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Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More

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Tim Ferriss: Elad, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Appreciate it.

Elad Gil: Great to see you, as always.

Tim Ferriss: I thought we could begin with something we were chatting about, or you were explaining before we started recording, which is a new phenomenon of sorts. Could you explain what we were just talking about?

Elad Gil: Oh yeah, we were just talking about some of the acquisitions that are happening in the AI world. We saw that xAI just got an option to effectively purchase Cursor, it looks like. Obviously, Scale was partially taken by Meta. There’s been a variety of these deals that have been happening over the last year or two.

And separate from that, we were just talking about, well, what does that mean for the AI research community and the AI community in general? And I think the most interesting, or one of the interesting things that’s happened over the last year or so is Meta really started aggressively bidding on AI talent, which was a very rational strategy. They’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars on compute, so it made sense to have a real budget to go after people. And normally, what happens in tech is a single company will go public, and a bunch of people from that company will be enriched and then a subset of them will continue to be heads down and working really hard and focused on their original mission. And a subset of people will start to get distracted. They may go and work on passion projects for society. They may get involved with politics. They may go start a company. They may just check out and hang out or go to the beach kind of thing.

And what happened recently is because of the Meta offers and then all the other major tech companies having to match offers for their best researchers, somewhere between 50 and a few hundred people effectively had an IPO, but as a class of people. It wasn’t like they were at one company. They were spread across Silicon Valley, but all of their pay packages suddenly went up dramatically and they experienced the equivalent of an IPO, and that’s really unusual. It’s kind of the personal IPO. And the only time in history I can think of where I’ve seen it happen before is in crypto where a bunch of the really early crypto holders or founders suddenly as a class all went effectively public in ’20, I guess ’17-ish, and then again, more recently.

But this is really interesting, it’s under discussed. It may not have huge long-term implications, but it does mean a subset of people will change what they’re focused on, try and do big science projects to help humanity work on AI for science maybe. Maybe some people will go off and do personal quests or things like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or just “quiet quit” and do lots of drugs and chase vices. I mean, there’s that too.

Elad Gil: Definitely that.

Tim Ferriss: In that case, you look around, say Austin, you’ve got the Dellionaires, which refers to Dell post-IPO or early employees and so on. But as a class of people, when that happens, I suppose we don’t know how large or how long term the implications are, but there seem to be implications. And I know only a few people who I would go to as technical enough and also broad enough in their awareness and networks to watch AI. To the extent that someone can watch it comprehensively, I would put you in that bucket. And you wrote this week just to talk about some of the other elements at play here, the compute constraints that AI labs are facing and the implications maybe for the next one to five years. This is in a piece people should check out: “Random Thoughts While Gazing at the Misty AI Frontier.” Good headline, by the way.

Elad Gil: Very dramatic.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very dramatic, I love it. It’s very evocative. So would you mind explaining, actually, before we move to the compute constraints, because I do want you to talk to that next, but for people who don’t have any real context on the talent wars and what you were just mentioning earlier with Meta, on the high end, what does some of these pay/equity packages, compensation packages look like that are getting offered?

Elad Gil: Yeah. I don’t have exact knowledge of the full range and everything else. The rumors and the things that have made it into the press, the claims are that these things are between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars per person. And again, it’s a very small number of people who would get anything that’s outsized. But I think the basic idea is we’re in one of the most important technology races of all times. The faster that we get to better and better AI, the more economic value will effectively show up. And therefore, people are really willing to pay in an outsized way for the handful of people who are the world’s best at this thing.

And five, 10 years ago, these people were well compensated, but it was a completely different ballgame because it just wasn’t the core of everything that’s happening in technology. But also honestly, societally and politically and for education and health, it’s going to have all these really broad, and I think largely positive implications for the world, but it is the moment of transformation, and so suddenly these pay packages were going way up.

Tim Ferriss: What are the compute constraints that you discussed in your recent piece?

Elad Gil: All the different — people call them labs now — that’s OpenAI, that’s Anthropic, that’s Google, that’s xAI, et cetera. All the labs are basically training these giant models. And effectively, what you do is you buy a bunch of chips from NVIDIA. You’re actually building out a system so you have chips from NVIDIA, you have memory from Hynix and Samsung and other places and you’re building out data center. There’s all these things that go into building these big systems and data centers and everything else. And you basically have clusters of hundreds of thousands or millions, or the scale keeps going up of systems that you’re buying from NVIDIA and from others. Google has your TPU, there’s other systems as well, and you’re using that to basically train an AI model.

