How to Stop Over-Optimizing & Focus on What Matters

00:00:00.000 | What if the key to living a better life isn't about optimizing more, but knowing when to stop?

00:00:05.180 | Today, I'm sitting down with none other than Tim Ferriss to explore the upsides and downsides of

00:00:11.020 | optimization, from the habits that helped him build best-selling books to the emotional costs

00:00:16.340 | he's learned to avoid. As Tim says, you're doing something very lazy if you're constantly trying

00:00:22.620 | to optimize. We'll talk about systems thinking, decision fatigue, how to spend more on what

00:00:27.740 | matters, the curse of over-optimization, and the surprising shift he's made that has had the

00:00:33.500 | biggest impact on his happiness. I'm Chris Hutchins, and if you want to keep upgrading your money,

00:00:38.340 | points, and life, click follow or subscribe. Tim. Yes, sir. It's good to be here in person.

00:00:44.220 | Yeah, good to see you. You are known as the optimizer, the four-hour guy. What was one of

00:00:49.220 | the earliest moments you realized optimization could really bend reality in your favor?

00:00:53.860 | The first time.

00:00:55.820 | Tim Ferriss: Or an early time. Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. I would say probably

00:01:01.580 | forced by necessity in kiddie wrestling when I was probably God knows how old. I really couldn't

00:01:11.900 | tell you. Seven, eight, something like that. Pretty hyperactive, very small, so group sports were out. I

00:01:19.580 | would just get bullied and defeated. And my mom was somehow introduced by another mom to

00:01:25.340 | kiddie wrestling, this program where you could throw a kid into a weight class, and lo and behold,

00:01:31.640 | like the puny kids can battle the puny kids. And you can actually build confidence instead of just

00:01:36.500 | getting your head stuffed in the sand constantly by bigger kids. And I had a lot of thermoregulation

00:01:43.580 | issues. That just means controlling body temperature or the way my brain interprets temperature is wonky

00:01:49.340 | after being born premature. I had a lot of issues also with my left lung. So for multiple reasons,

00:01:55.640 | basically had no endurance. And even to this day, sort of like I had muscle biopsies and stuff done for

00:02:01.340 | the four-hour body, my second book. And these sports scientists were like, okay, here's average,

00:02:07.660 | here's Homer Simpson, here's you. And I just had to figure out a way if I wanted to win. I certainly

00:02:15.420 | didn't enjoy losing. It's still true to this day, very competitive. And it was figuring out workarounds,

00:02:23.020 | that's it. So I think that for a long time, it wasn't trying to find shortcuts. It was just trying to

00:02:29.500 | find a path forward when the most obvious path and the stuff that the PE coach or whoever is going to

00:02:36.780 | tell you to do, yeah, run back and forth until you improve your endurance. I'm like, it's not working.

00:02:41.340 | So what's plan B, right? I think that that question, what's plan B or what's option C,

00:02:48.860 | broadly speaking is what directs a lot of any of the optimization, which is not fundamentally in my mind,

00:02:56.540 | the search for a shortcut. It's a search for an uncrowded path that gives you some kind of

00:03:02.300 | advantage. That's it. Something non-obvious. You do that all the time. That's what this show is about.

00:03:07.340 | I do. In fact, I often think of some of the earliest stories for me were in boarding school. I know you

00:03:12.300 | went to boarding school and I was surrounded by people whose parents gave them more disposable income

00:03:16.940 | than me. And it was like, you just need to find a way to make something happen. You want the pizza,

00:03:21.340 | you can't afford it, buy a whole pizza, sell slices, you know, eat your profit. Yeah. Something like that.

00:03:26.220 | That was my story. Did this kind of accelerate as you went later in school? I'll give you a job

00:03:32.220 | example that didn't work out. So I always abhorred waste and really applied myself super intensively to

00:03:42.700 | school. And I was in public school for ages before boarding school. Up until second year of high school,

00:03:49.660 | I was on Long Island going to just regular old public school and it was fine, but it wasn't rigorous.

00:03:57.900 | A lot of various problems where the idle hands being the devil's workshop and so on on rural Long Island.

00:04:05.420 | But I do recall since we're just on the topic of optimization, my first ever job was cleaning

00:04:13.660 | an ice cream shop called Snowflake no longer exists, but as cleaning the floors, mopping,

00:04:19.900 | doing this, that, and the other thing. And I'm pretty sure it was totally illegal. I was like 13 or 14,

00:04:23.500 | but the boss wasn't the brightest guy in the world, which will come up again in a moment.

00:04:28.300 | So I'm cleaning this and I got really good at figuring out

00:04:32.220 | how to clean really effectively in a very short period of time, but he's paying me per hour.

00:04:38.220 | And so I would finish my cleaning, which was supposed to take an hour and a half. I'd do it

00:04:43.340 | in a half hour. And then I would sit there and I remember I brought a copy of Black Belt magazine to

00:04:50.060 | work. I was really interested in martial arts at the time. Still am, I suppose, but after you accumulate

00:04:55.740 | a few surgeries, you tend to apply some constraints. Anyway, I would do my cleaning in a fraction of the

00:05:03.660 | time that it should have taken. And then I would sit there reading Black Belt magazine and the boss

00:05:08.620 | saw this and he'd get really pissed off. And he'd say, what are you doing? And I'm like, well,

00:05:13.740 | I finished my cleaning. I'll do it again later in the shift. And he'd say, do it again. And I was like,

00:05:19.820 | well, this is dumb. It's already clean. And long story short, like after a week, I got fired because

00:05:26.620 | I was just like, that doesn't make any sense. Like I'm happy to clean it, but it's not dirty yet. And he's

00:05:30.620 | like, I don't care. I'm paying you per hour. Do it again. And I was like, I think that's kind of

00:05:34.860 | dumb. I didn't say it that directly because he was a huge bald guy with like a limp, kind of scary,

00:05:39.420 | like a chief zombie or something from the last of us, like one of those giant mushroom people.

00:05:44.380 | So he was really intimidating, but I got fired and I was like, oh my God,

00:05:47.580 | is there something wrong with me? Like, am I really lazy? What's this? What's that? And my mom gave me a

00:05:52.780 | pat on the back and she's like, it's all fine. Everything's fine. But that was, I suppose,

00:05:58.220 | my first foray into trying to optimize anything professionally was slapped down very quickly.

00:06:02.700 | Yeah. And did that change the future or the next time you're like, let's keep going. I can find

00:06:07.260 | better ways to do things. It didn't really change anything. And I think constitutionally,

00:06:13.820 | and maybe this is the very root cause of all this stuff. I'm very impatient. So even as a little kid,

00:06:22.540 | I worked in restaurants growing up. So I was a bus boy, worked out on Long Island. Rich people would

00:06:27.660 | come from the city and kids would try to make their money during the summer. And even adults would try

00:06:32.860 | to make their money during the summer. That's how it still works. So in that environment, I would say

00:06:37.580 | that I've always been impatient and had really, really high standards for myself and other people.

00:06:45.500 | So even before I got into working as a bus boy, if I went to a restaurant and my glass for water sat

00:06:51.340 | empty for more than a few minutes, I drank a lot of water because of the thermoregulation stuff.

00:06:55.260 | I would literally get up and just walk into the kitchen of the restaurant, like to try to find a

00:07:01.420 | pitcher of water. And my mom saw this since I was very, very, very young. And I'm not proud of that.

00:07:09.180 | I'm not saying everyone should be impatient. There are a lot of downsides to that can cause a lot of

00:07:13.260 | friction and interpersonal relationships, but the upside is you just look to do things more quickly.

00:07:21.100 | So there is constitutionally that piece that is still with me to this day. I don't know if that's

00:07:28.220 | something that I can resolve necessarily. Me either. Like I find myself sometimes if

00:07:32.860 | I'm working and I need to go to the bathroom, I like get up and I run to the bathroom. Like my brain is

00:07:37.100 | just like, well, why would I walk? If I could run, I'd like get burned a couple extra calories. I get to

00:07:40.460 | the bathroom faster. Like it just seems like I want to use time, energy resources as efficiently as

00:07:46.140 | possible. Yeah. And if you want to slap a rebrand on it, right, we can say, okay, optimizing sounds nice,

00:07:52.540 | right? Sounds good. Rather than fucking impatient, pardon my French. But as I've gotten older, I think

00:08:00.620 | becoming more targeted with that. It's like, where do you apply the magnifying glass? You don't need it

00:08:06.380 | everywhere. And I think over time learning where to apply it and where not to apply it is part of the

00:08:13.180 | name of the game. Was there a light bulb moment where you said, I've become known for this person

00:08:18.060 | that is optimizing all these different things. And maybe, maybe it's not serving me in every way.

00:08:23.980 | And I should start exploring what it would look like to try to dial it back.

00:08:28.060 | I would say even from the earliest success, let's just say with the four hour work week,

00:08:37.740 | I think the premise of that book was misunderstood. And not necessarily by people who read the book,

00:08:43.820 | but by the vast majority who never read the book, but know the title. And the premise of that is not to

00:08:52.060 | optimize everything. The first steps are really clearly defining your target and then inputs,

00:08:59.260 | outputs, and choosing the things that are highest leverage, right? It's for the greatest per hour

00:09:05.580 | output, which is fundamentally very different from optimizing everything. But I would fall into the trap,

00:09:11.900 | whether we call it optimizing or through impatience, there's a lot of overlap with that Venn diagram

00:09:18.220 | in trying to apply a hyper logical, what I would love to paint as rational, objective approach to as many things

00:09:28.380 | as possible. And there are a few assumptions that are quite a stretch that you need to make for that to

00:09:36.860 | work in a lot of areas, whether it's the stock market or at home in your personal relationships. If you assume

00:09:43.660 | everyone is a perfectly rational actor who behaves in their best interest and who can be reasons with,

00:09:50.460 | and this is true for yourself as well, by the way, when people are dysregulated, you're just a fool.

00:09:55.740 | Like that's not reality. So I think that the place where I paid the highest tax for trying to,

00:10:03.980 | let's call it optimize, was in interpersonal relationships with significant others, with

00:10:10.860 | anyone in an environment where emotion and irrationality are just part of the soup in which we all live.

00:10:19.900 | That's where I think you can really shoot yourself in the foot. And sometimes it's recoverable and

00:10:26.700 | sometimes it's not. So I think that over time, as I would say from pretty early on, I mean, you're sold

00:10:35.020 | this dream as a kid or as a human in a culture like that of the US, broadly speaking, there are many

00:10:43.020 | different cultures that sort of financial freedom is the path to everything and that unlocks everything.

00:10:50.700 | It solves almost everything. And that's not true. There are a lot of benefits, but when you kind of drive

00:11:00.620 | with that, I pretty quickly got to experiences over things. But as I've gotten older, and this is

00:11:08.940 | certainly true, it's not brand new. It's not like a revelation I had yesterday. I mean, this is a work in

00:11:13.660 | progress over probably the last 20 years. It's relationships, relationships, relationships. And

00:11:19.180 | what that means is less and less and less optimization in a sense.

00:11:23.180 | Is that because you've rewired yourself to say, when I spend time on relationships, don't optimize?

00:11:28.140 | The magic of applying any kind of surgical thinking is first and foremost, knowing that you

00:11:34.220 | don't need to be a surgeon all the time. It's like, okay, there are times when you put on the scrubs and

00:11:37.740 | you wash in and you do the whole thing, but that's just not the right tool for the job all the time.

