RSS preview of Tim Ferriss

The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip Strength Tools, and More

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Kevin Rose: Okay, ready?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wait, wait. So we’re rolling?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, we’re rolling.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Kevin Rose: Three, two, one.

[CHIME]

It feels, actually, really good.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like my bowl is a little smaller than yours.

Kevin Rose: That’s always been the case.

Tim Ferriss: You want to kick it off?

Kevin Rose: Hello, friends and family, colleagues. That was amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Very prominent ejaculation projection show.

Kevin Rose: Welcome to The Random Show.

Tim Ferriss: Welcome, folks, to another episode of The Random Show.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Couch audition edition.

Kevin Rose: That’s right. ADU back-of-my-place edition.

Tim Ferriss: Why do we have these fancy bowls?

Kevin Rose: So this is —

Tim Ferriss: For people not looking, these are meditation bowls.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Got a bunch of script. Presumably that’s Tibetan or Sanskrit or something.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And you have a little corner, but that’s not the bad corner. That’s the Zen corner.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is Zen corner. Would you say bad corner?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you don’t need to put kids in the bad corner.

Kevin Rose: Did you used to have to do that as a kid?

Tim Ferriss: In school, I got sent to the bad table all the time.

Kevin Rose: Oh, there was a table.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. And then the teacher in kindergarten sent me to the bad table with a bunch of other kids who were really bad, and then forgot that she had decided it was the bad table and just left us at the bad table for the entire year.

Kevin Rose: And so she —

Tim Ferriss: It might explain a lot of psychological issues —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — that I’ve carried with me.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So this is not the bad table. This is the meditation area. And I have bowls over here that I just use. I just like the sound of a good — I mean, you heard that. Hopefully, it came through and didn’t distort the mic, but a well-rung bowl — it sets the tone for the beginning of the meditation and then also at the very end.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also just perfect for a podcast in Southern California.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Nice to be in person.

Kevin Rose: It plays well in the whole, yes, SoCal environment. There’s bowls per capita out here and crystal shops are very high.

Tim Ferriss: High density. High density, man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Another beautiful day in SoCal.

Kevin Rose: Beautiful day.

Tim Ferriss: Been doing a lot of walking. Where should we start off with? We’ve got tons.

Kevin Rose: We just came back from our retreat.

Tim Ferriss: We did. We did. You want to describe the format?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we’ve done a couple of these retreats. This is the second one where it’s just a small group of people that are interested in meditation and that want to go a little bit deeper in the world of Zen. You and I both talked about The Way and Henry Shukman a ton. The Way being his app. And Henry’s just a great leader, great Zen master. And it was accompanied by Valerie, another Zen master.

Tim Ferriss: This is in Mountain Cloud.

Kevin Rose: Mountain Cloud Zen Center.

Tim Ferriss: Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So we flew out there, small group, got together. And it’s kind of like if a proper Zen retreat is like 5:30 cushion in the morning and then you’re off at 7:00 p.m. and it’s hardcore, like no talking, shitty food. This was not that. We had a good chef that was there and we were allowed to ask questions in between sits. The sits were purposely time bound to call it maximum of 25 minutes and then a walking meditation, then another 25 minutes that was like the max.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me interject just so we don’t get into hyper bougie territory too fast. So the chef was not our chef. He’s actually, as I remember, this is a former, I think, James Beard award winner who decided to forego the accolades and the attention.

Kevin Rose: How is that less bougie than what I was going to say?

Tim Ferriss: Well, you said we had a nice chef and people might assume that we’re bringing in a chef. This is a chef who actually —

Kevin Rose: He lives there locally.

Tim Ferriss: I know, that’s the point I’m making. He lives at the Zen Center and has chosen a life of simplicity working with local ingredients and so on. And he is also normally there. It’s not like we had our own dedicated —

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: — chef.

Kevin Rose: That’s right. That’s one of the things.

Tim Ferriss: That’s not in my house. I ate venison jerky sticks most of the time. Lentils out of a can still stick.

Kevin Rose: And you chugged my freaking ketones about five minutes ago. Tim just goes to my fridge and he’s like, “Okay, what are you up to?”

Tim Ferriss: I want to see what Kevin’s up to. I want to see the evidence.

Kevin Rose: Okay, we’ve got a little something gluten here. We got some Repatha.

Tim Ferriss: A little Repatha, what else do you have?

Kevin Rose: He’s like, “Oh, ketones.” And he starts chucking my ketone esters.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I unwrapped it and I was like, “I probably should ask if I can drink this, but I’m guessing this has been in there for weeks.”

Kevin Rose: Dude, that stuff that you drank is like — so they make several versions of that. That’s like the full on — F16 isn’t the latest fighter jet. Whatever the Gen 5 fighter jet is, F22.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the highest intensity. This is the deltaG brand ketone monoester, which is BHB, which is kind of what you want, bound with something called 1,3-butanediol, which I will say if you see that on the ingredient list of your supplement for exogenous ketones, treat it like a shot of tequila. You really want to use it in moderation. There’s mounting evidence that it’s pretty unhealthy for your liver. So just use in moderation in terms of ketone supplementation. But hey, right before a podcast —

Kevin Rose: By the way, I’m —

Tim Ferriss: — it’s a great time for me to take like 15 grams. I will not do 30 because, and I talked to you, she’ll probably come up again, our mutual friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick about this. I don’t think I’m talking out of school here, but when you take, when I take, and this is true for her as well, and I suspect other people, the full 30, the entire shot, rather than decreasing anxiety, it actually, for me, spikes it. And I think that could be related to a very rapid rise and then trough afterwards. But who knows? The point is, keep it moderate.

Kevin Rose: You’re the first person to tell me that it impacts liver function. And I have more often than not had elevated liver enzymes, surprise surprise on the whole drinking front typically, but it’s something I watch. And when did you hear about that? Because I’d never heard that could be the case with ketones.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I, fortunately, by virtue of doing the podcast and also being incredibly interested in science, interact with a lot of researchers, so I get to have chats with them once I get to know them better about pre-publication data. Studies that are underway, and they never want to talk about them publicly because you have to check all the boxes, and science is also very much about not fooling yourself when you make a certain hypothesis. But the first whispers of this were from, and still are, from animal models, where you can basically dose mice with 1,3-butanediol and give them the equivalent of fatty liver disease.

Kevin Rose: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not good. And I’m sure I’m oversimplifying that.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: The point is treat it like ethanol. Treat it like not even tequila, moonshine, like you’re drinking moonshine and you wouldn’t want to do that every day.

Kevin Rose: It tastes like moonshine.

Tim Ferriss: Or cough syrup. Cough syrup moonshine.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So that is just to say, I think they still think there’s a time and a place for it. I’ve been experimenting with other versions like ketone salts, Dominic D’Agostino. He’s also the co-author in some of the papers that are describing this.

Kevin Rose: He tried bath salts for a while too. That was a very odd version of Tim that came out.

Tim Ferriss: If it’s good for McAfee.

Kevin Rose: Just eating the flesh off of us.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Eating people and eating —

Kevin Rose: Wasn’t that a thing that happens?

Tim Ferriss: — in the median in Florida. It’s always a Florida man.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So Florida man, duh-duh-duh. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Eats another person. Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Shooting someone’s face off after bath salts. Stay away from bath salts, kids. So yeah, I came in nice and fully loaded today.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I am glad that you’re feeling better because you also might not have made today.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a sidebar. I may have had a glancing blow of eggplant to which I’m deathly allergic and woke up in the middle of the night, incredibly sick last night. So I’m glad I’m here.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I brought my EpiPen for dinner later.

Kevin Rose: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Learned my lesson. Bring your backup.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the retreat, let’s finish that off real quick.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: So we got together. What did you learn this time around? Because we’ve done this twice. You’ve dabbled in the world of Zen. You’ve always said, correct me if I’m wrong, but meditation’s been a hard thing for you typically. Where are you now with your practice?

Tim Ferriss: Well, what I would say is, first thing, speaking as a very much still a novice on any level, I would say that meditation is like sports or exercise. “Do you like exercise?” Well, what kind of exercise? Meditation, there’s so many different ways to meditate or explore mindfulness. There’s the Vipassana approach. There’s Transcendental Meditation. There’s Zen, which is very much its own thing, and you know more about that than I do.

But what I do find helpful about the retreats is you can describe what is going on when you’re sitting still with your eyes closed, trying to focus on something, in the case of, say, the breath, or trying to just observe whatever that comes up. And the feedback that you get from someone like Henry or Valerie, where you can do a 25-minute sit and then take a short break, talk about it, and they can say, “Well, given that you experienced this, this, maybe you had restlessness. Maybe you had, in my case, this sort of planning compulsion.” So rather than memories or fantasies about who knows what, not necessarily people can run wild with that, but I default to plans, like things I need to do.

And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s coming up, then Henry might say, “Why don’t you try in the next sit, which we’re going to do in 10 minutes or five minutes, A, B, or C?” And then you do it and you provide feedback. And so you’re able to really polish the stone moving forward. And similar, I suppose, to a lot of what we might call transcendental experiences, which sounds fancy, but it’s really just perhaps not fixating on the self or interrogating what this thing is that we call the self, which you can do through meditation. You can also do it with, or maybe you’re forced to do it in some cases with psychedelic experiences or other things, breath work.

When I was there at the retreat, you might remember this, I was getting very frustrated and I was like, “Where’s all this frustration coming from?” And while I was there, I was like, “I don’t know how much I’m getting out of this right now.” But when I got back to “real life” in Austin, I had like three to five days of this just kind of blissful, calm attention where I was able to get everything done. I need to get it done. There was no rushing, there was no looping in any kind of future tripping. And I was like, “Well, that’s very interesting.”

And it also holds true for, say, breath work, psychedelics. There are many different things that you could look at. And interestingly, maybe this is one way to think of it. I mean, in a sense, there are a lot of parallels between different methods for entering what people might consider a trance state. And I don’t think meditation is exempt from that, depending on what it is. But if it’s a concentration practice, it’s like for sure, you’re using a mantra or you’re using something you’re repeating in the case of TM in the same way that you might use rhythmic drumming and you can go some pretty weird places and then you come out of it, you’re like, “I don’t know what to make of that. “

And sometimes the payoff is what you notice in the next unfolding week or two or three or whatever the duration might be.

Kevin Rose: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: So that was very invigorating for me. And also Henry at one point used a prompt in response to, I’ll give a great — this is a real world example of something that happened to me, something I experienced in a sit and then Henry’s response, right? So I use The Way all the time, full disclosure, we’re both involved with it. I mean, it’s really because —

Kevin Rose: Henry’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: — more than anything else, it’s just I think it’s good for humanity and people to learn from somebody who is really deliberate about layering on progressive skills that you can take outside of the meditation. But one of the practices is labeling. So if, and there are a million different ways to do this, but let’s just say talk comes up in the mind and you label it radio or talking. And then if some kind of video comes up in the mind, images, you’re imagining something or planning something or remembering something, “okay, that’s video” and so on and so forth.

But for me, as someone with very well-established OCD, I can just end up being like, radio, radio, radio, video, radio, radio, radio. And it turns into, instead of a helpful thing, a very interruptive, stressful thing. And at that point in the retreat, clear — it was three to four days, something like that. It was very short. Henry said, “Okay,” well, he moved into the next sit and he said, “Just be still. Just be still. That’s it. That is the focus. Just sit still.” Did that for two consecutive sits. I just focused on that and it was remarkable how much everything calmed down. I was like, “Okay.”

Well, just like exercise, some people, sure, can go to the gym and do full sprinting workouts on an incline treadmill. Not everybody can do that. And other folks are well-suited to yoga. Some people are well-suited to different types of lifting, et cetera. And everybody should probably spend a little bit of time in each of those compartments if they can, but it’s not like everyone is equally suited, for instance, in my case, to the open monitoring stuff, like, well, just sit there and notice all the things that come up.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I came out of the retreat thinking, you know what? Something along the lines of Transcendental Meditation, not necessarily with that branding, but using a koan, using “Just be still” as a concentration practice that I repeat really gives me a lot of payoff. If I just sit still for 10 to 20 minutes, twice a day — did I tell you my theory on this?

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: So one of my theories, because I’ve been going super deep on bioelectric medicine and different ways of using electricity in place of pills, basically, and medications, which I think is really the next frontier in a million different ways. People check out Michael Levin at Tufts and some of the crazy stuff he’s able to do. But related to meditation, I did this deep dive with someone named Kevin Tracey, who’s a very credible scientist, very widely cited, helped discover and explore a lot related to TNF alpha and all sorts of things.

And he is incredibly knowledgeable of vagus nerve stimulation, not the bogus bullshit kind, which is 99.9 percent of what you see on the internet, but using, say, implants the size of an omega-3 capsule in the neck, which is where the vagus nerves run. It’s really like two transcontinental cables running down either side of the neck. Each one has about 100,000 fibers. And if you put an implant in that’s giving continuous stimulation on and off, on and off, it’s not 24/7, it’s incredibly effective for things like rheumatoid arthritis. And actually it was FDA approved. It was on the cover of The New York Times —

Kevin Rose: Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: — the day that I interviewed him. And that raises the question, how? Why? What’s going on? And it just so happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve, you activate something called the inflammatory reflex and you can in effect prevent damaging cytokine storms, decrease systemic inflammation of all different types. That word inflammation is kind of an umbrella term for a million different things.

And I remember chatting with one of my friends who’s a professor, he was using the 10% Happier app by Dan Harris, and he was meditating twice a day. And then after like one or two weeks, he’s like all of his aches, which were debilitating. He had a lot of musculoskeletal issues. They just went away. And one way people might try to explain that as like, “Well, you’re becoming more present to your feelings and maybe it was psychosomatic.” But I think it might actually be when you sit still and you inherently end up breathing rhythmically, because you can also stimulate your vagus nerve with say box breathing and other things, that you do that twice a day. If you were to use an implant or let’s just say either ear-based or neck-based stimulation of the vagus nerve, guess how long it lasts? Roughly 12 hours. So you do it twice a day, you’re getting full coverage.

Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.

Tim Ferriss: And so if you’re getting full coverage, and there’s a lot more to it, I won’t dig too deep right now. If you’re getting twice a day, vagus nerve stimulation from sitting and focusing on breathing, even if you don’t realize that you’re entraining your breathing, I think that might have explanatory power for some of the benefits people see from meditation.

Kevin Rose: That’s fascinating. So I bought one of the vagus nerve stimulators that hooks onto my ear. Have you seen that one? And you feel that this little tiny pulse of current that’s happening.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So people who are not watching this may have trouble envisioning this, but I’m actually in communication with a couple of scientists in Scandinavia. I don’t want to dox this guy because I don’t think he’s public with it yet, but there are two ways currently, non-invasively, to stimulate the vagus nerve that are commonly known. One is the neck where you really press some type of device. There are a number of them out there, mostly used for migraines or cluster headaches, and it’s pretty unpleasant. You stimulate the neck and it actuates superficial muscles in your face and it pulls your face down. And I used one of those for probably four to six weeks. Didn’t see any systemic benefits.

A friend of mine doubled his HRV using one of those devices. He had some, I’m not going to call it PTSD, but he had some overactive sympathetic drive and the vagus nerve stimulation is associated with the rest and digest parasympathetic.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Which is also why right now I stimulate it before bed, five minutes twice a day.

Kevin Rose: I know you do.

Tim Ferriss: For the ear — Jesus Christ.

Kevin Rose: No, I’m talking about the device.

Tim Ferriss: For the ear, there’s something called the cymba concha. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And people can see most of the research —

Kevin Rose: This little bit right here?

Tim Ferriss: Most right here.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And you can look this up online. You kind of want the portion of the cymba concha that is closer to your sideburns, let’s say.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: And then you need another piece that is grounding and/or completing the circuit, and that’s got to be touching your skin. The contact point is incredibly important.

Kevin Rose: Are there any of these that you like that are consumer available? Because a lot of this stuff you mentioned —

Tim Ferriss: You can DIY it with components off of Amazon and maybe I’ll make that available to folks. The reason I hesitate to do that is that it’s easy to get wrong and you can — I just don’t want to be responsible for people trying to put current through their heads. There are a lot of people who DIY trying to do TMS and stuff.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is the one I —

Tim Ferriss: Or TDCS and they reverse polarity. And you can fry your brain, not with the vagus nerve stuff necessarily, but you got to be really careful with stimulation.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of this one, Nuropod?

Tim Ferriss: Uh-uh. I haven’t seen it.

Kevin Rose: I mean, it’s basically, if you look at who’s involved on the scientist level, it’s crazy. The number of —

Tim Ferriss: N-U-R-O-P-O-D. Let me see the world’s-most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulation.

Kevin Rose: A hundred plus international, UCLA did a study there, Penn —

Tim Ferriss: Okay. That’s interesting. I’d have to check it out.

Kevin Rose: It’s interesting, but I will say, just to be honest with people —

Tim Ferriss: Have you noticed anything?

Kevin Rose: I’ve owned this thing for about a year and a half. I did it for about two weeks for 30 minutes a day and I didn’t notice anything.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m looking at — it’s hard for me to see the placement on the earpiece. The placement is very, very, very specific.

Kevin Rose: It clips right here to this lobe right here.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I don’t think that’s in the right place.

Kevin Rose: But you feel a little ticky, ticky, tick, like shock, almost.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t think you’re — look, this is my first time seeing it, but I don’t think you’re going to be necessarily hitting as many fibers as you would want if that’s the placement.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But who knows? Look, a lot of fancy names on the website, maybe I’ll take a look at it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, it’s worth it. You can borrow mine, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Because I want something I can recommend to people.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I can’t recommend this because it’s not done anything for me. But when I was doing the research for the most — this one, they’ve clearly paid for studies to be done. Obviously, that’s a huge grain of salt because who’s doing the studies and what are their biases and whatnot. But I’ll let you borrow mine and see if it does anything for you. It is a $900 device, which is like, “Shit. That’s a lot of money to spend.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m using a prototype of one from Scandinavia right now. On Amazon, look, I’m sure people can find some instructions for this. You can DIY something for like 20 to $25 worth of components on Amazon. It is not hard.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just a small tense unit.

Kevin Rose: Dude, let’s do that.

Tim Ferriss: Cables, the placement is very challenging to get right. And I did not see much in terms of results from me, even with a lot of professional guidance using that.

Kevin Rose: I want to tell you about something related.

Tim Ferriss: But can I stop for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, please.

Tim Ferriss: Try breathing.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Do box breathing.

Kevin Rose: So that’s what this is?

Tim Ferriss: Or something like that. Do that twice a day.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: This is why also in The Great Nerve, which is a book written by Kevin Tracey, it’s a great book. There’s an extended chapter about Wim Hof. And Wim Hof is a very controversial figure, but well-known for breath work. And you see some of the same effects in terms of controlling immune response so that it is not excessive with respect to various types of cytokines and so on. You can do it with breath work. So what are we looking at?

Kevin Rose: Have you ever heard of HeartMath?

Tim Ferriss: I have heard of HeartMath. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Okay. I went to a little mini retreat where they were doing a bunch of different modalities in terms of different therapies and things to just really let you be the best version of yourself. And one of the things that they did was they gave you a HeartMath device and they had a whole class on it. And I was like, “Yeah, I heard of that thing before. I never tried it.”

And so I hooked it up to my ear and it measures your HRV, but what blew my mind was that the app, once you launch it, it’s like, “Follow this box breathing and we’re going to watch…” You get to watch your HRV in real time. And dude, when I followed it, just as it was telling me what to do, the HRV just shut up. And then I would try and trick it and I’d be like, I’d follow up, but I’d think of something really stressful and my HRV would go down.

So I’m telling you, this is the coolest device I have owned in a while and you lock into this coherence mode as you do this breathing and it’s pretty awesome. It’s 250 bucks. I’m not an investor or anything, but heartmath.com.

Tim Ferriss: Heartmath.com. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And 60-day money back guarantee. Well, I want to say that because I hate recommending stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Affiliate code Kevin 40 percent.

Kevin Rose: Exactly. TimTim, 20 percent off. I hate recommending stuff when people spend their money, but I will say this with the one thing that I was really-

Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard good things about HeartMath. I don’t know who’s involved. I did, maybe you didn’t know this, for a period of time, maybe it was about three months I did training for this specifically, I think it was before any retail options were available, with a doctor named Leah Lagos, who has a book about this. And we actually in real time would do a video call and identify what type of breathing specifically would have, in real time, the biggest impact on HRV.

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: And there is something to this. There’s definitely something to this. I can’t speak to HeartMath, but I’ve heard of it before. So don’t worry about the device for stimulation, the point being try meditating twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes. And if you’re like, “Ugh, meditating, God, I’m allergic to that word because it gets used so much,” Try breathing. Use HeartMath or something else. There’s not a whole lot you need to worry about. Andy Weil has some very good breathing exercises.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, 4-7-8. Yeah. So I have box breathing and 4-7-8 on my app Oak that’s still in the App Store and it’s 100 percent free. There’s no way you have to pay for anything on the app. So if you just Google Oak, you can find it. And it has like six different breathing techniques on there you can do.

Tim Ferriss: I think here’s a hypothesis-slash-bet. I think that if it hasn’t been demonstrated already, I haven’t done a full lit search for this, I think there are breathing patterns, if you repeat them in the morning and at night, twice a day, roughly 12 hours apart for like 10 to 20 minutes, that you will see a lot of benefits for things like chronic pain.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I think it is — I really feel very confidently. So it’s exciting.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Sweet.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what else you’ve got.

Kevin Rose I’ve got crazy things. I mean, I just had my birthday a few weeks ago, which is crazy because I’m marching towards 50 really quick.

Tim Ferriss: I know.

Kevin Rose: And so are you.

Tim Ferriss: Getting dragged through the —

Kevin Rose: I know.

Tim Ferriss: — doorway. With your fingernails leaving lines on the linoleum.

Kevin Rose: It’s really scary. Well, what’s crazy is, dude — okay, so when Tim and I first started hanging out, whatever, 15 years ago, 17 years ago, maybe 20, I don’t even know how long it’s been.

Tim Ferriss: It must be close to 20 years ago.

Kevin Rose: Close to 20 years ago, every time you walk into Tim’s house, he tackles you with some kind of new jiu-jitsu move to take you down. And in the last three years, he’s been carrying a ball for his lower back where he’s like, “I can’t move.” And it’s like old man Tim has appeared and that old Tim that would tackle you with the jiu-jitsu move is gone.

Tim Ferriss: The gentle art, not so gentle it turns out.

Kevin Rose: But I know one of the things that I want to really focus on for this next decade is balance. Balance obviously is such a key thing and it’s the number one way that people as they get older in their 60s, 70s, and beyond are actually permanently injured is by falling and breaking a hip and things like that. So two things to show off.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible increase in risk, all-cause mortality if you’re older and you break a hip.

Kevin Rose: Yes. It turns out breaking hips are not good. So check this out. This one right here I’ve had for a while.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t fall on your ringing bowl.

Kevin Rose: So can you imagine? I smashed my face on the ringing bowl. So I’m going to show you how this works.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, geez.

Kevin Rose: Have you used this before?

Tim Ferriss: I have. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And so are you good at these or no?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, I feel like a parent watching after you.

Kevin Rose: Move this. All right, how well can you do the balance boards?

Tim Ferriss: I haven’t done it in a long time. There’s one called the Indo Board, which I have and I’ve fucked around with it. I don’t think today is the day.

Kevin Rose: Well, so let’s check this out. So five minutes a day, there was some research that was done around people with ADHD and it dramatically improved their symptoms, which I have a ton of.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can’t really —

Kevin Rose: But I want to know if you can do this. I want to see if you can do these squats.

Tim Ferriss: You have to pay attention if you’re on this thing.

Kevin Rose: Could you do these?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know. Never tried it.

Kevin Rose: And then the tippy-toes. So I do 50 squats like this.

Tim Ferriss: I should also point out he has some history as a skateboarder.

Kevin Rose: I do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which helps.

Kevin Rose: Let’s see, let’s see, Tim —

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m going to —

Kevin Rose: You’ll be okay. I’ll hold your hand when you go up. Come on, just give it a shot for a second.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll give you some Depends. I’ll give you some Depends and give you a walker so you can get up there.

Fuck, man.

Kevin Rose: Okay. So one foot there.

Tim Ferriss: Yep. I got it.

Kevin Rose: Jesus. Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, fuck. Hold on.

Kevin Rose: There you go. It’s got blockers, so you won’t slide off the end.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: Lean hard right, harder on the right foot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like —

Kevin Rose: It’s hard, isn’t it?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m nervous about falling over.

Kevin Rose: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: There we go.

Kevin Rose: Now the squats.

Tim Ferriss: This is kind of like slackboarding where you need a couple of days to get your nervous system in order.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing how your nervous system adapts to it?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: It’s really —

Tim Ferriss: There’s a crazy video people should check out. I think maybe it’s not online. There’s a guy named Jerzy Gregorek, had on the podcast, he’s got to be 70 something right now, but he was 67. He could stand on one of these at 67 with a fully loaded barbell with like 150, 200 pounds. He weighs probably 130 and he could do a perfect form Olympic snatch —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — landing with ass to heels and then stand back up and do repetitions.

Kevin Rose: So dude, when I was just in Japan last week —

Tim Ferriss: All right, there we go. That’s enough.

Kevin Rose: When I was just in Japan last week, I was out there and I was at this event. Whoops. I was at this friend’s birthday party that Tony Hawk’s also friends with. So I was hanging with Tony and he’s like — last time I saw Tony, I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” Because —

Tim Ferriss: Tony Hawk, one of the most legendary skateboarders of all time, for people who don’t know.

Kevin Rose: People definitely know who Tony Hawk is, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You might be surprised.

Kevin Rose: I mean, a lot of people definitely know.

Tim Ferriss: A lot of people know who Tony Hawk is.

Kevin Rose: So Tony —

Tim Ferriss: For the youngsters.

Kevin Rose: Last time I saw him, he had a cane and I was like, this was probably like eight months ago or whatever. And I was like, “Dude, how you doing?” And he’s like, “I just got a couple screws put into my hip.” And he had this injury and I was like, “Holy shit, man.” In my head, I’m like, “Oh, the fucking legend.” Pushing himself in his 50s to do — he’s still doing whatever, 720s on the half pipe in his mid 50s. Fucking crazy.

And I saw him up at Hokkaido and we’re going snowboarding, he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going boarding today.” He has no cane, no nothing. And I’m like, “Do you have pain? Do you have pain? Do you feel pain? What are you doing in your mid 50s doing vert snowboarding?” You know what I mean? And he’s just like, “Yeah, my wife jokes that I should have a shirt that says ‘Always in pain’ or something like that.” And I was just like, that is a — some people are built like that though. Have you ever seen his shins?

Tim Ferriss: I’m sure he looks like a Thai kickboxer.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. He has been hit so many times by the board, it’s insane.

You and your birthday, when I was at your birthday in New York probably about, I don’t know, maybe seven, 10 years ago, you had a slackline in your backyard.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And I couldn’t do it at all at not even one step because it is very much a nervous system practice.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a nervous system practice.

Kevin Rose: So I found this online. It’s like a little home one. Do you have one like this?

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool. I have played around with these. These are pretty sweet. So I have not used the smaller ones. I had one between trees, same company, Gibbon. And just for people who’ve never played with this, if you’re going to try it, don’t do an hour thinking that you’re going to figure it out in one day. Actually, my belief is you need sleep cycles for your nervous system to try to integrate it. So you’re better off doing a few minutes every day and gradually you’ll figure it out. But that’s cool. Very portable. So obviously a lot easier to set up and take down a gigantic thing between two trees with ratchets and everything.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to get one because again, on the balance front, they’ll have a little QR code there at the end that you scan and they give you about 20 or 30 different exercises that you can do with it. Like the toe taps where one foot is on and you need to tap of toe on each side of the bar.

And you’re right. And there’s this weird thing and I noticed this in my kids where they got those little hoverboards for Christmas so they can just kind of zoom around and they’re seven and eight. And day one, like eating shit, helmets, full gear. And day two, my youngest is just like whoosh-shoom, just flying over the place.

Tim Ferriss: Totally figured it out.

Kevin Rose: But it took a couple of days of that kind of adaption and that muscle memory to kind of kick in, which I think all these things do. But yeah, this has been awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And for people who might want to try slacklining, don’t get on a slackline really far off the ground, number one, but a lot of rock climbing gyms have slacklines set up. So you can potentially get someone to show you the basic ropes, pun intended, of walking on a slackline over there. And it’s called Gibbon. Pretty sure this is why it’s called Gibbon because if you see really good slackliners, they do this with their arms as they’re walking across. And what does that look like? It looks like a gibbon, this monkey.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you can see footage of Gibbons walking across rope on small suspension bridges. Pretty fascinating stuff. So try it out.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: And I’ll throw something out there.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s related to rock climbing. Well, a couple of things, since you brought it up. So for the last two days, we’ve been hanging out a little bit and you have not seen my little blow up Pilates ball that I usually put behind my low back.

Kevin Rose: Well, I just mentioned it a few minutes ago. I do see it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but you haven’t seen it.

Kevin Rose: I know. So what’s going on?

Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems like, and this is not going to apply to most people, and this is a work in progress, so it’s not definitive, but I ended up meeting with a neurologist and surgeon in Austin.

Kevin Rose: And you’ve injected baby seal stem cells into your spine.

Tim Ferriss: No, no.

Kevin Rose: It’s going to be some shit like that.