What that means is you’re running huge amounts of data against these big clouds, and eventually the crazy thing is your output or your model is literally like a flat file. It’s almost like outputting a text doc or something. And that text doc is what you then load to run AI, which is insane if you think about it. You use a giant cloud for months and months and months, and your output is like a small file.

And that small file is a mix of representing all of humanity’s knowledge that’s available on the internet, plus logic and reasoning and other things built into it. And you can think about that in the context of your brain. You have three or four billion base pairs of DNA, and that’s more than enough to specify everything about your physical being, but also your brain and your mind and how it works and how you can see things and talk and taste things and all your senses and everything’s just encapsulated in these very small number of genes, actually. And so similarly, you can encapsulate all of human knowledge into this slot file effectively.

Tim Ferriss: How do you think about the constraints then? What are the constraints?

Elad Gil: Every year, the constraint on building out these big clouds to train AI, and then also what’s known as inference, where you’re actually using these chips to understand, to run the AI system itself, you need lots and lots of chips from NVIDIA to do this or TPUs or others, but then you also need other things. You need packaging to actually be able to package the chips, and so there’s a whole supply chain around building out these systems. Different parts of that supply chain have constraints of them at different times, and so right now the major constraint is memory or a specific type of memory that’s largely made by Korean companies, although there’s some broader providers of it. People think that that memory constraint will exist for about two years, maybe, plus or minus, because ultimately the capacity of those companies has been lower than the capacity for everything else in the system.

People think other constraints in the future may literally be building out the data centers or power and energy to run these things, but for today it’s this memory. Everybody in the industry is constrained in terms of how much compute they can buy to throw out these things. What that does is it creates a ceiling on top of how big you can scale these models up in the short run because every lab is buying as much as it can. A bunch of startups are buying as much of this compute as they can, and everybody’s constrained. What that means though is you have an artificial ceiling on how big a model can get in the short run, and how much inference can run or how many things you can actually do with AI right now.

That also means that you’re effectively enforcing a situation where no one lab can pull so far ahead of everybody else because they can’t buy 10 times as much compute as everybody else. And there are these scale laws that the more compute you have, the bigger the AI model you can build, in many cases, the more performant it can be eventually. That may mean that over the next two years-ish, all these labs should be roughly close to each other because nobody has the capacity to pull ahead. And when the constraint comes off, there is some world where you could make an argument that suddenly somebody can pull far ahead of everybody else. So right now, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, they’re reasonably close in terms of capabilities, although some will pull ahead on one thing versus another. That should roughly continue everybody thinks for the next at least two years because of this.

Tim Ferriss: Google is also constrained by the memory from Samsung, Micron, et cetera. They’re similarly constrained as the other players?

Elad Gil: Right now, everybody is similarly constrained and a subset of these labs either are already making their own chips or systems like Google has TPUs and other things. Amazon has actually built its own chips called Trainiums. There’s basically different systems for different companies, but fundamentally all of them are limited in terms of how much they can either manufacture themselves, purchase themselves. And a year or two ago, the main constraint was packaging, now it’s memory. Two years from now, who knows, maybe it’s something else. We constantly are hitting the bottlenecks as we’re trying to do this build out.

Tim Ferriss: This is probably going to be a naive question because I’m a muggle and not able to write technical white papers or anything approaching that, but it seems to me that, I’m not the first person to say this, we’re better at forecasting problems than solutions, potentially. And so for instance, way back in the day, the price per gallon of gasoline or petrol goes above a certain point. Okay, people are forecasting doom and destruction, but past a certain price per barrel, suddenly new means of extraction became feasible and there were investments made in things like fracking and so on. Is there a plausible scenario in which there is some type of workaround? Along those lines, if that makes any sense. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t.

Elad Gil: As far as I know, there, so far at least, is not. And part of that is because of the way that some of these things are built and it’s basically the capacity that you need, for example, for memory is basically a type of fab, and so you just need time to build out the fab and to get the equipment and put the lines in place. It’s a traditional CapEx into infrastructure cycle and these companies basically underinvested in that because they didn’t quite believe the demand forecast that other people had around this stuff, and so now they’re trying to catch up.

And so it’s one of these things where everybody keeps saying, “Well, AI is growing so fast, how can it possibly keep growing at this rate?” But it keeps growing at this rate, it just keeps going, and that’s because these capabilities are so impactful and so important. And so you look at the revenue of these companies and it’s interesting, I can send you the chart later, but Jared on my team pulled together a graph of how long did it take for companies to get to a billion dollars in revenue, and then from a billion to 10 billion, and then from 10 to 100. And there’s only a small number of companies that have ever done that. And you can literally look by generation of company how long it took. And so for example, I can’t remember, it was ADP or somebody, it took them 30 years to get to a billion in revenue or whatever it is, and Anthropic and OpenAI did that in a year.

