What if the key to living a better life isn't about optimizing more, but knowing when to stop? Today, I'm sitting down with none other than Tim Ferriss to explore the upsides and downsides of optimization, from the habits that helped him build best-selling books to the emotional costs he's learned to avoid.

As Tim says, you're doing something very lazy if you're constantly trying to optimize. We'll talk about systems thinking, decision fatigue, how to spend more on what matters, the curse of over-optimization, and the surprising shift he's made that has had the biggest impact on his happiness. I'm Chris Hutchins, and if you want to keep upgrading your money, points, and life, click follow or subscribe.

Tim. Yes, sir. It's good to be here in person. Yeah, good to see you. You are known as the optimizer, the four-hour guy. What was one of the earliest moments you realized optimization could really bend reality in your favor? The first time. Tim Ferriss: Or an early time. Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

I would say probably forced by necessity in kiddie wrestling when I was probably God knows how old. I really couldn't tell you. Seven, eight, something like that. Pretty hyperactive, very small, so group sports were out. I would just get bullied and defeated. And my mom was somehow introduced by another mom to kiddie wrestling, this program where you could throw a kid into a weight class, and lo and behold, like the puny kids can battle the puny kids.

And you can actually build confidence instead of just getting your head stuffed in the sand constantly by bigger kids. And I had a lot of thermoregulation issues. That just means controlling body temperature or the way my brain interprets temperature is wonky after being born premature. I had a lot of issues also with my left lung.

So for multiple reasons, basically had no endurance. And even to this day, sort of like I had muscle biopsies and stuff done for the four-hour body, my second book. And these sports scientists were like, okay, here's average, here's Homer Simpson, here's you. And I just had to figure out a way if I wanted to win.

I certainly didn't enjoy losing. It's still true to this day, very competitive. And it was figuring out workarounds, that's it. So I think that for a long time, it wasn't trying to find shortcuts. It was just trying to find a path forward when the most obvious path and the stuff that the PE coach or whoever is going to tell you to do, yeah, run back and forth until you improve your endurance.

I'm like, it's not working. So what's plan B, right? I think that that question, what's plan B or what's option C, broadly speaking is what directs a lot of any of the optimization, which is not fundamentally in my mind, the search for a shortcut. It's a search for an uncrowded path that gives you some kind of advantage.

That's it. Something non-obvious. You do that all the time. That's what this show is about. I do. In fact, I often think of some of the earliest stories for me were in boarding school. I know you went to boarding school and I was surrounded by people whose parents gave them more disposable income than me.

And it was like, you just need to find a way to make something happen. You want the pizza, you can't afford it, buy a whole pizza, sell slices, you know, eat your profit. Yeah. Something like that. That was my story. Did this kind of accelerate as you went later in school?

I'll give you a job example that didn't work out. So I always abhorred waste and really applied myself super intensively to school. And I was in public school for ages before boarding school. Up until second year of high school, I was on Long Island going to just regular old public school and it was fine, but it wasn't rigorous.

A lot of various problems where the idle hands being the devil's workshop and so on on rural Long Island. But I do recall since we're just on the topic of optimization, my first ever job was cleaning an ice cream shop called Snowflake no longer exists, but as cleaning the floors, mopping, doing this, that, and the other thing.

And I'm pretty sure it was totally illegal. I was like 13 or 14, but the boss wasn't the brightest guy in the world, which will come up again in a moment. So I'm cleaning this and I got really good at figuring out how to clean really effectively in a very short period of time, but he's paying me per hour.

And so I would finish my cleaning, which was supposed to take an hour and a half. I'd do it in a half hour. And then I would sit there and I remember I brought a copy of Black Belt magazine to work. I was really interested in martial arts at the time.

Still am, I suppose, but after you accumulate a few surgeries, you tend to apply some constraints. Anyway, I would do my cleaning in a fraction of the time that it should have taken. And then I would sit there reading Black Belt magazine and the boss saw this and he'd get really pissed off.

And he'd say, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I finished my cleaning. I'll do it again later in the shift. And he'd say, do it again. And I was like, well, this is dumb. It's already clean. And long story short, like after a week, I got fired because 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 like, I don't care. I'm paying you per hour. Do it again. And I was like, I think that's kind of dumb. I didn't say it that directly because he was a huge bald guy with like a limp, kind of scary, like a chief zombie or something from the last of us, like one of those giant mushroom people.

So he was really intimidating, but I got fired and I was like, oh my God, is there something wrong with me? Like, am I really lazy? What's this? What's that? And my mom gave me a pat on the back and she's like, it's all fine. Everything's fine. But that was, I suppose, my first foray into trying to optimize anything professionally was slapped down very quickly.

Yeah. And did that change the future or the next time you're like, let's keep going. I can find better ways to do things. It didn't really change anything. And I think constitutionally, and maybe this is the very root cause of all this stuff. I'm very impatient. So even as a little kid, I worked in restaurants growing up.

So I was a bus boy, worked out on Long Island. Rich people would come from the city and kids would try to make their money during the summer. And even adults would try to make their money during the summer. That's how it still works. So in that environment, I would say that I've always been impatient and had really, really high standards for myself and other people.

So even before I got into working as a bus boy, if I went to a restaurant and my glass for water sat empty for more than a few minutes, I drank a lot of water because of the thermoregulation stuff. I would literally get up and just walk into the kitchen of the restaurant, like to try to find a pitcher of water.

And my mom saw this since I was very, very, very young. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not saying everyone should be impatient. There are a lot of downsides to that can cause a lot of friction and interpersonal relationships, but the upside is you just look to do things more quickly.

So there is constitutionally that piece that is still with me to this day. I don't know if that's something that I can resolve necessarily. Me either. Like I find myself sometimes if 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 just like, well, why would I walk? If I could run, I'd like get burned a couple extra calories. I get to the bathroom faster. Like it just seems like I want to use time, energy resources as efficiently as possible. Yeah. And if you want to slap a rebrand on it, right, we can say, okay, optimizing sounds nice, right?

Sounds good. Rather than fucking impatient, pardon my French. But as I've gotten older, I think becoming more targeted with that. It's like, where do you apply the magnifying glass? You don't need it everywhere. And I think over time learning where to apply it and where not to apply it is part of the name of the game.

Was there a light bulb moment where you said, I've become known for this person that is optimizing all these different things. And maybe, maybe it's not serving me in every way. And I should start exploring what it would look like to try to dial it back. I would say even from the earliest success, let's just say with the four hour work week, I think the premise of that book was misunderstood.

And not necessarily by people who read the book, but by the vast majority who never read the book, but know the title. And the premise of that is not to optimize everything. The first steps are really clearly defining your target and then inputs, outputs, and choosing the things that are highest leverage, right?

It's for the greatest per hour output, which is fundamentally very different from optimizing everything. But I would fall into the trap, whether we call it optimizing or through impatience, there's a lot of overlap with that Venn diagram in trying to apply a hyper logical, what I would love to paint as rational, objective approach to as many things as possible.

And there are a few assumptions that are quite a stretch that you need to make for that to work in a lot of areas, whether it's the stock market or at home in your personal relationships. If you assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor who behaves in their best interest and who can be reasons with, and this is true for yourself as well, by the way, when people are dysregulated, you're just a fool.

Like that's not reality. So I think that the place where I paid the highest tax for trying to, let's call it optimize, was in interpersonal relationships with significant others, with anyone in an environment where emotion and irrationality are just part of the soup in which we all live. That's where I think you can really shoot yourself in the foot.

And sometimes it's recoverable and sometimes it's not. So I think that over time, as I would say from pretty early on, I mean, you're sold this dream as a kid or as a human in a culture like that of the US, broadly speaking, there are many different cultures that sort of financial freedom is the path to everything and that unlocks everything.

It solves almost everything. And that's not true. There are a lot of benefits, but when you kind of drive with that, I pretty quickly got to experiences over things. But as I've gotten older, and this is certainly true, it's not brand new. It's not like a revelation I had yesterday.

I mean, this is a work in progress over probably the last 20 years. It's relationships, relationships, relationships. And what that means is less and less and less optimization in a sense. Is that because you've rewired yourself to say, when I spend time on relationships, don't optimize? The magic of applying any kind of surgical thinking is first and foremost, knowing that you don't need to be a surgeon all the time.

It's like, okay, there are times when you put on the scrubs and you wash in and you do the whole thing, but that's just not the right tool for the job all the time. So I wouldn't say that the idea of doing things in a better way is absent when I'm looking at my relationships, but there can be different levels of applying a system.

