitals much because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage
0:34:12 for which he was responsible, he’d lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you
0:34:18 don’t become detached from the loss and you don’t go into denial. What I found is you keep yourself
0:34:25 focused on the objective. And you say, “This is what we are doing. This is important. This is
0:34:31 attainable. And the steps we are taking to it are the best steps I can figure out. They’re
0:34:37 responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability. And they are judiciously executed to the best of
0:34:42 what we can do.” So this would be potentially what you just said what you would sort of remind
0:34:47 yourself of in those moments? Yeah. And of course, you don’t say that quite that explicitly in the
0:34:53 organization. But the first thing you do when an organization suffers a loss is not tell them,
0:35:01 you know, don’t let people marinate in their grief. They can grieve. When I was in Afghanistan,
0:35:07 the German army got in a firefight and they had four of their soldiers killed. And it was the first
0:35:13 four German soldiers killed in combat since World War II. And so I flew up to be with this company
0:35:17 and they were literally in shock and they were all in this room trying to figure out how do you
0:35:23 process this? Because we go to war every few years. The Germans fathers hadn’t been at war.
0:35:28 Maybe their grandfathers had and certainly no one in active duty had ever had a soldier killed in
0:35:34 combat under their command or a comrade. So they were trying to figure out how to figure this out.
0:35:39 How to process the whole thing. Exactly. And so what I told them was that’s what happens in war.
0:35:46 The enemy gets to do that. You get to kill him. He gets to kill you. And what you do is you get
0:35:51 right back at it and you get right back at it right away and stay focused. And that’s I think
0:35:55 the best catharsis you can do difficult as it is. Get back on the horse. Exactly.
0:36:02 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:37:16 And now Liv Bere, winner of both the European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship
0:37:24 Titles, Gaming Theorist, Futurist, Philanthropist, and host of the Win Win with Liv Bere podcast.
0:37:30 You can find Liv on Twitter and Instagram @liv_bere.
0:37:34 Liv, welcome to the show. It’s nice to see you. Thank you for having me.
0:37:41 And we can go so many different directions. I thought we would start, actually maybe,
0:37:46 in a non-expected place. So I asked you before we started, what color would you prefer? Black,
0:37:50 blue, or orange? Or I think it was yellow. Oh, that’s what it was for, it was for a mic cable?
0:37:56 It was for a mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder.
0:38:01 And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain
0:38:08 clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video. But when you said black,
0:38:12 I said, I bet it’s going to be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason
0:38:20 I said that is I read something about you and Metallica. And to get into the zone coming here
0:38:25 on the driveover, I listened to Orion, the remastered version. Oh, great choice. Nice choice.
0:38:30 Very, very, yeah. Because my first, now we’re really getting off track here, but that’s okay,
0:38:35 there is no track. My very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape and it was Master of
0:38:48 Puppets. And can you guess why I bring up Metallica? Well, they were my love that boarded on an
0:38:55 unhealthy obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22. So that’s probably, I would guess,
0:38:58 why you brought it up. I don’t know how you would know that though.
0:39:01 Well, you know, we do research over here, metalinsider.net.
0:39:07 The Iron Maiden of the poker world, they called you and there’s a short
0:39:16 discussion of the unforgiven. And this led you, I guess, in some respects into
0:39:19 guitar. Do you still play guitar? I don’t. You don’t, but you did for a period of time.
0:39:25 I did. Yeah. From like 16 or 17 till 24, basically until poker took over.
0:39:31 So do you then have typically one obsession at a time? Do you ever have multiple obsessions
0:39:38 simultaneously or do you tend to have one obsessive fixation and that is where you put your energy?
0:39:46 I used to. I used to be very, a shiny new activity would come along and I would,
0:39:51 if it ticked enough boxes, I’ll be like, I have to become the best at this. I would rarely become
0:39:56 the best at it, but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient.
0:40:04 And I was like that, I would say, until some point in my, probably my early 30s,
0:40:09 some point around the age of 30, where I lost that a little bit. And in some ways that’s good,
0:40:14 because it means I can try greater breadth of things, but it comes a little bit at the cost of
0:40:18 men not ever picking. And I’m currently struggling with the fact that I’m being
0:40:22 too much of a jack-of-all-trades master of none, like not knowing what I’m going to be focusing
0:40:27 on YouTube or maybe I should just do speeches or maybe I should actually just start a company
0:40:32 and give up on this silly like public facing stuff. It can be a bit of a blessing in a curse,
0:40:38 I guess, not fixating on one particular thing, but certainly as a teenager, I was, I don’t know,
0:40:42 certainly with metal, because I think, you know, with teenagers, so often you don’t,
0:40:47 because you haven’t formed your identity yet, you will form it typically around a genre of music.
0:40:51 Sure. I was metalhead, which is… You were a metalhead? Oh, for sure. Oh, so, right. So,
0:40:55 yeah, you get it. Like, and metal is so… I mean, I say was as if it’s past 10s.
0:41:00 If I’m in the gym, I’m still a metalhead. Right, exactly. But you don’t look it,
0:41:04 you don’t live it in your visual… No, I mean, I have, like, from the neck up,
0:41:10 I definitely have the sort of early era, well, actually, no, like mid-era Pantera look to me.
0:41:14 Oh, that’s a Philan Selmo, like a little bit, you know, Philan Selmo after he’s
0:41:20 volgar display of power era or whatever. Yeah. So, I was kind of uncool until the age of 16,
0:41:24 and then metal came along and I was like, “Oh, this is what I was waiting for.”
0:41:29 And then I just went all out, you know, I had the piercings, red hair, black hair, blue hair,
0:41:35 the guitar, and just would not listen to anything but metal. And not just, like,
0:41:40 new metal. I hated new metal, no corn or anything like that. No, I wanted a really heavy shit.
0:41:44 Like Pantera was like, that was like a nice day on the beach. You know, I’m talking like
0:41:50 dimu bogear, bosom, you know, some of the Swedish black metal or Norwegian black metal.
0:41:54 Once you get to the Scandinavian death metal and you’ve gone really deep.
0:41:59 Yeah, exactly. But Metallica were a huge forming part of that. They were the one sort
0:42:03 of classic metal band that I still was like, I just loved so deeply.
0:42:09 All right, let’s paint a picture here. What was your, the age range of your competitive
0:42:14 poker career? And then we’re going to back into that by going to some very early,
0:42:18 early chapters. But what was the span? Cause I’m trying to overlay that on what you just said.
0:42:28 So I first learned to play poker aged 21. Yeah, it was 2005. I just graduated uni.
0:42:32 Didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to carry on in physics,
0:42:38 but I decided to take a gap here because I mean, when I first started taking physics,
0:42:40 I was like, oh, I’m definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it. But then
0:42:45 the more time I got to spend with like PhD students or even people doing their masters,
0:42:51 they seemed, I don’t know, they just didn’t seem very happy and they weren’t very, I don’t know,
0:42:54 just personality wise. I was wondering if it was actually going to work for me,
0:42:58 because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know,
0:43:03 see rock shows, metal shows. And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time.
0:43:06 And I was like, I just don’t know if this is going to quite work. Me sitting in a lab,
0:43:10 you know, fiddling around with lasers. So I decided to take a gap here. And
0:43:16 I think I signed up. Oh, I was doing like random, like goth modeling sometimes.
0:43:22 As one does in their gap year. Right. Well, you know, just any way I could make some money.
0:43:27 And I thought, I don’t know, I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as often as possible.
0:43:31 And I was like, if I can get paid to do that, that’d be great. I also got paid to be a cage
0:43:36 dancer in rock clubs in London. Yeah. Well, you know, I was admiring the boots.
0:43:41 On the way in, this is a, this is a shill’s household. So thank you for accommodating.
0:43:49 This is not my least metal sock ever. These are gray and pink stripes socks with hearts all over
0:43:55 them. So yes, it’s like the heart exterior, the goth death metal exterior. And then like the soft
0:44:01 sweet inside. I don’t understand how much pain I’m in. Actually, the fact that this is these,
0:44:05 I have so many, like most of my socks are black. I just just grabbed whatever I needed to.
0:44:10 So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year, totally lying. I’m kidding.
0:44:16 And I wish I, I wish I could have. So goth modeling, cage dancing. And then
0:44:23 I think I signed up for this like website that would advertise different TV shows or modeling
0:44:27 opportunities, that kind of thing. And I remember seeing an ad which said something like,
0:44:31 could you use your powers of skill and deception to win a hundred thousand pounds on TV?
0:44:36 And seeing as I was rapidly getting pretty damn broke, because dancing in a
0:44:42 rock club cage doesn’t pay you anything really. And, you know, I had some student debt mounted up
0:44:47 and really didn’t want to get a real job for, you know, my parents were like, you have to,
0:44:50 what are you doing? You’ve moved to London, get a job. So I was like, okay, I’m going to,
0:44:55 this seems reasonable. I’ve always liked, I wanted to try being on TV. I like game shows.
0:44:59 This seems like a game show. I’ll apply. Turns out they wouldn’t tell us what,
0:45:03 what it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret.
0:45:06 But turns out it was a reality show that was looking for five beginners
0:45:13 at poker to teach them how to play. And the sort of loose scientific premise was
0:45:17 they were looking for five different personality types to see which, you know,
0:45:20 is most suited for the game. So I got selected for that.
0:45:22 What was your personality type?
0:45:26 They called me the professor. I mean, I could see it.
0:45:32 I could see it. I was, I literally turned up in skin tight tiger prints, bandics, self-made
0:45:39 trousers. Now, did you do that because they had put you in the professor category? Was that a
0:45:44 rebellion, an active rebellion? Or did that just come out of your, genuinely how I dressed?
0:45:50 Your style emoting. No, it was, it was my genuine appearance. As I said, I lived and breathed metal.
0:45:53 Sounds good for TV. Right. And I think that’s probably why they selected me honestly,
0:46:01 like very overconfident to the point of like cocky 21 year old brat who was unheard of with
0:46:06 21 year olds. I just thought I was the smartest person in the world. And I think I even said
0:46:10 something like that in the interview, like the audition. And they’re like, oh, we’re definitely
0:46:13 bringing you in. Yeah, this is going to be a good one. And I didn’t disappoint because
0:46:18 I ended up having a complete meltdown on the show. I’m so glad this is not on the internet.
0:46:23 Basically on the final, I think we played like seven preliminary rounds where we would
0:46:27 the five of us would play and then like that would accumulate points. And those points were
0:46:33 translate into chips for the final game where we would play for the 100,000. And I was winning,
0:46:39 you know, I was leading going into that. And clearly I had a knack for the game. And I remember the
0:46:43 hosts and the professionals that they bought on the show to teach us were like, oh, you’re
0:46:47 definitely going to win. You know, you are the most talented at this. So I was so sure I was
0:46:53 going to win this thing. And then I ended up making not to get too technical, but basically I
0:46:58 misread my hand. I misread the board. I made a straight on the river. The opponent bet.
0:47:03 I was so excited. I was like, I raise, which was basically all my chips. And then I looked at the
0:47:07 board again and noticed there were four diamonds out there. And I didn’t have my, I had two black
0:47:16 cards and audibly went, oh, no, I’m not, I’m no professional, but is that what one would call
0:47:25 a tell? Yeah, that is, that is a tell. Do not do that. And the, my opponent, it was a really nice
0:47:30 guy called Lee was like, well, I guess she doesn’t have a diamond. And he was like, I’m all in.
0:47:36 And instead of again, keeping my, my cool or anything, I just started crying, like melted
0:47:42 down the producers of high fiving. Literally. And I’m like, oh, Liv, what’s the matter?
0:47:46 Tell us more. And I was like, you know, makeup everywhere. I think I like run away from the
0:47:51 table. They try and follow me with a camera. It was just, you know, classic reality TV meltdown
0:47:56 stuff. So that was my intro to poker. But I just completely fell in the love of the game.
0:48:00 And funny enough, while I was in the, during the filming of that, which took two months,
0:48:07 I went to a local card club in London to try and get some practice. And they had this
0:48:13 now sort of infamous, this five pound rebuy. So, you know, it was the cheapest tournament they had.
0:48:16 What is a rebuy? A rebuy means that if you, for the first hour or so,
0:48:21 if you bust out, you can just buy back in again. So considering it was only five pound entry,
0:48:25 you can imagine it’s just pandemonium. Everyone’s going in every single hand.
0:48:28 And people will easily like spend like a hundred pounds in their entry overall, you know,
0:48:32 20 rebies. Good for the house. Yeah. But I turned up with 10 pounds because I was like, well,
0:48:36 it’s a five pound tournament. Why would I ever need more than, you know, five pound for the entry
0:48:41 and five pound to buy a drink? And that will be my, my day. So you’re like, you’re like a player
0:48:47 in a video game with two lives where everybody else has like a hundred lives. Right. Yeah.
0:48:52 And most people were doing that. Yes. Only for the first hour. Then once after that period ends,
0:48:58 then if you bust out, you’re out. This is the first tournament I ever play. And I enter this thing,
0:49:04 somehow get through this carnage period in the, in the first hour. The zombies.
0:49:08 I think I did. Yeah. I think I did three by once with my other five pounds. So I didn’t buy a drink.
0:49:13 And anyway, I ended up winning it. I ended up playing till five in the morning. It was like
0:49:17 120 people in it. And then I came home. I remember just having this, you know, they paid me out in
0:49:22 tens and 20s. I think 750 pounds or something like that, which was more money. So I’d never seen that
0:49:27 amount of cash before. Just so much money. And I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time
0:49:33 and waking him up at five AM and just throwing the cash on him. Like, this is the best thing ever.
0:49:37 This is my game. I must be the best in the world. Like, you know, it’s my first ever tournament,
0:49:42 basically. And I win it. So even though the TV show did not go well and I didn’t win the 100
0:49:48 grand, I’d already got the bug basically from that little win. So let me weave through this and
0:49:58 inspect a bit because I have many questions. What do you think helped you during the show itself
0:50:03 to make it to the final table? What were some of, whether they’re your characteristics,
0:50:10 things you learned, things you observed, trained abilities, anything that comes to mind
0:50:16 that you think helped in the very early nascent stages of that tournament? Yeah. The TV show.
0:50:23 Right. The TV show. And then I have more questions. I mean, I think the thing that was most helpful
0:50:32 early on for me in poker was I was just so pathologically competitive. I just had to win
0:50:37 and like prove that I was the best in this thing. And that translated to just more study time.
0:50:42 Just, yeah, just like this like laser focus and then there’s like ruthlessness because the thing
0:50:48 about poker is that you actually, you do have to be really ruthless in the game. In what sense?
0:50:52 In terms of what bluffing people, if you’re not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker
0:50:55 table, which I don’t think a lot of people say, oh, it’s lying. It’s like, it’s not really lying.
0:51:00 No, it’s just a form of, it’s a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game. It’s an
0:51:05 integral part of it. It’s sanctioned lying. Right. If you’re not willing to do that, then
0:51:14 it’s not the game for you. And play chess. Right. And then you have to be just willing to,
0:51:21 I guess, just really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on because technically
0:51:24 at any given moment, even if you’re not in hand, there’s really valuable information
0:51:30 being exchanged about the way people, you know, the types of cards people play,
0:51:33 the way that their bodies move when they’re uncomfortable versus comfortable.
0:51:37 Are they a naturally aggressive person or are they naturally scared? What are the things that
0:51:42 make them scared? Et cetera. And certainly in the beginning, I was just, because I didn’t know
0:51:47 anything about the actual statistical sort of the mechanics of the game, all I could rely on was
0:51:51 the, you know, the stuff I knew, which was looking, looking for when people are bluffing.
0:51:56 So looking for when people are bluffing. Okay. So let me ask you about the statistical side,
0:52:02 because you’re coming out of physics. You have, it would seem a huge competitive advantage.
0:52:09 Why would you not begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on?
0:52:11 Well, I did too. You did that as well.
0:52:16 And the thing is that the statistics required in poker to actually be, you know, at a high level
0:52:19 are you’re not going to learn within the first month.
0:52:20 Sure. Right.
0:52:25 And also people didn’t even really know, because this is 2005, even the top players in the world
0:52:30 back then didn’t really understand game theory. Like even an average player understands it today.
0:52:36 So I read all the books I could get my hands on, you know, so I guess my sort of physics training
0:52:41 helped to an extent with, with being willing to just like dive in and research on this like,
0:52:46 on a big amorphous topic and, you know, not even clear directions of where to start.
0:52:52 That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. And then presumably I have a higher
0:52:59 than average IQ from physics. Exactly. It really helps. And all the drinking and guitar playing
0:53:06 and chasing after rock stars. Yeah. But it, which I think obviously helps in any kind of strategic
0:53:11 game. But honestly, the thing about poker is the beautiful thing about poker in fact,
0:53:17 is that if you’re talking about one night, you can have the literal best player in the world,
0:53:23 a medium player, complete beginners, and provided everyone knows the basic rules,
0:53:28 then technically anyone can win. It’s only over the long run does anything actually
0:53:34 meaningful start happening. And so even in this TV show where we played, I think,
0:53:40 eight different games, statistically, it’s not that meaningful the results over that time period.
0:53:47 There’s so much luck going on. And I didn’t realize that early on in the game. In some ways,
0:53:51 you know, like winning that big tournament early on was, was not a big tournament that the five
0:53:56 pound rebuy. It gave me an immense amount of confidence and love for the game, which I think
0:54:01 had I not had, I wouldn’t have then pursued it as much as I did. But it can also delude you a
0:54:05 little bit because I then just assumed, oh, okay, well, I’m going to win this. There isn’t that
0:54:09 much luck. It’s just who’s the best player wins. And I think that’s partly why it was such a
0:54:12 kick in the face when I screwed up and didn’t win the 100,000.
0:54:19 When you say you fell in love with the game, aside from things that maybe you’ve mentioned already,
0:54:25 what made you fall in love with it? What was so appealing? There’s an inherent excitement to it.
0:54:25 Right.
0:54:27 Of course, because there’s a blending of skill and chance.
0:54:28 Yes.
0:54:30 And money. I mean, there’s stakes.
0:54:32 Right. We’re actually just winning the potential of just winning,
0:54:38 you know, making a living where I don’t have to go and sit in an office and I can do that.
0:54:39 That was obviously a big carrot.
0:54:44 But there’s just so many different skills that it draws upon.
0:54:47 So there’s the statistical side, you know, the scientific side.
0:54:53 There’s the game theory. If you really want to dive deep into math, and I mean, these days you
0:54:58 can, you know, work with simulators, you know, computer science stuff, basically, and go in that
0:55:03 angle. But then you’ve also got this more, there’s like an art to it as well, you know,
0:55:08 of a psychology meant trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and
0:55:11 be one step ahead of they’re going to zig, you’re going to zag, that kind of thing.
0:55:15 And then also just like, I mean, there’s a scientific way to read body language.
0:55:18 But sometimes you just get like a vibe that you can’t explain.
0:55:22 So there’s just so many different approaches you can take to it.
0:55:24 And like today, I’m going to work on my body language reading.
0:55:28 And today, I’m going to work on my pot odds and my combinatorics.
0:55:33 And so there’s never a dull moment. And there’s always a new situation as well.
0:55:38 Like even after playing for 10, 15 years, I’ll still see something crazy with like the cards
0:55:43 run out like straight flush against the box, that kind of stuff. Like these incredibly rare
0:55:48 scenarios will sometimes happen. And or people will do weird things or some strange ruling will
0:55:51 happen that like everyone scratching their heads like, I don’t know what the right call is here.
0:55:54 It’s there’s such depth and complexity to the game.
0:55:58 Okay, so I’m going to admit something. It’s embarrassing.
0:56:03 I’ve been fascinated and drawn to poker for a very long time.
0:56:06 And I’ve never learned how to play properly.
0:56:07 No way.
0:56:07 It’s true.
0:56:08 Wow.
0:56:10 There are many excuses I may have for this.
0:56:15 One of them is that friends of mine, like a guy named Jason Calcanus,
0:56:18 want me to play, but it’s mostly because he wants to take all my money
0:56:21 because he’s going to be far better than I am.
0:56:24 And that’s a compliment, Jason.
0:56:27 I’ll teach you how to beat Jason.
0:56:33 And a lot of these investors are very confident. I know some of them certainly,
0:56:38 particularly the quants who have observed from afar seem to be pretty confident.
0:56:50 I had a little bite of the bug probably five years ago when I did an episode of a TV show
0:56:57 bringing it back to TV where I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up
0:57:02 against a whole cohort of folks, including some pros.
0:57:05 And I was able and I was trained by, I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon for that.
0:57:13 And for a very short period of time until the next skill I had to learn for the next episode,
0:57:17 pushed it right out of my head, had a lot of fun with heads up.
0:57:22 But one night when the filming had finished and I was like, you know, let me go try just a regular
0:57:30 table. And I got slaughtered. Like it did not translate at all, which I expected would largely
0:57:35 be the case, but I just got dismembered. I mean, well, heads up is a very different game.
0:57:37 Playing against eight people.
0:57:41 Yeah, totally. So yeah, one on one, a totally, totally different game.
0:57:47 But it’s actually brought back in a way my love of mathematics and statistics, which I lost
0:57:52 not to make this like a confessional, but I lost it in 10th grade because I had this one teacher
0:57:57 who just had this huge axe to grind with the boys in the class. And almost all the boys ended up
0:58:02 quitting math or avoiding it after that class. My brother had the opposite experience and then
0:58:08 later became a PhD in statistics. So it’s amazing to look at these divergent
0:58:13 kind of points, right, where you have a fork in the past, depending on your experience.
0:58:21 So my question after all that word salad is if you were to suggest a way of learning or to
0:58:31 teach me an approach to learning regular poker, whatever that means, the type of poker I would
0:58:35 play with my friends who are like, let’s play poker. How might you think of approaching that?
0:58:42 Well, given that you are, I mean, you’re pretty well rounded in your personality and that you
0:58:46 like both sort of human interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard.
0:58:48 Yes.
0:58:51 I don’t think there’s really a wrong way to teach you poker. Like if I was to teach my
0:58:57 mum or something like that, my mum is the most, sounds strange to say, but she’s the least autistic
0:59:10 person where in that she is so able to intuit social situations and unbelievably emotionally
0:59:16 intelligent, but phobic of math, phobic of she’s interested in sort of scientific concepts. But
0:59:21 if you actually try and get into the technical weeds, she’s like, she cannot and she, you know,
0:59:25 her happy. It’s like she would be in arms with Molly right now. Just like she’s just,
0:59:31 she just feels she’s a very feel based person. And if I was to teach her the game, you know,
0:59:37 I would take her to the table with group of fun people and, you know, we would slowly just like
0:59:41 turn the cards over and, you know, talk through, I’ll give her the hand rankings. I mean, take it
0:59:46 very steady in terms of like, this is look how the way that they’re acting. So they seem quite
0:59:52 confident that, you know, that take a more the human approach to it. But I think with you,
0:59:55 we would want to jump sort of straight into the game theory to an extent.
1:00:02 So let me apply some parameters if I could just to allow us to conjure an image. So let’s just say
1:00:08 he’s really going to want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let’s say I had a game
1:00:15 with Jason and you can pick the sort of minimally viable period of time over which you think I could
1:00:23 learn to be confident enough that I might have a chance. Is it four weeks? Is it 12 weeks?
1:00:29 This is also not knowing how good Jason is. I have no idea because I’ve always refused to play.
1:00:36 He’s pretty good. Okay, great. So let’s just say, you know, if luck is on my side, having some
1:00:42 chance in hell. Well, here’s the thing. So you have a chance in hell. Anyway, if you sat down
1:00:44 and just because it’s just going to be Jason, it’s going to be an entire table. Well, no,
1:00:48 but even if you were playing one on one against Jason, if you guys sat down, assuming, you know,
1:00:54 the basic rules of like which hand. Okay, but let’s, you know, assume the very basics, you know,
1:00:59 what betting chips means and how, you know, whether you have a straight on the river or not.
1:01:06 Assuming that you and I could sit down and play 10 hands and it’s basically 50/50.
1:01:11 Okay, let’s say we have, you can pick the period of time of training and so
1:01:16 however long it is. And then Jason and I are going to play a thousand hands.
1:01:18 Exactly. Yeah, a thousand hands.
1:01:24 Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands probably with like just knowing the rules is
1:01:32 45%. That’s how crazy it is. That’s the thing. Maybe it’s a bit less than that. Maybe it’s,
1:01:39 sorry, Jason, maybe it’s let’s say 37%. Maybe 35. I’m going to get a phone call after this.
1:01:46 Um, but could we get it so that it, so that you are a favorite against him?
1:01:52 Eight weeks of intensive. Okay. Yeah. If you sat and studied game, like all the charts,
1:01:57 because that’s what it is really these days. So poker is a note. Now that we know the mechanics
1:02:01 of the game, basically, there’s this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different
1:02:06 scenarios, which is basically, you know, if you have Jack nine suited on this type of board
1:02:12 against a person in this position, you will want to check raise them 30% of the time and
1:02:17 check calls 70% of the time or something like that. So it gives basically there are like answers
1:02:21 to what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies. It’s all about frequencies.
1:02:26 And so now that we know this and you can run simulators to give you the answers of all these
1:02:32 fictitious scenarios. Now it’s changed the game into a basically who’s willing to learn as many
1:02:36 different scenarios as possible and like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play.
1:02:40 So it’s a very different type of game. It’s more like kind of almost studying chess moves.
1:02:44 I was just going to say it sounds a lot like studying chess scenarios.
1:02:48 And it wasn’t like that even 10 years ago. It was very, very different. I mean, there was some,
1:02:52 it was more about you’d sort of do combination calculations in your head and that kind of
1:02:56 thing. But that was kind of the limit of it. And honestly, it’s actually one of the reasons why I
1:03:01 in the end didn’t like the game as much anymore. I’ve been doing it for 12 years anyway. And I
1:03:09 was just starting to get itchy feet naturally, but it required more and more time spent to at the
1:03:14 top levels at least with these incremental gains. Exactly. Diminishing returns in terms of hourly,
1:03:18 because also what it means is because it’s like these game theory optimal solutions exist.
1:03:22 It means that there’s technically this perfect style of play. Any one person can play.
1:03:27 And the more people study this style, the more people are close to it.
1:03:32 And so that means there is a ceiling of how perfectly you can play. Like technically, if you
1:03:36 and I are both two computers that are able to play this game theory optimal style, we’re just
1:03:40 breaking even against each other over infinity. Over the short time, you know, if we play for
1:03:45 an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win. But over infinity, we will just break even.