Tim Ferriss: No. It might apply to a very, very small fraction of the people who are actually listening to this. He did imaging. He used to be in a clinic where they ran trials and studies related to something called Bertolotti’s Syndrome. And Bertolloti’s Syndrome is incredibly uncommon, most specialists in his profession might see one or two cases in their entire careers, but he’s seen hundreds. And he looked at my imaging and he said, “You may actually have Bertolotti’s Syndrome.” And he pointed out, they had very advanced imaging, the first time it came up, it corresponds perfectly to where I point to when people ask me where I have pain.

And it’s, in effect, where you have a transitional segment. So it’s like a lumbar vertebra that’s behaving like a sacral vertebra or vice versa. And let’s just say it’s L5 and the transverse processes, I think it’s transverse processes on both, try to form a pseudo joint. So they basically lay on bone and other material to try to create what is then called a pseudo joint. And if you look at textbook cases of Bertolotti’s, you’re like, “Yeah, of course that’s going to hurt your lower back.”

And as a way of testing the hypothesis, he said, “Well, before we even consider any interventions, let’s try to hone in on whether that is accurate or not as a diagnosis. The way we’ll do that is there are some nerves that affect that area specifically, there’s no radiating effect or anything down the leg, let’s put in effectively a nerve block and then see what happens. We’ll put in a nerve block…”

Kevin Rose: What is a nerve block?

Tim Ferriss: Basically stops the area from transmitting pain signals.

Kevin Rose: But what does it mean though when you put in a nerve block?

Tim Ferriss: Well, you lay down, in my case, on your face. I hate when anyone is messing with my spine, man. I’ve had so many things done to me and I’m usually cool as a cucumber, but when needles are in or around my spine, I really get the fear sweats. I don’t like it at all. But in this case, that was required. So you get a — in this case, it was, I think it was lidocaine, small amount of lidocaine to numb the surface.

Kevin Rose: Oh, shit.

Tim Ferriss: Then they’re going through quite a bit of deep musculature. So they go in and then they’re putting, in this case, and obviously you need specialists for this —

Kevin Rose: It was a baby seal.

Tim Ferriss: Prilocaine, baby seal semen. No, it was Prilocaine and something called Kenalog. But none of those specifics are the punchline. The punchline is, after he did the injection, he said, “Okay, this particular portion of the cocktail is going to last 18 hours, and then you’re going to get probably two weeks of effect from the Kenalog, something like that, which is a cortisone shot basically.”

And he said, “I want you to do all of the things that you think will most piss off your back. All the things you’ve been avoiding,” which for me are sitting on hard surfaces, sitting with a slightly flexed back, like if you’re sitting on a bar stool and you’re kind of like this, any of those, stretching in that position, sitting on the floor with the dogs, certainly things like heavy deadlifts, squats. So I did all of that stuff for three days straight, zero pain.

And I’m like, “Holy shit.” After having so many specialists from different disciplines say like, “Yeah, I know you point to that, but that’s not the spot. It’s actually because there’s referral pain from this, this, or this.” And just having so many people dismiss how precisely I could point to where I felt the most pain, which was consistent over years. And for the first time, he’s like, “If we look at the imaging right here, it is exactly where you are pointing with your finger.”

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m cautiously optimistic.

Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: This is the first time in six years. Also, there are different tools that work for different people. Sometimes it requires multiple tools. A lot of people have benefited from the work of John Sarno, but that school, for instance, in effect, says none of the imaging really maps to symptoms well, it’s all in your head. So do cognitive training and reconditioning to solve it because —

Kevin Rose: That’s the guy that Howard Stern got his back problems fixed through, right?

Tim Ferriss: It might be. A lot of people benefit from that stuff, but it’s also infuriating to be told every type of back pain is in your head. I’m like, “Really? If I took a ball peen hammer and smashed one of your vertebrae, that would be in your head?” I guess technically since the brain is governing pain, fine, but this is the first time with a relatively simple but precise intervention, I guess it’s been about five days, it’s like I can do everything with no pain.

Kevin Rose: Dude, that’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So what does that mean?

Kevin Rose: Well it could be the cortisol shot. That’s the one thing that’s like, hmm?

Tim Ferriss: Well, that is —

Kevin Rose: You probably had that before, right? Or no?

Tim Ferriss: No, I haven’t, but here’s the thing. So that’s going to have —

Kevin Rose: Anti-inflammatory.

Tim Ferriss: — yeah, anti-inflammatory, it’s also going to basically kind of, for lack of a better term, like puff up the pseudo joint in a way that sort of reverses the chronological age or development of that in some ways from a symptom perspective. But this is where I’ll offer people something they can potentially look into, obviously with the help of really, really, really good doctors. If that shot continues to deliver benefits, and I can do all these things pain-free, which is the case right now, then there’s something called radiofrequency ablation, RFA, which is used to, in this case, temporarily, completely incapacitate those nerves.

So they go in, they apply radiofrequency ablation, and that should last for like a year to a year and a half, hopefully. And the hope in that case is, okay, with a year, year and a half, and I’ve spoken to multiple people and they’re like, “Even if you resume a lot of your activities and stare step into it that previously caused pain, you shouldn’t structurally make that worse.” Because that was a concern.

And I think that’s enough of a period of time where you could effectively reprogram your pain patterning, right? Because for years now, it’s like if I sit on a hard surface, my brain is like code red, DEFCON 5, you are about to not be able to sleep for six to seven days.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you’re going to have trouble walking and sitting and standing. So super exciting.

Kevin Rose: That’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So you mind if I continue my TED Talk for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So I also had long overdue surgery, I think I might have talked about this last time, but on my extensors, right? So the forearm extensors. So this would be considered like tennis elbow, like 20 plus years overdue, from a sports injury. And I’m back to rock climbing. I’m not great at rock climbing, but I love it. I just love rock climbing, feeling really good.

And if people have never seen something called Abrahangs, so like Abraham, but Abrahangs, go on YouTube, find this Swedish rock climber named Emil Abrahamsson, so Abrahamsson, S-S-O-N, he is a monster, very competent rock climber, does like V13 problems and probably much more, incredible explainer of things and dives into a lot of training. And he, along with the help of this scientist named Keith Barr, B-A-A-R, who I’ve actually had on the podcast, developed or tested this protocol for improving tendon strength.

And it is the simplest, lowest impact thing you can imagine. It’s basically 10 minutes, twice a day, and he does a bunch on a hangboard, but let’s keep it simple. Let’s say you’re hanging on, could be a pull-up bar, could be a door jamb, could be the underside of some stairs, whatever, and he’s hanging with like 30 to 85 percent of his weight, so his feet are still on the floor, does that for 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, and you do it 10 times, that’s 10 minutes, and then you do it again later in the day, and his before and after strength in endurance tests are mind-blowing.

This is already a guy who we could say is a high level climber, and to see the before and after is crazy. So you don’t always have to kill yourself to adapt in really, really interesting ways. And that’s something I’ve really, really benefited from. But the low back has been a limiter for the last few months, because hanging from a bar, if I don’t engage the abs, it could cause some issues with the low back and spasming.

So I bought this thing recommended by a friend of mine, Nick Norris, who’s also been on the podcast, former Navy SEAL, called the NUG. And the NUG is, it’s about the size of a gigantic bar of soap, it’s a piece of wood, and it has different depths of grips on it, like 25 millimeters, 20 millimeters, and you can move it around really easily. And basically you could keep it in a jacket pocket. And as long as you have a carabiner, like one of those things that kind of clicks on, you can do all sorts of exercises while you’re traveling. And at home I have basically a plate loading pin that you can load plates on.

Kevin Rose: Like this?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So that you can basically do like a single-handed deadlift with different weights.

Kevin Rose: And so this is the same as essentially doing the hanging board?

Tim Ferriss: It’s similar, right? You’re going to be, I’m looking for the same kind of loading, but what you can also do is take this thing that you can fit in your pocket and attach it to like a low cable machine. That’s what I was doing in Santa Fe, actually.

Kevin Rose: Oh, that’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: And just like get the weight off the ground, the stack off of the resting position and then I was doing 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 10 seconds on, 50 seconds off.

Kevin Rose: And you only have one of these?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, because I’ll do one hand and then I’ll do the other.

Kevin Rose: Oh, amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So I’ll be like, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 second rest, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds rest.

Kevin Rose: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And I think a lot — yeah, the website is Frictitious Climbing, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but like friction, Frictitious Climbing. They have the NUG, they have a bunch of other items that you can use while traveling for this, which are really, really interesting. So that’s another one that I’ve been traveling with. I’ll let you go and then —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, this is awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just a fun little tool to play with. Do not overdo finger training. You do not want to tear a pulley or something in your fingers. So less is more, less is more, less is more. This is, I guess, something like 30 to 85 percent of body weight. And obviously, or maybe it’s not obvious, that’s with two hands, so if you’re doing it with one hand, it’s going to be 15 to 40 percent.

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing. Oh, this is cool. Thanks. I already just ordered it by the time you’re done talking about it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s fun to play with.

Kevin Rose: Cool.

Tim Ferriss: What you got?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of things. One, I was hanging with Craig Mod in Japan and you’ve had Craig on the show before.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Craig.

Kevin Rose: Craig is —

Tim Ferriss: Amazing, amazing guy.

Kevin Rose: I don’t think there’s anybody that understands Japan the way that Craig does, in terms of the back country and just like the little artisans and all the stuff that he’s into.

Tim Ferriss: Craig has walked probably fair to say like thousands of miles of different trails and pilgrimage paths in Japan. It’s very likely he has walked more of Japan on foot than any other person.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So he was out here visiting, he actually stayed in this house for a week when he was out here in L.A. And I walked in and he’s got all his little toiletries sitting out. It’s sitting out, he puts it all in Japanese order where it’s got a little nice little cloth and it’s got all this shit —

Tim Ferriss: He even dresses like a Japanese person now.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I know. So I mean he’s lived there for 25 years, so that makes sense. But I saw his toothbrush and I was like, “That is a dope looking toothbrush.” And I got you one.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow, look at this.

Kevin Rose: So you can get these on Amazon. It’s got a really wide head. He said it’s his favorite Japanese toothbrush.

Tim Ferriss: So for people who can’t see it’s like the toothbrush bristles are almost in a square. I mean, it’s very square-like as opposed to being more elongated.

Kevin Rose: And so you get three of these for $11.50 on Amazon. And what does it say in Japanese?

Tim Ferriss: Premium care. Premium care.

Kevin Rose: Premium care. Oh, Toaster’s here.

Tim Ferriss: Premium care.

Kevin Rose: Hey, buddy.

Tim Ferriss: Hi, buddy.

Kevin Rose: Look at old man Toast.

Tim Ferriss: I was just saying hi to him earlier. Toaster is now 15. I was just saying to Darya that the last time we did a podcast sitting on a couch was at your place in San Francisco back when Toaster was a puppy and he chewed through the XLR cables on the Zoom.

Kevin Rose: Yes, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Hey, buddy.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, he can’t hear anything anymore. And sadly, his back legs are falling out from underneath them now. But look at that. He’s still a good dude. Look at that.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like he recognized me because I’ve seen him so many times.

Kevin Rose: Oh, for sure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What a sweetheart.

Kevin Rose: He’s such a good boy.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, premium care.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So I got you one of those and there’s a three pack for $11.50. I think it’s great. It’s a fantastic toothbrush.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. [Tim says something in Japanese]. Yeah, okay. Cool. I dig it. Thank you.

Kevin Rose: Speaking of all things Japanese, so I am hesitant to give this up. So if you want to get a —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, low in stock, only one left.

Kevin Rose: Well, hold on, let me tell you why. So first of all, check this out. Check out this jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Cool. All right. Oh, nice.

Kevin Rose: You feel how heavy that is?

Tim Ferriss: Feels almost like a — I know what this is. I know what this is.

Kevin Rose: So this is a fireman’s jacket in Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And this is a heavy, dope fireman’s jacket. It’s vintage from like —

Tim Ferriss: This would be hard to rip. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: — the 1970s.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Kevin Rose: And so I found a store on Etsy.

Tim Ferriss: How did you even think to look for this?

Kevin Rose: Because I love this style of jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese fire jacket.

Kevin Rose: I didn’t type in, fireman jacket. I typed in, Japanese jacket on Etsy. And so this importer, they import the coolest vintage Japanese.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll just wear this.

Kevin Rose: Everything from jackets to — you know how they used to do that patch mill work where they take stuff? They would patch quilts out of old material?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So everything from little tiny shrines to wicker baskets. Dude, check out the store. Let me just show you this store real quick. And the only reason I’m plugging it is —

Tim Ferriss: Vintage Japanese Indigo dyed Kendo jacket.

Kevin Rose: So they’ve got all the little dolls. Look at these different types of indigo dyed blankets.

Tim Ferriss: So what’s the seller?

Kevin Rose: The seller is just an importer from Japan. Or exporter.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t want to give the name?

Kevin Rose: No, I will. Well, here’s the deal. It’s so inexpensive. In the States, if you were to buy this jacket from a designer called Visvim, which is like a well-known Japanese designer, this style of jacket would be — oh, gosh, it’d probably be $2,500 for that jacket.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. It’s more expensive than my car.

Kevin Rose: No, it’s not. They sell these jackets on there for — here’s one for $92. Look at this. Vintage 1960s jacket, $92.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s cool. Watch out, buddy.

Kevin Rose: You okay, bud? He needs a little help.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think you’re ready for the slackboard, my friend.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There you go. Okay. I know, I know.

Kevin Rose: That jacket’s dope. But I just wanted to get this out there because I think if you’re looking to buy vintage fun things in, you can’t scroll.

Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. I know. I’m being an idiot.

Kevin Rose: If you’re looking for just various objects around your house that are vintage from Japan, this place is insanely inexpensive for all different types of things.

Tim Ferriss: Blue Heritage Japan?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Etsy name is Blue Heritage Japan.

Tim Ferriss: 4.9 stars, thousands of reviews.

Kevin Rose: But look at some of this stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool. These hanging tapestries for stores and stuff, those are fun.

Kevin Rose: So anyway, I just thought it was a fun shop that — and you know it’s legit because when you get the package, it’s actually shipped directly from Japan. Oftentimes you’ll find some of these places that make a Japanese style jacket and then you find a little tag that says made in China on the inside of it or something. So anyway, look at this farmer’s washy paper basket. But wouldn’t that be cool to have in your house sitting around somewhere? That’s just awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I guess these guys are based in Canada, looks like. CA.

Kevin Rose: Oh, no, that’s just because I’m logged in the Canadian store. They’re based in Japan.

Tim Ferriss: Why the hell are you logged into the Canadian store?

Kevin Rose: I don’t know. I was on VPN.

Tim Ferriss: You better close those porn browsers.

Kevin Rose: No, I was in Japan and they were firewalling me off of some stuff, and so I had to use a VPN.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose: I’m being dead serious, I’m being dead serious. It wasn’t porn, dude.

Tim Ferriss: Thou doth protest too much. All right. Should I hop in?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, go ahead.

Tim Ferriss: All right, cool. So I want to recommend some podcasts for people. And these are two that I continue to revisit. One is a miniseries by 99% Invisible, one of the OGs, Roman Mars, and he’s got some co-hosts. It is a series on The Power Broker. So The Power Broker by Robert Caro won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It’s a biography of Robert Moses, who basically shaped modern New York. And this book is considered the quintessential book to read if you want to understand state and local politics, especially power wielding in New York.

And it’s a legendary book. It’s 1200 pages. I’ve never made it through. I’ve never even really put a dent in it. And then what 99% Invisible does, they walk you through the whole book and give you their highlights. They interview Robert Caro himself who got to meet Robert Moses multiple times and they have guest appearances by people like Conan O’Brien, who’s a huge Robert Caro and Power Broker fan. It’s a wonderful series.

Kevin Rose: Awesome.

Tim Ferriss: And I think there are 12 parts. I had listened to it ages ago, but they only had three episodes out and then I just petered out because I didn’t want to wait months for the next one to come out. Now they have the full 12. So that’s one. And then the other one is a podcast called STEM-Talk. And if I want to find interesting scientists doing things that I think I might be able to apply to my life or the lives of loved ones, and certainly there’s a lot of stuff that’s out on the edges that is not yet ready for any clinical applications. STEM-Talk is just incredible. And my latest discovery there is a really fascinating scientist named Dr. Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, who’s at UT Austin.

One of the many reasons I’m interested in his research is that he has a very different view on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and thinks, as I do, that people underweight and researchers underweight, how you might think of Alzheimer’s as a vascular disease and including mitochondrial dysfunction. And the more I dig into this, the less compelling I find amyloid beta plaque, amyloid beta plaque for a whole host of reasons.

Kevin Rose: It’s pretty widely accepted now that that is a byproduct of something gone wrong and not the cause of it, right?

Tim Ferriss: But still, I do think a lot of doctors and scientists would view it as a byproduct. Nonetheless, a lot of the treatment options like Donanemab infusions or otherwise are focused on removing plaque. But you can remove a lot of plaque —

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t do shit.

Tim Ferriss: — assuming it doesn’t kill people because there are —

Kevin Rose: The side effects are huge.

Tim Ferriss: — risks of RA and stuff. And you may not see any change in cognition whatsoever.

Kevin Rose: What do you think of the Bredesen protocol?

Tim Ferriss: Look, Dale Bredesen, I don’t know much about Dale, so you should illuminate me. Let’s get to that in a second.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Tim Ferriss: But what I have seen, let’s just say in the case of some of my relatives, I’ve got three relatives with Alzheimer’s right now, one who’s disintegrating very quickly, one who’s in hospice, and another who’s in the early but rapidly advancing stages. I gave one of them actually the exact same ketone that I had before we sat down, only 10 grams because I didn’t want to risk them getting dizzy, which can be a byproduct and falling, but I gave them 10 or 15 grams and within 20 minutes, longer sentences, faster speech, this is someone who’s giving like one word, two word responses, and that lasted for about an hour, hour and a half. So if plaques, even if we’re talking about tau and so on, if those were solely responsible, that shouldn’t work. But I don’t want to be dosing my family with ketones constantly for a lot of reasons. It’s like, “Okay, well, what else can we do?”

And this Dr. Gonzalez-Lima has looked at low dose methylene blue and also photobiomodulation using lasers or LEDs right on, in most cases, the right prefrontal cortex.

Kevin Rose: By the way, do you know that they’re selling methylene blue on freaking Amazon now?

Tim Ferriss: That’s scary.

Kevin Rose: I know. They didn’t used to because they were scared to do it. Now there are supplement companies that are selling straight up methylene blue on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: That’s scary. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Although the safety profile, it’s been used for a very long time.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s got like 120 years of research, but if you overshoot the therapeutic window, you can fuck yourself up.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: So in this case, it’s low dose, ideally plus photobiomodulation, and you’re hitting two aspects of the electron transport chain that should be synergistic for mitochondrial function and also glucose metabolism. And so that’s really got my attention right now.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this on Amazon. Look at this guy drinking a big pitcher of it.

Tim Ferriss: Guy’s drinking a shaker bottle full of methylene blue.

Kevin Rose: With the goldfish.

Tim Ferriss: Dude.

Kevin Rose: Methylene blue is what they use for fish tanks, right? To color the water blue.

Tim Ferriss: Is it?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, they were using it in fish tanks.

Tim Ferriss: Well, if it’s good enough for the fish tanks, I guess. Be careful.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, look at it. Here it is. General disease prevention for fish.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, disease prevention. Oh, you know, hey.

Kevin Rose: If it works for fish.

Tim Ferriss: Those pet stores figured it out.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Be very careful, folks.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: If you overdo, this is true for a lot of things. You basically have a response curve where a hormetic dose, like a very small amount is good for you, like iocaine powder in the Princess Bride, or it helps with immune function and so on.

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: If you take too much, it has the opposite effect. So you could, I believe, I don’t think I’m getting this wrong, handicap your mitochondrial function by taking too much.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this. 15 milligrams of methylene blue with 75 milligrams of vitamin C NeuroPro. I’m not recommending this. This is just one on Amazon.

Tim Ferriss: It’s All over Amazon. God, that’s terrifying.

Kevin Rose: What would be considered a microdose in your opinion?

Tim Ferriss: I’d have to go back and look at his actual research. People should listen to the STEM-Talk episode with Francisco Gonzalez-Lima.

Kevin Rose: There’s a picture of someone putting it in her purse.

Tim Ferriss: Like an EpiPen.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, I’ll just take this to go.

Tim Ferriss: Take this to the spa.

Kevin Rose: By the way, the comments — it’s so funny you’re on this because literally two days ago, I was in here reading the comments and they’re like, “I’m peeing blue now.” You pee blue.

Tim Ferriss: You do pee blue. And that’s actually a way individually that you can begin to identify your customized dose.

Kevin Rose: Oh, you shouldn’t be peeing blue.

Tim Ferriss: No, at what point you go from blue to clear. You can figure out basically what the half — I’m probably using not exactly the correct terms, but figure out what the half life is in your body so that you’re dosing at the right interval.

Kevin Rose: They call this bro science, by the way, when two guys that don’t have —

Tim Ferriss: Well, I am pretty closely echoing. Yes, it is broscience, but it’s bro science with citations, meaning don’t trust exactly what I’m saying, but go listen to the episode and read his research.

Kevin Rose: Dude, look at this.

Tim Ferriss: Methylene blue gummies. Fuck.

Kevin Rose: They’re selling gummies now of methane blue.

Tim Ferriss: Terrifying.

Kevin Rose: Anyway.

Tim Ferriss: Just because it’s a supplement doesn’t make it safe, folks.

Kevin Rose: Amen. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Hemlock, all natural. Turns out, shouldn’t have too much of it.

Kevin Rose: Hemlock?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, killed Socrates.

Kevin Rose: Oh, yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s just like arsenic, all natural. Don’t go take a shaker bottle full of arsenic. So yeah, be careful out there, kids. But that definitely has my attention right now because I think about say parental risk, my mom’s cognition is slipping, but she’s APOE e3/e3. Her APOE allele profile is 3/3. I’m 3/4, my brother’s 3/4, which means we got the four from my dad. He’s sharp as a tack. He’s incredibly sharp and he’s older than my mom. So it’s like, all right, they both have metabolic dysfunction. So that’s equalized. The fasting glucose and all that’s terrible. It’s like, what’s going on? Well, you do inherit mitochondria from your mom and mitochondria are a very big deal. So looking at different levers that I might experiment with in my mom that could also potentially be applied preventatively in me and my brother.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So the Dale Bredesen protocol is pretty awesome. He wrote a book about six or seven years ago, maybe it’s closer to 10 now.

Tim Ferriss: Nicotine enemas, am I right?

Kevin Rose: Exactly. That’s all it is. Which you tried for the first time today.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but yeah.

Kevin Rose: So the one thing I like about, it’s called The End of Alzheimer’s, is the name of his book, is that he’s —

Tim Ferriss: Understated.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly. Won’t sell any copies with that title. But what he came up with is he said, “Okay, listen, what we’re seeing in the brain is the byproduct of something going haywire. It’s either blood-brain barrier breaking down, allowing bad shit in. It could be bacteria. It could be a whole slew of different things.” It could be, like you said, an issue with blood flow and it could be, what did you call it? A vascular type issue.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And he thinks it’s like three or four. He thinks it’s either vascular, which sauna, other things like that help with. CocoaVia, like other ways to make sure that you have vascular health. Obviously the mitochondria thing is another one that he’s huge on. And then he also thinks it could be toxin-related as well.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Kevin Rose: And talking about how to get those toxins out of your body, but his protocol is very common sense.

Tim Ferriss: What is it?

Kevin Rose: It is essentially a handful of supplements, which are all the ones that you’ve basically talked about along with, it’s like a lightweight keto. So just making sure you go into lightweight ketosis like five days a week. And then obviously no sugar, no refined carbohydrate, it’s eliminating all that shit. Turns out exercise, like intense exercise, is very important. And he’s shown now over the course of a decade that he’s taken people. Actually, you know Kelly Boys who we were on the —

Tim Ferriss: Retreat with.

Kevin Rose: — retreat with. She’s an awesome meditation — she teaches something, this form of relaxing yoga.

Tim Ferriss: Yoga Nidra.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. As an aside, her father, I think she’d be okay for me to share this, we’ll double check, but her father had mild cognitive impairment 10 years ago and they were, of course, really worried. They put them on the Dale Bredesen protocol and he’s scoring better now than he was when he first took the test. 10 years later.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: And she’s like, “Yeah, he still has issues here and there.” But he’s I guess in his 80s now or something, but that’s what you want.

Tim Ferriss: Makes a difference. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Even if we can say, okay, mild cognitive impairment, it’s progressing. My mom is in this situation. She can’t tell you what she had for breakfast, but thankfully she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She has some form of dementia. She remembers me, kids’ names, stuff like that, the important things. She would have a hard time telling you what the name of my dog is. There’s little things that slide through the cracks. She’s sadly really overweight, didn’t really want to do that. But the point is, if we could see this stuff early enough where you still have enough of your wits about you to take action, because compliance is huge, as you know. How hard is it to get your family members to go do high intensity exercise?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Can I pause for a second?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So that’s part of the reason why the methylene blue and the photobiomodulation are so interesting because for instance, there’s a device that is actually worth investigating on some levels called the Cognito device. It’s a headset and it was developed by scientists out of MIT and it’s 40 hertz, I believe, both visual and auditory stimulation, and in Rhesus monkeys, pretty recently in the last year, they showed a lot of plaque clearance enhanced by this, right? But that’s still, if I’m understanding correctly, people fact check this, but that’s still predicated on the theory of disease for Alzheimer’s that by removing plaque, you get clinical outcomes, right?

Kevin Rose: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: The photobiomodulation — well, before I get to that, as I understand it, this is an hour a day of wearing this device on your head. My mom’s not going to do that. There’s no fucking way, right? Nor any of my relatives. However, the photobiomodulation, it’s like eight to 10 minutes, right? Laser or LED. LED is a little harder to make —

Kevin Rose: And do you have to go in to do that or can you get a device that does it at all?

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to buy a device and I’m not recommending people do that. You can really damage your eyes with lasers and so on, but right now, it’s not like you can go to a clinic and be like, “Hey, I’d like to have this treatment.” Just doesn’t exist. So let me be the guinea pig before anybody does anything, but you get this device and I’m sure it’s going to be very expensive. Some of these lasers, they’re like $30,000. But eight to 10 minutes, and you can see, even after a single session, you can see multiple weeks of effect. It’s crazy.

Kevin Rose: And so it just sits right on top of — into the eye or on top of the —

Tim Ferriss: No. Well, there are devices that go through the eyes, but this one, what makes it so mystifying in a way for me is that it’s actually pointed at the forehead as an infrared laser. It’s so fascinating. And there are peer reviewed published studies on this, which you can find. Anybody who looks up Gonzalez-Lima will find it. So it’s exciting. It’s super exciting because there’s certain things. I know that my mitochondria are funky. And I know that through different types of endurance testing, different types of, obviously all sorts of stuff done through doctors and tests and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s something funky with the mitochondria. And I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s try to get ahead of that.”

And actually related to that, to invoke, I said she would come back. Rhonda Patrick, also, I was texting with her at one point because I was listening to STEM-Talk, that podcast I mentioned, and I came across a scientist discussing something called urolithin A.

Kevin Rose: Of course, Mitopure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Mitopure. And two years ago, maybe it was two years ago, she was pretty bearish on it, but there’s a lot of new research, or I shouldn’t say a lot. There’s new research that’s come out and also met with a couple of biotech people in Boston who are very respected. I’m not going to dox them because I don’t want to, but they basically did this comprehensive analysis and landed on three or four things and one of them was urolithin A.

Kevin Rose: Right. I take 300 milligrams a day.

Tim Ferriss: 300. How did you choose 300 milligrams?

Kevin Rose: Because that’s what all the studies are done on — or no, sorry, so 500 to 1,000. I take 500 milligrams a day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Clear then you’ve been taking a higher dose.

Tim Ferriss: I was like 300?

Kevin Rose: I’ve only been doing these things for three months to see some results. So bear with me people, I was close. it was 200 milligrams off.

Tim Ferriss: What’s a little strange is that if you buy the bag, you can get this on Amazon. I’m not recommending you do that. Jury’s still out, but I’m like, “Hey, I want to hit mitochondria from as many reasonably plausible mechanisms or angles as possible.” You can get Mitopure. It’s expensive AF. It is very expensive.

Kevin Rose: I was going to tell people that the one that people talk about the most in this world that has done a lot of clinical studies around it, your Urolithin A is this company called Timeline, who doesn’t say — they trademarked the name of it, which is Mitopure. The problem is it’s freaking expensive.

Tim Ferriss: It’s very, very expensive.

Kevin Rose: And I don’t know, is there another company that’s out there that has high quality? Because I’m not going to put shit into my body, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Kevin Rose: But I would like to know, is there any company that has —

Tim Ferriss: When you say expensive, it’s like 60 count is $125, right?

Kevin Rose: Right. And you’re taking two a day.

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. So that’s 30 days.

Tim Ferriss: And most of the studies actually have people taking a thousand a day. So if you’re taking a thousand a day, the prices are going to add up. But again —

Kevin Rose: I would trust Pure Encapsulations if they offered some of it. I haven’t seen anybody — there’s no other brands that I’ve seen that — you know the household names like the Thorns, the Pures, the ones that —

Tim Ferriss: And this is a single SKU, well, not a single SKU, but a single compound company. They have a lot vested in IP protection and so on.

Kevin Rose: But it can’t be synthesized. They don’t own urolithin A. Obviously that’s something that anyone can produce.

