this is Joo podcast number 50 with Eko Charles and me Joo willink good evening Eko good evening to be or not to be that is probably the most famous of all of Shakespeare’s lines and in fact it’s so famous that it’s often unfortunately used as a punchline used as a joke to be or not to be it becomes easy to forget what Shakespeare is actually talking about he’s talking about death and more specifically in this case he’s talking about suicide and Prince Hamlet the character that delivers that famous line who’s often called inane but who himself says I am essentially not in Madness but mad in craft meaning he is playing the role of in sanity to further his own objectives but not everybody even agrees on that point but here’s what Hamlet does say to be or not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in other words he’s talking about is it worth it to suffer through the problems we have in life and he goes on or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them meaning should we should we fight against the pain of life this sea of troubles and and in that fight should we choose death which is the only alternative to life and he goes on to die to sleep no more and by as sleep to say we end the heartache and the Thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to so he’s saying that death lets you escape all these hardships of life and these thousand natural shocks and he finishes it out is a consummation devoutly to be wished for to die to sleep and he’s saying that that is what we should wish for to die and that is this most famous of soliloquies is about killing yourself it’s about it’s about suicide now we have a guest on today and this is a guest who I’ve come to know since I sort of debuted in the world and in fact this guest happens to be the person that actually debuted me to the world that brought me into the world his name is Tim Ferris and in September of 2015 he interviewed me on his podcast just prior to the release of my book extreme ownership now at the time I was certainly a Tim Ferris listener I’d read the 4-Hour Work week I’d listened to a bunch of his podcasts but I I hadn’t listened to all of them and and I think I had kind of the broad view that most people have of Tim the the human guinea pig the investor the author just you know Mr smart successful healthy guy who’s out there enjoying the fruits of life and and with all that stuff in my mind there I was in the first ever interview I had ever actually done with anybody ever and it’s a a setup the setup is it’s an interesting setup going into this for me right we’re alone I don’t know Tim I’m not the most open person in the first place I don’t know Tim we meet two hours before now we’re in his house alone at a table and the interview starts going kind of joish pretty quickly and I start going a little bit heavy on some stuff and at one point Tim asked me about books that I’ve read and I brought up about face and and then I brought up up Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian and I described how I liked that book because it captured the darkness and not just the darkness of the world but the dark nature of human beings in the world and Tim after I describe that Darkness he said something along the lines of like hey Joo I I struggle with this how much should I voluntarily expose myself to Darkness because I’ve had my own ups and downs that I contend with and and then he kind of took that question from there and and from that personal level and he really quickly transferred it into something that was more about the world than about Humanity in general but the initial question that Tim started to ask it wasn’t about the world and it wasn’t about Humanity in general the question that Tim was asking was about Tim and I didn’t catch that during the interview I it went right over my head but when I listened to the interview I caught it and I heard it and I heard that beneath this guy that we all see this happy go-lucky exterior kind of a solid image of mental and physical and spiritual strength there was some darkness in there and Tim and I were going back and forth a few weeks ago and he said something to me you know I’m not sure if I’m aligned with the types of guests you normally have on your podcast and thinking back instantly to that moment I said oh no Tim you you definitely are because you are a person you’re a human and this is a podcast about human nature and despite all the success you’ve had you’ve had some challenges you in your life you’ve had some dark times and you still do and we all do and and people ask me about suicide I mean most of the time it’s some indirect messaging or some messaging through Facebook but people will will ask me about suicide whether they’re having those thoughts and I haven’t really addressed it directly because even though it’s it’s suicide has definitely impacted my life directly in some awful and horrible ways that I’ll never forget but I don’t have that same level of knowledge so today we do have that level of knowledge and we’re going to dive into it so without further Ado Mr Tim Ferris welcome to the show and thank you for coming on thanks for having me on now I I I don’t even want to play around here I want to I want to get right in I want to get this hard stuff done I want to talk about this this book that you you just put out it’s called tools of Titans and in this book and I I just got done telling you this you know I I looked and found the blog post that you had originally written that’s named a very Tim Ferris name in my opinion it’s it’s some practical thoughts on suicide right only Tim would think about practical thoughts on suicide so and you sent me the book and I had found that blog P post and I’d read it but when when you sent me the book I saw that you would put it in the book and I think that was awesome for you to do that to put it in this book so that people have access to it so I want to get into this piece of it right now from the book and here we go some practical thoughts on suicide in this chapter I’m going to talk about suicide and why I’m still on this planet it might seem dark but the objective is to give hope and tools to those who need them it is a much larger number than you might imagine I kept the following Story secret from my family girlfriends and cl and closest friends for years recently however I had an experience that Shook Me woke me up and I decided that it was time to share everything so despite the shame I might feel the fear that is making my palm sweat as I type this allow me to get started here we go so you had some you had some serious hesitation on putting this out there in the first place I did it sat in drafts for between six and nine months with fits and starts because I had a lot of doubt about my motivations for putting it out the good that it might do the bad that it could have in directly that I couldn’t foresee unforeseen consequences and uh just the embarrassment and also the fear of how my family would respond so there was a lot there were a lot of factors that kept it in my draft folder for a very long time and then this story that you tell here is is the story of what made you finally decide to to talk about it in the public forum and it what happened was a guy came up to you and said you at at an event a guy comes up to you and says hey can you can you sign this for my brother it would mean a lot to him and you you know you give him the hey no problem you you kind of notice that there’s something odd about the way the guy is acting but you sign the book and a little while later as you’re leaving he comes up and he says you know I got to talk to you and you say hey got to leave but what do you got let’s go walk with me and you find out that this guy’s younger brother who you had just signed the book for had recently killed himself at the age of of 22 and this guy told you people listen to you Tim have you ever thought about talking about these things about suicide or depression you might be able to save someone and then you say here in the book I didn’t know what to say I also didn’t have an excuse unbeknownst to him I had every reason to talk about suicide some of my closest high school friends killed themselves some of my closest college friends killed themselves and I almost killed myself and you held that in for a long time long time and there you were a public figure and you hadn’t you had never talked about this now as I said for me I certainly have brushed up against suicide starting with my best friend when I was a kid uh a kid named Jeff and I had joined the Navy and I was in Seal training and I got we had kind of Grown Apart and uh I I talked about this when I was on your podcast you know I grew up with in in a rural area in New England and there was a lot of hippies and just kids you know dead heads and whatnot and I didn’t go in that direction but my really good friend did and he ended up getting heavily involved in drugs and booze and everything else and he got involved with the girl and when they broke up he killed himself in a horrible way that I’m not even going to talk about but I got word of it I was going through SEAL training and I get word that this kid you know that I was such good friends with killed himself and then on top of that now we go 1993 and again one of my best friends in the SEAL Teams absolute stud of a individual of a human being an incredible athlete quarterback at the Naval Academy by the way record holder at the naval Academy just a hilarious guy leader of men just incredible human being named Alton Lee Grizzard he got murdered along with a female naval officer named Carrie O’Neal they got murdered both of them by another Navy officer who also went to the Naval Academy who then killed himself so murder suicide and I’ll tell you what anybody that knew Grizz I mean this was just devastating devastating this damn near broke my heart and then most recently in December of 2012 another seal that I knew who was the commander of the seals in Afghanistan the commander of all the seals in Afghanistan on deployment in Afghanistan goes to a meeting gets done with a meeting goes to his room shoots himself in the head kills himself no no suicide note no strange Behavior no indicators nothing and like I said this guy was my sister platoon at Seal Team too I mean just a great guy respected seal and boom gone and I guess that’s why I I I feel strongly about wanting to bring you on and and talk to you about this cuz I know you felt it personally you’re talking about it and I personally I actually have never wanted to kill myself before now I I will say there are times in my life where I where I cared less about living than other times and it certainly in combat I definitely accepted that I could die and I was okay with it and there’s probably times in combat where I crossed the line a little bit towards the just straight bring it on let’s do this but I I never seriously have had that you know that thought but it’s something I know is out there like I said said I’ve it’s brushed up against me it’s crushed me and when you say in this book that you almost killed yourself and and we’ll talk about what got you there and and how you ended up there but how real is that feeling when it hits you there’s nothing realer I think that the the delusion or the set of delusions that you find yourself in seem as real as this table that we’re sitting at as real as anything you see or hear and the voices in your head that internal dialogue The selft Talk is a powerful thing and it can be powerful in constructive ways and it can be powerful in extremely destructive ways so for me it felt permanent it felt inescapable it felt concrete I felt like I had a column of evidence exhibit a through z to indicate that I would be better off killing myself so it wasn’t a desire to it wasn’t a desire to end my own life it was a a desire to stop suffering and stop causing the suffering of others or what I perceive to be inflicting on my loved ones and family members and so on and feeling trapped I think above all it’s feeling trapped and feeling alone like you are flawed and in being flawed you are unique and you should be just be sent back to the factory and that equals taking yourself out extremely real though it’s definitely it was it it was as concrete as any emotion or any object or any interaction that you could imagine and it’s it’s got to be weird now and and you say this like you’re looking back at this now and of course this is so easy to see and go you know I was not thinking straight and right now you can tell it’s not real or those problems that you perceived you could tell that they weren’t weren’t real problems they weren’t unsolvable problems they weren’t worth ending your life over but you get trapped in there and I think in particular you do get trapped and in my case there were say five or six different events that happened roughly at the same time that caused me to spiral and as I spiraled I got to a point where I felt like I would never contribute anything meaningful to other people or to the world because I was so handicapped by this pessimistic dark view of the world and of myself and I was like well if that’s the case why go through all this pain to try to solve these various problems when clearly like you said in retrospect it’s ludicrous I mean it’s ridiculous but at the time it seemed anything but why not just control Al delete let’s just shut this computer down you know I got I got I get to see this a little bit right now um you know I got kids and you know my I got teenage daughters and little things in the world that they think are the most important you know things in the whole world I mean literally like a dress or a pair of shoes I’m like it’s okay we can get you some more shoes or whatever it’s you get to see a glimpse of what you’re talking about just with any human any human anywhere that even in a workplace where someone’s going through some problem at work and they didn’t get the report turned in on time and and they’re acting like it’s the end of the world and it’s actually the end of nothing it actually in many cases means almost nothing almost nothing I’m going to go back to the book so you say to Silas which is the guy that that had come up and asked you to to sign the book you come up and say or you you say look I’m sorry for your loss and then you had sort of the internal talk once again with yourself and you say I’d failed his brother by being such a coward in my writing how many others had I failed these questions swam in my mind and then you look at Silas and you say I will write about this I promise that’s probably when you made your first decision to get these drafts going actually you said and with that I got into to the elevator and I added my own phrase on here and you should have had me edit this but you said and with that I got in the elevator and I added and headed down because the next part of this is called into the darkness and you got a great quote in here that I’d never heard before the quote is they tried to bury us they didn’t know we were seeds and I think that’s an awesome quote they tried to bury us they didn’t know we were seeds and I can tell you that I didn’t bury these thoughts and these feelings and I’m I’m thinking back I’m just trying to kind of deconstruct where where my attitude came from with all the stuff and I think that when I grew up I listened to some things that may that that just pulled those seeds right out of the ground like they were plain as day when you grow up listen to the kind of music that I listen to Just dark heavy music that sang about this stuff and I’ll tell you there’s a one of the best pieces of music that you can hear on this subject and I don’t even it’s dark but Henry Rollins on an album called lifetime there’s a a song called gun and mouth blues and I saw him performing many times live and it like took me through those emotions you can go on YouTube and trying it doesn’t deliver the way it was when I was a kid when I was 14 or 15 years old and I got a guy on stage a grown man to me at that time who was you know 25 or something whatever Rollins was at that time and he’s singing about that and so for me I’m thinking to myself well those seeds weren’t buried for me they were out right I was thinking about that but I wasn’t like I was okay with me you know what I’m saying and and a lot of the music that I listened to back then talked about that stuff so I didn’t bury those seeds ever really and I’m want is that something that you did obviously you put the quote in here but how do you see yourself how did you bury those seeds so I included the quote for a few reasons the first is effectively exactly what you alluded to so these internal demons these self-doubts these self-criticisms I felt were a huge weakness and so to compete to whether that’s in sports academics or otherwise I kept that all in so I I actually grew up on the same music or similar music but I was listening to Slayer I was listening to a lot of dark music which I can still appreciate the double bass and so on and a Slayer album but for me because I never I never chose to express any of that I had no release valve so it actually fed I think in a way this type of self loathing and uh it could have been biochemical in the first place I don’t know quite frankly and I mean my family at least on one side has a history of uh extended depression and schizophrenia and so on uh schizophrenia less so but so maybe it started there who knows I don’t know what the origin is um and so I included that quote as a reminder of two things a when you try to suffocate or bury or disregard these thoughts and emotions as opposed to contend with them or deal with them in some fashion they are seeds and you’re pouring fertilizer on them when you try to neglect and avoid them the second reason I put that in