1:03:50 And so that meant that you’d have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking
1:03:54 pot of money, essentially, which is why I don’t now recommend to people to go out and try and be
1:03:59 professionals in poker. But I still absolutely recommend that people to go and learn the game
1:04:07 because it is probably the best way to… It’s the best mini-analog for the type of complex
1:04:12 decision making that you need to do in life. And we’re going to come back to this because I do
1:04:20 think with my very little exposure to poker and having watched some on TV and nonetheless having
1:04:29 had my ass handed to me when I tried it live, that particularly maybe an easy map is investing
1:04:36 and poker. There are just so many variables that are similar, which is why I think so many investors
1:04:42 are drawn to it. And also, give a plug all in podcast. Check it out. That’s Jake Al’s podcast
1:04:49 with his buds. It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts,
1:04:55 new-ish podcasts that I’ve put into my rotation. So don’t take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks.
1:05:01 What does the density of practice look like? Is that two hours a day? Is it 10 hours a week?
1:05:08 What does the distribution look like? To be confident that you’ll have a 60-40 edge on him,
1:05:12 I would want to do 40 hours a week, at least. Okay. Oh, yeah.
1:05:22 All right. 40 hours. How does that break down if we have, you said eight weeks, right?
1:05:27 Yeah. So hypothetically, let’s say week one. What does the schedule and curriculum look like?
1:05:35 So in the first week, I think we would, I mean, I would sit and just run out lots of different
1:05:40 hands. I think in-person is better than online. So you actually just get to play with the cards,
1:05:45 feel what it’s like. You get really familiar with the betting patterns and that kind of thing.
1:05:49 And we would talk about the more sort of general things like, why are we betting?
1:05:52 What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information.
1:05:58 We’d get into the idea of like ranges, because kind of a strange word. But basically,
1:06:02 we’re playing a hand right now. I don’t know anything about your cards. What I know is that
1:06:06 you’ve got two cards out of the, you know, a thousand and whatever the number is, a combination
1:06:12 of two cards that you can have. So right now, your range is 100% and same back at you.
1:06:18 And then as the hand progresses, basically, I want to narrow down the perceived range that
1:06:21 I think you could have, you know, now gain information so I can narrow that down and put
1:06:27 you on a hand. Well, meanwhile, giving away as little information about my own possible range,
1:06:31 so keeping it as wide open to you. So it’s about maximizing deceptiveness,
1:06:36 sure, while extracting information out of your opponent. So I teach you about concepts like
1:06:40 that. And we would talk about ways that you can do that. And then I think we would go and actually
1:06:44 play a little bit in person just so you get used to the, again, the kind of dynamic.
1:06:48 So we would need to find a table somewhere. Yeah, we’d go to a local, I mean, probably
1:06:53 invite friends over and we’d just have some games. And it’s so much fun anyway. Those are
1:06:55 the best type of poker games. Bringing my card mechanic and take all their money.
1:07:02 Exactly. Yes. And then after that, I think we would start, I don’t know at what stage,
1:07:07 but you know, once you seem competent and are able to, you’re able to do sort of basic math
1:07:13 calculations in your head about, okay, well, I have to call $100 into a pot of $400. I’m getting
1:07:17 four to one. What does that mean? What, how many cards are there that I need to hit, etc. So these
1:07:22 kind of pothold calculations, that kind of stuff. Could you just take a second and explain what you
1:07:27 mean by pothold calculations? So potholds are basically, you know, like in investing to an
1:07:33 extent, if things go well, what do you win versus how much would you lose? So then how do you bet
1:07:38 size accordingly? Right, exactly. Or like, you know, let’s say you’re, you’re trying to hit a
1:07:43 flush and there are nine cards left in the deck that could help you say out of 36.
1:07:49 So you have a 25% chance of hitting the card you need. And meanwhile, the pot is offering you
1:07:53 five to one. Well, now it’s actually a profitable thing, right? Because you’re getting the pot
1:07:58 is offering you more than the odds that you need to hit your card. So I haven’t talked about this
1:08:04 stuff in ages. It’s really interesting seeing my brains like, oh, find the words. So those kind of
1:08:10 rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do. And then as you get more comfortable
1:08:16 in that, then you would start doing more combination calculations. So as you’re sort of narrowing down
1:08:21 your opponent’s range, there will be presumably some hands that they will have that are better than
1:08:25 your hand, you know, so what we would call value hands that they would be playing. But they would
1:08:29 also have some bluffs in there. So you need to try and think about what are the conceivable bluffs
1:08:34 they would have given the sort of story that’s been told, you know, like pre flop, they raised
1:08:39 early. So that means they probably have stronger cards and weaker cards. So you can narrow it down
1:08:45 to like the top end of the cards, like aces, kings, ace, king, ace, three suited, that kind of stuff.
1:08:49 But then on the flop, when an ace came out, they actually slowed down. So that maybe suggests that
1:08:54 they don’t have an ace, maybe they have more like, nines, 10s, eights, you know, to a pocket pair like
1:08:58 that. Weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people’s ranges and put them on
1:09:04 like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands. So that kind of stuff. And then
1:09:10 after that, if, you know, you’re seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start
1:09:15 looking at the solver charts. So these are these like simulators, there’s this one called pyosolver
1:09:21 that was at least popular in the day when I was playing. How do you spell that? P I O pyosolver,
1:09:26 I think it’s still the main one. And at least when I was, you know, using it, that was back in
1:09:32 2016 or so, it would take many hours to run a sim. So, you know, you’d be like, I want to know
1:09:39 what the optimal players with Jack 9 suited on a 10, 8, 4, rainbow board or something like that.
1:09:41 And then let it run folks listening. I have no idea what I mean to either.
1:09:48 There’s so much jargon. I think I need a rainbow. That’s actually probably where we
1:09:52 would start. We would start with glossary, because there’s so many, there’s so many
1:09:56 work terms that the vocab is, you know, there’s just so much going on there.
1:10:01 But yeah, so we would start running simulation so you can see and understand like,
1:10:05 this is what the optimal solutions would be in these certain situations.
1:10:09 Because once you know what the optimal solutions are, and then now you can,
1:10:13 you’re sort of equipped with this like really solid baseline of what the perfect play is,
1:10:17 where if you don’t have any information about your opponent that you can just follow
1:10:21 and know that, you know, at worst, you’ll be breaking even, but you’ll still be beating them.
1:10:25 But then because you know what the perfect play is, you can look for ways to exploit
1:10:30 their screw ups. Because in reality, everyone, even the pros, are making mistakes. They aren’t
1:10:35 playing this perfect GTO style. But you can’t really know the way that they’re screwing up
1:10:39 until you know what the GTO is in the first place. So it acts as this like baseline benchmark of
1:10:46 high quality play. So we would sit and we would study these charts. And if over that course of
1:10:51 eight weeks, I got used so that you were able to like emulate these charts to, I don’t know how to
1:10:56 quantify it, but to a good amount, that would be more than sufficient to be Jason. You know,
1:11:01 he’s not a full-time pro. He’s good. Like he’s played a lot and we’ve only played once. And I
1:11:04 was more just like bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his mouth.
1:11:07 Well, I was going to say, if his poker is anything like his basketball, he will,
1:11:12 his ability to shit talk is actually incredible. That guy is world-class.
1:11:14 He’s very good at getting under your skin. If he wants to get under your skin.
1:11:21 Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He’s said many, we’ve had, we’ve been at a few parties together and he has,
1:11:26 he knows how to ruffle feathers, but he’s so funny. I love him.
1:11:30 Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just want to second the recommendation that was made
1:11:37 earlier. Let’s depart from the training for a bit. We may come back to it, but actually,
1:11:43 let me ask a question I haven’t asked in a long time. Maybe similar. This is like kicking in the
1:11:50 gears, starting the old car, trying to turn the key, get it to turn over. If you could
1:11:58 predict the main reasons, the failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks,
1:12:03 what do you think they might be? Assuming that I had the time, right, and the interest,
1:12:07 what are the things that might break me or cause me to walk, give up?
1:12:13 If for some reason you couldn’t wrap your mind around what these charts mean,
1:12:18 I guess that would be a sort of breaking point. But I just don’t see that ever happening,
1:12:21 to be honest. So it would be more that, I think the reason why you’d walk away
1:12:24 is because you’re like, ah, actually, this isn’t that much fun. And I’m not playing for,
1:12:27 I don’t care enough about beating Jason. You’re not playing for super cool stakes.
1:12:30 And you’re like, this is not worth my time. And for people listening, I’m just using Jason
1:12:36 as a stand-in because it’s fun. But right, I don’t care enough about beating anyone.
1:12:39 Exactly. They’re just the opportunity cost would be too high. That would be the only reason,
1:12:42 I think, because I think you would find it fun otherwise.
1:12:48 Now I would have to, I wouldn’t have to, but ensure that I have a certain frequency of play
1:12:54 after putting in 40 hours a week for eight weeks. Otherwise, the decay rate would be brutal.
1:12:57 And part of that time, by the way, in that 40 years, it’s not just studying the charts,
1:13:00 it’s also going out and actually practicing and getting real. Because assuming you’re going to
1:13:05 play one-on-one in the flesh, a big part of poker that we haven’t touched on yet as well is
1:13:11 emotional control, understanding yourself and your own biases, not only cognitive,
1:13:17 but also the way different negative emotions will arise, which they will in the game,
1:13:20 particularly with someone like Jason, who is so adept at like saying things to needle.
1:13:22 And it’s a big part of the game.
1:13:24 Getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails.
1:13:29 Exactly. That would be as important, particularly if you’re playing for a
1:13:34 particular, you know, you’re training for a big match, the mental game side of it.
1:13:37 Because ultimately, you can study all the charts and think you’re a GTO machine
1:13:41 and like, “Oh, I’m fine.” But then you get down there and he looks you in the eyes
1:13:44 and it’s like, “Well, you screwed up that hand, Tim. Like, what are you going to do?
1:13:47 What are you going to do? Huh?” You know, and just goes for Jason on you. Like,
1:13:50 you’ll forget everything. The red mist. I call it the white boy.
1:13:53 The red mist. I’ve never heard that. Okay. I like it though.
1:13:58 The red mist descends. Like, if there’s two mental blocks.
1:13:59 And that’s when one might go tilt.
1:14:00 Tilt. Exactly.
1:14:02 If I’m catching the leg off.
1:14:07 Yeah. Tilt. Very good. For those who don’t know, tilt is what people do,
1:14:10 basically, when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly.
1:14:16 Now, is Monkey Tilt just an exaggerated version of that?
1:14:16 Yes.
1:14:18 Okay. Yeah, because now…
1:14:20 Monkey Tilt is just like the, you know, you’ve got sort of…
1:14:21 I love the image.
1:14:22 One of the flavors.
1:14:27 Conchers. Now, the reason that this is fresh on the mind is not too long ago,
1:14:33 I was in a non-sober state and decided that it was the perfect time to start making
1:14:36 stock trades. And my friend was watching me and he’s like,
1:14:43 “I think you may be full tilt right now.” And I was like, “Do I look excited? Do I look upset?
1:14:48 I’m not. I’m not on tilt.” Those didn’t work out very well, those trends.
1:14:52 But the red mist, when the red mist, but you call it the white, what?
1:14:55 Well, so there’s two. There’s the white noise. So the white noise is when…
1:14:59 So red mist is when you’re angry. Someone has wound you up.
1:15:02 That would probably be my Achilles heel.
1:15:02 Right.
1:15:03 The white noise.
1:15:08 Yeah. And the white noise is where, for whatever reason, perhaps, you know,
1:15:12 you’re just really tired or you’re really stressed, but you’ll go and consult your brain
1:15:14 and it comes back with nothing.
1:15:16 Okay. Yeah. You’re just beach balling.
1:15:22 Just people. And I’ve had that a few times. I remember having it in the World Series,
1:15:28 day four or something, day five, and it was a really big part and I just needed to think.
1:15:30 And then, but then my brain was like, “Well, this is a really important decision.
1:15:33 You know, you just really pay attention to this one. Like, are you paying it? Well,
1:15:35 I’m not sure you’re paying attention. Why are you listening to me?”
1:15:39 So there’s a little voice and then I was like, “Okay, pay attention. Let’s count the combos
1:15:43 of what they’ve got and just nothing.” So in the end, I was like,
1:15:47 “My system two, are you familiar with system one, system two?”
1:15:47 No.
1:15:48 Okay.
1:15:51 Oh, wait a second. System one, system two. Is this like Daniel Kahneman?
1:15:52 Yeah. It’s a Daniel Kahneman thing.
1:15:54 Maybe if you could just give some context.
1:15:58 His thesis is that we have two modes of thinking. Well, system one is like your intuitive.
1:16:02 Like, if I ask you what’s five plus five, you immediately know the answer is 10.
1:16:05 So it’s kind of your gut instincts.
1:16:08 I just got a shot of a drill and said that you’re going to make me do multiplication tables.
1:16:13 Well, wait. So that’s your system one. It’s just the things you immediately know an answer to
1:16:18 or you know, it’s like an unconscious process. You know, if you technically it’s system one,
1:16:22 if you’re driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you, your body will take over
1:16:25 in your swerve because you don’t have time to do a sort of cost-benefit analysis of going
1:16:29 left or right. And then your system two is the like conscious thinking.
1:16:34 So if I was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is.
1:16:42 It would be 560. I didn’t even forgot the numbers now.
1:16:44 9. 471 and 88.
1:16:46 471 and 88. What’s that?
1:16:47 I got 31.
1:16:57 471. Yeah. 9, 5, 5, 5, 9. Is that right? 559. I have no idea.
1:17:00 5 is 500. Well, I can’t even remember. Anyway, the point is.
1:17:04 Whatever that was, you can’t use your gut feelings for that.
1:17:07 Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head.
1:17:11 So that’s your system two. And poke is really interesting because.
1:17:15 You know, I’m on five hours to sleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of
1:17:18 wiggle room on the mental map.
1:17:21 I didn’t even answer my own question and I have no excuse.
1:17:23 So may I make a quick aside?
1:17:29 One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen was when I was 15 as an exchange student in Japan.
1:17:32 And I got to know multiple kids because it’s mandatory
1:17:39 that every kid learned how to use an abacus. And something like one out of every 30 or 40 kids
1:17:43 would get so good that they no longer needed the physical abacus.
1:17:47 They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks,
1:17:51 their friends would just lob these like three digit multiplication
1:17:54 problems at them and they could come up with the answer.
1:17:57 It would take them a second because they actually had to physically.
1:18:05 Map it out, map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds, but astonishing.
1:18:07 My partner Igor can kind of do that. Yeah.
1:18:12 It was one of the ways he got me. Honestly, he just throw numbers at him and he’ll,
1:18:14 he hasn’t done it in a while and he’ll hate that I’ve mentioned this because now everyone’s
1:18:17 going to do it to him, but he can usually answer within like a second or two.
1:18:19 Wow, that’s fast. Yeah, it’s hot.
1:18:24 Rock stars to mental mathematics.
1:18:28 Yeah. So those are, I can’t remember where I was going now.
1:18:33 So where you were going is we were talking about system one, system two and that white noise moment.
1:18:33 Yes.
1:18:36 And that is not a time that you can rely on system two.
1:18:37 Is that what you’re going to say?
1:18:40 Right. Exactly. Because system two has shut down.
1:18:41 Yes. System two is offline.
1:18:43 Yes. Offline. It’s not, it does not compute.
1:18:45 There’s nothing there. Hello.
1:18:46 404. 404.
1:18:47 404. Yes. Blue screen of death.
1:18:51 And it’s bad when that happens in focus.
1:18:52 It sounds fucking terrible.
1:18:58 Yes. And that is, you know, if you’re playing, it can be various reasons.
1:19:01 It can be because if you’re wound up, someone’s gotten under your skin,
1:19:06 that will shut it off, but also just pure adrenaline and stress.
1:19:09 You know, you’re excited. Even I’ve had it when I had a really good hand.
1:19:12 And I was really, I was like, oh man, I’m going to win a huge pot here.
1:19:13 This is so exciting.
1:19:16 And I’m like, well, I need to think through what the optimal bet size is.
1:19:21 And again, because I just, it just, it’s so hard because I think you’ll,
1:19:24 you’ll put into, well, you know, this stuff better.
1:19:27 Like your sympathetic nervous system is in, is in play, right?
1:19:31 So you’re kind of in a fight or flight and that is not conducive to slow cognitive thought.
1:19:35 It’s conducive to immediate, you know,
1:19:38 physical stuff really useful for, but not so good for the mental.
1:19:40 So let’s talk about the regulation, the self-regulation.
1:19:42 So I’m in front of me, some notes.
1:19:44 Obviously you can see them.
1:19:47 Those who are on audio only will not be able to see them.
1:19:49 That’s fine because it makes me sound more professional
1:19:51 if you think I’m doing everything off the top of my head.
1:20:00 So at one point, you turned 500 euros into 1.25 million euros,
1:20:02 which is around 1.7 million.
1:20:05 And if I’m getting roughly, I believe that, that math, right?
1:20:13 That was at the EPT San Remo and it was 500 euro buy-in or 500 dollar.
1:20:17 It was a 500 euro satellite tournament into the main event buy-in,
1:20:18 which was 5,000 euros.
1:20:20 So everyone was buying in for 5,000,
1:20:22 but I won my way in because I couldn’t afford the 5,000.
1:20:26 I won my way in through a feeder, smaller tournament.
1:20:29 So a few just housekeeping questions about this.
1:20:37 How long after that first tournament win after the TV show was this?
1:20:41 This was 2010, so five years.
1:20:42 Wow. All right.
1:20:45 So five years later, this happens.
1:20:50 Presumably in this tournament, there was less and then crying
1:20:52 and running away from the table.
1:20:52 Great.
1:20:56 Okay. So what type of self-regulation
1:21:01 did you learn over that period of time and then subsequent to that?
1:21:07 Oh man. That tournament was nuts because the TV show was in 2005.
1:21:11 I didn’t actually really turn fully professional
1:21:16 whereby I was living off it until late 2008.
1:21:18 I was still sort of playing casually.
1:21:21 Couldn’t really get my act together enough to…
1:21:23 I wasn’t good enough really to be living off poker before then.
1:21:26 So I’d been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half
1:21:28 and I played some bigger buy-in tournaments,
1:21:31 but I’d never made like any like really big final tables or anything.
1:21:35 And this Italy one kind of happened by accident.
1:21:38 It was… Remember the volcano that went off in Iceland?
1:21:38 Yeah, I do.
1:21:40 And it shut down all of European airspace.
1:21:43 I was in the south of France for something completely different
1:21:44 and I couldn’t get home.
1:21:48 And someone… I heard that there was this tournament going on in northern Italy
1:21:49 and it was like a train ride away.
1:21:51 So I was like, all right, screw it. I’ll go there.
1:21:52 Thank God for volcanoes.
1:21:53 Bless that volcano.
1:21:57 Oh, yeah. And then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament
1:22:01 that’s called a satellite that night where it was 500 euro entry
1:22:05 and one in 10 people would win their ticket for the 5000, the main event.
1:22:07 So I won my ticket that night like four in the morning
1:22:10 and then went and played it the next day starting at noon.
1:22:14 And a very strange thing happened to me actually at noon
1:22:16 before the tournament started, but that’s like another topic
1:22:17 I think we can get into later maybe.
1:22:20 Wait a minute. You can’t leave that.
1:22:23 Just give us a teaser and then maybe we’ll come back to it.
1:22:32 I had my first of a handful of completely unexplainable
1:22:33 borderline metaphysical experiences.
1:22:37 And I won’t say what it is.
1:22:38 It’ll be better if we talk about it later.
1:22:39 We’ll come back to that later.
1:22:40 But anyway, so I had a very strange thing happen
1:22:42 just before the tournament started at noon.
1:22:46 And long story short, six days later,
1:22:48 it ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at the time.
1:22:51 Leaving that undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening.
1:22:52 Yeah, you could better keep watching.
1:22:56 And now for short commercial break, that’s good.
1:23:00 I ended up attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament
1:23:04 in Europe to date at the time at least was over like 1200 people.
1:23:06 So huge, huge tournament.
1:23:11 And six days later, I was on the final table down to the final nine.
1:23:13 How many hours a day are you playing?
1:23:17 I played like 10 hours a day on average.
1:23:20 Some days were a bit longer, some days were a bit shorter.
1:23:22 So you can imagine how exhausting that is.
1:23:25 Also, because the longer you’re going, the more intense it gets.
1:23:27 Because in the beginning, the stakes are like,
1:23:29 okay, I might lose my 5000 euro buy-in.
1:23:32 But as the tournament wears on and there’s less people,
1:23:35 your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity.
1:23:40 And so your loss aversion starts to go vertical.
1:23:41 By the time of the like the end of day five,
1:23:44 where we play down to the final table, the final nine.
1:23:49 For ninth place, I was already guaranteed, I think 90,000 euros.
1:23:53 I only had like, I think I had like 50,000 pounds to my name at this point.
1:23:57 So I was already guaranteed double my net worth
1:23:59 for whatever happened on that final table.
1:24:03 And first prize was the 1.25 million euros, so like 1.7 dollars.
1:24:09 And that morning, I think I got some sleep the night before.
1:24:12 Because I somewhat of an insomniac anyway.
1:24:15 So if I have something on the next day that’s big,
1:24:16 I often will just not sleep very well.
1:24:18 And so you can imagine this cranks it up to 10.
1:24:20 And I was dreaming, you know,
1:24:21 I don’t know if you ever have that where you’ve
1:24:24 been doing a lot of a particular thing, like trading or whatever.
1:24:27 And you sort of semi-sleep and see the thing.
1:24:27 Oh, sure. Yeah.
1:24:29 I was playing poker.
1:24:31 I was like, I was lying there, but I had pocket jacks.
1:24:34 I had a king queen, you know, just these fictitious hands.
1:24:36 My brain just could not shut off.
1:24:37 And that was my night, the night before.
1:24:39 And I was just like in a complete tiz,
1:24:41 because I’m like, I know we’re gonna play tomorrow.
1:24:41 Like I’m a mess.
1:24:44 I was so nervous before the final table.
1:24:47 I like threw up three times on the way, like walking down.
1:24:49 It was so stressful.
1:24:51 But I don’t know, once we actually started playing,
1:24:53 once I got the cards in my hand, it was just like,
1:24:58 and I just switched into this like mode of, I don’t know, it was weird.
1:25:01 Was that the first time that it happened or that happened to you before?
1:25:05 Not to that extent, because I think it was the perfect storm of like,
1:25:08 it’s such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand.
1:25:12 And then like actually being able to play well, I don’t know,
1:25:14 the Delta felt more than I’d ever had it before.
1:25:17 But I had had that before where I was like able to like get into the zone
1:25:18 very well.
1:25:22 I wonder if you just spent all of your stress calories.
1:25:22 Yeah.
1:25:23 You know what I mean?
1:25:25 Like that tank was empty.
1:25:27 So you needed to switch to a different tank.
1:25:30 Honestly, it felt like I had something guiding me that whole time.
1:25:31 It was a very strange experience.
1:25:34 And anyway, I won and it was great.
1:25:37 Of course, I’m not going to let go of the metaphysical experience.
1:25:39 We are going to come back to that probably quickly.
1:25:45 But before we do, for people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical
1:25:50 experiences or the feeling of being guided, what else have you learned about regulating?
1:25:55 Whether it’s the white noise or especially for me of personal interest,
1:26:02 when someone is actively trying to fuck with you and disrupt all of your systems.
1:26:09 The best thing I found is super simple is just breathing three deep breaths.
1:26:12 It’s so cookie cutter, but it just works.
1:26:17 Just close your eyes and inhale in.
1:26:19 You could feel even if your heart’s pounding.
1:26:22 My heart’s actually pounding a little bit now because I’m retelling the story.
1:26:26 It’s funny, but just that you notice that you feel your body.
1:26:28 You breathe in and you breathe it into your belly.
1:26:33 And I imagine my favorite color, which is usually a mix of like turquoise and purple,
1:26:34 something like that.
1:26:38 And I just I’m sucking that in and pulling it down into my stomach.
1:26:40 And then it’s just like this settling feeling.
1:26:44 And it’s, half it is just like bullshitting myself.
1:26:45 But it’s an interrupt, isn’t it?
1:26:47 It’s an interrupt, exactly.
1:26:51 And it just is enough to like settle your nervous system for a second.
1:26:54 Just ground you back to here and then be like, okay, now what’s the problem?
1:26:57 Another thing that’s helped as well is like just like laughing at myself.
1:26:59 Oh, you’re taking this one awfully seriously.
1:27:01 You’re all silly, like playing a silly little
1:27:06 in my head just to like make light of the situation a bit.
1:27:11 But that it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe the situation.
1:27:12 Because obviously once you’re in the red mist,
1:27:14 particularly the red mist more than the white noise,
1:27:17 by definition, you are like animalistic.
1:27:21 You are you don’t have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well.
1:27:26 So it’s I think just practice really practice, but getting angry, you know,
1:27:27 practice reading.
1:27:28 I guess the way you could do it is go like,
1:27:30 go read something that you know makes you angry.
1:27:34 Like really like reliably gets your blood pressure up.
1:27:37 And then try and like build in some kind of
1:27:41 trigger that makes you do the three breaths thing.
1:27:45 So for 99.9% of the sadomasochistic users of Twitter,
1:27:47 myself included, just go on Twitter.
1:27:48 Yeah, just go on Twitter.
1:27:48 Every day.
1:27:52 For two minutes.
1:27:53 Oh man, Twitter.
1:27:57 Oh, what a nasty neighborhood that’s turned into.
1:28:03 As you were saying this, I’m imagining Jason listening to this
1:28:05 and formulating in his mind.
1:28:09 That’s why I was working for if he sees me taking deep breaths.
1:28:11 He’d be like, yeah, Timmy, take those deep breaths.
1:28:12 Come on, buddy.
1:28:12 You can do it.
1:28:13 Oh, sorry.
1:28:14 I’ve set you.
1:28:14 Oh, yeah.
1:28:16 Yeah, I know you’re doing great.
1:28:17 You just close your eyes.
1:28:17 Don’t even look at me.
1:28:18 No, close your eyes.
1:28:18 Don’t look at me.
1:28:19 Don’t worry.
1:28:20 No, nothing to see here.
1:28:20 Just imagine I’m not here.
1:28:20 You can’t hear me.
1:28:21 Yeah, he’ll just.
1:28:23 It’s not like everybody’s waiting for you or anything.
1:28:27 All right.
1:28:29 Before I lose track, which I wouldn’t, but
1:28:32 what the hell happened in the morning?
1:28:34 And you can contextualize this however you want.
1:28:34 Sure.
1:28:37 No, I mean, what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments,
1:28:41 not of ones quite this size, but I’d still played a lot of tournaments at this point.
1:28:46 And I was there before it actually started.
1:28:49 Usually people turn up late, but for some reason I was there in my chair
1:28:51 before the first hand was dealt.