00:11:43.900 | So I wouldn't say that the idea of doing things in a better way is absent when I'm looking at my

00:11:51.580 | relationships, but there can be different levels of applying a system. And I think that more than

00:11:59.500 | being an optimizer, I try to be a systems thinker. How can you set up systems so it's hard to fail?

00:12:06.060 | How can you set up rules or policies so that even if something that's compartmentalized, like a project

00:12:11.340 | fails, you still win over the longterm? That's kind of how I try to approach things. So if you're applying

00:12:15.980 | that to relationships in a conversation, if you're having a fight over the objective truth or reality

00:12:23.420 | of what one person is saying or the other, and there's a great therapist named Terry Reel, his writing

00:12:29.260 | is very helpful as well, who gives the example of a couple sitting at dinner and the waiter comes over,

00:12:34.700 | waiter leaves. And the husband's like, honey, you don't need to yell. She's like, I wasn't yelling.

00:12:38.620 | He's like, yeah, you were. And it turns into this debate. And his point is, even if the husband said,

00:12:44.220 | well, honey, you didn't know this, but I hired an audiologist to sit next to us with recording

00:12:48.860 | equipment. And based on all these objective metrics and numbers and this, that, and the other thing is

00:12:53.020 | statistical analysis, you were technically yelling. Is the other person, whether it's man or woman,

00:12:58.220 | boyfriend, girlfriend, or a family member going to say, I'm so glad you shared that information with me.

00:13:04.140 | Based on the data, you're totally right. Is that going to happen? No, it's not going to happen.

00:13:07.740 | It's going to be a shit show. So rather than applied at that level, for me, at least over time,

00:13:13.260 | each year, let's say I do something called a past year review. And then I block out

00:13:19.660 | anything from a long weekend to a week at a time to spend with my closest friends and family.

00:13:28.860 | And I block it out, I pay for it in advance to have the right types of sunk costs because not all sunk

00:13:33.740 | costs are bad. And that is, I would say, sort of a longer term meta level way of quote, unquote,

00:13:43.020 | optimizing, applying a system so that things that are important to me don't fall through the cracks.

00:13:47.820 | But then when I'm having a conversation, if someone is telling me about their problem, I don't automatically

00:13:54.780 | assume, okay, my job is to try to solve this problem as quickly as possible, because that might not be

00:14:00.140 | what they need. It might not be what they want. It may not be what brings you closer. So I think it's

00:14:04.780 | also realizing that there's a stack of zooming in or zooming out and you can apply systems to different

00:14:11.500 | layers of that stack. It doesn't have to be all the time. That's actually in the name of efficiency,

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00:16:45.020 | Now, maybe we're wired differently. And in some cases, I'm sure we are. But for me, I could sit down or have a

00:16:51.660 | conversation like this and say, "Okay, I know that in these certain circumstances or when something costs less

00:16:57.260 | than this amount, it's not worth it." And create my system to say, "Don't try to optimize this. Don't try to win

00:17:03.660 | this argument." That doesn't mean in the moment. It just doesn't click on like a default behavior.

00:17:08.700 | Have you experienced that? Or how, if you have this system in place, can you turn it off in the moment

00:17:15.020 | when sometimes it just feels like it's natural behavior?

00:17:18.060 | I feel like what helps and continues to help, has helped, pick your tense, a lot is just zooming out.

00:17:29.580 | So for me, if you really want to zoom out, if you read a lot of history, if you listen to history podcasts,

00:17:37.580 | which are probably my favorite type of podcast to listen to, whether it's hardcore history, the OG,

00:17:41.740 | or the fall of civilizations, or the rest is history, any of these, the more you study history,

00:17:48.700 | the more you realize how absurd the idea is that, for instance, in my case, I'm going to leave some

00:17:55.260 | hundred year or eternal legacy with a podcast or something, right? I hope to do some good in the

00:18:03.980 | world. I hope to have a positive impact on listeners. And that's true with the books.

00:18:08.060 | It's true with a lot of what I do, but the idea that hundreds of years from now or something like

00:18:12.940 | that, people are going to remember my name is patently absurd. You look back at these titans of

00:18:21.100 | industry. Let's say you talk to younger generations today and you're like, "Guns and roses." They're like,

00:18:26.620 | who's guns and roses, right? Nirvana. Although Nirvana is back and cool again and on all the t-shirts,

00:18:31.500 | maybe that's an exception. So when you start to zoom out and just look at say this concept of legacy and

00:18:37.580 | realize how tenuous that is, it's like Alexander the Great, what's his full name? Greatest conqueror

00:18:41.980 | the world has ever known. People are like, yeah, no idea. It's like, yeah, exactly. Okay. So maybe we

00:18:46.220 | don't have to take everything quite as seriously, especially with the future tripping. Like, okay,

00:18:51.740 | this is very important and it's going to remain important. And this is going to solidify my good

00:18:56.380 | name. It's just kind of ridiculous. So let's just start with that, which I think is instead of being

00:19:01.580 | depressing, very, very, very liberating. So that's how I view, let's just say that piece of it. Okay,

00:19:07.900 | great. Is that fair to say? It's like, it doesn't matter as much. Like, is that the grand scheme?

00:19:12.380 | That is the grand scheme, but because then you can just, you can zoom out from like this

00:19:17.500 | long historical timeline and then you do something like a past year review.

00:19:22.540 | And I was joking with some friends a couple of months ago that I wanted to make a journal because

00:19:31.180 | I do a lot of journaling and it's become very fashionable for people to like write a few books.

00:19:35.980 | And then they're like, "Fuck, writing books is hard. Let me put out a journal or a workbook,

00:19:41.340 | if that allows you to charge more for it." And it's not a bad idea. And some of them are actually very

00:19:45.740 | well done, but I was thinking that maybe the most valuable journal I could put out because of

00:19:50.220 | brainstorming all these different ideas just for fun. And one was worries that mostly didn't happen.

00:19:55.980 | And basically the journal idea is each morning you write down the things you're worried about

00:20:00.940 | or each week, whatever it is. And then you look back on a weekly or monthly basis and see how

00:20:05.740 | completely irrelevant or unfounded or fantasy land these worries were.

00:20:10.780 | Similarly, you can look back at certain goals you had that you thought were going to make

00:20:14.060 | or break it that were critically important and they just end up being unimportant.

00:20:17.980 | So if we assume that we are all as humans kind of delusional on those levels,

00:20:26.380 | it allows you, it allows me at least to really slow down. And if as my mantra or maximum of sorts,

00:20:37.100 | I have, it's the relationship stupid. Like when in doubt, just like it's the economy stupid,

00:20:41.420 | like it's the relationships, it's the relationships. It's not the money. It's not the toys. It's not the

00:20:45.420 | fancy trips. It's not ABCDEF or G really what we're evolved for. And what you're going to feel best

00:20:52.540 | about is time with certain people. Then the rush kind of goes away. And that feels good. It's a huge

00:21:05.020 | weight that you're able to just take off your back and drop. And I don't think that's dependent on having a

00:21:11.740 | lot of money. I don't think that's dependent on having quote unquote success. I think that as you become

00:21:19.100 | a student of history, which sounds so boring, it's not boring. The more you realize that

00:21:27.100 | in a sense, and this is from a lot of my friends in the military, it relates to like reloading guns

00:21:32.940 | and all sorts of stuff, but you know, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's like, you don't actually

00:21:37.980 | need to do a lot of things well to have a great life. And if you're constantly rushing and cramming

00:21:45.580 | and trying to optimize every hour, even every day, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. And the

00:21:52.700 | collateral damage of that is going to be, I think clearest in your relationships. That's just my

00:22:00.140 | current take, but that's been my take for a while. And since I've used that as a lens for deciding what I'm

00:22:06.860 | going to schedule, what I'm going to protect, what I'm not going to schedule, what I'm going to turn

00:22:11.260 | down, quality of life has just been so much higher. And that is completely divorced from having more

00:22:20.540 | money. In some cases, it's making choices that are going the opposite direction.

00:22:24.780 | So if I try to summarize having more perspective and reflecting on your own circumstances and past

00:22:32.940 | actions, the process of doing that might make it easier in the moment to fight natural tendencies.

00:22:39.340 | Yeah. I mean, you could certainly say that. You could also say that if you just ask for what

00:22:47.500 | a few times, you realize you don't need to rush and it's like, okay, this is really important.

00:22:51.980 | Why? Because this, why is that important? Because of this. Okay. So what? One of my favorite quotes

00:22:57.260 | is from Rumi, which is be suspicious of what you want. I just think that is like, man, if you could

00:23:03.100 | have a question that you ask yourself on a really regular basis, that would currently for me be top of

00:23:09.580 | the list. I would say one of the top, then this compulsion to rush the sort of hustle culture

00:23:19.660 | saturation starts to drop away. That's true with a lot of different optimizing also with cost cutting

00:23:27.420 | too, right? Like it can apply to a lot of things and none of these things are inherently bad, but the

00:23:34.140 | dose makes the poison, right? Paracelsus is true with a lot of things like you can kill yourself by drinking

00:23:38.700 | too much water. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

00:23:42.060 | And just to humanize you to the audience, do you still catch yourself over optimizing?

00:23:47.340 | Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not like a one and done type situation.

00:23:51.820 | And we're all going to have certain compulsions, right? It's like, all right, the great Dan wants

00:23:57.180 | to sleep and the border collie wants to run. And, you know, the Dutch shepherd wants to like jump in the

00:24:02.460 | pool and play with the ball. And it's like, okay, well, if you're going to train any of those dogs to do

00:24:07.180 | anything, just like you have to train yourself, you're going to have natural inclinations. You're

00:24:12.860 | going to have conditioning. And if you want to counterbalance that or change it, it takes constant

00:24:21.900 | course correction, not to use a really belabored metaphor, but it's like, yeah, if you get in a boat

00:24:26.220 | and you're traveling from A to B, or if you're in a car going from A to B and traffic patterns change or

00:24:32.940 | whatever, it's like, you're constantly adjusting. You don't just set a straight line and go from A to B

00:24:37.420 | typically, right? There's constant adjusting along the way. And do I get distracted? Do I end up going

00:24:43.020 | on weird side quests? And I'm like, well, that was pretty stupid. Yeah, of course. Humans are weird

00:24:47.500 | animals somehow. And I don't know if it's having kids in the car that's changed this behavior, but I was

00:24:53.740 | always the person that would look like seven lights ahead of that light looks like it's probably going to

00:24:57.740 | change. So let's turn right here and let's do this. And now in the car, I'm just kind of like,

00:25:01.820 | it doesn't matter. Like we'll get there when we get there. But then there are other areas where I'm

00:25:05.020 | like, well, this seems like it's a little too expensive right now. Maybe we should go somewhere

00:25:08.540 | else to get it. So I've been able to turn off certain things and not other things. And one thing

00:25:15.660 | that I learned from Simon Sinek when we were talking about listening, he suggested I take a listening

00:25:20.620 | course. I don't know if you've ever done this, but he was like, I was the worst friend to all my

00:25:24.540 | friends. I took this listening course and it really helped. What do you learn in the

00:25:28.540 | listening course? Best I could describe it was you basically learn how to stop yourself from talking.

00:25:33.900 | Yeah. It's like the main thing is just not jumping in, like you said, to fix things,

00:25:39.660 | but it's like you learn how to really listen to what someone is saying. And, you know, there's these

00:25:44.220 | frameworks like three levels of listening and what you're trying to solve for. But I left that and

00:25:48.940 | thought, okay, so I think I need something that's almost like bite my tongue when someone's talking to

00:25:54.060 | remind myself, but the takeaway was the more you practice it, the more it becomes habit.

