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#859- Q&A With Tim — The Upcoming AI Tsunami and Building Offline Advantage, Book Recommendations, Spotting Psychedelic Red Flags, Courage as a Learnable Skill, and More

The Tim Ferriss Show

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  • Offline Advantage Wins In The Age Of AI
    • Offline advantage and real-world relationships become more valuable as AI homogenizes internet-based analysis.
    • Tim Ferriss says texting niche experts gives him information no model has, while public-market AI analysis likely shows millions the same answers. Transcript: Tim Ferriss So let’s hop into it. First question is from Hugo. In a world full of tool systems and AI, what human abilities or habits are becoming more valuable, not less? So I’ll try to keep this pretty short. I would say the relational, the tactile, anything IRL in real life, that can be extended also to, for instance, in my case, informational advantage. Offline informational advantage. A lot of the LLMs are slicing and dicing the internet. One might argue all of them are doing that. And whether you are looking at longevity in professional terms, if you’re looking at longevity in creative terms, I think putting on the lens of looking at what you can do in IRL that Currently, now that certainly robotics are on the edge of some type of Cambrian explosion. So who knows? Maybe it’s iRobot three years from now. But for now, the kind of offline differentiator is a big deal. And I would say the relational side, certainly the harnessing of awe, wonder, et cetera, nature immersion, which sounds like I’m suggesting everybody disappear off into a commune In the woods or become homesteaders or something. That’s not what I’m saying. But for instance, the fact that I have people I can text for very narrow types of expertise, even though they have the access of a generalist, allows me to have an informational advantage Because none of that is online. Conversely, if you’re using ChatGPT or Claude to try to assess a given public company as a good or bad investment or somewhere in between, can rest assured that many, many people, perhaps Even millions of people have already done this. And therefore, you’re going to be reading more or less the same thing as many others. (Time 0:05:31)
  • Do Not Outsource Skills You Want To Keep
    • Avoid using AI for skills you want to keep in your own head, especially synthesis and writing.
    • Tim Ferriss uses AI to critique drafts but hesitates when it offers to rewrite them, warning that convenience can quietly erode core cognitive muscles. Transcript: Tim Ferriss What are the top three things you should never use AI for? I would say any skill you want to preserve in your head, you should probably not use AI for. So I use AI for editing right now. You very quickly end up on a slippery slope. So if I create a rough draft, as I did with the self-help trap, for instance, I would then take that, feed it into these models and give them a personality. You are an editor from the New Yorker. This is your name. Maybe it’s a famous editor or the person who worked with Robert Caro, whatever it might be. I mean, that’s, again, not to compare myself to those people, but I want a good editor. Give me feedback on this rough draft. What the model will do, because they want to keep you using the model, of course, is it will give you all the feedback and then it will say, would you like me to incorporate all these changes And draft a version that uses all these things? And that’s where I have deliberately hesitated. I’ve also played around with it. And frankly, it’s very good, but therein lies the danger because if you want to preserve your ability to synthesize, and this will tie into questions shortly about creativity, I do Think that it makes some sense to exercise caution. There are already scientists and researchers looking at the negative cognitive impacts of depending on AI, much like your ability to navigate is probably deteriorated since using Google Maps. And I would say net-net, each individual is more enhanced, augmented using these tools. But if you do want to keep certain muscles strong and able, that’s where I would hesitate. And look, you can always change your mind later, but if you lose it, it’s a hell of a lot harder to reclaim it. (Time 0:11:31)
  • Interesting Lives Beat AI Content Floods
    • The best defense against AI content flood is not sharper analysis but more interesting lived experience.
    • Tim Ferriss repeats a photographer’s rule: put more interesting stuff in front of the camera, then applies it to writers doing real experiments and observation. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Oh, CJ. CJ’s question. Do you, Tim, think AI is capable of creativity in the sense that humans are? What I would argue here, and I’ve read all these books on creativity, I’ve looked at some research, which tends to be pretty soft, I would say, if I were being less generous, hand-wavy About creativity or flow. I feel like a lot of these are poorly defined. So we could even go so far as to say, I don’t think we understand what creativity is in humans, right? Could machines have the equivalent of the muse visit them? Is there a way to engineer that? When we create these metaphors for ourselves, are we really just using poetry or abstraction to try to verbalize something that’s actually pretty discreet and replicable if you just Operate from a sort of bottoms-up approach with reinforcement learning and this, that, and the other thing? Maybe. I just don’t know. The second question that CJ had, though, is the one that I think is worth not necessarily spending more time on, but I would underline this because I underline it for myself. As a writer and with the explosion of AI-generated content out there now, how do you rise above the noise? All right. It’s pretty simple. And I’ll answer that by way of a story. I was spending time, a little bit of time, drinking a Paloma with a very well-known photographer. He is one of the most commercially successful photographers in the world. And he was laughing and telling a story of how he gets approached by photographers. They could be amateur, but very often they’re professionals who want to know how they can become better photographers. And they’re asking all these gear-related questions. And his answer is just put more interesting stuff in front of the camera. Make what’s in front of the camera more interesting. And the equivalent of that, at least for me as a nonfiction writer, is doing interesting things. Go out in the world, do interesting things, or observe interesting things in real life and write about those things, do experiments, et cetera. I mean, there are many ways to skin this cat. It could be, let’s just say, Travels with Charlie. Amazing book by John Steinbeck. Road trip in a makeshift RV with his dog, Charlie. All right. Incredible book. And as it stands right now, I think it’s a ways off that a humanoid robot is going to get into a car with a canine companion, robotic or flesh and bone, and do something like this. Anything that is analysis-based is relegated to the machines at this point. They’re so good. AI, broadly speaking, LLMs being one manifestation of that are just too good. They’re so good. And we’ll talk about how I use some of those tools a little bit later. So do interesting things and write about them. (Time 0:16:04)
  • Start AI With A Use Case Not Hype
    • Start AI projects with a concrete use case instead of trying to track every new tool.