1:28:54 And I remember they, the company Pokestars whose event it was,
1:28:56 you know, they dimmed the lights.
1:28:58 I’m like, welcome to EBT San Remo.
1:28:58 Huge.
1:29:00 We’ve got an incredible field, blah, blah, blah.
1:29:03 And then they dimmed the lights and they put on on the screens around the room,
1:29:04 just like a promo.
1:29:06 Exciting promo video, you know.
1:29:08 And I remember distinctly the music.
1:29:10 It was Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl,
1:29:11 which I always loved.
1:29:11 I always loved that song.
1:29:12 Yeah, good choice.
1:29:13 Yeah.
1:29:14 And I was like, oh, this is cool.
1:29:15 Yeah, I’m excited.
1:29:18 And while I was just like listening to it, just
1:29:23 like out of nowhere, this like a bolt of lightning felt like there was like this,
1:29:28 and this voice in my head said, you are going to win this tournament.
1:29:31 And it sounded like my own voice.
1:29:34 But what I can’t remember is whether it was, I am going to win or you are going to win.
1:29:36 But I’m pretty sure it was you are going to win.
1:29:38 But it’s literally sounded like my own voice.
1:29:39 And it was so.
1:29:40 Sounded like your own voice.
1:29:40 Yes.
1:29:43 So it was like, you know, when you speak in your head, like the voice you hear,
1:29:44 like most people have that right.
1:29:49 That Tuesday voice that everyone hears.
1:29:52 Oh man, I’m learning a lot out here.
1:29:57 It sounded like how I would sound in my own head to myself.
1:30:00 And it said, you are going to win this tournament.
1:30:03 And I got this rush of goosebumps.
1:30:07 It’s even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my, you know, on my arms.
1:30:11 And I remember looking around the room, like, did I just say that out loud?
1:30:12 Did anyone else hear this?
1:30:14 And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever.
1:30:16 And I was like, well, that was freaky.
1:30:20 And then the lights came back up and they’re like, okay, cool.
1:30:21 Shuffle up and deal.
1:30:22 And I was still like stunned.
1:30:24 And I was like, okay, cool.
1:30:26 And then like halfway through the day, you know,
1:30:28 and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it.
1:30:31 But then like halfway through the day, I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips.
1:30:34 You know, it’s always a bad feeling when that happens.
1:30:36 And I was like, oh man, I’m nearly out the tournament.
1:30:37 I guess that was bullshit.
1:30:41 You know, so like, I had like little multiple moments over the next few days
1:30:45 where it clearly was a real thing because I like checked in on it.
1:30:46 And I even told a friend of mine on date.
1:30:48 What do you mean, checked in on it?
1:30:49 Meaning you remembered that it had happened?
1:30:50 That it had happened.
1:30:53 Well, because obviously the rational explanation to this is the,
1:30:55 it was just a false memory.
1:30:58 You know, that I have retroactively remembered something
1:31:00 that didn’t really happen as a way of like making…
1:31:01 You reconstructed it.
1:31:01 Exactly, I reconstructed it.
1:31:04 But you have multiple points at which you referred to it.
1:31:05 Yes.
1:31:09 And I even have a friend, my friend Melanie who was there
1:31:12 and I bumped into her in the women’s bathroom on like day two.
1:31:13 And she’s like, oh, you got a lot of chips.
1:31:14 She’s going, well, I was like, yeah, yeah.
1:31:16 The things are going, well, really weird.
1:31:17 I feel like I’m going to win this.
1:31:19 In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did.
1:31:21 And she’s like, yeah, you seem really confident.
1:31:22 We actually had this conversation.
1:31:25 And to the point that she, after I won it, she was like,
1:31:26 what the fuck was that?
1:31:28 You like predicted this.
1:31:29 I’m like, I know.
1:31:29 I don’t know.
1:31:34 So yeah, I don’t know how to explain it.
1:31:40 Now, I think you said string or series of experiences.
1:31:42 Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that?
1:31:45 And it doesn’t have to be constrained to poker.
1:31:46 So what was interesting was…
1:31:49 Actually, you may ask, I apologize for doing this
1:31:51 herky-jerky questioning style.
1:31:53 But did you have any of those types of experiences
1:31:55 when you were younger that you were called?
1:31:56 No.
1:31:56 No.
1:31:59 I was not like a weird kid that had…
1:32:01 Sorry, let me start again.
1:32:02 You’re a weird kid.
1:32:04 You weren’t like the kid from the sixth sense.
1:32:05 No, I wasn’t the sixth sense kid.
1:32:08 No, I did not.
1:32:09 Is to answer that question.
1:32:12 I had not really ever had, I think, anything.
1:32:15 You know, like I’d never saw a ghost or anything like that.
1:32:16 I’m not asking about ghosts.
1:32:20 Don’t love me in with the ghost hunters.
1:32:21 Come on.
1:32:22 I want to just paint the picture of that.
1:32:25 I was a very, in fact, like a deep skeptic.
1:32:26 Right.
1:32:27 Well, you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways.
1:32:28 Right, right.
1:32:31 But like certainly then, like I’d never had anything weird
1:32:33 that I couldn’t really explain in any conventional way.
1:32:36 I’ve certainly not had any time loops or anything like that
1:32:37 or weird voices in my head.
1:32:39 But yeah, to answer your question of like,
1:32:41 is it a sort of common thing in poker?
1:32:44 No, not so much common thing in poker.
1:32:47 But have you since had more of those types of experiences?
1:32:52 Not of like explicit premonitions.
1:32:54 No, I’m not nothing even close to that.
1:32:59 I have had one really notable thing that I am happy to talk about it.
1:33:00 It’s…
1:33:01 If you change your mind, I can cut it later.
1:33:02 Exactly.
1:33:07 For one of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing,
1:33:08 an almost accidental one.
1:33:13 So it was a few years ago and seemingly out of the blue,
1:33:17 I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear,
1:33:22 where particularly it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing,
1:33:24 humming quite frequently.
1:33:27 Like so some kind of tinnitus, but it was almost like a pressure.
1:33:32 And voices, particularly men’s voices,
1:33:36 became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to.
1:33:38 And it was really bumming me out.
1:33:39 It would come in like clusters.
1:33:41 I would have it like for a few hours and it would go away
1:33:43 and come later on in the day.
1:33:46 And it was stopping me from doing any social events
1:33:49 because any loud scenario was unbearable,
1:33:50 but particularly men speaking.
1:33:51 I just couldn’t handle it.
1:33:54 And this went on and off for a few months.
1:33:57 And I went and saw multiple doctors and I had hearing tests
1:33:59 and they said, “Oh, you’re losing your hearing.”
1:34:03 And the low frequencies of your hearing in that ear,
1:34:04 we think you have Meniere’s disease.
1:34:06 Meniere’s is this degenerative thing,
1:34:09 which usually people end up completely deaf when they have it,
1:34:13 where basically the nerve cells in the inner ear start dying.
1:34:13 And they don’t really know why.
1:34:16 They think it’s something to do with like salts and ion channels.
1:34:18 And it’s incurable as far as they know.
1:34:21 And so I was told that’s what I probably have.
1:34:23 And they were like, “It’s pretty really sorry.
1:34:25 It was just bad news to find that out.”
1:34:28 And also because one of the symptoms of it is
1:34:30 you start having balance problems as well.
1:34:31 You get like these vertigo attacks
1:34:33 and people would be like vomiting and so on.
1:34:34 And so you can imagine,
1:34:36 I was like really down in the dumps finding this out.
1:34:39 And then cut to three months later or so,
1:34:40 “Go to Burning Man.”
1:34:44 And I have for the first time one of these vertigo attacks,
1:34:44 one of the days.
1:34:46 I mean, I wasn’t completely sober,
1:34:47 but it was not a good time, as you can imagine,
1:34:50 having a vertigo attack while not being sober for the first time.
1:34:53 So I was then really down in the dumps.
1:34:55 And then on the last night of the burn,
1:34:57 I was talking to some friends
1:34:59 and I started talking to this girl who I kind of,
1:35:00 I don’t know that well,
1:35:01 but she’s a friend of a friend.
1:35:04 And I mentioned about my ear and she’s like,
1:35:06 “Oh, well, I do energy healing.
1:35:06 I’m an energy healer.”
1:35:10 I was like, “I don’t know what that is,
1:35:12 but sure, do whatever you want to do.
1:35:12 Yeah, have a go.”
1:35:13 She’s like, “I can try.”
1:35:17 And after,
1:35:21 she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes.
1:35:23 And then she says,
1:35:24 I remember saying something like,
1:35:26 “There’s something there. I need to get it.”
1:35:29 And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth,
1:35:30 like not touching it,
1:35:31 but just like…
1:35:32 And it was really unpleasant.
1:35:34 So like, you know, you can imagine that sensation
1:35:36 of someone like inhaling over your ear.
1:35:37 And I was like, “Oh, please stop.”
1:35:38 She’s like, “No, I need to get this.
1:35:39 There’s something there.”
1:35:42 And she does it, I don’t know, for a few minutes
1:35:43 and then eventually kind of…
1:35:46 It collapses in a heap on the floor,
1:35:49 crying and freezing cold, going,
1:35:51 “Oh my God, that was bad.
1:35:52 I don’t know what that was.
1:35:53 That was really, really bad.”
1:35:55 Again, I was not fully sober,
1:35:57 so this is slightly retelling.
1:36:01 But I just remember being so shocked.
1:36:04 I just didn’t expect anything to actually happen.
1:36:05 I didn’t really feel anything other than
1:36:07 this unpleasant sensation of her sucking.
1:36:10 But I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting,
1:36:11 because she was shocked.
1:36:12 She did not seem to expect whatever
1:36:14 had had just happened to her.
1:36:15 And she said afterwards,
1:36:17 she came around after a while and she’s like,
1:36:18 “I don’t know what it was.
1:36:20 It was like bad energy.
1:36:22 I don’t know. It’s gone.”
1:36:24 I’m very pleased to say it’s fully gone and it’s gone away.
1:36:26 And I was like, “Well, okay.
1:36:27 What does that mean for my symptoms?
1:36:28 Are my cured?”
1:36:28 She’s like, “Yeah, yeah.
1:36:30 You’ll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks
1:36:31 and then you’ll be fine.”
1:36:33 And that’s exactly what happened.
1:36:35 And I haven’t had any problems since.
1:36:37 It kind of just like…
1:36:40 It just blew my world open,
1:36:43 because aside of that premonition thing,
1:36:45 which I kind of forgotten about,
1:36:49 I have not ever subscribed to anything like that.
1:36:50 Like I’m a physicist.
1:36:53 In fact, I’ve kind of built a career
1:36:56 of being a materialist, rationalist physicist.
1:36:59 And I don’t have any time for any of that stuff.
1:37:00 It’s all nonsense.
1:37:01 It’s all confirmation bias.
1:37:04 No one’s ever actually tested it empirically or proven it.
1:37:06 Show me the study and I’ll believe it.
1:37:10 But here I am, having that experience with two,
1:37:12 what feel like pretty incontrovertible data points,
1:37:18 that something that I cannot explain happened,
1:37:21 and fortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me.
1:37:22 Such a blessing.
1:37:23 So yeah.
1:37:30 So these experiences are particularly interesting to me
1:37:32 as direct first-hand experiences.
1:37:36 Of course, second-hand now that I’m listening,
1:37:38 but are particularly interesting to me
1:37:41 when I’m speaking with someone who has demonstrated
1:37:49 a very well-developed ability to use system two thinking,
1:37:54 and rationality, and reasoning, and mathematics,
1:37:59 and so on in not just the world,
1:38:01 but in competitive arenas.
1:38:06 So you have a calibrated and also tested ability
1:38:09 to use those faculties that you’ve developed.
1:38:14 And I’m glad you’re mentioning these things,
1:38:16 just because weird shit happens.
1:38:20 And the idea that we have it all figured out is ludicrous,
1:38:22 even though humans at any point in history,
1:38:24 whether you go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages,
1:38:27 you know, I’m sure, you know, 6,000 years ago,
1:38:29 or whatever it was with the Egyptians,
1:38:31 I’m sure they thought they had most things figured out.
1:38:36 And it’s just so clear when you begin to really poke and prod,
1:38:40 and as you gain more years and have more experiences,
1:38:42 especially if you start pushing into some strange corners,
1:38:47 that there’s a lot we simply don’t understand.
1:38:52 And even if we were to say not chalk those up to false memories,
1:38:54 but let’s just say we chalked it up to placebo effect,
1:38:59 nonetheless, even if it were just placebo effect.
1:39:00 – Incredible.
1:39:07 – That doesn’t diminish the absurd inexplicability
1:39:12 of it with the current mechanisms that we understand.
1:39:15 And that’s super exciting to me.
1:39:16 It’s super exciting to me.
1:39:20 And it doesn’t mean that you nor I would advocate
1:39:22 that people just accept everything at face value.
1:39:24 Of course not, there’s horseshit everywhere.
1:39:25 I mean, we’re sitting in Austin,
1:39:28 like the world capital of spirituality.
1:39:31 There’s so much nonsense and so many charlatans,
1:39:35 but I do pay attention to people like you
1:39:39 who have demonstrated in other areas
1:39:44 that they have the ability to think rationally
1:39:49 and have some grasp of a very good grasp of science and so on.
1:39:51 That’s kind of one of the first litmus tests for me.
1:39:52 If someone’s sharing something with me,
1:39:56 I’m like, all right, can they fight logically out of a paper bag?
1:40:02 Like, have they demonstrated any ability
1:40:05 to use structured reasoning in other places?
1:40:07 – Are they able to cross-examine their own beliefs?
1:40:08 – Right, exactly.
1:40:15 And are they skeptical in other areas?
1:40:16 Or is it just like, okay,
1:40:19 they accept anything as long as it’s alternative,
1:40:22 but they reject Western science for any number of reasons
1:40:23 that don’t make sense to me.
1:40:26 If you’ve ever had antibiotics,
1:40:29 yeah, Western science may have saved your life.
1:40:30 And there are many other examples.
1:40:33 I certainly wouldn’t be here for more for Western medicine,
1:40:35 let’s just say, not science.
1:40:38 And I struggle with where to even take this
1:40:39 because there’s so many directions
1:40:40 that could go that are pretty strange.
1:40:44 But I don’t want to co-opt physics,
1:40:46 so please give me a slap here
1:40:51 if this is just an amateur butchering the good name of physics.
1:40:54 But I’ve had a number of cognitive scientists
1:40:57 on the podcast, like Donald Hoffman.
1:41:00 I’ve had physicists on the podcast,
1:41:02 although some would consider Michio Kaku more
1:41:03 of a science communicator.
1:41:06 But still, as some fundamentals,
1:41:08 I’ve had private conversations, certainly,
1:41:09 with a number of physicists.
1:41:13 And I lack the foundation of mathematics
1:41:14 necessarily to fully appreciate it.
1:41:17 But when you even start to look at the conversations
1:41:20 that were being had between Einstein and Bohr
1:41:24 way back in the day, relative to quantum mechanics,
1:41:29 putting aside even the experimental design
1:41:34 and evidence for quantum entanglement that have been done,
1:41:36 I think, in the Canary Islands and in other places,
1:41:39 stuff is really strange.
1:41:44 Just even space-time itself as an objective reality.
1:41:46 I mean, there are pieces people can find online
1:41:50 by qualified scientists on the death of space-time, right?
1:41:56 And thinking about that as almost a UI
1:41:58 that we have evolved to utilize,
1:42:02 but not as the one and only user interface
1:42:04 to whatever we might be contending with.
1:42:06 And like Donald Hoffman even thinks that,
1:42:07 well, not just Donald Hoffman,
1:42:10 he thinks that consciousness essentially
1:42:12 gives rise to space.
1:42:17 And while a lot of theoretical physicists
1:42:19 poo-poo his ideas, and I think, by and large,
1:42:23 they are correct to, even they would agree
1:42:26 that it seems like space itself is an emergent property.
1:42:28 It’s not a fundamental thing.
1:42:30 We’re not objects rattling around in a big, empty box.
1:42:36 It is a thing that emerges from basically interactions
1:42:39 of mathematical functions on some…
1:42:41 Whether it’s on a substrate or whether it…
1:42:42 I don’t know if it even needs a substrate.
1:42:43 I’m too rusty on that stuff.
1:42:47 But it’s super weird if you dig into the fundamental structure
1:42:48 of this reality.
1:42:52 And this is not a Wiccan witchcraft shop
1:42:55 with tarot cards in the display case,
1:42:56 not to knock that, right?
1:43:02 But we’re talking about some of the most esteemed scientists
1:43:06 in a hard science with peer-reviewed publications and so on.
1:43:09 And if you just look at that stuff closely enough,
1:43:11 shit’s really weird.
1:43:12 Yeah.
1:43:13 There’s a paper on his recently reading
1:43:15 that’s like digging into the…
1:43:19 That it seems like space-time is…
1:43:23 What space itself is essentially coming out of observers
1:43:24 interacting with each other.
1:43:25 Oh, I’d love to see.
1:43:27 Consciousness is interacting with each other.
1:43:29 But it’s really, from what I can tell,
1:43:31 really granular, legit physics.
1:43:32 I mean, it’s a math paper, basically.
1:43:35 It’s beyond my pay rate.
1:43:35 So, I don’t know.
1:43:37 But I may need your…
1:43:38 I want to send it to like Sean Carroll.
1:43:40 I don’t know if you’ve ever had him on.
1:43:41 Sean Carroll, I haven’t had on.
1:43:43 But my brother introduced me to
1:43:44 his podcast, Mindscape.
1:43:46 Is it Mindscape?
1:43:47 Excellent podcast.
1:43:47 So good.
1:43:49 So if Sean Carroll is out there listening
1:43:51 or if anyone knows him, let him know.
1:43:53 He may not want to hear this.
1:43:55 I don’t know what his opinion will be of me.
1:43:57 But big fan of his podcast.
1:44:01 He’s a damn fine thinker and a damn fine communicator.
1:44:02 He really is, yeah.
1:44:07 And he had an excellent episode on sort of
1:44:11 an archaeological exploration of Stonehenge
1:44:17 and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices.
1:44:18 Super cool.
1:44:19 Saliv.
1:44:20 Olivia.
1:44:22 Question for you.
1:44:28 How do you, as someone who is a trained rationalist,
1:44:33 materialist, although you may not identify as solely
1:44:35 those things, I don’t want to imply that,
1:44:38 how do you integrate some of these experiences
1:44:41 into your life, your framework, your worldview?
1:44:42 What do you do with that?
1:44:44 It’s tricky.
1:44:47 I mean, I think with all these things,
1:44:52 it’s walking this fine line between gullibility,
1:44:53 open-mindedness, whatever you want to call it,
1:44:55 and skepticism and cynicism.
1:45:01 And I think where my poker training comes in handy
1:45:04 is that poker trains you to think in probabilities.
1:45:06 You’re never certain about anything.
1:45:08 You could be bluffing me with, you know,
1:45:10 you could have aces or you could be bluffing me
1:45:14 with six, four suited that missed the card it needed.
1:45:16 So you become very comfortable in terms of
1:45:19 holding concurrent belief states in your mind
1:45:20 with different weighted probabilities
1:45:22 of those things being true.
1:45:25 So with these two weird,
1:45:28 unexplainable experiences that I had,
1:45:30 whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo,
1:45:32 which would still be crazy because it would mean
1:45:35 that basically I have the ability to heal my mind
1:45:37 by thinking I was going through some kind of thing
1:45:38 being sucked out my ear.
1:45:39 Fine.
1:45:41 And potentially heal your inner ear.
1:45:43 Yeah, like I was literally told I had a degenerative thing
1:45:46 and I was going to go deaf and no one’s been cured of it.
1:45:47 And this has miraculously gone away.
1:45:49 So whatever the hell happened,
1:45:51 the point is I didn’t go and change my life.
1:45:52 I didn’t suddenly go and be like, that’s it.
1:45:54 I’m going to go and practice energy healing
1:45:56 and become a witch and so on.
1:45:59 I continued still like I still am an adherent
1:46:01 to the scientific method.
1:46:03 It’s just that I’ve now broadened my, as you mentioned,
1:46:05 it’s almost like people become,
1:46:08 they believe in the scientism as opposed to being scientists.
1:46:11 A true scientist is that you are maximally curious.
1:46:13 You do your best to devise experiments
1:46:16 in order to get reliable, robust results
1:46:18 that you can use to predict the world.
1:46:20 And you try and minimize all the biases and things
1:46:22 that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result.
1:46:28 And so there’s no reason why I can’t incorporate
1:46:30 these two data points in terms of,
1:46:31 I mean, I haven’t gone out and done any science.
1:46:34 I really should, I guess, go and do some tests
1:46:37 and see if I can try and recreate that experience.
1:46:39 But it’s very difficult because it was a set and setting
1:46:41 were very important and what happened there,
1:46:42 I would assume.
1:46:43 Anyway, I don’t know that.
1:46:45 Well, when they make the Netflix series about it
1:46:47 and they recreate the entire environment,
1:46:49 then you can sit down and try to recreate.
1:46:49 Yeah.
1:46:53 So what I guess I’ve done is I have up-weighted,
1:46:55 whereas before I would have given the probability
1:46:57 that energy healing is a real thing.
1:46:58 I would have given it like a,
1:47:01 probably if you’d asked my old like skeptical self,
1:47:02 I would have literally said it’s zero,
1:47:07 but I wasn’t such a bad Bayesian that I would give it actual zero.
1:47:08 Maybe like one in a million.
1:47:09 Bad Bayesian.
1:47:12 Oh, that’s good to be careful.
1:47:13 We don’t have to unpack that.
1:47:16 No, no, but yeah, we’re giving it a one in a million.
1:47:19 And now I have updated it with this evidence to,
1:47:25 how many orders of magnitude do I want to go?
1:47:28 I mean, I will give it, at least give it a one in 100.
1:47:30 But I think it’s more likely that there is a
1:47:34 an explanation through what we know conventionally
1:47:38 that it’s still more probable than that it is something completely,
1:47:41 like some completely novel thing that is untapped.
1:47:43 But that said, I’ve actually had a few other little ones
1:47:45 I won’t go into, but like other little data points
1:47:46 of just like weird energy things that have happened
1:47:48 in certain scenarios, it’s helped me.
1:47:53 But it’s still important to keep the like skeptical hat on.
1:47:57 And extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence.
1:48:01 And in order for me to like give up everything that I know
1:48:03 about our current understanding of the world,
1:48:06 I would need significantly more data points.
1:48:08 And I think that would just not the practical way to go forward.
1:48:13 Yeah, I would also add to that that if folks want to be proper skeptics,
1:48:16 you owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with
1:48:18 to be an informed skeptic.
1:48:22 So if you are going to invoke the name of science
1:48:27 and not invoke it like the name of Odin and some like
1:48:31 you know, God works in mysterious ways kind of way.
1:48:36 You need to actually, my opinion, have the ability to read a study
1:48:39 and understand a study and study design.
1:48:43 It’s not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation
1:48:47 from the Wall Street Journal or film the blank online publication.
1:48:48 That’s not good enough.
1:48:53 It’s also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract.
1:48:56 And confidence intervals.
1:48:59 Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering,
1:49:03 because you’ll also find folks who, I’ve been saying “scientism,”
1:49:06 but I guess it’s “scientism,” the sort of like capital S.
1:49:08 In either case, it has a capital S and it’s not good.
1:49:12 So if you come to that, one of the telltale characteristics
1:49:17 that I’ve come across is they’ll ask if something was a controlled study
1:49:21 or a placebo-controlled randomized study, randomized control, you know, RCT,
1:49:24 and then say, well, how many subjects were there?
1:49:26 Or what was the end if they get fancy?
1:49:31 And I might say 20, 25, and they’re like, oh, yeah, small study.
1:49:32 Well, nonsense.
1:49:36 And I’m like, it’s not that simplistic.
1:49:39 There are quite a few variables you have to take into account.
1:49:42 So recommendations for folks who are interested.
1:49:46 Number one, studying the studies by Peter Atea-MD,
1:49:52 excellent series of blog posts that take you into the fundamentals
1:49:56 of understanding how to dissect and understand a study,
1:50:03 which includes meta-analyses and gets into the risks of taking meta-analyses as gospel also,
1:50:05 because garbage in, garbage out, and there’s a lot to it.
1:50:11 Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago,
1:50:15 I realized when I pulled this up, this is podcast number 194,
1:50:17 The Magic and Power of Placebo.
1:50:23 This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book called Suggestible You,
1:50:27 subtitled The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal.
1:50:29 And he’s written very widely on Placebo.
1:50:30 It’s an excellent book.
1:50:33 Many of his feature pieces are exceptional.
1:50:37 There was a great piece in Wired Magazine, probably 10 years ago,
1:50:42 on the evolution of the Placebo effect and how it has changed,
1:50:45 depending on the culture and other influences.
1:50:50 So in certain places, say, a Placebo pill in a blue capsule or a red capsule
1:50:51 perform better than other colors.
1:50:51 It’s really…
1:50:55 You need to do a blue or red one on this day and age more.
1:50:56 That’s true.
1:50:56 That’s true.
1:50:57 Yeah, we could pick out the colors.
1:51:01 But the context that surrounds that is really, really interesting.
1:51:07 And then the last thing I would recommend people check out is cognitive biases and looking at
1:51:10 both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding.
1:51:14 So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list.
1:51:18 You can look at something like poor Charlize Almanac with Charlie Munger.
1:51:24 Although it’s a bit dense and it’s a little user-unfriendly in a lot of respects.
1:51:25 But what were you going to say?
1:51:31 I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galeff’s work on the Scout mindset
1:51:33 and Motivated Reasoning.
1:51:34 What was the first one?
1:51:35 The Scout mindset.
1:51:36 Scout mindset.
1:51:36 Yeah.
1:51:39 I mean, she did a TED talk on it, but she’s just written a book on it as well.
1:51:41 And I think she actually goes in…
1:51:42 If I remember rightly, she goes in…
1:51:44 Her last name is G-A-L-E-F.
1:51:44 Yes.
1:51:46 She goes into that sort of…
1:51:51 Again, when I first learned about rationality, I read everything unless wrong,
1:51:53 if people know that, which is incredible resource for it.
1:51:58 And it really breaks down how you get your brain, which is like the map,
1:52:03 to match the actual territory, which is the universe, as accurately as possible.
1:52:07 But where I think it’s maybe lacking a little bit now,
1:52:10 because I’ve had some of these weirder experiences, which actually…
1:52:15 Where I wasn’t, in the classical sense, rational.
1:52:18 Clearly went off the beaten path into some weird land,
1:52:20 but it was actually very beneficial to me.
1:52:24 Even if it was some completely useful fiction, it was still useful.
1:52:29 And this idea of useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further.
1:52:29 Yeah.