00:25:58.700 | So if you have a partner and you're like, Hey, every time you can, can you help me out and just

00:26:03.100 | remind me if I jump in and say, Hey, don't forget to listen. You know, you can train yourself by

00:26:07.180 | practicing the thing you want to be. And it sounds so crazy, but I'm getting better at it.

00:26:12.460 | Yeah. I mean, this has come up a lot with type A people on the podcast also,

00:26:17.580 | where, you know, when in doubt, talk less, talk less, talk less and stop compulsively making things

00:26:23.900 | worse. Or I wish I remember the attribution, but someone had the acronym wait. They just constantly

00:26:31.660 | would say, wait to themselves. Why am I talking? And you perpetuate not always, but oftentimes what

00:26:40.140 | you get rewarded for. And so if you're getting rewarded for problem solving throughout your life,

00:26:46.060 | what are you going to do? You're going to look for problems to solve. Even if there aren't actually many

00:26:51.020 | problems, that can be a big problem in and of itself, right? If you get rewarded for making money, okay,

00:26:56.620 | you're going to look to make more money. You get rewarded for all the hacks, right? You're going to look for

00:27:02.780 | all the hacks and that's not in and of itself a bad thing, but if it becomes consuming and it becomes a

00:27:11.260 | singular lens, it becomes a pair of glasses. You can't take off. Yeah. Then you're probably going to pay some

00:27:16.300 | costs and they can be ultimately pretty significant.

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00:29:43.580 | what stage you're in. Allthehacks.com/shopify. So for people whose framework is often seeking

00:29:50.380 | outcomes, solving problems, you know, the healthier alternative I've heard you've talked about is

00:29:55.260 | designing for states. Is that an alternative? I think it's a worthwhile experiment. Just

00:30:02.300 | put on a different hat for two weeks. I was like, okay, if you were going to choose how you say yes

00:30:07.260 | or no to things, choose how you say yes or no to people, right? So maybe instead of saying, should I

00:30:13.260 | commit to this activity? Should I say yes to this invitation? You could instead say, all right,

00:30:18.780 | I'm going to say yes or no based on the people. That's it. For instance, we have a mutual friend,

00:30:22.940 | Kevin Rose. And if Kevin was like, let's go have, he's not drinking right now, but let's go have a

00:30:27.420 | coffee and like talk about taxes. I'm not excited about taxes. If anyone else was like, come and to

00:30:34.540 | this event and we're going to talk about taxes. I would say I am 100% not interested, but because

00:30:40.300 | Kevin is so funny, he's so smart. He's a close friend. I want to deepen my relationship with Kevin when

00:30:46.460 | I can true with you as well. I'd be like, yeah, sure. Okay. Based on the subject matter, it would

00:30:52.460 | be a no, maybe even based on the activity. Maybe it's like, we're going to go to this event together

00:30:56.460 | about taxes. I'd be like, oh gosh, shoot me now. No. But based on the person, I would say yes.

00:31:01.340 | And I did that for a while. I was like, okay, there are certain people on my list. When I do my

00:31:06.700 | past year review who give me consistently, this comes to the state question, positive emotions. They

00:31:12.860 | recharge my batteries. Okay. I'm just going to say yes to basically anything involving those

00:31:19.660 | people for a period of time. So you could do that. And I really just encourage people to be

00:31:26.060 | experimental about it and try on different hats. Like you're not losing that hat you've worn forever.

00:31:32.300 | Just putting it on the shelf. You can always take it back, put it on your head and use it again. But like,

00:31:38.060 | try other lenses. Can you share a few lenses for people who are like, okay, I'm ready to try.

00:31:43.500 | I could optimize for relationships when I'm thinking about how to make a decision. Sure. So it could be

00:31:48.380 | people when you're looking at things to say yes or no to, it could be, I'll give one. Where can I

00:31:55.340 | overspend? And you know, Ramit said, he talks about this, but I've thought about it a lot as well. And

00:32:01.500 | where can I spend more? Not where can I spend less? Where can I spend more? Even if it's very temporary,

00:32:08.300 | two weeks. And I remember this really hitting me hard. This is quite a while back, but I wrote a

00:32:15.020 | blog post about it called, where are you still using single ply? And I remember sitting, sitting on the

00:32:21.980 | toilet. Sorry guys. And I just remember, I was like using this toilet paper. I had bought it. It was like the

00:32:27.740 | thinnest onion paper, like newspaper that you could imagine single ply. And what do you do if you have

00:32:34.620 | single ply toilet paper? You just, you have to fold it or you're going to end up stabbing the pit of

00:32:40.220 | despair. Like you, it's going to be messy. So the whole point of saving money by having single ply

00:32:47.100 | is kind of ridiculous at face value. It's just end up folding it anyway. And I was just like, what am I

00:32:51.420 | doing? This is so ridiculous. Clearly I can afford like the fluffy, luxurious toilet paper. It's like a

00:32:58.220 | meaningfully different quality. The cost is trivial. What am I doing? Like, why, why is this that I have

00:33:06.140 | this terrible, terrible toilet paper here? And I started just asking that question, right? Where am I using

00:33:13.020 | single ply in life? It's such a nominal cost. And then you can take it up a few levels, right? And

00:33:20.700 | this is straight from Rameet. So I'll give him credit, but it's like, all right, if I had to spend

00:33:25.500 | 10 times more on one or two things, one or two areas, something coming up in my calendar, what would

00:33:32.540 | that be? It's like, okay, you don't actually have to do it, but just as a thought exercise

00:33:37.820 | that can clarify your values. It can clarify the things that actually give you a huge return on

00:33:42.460 | energy, right? Okay. Maybe you try that. Is it going to kill you? Is it going to break the bank?

00:33:47.900 | Probably not. Anyone who's even asking that question as a stretch exercise is not going to be prone to

00:33:52.940 | overspending. Most likely we have some friends who might be exceptions to that, but I grew up in a family

00:33:59.820 | without much money where there was definitely a lot of cost cutting. It's like, want a new bike,

00:34:04.060 | ain't going to happen, right? Want this toy that everybody else is getting? Ain't going to happen.

00:34:07.980 | Lots of TV dinners and stuff. Not dirt poor, but we had to watch expenses. And when you grow up with

00:34:16.220 | that kind of conditioning, which I did, that is going to be closer to my default than spending tons of money.

00:34:21.740 | So it's worth pushing in the opposite direction. You're not at risk of just going broke like some

00:34:29.580 | NFL star who's like misspent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That's not going to happen.

00:34:35.740 | The risk is that you push from like a 10 out of 10 frugality to like an eight out of 10. So like,

00:34:41.020 | yeah, stretch, give it a shot. That would be another lens. And it's more than a lens because that sounds

00:34:45.980 | kind of abstract. It's just like a guiding question that helps you make different decisions

00:34:50.700 | for a period of time. That's it. Another exercise similar to the 10x that I tried once,

00:34:56.140 | which was really funny. It's like, what are the things in your life that you wish you could

00:35:00.620 | improve, but you haven't because of the cost? Write them down and see how much they cost.

00:35:04.300 | Yeah. And sometimes they don't actually cost that much.

00:35:06.780 | A lot of the time they don't cost very much.

00:35:08.380 | My wife and I really wanted to put mirrors in the garage, which we turned into a gym.

00:35:13.020 | And we were stressing out about all these things. And then one day we were at Lowe's or Home Depot,

00:35:17.660 | and I just saw them on the wall. And I was like, what if we just buy these? They might not be the perfect

00:35:21.260 | ones. They might not be the perfect dimensions. They were like $180. And three hours later,

00:35:26.780 | they were on the wall, mounted, good to go. And we'd been holding off trying to think about how do

00:35:33.420 | we make sure we do this well? How much is it going to cost? And then for what was not egregiously

00:35:38.860 | expensive and a couple hours, we just solved it. And this lens I now have for a lot of things is

00:35:46.060 | execute on the easy and then decide if you want the perfect later. So it's kind of like,

00:35:51.580 | if you were looking for new insurance policy, it's like, well, I found one that's $200 cheaper.

00:35:56.300 | Is there one that is $500 cheaper? Maybe. But there's not a lot of switching costs. Maybe insurance

00:36:01.740 | for some people is a high switching cost. It's like, well, switch to the ones that could save you $200.

00:36:05.500 | Pause and be like, do I want to keep looking? Yeah.

00:36:07.980 | I often think I have to go to the end. But sometimes it's like, if you find something good enough,

00:36:13.900 | one way to rewire your brain is let's just do the thing that's good enough. Not tell myself I'm

00:36:19.020 | stopping there. Yeah. But do it and then decide if I want to keep going. And if I don't do it,

00:36:24.220 | in my mind, I want to keep going. But once I'm halfway there, I'm like, I'm okay stopping.

00:36:28.540 | Well, this comes back to the water, the elixir of life. You drink too much, you die, literally,

00:36:35.100 | if you really, really overdo it. And there used to be these radio programs that would compete to have

00:36:39.740 | people on air drink water and people died every year doing this. And if we look at optimizing,

00:36:44.460 | there are different versions of this, different breeds of overdosing that you could call the

00:36:52.140 | optimizer's curse. There are different types of optimizer's curses, and it depends on what you're

00:36:57.180 | optimizing for. So if, for instance, you're optimizing your time, and this is a risk with,

00:37:02.860 | say, the four-hour workweek or folks who are looking for whether it's effectiveness, right?

00:37:07.500 | Doing the right things, efficiency, doing things well, which can be treated quite separately. You

00:37:13.420 | could end up at a point where you are valuing your time so highly that if you have to wait 10 minutes

00:37:21.420 | at a grocery store, you get stressed out because you have already tabulated the value of each minute or

00:37:29.580 | each hour at X. And now you're in a pissy mood for the next hour, or at least those 10 minutes,

00:37:35.340 | maybe that bleeds over because you're frustrated and then you're sharp with your wife or your kids or

00:37:40.140 | something. I mean, this is a, this is actually a real thing. And this is a real problem that people

00:37:43.900 | experience. I've experienced it. And that is a function of over-optimizing, becoming somewhat myopic

00:37:50.140 | about the value of your time. On the other hand, if you overvalue your money, right? And expenses and

00:37:59.580 | so on, you can end up really short changing the value of your time. So you give one example of a

00:38:05.260 | workaround, which is like solve for good quickly, and then you can do perfect later. That's a great

00:38:09.820 | approach. Another approach, for instance, right now, I have a new home office. It's pretty small.

00:38:16.380 | I do a lot of recording there and it is very, very bouncy. So for purposes of recording audio,

00:38:22.860 | it's not great. It just is. It has a lot of echo and bounce. So I and my team have been looking at

00:38:29.820 | different types of paneling for the ceiling that can reduce bounce. And this is turned into God bless

00:38:37.340 | them. And this is because I have set the model for this, an incredible due diligence on these

00:38:44.380 | different types of paneling in a Google document. It is like a world-class deep dive as if I were about

00:38:50.940 | to make like a $20 million investment in paneling company. And I mean, I don't make investments that

00:38:55.820 | big, just to be clear, but it's like the due diligence is impressive. And my take is, hey, just order three

00:39:02.140 | types. I'll decide which one I like when I get home and see it. And then we'll just return the other two

00:39:07.980 | or give the two away to people in my audience who need them. Right. But the cost of us all spending time

00:39:16.460 | on this is real. So let's just order three and move on with life. Right. So that's another option,

00:39:24.700 | right? Like when in doubt, okay, you're painstakingly trying to choose across three. It doesn't work as

00:39:29.660 | well with insurance, but with something like paneling, it's like, you just buy all three. And these are not

00:39:35.900 | that expensive, by the way. This is not like buying three cars and then deciding which one you like.