Tim Ferriss: Well, urolithin A is also —

Kevin Rose: urolithin A, I mean.

Tim Ferriss: — what’s called a postbiotic. If you were eating tons of pomegranates and walnuts and so on, there’s certain things that in your gut, biomicrobes will be converted into, in part, urolithin A. The problem is that there’s a high degree of variability. So if Kevin eats two handfuls of walnuts and I ate two handfuls of walnuts, we’re not going to get the same amount of urolithin A out. Fortunately, urolithin A is very orally bioavailable, which is why the supplementation potentially makes sense.

Kevin Rose: What’s interesting is actually Pure Encapsulations does make one, and when you go and look at the label, they actually buy Mitopure for theirs.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, There you go.

Kevin Rose: So they use Mitopure in theirs.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Mitopure in this case is almost like an industrial grade supplier in so much as Creapure. If you’re buying Creatine, I use Momentus Creatine, they’re a sponsor of the podcast, but I like their stuff and everything is NSF certified and third party analyzed. Creapure is this supplier, just like maybe Mitopure is, that’s providing something that is very pure and properly assayed and so on and so forth. Okay. So Pure Encapsulations, it’s not cheap either. That one’s 80 bucks.

Kevin Rose: 80 bucks, but so that’ll get you — hold on. Let’s just do the math here. So $80 of 60 pills. And, again, it is 250 mgs per two pills, so that’s half the dose.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so if you wanted — well, per two pills, so if you wanted a thousand a day, that’s eight per day.

Kevin Rose: It’s 160. Oh, thousand a day, yeah, eight a day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s eight a day, 60 capsules.

Kevin Rose: But it has other shit in there, too. I don’t want all this other stuff, the resveratrol and whatever.

Tim Ferriss: So, yeah, it’s expensive. That 80 bucks is going to last you like 12 days, something like that. In any case, guys, the jury is out.

Kevin Rose: The jury is out.

Tim Ferriss: But it’s interesting enough that I added it into the rotation. And I routinely take things out of the rotation also.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.

Tim Ferriss: This one I’ve been taking for probably six to eight weeks.

Kevin Rose: What’s the number one thing that you’ve kept in rotation for the longest time? I have two, vitamin D, obviously, because my levels are chronically low without it. And I think, at this point, it’s a no-brainer to get your levels where they should be. And then I would say curl-ups is another one that I have had in for a long time —

Tim Ferriss: CocoaVia is interesting, yeah.

Kevin Rose: — just because it looks really interesting in terms of vascular health, and then I think, well, obviously, your high-quality omega-3. Outside of that, I don’t know what else I’ve had. What’s been in your rotation forever?

Tim Ferriss: I mean, a lot of them are dictated by genetic analysis and blood biomarkers in some way. Right? So, outside of prescription stuff, because I am taking things to not die of cardiovascular disease, because everybody in my family gets smoked by some kind of cardiovascular disease, and I’m, like, “Yeah. I’m no spring chicken.”

Kevin Rose: Are you taking Repatha, too?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m taking Repatha.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Where do you inject it?

Tim Ferriss: In the thigh. I hate it. It’s so painful.

Kevin Rose: Oh, really?

Tim Ferriss: I find it so painful.

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God, dude, I can tell you a secret.

Tim Ferriss: What’s the secret?

Kevin Rose: How often are you — how long do you let the alcohol dry for?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s the alcohol.

Kevin Rose: Dude, I’m telling you —

Tim Ferriss: I’ve done thousands of injections in myself.

Kevin Rose: You got to let it because, if you would just like swipe, swipe, swipe and then go pop, it hurts because it’s pushing the alcohol down into the cuts.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe I’m not waiting long enough because I’m impatient. It’s possible because —

Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, oh, are you letting it come to room temperature, too?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did let it come to room temperature. Yeah.

Kevin Rose: Okay, because you know it takes five times as long to inject it if you don’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, there’s the prescription stuff. It’s not going to apply to too broad a number of people, and I don’t want anyone aping it and getting themselves into trouble, but there are like a few prescription meds for lipid profile specifically, in my case, cholesterol absorption, hyperabsorption. But I would say supplement-wise, omega-3, I honestly try to get that from fish when I can. I eat a lot of canned sardines and mackerel and stuff, which ties into the keto and Fasting Mimicking Diet diet stuff. Vitamin D, yes, although I’m pretty skeptical of like the entire planet having vitamin D deficiency frankly. I do take it though. And then there’s some B vitamin complex stuff.

Kevin Rose: I do that, too.

Tim Ferriss: I’m a shitty methylator, so that’s a good idea.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Same.

Tim Ferriss: And creatine, although I end up looking kind of like a puffy fat baby if I eat too much of that stuff.

Kevin Rose: Wait. Are you doing five grams?

Tim Ferriss: It depends on the day, right? So like I took five grams today. If I’m training, I’m going to use at least 10. I’m doing weight training. And then, if I have a crazy travel schedule ahead of me where I’m going to be in like London for one day and Sweden for one day, I’ll be taking probably 20 to 30 grams a day —

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: — because my sleep’s going to be so screwed —

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — just to compensate for the sleep deprivation.

Kevin Rose: Holy shit. Good luck.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Kevin Rose: Good luck making it to the toilet.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Don’t —

Kevin Rose: Creatine jacks your stomach up, right?

Tim Ferriss: Don’t combine. Actually, I’m fine with creatine. If I get —

Kevin Rose: You told me at one point it was messing you up though.

Tim Ferriss: Well, there was the story of me — what did I have? I was in San Francisco. This is probably TMI, but whatever. We’re all friends here, right? So I was in San Francisco. I had my Volkswagen Golf. It got broken into like three times for change. I was so annoyed. San Francisco for the win. And, in any case, I had to run to an international flight, and I was stressed out because I was running behind. And I was, like, well, just before I go, I’m going to have double espresso, 10 grams of creatine, and then I had MCT oil.

Kevin Rose: Oh, oh, my God, dude.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m driving on my way to the airport like in a massive rush. I don’t have time for anything. And I leaned to do a little squeaker, and just —

Kevin Rose: Oh, no.

Tim Ferriss: — full disaster pants.

Kevin Rose: In an Uber?

Tim Ferriss: No. In my own car.

Kevin Rose: Oh.

Tim Ferriss: I park in long-term parking and —

Kevin Rose: Did you grab a new pair out of your thing, just wipe and go?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God, all right, I can’t believe I’m talking about this to millions of people. But I basically took the underwear and like some rags that I had, like did what I had to do for like emergency field triage —

Kevin Rose: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — tossed it under my car, put on my pants —

Kevin Rose: Throw it in the trash.

Tim Ferriss: — put on my pants. No, I literally was about to miss my flight. I put my pants on commando style and then ran on and got on the flight.

Kevin Rose: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And I was just, like, “I’m sorry, everybody.” I know this can’t be too much of a wonderful cologne for anyone near me.

Kevin Rose: Oh, God.

Tim Ferriss: We might need to edit some of that. So, yeah, don’t do those three at once. If you’re getting Creapure creatine, I don’t find it to mess up my stomach at all. Totally fine. If you combine it with caffeine and MCT oil —

Kevin Rose: MCT oil is the devil, dude.

Tim Ferriss: All bets are off. All bets are off.

Kevin Rose: That stuff just goes straight through you. I don’t know a single person that can do high-dose MCT and has been, like, “Oh, my stomach’s fine.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. You’re going to — high risk. You should just pre-order the subscription of Depends.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Let me mention one other thing. So, related to all the mental health stuff, it sounds like we’re doing like tons of stuff, millions of things. It’s actually not that complicated for me. Right? There are a few supplements that I’m taking consistently, the creatine, the Urolithin A, et cetera. There are a few things I’m considering like methylene blue. If photobiomodulation with the lasers or LEDs is something that you can experiment with once a week or once every few weeks and track changes over time, let’s do that, and before and after cognitive testing. Intermittent ketosis, which I find easiest to do through intermittent fasting, frankly, which I’ll be doing when I travel also. I find it to help with jet lag.

And then there’s the exercise, right? And so what kind of exercise? I did a podcast with Dr. Tommy Wood recently. Fascinating guy. People should listen to that episode. But 4×4 Norwegian, high-intensity training, which is like you’re basically doing — I guess it would be considered zone four. You’re really maxing out your heart rate. And you’re doing four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on, three minutes off, four minutes on. You’re repeating that four times. And it is very much puke inducing. It’s a lot of lactic acid.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The problem has always been, or one of the problems has always been that, if I’m traveling, stationary bikes in hotels are just terrible.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: They will destroy my knees. They’re just too inconsistent in terms of settings and stuff. So I was texting with Tommy. I don’t think he’d mind me saying. I’ll have to double check with him. But I asked him, I said if — in the conversation we had, I was, like, “Well, what are the drivers here? Is it VO2 max, because talk about VO2 max, VO2 max, VO2 max?” And he said, “Well, lactate actually seems to be a big driver, like lactic acid, right?”

Kevin Rose: Driver of what?

Tim Ferriss: Driver of the cognitive changes, like the neuroanatomical and vascular changes. And he’s, like, “Okay.” “Well, hold on a second.” I was, like, “If that’s the case, there are certain ways of weight training. Like if you do 20 rep squats in slow cadence or any number of different things, like you are going to be brimming with lactic acid. Could that possibly achieve the same effect?”

Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?

Tim Ferriss: What’s that?

Kevin Rose: You don’t think it’s klotho?

Tim Ferriss: Klotho is another part of it.

Kevin Rose: Because klotho has been shown — like HIIT is what creates klotho in humans.

Tim Ferriss: Well, klotho is another piece. I don’t think it’s the only piece. I mean, look, I can’t wait for us to have proper injectable klotho or that lever to pull. But, in the meantime, I guess, right now, today, what I’m saying is like high intensity interval training when you’re traveling is not always the easiest thing to do.

Kevin Rose: Right. Right. Right.

Tim Ferriss: But, like for instance, when I go back to my hotel tonight, can I do like a couple of sets of very high repetition leg presses and just basically have lactic acid pouring out my eyeballs? Yeah, I can do that.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I can do it in like five minutes. Right? And there are many open questions about it, but that’s the approach I’m taking. And what’s really cool about the Norwegian 4×4 that Tommy describes, and I think I’m remembering this correctly, is that, if you do it, I think it’s three times a week for six months, you can observe the effects, the beneficial effects for like five years afterwards.

Kevin Rose: Wow. Holy shit.

Tim Ferriss: Isn’t that fucking crazy?

Kevin Rose: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: The durability of the effects are just nuts.

Kevin Rose: Okay, this is what I get to — I’ll start by like 1×1 or something. And you could go in 4×4?

Tim Ferriss: There ain’t no way in hell I’m doing 4×4.

Kevin Rose: 4×4, if you’re doing it properly. I use a Morpheus chest strap. But you’re assuming a certain level of like baseline cardiovascular fitness to do 4×4.

Tim Ferriss: Not really because, I mean, look, you don’t —

Kevin Rose: It’s subjective.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t blow yourself apart, but it’s heart-rate based, right?

Kevin Rose: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So, if you get winded and your heart gets gone walking up a flight of stairs, like you’re not going to need very much to get into the proper zone. I will say, for me, and this comes back to the mitochondrial discussion, and I’ve had doctors who are, like, “That’s nonsense. It’s all mediated by the lungs.” It’s actually not mediated by the lungs. It’s all like heart stroke volume. I’m, like, “My legs crap out first before my heart rate gets to where it needs to be.” My legs are the weak link.

Kevin Rose: Oh, dude.

Tim Ferriss: I feel that fatigue in my legs.

Kevin Rose: I’ve got boots for you tonight. Can I put the boots on while you have dinner?

Tim Ferriss: Are these the —

Kevin Rose: The ones that go all the way up the leg.

Tim Ferriss: — Normatec?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, Normatec.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll try them. Yeah, I’ll try them.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever tried them?

Tim Ferriss: I have. I love those.

Kevin Rose: Oh, they’re so good, man. For people who don’t know, real quick, just a quick aside, they just squeeze and then move the blood around in your legs. They’re great for recovery.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like if you want to feel like a Kobe cow —

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — just throw on some Normatec boots, have a cold beer while you’re doing it.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. And we could do both of those things tonight.

Tim Ferriss: I mean that’s —

Kevin Rose: That’s it from my side.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot —

Kevin Rose: I can do the doom-and-gloom AI shit, but I don’t want to talk about that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. Let’s save the doom-and-gloom for next time. I think you’re getting contagions from one of our other friends. I left out something that’s kind of important.

Kevin Rose: I’ve just got to make sure what you’re talking about. We have a buddy that just like we text with. And we love you if you’re listening. But he’s, like, “The world is ending.”

Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot of — I lean dystopian anyway. It’s like I don’t need any feeding that hypervigilant. Like I need to become John Connor. Like I don’t. Plus, it’s like, can I do anything? What am I going to do? What’s Tim going to do?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Exactly. Meditating.

Tim Ferriss: The fuck, the genie is out of the bottle, folks, so we’ll save the doom-and-gloom for next time. But, in terms of an actionable thing, like something I just did before coming here, let’s say you want to experiment with this lactate as lever for cognitive longevity, right? That’s interesting. Okay, and let’s just say, furthermore, to your point, right, everybody’s getting older. And, believe me, maybe you’re like a 20-year-old dude and feeling immortal. Those like popped-up joints and broken bones will add up, and they will come back to haunt you like the ghost of Christmas past. So, if you’re trying to minimize injury risk, right, there are a couple of different ways you can do it. One that I’ve been a proponent of for a long time is slow down, right? Five seconds up, five seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down.

Kevin Rose: Time under 10 is just huge, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so it’s like, look, if you’re not a competitive powerlifter, consider moving slowly. What that requires you to do is lower the weight. You’re also not going to be using momentum. The second thing you can —

Kevin Rose: Testosterone?

Tim Ferriss: Not for lactate, but, yeah, I mean, sure, when in doubt, yeah, testosterone.

Kevin Rose: When in doubt.

Tim Ferriss: When in doubt.

Kevin Rose: 200 milligrams once a week.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a joke, people.

Kevin Rose: Well, first of all, if you have it — well, anyway, don’t do that.

Tim Ferriss: So the second thing you can do, which I’ve been experimenting with, which Tommy would use this all the time, especially when traveling, is blood flow restriction cuffs.

Kevin Rose: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And so —

Kevin Rose: I used to have some of those before my fire happened.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so —

Kevin Rose: I would blood flow. I got the automatic ones that would automatically keep the pressure, too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to use, like, a hand pump. I’m using the KAATSU —

Kevin Rose: Yeah, mine are digital KAATSU. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — K-A-A-T-S-U, C4. I’m using the C4 because I’m, like, I don’t want another app on my phone.

Kevin Rose: Did you get the app? Oh, I got the app.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t want —

Kevin Rose: That’s nice.

Tim Ferriss: No. Like, look, if people want apps, they can. I’m kind of along the Bill Burr lines of, like, “I need to install a fucking app to use my toaster now? Like, please, shoot me.”

Kevin Rose: What about having a hummingbird feeder?

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, we’ll talk about that.

Kevin Rose: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Let me finish the blood flow restriction. We’re all over the place. All right. So the blood flow restriction, all it is is a cuff. It inflates and it causes a partial occlusion. Right? It’s cutting off circulation to your arms or your legs. And there’s a lot of really good science on this. You can check it out. But what you can do when traveling — and I’m trying this right now. Tommy Wood, by the way, is a phenomenal athlete, endurance and strongman in addition to being an incredible researcher. I don’t know where they breed these people like Dominic D’Agostino, same thing, like 500-pound deadlift for 10 reps after a seven-day fast. Like who are these people? Anyway, Tommy is a beast. When he’s traveling, and he doesn’t lose muscle when he’s doing this, he’ll use blood flow restriction. And he’ll bring bands.

Kevin Rose: Oh, interesting.

Tim Ferriss: He’ll just bring a bunch of bands. And I got to tell you.

Kevin Rose: It doesn’t take much. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I like to think of myself as reasonably strong. I’m not a world-class powerlifter, but I think, like generally, pretty strong guy. I put on those cuffs today. And I was, like, “I think I’ll just bump it from light up to medium.”

Kevin Rose: Like 20 pounds?

Tim Ferriss: Ah, well, it has a different metric. It has a different —

Kevin Rose: The band strength?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, in terms of like there’s —

Kevin Rose: Extra large or extra strong or whatever?

Tim Ferriss: I can’t remember. Yeah, I mean, if you use the KAATSU bands. There are many other brands. Tommy uses a different brand. You can find it in the podcast. We can put it in the show notes. But, suffice it to say, it’s like you’re using very, very light weights. And it’s like I can probably do hammer curls with like 40-pound dumbbells, let’s just say.

Kevin Rose: With those on?

Tim Ferriss: No.

Kevin Rose: That’s what I was going to say. That’s way too much weight.

Tim Ferriss: I’m saying, normally, with reasonable cadence, not swinging around, I can probably do hammer curls with 40 pounds without too much trouble with the blood flow restriction bands on.

Kevin Rose: Like, literally, 20 pounds is all you need.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, 10 pounds.

Kevin Rose: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I was doing like 30 reps and then take a 15-second rest, then 20 reps, 15-second rest, like 10 to 50 reps.

Kevin Rose: So you have the C4s, these bad boys?

Tim Ferriss: I’ve got the C4s, yeah. And, look, KAATSU is expensive. These are, what, yeah, $1,259. Like that is expensive. There are other options that are not that expensive. But then the one that really was humbling is I was, like, “Okay, I’ll just do pushups for like triceps,” just because I only brought the armbands. I didn’t bring the leg bands and everything this time around. I can just do like walking and lunges. Trust me, you can smoke yourself doing those. But I was doing pushups, and I was, like, “Well, let me start moderate. I’ll just start on like a bench that’s about 18 inches off the ground. I’ll do some pushups.” And I did like 25, and I’m, like, “Wow, that’s a lot harder than I would expect,” right, because like, on the ground, I could probably do, I don’t know, 40, good form, 50 pushups. And I did 25. I was, like, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable.”

And then I went to do the next set, got like five, and I was, like, “Oh, I can’t do it.” And so then I increased my — basically elevated myself to make it easier. Right? And I’m doing it on, like, the seat of a hamstring curl machine. Did like 12. Couldn’t do any more. And then I got to the point where I was literally doing pushups. It’s so humbling on like the railing of the stairs. I was basically standing up straight, and I did 30 reps, and I was, like, “This really…”

Kevin Rose: Okay, real quick —

Tim Ferriss: “…keeps your ego in check.”

Kevin Rose: 20-second version, why is it working? Why is restricting blood flow working? Why is it building more muscle?

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s doing a few different things. It’s also increasing capillary density and vasculature. It’s having a whole host of effects. I, to be honest, don’t —

Kevin Rose: But doesn’t it increase HGH as well, localized?

Tim Ferriss: It might. It makes you sweat your balls off, too.

Kevin Rose: And then had another question.

Tim Ferriss: Not to get too technical, but

Kevin Rose: Could it work? Could that work?

Tim Ferriss: Kevin’s asking me if you could use blood flow restriction on your —

Kevin Rose: I didn’t want to bring it up unless it was with —

Tim Ferriss: — on your Schwantz.

Kevin Rose: So, listen, I think —

Tim Ferriss: I think it sounds like a terrible idea.

Kevin Rose: No. Listen, they have rings that you can put around your schwonks and — but, listen, hear me out.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I know those exist.

Kevin Rose: I just literally Googled that there is smooth muscle tissue in there. If you’re telling me that you’re putting bands on your arms doing lifts, if you —

Tim Ferriss: How are you going to do lifts with your Schwanz?

Kevin Rose: You have to have a schlonks erection.

Tim Ferriss: And then you do some shaolin monk — like —

Kevin Rose: Well, if you have the band —

Tim Ferriss: — like curl-ups?

Kevin Rose: I’m just saying this is a theory.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I guess you could like do manual resistance. You could push it down and then bring it back up.

Keving Rose: Push it down, five seconds up. Do you know what’s crazy? Obviously, everyone knows this is a joke, but it might not be, you know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Do not —

Kevin Rose: Like this could be real.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, do not wrap duct tape or anything —

Kevin Rose: Well, they have rings that they sell at stores.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think you can try that and then report back in the next show.

Kevin Rose: Have you ever used one of the rings?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so.

Kevin Rose: You have to.

Tim Ferriss: No. I mean, I would. Why not? Yeah, I mean, why not? As long as you’re not going to completely — I mean, it’s not going to just fall off.

Kevin Rose: Apparently, it locks the blood in.

Tim Ferriss: Well, obviously, yeah. What else would it be for?

Kevin Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously, for people that don’t know, pre-Viagra era.

Tim Ferriss: We’re talking about cock rings. We’re speaking in fucking riddles here. It’s like that’s what they’re called.

Kevin Rose: We’re speaking in Zen koans here. What is the sound of one —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. This really fucking went in the gutter, yeah, quickly.

Kevin Rose: Well, we’re almost at the end of the episode, so —

Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds.

Kevin Rose: Hummingbirds. Okay. So, before we started the show, Tim was, like, “You’ve got to mention the hummingbirds,” and I’m like —

Tim Ferriss: Well, I looked at your draft, and I was, like, “You’ve got to talk about your hummingbird thing.” You’ve sent me a bunch of these videos.

Kevin Rose: Dude, they’re so cool. Okay. So, essentially, for Christmas, I got my kids a hummingbird feeder with a digital camera built in. And the cool thing about it is it charges from the sunlight and then also — so the camera just always stays on. And then also it detects what — in this case, it’s the hummingbird, but they have for normal birds as well. But it’ll tell you the variety of hummingbird that landed and then uses AI. And then you could name them. And so we have one named —

Tim Ferriss: Tony is back.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, exactly, and we have one named Sunset. Our girl’s named it Sunset because it has this beautiful red neck, and we’re like — I’ll get a text notification. “Sunset is drinking…”

Tim Ferriss: Is this the one?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, that’s the one, Birdbuddy. It’s the Birdbuddy Smart Solar Pro Hummingbird Feeder. And it’s fun, people, because these things are so beautiful and —

Tim Ferriss: The videos are amazing.

Kevin Rose: The videos are amazing. And then they play with each other. And you watch them hovering. And you get full audio. You see the little — their tiny tongues like sticking out. It’s just amazing. It’s really cool.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the videos were quite cool.

Kevin Rose: And then I got the one that is for just standard birds which has bird feed that comes down, and the motherfucking squirrels are taking it over.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, they’re just mercenaries.

Kevin Rose: They are ruthless. Dude, they jump. Like there’s nothing you could do to keep them out of it. They will spring onto it. And then you see they’re like — sadly, they look out because they don’t want to get attacked, and so all I have is squirrel ass on my freaking camera. I’m, like, “Goddammit, how do I get rid of the squirrels?”

Tim Ferriss: Have you heard of Mark Rober? Does his name mean anything to you?

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: He created like the ultimate squirrel ninja warrior course in his backyard.

Kevin Rose: No.

Tim Ferriss: He put it on YouTube. Let me — yeah, there we go. All right. Mark Rober, squirrels, I think he had the same problem. Here we go. Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 Ninja Warriors.

Kevin Rose: It’s supposed to keep them out?

Tim Ferriss: People have to check this out. Oh, hold up, no ads, no free ads.

Kevin Rose: I got to pay for my pro.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re not paying the $5 a month.

Kevin Rose: I’m not logged in. I’m not logged in to the pro.

Tim Ferriss: You’re buying $7,000 Japanese vintage jackets but you won’t pay $5 to get rid of these goddam ads.

Kevin Rose: Yeah, just click “skip.”

Tim Ferriss: All right. So, here, hold on a sec.

Kevin Rose: Whoa.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, look at this setup.

Kevin Rose: This is like MrBeast for squirrels.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, look, these guys just get —

Kevin Rose: My God, it’s totally MrBeast for squirrels. Like he’s having them go through all these obstacle courses.

Tim Ferriss: They stick their heads through and then they get a photo taken. All right, we’ll link to that.

Kevin Rose: People, you have to watch this video.

Tim Ferriss: Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 by Mark Rober.

Kevin Rose: Dude, this is —

Tim Ferriss: R-O-B-E-R.

Kevin Rose: — 144 million views.

Tim Ferriss: See, this is the kind of shit where I’m, like, “I should have come up with this idea.” Like this is too good. All right. Solid.

Tim Ferriss: Hummingbirds and cock rings.

Kevin Rose: Yeah. We covered it all this time, people.

Tim Ferriss: Brought to you courtesy the Random Show.

Kevin Rose: Brother, good to see you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, good to see you, too, man.

Kevin Rose: Glad you’re —

Tim Ferriss: Good to see you, too.

Kevin Rose: Glad you’re feeling better. And, yeah —

Tim Ferriss: To be continued.

Kevin Rose: To be continued.

Tim Ferriss: All right, folks, we’ll put everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Random Show. It’s going to be one of those. Search for cock rings. It’ll be the only result on tim.blog. And, until next time, take care of —

Kevin Rose: For now.

Tim Ferriss: — yourselves. Be nice. Be a little kinder than is necessary to yourselves and to others.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858)

2026-03-19 03:44:03

Welcome to another wide-ranging “Random Show” episode that I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose!

We cover our recent Zen meditation retreat with Henry Shukman at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, the fascinating science of vagus nerve stimulation, my recent back pain breakthrough, balance training tools, tendon-strengthening protocols from Swedish rock climber Emil Abrahamsson, the emerging research on photobiomodulation, urolithin A supplementation, blood-flow-restriction training, the Norwegian 4×4 protocol for cognitive longevity, podcast recommendations, vintage Japanese finds on Etsy, Kevin’s hummingbird-feeder obsession, and much more.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim
AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim
Cresset family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs: CressetCapital.com/Tim

Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip Strength Tools, and More

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Kevin Rose:

Books

The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline by Dale Bredesen
The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes by Kevin Tracey
Heart Breath Mind: Conquer Stress, Build Resilience, and Perform at Your Peak by Leah Lagos
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

Related Resources

Tibetan Bowls: Invoking Inner Peace and Deep Relaxation | Mindful Melodies
Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans | The Tim Ferriss Show #560
Divergent Hepatic Outcomes of Chronic Ketone Supplementation: Ketone Salts Preserve Liver Health While Ketone Esters and Precursors Drive Inflammation and Steatosis | Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating “Software” for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show #849
Kevin J. Tracey, MD — What Most Has My Attention Right Now — Credible (vs. Bogus) Vagus Nerve Stimulation | The Tim Ferriss Show #824
New Implant Offers Hope for Easing Rheumatoid Arthritis | Hospital for Special Surgery
The Effects of a Four-Month Skateboarding Intervention on Motor, Cognitive, and Symptom Levels in Children with ADHD | Frontiers in Pediatrics
Jerzy Gregorek Snatching on a Balance Board | The Happy Body
57-Year-Old Tony Hawk Snowboarding Hokkaido with Screws in His Hip | Instagram
Gibbon Tightrope Walking on a Suspension Bridge | Facebook
Dr. Keith Baar, UC Davis — Simple Exercises That Can Repair Tendons (Tennis Elbow, etc.), Collagen Fact vs. Fiction, Isometrics vs. Eccentrics, JAK Inhibitors, Growth Hormone vs. IGF-1, The Anti-RICE Protocol, and How to Use Load as an Anti-Inflammatory | The Tim Ferriss Show #797
Craig Mod — The Real Japan, Cheap Apartments in Tokyo, Productive Side Quests, Creative Retreats, Buying Future Freedom, and Being Possessed by Spirits | The Tim Ferriss Show #802
Craig Mod Returns — Epic Walks in Japan, The Art of Slowness, Digital Detox, Publishing “Impossible” Books, and Choosing Beauty Over Scale | The Tim Ferriss Show #803
Francisco Gonzalez-Lima Talks About Brain Metabolic Mapping and Alzheimer’s | STEM-Talk #106
Francisco Gonzalez-Lima Discusses Methylene Blue & Noninvasive Human Brain Stimulation | STEM-Talk #191
Cognitive Enhancement by Transcranial Photobiomodulation Is Associated With Cerebrovascular Oxygenation of the Prefrontal Cortex | Frontiers in Neuroscience
Anurag Singh on Urolithin-A’s Ability to Optimize Mitochondrial Efficiency | STEM-Talk #173
Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia | The Tim Ferriss Show #851
Backyard Squirrel Maze 1.0 Ninja Warrior Course | Mark Rober

People

Podcasts

Tools, Products, & Devices

Supplements

CocoaVia
Creatine
Ketone Salts
Methylene Blue (Not as safe as its ubiquitousness suggests.)
Omega-3 Fish Oil
Pure Encapsulations Renual (with Mitopure Urolithin A)
Vitamin D

Concepts & Protocols

Shopping & Lifestyle

Blue Heritage Japan
Japanese Wide-Head Toothbrushes
Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM
Visvim

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] A meditative start.
[00:02:19] Reflecting on our second Zen retreat in Santa Fe with Henry Shukman.
[00:04:08] Ketone liver warnings and eggplant allergies: The perils of raiding Kevin’s fridge.
[00:08:06] “Just be still” — three simple words that miraculously shut down my OCD.
[00:13:54] Is meditation secretly vagus nerve stimulation?
[00:20:17] DIY vagus nerve stim for $25 vs. Kevin’s $900 ear clip.
[00:24:57] HeartMath and watching your HRV move in real time.
[00:27:57] Marching toward 50: balance boards and the end of jiu-jitsu.
[00:31:26] Tony Hawk snowboarding Hokkaido with screws in his hip.
[00:33:01] Slacklining and why your nervous system needs sleep cycles.
[00:35:19] Bertolotti’s Syndrome: My six-year back pain gets a name.
[00:37:09] The nerve block test: everything wrong, zero pain.
[00:44:10] Abrahangs tendon protocol: 10 seconds on, 50 off.
[00:46:24] The NUG: a pocket hangboard for travelers.
[00:48:31] Craig Mod’s Japanese toothbrush and Toaster’s cameo.
[00:50:45] Kevin’s $92 vintage fire jacket: Blue Heritage Japan.
[00:54:26] Podcast picks: The Power Broker and STEM Talk.
[00:56:20] Alzheimer’s: A plaque or mitochondrial problem?
[00:57:30] 10 grams of ketones turns one-word answers into sentences.
[00:58:40] Methylene blue on Amazon: 120 years of research, zero guardrails.
[01:02:36] Bredesen Protocol, APOE genotyping, and a cognitive comeback.
[01:05:32] Photobiomodulation: $30k laser to the forehead.
[01:07:55] Urolithin A and the high price of mitochondrial upkeep.
[01:14:56] Recipe for disaster pants: espresso + creatine + MCT oil.
[01:17:39] Norwegian 4×4 training and lactate as a brain lever.
[01:23:15] Blood flow restriction bands and schwantz ring koans.
[01:29:08] Hummingbirds named Sunset and squirrel obstacle courses.
[01:32:06] Parting thoughts.