So for Google, it took four years or whatever. I don’t remember exactly what the numbers are, but it was like as you go through these subsequent generations, it gets faster and faster to get to scale. Right now, OpenAI and Anthropic are each rumored to be roughly around $30 billion run rate.

Tim Ferriss: That’s crazy.

Elad Gil: Because four years ago they didn’t have any revenue. And that’s 0.1 percent of US GDP. So AI probably went from zero to half a percent of GDP, at least as a revenue contributor. And you extrapolate out, and if they hit 100 billion in revenue in the next year, two years, whatever it is, then we’re getting close to a place where each of these companies is a percent or two of GDP. That’s insane if you think about that.

Tim Ferriss: It’s bananas, yeah. It’s bananas.

Elad Gil: This stuff is really actually important and useful. That doesn’t include the cloud revenue for Azure for doing AI stuff or Google GCP or Amazon. It’s just those two companies. It’s insane.

Tim Ferriss: I would love to dig into your thinking because you’re one of the best first principles and also systems thinkers I’ve met, and I love having conversations with you because I always learn something new, and it’s not necessarily a data point, but often it might be a lens or a framework for thinking about different things. And that framework evolves for you as well. But for instance, if I was looking at this interview you did, this is a while back with first round capital and you were talking about market first and then strength of team second, but you talked about passing on investing in Lyft Series C. This was at the time, right? And ultimately, part of it seemed to hinge on winner-take-all versus oligopoly versus other.

I’m curious how you are thinking about that within the AI space, because I mean, you started skating for that puck before almost anyone I know, if not everyone I know. And so how are you thinking about that? And this ties into something that you mentioned in your piece that I haven’t heard anyone else talking about, but I’ll give the sentence as a cue. I don’t think you’ll need it, but founders running successful AI companies should all take a cold, hard look at exiting in the next 12 to 18 months, which might be a value maximizing moment for outcomes. And you went back to the dot-com bust and the survival rates and then breakout rates. How are you thinking about, could you just explain that sentence?

Elad Gil: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: And then also explain how you’re thinking about whether you think this will be winners-take-all, oligopoly, like what type of dynamic you think emerges?

Elad Gil: So in terms of the precedent, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen here, but if you look at every technology cycle, 90 percent, 95 percent, 99 percent of the companies in that cycle go bust. And that dates way back even to what was high-tech a hundred years ago, which was the automotive industry. Detroit had dozens of car companies and hundreds of suppliers, and it collapsed into a small number of auto companies essentially, and so this is not a new story. During the internet cycle or bubble of the ’90s, 450 companies went public in ’99, 450 or so companies went public in the first few months of 2000, and so that was 900 companies. And, say, another 500 to 1,000 went public in the couple years before that. So you had somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 companies go public.

Go public, so that means they kind of made it. And of those, how many have survived? A dozen, maybe two dozen. And so that’s out of 2,000 companies, 1,980 or so went under, one form or another, or maybe they got bought for a little bit. And so there’s no reason to think that AI cycle will be any different. And every cycle’s like that. SaaS was like that and mobile was like that and crypto was like that. Most companies are not going to make it. A handful will, and we can talk about those. And so if you’re running an AI company right now, you should ask yourself, what is the nature of the durability of your company? And are you one of that dozen or two that are going to be really important 10 years from now? Or is now a good moment for you to sell because what you’re doing will start to get commoditized, or will be competed by a lab, or will be something that the market will shift or the technology will shift and you’ll become obsolete?

There’s a handful of companies that will continue to be great. They should never sell, they should never exit, they should keep going. But there’s probably a lot of companies that now, or the next 12 to 18 months is the best moment for them possible in terms of the value that they’ll get for what they’re doing. For every company, there’s a value maximizing moment where they hit their peak, and it’s usually a window. Usually six, 12 months where what you’re doing is important enough, you’re scaling enough, everything’s working before some headwind hits you.

And sometimes it’s very predictable that that headwind is coming and you can see it. And often, you see it in the second derivative of growth. How fast are you growing starts to plateau a little bit and you’re either going to keep going up or you should sell. That’s really what that’s meant to be. I’m incredibly bullish around AI, as you can tell from the rest of the conversation. And so it’s less about the transformation that’s happening overall because of this technology, and more that only a handful of companies are going to continue to be really important, and so are you one of them or not? If you’re one of them, you should never, ever, ever sell.

Tim Ferriss: So what are the characteristics of that handful? The handful that have durable advantage, right? Because you look back at 2000 and it’s like, man, what would you have used to try to pick out Google and Amazon, right?