00:39:39.900 | And that can be applied tons and tons of places.

00:39:42.460 | And sometimes not just buying three, but paying someone to outsource the problem. I go back to

00:39:48.620 | when we had our first child, my wife was really trying to make sure that we had a variety of foods

00:39:53.500 | to feed our kids so that as they age, they were comfortable eating all kinds of things. And she was

00:39:58.220 | like, I want to make a meal plan to infuse a hundred foods across these number of days. And there was this

00:40:03.500 | woman that sold, she basically someone like her who had this problem and created a menu plan for kids

00:40:09.020 | for this purpose. And it was like 50 bucks. And she's like, why would I pay $50? I could just do

00:40:12.380 | this. And we had this discussion about like, well, how long is it going to take? She's like, I don't

00:40:15.660 | know, like 20 hours of research. It's like, we'll just pay the person. Sometimes we feel like we don't

00:40:19.980 | want to pay people to do something we could do. But if you think about how much time you can save,

00:40:25.580 | sometimes it's an extreme amount of time. And sometimes even just saving money, even if you're not

00:40:30.460 | paying someone, it's just like buying the thing. I hate throwing money away. So I've had times where it's like,

00:40:34.860 | you buy the thing and it's like, well, they won't take the return unless I drive it. And now

00:40:38.300 | I'm going to lose this $12. And you just have to like, the idea of letting it go is hard. But sometimes

00:40:42.940 | it's just don't shop for the discount. If you're only going to save $5, just buy it and be done with it.

00:40:48.300 | Sure. And there are a lot of ways to look at that, right? One is, for instance, just thinking

00:40:54.380 | about decision fatigue and trying to minimize decisions. So you can minimize decisions in a bunch of

00:40:59.740 | different ways so that you're preserving your mental bandwidth for actually making hopefully

00:41:05.980 | more important decisions or decisions you enjoy thinking about. One is you can outsource, right?

00:41:12.140 | So outsourcing, yeah, sure. It could be an assistant. It could be AI. It could be when you go to a

00:41:17.020 | restaurant, if you want to have a lot of fun, my friend and I did this last year. This is one of those

00:41:21.980 | examples of booking something way in advance, the right sunk costs. Day of the dead in Mexico City had

00:41:26.780 | wanted to do it forever, hadn't done it for any host of reasons, usually because it would creep

00:41:31.420 | up and I would get too close. And then it was too last minute or there was an issue with housing.

00:41:36.220 | Booking in advance in this case, even if I end up not going, right? Hotel room, easy. Inviting some

00:41:43.260 | friends, got down there and what we ended up doing, I mean, I speak Spanish, so it wouldn't have been a

00:41:47.820 | problem. My other close friend who was with me also, but we just decided to go to

00:41:54.140 | a restaurant we walked by, no Google reviews, no nothing. We'd say, we want one appetizer and one

00:42:01.420 | main. We're going to share it. We don't want to know what you're going to pick. If there are any

00:42:04.780 | allergies, okay, here are the allergies, but like, don't tell us what's coming. Just give us one

00:42:08.220 | appetizer, one main, and we're going to eat it here. And then we're going to ask you for another restaurant

00:42:12.860 | recommendation. We're going to do the same thing. And that became how we did dinner. And it was so fun.

00:42:17.900 | And we tried things we never would have tried in a million years. Delicious and no decisions. It was

00:42:25.580 | so fun. And that is the type of off menu, I guess, pun intended approach that you could take.

00:42:33.260 | Then there are decisions. Maybe you don't need to make it all. This is also true with

00:42:36.780 | questions or terms that are really ambiguous. Like the best way to solve a lot of problems

00:42:43.660 | is to not take them on as your problem. So that could apply to how do I find happiness? You know,

00:42:50.860 | how can I be successful? How can I find contentment? And unless these terms are very, very, very carefully

00:42:57.580 | defined, that's just putting yourself in a maze with no exit. You're not going to get anywhere. And

00:43:05.180 | that can become very disconcerting because you've placed a value on this thing, this concept. But if you

00:43:11.340 | haven't defined it, you're literally just driving down a dead end street and you're going to beat yourself

00:43:18.220 | up over something that you shouldn't beat yourself up about at all. And I've just realized there are a

00:43:24.540 | lot of problems where the answer is just avoid it in the first place or put it down. You don't need to

00:43:29.420 | solve it. And that can certainly apply to a lot of decisions. Like there is like, could I outsource

00:43:35.580 | this? But then there's also like, do I need to even do this at all? Like in the case of my home office,

00:43:39.980 | if I had the option, this is not true of a studio nearby where I could just rent instead of buy.

00:43:48.140 | Yeah, rent. And I thought a lot about the elegance of renting instead of buying supplies to homeownership

00:43:55.980 | to supplies to anything with like a mental and financial carrying cost. There's a lot of logic,

00:44:01.260 | more than you might expect around viewing yourself as rich enough to rent.

00:44:05.740 | This episode is brought to you by Mercury, the banking product businesses like mine use to

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00:44:22.860 | is light years ahead of the clunky and hard to use websites and apps of almost every other bank. In fact,

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00:45:09.020 | Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice

00:45:13.340 | Financial Group, Column N.A. and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC.

00:45:19.340 | Thank you for being here today. You can find all the links, promo codes and discounts from

00:45:23.820 | all our partners at allthehacks.com/deals. They're all brands I love and use. So please

00:45:30.060 | consider supporting those who support us. I've thought about writing. I actually

00:45:34.300 | did write a long piece on this for the book that might come out in a hundred years, but rich enough

00:45:39.660 | to rent. What does that look like? Even if you don't view yourself as rich and the idea of

00:45:45.180 | reframing, throwing away money with just like putting it back into circulation,

00:45:48.940 | the money's going to somebody. And this is also why I'll, if I'm trying to simplify,

00:45:54.220 | which I do routinely, I'll go through my closet and I'll be like, all right,

00:45:57.500 | what have I not worn over X period of time? Or what type of anything do I have? Artwork,

00:46:03.740 | clothing, anything that I'm getting like a one to five out of 10 use of that I could donate where

00:46:12.220 | someone's going to get like a seven to 10 use out of. I'm like, that just seems like karmically the right

00:46:16.540 | thing to do. This object will just get better used by someone else. Okay. Donate. Boom.

00:46:22.060 | Speaker 1: Does it ever cross your mind of like, well, what if I need it one day?

00:46:24.780 | That question did cross my mind a lot. And my solution these days is over correct. If you're

00:46:31.820 | asking that question, the answer is low probability that you're going to need it, right? If you're even

00:46:38.300 | asking the question, like, what if I might need this someday? The answer is probably not. And the answer is

00:46:45.100 | also likely if you're considering donating it that you can afford to buy it later. And so if you sort of

00:46:50.700 | look at the costs involved of having this thing, occupying space, maybe feeling guilty that you're

00:46:56.220 | not using it, that's a real thing and weighing that against like the probability. Okay. Let's just say

00:47:01.500 | there's a 10% probability that you're going to need it at X point in time in the future. And it costs 20

00:47:08.540 | bucks. Okay. Well, I'm sure somebody can provide a more sophisticated model for this, but it's like,

00:47:14.620 | okay, the real cost is $2. And I'm sure there's some discount you could apply to the time in the

00:47:20.220 | future. So it's like $1, relax, get rid of it. Especially with Amazon same day, some of these

00:47:25.820 | things, it's like, how hard is it to replace 20 years ago? It might've been a big adventure. Now,

00:47:30.700 | most things seem like you can get them tomorrow. Yeah. If you live in a major city, at least

00:47:35.500 | whether it's objects or information for me also reading, looking, and I'm, I'm borrowing this term

00:47:42.700 | from a woman named Kathy Sierra. And I came across this probably 20 plus years ago. And I still remember

00:47:48.220 | it, but like just in time information instead of just in case information. So you could read 20 books

00:47:54.700 | on personal finance. You could read 20 books on some business you hope to start someday. And what's

00:48:01.740 | going to happen a year later, if you're actually going to start the business, you're going to have

00:48:04.780 | to reread those damn books. So instead of just in case information, just in time information,

00:48:09.660 | you can apply that to things as well with experiences, with friends and those close relationships.

00:48:15.420 | I don't do that. That is where it's like, block it in the calendar. If it's not in the calendar,

00:48:19.660 | it's not real. You're not going to protect it. It's just going to get crowded out by other

00:48:23.980 | or other things that you might think are important, but it's going to be to the detriment of those

00:48:29.180 | relationships and stuff. That's the one place where it's like, okay, pay for it in advance,

00:48:32.940 | do basically the opposite of most of what I'm saying for things.

00:48:36.620 | And to make room for all of that time with people, you say no a lot, or you probably need

00:48:43.500 | to say no more, whether it's events, time spent otherwise, how do you think about saying no more?

00:48:49.900 | There are a few ways that I think about saying no more. The first is

00:48:54.700 | don't rely on willpower or discipline. Both of those are really overrated and a lot of the forces

00:49:03.180 | that exist and will continue to get magnified and more powerful in terms of anything that is on your

00:49:11.580 | screen. When you open your phone is intended to defeat your discipline and willpower. You are outgunned,

00:49:17.180 | trust me. I mean, you know, people at these companies, I know people, these companies,

00:49:19.980 | these teams are very sophisticated. It's like, if you do something really bad and the SWAT team gets

00:49:25.900 | called on you, just shoot yourself in the head. You're not going to win. You're not Jason Bourne.

00:49:29.180 | You are going to lose. Similarly, it's like, if you open your phone, that's basically the SWAT team

00:49:33.980 | or a SEAL Team 6 of behavioral psychology and data science being called upon to use everything they know

00:49:41.100 | about you against you. You're going to lose. For that reason, in my mind, you need to try to stack

00:49:50.380 | the deck in your favor. The way I do that is putting things in the calendar early, prepaying for things,

00:49:58.060 | inviting people so that if I beg off or try to cancel, there's a lot of social cost, financial cost.

00:50:06.780 | If it's not in my calendar, I know that I will squeeze all sorts of things into it and then it

00:50:13.340 | will become incredibly difficult to block out extended periods of time. And by extended, that's

00:50:17.980 | going to differ person to person. But for me, it's like a long weekend, maybe a week. Like these things

00:50:23.020 | are in the calendar way out to the end of the year. By the end of Q1 each year, I have lots of stuff

00:50:30.540 | blocked out for the whole year. And that is not dependent. I just have to emphasize this on

00:50:36.220 | having financial freedom or a ton of money. It is not. You do not need to spend a lot of money on

00:50:43.020 | this stuff. You do need to block it out in your calendar and set some incentives, whether those are

00:50:49.020 | carrots or sticks. Sticks do work pretty well. They're not very fashionable, right? It's like kumbaya,

00:50:55.180 | positive reinforcement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the stick still works pretty well in terms of

00:51:00.060 | if you cancel this thing, there is a non recoverable cost. That's a great way to keep you on task in

00:51:06.620 | terms of spending time with your friends or family. So that's how I think about it. And then in terms of

00:51:12.380 | saying yes or no, if you want to broaden that, for instance, to projects for me, professional

00:51:18.300 | projects or creative projects, I'm thinking about how I can win, even if the project fails. And the way

00:51:24.780 | I approach that is looking at anything, whether it's a test run with my podcast, 10 plus years ago,

00:51:32.380 | I commit that I'm going to do six to 10 episodes. That gives me a graceful exit if it doesn't work out,

00:51:38.620 | but there's enough there that I should learn a lot. So that's the first criterion,

00:51:43.900 | like density of learning. How much am I going to learn? How many skills am I going to develop?