This episode is brought to you by Cresset Family Office! Cresset offers family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay and wires, and all the other parts of wealth management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most: making things, mastering skills, and spending time with the people I care about. Schedule a call today at cressetcapital.com/Tim to see how Cresset can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth.

I’m a client of Cresset. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. All investing involves risk, including loss of principal.

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 5 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 5 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can get $350 off of the Pod 5 Ultra for a limited time! Click here to claim this deal and unlock your full potential through optimal sleep.

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. Right now, get a FREE Welcome Kit, including Vitamin D3+K2 and AG1 Flavor Sampler, when you first subscribe. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones!

Want to hear a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from AI to Alzheimer’s prevention? Listen to our last Random Show, in which Kevin and I discussed the 2-2-2 rule for alcohol, bioelectric medicine and accelerated TMS, the promises of DORAs for Alzheimer’s prevention, Kevin’s AI stack and investment thesis, aphantasia vs. hyperphantasia, surviving modern dating, wisdom from Anthony de Mello, and much more.

The post The Random Show, Couch Edition! — Supplements, Hummingbirds, Cock Rings, Optimizing Mitochondria, Breathing and Balance Training, Cool Grip-Strength Tools, and More (#858) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857)

2026-03-12 05:07:22

Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, for which I invited five long-time listener favorites to answer a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? You’ll hear from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman. You can find their full bios here.

Legal conditions/copyright information

How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Maria Popova: My name is Maria Popova and I am a writer. Here are two things I have done to anneal my life. Simple, practical, behavioral changes that have had profound existential benefits.

The first is that at some point I realized I was giving my time to people I perfectly like, respect, can spend a passable hour with conversing about things of some interest, but it was always leaving me malnourished, wishing I had spent that hour writing or down a rabbit hole about the anatomy of the eye of the scallop or talking with one of my closest friends about her work on exoplanets. And so I adopted a kind of, I guess you could call it the cherish quotient. I decided to stop giving my time to people whose company and conversation I don’t absolutely cherish, not just like or appreciate or admire or feel kinship with, but cherish.

Because as Annie Dillard so memorably wrote, how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. And so every middling hour is a step toward a middling life. Life is wasted on the lukewarm. Anything you give your time and attention to should roil with the magma of yes.

And the second thing is very kindred to the first. Some years ago, I emailed a poet I know who’s also an ordained Buddhist and got an auto response detailing her over commitment. And as I was reading it, I got a text from a physicist friend with an elaborate breakdown of his travels and his relationship troubles to explain why it had taken him three days to get back to me.

And I thought, holy stardust, here are people of extraordinary intelligence, creativity, accomplishment, and work ethic who think they are accountable to others for how they spend their time, which is the fulcrum of their life. And I thought how sad, how necessary that we train each other in a kind of basic faith, that everyone is doing the best with the equation between the resources they have, which we tend to overestimate, and that demands their life places upon them, which we tend to underestimate because most of them are invisible to us. And so I stopped using auto responders or apologizing for how long it takes me to return a text because the moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.

Morgan Housel: Hey, Tim Ferriss listeners, thanks for having me. My name is Morgan Housel. I’m the author of three books, The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever, and The Art of Spending Money.

And I want to share with you a couple of things that I’ve done in the last 10 or 20 years that I think had a big, positive impact on my life that were both just around the philosophy of making everything as simple as I possibly could. And the first is how I invest and manage my own money.

My entire net worth is a house, cash, Vanguard index funds, and shares of Markel where I’m on the board of directors. It is hard to imagine a more simple investing asset allocation philosophy, and I’ve done it for a few reasons.

I think there are smart investors out there who have and will continue to outperform the market, and I know some of them and could invest with them. I’ll tell you why I don’t do it though. I think there is so much evidence throughout history that the fewer decisions you have to make as an investor, the better you’re going to do over the course of your life. And so there may be given years, maybe even given decades, when smart people ride a trend, spot an opportunity. Of course that exists. But the fewer chances and opportunities and decisions that I have to make of what are the trends are going to be? Who are the investors that I need to go with? When have they lost their touch and get out? The fewer of those decisions I have to make, the better.

So much of the decisions that we make and the forecasts that we make in the economy and with investments are less about truly objective views of trends and where we think the world is going, and more to do with what we want to happen in the future. When you make a prediction about where the US economy’s going, where AI is going, whatever it might be, it’s less about what you truly think is going to happen given the evidence and more about what you want to happen, given the biases and the lens of your own history and your own life and your own incentives, that kind of thing. And nobody is immune to that. Everybody has that. The fewer decisions that I have to make and anyone can make, the better we’re going to do as investors. I think that is true for 99.9 percent of people.

The other reason I do it, and I think this gets lost, is there’s a lot of evidence that how well you do over your lifetime as an investor has less to do with the returns that you earn in any given year or any given decade, and more just how long can you do it for? If your goal is to not outperform your peers this quarter or this year, if your goal is to maximize wealth over the course of your life, pretty much the variable that matters more than anything is just how long you do it for. And I know that if I can be an average investor for an above average period of time, I’m going to outperform the huge, huge majority of investors. If I can be a passive investor for 50 years, you will probably, after taxes and fees, end up in the top, I don’t know, two or three percent of investors, maybe the top one percent of investors, just by doing nothing.

And maybe that last point is the most important. You’re getting all this for doing nothing, for just sitting back and passively owning a slice of capitalism. How do you factor in that ease? And so let’s take an active investor who is working 40, 50, 80 hours a week tracking markets, and maybe they love it and they enjoy it and it’s their hobby, but let’s say they do that and they outperform me by 50 basis points per year, whatever it might be. How do you factor in the fact that I got my return for doing nothing and somebody else got it for lots and lots of work and stress and whatever it might be? And so I think when you put all that together, I want to minimize the biases that I and everybody has in the world. I think if I can do that, I’ll actually end up in the top one percent of investors over the course of my life, and I’ll do it for virtually no effort.

There’s a psychological cost of putting up with the volatility, but I can spend the time that I would have spent trying to track the global economy and trends and use that time in my career, if that’s outside of investing, my family, my health, my hobbies, those kinds of things.

The second thing I’ve done has to do with my relationship with the news. And I would sum it up like this. I think a really good heuristic for your relationship with information is read more history and fewer forecasts. As simple as it gets. Now, if you were to scroll most people’s social media timeline, if they’re interested in the news, whether that is business news, economic news, political news, science news, whatever it might be, the vast majority of it is forward-looking predictions. It’s maybe “Here’s what happened today and here’s what that means is going to happen tomorrow.”

It’s very predictive. And of course, if you’re even a loose amateur student of history, you know how difficult the history of predictions are. It’s just a very difficult thing to do. The world is so much more complex than we want to make it out to be. And so when we’re trying to predict what’s going to happen next, it’s very, very difficult.

A little side note because I just watched it and just finished it this week. If you watch or read the book, it’s called 11/22/63. It’s a book written by Stephen King, unbelievable book about a guy who basically finds a time machine and goes back in time to prevent JFK from being assassinated. And he does this, he goes back in time, he prevents it. He thinks he saved the world and there’s going to be no Vietnam war and whatever. And then he comes back to the present day and realizes that because he screwed with a little bit of history in 1963, the present world completely fell to pieces.

And so when he comes back in time, it’s like a Mad Max scenario. And I think that general idea that trends are very, very difficult to extrapolate and to figure out what’s going to happen in the future, particularly if we’re talking about long periods of time, is very difficult. And so I don’t spend a lot of time doing it or reading it. What I do want to spend a lot of time doing in my life is reading history. And I think if you immerse yourself in history, any kind of history, business history, political history, military history, whatever it might be, even if you’re looking at just the last hundred years, just in your own country, you become familiar with a lot of the psychological trends that repeat and you see over and over and over again.

And so if you spend time doing that, you understand how people are influenced by incentives, how whole cultures fall into traps of greed and fear and blindness to the problems that they’re causing themselves and the problems they’re causing in the world. You become very familiar with big, broad trends. And once you become familiar with those and spend most of your time studying that stuff, your ability to filter the news, the current news, is much stronger and you can read the news in a much more simplified manner.

You can run through the headlines and very quickly tell, “That headline’s not important. I’m not going to care about that six months from now or a year from now. It’s not important in the slightest. This thing about this new technology or whatever this might be or this example in the news of people falling for the traps of greed and fear, that’s pretty interesting. Let me read that and wrap my head around it.”

Contextualize within the big models that you’ve learned from history. I think it’s made my relationship with the news simpler and healthier. And I think if you don’t have those big trends of human behavior in your head that you learn from history, it’s very easy to get stuck in these wormholes of reading the news of every headline seems like it’s a disaster and every headline seems like it’s something you need to pay attention to that’s going to change the rest of your life. And there’s a great quote that I love from an author named Kelly Hayes, and she says, “When you haven’t engaged with history, everything feels unprecedented.” I think that’s a great way to summarize that.

That’s what I’ve got for you. Thanks so much for listening and thank you for Tim and the rest of his team for doing this.

Cal Newport: Hi, I’m Cal Newport. I’m a computer science professor and a technology theorist. I write and podcast about seeking depth in an increasingly distracted world. What I want to talk about here is simplifying.

Now, I want to establish something right off the bat. The entire reason why I’m a professor and a writer for my job and not, say, like a technology executive or a startup founder who’s made a bunch of money is that my body cannot handle busyness. When I have too many things to do and my calendar is filled with appointment after appointment, this does not energize me, this does not excite me. I get anxious. I get stressed out. What I need in my life is autonomy and space to work on my own terms, to produce cool things over a long amount of time, not to do a lot of stuff in the short term.

This has caused me to have to continually readjust what’s going on in my life to make sure that this busyness does not get out of control. I have to continually simplify to keep my lifestyle something that I can actually tolerate. So I want to give you two examples about this from my actual life. The first has to do with the opportunities that I get offered. Because as a writer and a podcaster, I’m relatively successful at what I do. As the years have gone on and I’ve gotten better, so have the opportunities and offers that come my way. I’m talking about, like, traveling to really cool places, chances to hang out with famous, really interesting people, stupid amounts of money being thrown my way. I mean, I’m talking about, like, a two-day trip that they’re offering you healthily more than my annual professor salary. What I’ve learned over the years is that I basically have to make no my default answer, because here’s the problem.

If you try to put in a triage rule, “Here’s how I evaluate if something is good enough for me to actually spend time doing it,” I found that whatever rule I came up with, too many things actually satisfied that rule. There were too many good enough offers coming my way that I would end up becoming busy anyways. And I would go into a cycle where I’d be completely overloaded, I’d get anxious and resentful, and then in reaction, I’d angrily say no to everything else. And I would tell people, they don’t care, but I would tell them, I am so busy, I can’t possibly do this like they care, like they need to know why you can’t do something. And then I would cycle down to doing nothing. And then I would cycle up to being too busy, getting anxious and upset. And this was not healthy. So I realized no just has to be more or less my default answer to keep my life at the level of simplicity that I personally need to thrive.

So now I basically, when it comes to these type of offers, I’m really only agreeing if it’s something I can bring my family to and it’s basically funding a vacation that we want to do otherwise, or if it’s something that’s cool and super convenient.

Now here’s the thing, in addition to missing out on money and contacts and book sales or whatever, I’m also clearly missing out on cool experiences by doing this. I’ll give you an example.

For over a year, MasterClass was asking me like, “Hey, will you do a MasterClass? We think your topic is well-matched to our audience.” And my default answer was “No, that sounds like a hassle. I know it’d be cool, but I don’t want hassle.” I said, no, no, no, no. But eventually, we found a way to make it work. I mean, they were really accommodating like, “Look, we could just do this in DC. It’s not going to be a big deal.” I talked to some other people that had done MasterClasses. I was like, “You know what? Maybe I’ll do this. This is convenient enough.” And I did.

And you know what? It was really cool. They rented a house, they had a crew of 20 people. It was like a movie set where the only “talent,” and I’m putting ferocious air quotes around this, was me. So you got to meet interesting people. The director had worked on a bunch of television shows I know. The makeup artist had just been working on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and the class, which actually just came out, is like, really good. I was like, I probably should have just done this originally. And who knows how many other things like this that are pretty cool that I’m missing out on? But here’s the thing, I realized over time that’s okay.

The goal with me simplifying the things I say yes to is not to try to avoid bad things, not like I need to get rid of these bad things out of my life so I can focus more on the things I really like. It’s instead trying to hit an ideal lifestyle.

And for me, my ideal lifestyle isn’t too busy.

All right, let me give you another example.

This has to do with my academic life. This was a complicated one for me. I’m a computer scientist by training. I got my doctorate at MIT. I worked under Nancy Lynch in the Theory of Distributed Systems Group. I specialize in distributed algorithm theory with a focus on shared channels. And really my subspecialty, because you all care about this, is lower bounds for randomized algorithms.

And that’s what I do. And I was pretty good at that. And I became a professor at Georgetown to work on doing distributed algorithm theory, supervising grad students, getting grants, writing papers, trying to win awards, et cetera. So this is what I did.

I also was always a writer. I wrote my first book when I was an undergraduate, and so I sort of had writing going on, but it was on the side and these weren’t at the time major books and it was just something I started as an undergraduate and as a grad student to make some extra money and I kept going.

These two worlds collided in 2016. This is right around the time I was about to go for 10 years as a professor and I published my book Deep Work, which was actually my fifth book because I started early. So I published this book, Deep Work, and it did really well. And it wasn’t meant to be some major launch or whatever. It wasn’t meant to be the big book of the year, but something about it hit a chord and that book started to do really well, like two million copies, 45 languages type of well. That began to change things for me, especially as I kept writing books and I started podcasting. That part of my life shifted from being almost like a hobby to something that I was really well known for. And now I had two major lives going on at the same time, wrangling my career as a writer while also wrangling my career as a professor and a theoretician.

And it was a lot to try to do both of these things because there’s a lot of logistics and overhead involved with both of those worlds. There’s a lot of work involved with both of those worlds. A lot of thinking goes into proving theorems and a lot of thinking goes into trying to write a book and you have to do these things at the same time. It also created like really sort of schizophrenic experiences, where you would go from a small computer science conference, where you’re essentially taking the super shuttle over to present the paper and there’s like 20 people there, and then you would fly to Malibu and a driver is taking you to your oceanside suite where a handler brings you to stage to give this one hour talk. It really became this weird mixed world and it was too complicated, but I didn’t know what to do.

I love being a professor. I’ve been in academia my entire life and I love writing. I just love thinking. What was I going to do here? And the key was simplify what’s going on with unification. So the discovery I had is like, “Well, wait a second. This book I wrote, Deep Work, which is at its 10th year anniversary, that book was about technology disrupting our ability to work well and what you should do about it. My next book was called Digital Minimalism. That was about technology. My next book after that was called A World Without Email. That book was about technology. A lot of what I was doing on my podcast was technology. I started writing for The New Yorker. A lot of what I was covering for The New Yorker was technology. And then around this time, as if the point wasn’t being made clear enough to me, the university where I work started a focus on digital ethics and they created the Center for Digital Ethics and asked me to be involved.

And I realized, wait a second, these aren’t two different worlds. I’m a computer scientist and I’m writing about the impacts of the type of technologies that computer scientists create and what we should do about it. Oh, this is the same world. I could be an academic that focuses on technology and its impacts, the ethics of technology. And this is a more recent change I’ve made and it’s brand new and I’m still trying to adjust to it, but at least for now, I have put a pause on doing distributed algorithm theory and supervising doctoral students, working on distributed algorithm theory and going to distributed algorithm conferences and getting grants to fund students to work on distributed algorithm theory.

I put a pause on that to say all of my effort is aimed at the same thing. Thinking and writing about technology and its impacts on humans flourishing and depth and what we can do about it. And that simplified everything.

That’s a completely reasonable thing. I’m now a full professor, so I’m at a stage of my career where I have flexibility and I should be exploring other intellectual avenues. Now my writing, my podcasting, my article writing, all of this is now unified towards a common topic. I simplified what was going on in my career. Now, again, this involves cutting off options. It involves cutting off opportunities. It also means I could be doing one thing maybe even better.

To me, the right way to think about simplifying is lifestyle design. I’m going to use Tim’s word here, lifestyle design. You know what conditions of your day-to-day existence are best for you, the conditions in which you as an individual are going to thrive.

And the whole game is designing a lifestyle that matches that. And for me, that required a high level of simplicity. I needed autonomy and I needed a lack of busyness. And so I don’t think about any of this in terms of what’s being left on the table. I think about it in terms of like how much I get to enjoy my day-to-day life when I’m successful with these efforts. So I still struggle with this. I constantly have to cycle and resimplify. Sometimes I go too far, but it’s something I think about a lot. It’s probably something you should think about a lot as well.

Craig Mod: Hi, I’m Craig Mod, writer, photographer, and long haul walker who has lived most of his adult life in Japan, actually pretty much all of it. My most recent book is called Things Become Other Things. It was published by Random House last year. I did a book before that called Kisa by Kisa. These are both books about huge walks across Japan. I’ve walked from Tokyo to Kyoto three times. I’ve walked the Kii Peninsula a bunch, the Hagiokan, the Rokujurigoe Kaidō, all sorts of different routes all over Japan and actually all over the world at large. But in Japan, I’m mostly looking at how the country is changing and just trying to understand things.

So three decisions I’ve made to simplify my life. Number one, cutting out alcohol. Easily the lowest energy in, biggest impact out simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of dead cats, stinky dead cats.

I struggled mightily with alcohol abuse in my 20s. And looking back, nothing made things more complicated than this very stupid, very destructive relationship between me and drinking. Everything I perceived as complex in my life, trying to figure out who I was, believing in that person that that person could even exist, wanting to find a strong, meaningful partnership was made exponentially more complex by the presence of alcohol. If I could just go back and whisper in my 19-year-old ears, “Hey, dude, just don’t drink.” And if I could have followed that, a lot of things would’ve been simpler. Almost nothing in my 20s was made better by alcohol. And now the big question is, of course, if you’re struggling with alcohol is how do you cut the cord? That’s the big conundrum with a habit, an addiction like that. And for me, it was finding deep meaning in my work.

It was also sort of about hitting rock bottom. That was definitely a catalyst waking up one night and just really feeling like I was at the bottom of a terrible well. But just being at the bottom of that well I don’t think is enough to motivate you to really kick the habit. You need some kind of almost spiritual, “higher power” experience, I think, to really get over an abusive relationship, alcohol or otherwise. For me, that was my work. I was really lucky in the sense that I had this internal compass that I’ve felt for my entire life that was drawing me towards a certain kind of work, the writing, the walking I started doing. And I could see, once I acknowledged that kind of higher power in the work, every drink I took, I saw and I felt in my bones as taking away from that work.

And that alone was enough for me to be able to say no easily, consistently. And ultimately over the long haul, that was about 18 years ago that I really decided to, okay, let’s cut this out. But I think if you don’t have that purpose, it’s almost impossible to cut the habit.

The second big decision I made or tiny decision or whatever to simplify my life is therapy, at the risk of sounding like a cliche, starting therapy in earnest almost nine years ago now, which is funny. It was about nine years after I quit drinking. It was one of the simplest decisions I’ve made that’s probably had one of the biggest impacts on my life and in simplifying my life through clarification. I believe that it’s very difficult to achieve simplicity in life and to feel purpose strongly and clearly with a muddled mind, kind of makes sense.

And the man who doesn’t know who they are can’t be expected to perform at the best or to simplify their life or to make the right decisions if purpose itself feels mystical and forever off on some impossibly elusive horizon. I find that therapy when it’s done really well, it cuts to the bone in a really clarifying, interesting way. It just calls out all the bullshit-addled voices that you carry around in your head that you’ve probably been carrying around your whole life and it just kind of calls bullshit on this. Hey, okay, let’s really figure out what this voice is saying. And most of the time you realize that voice is responding to something that either hasn’t been a part of your life ever or hasn’t been a part of your life in, say, 30 years, and demystifying yourself and then thereby clarifying who it is you really are and why you are the way you are, you are paradoxically, I find, more freer, less limited than ever.

To use a [inaudible] metaphor, we’re all swimming. Some of us are swimming in clearer waters than others. Fundamentally, you’re not going to change the creature that you are in the water, but I do find that therapy cleans the waters quite a bit. And in those muddy waters, you just find yourself swimming in circles like an idiot. And I certainly found that to be the catalyst for reaching out nine years ago and wanting to begin therapy in earnest was even though I had achieved a certain amount of clarity and I felt a certain kind of purpose, I was still doing some dumb things in my life that felt just irreconcilable based on the purpose that I also felt. And so these sort of circles that I found myself moving in for certain aspects of my life, in order to demystify, to clarify them, I thought, okay, third party help is probably required. I don’t think we can carry this weight on our own.

And I did. And actually immediately I found within the first couple of weeks of therapy, this incredible sense of clarity and also this vision of a better version of myself, an even better version of myself that I felt like I could become. And every week in therapy, I find myself stepping up and becoming that person. And over time, it’s not just been an hour of therapy a week, becoming that person leaks out onto the sides of it and I find that I’m more able to readily inhabit that version of myself that I want to be. So therapy just cleans the waters, clarifies things, simplifies all of that, the act of living, and it allows you to move forward in ways that I think would be impossible on your own. And those paths that you can move forward on are much simpler than the ones I found I was moving on without therapy.

And then the third decision I’ve made to simplify my life has been to commit to craft. Almost nothing in my life has paid bigger dividends than stopping my waffling around, trying to figure out if I was an artist or a musician or a technologist or a writer or programmer or publisher or a photographer. No, I’m a writer. The end. And the more I’ve doubled down on that choice, that commitment to the craft of writing, the simpler my life has become, and the more vast my connections to beautiful, inspiring people. Everyone that I have in my life that I love and respect can be traced back almost one-to-one to the commitment to the craft of writing and the act of writing itself and publishing, getting things out there in the world. The more I write and the more people I reach, I find the bigger the impact of not only my present writing, but also stuff I’ve written in the past.

It sort of pays compounding dividends. And the more all of that is happening, the more inspiring people enter my orbit.

And when I say craft, committing to that craft of writing is not just dashing things off here and there. It is a full sort of almost maniacal pathological commitment where you’ll spend weeks and months and years working on certain texts. And it involves a lot of reading, editing, conversations, engagement with the world of literature as a whole. That’s what it means in my mind to commit to craft is you’re not just committing to hiding in a cave, typing. You’re engaging in the case of writing, in the case of writing that I like to do, case of writing that moves me, that I feel most drawn to, it’s literary nonfiction, literary fiction, universe of writing.

In my mind, look, I’m still a photographer and I love technology and following how it’s changing the world and thinking about its impact on society, but these interests and identities that I’ve carried all throughout my life to a certain degree or another are all mediated now through writing. And instead of trying to be a jack of 50 trades, especially as I was in my teens and 20s, which I kind of had to be to a certain degree, I chose one trade to commit to, which is the craft of writing.

That’s it. I mean, of course, friends and family are omnipresent, big part of things, but the foundations that allow me to be present for them and to be the best version of myself for them and for everyone else out there lies in the three decisions that I’ve outlined here. They’ve made things simpler and goddamn, they’ve made things better.

Debbie Millman: The Four Month Decision by Debbie Millman. In 2016, I turned down a job offer to become the CEO of the company where I had been working for over 20 years. At the time, I was president of the firm. My partners and I had sold the company to Omnicom in 2008. I had a five-year earnout, which meant I was obligated to stay there through 2012. After that, I was free to leave. And that is exactly what I was planning to do. For years, I’d been fantasizing about a different life, a life with more writing and creativity, more teaching, more experiments, a life that felt simpler and less operational, less quarterly. But when the earnout ended, I didn’t leave. I told myself at the time there were many reasons, money, security, status, fear, power, identity. I acknowledged it was hard for me to walk away from something I had helped build.

It was scary to leave a place where I could see the evidence of the biggest successes of my life all around me, and it was difficult to disentangle what I was running day-to-day from what I wanted to run towards. So I stayed.

Three years went by, but by 2015, I finally mustered up the courage to make my move. It wasn’t particularly dramatic. It really was just time. And then I was offered an even bigger job. My existing CEO, a man I worked with for the entirety of my 20 years at the firm, was looking to transition to chairman. And then he offered me his job, CEO, the chief executive officer.

On paper, it was extraordinary. I would be one of a small number of female CEOs within Omnicom. I would be one of the few openly LGBTQ leaders helming a branding consultancy. I would have full authority to shape the future of the agency I loved.

It felt like an honor. It felt historic and powerful, but it also felt heavy. I told myself I should want it. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I told myself that declining it might mean I lacked the ambition or courage or vision. As I considered what to do, I wondered if I turned it down, I would regret it forever, if I would disappoint people, if I would disappoint myself, and then I couldn’t decide. For four months, I vacillated. I made spreadsheets and pro con lists. I sought advice. I talked to friends. I consulted with my mentors, and every time I tried to land on a yes, something in me resisted, and I continued to vacillate.

One afternoon, after yet another conversation about my indecision, my very patient CEO said something to me that changed everything. He said, “Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide might mean you really don’t want to do it.”

And suddenly, it was as if someone had opened a window in a sealed room. I had been framing my decision as bravery versus fear, as ambition versus retreat, and as success versus surrender. What if the four months weren’t indecision, but rather clarity trying to surface? His sentence gave me the permission to admit what I didn’t want and permission to prioritize alignment over advancement. And so I turned the CEO job down.

I remember the moment distinctly, but it wasn’t cinematic. There was no swelling music. There was no dramatic speech. But there was immediate, unmistakable relief. And yes, it was also bittersweet as I went through the realization that when you close one door, you’re closing a version of yourself, but I have never once regretted it. Not once in the 10 years since I made the decision to step into the life I now lead.

Turning down that job simplified my life in ways I couldn’t have predicted. Instead of scaling an organization, I began expanding my ideas. I continued my writing and my podcast, taught more intentionally, and began taking my illustration work more seriously. And I invested in doing projects that felt like extensions of my values rather than my title or my portfolio. Something else happened too. My ambition changed shape. For much of my career, ambition looked like ascent, more responsibility, more authority, more achievement, more recognition. Becoming CEO would have been impressive to who I was, but it would not have been aligned with who I wanted to be. There’s a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn’t only about minimalism. I think it’s also about coherence. I often think about how seductive power can be, especially for women, especially for queer people, especially for anyone who has had to fight for legitimacy.

When an institution offers you the top seat at the table, it’s heady, feels like validation, but validation is not the same thing as fulfillment and power is not the same thing as purpose. Simplifying my life didn’t mean shrinking it. What I wanted, though I didn’t fully have the language for it at the time, was not more control. I wanted more freedom. That freedom has allowed me to build a very different kind of life. This meant removing the parts that no longer fit so that the parts that did could expand. And to me, that has been the greatest simplification of all.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857)

2026-03-11 04:13:53

Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? To explore that, I invited five long-time listener favorites: Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman.

More about today’s guests:

Maria Popova (@mariapopova) thinks and writes about our search for meaning, lensed sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Traversal, The Universe in Verse, Figuring, The Coziest Place on the Moon, and An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into 53 languages. Morgan is also the author of Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes and The Art of Spending Money.

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His latest book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

Craig Mod (@craigmod) is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.