    • Tim Ferriss cites Chris Hutchins on using Claude desktop features first, keeping agents away from email and cards, and using skills plus API keys for narrow automations. Transcript: Tim Ferriss How are you keeping up with all the new AI tools? Where do you keep your focus? Have you set up OpenClaw? And if so, what’s your workflow? Okay. So I am not keeping up with AI developments. People who do this full-time as the C-suite executive teams of the best-known companies in the world have trouble keeping up. So I am definitely not keeping up or trying to keep up. I feel like as soon as I’m doing that, I’ve already lost. So it’s not how do I win the game? It’s choosing the right game, which might sound cliched. But does that mean I’m ignoring everything? No. Of the first monkeys shot into space. So I’m going to read from a friend of mine who I texted, right? This is about this question right before we started recording. All right. So about OpenClaw, he played around with OpenClaw. His name is Chris Hutchins. He’s been on the podcast. He has a podcast called All the Hacks, which he has used to explore some really fascinating stuff. If you’re a points nerd or like travel, it’s a good one. He goes a lot further than that. But one of his episodes is, I built an AI assistant that works while I sleep. And he explains what he did with OpenClaw. However, here’s what he texted to me. In the last week, Claude’s desktop app has shipped a bunch of features that do a lot of what OpenClaw can do in a more user-friendly way. Schedule tasks, remote access, et cetera. So that could be a good beginner way to start. But with all AI projects, I suggest going in with a use case. This is, again, Chris texting. And then he documented his whole journey with building a basic app through OpenClaw, etc., etc., etc., and leveling up his knowledge each time. We’ll link to that episode in the show notes. You can find it pretty easily. Here’s what he added to that. For OpenClaw, I’d say you absolutely don’t need a fancy computer. I ran it on a 2012 Mac Mini for the first few weeks. But if you have an old computer and you want to set it up and test it out at home, great. But until you feel confident, one, don’t give it access to things like email, credit cards, etc. And there are some hilariously tragic stories of this gone awry that you can find on your own. Two, that was my director’s commentary. Two, don’t install random skills you find on the internet. Three, go to Claude, ChatGPT, etc. And get advice about how to set it up securely. Four, every time I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve been able to use Claod code in the open claw directory to fix things so there you have that is by virtue of texting chris hutchins an answer on open Claw and what i could also do is give some examples of internally how we’re using stuff. So I have an employee who is very interested in these tools, and I have wanted to encourage that as long as we’re not completely demolishing our own security from the inside out. So he’s played a lot with cloud code and other things. And I asked him for some use cases that I could share with you. So I will pull those up right now. And this alludes to a term, defines a term that Chris used. All right. So one thing I did, this is my employee. One thing I did earlier today was build a skill, quote unquote skill, fancy name for a text file. In this case, inside Claude that will generate the PDF and word versions of an IO.O. That’s an insertion order for a podcast sponsor. If I only give it the missing items from the I.O., for instance, company name, official company name, da-da it fills it out automatically and creates a PDF. It’s a small save in time, but this is something he repeats a lot. And there may be a better way to do it, like a template and hello sign or something. I also have been working on a project doing a roughly 20-year retrospective deep dive and analysis of all my angel investing. Are the stories I tell myself about my report card accurate? Are they completely false? Are they somewhere in between, et cetera, et cetera. And for that project, coming back to his text here, it’s been really crazy to just tell it, quote, here’s an API key, and it will figure out how to connect to a given service like Gmail. And if you have an API key for a product, you can easily start using it in Claude as it will simply write itself a script. And one of the wildest things, and this is paraphrasing here, but it can ingest an absurd amount of data and convert it into something useful. And it can also enrich data in some very interesting ways, right? So if I’m trying to figure out, okay, via email introductions, who introduced the winners, who introduced the losers, who introduced the zombies that just can’t seem to die after years Of struggling, take off for that matter. And then is there a signal, say, looking at the education levels, the schools, the alma maters of founders, right? What about single founders versus two founders versus three founders, things like this, location, geography, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Is there any signal to any of this? Another example, which might apply to more of you, the Google calendar integration has also been helpful. In other words, updating a calendar entry from Claude or creating multiple at a time, right? So using Claude to add calendar entries. Now, in my case, I have a bunch of different calendars and different people on my team add to different calendars. One thing that helps us a lot, and maybe someday I’ll share this for right now, I’m probably not going to, but I have a document, a Google doc that is the 10 commandments of my calendar, Basically. And it’s rules around formatting, what to include, et cetera, right? Secondary points of contact, cell phones, time zone always, right? Indicated in the headline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are lots of different rules, but he can use that or other people on my team can use that to then automatically check calendar entries through cloud code and fix them as needed. So some people have joked that the four-hour workweek should be rewritten as the four-minute workweek. I think there’s something to it. And there’s a temptation to do an entire section on the use of AI in place of virtual assistants and so on. The problem with that is that as soon as the ink had metaphorically dried on that paper, it would already be out of date. So I’m not going to do that, I don’t think. So there you have it. And the API key is a really important component to all of this. Also, and I’m sure some of you have figured this out, but with CloudCode and Chris Hutchins alluded to this as well. For debugging, for instance, we did a website redesign and there was an issue with a form. No idea why. And we wanted to fix it very quickly and we weren’t sure how long it would take for support to get back to us. So he was able to dump all the code at the time into the model and just figured out how to fix it. And there are many, many, many other examples (Time 0:19:22)
  • Use Dynamic Tools For Career Pivots
    • Use adaptive tools to map strengths and learn faster when planning career jumps amid AI displacement.