And I think that more than being an optimizer, I try to be a systems thinker. How can you set up systems so it's hard to fail? How can you set up rules or policies so that even if something that's compartmentalized, like a project fails, you still win over the longterm?

That's kind of how I try to approach things. So if you're applying that to relationships in a conversation, if you're having a fight over the objective truth or reality of what one person is saying or the other, and there's a great therapist named Terry Reel, his writing is very helpful as well, who gives the example of a couple sitting at dinner and the waiter comes over, waiter leaves.

And the husband's like, honey, you don't need to yell. She's like, I wasn't yelling. He's like, yeah, you were. And it turns into this debate. And his point is, even if the husband said, well, honey, you didn't know this, but I hired an audiologist to sit next to us with recording equipment.

And based on all these objective metrics and numbers and this, that, and the other thing is statistical analysis, you were technically yelling. Is the other person, whether it's man or woman, boyfriend, girlfriend, or a family member going to say, I'm so glad you shared that information with me. Based on the data, you're totally right.

Is that going to happen? No, it's not going to happen. It's going to be a shit show. So rather than applied at that level, for me, at least over time, each year, let's say I do something called a past year review. And then I block out anything from a long weekend to a week at a time to spend with my closest friends and family.

And I block it out, I pay for it in advance to have the right types of sunk costs because not all sunk costs are bad. And that is, I would say, sort of a longer term meta level way of quote, unquote, optimizing, applying a system so that things that are important to me don't fall through the cracks.

But then when I'm having a conversation, if someone is telling me about their problem, I don't automatically assume, okay, my job is to try to solve this problem as quickly as possible, because that might not be what they need. It might not be what they want. It may not be what brings you closer.

So I think it's also realizing that there's a stack of zooming in or zooming out and you can apply systems to different layers of that stack. It doesn't have to be all the time. That's actually in the name of efficiency, you're doing something very lazy. If you're constantly trying to optimize, at least in my personal experience, that's what I've concluded this episode is brought to you by delete me.

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But for me, I could sit down or have a conversation like this and say, "Okay, I know that in these certain circumstances or when something costs less 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 this argument." That doesn't mean in the moment.

It just doesn't click on like a default behavior. Have you experienced that? Or how, if you have this system in place, can you turn it off in the moment when sometimes it just feels like it's natural behavior? I feel like what helps and continues to help, has helped, pick your tense, a lot is just zooming out.

So for me, if you really want to zoom out, if you read a lot of history, if you listen to history podcasts, which are probably my favorite type of podcast to listen to, whether it's hardcore history, the OG, or the fall of civilizations, or the rest is history, any of these, the more you study history, the more you realize how absurd the idea is that, for instance, in my case, I'm going to leave some hundred year or eternal legacy with a podcast or something, right?

I hope to do some good in the world. I hope to have a positive impact on listeners. And that's true with the books. It's true with a lot of what I do, but the idea that hundreds of years from now or something like that, people are going to remember my name is patently absurd.

You look back at these titans of industry. Let's say you talk to younger generations today and you're like, "Guns and roses." They're like, who's guns and roses, right? Nirvana. Although Nirvana is back and cool again and on all the t-shirts, maybe that's an exception. So when you start to zoom out and just look at say this concept of legacy and realize how tenuous that is, it's like Alexander the Great, what's his full name?

Greatest conqueror the world has ever known. People are like, yeah, no idea. It's like, yeah, exactly. Okay. So maybe we don't have to take everything quite as seriously, especially with the future tripping. Like, okay, this is very important and it's going to remain important. And this is going to solidify my good name.

It's just kind of ridiculous. So let's just start with that, which I think is instead of being depressing, very, very, very liberating. So that's how I view, let's just say that piece of it. Okay, great. Is that fair to say? It's like, it doesn't matter as much. Like, is that the grand scheme?

That is the grand scheme, but because then you can just, you can zoom out from like this long historical timeline and then you do something like a past year review. And I was joking with some friends a couple of months ago that I wanted to make a journal because I do a lot of journaling and it's become very fashionable for people to like write a few books.

And then they're like, "Fuck, writing books is hard. Let me put out a journal or a workbook, if that allows you to charge more for it." And it's not a bad idea. And some of them are actually very well done, but I was thinking that maybe the most valuable journal I could put out because of brainstorming all these different ideas just for fun.

And one was worries that mostly didn't happen. And basically the journal idea is each morning you write down the things you're worried about or each week, whatever it is. And then you look back on a weekly or monthly basis and see how completely irrelevant or unfounded or fantasy land these worries were.

Similarly, you can look back at certain goals you had that you thought were going to make or break it that were critically important and they just end up being unimportant. So if we assume that we are all as humans kind of delusional on those levels, it allows you, it allows me at least to really slow down.

And if as my mantra or maximum of sorts, I have, it's the relationship stupid. Like when in doubt, just like it's the economy stupid, like it's the relationships, it's the relationships. It's not the money. It's not the toys. It's not the fancy trips. It's not ABCDEF or G really what we're evolved for.

And what you're going to feel best about is time with certain people. Then the rush kind of goes away. And that feels good. It's a huge weight that you're able to just take off your back and drop. And I don't think that's dependent on having a lot of money.

I don't think that's dependent on having quote unquote success. I think that as you become a student of history, which sounds so boring, it's not boring. The more you realize that in a sense, and this is from a lot of my friends in the military, it relates to like reloading guns and all sorts of stuff, but you know, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

It's like, you don't actually need to do a lot of things well to have a great life. And if you're constantly rushing and cramming and trying to optimize every hour, even every day, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. And the collateral damage of that is going to be, I think clearest in your relationships.

That's just my 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 going to schedule, what I'm going to protect, what I'm not going to schedule, what I'm going to turn down, quality of life has just been so much higher.

And that is completely divorced from having more money. In some cases, it's making choices that are going the opposite direction. So if I try to summarize having more perspective and reflecting on your own circumstances and past actions, the process of doing that might make it easier in the moment to fight natural tendencies.

Yeah. I mean, you could certainly say that. You could also say that if you just ask for what a few times, you realize you don't need to rush and it's like, okay, this is really important. Why? Because this, why is that important? Because of this. Okay. So what? One of my favorite quotes is from Rumi, which is be suspicious of what you want.

I just think that is like, man, if you could have a question that you ask yourself on a really regular basis, that would currently for me be top of the list. I would say one of the top, then this compulsion to rush the sort of hustle culture saturation starts to drop away.

That's true with a lot of different optimizing also with cost cutting too, right? Like it can apply to a lot of things and none of these things are inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison, right? Paracelsus is true with a lot of things like you can kill yourself by drinking too much water.

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And just to humanize you to the audience, do you still catch yourself over optimizing? Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not like a one and done type situation. And we're all going to have certain compulsions, right? It's like, all right, the great Dan wants to sleep and the border collie wants to run.

And, you know, the Dutch shepherd wants to like jump in the pool and play with the ball. And it's like, okay, well, if you're going to train any of those dogs to do anything, just like you have to train yourself, you're going to have natural inclinations. You're going to have conditioning.

And if you want to counterbalance that or change it, it takes constant course correction, not to use a really belabored metaphor, but it's like, yeah, if you get in a boat 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 whatever, it's like, you're constantly adjusting.

You don't just set a straight line and go from A to B typically, right? There's constant adjusting along the way. And do I get distracted? Do I end up going on weird side quests? And I'm like, well, that was pretty stupid. Yeah, of course. Humans are weird animals somehow.

And I don't know if it's having kids in the car that's changed this behavior, but I was always the person that would look like seven lights ahead of that light looks like it's probably going to change. So let's turn right here and let's do this. And now in the car, I'm just kind of like, it doesn't matter.

Like we'll get there when we get there. But then there are other areas where I'm like, well, this seems like it's a little too expensive right now. Maybe we should go somewhere else to get it. So I've been able to turn off certain things and not other things. And one thing that I learned from Simon Sinek when we were talking about listening, he suggested I take a listening course.

I don't know if you've ever done this, but he was like, I was the worst friend to all my friends. I took this listening course and it really helped. What do you learn in the listening course? Best I could describe it was you basically learn how to stop yourself from talking.

Yeah. It's like the main thing is just not jumping in, like you said, to fix things, but it's like you learn how to really listen to what someone is saying. And, you know, there's these frameworks like three levels of listening and what you're trying to solve for. But I left that and thought, okay, so I think I need something that's almost like bite my tongue when someone's talking to remind myself, but the takeaway was the more you practice it, the more it becomes habit.