Debbie Millman (@debbiemillman) has been named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and one of the most influential designers working today by Graphic Design USA. She is the host of Design Matters—a great show and one of the world’s longest-running podcasts. She is also chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, editorial director of Print magazine, a Harvard Business School case study, and a member of the board of directors at the Joyful Heart Foundation.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/Tim
Helix Sleep premium mattresses: HelixSleep.com/Tim

Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview

How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Maria Popova:

Connect with Morgan Housel:

Website | Twitter | The Morgan Housel Podcast

Connect with Cal Newport:

Website | Blog | YouTube | Deep Questions Podcast

Connect with Craig Mod:

Connect with Debbie Millman:

Books

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
The Art of Spending Money: And Other Simple Choices That Lead to a Rich Life by Morgan Housel
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport
Things Become Other Things: A Memoir of Walking Japan by Craig Mod
Kissa by Kissa: How to Walk Japan by Craig Mod
Books by Debbie Millman
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Films & TV

People

Podcasts & Media

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:49] Maria Popova: Writer, cherisher, boundary architect.
[00:02:04] The Cherish Quotient: Stop giving hours to people who rank as “fine.”
[00:03:15] When you apologize for your priorities, you’re apologizing for your life. Stop!
[00:04:41] Morgan Housel: Author of three books, evangelist of doing nothing.
[00:04:50] The do-nothing thesis: Be average long enough and you’ll end up in the top 1%.
[00:08:42] Read more history, fewer forecasts — and watch the news lose its power over you.
[00:09:32] How Stephen King’s 11/22/63 illustrates the futility of prediction.
[00:12:21] Cal Newport: Computer science professor whose body rejects busyness.
[00:12:36] What deserves a “yes” when the default is “no?”
[00:16:38] Deep Work sells two million copies and creates a schizophrenic double life.
[00:19:07] The unifying insight: Both careers were always about technology and human flourishing.
[00:24:07] Craig Mod: Writer, photographer, long-haul walker, full-time resident of Japan.
[00:24:46] How quitting alcohol has been Craig’s highest-ROI decision.
[00:27:13] Therapy after a decade of sobriety: The cliché that actually cleared the water.
[00:30:27] The compounding interest that comes from committing to one craft.
[00:33:09] Debbie Millman: Designer whose four-month decision changed the course of her life.
[00:34:30] How being offered the CEO seat at her company led to four months of paralysis.
[00:36:10] The sentence that broke the spell: “If it takes four months, you probably don’t want it.”
[00:37:38] Ambition changes shape: Validation isn’t fulfillment, and power isn’t purpose.

QUOTES FROM THE EPISODE

“The moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.”

— Maria Popova

“The fewer decisions [we] have to make, the better we’re going to do.”

— Morgan Housel

“What I need in my life is autonomy and space to work on my own terms, to produce cool things over a long amount of time, not to do a lot of stuff in the short term.”

— Cal Newport

“Easily the lowest energy in/biggest impact out simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of stinky, dead cats.”

— Craig Mod

“There’s a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn’t only about minimalism. I think it’s also about coherence.”

— Debbie Millman

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting Shopify.com/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2025 by Forbes and Wired magazines and best in category by Good Housekeeping, GQ, and many others. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering listeners 27% off all mattress orders for a limited time at HelixSleep.com/Tim.

Want to hear even more strategies for cutting the noise? Check out the last “How to Simplify Your Life” episode, featuring Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck, in which they discussed radical first-principles for living, why simplifying is hard work, making “no” your default answer, building a life around deep peace rather than dopamine, and much more.

Want to hear another episode with someone committed to the disciplined pursuit of less? Listen to my conversation with Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism and Effortless, in which we discussed how Gandhi would sum up Essentialism, the joys of simplicity, the difference between effortless action and effortless results, questions to cope with pet peeves, actionable gratitude, and much more.

The post How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman (#857) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck (#856)

2026-03-07 02:17:03

Please enjoy this transcript of my third interview with Jim Collins (jimcollins.com). Jim has published multiple international bestsellers that have sold in total more than eleven million copies worldwide, including the perennial favorite Good to Great. His writings and teachings are based on extensive research projects designed to uncover timeless principles of human endeavor that have had a lasting impact across all sectors of society. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. He will be live at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 9, 2026. Click here to buy your ticket.

Legal conditions/copyright information

Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Au

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: So, Jim, so lovely to see you yet again.

Jim Collins: It is. Yeah, absolutely. I really, truly just revel in the idea of a conversation with you.

Tim Ferriss: We’ve had two previous dances.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to thank you/blame you for a very difficult morning because I had done lots of research and reading, certainly on your latest work, which took quite a tour of duty to complete. And I decided that this morning, I would go back, starting early with a lot of coffee to reread the transcripts of our prior two conversations.

Jim Collins: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: And typically, when I do something like that, I have a few highlights, a few marginalia to refer back to. And I ended up underlining about 50 different things, and it caused a bit of a crisis in terms of where to start and what to do. But, I do have a lot of notes, and the latest work, What to Make of a Life, and we will certainly get to that, but we’re going to meander all over the place.

Jim Collins: You got it.

Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to start with, and I’m paraphrasing here, but a line in this new work, which is effectively that you have more energy at 67 than 37, you are now 68. And I wanted to dig into that for a minute or maybe even a few minutes, because looking back at the last two conversations, I wanted to spot gaps in the terrain, what had you not discussed?

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: And I wanted to look at some of maybe the mundane things related to routine, food. Do you consume caffeine? Are you still rock climbing? Maybe we’ll start with rock climbing because I just had elbow surgery and I’m looking to get back into it, are you still climbing?

Jim Collins: Not so much. I’ve been doing cycling with Joanne. She has gotten me into going off to Italy and the Dolomites and places like that to do these huge mountain passes, and it’s something we can share together, and with whatever years we have left. And I think that maybe the intense aerobic aspect of that, if you have your heart rate above 160 for an hour, two hours, I mean, and spiking into the 170s, I think that does something for you. I’m not sure what, but I actually think that’s part of it.

And then I just have other ways, I can’t really explain entirely. In fact, my team has heard me say multiple times, “Where’s all this energy come from?” Because it’s only increased. I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37. I had a lot of energy at 17. I have more energy at 67 when I wrote that, 68 now. I mean, I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think is higher.

And I mean, I really, really look forward to 4:00 a.m. because that’s the point at which I give myself permission if I’m awake to leap into the day. And it really is true that I will wake up and I will think to myself, “Please, oh, please, oh, please let it be at least 4:00 a.m., so that I can get up and get going.” And that is, it’s hard to explain, but it’s that sense of almost childlike anticipation to get up and get rolling is palpable. It’s there almost every single day.

Well, I do get one, we might have spoken about this in our first conversation, but I’ve always been a morning person. I actually figured out how to get two mornings a day, and that, I’m just really fortunate that I have the ability to nap under any conditions, anywhere, at any time I can nap. And I was doing a talk once and a few thousand people in the room and they had a nice couch backstage. And I was supposed to go on and I don’t know, whatever it was, 30 minutes or something. And I laid down on the couch and I just went bang, right out to sleep. I’m dreaming and I’m having a sleep, et cetera.

And they come back and they look at me and they’re like, “He’s asleep. Oh my goodness, he’s supposed to be on in five minutes.”

And they shake me and I’m like, “Okay, good to go.”

I can go sleep immediately, and then I can wake up immediately, and then I can walk out, 3,000 people and I was asleep five minutes before. I don’t know where that comes from, that’s just a fortunate thing. But what that allows me is I get two mornings a day. I get first morning after a night’s sleep, but then I get second morning, which is after a nap. And in fact, my team knows that I’ll sometimes say to them, “I’m going to go get ready for second morning,” which basically is I’m going to go take a nap, and then I get second morning. And then I’ve learned really systematically what kinds of activities really fit with what times of day. What I do in second morning —

Tim Ferriss: Is your first morning, Jim, sorry to interrupt, is that 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., something like that? What does your first morning look like?

Jim Collins: That’s ideal. I love the 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Joanne tends to sleep later than me, so especially when I was really working on the book, but this is a general pattern as well. I love to be up at 4:00. I have one cup of coffee that I make in the day. I don’t have caffeine after that. I travel with my own coffee because you really need to — the only place I go where I don’t take my own coffee is Italy. I make my own coffee and I start the day and that’s that one cup that I make and I get right into, usually that’s when I do my most intense creative work. And I love that three to four hours if I can get it of just the light changing, and bang, into it. Within 15 minutes, I’m fully into it and just go.

Tim Ferriss: When do you consume your first food typically? And what does that meal look like if it’s a meal?

Jim Collins: I always have something with my morning cup of coffee so that I have enough calories to keep my brain going. And I just grab something that’s fairly easy to eat with a cup of coffee, a KIND bar or maybe a yogurt or something like that. And then I have breakfast with Joanne. We have a morning when I’m in town, which is most days. I don’t like to travel that much. And once Joanne’s up and going, the day is I make her a latte. We joke that I’m a coffee elf and I make her a latte. And then Joanne curates stories from The Wall Street Journal or from wherever and she reads them out loud and then we talk about them.

Tim Ferriss: Is this after your first morning that you’re doing this?

Jim Collins: Usually after first morning, exactly. Yeah. Sometimes we might get up at about the same time, but most times I’m up early. And so then I have a more robust breakfast and really listen to Joanne’s curation, and I’m always just really curious what she thinks.

Tim Ferriss: Could I just add a little running commentary if I could?

Jim Collins: Sure, please.

Tim Ferriss: The first is that I’ve noticed this across a few different disciplines that as a comparison, Marcelo Garcia, nine time world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, considered by many to be the greatest of all time, he is incredibly good at going from effectively one to 10 on an intensity scale. So even before his finals match in the world championships, my friend Josh Waitzkin, who is the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, also very good at this, told the story of them trying to track down Marcelo because he was about to be in the final match for his particular weight class, it might have been the unlimited division. They couldn’t find him because he was sleeping under the bleachers. They had to wake him up and then he walked to the mat, shook his head and went from one to 10. And what Josh has said, and Marcelo echoes this certainly in different language, is avoiding the simmering six. So basically not being in this simmering six, but oscillating between rest or full activation, so to speak.

The second thing I wanted to comment on is the gear shift to shared activities and biking with Joanne, because I have seen in some of the most successful relationships that I’ve observed, and certainly that I’m modeling now for myself, that at some point there’s often an activity shift to focus on what you can share together. Kelly Starrett, very famous performance coach, PT, and other things, has done this with his wife, Juliet, who’s amazing, where he’s shifted from some of the things he used to do to actually mountain biking. This is in Northern California. So just wanted to make those observations to ask a very, very specific question.

You said you travel with your own coffee. I have to scratch the itch, what are you actually packing?

Jim Collins: Okay, yeah. So I pack Peet’s ground coffee, Arabian mocha Java, a cone filter, the filters themselves, a water boiler so that you can make sure that you have hot water, and have the whole setup that way. And then when I start the day, I get the whole system going, and it doesn’t really matter where I am or what time of day it is. It’s actually an interesting thing because if I’m going to do something where if I’m doing some kind of session that really requires me to be absolutely at my best, which I expect of myself anytime that I’m out there. There is a ritualistic aspect of it, but it’s also this sense of it doesn’t matter if room service is open.

It doesn’t matter any of that kind of stuff, that opening bubble of the day. Now, if it didn’t work, I’d still be fine because you always have to be able to — if something just went awry, you just adapt. But for the most part, you’ve got that opening bubble of the day and to be able to basically replicate that no matter where I am, no matter what time of day. It could be 4:00 a.m. East Coast time, or it could be 7:00 a.m. California time or wherever. It replicates that morning bubble, right?

Tim Ferriss: It’s like a boot up sequence that you’re able to preserve.

Jim Collins: It is. It’s a boot up sequence, that’s exactly what it is. And I don’t have to control any variables or wonder, are they going to have any good coffee or does room service run on time or the room service isn’t open at 4:30 or whatever. You don’t think about any of that stuff, you just move.

Tim Ferriss: So the particular idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, I think that’s what you say of successful people, right? In these boot up sequences —

Jim Collins: Yeah, their own idiosyncratic encoding. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there we go, and we’re going to really double click on this word encodings, is endlessly fascinating to me. I have a few of my own and certainly in What to Make of a Life, which I found very inspiring because at least in your cohort, and we’ll talk about this, they did a lot of their best work after 50, after 60, in some cases after 70.

Jim Collins: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: And I am 48 at the moment, so I found it very reassuring that there were so many case studies.

Jim Collins: Oh, you’re still warming up.

Tim Ferriss: I’m still warming up, which is very exciting on a lot of levels. I did note a few things, for instance, and I’ve got lots and lots and lots of notes that I took while reading the book. For instance, Alan Page, former NFL player, became very engrossed with running, woke up every morning at 5:19 a.m. exactly, right? 5:19. And you gave a list at one point, this is going to be a pretty odd segue, but you gave a list of some of the, let’s call it side passions or eccentricities of different people. And one of them, a lot of them were like, “Okay, okay, sure, I can see that. Some of my friends do that,” and then one of them was studying the occult. And I’m just wondering who was, who’s the person.

Jim Collins: Well, if I wanted to say who it was, I would have put it in the book. But that list, I think that list was really interesting because, so one of the things that I was very curious about because our people became really, once they really locked onto a big thing for a given period of their life. As you know from the reading, I mean, they were really, really focused, and the level of intensity and energy over years or decades or multiple decades they put into it. I was just curious though, did they have any room for anything else in their lives, or were they just mono maniacally obsessed freaks? And then I just went through just a very simple, okay, on that particular dimension, did they have really intense side passions of some kind? Even if the big thing was over here.

I think I can remember there was something like 80 some percent had some kind of an intense side passion. What I was struck by is the range of them. Oh my goodness. I mean, disco dancing, studying the occult, but also teaching Sunday school, and running, and mountain climbing. Some people were really into just hosting interesting dinner parties, others wouldn’t have been interested in that at all, but they had things that absolutely, they were incredibly passionate outside of the big thing that they focused on. I found that just an interesting data point, that they didn’t make a life where they had nothing else except the primary arena of their work to focus on.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s set the table a little bit, and I apologize in advance, I know you like to shine the spotlight on other people and research and data sets, but I’m probably going to turn the spotlight back on Jim, the bug called Jim.

Jim Collins: By the way.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a call back for people who listened to the first conversation.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: When we spoke, the second conversation we had, I asked you what was on deck coming up, and you said, “I’m five years into research on self-renewal.” And I really like this term, self-renewal. And before we go back to Jim, I guess this is related to Jim, but I’m curious how you thought about framing this book, self-renewal versus, say, the title What to Make of a Life, as I’m looking at it, how did you think about presenting this? And then if you wouldn’t mind, because we were chatting before we pressed record, I think our first conversation was your first long form podcast, and I believe this will hopefully be the first conversation about the new book that comes out. Just giving a little bit of context or genesis on how you wrote it, so you can tackle it in any direction you like.

Jim Collins: In my 30s, I came across a remarkable man, one of the many sages I’ve had the joy to be affected by in my life of John W. Gardner, who was a wise man in residence at Stanford Business School, Emeritus at that point, just down the hall for me when I was teaching there. He’d written a great book, a little book back a number of years ago on self-renewal, and I was very interested in the question of, I don’t know why I was interested, but I was just interested in why would some entities or some people have a life of continuous self-renewal rather than a life of this followed by just a long degradation.

Tim Ferriss: Peak, and then a decline.

Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And John encouraged me to consider doing eventually some research on the question of self-renewal. And I was off working on Built to Last and Good to Great, and I was working on my company research, but I still have my notes from long conversations with John about how you might think about self-renewal. That seed had been in there and it was gestating, and I thought someday I might return to that. Then what happened is I started thinking that question was always like, how would you actually study it?

And then a seed got activated that had been planted back a decade before that in my 20s. Joanne, who you know is so central in my life, we’ve been married 45 years, and Joanne was a world-class athlete. She was world champion in the IRONMAN. She was the first female figure in the original Nike Just Do It campaigns back in the 1980 with Bo Jackson and Howie Long and she was really constructed to compete.

And that sense of, when we talk later about [inaudible] being encoded for something, there’s just some athletes that they need to win. I mean, it’s a need, they need to win, and that was Joanne. When she came, when she gave up all these other opportunities she had in life to focus on ultimately trying to win the IRONMAN and went in on that. It’s like everything came together. We go off to Hawaii and she raced in ’84, ’85, ’86, and ’85 she won the World Championship in Hawaii.

There was a backstory to that race, which is that Joanne had a hamstring injury, and that hamstring injury just was chronic and it wouldn’t really go away. And in the race, it began to catch up with her. She had this 10 minute lead with 10 miles to go, and the marathon as you know is 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile marathon in 90 degree temperatures and 80 some percent humidity on the lava fields. I mean, it’s just horrendous out there. She had a good swim and a great bike and she had this 10 minute lead with just 10 miles to go coming back into town. The hamstring caught up with her partly because it did limited her training and it was always there and she began to lose a minute a mile.

And I remember watching the ABC feed because the Wide World of Sports truck was in front of her and I could see the race unfolding. I could watch it in real time with the camera of the truck right in front of her. And you could see her starting to lose time, just nine minute lead, eight minute lead, seven minute lead, six minute lead. And you’re getting closer and closer to the end, but is she going to get there before somebody else does?

And then there is this moment, I mean, I’ll never forget the moment where she stops in the middle of the lava fields, and I mean, she has this, she’s just in extraordinary discomfort and pain. And she’s looking at her legs hoping they would move and she reaches down and she massages them and she pounds on her quadriceps and she looks up to the sky and it almost looked like she was pleading with somebody to help her somehow. And then she just fixed her gaze on the horizon and there was this stoic countenance that came over and she just started to move and then she started to run and she ended up winning a 10-hour plus race by about 90 seconds. And it’s like one of those things in life, you have very few experiences like that.

And then when we got back to Palo Alto, where we lived at the time, the hamstring just didn’t heal. She tried everything. Surgery, physical therapy, rest, stretching, you name it. And eventually, she just had to confront the brutal fact that her athletic career was going to end at her peak.

We were sitting there in a little townhouse in Palo Alto and we’re sitting at our kitchen table and Joanne just one day, she gasps out to me, and it was just one of those moments, it’s just etched in my emotional memory. She just gasps, “I feel like I’m dying.” And I mean, I had no answer. It’s not like you can solve that or anything like that. It’s just, “I feel like I’m dying.”

And in a sense, she was, right? Because that identity as a world champion athlete, this thing that she was so encoded for that she so loved doing was being taken away from her. And in a sense, it was dying, a certain kind of dying. And that seed somehow mixed with the John Gardner thing, because what happened is I somehow fused these together in my mind. I think that actually Joanne’s experience is what gave me the original interest in self-renewal, because I just didn’t have the language for it, I didn’t really see the connection so clearly. It was murky, but I think they fused together and I realized that one way to study self-renewal would be to look at people who go through what in the book we call cliff events, these times in life where life in some really significant way changes under your feet.

Either you choose it to change, or it happens to you, but there’s a before and an after, and your life is so changed at that time that you have to really reorient and reconsider. And sometimes those cliffs like Joanne’s are really monumental moments in life. They are real cliff events.

And I thought if I could find people, if I could study people at the cliff, and I could study their lives up to the cliff, through the cliff, and after the cliff and how they come out and how they constructed life after that, I would be able to have a method for understanding this thing that I used to think of as about self-renewal.

I just need to fill in a couple other pieces because yes, the creative journey of how I got here, but then as you know, I always like pairs. I like to have two entities in the same situation to sit next to each other. I did that in all my prior works. And so the idea was, wow, what if you could find pairs of people that were at the same cliff and their lives were really similar up to that cliff. And then you look at how their lives, how they come under the cliff, through the cliff, and out of the cliff. And then by looking at that, I would understand this process of renewal out here through this methodology. And so that’s when I started the whole journey.

Now, let’s just zoom way out. As I got into it and I really began, I selected my, I had my match pairs, I had my people who had gone through these cliffs, I was studying their whole lives. It was overwhelming in scale, this project. I honestly thought at times I might never be able to finish it because it was just so monstrously big. But it began to dawn on me the more I worked on it because I was looking at, you couldn’t understand this cliff out thing if you didn’t understand the whole life.

And so I had to study from their entire lives, right? And most of them are deceased, few are in their 80s, but basically I had the record of their lives pretty much intact. And all of a sudden, I began to realize two things. First of all, none of them thought about self-renewal as an objective. And rather what I really saw were people who achieved what I might call self-renewal, but that’s not what they were doing. They were leading their lives, and they were leading their lives through these cliff events and in between the cliff events, and somehow all the way through to the end for the ones that had passed away. I began to realize that what I had was a huge and rich data source for really the big question.

And just so that you grasp this, this has happened to me multiple times. Back in Built to Last, which was about visionary companies and enduring great companies and all that, Jerry Porras and I set out, our original question was to study the concept of corporate vision because it was, what would that be? It was back before it was something that anybody had ever studied. And then our method of match pairs of these visionary companies over long periods of history led to a much bigger question, which was, how do you build an enduring great visionary company. Which is very different than the smaller question of what is corporate vision and how does that work?

And so repeatedly in my journey, I’ve started out with what I think is the question, self-renewal, corporate vision, whatever, and I’ve ended up with the method leading me to a much bigger question that the method answers. And so in this case, all of a sudden, as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I’m not studying self-renewal. Self-renewal is a residual artifact of really the big question, and the big question is the title of the book, which is the question we all face with, which is What to Make of a Life? And we face that question when we’re young, you and I faced it coming out of the fog of youth.

And what I came to grasp is that cliffs are an amazing way to look at the question of wrestling with what to make of a life because when you have a big enough cliff, like Joanne’s cliff, like the cliffs in the study, you have to answer the question again. Part way through your life when you have one of a big enough cliff, you have to answer the question, “Well, now what to make of a life? Because all that’s done or all that’s changed.”

And then I realized there’s a third time, which is when you’re in the later decades of life, and many never get around to answering this question, and I hope they will after reading this, is, “Well, now what to make of a life so that my 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe my 90s turn out to be my biggest, most creative, most impactful, most interesting years, rather than sitting over here in inferiority to my younger years?”

And so essentially, it’s very similar to what happened with Built to Last, with Good to Great, whatever. I started with a narrower question, I came up with a method to answer it, and then realized that that method was actually answering a big question.

Tim Ferriss: Bigger question.

Jim Collins: And then I just gave myself over to that question, and that’s how I ended up really framing the whole book. And then as you know, and we’ll probably get into this, the seeds of that go all the way back to a shattered kid, trying to figure out life. That is really the creative journey. When you get the book, it feels like, God, it’s almost clearly linear, but you write that way because you want it to hang together conceptually, but the creative journey of how you get there is wonderfully dynamic.

Tim Ferriss: Well, a few things. So we are going to get to childhood, for sure, probably sooner rather than later. And separately, as I was reading this book, particularly given the end of our second conversation, I was really cheering for you because I am in the middle of a fog with a draft that is 850 pages long, and I won’t get into that, but I was like, “Oh, so there can be a light at the end of the tunnel.” Because honestly, I’m looking at this thing and I’m like, this rock just seems to get denser and denser. It gets harder and harder to chip away at it, so congratulations, and it was also very helpful as moral support to me.

Jim Collins: So are you in the fog on the book itself or in a general Tim wandering in the fog time?

Tim Ferriss: So I am, I would say, in the inverse of where I’ve found myself typically before, and what I mean by that is before, I would say I have had a lot of clarity around specific projects. Here is the book in front of me, here is the podcast I’m building. Here is the fill in the blank business project where I would have extreme clarity, and then in contrast to that, I would say broadly, for life direction, I would feel like I had less clarity.

Right now, and I am quite content with this for the time being, I have the flip side, which is I’m with a wonderful partner, we are very clear on where we’re headed together, and I feel like that is the Archimedes lever for everything else. I don’t feel like I have much to prove any more from a professional perspective, but I do also want to end up where you are in the sense of feeling like you have, or in fact having more energy, more fire within you at 67 than 37. I do want that, but on a project level, I have much less clarity in terms of what does Tim 3.0, 4.0 look like? Because I do love the podcast, I plan to continue doing it, but it’s also become one of the most saturated, noise-filled playing fields imaginable. And I think anyone who expects the same music to play forever probably does not anticipate the inevitable, which is probably a cliff of some type.

So I have a fog as it stands currently around a few things, one of which would be writing. So for instance, this 850 page behemoth, do I chip away at that, which I find a little bit draining, to be honest, so I’ve actually put it on the back burner, or do I say focus on a newer writing project that I’m very, very excited about? And is that in fact leaning into my encodings, which is a term we should probably define, or is it just the allure of the novelty of the new? And guess what? Surprise, surprise, as soon as I get into the mud, I’m going to still be paying the taxes that you need to be prepared to pay. So that is a bit of a crossroads at which I find myself right now.

Jim Collins: So my question for you is, so first of all, just for anyone who’s listening to this, we’re using the term fog, and I’m just going to put a quick context on that and then ask a question.

And so we just talked about the notion of cliffs and the whole study structure was around cliffs and so forth, and so I knew cliffs would play a critical role in how I look at things. I was really overwhelmed with the prevalence of fog in the lives that we studied. That was not something I expected to find, and fog are these periods of time where you’re either in some portion of your life or maybe overall in life at a given point where you’re lost, confused, befuddled, disoriented, uncertain. And there’s these clarity phases of life, like I’m in a clarity phase right now. I was in a fog phase about 2013, 2014, certainly in a fog in my 20s. There’s fog phases and these clarity phases, and every person in our study had these sometimes even extended episodes of fog, which I found very comforting in the end because the people we studied had remarkable lives when you summed up the entire thing, but they could lose a decade in the fog along the way.

And then in the wake of cliffs in particular, there seems to almost always be fog. So fog can come at any time for a variety of reasons, but the likelihood fog will follow a cliff, based on what we looked at in the study, is that if you have a big enough cliff, especially if it was unexpected, the fog is likely to roll in and can be very thick and very befuddling, so that’s why we’re talking about fog.

So my question for you is, I’m curious, as you are wandering around a little bit in the fog, and I think it’s a very interesting time as you describe it of, well, it’s this question of the things that you’d done up to this point, are you ready to be done with them? Are you ready to extend out in a different direction? All these sorts of questions that are swirling about. I’m curious if anything in the book, as you read it, illuminated for you or got you thinking about navigating through this fog?

Tim Ferriss: Well, I would hope so. I took a lot of notes, so either I’m a very bad note taker or there are things for me to focus on from the book. So I would say a number of things come to mind, and I could send you photographs of these if you’re curious at some point, but in terms of navigating fog, I think the first is rule number one, don’t freak out. And that was more of an interpretation than something you said literally, but in effect, hey, if you’re in the fog, guess what? Everybody ends up in the fog.

Jim Collins: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: So don’t panic, number one. And then there were more than a few things, but certainly a few things that I found helpful and also a few things that gave me terminology for some explanatory power of things that have happened to me in the past or things that I’ve done in the past. And we’ll definitely talk about this, but the concept of return on luck and different types of luck I found very compelling, and thinking of how you take advantage of or widen the aperture on luck. Because I think broadly speaking, luck is thrown around as something you either have or you don’t, and it lands on you and exerts its force, but it’s not quite that simple, and I think you put words to that that I found very helpful.

And then in terms of navigating the fog, I would say you talk about simplex stepping, which I think we may spend some time on, but I have, I think, upstream cascading questions that I want to ask you about first, principally around encoding. I would say that with the fog, there were questions that I began to ask myself that I’ve not yet answered, and this is part of the reason I was looking forward to chatting with you, one of which is how do I think about energy as a core currency of life? And the reason I say that, this is not taken verbatim from the book, but it seems to be fundamental.

Outside of accidents and so on, there is a point when you die, and that is the cessation of energy. And if you have all of the greatest intentions in the world, the best laid plans, if you do not have the energy to implement those things, to execute, I don’t want to say all is for naught, but you’re caught at a bit of a problematic situation. So when I’m reading about these different case studies, these profiles in the books, and there were so many fantastic ones. I really have to say, I love the Katharine Graham piece. It was just so compelling.

Jim Collins: Hard not to love Katharine Graham.

Tim Ferriss: Hard not to love, because you see people who are put into, say, cliff situations and they are unprepared, and then there are counter examples where people effectively have prepped for 10 or 20 years for the cliff they eventually face, and those are very, very different in a lot of ways. And you also, not to keep bearing the lead on this, have people who methodically find their encodings, and I want you to distinguish that from strengths.

Jim Collins: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You have people who are forced into a situation, and thank God they just happen to have an overlap with the circumstances forced upon them and these inner workings that allow them to find their stride, as if Michael Jordan was sent to basketball prison camp, and lo and behold, what luck? He happens to be incredibly good and built for basketball.

So my question for you that I want to hit on before we dive into some of this is if I asked Joanne, “Why does Jim have more energy now than he did at 37?” How would she answer it? Because it seems to me like there might be a piece of [homing] in on encodings as a wellspring of energy, but you seem like you’ve always been pretty good at that, at least after some of your experiences at Stanford. What would her answer be, do you think?

Jim Collins: Years ago, there was a profile being done on me, and I’m not big on a lot of profiles. I’d rather just have people read my books and take away the ideas. But anyways, the profile was going to happen, and so I said, “If we’re going to do it, we’ll do it right.” And I invited the reporter out to Boulder, and he said, “I’d really like to spend some time with Joanne.” And I’m like, “Ooh, okay, here we go.”

Tim Ferriss: What profile is this going to be?

Jim Collins: So we go off to — so we’re at breakfast and he says, “I have one real question I really want to ask you. So if you could just pick one word to describe what it’s like to live with Jim, what one word would you use?” Okay, so you got a picture. I’m sitting there waiting for the answer, and always an adventure, inspired, energizing, creative. All these things are going through my mind as possible. She gets one word, and after a long pause, she just looks at him, completely serious, completely just straight, single answer — exhausting.

Tim Ferriss: It’s hilarious because I knew that word was coming, and that’s me projecting. I’m thinking about my partner. That’s hilarious. I literally in my head had exhausting.