is be to remind myself if you feel like external cons uh if you if you feel like external circumstances or external actors meaning people are stacking the deck deck against you or trying to bury you right trying to defeat you in some fashion you are the seed so you can recover from that uh and there’s strength to be found in the struggle so I included it for both of those reasons yeah that’s and I’ve talked about that before this idea of battling demons right and one of the things I I I said on the podcast one of the earlier podcasts is I just said don’t let the demons Ambush you don’t let them sneak around in there you got to bring them out you got to you got to bring them out and confront them and deal with them don’t try and bury them bring them out and so that’s that’s very similar and also when you were a kid this is this is also interesting CU you were an overachiever as kid right I was good in school I was very very small I got the [ __ ] kicked out of me routinely up until about sixth grade but you wrestled you you were a good wrestler right I did yeah I got up to uh National level towards the end of high school I did not wrestle in college since it was title n at Princeton where I ended up going but I I was a uh academically certainly a high achiever and a good wrestler and a really good wrestler academically I mean you’re going to Princeton right so that’s pretty much and then you landed prin by the way that kicking ass in yeah no no I I I I had very supportive parents did really well in school got to Princeton and realized everyone was at that level or higher and it’s a different playing field and that and is that one of the things you think that as you started thinking about this Darkness you’re looking at these other people going oh they don’t have that I got to bury it because they’re all they’re all smart as me and great athletes and so I I’m competing with them and I don’t want to have that chalk against me of saying oh you know I’m a little bit sad today that’s bad I’m going to be positive uh for sure I think that was part of it the and on one hand I enjoy competing so having a bunch of stronger competitors didn’t bother me at all that was actually pretty thrilled about it but I did feel like to compete on this higher level playing field uh it would not behoove me or help me to walk around boning my weaknesses at all so I didn’t and I felt like particularly being the the going to that school was a real stretch for my entire family an extended family I felt like I had to deliver and there was no pressure from my parents whatsoever but I don’t need anyone else’s pressure I can deliver plenty of that for myself and I felt that a lot was riding on that and I the plan of course as many people might have in their lives is get good grades in high school go to a good college get great grades in college go get to a fantastic job job and so on and so forth so which led up to I mean a lot of the catalyzing events later in college in senior year that that were really the the straws that broke the camels back because I was I was I wasn’t always near the precipice I mean I was healthy for long stretches of time then I’d have maybe a depressive period but it was manageable often times coincided with winter I don’t handle that type of weather very well which is part of the reason that I now live on the west coast and did you did you were you self aware of that I’m very aware uh very aware at the time probably less aware of the weather having the impact that it did but but you would literally say oh man I’m I’m feeling down right now this is one of my cular things it’ll be okay definitely and used that’s pretty introspective for a kid well I spent a lot of time in my own head and there are benefits that come from that you can get very good academics and then sometimes you’re just Your Own Worst Enemy so being trapped in my head uh is not always the uh the the carnival that you might think it to be sometimes it is for sure uh depending on what I’ve eaten or em bibed as well but that’s a separate podcast the the um but I’ve learned to manage it and we’re jumping a little bit ahead but for instance uh and we’ll get to it I’m sure but the the writing of senior thesis yeah that was a a major trigger for a lot of reasons now for instance you know writing the book that’s sitting in front of us I flew a researcher from Canada to be with me almost 24/7 while I was in the final six to eight weeks of writing this book why did I need him to come from Canada to be there in person no absolutely not but I wanted another human around so I wouldn’t go red rum Red Rum and well when you write 700 page books my brother you’re going to end up a lot more likely to end up in the red R than in the normal room uh so you’re right that we do start getting into this um let’s talk about this but can I can I can I say one thing absolutely one of the reasons and you did give me a 20 to say this so un fairness but one of the reasons I recommend your podcast so much is because you talk about the darkness and you talk about how common it is and I think the reason for instance out of the blue one of my friends super handsome guy wealthy family ladies throwing themselves at him in high school kills himself out of the blue no one expected it and I think that when you find people in any circumstance who end up taking it to the that point it’s because they think it is a rare flaw they’re the one in a thousand who happens to be so [ __ ] up Beyond repair that it’s not worth continuing and by exposing And discussing the darkness you realize I mean that’s 50% of the people or more 50% of the time it is extremely common no matter what you think your defect is anger depression you have plenty of people to keep you company so uh in any Cas get a little crowded up there gets crowded so that’s that’s that’s a great Point um let’s go into this then when when we go into what happened and some of the things that that went down this downward spiral is is is what you call it and and and again in here I’m going back to the book in hindsight it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems and and I put my note in there next to that it’s like cuz you’re detached from it now and that’s such a key thing I talk about all the time right we want to remain detached from things we don’t want to get wrapped up in the emotions we want to stay back because when you detach from it every answer is so clear when you’re not wrapped up in it this is this stuff that that that happened to you sure was it challenging yes did it suck was it hard yes yes of course but detached from it now you’re looking at it you’re you you might literally be laughing at this stuff now oh I do I mean I wrote it and that’s why at the end there’s this part towards the end it’s like many of you might be thinking wait a second a Princeton student got a really bad grade boo [ __ ] who like are you kidding me but that’s the whole point right that is the whole point is that you don’t is that people we don’t detach we get absorbed in this stuff and it becomes our world so you get here I’m going back to the book I include wording like impossible situation which was reflective of my thinking at the time and it begins senior year slated to graduate in June of 1999 somewhere in the next six months all these things happen first you fail to make get to the final interviews for McKenzie Consulting and some other company and you start losing confidence so this is the first time you get kind of little bit beating your life a little bit for sure I was doing extremely well academically and and all of a sudden I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and just just to provide a little bit of context and it’s and like this is like I have this huge smirk on my face because it’s so ridiculous you know in hindsight but at Princeton or any IV League school really there are only a handful of industries that recruit primarily you find management consulting firms and investment Banks why because they want to hire you and then use your pedigree so that they can charge their clients in the case of management consulting $500 an hour for photocopying right it’s not it at all as exotic as it might seem but everyone is competing for those slots and I didn’t know what to do next so I just decided being very driven in that way I’m going to compete for what everyone is going after because I think I can beat them now this is the first time that I really felt like a I got my ass handed to me with and B this was important if I lose a wrestling match I know why I lost here I didn’t know what so that unknown variable hit me reasonably hard I can imagine that now you’re doubting everything in a wrestling match you go hey my conditioning wasn’t good or hey my takedowns weren’t on point in here you’re just going what was wrong I don’t know what was wrong exactly something’s wrong with me and no one could tell me even the people who interviewed me they wouldn’t give me the feedback so that’s that’s point a uh very shortly thereafter have a long-term girlfriend break up with me with which again in isolation I think I could have weathered and I had weathered many times before but I’m kind of reeling on my heels a little bit and then my hold on I’m going to go to the book here because you give some pretty good specifics on that she breaks up with you because this is from the book because I became insecure during that period wanted more time with her and was massively disrupted to her Varsity Sports but my point is that these things compounded right you get insecure you think why didn’t they why did they why didn’t they hire me and then you look at your girl and you say well I’ll go to her for Comfort hey but you know I need more from you and she’s going which all humans do which is oh you’re you want to throw yourself at me I don’t need you exactly it was not only that but so she wakes up like you do and I tend to go to bed when you do and so I would want to have these late night conversations and it it screwed up her competition I mean and uh it was it was extremely important to her rightly so she was a varsity athlete so exit stage left girlfriend gone and then the the primary piece of this sort of the in my mind the Checkmate for a loss was the interactions that I had with my counselor or thesis adviser and I was in the East Asian studies Department I started in Psychology then I moved from Neuroscience to East Asian studies to focus on language acquisition and uh this the senior thesis just to put this in perspective not every College University has a mandatory senior thesis Princeton does and it breaks a lot of kids so I’m not unique in this but I thought I was at the time it breaks a lot of kids when you say breaks like they don’t graduate because they don’t finish it or they just get emotionally they go through total turmoil and it it test both the above and what I realized after the fact is a lot of kids kill themselves actually uh at uh many of these top schools and I’m sure other schools but it’s it’s such a pressure cook or the kids perceive it that way God I feel old calling them kids but regardless it’s such a pressure CER for you [Laughter] Tim it’s very very common so it it really does break a lot of kids but it’s generally let’s just call it and it varies by department but 60 to 100 Pages sometimes longer and it can count for 25% of your 4-year or let’s just say cumulative departmental GPA it is weighed very very very heavily so even if you’ve had straight A it can really throw a a wrench into the works if you want to finish with a very strong GPA now keep in mind I had already been turned down for jobs and this is so they they go together here lose my my crutch that’s keeping me up which is the girlfriend and then at that point I I am researching for my thesis everything’s going fine so far and I meet with the head of curricul culum design for berlitz international which is near Princeton had a great dinner and he said it’s really too bad you’re graduating an X number of months because we actually have a fantastic job for you that I could give you right now you’d be a perfect fit so I think to myself well this is going to solve a few different problems I don’t know what I want to do I’m not getting picked up by these other companies why don’t I take some time off and figure out the job and then figure out the thesis now the thesis I’m going a little bit out of order here but the thesis was important because I had a meeting with my thesis adviser who had his own research agendas and and as is very common in academics professors will utilize the help of students at times to integrate things or research things for them and slave labor slave labor and he dropped a pile of say 50 60 pages of original Japanese research so this is all in Japanese to integrate into my thesis it wasn’t fit it was it was a round peg in a square hole it would be nearly impossible to put into my thesis but I decided all right well he’s the adviser he’s tenured this is mandatory it’s not an optional then I figured out oh my god well I could take this job take year off do a great job on thesis come back problem solved so I have a meeting with my thesis advisor to tell him that I’m going to do this not realizing at the time also that his his research needs of me are time sensitive and he lost it he basically he basically said oh you’re just going to cop out and take all this time off of school well it better be the best thesis I’ve ever seen in my life and not so subtly saying I’m going to tank you if this is what you’re going to do I’m going to I’m going to tank you and I I don’t think I was misreading that and I was completely bewildered then really upset meaning sad depressed then really angry and I was like you know what this is [ __ ] like this is Princeton University focus on the undergrad this is this should be a solvable problem so I go to people in the administration and I tell them what happened and collectively the response was effectively he wouldn’t do that because once you have your immunity bracelet in the form of tenure you’re not getting voted off the island and uh even people within the department would not pick a fight with him uh or even really seek to clarify it and that was when I felt totally hopeless and uh that was kind of the beginning of the end as I saw it at that point it’s very important to note I was not suicidal I just felt completely trapped and without options I ended up regardless taking the year off uh and that is where things got particularly dark because I went from being surrounded by students didn’t have the girlfriend but I was in a social environment to working for Berlin blits but what I didn’t realize was going to be the the setup the logistics was working remotely what does that mean that means that I’m off campus now with two of my friends who go to work every day normal hours and I’m left in a bedroom or a living room alone to try to work on my thesis and to do work for Blitz completely solo that is where the carnival in my head is a very dangerous thing I’m outmatched right and um we can we can keep going but yeah I mean so the other thing that struck me as once that happens now you also start to see your friends graduate graduate and they’re all done they’re done they’re gone and you got the heavy burden still on you yeah that was that that was seemed to be a huge piece of it as as well and then I’m going to go to the book back to the book here your your coping mechanism is to cover myself in sheets minimize time awake and hope for a miracle no Miracle arrives one afternoon as I’m wandering through a Barnes & Noble with no goal in particular I chant upon a book about suicide it’s right there in front of me on a display table perhaps this is the miracle I sit down and read the entire book taking cope cous notes into a journal including other books listed in the bibliography for the first time in ages I’m excited about research in a sea of uncertainty and hopeless situations I feel like I’ve found hope the final solution the idea just appears in a book yeah and you go full t Ferris on this thing yeah with the same enthusiasm and rigor and OCD that I tackle anything I I dove into that and um went to Firestone Library Great Library at Princeton to check out as many of those referenced books as possible to do my research and one of them was not in one of the key pieces and so I I I made a request put in a a request to get notified and I was living I think it was in lawrenville which is near Princeton at the time and I think it’s worth noting that I was past the point of deciding yeah I wasn’t planning you say that in the book and I I’ll just read it it’s important to mention that by this point I was past deciding the decision was obvious to me I’d somehow failed painted myself into this ridiculous Corner wasted a fortune on school that didn’t care about me so what would be the point of doing otherwise to repeat the these types of mistakes forever to be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and my friends [ __ ] that the world was better off without a loser who couldn’t figure out this basic [ __ ] what would I ever contribute nothing so the decision was made and I was in full on planning mode in this case I’m a dangerously good at planning I have four to six scenarios all spaced out start to finish or sorry spec Out start to finish including potential collaborators and covers when needed so as you just said as you just pointed out you were full on Tim Ferris researched complete decision made going forward figure out the best way to execute this and make it happen oh yeah yeah I remember and actually something that’s not in there I I recall I recall when I had the plans and it was matter of scheduling and I was waiting for that last book to see if I missed any research before proceeding but I had driven