1:52:33 I’d also add that much like poker, science, I don’t think a lot of folks realize,
1:52:37 is largely a game of probabilities.
1:52:41 You don’t prove something 100% most of the time.
1:52:42 It’s like, well…
1:52:43 Literally never, actually.
1:52:44 Yeah, exactly.
1:52:49 I mean, you can have overwhelmingly compelling data, even with, say,
1:52:53 an observational study, say, with the quintessential example,
1:52:56 would be cigarette smoking causing lung cancer, right?
1:53:02 But most of the time, it’s like, this suggests, with this degree of certainty,
1:53:03 that this is the case.
1:53:07 But when you start to look at the replication crisis,
1:53:11 which is not just in social sciences, it’s all over the place,
1:53:16 and especially if you start to actually roll up your sleeves
1:53:19 and get involved in science, whether that’s as a subject,
1:53:22 I’ve been a subject in studies at all sorts of places.
1:53:24 I started doing it as an undergrad.
1:53:26 I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman’s studies,
1:53:30 and it was not very intellectually engaging.
1:53:34 It was like space bar every time, like a green square popped up or something.
1:53:36 But I needed the $7 an hour, whatever it was.
1:53:41 And I’ve been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments.
1:53:42 That was also not terribly fun.
1:53:46 Marching to exhaustion with like an esophageal probe and an anal probe,
1:53:47 kind of meeting in the middle,
1:53:52 in fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like complete–
1:53:53 Collapse.
1:53:53 –mental collapse.
1:53:55 Yeah, so why do I do these things?
1:53:57 Because I’m interested in seeing the process.
1:54:01 And even some of the best science you could point to
1:54:04 in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there,
1:54:07 it’s a lot messier than people think.
1:54:09 But people want to have confidence in something,
1:54:12 then religion has become so out of fashion
1:54:14 that they look to the high priests of science.
1:54:18 And they’re like, at least I have the confidence in this being true.
1:54:19 So I actually want–
1:54:21 One of my next videos I want to make on this,
1:54:27 which is about basically these signaling prestige bad incentives
1:54:30 that get society stuck in these kind of–
1:54:32 These traps, essentially.
1:54:34 So we’re stuck in one of those.
1:54:37 With the current status quo of the way science is done–
1:54:39 And this is not at all to knock any scientists.
1:54:41 They’re doing their absolute best.
1:54:43 But the way the system has been designed,
1:54:48 we give all the reward to the people who first make the new fancy discovery
1:54:52 and don’t give any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it.
1:54:56 So there’s this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing
1:55:00 in order to get your thing published in nature
1:55:02 and get those research dollars for the next time.
1:55:05 But it doesn’t actually really advance human knowledge,
1:55:08 because so many of these things don’t replicate.
1:55:12 And we’re sort of stuck in this spiral of just like,
1:55:15 everyone’s trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal.
1:55:17 And there’s a name for it.
1:55:21 So there’s this really incredible short online book called “Inadequate Equilibria”
1:55:25 by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Les Wrong, Eliezer Yodkowski.
1:55:26 And I recommend–
1:55:27 “Inadequate Equilibria.”
1:55:30 Yes, it’s a heady name.
1:55:31 Oh man, I know it sounds–
1:55:32 It’s so good.
1:55:33 It has one of the best things.
1:55:38 It has a discussion, a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society,
1:55:41 like a basic person who thinks everything’s explained,
1:55:43 everything that’s wrong in our society is because of like,
1:55:48 there’s bad people being greedy and then with a cynical, smart economist.
1:55:50 And they have this three-way discussion talking about like,
1:55:52 reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive.
1:55:54 And it sort of goes into this meandering thing about–
1:55:55 That’s a cool premise.
1:55:56 It’s so good.
1:55:58 Like, you must include this in the show notes.
1:56:00 How long would you say it is?
1:56:03 I mean, ideally, they could just read chapter 3, honestly.
1:56:06 It’s, I don’t know, it’s like a 45-minute read.
1:56:07 Yeah, it’s like a book chapter.
1:56:09 And you can kind of read it standalone.
1:56:10 We’ll put this, we’ll put it in the show notes.
1:56:14 But basically, it’s talking about these traps that we can get into
1:56:17 where it gets people now speaking, game theory.
1:56:21 It gets society stuck in like, shitty Nash Equilibria.
1:56:25 So a Nash Equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing
1:56:29 in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy.
1:56:30 It’s like everyone’s stuck doing that.
1:56:33 But not all Nash Equilibria are actually created equal.
1:56:37 There are some where if everyone was doing X instead of Y,
1:56:38 everyone would be happier.
1:56:40 They’d also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing.
1:56:42 So like a good example of this would be–
1:56:45 So I just made a video called The Beauty Wars
1:56:48 about this like fictitious thing called Moloch,
1:56:52 which I call like the demon of negative sum games, basically.
1:56:54 It’s like the God of negative sum games.
1:56:58 It’s a force of bad, usually economic incentives
1:57:02 that make people sort of sacrifice things that they want
1:57:04 in order to optimize for a short-term goal.
1:57:08 And the example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram.
1:57:09 I don’t know if you’ve spent any time–
1:57:11 They are horrifying.
1:57:13 I mean, in how dramatic they are.
1:57:16 I’d never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me
1:57:18 and I was dumbfounded.
1:57:22 They’re horrifying not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff,
1:57:26 but also how now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones.
1:57:29 Because there are some where you would never–
1:57:31 You’d go online and you would not be able to tell.
1:57:33 If you don’t know the person or even if you know the person,
1:57:35 you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell.
1:57:36 You just think it’s a good picture of them.
1:57:39 They’re so subtle, but they’re so effective.
1:57:42 It seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure
1:57:44 that our eyes find pleasing.
1:57:45 And it just tweaks people.
1:57:47 It makes the eyes a little bit wider apart
1:57:48 or a little bit bigger or the lips.
1:57:51 You know, just changes the proportions,
1:57:55 just right that it sets the dopamine spike off in your brain.
1:57:57 And it’s going to make online dating really hard.
1:57:58 Oh, man.
1:57:59 Well, so as a girl on Instagram–
1:58:01 Not that I’m on the field.
1:58:04 I’m not on the playing field, but if I were, that sounds like a headache.
1:58:06 Well, and but also for people who use them.
1:58:08 Like, so I’m a girl on Instagram.
1:58:12 You know, I for a while certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked.
1:58:14 There’s such an incentive pressure.
1:58:16 You know, if I want to keep playing the game
1:58:18 or trying to grow my Instagram like a sexy pic–
1:58:20 Yeah, it’s the arms race, exactly.
1:58:21 And that’s what MOLIC is.
1:58:23 MOLIC is this like the god of arms races
1:58:26 and it’s like these bad incentives where we could–
1:58:30 The cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on all my pictures.
1:58:31 And I know I’m going to look good
1:58:33 and I’m going to get a ton of likes and it’ll grow my thing.
1:58:36 But it will make me miserable in the process.
1:58:42 And if you poll probably most particularly women on Instagram,
1:58:44 they are not having a good time with these things either on themselves.
1:58:47 Because if you then like compare your face side to side,
1:58:49 you’re just like, man, you just it just makes you feel ugly.
1:58:53 And so we’re in this weird situation where no one wants to do stuff
1:58:57 that makes them hate their face, but they’re doing it anyway.
1:58:58 It’s like a lower Nash equilibrium.
1:59:00 You know, we could all be in a higher Nash equilibrium
1:59:03 where we’re not doing it, but instead we’re all stuck down there
1:59:05 because of these bad game theoretic incentives.
1:59:07 So this is my current obsession, this thing called MOLIC.
1:59:08 And I think about it all the time.
1:59:12 M-O-L-O-C-H for people wandering.
1:59:13 And we’ll link to that in the show notes.
1:59:15 So just to underscore this for folks,
1:59:18 because I do suggest that everybody check out your YouTube channel.
1:59:21 What’s the best way for them to find your channel?
1:59:24 Probably the best thing is if they search for my name
1:59:25 and then the beauty wars,
1:59:28 that’ll link to the video I just talked about.
1:59:28 All right.
1:59:30 And then you can find my channel from that.
1:59:32 And just for the spelling, everybody,
1:59:37 it’s live L-I-V last name, B-O-E-R-E-E.
1:59:40 Which means I learned just beforehand.
1:59:42 Drunk farmer.
1:59:45 So they say.
1:59:46 So they say.
1:59:47 And I did grow up on a farm.
1:59:50 And I did drink a lot.
1:59:51 It’s so good.
1:59:53 So good.
1:59:55 Yeah, Ferris, you know, the best I can tell.
1:59:56 You’re a big wheel.
1:59:58 Could be that.
2:00:03 It also refers to Ferris, like Ferris Oxide, F-E-R-R-O-U-S.
2:00:04 Ooh, rusty.
2:00:11 Because apparently some of my progenitors were silversmiths.
2:00:13 I don’t know how it all fits together.
2:00:15 Seems like a very dubious story.
2:00:15 I’m not sure.
2:00:18 But I want some story to go along with the last name.
2:00:20 But I don’t have drunken farmer.
2:00:21 That’s an amazing one.
2:00:25 Live, we should do around two sometimes.
2:00:27 When we’re practically neighbors,
2:00:28 we have so much we could talk about.
2:00:30 We’ve got a million other things,
2:00:31 even in the notes in front of me
2:00:32 that we could cover and should cover.
2:00:35 I’m thinking about this training.
2:00:36 And.
2:00:37 Are you going to do it?
2:00:39 We’ll see.
2:00:42 Requires more mezcal to make that decision.
2:00:43 I think we could condense it down.
2:00:45 We don’t have to do the full eight weeks.
2:00:48 I think commit to even three weeks, honestly.
2:00:49 I think you would…
2:00:52 J.K. will still be better than you at that stage.
2:00:53 I have to say that.
2:00:54 Not he would be.
2:00:57 All right.
2:00:57 Three weeks.
2:00:58 Three weeks.
2:00:59 I’m going to sleep on that.
2:01:02 I do my best thinking when I’m asleep.
2:01:04 Let me sleep on that.
2:01:06 Is there anything else that you would like to say?
2:01:07 Any closing comments?
2:01:10 Places you’d like to point people?
2:01:12 Anything at all you’d like to say before we wind this down?
2:01:17 No, I mean, I guess do check out my YouTube.
2:01:18 I’d love people to go and…
2:01:22 Now I’ve moved to Austin and I’m like building a studio and everything.
2:01:24 I’m going to be ramping up production again.
2:01:28 So I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that they catch my stuff.
2:01:32 Because we’re playing the rat race, the attention wars.
2:01:33 That’s the name of the next video is the attention wars,
2:01:37 which is about why Twitter and everything is making us so angry and hate each other.
2:01:38 Yeah.
2:01:39 That’s a big one.
2:01:40 Talk about a nasty game.
2:01:41 Yeah.
2:01:43 And Moloch, Moloch’s in that.
2:01:44 Moloch, Moloch’s all over that.
2:01:44 Fucking Moloch.
2:01:50 So Liv, we’re going to link to everything in the show notes.
2:01:53 People can find you at livbari.com also,
2:01:56 which I would imagine has links to many things.
2:01:59 And we will put links to everything we’ve discussed,
2:02:05 all the resources, inadequate equilibria, and all other good things
2:02:08 in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast.
2:02:11 And so nice to see you.
2:02:12 Thanks for taking the time.
2:02:13 This is awesome.
2:02:13 Thank you.
2:02:14 Super fun, super fun.
2:02:18 And for everybody listening as per usual, thanks for tuning in.
2:02:22 And until next time, just be a little kinder to yourselves
2:02:27 and to others than you think is necessary and take care.
2:02:30 Hey guys, this is Tim again.
2:02:32 Just one more thing before you take off.
2:02:34 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
2:02:37 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday
2:02:40 that provides a little fun before the weekend?
2:02:42 Between one and a half and two million people subscribed
2:02:45 to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter
2:02:46 called Five Bullet Friday.
2:02:48 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
2:02:53 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday
2:02:55 to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
2:02:57 or have started exploring over that week.
2:02:59 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:03:02 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading,
2:03:07 albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on
2:03:11 that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcasts.
2:03:15 Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field
2:03:18 and then I test them and then I share them with you.
2:03:21 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short.
2:03:24 A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off
2:03:26 for the weekend, something to think about.
2:03:29 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday.
2:03:33 Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday.
2:03:36 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
2:03:36 Thanks for listening.
2:03:42 This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T.
2:03:44 What on earth is Element?
2:03:47 It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix.
2:03:50 I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this.
2:03:52 It was one of the first things that I bought
2:03:54 when I saw COVID coming down the pike
2:03:57 and I usually use one to two per day.
2:04:00 Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs
2:04:03 and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet.
2:04:07 Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance,
2:04:08 that’s often when I drink it.
2:04:10 Or if you’re doing any type of endurance exercise,
2:04:13 mountain biking, et cetera, another application.
2:04:16 If you’ve ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo,
2:04:20 it’s most likely because even if you’re consciously consuming electrolytes,
2:04:22 you’re just not getting enough.
2:04:24 And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone
2:04:26 called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low.
2:04:29 But suffice to say, this is where Element,
2:04:31 again spelled L-M-N-T, can help.
2:04:34 My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt,
2:04:39 which is a side note you can also use to make a kick-ass no sugar margarita.
2:04:42 But for special occasions, obviously,
2:04:45 you’re probably already familiar with one of the names behind it,
2:04:47 Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf,
2:04:50 who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times
2:04:53 bestselling author of the Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat.
2:04:57 Rob created Element by scratching his own itch.
2:04:58 That’s how it got started.
2:05:01 His Brazilian jujitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes,
2:05:03 as a performance enhancer.
2:05:06 Things clicked and bam, company was born.
2:05:08 So if you’re on a low-carb diet or fasting,
2:05:14 electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.
2:05:18 Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that’s garbage, unneeded.
2:05:19 There’s none of that in Element.
2:05:23 And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element.
2:05:26 It was recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends.
2:05:28 Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their master chief,
2:05:33 marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions.
2:05:38 They are the exclusive hydration partner to team you as a weightlifting and on and on.
2:05:39 You can try it risk-free.
2:05:42 If you don’t like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked.
2:05:45 They have extremely low return rates.
2:05:50 Get your free sample pack with any Element purchase at drinkLMNT.com/tim.
2:05:53 Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling,
2:05:57 a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.
2:05:58 Again, check it all out.
2:06:01 DrinkElement.com/Tim.
2:06:04 DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.
2:06:08 This episode is brought to you by AG1,
2:06:13 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.
2:06:17 I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new.
2:06:23 I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago,
2:06:26 the 4-hour body, and I did not get paid to do so.
2:06:32 I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement
2:06:37 that you could use conveniently while on run, which is for me a lot of the time.
2:06:40 I have been using it a very, very long time indeed.
2:06:44 And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement.
2:06:46 And the true answer is invariably AG1.
2:06:48 It simply covers a ton of bases.
2:06:53 I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.
2:06:55 So what is AG1?
2:06:56 What is this stuff?
2:07:01 AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients.
2:07:06 In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.
2:07:10 Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times
2:07:14 in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible
2:07:18 using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients.
2:07:19 How many ingredients?
2:07:24 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market.
2:07:29 It has multivitamin, multi-mineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health,
2:07:35 an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress.
2:07:39 Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.
2:07:43 That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right?
2:07:45 That is why things are called supplements.
2:07:47 Of course, that’s what I focus on.
2:07:48 But it is not always possible.
2:07:50 It is not always easy.
2:07:54 So part of my routine is using AG1 daily.
2:07:59 If I’m on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once
2:08:03 and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes.
2:08:05 So each morning, AG1.
2:08:08 That’s just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine.
2:08:13 It’s also NSF-certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.
2:08:16 And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label,
2:08:20 does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals,
2:08:23 and is free of 280-band substances.
2:08:26 It’s the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop.
2:08:29 So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today.
2:08:34 You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs
2:08:36 with your first subscription purchase.
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2:08:42 Go to drinkag1.com/tim.
2:08:45 That’s Drink AG1, the number one.
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2:08:53 Check it out.
2:08:56 (crowd cheering)
2:09:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:06 I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something say a show on
0:00:12 Amazon or elsewhere and it says not available in your current location something like that or
0:00:15 Creepier still if you’re at home and this has happened to me
0:00:18 I search for something or I type in a URL
0:00:24 Incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says you might be searching for this
0:00:32 How about that and it suggests an alternative and I think to myself wait a second my Internet service provider is tracking my searches
0:00:34 And what I’m typing into the browser
0:00:40 Yeah, I don’t love it and a lot of you know I take privacy and security very seriously
0:00:45 That is why I’ve been using today’s episode sponsor express VPN for several years now
0:00:49 And I recommend you check it out when you connect to a secure VPN server
0:00:55 Your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into including hackers governments people and Starbucks
0:01:01 Your internet service provider, etc. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser
0:01:07 This was something that I got wrong for a long time your activity might still be visible as in the example
0:01:09 I gave to your internet service provider
0:01:12 Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address
0:01:17 Also with the example that I gave of you can’t access this kind of that content wherever you happen to be then you just set your server
0:01:20 to a country where you can see it and all of a sudden voila
0:01:26 you can say log into your normal Amazon account is supposed to be enrouted to dot UK or whatever and
0:01:34 Everything works so express VPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers
0:01:38 So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider now
0:01:43 They can’t read it express VPN is so fast also doesn’t bog things down at all
0:01:49 I usually forget that I even have it on I can stream high-quality video with no lag or buffering even on servers
0:01:54 Thousands of miles away gives me access to servers in a hundred and five countries around the world
0:01:58 Which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so
0:02:04 It’s easy to use you just choose a server location and tap one button to connect you do not need to be
0:02:08 Technologically savvy. You don’t need to know anything about how it works
0:02:14 It’s just one click and it works on every device phone laptop tablets even TVs
0:02:20 Express VPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can’t recommend it highly enough so check it out right now
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0:02:35 Just go to express VPN ex p ress VPN comm slash Tim for an extra three free months of express VPN one more time express
0:02:37 VPN comm slash Tim
0:02:47 This episode is brought to you by a G1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health
0:02:52 I view a G1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new
0:02:55 I actually recommended a G1 in my
0:03:01 2010 best seller more than a decade ago the four-hour body and I did not get paid to do so
0:03:08 I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use
0:03:12 Conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time
0:03:15 I have been using it a very very long time indeed
0:03:21 And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably a G1
0:03:24 It simply covers a ton of bases
0:03:28 I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road
0:03:37 So what is a G1? What is this stuff a G1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins probiotics and whole food sourced nutrients in a single scoop
0:03:42 a G1 gives you support for the brain gut and immune system since
0:03:51 2010 they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and
0:04:00 quality ingredients how many ingredients 75 and you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market
0:04:07 It has a multi vitamin multi mineral superfood complex probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and antioxidant immune support formula
0:04:11 Digestive enzymes and adaptogens to help manage stress now
0:04:18 I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic basic basic basic requirement
0:04:24 Right, that is why things are called supplements. Of course, that’s what I focus on, but it is not always possible
0:04:26 It is not always easy
0:04:31 So part of my routine is using a G1 daily if I’m on the road on the run
0:04:38 It just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes
0:04:43 So each morning a G1 that’s just like brushing my teeth part of the routine
0:04:50 It’s also NSF certified for sport so professional athletes trust it to be safe and each pouch of a G1 contains
0:04:58 Exactly what is on the label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 band substances
0:05:01 It’s the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop
0:05:04 So take ownership of your health and try a G1 today
0:05:11 You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free a G1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase
0:05:20 So learn more check it out. Go to drink ag1.com/tim. That’s drink ag1 the number one
0:05:27 Drink ag1.com/tim last time drink ag1.com/tim check it out
0:05:33 At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking
0:05:43 I’m a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton
0:05:57 Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show
0:06:08 Where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives
0:06:14 This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary
0:06:19 Which is insane to think about and past 1 billion downloads to celebrate
0:06:26 I’ve curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade
0:06:31 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally
0:06:36 We’ve been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes
0:06:42 Enjoy the household names the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people. I consider
0:06:49 Stars these are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you
0:06:53 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode
0:06:55 Just trust me on this one
0:07:00 We went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests
0:07:10 You can find that and more at tim.log/combo and now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening
0:07:13 First up Robert Rodriguez
0:07:21 Screenwriter producer and director of Desperado from Dusk till dawn the spy kids franchise
0:07:24 once upon a time in Mexico
0:07:26 Frank Miller’s Sin City
0:07:32 Machete and we can be heroes and founder of L. Ray network
0:07:37 You can find Robert on Twitter and Instagram at Rod Regas
0:07:47 How do you use journaling? I started, you know with the word processing way back, you know when I first started filmmaking the first
0:07:50 When I sold El Mariachi in Columbia hired me
0:07:55 First thing asked for was an Apple laptop computer, which was the very first one that came out
0:07:58 They know what it was. I was the only one on the plane with one
0:08:03 I was writing my screenplays and I would continue my journal which I’d started by handwriting it
0:08:09 It really started I think in college my dad gave me a day planner one of those day planners
0:08:13 And I started using it and I would write the things you’re gonna do on the left side
0:08:18 And then you would write what you ended up doing that day on the right and even though I was in college
0:08:20 I would try to push myself pretty hard. I would look and I’d go wow
0:08:23 I didn’t have very much to write about myself at the end of that day
0:08:28 I’m gonna have to give myself more things on the left so I have more to write stuff on the right
0:08:31 It really made you reflect on your day realize I didn’t I didn’t do much today
0:08:37 And so those got really full and I became a filmmaker right away El Mariachi got made and then during the process of El Mariachi
0:08:39 I remember
0:08:43 Keeping a really dense journal because it was an experiment
0:08:49 It was really a test film and that was during all parts of the process for all all parts of the process because I thought if I’m gonna
0:08:51 Go take on this endeavor. I know a lot of things aren’t gonna work out
0:08:55 It’s my first feature film. No one’s intended to see it. It’s really a learning experience
0:08:59 I’m just gonna go make it and I’m gonna be able to look back on my journal to see where I messed up
0:09:03 It was really gonna be a document so I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I could go back and track
0:09:08 Why did the exposure not work and I’d be able to go back and go? Oh, I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that
0:09:13 It was really gonna be a record of failure rather than a document of success in any way
0:09:15 it was really about
0:09:21 recording a methodology for a project a specific project and as the process went on right away as I started
0:09:27 Editing it. I kept track of that I sold it pretty quickly and then I was in Hollywood and that was like now
0:09:31 I really got something to write about I was writing down all the weird stuff that was happening
0:09:36 Finally, I decided to put out a book on just the making of a mariachi and I kept journaling from then on everything
0:09:41 Which was rebel without a crew rebel without a crew and I would find that you meet the same people over and over again
0:09:44 Like I wrote down very specifics of people that I would meet casually in Hollywood
0:09:49 Knowing we would run into each other again and they know being great collaborators 10 years later
0:09:53 You know or showing up in things and I’d be able to go back and read them stuff from the early days
0:09:54 They would blow them away
0:09:59 So when you write these down for instance don’t go into computer so I can find them and I do in my year
0:10:02 So do you do it by hand and then input it into a computer? No, I do them all in the computer
0:10:06 So I have a little alarm that goes off at midnight to make sure because around midnight’s usually a good time
0:10:11 And I’ll write something down because I found that even when I just wrote some items down
0:10:15 I could go back and fill them in later because you would remember and would always would shock me would kept it going
0:10:19 It’s when I would go back and review the journals at how many
0:10:25 Life-changing things happen like within a weekend or things that you thought were spread out over two years were actually
0:10:27 Friday Saturday Sunday and that Monday
0:10:34 I mean so many occurrences happen in chunks to blow you away things that kind of define you and you use some word
0:10:40 Do you use a different application? How do you always just used word because I was the first thing I had on Apple laptop
0:10:42 They’re about a thousand
0:10:45 Sometimes a thousand two thousand pages per year Wow of journals
0:10:50 Few days or I’m sorry a few pages per night on average
0:10:55 Yeah, few pages per sometimes some some hardly anything some things are bigger and sometimes it’s a cheek sometimes
0:10:59 I’ll clip like reviews or conversations I had that have been written down somewhere else
0:11:02 And I’ll throw them in there too everything goes right in the right date
0:11:08 And so I could search by date and I can kind of cross-reference stuff which is I would just say for anyone’s a parent
0:11:12 It’s a must. It’s a must because your children and you forget everything, you know
0:11:16 Within a few years they’ll forget things that you think they should remember for the rest of their lives now
0:11:20 They’ll only remember it if it’s reinforced and I’m a real family man
0:11:21 So I really love every birthday
0:11:28 I’ll go tell my kids again because they forget by the next year what their first years were like cuz I’ll just read those journal entries
0:11:35 And it blows them away, you know, or they’ll say hey, we should go camping again. I go camping. Oh, yeah
0:11:40 I remember that time we went camping and I put the tent in the backyard and had electricity going through we had fans
0:11:43 We’re watching Johnny Quest and we’re playing I must have
0:11:49 Journal on that and I must have video so I would go year by year. I just searched camping camping camping
0:11:56 Oh May 4th 1999 we went camping. Oh, it’s on tape 25 of this particular tape
0:11:59 I’d go find the tape and show it to them. I’ve tried showing the tape
0:12:04 They didn’t have to go camping again. They just relived it relived it and there was better than we even remembered
0:12:06 so
0:12:12 Capsulating stuff like that was just really important reminds me of something. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about but my
0:12:18 Mom when I was 15 I spent a year abroad in Japan as my first time overseas and I was in a Japanese school
0:12:22 It’s the only you know, where’s Waldo American kid in the entire yeah, I think it was 5,000 students school
0:12:27 Japanese family and of course I assumed at the time I was going to remember everything that happened
0:12:29 But my mom to her credit
0:12:33 Every time we had a phone call would get off the phone and write down what I had said
0:12:38 Wow, and so she has this record of my experience in Japan that I have no record of and of course
0:12:40 I don’t remember any of it without that kind of queuing. Yeah
0:12:47 Part of that came from I read about a diary my mom tried to keep when we were really though and it had
0:12:49 Very few entries
0:12:53 But one of the most defining moments when she pushed me into a pole because I wouldn’t go jump in
0:12:55 She knew I just needed a push and I felt totally betrayed
0:13:01 Angry with it it was in there, but had her side of the story and of course it was correct
0:13:06 But I wish she had written more so I thought I’m gonna make sure I write and now it’s become an addiction
0:13:10 And I and it’s just so necessary me you ask her girlfriend or your wife
0:13:12 What do we do last year on your birthday?