Jim Collins: Exhausting, and so she would relate to the question. I think what she would say is that, yes, I’ve always had a high energy set point, and just as an aside, it’s not something I think I even put in the book, but the way I came to think of it is that we all have an energy set point, and maybe mine is just a reasonably high energy set point. And just to be clear though, I think that the thing I would want people to take away from what they read here is that whatever your energy set point, you can have variation around that set point, and the question is how do you lead your life in such a way that you’re on the positive side of that variation and the set point, and it sustains until you run out of breath?

Because so many, what happens is they reach a certain point and they go below the energy set point because of whatever sets of reasons and end up with maybe 20 or 30 years of their life essentially off the table, and that’s an unfortunate loss to the world. So I think Joanne would say, one, I’m one of those people who really set out in life somehow to end up expending my energy in things that I derive tremendous intrinsic pleasure from doing, the actual doing of it. That sense of if you’re doing it, you can’t not do it.

Like you, I don’t have to demonstrate that I can do well at what I do. I don’t have to worry about do I know how to, I don’t know, have a teaching moment or whatever, how to come up with the right questions to ask somebody running a big company. But if I sit down, I still get joy out of preparing for a moment or being at it, or just a sense of excitement that morning, because the actual doing is something that I so love.

I put in the book, and Joanne is the one that helped me see this, I’d always thought of myself as an incredibly disciplined person and everybody else saw me as really disciplined, and I finally came to the conclusion, I’m really not very disciplined. I am somewhat, but look, if you just can’t help, if you just can’t stop yourself from preparing, from getting ready to do the very best you can because you’re doing something that just so pulls it, like you can’t stop yourself, well, that’s not discipline. You’re just compelled. It’s almost a form of compulsion, which isn’t discipline. And if it’s sheer love of the actual doing itself, well, how’s that discipline? I just love doing it, so that’s one.

But I think she would also say that like you, I love having a big project, and this has been a huge project. So for 12 years from the time I first started noodling on this to when I finally finished the writing, when I wake up in the morning, I don’t have any question until the book’s done. Maybe I’ll go into a fog now. I had no question what was in front of me at 4:00 a.m. There’s always the project. Every single day, there’s the project, and that’s energizing, even if it’s huge and monstrous.

And then the third is this sense of extending out and circling back that I saw on all the people in the study that’s really interesting, and it’d be very interesting to see for you as well as happens with this, with this sense of this notion of radical reinvention isn’t really what we saw. There weren’t people who, quote, “radically reinvented” themselves. It was this organic process of extending and pushing themselves out into new modes or new things or new activities, et cetera, an extension outward, but then they would always find a way to circle back to things that they had built upon previously as almost a form of fuel to further extend out.

Robert Plant’s one of my favorite people in the study, and I love how what keeps him so full of fire for music and for singing all these decades later. And if you look at him, sure, he’s no longer in Zeppelin. He doesn’t need to be. He was extending out into bluegrass and he was extending out into going off to the desert and playing with trance musicians and all these kinds of really — and learning to blend his voice with Alison Krauss. I mean, utterly marvelous extensions, but with Allison Krauss or with some of his extensions, he’d come back and re-bring to life a Led Zeppelin song, and then they would do a bluegrass version of “Black Dog,” and just that sense of this extending and circling back.

Well, this study for me, you could look at it as I’m doing something radically new. Yes, it’s a new question, new study set, all that, but I’m also circling back, and to what I’ve always loved to do which is to take a big, giant, messy question, put a methodology around it and spend years figuring it out. So that’s consistent, that’s a circle back. The extend out is it’s a different question and different unit of analysis as both.

And then the last is this, and we talked about this I think a little bit in one of our previous ones, but I would really put it this way. When I was younger, I had a lot of fire, but it was really painful fire. It was burning hot, red molten lava in my stomach, almost like channeled rage, channeled ferocity.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know the feeling.

Jim Collins: Yeah. You know that feeling, right? And I used to worry that if I ever lost that, I’d lose my drive. And I think what’s happened, I know what’s happened, is the fire’s changed. The fire used to be like this molten hot, burning ferocity in the belly, and now it’s like this — it’s not red. I think of it as green and yellow and it’s like this sustained warming glow, and I do not have those kind of insecurity, prove myself kinds of things that are driving me, and as a result, my energy’s gone up. And I think that because the fire is different, because the fire is this sustained warming glow, it is just constantly generative, and I think that’s a really, really big part of it. That sense of like, you write a sentence and you look at it and you go, “Wow, that’s almost a good sentence.”

Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you about that color shift, going from the red to the greenish yellow. Is that a byproduct of age in the sense that you’ve amassed a corpus of work that at some point, you cannot with a straight face to yourself justify being red-hot because you’re like, “Look at this CV. I cannot with any sincerity say that I have anything left to prove”? Is that what provoked the shift? Is there something else? What actually happened that led to that shift in fuel, so to speak?

Jim Collins: First of all, I would imagine that a number of people, and maybe you yourself, relate to the raging, burning lava coals.

Tim Ferriss: Oh boy, yes.

Jim Collins: And you cling onto them because you feel you need them. And I guess I’m just a data point of one that I don’t need them to have even more energy, and so there is life without them that’s really wonderful and your best stuff, your best work coming from it. I don’t think it was, oh — I mean, it’s nice that Joanna and I don’t need to worry about are we going to hit the pavement and having no safety net and all that kind of worry and fear that we used to live with of just genuine almost terror of are things going to work? So it’s nice to not have that, but I don’t think that’s the essence of it.

I think it didn’t happen like a flash. I think a lot of what really happened happened as a result of studying the lives in this book. I really mean it. The last 12 now plus years since I started the first nibblings of this project in 2013, and the journey of doing this book so transformed me. And I think that I was probably prepped for that, but it was by somehow living alongside them in their lives, it was affecting me, and I think one of the ways it affected me is was I saw them — you just look at the sheer rapturous joy of Robert Plant blending his voice with Alison Krauss, or you look at this wonderful video I came across of Grace Hopper, the great computer scientist who invented software essentially. It’s an amazing story. Silicon Valley should know her story more, it’s really an incredible story. And she’s on Letterman at I think age 79, and she is like one of the most sparkle filled, fire filled — she just radiates out of that Letterman interview, and it’s just absolutely marvelous.

I could just go through case after case where what I saw was Barbara McClintock solving a genetics puzzle and her sense of she didn’t fear dying in a car crash, because there were all these car crashes that she was driving across the country so much that she feared dying in a car crash before she’d solved the puzzle that she had, because she just so needed to solve the puzzle. And every life was one of these ones where it’s like they got to this point where the thing that they were engaged in and doing was so reinforcing in itself, for itself, and I think somehow, just being so close to their lives while I walked through them had this effect on me, and it began to soften me.

It’s very hard to explain, but if you spent years alongside them at each step of the way through their lives, which is what I did, they rubbed off on me, and they all somehow got to this point, and I think that it just affected me. I can’t really explain it other than that it just affected me.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s look at another facet of this same prism, because looking at, for instance, whether it’s you, whether it’s a geneticist or any real figure in the book that you’ve profiled, finding your power zone with respect to encodings, and I want you to differentiate that from strengths, seems at the very top of the pyramid in some respects, or the base, depending on how you want to look at it. But if we’re trying to put dominoes in order, that seems like a very important domino to tip over first. It seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of the other things.

And I’m wondering, if somebody flew out, spent time with you for a day and they were like, “Jim, I know you’re good at asking questions. That’s what you do. How the hell do I find what my encodings are?” Because without that, it seems like having the conviction to know when you wake up, exactly what you’re going to do becomes a lot harder. And I’m not trying to speak for you, but it does seem to me that if you are always suffering from decision fatigue, paradox of choice, man, that’s a great way to use up all your chi and end up dead before you should be. I mean, creatively or physically or otherwise.

What are encodings? If they’re different from strengths, how are they different? And how do you find them if you’re not lucky enough to be like a Yo-Yo Ma who gets a cello handed to him when he’s four, or a Tiger Woods whose dad’s like, “Here you go, buddy,” at age God knows whatever.

Jim Collins: So we should go back and forth on this a little bit because there’s two strands that will come together, and I think for me, were really, really eye-opening and very uplifting in the end by looking at the study across these lives. Because there’s the luck piece of how the roulette wheel of your life spins as to which encodings you discover, and then there’s what the encodings are. So they’re actually, they’re joined, if you will, as an idea. There’s multiple examples in the book of where people, it was almost like by, well, chance in some ways that they discovered the set of encodings that they decided to dedicate themselves to. And so first of all, let’s just talk about encodings, and I’m going to describe what encodings are and how they work, but if you don’t mind, Tim, given that you’re in the fog, I want to ask you a question about encodings for yourself.

Tim Ferriss: I love questions.

Jim Collins: So encodings are these durable capacities that reside within, and they’re awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. And first huge thing about encodings is most of us, our lives will come to the end with probably vast swaths of our encodings never discovered. And the way I think about it, and you know this from the book, but I really like to help people who are listening hear this, is that I came to think of it as like a constellation of encodings. You have a constellation of encodings, I have a constellation of coatings, everybody on the planet has a constellation of encodings, and it’s like a vast galaxy of encodings. But in any given moment, your life is looking through a window frame at those encodings, and that what happens is that there’s points in life where the window frame captures a big, bright set of those encodings coming through the window, and you’re in frame with them.

And then if the window frame shifts again and doesn’t capture very many encodings, if you will, you’re out of frame, you’re not really capturing many encodings. The encodings are still there. They’re just there, but your life can shift around whether you’re capturing a set of encodings or whether you’re really not.

So I think about the desk pilot, John Glenn, who you read about, and how he was not capturing encodings when he was a young man. At first, his parents thought, “Well, maybe he’ll come into the family business or maybe you should go try to be a doctor.” But he just was — the encodings were not really in frame when he was taking chemistry and physics and things like this, and then through a happenstance event, he was able to get a pilot’s license paid for by the government that was looking to train some pilots, and he goes and he signs up for this, convinces his parents to let him do it, and the moment he gets into an aircraft, it was like click. I mean, the way the aircraft felt, eventually being able to wear the aircraft like a glove. And his encoded ability that he only discovered, he didn’t add it was just there, that under extreme danger and immense speed, he could have a heart rate that everything slows down.

If somebody’s flying behind me in a supersonic jet trying to knock me out of the sky over Korea in the Korean War, my heart rate’s probably not going to go down, but John Glenn’s would go down. And then of course he becomes an astronaut. Gordon Cooper, his match pair, very similar. And so it’s all of a sudden, bang, and then after his career, and that came to an end, very interesting little story of how he finally concluded that John Kennedy had pulled him out of the rotation so that he wouldn’t be able to go to the moon, because Kennedy felt he was too valuable as a national hero. And so he couldn’t be an astronaut any more really, and that was his cliff. And 10 years, and he went off to Royal Crown Cola. And what I love is this little detail where he’s got, of his memoir, his time at Royal Crown Cola is like almost 10 percent of his life, and it’s 0.2 percent of his memoir. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing —

Tim Ferriss: Not much to report here. Yeah.

Jim Collins: Exactly. Exactly. And so here he’s still John Glenn, but what happened is the window frame shifted, and it wasn’t until he got back into the Senate where it shifted again. I’m sure he was an adequate executive, but it wasn’t like when he was flying fighter jets and going up and orbiting the earth. He was now out of frame. And so it’s not that — so the essence of it is encodings are there to be discovered by the experiences of life. And when they click into frame, it’s trusting them almost if you don’t know where they’re going to go. In many cases, the people didn’t know where they were going to go.

And yes, you turn encodings into more strengths by training and discipline and all those sorts of things. But John Glenn could have done 10 MBAs and he would have never been as encoded for being a business executive the way he was encoded for being a senator and encoded for being a fighter pilot and an astronaut. And so the key is that is discovering some set of them and letting them go. And that’s an empirical set of observations. So now I come back to the question for you.

You’ve written, you’ve done — I mean, you clearly have encodings for doing what we’re doing today. You have other kinds of encodings around just sheer curiosity and so forth. So if you thought about this, as you were making notes, as you were thinking about what are your encodings, as distinct from, sure, you’ve turned your encodings that you’ve discovered into strengths, but the things that were really have a basis of encoding coming into frame. I’m curious what occurred to you, and especially as you think about what’s going to be next.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. All right. I’ll definitely — I’ll return serve. So I’ll then have a ton of other questions, but I’ll answer that in maybe a bit of a roundabout way. I have tried to ferret this out before for myself, I think with different degrees of success. I think I have, in most cases, because I assume my self-awareness is very imperfect, at best, benefited from asking other people questions who are very close to me. And those have been coaches, agents, friends, collaborators, almost like a 360 degree analysis. And some of those questions have included, when have you seen me at my best and when have you seen me at my worst? What do you think I find easier to do than other people? These types of questions.

And I suppose where I’ve landed, but let me maybe postpone the punchline first, to say that I’ve really found it fascinating to look at, this is going to seem like a hard left to people, but the Soviet and also Chinese approaches to sourcing athletes. How on earth are they so successful? How were they so dominant for so long? And yes, you can explain some of it with top-down autocratic decision-making and policymaking and so on. But in China, for instance, they will scout by doing some very, very simple things.

They’ll go to every elementary school you can imagine and have kids do a broad jump. And they’ll make it fun. It’s not some back whipping exercise, but they’ll have them do a handful of things, hold a broomstick overhead and get into a squat. And that’s how they start to source potential candidates for Olympic weightlifting gold. But unfortunately, as a single person, as an N of one, you don’t have the luxury of infinite time to try everything. This has been an ongoing, open question for me, and I haven’t yet used any of them, but looking at things like, okay, well, is a strengths finder test helpful for this? Could you do five or six of these and look for the overlap to try to get some direction so that you’re not penalized for trial and error by losing decade after decade?

Where I’ve landed for myself is, through my own experimentation, I think asking a lot of dumb questions. I’m very good at asking seemingly dumb questions, which often are not dumb. Sometimes they are just straight up dumb, let’s be honest. But oftentimes they’re questions that could be or already are on the minds of a lot of people. And I think I’m good at putting on beginner’s glasses and being very persistent, like a dog with a bone, if I don’t get an answer to a supposedly dumb question. And those lead interesting places, I think I am also good, and this is a blessing and a curse which will lead into some later questions about not getting trapped in various doom cycles and something we talked about before, which is the 50/30/20 from respected faculty.

I am a novelty seeker. That’s an intrinsic drive that I have in a lot of ways. And the upside of that is that I can do angel investing in different industries. I can interview people from yet a different set of worlds, and I can borrow practices and copy and paste different principles from one area into a disparate area, and sometimes those really, really work. So I think I’m good at combining those worlds. Separately, and maybe people listening can give me feedback if they’re interested in this, a friend of mine, one of my closest friends, said to me, “You should really do some podcast episodes where you are recording conversations that you have with founders.” Because I’ve invested in 100 plus companies over more than a decade, probably close to two decades.

And he said to me, he’s like, “There are things that you are really good at that I don’t think you realize you’re good at.” In terms of really pinpointing terms, positioning and various other things that I do routinely, every week, with startup founders anyway. I’m having those conversations anyway. And so I’ve been experimenting with recording those and I even go back and listen to it and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything special here.” And he’s like, “That’s the problem.” He’s like, “You don’t think it’s anything special because it’s so easy for you.” He’s like, “It’s actually not easy for most people.” So those are a few scattershot thoughts that come to mind. But for myself and certainly also for people listening, I am still wondering if there are ways that people can facilitate the process of finding those encodings.

Jim Collins: Yeah. So I was listening very carefully to what you were saying, and a couple things really popped into my mind as you were talking, is that first of all, I think if we rewound — well, I did rewind the tape of their lives, right? And I wouldn’t describe that the process of coming into a frame with a set of encodings was a systematic process. It was pretty organic and pretty messy, if you will. And I think the thing that really stood out is it wasn’t that there was some deliberate test taking or anything like that. It was that life spun them into a situation where they could feel the encodings light up, if you will. And I think what really stood out, the more I think about this, a question is less about — well, there are two ways in which I want to sharpen the question a little bit for you.

One is that it’s not even entirely about discovering encodings. I think people are getting clues to their encodings based on their experiences in life and input from others, which is a very interesting piece of this, all the time. What I think really stands out to me about the people that I studied is that, regardless of whether they got support from others, like John Glenn’s parents didn’t want them to be a pilot. They wanted them to be in the family business or be a doctor. Robert Plant’s parents didn’t want him to be a singer. They wanted him to be an accountant.

Think about that. I mean, with all that, I mean, you go through these different ones. What really stood out is that when they got a sense for them, they trusted them. It was their trust of them when they got a glimpse of them. That is what really stood out to me. Once they felt them, they didn’t really start questioning them or letting other people talk them out of them or listen to what other people think they should do. And so if you said, “Jim, 100 points, allocate between two buckets, how much of it is about discovering a set of encodings and how much of is it about trusting the encodings you’ve discovered?” I’m going to put 70 points on trust.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s cool.

Jim Collins: Because I think we’re getting clues all the time. The second is that — you said something about asking people what you think you do better than others. This study changed my view on that. I think it’s about doubling down on what you can do better than other ways you could expend yourself, which is a very different question.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s very different.

Jim Collins: It’s a very different question. It’s like I could expend myself asking these supposedly dumb questions or I could expend myself in some other way. And it’s not competitive comparative to others. It’s this is in frame and this is out of frame. And then I have learned something in my own experience, and this book is not about business, it’s not about leadership, it’s not about management. There’s a few ways, though, that it’s really affected me a lot when I think back to my prior, my classic work.

And one way that it has really affected me is we talk about the right people on the bus from Good to Great, still true. But what I’ve really come to see is it’s about the seats and whether people are in seats where they’re in frame in that seat. Whether they are in a seat for which they are encoded for that seat and in a seat that feeds their fire. And as I began to study the people, in my work, what I found is that they gravitated towards some walk of life, some arena of activity where they really hit a big, bright set of their encodings. It really fed their fire, and then they just went, once they clicked into frame.

And I think that I used to spend a lot of time trying to turn people into what they’re not and feeling very frustrated with what they’re not. And as I did this study, one of the things that just really went over me like water and just softening me and softening me and softening me is I began to realize that what I really had to learn how to do was to begin to find what the people around me, what their encodings are. Me, for people on my team, that part of my responsibility as a leader of a small bus is to really be attuned to me observing the encodings based upon what people do of the people around me, and then to begin to shift, in steps, their responsibilities so that in what they’re doing here is increasingly clicking into frame. So that then what happens is my emotional experience is not being frustrated with what they’re not and truly being almost at a level of almost awe, grateful for what they are.

And when that happened, their lives got better, my life got better, and I played a role in helping them, helping them discover their encodings, mainly by experiments, like testing them with something, see how something works, right? And then I could see the encoding flash and then I’d move the responsibility and I’d click them some into frame. And it’s been a marvelous, joyful journey to see that happen. And I have people who are in frame and they just, it’s astounding for me to see. And so I think that notion of other people, but I’d flip it around, which anybody who has teams, anyone who leads organizations or companies, if you spend emotional energy feeling frustrated with what people are not, you’ve got them in the wrong seat.

They’re out of frame. And the question is, if you have a bus issue, you deal with it. They shouldn’t be on the bus. But the real question could be, you have them in a seat for which it doesn’t line up with their encodings, that doesn’t feed their inner fire. And if you try to spend your life trying to turn them into what they’re not, they’ll be miserable and you’ll be miserable. And I think other people can really play a role in helping you see what those encodings are.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve had a number of friends who run large companies who, and not to say this is the right tool for everyone, but who’ve used Enneagram actually as a sort of heuristic.

Jim Collins: What’s your point on the Enneagram?

Tim Ferriss: So which type am I or what’s my perspective on it? Both?

Jim Collins: So yeah, have you identified an Enneagram point for yourself?

Tim Ferriss: Well, so I’m a self-preservation six, which honestly is —

Jim Collins: I’m married to a six. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There you go. So it resonates for me. I have a bunch of caveats that I’m about to put out, but it resonates for me. I have found it to greatly inform doing a postmortem on things and people who have not worked in my organization. Organization is a very highfalutin term for a very, very small team, and people who have worked over time, there are, I would say — to my mind, irrefutable patterns.

It’s so clear the types that work and the types that don’t. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s just for me, as a strong-willed, hopefully decent leader, but at the same time, very demanding person with certain preferences and so on. There are certain people on the bus who work and certain people who don’t, and Enneagram, I found very helpful for that. I think Shopify and Dropbox, both I think still use Enneagram as two examples, but very good for conflict resolution as well.

The caveat is sometimes I think, at least, say, in Silicon Valley, that Enneagram is an acceptable horoscope for tech guys. I mean, it definitely rhymes in some ways, but when I read my particular, and it’s helpful to have a person who is experienced with typing do this. I’m sure there are online tools that can also help. Side note, also found this incredibly helpful, people are going to hate this. Some people are going to hate this, but for thinking about dating and ultimately ending up with a woman who is an incredibly, incredibly good match for me and vice versa. I’m a good match for her.

But the Enneagram was not a, it was dead on. I was like, “This is nonsense for the — I just don’t believe it can be that simple,” and it’s not that simple, but incredibly helpful. So I would say there are some people who go down the rabbit hole to an extent that I think ends up turning everything into an Enneagram exercise. I think that’s probably losing the forest for trees, but as one input of many, I’ve found it helpful.

And let me ask you a question for you, personally, and this could also be reflected in people in the book, but for you. And I want to, this is one of the 7,000 highlights I had from this morning over my several cups of coffee. So this is, I can’t recall if this is from our first or second conversation, but let me just read for a second here, all right.

And I apologize. Well, here’s the recap. Jim was clear that he didn’t want a half life of quality in his work. I’ll skip forward a little bit. When he was invisible at Stanford, he could do deep work in long cycles of reflection for six years. He worried that if he became visible, he might wake up years later and realize his subsequent books were only half as good because he hadn’t returned to the wellspring of quiet solitude.

Separate note, people should listen to these conversations, but one of the commonalities of your plus two days in your spreadsheets were either, I believe, intense solitude or highly socialized, but very little in between. All right, coming back to what I was reading, he wanted quality to get better. Here’s the part that I underlined. He asked respected faculty, so that’s Stanford, how they spent their time and got a consistent answer. 50/30/20. And to elaborate on that, it’s pretty simple. 50 percent equals new intellectual creative work, 30 percent equals teaching, 20 percent equals other stuff, committees, et cetera. Okay. And you organize your life and tallying things in a very methodical way.

Jim Collins: And I still do that. To this day.

Tim Ferriss: And you still do that. So people should listen to our prior conversations on that, but this 50 percent new intellectual creative work, 30 percent teaching, 20 percent other stuff, committees, et cetera. And this might feed into the — I’m going to screw up the exact terminology, but the doom cycle of competence or whatever it might be. What I’ve found is one of the penalties of being a novelty seeker is that sometimes I will get pulled into things that I am quite good at, they could be new, they could be older, that do not align super strongly with my encodings. And so the days end up being very choppy. In other words, I’m doing a lot of management stuff.

Maybe I’ve said yes to a speaking engagement I regret. Maybe I’ve invested in a few too many startups and all of a sudden I’m on Zoom calls when I’m quietly grinding my teeth because I feel like I should be working on a book project, et cetera, et cetera. And my question is, A, have you ever succumbed to this type of gravitational pull to other things where you end up managing more than making perhaps? And then separately, if that’s true, how have you corrected course?

Jim Collins: So there’s two aspects of how I can get — I have really struggled getting pulled. First of all, just way earlier in my life, I was very close to — I was getting pulled into things that I was not going to be encoded for. And fortunately, by a series of really good events and choices, I ended up very much in frame. But if I’d stayed too long doing some of those things or taken some opportunities that were very glittering opportunities, that my life might have taken a very different path. I think I would have ended up successful and out of frame, and I think that that would have been an unfortunate outcome.

I think that — so the two areas that I’ve had to work with, and I eventually finally got my way to succeed at both of them. The second one was harder. First one was that you’re right about the thing about visibility. I was always prepared for failure. I was not prepared for success. And when success came, it surprised me, number one. I was like, okay, I was prepared for the catastrophe on the other side. I didn’t expect this to be coming, and now I got to deal with all this stuff coming at me. And all of a sudden, you have all these wonderful things, some of them may be not so wonderful, but they’re all coming at you, right? And you have all these voices and people and opportunities and glittering things that could pull you out of what you’re really encoded for because of all this wonderful opportunity and noise coming at you.

And early in that reeling from the, I was a fog of success phase. And I was really trying to sort through how I would allocate my time and I was reeling on my back feet and I would say yes to things that later, that today I would never in a million years say yes to, but I did. Whether it be involving too much travel or whatever sorts of things, but I began to realize, man, my whole life could be sucked away accepting opportunities. And so I had to really fight that and to eventually just clamp it all down, but to do it in a really systematic and disciplined way. And that’s when I started counting my hours. I basically just like, I’ve got to have above 1,000 creative hours every 365 day cycle, every single day looking back for 50 years without a miss. I just set that. I will not ever break it.

And then the other was to begin using very, very disciplined mechanisms for what I would say yes to. We have a punch card system. It was something that I was very impressed by Warren Buffett’s view of the world, which is any use of you is an investment, it’s a punch and you can’t get it back. And so when we’re laying out for the year what sorts of things I will say yes to, we literally have, every year we’ll be talking, “Well, what’s the punch card look like? How many punches are left?” And it’s not a question if somebody calls up and says, “Are you free to give a speech on October 17?” It’s irrelevant whether I’m free to give a speech on October 17. The relevant question is, do I have any punches left?

That’s the first question, or how many punches are left? And we limit them. We limit them tightly. And so that became another way of like, it’s punches, it’s punches and they go away. And one thing I’ve learned, I’ve come to see now at age 68, life is the ultimate punch card. I mean, think about it, right? So you’re 48. If any given good size project is, call it, a five-year project, you got a bunch of five-year punches left. I’m 68. I probably have really good health, but I know the number of punches that I have left is a lower number than yours. And so life is the ultimate punch card. And if you end up spending five years or 10 years pulled away from what you’re really encoded for in some way because of whatever sets of reasons, you can’t get that punch back. And so I began a punch card process and that’s how I managed that. But then the other goes back to what we were talking about earlier.

Tim Ferriss: Could I pause for one second?

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Please don’t lose your train of thought.

Jim Collins: No, please.

Tim Ferriss: But for the punch cards, are those on a category by category basis? In other words, or for example, speaking engagements, I’ll only do five speaking engagements per year. They need to be within X number of hours of my home. Is it on a category by category basis? When it’s —

Jim Collins: So the way we’ve done it, it’s taken us a few years iterating on the exact process, but every week we calculate the punch card and the way it works is we have a point system. And the way the point system works is, if I’m going to do an engagement that involves an airplane, it costs more points. If I’m going to do a virtual presentation from here, it costs fewer points. If I’m going to do an intense — we have these lab sessions where people will bring their executive team to Boulder for two days and be essentially grilled by me for two days. If it’s going to be one of those, even though it’s in Boulder, it actually takes a fair number of points because of the intensity of it is so high. And so what we’ve done is we’ve basically used a numerical sense and then in any given period of time, there’s only so many points. So if I end up agreeing to do a commitment in London, I’m just going to blow like the equivalent of three punches. And then —

Tim Ferriss: Like a reverse frequent flyer program.

Jim Collins: Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: You just get points subtracted and [inaudible].

Jim Collins: Exactly. And so that’s how we do it. And then we always have a running, what the total of the punch card is. And it doesn’t have to hit the exact number at a given time, but you can’t start going over. It’s okay if you get to the end of the year and you haven’t spent all your punches. What’s bad is if you get to the end of the year and you did twice as many as you should have. And so our conversations are always, everything is in the context of where’s the punch card? There’s only one and a half points left on the punch card.

Tim Ferriss: So when you and your team are turning something down because you’re lower on points —

Jim Collins: Well, we turn things down sort of all the time.

Tim Ferriss: Do they say, “We’re very sorry, but Jim is out of points?” Or do they say, “Sorry, Jim has reached his maximum allotment of commitments?” And actually, it’s a real question. What is the language that you use for those polite declines?

Jim Collins: So first of all, I have absolutely people totally in frame doing things that they’re incredibly encoded for. And one of the people on my team is a person who is incredibly encoded to build relationships and make friends and to learn a lot, and then to help me think. And this person who’s been with me now for quite a number of years, what she does that’s so marvelous is that everything begins with making a friend and building a relationship and everything we do. And as part of that, we’re always thinking ahead to the fact that we’re likely to say no. And just statistically, we’re almost certainly likely going to say no to almost everything that comes through.

And so by establishing a relationship and a friendship and setting expectations right out of the gate, the odds that Jim will be able to do this are very, very low. You should know that at the very beginning of this conversation. So we’re thinking ahead to preserving the sense of relationship when we say no from the very beginning of how the conversation begins. And then this person helps the person on the other end understand Jim has a punch card, so that he can focus on his research and his writing. It’s a limited punch card and I have to set expectations that there just aren’t very many spots on it. And then once we’ve established all that, then there’s a conversation about what the event is, what the invitation is, et cetera, and then we have our conversations and then the communication will come back as, in most cases, a no, a few cases a yes, where we will say, “We’re unable for Jim to be able to join you. Punch card constraints.” And that’s just very real.

But they’ve been prepared for that from the get-go. So that’s why, because we want people to walk away feeling better. No matter what answer they get, we want them to walk away feeling better about us than before they ever reached out to us, even though they’re likely to get a disappointing answer. And then in some cases, I will follow up, not all cases, because I couldn’t do it for all, but for some, I will personally record a voice memo for the person, expressing my appreciation for what they’re doing and for the invitation and try to close the whole thing out with a sense of, I want them to walk away and say, “That’s the most wonderful, disappointing answer I’ve ever received.”