So if you have a partner and you're like, Hey, every time you can, can you help me out and just remind me if I jump in and say, Hey, don't forget to listen. You know, you can train yourself by practicing the thing you want to be. And it sounds so crazy, but I'm getting better at it.

Yeah. I mean, this has come up a lot with type A people on the podcast also, where, you know, when in doubt, talk less, talk less, talk less and stop compulsively making things worse. Or I wish I remember the attribution, but someone had the acronym wait. They just constantly would say, wait to themselves.

Why am I talking? And you perpetuate not always, but oftentimes what you get rewarded for. And so if you're getting rewarded for problem solving throughout your life, what are you going to do? You're going to look for problems to solve. Even if there aren't actually many problems, that can be a big problem in and of itself, right?

If you get rewarded for making money, okay, you're going to look to make more money. You get rewarded for all the hacks, right? You're going to look for all the hacks and that's not in and of itself a bad thing, but if it becomes consuming and it becomes a singular lens, it becomes a pair of glasses.

You can't take off. Yeah. Then you're probably going to pay some costs and they can be ultimately pretty significant. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up, inflation down.

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Is that an alternative? I think it's a worthwhile experiment. Just put on a different hat for two weeks. I was like, okay, if you were going to choose how you say yes or no to things, choose how you say yes or no to people, right? So maybe instead of saying, should I commit to this activity?

Should I say yes to this invitation? You could instead say, all right, I'm going to say yes or no based on the people. That's it. For instance, we have a mutual friend, Kevin Rose. And if Kevin was like, let's go have, he's not drinking right now, but let's go have a coffee and like talk about taxes.

I'm not excited about taxes. If anyone else was like, come and to this event and we're going to talk about taxes. I would say I am 100% not interested, but because Kevin is so funny, he's so smart. He's a close friend. I want to deepen my relationship with Kevin when I can true with you as well.

I'd be like, yeah, sure. Okay. Based on the subject matter, it would be a no, maybe even based on the activity. Maybe it's like, we're going to go to this event together about taxes. I'd be like, oh gosh, shoot me now. No. But based on the person, I would say yes.

And I did that for a while. I was like, okay, there are certain people on my list. When I do my past year review who give me consistently, this comes to the state question, positive emotions. They recharge my batteries. Okay. I'm just going to say yes to basically anything involving those people for a period of time.

So you could do that. And I really just encourage people to be experimental about it and try on different hats. Like you're not losing that hat you've worn forever. Just putting it on the shelf. You can always take it back, put it on your head and use it again.

But like, try other lenses. Can you share a few lenses for people who are like, okay, I'm ready to try. I could optimize for relationships when I'm thinking about how to make a decision. Sure. So it could be people when you're looking at things to say yes or no to, it could be, I'll give one.

Where can I overspend? And you know, Ramit said, he talks about this, but I've thought about it a lot as well. And where can I spend more? Not where can I spend less? Where can I spend more? Even if it's very temporary, two weeks. And I remember this really hitting me hard.

This is quite a while back, but I wrote a blog post about it called, where are you still using single ply? And I remember sitting, sitting on the toilet. Sorry guys. And I just remember, I was like using this toilet paper. I had bought it. It was like the thinnest onion paper, like newspaper that you could imagine single ply.

And what do you do if you have single ply toilet paper? You just, you have to fold it or you're going to end up stabbing the pit of despair. Like you, it's going to be messy. So the whole point of saving money by having single ply is kind of ridiculous at face value.

It's just end up folding it anyway. And I was just like, what am I doing? This is so ridiculous. Clearly I can afford like the fluffy, luxurious toilet paper. It's like a meaningfully different quality. The cost is trivial. What am I doing? Like, why, why is this that I have this terrible, terrible toilet paper here?

And I started just asking that question, right? Where am I using single ply in life? It's such a nominal cost. And then you can take it up a few levels, right? And this is straight from Rameet. So I'll give him credit, but it's like, all right, if I had to spend 10 times more on one or two things, one or two areas, something coming up in my calendar, what would that be?

It's like, okay, you don't actually have to do it, but just as a thought exercise that can clarify your values. It can clarify the things that actually give you a huge return on energy, right? Okay. Maybe you try that. Is it going to kill you? Is it going to break the bank?

Probably not. Anyone who's even asking that question as a stretch exercise is not going to be prone to overspending. Most likely we have some friends who might be exceptions to that, but I grew up in a family without much money where there was definitely a lot of cost cutting.

It's like, want a new bike, ain't going to happen, right? Want this toy that everybody else is getting? Ain't going to happen. Lots of TV dinners and stuff. Not dirt poor, but we had to watch expenses. And when you grow up with that kind of conditioning, which I did, that is going to be closer to my default than spending tons of money.

So it's worth pushing in the opposite direction. You're not at risk of just going broke like some NFL star who's like misspent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That's not going to happen. The risk is that you push from like a 10 out of 10 frugality to like an eight out of 10.

So like, yeah, stretch, give it a shot. That would be another lens. And it's more than a lens because that sounds kind of abstract. It's just like a guiding question that helps you make different decisions for a period of time. That's it. Another exercise similar to the 10x that I tried once, which was really funny.

It's like, what are the things in your life that you wish you could improve, but you haven't because of the cost? Write them down and see how much they cost. Yeah. And sometimes they don't actually cost that much. A lot of the time they don't cost very much. My wife and I really wanted to put mirrors in the garage, which we turned into a gym.

And we were stressing out about all these things. And then one day we were at Lowe's or Home Depot, and I just saw them on the wall. And I was like, what if we just buy these? They might not be the perfect ones. They might not be the perfect dimensions.

They were like $180. And three hours later, they were on the wall, mounted, good to go. And we'd been holding off trying to think about how do we make sure we do this well? How much is it going to cost? And then for what was not egregiously expensive and a couple hours, we just solved it.

And this lens I now have for a lot of things is execute on the easy and then decide if you want the perfect later. So it's kind of like, if you were looking for new insurance policy, it's like, well, I found one that's $200 cheaper. Is there one that is $500 cheaper?

Maybe. But there's not a lot of switching costs. Maybe insurance for some people is a high switching cost. It's like, well, switch to the ones that could save you $200. Pause and be like, do I want to keep looking? Yeah. I often think I have to go to the end.

But sometimes it's like, if you find something good enough, one way to rewire your brain is let's just do the thing that's good enough. Not tell myself I'm stopping there. Yeah. But do it and then decide if I want to keep going. And if I don't do it, in my mind, I want to keep going.

But once I'm halfway there, I'm like, I'm okay stopping. Well, this comes back to the water, the elixir of life. You drink too much, you die, literally, if you really, really overdo it. And there used to be these radio programs that would compete to have people on air drink water and people died every year doing this.

And if we look at optimizing, there are different versions of this, different breeds of overdosing that you could call the optimizer's curse. There are different types of optimizer's curses, and it depends on what you're optimizing for. So if, for instance, you're optimizing your time, and this is a risk with, say, the four-hour workweek or folks who are looking for whether it's effectiveness, right?

Doing the right things, efficiency, doing things well, which can be treated quite separately. You could end up at a point where you are valuing your time so highly that if you have to wait 10 minutes at a grocery store, you get stressed out because you have already tabulated the value of each minute or each hour at X.

And now you're in a pissy mood for the next hour, or at least those 10 minutes, maybe that bleeds over because you're frustrated and then you're sharp with your wife or your kids or something. I mean, this is a, this is actually a real thing. And this is a real problem that people experience.

I've experienced it. And that is a function of over-optimizing, becoming somewhat myopic about the value of your time. On the other hand, if you overvalue your money, right? And expenses and so on, you can end up really short changing the value of your time. So you give one example of a workaround, which is like solve for good quickly, and then you can do perfect later.

That's a great approach. Another approach, for instance, right now, I have a new home office. It's pretty small. I do a lot of recording there and it is very, very bouncy. So for purposes of recording audio, it's not great. It just is. It has a lot of echo and bounce.

So I and my team have been looking at different types of paneling for the ceiling that can reduce bounce. And this is turned into God bless them. And this is because I have set the model for this, an incredible due diligence on these different types of paneling in a Google document.

It is like a world-class deep dive as if I were about to make like a $20 million investment in paneling company. And I mean, I don't make investments that big, just to be clear, but it's like the due diligence is impressive. And my take is, hey, just order three types.

I'll decide which one I like when I get home and see it. And then we'll just return the other two or give the two away to people in my audience who need them. Right. But the cost of us all spending time on this is real. So let's just order three and move on with life.

Right. So that's another option, right? Like when in doubt, okay, you're painstakingly trying to choose across three. It doesn't work as well with insurance, but with something like paneling, it's like, you just buy all three. And these are not that expensive, by the way. This is not like buying three cars and then deciding which one you like.