    • Tim Ferriss points to Apt for personalized strength and direction discovery, then Oboe for accelerated skill acquisition instead of relying on static career books. Transcript: Tim Ferriss This is a question from Becky. What would you say to someone who wants a career jump? Sometimes I feel I get caught in a loop of same pay range, same experiences, same mid-level opportunities. How can I start increasing my income opportunities and skills this year? Okay. So I reached out as I often do, texted a couple of people about this because they’re actually, this is going to be a huge, huge, mega, mega, meta problem for people moving forward. And it’s going to increasingly, I think, be pervasive. People are going to wonder what they should do next, right? Which then informs kind of upskilling. And there’s a later question, so I might as well explore it here, related to encodings in the Jim Collins episode, Question Rounded Encodings. I might come back to that. But suffice to say, some of these personality tests and things like Enneagram are actually very helpful and things like StrengthsFinder and so on. And there are two startups I’m involved with because I recognize just through questions like this from Becky, which are kind of the canary in the coal mine. It’s not really a canary in a coal mine. It’s like there was one whisper, now there are 10, then there are 100, now there are 1,000, right? This question is coming up more and more. And a lot of folks are going to, in one way or another, need to zig and zag, even though they might not expect it right now. And a lot of that’s going to be due to AI job displacement. So the two startups that, and again, I mentioned that I’m an investor in these, so I’m biased. But the reason that I invested in these is to answer this question, or more specifically, to help people answer this question. So the first one is called apt, A-P And you can check that out at try apt dot AI. So try apt, T-R dot AI. I had the co-founder and CEO create a code. So if any of you guys want to try it, ultimately it does cost money to get all the results and to get this sort of AI guided mentor around your strengths and so on, which you discover or uncover Through the process of going through this. But you can get 50% off with TIM50. That’s the code to use, T-I All right. So if you want to take a look at that, you can check it out. The other is Oboe, so O-B And that is entirely focused on accelerating skill acquisition and learning. So I think these two actually go together really well. You could use Apt first and then Oboe. And I’ve played around with both. There’s a lot that’s going to be coming into both of these, but might be worth checking out. Honestly, if I were to tell you to go buy what color is my parachute or something, you might glean something from that. But I feel like in very dynamic times with so much shifting sand with respect to technology, you probably need something a bit more or benefit from something that is more dynamic and Personalized from the get-go as opposed to you having to do lots and lots of heavy lifting with a fixed format. (Time 0:26:43)
  • Build Communities Like A Well Run Dinner Party
    • Shape community culture early with zero tolerance for toxic behavior and small costs to join.
    • Tim Ferriss treats communities like dinner parties, removes broken-window behavior fast, and notes that even a $1 fee sharply reduces no-shows and raises contribution quality. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Okay, this is the question. You’ve worked across books, podcasts, and experiments that each attracted their own communities. What have you learned about proactively shaping a community’s culture, not just growing an audience? And how has direct interaction with people changed the way you enter creative flow today? The last piece is probably the hardest answer, but I can tell you that I think that proactively shaping a community’s culture actually helps you to build an audience. But to what end? Not build an audience like, oh, I’m aiming for 2 million, 3 million, 10 million YouTube subscribers. I don’t like renting audience in a way that’s dependent on algorithms. And you can look at a lot of the biggest YouTube channels. It’s like their average views per video have cratered, even though they have huge numbers of subscribers. You see that with engagement on X and other places. However, one thing that never goes out of style is 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. You can read it for free at kk.org. And therefore, I will focus on the proactively shaping a community’s culture. In my case, I think it’s pretty simple. I treat a closed community like I would a dinner party at my house. So somebody walks into my house. This is a shoes-free house, right? Because who wants dog shit and bubble gum on your kitchen floor? I don’t. So the shoes come off at the door, right? So let’s say somebody comes in. They’re like, no, I’m keeping my boots on. They come in tracking mud all over the place. They sit down at the dinner table. They kick their feet up on the table and start calling people assholes or something like that person’s going to get dragged by their hair out. And then they’re never coming back in. So that’s a bit of a, maybe a melodramatic example, but zero tolerance policy for broken windows, right? You know, Malcolm Gladwell and others have written about this, but it’s like when these minor infractions are permitted, I’m going to pull out a fancy term that tech people like the Overton window, the broadness of what is now allowable behavior shifts. Okay. Or I shouldn’t say shift. It’s a fucking window. It’s not supposed to get wider or shorter, but it moves in a more aggressive behavioral direction, right? So if you allow minor infractions, you’re going to get moderate infractions. You allow those, you’re going to get major infractions. So from the very first days of, say, the blog, the comments section has guidelines and it’s like, remember the Fonzie? We’re going to be cool like that. Like if you’re an asshole, we’re going to boot you and blacklist you. And you can criticize me, but don’t