0:13:17 They won’t remember a year goes by you will not remember the details you go back and you see the journals
0:13:20 It’s even better the second time you live that again, and you realize the importance of it
0:13:21 and when you meet someone
0:13:28 You think might be a recurring figure in your life or you meet someone who ends up being a teacher of some type
0:13:29 Mm-hmm
0:13:34 How often do you go back and review the notes or do you is it really just in time information?
0:13:37 Not just in case so when you when you realize oh my god
0:13:40 I’m gonna be meeting say Francis Ford Coppola for the second time
0:13:45 I should probably go back and look at what happened in the first meeting or is it something that you proactively review
0:13:50 It’s only gonna need to know because there’s so many things you mean you’re you’re really I’d tell myself
0:13:53 I want to be the guy looking through the windshield not the rearview mirror
0:13:58 But sometimes you can see better through the windshield if you look through the rearview mirror and look at some of this stuff
0:14:01 That’s gone on and seen kind of makes sense of where your
0:14:05 Relationships are going or what you’ve learned and it blows me away sometimes
0:14:09 I’ll just go ahead and look somebody up you know that I’m about to meet with I just met with Jim Cameron
0:14:11 We have always talked like four hours
0:14:15 We hadn’t seen each other in a few years and they looked up old stuff and I was like oh my god
0:14:18 Do you remember we did this this time at him 20 years ago
0:14:21 And we’d been friends over the years and they totally forgot when I went and showed him
0:14:25 Desperado for the first time before it came out just to see what he thought
0:14:29 He’s watched it in his screening room, and he gave me two little manuscripts here
0:14:34 Why watch your movie you go read couple of my treatments one of them was for spider-man and one of them was for avatar
0:14:40 This was a 1994. Wow. That’s how long ago he had that and how much that was going in his head
0:14:42 I thought wow
0:14:46 To keep something that was that visionary and you had that long waiting for the technology to come
0:14:51 Those kind of things made you realize some of these projects. I’ve had for ten years
0:14:52 I should go re-bring them back up
0:14:57 I wonder and I have I have since then dusted off something that I’d had 15 years and
0:15:02 Sold it and now I’ve just finished a screenplay for it. So you mentioned Jim Cameron
0:15:09 I had an opportunity to I met him very briefly through the X Prize and Peter D. Mendis and those guys and
0:15:14 As part of the experience it was a fundraiser for the X Prize. We all got
0:15:19 Staff or crew shirts from avatar, right and the shirts said
0:15:22 It said something along the lines of hope is not a strategy
0:15:26 failure is not an option luck is not a factor and
0:15:30 Jim is known for being very demanding not in a bad way
0:15:34 But I thought that shirt was just it spoke volumes
0:15:38 I think in so many different ways about sort of his process his mentality
0:15:45 How do you keep morale high when you’re working with a crew and maybe like you said you’re doing like an exterior
0:15:49 Shot in Austin and people are just suffering and sweating and so on fatigue
0:15:52 Do you have any tricks or?
0:15:57 Approaches that you use over and over again to keep kind of morale high and get the best out of people
0:16:00 I’ve worked with the same crew for some of them for 20 years
0:16:07 And so they kind of know already the philosophy I tend to have and I’ve learned this not through filmmaking
0:16:13 But through other disciplines sometimes working with painters and with sculptors and musician friends because what I found
0:16:15 It’s kind of why I do so many different jobs is because
0:16:19 Creativity is in job specific. I mean if you know how to be creative
0:16:25 You can literally jump from job to job with no training and do them pretty well because the technical part of any job is 10%
0:16:30 90% of that is creativity if you already know how to be creative you’ve kind of got the battle
0:16:34 You know half B, which is you don’t need to know you don’t need to know what notes specifically
0:16:37 You’re gonna play when you get on stage and do your solo everybody will go. What did you just play and you’re gonna go?
0:16:41 I don’t know. Yes, it’s to me fun though. How do you know what you’re playing just now?
0:16:46 I don’t even know what I played. I said, well, it was fantastic anybody tape it. No, that’s another one
0:16:50 It goes off into the air, you know, I guess any of the greats, you know painters
0:16:56 I studied under a painter Sebastian Kruger went all the way to Germany to watch him paint to figure out his trick
0:16:59 How does he do it because I tried to do what he did and it looked like garbage
0:17:04 He must have a special brush much to have special paint and a special technique and I go
0:17:09 No, he’s just doing starts with the mid tones just knocking in some highlights a little bit on the chin
0:17:11 Then he goes to the high and how do you know where to go next because oh, I never know
0:17:15 It’s different every time that drives me bonkers. We need so how come I can’t do that
0:17:19 And I go sit down and suddenly I could do it it blows you away
0:17:24 So I take those lessons back and I teach my actors that I teach my crew that so just to don’t need to know
0:17:30 Yeah, so since it started pause, but this is so fascinating to me. So what clicked what was the realization when you sat down?
0:17:35 And so you get in your own way thinking that you needed to know something a trick or a
0:17:39 Process before it would flow if you got out of the way
0:17:45 It would just flow what gives you permission to let it flow sometimes if you take four years of schooling or you study under somebody
0:17:49 Then you’ve suddenly given your permission to let it flow and I know you’re a guy who likes to take a shortcut in
0:17:51 Here’s the shortcut just get out of your own way
0:17:57 Right you just opening it up the pipe and that creativity flows through and as soon as your ego gets in the way and you go
0:18:03 But I don’t know if I know what to do next. You’ve already put I in front of it and you’ve already blocked it a little bit
0:18:06 I did it once but I don’t know if I can do it again
0:18:10 It was never you the best you can be is just to get out of the way so it comes through
0:18:14 So when an actor comes to me or crew member goes, I’m not sure I know how to play this part
0:18:18 Or I’m not sure I know because that’s beautiful because the other half’s gonna show up over there
0:18:19 They say knowing to have the battle
0:18:23 I think the most important part is the other half not knowing not knowing what’s gonna happen
0:18:27 But you trust that it’ll be there when you put the brush up to the canvas
0:18:30 It’s gonna know where to go and the further you’re out of the way of it
0:18:35 It’ll just happen so the trust comes first and trust comes first you have to trust first and then it’ll happen
0:18:38 And I always point it out when it does I point it out
0:18:41 You’ll see it and I’ll point it out when it’s gonna fall on your lap
0:18:45 Or I’ll just call upon you to come up with something and you will and I’m gonna point out because that’s the magic
0:18:48 You’re just gonna be open to it. It’s all attitude. There’s nothing wrong that could ever happen
0:18:53 I remember I’m from desktop on the film the special effects guys
0:18:59 Put too much fire and the explosion and the actors come running out of the building and the it’s in the movie
0:19:03 You see the building blow up the bar at the end and the fireball if you were to continue
0:19:07 But I cut away it just kept going and engulfed the whole set and that was the first shot
0:19:11 We still needed lots of other stuff to shoot with it and they’re like, okay
0:19:17 Everyone else is freaking out the production designers cry and those all their work and mean my assistant director
0:19:21 He came over and he goes you think what I’m thinking. Oh, yeah, this it looks good the way it is
0:19:25 It’s all charred. Let’s just keep shooting and we’ll do the repair
0:19:28 You know little repair these been done for next week and we’ll shoot that exterior next week
0:19:34 But let’s just shoot let’s just keep shooting sometimes you use those gifts because nothing ever goes according to plan
0:19:38 And sometimes when I hear you know new filmmakers talk they talk all down about their film
0:19:41 No, well nothing worked and it was a disappointment. It’s like oh, they don’t realize it
0:19:45 That’s the job the job is that nothing is gonna work at all and you go
0:19:47 How can I turn that in a way?
0:19:52 To turn it into a positive and I get something much better than if I had all the time money in the world
0:19:56 Yeah, and I love those experiences so much that I would purposely
0:20:03 And I talked to Michael Mann about this and Michael Mann director’s chair because we talked about manhunter once years ago
0:20:08 And he retell me the story and he didn’t have any money. He’d fired the effects crew
0:20:14 It’s some of the really cool staccato editing was really to cover up the fact that they didn’t have effects and I didn’t know that
0:20:18 I always thought it was a stylistic choice. He goes no because we didn’t have any money or time
0:20:21 And I had the covers cut it in myself and I was throwing ketchup on the guy in between and I put it at it
0:20:24 I was like, oh my god. I thought that was brilliant stylistic choice. No
0:20:28 I said, I’m gonna do that for all my movies now
0:20:30 I want all of them to not have enough money not enough time
0:20:37 So that we’re forced to be more creative because that’s gonna give it something to spark that you can’t manufacture and people will tap it
0:20:39 Or they go, I don’t know why I like this movie. It’s kind of a weird move
0:20:43 But there’s something about it that makes me want to watch it again and again because it’s got a life to it
0:20:50 Sometimes art is should be imperfect in a way the point you made just a minute ago about creativity
0:20:55 Transferring from one area to the next to seemingly unrelated
0:21:01 Skills and areas I think is really important and I cannot recommend highly enough that people check out the director’s chair
0:21:07 and one of the one of the terms that jumped out which you kind of mentioned in your last example was the gremlins right and the
0:21:14 Gremlins and turn to you how do you embrace the gremlins right and turn them to your advantage and the you know the example of the ending of
0:21:21 Back to the future and how like the church down and all of that was because the studios just refused to finance this more
0:21:25 Kind of spectacular ending things that you would think that planned for four years
0:21:30 Yeah, we’re created at the last moment and you guys couldn’t believe that myself. That’s why I enjoy doing those interviews
0:21:34 I truly want to know these things because they still blow me away the creative process blows me away
0:21:38 And it applies to so much that even if you’re not a director or a filmmaker you watch that
0:21:46 You see people talking about the creativity and creative process and you see how it applies to anything that you do how you raise your children
0:21:50 how you cook food how you run a business, you know creativity is so much a part of that and
0:21:58 When people say, oh you do so many things you your musician your painter you you know you edit your composer
0:22:02 Cinematographer you the editor is saying you do so many different things go. No, I only do one thing
0:22:09 I live a creative life when you put creativity in everything everything becomes available to you anything that has creative aspect
0:22:13 Is suddenly yours to go and do there’s no separation between work and play. I mean I
0:22:19 Work quote unquote in my house. I mean, that’s why I write my scripts come up with my ideas
0:22:22 While I’m playing with my kids while I’m cooking them a meal
0:22:27 Which is a creative exercise art you can eat in itself and you go upstairs and do some editing
0:22:30 Yet it is seeing you I can already hear the kind of the music for I’ll walk over to this room
0:22:33 I’ll do music for it. I mean then you know and I’m not sure how I’m that’s character
0:22:39 I’m gonna get into this character said maybe I’ll paint him first and to kind of see visually what he looks like or musically
0:22:43 What he sounds like and you can work completely non-linear that way because you realize I
0:22:49 Can do anything I want because everything can be creative even the business call suddenly you go
0:22:53 This is kind of out of my league, but me had my creativity to it
0:22:56 And maybe that’ll solve something no one else would be able to solve and sure enough
0:23:02 You can always rely on creativity to sort of win the day and in a lot of areas and with say
0:23:08 El mariachi, I’ve heard a couple of different versions of this financing, but I’d love to know how you
0:23:14 Financed it because I’ve heard experimental medical procedures. I’ve heard
0:23:19 Selling your sort of body to science. How was that financed?
0:23:23 Yeah, that’s one of the strangest things the legend kept growing around El mariachi
0:23:27 And it’s one of the few times you’ll hear a legend where it was all literally true
0:23:28 I mean it was
0:23:32 It was as crazy as it sounded but back then, you know, I mean I was from a family of ten kids
0:23:36 There was no borrowing from mom and dad to go make a movie. Yes, that was on me
0:23:41 I was already paying my way through school and I already had two jobs. I had a job as a cartoonist
0:23:45 I had a job working at the University and barely making rent and tuition
0:23:51 So to go make a movie even though, you know, people would sell 7,000 that’s so cheap for a 16 millimeter movie
0:23:55 Oh, yeah, you got $7,000 sticking out of your pocket. Who has that?
0:24:00 So you had to kind of take down a score and the only way you could actually go do a big number
0:24:04 West to go to this. It was one of the biggest universities in the country at the time
0:24:08 They had this thing called a pharmacot, which was a medical research facility
0:24:11 And it’s only like a fourth stage where it’s already been tested many times
0:24:15 And this is the final before they get FD. You’re not replacing you. They’re not they’re not like, you know
0:24:18 Mixing a couple things together and give it to you and say, okay, let’s see if it works
0:24:23 They’re really kind of seen but they need healthy young specimens between the ages of 18 and 24
0:24:25 And so that’s college students and they all need money
0:24:28 So you go in for a weekend and make 500 bucks, which would be my picking cushion
0:24:34 I would go in there for the longer ones. They were like a month where you would be paid for your time rather than your pain
0:24:39 And I would write scripts while I was in there and you make two thousand three thousand dollars
0:24:43 It’s real money in a month real money when you’re not having to pay for food and rent anything now
0:24:45 You have to eat. Oh, so you were housed there your house there
0:24:49 Yeah, you’re housing you can’t leave and you got to eat and shit and pee at a certain time benefit though
0:24:54 Right because you’re they’re covering some of your what would otherwise be expensive. It was a great deal
0:24:58 And so I did a couple of those and one of them was a drug that’s on the market Lipitor
0:25:02 Cholesterol lowering drug. That’s the one I was on so I got to eat bacon
0:25:06 Okay, I got to eat a high cholesterol diet
0:25:12 I use that money to go and make the film because I had an idea we could sell it for at least double what we made it if we
0:25:16 Kept the budget really low. I didn’t know so I had to just make it for as little as possible
0:25:21 Most of that money went to just the film stock and I really didn’t think anyone was gonna see it
0:25:25 It was really just a test film. That’s why I did it in Spanish. I did it for the Spanish market
0:25:29 I was already had a bunch of award-winning short films, but I needed to practice telling features
0:25:34 So I thought I’d just make a bunch of features for the Spanish market just to get some seasoning do all the jobs myself
0:25:39 Because I couldn’t afford a crew and that way I’ll learn them all if I can sell it for twice of what I put in
0:25:41 That’s like the best film school. I’ll learn every job
0:25:43 I’ll do like two or three of these things cut them all together
0:25:49 Take out the best portions and use it on my demo reel and then use the money that I make to go make a real first
0:25:56 film English language American independent film the first one got released by Columbia Pictures and I was shocked
0:25:58 how did that happen and
0:26:04 Who took a chance on you or how did you increase the odds of that happening because I guess it was Sundance
0:26:07 Is that was that the trigger? No, I was already bought by Sundance. It was already bought by Sundance
0:26:10 So how did that happen? I had this crazy idea
0:26:14 I had made this short film by myself was a wind-up camera was eight minutes long
0:26:20 It was called bedhead. It’s online and I utilized it to use slow motion and all kinds of things that I couldn’t use on a
0:26:25 Video camera. I really wanted to show off what I could do with that little camera as a world world or two camera
0:26:28 They’ll wind up ones. I mean a piece of junk but it could do stuff
0:26:33 It couldn’t do a video shot that put it in festivals and won a bunch of festivals and I was like wow
0:26:38 I did that all by myself with $800 it’s eight minutes if I did that times 10
0:26:42 I could do an 80-minute movie for $8,000 or less because it would be dialogue scenes
0:26:45 It wouldn’t be wall-to-wall action like that short film. I could pat it out
0:26:50 I could probably do it for five grand I felt like I was getting away with something coming up with this idea thinking
0:26:53 How come no one’s ever done this before let me go try it this summer
0:26:57 I mean try it for the Spanish video market because they make them for like 30 grand, but I’ll guarantee no one sees it
0:27:01 I’ll call it a mariachi, which is basically if you’re going to the action section
0:27:07 You won’t buy a movie call a random movie called the guitar player that promises no action at all
0:27:11 But I just thought you know had a sense of humor and I thought let me make it kind of don’t really want people to see it
0:27:14 I just want to be able to test out these ideas and see if it’s possible
0:27:19 Shot shot shot cut it cut it cut it went to sell it in LA because that’s where the distributors were for those
0:27:25 U.S. Distributed Spanish language movies because you would just look at the video box and all the companies were like on Wilson Boulevard
0:27:27 So I drove up here with my friend Carlos
0:27:33 And the in I had was there was going to be a 25th anniversary of the Texas Film Commission in Austin
0:27:39 and a bunch of people from Hollywood that Governor and Richards was trying to invite in and I saw the list of people and one of the
0:27:44 Agents from ICM called Robert Newman was going to be there and I thought maybe I can try and slip on my short films
0:27:50 Well, the whole thing got canceled and fell apart. So when I was in LA, I called ICM up cold
0:27:54 I looked him up in the film book called him up. This was in 1992 and asked for Robert Newman’s office
0:27:58 And they put me right through he was a new agent there. He didn’t have any directors yet
0:28:00 I called up his assistant and said hey, can I talk to Robert Newman?
0:28:04 He was gonna come down to this 25th anniversary thing and they said oh
0:28:08 Said yeah, what happened with that? I was already to come down. Oh, I don’t know
0:28:10 But I was gonna show you my film and I’m here in town
0:28:14 I wanted to drop off my award-winning short film in a trailer for a movie I made for $7,000
0:28:16 Okay, drop it off. I couldn’t believe it dropped it off
0:28:20 He called me back up the next day. Hey the machine ate my tape
0:28:27 He actually watched it couldn’t believe it went made another tape give it to waited over the weekend and I got to call
0:28:33 And he says I love the short film, but I love the trailer the trailer for this movie the mariachi movie
0:28:37 I mean, it’s like a world-class trailer because I kind of I knew people can watch the whole thing
0:28:39 So I was pretty good at it. I kept this really snazzy
0:28:45 Trailer that just made you want to watch the movie and he said it. How much did it cost again? It’s at 7,000
0:28:48 Well, that’s pretty good. Most trailers cost 20 or 30. No, no the whole film cost
0:28:53 So come on. I know the whole thing I shot it. I shot it really little budge
0:28:56 But I’m gonna can I come up and talk to you so you had me come up and I told them
0:29:01 I plan on making two or three of these like a trilogy of these guy with a guitar case as
0:29:08 Just a test and I’m wondering what else I should put on my demo tape because you know my award-winning short films been doing well
0:29:13 I think it was all kind of like a dollars trilogy and I could get you work right now off of this
0:29:18 So really because yeah, I send this to the studios just put subtitles on it and I’ll send it to him
0:29:21 So I subtitled it send it he got me a two-year deal right away
0:29:26 Columbia pictures not to even release mariachi mariachi was just a calling card, but it happened to so quick
0:29:33 I mean, I was really young was what 22 23. I really thought I was gonna make some test films first and have a chance to come up with
0:29:39 What my big idea was. I mean, I wasn’t no rush. I really wanted to be prepared. I really wanted to learn every job and really know
0:29:43 What I was doing so this suddenly caught me by surprise because now they’re asking well
0:29:47 You’re a filmmaker now and he even wrote me down as a writer director. I guess a writer director
0:29:49 I guess I wrote the scrubs. Oh, yeah, I guess I’m a writer director
0:29:52 I really thought of myself that way and I was suddenly
0:29:58 Young kid plunged into this world and I suddenly have to come up with a bunch of original ideas because this was my shot
0:30:03 It was too quick. Yeah, they call it not prepared. So I thought well, look you guys like the mariachi
0:30:08 Why don’t we just remake that remake it with like Antonio bandedis in Spain and we’ll just cast it up and just remain
0:30:09 They said, okay, that’s a good idea
0:30:15 But we want to test screen on mariachi first to make sure people aren’t think that’s a downer ending when the girl gets killed
0:30:20 So they made a film print they tested it people liked it the way it was they decided to take it to festivals
0:30:25 I completely protested. It’s like this was my practice film. No one was ever supposed to see this
0:30:30 Give me $2,000 my debut baton ball. Don’t put this out for the world to say it’s out
0:30:32 I should if I knew people were gonna see give me $2,000
0:30:33 I’ll go reshoot half of it
0:30:37 Just knowing people were gonna see it as my first film and they said now you don’t know what you have here
0:30:44 It’s very special and they took it out and they went to tell your ride Toronto and the the head of Sundance came to me at Toronto
0:30:47 So don’t show it at any more festivals and you can bring it to Sundance and put it in competition
0:30:52 Because you know, he knew it would do really well there and it once and I was already bought by Columbia
0:30:55 So I was one of the few films usually that it’s already had a distributor
0:30:57 and we took it and I
0:30:59 Had a great little talk
0:31:02 I would do before to set it up because I had to disclaim why it was the way it was
0:31:05 And so when you see the Columbia logo come on in the front
0:31:10 Local probably cost more than the whole movie when everything you watch after that
0:31:14 Just know that I how I did it. I wanted people to know how I did it
0:31:18 I really wanted to deconstruct how it was done because I would have wanted to know that as a film student who felt
0:31:23 Coming from a family of ten kids living in Texas people constantly saying you want to be a filmmaker?
0:31:28 Oh, you need to move to LA that you could stay where you are and come up with something that could be sold
0:31:29 I wanted others
0:31:34 I just wanted to get on top of mountain tell everybody so that’s why I put out a book and that’s why even before each screening
0:31:35 I would explain
0:31:40 How it was even possible because I knew they would be wondering because nobody had really ever done it
0:31:44 It wasn’t that it was impossible just nobody had done it before no one ever thought that way people kind of forgot
0:31:49 That’s how movies really started. It was always like a couple guys with a wind-up camera and Buster Keaton in front
0:31:55 It wasn’t a business yet when it became a business suddenly everyone had a job and you needed 200 people because it was now an industry
0:31:57 That’s not what the art form was originally
0:32:03 It was just the manipulation of moving images and you can do that with two people one person that was a breakthrough idea
0:32:07 And so be able to tell them I just took stock in what I had my friend Carlos
0:32:11 He’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guys at his cousin owns a bar
0:32:17 The bars was gonna be the first initial shootouts were gonna be all the bad guys hang out his other cousin owns a bus line
0:32:22 Okay, they’ll be an action scene with a bus at some point. There’s a big action scene in the middle movie with a bus
0:32:25 He’s got a pit bull. Okay. He’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle
0:32:31 He found okay the turtles in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler and that was suddenly raised production value
0:32:35 See I wrote everything around what we had so you never had to go searching
0:32:39 You never had to spend anything on the movie the movie cost really nothing
0:32:42 It was really just the the fact that I wanted to shoot it on film instead of video
0:32:47 So that it would look more expensive and try and tell people, you know made it for 70,000 try to sell it for like 70,000
0:32:55 Said it ended up going to Columbia and getting released and that story really when we won Sundance the audience award
0:33:01 My acceptance speech said you’re gonna get a lot more entries next year when people find out that this is the one that won
0:33:05 Movie made with no money. No crew. Everyone’s gonna pick up a camera start making their own movies
0:33:10 And it’s been flooded with entries since then it was really a real change in the paradigm
0:33:14 And it was only out of necessity. It wasn’t my big idea that it could be done
0:33:16 I really just thought I don’t want to take anyone with me
0:33:20 Even my best friend wanted to come help on my movie shoot from mariachi. I said no
0:33:26 So I gotta go to Mexico and this camera bar, you know, it’s probably gonna break down the first day
0:33:30 I don’t want to jinx it if I start bringing too many people down. I don’t mind failing
0:33:32 I just don’t like failing at a bunch of other in front of a bunch of other people
0:33:36 So where they go back and they say Robert trying to make a movie for no money
0:33:45 I really didn’t think it would work and I was surprised and that’s the best I tell people is just be naive stay naive
0:33:51 Throw it away. Don’t overthink it. I didn’t overthink it at all because I would have treated it completely differently
0:33:56 Had I thought I would ever even show it to anybody and I thought it would go to a festival and I would submit it
0:33:58 I would have spent ten times as much
0:34:00 I would have gone and borrowed money and done all instead
0:34:05 It was like one take one take one two everything was one take even if it didn’t work because I had the film so expensive
0:34:08 So I would go and it was a noisy camera. It was a soundless camera
0:34:13 I mean, it would make so much noise. You couldn’t record sound. So I had to record sound the way you’re doing right now
0:34:18 Right, so I would shoot a take put the camera away get the sound out put the mic up close
0:34:21 So for those people, yeah, we have two mics attached to a little recording device
0:34:25 I would put the mic as close as you have it. So I got great sound, but it was out of sync
0:34:30 But you kind of talk in your own rhythm. So if you say hi, my name is you know Robert
0:34:36 Put the camera away. Okay, now do the audio. Hi, my name is Robert the kinds of comes in pretty much get a little sync
0:34:38 I don’t like rubbery lips if you look at mariachi
0:34:41 It’s all in sync except where it started to get out of sync
0:34:46 I cut away to the dog or I cut away to a close-up and it created this really little snappy editing style
0:34:50 But it was really just to get it back in sync because I couldn’t stand that but that was the whole idea
0:34:54 You know, it’s like, let me just try and do all these things myself and see if we can put it together
0:34:55 it reminds me of
0:35:01 Jack Ma, I mean it’s very consistent among these people who seem to come out of nowhere and build something very big
0:35:06 Of course, there are exceptions, but Jack Ma of Ali Baba. I said, you know, we had a couple of advantages when we started
0:35:08 We had no experience no money
0:35:15 No plan and so every dollar we spent we had to consider very very very carefully. Well, my plan was I had a really good plan
0:35:16 This was the plan was
0:35:22 I’m gonna go shoot one take of everything because the film is the most expensive item if I just shoot two takes
0:35:27 You know one just in case I’ve just doubled my budget so one take I’ll cut it together
0:35:32 The stuff that I need to come reshoot will only reshoot that will only get those shots
0:35:36 He never come back and reshoot by the time you get back up there back to Austin
0:35:43 You figure out a way to cut around things that were like not done right or a little slow or and I never came back
0:35:45 And reshot anything you end up just working with what you got
0:35:50 But it left me off got me off the hook from being too precious is by knowing I had that safety net
0:35:55 Which I never ended up using so if you can do that for yourself, you know in any area that you’re in
0:36:00 Try to just go free with abandoned and sometimes, you know, they say that for writing a book or writing a script
0:36:05 Just right don’t keep rereading each page and going oh, it’s not good enough and then tear it up and throw it in the trash can
0:36:06 You’ll never get anywhere
0:36:10 You got to just get momentum get it down and keep going and come back later with fresh eyes and look at it again
0:36:12 Now that you have access to so many resources
0:36:15 what are practices you have or
0:36:24 Principles for maintaining that scrappy creative mindset right because if you you don’t have to have many constraints if you don’t want to yeah
0:36:28 At this point are there ways that you try to simulate that or there’s a couple things with that
0:36:32 This is freedom of limitations, you know, there’s almost more freeing to know I
0:36:39 Got to use only these items turtle bar ranch. You’re almost completely free within that. You know, you almost can do
0:36:42 not anything because that would be almost
0:36:46 Too many options, but you’re just put into a box is one of my favorite moves
0:36:50 I did with Quentin was called four rooms where they said we’re all doing short films
0:36:55 We’re all have the same criteria has to be set in one room has to be New Year’s Eve and you have to use the bell hop
0:36:59 The freedom of limitations was enormous
0:37:04 I mean you watch that short and it goes all over the room by the end we burn down the room
0:37:10 I mean, it’s it’s almost a some more exciting to know that you were in a box and you could be creative within that box
0:37:13 So now that so many things are available to you you want to limit yourself in a way
0:37:20 So I try to limit time and try to limit money so that we can really get still keep that essence of creativity
0:37:23 And deliver on the screen something that just looks much bigger
0:37:28 So that you can retain your freedom creative freedom because if you start spending more money
0:37:36 Suddenly the financiers rightfully so the studios or you know, the executives will be over your shoulder constantly
0:37:41 Questioning every move you make because they want their money back, but if you keep the budget low
0:37:46 It’s a win-win situation and the movie does great. It’s a great success of the movie doesn’t do great
0:37:50 It’s still a success because it didn’t cost very much and it’ll make back its money over time
0:37:52 That’s kind of where I’ve kind of lived and breathe
0:37:55 I’m about to jump out of the box a little bit more and do some things that are a little bigger
0:37:59 Just to learn more you could you just learn more when you go and do other kind of assignments
0:38:04 But where it’s really the most fun and that’s why you guys how do you keep the morale high?