00:51:47.740 | And then relationships, new relationships or deepening relationships. And both of those pillars

00:51:54.060 | need to persist after the project and be transferable to other things, but you don't need to overthink it.

00:52:01.020 | It's just like optimize for relationships, new or existing and skill acquisition and learning. And if

00:52:09.100 | you do that, I've had so many startups fail. I've had many projects fail, but if you are optimizing for

00:52:17.100 | those two things, as those accumulate snowball over time, you'll often find in the ashes of some failure,

00:52:27.580 | the actual seeds of some much greater success later. That was true with say the four hour chef,

00:52:33.900 | which was my probably worst performing book and was a disaster for a number of reasons. The book itself,

00:52:40.700 | I'm very proud of, but for lots of reasons that didn't work out, I was totally burned out.

00:52:46.060 | But in the process of launching it, I was optimizing for learning. How did I do that in a launch? I was like,

00:52:51.260 | well, every time I launch anything, I'm asking, what is a new channel? What is an old channel that

00:52:56.780 | has become unsexy that I don't know about? What is something that's growing in importance, but that

00:53:01.580 | people aren't paying a lot of attention to? And I would ask a bunch of my friends who just launched

00:53:05.020 | books. I said, yeah, there are these things called podcasts. And so by virtue of being on a bunch of

00:53:09.900 | podcasts, Rogan, Marin, Nerdist, Adam Carolla at the time, which were kind of the big dogs,

00:53:17.020 | certainly some of them still are. I thought to myself, wow, this is so enjoyable. I'm not getting

00:53:22.620 | my face airbrushed for like two hours, starting at 5:00 AM for a morning show that lasts two minutes

00:53:27.340 | where they mispronounce my name and read a teleprompter over my shoulder. Okay, maybe I'll try

00:53:32.380 | this. So if I hadn't thought about optimizing for those things in the four hour chef, even though that

00:53:37.340 | book by objective measures compared to my other books was absolutely a failure,

00:53:41.580 | podcasts never would have happened. And we could look at that. We could look at all of my biggest

00:53:46.700 | wins. Almost all of them had some predecessor that didn't work out that ended up being hugely,

00:53:53.340 | hugely valuable. So you look at say my biggest angel investing wins. I became an advisor to a company

00:53:58.540 | called StumbleUpon. Garrett Camp was the founder of StumbleUpon. It was basically like people get the

00:54:05.180 | reference like a Pandora for web pages. And back in the day, it drove a ton of traffic

00:54:10.860 | to different websites, just like Dig and our buddy, Kevin Rose. These were hugely important in terms

00:54:16.620 | of driving web traffic to different web pages. Didn't work out. I was an advisor, became really

00:54:22.220 | close to Garrett because he was a genius, really fun to hang out with. I was just texting with him

00:54:26.940 | yesterday. We're still friends to this day. This is 2007. I want to say something like that.

00:54:32.060 | StumbleUpon was a zero for me. But then what happens? About a year later,

00:54:36.140 | Garrett wants to grab some coffee. Hey, I've got some ideas around this new thing.

00:54:39.180 | At the time it was shortly named UberCab LLC becomes Uber, right? Boom. It was the relationship

00:54:47.420 | that transferred. We're still friends now. So I just want to say that the yes, no question is a big one.

00:54:53.820 | Like what you say yes and no to determines the course of your life and the course of the lives

00:55:00.380 | around you. You are sort of the sum of your decisions. So you can use different approaches

00:55:07.660 | for this, different frameworks, different tools. I mean, there's some really simple ones. I mean,

00:55:11.020 | this is one that we probably don't want to spend a ton amount of time on because it gets very nuanced.

00:55:15.500 | But if you're used to looking at spreadsheets and numbers might point at somebody next to me and I

00:55:22.300 | can point at myself, right? Really trying to do things by the numbers, trying to be very analytical.

00:55:26.460 | Sometime you lose sight and lose touch with

00:55:30.620 | basic intuition. Now, this can be a hand wavy thing. I would say that there is

00:55:36.460 | engaged intuition and evasive intuition, or let's say active intuition and passive intuition. Passive

00:55:43.340 | intuition is where someone uses hand wavy intuition in quotation marks to justify doing something they

00:55:51.340 | want to do anyway. But they can't give you a real reason. They just say, well, it's just my feeling in

00:55:57.900 | my gut, this intuition, and it's a laziness. That's sort of passive intuition. Active intuition is where you

00:56:07.180 | actually check in with yourself as someone who has thousands, hundreds of thousands of years or more

00:56:15.260 | of evolutionary machinery that predates language to check in, to ask yourself, how do I actually feel

00:56:22.860 | about this person? Like what's happening in my body? When I look at these possible projects on a list

00:56:31.340 | of possible commitments for the next year, like how do I actually feel internally?

00:56:36.140 | When you have some type of approach for feeling that, you can actually get a really strong signal.

00:56:42.140 | And I remember this is way before

00:56:45.100 | the four hour work week. I was considering doing this TV show way back in the day before anyone knew who I was.

00:56:52.540 | And I was agonizing over the deal points structure and all of the specifics that I could put into some

00:57:01.180 | kind of Excel spreadsheet, agonizing over it, going back and forth for weeks.

00:57:06.700 | And then my girlfriend at the time asked me over dinner one night, she's like,

00:57:10.700 | do you even trust this guy who was like the producer who would be the counterparty? And I was like,

00:57:15.260 | not really. And she's like, well, why are you doing the deal then? And I thought to myself,

00:57:19.500 | she has a point, she has a point. And I'd say in the last handful of years, as someone who tends to

00:57:27.180 | be very kind of prefrontal cortex by the numbers that revisiting of evolved animal intelligence has become

00:57:37.820 | more and more a part of how I do things and more and more a part of how I do past year reviews as well.

00:57:45.580 | So those are a few ways that I could say I've refined my way that I approach yes and no.

00:57:51.020 | And there's the tactical stuff. It's like, okay, I could give someone

00:57:53.980 | 20 templates for how to say no in different circumstances, and they'll be good. They'll be useful.

00:58:00.060 | But if you're not addressing some of the underlying psychological aspects, if you're not addressing

00:58:08.220 | some of the underlying philosophical beliefs that you have or worldviews that you have, if you're not

00:58:15.820 | revising those things, the templates don't have any gas, they don't last. And that's true with also,

00:58:22.780 | if you have failed to lose weight for 10 years, I could give you an index card. And that's what all

00:58:27.180 | my busy friends requested. When I wrote the four hour body, give me an index card. I just need the

00:58:31.500 | cliff notes, and then I'll do it. Success rate, 0%. And that's true with yes and no as well. If you

00:58:38.380 | have incredible FOMO, and you believe that opportunities are always fleeting, or that

00:58:46.780 | there are certain people in your life who if you cross them, you're going to pay this huge social

00:58:51.740 | penalty that is going to be incredibly impactful in your life, terminal maybe in some way.

00:58:58.220 | I can give you all the tools and templates in the world. They're not going to work. So for yes and no,

00:59:05.980 | I would also say having confidence, for instance, in your ability to come up with ideas, your ability to

00:59:12.140 | execute, your ability to make opportunity, your ability to forge new relationships, or repair

00:59:19.260 | relationships, the ability to look at your journal of worries that mostly didn't happen and to realize

00:59:25.580 | like, oh, for instance, like right now, I'm dealing with multiple aging relatives who have all sorts of

00:59:31.980 | different issues, including diabetes and Alzheimer's. And in some instances, I will spend all this time

00:59:39.740 | agonizing over a conversation because everything in my lived experience tells me it's going to be

00:59:44.140 | really difficult. There's going to be a ton of pushback. It's going to take forever. And then

00:59:49.660 | plan B or C are going to be terrible, et cetera, et cetera. I get myself all wound up about this.

00:59:55.580 | And then I have the conversation. They're like, yeah, that sounds fine. It's like, oh my God.

01:00:02.460 | Wow. That was a lot of unnecessary suffering. And you can't just on paper, convince yourself of all

01:00:09.500 | these things. You got to practice, which is why currently the book tentatively titled the notebook

01:00:14.940 | is an 800 page draft, because if it were really easy, it can be simple, but if it were really easy,

01:00:22.540 | everyone would be good at it. And that's not the case clearly. So what is it like when it's actually published?

01:00:28.780 | It's going to be a super practical training manual. It will be like a personal trainer for saying no,

01:00:35.820 | which is actually a personal trainer for saying yes to the right things. That's like

01:00:39.820 | the aspect of it that is part and parcel of the whole thing. If you get good at saying no,

01:00:46.860 | there's sort of informed no. And then there's uninformed no, like a petulant two-year-old or

01:00:52.700 | three-year-old kid can be like, no, no, no, they're not thinking about it. They're just being a pain in

01:00:56.540 | the ass and adults can do that too, which is not necessarily a bad experiment. If your default is

01:01:02.540 | always saying yes, like a lazy, yes, sure. Having a lazy no for a while is actually not a bad idea.

01:01:09.740 | I'm going on a no diet where you just say no to basically everything, because then you see that the

01:01:14.300 | social fallout, the costs actually are pretty minimal or they're recoverable, or maybe one

01:01:19.500 | person shows you their true colors. And it's like, okay, I have a really high maintenance,

01:01:23.660 | volatile friend who loves drama. Well, maybe that friendship has sort of come to the end of its

01:01:31.580 | season. Past that though, to get really good at making better decisions, you have to be good at both.

01:01:40.140 | Yes and no. I think one thing that's helped me say no is having children because you have less time

01:01:45.980 | and you have a thing and you're like, I actually want to spend a lot of time with these people.

01:01:49.260 | Great excuse too. And it's a great excuse. No one's mad. Like, oh, I've got kids. I can't come out

01:01:53.420 | tonight. And then you realize, oh, didn't matter. There was an event last night that I had tentatively

01:02:00.220 | planned on going to Portland for the day, fly to Portland, wake up at 6am, fly down to LA to be here

01:02:05.820 | with you. And fortunately, someone said, oh, the dinner that we were going to host, we're not going

01:02:11.500 | to be able to host it. And I was like, that was the perfect thing I needed to say no. There were other

01:02:15.420 | things that I wanted to accomplish there. It felt so good to not be there, you know, like to everyone

01:02:19.980 | there that is listening. Like I would have loved to spend time with you, but the cards didn't play

01:02:24.940 | right today. And I feel so good about that. Now I can experience that. It makes it easier the next

01:02:30.540 | time. Yeah. And I've found that kids really forced a conversation because you just have less time and

01:02:37.500 | you have to be better at prioritizing it. It doesn't make the FOMO all go away, but it forces you to

01:02:43.020 | experience what it's like to miss out and realize that it's just not that big of a deal.

01:02:47.740 | Yeah. It doesn't matter. And I think over time also, and people might think when I say what I'm

01:02:53.580 | about to say, I'm like, well, that's easy for you to say. And it's true. It is easy for me to say,

01:02:56.780 | but you have a much greater ability to create opportunity at a surface area for luck. Then you

01:03:02.540 | realize you meaning anyone listening. And the more I travel around, the more I hear from readers,

01:03:09.020 | stories and listeners and so on, the more I believe this to be the case.