Tim Ferriss: I love that. Fantastic. Very, very helpful. By the way, the 850-page monster that I was describing.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I shouldn’t malign it by calling it a monster.

Jim Collins: Oh no. All books are monsters.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. There we go. Right, right. My little pet monster. Maybe it’s more like a monster from Monsters, Inc. as opposed to a Kraken, but it’s entirely about how to say no. And that’s a simple way of putting it. But turns out, just like I think what you realized with What to Make of a Life, I can’t remember if it was Emerson who said this, of course I want to call it Emerson or Thoreau. But whenever you try to isolate one thing, you find that it’s hitched to everything else in the universe. It turns out that saying no is related to saying yes, which is really to decisions, which then you’re like, “Fuck, now I have to talk about everything in life.” So pardon my French, but thank you for that answer. I would love to come back to a few things you said, which I’m not sure I —

Jim Collins: Can I just close one quick thing out?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.

Jim Collins: Which was you asked about this notion of dealing with the staying on track, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yes, right.

Jim Collins: And not getting sidetracked, just very briefly, we talked earlier about right people in the key seats. Are they encoded for it when they’re in frame? You’re grateful for what they are. A lot of getting knocked out of frame was trying to manage my small system. And I did a pretty bad job of it. Took a lot of my energy. What changed is once I got really good at people in seats for which they’re encoded, my time and energy that goes to that has shrunk to almost nothing in terms of that extraneous angst and replace with just the joy of working with my people. So I think that’s the second answer is — I mean, all the way back to first two from Good to Great, it’s always still first two, and especially with people in key seats for which they’re encoded. So enough on that.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s double click on that actually before I hopped to where I was going. I’m imagining, and maybe this is not the right way to think of it, but if you have a small team, like I have a very small team, three or four people in terms of full-time. I suspect you have, at least —

Jim Collins: Some more.

Tim Ferriss: — if we’re looking at broader corporate America, let’s say you have a small team.

Jim Collins: Yes, absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: And you can run some trial and error. Once you get up to 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people, maybe the trial and error becomes a little harder to systematize. But even on a small scale, one could make the argument that you have fewer players on the chessboard, so you also don’t want to chew up too much of their cycles with endless trial and error. Are there ways that you have thought about making that process as fruitful as possible? You’re like, “Hey, there are five types of tasks. I’m going to have everybody do trial and error with five types of tasks, and that’ll help us hone in quickly.” I’ll stop there.

Jim Collins: First of all, I just want to comment something about scale. Two aspects of scale. The first is this, never confuse scale of impact with scale of enterprise.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jim Collins: You and I are like a special operations team, right? A small special operations team can have an immense impact with six people in the unit. And I think people confuse scale and impact all the time. And so first of all, I don’t think you have to be big to have big impact. So you and I have chosen that model. The second is, I think one of the best reasons to grow a company is you have a lot of seats and it’s an ever expanding range of types of seats, which means that there are more opportunities for being able to shift people across seats into seats for which they’re really encoded. Because there’s a wider range and a larger number of seats in which you could do that.

And then I think what really good unit level leadership is, is that an individual unit leader is really good at kind of shifting people around on their unit across the seats by a process of kind of sensing when they’re in frame or out of frame. My own process has, I guess, there’s a little bit of systematic, but it’s very — I’m not going to package any of this because I don’t know how to package any of it. And it’s not my encoding to package and put out programs or anything. For me, it’s been just, I observe. So I have a member on my team that is absolutely marvelous at keeping a cool head in the face of unexpected crises. It’s not me because I have a little bit of the four Enneagram in me and I can go pretty overly dramatic. It’s not helpful.

And with this person, it’s really, really, really encoded for this calm for the unexpected crisis. We had an unexpected thing happened yesterday that was like, “Whoa.” But how did I discover that? It was observation. And what really became clear to me was in the middle of COVID, when everything is kind of chaos and there’s just this sense of just everything spinning out of control. And what I observed was this person was like the calm ballast through everything. I could just see the behavior and it was more just kind of recognizing it. And then once I recognize it and I just see little snippets, it could be just something I just notice. Then I kick the frame to the side. I just kind of kick it a little bit so that what they’re doing captures more of that. And it’s a very iterative process. So I don’t have any magic dust on this. That’s just kind of what I do.

Tim Ferriss: So in that example, this is a great example for a follow-up question, which is if someone is good, you don’t want to manufacture crises to —

Jim Collins: Yeah, let’s see how we all do in crises —

Tim Ferriss: — it’s like the thirst of the crisis manager. So how do you harness that if it seems like, intrinsically, it’s contending with destabilizing unexpected events? How do you use that encoding?

Jim Collins: So it was really interesting. So yesterday, it was really simple. It’s like, “Boy, I’m really glad you’re encoded for this.” It’s that simple. “Let me know how it goes.” So remember I talked earlier about, I think if you talk to people on my team, they would reinforce this. We talked earlier about for yourself, it’s not just recognizing your encodings, probably I put sort of 70 points on trusting them. What I’ve learned with my small team is it’s also true with like, I think this really fits with that person’s encodings. I’m going to trust them. And I think that’s the real key is I sort of trust and get out of the way because it’s like, they’re so well encoded for this that I don’t need to worry. I just need to let them do what’s actually going to be really quite natural for them.

And I think that’s not a particularly maybe satisfying answer, but I think the essence of it is I don’t tend to, just like you don’t want to second guess your own encodings, I don’t second guess their encodings. I just trust that letting them go with their encodings is going to produce a great result and I just breathe calmly and stay out of the way.

Tim Ferriss: So with that person, again, not to belabor the point, but I guess I specialize in belaboring the point to my earlier point of dumb questions. In this particular employee’s case, team member’s case.

Jim Collins: Team member, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: If we look at say Google, they have a lot of seats on the bus.

Jim Collins: A lot of seats.

Tim Ferriss: If they have some people are underutilized, but who are critical when they are needed, like firefighters, let’s just say. They’re playing cards all day long until you need them.

Jim Collins: And then, bang.

Tim Ferriss: But when you need them, you really want them.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Does that team member fit that description? In other words, they’re underutilized most of the time or how do you think about that?

Jim Collins: No, I think my people would tell you that I’ve got them overutilized almost all the time. So back to the exhausting thing. No, this I think actually leads to something really important for us, I think, to talk about. People are not encoded for just one thing. And so for example, with this person, this person is also incredibly well encoded to coach people, he’s a really phenomenal, just instinctive coach. And the coaching responsibility is something that never — that’s there all the time. We have young people who come in who are on my research team, young people who are here with us for a couple of years before they head off to do what they’re going to do in the world, other people on our team who are handling range of different types of things. And they’re in seats for which they’re encoded, but then with that extra bit of coaching, they just kind of have a big inflection. And this particular person is really, really good at coaching.

So the crises come kind of unexpectedly. They just kind of happen, but the notion of coaching other people is there all the time. And so pretty fully utilized on that. I mean, sure, if you’re in a special operations unit, you’re not out on patrol every minute. But there’s a whole lot of other activities that are taking place. And you can be activating different encodings in those kinds of activities. But I want to come to this, this is, I think, and I speak to the world of founders on this especially. But look, here’s one of the things that — let me just pause for a moment. What I said there a moment ago, I’ll let you kind of pick how you’d like to go with it. It is one of the most uplifting aspects of this study, that you’re not encoded for just one thing.

And this idea that you have to find what you’re made for, or even Abe Maslow’s original definition of self-actualization, which was discovering what you were made to do and then committing to pursue it with excellence, which I think is actually a quite good definition of self-actualization.

Tim Ferriss: Can you say that one more time, please?

Jim Collins: Yeah. I think he defined it as discovering what you were made to do and then commit to pursue it with excellence. And I think at some level, that’s what all of our people did at different phases of their life when they were in frame. But there’s a little asterisk to it that this study has really changed my view, which is that this idea of like, as if there’s this one thing that you’ve got to discover that you’re made to do. And what this study has done has blown that apart for me completely. And in the idea that the range of things that you’re encoded to potentially do is incredibly vast and all you have to do is find one of them. And the way you find that can be really random. It doesn’t matter how it happens. It just matters that it happens.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s this portion of the encodings, or that portion of the encodings, or that portion of the encodings. Whether it’s playing NFL football like Alan Page is the first offensive player ever to be League MVP and then becoming a Supreme Court Justice in the state of Minnesota, there’s almost no overlap encodings in that at all, but he’s encoded for both. And we see that notion of the — it’s not just one thing, you may find one and stay with it for your whole life. Some of the people in our study, once they found it, they never left it. And there are other people who, because of a cliff, ending it, or because of some other driving interests, they were in one frame, and then they were way over here in another frame. And the encodings that they were drawing upon could have been radically different.

You look at Benjamin Franklin, right? Built one of the first media empires in history, then becomes a scientist, then becomes our greatest diplomat and helps found a nation. Three really different frames. And I’ll get very excited here because I think that there is a really, really important set of questions here for company builders and company founders. Because personally, I think how you think about the intersection of your life to the cycles of building a company can be radically affected by how you think about this question of in-frame or out-of-frame. So I’m just going to pause there and you can be curious, Tim, however you’d like to go.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m curious. I’m curious in maybe too many ways, that can be problematic. And actually, that relates to — I do want to come back to what you just said, since that’s a nice cliffhanger, pun intended.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: What I do want to ask you, because this is after all, in some ways, a self-indulgent therapy session for myself, let’s take a sidebar. I want to talk about return on luck because it’s been so present on my mind. It came up in passing in one of our earlier conversations, but we never really did a deep dive. And then it comes up again more substantially in What to Make of a Life. And I want to talk about it —

Jim Collins: Wrote a chapter on it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I want to talk about it because it strikes me, and I want you to poke holes in this if need be. It strikes me that one of my encodings might actually be maximizing return on luck.

Jim Collins: Oh interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Because I do so many different things and very often if — and we have to be careful about hindsight 20/20 and survivorship bias, and blah, blah, blah. But when I look at a lot of the home runs, whether that’s from personal reward, external accolades or both, a lot of the time it is connecting these disparate worlds. And the way that comes about frequently is I’ll have these dozens and dozens of conversations, which I do every week, and they could be with scientists, they could be with startup founders, you name it. And most things are a no in one form or another, but I suppose the picture I might paint is I feel like sometimes by the virtue of how I live my life, I’m standing on one side of a tennis net and there are 600 tennis ball shooting machines on the other side, and I seem to be very good at picking out when there’s 600 balls in the air, which one I should actually take a swing at.

And I may be giving myself too much credit, but I think my closest friends would say that also, some version of that. If we step back, could you just describe the different types of luck that you’ve identified and what return on luck is? And I might add something else that I picked up from someone in Silicon Valley that I think is also pretty helpful. But let’s start there because I do think it’s a mistake for folks who think I either have this thing called big luck or I don’t, and that’s the end of the story. Because you mentioned clues all the time, and I think this relates.

Jim Collins: So this has always been a real interesting question for me because I think I’ve always been kind of attuned to the role of luck in life, good luck and bad luck. And I was always really interested and curious about, well, in the end, what role does luck play? Now, real brief background, the first time that I began to see this distinction between luck and return on luck goes all the way back to when Morten Hansen and I were doing our book Great By Choice. We’re looking at really chaotic environments and some of the most successful startups to great companies that came out of really turbulent worlds. And because of the environment we’re looking at, it allowed us to be able to say, “Well, wait a minute, these are environments where luck events can happen.” You can think about two companies, both having IBM walk in the door looking for an operating system, and they both get the same luck event, but one got a return on that luck event.

And so what we did was we said, “Well, we need to systematically understand this.” And Morten really gets a lot of credit for this because we figured out how to do it. You have to first of all define what luck is. If you’re going to study luck, you have to understand what it is and realize that luck is not an aura or something. It’s an event. It’s a luck event. And if we could put the parameters of what is a luck event and with Morton’s collaborating together, we defined a luck event, and I think this is a really good definition, is A, you didn’t cause it. So if somebody says you make your own luck, it’s not luck by definition.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Jim Collins: Right? Because there’s bad luck too. If I get a cancer diagnosis, you mean to say I make my own luck? Right? No, you didn’t cause it. The second is it has a potentially significant consequence, good or bad. And the third is in some way it came as a surprise. You didn’t know that it would happen or when it would happen or what form it would take, right? But there it is. And any event that meets those three tests is a luck event. And once you have that lens, you didn’t cause it, potential significant consequence, some element, some significant way as a surprise, you begin to see their luck events happening all the time.

And so then what Morton and I did was we looked at these companies and we said, “Well, now let’s actually run the numbers and see,” because we always had comparatives in that study. And we were able to demonstrate that the big winners, the ones who had the huge outsized returns relative to their direct comparisons, did not get more good luck. They did not get less bad luck. They did not get bigger spikes of luck and they didn’t get better timing of luck. So luck as a distributed variable was pretty even between those that were the huge 10X winners and their direct comparisons. So clearly luck didn’t separate.

And then that led to the observation that, but it was the return on luck, that when the luck came, they had this amazing ability relative to the comparison to make more of the luck. And that led to the return on luck as the critical variable. So now we come to this study and I was looking through, just looking at the amount of luck that’s in these people’s lives. And there’s a whole chapter on it. There’s lots of permutations of luck, including the roulette wheel, which set of encoding she get thrown into at some stage of life that just puts you there that you didn’t expect to be there. We’re talking about Grace Hopper earlier. How’d she end up in computer sciences? Well, World War II happened. She got pulled out of being a professor at Vassar. She was assigned to this project at Harvard she didn’t even know existed, and it was the first computer, the Mark I. And that cast the dye for the rest of her life.

Well, without World War II or without that assignment, without, it would’ve been some other set of encodings that went off. But then I started looking at what are the types of luck. And I, through this study, came to see, I think there are three. There’s what luck, which is a good event that goes your way or a bad event. A cancer event would be a bad luck, what luck. There’s who luck, and I think this is the often underappreciated, gigantic kind of luck in life. My life is a continuous series of who luck events, starting with Joanne, but others as well. And bad luck, the bad luck of my father.

And then there’s zeit luck. And zeit luck, which I didn’t really see until this study, is when what you’re doing just happens to fit with a particular zeitgeist that’s happening at the time, which you did not cause, but it is a huge reality. So Benjamin Franklin, you and I would never talk about Benjamin Franklin if he had been born at a time that he wasn’t there for the revolution and the founding of the country. And Alice Paul, if she’d been born 20 years later or 20 years earlier, she wouldn’t have been there to bring the 19th Amendment and suffrage to a successful close. She would’ve done something else, but not that. And so Jimmy Page had not been born in England, coming of age in the Blues Rock Revolution right there as all this great music was happening.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll just say briefly, people need to read it, but the entire founding story of Led Zeppelin is kind of insane.

Jim Collins: Right?

Tim Ferriss: When you look at the number of things that had to go right, it’s just wild. Yeah.

Jim Collins: And there’s that great quote from Robert Plant saying, what was it? “The gods roared, and lightning crackled, and Blake wrote a poem from under the ground and all England was reunited.” It’s this great moment in that basement where they had that first song when they played “Train Kept A-Rollin'” and the four of them came together.

Anyway, zeit luck is a big one too. And then what we found in this study is, and I think it really is, it’s a very true finding, they were really good at getting a return on luck when luck came because they have these things we called “NATALIE” moments: Not All Time In Life Is Equal. And you recognize this is a not all time in life is equal moment, and it requires an unequal response to an unequal moment.

And so now I come back to you, Tim. If you’re good at this return on luck thing, okay?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jim Collins: So the 600 tennis balls are coming at you. One of them is the one that you decide to hit. What about your ability to kind of recognize it’s a not all time in life is equal moment and to go to kind of a 10X intensity in that moment. I’m curious how that plays out for you.

Tim Ferriss: I think there’s a lot of overlap. And certainly, I think my maximizing return on luck has an ROI distribution very similar to angel investing. So 80 percent of the times I hit the ball, it’s like Marco and there’s no Polo. Nobody hits it back. But every once in a while, I’m like, “Holy cow, I just scored the winning point in Wimbledon. That’s crazy. I didn’t see that coming.” So I’ll come back and answer that. I think they’re very closely related and I identify with the what, who, and zeit luck. For instance, when I started angel investing, 2008 roughly, 2008, 2009, 2010. It was just a beautiful time to angel invest. Yes, there’s some skill involved. I tend to disbelieve people who attribute anything solely to luck or solely to skill. It’s usually some combination, but there are definitely periods of time where I felt that not all time in life is equal and this is where you need to apply some pressure to the vessel.

And that could be the first book, which we don’t need to get into right now. It could be early on the angel investing. It could be, for instance, around 2015 deciding to 10X, 20X, 30X down my bet on supporting science related to psychedelic-assisted therapies, and even back then starting also. But now typically non-invasive, but sometimes invasive bioelectric medicine, brain stimulation, I think that’s — I have very high conviction that that is around the corner. So taking a peek at the future that’s not evenly distributed, I feel that way about bioelectric medicine right now. So I think they’re very tightly bound in a sense. And question for you, there’s this term that I came across, I wish I had the attribution, but I believe it was from someone in Silicon Valley or at least someone in tech. They talked about increasing the surface area of luck. In other words, if you need luck, if we’re talking about good luck to stick to you, how do you increase the surface area available to which that luck can stick?

And when I think about my own who luck, for instance, it was entirely dependent in the world of startups and even one could argue the success of the first book on me moving to Silicon Valley, being in the middle of that switchbox. Without that, forget it. There was not enough surface area to which who luck could really stick. And I’m just wondering if that resonates with you.

Jim Collins: So first of all, I think whatever the size of the surface, the idea of luck and return on luck is always operating, if you will, right? Because I mean, you could be — my family in rural Northern Oklahoma on my father’s side isn’t Silicon Valley, but my grandmother who grew up there, she had luck and return on luck that her life was affected by. She was this beautiful Oklahoma farm girl and she was working at the Wichita Airport. And this dashing test pilot who was my grandfather, Jimmy Collins, landed for fuel on a Memorial Day weekend, and they met, and four days later they were married. And it was like, “Okay, this is a who luck moment, but we’re both going to seize the not all time in life is equal and boom.” So that notion of the luck and return on luck can happen sort of anywhere.

So one, I don’t think it’s contingent that it has to be the largest sphere. That said, I absolutely agree with you that one of the reasons to be in certain environments, if you’re fortunate enough to be there, is there’s just a lot more tennis balls coming at you and there’s a lot more around the who luck side of it. And my life, I’ve often said there are lots of ways to be wealthy, but the way in which I have been incredibly wealthy, I’ve done well in many dimensions. But probably the way in which I have the greatest wealth is in a vast, vast set of who luck events. And that happened, it started because I started being in environments where I would come in contact with people who ended up being who luck, John Gardner down the hall for me at Stanford.

But just a couple to really illustrate, that really affected my own life because I was in a place where the surface area was fairly large. When I went off to — I was at Stanford Business School second year. And the course sorting machine, I wanted to get into an entrepreneurship small business course, it filled up. And so the course sorting machine just randomly put me into a section with a totally unproven guy named Bill Lazier, who we spoke about in one of our previous conversations. It was truly just the random course sorting. So it is absolutely like a coin flip.

And then Bill ended up, it was the first time he taught, no one knew who he was, was the first person that was ever like a father for me. And Bill, despite all of my challenges to be somebody to deal with or whatever in those hot coals and he had to manage those. But Bill like — now the return on luck was I recognized Bill’s caring and I invested in our friendship and our relationship all the way along as well. And then that led to another luck event, a what luck followed by a who luck. So I was 28, 29 years old, I think 29, maybe 30, right around that age. And so how did I end up teaching at Stanford Business School? Well, shortly before the start of the fall term in 1988, Bill was teaching entrepreneurship and small business. I was kind of still in the fog of my 20s, and I’d been managing Joanne’s athletic career.

And one of the sections of entrepreneurship and small business, because of a family tragedy, all of a sudden lost the professor who was going to be teaching it. I mean, it was a really bad luck event for that person, but all of a sudden it hit me with a luck event in the sense that the luck event was all of a sudden that class had nobody to teach it. And Bill taught the other section of it.

And Bill went to the deans and said, “How about we let Jim teach it?” I wasn’t teaching there at the time, and they were very skeptical of this. But Bill said, “I’ll take responsibility and so forth.” And that’s what opened up the door for me to teach at Stanford. It was like had that tragedy not happen, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity. And if I had not had Bill from the previous luck event, I would not have had that opportunity.

And then Bill said, “Okay, this is like you unexpectedly got to pitch in Yankee Stadium. And you only get to pitch once if you don’t throw a good game. But if you throw a no hitter, you might get to pitch again.” And so that’s the Natalie time, right? Not all time in life is equal, is that moment I get this — it’s, look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you wanted in one moment, would you capture it or let it slip? I mean, it’s one of the great songs of all time because it gets right to this thing, right? That’s the Natalie moment.

And then the next luck event, which was a who luck thing happened, which is I’d written a little article for the San Jose Mercury News. A fellow by the name of Jerry Porras just happened to read it, who happened to be on the faculty with me, who sent me an email saying, “I noticed you’re interested in this stuff on corporate vision. Can we talk?” So I go have a conversation with Jerry Porras. He’d been a professor of mine before, but he didn’t even probably remember that.

And then we ended up, that became where we started the project that eventually led to Built to Last, right? So another who luck. And then those years of teaching and basically having no time for anything except the research and the teaching and the whole bit, and then that leads to Built to Last, which then leads to another luck event, which is this thing that no one knew who we were and totally unexpected, I mean, totally unexpected.

The day that Built to Last was published, I wake up in a hotel room in a small hotel down in Half Moon Bay, California. And I think pub date was October 17 or something like that anyways. And I was down there to do a little thing for the Stanford Alumni Association, kind of a talk or something. And I get up and I open the door, look out, to pick up my morning USA Today. And I pick it up and the top of the USA Today says, “Built to Last author,” something, “see money section.” Okay.

So then I flipped to the money section, and there’s a picture this big of Jerry and me, and we own the entire front page of the money section, and with a picture of the book and the two of us, and it goes on for like three pages. We had zero idea any of this was going to happen. And it simply, there’s a series of things that led to that happening, which related to who luck. I thought it was a joke. So I called Joanna, and I said, “God, my friends are taking pity on me. They’re playing a joke. They made this mock up copy of USA Today and they left it on my doorstep.”

And well, actually I didn’t call her at first because I went downstairs, and then I saw there were other USAs Todays there. And I went and I looked, and they all had the same thing. I said, “Man, this is a really elaborate hoax because they changed all the newspapers.” And then I called Joanne, and she said, “Oh my gosh, now we’re in trouble because that actually is real, and we’re 50,000 copies back ordered overnight.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. Quality problem. Yeah.

Jim Collins: You think about those series of — and then of course there was the year after that, which was a Natalie year at the end of which I put so much into it, I ended up getting shingles because my immune system was so shot. So each of those were, there was the luck event, often a who luck event, sometimes a what luck event. But every one of them, what followed was the return on luck aspect of it. Of yes, I get the email from Jerry Porras, but then there’s the five years of doing the research and inventing the matched pair method and what a wonderful opportunity to do that.

And my life is just who luck after who luck after who luck. And then this fear, I was in a place where there was a lot of this fear. I just have to say though, there’s one thing which is that sometimes you have who luck, though, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that — the key is you can have opportunities come at you. And the hard part is when not to make a return on luck event out of it because it wouldn’t fit your encodings. And so just because something’s a once in a lifetime opportunity is merely a fact, it’s not a reason.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, yes. And everything’s kind of a once in a lifetime event if you sit down and really think of it, right?

Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. Each and every day.

Tim Ferriss: I think about this line, and I’m going to paraphrase, although I think I’m very close, by the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who I had on the podcast a few years before he passed. And I think he said something along the lines of, “The great challenge in life is to separate an opportunity to be seized from a temptation to be resisted.”

Jim Collins: Exactly. Oh, exactly. Those are really good words.

Tim Ferriss: I think about that a lot. And to follow up on the luck question, so if we look at return on luck, it doesn’t specify good or bad. I was thinking about this in the process of reading. And I’m wondering if you look at the people you have studied, whether it’s for What to Make of a Life, or other books or outside of the context of books, it seems like, yes, you can conclude distribution of luck for these matched pairs seems roughly equivalent, but the return on luck is not. And I’m wondering if that applies, not only to good luck, and I’ll tell you what went through my head. I thought, if you were teaching, let’s just say you, Jim, teaching a class at Stanford called luck or —

Jim Collins: Return on luck.

Tim Ferriss: Return on luck. Is it possible there’s actually a progression of skill related to return on luck just as there might be with different types of investing. And that if there’s big good luck, that’s sort of the white belt level. Most people can recognize that. Some percentage of those people can capitalize on it. Then there’s small good luck, which is a little more challenging. Then let’s skip over neutral. Just say there’s small, bad luck, little bad things that people can sometimes make use of, along the lines of the apocryphal Chinese saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” type of thing. And then there’s big bad luck. And I’m just wondering, we could think of these all as forms of chance, if you’ve noticed any patterns among the matched pairs who were able to make good use of big good luck or small good luck, were they also able to reframe bad events or make use of, quote, unquote, “bad events.” It’s just a question.

Jim Collins: I’ve struggled with this myself because I feel like I’ve done better at return on good luck than return on bad luck myself. I’ve had some return on bad luck too, but I can more easily zero in on the return on good luck. So first of all, I just want to clarify one thing that’s really, worth mentioning.

In my prior work, Good to Great, Built to Last, Great By Choice, How the Mighty Fall, so forth, where I was doing matched pair studies and Jerry Porras really gets the credit for coming up with the idea of the historical matched pair method that’s been so central to me. And you were always asking, I got two companies, and then multiple pairs of companies, and they’re in similar circumstances, and then one does really well and the other doesn’t. And you’re looking at the contrast and asking what’s different and that’s how you see the ideas. And so that was really good for my corporate research.

This study is different in how I use pairs. And Joanne came into me one day, and she just said, “Jim, people are not stock returns.” And what she meant by that is, whereas if I’m studying companies, I have these objective output variables. I can look at cumulative returns relative to investors, for example, and I can definitively prove this company over time did better than that company. I can unassailably demonstrate that. But there’s no legitimate way for me to define what is a better life than another life.

And so what happened in doing this study, and this was a big change in how I just even look at the whole world, is that the way it actually turned out, because there were really interesting people all the way around, is my other studies, it was like this, right? There was always one that was better than the other. In this study, I had two people, and then they would hit a similar cliff, and they would come out and they would maybe go different directions, but you couldn’t necessarily say one direction is better than another direction. You could say maybe one person had more trouble getting in frame before they got to the other side or whatever.

And so this study is very much about people going through similar cliffs and coming out and making different choices, which is a very different thing than saying making better choices. So I want to be really careful that I use pairs here. I learned a lot from having pairs. Pairs were essential to this. But the way I think about them when it comes to human beings is different than the way I think about it when it comes to companies.

The bad luck part, I want to speak from a company standpoint, I want to speak from a personal standpoint. Company standpoint. What Morten and I found in Great By Choice is that the only mistakes you can learn from and the only bad luck events you can learn from are the ones you survive. And so it’s true, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jim Collins: And so what we found is that there’s sort of a part of getting a return on bad luck for companies, and speaking for any founders or people who are building companies, what we really found is that the way they manage the bad luck side of things is you think of like a curve, a rising curve of a company or a company moving through, and to say it’s growth or it’s success or whatever’s like this, but around this are like these events like COVID, financial crisis, massive technological disruption, whatever it happens to be. These are sort of these things that are happening along the way.

And meanwhile, down here is this line that you’d think of as the death line. And if you ever hit the death line, it’s over. You never get a chance to get a return on what comes next because it’s done. And so what we found is the kind of the secret to managing, from a company standpoint, the bad luck side of it is you got to stay alive. And the part of getting a return on luck is if you manage yourself with such discipline and with such financial reserves and with such buffers and such relationships and so forth, such that when you get a triple hit of bad luck, you’re alive. You don’t hit the death line. Part of the return on luck is you get to the other side and others got wiped out, but you didn’t. And that sets you up for a return after the fact.

And so this notion of kind of part of the secret to getting a high return on bad luck as a company is to have constant productive paranoia so that you never hit the death line. Because if you’re one of the ones who never hits the death line, then you get a return by almost definition because you survived and others didn’t. So that’s the company side of it. And then of course, you make the most of the things you learned and all that sort of stuff.

From a personal standpoint, I think about — one of the people in the study who you met in the study is we have a pair of women whose husbands died with tragic luck events. One died in a plane crash and the other died of a heart attack. So these two women got hit with a massive blow of bad luck. I mean, it’s the ultimate. You didn’t cause a plane crash, huge negative consequence, total surprise out of the blue when you get that call that afternoon.

And you look at Cardiss Collins, whose husband, both of these women, their husbands served in Congress, which meant that they had the opportunity to take their husbands’ seats because the way that works with this mandate that opens up the possibility. If your spouse dies, you get to take their seat. And Cardiss Collins, she felt that her husband would have wanted her to at least give it a try. And she goes off to Washington DC. She was totally unprepared for being — she’d never thought of being a Congressperson. The whole frame of her life has shifted and her life had been shattered.