0:38:08 The morale is always high on the set because they know we’re just being creative. That’s the name of the game
0:38:14 It’s not looking for a result. It’s like how can we just keep ourselves jazzed about this?
0:38:24 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by element spelled
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0:39:30 and
0:39:36 Now Susan Kane
0:39:43 Number one New York Times best-selling author of quiet the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking
0:39:51 Which spent eight years on the New York Times bestsellers list and bittersweet how sorrow and longing make us whole and
0:39:57 Award-winning speaker whose TED talks have garnered more than 46 million views
0:40:02 You can find Susan on Instagram at Susan Kane author
0:40:07 Susan welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me
0:40:12 I have been looking forward to having you on the show for some time and
0:40:17 We have a lot of terrain to possibly cover so we may end up having a part two and three
0:40:21 But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I thought that we could look at
0:40:28 Public speaking just for a second because many people will associate you with this blockbuster
0:40:30 mega hit of a TED talk and
0:40:34 Rumor has it that you
0:40:41 Straight in the delivery room from the get-go were a natural born killer on stage. This is true
0:40:45 Were you born a spectacular public speaker? Oh my gosh
0:40:52 Okay, well everybody listening you can’t see Tim right now, but he has a very devilish smile on his face
0:40:57 because of course the answer is the complete opposite so I
0:41:03 Had a lifelong while dating back to middle school. I know exactly when it started
0:41:09 I had an almost lifelong fear of public speaking and a lot of people say they’re afraid of public speaking and you know
0:41:15 They’re telling the truth, but like they didn’t have a fear the way I had a fear of it. It was so extreme
0:41:21 What was the triggering event? Oh, okay, the triggering event was I had recently switched to a new middle school and
0:41:25 I was in an English literature class
0:41:31 And I probably appeared to the teacher in that class to be not a shy person at all because I love English
0:41:35 So I was always participating. Anyway, she called me up to the front of the room
0:41:38 We were doing Macbeth and she called me up with a friend of mine and she said okay
0:41:44 You’re gonna play Lady Macbeth and your friend Rob is gonna play a Macbeth and just improvise this scene and
0:41:49 for me as a shy person in a new school, this was like
0:41:51 total kryptonite and I
0:41:55 Couldn’t say anything. I just completely
0:42:02 Blanked out and just stood there dumbly at the front of the class and finally just had to kind of sit back down
0:42:07 Red-faced not having said a word. That sounds terrible. Oh my god making my palms sweat
0:42:16 Just listening to it. Yeah. Yeah, you know and I know this now now that I’ve studied all this stuff that if you have an experience like that
0:42:18 It gets encoded into your amygdala
0:42:25 Which is the part of your brain that registers all your fears and then the amygdala for the rest of your life is doing its job by saying
0:42:31 Oh, you know, I’m gonna steer you clear of any situation ever approximating anything like that literature class ever again
0:42:33 so
0:42:38 After that any time I had to give a speech and I did it, you know, I used to be a lawyer and on Wall Street and stuff
0:42:40 Anytime I would do it
0:42:48 I would just sort of suffer my way through and I would always lose five pounds because I couldn’t eat before like for a week before
0:42:56 Then I started writing this book quiet after I had left law and I really really really cared about it
0:42:57 You know
0:43:01 It was my dream come true to be a writer and I cared so much about the ideas in the book
0:43:07 And I didn’t want my fear to stand in my way and I was giving this Ted talk
0:43:12 So I had to overcome it. How did the opportunity for the Ted talk come about?
0:43:17 So I had a friend who worked at Ted told him about the book
0:43:20 And he kind of passed on the idea to the curators at the time
0:43:26 And I think that they understood that most of the Ted audience is really introverted
0:43:29 And so they knew that it would relate with their audience
0:43:35 And I think that that was probably why they invited me in and I mean I’ll come back to how I overcame my fear in a minute
0:43:41 But I will tell you they turned out to be so accurate that after I gave the talk
0:43:48 You know, I came down off the stage and I was absolutely mobbed for the whole rest of the week by every single other audience member
0:43:51 Who are all coming to tell me, you know, that’s my story too
0:43:56 And I’m going around pretending to be this very confident extroverted person and that’s not really who I am
0:44:01 So amazing. Yeah, prison company included. Oh, yeah
0:44:06 Absolutely, I will steer us back and you will also bring us back to what we were just talking about but
0:44:14 Last night at a group dinner, which I helped organize. Keep in mind at a wonderful restaurant here in New York City called the Lillian celebrities place
0:44:20 I had to take four or five bathroom breaks, which were not to use the bathroom
0:44:24 It was just that is what I do at any dinner of more than one or two people
0:44:31 I have to exit not just the conversations, but the environment to just
0:44:38 Recharge my batteries and gather my bearings for a few minutes and then go back on it’s it’s like you’re feeling a kind of over-stimulation
0:44:44 Overstimulation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s so interesting because I’ve heard you talk before about
0:44:51 Moving to Austin and having these group dinners and I thought oh, that’s so interesting that that’s what Tim wants to do because I
0:44:57 Would never choose to socialize that way. I always love to socialize one-on-one almost the way we’re doing right now
0:45:02 Yeah, sitting here just talking. There’s a kind of boiling point for me in terms of size like four to six
0:45:09 I can handle and it depends for me also on the environment. I think more so than the number of people
0:45:13 So when I do these group dinners, I will generally host them at home or
0:45:19 Have them at one of my friend’s homes right not in a popular restaurant
0:45:25 Yeah, like I did last night. So I’m just gonna say what what’s interesting about that is how strategic
0:45:30 You are about it and I really noticed this with people. So we were just talking about Ted
0:45:34 I was just talking to Chris Anderson who runs Ted about this whole phenomenon
0:45:39 And he describes himself as an introvert to you and he said he loves group dinners
0:45:45 If there’s a specific topic that everybody is gathered there to discuss and he knows it’s gonna be something really substantive
0:45:47 Then he’s in his comfort zone, you know
0:45:52 But if it’s just kind of this amorphous socializing, he wants to leave. So just on the tactical practical side
0:46:00 I also tend to very frequently cook the meal for the group so that I have a task
0:46:03 while people are arriving and
0:46:09 Talking also deliberate because I’m often inviting people who don’t know one another
0:46:15 So I want them to have a chance to chat without having me as a mutual crutch if that makes sense
0:46:17 Yep, but in any case
0:46:21 Yeah, no, and that’s a really common strategy and I hear that from many people
0:46:28 Yeah, but I can play extrovert. I’m good at playing extrovert, but up until say 6th grade
0:46:29 I wouldn’t even go out to recess
0:46:35 I would sit on a step and read usually books about sharks and fish because I wanted to be a marine biologist
0:46:37 But I wouldn’t even go out to recess. Wow
0:46:41 So a lot of what you talk about and I’ve written about certainly strikes a chord now
0:46:43 I feel like I want to ask you so many questions
0:46:50 Well, I’m sure if we talked about if we could go back and talk to 6th grade you right this minute
0:46:57 Like would 6th grade you have any idea that you would have the life path that yours has taken that’s so public
0:47:04 Absolutely not. No, definitely not. I mean what happened in 6th grade also just for people who might be wondering
0:47:08 Well, what happened in 6th grade if it’s up until 6th grade what happened in 6th grade or I should say more accurately
0:47:14 The summer of 5th grade is that I had a huge growth spurt and I had been bullied really badly
0:47:18 I was born premature and very small and I was bullied really really badly up until
0:47:26 The end of 5th grade then I left to a summer camp and gained about 30 pounds of muscle and grew four to five inches
0:47:28 over the summer came back and
0:47:32 Then it’s like a captain America. Yeah, yeah, exactly
0:47:37 And then the bullies who had been accustomed to bullying me tried their usual playbook
0:47:42 And I just went on this vigilante spree like the Punisher and that changed the dynamic social
0:47:47 So I was able to actually go outside and do things that I wanted to do
0:47:53 Recess from that point on so it didn’t mean that I socialized a lot more, but it has more mobility
0:48:02 So that is that is what happened, but like you and this is part of the reason why I wanted to start with this
0:48:09 Question about overcoming a fear of public speaking is that it’s when the people see the finished product
0:48:16 It’s easy to assume that it comes from an attribute as opposed to a skill. Yes, and
0:48:20 in fact a lot of what appears to be
0:48:25 Natural appears only to be natural because it started off very very unnatural
0:48:31 And someone has worked at shipping away at it over time. I think that’s true
0:48:34 I think so often when you see someone who’s really good at almost anything
0:48:40 It’s because they actually started out exactly the opposite and then they cared so much about fixing that problem
0:48:44 Yeah, but in terms of how I overcame that fear and I have this kind of
0:48:52 Evangelical desire to share it because it was so extreme. I feel like if I could do it then I know anyone can overcome any fear
0:48:58 So first of all, I spent years sitting in therapists offices kind of coasily discussing
0:49:04 Well, what might be the sources of this fear and you know, what do I trace it back to and and that does no good at all
0:49:09 I’m actually a big believer in therapy, but not for this type of issue
0:49:16 So what really does it if you’re afraid of something you have to expose yourself very slowly to the thing that you fear in
0:49:21 Really manageable doses so you can’t start off by giving the Ted talk
0:49:28 So in my case I signed up for the seminar and it was a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety here in New York and
0:49:32 You know, you’d get there and on the very first day
0:49:34 All you had to do was stand up
0:49:42 Say your name sit back down declare victory. You’re finished and that’s it. What was the organization?
0:49:46 Oh gosh toastmasters or something. No, and I am a big fan of toastmasters
0:49:53 But this was almost like more remedial than toastmasters like yeah, this is like pre toastmasters. Yeah, so
0:50:00 The guy’s name. He’s amazing. His name is Charles de Cagno and you can find his organization
0:50:04 It’s speak easy calm and I think it’s spelled with three E’s perfect
0:50:08 I’ll put a link in the show notes for people as well. Yeah. Yeah, I really recommend him
0:50:12 Yeah, and so, you know, you’d come back the next week and maybe you’d stand up
0:50:15 And he would do these things like he’d have people stand on either side of you
0:50:19 So you didn’t feel all all alone up there on stage. It’s brilliant. Yeah. Yeah
0:50:24 And then the audience would ask you questions like where are you from and where’d you go to college?
0:50:28 You know, so really easy stuff you answer the questions and you’re done
0:50:33 And it’s like if you do that little by little by little you actually really can overcome it
0:50:41 It’s kind of crazy, but true, but I will say having said all this still, you know, there’s something about a tend talk
0:50:44 That’s on some whole crazy other realm of
0:50:50 Yes, public speaking nerves and even if the setting is exactly the same. There is a
0:50:53 performance anxiety
0:50:58 Associated with that three letter acronym for sure. Yeah, we were talking about this before we started taping
0:51:00 Yeah, so many of the speakers are really
0:51:07 Practiced on stage and yet you see them minutes before they go out and they’re sweating bullets and they’re they’re all losing it
0:51:13 Yeah, we were chatting for a second about then Chris Anderson could certainly correct me and blank in the exact term
0:51:16 But there’s some space right next to the stage
0:51:20 behind the curtain called the Zen room or the
0:51:27 Relaxation cube. There’s some very pleasant sounding name for this space and it’s intended to be the next up
0:51:32 batting cage for the two or three speakers to come and I remember
0:51:36 It’s probably 15 or 20 minutes before I was supposed to go live or no
0:51:42 It couldn’t have been that it was probably an hour before and I really didn’t want to be around a lot of people and in the green room
0:51:47 They’re all sorts of staff and lots of people milling around and working on production and I thought to myself
0:51:49 I need to go to the Zen room. We’ll just call the Zen room
0:51:54 And so I walk out to the Zen room and I won’t mention names, but there are like three just
0:51:57 Killers these are
0:52:01 Consummit professionals who have done this type of thing thousands of times people
0:52:04 I look up to and would love to someday have a coffee with and they are
0:52:07 freaking the fuck out
0:52:11 And I was like not helping not helping I need to leave the Zen room right now
0:52:21 So yes, it’s a different beast. So how do you go from talking about your favorite color on stage with two people next to you to Ted then?
0:52:29 Okay, so I graduated from that to Toastmasters, which I also completely recommend and should I describe what that is?
0:52:32 Yes, please. Yeah, okay. So Toastmasters. It’s a worldwide organization
0:52:37 You can absolutely find one near you because they’re everywhere and it’s basically this
0:52:42 non-for-profit thing where you sign up for a group that meets near you and
0:52:46 Once every two weeks you get together and you practice public speaking together
0:52:50 And they have this ritualized way of doing it and some of the time you’re practicing
0:52:57 Speaking off the top of your head and sometimes it’s a prepared speech and it’s just kind of giving you that exposure therapy of
0:53:03 You know putting you in the beast of the thing that most frightens you you have to show up every two weeks and do it
0:53:07 So I did that but then the next stage after that and it was my husband’s idea
0:53:12 I hired a coach for the full week before the Ted talk
0:53:20 It was really amazing guy named Jim Fife who I also completely recommend and since then he has coached many other Ted speakers
0:53:25 So I worked with him morning till night for a full week before the talk for you
0:53:33 Yeah, and what did the working with him look like okay, so he he did a really brilliant thing
0:53:39 He was very psychologically attuned and I said to him, you know, I’m really comfortable in
0:53:45 General talking to people one-on-one and kind of like cozely sitting on a couch and talking about life
0:53:51 I love that for me at that point though getting up on a stage and holding forth was the hard thing
0:53:54 So he said okay, let’s practice your talk
0:53:58 Sitting on the couch and just talk to me about it
0:54:04 And we did that for like two days and it was only after that that we then moved to the stage and started getting into kind of
0:54:07 The theatrics of it that kind of transition was so helpful
0:54:16 It’s I just want to note that this is I spend so much time with it. I’m so obsessed with good teachers
0:54:18 Yeah, good coaches
0:54:24 This is very common where they will effectively say let’s start from where you are right now, right?
0:54:30 They will always return if they sense any type of overwhelm or fear to bring you back to a point of familiarity or comfort
0:54:32 Yeah, and then edge into
0:54:36 Sort of the next concentric circle of yeah is your limit of comfort
0:54:42 Yeah, and I think they also have to show a lot of non-judgment because I had some dark moments during that week
0:54:48 you know for me this was the abyss and I was just hanging out in the abyss for a week and
0:54:54 So he saw me, you know, I had only just met him and he saw me not in the most flattering circumstances
0:54:56 And yet I didn’t feel embarrassed by that
0:55:03 There’s anything about anything in the beginning to assess you or establish a baseline or was it more of an interview?
0:55:08 That he used like an intake. Do you remember what it wasn’t really formal like that, you know
0:55:11 He’s such a human guy. It was just like we were just talking
0:55:15 Yeah, yeah disguised as intake smart fellow
0:55:20 Yeah, and then so the amazing thing to me now is I
0:55:24 Now super ironically have a career as a public speaker
0:55:31 Like I travel the world going and giving talks to all different companies and conferences all over the place
0:55:35 Like I asked you well if we could tell sixth grade Tim where he would be
0:55:38 What would he say and I say that to myself, too
0:55:41 Like if you could have even told me eight years ago, but this would be my life
0:55:44 I would have been so shocked by it and now I’ve come to like it
0:55:47 So do you have any particular?
0:55:57 Pre-game ritual or anything that you did in the hours leading up to your talk that helped or that you didn’t do
0:56:02 I have things now back then. I just suffered but what do you have now now?
0:56:07 I have a few things. I mean I do deep breathing just like everyone else
0:56:10 I’m sure you’ve heard that a million times, but it’s got to be real deep breathing
0:56:14 You know where you really feel your belly and your diaphragm filling up
0:56:18 but for me what I also do is I
0:56:23 Usually think to myself and I do this especially when I’m speaking to an audience that I find more
0:56:28 Intimidating, you know like a group of finance people at an investment bank or something
0:56:31 I will say to myself there
0:56:36 I am sure is one person in this audience who has a child who is shy or introverted and
0:56:44 If that child has a better life because of one tidbit that that person hears today, then it’s all good
0:56:46 And that pulls me out of myself
0:56:47 instantly
0:56:50 Yeah, it gives you also a hurdle that you can clear
0:56:54 For winning the presentations that speak
0:57:01 Right, it’s a manageable goal, but I think it’s it feels deeper than that to me. It feels also like I
0:57:03 Think when people get nervous about speaking
0:57:06 Obviously, they’re really nervous about being judged, right?
0:57:12 But this completely shifts the energy where it’s not any longer about how anybody judges me
0:57:14 It’s about
0:57:20 Can I help that kid out there? I want to say also that part of the reason I am
0:57:22 more than happy
0:57:28 Actually excited to spend so much time talking about this is that it is not specific to public speaking, right?
0:57:31 This just happens to be a very common
0:57:37 Fear and perceived weakness of many many many people. Yeah, so yeah as a side note
0:57:41 What Warren Buffett says is his greatest ever investment?
0:57:46 Put more specifically a Dale Carnegie course that he took in public speaking, right?
0:57:53 Because it magnified his ability to do almost everything else to make it effectively both in spoken word
0:57:59 But also in the written word in some respects. Yeah, I’ve never I don’t think I’ve ever I’ve ever spoken about this
0:58:01 but I also did Toastmasters and
0:58:08 If you have trouble finding it oftentimes there are large companies that will have within
0:58:12 their HQ or any large
0:58:18 Location their own Toastmasters group and that’s actually how I found it in San Jose initially was at Adobe
0:58:21 so I would go in and I would do this Toastmasters and
0:58:26 your description of having this very logical progression of
0:58:30 Small wins layered upon small wins getting up on stage and then getting off stage
0:58:35 I’m getting up on stage having two people next to you and answering a few questions and getting off stage is
0:58:37 so
0:58:39 incredibly effective and
0:58:46 I’m laughing right now because I remember when I was preparing for my first
0:58:50 Presentation at South by Southwest. So this is a very large
0:58:56 Festival and conference in Austin, Texas and the timing was 2007
0:59:02 It’s about I want to say a month month and a half before my book is going to come out my first book
0:59:04 Which I’m very nervous about
0:59:09 There had been no speaking slots, but I had pitched Hugh Forrest at the time
0:59:16 Who I’d been introduced to that I would take anything available corner of a room hallway
0:59:21 If there are any cancellations, I would really appreciate that the opportunity
0:59:27 To speak at the event and lo and behold there was a last-minute cancellation not by a keynote speaker
0:59:33 But by a sponsor who is going to have a stage to pitch their products from and in this makeshift cafe
0:59:38 And I was like I’m in I’m in but I was so incredibly nervous about this
0:59:43 That in the beginning in particular, I was and this is true today
0:59:50 Too nervous to practice my rough rough draft of the presentation in front of people. Yeah
0:59:54 I guess and so what I did I was staying in a guest bedroom at a friend’s house
0:59:58 he had three Chihuahuas and I went outside as playing the Chihuahuas and
1:00:01 They followed me into the garage. I was I practiced in the garage
1:00:05 I didn’t want to practice in the house where my friend’s wife was and
1:00:07 I gave my presentation
1:00:14 I felt reasonably confident about the content, but I wasn’t comfortable with any of the performance aspects of trying to keep attention
1:00:23 So I gave my draft of this talk over and over again until I could get the dogs to sit and stare at me
1:00:28 Somewhat bewildered but to hold their attention. That was the litmus test for me
1:00:34 Wow to graduate to giving a rough draft in front of humans for those people out there
1:00:40 Who are wondering whether this all comes naturally to me. It does not at all
1:00:45 Have you talked about that before or is this the first time? I don’t think I don’t think I’ve talked about that
1:00:49 certainly I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast and
1:00:56 For the Ted talk also something I did which I did not do for the South by talk, which I thought
1:01:03 Really made a difference was I practiced giving the talk in front of small groups of strangers
1:01:09 Once I had a reasonably polished version and I asked friends of mine who worked at larger companies who had teams
1:01:14 during lunch hour if there was if there happened to be an empty conference room could they
1:01:19 Invite people to hear a rough draft of a Ted talk and then I would ask them for feedback
1:01:23 And usually there was enough time that I could give it two or three times so I could actually incorporate their feedback
1:01:28 Give another version and once I’d given the second version
1:01:34 There are a lot more people in the room who are willing to be critical the first round you get one or two
1:01:36 yes, that’s so true and
1:01:41 This is just something I’ve thought about a lot because I’ve been so nervous about public speaking for so long
1:01:44 And it by the way doesn’t really go away like I at least for me
1:01:45 I still have those nerves
1:01:50 But with Ted very specifically I assumed and this came from sports
1:01:54 But I’d never applied it that I was going to be my heart rate was probably going to be 30
1:01:57 beats per minute higher than normal and
1:02:03 That it was not just important for me to practice the content but to practice under
1:02:08 The physiological stress that I would probably experience when trying to deliver the content
1:02:13 So I would do a bunch of push-ups in another room and drink
1:02:21 To double espressos and wait for it to hit and then go in and give my dress rehearsal to see if I could handle that stimulation
1:02:24 that was so so smart and
1:02:32 You know listening to that story is reminding me of this crucial step that I left out in a lot of ways a kind of
1:02:35 Mistake that I made which is you know, I told you I worked with that guy
1:02:41 Jim for a week who’s amazing and I thought I was pretty well ready at that point so I
1:02:49 Talked to my friend Adam Grant who’s a very dear friend very good speaker to and a really good speaker and who also started out as a
1:02:53 Very nervous and by his description a terrible public speaker
1:02:56 He says he used to get like terrible reviews from his students
1:03:00 And he just worked and worked and work at it and now he’s the most popular professor at Wharton
1:03:05 But okay, so I was talking to Adam about all this and so he said
1:03:08 So I’m leaving for Ted on Sunday morning right to fly out to California
1:03:13 Which is where it was at that time and he says oh, I’m gonna pull together a group of friends
1:03:15 And you can practice your talk in front of them
1:03:18 And so this is Friday night and I’m leaving Sunday morning
1:03:24 And so I show up at this apartment full of Adam and his friends and I think that I’m pretty well done with the talk and
1:03:31 This is the first time that I’m giving it in front of any kind of group because I didn’t have the foresight of what you just described and
1:03:34 Not only was I so nervous
1:03:38 But I realized from the feedback that a lot of the content was all wrong
1:03:44 And it’s Friday night and I’m leaving you know like the next day basically or the day after the next day
1:03:46 so I
1:03:49 Went home and I just spent the whole entire night
1:03:56 Rewriting the whole final third of the talk and then I’m like on the plane going out to Ted trying to memorize the new talk
1:03:58 I don’t recommend
1:04:00 kind of approach
1:04:03 But you need to get real people in front of you
1:04:11 This is just like entrepreneurship and people who try to get the product perfect before exposing it to any perspective clients like you really need
1:04:14 to get into
1:04:21 The messy reality of what a live audience or a real customer looks like and the same was true for me
1:04:28 I made a lot of changes in the last few days, which I thought we’re just gonna be fine-tuned right and then you and I was like
1:04:31 Oh, actually, I really need to completely change by 30% of this
1:04:33 yeah, and
1:04:38 I was very very nervous before the Ted talk and I came off stage and I did not think that I
1:04:42 I didn’t think that I blew it, but I didn’t think that I did a great job
1:04:46 I came off stage thinking that there were definitely bits and pieces. I could have done better
1:04:53 But seems to have worked out. Okay, wait, but I want to come back to one thing that you said for the benefit of people who are listening now
1:04:56 so you said
1:04:58 That you still are really nervous when you give a talk
1:05:05 But are you really as nervous as you used to be because I I really want people to understand that you can get to a point
1:05:08 You might still have butterflies. It’s not like the nerves completely
1:05:14 Disappear, but they get to in my experience and from all the literature that I’ve studied on this
1:05:19 They really do get to a point where you can manage them and the difference between manageable and non manageable
1:05:23 Is gigantic in terms of its effect on your life and your career and everything
1:05:30 So I just want to make sure yeah, I can clarify. So it depends a lot on the event
1:05:33 Right, so if it’s
1:05:36 We’re going to do a q&a and it’s a friend of mine interviewing me on stage
1:05:41 That’s not from my perspective really public speaking. I mean it is but at this point
1:05:46 I could do that with zero preparation if it’s anything resembling
1:05:54 A keynote if it is tim on stage talking to an audience and they expect something that has been well rehearsed
1:06:00 My physiological response is still very strong. I get really sweaty hands
1:06:06 I pace I have very minimal contact with anyone beforehand
1:06:09 But let me mention a few things number one
1:06:11 and
1:06:12 both
1:06:14 Mike Tyson
1:06:18 And dean martin used to vomit before nearly every performance
1:06:23 But the way that they psychologically contended with that
1:06:25 Evolved over time
1:06:32 And since I mentioned mike tyson customado who was the trainer who really in a lot of respects. I think boxing
1:06:38 Scholars or boxing fans would agree made tyson into what tyson was at his prime
1:06:44 As an athlete used to say something along the following that the hero and the coward feel the same thing
1:06:52 It’s how they respond. Yes. Oh, I so believe that yeah, and I mean there is no courage without the presence of fear
1:07:00 And for me, I have come to see those physiological symptoms that used to make me panic
1:07:06 That used to make me feel like I was doing something wrong that used to make me feel like I was unprepared
1:07:09 As simple precursors to a performance
1:07:12 The way that I frame them for myself
1:07:17 Is completely different and I’ve learned to view it as this
1:07:20 energetic asset
1:07:25 That I can use yeah, and that has made all the difference
1:07:30 It has decreased in some circumstances, but certainly before ted. I mean I had given hundreds
1:07:33 of different presentations and
1:07:36 It was like I was getting on stage for the first time
1:07:38 In part also for people who don’t know
1:07:43 They are very as they should be strict about
1:07:46 Many things at ted including running over. Oh, yes
1:07:50 If running over I mean then I want to say and this is exactly what they should say
1:07:55 But in effect they say if you run over by you should not run over number one
1:07:59 Do not run over if you run over if you get to the point where you’re like 30 seconds over
1:08:01 We will come up and remove you from stage
1:08:07 And while I’m preparing and while I’m rehearsing one of the things that made me most stressed out is that
1:08:10 My finish times were really variable
1:08:15 And I would say like 30 40 percent of the time I ran over then other times
1:08:21 I would run two minutes under but miss something really really important. Yeah, because I was rushing and I was like good
1:08:28 God, this is just a crapshoot like I am at the craps table with my timing and that
1:08:32 Really was a concern for me. So that was another element
1:08:39 That made ted unique for me was that degree of cutoff
1:08:43 Yeah, I felt that way too and I did end up going over by over a minute
1:08:48 Ah, good for you. And there it is. And there we’re just like we cannot stop this performance
1:08:51 I don’t know about that but
1:08:55 But I want to say also for anybody who is listening and who
1:09:00 Is right now in the grip of this kind of fear and isn’t sure whether they can really get past it
1:09:04 Um, also like what is waiting for you on the other side of it is so
1:09:09 Gigantic because there’s just there’s something weird about public speaking where
1:09:13 It has such disproportionate value to
1:09:18 In a way what you’re investing in it, you know, like you’re going up on stage for 18 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever
1:09:23 Or or maybe within your own workplace, you know, even giving a two minute talk
1:09:28 Suddenly everybody is regarding you as a leader and as
1:09:35 Someone who they can turn to in a new way from if you hadn’t been willing to put yourself forward in that way
1:09:37 Definitely. I mean, there’s there’s public speaking as
1:09:43 The force multiplier for the value of your other skills, which is absolutely true
1:09:51 And then public speaking in a way is also a wonderful diagnostic tool and what I mean by that is I remember talking to
1:09:55 a friend of mine who
1:09:58 he’s a wealth manager for a lot of
1:10:02 buckety mucks who you would recognize and
1:10:05 He said I know them
1:10:11 Generally better than therapists. They’ve been seeing for a decade within the first few hours because
1:10:14 Money brings up everything
1:10:16 Talking about money. It brings up
1:10:19 The full spectrum of someone’s
1:10:21 insecurities fears desires
1:10:23 neuroses
1:10:25 sex also true
1:10:32 And public speaking, I think if it makes you remotely nervous when you start to learn public speaking like it at least for me
1:10:36 It kind of brings up all your stuff. So if you were simply interested in
1:10:38 personal growth
1:10:42 it brings to the surface many different pieces of your
1:10:47 Personality and psyche that you can then work on in a way that transfers to other areas
1:10:54 So that to me with my experience and I find really interesting. It’s okay. Well, maybe you don’t have to play
1:10:56 can hide and go seek
1:11:03 with talk therapy for 20 years to find all of the bits and pieces when if rather than following these different gingerbread trails
1:11:06 you can use certain
1:11:08 fearful circumstances
1:11:10 To just bring it all right
1:11:14 Or a lot of it to the surface. That was my experience. I’m not saying it’s true for everybody
1:11:19 But it was one of those things like talking about money talking about sex or public speaking
1:11:21 It’s like, okay. Now we just bring everything to the forefront
1:11:27 So for me that was also uh, even if I had not had any interest in getting on stage and giving presentations
1:11:31 Yeah, it would have been valuable. Yeah in and of itself. Yeah, no that makes complete sense
1:11:36 Are there other things that you’re fearful of or have been afraid of that you’ve overcome?