01:03:12.220 | And I'll give people an example of how you might do that. And you can do this from pretty much

01:03:16.860 | anywhere. There are some limitations, of course, but if you say, Tim, I don't believe you. That's

01:03:22.940 | that doesn't seem true for me in my life. Let's say a full-time job and you have a family. Okay.

01:03:27.580 | What if you were to volunteer? Maybe you do this with your spouse or your partner. You can figure it

01:03:34.140 | out. Most things can be figured out. Most people listening are not living in like a war torn country

01:03:39.580 | with the types of problems that are actually very

01:03:41.420 | common around the world. Most people have pretty high grade problems. They are solvable.

01:03:46.860 | You could volunteer at a nonprofit. This is what I did when I first moved to Silicon Valley. I knew

01:03:51.340 | nobody. I was driving around in a shitty, it was a Plymouth used minivan, kind of puke green.

01:03:58.620 | The back seats got stolen when I was in Mountain View. So it looked super sketchy. It looked like

01:04:06.540 | something from Silence of the Lambs. And I was like, oh God. And I'm listening to audio cassette tapes that I

01:04:12.860 | bought used. Tony Robbins' Personal Power 2 was actually excellent. And a couple of other things like

01:04:19.260 | Roger Dawson's, I think it was Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating, etc. Occasionally eating Jack in

01:04:25.900 | the Box, which was across the street from my apartment complex next to the Safeway. I mean,

01:04:30.300 | this was the state of affairs. So very little money, knew nobody. And I just looked for startup nonprofits,

01:04:37.980 | like the Indus Entrepreneur, Tai at the time, SVACE. I'm not sure if it's around anymore. Silicon Valley

01:04:42.620 | Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. Wherever you are, let's say in the US, chances are there's a YPO,

01:04:48.700 | or an EO, and these are like Entrepreneurs' Organization, Young Presidents' Organization,

01:04:53.660 | I think it is. Chances are there's a chapter nearby. Volunteering at these events and doing more than you

01:04:59.180 | are asked to do, this is key. Because most folks who volunteer do the bare minimum. If you do slightly

01:05:06.700 | more than is asked of you, chances are you'll be offered more responsibility. And that is exactly what

01:05:12.780 | happened with me, right? So I would be tasked with checking people's tickets on the way in, and then I

01:05:18.140 | would walk around refilling water glasses. Literally, that's what I did. And then I would

01:05:23.740 | ask, I'd say, "Hey, my hands are free. I know I finished with the tickets. Anything else I can do?"

01:05:27.420 | Ask that of the organizers or somebody with one level down. Before you know it, lickety-split within two

01:05:33.100 | months, they're like, "Hey, this guy really likes working for free. So let's give him more responsibility."

01:05:40.460 | Actually shows up on time. These are basic things, right? Shows up on time, does what he says he's going

01:05:45.580 | to do. And within a few months, I was interacting with the speakers. Boom. I'm still in touch with some

01:05:53.500 | of the speakers to this day. That was 2,025 years ago. And these are solvable things. That's one of the

01:06:03.820 | ways. And yes, luck outside of your control, lady fortune, is a huge factor, but you can create more

01:06:10.620 | opportunity than you realize. And that's important because then you don't feel like you need to white

01:06:16.860 | knuckle or rush into these sliding door situations where you have to say, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

01:06:23.500 | It just isn't necessary. Now, could someone argue, "Hey, early in your life, should you say

01:06:28.860 | yes to a lot?" And the answer is sure. I believe that. When you can survive on a futon or a pad on the

01:06:37.260 | floor of someone's apartment eating ramen, and you have very few responsibilities, and most importantly,

01:06:42.540 | you don't know what you're really skilled at. You don't know what you are good at and what you love

01:06:48.140 | doing or what you're obsessed with. I should be clear. Follow your passion. I'm not sure it's very

01:06:52.060 | helpful, but what you're good at that you can be obsessed about. That'll give you the endurance to

01:06:57.020 | win competitively. To figure out where those two things are and where they overlap in your life,

01:07:02.220 | you need to try a lot of stuff. So yeah, in the beginning, say yes to tons of stuff,

01:07:05.740 | but sooner than you realize. It's not when you have millions of dollars. It's not when you've hit a home

01:07:10.060 | run. Sooner than you realize getting good at single tasking and putting on blinders and getting good at

01:07:15.180 | saying yes to very few things and then defending those, that is the superpower. And I think not to

01:07:22.780 | pull us into the swamp of AI conversation, but as things get more saturated, as there is just an

01:07:31.100 | increasing deluge of noise and information and deepfakes selling you shit that is perfectly customized

01:07:39.660 | to your feed, the ability to say no and to firewall your attention, it's going to become a survival

01:07:45.740 | necessity. It will not just be for people who want to hit a home runs or do super well, just to maintain

01:07:52.700 | some semblance of like psychological stability, that's going to become a real critical life skill.

01:07:58.940 | Ted talk complete. We talked about optimizing for a lot of things. One thing you've talked a lot about,

01:08:05.180 | but we haven't discussed yet is play. Does that fit as a state that you aim for?

01:08:10.460 | Yeah, it does. Play is not frivolous. Fun is not frivolous. We can canvas the animal kingdom,

01:08:19.100 | like play as often rehearsal for something else, right? You see cubs playing, you see

01:08:24.780 | puppies playing. It's practice for all sorts of different life skills, even though they're doing

01:08:32.460 | it for pure enjoyment. And furthermore, I would say in the last, certainly in the last five years,

01:08:40.700 | I've resurrected play and games in my own life. They take a lot of different forms

01:08:46.620 | because it is one of the easiest ways to ensure social interaction, like analog social bonding.

01:08:59.180 | I look at my friends. I look at their families. I look at their kids. I look at my audience. You see

01:09:04.140 | chronic anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, self-harm, all of these things, just hockey

01:09:10.300 | sticking up and to the right. And you can't point to a single cause, but I do think just for simplicity

01:09:18.620 | stake to cut another Ted talk short, that analog social interaction, ideally play of some type,

01:09:27.420 | is like the key counter medication for addressing a lot of these things.

01:09:33.660 | And what does that look like for adults? Because I know as a kid, you think I'm going to run in the

01:09:37.180 | woods and climb a tree. Is it the same thing? Let's look at play. What does this mean? I'm sure someone

01:09:41.020 | has a great definition of play, but I would say it's any type of activity you engage in that doesn't

01:09:48.300 | immediately have some survival value. So for instance, a few months ago, I went to the mountains

01:09:56.700 | in Montana into the wilderness for survival training with a couple of close friends. And that's an

01:10:00.860 | example of one thing I blocked out. I was a week and there was a decent amount of shared suffering,

01:10:07.740 | right? It was like freezing rain and hail on the first day that we packed in and we're trying to make

01:10:13.820 | a fire. It's pissing rain. That doesn't sound like fun to most people, but like that is a game of

01:10:20.220 | sorts where it's like, we're learning these survival skills and getting a lot of physical activity. And

01:10:25.820 | there's a physical component, which I think is undervalued. And even if you're sitting in front

01:10:30.860 | of a screen playing world of Warcraft, there's definitely a physical interaction. Your body has

01:10:35.180 | to be engaged. Mind and body are not separate, but we are evolved to move, which is why I think

01:10:43.900 | the idea of uploading consciousness and having anything resembling this experience as a brain

01:10:49.020 | in a jar or a brain and some type of solid state storage doesn't actually work. And a famous investor

01:10:56.540 | and also really technical polymath named Steve Jurvetson has written about this at length. I don't

01:11:01.740 | actually think it works because we're so evolved to move. So for me, these days, play typically

01:11:07.980 | involves some type of motion. There's a certain critical mass. It could be one person if you're

01:11:13.100 | playing something like tennis, but it could be a handful of people at a group dinner where you're

01:11:18.220 | getting up, moving around, standing around a kitchen island. I would view that as play also.

01:11:22.540 | The connective tissue for me, there are many different types of play. You could play solitaire,

01:11:26.700 | sure. And consider that play. But for me, it is the social interaction. So one example from childhood

01:11:34.780 | would be, since I was not, when I was really young, sort of in the wrestling epoch, that was a great way

01:11:40.300 | that my mom would exhaust me, but I wasn't particularly athletically inclined. I would play Dungeons and

01:11:46.060 | Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons was my salvation. I mean, it was me and a bunch of Uber nerds,

01:11:51.340 | like three or four. And in terms of storytelling, teamwork, escapism, fun, just taking a break from

01:11:59.180 | the misery, frankly, that was being a small super nerd in school, it was not fun on Long Island,

01:12:06.940 | I assure you. And I think in most places, it's not very fun. Dungeons and Dragons was like this incredible,

01:12:15.500 | nourishing, beautiful experience. I mean, sometimes there's bad behavior if you had like a

01:12:20.060 | pissed off dungeon master wanted to punish people or something. But Oliver talking to you,

01:12:24.860 | thankfully, he never punished me. I appreciate that. So games of that type are something I've

01:12:32.220 | been trying to sort of resurrect for myself in the last four or five years.

01:12:36.540 | It's funny, I was thinking about the last week, and what was one of the most enjoyable moments of my

01:12:41.660 | last week. And not for the purpose of recording any of this, but my wife and I decided to try some of

01:12:49.820 | the like ridiculous couples balance weird ways do ridiculous things jump over shoulders and pull

01:12:55.820 | between legs that are all over, you know, the reels of Instagram and TikTok. And my wife and I are in the

01:13:01.820 | living room trying these ridiculous things. We're not recording it. My five year old daughter,

01:13:05.980 | who's quite conservative was like, Mom, Dad, stop doing this. You might get hurt.

01:13:10.140 | And at one point, there was something where my wife was going to crawl onto my back.

01:13:14.140 | We had a camera in the house that caught the audio because we were debating what happened.

01:13:19.020 | And she was like, I'm going to climb on your back. And I was like, okay, I bent over. But she jumped.

01:13:22.940 | We both fell over and we were laughing for five minutes straight.

01:13:27.820 | It was one of the most fun things we've done in months. Didn't cost any money, took the time of moving

01:13:33.900 | a table out of the way. And we were just like, we should do stuff like this more often.

01:13:38.060 | And I think with our kids, it's natural, but just as adults, you know, sometimes it doesn't seem as

01:13:44.300 | natural. And then we were like, we should invite people over and just do this. Like, let's invite

01:13:48.780 | our friends over and try to recreate ridiculous TikTok partner challenges, but not record it. Like,

01:13:54.140 | like this is not a performance broadcast. This is not trying to for clicks or anything. This was

01:13:59.340 | just to have a good time. Yeah. And then how do you actually do it? You have that realization.

01:14:03.420 | Then what do you do? Yeah. So I think for us, it was like, oh, let's just do this again this week

01:14:08.940 | for the involving other people. We haven't gotten that far yet.

01:14:12.300 | But if you put it in the calendar, you invite those people and then you're like, okay,

01:14:15.580 | I'm making this up. It doesn't have to be this fancy. But if you were like, all right,

01:14:19.340 | I'm going to pay my friend Bob 50 bucks to come over and like barbecue for everybody. Okay. Boom.

01:14:24.780 | You got some sunk cost. You invited people. They've blocked it out on their calendars. You're

01:14:28.060 | going to feel like an asshole if you cancel. You're probably going to do that. Yeah.

01:14:31.660 | You're probably actually going to do it. We're going to force ourselves to do it.