And while she was there, she began making these steps. She just started, she would serve on a committee. And she wasn’t even sure she was going to stay. But then what happened is she began to discover a marvelous sense, like she had these amazing encodings, probably, I mean, just really amazing encodings for being an incredible legislator. She became chair of the Congressional Black Caucus at one point. She was there for 25 years. She really flourished in the role of being a congressperson, Seventh District of Chicago.

Now, I want to be really clear. I wouldn’t look at it as that, oh, it turned out that it was a good thing she lost her husband. It wasn’t. It was a terrible thing. So you don’t look at it and kind of denigrate or in any way dismiss the pain and the grief of losing her husband. That’s just awful, tragic, terrible luck. But what the story illustrates is that sometimes the bad luck events, cliff events, a number of the people in our study, these cliff events, have a way of knocking your life to the side. And when that gets knocked to the side, you’re thrown off to Congress, or you have a disease. I mean, your life has just been just bang.

And what happens, I think the way I think of it through this study is it isn’t just kind of like I will make good from bad luck. It’s just awful to lose your husband. But in many ways, what it showed is this sense of that those cliff events, which are often a form of bad luck in some cases, so sometimes good cliff events, but can be bad luck events, can reframe your life in incredibly unexpected ways and exposing codings you never knew you had. And then the return on that is right back to the very earlier part of the conversation, which is those encodings pop into frame, you recognize them, you begin to trust them, and your life takes a different vector.

And that’s how I really kind of came to see it on these big ones, is that you’re not Pollyannish about it at all. They can be terrible, terrible things. Katharine Graham, another one. She had no idea she had the encodings to be one of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. But when the frame shifted and she began to discover those leadership encodings, it doesn’t take away the pain of what she lived through. But when she really committed to and trusted, “I am the leader of the Washington Post Company,” that was the ultimate return for the company, for her, for journalism, for the whole deal. So that’s kind of how I think about it.

And think about it this way, this is going to happen. There are going to be founders. I know you have founders in your world. One of the big luck events that happens to a lot of founders is they lost control of their company, then they lost their company. And sometimes it comes as a terrible ripping shock, almost like a death. And they’re cast into the fog. Or the other version of it is they sell their company, and then they lose three decades of their life because they don’t get back in frame.

And one of the groups, there’s multiple groups of people that I really, really, really hope engage with this book, but one of them, my friends in the military, veterans coming out of places like special operations who have to reframe their life, et cetera. But I think for people who aren’t going to build a company till the day they die like Sam Walton or Steve Jobs, you’re going to face this cliff event. And I think a lot of them are not well prepared for it, and I think they just jump right off another cliff. I would love to see that not happen.

And one of the big questions I would put to [inaudible], I really believe this, is to ask yourself the question is, ultimately in the end, are you going to be a founder who actually the big thing you discovered in your life is building your company, and you will do it until you’re out of breath, or are you going to be somebody who that’s one frame of your life and then there’ll be a second very, very different frame that comes after that?

What worries me is how many people, either they lose their company or they sell their company, and they actually don’t know how to get back in frame. And then a year goes by, and five years goes by, and 10 years goes by, and 15 years goes by. And as you know from the book, your best years are starting to hit it about 55, 60, 65, 70 anyway. And all of a sudden, those punches in life have just expired without being really used.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would say very few founders have a plan. They have scripts they can copy, but it’s not reasoning from first principles or from seeking encodings. It’s, I guess this is what you do now. And that typically ends up with a crisis of identity, much like you described after an athletic career, after flops, after anything that has been a linchpin of your identity for such a long time. I had a question that I think ties into a lot of what has comed up. What has comed up. Do I speak English? I think I’ve tried —

Jim Collins: Yes, you do.

Tim Ferriss: — very hard.

Jim Collins: You do. Yes. You use English very well.

Tim Ferriss: Let me try that again. So I’d love to ask you a question that may tie into a lot of what we’ve discussed already. It came about in reviewing our earlier conversations, and I’d love for you to expand on it. So here’s the line. His mentor, Irv Grousbeck, hopefully I’m pronouncing that correctly, told him —

Jim Collins: Yep. Grousbeck, yep.

Tim Ferriss: — “An option to come back,” in quotation marks, has negative value on a creative path because it will change your behavior.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Could you expand on this? Because part of the reason why I have the confidence, I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, to pursue all these different paths and chase different laser pointers of novelty is that I know I don’t have to stick with any given boondoggle if it turns out to be a boondoggle. So could you just expand on this? I want to make sure I’m understanding it correctly, and where it applies, where it might not apply if this Irv Grousbeck —

Jim Collins: So Irv was another one of the wonderful people that hit my surface, if you will. A great who luck event. So the story you’re referring to essentially was I was at the point where I was going to be really contemplating and confronting the leaving Stanford to head out on my own, bet on my own work. And of course the key is now we know the result. It worked. And I’m really glad that I carved my own path. I wouldn’t have been encoded to be successful in a political environment anyway. And most universities are political. You had to be good at that. I wasn’t very good at it. I was singularly terrible at it.

But there was a question in my mind about, should I try to build some bridges and threads back such that if I stepped away for six months or a year or whatever, that I could have the option to return, if Built to Last didn’t work or whatever. Because it was all right about that time. And Irv said, “It’s not in your interest to have the option to come back.” And I said, “Well, I thought options always have positive value.” He said, “No. Options sometimes can have negative value. Because if you know you have the option to come back, it will change your behavior, the level of commitment. If you know there’s no option to come back, you’re going to have to do…” It’s ultimately it’s a Natalie time, right? It’s going to be ultra Natalie time. And it will change your behavior if you don’t have the option to come back.

And so that idea of — I think you can have a lot of things in life that are sort of small test options and things like that, but I also, what I really took from that is that there come these times when you just go all in it. This is the key. In low odds games, games where there’s a very low odds of success statistically, if you don’t go 100 percent all in, the odds will be zero. So you’re either looking at a two percent chance or a zero percent chance. I’ll take two over zero.

Tim Ferriss: And zero is like anything from zero percent to 80 percent commitment is a zero.

Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that.

Jim Collins: And you can see it in the people in our study at certain points in their life, when they went, once they got clear, they got out of a fog phase or they were sort of clicked into frame for the first time, I mean, the extent to which they were in, I mean, it was, this is what I’m doing. I’m not looking back. Here we go. That moment when Franklin gets dressed down by the Privy Council, and he realizes that it is finally, there has to be the separation from —

Tim Ferriss: Such a great story. It’s so good.

Jim Collins: Oh God. They’re dressing him down and he’s just like —

Tim Ferriss: Walked in an Englishman and walked out an American, I think is —

Jim Collins: Yeah, as a history professor put it, and I’m pretty sure I quoted him, that history professor, he goes, “Perfect, he walked in an Englishman, walked out an American.” But then think about then when they did the Declaration of Independence. Because what I came to understand by studying Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin, who are the pair in this is, obviously historians know this really well, but I had to learn a lot about the American Revolution, the founding of the country, the Constitution, all this kind of stuff through this pair of these people.

And this difference between separating from parliament and separating from the King. And the Declaration of Independence was separating from the King as I came to — and that thing, of the understanding that when we signed this document, we lose, we die. We all die. This is a death warrant if we don’t win. And if that moment of putting your signature on the Declaration of Independence would result in your death if you don’t win, has a way of focusing the mind to win. No options.

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to hear you discuss for a bit what you learned from simply choosing who to include in the book. Because you’ve applied, much like sometimes people think of options as always good things, not true, people may think of constraints as bad things, but very often necessary. Positive constraints are a real thing. So having matched pairs requires, it’s a forcing function for filtering. And even with matched pairs, you have many you could ostensibly choose from, and you had to winnow that down to something that could be contained in a coherent way in this book. And I’m wondering if, as an entire group, you learned from who you chose to omit as opposed to who to include, and if anything distinguished one group from another, meaning who made it and who didn’t make it, outside of the matched pair forcing function.

Jim Collins: There was a journey of really looking for a range of people who would shine a light on the questions that I was interested in. But there’s lots of folks that for, whatever reason in the end, I ended up not including. And partly the first, you put it right on number one, if I was going to have matched pairs, I’ve got to find the opposite side of the pair. So if I found somebody — so I’ll give a really good example.

We were just talking about Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin. I thought that this was back when I originally framed it as renewal, but then began to look at an entire life. But I always thought Franklin would be fascinating to study. I mean, this guy, he’s the kind of first poster child of great stuff late. I mean, the things that he did 70 and beyond. And of course, most of the people in our study did great stuff late too. That’s one of the most uplifting findings of the study is how much great stuff happens late. But I was just fascinated by Franklin that way.

But then how do you find a matched pair for Benjamin Franklin? And I was like, well, we may not be able to have Franklin because I don’t think there’s going to be a match. How do you find a match for Franklin? And so a member of my team and I kind of puzzled on this, and we came up with this idea, which was we said, well, let’s just take all the names of all the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and who were also at the Constitutional Convention. That’ll be a starting set.

Now what we’ll do is we’ll go pull apart all those lives looking to see if there’s anybody that meets the following tests. One came from what they call the leather apron class. Two, through self-education, became a successful business person and hard work. Three, then went on to sort of a second life after that in some form, some sort of interesting way. Four, played a significant role in the founding documents of the United States. And five would have been kind of a comparable age cohort to Benjamin Franklin. The whole thing, just go through. And you start taking all these people in this long list and you start ticking it off and ticking it off. And then all of a sudden we discovered Roger Sherman, who met all of those tests. It turns out to be one of the great finds for me in the study. Almost no one knows about Roger — well, that’s not true. I didn’t know much about Roger Sherman.

Tim Ferriss: I didn’t either. I was shocked. And the way —

Jim Collins: And he saved the Constitution twice.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The way you penned the introduction to that section —

Jim Collins: Oh yeah. Who is this —

Tim Ferriss: — was really fun also.

Jim Collins: Yeah. Who is this guy? And it turns out to be amazing. And they were the two oldest people at the Constitutional Convention. They played a seminal role in the founding of the country. But if I wouldn’t have found Sherman, I wouldn’t have been able to have Franklin, because I wouldn’t have had the match. And so throughout the entire study, there was this constant process of, “God, that’d be really interesting, but is there a match?” I thought it’d be fabulous to have Lennon and McCartney, but you have an asymmetry. Tragically, sadly, we lost John Lennon at a point where all of a sudden his life’s truncated. And so it just wouldn’t have been as good of a match to look all the way out, right? So ended up with Plant and Page from Zeppelin, which I think was a phenomenal match. And so just time and again, and then the other part was I wanted different walks of life. I wanted scientists, I wanted writers. I wanted very different kinds of roles and things that people did and different eras.

I’ve got the Suffrage era, I’ve got the founding of the country, I’ve got the 1920s or ’40s or ’60s or whatever. But the other is they all had to be people where their life, even if it’s not over, and most of them it is over, is largely in the record books. They couldn’t be at an age where you sort of don’t know what’s really going to happen. There’s too much more yet to live. And I’m really glad I stuck to that because that’s what really showed the, “Hey, look at what happens after 50, 60, 70.” And beyond.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a sort of holistic question about all the folks that were included also. And that is, it’s dangerous to assume, but presumably you could have chosen a cohort. And I’ve looked a lot, just given my involvement in science and studies and so on.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: These meta analyses of key contributions to science and perhaps they’re awarded with the Nobel Prize or something much, much later. But a lot of scientists, it seems, produce their most compelling work, let’s just say, sort of in their startup years. In quintessential startup Silicon Valley terms like 18 to 25 or 18 to 30, something like that. If we take that just as a placeholder to be true for some, many scientists, and maybe even more broadly speaking in other disciplines, what separates the people in the book who in the book are so consistently incredibly productive in their later years from the people who don’t do that?

Jim Collins: First of all, before we even just get into this a little bit, I want to ask you a question, which is —

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Jim Collins: Where do you think this mythology comes from that creativity, innovation, breakthroughs, best work, et cetera, et cetera, is the province of the young?

Tim Ferriss: Where do I think it comes from?

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, okay. So my thoughts may not be appetizing, but let’s give it a shot. So I think about this too, part of how I’ll answer echoes, I think, some of how you approach your work in the sense that why do you study publicly traded companies? Because you can compare them across metrics and criteria that are publicly available. You have the data.

Jim Collins: I have the data.

Tim Ferriss: And I don’t want to make everything about startups, but I do find startups a really strange, fascinating laboratory within which you can look at different types of phenomena. And one, I’m currently right now, I have a whole group of people and we’re also using Claude Code and all sorts of stuff to do the most intense, fine, detailed analysis of my last 20 years of investing in startups that you could possibly imagine. It’s pretty incredible what you can do with enriching data and so on.

But one of the questions is age of founder, right? What do you see when you’re sorting by ages of founder as one variable, which is not independent? And I would say that I think the belief, whether it’s a myth or not, and I think it’s situationally dependent, part of it is, hence my incessant annoying questions about energy is that for certain disciplines, the intensity required to sustain a Natalie over years of intensity is constrained by energy. And sometimes it’s also constrained by responsibilities. So if you are early 20s, you’re living on a futon in a cockroach infested apartment eating ramen to survive and that’s good enough for you at the time, there is a certain competitive advantage to that. I think there’s also possibly just a mitochondrial physical advantage.

So you see a lot of home runs are created in, it seems like to me, I haven’t done a fine tooth comb analysis of this. People produce a lot of their best work when they’re in those kinds of professional sports peak years. It’s not that they’re limited to that. I think that’s a piece of it is just energetic intensity endurance advantage, which may be physiologically bound.

Jim Collins: I think it’s really interesting, and I would process this through a different lens, actually, at this point.

The way I would process this is having done this study is I think it’s not a question of energy. I think it’s a question of being in frame with your encodings and that if you are, I don’t think the energy is — I mean, there’s physical things like you can have something that catches up with you physically, of course, or you might have an autoimmune disease or something like that. Okay? But setting aside things physically, health-wise that begin to come at you. I just see repeated levels of evidence from the lives I studied here and people I’ve known over the course of my more classic work, people building companies and so on and so forth, that there’s no evidence to me that the energy goes down, it goes up, that the creativity goes down, it goes up.

And what I would say is that a founder that kind of burns out might have not even really been in frame being a founder. And the ones who really are in frame building a company is just — so if you take a Sam Walton or a Walt Disney or Steve Jobs, there’s no evidence to me that their creativity, that their intensity waned until they were basically expiring and it’s a — I mean, Sam was — he had bone cancer and he still — and he lived a very simple life. I mean, I don’t think that some of the people I studied that their lives changed very much. Their circumstances changed in terms of the amount of wealth they had, but the way they lived didn’t really change.

And they still get up every day and they go to work and they do the thing that they’re there to do and Walt is still thinking about what the next thing at Epcot might be and Sam is still thinking about the expansion of stores and what could happen with the culture and Steve Jobs is thinking about what will be the next iteration of sort of things and how can he set up Apple to be outstanding beyond him? And then the clock stops at some point, but until then, they don’t stop. They don’t stop. They just don’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Collins: So this idea that somehow it goes like this —

Tim Ferriss: Peak and fall, right.

Jim Collins: Peak and fall. I mean, I see it as a peak when you’re young isn’t this, it’s a peak and then there’s this and it just goes up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I mean, you found a media empire, peak, you found a nation.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Jim Collins: And so, I mean —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. It’s a pretty tough act to follow.

Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And even in the science or creative areas, you know what it’s like to write a book.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jim Collins: And how exhausting it is, how draining it is. And you look at Toni Morrison, doesn’t even become a writer until her 40s. She comes into frame as a writer. She doesn’t publish Beloved until she’s 56. She doesn’t publish Jazz until 61, which is an astounding thing. And then she just goes on and she does about half of her contributions after the age of 60. And there’s no evidence. Anybody want to say that, well, Toni Morrison was slowing down when she did Beloved because she’s after 50.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Jim Collins: No. And Barbara McClintock, Grace Hopper, Grace Hopper made huge contributions to computer science. Those happened as her second career. Barbara McClintock’s breakthrough on transpositional genetic elements when it all came together, happened after the midpoint of her life, which was in her late 40s.

So this idea that it happens early, and then I go back to my classic work and the people who built companies, the ones who really built companies, the reason why I think they didn’t have this peak early and then they’re just sort of exhausted and burnout is because they were in frame. Sam Walton was encoded to build Walmart. Steve Jobs was encoded to build Apple. Walt Disney was encoded to build Disney. And if you’re encoded to build your company the way they were encoded to build their companies, a startup is just kind of the first step and you would still eat ramen to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Can I offer an alternate?

Jim Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to —

Jim Collins: Anyways, forgive me. I just —

Tim Ferriss: No, you’re good.

Jim Collins: I so chafe against the —

Tim Ferriss: I love it.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I want the chafing, a sentence you don’t hear very often. No, I’m into it. The alternate explanation I wanted to offer, maybe it’s complimentary, but let’s just say we rule out my theory of professional sports.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Physiological advantage. I think there’s a piece of that sometimes, but —

Jim Collins: Sure. For singing and stuff, sure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Look, I won’t drag that particular piece out, but let’s say I take it off the table. The reason I was asking about the 50/30/20, right? How do you actually maintain the 50 percent of your time allocated to new intellectual creative work is because the alternate explanation I would probably vote for as to why some people seem to get lost or certainly don’t focus on their encodings after some initial success. And therefore you do see a peak and maybe a decline or plateau is that in the beginning, sounds like you’ve sustained this very well, they wake up, they know exactly what they’re doing.

They are doing one or two things, but there’s a primary, and let’s just say it’s a startup, it’s making this metric go up five percent per week or per month compounding over time. That’s it. That is the focus, period, end of story and when you have a modicum of success or a lightning bowl of success and you see this in Nobel Prize winners, right? I can’t remember the term for it. It’s like Nobel Syndrome or something —

Jim Collins: Nobel Curse. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Where their productivity just plummets afterwards. Why? Because they’re now getting all of these invitations over the transom. And similarly, it’s like when fill-in-the-blank founder, putting Steve Jobs aside, although he had his periods in the fog for sure.

Jim Collins: Well, for sure after he got fired, which was a cliff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So taking someone who’s maybe, you could take your pick of hundreds of founders who’ve had an exit of some type or done well enough that now they don’t necessarily feel like they have a demon whipping them at their back. Again, that is not necessarily entirely compatible with the encodings. But the point being, now they’re thinking about the charity whose board they just joined. They’re thinking about any number of other things that slowly or quickly eat up the pie chart of time such that they are well below their 50 percent in terms of new intellectual creative work or applying it to their encodings.

How have you seen people most reliably preserve that? Outside of some mutants who are maybe like, I certainly see this in Silicon Valley on the spectrum, who seem unable to do anything but focus on their encodings, what have you observed in all of your studies to people who are — how they are good at preserving the majority of the pie chart for their encoding? Because I find it very, very, very challenging. Yeah, I do. I do. I’m not going to lie.

Jim Collins: It is. It is. And I have, I mean, just for myself, I have one great advantage, which is part of my encodings going all the way back to what you even wrote about, described our first conversation. I’m belligerently reclusive and it’s a temperament, right? It’s a temperament. People have often said, “Well, Jim, you must feel really lucky that you’re in such an enviable position, because it’s easy for you to be selective and to say no to stuff because you have so much to select from.” And what they don’t see is that I was always selective even when I didn’t have anything to select from. It’s an encoded mode that I’ve always had. So for me, it’s been, I think, easier than for some people, because they maybe don’t have that encoded mode of belligerently reclusive and naturally selective as a way of being independent of circumstance.

But then that brings me to, I think, what I would really see with the people in our study is that there’s phases of life and I don’t think they’re common stages, by the way. They’re just phases. You’re kind of in a phase or out of a phase. And there’s what I would describe as kind of clarity phases and fog phases. And we talked about the fog phases, but there are also these times of great clarity when they click into frame with a really big thing and sometimes they click into frame with a really big thing and it is the big thing till the day they die. They just all the way to the end. And they may have cliffs, but it doesn’t knock them into doing something else.

Toni Morrison just kept writing and Barbara McClintock just kept doing her genetics and Robert Plant is still doing music, right? They found the big thing and it’s just like, “That’s just what I’m going to do.” And then there are others who life would hit them or they would make a change and they kind of go through a fog phase and then there can be a lot of these different sorts of noisy things around them, but then they click in again with a big thing and what happened with the people in our lives is there are these times when they’re doing something they’re encoded for that really feeds their fire, that they’re willing to flip the arrow of money to do. And this is the other part we need to talk about, about this, that what happens is once they do that, it’s a big thing, right?

And they go into what I was describing in the book as hedgehog mode. There are times in life when you’re in hedgehog mode. This is the big thing I’m doing. Now I may have some other things around here, but I’m really clear on the big thing. And sometimes they get out of that, but then they’ll come back to a version of being in the big thing. Science, building my company, founding a nation, right? Big, big, big, right?

Tim Ferriss: Tuesdays, got to focus on founding the nation. Yeah.

Jim Collins: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that once you click in with the really big thing, you give yourself over to it and it sort of dominates. It’s kind of like, sure, you may have tributaries in your life of water, but there’s a big river, which is the Mississippi, of how you allocate yourself. Now, there can be a lot of pieces within it. It can have a lot of sub points to it. It might not be as simple as just, “I solve genetics puzzles.” But it’s got a big organizing theme around it.

Tim Ferriss: If that’s simple, man, I don’t know what my life is, but yeah.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Pickup sticks.

Jim Collins: But this thing about flipping the arrow of money, so now thinking about this with the startup community and so forth, one of the things that is very clear about how people really got in frame in our study, and I really resonate with this as I reflect on my own life too, but question is, what’s the arrow of money? Are you doing what you do to make money or do you need money to do your work? Is money fuel? Back to the flywheel. Is it simply fuel to make the flywheel go further? Is money fuel to write your next book? Is money fuel to do the next Zeppelin album? Is money fuel to be able to do your science? Is money fuel to be able to be a provocative questionnaire in the world? Is money fuel? Money is a fuel and that’s the direction of arrow this way.

The other is the direction, the flipping of the arrow of money of actually the truth is, if I strip it away, the truth is, in the end, a big part of this is I’m doing this to make money. And what I found with our people is if they’d flip the arrow of money that the only purpose of money is to be able to do what I’m encoded for that feeds the fire, that’s the point of it. So I never have to stop. Then you have a very different relationship to success when it comes.

If it was about the money, and then you get the money, and you were never really in frame in the first place maybe, or maybe you were, but I think that notion of what is the direction of the arrow plays a big role in what happens when you get, say, to the other side of having built something, succeeded, or whatever. And I go back all the way to my classic work, I think the great company builders that I studied was never about the money. It was what they were building, and that’s why they never ran out of steam. And no matter how much money they made, they never ran out of steam. And I think that’s a really critical part of how this cycle gets managed.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a huge piece from what I can tell. And I’ll just throw a few things out there and then I want to also make sure I don’t forget to ask you about this live event that I believe you’re doing not too far from now.

Jim Collins: Oh, yeah. Thank you for reminding me about that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. So I’ll sprinkle some thoughts. So the first is, the older I get, the more I think about, I guess, finite and infinite games, cars and just along the lines of what you were saying, fuel, being very clear to distinguish between fuel for the journey and the journey itself.

Jim Collins: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it makes me think of this quote, people should look up — I think I may have had him on the podcast, in fact, Tim O’Reilly, fascinating figure in Silicon Valley, publisher, but much more than that. And I’ll paraphrase his quote, which is, “Imagine life as a road trip across the country, you need fuel for the trip, but it’s not a tour of gas stations.” And also, if you’re selecting, perhaps using a reframed question from Seth Godin, so the question people often hear is, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” It’s like, okay, and I have a mug with that on it, and it’s helpful to think about that, but Seth’s reframe is what would you do if —

Jim Collins: You’re a six! You’re always going to be worried about failing.

Tim Ferriss: Well, the way Seth puts it is he said, “What would you do if you knew you would fail?” Right? Which forces you to think about the actual day-to-day process of traveling on whatever that journey happens to be. Those are just a few things that came to mind. And also, it’s like the more I do certain things in my life, the more I realize, yes, there might be — it’s a big might, a monetary reward. And I’ve maybe been rewarded in the past, but now I just want those additional chips if they come so I can keep putting them back into play.

Jim Collins: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: Which may not be the most financially responsible all the time, but I’m also not anywhere — much like Richard Branson or a lot of these other folks people think of as risk-takers, they’re actually really expert risk mitigators. If you really dig into their stories, they’re very rarely at risk of ever touching that deathline that you were talking about.

So if you want to hop into it, since I know we’ve got to be coming up on three hours now, do you want to mention this live event?

Jim Collins: There are very few times when I’m just out there in a public event that people can sign up for, but related to this on April 9th at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco —

Tim Ferriss: Great spot.

Jim Collins: Yeah. I’m going to be doing a conversation on the evening and around the ideas in this book. I don’t know what direction the conversation exactly will go, but I know sometimes people are like, “Is Jim ever going to be live at something?” And usually there are things people can’t sign up for, but this is one they can. So I would hope to see some friendly faces there and maybe even people are provoked a little bit by our conversation in some way. And I would look forward to that very much.

Tim Ferriss: So if people search Jim Collins Commonwealth Club, would they be able to find it easily online?

Jim Collins: I think they should be able to. I would hope so. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: You would.

Jim Collins: And so yeah, there’s the Commonwealth Club, April 9th, San Francisco. Yeah. What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins, they can find it there.

Tim Ferriss: In our second conversation — we’re going to start to land the plane shortly — but I was looking at a reference to the Good to Great acknowledgements. This was also something that I think you may have brought up, and I’ll just read the line, because there may be something that was alighted here, but, “Success is that my spouse likes and respects me evermore as the years go by.” And I’m wondering if you would keep it to that, if you would revise that, add to it, simplify it? How do you think about success these days?

Jim Collins: I think that’s one of the best paragraphs I ever wrote is the final acknowledgement paragraph in Good to Great, and I really would still see that as, for me, the ultimate definition of success in life. Joanne and I, and the ultimate who luck, right? We got engaged four days after our first date.

Tim Ferriss: Seems to run in the family, I guess.

Jim Collins: It does. And the Natalie moment was, “She’s saying yes now. I should say yes. Let’s get married.”

Tim Ferriss: Smart, smart man.

Jim Collins: I was very much. But then the thing is that, and then 45 years is the return on luck, right? And we’re going to do 46 this year. Your spouse knows you like no one. And to me, I mean, the depth of my — not just my love for Joanne, but the depth of my respect for her, for her intellect, for her integrity, for her amazing ability to speak so directly and sharply to me about what needs attention, our marriage works because we have this multiple reasons it works, but one of it is Joanne is incredibly good at seeing what needs attention and I’m encoded to hear it and the combination is what — is a great combination for us. And she’s strategic guidance mechanism, I’m creative propulsion. And I, over the years, somehow just began to realize that Joanne can see me for really who and what I am, what my real motivations are, why I’m doing things, my weaknesses, my flaws, my fracture points, my unlikeable tendencies, whatever they might be.

And I just, when I wrote that sentence, and this is true today as ever, the measure for me is that Joanne will love me unless I did something really stupid, Joanne will love me regardless, but will she like me more as the years go by? Will she respect me more as the years go by? And for me, this is like the truest, most searing test is if Joanne likes and respects what she sees, I’m not too far off the mark and other kinds of success have come and I want my work to be read and all those sorts of things, but that really is. If I had all kinds of external success, but I lost Joanne’s respect or Joanne woke up one day and was like, “Well, I actually don’t really like you anymore.”

Tim Ferriss: Be a bummer of a day.

Jim Collins: Yeah. That would be the worst possible kind of failure.

Tim Ferriss: Jim, that’s deeply inspiring. I find your life and your examination of your life and the lives of others deeply inspiring. People can find you at jimcollins.com, the new book. I encourage people to check it out. I read every page of it. What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. That’s the book that people will be able to find everywhere. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wind to a close?

Jim Collins: I would just add that it is truly a great joy to connect with you in conversation again. The range of things that we get to talk about, the quality of your questions, it is, as you know, I track my days minus two, minus one, zero, plus one, plus two. Our conversation makes today absolutely, for me, a plus two day. I would converse with you anytime.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, Jim. That makes my day and always a pleasure to connect. Hopefully, we’ll have a chance to break bread in person in the not too distant future.

Jim Collins: That would be great.

Tim Ferriss: That would be nice.

Jim Collins: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I like getting to the mountains. And for everybody listening, we will link to everything, including the new book, What to Make of a Life and the Commonwealth Club and so on. In the show notes, tim.blog/podcast, just search Jim Collins and go to the most recent episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself.

Jim Collins: Oh, I love it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you, Jim.

Jim Collins: You’re welcome.

Tim Ferriss: And thanks to everybody for tuning again. Till next time. Take care.

Jim Collins: All right.

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck (#856) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck (#856)

2026-03-05 08:48:28

Jim Collins (jimcollins.com) has published multiple international bestsellers that have sold in total more than eleven million copies worldwide, including the perennial favorite Good to Great. His writings and teachings are based on extensive research projects designed to uncover timeless principles of human endeavor that have had a lasting impact across all sectors of society. All of Jim’s books share a common thread: the study of people and how they navigate the big questions of leadership and life.

His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative.

Jim will be live at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 9, 2026. Click here to buy your ticket.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim
Cresset family office services for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs: CressetCapital.com/Tim
Momentous Fiber+ 3-in-1 formula with soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, and Solnul® resistant starch: LiveMomentous.com/Tim
Gusto simple and easy payroll, HR, and benefits platform used by 400,000+ businesses: Gusto.com/Tim