And that can be applied tons and tons of places. And sometimes not just buying three, but paying someone to outsource the problem. I go back to when we had our first child, my wife was really trying to make sure that we had a variety of foods to feed our kids so that as they age, they were comfortable eating all kinds of things.

And she was like, I want to make a meal plan to infuse a hundred foods across these number of days. And there was this woman that sold, she basically someone like her who had this problem and created a menu plan for kids for this purpose. And it was like 50 bucks.

And she's like, why would I pay $50? I could just do this. And we had this discussion about like, well, how long is it going to take? She's like, I don't know, like 20 hours of research. It's like, we'll just pay the person. Sometimes we feel like we don't want to pay people to do something we could do.

But if you think about how much time you can save, sometimes it's an extreme amount of time. And sometimes even just saving money, even if you're not paying someone, it's just like buying the thing. I hate throwing money away. So I've had times where it's like, you buy the thing and it's like, well, they won't take the return unless I drive it.

And now I'm going to lose this $12. And you just have to like, the idea of letting it go is hard. But sometimes 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. Sure. And there are a lot of ways to look at that, right?

One is, for instance, just thinking about decision fatigue and trying to minimize decisions. So you can minimize decisions in a bunch of different ways so that you're preserving your mental bandwidth for actually making hopefully more important decisions or decisions you enjoy thinking about. One is you can outsource, right?

So outsourcing, yeah, sure. It could be an assistant. It could be AI. It could be when you go to a restaurant, if you want to have a lot of fun, my friend and I did this last year. This is one of those examples of booking something way in advance, the right sunk costs.

Day of the dead in Mexico City had wanted to do it forever, hadn't done it for any host of reasons, usually because it would creep up and I would get too close. And then it was too last minute or there was an issue with housing. Booking in advance in this case, even if I end up not going, right?

Hotel room, easy. Inviting some friends, got down there and what we ended up doing, I mean, I speak Spanish, so it wouldn't have been a problem. My other close friend who was with me also, but we just decided to go to a restaurant we walked by, no Google reviews, no nothing.

We'd say, we want one appetizer and one main. We're going to share it. We don't want to know what you're going to pick. If there are any allergies, okay, here are the allergies, but like, don't tell us what's coming. Just give us one appetizer, one main, and we're going to eat it here.

And then we're going to ask you for another restaurant recommendation. We're going to do the same thing. And that became how we did dinner. And it was so fun. And we tried things we never would have tried in a million years. Delicious and no decisions. It was so fun.

And that is the type of off menu, I guess, pun intended approach that you could take. Then there are decisions. Maybe you don't need to make it all. This is also true with questions or terms that are really ambiguous. Like the best way to solve a lot of problems is to not take them on as your problem.

So that could apply to how do I find happiness? You know, how can I be successful? How can I find contentment? And unless these terms are very, very, very carefully defined, that's just putting yourself in a maze with no exit. You're not going to get anywhere. And that can become very disconcerting because you've placed a value on this thing, this concept.

But if you haven't defined it, you're literally just driving down a dead end street and you're going to beat yourself up over something that you shouldn't beat yourself up about at all. And I've just realized there are a lot of problems where the answer is just avoid it in the first place or put it down.

You don't need to solve it. And that can certainly apply to a lot of decisions. Like there is like, could I outsource this? But then there's also like, do I need to even do this at all? Like in the case of my home office, if I had the option, this is not true of a studio nearby where I could just rent instead of buy.

Yeah, rent. And I thought a lot about the elegance of renting instead of buying supplies to homeownership to supplies to anything with like a mental and financial carrying cost. There's a lot of logic, more than you might expect around viewing yourself as rich enough to rent. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, the banking product businesses like mine use to simplify their finances in one place.

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They're all brands I love and use. So please consider supporting those who support us. I've thought about writing. I actually did write a long piece on this for the book that might come out in a hundred years, but rich enough to rent. What does that look like? Even if you don't view yourself as rich and the idea of reframing, throwing away money with just like putting it back into circulation, the money's going to somebody.

And this is also why I'll, if I'm trying to simplify, which I do routinely, I'll go through my closet and I'll be like, all right, what have I not worn over X period of time? Or what type of anything do I have? Artwork, clothing, anything that I'm getting like a one to five out of 10 use of that I could donate where someone's going to get like a seven to 10 use out of.

I'm like, that just seems like karmically the right thing to do. This object will just get better used by someone else. Okay. Donate. Boom. Speaker 1: Does it ever cross your mind of like, well, what if I need it one day? That question did cross my mind a lot.

And my solution these days is over correct. If you're asking that question, the answer is low probability that you're going to need it, right? If you're even asking the question, like, what if I might need this someday? The answer is probably not. And the answer is also likely if you're considering donating it that you can afford to buy it later.

And so if you sort of look at the costs involved of having this thing, occupying space, maybe feeling guilty that you're not using it, that's a real thing and weighing that against like the probability. Okay. Let's just say there's a 10% probability that you're going to need it at X point in time in the future.

And it costs 20 bucks. Okay. Well, I'm sure somebody can provide a more sophisticated model for this, but it's like, okay, the real cost is $2. And I'm sure there's some discount you could apply to the time in the future. So it's like $1, relax, get rid of it.

Especially with Amazon same day, some of these things, it's like, how hard is it to replace 20 years ago? It might've been a big adventure. Now, most things seem like you can get them tomorrow. Yeah. If you live in a major city, at least whether it's objects or information for me also reading, looking, and I'm, I'm borrowing this term from a woman named Kathy Sierra.

And I came across this probably 20 plus years ago. And I still remember it, but like just in time information instead of just in case information. So you could read 20 books on personal finance. You could read 20 books on some business you hope to start someday. And what's going to happen a year later, if you're actually going to start the business, you're going to have to reread those damn books.

So instead of just in case information, just in time information, you can apply that to things as well with experiences, with friends and those close relationships. I don't do that. That is where it's like, block it in the calendar. If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. You're not going to protect it.

It's just going to get crowded out by other or other things that you might think are important, but it's going to be to the detriment of those relationships and stuff. That's the one place where it's like, okay, pay for it in advance, do basically the opposite of most of what I'm saying for things.

And to make room for all of that time with people, you say no a lot, or you probably need to say no more, whether it's events, time spent otherwise, how do you think about saying no more? There are a few ways that I think about saying no more. The first is don't rely on willpower or discipline.

Both of those are really overrated and a lot of the forces that exist and will continue to get magnified and more powerful in terms of anything that is on your screen. When you open your phone is intended to defeat your discipline and willpower. You are outgunned, trust me. I mean, you know, people at these companies, I know people, these companies, these teams are very sophisticated.

It's like, if you do something really bad and the SWAT team gets called on you, just shoot yourself in the head. You're not going to win. You're not Jason Bourne. You are going to lose. Similarly, it's like, if you open your phone, that's basically the SWAT team or a SEAL Team 6 of behavioral psychology and data science being called upon to use everything they know about you against you.

You're going to lose. For that reason, in my mind, you need to try to stack the deck in your favor. The way I do that is putting things in the calendar early, prepaying for things, inviting people so that if I beg off or try to cancel, there's a lot of social cost, financial cost.

If it's not in my calendar, I know that I will squeeze all sorts of things into it and then it will become incredibly difficult to block out extended periods of time. And by extended, that's going to differ person to person. But for me, it's like a long weekend, maybe a week.

Like these things are in the calendar way out to the end of the year. By the end of Q1 each year, I have lots of stuff blocked out for the whole year. And that is not dependent. I just have to emphasize this on having financial freedom or a ton of money.

It is not. You do not need to spend a lot of money on this stuff. You do need to block it out in your calendar and set some incentives, whether those are carrots or sticks. Sticks do work pretty well. They're not very fashionable, right? It's like kumbaya, positive reinforcement.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the stick still works pretty well in terms of if you cancel this thing, there is a non recoverable cost. That's a great way to keep you on task in terms of spending time with your friends or family. So that's how I think about it.

And then in terms of saying yes or no, if you want to broaden that, for instance, to projects for me, professional projects or creative projects, I'm thinking about how I can win, even if the project fails. And the way I approach that is looking at anything, whether it's a test run with my podcast, 10 plus years ago, I commit that I'm going to do six to 10 episodes.

That gives me a graceful exit if it doesn't work out, but there's enough there that I should learn a lot. So that's the first criterion, like density of learning. How much am I going to learn? How many skills am I going to develop? And then relationships, new relationships or deepening relationships.