be a dick to other people. And if you are, you’re gone. I guess it’s zero tolerance and you have to enforce that. If you don’t, people are crafty. They’ll, they’ll learn how to manipulate you because you are asking to be at least abused by not enforcing your own rules. So that’s the first one. It’s just like, you have to excise the cancers and remove the poison. You just have to, because the default state of pretty much the entire internet now, because it’s been allowed and encouraged through various gamifications on social platforms is Just being loud, obnoxious, awful. So you have to set rules to countervail that. Also, and Jeff, I think you’ve experienced this, if you have a private community of 100 people or 200 people or 50, doesn’t really matter, and you charge $5 a quarter, $5 a year, doesn’t Really matter. But if you have some very nominal costs, people opt in who generally want to contribute and be in an environment of positivity. That’s my experience generally. So having some very, very nominal fee at the door, I think is incredibly helpful. And you find that also with events. I’ve done plenty of live events. Don’t really do them anymore for a lot of reasons, but very, very rarely in the past, I would throw these live events for book launch parties, 100 people, 200. If people can RSVP to an event, your rate or no-show rate is going to be sky high. If you force them to pay $1 to hold their spot, suddenly the no-show rate goes down to low single digits. So I don’t think there’s any rocket science here, but the tough part is being willing to enforce. And maybe you give someone a two strikes you’re out policy, but frankly, I find that that can metastasize. For instance, I have a lovely dog, was a stray two months ago, adopted her, and she’s really smart. She’s part Anatolian Shepherd, it would seem. And if she realizes, for instance, that she can kind of pit me against my partner and that she doesn’t actually have to listen to sit until the third time, she’s not going to listen to the First two. She’ll just stare at you defiantly and then sit the third time. Humans are the same way. They’ll do that too. If they know they have two strikes, you’re going to get more bad behavior because they know they can get away with it once. All right. So there you go. (Time 0:30:21)
  • Books Tim Ferriss Keeps Close For A Reason
    • Read books that sharpen judgment or push you toward richer firsthand experience, not just abstract analysis.
    • Tim Ferriss highlights The Effective Executive, Of Wolves and Men, Travels with Charley, Alice in Wonderland, and Richard Koch’s 80-20 books. Transcript: Tim Ferriss If I could only pick from the books on the shelves behind you, what book would you want everyone in this group to deep dive into or dive deep into? I mean, I have those books up there for a reason. I have thousands of books. I’ve donated most of them. These are the ones I keep up for me to look at. Give me a second. I’ll tell you. I’m going to give answers that may not be satisfying to some folks. That’s okay. I’ll give you one that I suppose you might expect from me. So one is going to be the Effective Executive from Peter Drucker. Classic, old, short, incredible bang for the buck. However, the other books, I would say, again, talking about what you do in a world of AI, do more interesting things. There’s a book back there called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, who won, I believe it was the Booker or Pulitzer Prize for another of his books called Arctic Dreams. Of Wolves and Men is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read. And it really shattered the mold. It redefined what, let’s just call it nonfiction nature writing could be. It’s just an incredible, incredible book. So there’s one, but again, this is choose your own adventure, pick and choose. Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck. I mentioned it earlier. It is hilarious. Also an incredibly accurate and enjoyable, warts and all, ride through the US. What a quirky, weird-ass country. So that’s another one. Pretty fast read. Then there are entire shelves back there related to animal tracking and so on, because I’ve done a bunch of that. I don’t think most of you should probably spend a lot of time on that. If you haven’t read, I’ll simplify the title here, Alice in Wonderland. You should go read Alice in Wonderland. Read the whole thing, not just quotes from it. I have a collector’s edition back there. And then there are a few actually that I was going to mention for one of the questions you guys submitted or as an answer. The 80-20 principle, Richard Kosh, that just never gets old, just does not get old. And there’s another book of his up there called Living the 80-20 Principle. It might be Living the 80-20 Way, but he really walks the talk. And if you haven’t heard my podcast with Richard Kosh, K-O he’s also one of the best investors I’ve ever met. I mean, he’s had, I don’t know if he’s disclosed the actual amount. I know a lot of the world’s best investors and he is quietly way up there in the Pantheon. So also a practitioner, he’s on the field. So worth paying attention to him. All the places I’ve traveled to, which have been the most breathtaking, there’s so many. I mean, Queenstown, New Zealand at the right time of year, I think is incredible, but you name it. I think upstate New York, honestly, the gunks and that entire region where a lot of the last of the Mohicans, the book, certainly, I don’t know about the filming of the movie, but that Takes place in that region. You can kind of put me anywhere. I mean, I think so many places are beautiful. Take a couple of drawing classes. That makes things much more beautiful overall, like gesture drawing classes. Get some live nudes. Keep it interesting. I mean, you may get an obese dude with his schwanz all over the place. So just so you know, it’s not automatically going to be a Victoria’s Secret model. But that’s okay. I can’t win them all. (Time 0:38:03)
  • Work Conferences Like A Network Architect
    • Maximize conference trips by doing heavy prep and prioritizing overlooked connectors over obvious stars.