to Firestone taken out these books and was very lethargic I remember I mean this coincides with a this type of deep depression just very tired all the time and uh laid down in my van my my used minivan hand me down for my mom after going to Firestone and just slept for like 3 or 4 hours and woke woke up and I was like okay let’s just get this done let’s figure it out and put it on the calendar and the what prevented that it was pure luck I had forgotten that instead of using my lawrencville address I hadn’t changed my address with the registar so my mail was going back to my home address where my parents lived on Long Island and so my mom gets this postcard in the mail I mean thank God this didn’t happen a few years ago it would have been via email she wouldn’t have seen it and it said in effect uh good news the book on suicide that you reserved is now available at Firestone library for pickup so I got a very nervous call from my mom which I did not expect to interrupt plans did you did you think your mom did your mom sense it oh yeah I could tell I mean her her voice was was very shaky and uh I quickly tap danced and talked my way out of it and I said oh no no it’s a friend at ruter he could couldn’t get it at his Library so I I reserved it at Firestone but it it shocked me out of my self-imposed false reality and it was it sounds so odd to say but it was the first time that I realized my Suicide would affect no matter how cleverly I laid it out it would ruin the lives of people around me because I thought well let let me figure out a scenario where I can make it look like a complete accident it won’t look like suicide it’ll just look like an accidental death I mean I really I really figured it out and U it didn’t matter it didn’t matter I realized after that phone call that did your mom confront you with it she asked me about it and I was very fast to come up with the ruter LIE did she say like hey Tim are you okay she did she did she did and we love you know we we love you right and it wasn’t a 30second conversation it was a longer conversation and there were followup phone calls props to Mom for picking up on that yeah yeah so that was uh dodging a bullet metaphorically by a millimeter I’m going to go into this here uh it’s sort of you you get through that you you kind of get through what you just said you realize that this wasn’t just about you this was going to hurt everybody you get through that and then you say the very next week I decide to take the rest of my year off truly off to hell with the thesis and focus on physical and mental health that’s how the entire Sumo story of the 1999 Chinese kickboxing sansu championships came to be if you read the 4our work week so you you go on a full-on year off just complete now my question for you on that is what about normal people right normal people that can’t take a full-on year off they got to find another way to get their focus off the what’s going on in their brain at the work and get out of that Carnival and focus on their mental and physical health while they’re working their job taking care of their kids doing whatever is they have to do for sure how does a normal person pull that off well there are I think a few strategies and tactics that I have used and continued to use so it’s critical that people understand it’s not like I summited the mountain slay the dragon and I’m done this is this is uh this is a movie that tends to like Groundhog Day repeat itself not necessarily that intensely but if you are predisposed to periods of Darkness as many people are you need to develop coping strategies and it’s not so much the year off it was a focus on other things right that helped and there are a few I mean looking back on it now I have a better toolkit the first is people talk about Mind Over Matter mind over body mind over body this type of I think body over mind is extremely underrated so if you can’t get out of your head get into your body number one that is the number one get out and move and really things didn’t change for me dramatically until I started oddly enough getting punched in the head going to the toughest boxing gym I’ve ever seen in Trenton New Jersey where I was the only guy not on work release so I don’t recommend that therapy for everyone but uh you know one broken nose and a lot of bloody sparring sessions later I was feeling uh more like my old self so if you can’t get out of your mind get into your body I think is very important there are a lot of good biochemical reasons for this I I’ll back that up too and uh Tim Kennedy who’s a MMA fighter amazing just an awesome guy he posted something on Instagram of a month ago or something like that in Facebook and whatever and basically he was saying he’s addressing PTSD and and that sort of Darkness right and he basically said look guys get out go work out go push yourself and it’s very similar to what I tell people like hey man you know do Jiu-Jitsu lift weights Sprint surf go get outside get into your body so I think that’s universally I universally agree with that statement so so let me lay out a couple of super concrete recommendations and I should say in advance I’m not a doctor I don’t play one on the internet so you may need uh certainly there are many people who need um medical interventions uh whether it’s uh pharmaceutical or otherwise in my case a few things that very much help with or without other adjuncts cold therapy so cold exposure and this has been studied very very effective as a supplemental or uh singular therapy for anti-depressive purposes it’s very very effective so I I routinely and when I’m home in San Francisco for for instance even on Long Island in the winter I take short cold showers pure cold showers and Van go for instance when he lopped off his ear and was put into treatment he had two ice baths every day that was one of the treatment protocols and it’s it’s been looked at quite closely in the last few years so cold Exposure One so even if you don’t get outside of the house that’s an option you’re going to take showers hopefully anyway uh then you have I if you can afford it very I think a a a good test to have performed is comprehensive blood work look at micronutrient deficiencies in particular so you you could have this is very common with depleted uh ground soil selenium deficiency zinc deficiency copper deficiencies the these affect hormone production and much more and can be fixed relatively easily once you identify them I have friends for instance one was deficient in selenium was going through depressive period and he started eating Brazil nuts very high in selenium content and he he called me a week later said I feel like I’m on cocaine now that’s a dramatic example U and know you shouldn’t use cocaine uh to fix your depression but blood work I think is if you get your car checked more often than you get your body checked you need to rearrange your priorities stoicism would be the next one uh I find senica in particular uh moral letters to lucilius Marcus Aurelius people tend if they read both to either be fullon Marcus Aurelius guys or fullon senica guys and uh there’s not a whole lot of overlap I tend to read senica but I will listen to say one of the letters letters of lucilius every few days and if I’m going through a tough period I will listen to a 15-minute letter every day in the morning as I walk to say get a cup of coffee and what stoicism helps to teach you at its core I think or what it represents is a an operating system for being nonreactive in high stress situations and high stress is relative high stress could be going to the DMV and waiting in line for some people but stoicism is also not just something you read it’s a practice so there’s uh fear setting and fear rehearsal is very important so the practice the worst case is something that I’ll do regularly for instance taking a few days of every month to fast I do that uh taking a few days uh every month or every quarter to like sleep on your kitchen floor in a sleeping bag and eat oatmeal for a few days and realize even if I have to quit my job even if I get fired from my job because a lot of concerns for many people are Financial I’ll be fine things are fine things are manageable so I spent a lot of time defining the worst case scenarios not just being vaguely afraid of bad things happening and practicing them so that I build up some level of immunity not immunity but it’s an inoculation it’s like getting a flu shot yeah stress inoculation this is what we we did in SEAL Teams to each other you go through hard training you put all kinds of combat stress and that way when you get in these scenarios in real life you’re kind of used to it well exactly and um did one of my other favorite quotes and I’m probably not going to get the pronunciation right on this name but Arcus I think it is says we do not to the level of our hopes we fall to the level of our training and that applies to a lot more than military applies to everything uh so so those are a few recommendations I do think I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention some type of meditation or mindfulness practice which can take dozens of forms it can take the form of exercise anything with a repetitive motion or anything quite frankly that forces you to be present stay aware if you’re performing Olympic lifting I guarantee you’re not thinking about your to-do list mhm yeah or the argument that you had with a cooworker that’s you know I think it was when I was doing a followup for the first uh podcast that I did with you and somebody asked me about meditation and I was like no I don’t meditate I guess what I do do surf Jiu-Jitsu weightlift all this other stuff so that kind of falls into again I don’t know because I you you know you say do you meditate my answer is no I don’t meditate you don’t see me sitting in a corner with my legs crossed Indian style chanting right I don’t do that do I get those benefits that people talk about do I feel them when I’m on the Jiu-Jitsu mat or when I’m Olympic weightlifting or when I’m doing whatever these physical activities I do I guess I do I guess that’s where it is and I think my word that I go back to all the time is being able to detach I already said it once a day is is being able to detach from these situations detach from these these stresses that are there and and actually going back to the book here you say I returned to Princeton tur in my now finished thesis to my still sour advisor get chewed up in my thesis defense and I don’t give a [ __ ] and I think that is a very powerful tool that is a very powerful tool and it got me through all kinds of things and I’ll tell you specifically like oh things are going bad at work fire me go go ahead what you you you want to fire me do it bring it on I’ll I’ll find another job I’ll go do something else you know even in the SEAL Teams you know in in my book I talked about this horrible situation that happened with the fraer side and that was the beginning of deployment well as things continued on deployment more it’s not like the bad thing sto there other bad things are going to happen and what I knew was that I was doing the best job I possibly could do and if you guys above me in the chain of command want to come and fire me bring it and it wasn’t that I actually didn’t care but I kind of told myself I didn’t care and when you when you Release Yourself of that stress of caring you can actually perform better you perform better when you say you know what and we talk about with Fighters all the time Fighters will be in an event and maybe they have a hard match and they barely get through and then they go you know what screw this I’m I don’t even care if I win or lose they go out there and have the performance of a lifetime because they’ve relieved themselves of that stress so sometimes not caring is one of the best antidotes for do performing better but it’s very contradictory because you’re saying okay I got to perform really well so what am I going to do I’m not going to care but I want to perform well but you’ve got to and I I used to say this with guys would deal with girls right in the SEAL Teams you got guys they’re going through you they’re they’re young guys right they’re 20 years old 22 years old and so they get these relationship problems and sometimes you got to help them through that and one of the things I’d say I’d say listen listen bud you they would be sad because they whatever and I’d say listen man you got to not care and then I’d say you can’t just act like you don’t care you have to actually not care that’s what you actually have to you have to actually not not care and if you do that you’re good and you can walk away and somebody asked me that the other day on Twitter how do you get over a how do you get over someone that you love that doesn’t want you anymore and I was like wish them luck walk away don’t look back don’t look back you got to not care and I think when you said when you wrote that in the book right there I think that’s a powerful thing it it is and I want to look at the ingredients that led to that or at least one of them uh so a key component in that entire story is after deciding after having the mom intervention after deciding to focus on other things getting the thesis done but not staring at pages on the floor in my house by myself 12 hours a day I I was offered an opportunity it was half joking but from a friend of mine I’d wrestled with who was going to be competing in the San show Nationals Chinese kickboxing so that became Focus that became a clear goal where I knew input in output out you know garbage in garbage out good training in probably good results out maybe I get knocked out but there’s always that chance and the reason this is important you don’t need to have a large athletic event what what I’ve realized I accidentally did then and now I always do is much like and I think you’re saying don’t care another way that maybe you could phrase it is not being pre occupied by it right and if you’re an investor let’s just say you’re not a full-time investor how do you create that piece of mind you diversify your portfolio so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket you can do that in life in a number of ways one of them is diversifying your identity so the way that I had set myself up for failure is all of my worth was set up in whether this thesis would be a success or not and there were factors outside of my control that could affect that what I try to do now and I recommend this to Startup Founders all the time I’m like look if your startup is the way you measure your entire worth as a human being there are factors outside your control that could tank it macroeconomic or otherwise competitive Etc you can’t have it dictated by how well your company is doing that day so for instance why don’t I show you how to do a very simple deadlifting protocol and therefore as a result even if your company is having the most difficult quarter imaginable if you’re putting 10 lounds on your Des 10 pound on a Max all good that’s a winning week that’s all and so I try to have at least three primary goals which would seem to to distract me maybe for someone who isn’t predisposed to depression and darkness you can have one singular goal for me having say three provides me with that divver that identity diversification yeah and also the it sounds like the you’re not going to pick goals that are counterproductive I mean you can run a good company and still increase your deadlift and work on your breath hold and none of those things are going to they’re all compliment they’re all going to help exactly they’re all complimentary and I should also say this is going back to the the meditation piece so meditation is terrible word I mean it needs a complete brand overhaul it’s just ludicrous carries a lot of baggage with it uh another option for getting your monkey mind out of your head so that you can function properly is to and we had a funny exchange on Twitter about this but is to journal in the morning and really you can look at morning pages I won’t get into it now but stream of Consciousness writing for three pages will very often show you how stupidly trivial your concerns are it makes it concrete when you try to write it out and you’re like wait that doesn’t make any sense why am I I’m going to take that one step further you want to know what it actually does well in my mind what it actually does when I’m writing something cuz I now write for my own podcast right when you write you are forced to detach from what you’re writing forced to detach from it so when I’m writing something I’m go I you’re looking at it it’s you’re not it’s not in you anymore it’s out there so that is a good way to detach it’s by writing something down that’s another thing that happens when you do pros and cons list right oh I’m hey I don’t know what decision I’m G to make I’m G to do pros and cons well all you’re doing is physically detaching physically pulling those thing those ideas out of your brain putting them on a paper and now you’re detached from them and you can make a good decision mhm I hate when I agree with you Mr Tim Ferris makes it makes the internet so much less fun when we agree but a few other uh recommendations one would be and this is something that I’ve used as a coping mechanism often if you can’t make yourself happy and happiness as a word is really problematic I think and chasing it tends to mean you’re not going to catch it by the way but if you if you are in a low state or uh a depressive State and you can’t figure out how to make yourself happy just try to make other people happy and it seems cliche Kumbaya but it’s like look something as simple and this is something that I do as paying for the co for the coffee for the person behind you in line at Starbucks can actually have a significant impact on the