And both of those pillars need to persist after the project and be transferable to other things, but you don't need to overthink it. It's just like optimize for relationships, new or existing and skill acquisition and learning. And if you do that, I've had so many startups fail. I've had many projects fail, but if you are optimizing for those two things, as those accumulate snowball over time, you'll often find in the ashes of some failure, the actual seeds of some much greater success later.

That was true with say the four hour chef, which was my probably worst performing book and was a disaster for a number of reasons. The book itself, I'm very proud of, but for lots of reasons that didn't work out, I was totally burned out. But in the process of launching it, I was optimizing for learning.

How did I do that in a launch? I was like, well, every time I launch anything, I'm asking, what is a new channel? What is an old channel that has become unsexy that I don't know about? What is something that's growing in importance, but that people aren't paying a lot of attention to?

And I would ask a bunch of my friends who just launched books. I said, yeah, there are these things called podcasts. And so by virtue of being on a bunch of podcasts, Rogan, Marin, Nerdist, Adam Carolla at the time, which were kind of the big dogs, certainly some of them still are.

I thought to myself, wow, this is so enjoyable. I'm not getting my face airbrushed for like two hours, starting at 5:00 AM for a morning show that lasts two minutes where they mispronounce my name and read a teleprompter over my shoulder. Okay, maybe I'll try this. So if I hadn't thought about optimizing for those things in the four hour chef, even though that book by objective measures compared to my other books was absolutely a failure, podcasts never would have happened.

And we could look at that. We could look at all of my biggest wins. Almost all of them had some predecessor that didn't work out that ended up being hugely, hugely valuable. So you look at say my biggest angel investing wins. I became an advisor to a company called StumbleUpon.

Garrett Camp was the founder of StumbleUpon. It was basically like people get the reference like a Pandora for web pages. And back in the day, it drove a ton of traffic to different websites, just like Dig and our buddy, Kevin Rose. These were hugely important in terms of driving web traffic to different web pages.

Didn't work out. I was an advisor, became really close to Garrett because he was a genius, really fun to hang out with. I was just texting with him yesterday. We're still friends to this day. This is 2007. I want to say something like that. StumbleUpon was a zero for me.

But then what happens? About a year later, Garrett wants to grab some coffee. Hey, I've got some ideas around this new thing. At the time it was shortly named UberCab LLC becomes Uber, right? Boom. It was the relationship that transferred. We're still friends now. So I just want to say that the yes, no question is a big one.

Like what you say yes and no to determines the course of your life and the course of the lives around you. You are sort of the sum of your decisions. So you can use different approaches for this, different frameworks, different tools. I mean, there's some really simple ones. I mean, this is one that we probably don't want to spend a ton amount of time on because it gets very nuanced.

But if you're used to looking at spreadsheets and numbers might point at somebody next to me and I can point at myself, right? Really trying to do things by the numbers, trying to be very analytical. Sometime you lose sight and lose touch with basic intuition. Now, this can be a hand wavy thing.

I would say that there is engaged intuition and evasive intuition, or let's say active intuition and passive intuition. Passive intuition is where someone uses hand wavy intuition in quotation marks to justify doing something they want to do anyway. But they can't give you a real reason. They just say, well, it's just my feeling in my gut, this intuition, and it's a laziness.

That's sort of passive intuition. Active intuition is where you actually check in with yourself as someone who has thousands, hundreds of thousands of years or more of evolutionary machinery that predates language to check in, to ask yourself, how do I actually feel about this person? Like what's happening in my body?

When I look at these possible projects on a list of possible commitments for the next year, like how do I actually feel internally? When you have some type of approach for feeling that, you can actually get a really strong signal. And I remember this is way before the four hour work week.

I was considering doing this TV show way back in the day before anyone knew who I was. And I was agonizing over the deal points structure and all of the specifics that I could put into some kind of Excel spreadsheet, agonizing over it, going back and forth for weeks.

And then my girlfriend at the time asked me over dinner one night, she's like, do you even trust this guy who was like the producer who would be the counterparty? And I was like, not really. And she's like, well, why are you doing the deal then? And I thought to myself, she has a point, she has a point.

And I'd say in the last handful of years, as someone who tends to be very kind of prefrontal cortex by the numbers that revisiting of evolved animal intelligence has become 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.

So those are a few ways that I could say I've refined my way that I approach yes and no. And there's the tactical stuff. It's like, okay, I could give someone 20 templates for how to say no in different circumstances, and they'll be good. They'll be useful. But if you're not addressing some of the underlying psychological aspects, if you're not addressing some of the underlying philosophical beliefs that you have or worldviews that you have, if you're not revising those things, the templates don't have any gas, they don't last.

And that's true with also, if you have failed to lose weight for 10 years, I could give you an index card. And that's what all my busy friends requested. When I wrote the four hour body, give me an index card. I just need the cliff notes, and then I'll do it.

Success rate, 0%. And that's true with yes and no as well. If you have incredible FOMO, and you believe that opportunities are always fleeting, or that there are certain people in your life who if you cross them, you're going to pay this huge social penalty that is going to be incredibly impactful in your life, terminal maybe in some way.

I can give you all the tools and templates in the world. They're not going to work. So for yes and no, I would also say having confidence, for instance, in your ability to come up with ideas, your ability to execute, your ability to make opportunity, your ability to forge new relationships, or repair relationships, the ability to look at your journal of worries that mostly didn't happen and to realize like, oh, for instance, like right now, I'm dealing with multiple aging relatives who have all sorts of different issues, including diabetes and Alzheimer's.

And in some instances, I will spend all this time agonizing over a conversation because everything in my lived experience tells me it's going to be really difficult. There's going to be a ton of pushback. It's going to take forever. And then plan B or C are going to be terrible, et cetera, et cetera.

I get myself all wound up about this. And then I have the conversation. They're like, yeah, that sounds fine. It's like, oh my God. Wow. That was a lot of unnecessary suffering. And you can't just on paper, convince yourself of all these things. You got to practice, which is why currently the book tentatively titled the notebook is an 800 page draft, because if it were really easy, it can be simple, but if it were really easy, everyone would be good at it.

And that's not the case clearly. So what is it like when it's actually published? It's going to be a super practical training manual. It will be like a personal trainer for saying no, which is actually a personal trainer for saying yes to the right things. That's like the aspect of it that is part and parcel of the whole thing.

If you get good at saying no, there's sort of informed no. And then there's uninformed no, like a petulant two-year-old or three-year-old kid can be like, no, no, no, they're not thinking about it. They're just being a pain in the ass and adults can do that too, which is not necessarily a bad experiment.

If your default is always saying yes, like a lazy, yes, sure. Having a lazy no for a while is actually not a bad idea. I'm going on a no diet where you just say no to basically everything, because then you see that the social fallout, the costs actually are pretty minimal or they're recoverable, or maybe one person shows you their true colors.

And it's like, okay, I have a really high maintenance, volatile friend who loves drama. Well, maybe that friendship has sort of come to the end of its season. Past that though, to get really good at making better decisions, you have to be good at both. Yes and no. I think one thing that's helped me say no is having children because you have less time and you have a thing and you're like, I actually want to spend a lot of time with these people.

Great excuse too. And it's a great excuse. No one's mad. Like, oh, I've got kids. I can't come out tonight. And then you realize, oh, didn't matter. There was an event last night that I had tentatively planned on going to Portland for the day, fly to Portland, wake up at 6am, fly down to LA to be here with you.

And fortunately, someone said, oh, the dinner that we were going to host, we're not going to be able to host it. And I was like, that was the perfect thing I needed to say no. There were other things that I wanted to accomplish there. It felt so good to not be there, you know, like to everyone there that is listening.

Like I would have loved to spend time with you, but the cards didn't play right today. And I feel so good about that. Now I can experience that. It makes it easier the next time. Yeah. And I've found that kids really forced a conversation because you just have less time and you have to be better at prioritizing it.

It doesn't make the FOMO all go away, but it forces you to experience what it's like to miss out and realize that it's just not that big of a deal. Yeah. It doesn't matter. And I think over time also, and people might think when I say what I'm 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, but you have a much greater ability to create opportunity at a surface area for luck. Then you realize you meaning anyone listening. And the more I travel around, the more I hear from readers, stories and listeners and so on, the more I believe this to be the case.

And I'll give people an example of how you might do that. And you can do this from pretty much anywhere. There are some limitations, of course, but if you say, Tim, I don't believe you. That's that doesn't seem true for me in my life. Let's say a full-time job and you have a family.