    • Tim Ferriss recommends his South by Southwest networking playbook and specifically notes that moderators often offer better access than crowded panelists. Transcript: Tim Ferriss All right. This is from Hilka. I’ll abbreviate a bit because this was a long question. I’m only going to hit the first part here, but I’m a bootstrap founder in Replitz Race to Revenue flying into San Francisco next week to pitch and network for a few days. If you were in my shoes and wanted to squeeze the maximum long-term leverage out of that short trip, what specific things would you do before, during, and after the event to one, have The right conversations and two, turn them into real opportunities rather than just great chats. Okay. Bonus, how has your bootstrapped versus VC changed lately for tech software? I mean, I think it’s just getting cheaper and cheaper to make software. So I think we’re going to see a lot of self-funded startups. I mean, good news, barrier to entry technically, also economically is much lower. Bad news, the barrier to attention and actually getting people to use your stuff has never been higher. So there is that, but I do think that we’re going to see huge self-funded bootstrap companies, assuming that there aren’t just a few gods, aka superintelligence, AI beasts that eat Everything. But coming back to your question about network, this has also never been more true. I think in real life wins. Everything else is too crowded. So there is a talk I gave. I don’t think there’s any video. You don’t need video, frankly, but there was a talk I gave at South by Southwest. We’ll link to this in the show notes. But if you search my name and how to build a world-class network in record time, this will pop up. This is a talk I gave, who knows, seven years ago, 10 years ago at South by Southwest describing exactly what I did at South by Southwest 2007 when I launched the four-hour workweek. And my entire budget for that book for launch and marketing and so on was spent on a few trips to, I think it was Web Summit, maybe something Expo, Blog Expo, and then South by Southwest. And there’s an approach described in that that I think is very, very effective. And it’s still surprising to me, no matter how many times I talk about certain things, people just don’t follow it. If I’m like, hey, if I wanted to shill some shit coin and be like, it’s going to the moon, people would buy it immediately. But I’m like, hey, here’s this thing. It actually takes some hard thinking and you need to plan for it. But it’s so much more effective long-term than all of this hustle culture bullshit, like three-card Monty that you want to do every day for 10 hours. It’s like the upfront stuff really matters a lot. In this case, I really recommend this talk, How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time. And that sounds like YouTube clickbait, but it’s actually true. A lot of friends who are still friends of mine, almost 20 years later, came from South by Southwest 2007 and a couple of those events I flew to. These were not just interactions. And there is a way to approach this, right? You definitely need to study any sessions and attendees beforehand. The good news is, good news, bad news is that have the right conversations you don’t need to worry about. You have no idea how to have the right conversations. Your goal is to meet people who are hopefully world-class what they do, simpatico with you, meaning you guys will actually get along. Could be extracurricular interests, side hobbies. It could just be the way the two of you are programmed. And there are other kind of general strategies like talking to moderators of panels instead of the panelists. Everybody floods the panelists, the moderator gets orphaned. And in many cases, the moderator is just as impressive. And certainly the moderator knows everybody on the panel and lots of people on other panels and everywhere else. So there are a couple of tips in that that I would suggest checking out. (Time 0:41:43)
  • Ask Psychedelic Practitioners About Freakouts
    • Vet psychedelic or somatic practitioners by asking about adverse events and how they handle people who lose control.
    • Tim Ferriss says anyone claiming there are no freakouts is likely lying, delusional, or inexperienced, and favors practitioners with pre-trend longevity. Transcript: Tim Ferriss All right, next question is from Alex. My company is growing quickly. There are a lot of things that I need to be doing to hit escape velocity and be able to hire to manage at the top. I think that’s manage. It says mange, but I assume you don’t want mange. How do I choose what not to do? All right, well, the good news is we already talked about a couple. So 80-20 principle, Richard Koch, I would read that. The Effective Executive, absolutely read that. And it’s really going to give you frameworks for better discerning yourself, what to do and not do. The other, depending on the current scope and scale of the company and then the ambitions, especially if it’s venture-backed, is to read a book called The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. E-L Arguably one of the best, certainly, angel investors of the last few decades. I mean, his hit rate is absolutely insane. He’s invested in at least 40 unicorns, also a tremendous founder and operator in his own right. You can check him out. He has a pretty wicked biology background on top of everything else. So those are a few that come to mind. And then maybe last but not least, it’s been a long time since I read it, but the Blue Ocean Strategy, probably worth checking out. Because if you choose to compete in a crowded category, you just have a harder road ahead of you. So creating a category of one in a sense, much like Cirque de Soleil did back in the day. I’m expecting you’re not dealing with Eastern European acrobats, but you get the idea. All right, let’s take a look. This is from JC. When exploring somatic or psychedelic healing spaces, what specific questions or observations do you use to quickly distinguish between a highly competent, grounded practitioner And a narcissistic guru? Tough. A lot of good actors out there. The first thing that comes to mind, and obviously with all the usual caveats, these things are powerful. You can definitely destabilize yourself. They’re illegal in most places, etc. So don’t break any laws. Talk to your doctor, blah, blah, blah. But you could ask practitioners or you could ask someone who’s had two trips and they’re suddenly acting like a messiah proselytizing everybody. You could ask them the same question. But specific to clinicians or practitioners, ask them what types of adverse events they’ve seen. What are the most concerning adverse events that they’ve seen? A simpler way to put that is how do you handle freak outs, right? What do you do when somebody really loses their shit? And if their answer is people don’t lose their shit, there aren’t any adverse events. They’re either lying, delusional, or very inexperienced. Maybe all three. Those are not mutually exclusive. So I find that to be a pretty quick, necessary but not sufficient way to use a particular line of questioning to separate seasoned practitioners who are honest from those who are neither Of those things. Of course, do your own homework. I don’t think anyone who’s new to this, and by new, I mean, they have not been doing it more than a decade, ideally multiple decades, makes the fly list for me. It’s just become too goddamn trendy. (Time 0:47:34)
  • The Alternate Career Tim Ferriss Still Feels
    • In another life, Tim Ferriss thinks he might have become a comic book penciler or illustrator.