well-being that you experience into day something tiny like that or like sometimes I’ll just walk in I’ll be like all it’s a Friday there’s six people in this coffee shop all right round a coffee on me like it’s it’s such a simple thing to do but cheapest therapy you will you will ever have you want to know what I do what’s that it’s kind of similar to that but it’s a little bit different when I interact with some let’s say I’m not a coffee drinker but let’s say I’m in a restaurant but you know a 7-Eleven right a 7-Eleven I’m going in there I got to pick up whatever a bottle of water when I interact with the person that’s selling me a bottle of water at 7-Eleven who’s making $8 25 an hour I treat that person like a human being yeah I treat that person like a human being I hey how’s it going yeah just this bottle water thir it’s hot out there isn’t it hey I hope you have a good day I just do that cuz I always see people in the world that treat those other people like they’re not people and I think that just dehumanizes you as an individual so somebody that’s cleaning toilets and is coming out of the thing with a with a the bag of garbage and whatever and hey man how’s it going everything cool you know hey thanks something something like that I think those are uh important and I definitely the the the way you put it in the book is if you can’t seem to make yourself happy do little things to make other people happy very effective magic trick focus on others instead of yourself totally agree with that one going to the G the other ones you put in here is going to the gym move for at least 30 minutes I tell this this is like the solution to everything right yeah oh you got problems in your life cool go to the gym cool go get a workout on the next NE let’s let’s at least start there I think those are those are super powerful and to give some specific recommendations that um if you’re not particularly prone to working out by yourself a couple of recommendations these are going to sound funny but any kind of partner or group exercise and you can take your pick I think rock climbing is fantastic any kind of ballet system for instance any type of dance I have to recommend dance on the Jacko podcast eeko edit that out C yoga even better I’m going to keep going here okay we’re going in the we’re going in the black hole here H or it could be tie boxing right somebody with pats interact with a [ __ ] human being we like to say Jiu-Jitsu Jiu-Jitsu I’m just just involved with jiu-jitsu enough to get choked out on a regular basis no you actually you got a great list in here of uh practical Gremlin defense is what you call it you know you talk about and these are all all in the book that you put out all these little tricks they’re not necessarily to combat depression they’re just things for people to maybe do better in their lives morning rituals you got productivity tricks you got how do you face things that you’re afraid of you got the jar of awesome you got gymnastics you got Acro yoga but I’m not going to talk about that one but my point is you got a bunch of these things written about in the book which I think is is is very helpful to people hey I I got to put this out there too just because people are listening to this if you’re in that zone 1 800 2738255 Suicide Prevention line if you’re there give it a call 24 hours a day seven days a week get yourself help get get through it brother and if you’re prone to those Cycles also one of my very close friends uh who by the way extremely successful CEO so material professional success does not make you immune to this necessarily and that should be reinforcing and reassuring for people meaning to say the people you see on magazine covers they might very well be fighting the same battle that you are something very very similar and uh what this friend of mine did extremely successful I mean top 1% by any measurement and uh he he got close to the edge a number of times and he realized he didn’t care about himself self but he cared about his promises that he made so he made a not a nonsuicide pact with his brother because he knew that he would never break his word to his brother even when he didn’t care about himself at all which is another effective approach I believe that I know plenty of guys at least in my old job we definitely all cared more about our friends our brothers and the SEAL Teams than we did about ourselves without question so that would be a uh a powerful thing there as well I’m going to I’m going to take it to your little section here where you wrap this this section up of the book back to the book My Perfect Storm was nothing permanent but of course it’s far from the last storm I’ll face there will be many more the key is building fires where you can warm yourself up as you wait for the Tempest to pass these fires the routines habits relationships and coping mechanisms you build help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood if you want the lushest green of life and you do the gray part is part of the natural cycle you are not flawed you are human you have gifts to share with the world and when the darkness comes when you are fighting the demons just remember I’m right there fighting with you you are not alone there is a large tribe around you and thousands of them are reading this book right now the gems I found were forged in the struggle never ever give up much love to you and yours Tim well it would appear that once again the the podcast went into the darkness a little bit and I think that’s okay and again I think that having you on here to Tim someone that certainly like you just talked about comes across as outwardly happy and successful and loving life and having you talk about these things and having you put them in the book is is it real service to people I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever written period hands down end of story and that’s a bold statement that’s a bold statement and I think the other thing is that people that aren’t maybe necessarily in that boat it’s important that they learn too so that you can recognize look for signs understand some solutions that you can give to people a and also remember that the darkness that seems all consuming we’ve seen it time and time again we’ve seen it and it’s not it’s not it is not stronger than the forces of good the darkness will subside and the light will win in the end so hold on fight on drive on and look look into the distance out there somewhere in all that Darkness there is light there is hope and there is renewal and rebirth and there is joy and there is this thing this amazing thing this crazy thing this beautiful thing this horrifying Thing This Magnificent thing that we call life and it isn’t easy and it wasn’t meant to be easy but it is worth every second so live it and with that I wanted to make sure that I pointed out that this book which is 700 and something pages long actually it’s 600 after cutting about5 pages long Pages this book is not in any way this book is not a book about suicide this is a fraction was it five pages eight pages something like that I just wanted to make sure that I covered the subject I don’t think that most people are going to pick up the book and say oh I’ll cover the suicide section no they leave that for me that’s what that that’s that’s my job here uh but the book it’s it what it really is is a compilation of all the lessons that you’ve learned talking to all the people that you’ve talked to on the podcast which is a wide range of different people and you taken that and distilled it down for those of you people that uh go and listen to Tim far’s podcast and you go man what am I I can’t get this I two hours two and a half hours who has two and a half hours now you can get it done in 15 minutes you can get it the distilled version the the peak knowledge there and that that’s what the book is all this information kind of distilled down into nice little digestible pieces like a reference book that you can look at which actually now we’re going in the question Zone by the way Hot Seat Tim Ferris get some rolls reversed uh first question can I say something first yeah absolutely so I just wanted to also note for people who might be listening to this and thinking to themselves well I’m not prone to depression I’m not prone to these dark periods the so-called coping mechanisms that you use to take yourself from bad to so-called normal they are also the same strategies you can use to go from normal to better or from better to far better they’re the same it’s just it’s just shifting into a higher gear that’s a great point and I use a lot of those strategies work out every day wake up early get after it of course I I read a lot write a lot okay and you know what I feel pretty damn good right now how’s that how’s that how that apple I feel better yeah and to and to just put a button in it also I I I have with using these different approaches for those people may be listening to this and still feeling somewhat hopeless the dark periods have gotten shorter I’ve been able to turn down the volume and the joyful periods the Zonik periods the productive periods have become longer and brighter and you can engineer that it just takes the right toolkit love it uh this is a good piece of the toolkit right here speaking of toolit tools and Titans um speaking of the book this ties into it the book is filled with all kinds of good ideas and enticing options and they all sound really good how do you take and pick the right path and not get distracted by all these other shiny objects that are out there especially because the path is laid out and you think oh oh cool this oh this looks really good you know I’m going to do this do what Tim Ferris told me to do in this interview and I’m going to do that and then you get a week into it and you haven’t you know you get it’s hard you realize that it’s hard you realize that you you don’t like doing that thing and all of a sudden you go look for the next solution and you end up jumping from solution to solution and you never get any progress because you’re too busy trying to chase this shiny object how do you resolve that yeah is this is a common problem uh you have for instance in the self-help world you have seminar junkies I don’t really do seminars but you have people who go to a different seminar every weekend they get all hopped up on enthusiasm take a lot of notes they do nothing from Monday to Friday and they hit another seminar it’s like a junkie hit getting a getting a dope hit but they don’t put in the work so the the way that you stack the deck is by understanding behavioral modification in in a few ways and you don’t have to do a lot of reading about this but there are a few necessary ingredients one is if you just look at the literature do less than you think you’re capable of doing so what does that mean if you are 100 pound overweight and you are starting exercise after no exercise for 20 years do not start off with 5 days a week of an hour of running on a treadmill the pass fail threshold is too high so you set it first let’s get you to the gym that is priority number one so make it five minutes of walking on a treadmill two or three times a week let’s just say of course my preference would be weight trending but makes an easy example anything beyond that is bonus points when I write a book like this which is just a monster and like you said kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure book but two crappy Pages a day best writing advice I ever got your threat your quota is two crappy Pages a day you don’t even have to use them but if you if you have if you put out two crappy pages of a day that is a successful day and it takes away the performance anxiety and the procrastination if you’ve never flossed you want to floss front teeth that’s it get those get those pearly whites in the front done actually I got an issue with that okay if you break out the floss and you can’t floss the rest of your teeth after you get done with your front ones you got issues get in the game and floss all your teeth people come on so I think I think we got to get people there with the the Gingerbread Trail maybe appropriate for the flossing conversation but so the point is though if you want to submit a behavior you have to break that behavior down into a few pieces one is just getting out the floss and starting then the other is finishing there are different components to it so if I can get someone to say five sessions is my general guideline make it as easy as possible so that you cement the first five sessions flossing do the first front do your front teeth generally people are going to do more but you start there do it for 5 days you don’t do more call me Jo we’ll send a drone to your house come rest with shoelaces his boots have big shoelaces folks don’t let them do it so there’s that the the other piece that is very underestimated is incentives and what I mean by that is and actually a guest on the podcast Derek cers who’s an incredible entrepreneur and uh sort of a philosopher programmer made millions of dollars donated it all to music education he’s a real character but he said if information if more information were the answer we’d all be millionaires with six-pack abs more information is is not the answer generally uh of course there’s good and bad information but I’ll give you a great example and this is kind of a ridiculous one but it proves a point which is I have a friend named AJ Jacobs he’s a writer and uh he wanted to get into better shape but he’d never been an athlete never really worked out never watched his diet but there he is he’s got one kid another one on the way and um skinny Jewish guy but he described his physique as a python that had swallowed a goat physique so he wasn’t morbidly obese but just not looking super hot and uh he knew what to do he just wasn’t doing it so he wrote a check to the American Nazi party for $1 000 and I believe it was his best friend this like merciless friend he gave this check to and he said if I don’t lose 20 pounds by the end of next month something like that I want you to mail this check in which would put his name AJ Jacobs known writer and Jew on the list of contributors for the American Nazi party he lost the 20 [ __ ] pounds is the punch line and you can use sites like coach me or stick Stik where you actually create an anti- charity so if there’s a nonprofit or a charity you’d rather nuke than give money to uh you can actually put money into escrow and if you don’t hit your goals and they have referees and judges and so on that money goes to your anti- charity and it sounds so ludicrous you could also do something simple like a beding pool I know people who have never lost weight and they let’s say five co-workers each put in a 100 bucks and whoever changes their body composition ideally rather than a scale right but using a a dexa scan for instance gets the pot at the end and it is incredible I I how hard people will work to not lose a and then B lose money I know two guys who worked at Google both fatties at the time and uh one of them has since lost more than I want to say 80 pounds and run a few marathons but it started with a commitment to go to the gym together and if anyone missed the session they had to pay the other person a dollar these are people who make 100 000 plus a year no problem and it worked is the is the funny part but incentives whenever you’re like how can I change this Behavior you need incentives so give your give your close friend who you know would love nothing more than to see you humiliated pictures of you your like fat ass I’m just making this up but like whatever in like your tidy whes and if you don’t lose X number of pounds by y point in time those go on Instagram end a story like you will lose the weight I promise you but there need to be incentives humans are incentive driven machines and so those when when now we’re trying to narrow all this information do you pick one do you set a certain amount of time like okay I’m going to stick with this program here cattle Bell swings at night right I’m going to do 75 kettle bell swings at night do you say I’m gonna do this regardless of the outcome and I think you did this with podcast too you said I’m gonna do eight podcasts or six podcasts I’m going to going to record them regardless if I hate it doesn’t matter I’m committing to it so that’s sort of a way to avoid distractions of on other things as well definitely so there there are two different aspects to that so the podcasting was a goal but I always try to set goals where you can win even if you fail so these are goals that have side effects that carry over and Scott Adams creator of Dilbert talks about this in tools of Titans actually he calls it systems thinking and in the case of podcasting he did this with blogging I asked myself what can I take out of this in terms of skills and relationships even even if it bombs as a podcast I can get better at asking questions which means getting better at thinking I can start to minimize my verbal ticks both of which will help me to do research for books later and on down the list there were maybe 10 different things that would I would benefit from even if the podcast failed so six was this critical mass I tend to do things in terms of sessions five or six times that’s that’s usually my experimental minimum but for a period of time let’s just say behavioral modification so k swings or fill in the blank some kind of dietary intervention I’m going to start with intermittent fasting okay so I’m going to fast 16 to 18 hours a day I’ve done up to 10 days but let’s just say I’m starting with 16 to 18 hours a day of fasting then I will measure things it’s a very I don’t want to scare people off but scientific approach it’s like you have to know what effect something is having so you can do