Okay. What if you were to volunteer? Maybe you do this with your spouse or your partner. You can figure it out. Most things can be figured out. Most people listening are not living in like a war torn country with the types of problems that are actually very common around the world.

Most people have pretty high grade problems. They are solvable. You could volunteer at a nonprofit. This is what I did when I first moved to Silicon Valley. I knew nobody. I was driving around in a shitty, it was a Plymouth used minivan, kind of puke green. The back seats got stolen when I was in Mountain View.

So it looked super sketchy. It looked like something from Silence of the Lambs. And I was like, oh God. And I'm listening to audio cassette tapes that I bought used. Tony Robbins' Personal Power 2 was actually excellent. And a couple of other things like Roger Dawson's, I think it was Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating, etc.

Occasionally eating Jack in the Box, which was across the street from my apartment complex next to the Safeway. I mean, this was the state of affairs. So very little money, knew nobody. And I just looked for startup nonprofits, like the Indus Entrepreneur, Tai at the time, SVACE. I'm not sure if it's around anymore.

Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. Wherever you are, let's say in the US, chances are there's a YPO, or an EO, and these are like Entrepreneurs' Organization, Young Presidents' Organization, I think it is. Chances are there's a chapter nearby. Volunteering at these events and doing more than you are asked to do, this is key.

Because most folks who volunteer do the bare minimum. If you do slightly more than is asked of you, chances are you'll be offered more responsibility. And that is exactly what happened with me, right? So I would be tasked with checking people's tickets on the way in, and then I would walk around refilling water glasses.

Literally, that's what I did. And then I would ask, I'd say, "Hey, my hands are free. I know I finished with the tickets. Anything else I can do?" Ask that of the organizers or somebody with one level down. Before you know it, lickety-split within two months, they're like, "Hey, this guy really likes working for free.

So let's give him more responsibility." Actually shows up on time. These are basic things, right? Shows up on time, does what he says he's going to do. And within a few months, I was interacting with the speakers. Boom. I'm still in touch with some of the speakers to this day.

That was 2,025 years ago. And these are solvable things. That's one of the ways. And yes, luck outside of your control, lady fortune, is a huge factor, but you can create more opportunity than you realize. And that's important because then you don't feel like you need to white knuckle or rush into these sliding door situations where you have to say, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes." It just isn't necessary.

Now, could someone argue, "Hey, early in your life, should you say yes to a lot?" And the answer is sure. I believe that. When you can survive on a futon or a pad on the floor of someone's apartment eating ramen, and you have very few responsibilities, and most importantly, you don't know what you're really skilled at.

You don't know what you are good at and what you love doing or what you're obsessed with. I should be clear. Follow your passion. I'm not sure it's very helpful, but what you're good at that you can be obsessed about. That'll give you the endurance to win competitively. To figure out where those two things are and where they overlap in your life, you need to try a lot of stuff.

So yeah, in the beginning, say yes to tons of stuff, but sooner than you realize. It's not when you have millions of dollars. It's not when you've hit a home run. Sooner than you realize getting good at single tasking and putting on blinders and getting good at saying yes to very few things and then defending those, that is the superpower.

And I think not to pull us into the swamp of AI conversation, but as things get more saturated, as there is just an increasing deluge of noise and information and deepfakes selling you shit that is perfectly customized to your feed, the ability to say no and to firewall your attention, it's going to become a survival necessity.

It will not just be for people who want to hit a home runs or do super well, just to maintain some semblance of like psychological stability, that's going to become a real critical life skill. Ted talk complete. We talked about optimizing for a lot of things. One thing you've talked a lot about, but we haven't discussed yet is play.

Does that fit as a state that you aim for? Yeah, it does. Play is not frivolous. Fun is not frivolous. We can canvas the animal kingdom, like play as often rehearsal for something else, right? You see cubs playing, you see puppies playing. It's practice for all sorts of different life skills, even though they're doing it for pure enjoyment.

And furthermore, I would say in the last, certainly in the last five years, I've resurrected play and games in my own life. They take a lot of different forms because it is one of the easiest ways to ensure social interaction, like analog social bonding. I look at my friends.

I look at their families. I look at their kids. I look at my audience. You see chronic anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, self-harm, all of these things, just hockey sticking up and to the right. And you can't point to a single cause, but I do think just for simplicity stake to cut another Ted talk short, that analog social interaction, ideally play of some type, is like the key counter medication for addressing a lot of these things.

And what does that look like for adults? Because I know as a kid, you think I'm going to run in the woods and climb a tree. Is it the same thing? Let's look at play. What does this mean? I'm sure someone has a great definition of play, but I would say it's any type of activity you engage in that doesn't immediately have some survival value.

So for instance, a few months ago, I went to the mountains in Montana into the wilderness for survival training with a couple of close friends. And that's an example of one thing I blocked out. I was a week and there was a decent amount of shared suffering, right? It was like freezing rain and hail on the first day that we packed in and we're trying to make a fire.

It's pissing rain. That doesn't sound like fun to most people, but like that is a game of sorts where it's like, we're learning these survival skills and getting a lot of physical activity. And there's a physical component, which I think is undervalued. And even if you're sitting in front of a screen playing world of Warcraft, there's definitely a physical interaction.

Your body has to be engaged. Mind and body are not separate, but we are evolved to move, which is why I think the idea of uploading consciousness and having anything resembling this experience as a brain in a jar or a brain and some type of solid state storage doesn't actually work.

And a famous investor and also really technical polymath named Steve Jurvetson has written about this at length. I don't actually think it works because we're so evolved to move. So for me, these days, play typically involves some type of motion. There's a certain critical mass. It could be one person if you're playing something like tennis, but it could be a handful of people at a group dinner where you're getting up, moving around, standing around a kitchen island.

I would view that as play also. The connective tissue for me, there are many different types of play. You could play solitaire, sure. And consider that play. But for me, it is the social interaction. So one example from childhood would be, since I was not, when I was really young, sort of in the wrestling epoch, that was a great way that my mom would exhaust me, but I wasn't particularly athletically inclined.

I would play Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons was my salvation. I mean, it was me and a bunch of Uber nerds, like three or four. And in terms of storytelling, teamwork, escapism, fun, just taking a break from the misery, frankly, that was being a small super nerd in school, it was not fun on Long Island, I assure you.

And I think in most places, it's not very fun. Dungeons and Dragons was like this incredible, nourishing, beautiful experience. I mean, sometimes there's bad behavior if you had like a pissed off dungeon master wanted to punish people or something. But Oliver talking to you, thankfully, he never punished me.

I appreciate that. So games of that type are something I've been trying to sort of resurrect for myself in the last four or five years. It's funny, I was thinking about the last week, and what was one of the most enjoyable moments of my last week. And not for the purpose of recording any of this, but my wife and I decided to try some of the like ridiculous couples balance weird ways do ridiculous things jump over shoulders and pull between legs that are all over, you know, the reels of Instagram and TikTok.

And my wife and I are in the living room trying these ridiculous things. We're not recording it. My five year old daughter, who's quite conservative was like, Mom, Dad, stop doing this. You might get hurt. And at one point, there was something where my wife was going to crawl onto my back.

We had a camera in the house that caught the audio because we were debating what happened. And she was like, I'm going to climb on your back. And I was like, okay, I bent over. But she jumped. We both fell over and we were laughing for five minutes straight.

It was one of the most fun things we've done in months. Didn't cost any money, took the time of moving a table out of the way. And we were just like, we should do stuff like this more often. And I think with our kids, it's natural, but just as adults, you know, sometimes it doesn't seem as natural.

And then we were like, we should invite people over and just do this. Like, let's invite our friends over and try to recreate ridiculous TikTok partner challenges, but not record it. Like, like this is not a performance broadcast. This is not trying to for clicks or anything. This was just to have a good time.

Yeah. And then how do you actually do it? You have that realization. Then what do you do? Yeah. So I think for us, it was like, oh, let's just do this again this week for the involving other people. We haven't gotten that far yet. But if you put it in the calendar, you invite those people and then you're like, okay, I'm making this up.

It doesn't have to be this fancy. But if you were like, all right, I'm going to pay my friend Bob 50 bucks to come over and like barbecue for everybody. Okay. Boom. You got some sunk cost. You invited people. They've blocked it out on their calendars. You're going to feel like an asshole if you cancel.

You're probably going to do that. Yeah. You're probably actually going to do it. We're going to force ourselves to do it. And the physical play and the laughing, like the emotion and the laughter and the social connection, those are ingredients in the cocktail that I try to include. So for instance, people can find groups all over the country.