01:14:33.980 | And the physical play and the laughing, like the emotion and the laughter and the social connection,

01:14:39.740 | those are ingredients in the cocktail that I try to include. So for instance,

01:14:45.660 | people can find groups all over the country. Now, one of my friends, Jason Niemer was one of the

01:14:50.700 | co-creators of something called acro yoga. Kids love it. If you watch like bonobos and chimps playing,

01:14:57.500 | they do something that very much resembles acro yoga, which is effectively, it's not quite yoga. So for

01:15:02.780 | people who are like, oh, I don't want to do sun salutation. It's going to make my hamstrings hurt.

01:15:06.700 | This is not that it's more like partner acrobatics can be very simple. And there is always fumbling

01:15:15.100 | and laughing involved also can get you in really great shape, but that's a side note. So people can

01:15:19.580 | check out acro yoga. It's like playing airplane with your kids, but with your partner, with your

01:15:23.980 | partner or with your kids, which is the fun thing. But to give people an idea, it's like, you know,

01:15:27.820 | you lean on your back and you balance your kids on your feet. You're kind of doing an acro yoga pose with

01:15:32.140 | your kids. Yeah, 100%. The person on top would be in bird position and it doesn't take a lot of

01:15:37.580 | athleticism. I have bought lessons of acro yoga for a lot of couples and the hit rate is 100%. This

01:15:45.900 | includes people who are not athletic and you don't have to pay for a private. Chances are, if you're in

01:15:51.580 | just about any major city, you don't even need to be in a city. There are acro yoga groups all over the

01:15:57.180 | country, all over the world. They do it in parks, typically costs nothing. And man, the before and

01:16:05.980 | after in terms of like state of doing something like that, it doesn't have to be that, but CrossFit

01:16:11.340 | would be a more intense version. And you see the camaraderie and the bonding and putting aside the

01:16:15.820 | hyper cult behavior, but that is valuable. It's really, really valuable. The laughter I like to add in.

01:16:23.020 | I've done CrossFit, not as much laughing involved. The point is you can engineer these things. They

01:16:28.060 | don't have to cost a lot, but if you have that realization like you did, like, oh man,

01:16:33.820 | we should do more of this. You need to get it in the calendar. If it's not in the calendar,

01:16:38.780 | it's not real. And you just have to make it as defensible as like an important business meeting.

01:16:46.300 | And I will often book something like that. It could be, well, I just had elbow surgery,

01:16:52.060 | so it's going to be a little while, but like rock climbing with friends, like indoor gym.

01:16:56.540 | And I'll book it for 6:00 PM so that I have a bookend to my day so that I cannot do what I trained

01:17:03.580 | myself to do for a very long time after college, which is just let work drag and sort of fill the

01:17:10.300 | void because there's always more to do. I have 300 unread text messages right now, 320 something

01:17:14.700 | text. That's let alone inbox, which is like a thousand plus, which is comical at this point.

01:17:20.540 | So there's always going to be more to do or that you can do. So having that as a bookend,

01:17:27.180 | having stuff planned for the weekend, because guess what? If you don't have stuff planned for your

01:17:31.580 | weekend, something else will fill that void. It's not always going to be something good.

01:17:35.420 | Yeah. It's very easy to just sit around and do nothing. And again, I feel like one of the biggest

01:17:40.220 | themes of the changes that you talk about in my life is, oh, you have kids, we got to plan something

01:17:44.220 | because they're not just going to sit at home and do nothing. You don't want to sound like a marketing

01:17:47.580 | case for having children, but it does solve some of these challenges for optimizing and play and all

01:17:53.020 | that. One of the other things, my wife, we've kind of run out of this, but we do escape rooms a lot.

01:17:58.300 | Now we've done almost every escape room in a short drive from our home. We play a lot of board games.

01:18:04.540 | games. And I don't know if we've ever talked about the fact that I love

01:18:07.660 | games and board games and card games, like to a nerdy level, we probably have like

01:18:11.980 | maybe 50 or a hundred games in our house. And so I'm just fascinated as someone who loves games to hear

01:18:18.220 | a little bit about the process for creating a new game. So for people that don't know, Tim, I brought

01:18:23.980 | my copy of Coyote, which is a game you created. It's not technically for children, but we've played it

01:18:29.820 | with children successfully 10 plus 10 plus. Well, I can, but you went lower. I can attest that this

01:18:35.180 | goes down to the toddler phase with some loose interpretation of the rules and certainly not as

01:18:40.060 | stringent. And we had so much fun doing it. How does the process to create a game? Because it seems like,

01:18:45.580 | oh, I want to create a game like that sounds fun. And every time I think about, oh, let's come up with a

01:18:49.340 | new card game. It doesn't go anywhere. So how did you end up at something that is quite enjoyable

01:18:55.340 | to play with a group? Well, let me start at the beginning for a second, which is why a game?

01:19:00.460 | It does hit on something we mentioned earlier, which is the two sort of criteria,

01:19:05.100 | learning a ton, interacting with amazing people or developing relationships, right? So interviewed

01:19:12.220 | someone named Alon Lee. He's the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens. He created augmented reality.

01:19:18.300 | He worked on the first Xbox. He was lead game developer for Halo and has created

01:19:24.780 | just every type of game you can imagine. The guy's a genius. Also really hilarious, soulful guy,

01:19:31.500 | eclectic, wild man, just great dude. Awesome dad and family man as well. And it's rare for me to become

01:19:39.580 | close with new people in terms of friendships as an adult. It's just like my parking lot's kind of full,

01:19:46.140 | but with Alon, I was like, I could really be good friends with this guy. Okay. How can we spend time

01:19:50.300 | together? And I'd already been thinking about making a game in part because like, all right,

01:19:54.540 | you got four hour work week productivity. I think that's valuable. It's necessary, but it's not

01:19:59.580 | sufficient for our body. Like the physical equation still stand by almost everything in that book. It's

01:20:05.740 | played out incredibly in terms of now a lot of support for almost everything in that book. Important,

01:20:10.780 | critical, necessary, not sufficient. Then like four hour chef learning. Okay, sure. You can hit the

01:20:16.860 | cognitive side of things. Learning important, not sufficient, right? At the end of the day,

01:20:22.700 | if you're not cultivating these relationships, if you're not deepening the relationships with,

01:20:28.940 | well, let's just say your five to 10 most important relationships. And those are the places I invest

01:20:32.780 | first every year in terms of blocking out time. That is the connective tissue that holds everything

01:20:37.580 | else together. That is also the safety net under everything else. And so I wanted to create a really

01:20:42.940 | light lift, like a really light lift, just a wedge in the door for people to cultivate that. And that's

01:20:49.980 | why I want to make a game, but not something like D and D level, super complicated. It's like, no,

01:20:55.260 | after dinner, you've got an hour. What can you play in 10 minutes? Something is really fast.

01:21:01.580 | That was the germ of the whole thing, the origin. And then in terms of how to make it, I listened to a

01:21:07.500 | podcast called how to think like a game designer by Justin Gary. Great. He interviews all of these

01:21:14.380 | amazing game designers who create many different types of games. Started with that. Didn't make

01:21:20.380 | much progress. I ordered blank cards. I bought all of these kinds of crafting tools for prototyping games.

01:21:27.020 | Didn't make a lot of progress in part, because I was trying to make it too complicated

01:21:30.220 | without realizing that it was complicated. And then ultimately partnered with

01:21:36.060 | Elon and exploding kittens because they've made dozens and dozens of games.

01:21:39.100 | And then it was a two year process. We tested and prototyped probably 20 different games.

01:21:44.700 | Nothing quite clicked to make a decent game, a decent game, like five out of 10 fun is not that hard,

01:21:53.900 | but as is true with books or podcasts or anything else to go from good to really good to excellent is very

01:22:03.500 | hard. And none of those games, because I knew my name was going to be on it. I was not prepared

01:22:09.180 | to live with any of those forever. I was like, this might be the only game I ever do.

01:22:14.700 | So looked back and ultimately we were doing these sprints, these in-person sprints,

01:22:21.500 | and they were really fun. And frankly, again, like setting it up so you can win, even if you fail. I was like,

01:22:27.020 | well, the process of trying to make a game will force me to play more games with my friends.

01:22:31.900 | So it's sort of a win, as long as I control my costs and my time, even if it doesn't get published.

01:22:37.900 | Okay. So far so good. But there came a point where we're like, all right, look,

01:22:40.940 | we're doing these sprints. We've tested 20 games. We should make a go or no go decision.

01:22:45.740 | And flew to Canada. I spent time with the lawn and amazing game designer on his team name, Ken,

01:22:51.020 | drank a ton of coffee, walking around, walking around. What if this, what if this, what if this,

01:22:54.940 | and ultimately landed on the concept that became coyote when they asked me, well,

01:22:59.980 | what type of games do you like? Forget about tabletop, any kind of game. And I was like, well,

01:23:05.020 | okay. Like didn't like dodge balls. I got bullied. All right. I like tennis. What do I like about

01:23:10.220 | tennis? Okay. Kind of like shuffleboard. What do I like about shuffleboard? And then I was like,

01:23:14.780 | you know, I'm really embarrassed to admit this. And I think I'm going to have a lot of eye rolling from

01:23:18.460 | both of you, but my friends and I, especially if we've had a few drinks, love rock, paper, scissors.

01:23:23.420 | It's so dumb, but there can be some strategy involved and people have these weird runs where they're

01:23:30.460 | like one person will win 20 times in a row or 30 or 40 times in the road. It just seems like really

01:23:34.380 | statistically improbable. And so we started digging into that. I was like, okay, well let's play with

01:23:37.740 | that. What might rock, paper, scissors look like as a group, four or five people. Okay.

01:23:43.660 | Like how can you make that more interesting? Well, what if this, what if this, it's a lot of what if,

01:23:49.420 | which is I think useful for anything, but the difference between professionals and amateurs,

01:23:56.140 | cause I'm walking around with two professionals is that the amateurs will want to talk about it for a long

01:24:00.060 | time and think about it, brainstorm, quote unquote, figure it

01:24:03.740 | out by talking. But I think Justin Gary or someone else in his podcast said this,

01:24:07.980 | like you can either talk about it for 10 hours or you can prototype for 10 minutes and try to play it.

01:24:12.940 | So we just went back to where we were staying, sat at the kitchen table, had a bunch of blank cards,

01:24:19.500 | started mocking it up within probably an hour, sat down and started trying to play. And I was like,

01:24:25.260 | okay, it's broken. Okay. Let's try this, fix this. Oh, that's interesting. That was fun.

01:24:30.460 | This definitely isn't working. The game's going to last forever. Okay. Let's try it.

01:24:33.100 | Yank that card out, scratch it out, write something new on it. And once we had the basic

01:24:39.820 | concept and started prototyping, I'd say within two or three hours, we had a very, very, very basic

01:24:48.220 | prototype that got us to 10 to 15 minute games. And then I was like, all right, well, creating more

01:24:55.820 | gestures is important, making the gestures funny, but that's not enough. Okay. Well then we have these

01:25:02.860 | wild cards where people can be basically tricksters and make things really odd and bizarre. Those are

01:25:09.420 | the coyote cards. And I have a long history with coyotes. I don't know if I want to bore people with

01:25:13.420 | it, but trickster mythology in a lot of cultures is associated with coyotes. It's like, okay, well,

01:25:20.700 | hence the name coyote. So these coyote cards, but then for instance, as we kept play testing and

01:25:25.660 | play testing, I wanted the game to be a little closer to say backgammon than chess. Like chess,

01:25:31.500 | if somebody is a lot better, you're just going to lose every time. That's not fun. Backgammon,

01:25:35.660 | like there is an element of chance. So even a beginner who is not as skilled could get lucky and toast

01:25:41.340 | someone who's incredibly good. I wanted that possibility. And that's where like the attack cards came in.