    • He says he still does live gesture drawing because short poses force him out of his head, unlike work that invites overthinking. Transcript: Tim Ferriss If I weren’t an author and podcast or what other careers or industries would you have pursued? I wanted to be a comic book penciler for ages and still do some actually of my art pads right back over there where I love to do live gesture drawings. Honestly, helps me get out of my head. Somebody will be up there. They’ll hold a pose for like 60 seconds at a time and then change or two minutes or five minutes at a time. You really can’t get in your head. There’s just not enough time for it. So I really, really enjoy that. But I wanted to be a comic book penciler and was an illustrator through a good part of college, helping to pay for expenses, things like that, illustrating books and so on. The prospects then were not very attractive financially to do that, especially after my extended family paid a fortune on my education. So I shifted gears, but certainly felt a draw towards that. What kind of dog is Molly? Molly is a rescue mutt. She is a Labrador, Bloodhound, and Pitbull mix. Then I’m sure there’s Heinz 57 of other breeds in there. In terms of training, honestly, I put up some basic training videos on YouTube if you just search my name and dog training. But the books that I have found most helpful are Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. I think everybody should read that. I think the back copy says something like, whether you want to stop your cat from jumping on the table, train your dog to do X, or convince your mother-in to stop nagging you, the instructions Are all the same. Something like that. It’s pretty funny. But Karen Pryor brought clicker training, sort of audible cueing of that type, from marine mammal training, dolphins, orcas, et cetera, to dog training, or at least she’s one of the People responsible for that really fantastic book on behavioral change and shaping behavior overall. And then listen to my podcast with Susan Garrett. Susan Garrett, G-A is impressive because she has won, I want to say, I don’t know, five to 10 national dog agility championships, even though she herself is much older than most of the Human competitors who have to kind of run alongside their dogs. And she really, really knows her stuff. So those would be, I would say, two places that you can start, two or three places. (Time 0:52:35)
  • Selective Ignorance Protects Friendships And Sanity
    • Keeping friendships across ideological lines depends more on civility and adaptability than on agreement.
    • Tim Ferriss avoids identity-locked blowhards, keeps no social apps on his phone, and treats selective ignorance as a sanity-preserving filter. Transcript: Tim Ferriss How do you maintain so many friends despite your counter-cultural ideologies? My friends and I, I think, have maybe implicitly, and this is maybe survivorship bias, but agreed that as long as you’re civil, you can disagree on all sorts of stuff. And I surround myself with friends who are going to push back. And this includes my oldest friends. This isn’t just fancy friends that I’ve accumulated since the podcast or anything. This also applies to my oldest friends from high school and college. So I would also say that most of my friends are pretty adaptable in light of new information. I don’t spend a lot of time around blowhards where I’m an X, I’m a Y, right? I’m a liberal and that person’s a neocon, or I’m a conservative and that person’s a libtard or whatever. I don’t hang out with those folks because while I recognize that level of simplicity is appealing in a very chaotic, messy world, it’s not particularly an accurate reflection of reality And the gradations in between extremes. And it’s certainly not very helpful, unless you are playing the political game and that’s just an arrow in the quiver that you have to use. But otherwise, I just stay away from that stuff, right? Which doesn’t mean I certainly don’t steer away from controversy, but I ask myself, right? And this applies to watching news or social media. I know I’ve said this before, but I haven’t had any social media apps on my phone for probably three or four years. And the way I feel about the news in the four-hour workweek is probably 10x more intense now in terms of my selective ignorance around mainlining quote-unquote news. Because if it’s not relevant to your life, and if you are not going to make a decision differently or take action because of it, or maybe avoid action because of it, if there isn’t some Kind of follow-up, you don’t need it, is my general feeling. And that’s going to become not just a maybe perceived luxury. I’ve been doing this for decades now, and I wouldn’t consider myself ineffective in the world, but it’s going to become a survival imperative. If you want to remain sane, you can’t doom scroll 24-7. There’s no way. You can’t doom scroll even a few hours a day. So I’ve seen some crazy, crazy physiological data from people on and off of social media, like blood tests and mental health assessments and so on. Ham D, Caps 5, all this kind of stuff. It’s not good, guys. So I’m getting up on my soapbox now. But yeah, and we were talking about that no asshole rule. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they’re an asshole. But if someone is really throwing sharp elbows for no reason, it’s like, they’re out. I very freely have an inflow and outflow of friends. There are certain friends who have remained in the inner sanctum and I for them too, because they reserve the same right for years and decades and decades now. And people are allowed to have off days, but it’s like if someone has suddenly adopted being an asshole as part of their personality or identity in service of quote unquote, keeping It real or something, I don’t have time for that. (Time 0:58:19)
  • Use Generous Interpretation To Defuse Anger
    • Add one calming diagnostic question to conflict: what is the most generous interpretation of this?