Now, one of my friends, Jason Niemer was one of the co-creators of something called acro yoga. Kids love it. If you watch like bonobos and chimps playing, they do something that very much resembles acro yoga, which is effectively, it's not quite yoga. So for people who are like, oh, I don't want to do sun salutation.

It's going to make my hamstrings hurt. This is not that it's more like partner acrobatics can be very simple. And there is always fumbling and laughing involved also can get you in really great shape, but that's a side note. So people can check out acro yoga. It's like playing airplane with your kids, but with your partner, with your partner or with your kids, which is the fun thing.

But to give people an idea, it's like, you know, you lean on your back and you balance your kids on your feet. You're kind of doing an acro yoga pose with your kids. Yeah, 100%. The person on top would be in bird position and it doesn't take a lot of athleticism.

I have bought lessons of acro yoga for a lot of couples and the hit rate is 100%. This includes people who are not athletic and you don't have to pay for a private. Chances are, if you're in just about any major city, you don't even need to be in a city.

There are acro yoga groups all over the country, all over the world. They do it in parks, typically costs nothing. And man, the before and after in terms of like state of doing something like that, it doesn't have to be that, but CrossFit would be a more intense version.

And you see the camaraderie and the bonding and putting aside the hyper cult behavior, but that is valuable. It's really, really valuable. The laughter I like to add in. I've done CrossFit, not as much laughing involved. The point is you can engineer these things. They don't have to cost a lot, but if you have that realization like you did, like, oh man, we should do more of this.

You need to get it in the calendar. If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. And you just have to make it as defensible as like an important business meeting. And I will often book something like that. It could be, well, I just had elbow surgery, so it's going to be a little while, but like rock climbing with friends, like indoor gym.

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 myself to do for a very long time after college, which is just let work drag and sort of fill the void because there's always more to do.

I have 300 unread text messages right now, 320 something text. That's let alone inbox, which is like a thousand plus, which is comical at this point. So there's always going to be more to do or that you can do. So having that as a bookend, having stuff planned for the weekend, because guess what?

If you don't have stuff planned for your weekend, something else will fill that void. It's not always going to be something good. Yeah. It's very easy to just sit around and do nothing. And again, I feel like one of the biggest themes of the changes that you talk about in my life is, oh, you have kids, we got to plan something because they're not just going to sit at home and do nothing.

You don't want to sound like a marketing case for having children, but it does solve some of these challenges for optimizing and play and all that. One of the other things, my wife, we've kind of run out of this, but we do escape rooms a lot. Now we've done almost every escape room in a short drive from our home.

We play a lot of board games. games. And I don't know if we've ever talked about the fact that I love games and board games and card games, like to a nerdy level, we probably have like maybe 50 or a hundred games in our house. And so I'm just fascinated as someone who loves games to hear a little bit about the process for creating a new game.

So for people that don't know, Tim, I brought my copy of Coyote, which is a game you created. It's not technically for children, but we've played it with children successfully 10 plus 10 plus. Well, I can, but you went lower. I can attest that this goes down to the toddler phase with some loose interpretation of the rules and certainly not as stringent.

And we had so much fun doing it. How does the process to create a game? Because it seems like, oh, I want to create a game like that sounds fun. And every time I think about, oh, let's come up with a new card game. It doesn't go anywhere. So how did you end up at something that is quite enjoyable to play with a group?

Well, let me start at the beginning for a second, which is why a game? It does hit on something we mentioned earlier, which is the two sort of criteria, learning a ton, interacting with amazing people or developing relationships, right? So interviewed someone named Alon Lee. He's the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens.

He created augmented reality. He worked on the first Xbox. He was lead game developer for Halo and has created just every type of game you can imagine. The guy's a genius. Also really hilarious, soulful guy, eclectic, wild man, just great dude. Awesome dad and family man as well. And it's rare for me to become close with new people in terms of friendships as an adult.

It's just like my parking lot's kind of full, but with Alon, I was like, I could really be good friends with this guy. Okay. How can we spend time together? And I'd already been thinking about making a game in part because like, all right, you got four hour work week productivity.

I think that's valuable. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient for our body. Like the physical equation still stand by almost everything in that book. It's played out incredibly in terms of now a lot of support for almost everything in that book. Important, critical, necessary, not sufficient. Then like four hour chef learning.

Okay, sure. You can hit the cognitive side of things. Learning important, not sufficient, right? At the end of the day, if you're not cultivating these relationships, if you're not deepening the relationships with, well, let's just say your five to 10 most important relationships. And those are the places I invest first every year in terms of blocking out time.

That is the connective tissue that holds everything else together. That is also the safety net under everything else. And so I wanted to create a really light lift, like a really light lift, just a wedge in the door for people to cultivate that. And that's why I want to make a game, but not something like D and D level, super complicated.

It's like, no, after dinner, you've got an hour. What can you play in 10 minutes? Something is really fast. That was the germ of the whole thing, the origin. And then in terms of how to make it, I listened to a podcast called how to think like a game designer by Justin Gary.

Great. He interviews all of these amazing game designers who create many different types of games. Started with that. Didn't make much progress. I ordered blank cards. I bought all of these kinds of crafting tools for prototyping games. Didn't make a lot of progress in part, because I was trying to make it too complicated without realizing that it was complicated.

And then ultimately partnered with Elon and exploding kittens because they've made dozens and dozens of games. And then it was a two year process. We tested and prototyped probably 20 different games. Nothing quite clicked to make a decent game, a decent game, like five out of 10 fun is not that hard, but as is true with books or podcasts or anything else to go from good to really good to excellent is very hard.

And none of those games, because I knew my name was going to be on it. I was not prepared to live with any of those forever. I was like, this might be the only game I ever do. So looked back and ultimately we were doing these sprints, these in-person sprints, and they were really fun.

And frankly, again, like setting it up so you can win, even if you fail. I was like, well, the process of trying to make a game will force me to play more games with my friends. So it's sort of a win, as long as I control my costs and my time, even if it doesn't get published.

Okay. So far so good. But there came a point where we're like, all right, look, we're doing these sprints. We've tested 20 games. We should make a go or no go decision. And flew to Canada. I spent time with the lawn and amazing game designer on his team name, Ken, drank a ton of coffee, walking around, walking around.

What if this, what if this, what if this, and ultimately landed on the concept that became coyote when they asked me, well, what type of games do you like? Forget about tabletop, any kind of game. And I was like, well, okay. Like didn't like dodge balls. I got bullied.

All right. I like tennis. What do I like about tennis? Okay. Kind of like shuffleboard. What do I like about shuffleboard? And then I was like, you know, I'm really embarrassed to admit this. And I think I'm going to have a lot of eye rolling from both of you, but my friends and I, especially if we've had a few drinks, love rock, paper, scissors.

It's so dumb, but there can be some strategy involved and people have these weird runs where they're like one person will win 20 times in a row or 30 or 40 times in the road. It just seems like really statistically improbable. And so we started digging into that. I was like, okay, well let's play with that.

What might rock, paper, scissors look like as a group, four or five people. Okay. Like how can you make that more interesting? Well, what if this, what if this, it's a lot of what if, which is I think useful for anything, but the difference between professionals and amateurs, cause I'm walking around with two professionals is that the amateurs will want to talk about it for a long time and think about it, brainstorm, quote unquote, figure it out by talking.

But I think Justin Gary or someone else in his podcast said this, like you can either talk about it for 10 hours or you can prototype for 10 minutes and try to play it. So we just went back to where we were staying, sat at the kitchen table, had a bunch of blank cards, started mocking it up within probably an hour, sat down and started trying to play.

And I was like, okay, it's broken. Okay. Let's try this, fix this. Oh, that's interesting. That was fun. This definitely isn't working. The game's going to last forever. Okay. Let's try it. Yank that card out, scratch it out, write something new on it. And once we had the basic concept and started prototyping, I'd say within two or three hours, we had a very, very, very basic prototype that got us to 10 to 15 minute games.

And then I was like, all right, well, creating more gestures is important, making the gestures funny, but that's not enough. Okay. Well then we have these wild cards where people can be basically tricksters and make things really odd and bizarre. Those are the coyote cards. And I have a long history with coyotes.

I don't know if I want to bore people with it, but trickster mythology in a lot of cultures is associated with coyotes. It's like, okay, well, hence the name coyote. So these coyote cards, but then for instance, as we kept play testing and play testing, I wanted the game to be a little closer to say backgammon than chess.

Like chess, if somebody is a lot better, you're just going to lose every time. That's not fun. Backgammon, like there is an element of chance. So even a beginner who is not as skilled could get lucky and toast someone who's incredibly good. I wanted that possibility. And that's where like the attack cards came in.