that subjectively 0 to 10 how do I feel or you can look at things like number of reps weights lifted I mean I’m I have my my mug of my mug of tea and my get after a Joo mug approved thank God if I had unapproved i’ look at all these knives on the table uh but I this is one of my training logs right here and I’ve had these training logs since I was 16 so I like to treat most of my behavioral experiments exercise experiments dietary experiments as a two-e experiment and that’s that’s the minimal effective dose that I’ll use in cases like that um and I’ll always do the fewest number of things possible possible so let’s just say you have you read a book like this or any other book I think I take the opposite approach unfortunately probably bad I’ll just go as many as I can possibly get get it done so so for those of you who don’t know ja is a cyborg he’s a robot uh I know I’m actually just an idiot all good poorly programmed robot but the the the reason here’s how I think about it when I’m looking at goals or I’m looking at behaviors I ask myself all right I’m enthusiastic I’ve this list of 40 things that I might do which of these if done well will make the others irrelevant or unnecessary I’m looking for a lead Domino which of these will make all the rest irrelevant meaning I don’t need to do them or easier and that is how I choose the behaviors or the goals to focus on and then once I have those just so I can control my variables to the extent possible so if I’m changing my diet and six different exercise routines and my sleep all at the same time I may not know which is contributing to higher reps in the kable swing right maybe the kable swing is killing me but because I fix my diet I’m actually recovering properly so you don’t have to take it to that level BJ fog uh fog has done some very interesting work in this area uh but I would say honestly you want to get good at training yourself and this is going to sound ridiculous and it is kind of ridiculous take a dog training course or train a chicken chicken are the most interesting cuz they don’t respond to negative reinforcement but maybe that’s not joo’s away you need something you can like hit with a lash Trina I don’t know what that would be what do you TR chickens to do uh so the if you train a chicken clearly not I didn’t even know that was actually a thing well so it is a it is a litmus test there there there’s a couple and I’m blanking on their name right now who trained more than 1500 species for Espionage purposes at one point and they started as Marine Mammal trainers so they were training Dolphins orcas Etc and you can’t just roll up a newspaper and bad Orca and hit it on the head for a lot of reasons but it doesn’t work so they have to use a positive reinforcement and we we really get into the weeds with this but they also use a reward marker or or a bridge which is a clicker in this case or a whistle to indicate when the animal is getting closer to the desired Behavior so in the case of a chicken you could teach it to say turn counterclockwise or turn clockwise take a certain number of steps and then come back to you uh to receive feed you’re only using feed uh but you know one of the quotes that I really liked from a trainer was you shouldn’t be allowed to have a child until you’ve been required to train a chicken um and there’s a lot of Truth to that but it’s just operate and classical conditioning but any anyway I I could really go down the rabbit hole there’s a great book called Don’t Shoot the dog about this type of training uh but I digress the point being understanding that we’re all incentive driven I think is is is very important and then trying to work on one or two things at a time because you’re only doing it for two weeks in in the way that I the mental model that I use and then you’re assessing things and which by the way is why I generally recommend if we’re talking about diet so someone who needs to lose a 100 or 200 pounds and I’ve had the chance to interact with a lot of these people and they’ve lost that weight uh I will put them on a diet that has the there are three criteria that I use when I’m trying to say you design a diet for an intervention for someone number one ad so of 100 people I told to do it will I have the highest percentage of compliance possible and you could tell people hey the best workout routine for losing weight is taping bowling balls to your hands and doing Wind Sprints up and down a stadium stair well not too many people are going to stick with that uh so you look at the adherence then the effectiveness does it produce the desired result and then the efficiency last in terms of is it uh is it time economical right among other things but the point being a lot of folks give me [ __ ] on the internet they’re like what slow car beans that’ll make your intestines explode and I’m like a if your intestines explode like you’re training yourself to be weak you need to fix your regimen but like B uh you could throw a thousand people into strict paleo or strict veganism whatever your religion happens to be and uh one out of a thousand are going to make it whereas if you use the gateway drug of say slow carp diet which is more convenient a little easier to work with in 2 weeks uh let’s say someone who weighs 300 lb and has1 to lose they’ll probably lose between 5 and 10 pounds in the first 10 days so treating it as a two-e experiment they now have the positive reinforcement and the results that will lead to a credibility for me where I can drive them to do more ambitious things and step by step that can then lead them to strict say paleo or whatever but when you you have to start with the good program you practice is better than the perfect program you quit you see this in exercise all the time absolutely people come hot out of the gate and they quit four days later yeah yeah that’s you really really what talked about earlier is for for me is prioritized and execute which I talked about in the book extreme ownership is you know what’s the biggest impact you’re going to have make that thing take that thing to the top of the list and start working on that one boom done yeah totally all right next question all right there was a friend of mine that was older than me and he was always looking for the right girl and the right girl to settle down with and to marry and have kids and all that stuff and it never seemed to happen and the reason it never seemed to happen is cuz he was always looking for Perfection always looking for Perfection and I told him that you know profession doesn’t exist and I also had another buddy of mine that was we were like surfing and he was always looking for like the next good time always looking for he’s looking for happiness right and one time we’re surfing and I go bro you you keep looking around for happiness this is it this is it man we’re surfing this is happiness right now do you ever feel like you’re searching too much and looking for something instead of enjoying what you have 10 years ago I would have said yes right now I feel like I’ve found I found uh a few things meaning realizations and I view my job as testing things on The Fringe and Reporting back it’s like half like ethnobotanist might be eaten by cannibals plus a little bit of athletic stupidity and really trying to find the things at the extreme so I can inform the mean and as an experimentalist or an experimenter I view that is my responsibility my job and i’ I’ve also replaced a number of words in my life so we we used happiness because it’s just the easiest reference point for a lot of folks uh I think that the better word is excitement so I I chase what excites me now that’s a Razor’s Edge you got to be careful with but when I say excite it means I wake up excited and I go to bed exhausted basically is what that means and uh I’ve also realized that there are things to optimize in their things to savor and I don’t have a lot of trouble with that most people would think that I’m just like speed reading poetry and you watching every movie on like 28x forward with subtitles just to cram in as much Mr Robot as I can or whatever and no uh I I I feel like I am increasingly better at the appreciation portion of the equation the achievement I’ve always been I wouldn’t say hardwired for but very well trained for I’m good at putting goals in the sites and achieving those goals but if you’re constantly looking for the next thing whether it’s the next goal or it’s the next girl or it’s the next high then you are never going to be operating in the present tense was there something that you said 10 years ago if I would asked you this you would probably been on your heels a little bit is there something that happened when you said you know what what did I just you know did you get home from a trip one time and say what did I just do or what was there no I can tell you I can tell you it was um so this this is related to something that you know Robert Rodriguez who’s the director producer writer musician everything he’s a fascinating guy also huge I didn’t realize how big he was so Sin City good on the list right he’s he has a lot of hits and he’s said I always find it funny and I’m paraphrasing here but uh he he’s one of the longer chapters in the book he said I always find it funny when filmmakers come up to be brand new filmmakers and they say nothing went the way it was supposed to go like this happened and that happened and [ __ ] broke and then we missed this shot and d and he said they don’t realize that that’s their job that nothing is going to work like if you’re the director your job is nothing’s going to work uh so at one point I was feeling uh maybe existentially scattered I was like well I’m trying all these different things and doing all these different experiments and when am I going to figure out my thing and then at some point someone just said no your thing is going meta like your thing is doing these types of experiments and what I realized is my my one thing is learning things quickly and whether that is cooking or sniping I’ve taken some sniping courses that’s separate story uh rally car racing whatever right Tango doesn’t matter that the approach to deconstructing these things and learning them quickly compounds so if I get better at one I get better at the next doesn’t matter what the subject area is so that’s my one thing uh and it just gave me great peace of mind a you don’t need one thing in a traditionally defined sense maybe your thing is as I have found you know being a human guinea pig and trying to train people to be better learners is my one thing uh and that that made me feel more confident uh in this sort of experimental approach I don’t have 10e plans and I used to that used to bother me a lot I am no longer remotely bothered by that uh because I have twoe experiments and I have six-month projects and if I do my we we actually talked about this and you’ve written about it but rather than worrying about the the next 17 promotions you just do what’s in front of you in my case say a book project if I do an exceptional job I knock it out of the park with this one thing opportunities will present themselves that I couldn’t have conceived of six months ago and then it’s just a matter of paddling for the wave that’s awesome yeah but I’m a lot better at appreciation than I was along uh say 10 years ago uh because 10 years ago it didn’t matter how how well I did what I won what I accomplished I was always obsessing on the next thing I never took the time to actually enjoy it good lesson all right and this is this is almost down the same line of thinking so we we I kind of see you as the king of Outsourcing right um but for me my whole life I was doing a job that I absolutely loved a job that I wouldn’t Outsource to anybody ever and I feel like I was really lucky and even even right now I’m doing this podcast you know what I love doing this podcast and people have sent me hey we can help you you know set up for it and help you I I I would read books for you and give you notes I’m like no I don’t want you to help me read books and give me notes I’m doing that that’s what I’m doing so is there a job that would satisfy you that you said or what let me ask you this what jobs do you do that you like I own this thing and I’m not going to let anybody else do it the podcast for instance it’s my favorite part of bookwriting without the book writing it’s fantastic and uh nobody’s trying I don’t have some like suit who’s paid to manage the bottom line with no creative bone his body trying to tell me how the podcast should be run it’s fantastic so I think that uh the podcast I could see doing indefinitely and there are many things like that for me I mean I could see doing PE well I’ll give an example just cuz I I have to take the opportunity to talk about Tango on the Joo podcast just to shave your nuts we’ll edit this out there so the the reason I stopped doing it I mean I got to got to the World Championships uh but the reason I stopped wa I was a semi-finalist in the world championship just I I don’t even know I can’t I can’t even imagine what the world championships in Tango is I know Tango’s a dance but how do you attack the other people like how do you get them out of the Arena how thr out the r what happens it’s uh well it’s very delicate so there’s points is there points or something yeah they’re judges and so on it’s just like a like an but the point being I stopped because I left an environment in which it was highly competitive I I went from Argentina where there are dozens hundreds of world-class dancers to the US where they just are a fra a handful right oh it’s it’s it’s Bob again okay great uh so the the um the one thing honestly is teaching people to test assumptions and become better learn that’s it that’s my thing so that’s the one thing that’s the constant through all the books through the podcast don’t believe everything you think detach to use your word right assess and test the assumptions and get better at getting better ultimately um that that’s it for me but I there are many things that I do now that I could see doing for a very very long decades for sure including the podcast good yeah the podcast we were talking about this earlier the great thing about the podcast is is that you can do whatever you want oh yeah it can be 3 minutes long it can be 3 hours it can be 30 hours long you can talk about whatever you want no one’s going to just do what you want and that’s a um if you’ve written a book The amount of other people that start to weigh in on that thing it’s it’s can be a little bit it’s not oppressive but it’s just not as nice as hey I’m going to turn this on and do whatever I want which is a good feeling all right and and speaking of doing whatever you want and I know that’s kind of how you set your life up which is awesome but to take that that notion to the extreme if you got diagnosed with a horrible disease and I I try to think of a better way to ask you this question which isn’t like majorly depressing because this is but if you got diagnosed with a disease that was going to kill you in a year or 18 months what would you do with those months so I roleplay this all the time uh not not because I want to dwell in the darkness but this is part of the rehearsing the worst case scenario so not only do I rehearse this for myself but I try to spend time around people who are going to die uh and when I get back to the Bay Area I actually want to volunteer in a hospice center to contend with that uh there are a few things so I would I would get my Affairs in order relatively quickly they’re already largely in order so that my family would be taken care of and to be honest and there aren’t many points in my life where I could say this I would largely keep doing what I’m doing honestly uh I I think that I stopped for instance the tech investing about two years ago because I felt like I was replaceable I felt like if I in a sense didn’t participate there were a hundred other people in line who were going to step up and write a check and that that wasn’t a unique opportunity nor a unique skill that I held to hopefully put into the world to benefit people in some way but uh the you know all the ludicrous experiments some more practical than others and the podcasting and so on I feel like I’m putting out the best work that I can and I think I’d keep doing it I’d certainly and and in the last few years I’ve uh after reading an essay I think it’s called The Tail End by Tim Urban on wait but why about how effectively by the time you’re 18 and leave the house you’ve spent 80% of the total hours you would ever spend with your parents uh I’ve reorganized my calendar and my year to spend a lot more time with my family uh meaning my parents and my brother and I think I’d keep doing what I’m doing honestly until uh until I slift you know end up in a pile of dust which is where we’re all ending up that’s where we’re heading sooner or later ex you get I was listening I keep wanting to do this I want to when I’m listening to certain podcasts sometimes I I want to just live tweet like when I’m having thoughts about him and I I do it with Rogan sometimes I go man I should just be live tweeting this cuz sometimes when he had who’ he have on oh when when he had Sam Harris on I was just there was so many things that they were saying that were just hilarious to me and I want this live tweet but when you had Shay Carlon at one point I can’t remember his quote there was this you got to this topic and you know you you know of what you would do and it wasn’t the same question it was but it was somewhere in the same thing maybe it was about money you got enough money now or it was something something along those lines and kind of at the same time you know he says he says something like you know just imagine being able to spend all this time with your