    • Tim Ferriss uses it to counter his own anger-forward wiring when he feels ripped off or assumes a partner’s annoying behavior is intentional. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Let me think about, this is a question from John. Still love the 17 questions. People can find those 17 questions. I think they’re in Tools of Titans, maybe Tribal Mentors, but also on Tim.blog. There’s a PDF with the 17 questions I most often ask myself. I’ve got one. A question that I would probably add is some version of what is the most generous interpretation of this. I have been trained since a wee little lad to be pretty anger forward, let’s just say. If I were a wine, very anger forward. And the way that shows up, there are, to get fancy, myriad ways this shows up. One is that some days I can just feel like the entire world is conspiring to make me annoyed. And obviously that’s not true. But if it seems like someone is ripping you off, which does happen, most of the time it’s probably just a misunderstanding. So what’s the most generous interpretation? If you feel like your significant other did something to annoy you, or they always do X, they never do Y, like, okay, well, what’s the most generous interpretation of this? And I’m borrowing this from other people, but I feel like that is a very helpful question. And you could pair that with a bunch of other ones. I think Krista Tippett, great podcaster, by the way, but Krista Tippett, one of the OGs on being, I believe is her podcast. And I believe it’s Krista, I might be misattributing, but at least I’m not saying Oscar Wilde or Abe Lincoln. That she said, anger is pain shown in public, something like that, right? So you can apply that to yourself too, if you’re a little anger forward. And that doesn’t mean navel gaze and you have to do 12 years of therapy to figure it out. What is the most generous interpretation of this, whatever this might be? I would add that to my questions. (Time 1:05:36)
  • Relationships Outlast The Wealth Chase
    • Wealth accumulation matters far less than people claim once you see how often it ends in hollowness.
    • Tim Ferriss invokes Ozymandias, says nobody will remember us anyway, and uses his past year review to prioritize time with the ten most important people. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Bicycle tour, bike tour, for sure. One of the best ways to meet locals, figure out what’s fun that isn’t just a glossy photo posted on Instagram, or a super expensive three Michelin star restaurant, bicycle tour, hang Out, you know, also hang out with, you don’t have to actually stay at a hostel, but like go talk to the manager of a hostel or somebody who works the front desk and has been there for a couple Of years. They’ll have lots of great recommendations. Okay, where does accumulating wealth fall on my scale of overall success? Zero. It’s like, look, a lot of wealthy people make a lot of excuses as to why they need to keep making money. Like, well, you know, I could give money now, but if I compound at such and such, compound an annual growth rate, and then, you know, I’ll give it away when i’m dead basically or yada yada I just don’t buy it working dogs who’ve been tracing a rabbit around to track their whole lives in sixth gear get very good at chasing something in sixth gear so they want to continue doing That i’m not holding myself up as some enlightened being I’ve just had the benefit of seeing so many people crash and burn or just end up with this existential malaise because when they Actually pause for a second, if they do pause and sometimes life forces you to pause with a divorce or medical emergency, they have this maybe sense of hollowness or certainly not a sense Of fulfillment. So I’ve just seen that so many times. It’s like accumulating wealth, who cares? It’s just like, how many people can give you the full name of Alexander the Great? Nobody’s going to remember you. Nobody’s going to remember me. Nobody’s going to remember us. It’s okay. It’s totally fine. It’s actually very freeing. It’s like everybody should read. I think it’s Percy Shelley, Ozymandias. Yeah. Percy Shelley, Ozymandias. Everybody should find this. O-Z So good. Everybody should read Ozymandias. What do I prioritize instead of wealth relationships and this sounds so trite but it’s like there are people who say that and then you go visit them and you’re like holy shit like their Kids hate them and like they never see their best friends or their quote-unquote best friends are constantly a different roster because as arthur brooks would it, they’re deal friends, Not real friends, right? But I mean, the past year review really helps to make this point for me over and over again. And if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, just search my name and past year review. But thinking about it, it’s like, okay, who are the 10 most important people in your life? Did you spend as much time as you would like to spend with them last year? If the answer is no, invest in those 10 before you invest in anyone else and track the results. Then you look back, look at the number of positive experiences, right? Energetically, emotionally, whatever it is over that quarter, that year, it’s not something you have to do all the time. And you’re like, oh yeah, doubling down on those 10 really made my year so much better. Blocking out time with those people in advance made it so much better. Okay, let’s do more of that. That’s about it. (Time 1:07:45)
  • Raise Kids With Optimism Resourcefulness And Motion
    • Teach kids optimism, resourcefulness, and courage through repeated physical challenges rather than abstract lectures.