So as a group, and just so people understand, it's kind of like rock, paper, scissors on steroids. The gestures are more interesting and fun. And you can sabotage other players who are good at it. It's a rhythm games. It's like, boom, boom. And then you have to do these gestures and say a word and it goes around the table and each person gets three lives.

Last person standing wins. We're going to put a link in the show notes. I feel like it needs to be seen. Yeah. You need to see it. I recorded a live demo with players I'd never met before. None of it was scripted. And so you can watch two like real demo games to get an idea of it.

Coyote game.com. You can find on Amazon, Walmart targets, everywhere. 300, 400 million views of gameplay online on social, which is nuts. So it's doing super well, but the attack card allowed you to handicap people like musicians. People are good at math. Like some of those people are just abnormally good at this game.

There were all these positive constraints. I won't bore you with a lot of the under the hood stuff. But now when I walk through a store and I see a game rack, holy shit, I already had a lot of admiration for game designers, but to make a really incredibly simple game is shockingly hard.

There are different types of hard, but to make a simple game is not simple, but coyote. Yeah. It's, it's been tested with hundreds of families. I'm going to do some really big stuff with it in terms of competitions. So encourage people to start training. And one of the constraints was I wanted families to be able to play this and what people will figure out very quickly is it's good brain training and kids have really good reaction speed.

So a lot of kids can smoke adults. So it's also a game that you can play with kids without having to ask yourself, ah, do I need to, do I need to lose on purpose? Do I need to do this? Like, or do I need to get bored? We've been playing a lot of candy land.

Yeah. And eventually and it's just, it gets old going down the line. Yeah. And also, you know, you talked about making a game. You can create house rules. I include blank cards because you can make this game your family game. very, very, very, very easily. And some of the greatest videos that I've seen online of QDF four or five people playing like three kids and two parents are when they've created their own cards.

It's very easy. And so you get to be a sort of mini game designer just by having this deck. Yep. Yeah. So that's, that's coyote. It's fun. Definitely check it out. So you've got a game. What's the next big project you're thinking about? Even though I don't have long-term business plans, I never have like five, 10 year in part, because if you're going to have a reliable, dependable five to 10 year plan, you have to play it so safe that generally you're going to be really shortchanging yourself.

Like you're not going to be stretching your abilities. And even if you try to play it safe, there's so many factors outside of your control. Five to 10 years is pretty hard. There are some people who can do that. I'm just not one of them. I also find that kind of boring.

So if I'm looking at most of my professional projects, whether it's a book, the podcasts, angel investing, it doesn't matter. All of them kind of fit this. It's usually a six to 12 month experiment. And my assumption is if I execute really well, and I have tunnel vision on that one thing, which right now is coyote, that the doors that open, the opportunities that present themselves, the people who come out of the woodwork, who I never otherwise could have predicted meeting will be more interesting than anything I can plan for now.

So are there things that I'd like to do in the future? Sure. I've wanted to make a feature film forever and have a script that I did 15 years ago, probably that is 70, 80% done that I think is actually, I think it's pretty hilarious. Like it would be a comedy of sorts.

And I'm not one of a kind in that I'm sure there are millions of people out there who are like, I have this partially done screenplay. That is not uncommon. We're sitting in LA right now. I'm just visiting, but it's like, you could throw a stone in any direction.

I hit somebody who could say that. I do think that making a feature film or some type of scripted television that is self-contained, probably not intended to run forever, which will make it harder to sell would be really fun because I have a very, very, very visual mind worked on all the artwork of the game.

People can check it out. It's pretty fun. And then split tested all of it, which, you know, I'm like a multivariate machine when it comes to testing. But if you go back to my childhood, I wanted to be a comic book penciler for at least a decade and got paid for illustrating in college as part of how I paid my expenses and kind of set that down to quote unquote, get serious and be an adult.

But I've been resurrecting that learning how to use procreate and spending time with comic book artists and writers. I think almost in terms of comic panels or storyboarding, like that's how my mind works anyway. I think I'd be pretty good at thinking as a director while I'm scripting, we haven't really talked about this, but humans are storytelling and meaning making machines.

And I used to be a nonfiction purist. I only read nonfiction and that was very short sighted because I think a lot of truth, a lot of valuable lessons are best conveyed through really good storytelling. And oftentimes that's fiction. Just as fun as not frivolous, like fiction does not need to be frivolous.

And for a long time I discounted it. I was like, if I want to read something made up, I can do that myself. I think that's missing a lot. That's tossing out the baby with the bathwater. There's a bunch of garbage fiction out there that I don't want to read.

There are a lot of terrible movies I don't want to watch. But I feel like if you had the right curation for film, television, fiction, you could learn just as well, if not better, a lot of the lessons that you would get from reading biographies and so on. Sounds like Tim's book club.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. So I could see also playing with fiction, but these are all overlapping. Fiction writing, script writing, screen writing, film, all these are overlapping and I'm somewhat tool agnostic. I would love to make a comic book. I've looked very seriously at that and talked to the right people a number of times.

I do think that would probably be mostly a vanity project because the audience for actually reading comic books and graphic novels is not that large. It's decent. But if part of my goal is to share a story with a very large number of people to make hopefully some kind of impact, then it may not be the right medium.

But could it be wink, wink, basically storyboarding for something I want to do in moving pictures? Yeah, possibly. Those are things that are top of mind. I don't have huge plans for growing the podcast. I think growth is a risky objective. You can end up making a lot of compromises and you can end up following other people's agendas and priorities very easily, especially in a world where the platforms are incredibly good at value capture.

You can just become an algorithm chaser and then the risk of that is audience capture and you start to become a caricature of yourself and your most extreme positions or behaviors or statements get reinforced. And suddenly you're wearing this mask all the time. And if you wear a mask long enough, it ceases to become a mask.

That's who you become. 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 them. It's not good for their families to see what they've become through this feedback loop of having their most extreme behaviors and positions getting reinforced every time that they are recording and publishing something.

So to avoid that, I mean, I guess you can just sit in the cave and do your thing, which is sort of my position. I'm very happy with my current audience. So we'll see. But most of my thinking on the creative side is focused on storytelling. So we'll see.

We'll see where things go. I'm here to follow on the journey. If anyone else wants to follow along, where do you want to send them? Yeah. People can go to Tim.blog. Tim.blog's got everything Tim on there, thousand plus blog posts, but obviously that's a lot to dig through. There's a start here where you can look at some of the greatest hits.

People can find the Tim Ferriss show. It's got somewhere between a billion and 1.5 billion downloads. Now that's pretty easy to browse the Tim.blog slash podcast allows you to dig around really effectively. And then Coyote, if you just search Coyote game and, and look for the orange and green, because I have noticed some competitors that you can find it.

Coyote game.com will take you to a page where you can just click through to whichever retailer you want. Walmart, Amazon, target that's all over the place. And I would say no matter what, whether it's acro yoga or playing a card game of any type, of course, I'm biased. I think Coyote is a very easy, reliable way to get a lot of laughs and move around a bit with your family, do something analog schedule, analog time.

It is sort of your last life raft. I worry about the future of mental health and physical health a lot. It's just the trend lines look very bad. A little bit goes a long way. It's kind of like you need vitamin A, but you don't want too much, right?

I think you can die from too much vitamin A. So it's like, no, it's just a little bit goes a long way. Vitamin E, vitamin D, same thing. Vitamin P play like a little bit goes a long way. We spent five minutes doing these silly exercises in the kid living room and it felt like a meaningful part of the week.

So my challenge, and I assume your challenge is everyone go find some way to block off some time to play this week. Yeah. Black out some time. Find a local game shop. The game shop owners and the people who hang out are so friendly, so friendly. So just like figure out chances are they have a themed game night or something, or just go in and talk to them about their favorite games that are underappreciated that people haven't checked out.

The one that led me to exploding kittens, because I was testing all these games with my friends. Poetry for Neanderthals is a really hilarious physical game, and these games are generally really inexpensive. Poetry for Neanderthals probably costs 14 bucks, 15 bucks. Coyote is $9.99 in most places. Might be a little bit more in some places where there's a unique addition.

It's less than the cost of one ticket to the movies. It's fun just to look for the right game with your family. Try a couple out. Worst case, you donate it to your local library and somebody who would not have the opportunity to play a game has a chance to play a game.

Awesome. Well, everybody has their homework. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Good to see you. This has been awesome. I hope everyone listening really enjoyed this conversation. If you have questions, feedback, anything, podcast@allthehacks.com. That's it for this week. I will see you next week.