family and then you said at the same time cocaine and [ __ ] and I was like I wanted to live tweet that I was like that’s gold yeah Shay and I had spent a couple days together classic and which just for those people don’t have any context he’s also you raised uh Church of latterday saints you know Mormon Utah and uh so I was like cocaine and hores um which is the nature of my [Music] podcast I thought that was classic it’s the little things it’s the little things that that was another one I wanted to live to cuz he was saying to some really classic uh lines in there as well um all right normal day to day okay no imminent death that I just placed but you’re healed my son thank you demons be G no disease uh it seems like you’ve gone through your life going from all these different Hobbies you talked about Tango you talked about Jiu-Jitsu you wrestled you did Judo when you were in Japan now you’re talking we show up here you’re talking about archery right you got all these different things going on for me I I’ve only had a couple things that have made me feel that way that thing right number one is combat that’s that’s as good as it gets for me Jiu-Jitsu is the next thing down it’s just empty brain and just awesomeness and surfing is up there to maybe jamming with my band getting it on in that way how come you’re jumping around so much and is there anything that you always go back to so I jump around I had a I had a conversation about this uh with one of my very close friends Josh whiteskin so Josh whiteskin for those who don’t know he’s the inspiration for the book in the movie Searching for Bobby fer he was a chess well considered a chess Prodigy I take some issue with the name he doesn’t like that label either uh very good at learning just about anything he’s also the first black belt under a uh incredible Jiu-Jitsu athlete and teacher named Marcelo Garcia legit who is and eeko finally chimes in and when Eko chimes in he just wants to point out that yes Marcelo Garcia is legit yeah Marcelo is one of the finest Grapplers in the last 100 years for sure and which by the way makes him the one of the best Grapplers in the history of the world and the universe exactly no this is this is completely true I mean I I’ve not to go down the the Marcelo rabbit hole but uh yeah I had the opportunity to train with Marcelo and it’s just another planet it’s actually Josh invited me when I when I get out to New York Josh said hey come on by the academy I’m like okay yeah no problem I’ll be there so we’re going to get out there he’s like oh we got geese and everything he got everything yeah just like service oh it’s it’s it’s a fantastic school it’s a fantastic school and uh he’s applied his learning approach to Jiu-Jitsu he’s applied it to taii Push Hands he was a world champion and he’s he’s applied to a handful of things but not a lot he’s not as as frenetic as I am but we’ve we’ve spent a lot of time together he’s a very close friend and he said and this is you know his words not mine but he feels like I one of the best people on the planet at getting people from zero to 80% of a skill as quickly as possible and he’s focused on the last 1% getting someone from 99 to 100 so he works with some of the biggest names in the Finance world uh people who are very under the radar to get them from say beating 99 99% of the competition to 999 and I think those are complimentary skill sets but for me the high that I get is different from the high Josh gets the high that I get is taking someone for instance I didn’t learn to we talked about this I didn’t learn to swim properly until I was in my 30s uh for a host of reasons I won’t bore everybody with I did a Ted Talk on on why that is is absurd as it is but taking someone who hasn’t hasn’t been able to swim ever and getting them in 2 days to the point where they can swim say open water in the ocean for a half a mile which is completely feasible it’s completely possible for someone who has some athletic background that’s my high showing someone that the impossible or what they thought was impossible is not only possible but in a time frame that seems completely unrealistic that’s my high uh so I think that’s part of the reason I jump around is in part to learn but it’s also being able to teach someone in a way that saves them hundreds of hours and just to see their head go and you get that obviously then you get that satisfaction yourself when you try something for the first time oh yeah yeah there’s there’s nothing better for me I mean when I figure out for instance with with archery uh blank bail practice and I’m like oh my God it’s just like dry firing with a pistol like to fix your like casting or healing it’s like oh my it’s the same [ __ ] thing oh my God you know and then I get all excited because I’m piecing these things together or oh the way that you train someone figure out their eye dominance like if you’re constantly missing basketball shots by like an inch you probably haven’t figured out your eye dominance it’s like oh then you shift your Center Line slightly so you’re raising the ball in a different way oh my God it applies in the same way to Bowling even though no one even talked about bowling those types of things get me very excited I always thought I was going to be a teacher because I had these coaches and teachers in 9th or 10th grade who steered me from this very bad path onto a much better path I mean a lot of my friends growing up Long Island ended up overdosing dying my best friend growing up was one of them or drug addicts or alcoholics and I got steered in this other direction and that ninth 10 grade window is what I always thought I would go back and teach so I love teaching so that’s why I jump around but uh what what creates the zone for me is partially just that aha moment is exciting for me so I I do spend a lot of my time looking for FAL ground so it’s a new skill set but these skill sets compound so like the better you get at learning any skill the faster you will learn subsequent skills uh but if I had to default to a few activities I would say it’s and I have to be trying to be smarter about this but it’s a physical activity with a component of danger that’s it it’s a physical activity with a risk with real Stakes of some type so that could be rally car racing which is very physical it could be Jiu-Jitsu it could be a different martial arts say tie kickboxing where I’ve probably spent the most time outside of Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling uh those would be the activities that that put me in the Zone by necessity because the penalties are so Swift and so immediate and so severe uh strongly incentivized to not think of the alfree runs you’re going to hit when someone’s trying to kick you in the head similar question next one down the down the list here now I was with a friend of mine the other day and we were doing some work on his car just like body work right you’re sanding and then you’re polishing and then you’re sanding again you’re polishing and you’re painting priming all this stuff and there’s a certain level of Detachment in cour sort of for lack of a better word like a Zen mindset where you’re doing this thing but you’re not doing it right it’s the same thing with cleaning guns you know you’re cleaning guns you’re just there it’s just a very calming thing you know sometimes when I just need to relax I’ll just clean my weapons I think everyone kind of does that but do you do do you do that is there anything that you do that you do that puts you in that state of mind of that just let let you kind of relax oh absolutely there are there are a number of them and I I view them as medicine I need consistent dosing of these things uh the first few that come to mind swimming now that I do for fun which blows my mind to this day because I’m so terrified of it forever but swimming laps just a very repetitive left right left right that rhythm is Hypnotic for me God somebody asked me the other day like oh do you still swim I said no i i surf but I I don’t swim like I swam enough my whole my whole life been swimming yeah and I don’t swim like um on purpose oh yeah so and the reason somebody said why and it’s it’s and I I said boredom right yeah uh maybe I need to revisit that CU that boredom is is can be a positive thing it can be so I find uh this is I mean one of the reasons that I this is slight this is different because you do have to pay attention with this one but dog training uh I I went really deep with dog training and for a lot of folks it’s really monotonous shaping a behavior at a high level is extremely repetitive and I find it therapeutic I love it so swimming would be one and here’s how I make swimming a little more interesting to me with swimming I focus on the efficiency of Strokes per per length so you got a little challenge going gameing I have a I have a game or I will look at instead of say right left breathe and then breathing to the alternate side so you’re breathing every third stroke I’ll try to do every fifth stroke and I I have these metrics that I use to keep me motivated that’s the little Scooby Snack uh so uh cooking I find something I always hated until maybe three years ago no more five five years ago I find also very uh present State forcing it’s a forcing function for me when you’re trying to figure out five different dishes going at the same time and timing everything you don’t have any slack to think of other things so I don’t I I very rarely cook for one person meaning myself but having groups over uh we had an entire Pig for my birthday a few months ago and uh spatchcock for those who don’t know what that is is you basically splitting it down the middle and then spreading it out like a pancake and uh we just created this raging Inferno in my backyard uh with a pig and fish and all this stuff and everybody was involved probably 10 different people and I was not the uh the commander-in-chief for that one we had we had a friend who really knows what he’s doing doing but just one of the most relaxing experiences that everybody had had everyone came away from that after 2 days of being involved and it they said it felt like a six-month vacation I think that this is a problem for me right in the military you starting really early in the military you eat for time you eat for to get Fe fuel in your system and I’m really not a good relaxed let’s take some time prepare the meal sit around and eat it I’m shovel it in so we can go to more stuff that’s I don’t enjoy that enough and I love eating I mean I love eating but I don’t ever just sit and relax and eat I’m always in the game like trying to get that food down so I can go and get after it some more any any kind of detailed practice for me where I have immediate feedback uh is it can put me into that zone uh shooting shooting steel I was just yeah shooting steel uh particularly if I’m doing any type of drilling at close distance with a handgun MH um uh although there are different types of feedback for me if I’m doing longer range Marksmanship then I’m thinking more about a lot of my breathing and so on with the with pistols you know if I’m using a whatever Glock 34 M&P 45 whatever it might be uh the focusing on the subtleties of predicting when you’re going to pull the trigger the flinches and the sort of stutters and stammers that can affect the shot and then making an adjustment and then taking the next 10 shots I just I find that endlessly interesting isn’t the right word yeah endlessly focusing that’s another thing that the military kind of screwed up for me is because shooting in the military on the best ranges in the world with unlimited ammunition and all that’s what you’re it’s your job and so you get in this mode where you’re just loving it and and then you get in the civilian world and you know you go to the range and the ammunition costs money right you’re all angry about that and then they say oh you can’t shoot Steel in this range and what about moving targets what about you know I want things and you just get used to so you get spoiled in the military a little bit and there’s some great civilian ranges out there as well that that offer the same thing that I’m love to utilize it’s awesome uh good all right I like that there’s some kind of a dichotomy between Zen State and shooting but it’s all and Irish flute my preferred I’m kidding okay yeah that’s cool all right now here’s here’s another one so when I retired from the Navy and got out and started the Consulting business working in one of my risk averse friends that was staying in the military for its its welfare program right it’s a it’s a paycheck right and he the guy wasn’t you know he wasn’t all fired up anymore but he was in and so he had a mortgage to pay and kids to feed so he’s just staying in and he kind of looked at me when I was getting out and I said yeah man I got bills to pay too but I’m going to go and get get after it somehow and he said what are you going to do if it if it you know if the business doesn’t work and you end up you know you’re going to come back in and what are you going to do you won’t be able to get back in blah blah blah blah and I said bro worst case scenario everything goes to hell guess what I’m going to be doing I have an RV I will be in my RV with my family we’ll be driving up and down the coast of California raiding Jiu-Jitsu schools and training and I’ll be perfect and it’s all good and it won’t cost me barely anything to do that my retirement cover will be good to go you got a backup plan like that well let me let me rephrase that if you needed a backup plan like that mhm what would it be this is this is one of my favorite topics uh so I would say that I have an infinite number of backup plans and the way I think about that is by doing what I call fear setting so much like you just said looking at my goals the worst things that could happen the ways I could mitigate that in the way I could get back to where I am now if all hell struck at once helps me to remove the fear of taking these these steps that might paralyze me otherwise this the second part is by say practicing fasting practicing spending no money for certain periods of time I don’t feel I would say the top handful of things that tend to stop people from taking what they perceive as risks the other very important thing is that risk has a very specific meaning for me and I realized early on that people talk about risk tolerance taking risks but if they don’t Define it clearly it can it can end up being paralyzing and how nebulous it is so for me risk is very simple it is the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome that’s it so most things I do even though people look at it they say oh my God this guy’s in investing in speculative startups when it’s just one guy in an idea man he’s a risk taker I don’t view myself that way at all I view myself as if anything someone who’s very has taken a lot of time to get good at mitigating risk I’m a risk mitigator uh and in the case of say speculative investing I am only using money that I can comfortably afford to lose and for me backup plan similar to yourself you know throw my dog in an RV get some get some instant oatmeal sleeping bag yusei’s right in my backyard I don’t know go find some dirt bag climbers and hang out there good to go yeah go hang out with my parents get to see more of them go for a run in the woods yeah while I’m trying to figure out the next step I it’s and you had that attitude when you were taking more legitimate risk I mean right now obviously you’re you’re pretty good to go MH and but but in the beginning when you moved out to the West Coast you you had to have the similar attitude of because I know I did that that that attitude for me freed me like oh worst case scenario I lose everything cool I’ll still have my RV it’s paid for yeah we’re good yeah totally I I had that at got more surfboards than any other human should ever have but and and knives and surfboards I we roll deep I I I I think I had that realization early on and of course when I first graduated from school went out to the West Coast I did not have a lot of money I remember when I came out to California for the first time for job interview I couldn’t afford a hotel I stayed at the faex kickboxing gym on the second floor sleeping on a bunk bed with a tie instructor sleeping above me and washed my clothes in the sink good to go and I was happy I I mean I was fully content I I didn’t feel like I was missing anything and uh but let’s not kid ourselves I mean when I first moved out it was 1999 this is at the peak of the bubble rental prices are out of control and I was making 40 Grand a year pre-tax and get some yeah and my my office my desk was in the fire exit I mean they they was completely illegal I I was I had to I I had a a pretty slick setup but it was very low budget and uh but really what I think freed me on some level is realizing and this hopefully this doesn’t sound prick or arrogant or whatever but no matter what difficulties might befall me whatever uh unemployment might come my way there are people with fewer Resources with less education who have figured it out before and survived so if dozens or hundreds or thousands of millions of people have figured this out I’m going to come out the other end would be fine and so that that was very reassuring to me yeah that’s that that is a good one and we’ll move to the next question any misconceptions about you that you want to clear up well uh you you actually you actually confirmed a misconception for everybody tonight you said oh well you know if joo’s going to train somebody he’s going to need to beat them and that’s like people always think that and it’s just so wrong so wrong so wrong and I mean I I I don’t I’m not going to go into it now because I talk about on the podcast all the time that that stuff