    • Tim Ferriss frames effort as feedback, compares behavior shaping across mammals, and says lots of movement helps kids prove they can do hard things. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Let me do this. David, here we go. As a soon-to father, I’m thinking a lot about parenthood. If you started a family, what would be the top three values or lessons you’d hope to instill in your children? I have thought about this a lot, and I’ve been able to watch what has worked and what has not worked. I think optimism, resourcefulness, and lots of physical activity. Lots of physical activity. You got to run that dog. Tired dog is a happy dog. So yeah, optimism. I think Mike Maples Jr. Was the first person who really underscored this. He has a bunch of kids who have turned out well. Optimism is kind of number one. It’s like the mother quality that enables all else. Resourcefulness, I would say, I think Maya Angelou actually said courage is sort of the mother quality because everything else at its breaking point depends on it. I had something which is like no failure, only feedback, just encouraging them to try stuff. Positive reinforcement, try stuff, try stuff. I mean, this applies to dog training too, but some of my friends have never had dogs get all pissed off and get their knickers in a twist when I compare kids to dogs. I know they’re not the same, but you know what? Shaping behavior is pretty similar across mammals. Anyway, optimism, courage, slash try a bunch of shit. It’s fine. It’s just feedback. And then resourcefulness. And I think if you have optimism and you’re willing to try a bunch of stuff, aka use courage in certain ways, then I think resourcefulness is a byproduct of that. So those would be the things I would focus on. (Time 1:11:21)
  • Borrow Other People’s Eyes To Find Your Strengths
    • Ask trusted people when they saw you at your best and what strengths you discount in yourself.
    • Tim Ferriss says specific examples matter, and that friends can spot a weird superpower you miss because you are the fish swimming in the water. Transcript: Tim Ferriss This is coming back to encodings. Cindy, you and Jim Collins talked about encoding. This is a term that Jim uses, which is somewhat comparable to strengths. What are your innate strengths? So we spoke about that. I’d love if you’d go deeper on the topic, share more about how it resonated with you personally and give additional practical advice on how people currently locked into work or career Situations can progress with a plan towards living fully within their encoded selves. I find that asking your best friends could be family members, could also be employees. 360 reviews can be very brutal. You can listen to my conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, about how brutal that can be. It doesn’t have to be brutal, though. I would say that a couple of questions come up that I have asked close friends, some of my best friends, people who know me really well. When have you seen me at my best? Or when do you see me at my best? But it’s good to have practical examples or concrete examples from the past, not just like, when you tend to do this, you tend to do that. It’s like, no, give me an example. Like, when have you seen me at my best? When have you seen me at my worst? What stories or memories come to mind? Then what is easier for me than for other people? What do you see in me that I find easier than most people? Jim didn’t like that question, right? Because he wanted it all to be internally, individually referenced, but this is how I do it. I actually do find that aspect helpful because then you’re not only finding strengths, you’re finding strengths that allow you to potentially compete. And I just like having both if I can. And then you could ask, this is very closely related to the last one, but what strength or ability do I discount in myself? And I was like, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t strike me as particularly special because A, B, and C. And he’s like, that’s the problem. He’s like, you can’t see it because you’re the fish swimming in the water. And I was like, huh, okay. And then I bounced it off a few other people. And they’re like, yeah, that’s like a fucking weird superpower of yours. And I don’t understand it. And I was like, oh, never really realized. So what strengths or ability do I discount on myself, right? This is you using that question for somebody else or not harness, right? It could be discounting. It could just be like, what strength or ability am I not using that I have? (Time 1:14:27)
  • Courage Is Built Through Progressive Exposure
    • Courage is not a trait you absorb from books but a capacity you build through progressive exposure.
    • Tim Ferriss says if you’re not afraid it’s not courage, and compares learning it to stair-stepping into harder reps in the gym. Transcript: Tim Ferriss This is the last question. I think it’s a good one to end on. Is courage external or internal? How do you teach it to kids? I think courage is learned. You have to practice it. And if you’re not afraid, it’s not courage, right? If someone’s fearless, they’re by definition, not using courage. You have to be afraid of something. So you can edge yourself and you can edge kids into that, right? It’s not like, Hey, you’ve never been in the water before. Let’s take you up to do cliff diving. No, no. Yeah. I mean, that’s unhelpful fear with severe consequences. It’s like you can stair step into it. I don’t think courage is a decision. I don’t think courage is something you get from reading a book. I don’t think courage is something that you can develop abstractly. I think you have to prove to yourself that you have it. And the only way your subconscious will believe it is if you are actually doing things that are uncomfortable. That’s it. Which means it is learnable. And there may be some set point that contributes to it, right? In one way or another, right? If you’re Alex Honnold and your amygdala is like basically asleep, it’s like, okay, well, right. That explains a few things, but it’s also something that you can very sequentially sort of expose yourself to just like you would to build a tan or to get stronger in the gym. I think it’s through action, right? It’s like progressive resistance that you develop courage. I’ve seen my friends do this with their kids. And this is also why the physical activity is very, very helpful to prove to kids or help them prove to themselves that they can do hard things. Like, okay, sure. You can wait until they can sit down with calculus and try to figure that out. Or you could be like, yeah, that thing that you’re nervous about doing, like hitting a baseball, climbing a whatever, you know, five, nine in an indoor climbing gym. Like, yeah, okay, let’s get after it. All right. I will stop there, guys. (Time 1:17:32)