1:11:39 No, I mean that was really the big one for me
1:11:47 But yeah, we were talking about this before I guess, you know, my bug-a-boo in general is that I just tend to be a worrier
1:11:48 So
1:11:53 Other than the experiences I had with public speaking. It’s not like I have full on panic or anything like that
1:11:55 It’s more like it’s a
1:12:00 Very familiar companion for me. So I’ve had to just come up with various hacks around it
1:12:02 What what are some of your hacks?
1:12:05 This is going to get us into another big topic, but why not? Why not?
1:12:12 So for example when I stopped practicing corporate law and I decided that I wanted to be a writer
1:12:14 I told myself that
1:12:18 It’s really hard to make a living as a writer and I said, okay
1:12:21 The goal is to publish something by the time you’re 75
1:12:27 And at the time I was 33 at the time that I said that and I kind of did that instinctively
1:12:33 Because I was always doing these hacks of like just wanting to completely take the pressure off of something that I otherwise
1:12:37 Loved so deeply and like I just knew that if I
1:12:40 Turned this thing that I deeply loved into
1:12:45 A source of like this has to be the place where I make my living
1:12:49 This has to be the place where I derive some kind of professional stature
1:12:52 It was going to soak a lot of the joy out of it
1:12:59 And so that’s the kind of hack that I just naturally do on a very related note
1:13:05 Could you give us a little bit of context around the leaving law like why you left law?
1:13:07 and then
1:13:09 You decide you want to be a writer
1:13:16 And you kind of alluded to it, but does that mean that suddenly your rent is dependent on writing?
1:13:20 Right. Okay. So I had wanted to be a writer from the time I was four
1:13:25 And then for a whole bunch of reasons and like so many people
1:13:30 I took some creative writing classes in college and I decided, you know, I’m not actually that good at this
1:13:36 And I need to make a living and I also kind of had a desire I think to show myself that I could be
1:13:40 Out there as a kind of alpha person out in the world of finance or something
1:13:46 So I went to law school and I practiced law while street law for almost a decade
1:13:49 And during that time that I was practicing law
1:13:55 It was so all-consuming that I completely forgot about the fact that I had wanted to be a writer
1:13:59 It wasn’t like, you know, I was walking around conscious of this broken dream or something
1:14:05 I’d completely forgotten and the first few years of practicing law. I really loved it
1:14:09 It was just this kind of crazy adventure that I was on and as the years went by
1:14:13 It started to get really tough for me. You know, I’m not
1:14:16 A very natural lawyer in a million different ways
1:14:19 But I was on this partner track and I was committed to it
1:14:24 And then came the day and I think I may have told you about this in earlier correspondence
1:14:29 but then came the day when a senior partner in my firm walked in and said
1:14:34 I was supposed to be up for partner that year and he said, well, we’re not going to be putting you up and
1:14:40 Funny thing is to this day. I don’t really know if he meant we’re not putting you up ever for partner or
1:14:44 Just not anytime soon. I don’t really know what it meant. All I knew was like
1:14:48 Number one, I burst into tears and number two
1:14:54 Here was my get out of jail free card. So three hours later. I had left the firm
1:14:58 Like I was gone. I took a leave of absence and I just started
1:15:01 Bicycling around central park. Like I didn’t know what I was going to do next
1:15:05 But as soon as that space opened up
1:15:08 That I now had free time for the first time in like 10 years
1:15:14 I started writing and I had no idea that was going to happen. It was almost like in a movie
1:15:17 That’s cool. Yeah, it’s I’ve just been waiting for you
1:15:23 Yeah, I mean literally I like I remember that night, you know, like kind of curled up on my sofa in my apartment
1:15:27 And I just started writing on my laptop and and then a week later
1:15:30 I signed up for a class in creative nonfiction at nyu
1:15:32 and
1:15:36 I just had this complete feeling of certainty that this was what I wanted to be doing
1:15:39 And zero expectation that I would make a living out of it
1:15:41 So and this this is a really important thing
1:15:45 I think I think if you have that kind of a creative dream and a creative love
1:15:51 You have to do everything you can not to spoil it with the pressures of paying the rent and all those other things
1:15:55 Or the pressures of needing to derive professional status from it
1:16:00 So I set up a little side business teaching people negotiation skills
1:16:02 And that was how I was paying the rent
1:16:10 But the thing I was really doing in my heart was this beloved hobby of writing. This is super super super super super important
1:16:11 and
1:16:12 there are
1:16:18 I think it’s true in creative fields, which is pretty much every field but just for the sake of illustration
1:16:20 writing music etc that
1:16:27 Also in entrepreneurship you hear these stories of desperation where a necessity is the mother of invention
1:16:29 and
1:16:31 You know but a bing but a boom
1:16:34 Magic wand and then there’s a billion dollar company or there’s
1:16:42 J.K. Rowling or whatever it is, but those are in my experience the outliers at those they make for great
1:16:44 cover stories and magazines
1:16:46 but the fact of the matter is that
1:16:52 From what I’ve seen certainly with the guests on this podcast is that for instance, so Minccianani who has
1:16:57 a number of mega successful novels, but he had a
1:17:02 SAT prep counseling service that he offered
1:17:09 Well past the point that his first book was successful because he wanted to always feel like he had a safety net
1:17:13 So that the writing would not be tainted or even subconsciously
1:17:16 influenced to match the market or
1:17:20 Whatever the the lens might be come by this pressure
1:17:26 Yeah, and that is something that whenever possible has come up as a really valuable
1:17:32 I suppose on one hand financial sort of survival mechanism, but even more so as psychological
1:17:39 Through a freeing device. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I think we’re so addicted to having a really glamorous narrative for things
1:17:43 and the glamorous narrative is you know, you you had so much courage you
1:17:49 Took the risk, you know, you you were dependent on this company or this book or whatever and if it didn’t work
1:17:50 It was going to be a disaster
1:17:54 But you know you you were the one who beat the odds like we love that narrative
1:17:57 And for most people that’s a really bankrupt narrative
1:18:01 And there’s a kind of deeper glamour actually in the kind of story that you just told
1:18:09 Because the glamour comes from you’re you’re doing everything that you can to deeply protect the thing that you love most
1:18:11 definitely
1:18:16 Now the book itself people may not know backstory. I’m sure a lot of people don’t
1:18:19 How long did it take?
1:18:20 to
1:18:22 Get that book done
1:18:27 Okay, so i’m laughing because it took a really really long time, especially by tim ferris standards
1:18:34 I like I listen to you and like look at your life trajectory. I’m like, how does he do that? But
1:18:37 Lots of cheating with format is the short answer
1:18:40 But I don’t want to take a self-track
1:18:42 so
1:18:46 Yeah, it took from start to finish. It was about seven years
1:18:49 I will say in my defense that during those seven years
1:18:52 I also had two children and was raising them
1:18:57 So that was part of it. But I also just think i’m kind of a slow writer
1:19:01 like I like to really really think about everything super deeply and
1:19:04 What I think is probably people might not know
1:19:09 I had a deadline as all writers do and I turned in some sort of draft upon
1:19:13 My deadline coming to you, you know after 18 months or two years
1:19:18 And my editor basically read it and said this is terrible
1:19:22 And she said, you know go back and completely throw that out
1:19:25 Start from scratch and take all the time that you need
1:19:29 And you might think that when that happened that I would have been really bummed
1:19:31 But I was actually elated
1:19:37 Because I knew that it was terrible and I knew that I needed much more time and I had no idea what I was doing
1:19:39 I’d never written anything before
1:19:44 So yeah, I was just really happy to have that time and it’s actually really unusual
1:19:47 Like usually in publishing they had given me a big advance for the book and usually
1:19:51 They want their advance back and they’re not willing to delay like that
1:19:58 So that was very understanding editor. Yeah, she’s brilliant and I’m working with her again on my next book
1:20:04 It’s also smart in the sense that a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all
1:20:07 Yes, yeah for everyone involved for everyone involved
1:20:13 Yeah, and because you know, I have this philosophy about writing that it’s the deep love that has to be protected at all costs
1:20:18 Because of that, I don’t care how much time it takes, you know, like I’m just
1:20:20 Interested in doing it as well as I can what is your
1:20:25 Writing process at this point look like you had your experience
1:20:32 With that book and now when you are writing do you have a daily practice? Does it go through phases of?
1:20:36 research period then organizing
1:20:39 then putting all of that into
1:20:46 Pros through synthesis. What are your writing routines or how do you think about writing these days? So for me? I take
1:20:53 Whatever thesis I’m working with and then I spend a year or two just walking around the world
1:20:55 Looking at everything through the lens of that thesis, you know
1:20:58 So it used to be introverts and now it’s onto a new topic
1:21:04 And I’m taking crazy notes through that period. You know, so every conversation that I have every book I read
1:21:08 It’s all going in. How do you take and organize your notes? Do you do it?
1:21:11 Notebooks, do you do it?
1:21:14 Digitally, what are the the end of this is nerdy, but no, it’s not
1:21:20 I’m into it because a lot of writers do it differently. The reason I’m laughing is I’m thinking
1:21:24 When you hear my answer, you’re going to know that I need a consultation with you for the next book
1:21:27 I don’t do it in a super systemic way
1:21:32 I basically all those conversations all those ideas and notes and thoughts I’m having I
1:21:39 Stick them all into one word document and that document becomes about seven or 800 pages by the time I’m done
1:21:45 And then I go through that document and I’m kind of tagging as I go along and then I’m separating everything out by topic
1:21:50 So I end up with like eight or nine loose leaf binders that are organized by topic
1:21:55 But in each of those binders, it’s just like one big one big massive notes
1:22:01 And then I think about where do I want everything whenever I’m emotionally moved by one of the ideas that I’m taking notes on
1:22:06 I try to write out the riff around that idea right then and there because
1:22:10 You don’t know if that emotion is going to come back. So you have to capture it when it happens
1:22:15 I think it’s a perfectly fine system. Uh, so you feel like technology must have come up with something better
1:22:19 Like I do it in microsoft word. There are there are probably better tools
1:22:24 Available, but I would say also that a lot of people confuse
1:22:29 New tools for better content is very easy
1:22:34 At least let’s speak for myself for a second when I’m writing I have to
1:22:39 disallow myself from thinking about say marketing because marketing is
1:22:44 Fun and exciting and to you easy for me
1:22:48 Because I whatever had insomnia as a kid and watched too many infomercials or something in any case
1:22:52 It’s a way to procrastinate doing the harder piece, which is
1:22:56 The actual research and digging and pros. That’s the hard part for me
1:22:58 Always has been but it’s the most important part
1:23:03 and I think similarly a lot of folks can become consumed by
1:23:08 upgrading their tools multiplying their tools versus just
1:23:11 The words you got to put the words in
1:23:13 And I have some questions about this word doc though
1:23:18 So when you’re going through and adding things to the word doc and you come in and you’re tagging things
1:23:23 So you can separate them and you mentioned binders. So you’re printing this stuff out and then separating them
1:23:29 Does that mean that when you put in a new note in the word doc you go to a new page if it’s tagged differently
1:23:33 So you can separate them more easily later. Does that make sense as opposed to
1:23:38 Each time you add a note then hit return twice and then add a new note
1:23:42 If they’re tagged differently, it would seem like you would have to cut up the page into multiple pieces
1:23:46 So do you start a new page? Are there any particular ways that you?
1:23:49 Tag for instance, would it be a chapter name?
1:23:55 Or would it be a theme what would the tag look like a lot of questions a topic or a theme and
1:23:58 Yeah, so every time I’m adding a new note
1:24:00 If I know that it relates to something I’ve already done
1:24:05 Then I’ll search for the thing I’ve already done so I can add it to that section to make it easier later
1:24:06 That makes sense
1:24:10 But you know sometimes I don’t or I can’t think of it and then I’ll just add it to the end of the document
1:24:15 Which control f right word. Yeah. Yeah good to go. Yeah simple simple works
1:24:21 Robert Rodriguez the filmmaker keeps a journal. I think he does puts it in almost every day at midnight and it’s
1:24:28 Word doc Word docs. Yep. It works. Yeah. Yeah, I actually I will say I tried for this next book
1:24:30 I spent a few days
1:24:36 Reading the instructions for Scrivener one of these programs Scrivener’s and I just ended up thinking, you know, this isn’t for me
1:24:38 It looks great
1:24:41 Scrivener well some other time we can sit down
1:24:48 That is one tool that if you set it up really simply and you don’t use 98 of the features
1:24:51 I find really useful just because
1:24:57 You can create a view by which you see all of your separate documents
1:25:00 Or actually I should say rather you see your tentative
1:25:03 table of contents on the left side
1:25:08 In a vertical pane and then you can look at what you’re on the right hand side then I would have it set up so that I have
1:25:14 Two split windows so the left hand side you see your table of contents and then there’s a research and then you have whatever research
1:25:20 You want that way you can be working on a document in the upper right hand pane while you have your research
1:25:25 That you’re wringing off of in the bottom right and if you decide to move docs around to see how it affects flow
1:25:27 It’s just drag and drop. It’s actually quite wonderful
1:25:32 They did have some issues with footnotes or maybe I was just too technically incompetent
1:25:36 At one point when you then had to export when the publisher insists on say word
1:25:42 Which maybe that’ll change at some point but getting a little geeked out but scrivener. Have you scrivener for
1:25:46 Almost all of my books. There may be one exception
1:25:49 I think for our chef because of how visually intensive it was
1:25:55 Was done outside of that and in terms of routine or ritual you spend a year
1:26:01 Gathering these notes. So then you have your maybe more. So yeah or more. So you have 700 to 800 pages
1:26:07 It’s a big word doc. Yeah, and then what happens. Yeah, so then I spend the time sorting them out
1:26:13 So I get to the point where I’ve got my eight or nine loose leaf binders that are more or less organized by what the chapters are
1:26:19 Going to be. Yeah, and then comes the time to write during which I’m still doing more research, but I’m starting to write
1:26:21 for me
1:26:23 the writing like the
1:26:28 Sitting down with my laptop and thinking about it all that’s like I want to say it’s my happy place
1:26:33 But that’s not really the best description. It feels like it’s this place that I go
1:26:37 Deep in my mind and I really love being there
1:26:42 And it’s like no matter what happens to be going on in my outside life
1:26:48 I always have those few hours a day where I’m going to a cafe or a library or whatever
1:26:52 and I’m sitting with my laptop and my cappuccino and
1:26:56 I’m just doing it like I’m stressing the emotional aspect because
1:27:00 That’s so huge for me and I feel like I train myself
1:27:05 To associate writing with all of these pleasures of you know sitting around in cafes and things like that
1:27:08 Do you have a consistent time?
1:27:13 When you sit down with your cappuccino and do this. Are you a morning writer or are you a
1:27:17 Catch-us-catch-can writer? Are you an evening writer? I mean you also
1:27:19 Have kids. I mean you have other obligations
1:27:24 So when do you tend to do your writing or do your best writing? You can answer it however you like
1:27:27 Well, I mean there’s what I do and there’s what would be ideal
1:27:32 But as you say I have kids so my routine is that I drop my kids off at school
1:27:33 That’s at around eight
1:27:39 Then I go and I either play tennis or do yoga every day and then after that I do my writing
1:27:45 And that’s a pretty good time for me. But what time of day would that typically end up being?
1:27:49 Yeah, that probably ends up being around 10 or so that i’m starting
1:27:53 Yeah, but if I had no other obligations
1:27:58 The best times of day would be more like either seven in the morning and also super late at night
1:28:01 So two time periods that I have no access to for this stage of life
1:28:07 And you start writing this is really I’m interesting to me. Hopefully interesting and other people
1:28:09 To start let’s say around 10
1:28:16 Do you break for lunch? Do you skip lunch? Do you have a standard type of lunch that you would have?
1:28:19 And the reason I ask is that I think part of the reason
1:28:26 So many writers seem to work between the hours of say just make this up but 10 p.m
1:28:29 and
1:28:33 7 30 a.m. And they tend to either be night owls like me
1:28:39 Or early risers is that there are fewer distractions and they get a relatively uninterrupted block
1:28:43 Of three to five hours. But if you’re starting at 10
1:28:47 Then most people that have lunch scheduled
1:28:54 Shortly thereafter like two hours later. Right. So do you break for lunch? Do you have something really small?
1:28:55 How do you handle that?
1:28:59 Because for me just speaking personally, it’s like if I might have time
1:29:01 Of course, I have time for a five minute phone call
1:29:04 but if I do a five minute phone call about something very
1:29:07 mechanical or mundane like
1:29:10 Calendaring stuff or whatever and I’m juggling
1:29:13 15 pieces that were on paper in my head
1:29:17 I kind of have to start over a lot of times like I drop all those balls
1:29:22 I’m juggling right right right because of the task switching. So I’d love to hear not that that’s true for everybody
1:29:26 But it’s true for me. What is your schedule look like then once you sit down?
1:29:31 I’ll just kind of go until I realize that I’m not concentrating well anymore and
1:29:36 Very often that happens after two or three hours and I just have to take a break
1:29:39 I have a lot of discipline if my brain would cooperate
1:29:43 So I would happily sit there for seven hours until my kids come home from school
1:29:46 But at a certain point I’ll notice that it’s just not coming anymore
1:29:49 And so then I’ll take a break and I’ll eat or something like that
1:29:52 But you know, I would say like you were mentioning
1:29:58 Well, people might work at night because it’s when you get uninterrupted time and I think that that’s one factor
1:29:59 but
1:30:02 I also think the reason that those hours tend to be so good
1:30:07 So nighttime is when your cortisol levels are really low, you know, which of course is your stress hormone
1:30:10 and so I noticed this in myself all the time that
1:30:17 The ideas that I come up with late at night are different from the daytime ideas because they’re completely
1:30:20 unfettered by any stress
1:30:25 And so I’ll just I don’t know. I just make different kinds of associative leaps and there’s
1:30:30 There’s like a softness and an ease in my thinking and my feeling about the ideas
1:30:34 So I think that’s one advantage of late night writing and then in the morning
1:30:40 You’ve got the high cortisol, but you also have the sort of acute attention. Yeah, I can totally see that
1:30:45 I can definitely see that I also find that writing late at night if I’m writing it too in the morning
1:30:52 It’s very hard for me. I remember I want to say it was ein rand who wrote a she had a book about the craft of nonfiction
1:30:54 And there was some
1:30:57 It wasn’t a metaphor. I think it was a real world example
1:31:01 But in effect she’s saying writers many writers will do almost anything to not write
1:31:07 And there’s the story about the white tennis shoes like I have to clean my white tennis shoes before
1:31:11 Before I’m going to write because I’m going to go out and when it’s two or three in the morning
1:31:16 Like I have to check email to make sure x is just not a viable excuse
1:31:23 So it also just removes a lot of bullshit distraction that I would impose on myself to avoid doing
1:31:25 What it is that I find hard
1:31:29 I so relate to this like when so when I was writing quiet. I suddenly
1:31:35 developed this idea that I had to learn everything in the world about digital photography
1:31:40 Like and I was reading all these books about it and the rule of thirds and all this stuff
1:31:44 And I have never had any interest in photography before or since
1:31:50 It was just these two weeks of mania where I didn’t want to have to be looking at that manuscript over there
1:31:57 Are there any particular I mean you are student of the craft, right? You’ve taken creative nonfiction courses
1:32:02 Are there any particular books or resources or?
1:32:05 writers who have had
1:32:09 A significant impact on how you view or practice writing
1:32:12 Oh, gosh. I’m sure the answer is yes
1:32:17 I can try to buy some time if helpful draft number four by john mcfee
1:32:23 I think is is really I was very fortunate to spend time with him when I was an undergrad in college because he was teaching a
1:32:27 Yeah, but that’s where I took my creative writing classes. Yeah, so the structure
1:32:34 thinking about structure in the way that mcfee thinks about structure saved me because I
1:32:41 Thrive with some type of predetermined blueprint for structure. It’s very hard for me to
1:32:44 Just freehand flow of consciousness
1:32:51 Let things take some emergent form. It’s very hard. I do know friends who do that really really well that terrifies me
1:32:56 So I need the scaffolding right bird by bird by and oh, I love that book
1:33:00 That’s a good book bird by bird for people who don’t know the book
1:33:05 I will say just before getting into a short description has
1:33:11 Saved at least a half a dozen friends of mine from the precipice
1:33:15 meaning they were at the point of throwing in the towel and just
1:33:21 Quitting their books and they were all writers in this case. They were at the point where they’re like, I’m done. I can’t do this
1:33:25 It’s too stressful. I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this. It’s going to be terrible
1:33:29 and they were going to in some cases return their advances and just walk and
1:33:33 I want to say at least half of them
1:33:35 read this book
1:33:38 Went on to finish their books and their books went on to become New York Times bestsellers
1:33:41 So talk about an important window
1:33:46 for making a decision and the gist of the book the title I should say comes first from
1:33:49 I think it was her brother
1:33:54 Ann’s brother and lamada is a writer and her brother had this experience where he’d had something like an entire
1:33:56 semester in
1:34:00 I’m making this up. But let’s just call it fourth grade to prepare for
1:34:03 this end of semester project
1:34:07 And he was supposed to put together a term paper on birds or something like that
1:34:10 And it was like the night before he hadn’t done any preparation
1:34:15 And this poor kid who granted kind of deserves it because he didn’t do any prep
1:34:21 But nonetheless is having this like nervous breakdown at the kitchen table with like 15 books about birds and he just is paralyzed
1:34:24 And I want to say it was ann’s
1:34:29 Dad who came over and like put an arm on his shoulder and said just take it bird by bird buddy bird by bird
1:34:32 Something like that
1:34:34 And it’s sort of a psychological
1:34:39 life raft break glass in case of emergency kit for writers
1:34:43 Who are just hitting that point like maybe you did with the photography were just like
1:34:49 I want to do anything other than look at that screen or that page. I just I can’t handle it
1:34:51 And I don’t know what to do
1:34:56 So for that reason not necessarily for the nuts and bolts of the writing process itself
1:35:00 But for the psychological component, it’s like if you had a if you were a top athletic coach
1:35:04 And you had your sport specific technical coach and then you had a mental
1:35:11 Like toughness coach who also doubled as a shrink like the mental toughness coach who doubles as a shrink is the bird by bird
1:35:15 Yeah, I’m remembering. She also talks about shitty first drafts. Yes
1:35:20 And just those three words are incredibly helpful because you know when you’re looking at your draft
1:35:25 And it is always really shitty at the beginning and so just knowing. Okay. That’s what it’s supposed to be
1:35:29 Yeah, but yeah, you know the other thing that’s been really helpful to me
1:35:33 So I told you I started taking that creative nonfiction class at NYU
1:35:37 And all of us who took that class got along really well
1:35:42 So we formed a writers group after the class was officially done and we stayed together for years
1:35:47 And we would meet once every week every two weeks and read each other’s stuff
1:35:52 And especially at that stage that really really helped, you know getting the feedback
1:35:58 But also having the kind of camaraderie and support system and in fact totally isolated
1:36:04 Not feeling isolated and I actually met my literary agent from one of the people who was in that group
1:36:09 Who was a publishing lawyer and I said, you know, I have this idea for this book about introverts
1:36:15 Which at the time to me seemed like the most idiosyncratic project on earth, but she said
1:36:17 When you’re ready, I know the right agent for that
1:36:24 And that’s a really serendipitous thing when I put together the proposal for the book that became quiet
1:36:29 I sent it out to that agent who she recommended and to four other
1:36:33 Super amazing agents two of whom I had connections to and
1:36:35 every single one of the other ones
1:36:39 Past and some of them said, you know, I really like the writing
1:36:43 But I think this topic is not commercial enough and I just don’t think it’ll sell
1:36:45 So could you come back with a different topic?