01:25:47.180 | So as a group, and just so people understand, it's kind of like rock,

01:25:49.820 | paper, scissors on steroids. The gestures are more interesting and fun. And you can sabotage other

01:25:56.860 | players who are good at it. It's a rhythm games. It's like, boom, boom. And then you have to do these

01:26:00.860 | gestures and say a word and it goes around the table and each person gets three lives. Last person standing

01:26:06.140 | wins. We're going to put a link in the show notes. I feel like it needs to be seen.

01:26:09.660 | Yeah. You need to see it. I recorded a live demo with players I'd never met before.

01:26:14.620 | None of it was scripted. And so you can watch two like real demo games to get an idea of it.

01:26:20.140 | Coyote game.com. You can find on Amazon, Walmart targets, everywhere. 300, 400 million views of

01:26:25.180 | gameplay online on social, which is nuts. So it's doing super well, but the attack card allowed you to

01:26:31.100 | handicap people like musicians. People are good at math. Like some of those people are just

01:26:35.420 | abnormally good at this game. There were all these positive constraints. I won't bore you with a lot of the

01:26:40.620 | under the hood stuff. But now when I walk through a store and I see a game rack,

01:26:45.820 | holy shit, I already had a lot of admiration for game designers, but to make a really incredibly simple

01:26:53.340 | game is shockingly hard. There are different types of hard, but to make a simple game

01:27:02.940 | is not simple, but coyote. Yeah. It's, it's been tested with hundreds of families. I'm going to do

01:27:09.660 | some really big stuff with it in terms of competitions. So encourage people to start training.

01:27:15.340 | And one of the constraints was I wanted families to be able to play this and what people will figure

01:27:21.180 | out very quickly is it's good brain training and kids have really good reaction speed.

01:27:27.900 | So a lot of kids can smoke adults. So it's also a game that you can play with kids without

01:27:33.180 | having to ask yourself, ah, do I need to, do I need to lose on purpose? Do I need to do this?

01:27:37.740 | Like, or do I need to get bored? We've been playing a lot of candy land. Yeah. And eventually

01:27:42.220 | and it's just, it gets old going down the line. Yeah. And also, you know, you talked about making

01:27:47.820 | a game. You can create house rules. I include blank cards because you can make this game your family game.

01:27:56.140 | very, very, very, very easily. And some of the greatest videos that I've seen online of

01:28:02.540 | QDF four or five people playing like three kids and two parents are when they've created their own

01:28:08.780 | cards. It's very easy. And so you get to be a sort of mini game designer just by having this deck.

01:28:16.380 | Yep. Yeah. So that's, that's coyote. It's fun. Definitely check it out.

01:28:20.620 | So you've got a game. What's the next big project you're thinking about?

01:28:24.300 | Even though I don't have long-term business plans, I never have like five, 10 year in part,

01:28:31.020 | because if you're going to have a reliable, dependable five to 10 year plan, you have to

01:28:35.740 | play it so safe that generally you're going to be really shortchanging yourself. Like you're not

01:28:42.220 | going to be stretching your abilities. And even if you try to play it safe, there's so many factors

01:28:46.380 | outside of your control. Five to 10 years is pretty hard. There are some people who can do that. I'm just

01:28:50.220 | not one of them. I also find that kind of boring. So if I'm looking at most of my professional

01:28:57.900 | projects, whether it's a book, the podcasts, angel investing, it doesn't matter. All of them kind of

01:29:04.620 | fit this. It's usually a six to 12 month experiment. And my assumption is if I execute really well,

01:29:11.660 | and I have tunnel vision on that one thing, which right now is coyote, that the doors that open,

01:29:17.020 | the opportunities that present themselves, the people who come out of the woodwork,

01:29:20.300 | who I never otherwise could have predicted meeting will be more interesting than anything I can plan

01:29:26.700 | for now. So are there things that I'd like to do in the future? Sure. I've wanted to make a feature

01:29:30.780 | film forever and have a script that I did 15 years ago, probably that is 70, 80% done that I think is

01:29:38.060 | actually, I think it's pretty hilarious. Like it would be a comedy of sorts. And I'm not one of a kind in

01:29:45.180 | that I'm sure there are millions of people out there who are like, I have this partially done

01:29:48.380 | screenplay. That is not uncommon. We're sitting in LA right now. I'm just visiting, but it's like,

01:29:54.300 | you could throw a stone in any direction. I hit somebody who could say that. I do think that making

01:29:58.140 | a feature film or some type of scripted television that is self-contained, probably not intended to

01:30:04.220 | run forever, which will make it harder to sell would be really fun because I have a very, very,

01:30:09.020 | very visual mind worked on all the artwork of the game. People can check it out. It's pretty fun.

01:30:14.380 | And then split tested all of it, which, you know, I'm like a multivariate machine when it comes to

01:30:18.620 | testing. But if you go back to my childhood, I wanted to be a comic book penciler for at least

01:30:25.340 | a decade and got paid for illustrating in college as part of how I paid my expenses and kind of set

01:30:33.340 | that down to quote unquote, get serious and be an adult. But I've been resurrecting that learning how

01:30:39.100 | to use procreate and spending time with comic book artists and writers. I think almost in terms of comic

01:30:45.500 | panels or storyboarding, like that's how my mind works anyway. I think I'd be pretty good at thinking as

01:30:51.900 | a director while I'm scripting, we haven't really talked about this, but humans are storytelling and

01:30:57.740 | meaning making machines. And I used to be a nonfiction purist. I only read nonfiction and that was very

01:31:07.580 | short sighted because I think a lot of truth, a lot of valuable lessons are best conveyed through really

01:31:17.980 | good storytelling. And oftentimes that's fiction. Just as fun as not frivolous, like fiction does not

01:31:23.500 | need to be frivolous. And for a long time I discounted it. I was like, if I want to read something made up,

01:31:27.660 | I can do that myself. I think that's missing a lot. That's tossing out the baby with the bathwater.

01:31:34.140 | There's a bunch of garbage fiction out there that I don't want to read. There are a lot of terrible

01:31:37.340 | movies I don't want to watch. But I feel like if you had the right curation for film, television,

01:31:44.780 | fiction, you could learn just as well, if not better, a lot of the lessons that you would get

01:31:52.380 | from reading biographies and so on. Sounds like Tim's book club.

01:31:55.180 | Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. So I could see also playing with fiction, but

01:32:01.020 | these are all overlapping. Fiction writing, script writing, screen writing, film, all these are

01:32:06.700 | overlapping and I'm somewhat tool agnostic. I would love to make a comic book. I've looked

01:32:11.420 | very seriously at that and talked to the right people a number of times. I do think that would

01:32:16.540 | probably be mostly a vanity project because the audience for actually reading comic books and graphic

01:32:23.180 | novels is not that large. It's decent. But if part of my goal is to share a story with a very large

01:32:30.460 | number of people to make hopefully some kind of impact, then it may not be the right medium.

01:32:36.780 | But could it be wink, wink, basically storyboarding for something I want to do in moving pictures? Yeah,

01:32:43.100 | possibly. Those are things that are top of mind. I don't have huge plans for growing the podcast.

01:32:49.660 | I think growth is a risky objective. You can end up making a lot of compromises and you can end up

01:32:59.340 | following other people's agendas and priorities very easily, especially in a world where the

01:33:05.180 | platforms are incredibly good at value capture. You can just become an algorithm chaser and then the

01:33:12.540 | risk of that is audience capture and you start to become a caricature of yourself and your most

01:33:19.580 | extreme positions or behaviors or statements get reinforced. And suddenly you're wearing this mask

01:33:26.540 | all the time. And if you wear a mask long enough, it ceases to become a mask. That's who you become.

01:33:31.580 | And I've seen a number of people, I won't mention them by name, but it's disturbing and it's not good for

01:33:36.860 | them. It's not good for their families to see what they've become through this feedback loop of having

01:33:43.340 | their most extreme behaviors and positions getting reinforced every time that they are recording and

01:33:50.220 | publishing something. So to avoid that, I mean, I guess you can just sit in the cave and do your thing,

01:33:55.660 | which is sort of my position. I'm very happy with my current audience. So we'll see. But most of my

01:34:02.860 | thinking on the creative side is focused on storytelling. So we'll see. We'll see where

01:34:09.740 | things go. I'm here to follow on the journey. If anyone else wants to follow along, where do you

01:34:13.500 | want to send them? Yeah. People can go to Tim.blog. Tim.blog's got everything Tim on there,

01:34:20.380 | thousand plus blog posts, but obviously that's a lot to dig through. There's a start here where you can

01:34:24.860 | look at some of the greatest hits. People can find the Tim Ferriss show. It's got somewhere between a

01:34:30.140 | billion and 1.5 billion downloads. Now that's pretty easy to browse the Tim.blog slash podcast allows

01:34:36.300 | you to dig around really effectively. And then Coyote, if you just search Coyote game and, and look

01:34:43.020 | for the orange and green, because I have noticed some competitors that you can find it. Coyote game.com

01:34:51.820 | will take you to a page where you can just click through to whichever retailer you want. Walmart, Amazon,

01:34:56.620 | target that's all over the place. And I would say no matter what, whether it's acro yoga or

01:35:03.980 | playing a card game of any type, of course, I'm biased. I think Coyote is a very easy,

01:35:10.940 | reliable way to get a lot of laughs and move around a bit with your family, do something analog schedule,

01:35:16.860 | analog time. It is sort of your last life raft. I worry about the future of mental health and physical

01:35:25.180 | health a lot. It's just the trend lines look very bad. A little bit goes a long way. It's kind of like

01:35:30.140 | you need vitamin A, but you don't want too much, right? I think you can die from too much vitamin

01:35:33.900 | A. So it's like, no, it's just a little bit goes a long way. Vitamin E, vitamin D, same thing.

01:35:37.260 | Vitamin P play like a little bit goes a long way. We spent five minutes doing these silly exercises

01:35:44.460 | in the kid living room and it felt like a meaningful part of the week. So my challenge,

01:35:50.380 | and I assume your challenge is everyone go find some way to block off some time to play this week.

01:35:55.020 | Yeah. Black out some time. Find a local game shop. The game shop owners and the people who hang out are so

01:36:01.820 | friendly, so friendly. So just like figure out chances are they have a themed game night or something,

01:36:07.260 | or just go in and talk to them about their favorite games that are underappreciated that people haven't

01:36:12.780 | checked out. The one that led me to exploding kittens, because I was testing all these games with

01:36:16.540 | my friends. Poetry for Neanderthals is a really hilarious physical game, and these games are

01:36:22.380 | generally really inexpensive. Poetry for Neanderthals probably costs 14 bucks, 15 bucks. Coyote is $9.99

01:36:29.420 | in most places. Might be a little bit more in some places where there's a unique addition. It's less

01:36:34.060 | than the cost of one ticket to the movies. It's fun just to look for the right game with your family. Try a

01:36:39.820 | couple out. Worst case, you donate it to your local library and somebody who would not have the opportunity

01:36:44.860 | to play a game has a chance to play a game. Awesome. Well, everybody has their homework.

01:36:48.620 | Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Good to see you.

01:36:51.740 | This has been awesome. I hope everyone listening really enjoyed this conversation.

01:36:55.820 | If you have questions, feedback, anything, podcast@allthehacks.com. That's it for this week.

01:37:00.700 | I will see you next week.

How to Stop Over-Optimizing & Focus on What Matters — Tim Ferriss

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