is ineffective and you you actually have to lead people and you so that was a good misconception you piled on I’ll have I’ll now spend another five years trying to debunk that and prove to people that I’m not a drill instructor With A Lash but it’s good thank you appreciate it which was was deliberate I’m just uh joo’s so effective at busting my balls on Twitter and then everyone takes it literally I’m like okay well I have to take this opportunity but the so first misconception so the uh cocaine and hores only twice a week folks it is it is not disabling uh that’s a joke internet by the way so the I’d say the biggest misconception is uh and it’s very understandable look I mean my book titles I didn’t expect the 4our thing to become a thing so the 4our work week funny story behind that the the original idea for the title and I had dozens but the one that that I ended up testing first was the two hour work week which was about the amount of time I was spending managing my company at the time and uh some people at the publish were like that’s way too unrealistic 2 hours a week and I was like four hours a week and they’re like that’s so much better I was like okay perfect nailed it and uh it sounds like a product you’d see after like the spray on hair and before the rotisserie chicken at 3: in the morning it sounds like an infomercial product so I get it but the biggest misconception from people who have not read the book or books is that I advocate idleness oh okay and that’s not the case I have no problem with hard work as long as it’s focused on the right things so I think of maximizing per hour output that doesn’t mean I advocate dropping a bunch of acid and like watching your cat walk around the house for 12 hours a day that doesn’t do much good for anyone uh so that that’s the biggest misconception uh I I have no problem with hard work I just hor doing something well that shouldn’t be done at all I think that’s a waste of skill and a waste of energy uh that’s the biggest I there there are plenty of other ones you know something too that you need to watch out for is just because you work hard doesn’t mean that you’re doing good right and there’s there’s a bunch of little sayings about that but just because you’re working hard and getting up early and and you think you’re getting after it you might be moving a lot but you’re not making any progress and there’s a big difference there and I think that’s something that people need to watch out for as well right so the for instance I think the prioritize and execute people need to I think that’s such an important starting point like like what you do is infinitely more important than how you do something if you have a list of unimportant Tod do and you’re killing it with the unimportant todos that’s that’s still a chalking up to a loss yeah yeah uh and you’re still losing my friend you’re still losing uh so for me it’s I I when people ask me about time management I’m like no no no if you don’t have time you don’t have priorities so focus on the what should you be doing and for me you know the eff of executive by Peter drer is is the classic there don’t worry about your apps and your email management and so on just like read a book that’s a few decades old that just talks about prioritizing uh so the the biggest misconception yeah just the whole 4our stick that is my blessing and my curse forever that part which is another reason why this is my first book without 4 Hour on the title oh hopefully it’ll sell we’ll see I also Lo lost the Timothy and went to Tim just so I don’t have to feel like I’m getting chastised by my mom every time I’m what made you go Timothy on the first ones I don’t know sounded more official I have no idea I honestly have no idea awesome all right uh we’re getting I got one more question here you as a leader right there’s actually millions of people that follow you right that listen to you that respect what you say and they they truly follow your lead I mean clearly they follow your lead we saw this with uh with the the launch of or the release what’s it called when a book comes out when my book cames out yeah you had kind of predicted everything that was going to happen to a tea of like yeah when we talk about this book it’s going to you know people going by it that’s and so people clearly follow you and and listen to what you say as a leader and I don’t know if you for see yourself that way but you are a leader two questions one where do you think you fall short and two and more important where are you trying to lead people yeah these are good uh so I haven’t thought of myself as a leader uh but I think that two terms sometimes get used interchangeably and I view them as very different so as a leader if I’m looking through that lens of myself I think I’m very good at affecting National conversations and steering the attention of groups to one thing for sustained periods of time I think I’m very good at that and helping people to prioritize if I were to view myself as a manager I think I have many deficiencies uh and one of them would be and this has been a help and a hindrance as many things are uh impatience I have extremely high standards and hold myself to just a ridiculous degree of expectation for Perfection which of course leads to a lot of the problems we’ve talked about earlier but on the flip side I I get a lot done in part I think because that is is a driver that can also damage relationships very quickly and it can in a management environment uh cause hurt feelings and people to not put forth their best because they feel like they are being criticized and not lauded for their successes and in part that is because as an athlete I really and hope hopefully it doesn’t sound weird I don’t really care if it sounds weird actually in sports and in business my general feeling was and I remember a mentor early on said something like this to me he said don’t tell me about the good stuff the good stuff takes care of itself just tell me about the bad stuff and that’s always been my personal policy for myself but that does not always translate well to team environments so that that I think is my my my homework that uh and and uh deficit that I’ve been working hard to correct for the last few years is getting better at managing people who do not necessarily conform to that mindset at all times which I think can be uh a big problem when it’s when it’s out of control but that that would be the biggest deficit but if we’re if we’re defining leader as someone who can put forth a vision or an objective or catalyze a movement and move attention in people in One Direction I I feel like I’m I’m quite good at at at mitigating the risk of that uh in because for instance people think that the haters this is a very popular word on the internet and not all critics are haters of course important to be able to take criticism and feedback but many people who are thrust into a position where they have the opportunity to lead people virtually on the on the internet which is a a huge responsibility and I take it extremely seriously worry about say their detractors causing problems it’s not the detractors in my experience that can do the most damage it’s the DI hard fans who get the message wrong who get the directive and misinterpret it that that is where you have to do damage control and think ahead so I think I think I’m quite good at that as far as where I’m leading people if I’m leading them anywhere uh I I’ve always I shouldn’t say always but for the last at least 5 years thought of my goal as creating a benevolent Army of super Learners effectively who can teach in turn 10 additional people each the same skill set so to propagate a toolkit that enables people to be elite problem solvers instead of accidental haphazard problem creators is has been been my goal for at least the Last 5 Years explicitly teaching people how to learn so they can teach people how to learn that’s right and part of learning is problem solving so you’re by by definition getting people who are good at dissecting problems testing assumptions that’s where I’m leading people yeah that’s that’s solid I mean that’s obviously a really positive thing I always talk about the fact that you know I want to help people learn how to learn I I talk about that all the time and I’ve said that before on the podcast we we teach people how to not not what to think but how to think and obviously I’m not the same scale that you are in terms of volume of masses of people but there’s definitely some people out there that I think are following me in some way and that might be a strong word but I always think that what I’m trying to get people to do if you’re following me I’m really trying to get you to follow yourself and Lead yourself I don’t I don’t you know lead yourself okay you see it my path that’s cool my path was good I like my path now Forge your path you know figure out where you want to go how you’re going to get how you’re going to get stronger how you’re going to get faster how you’re going to get smarter how you’re going to get how you’re going to get better and I always think that those answers work best when they don’t come from somebody else but when they come from yourself absolutely and I think also the teaching people how to learn uh enabling my audience to learn how to learn and when I say that I mean 10 100 times faster than would be expected in a lot of domains that’s only one leg of the stool so let’s say there are three legs the other two would be teaching them to dissect and manage fear and then the third leg would be teaching them to be emotionally aware and resilient and that I think is covered largely by stoicism if you take it as a practice and not as something to passively ingest yeah and I just talked about stoicism on my last podcast because somebody hit me up on Twitter and says do you practice stoicism and I was like no I just said no because I’m pretty tur on Twitter and and the guy kind of wrote back I don’t want to say he was offended and I don’t want to rehash the whole story because I just talked about my last podcast but you know he said hey what you know what’s wrong with stoicism and and I wrote back I’m like man there’s nothing wrong with stoicism I I I I get it but for me to say that I practi it or even that I learned it from studying the agents is not true I didn’t go to Princeton you know I didn’t study when I was in high school I wasn’t an overachiever I wasn’t underachiever I was a I was a troublemaker so I didn’t learn anything about about stoicism until much later in my life my roots aren’t my beliefs aren’t founded on what I read They’re founded on what I lived and it’s just does it make sense yeah when I look at it now and people have always asked me are you going to do Marcus aelius on I’m going to do Marcus aelius on the podcast and and really all I’ll be saying is like look Marcus aelius said this thousands of years before I did awesome and but I I I would love to be all educated but I wasn’t I was just I went down the path I went down and experienced the things that I experienced in my life and I came to the same conclusions that these ancients came to so it’s an interesting Dynamic no it is and I I think it’s worth noting also that if you find anyone who is consistently good at operating at a high level in stressful environments the tools are the same exactly I mean if you read one of my favorite books Masashi M historical fiction fantastic book it’s all the same [ __ ] M you read that stoicism stoicism Ina was my real introduction but that didn’t come into my life until 2004 so it was after graduation for those of you that want me to do Masashi on this podcast I’m not gonna do it I’m not going to do Masashi and I’ll tell you why and if you’ve read it you know you can’t you got to go through moushi to get to the end you got to go through the whole thing to get to the end it is one of the best rewards in all of literature to get to the end and the end this is a what’s how many pages is Masashi 900 something it’s massive book and it’s and you have to read the whole thing and it’s all good but it all comes and it’s literally I think in my copy because I always laugh about this it is two or three pages from the end of the whole book is where you get to the end of moushi where you go damn that just happened yes payoff is so good oh the payoff is so good and the old and I’m not going to do it on here cuz I obviously I’d have to give away the payoff and so I’m not going to do that and you have to go and read moushi it’s it’s awesome and the ending is just as good as it gets it’s it’s as good as it gets and it’s historical fiction but that happened oh that’s documented oh yeah and it doesn’t get any better so read moushi for yourself people maybe I’ll give a like a oneyear lead time and then I’ll do it one year episode 100 maybe we’ll do give people enough Heads Up episode 100 we’ll go back and do Masashi if and I’ll give you a a spoiler aler at the beginning cuz moushi is good when you get to the end you go yeah is that kind of like the Matrix what’s that the [Music] movie is there like a spoiler at the end of uh The Matrix oh does it kind of I guess I don’t know man I got to watch more movies apparently more Echo Charles movies highly recommend babe involves a pig I think you’d like a jaka didn’t you watch that a bunch of times or something you got some babe story right so yeah I do so I I tend to when I write books so that I don’t feel isolated I will generally I write late at night that’s when I do my synthesis so I can do research and interviews and so on but I’ll do my writing generally between 11:00 p m and 5:00 a m and so that I don’t feel like I’m sitting in a cave by myself I will generally listen to the same track or same album over and over again for a given book that’s how I focus and then I will have a movie playing on mute in the background so that I feel like there are other people in the room now at one point I was like all right I’ve seen the born identity 5 000 times I don’t want to see it anymore I’ve seen because that was for the first book I’ve seen Shawn of the Dead which is the comedy 6 000 times I don’t want to watch that anymore because I’ll just I’ll just watch it on repeat so I might watch a movie five times a night okay let’s go to Amazon Prime and I pull it up and the first movie that gets displayed is babe about a little pig and farmer hog it and I put it on and I was like oh this is hilarious this is all right well I’ll pick a real movie after this and then I was like good God this is a fine film and uh the Renegade duck anyway uh so yeah yeah babe I don’t think you’d actually like it I think you’d be disgusted with my recommendation but I I don’t watch enough I don’t watch a lot of movies um kind I think you’d like narcos which is a Min series I’ve heard of that one about Pablo Escobar right I I’ve heard about that one I just then then you’re then you’re jumping into what like 30 hours of content that is only yeah you’re looking at about 20 yeah then you’re in the vortex you know what you know what I want to watch that like when I’m 78 I watch narcos put that on my list did you have any questions Eko yeah I have a question sure Echo Charles chiming in yep for the second time you know how like we’re g to go to Entre preneurship sure you know how uh it feels like anyway that it’s kind of become like a trendy thing to be an entrepreneur whereas a lot of times like you might even notice people they don’t know what they want to do they don’t know what problem they want to solve or product they want to develop they just want to be an entrepreneur because it it seems like it’s like this cool the cool thing now do you find that to be the case and if so is that a good thing yes entrepreneurship I think that it is highly romanticized and uh it’s easy to believe all you got to do is drop out of college and next thing you know you’re a Zuckerberg yeah and you have a company worth billions of dollars but that’s not how it works folks and uh I so I do think that entrepreneurship is a mindset you don’t have to start a company to be an entrepreneur it’s and if you were to look at the Spanish equivalent you know like impr to like undertake it is someone who makes something happen and you can innovate within a company that is not your own within an organization that is not your own or you can create a company so it’s someone who makes things happen at the end of the day so who is it is it in a are we in a boom cycle I think if we’re looking at Tech entrepreneurship absolutely uh I think that there are certain experiences every human being should have even if they fail I do think that starting a business or Enterprise even if it’s a side gig that they Moonlight is worth the education uh but there’s a huge survivorship bias out there meaning so you open a baren let’s say and lo and behold you see all these mutual funds advertising oh my God they’ve had incredible returns for 10 years straight well uh maybe they’re just the mutual funds that happen to survive by luck for 10 or 20 years they happen to place the right bet so of the 500 well the other 490 are no longer advertising so you’re getting you’re getting a false sample size and you see that a lot with entrepreneurship they don’t talk enough about the failures they don’t talk enough about the vast majority who will fail is it good I think that it’s good for certain groups it’s certainly good for investors if they can play the game well because even if there are a thousand shitty ideas that might mean if more people a higher percentage of say high schoolers or college students or otherwise are going into entrepreneurship that you get an extra five that change the world at the end of the day uh so I am I am a big fan of Entrepreneurship even though much like anything else uh that is perceived as high- risk and