1:36:50 And my the guy who became my agent instantly saw what the potential was going to be
1:36:54 And we’ve been together ever since and I feel like I owe him everything and I love him
1:36:58 And his name is Richard Pine if you’re out there looking for an agent
1:37:02 And I think about this story all the time not only because of book writing
1:37:09 But because all these people these other agents these are experts and these are the culturally anointed gatekeepers
1:37:11 and they know what they’re doing
1:37:17 And yet they didn’t see this one particular thing and I think that that happens all the time. Totally. So
1:37:22 No, I’m glad you shared that and I had a very similar experience. I reached out to I want to say it was four
1:37:32 Agents who were introduced by a very successful author who I’d met something like seven years earlier by volunteering at a non-profit
1:37:37 Which is a great way to meet people above your pay grade as a side note just like filling water glasses for panelists
1:37:43 Works really well. So I had the right introduction the writing. I didn’t think my writing was
1:37:46 Tolstoy or anything, but it was it was passable
1:37:48 and
1:37:50 complete rejection
1:37:55 from three of the four this was the four hour work the four hour work week two of them were not were
1:37:58 Pretty heavy-handed about it
1:38:02 The one of the third july I remember named jillian manas a very good
1:38:06 Agent and she passed but she gave me a lot of really helpful feedback
1:38:10 She didn’t say this won’t work. She just said I don’t think
1:38:12 This is the right fit for me, right
1:38:18 And that that one fair enough, which is totally fair. Yeah, but like here’s a bunch of advice and one of the pieces of advice
1:38:20 She gave me actually wow, I haven’t thought about this forever
1:38:22 was
1:38:26 Think of each I was intimidated by the prospect of writing a book. I never written a book before
1:38:31 She said treat each chapter like a feature magazine article beginning middle and end
1:38:38 Self-sufficient yeah each chapter can live on its own and I’ve followed that advice ever since yeah
1:38:43 That’s great with nonfiction. Yeah, which makes it easier to write also because if you get stuck somewhere
1:38:47 It’s not like you have to cross that bridge to get to a chapter
1:38:52 That sequentially should show up three chapters later. You can treat it in a modular way, right?
1:38:55 If you get really bogged down you can skip
1:39:00 Which also in some cases like the rest of my books leads to a book that can being read
1:39:02 non sequentially in any case
1:39:08 So three out of four turn it down finally signed with my current agent Steven Hanselman
1:39:13 Who I still work with to this day very similarly. Yeah, and
1:39:18 He had just become an agent. Wow. He had just become an agent
1:39:20 But part of what attracted me to him was that
1:39:25 He had a long career as a very successful editor
1:39:31 And was also just is just an eclectic guy went to divinity school plays in a jazz band
1:39:34 I mean really like my kind of my kind of person. Yeah
1:39:37 And then we went out to sell it
1:39:44 And I always forget if it’s like 26 or 27, but nonetheless it was like somewhere between 26 and 28 publishers turn it down
1:39:46 Really? Yes. Wow. And then the
1:39:51 But you only need one that’s the thing. It’s like it’s not about how many people don’t get it. Yeah
1:39:53 It’s about having the right
1:39:56 person or people who do get it
1:40:00 And I mean which is so clear with your book, right? It’s like you don’t need
1:40:03 All the people in the world to think it’s a good idea
1:40:09 You don’t need half the people in the world think it’s a good idea. You need the people who it resonates with
1:40:14 To have it resonate. Yeah, that’s right. And it does not need to be does not need to be millions of people
1:40:18 It could be but it doesn’t have to be and I had a note down also to just
1:40:22 And we don’t have to necessarily spend a ton of time on this but just to clarify
1:40:24 the
1:40:28 Talk about introversion versus shyness. I came across this when I was doing
1:40:31 A bit of homework
1:40:33 Which is people think of say bill gates, right?
1:40:39 It’s sort of maybe a one example of someone who could be useful and distinguishing between the two, but could you
1:40:46 Clarify what an introvert is or how you define introvert. Yeah, how it might differ from from somebody who’s shy, right? Yeah
1:40:49 introversion is really about
1:40:57 The preference for lower stimulation environments and you can trace it to your neurobiologies
1:41:01 Like introverts have nervous systems that react more to all the incoming stimuli
1:41:06 And so that means that we’re kind of at our most alive and happiest and switched on
1:41:11 When things are a little more chill around us, which is probably why when you’re in those group dinners
1:41:15 You’re going to the restroom every so often because your nervous system wants to tone it down
1:41:21 And extroverts have the opposite situation and the opposite liability and because for an extrovert
1:41:25 You’ve got a nervous system that’s reacting less to stimulation and that means
1:41:31 When you’re in an environment that you find too quiet you start to get really listless and checked out
1:41:33 So that’s the liability there
1:41:39 Shyness and I always feel like my work has to do with both introversion and shyness by the way
1:41:42 But shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment
1:41:49 So you’ll know if you’re a shy person because when you encounter someone who has a neutral expression on their face
1:41:54 You will have a tendency to read disapproval in there and to react really strongly to the disapproval
1:41:58 You feel kind of really unhorsed by it and it can take different forms
1:42:01 So it could be if you’re a public speaking or it could be
1:42:06 A job interview or any kind of situation where you feel you might be evaluated
1:42:13 So in reality lots of introverts do tend to be shy and vice versa, but not necessarily at all
1:42:19 I don’t know Bill Gates personally, but my guess is that he’s an introvert but not especially shy and then
1:42:22 somebody like an Eileen Fisher
1:42:29 She’s got this wonderful and I think it’s been decades now. Um, super successful fashion brand
1:42:32 She describes herself as a shy extrovert
1:42:38 So like she really wants to be around people all the time. She wants to be connecting all the time
1:42:43 You know, you talk to her she’s constantly like setting up this workshop and that program and you know
1:42:47 You look at her life and she’s always surrounded by lots of people and things going on
1:42:50 but she’s often feeling intense discomfort and
1:42:57 Needing to work through that wild. Yeah, I would certainly describe myself as an introvert and
1:43:02 I never knew quite how to frame it until
1:43:05 Coming across your definition of preferring lower
1:43:08 stimulation or
1:43:13 Environments or environments with fewer stimuli except I’ve ever since I was a little kid been very sensitive
1:43:16 I mean my sight is very sensitive, right?
1:43:22 My hearing is very sensitive. Yeah, but I’m not shy in the sense that I don’t
1:43:26 I want to engage and ask questions and interact
1:43:35 But if the volume is turned up too much or there are too many speakers metaphorically or or physically I I have a lot of difficulty
1:43:42 Parsing at all, but you don’t have like a shyness would be like, you know before you go into those group dinners
1:43:48 Are you feeling a kind of social anxiety? No, right? Yeah, that’s the difference. Yeah. Yeah
1:43:52 Yeah, there are so many questions that I want to explore
1:43:56 But let’s uh because we have maybe 10 or 15 minutes more
1:44:01 Let’s ask a few of the questions that I that I always like to ask sure
1:44:05 Are there any books that you have given the most to others?
1:44:09 As a gift or any books you’ve gifted often to other people
1:44:11 I think that the book I’ve probably
1:44:16 For the last few years been giving out the most is Waking Up by Sam Harris
1:44:21 Which yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s such a fantastic book and it was really for me
1:44:27 Completely life-changing. I think for probably the reasons it is for many people, which is
1:44:35 I hadn’t really known much about meditation before reading it and because I think by my
1:44:39 My nature. I’m sort of a cross between a skeptic and a mystic or something
1:44:46 You know in the skeptical side of me and it it’s a pretty deep skeptical side
1:44:51 It really needed somebody like Sam who’s such an extreme skeptic, right?
1:44:55 You know and then who very conveniently spent like what 28 years of his life or something
1:45:02 Investigating all these different spiritual tools and then reporting back on them. You know for me that was a narrator
1:45:05 I could really I felt I could really rely on fantastic book
1:45:12 You know, I just I have to I just think you’ll we were talking a bit about Sam before we started recording because
1:45:17 We were both, you know, sort of fanboying and fangirling about these meditation app and
1:45:21 Handful of other things, but I haven’t told you and I don’t know if I’ve even mentioned this
1:45:25 Publicly about here we go. So the first time I met Sam
1:45:29 This relates to Ted went to Ted for the first time as an attendee
1:45:32 Which by the way was too much stimulation. So I never went back
1:45:36 Interesting. Yeah, but I went to Ted for the first time as an attendee
1:45:41 And I was invited to one of these group dinners, right? And so I go out to this group dinner
1:45:47 And we’re eating dinner and off to the side on a separate
1:45:52 Table, there’s this tray of brownies and I love brownies. It’s one of my weaknesses
1:45:57 It is an Achilles heel and I have zero portion control and these brownies are large brownies
1:46:00 And I sneak over kind of in between courses and I’m like, you know what?
1:46:04 I’m going to skip one of the later courses and just substitute the brownies because I love brownies
1:46:07 and so I eat two of these brownies and
1:46:08 about
1:46:13 20 minutes later, the host who I shall not name comes up to me and he goes, Tim, did you eat any of the brownies?
1:46:16 I go, yeah, I had two of them and he goes, okay
1:46:21 Everything’s going to be fine. And I’m like, wait, what? Everything is going to be fine. What the hell are you talking about?
1:46:24 They were heavily dosed
1:46:26 pod brownies
1:46:33 And I am not a habitual pot user and so I suddenly in the middle of dinner
1:46:41 Just get hit by this tsunami of cannabis and you combine that with my discomfort with high stimulation environments
1:46:43 And I’m like, I need to get the hell out of here
1:46:48 So I excuse myself to go to the restroom and by this point
1:46:54 I’m already a huge fan of sam. Yeah, but I’ve never had any contact with them
1:46:56 so I run off to the bathroom to escape
1:46:57 and
1:47:03 I open the door and literally like at the sink run straight into sam Harris in the men’s room and I’m like
1:47:06 Sam Harris
1:47:08 high off my rocker
1:47:13 And that was my first and he looks at me kind of like he’s like, hi
1:47:16 It’s kind of sideways because I’m just just beyond
1:47:23 Reality at that point and that was my first meeting with sam. That’s hilarious. And did you tell him your brownie story?
1:47:27 I did I did tell him which he appreciated because he does have some history with yes, he does
1:47:33 Altered states, but yeah, no, I found that book and the subsequent meditation app
1:47:38 And all of it incredibly helpful and fantastic the one piece of it that
1:47:42 I’m kind of trying to explore separately because I feel like
1:47:45 He looks at much less is the whole
1:47:49 tradition of loving kindness meditation and all the meditations around that
1:47:52 So that’s really really of interest to me
1:47:56 So I’m sort of charting a different course there and I’ll tell you like even just last night
1:48:01 I was interviewing on stage this guy. Heyman sunim. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him
1:48:05 But he’s a a really renowned zen Buddhist monk from korea
1:48:11 And his books are all number one bestsellers and korea and lots of other countries, but here he’s less well known
1:48:15 But anyway, he has a new book out. So I was doing this interview and
1:48:18 We’re up on stage so you can see the audience
1:48:24 And it happens to be a pretty formal audience. So before we start the audience is kind of sitting there
1:48:29 Kind of still in their seats and then he opens by doing a loving kindness meditation
1:48:34 And it was so amazing to see the transformation on their faces
1:48:38 And he did this for maybe one or two or three minutes like it wasn’t long
1:48:43 Yeah, and you know, suddenly they’re totally smiling and they’re open and they’re happy
1:48:46 It’s remarkable. Yeah, it’s remarkable. And I think it’s so
1:48:53 Weird and dispiriting how in the mainstream media and in corporate life
1:48:57 I mean, it’s great that there’s been this incredible embrace of mindfulness meditation
1:49:02 But I think there’s a kind of allergy towards going too much in the loving kindness
1:49:08 Direction. Um, and I spoke to Sharon Salzburg about this. Who’s one of the great teachers
1:49:14 And she said that people have this sense that it must be phony like that you couldn’t possibly
1:49:19 Actually have those feelings and so it kind of gives them a sort of creepy feeling to do it
1:49:22 Totally, but I feel like that all needs to get
1:49:25 completely rethought loving kindness the label I think
1:49:28 Smells of kind of hand-wavy
1:49:31 hippy
1:49:37 Associations and therefore people veer away from it. Yeah, or if they have sensitivity to that stuff, which I
1:49:39 Do and have for a very long time
1:49:43 But so did mindfulness for many years
1:49:47 Absolutely, you know, but that’s been recast but I mentioned that as a contrast to my
1:49:53 Then subsequent experience with loving kindness meditation also called meta me tta meditation
1:50:00 Which I was introduced to not first by jack cornfield. I did spend some time with him
1:50:03 Who’s sort of of the same cohort as Sharon Salzburg?
1:50:06 They’re close friends and Sharon’s been on the podcast
1:50:10 But meng chad meng tan of google actually you started this
1:50:14 Class within google called I think it’s search within yourself
1:50:16 It was a course that included many tools including mindfulness
1:50:21 And he has a book called joy on demand, which is fantastic. I thought it was a fantastic title
1:50:23 I was like, I could use join demand. Let’s take a look at this
1:50:28 And there’s a very short part in that book which ended up excerpting for I want to say
1:50:32 tools of titans about loving kindness meditation
1:50:39 And he tells the story of this woman who as an experiment guided or suggested by meng
1:50:44 Did a one-minute loving kindness meditation on the hour every hour for one workday
1:50:49 And she picked people who were walking about at the office or so and she came back and she said that is the
1:50:54 Best day I’ve had at work in seven years. And I think part of that
1:50:56 is at least for me
1:50:58 That’s I am very
1:51:05 Historically, I’ve been very trapped in my head. I’m very prefrontal. Yeah, and I come from a family of
1:51:09 Warriors people who are warrior or warrior
1:51:15 Warriors not not the not the battle axe type but the like larry david type
1:51:17 Yeah, yeah for one of those two right and
1:51:20 When you are consumed with
1:51:23 worry or anxiety
1:51:28 And this is not my description, but it’s been described to me as being trapped in the future
1:51:32 Like depression is being trapped in the past anxiety or worrying is being trapped in the future
1:51:35 And it’s also at least for me. It’s a focus on the self
1:51:40 It’s like me me me it’s all things that might happen to me things that I should do
1:51:46 And the loving kindness meditation which can be so short and have an impact
1:51:53 Gets you unlike most types of mindfulness practice that are popular or becoming popular in the west
1:51:56 It gets you out of yourself. Yeah, and
1:52:03 I recall when I was writing tools of titans. I decided to take mangs advice and I did loving kindness for
1:52:07 Literally two or three minutes every night
1:52:12 I was at this hotel and they had a dry sauna and I go into the dry sauna really late because I was doing my writing
1:52:14 Really late right and just do
1:52:19 Two to three minutes of thinking about a friend and wishing them happiness and seeing them smiling and giving them a hug
1:52:23 and having them smile back at me and wishing me the same and it was
1:52:29 transformative as regards with regards to my mood. It was really just incredible. Yes
1:52:37 Low dose really really low dose and I’m curious you mentioned that you were thinking about or meditating on loving kindness to your friend
1:52:40 Did you also start with a traditional
1:52:46 Practice of wishing it to yourself or is that less comfortable? This is a great question. So I did not
1:52:48 It did not even occur to me
1:52:50 to do this
1:52:53 until years later when I
1:52:56 went to my first
1:53:02 Seven day might have been 10 day silent meditation retreat at spirit rock right and jack cornfield was there
1:53:06 And I went in they check in with you to make sure you’re not having a total psychotic break
1:53:11 For a few minutes every other day and I had this meeting with jack and one of his
1:53:18 Co-teachers for the event and we were talking about loving kindness talking about loving kindness and as I was leaving
1:53:21 The woman with jack said
1:53:25 Just out of curiosity. Have you been doing any loving kindness for yourself and it struck?
1:53:30 I don’t know how to describe this in a way that doesn’t make me look like an ass
1:53:33 But it just struck me as such a silly question. I was like, no, of course
1:53:35 I haven’t been doing it for myself and then I realized
1:53:38 how much that
1:53:43 Probably explained a lot of my problems and she goes. Yeah, you might want to try that. Why don’t you experiment with that?
1:53:49 And I remember jack later saying, you know, and I’m paraphrasing but you know, if your compassion doesn’t include yourself
1:53:54 Then it’s incomplete. Yeah, and that is and you can’t really give it to other people in a complete way either
1:54:00 Right. So that has become probably I’m so glad you asked that one of the biggest changes in
1:54:01 my
1:54:10 I could call it a mindfulness practice, but my way of relating to the world and thinking about helping others has been actually taking time to
1:54:19 Show or think on self compassion specifically for myself at a handful of younger ages. Yeah. Yeah, which I do at meal times
1:54:21 and
1:54:27 Might talk about that more at some point, but yeah, that’s that’s become really it’s become a very very very very important ritual for me
1:54:32 But I don’t think you’re alone. I mean Sharon Salzburg mentioned to me that many
1:54:38 People have trouble. I mean the traditional progression of the practice would be start with yourself and then, you know
1:54:41 Move progressively outward to other people in your life
1:54:45 And she said many people have trouble beginning with themselves
1:54:50 And so I was really struck because last night this man came and soon him who I love began
1:54:53 In this meditation by directing it to ourselves
1:54:58 And I asked him about that afterwards and he seemed kind of puzzled by the question
1:55:02 Which made me wonder if this is a uniquely American problem. I don’t know
1:55:08 This reminds me of the story I heard of this
1:55:13 I don’t know what it was. Nepalese or I know buddhini’s monk who came to the us any
1:55:16 He was in a car on the way to some event
1:55:21 This was in the us and there are these people running, you know jogging on the side of the street to get in shape
1:55:26 But they’re just they looked like they were dying. I mean they looked like they were running from hyenas and he was just like
1:55:29 Are they okay? What’s wrong with them?
1:55:32 It just it was so foreign
1:55:38 Um, my goodness. So we have just a few minutes. Let me ask you
1:55:44 The billboard question. Uh, so if if you could put a message on a billboard
1:55:48 This is metaphorically speaking to get a message a quote a question anything
1:55:54 Non-commercial out to millions or billions of people. What might you put on that billboard?
1:55:56 I think I’d probably put
1:56:02 This one aphorism that I’ve loved since high school. I think which is only connect by em forster
1:56:06 Only connect only connect. Yeah, like that at the end of the day
1:56:09 That’s all that really matters. What does that mean to you?
1:56:13 It just means connecting on some really
1:56:19 Deep level with the people around you and that might sound like
1:56:23 An ironic aphorism for someone who wrote a book
1:56:28 About introversion, but to me those are not contradictory things at all
1:56:31 You know, and so for me like connection
1:56:34 It can happen in person for sure, but it could also happen just by listening to
1:56:40 Music that’s really touching you and you feel completely connected to this musician who may not even be alive anymore
1:56:44 You know or a writer who might not be alive anymore, but they’re expressing something
1:56:50 Deep and unchanging about what it’s like to be human. So those I think there’s kind of nothing
1:56:53 More important than that only connect only connect
1:57:00 Is there anything you’ve done that has helped you to more deeply or frequently experience those moments or any
1:57:03 advice you might have for people who
1:57:06 want to
1:57:11 Cultivate that so aside from meditation, which I am a huge proponent of but
1:57:17 I think you really do have to pay attention to what works for you and it really is so different for everybody
1:57:21 You know, so for me, I love to have deep one-on-one conversations
1:57:25 It happens through music. It happens through literature and those
1:57:29 That’s how it happens. Um, but I think it it really is a different answer for everyone
1:57:35 But I’ll tell you and this is maybe a different topic, but the whole
1:57:41 idea for my next book came out of one of these kinds of experiences, which is
1:57:46 I have always had a love of bittersweet and minor key music
1:57:50 And and the book’s not about music, but I’m going to tell you this story anyway. Okay
1:57:53 So when I was in law school
1:57:58 I was listening to music like that in my dorm and a friend came by and he was kind of a funny wise guy
1:58:01 And he said, why are you listening to this music to commit suicide too?
1:58:03 And
1:58:07 You know, and I thought it was funny and I laughed but I thought about it for decades afterwards
1:58:12 Like I was thinking well, why is it first of all, what is it about our culture?
1:58:17 That makes this music so suspect that you would make that kind of joke and also
1:58:22 What is it about the music itself that for me is not suicide inducing at all? It’s like it’s the opposite
1:58:25 I feel when I hear music like that completely
1:58:28 connected to
1:58:29 everything
1:58:34 Because it’s like the composer is expressing some really deep truth about what it is to be human
1:58:39 So I’ve thought about this for decades and and the place that i’m going with this next book is
1:58:40 I think that
1:58:45 Tuning into the sorrows of the world actually is a kind of secret superpower
1:58:52 That we’re not really allowed to access very often because of course we live in this culture that tells you
1:58:55 Don’t go there and always wear the smiley face and and so on
1:58:58 But if I can say like even look at somebody like you
1:59:06 Even before you started being really open and upfront about some of the demons that you’ve struggled with which by the way
1:59:10 All the honor to you for doing that. It’s amazingly brave and generous
1:59:13 But even before you did it and if you had never done it
1:59:15 I don’t think you would have been
1:59:20 Touching all those people the way you have all these years if it weren’t for those sorrows
1:59:26 I agree. Yeah. Yeah, so it’s all about that. I’m excited to read your next book. Thank you
1:59:31 I think that’s a really really really really really important topic. Yeah, I think it’s really important
1:59:37 I think we’ll have to do it around too in that case. I would love that. That would be awesome. I just have to write a little faster
1:59:44 I will I will happily wait for your best work. So thank you. No need to rush
1:59:49 Well, Susan, this has been such a joy and I’m sure people can hear it
1:59:51 but just to
1:59:56 Maybe underscore the point. I mean you are a very present person when
2:00:01 you’re speaking with someone else and I can find you feel that in the room
2:00:04 And so you’re you’re walking the talk
2:00:10 Which is always refreshing and not always the case. So thank you for taking the time today. Thank you so much
2:00:15 I really enjoyed it. Yeah, and I’m and I will link to everything in the show notes for folks
2:00:21 Including the the name of the Korean monk that I couldn’t spell to save my life at the moment
2:00:26 But we will have links to everything at tim.blog/podcast and you can just search Susan
2:00:30 And pop right up people can find you
2:00:35 Online presumably where are the best places to say hello learn more about what you’re up to?
2:00:38 Well, best thing is to sign up for my newsletter
2:00:42 Which you can get to if you go to quiet rev.com, which is for quiet revolution
2:00:48 So you’ll find it right there on the home page. There’s a sign up form and there’s a newsletter that goes out every week
2:00:56 So that’s the absolute best and then I’m also super active on LinkedIn and on Facebook. Great. And is that simply
2:01:02 Susan Kane because I think Facebook correct me if I’m wrong. I think it’s author Susan Kane. Oh gosh. Thank you for saying that
2:01:05 Yeah, so on Facebook. It’s author Susan Kane and on LinkedIn
2:01:08 I actually don’t remember but it’s part of the LinkedIn influencer
2:01:11 I’m sure if you put in LinkedIn influencer and my name
2:01:13 It’ll pop right up. Yeah
2:01:16 And then twitter may be less active
2:01:20 Yeah, I am on twitter but a little less active at Susan Kane at Susan Kane. Yep
2:01:23 And
2:01:28 Can’t wait to see the next book and continue to follow your work. Thank you so much. I will say the same to you
2:01:30 What is the next book?
2:01:34 What is the next book? Well, you know based on the an episode that came out a few days ago
2:01:37 I think it’s going to be this book that I
2:01:40 Have been waiting to give myself permission to write which is about
2:01:43 It’s not that it’ll be
2:01:49 A close cousin to what you are thinking a lot about right now. It would be
2:01:55 How to pay attention to the psycho emotional
2:01:57 undercurrents and
2:02:00 components of life very closely and
2:02:03 how to use tools both
2:02:07 On the beaten path and off very very very off the beaten path
2:02:08 for
2:02:10 finding resolution for
2:02:13 problems or challenges or
2:02:15 insecurities
2:02:19 Or trauma that are at least in current conventional practice
2:02:23 Considered very difficult to treat or untreatable. So that would be
2:02:30 As far as I can tell and I’ve been gathering notes for about five years now. That would be the thrust of it. That’s going to be
2:02:33 Your most important book
2:02:35 I hope so. What’s your timetable?
2:02:38 What’s my timetable?
2:02:40 It’s
2:02:43 Well as who was it? I think this was this something I heard on a tv set once
2:02:48 They didn’t want people to rush, but it was the just was people need to rush and they said
2:02:53 But they didn’t want to say that and make people panic. So they said we need everyone to move with purpose
2:02:57 So I think my answer is move with purpose
2:03:02 but not in haste because I want to treat it with
2:03:07 The depth and thought that it deserves. So I don’t want to rush
2:03:15 We’ll probably write it without signing before selling anything or signing any contracts. I’ll probably
2:03:21 Oh, you’ll write the whole thing. I’ll probably do it on my own time. Oh, interesting. Okay, but it is atop if not the top priority
2:03:27 Wow, so so are you like working on it every day right now? I am in some fashion working on it every day
2:03:29 but it’s going to be a while before I get to the
2:03:32 composition pro stage
2:03:37 But the vast majority of the work that I do on my books is the experimentation and the traveling for
2:03:43 Subjecting myself to all sorts of unusual things and the note taking and the organizing of said notes
2:03:47 And I’m doing some piece of that almost every day. Wow
2:03:53 Yeah, oh, I’m so glad you’re doing this book. Yeah, so if I can help, you know, if you want an early reader or whatever
2:03:58 I would love to awesome. It’s completely at my alley. Well likewise likewise. This has been so much fun
2:04:05 And until next time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much and to everybody listening
2:04:07 Same
2:04:10 Until next time. Thank you for listening
2:04:13 Hey guys, this is tim again
2:04:17 Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday
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2:04:40 That I send out every friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week
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2:08:37 And it says you might be searching for this how about that and it suggests an alternative and I think to myself wait a second
2:08:42 My internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I’m typing into the browser
2:08:44 Yeah
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