therefore treated sometimes with Reckless abandon where people are throwing hail maras when they should be doing risk management you’re going to have a high fatality rate yeah and uh I don’t view that as a Bad Thing necessarily uh but I do think that and this is actually a question that Brian Johnson who was a friend of mine he started a company called brain tree it was sold for I think 800 million cash to eBay and uh he settled huh yeah he settled he uh so he shows up in uh in tools of Titans as well but the question that he has because he’s constantly flooded with various questions from entrepreneurs who want to make $800 million say oh what should I do this should I do that what about this idea what about that idea and he just asks them uh is it an itch or is it a burn and he’s like if it’s just a little itch don’t do it you’re going to fail because for the other people out there where it’s a burn they can’t not do it they’re going to rip your face off and uh that I think is a very good question uh and you know the other one uh which I think originally came from let me think about this now Vander Holyfield first coach told him that he could be heavyweight or at the time a probably cruiserweight champion of the world and he asked avander if he wanted to do it and uh he said he didn’t know he had to ask his mom so he went back asked his mom yes I would like to do it he said well is that is that a is that a dream or is that a goal those are two very very different things MH uh so I I think that uh if you feel like you can’t not do it or on the flip side as I would probably approach it if you can look at it as a short-term experiment where you’re doing a phase one to see if you can develop any traction or get 10 friends to buy whatever it might be and you can cap the downside I always think about this first I don’t think about the 800 million I might make how can I cap the downside then by all means you’re you’re taking in my opinion the measured intelligent approach hey yeah throw a bunch on the wall and see if anything sticks yeah because that’s not really like the the trend the fed you know that I mentioned um that’s not really what it says um it’s like saying I mean now we kind of have this emergence of like the grind work hard and that’s now that’s kind of cool you know that the working 20 hours a week like that’s kind of becoming like you know uh who is Gary ve how you you know grind and oh 20 hours a day yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it’s it’s it it can work I think that you just have to be careful what I would suggest everybody do and I’m not sure if it’s still on Wikipedia believe it is study cognitive biases yeah humans get themselves into a lot of trouble with cognitive biases whether it’s sunk cost fallacy you’ve put x amount of money or time into something and therefore you continue to put good money after bad because you feel like you have to make it back the same way you lost it or this the survivorship bias that I talked about you have there’s a big difference between correlation and causation things that happen at the same time and things that for instance and things that cause something else to happen so you you just have to ask like of a thousand people who do X how many are going to get the outcome that is being showcased and if the answer is I don’t know then you should be really careful about assuming that a leads to B right uh and for me it also comes back to the adherence so if if I’m trying to coach a 100 entrepreneurs and if I’m talking to three entrepreneurs it’s very Case by case but if I’m talking to a class which I did for a long time class of high-tech entrepreneurs 100 students hypothetically I want the advice I give them to apply to the greatest percentage of people in the classes possible or to be usable and if I say 20 hours a day there might be one or two mutants who can do that and sustain it the rest are going to flame out and for me in that environment it’s about finding first s of the the good program you can follow as opposed to the best program that will knock out 99% but environment dependent now if we’re in buds okay that’s that might be a different situation if you’re training dogs for say military or police utilization probably a different story if you are looking for athletes for Ultra endurance competition or 24-hour plus competitions you are looking for mutants make no mistake about it uh but if I’m trying to encourage the greatest number of people to attempt entrepreneurship and succeed then I’m going to adjust my advice accordingly hey do you ever I get a lot of sleep for instance people are like oh my God that Ferris guy is a four hour you must get two hours of sleep a night I’ve done all sorts of weird stuff with sleep deprivation I’ve done polyphasic sleep where I’ve gotten whatever it is two to four hours a night for ages on end but my default is 8 to n hours a night I love sleep I’m sorry Jo but I love it hey do you ever get um like you know how like entrepreneurship as like this the trendy thing to do do you ever get annoyed when you see like Po posers you know you know how they subscribe to all the things and then they always want to talk about it and they use all the jargon you know I would say I’ll tell you what annoys me more I don’t mind people who are blissfully unaware and extremely enthusiastic because quite frankly we well I shouldn’t speak for everybody but I think everybody’s been there like I remember graduating in ’99 oh my God was I excited to get into Tech and Entrepreneurship CU I remember this like we I kind of knew a friend of a friend who sold a company for some ungodly sum of money 300400 million I was like what that guy’s smart but he’s not that smart and it was a very exciting time and I I don’t think in that in that world that excitement can be undervalued really I think it’s the fuel I think it’s it’s a big part of the fuel the people who bother me are the B players who think they’re Elon Musk or the or the once you’re lucky couldn’t pull it off twice or didn’t attempt like once you’re lucky twice you’re good the people who had good timing and now think they walk on water yeah like like the kind they start like a a course now those kind of guys oh there are a million different varieties and I mean I’d like I’d love to see them all run off a cliff like Lemmings I mean they make me absolutely insane because the best of the best of the best when you meet them they don’t act like dicks well I should take it back there probably a few but in general they have nothing to prove they have nothing to prove like Marcelo Garcia he doesn’t walk around with invisible lat syndrome yeah yeah like mean mugging people in the street are you kidding me he could he could destroy all he just doesn’t he’s so far above it he doesn’t care he’s a nice guy to begin with but uh yeah the folks who walk around with a lot of attitude and are acting here’s the here’s the description entitled people who feel like the world owes them something those people make me insane and there’s a lot of it in Silicon Valley that’s part of the reason I stopped all of my early stage Tech investing two years ago I was like I’m out I’m out this is no fun anymore for a lot of reasons but that was one of them I was like I’m sick of sitting down with people who have something sketched out on a piece of paper and now they’re asking for $20 million or a $20 million valuation I’m just like what have you done I hey good on you great plan I know you want to change the world like everybody I’ve talked to today with your photo sharing app fantastic what have you built before because you walked in here like you’re you know levitating CU you walk on water and I appreciate the confidence SL arrogance but what have you actually built the entitlement is what I can’t stand and uh one of my favorite answers I ask people a lot of the time you if you could put anything on a billboard what would your answer be so there are a few favorites discipline equals Freedom that’s one another is no one owes you anything that’s a good one no one owes you anything this from a multiple time world champion and uh yeah I think that uh by hooker crook a lot of the entrepreneurs and otherwise who feel entitled will get served humble by whether it’s by competition or by the universe so I don’t have to do it myself yeah I was going to say I don’t think this even has anything to do with entrepreneurs you know you just get people that are acting that way that’s just the way it is yeah yeah it’s it is interesting don’t be that guy yeah my uh my brother he goes to San Francisco from time he has a tech company um and they uh he he he said it’s interesting that it’s this fad now like you have like groupies of tech entrepreneurship like you have Fanboys you have posers to be a business person you know it’s not like you know like a rockstar anymore it’s like o I’m a tech entrepreneur oh yeah it’s uh it’s a weird environment but I I’m very much of the opinion that as perverse as it might seem or as perverse as it is on many levels and weird and unsustainable there’s good that will come from it yeah um the more entrance you have in the race it’s just like the more Freaks and mutants you’re going to find and those those people are interesting so I’m cool with it I’m just going to wait until there’s blood in the streets and the game’s a little easier for me all right Eko yes um anyone wants to support this podcast how should they do it they they do by the way if they I heard yeah on Twitter and whatnot um they do and here’s the way first off support yourself as I always say if you don’t know Tim Ferris I know you know about this stuff but I’m going to say it anyway supplementation talk about efficiency from time to time I know shroom Tech utilizes oxygen more efficiently in your body that’s what shroom Tech sport is for understood did I already say that before you said it before yeah anyway uh on it has a bunch of stuff that’s on it that’s the supplementation that you want to engage in because you don’t want Jun uh supplements so go on it com get 10 10% off and supplement your wallet as well and then of course the Amazon clickthrough Christmas is coming up Christmas is coming various birthdays I’m not going to say when mine is but it’s soon if you shop on Amazon click through our website you can support this podcast in that uh in that way if you’re in the mood to um so yeah you go to the website Jo podcast com click through and then do your shopping regardless of what you’re buying whether or not you’re buying Tims book tools for Titans or uh or duct tape whatever right yeah you can buy some duct tape on there you can buy tools of Titans yeah you could actually use duct tape to make a handle and turn it into a kettle book as you mentioned yeah it’s a big book you can get Joo white tea which is when though it’s back it’s back we’re there by the time this podcast releas I think will be there we ordered a ton this time so you can get it you can buy the book extreme ownership and if you don’t have enough Joo Jaco does make a number of Cameo appearances in tools of Titans that is right that is right that is uh I am in tools of Titans which is awesome and I appreciate you uh you throwing me in there of course and um and just a ton of ton of other great information um I also got some mugs coming you can buy mugs those are good mugs they say they I try to keep it simple you know what they say on it they say get after it cuz that’s pretty much their answer to everything right yeah and you can kind of tell like cuz there’s going to be knockoffs potentially there’s like a an official it’s been approved Jo approval the Jo approved some people if they get bumper stickers which I might mention in a bit but the envelope that comes some of them are Joo approved that’s all I’m going to say about yeah these mugs these are manly mugs I I could fit probably yach my entire fist into this mug if you get chased by a cassowary you could probably crack its skull with this it’s uh it’s very functional piece of uh porcelain wear or whatever this made out of carbon fiber maybe that’s what we do multipurpose what else well of course we have the store Joo store if you like shirts if you wear t-shirts from time to time hoodies winter coming up in the United States Australia might be different but um you know they’re the heavier hoodies but yeah shirts if you like um shirts and whatnot check them out see which one you like and then if you buy one of those that’s a good way to support the podcast if you’re in the mood to do so and as Joo said the TR the mugs hey I’m going to change the the the travel mugs okay we’re going to improve them we’re we’re we we approve that there you go I like it there you go boom yeah but yeah go in there see what up see subscribe to the podcast yeah subscribe to Tim Ferris is podcast if you don’t already you probably do most people do yeah check it out just pass you no I was just going to say just passed 100 million downloads since the first business interview podcast to do so when are you going to start stepping up your game though I know every day I’m trying to step up my game and the YouTube channel which Echo has now begun yep to engage in which is appreciated by all of us me over here I’m appreciating it so thank you for doing that there’s more videos coming out excerpts yeah so I I do have to kind of disclose disclaim whichever um so I was going into a a a through a camera transition phase so the excerpts there was a small delay on that but the the the the transition phase is is over and we’re good to go so we’ll do more um excerpt stuff I want to make another dis disclaimer and dis closure which is uh for those of you who see this on video I apologize for shopping at Gap Kids for my shirt these guys are [ __ ] huge animals and I wanted to feel more confident Gap Kids I Like it anything else U you know that’s it also we did it the extreme ownership muster in San Diego California it was awesome if you want to come and you’re on the East Coast you want to come May 4th and 5th 20 2017 extreme ownership muster number two in New York City dang Marriott Grand Marquee it’s going to be awesome and I’m gonna tell you I’ve I haven’t said it yet on the podcast because I wanted to give people the opportunity that are already in the game and are tracking to get there but it’s going to sell out it’s selling really quickly so if you want to come byy now extreme ownership muster you’ll probably come to this one yeah it’s in my backyard if I’m on on the co especially you missed the first one but it’s all good I don’t hold it against you I won’t even get into the apology and the explanation I’m looking forward to number two awesome uh Tim you got any closing comments uh closing comment just to bring it back to the very beginning uh if you’re feeling alone with whatever doubts challenges you might have you’re not alone you’re far from it and honestly at this point that if I’ve learned anything from interacting with hundreds of thousand thousands and millions of people on the blog through the podcast all humans have the same problems and the very least you have a large Brotherhood and Sisterhood thousands of people at a minimum who are feeling going through the exact same thing that you are so do not feel alone and uh that’s that’s pretty much it I would say uh there’s some samples up if people want to check it out from tools of Titans uh I was it’s it’s surreal for me but arold Schwarzenegger wrote the forward which is incredible he’s in the book and uh that’s up the introduction is up how to use this book so if you want to check that out you just go to tools of titans com and if you want to continue this conversation by the way you can find all three of us out there on the interwebs you can find us on Twitter on Instagram and you know you can even find us on that Facebook e boa Eko is at Echo Charles I am at Joo willink and of course Tim Ferris is T Ferris two RS and two s’s on Twitter Tim Ferris on Instagram and of course he’s also on that Facebook he’s not hard to find and to everybody that’s listening I want to say thanks to Tim thanks Tim for coming on thanks to Tim for actually getting me to do a podcast it was you and Joe Rogan you as soon as you pressed record on our first one you press you pressed stop you looked at me and said you need to do your own podcast and I was pretty uh packed for time right then because the book was coming out but as soon as Joe Rogan said it to have you two tell me that I was in so thank you for making me do this podcast thanks for coming on appreciate all the support that you’ve been giving me and and Ekko and the podcast and the book and everything else thank you it’s much appreciated to everybody else that’s listening thanks to you for listening listening first and foremost to the people out there in uniform military police firefighters paramedics by the nature of your very job you are serving all of us so thank you for that service and thank you for the freedom and security that you provide us and rest of the people out there the true ERS out there that have your own battles around the world fighting against apathy fighting against mediocrity and fighting like we all do sometimes fighting against the darkness to you all remember remember that this isn’t easy for anyone remember that anything worth anything is worth fighting for remember that the battle doesn’t fight itself you are the one that has to fight it remember that there’s a price for victory and that price is hard work and early mornings and late nights and that price is unmitigated ated daily discipline in all things in those times when you can’t remember everything I just said Just remember this one thing to get out there and get after it so until next time this is Tim and Ekko and Joo out
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