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m not saying that’s the best comparator, but within the many just avalanche of AI companies, which are those that you think have durable advantage? I mean, of course, some of the name brand labs come to mind. Maybe they become the interface for everything else, who knows? But how would you answer that in terms of either shared characteristics or actual names? What sets apart the handful that you think will make it?

Elad Gil: Yeah. I mean, I think the core labs will be around for a while, so that’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, barring some accident or disaster or some blowup, but it seems like they’re in a relatable spot. And to your point on market structure, I wrote a Substack post, I don’t know, three years ago or something predicting that that would probably be an oligopoly market and there’d be a handful and then be aligned with the clouds, and that’s roughly what happened. I mean, there’s Meta and there’s xAI and there’s other players that may change this. It didn’t exist when I wrote that post. But it feels to me like in the short run, that’s an oligopoly. There’s no reason for that to be a monopoly market, unless one of them pulls ahead so much on capabilities that it just becomes the default for everyone. And that could happen, but so far it hasn’t. And again, this compute constraint may prevent that in the short run or at least provide an asset to it on it.

As you move up the stack and you say, “Well, there’s different application companies, there’s Harvey for legal, there’s Abridge for health, there’s Decagon and Sierra for customer success.” There’s these different companies per application. There’s three or four lenses that you can look at. One is if the underlying model gets better, does your product or service get dramatically better for your customers in a way that they still want to keep using you?

Second, how deep and broad are you going from a product perspective? Are you building out multiple products? Are they all integrated in a cohesive whole? Is it really being built directly into the processes in a company and a way that it’s hard to pull out? Often the issue for companies and adoption of AI isn’t how good is the AI, it’s how much do I have to change the workflows and the ways that my people do things in order to adopt it? It’s about change management, usually. It’s not about technology.

And so if you’ve been able to embed yourself enough into workflows and how people do business and how they work and how everything else ties together, that tends to be quite durable. Are you capturing and storing and using proprietary data? Sometimes it’s useful. I think data modes in general are overstated, but I think sometimes it can be actually quite useful and that’s usually the system of record view of the world. There’s a handful of criteria around, will this thing be long-term defensible or not? And at the application level, that’s often one potential lens on it.

Tim Ferriss: So, question, if people are listening to this and they are in the position of perhaps a founder who should consider identifying their short period of maximum valuation and perhaps hitting the parachute in some way, what are the options? Because I think of some of these companies, I’m not going to name them, but there are multiple companies that have multi-billion dollar valuations. There seems to be, again, from a mostly layperson perspective, i.e. me, that the labs probably can build what they are currently selling without too much trouble. Do they aim to be acquired by a lab, in which case there’s a build versus buy decision for the lab itself? Are they aiming for one of, not the OpenAIs or Anthropics, but maybe somebody who’s trying to get more skin in the game like Amazon or fill in the blank. What are the exit options?

Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of exit options. And the thing that’s crazy right now is if you go back 10 or 15 years, the biggest market cap in the world was 300 billion. And the biggest tech market cap was, I don’t know, 200-ish or something. I think the biggest one at the time was Exxon or somebody 15 years ago. And over the last 10 or 15 years, what happens is we suddenly ended up with these multi-trillion dollar market caps, which everybody thought was nuts at the time, but things will probably only get bigger. There’ll probably be more aggregation versus less into the biggest winners.

There’s more and more companies who have these market caps between say a hundred billion and a few trillion in a way that is unprecedented. And that means there’s enormous buying power because one percent of three trillion is 30 billion. We can dilute one percent and pay $30 billion for something, which is insane. That’s truly unprecedented. And that means that these really big acquisitions can happen.

Tim Ferriss: For the companies that I’m imagining, again, I don’t want to name names, that may have, seem to have a limited lifespan. When I’m in these small group threads with friends of mine who are oftentimes, not always, but I’m in a bunch of them. And when they’re tech investors, very successful tech investors, and I’m like, “Okay, these five companies, you’ve got 10 chips. How would you allocate your 10 chips?” There’s certain companies that can consistently get zero, even though they’re reasonably well known. Why would one of the labs buy one of those?

Elad Gil: Depends on what it is. And it may be a lab, it may be one of the big tech incumbents and Apple, Amazon, Google’s kind of both things. There’s Oracle, there’s Samsung, there’s Tesla, there’s SpaceX now in the market doing things that there’s a bunch of different buyers of different types. There’s Snowflake and Databricks. There’s Stripe, Coinbase if you’re doing financial service. There’s just a ton of companies that actually are quite large, that’s kind of the point. And so often you end up selling to one of four things, right? You can sell to one of the big labs or hyperscalers or giant tech companies.

You can sell to somebody who cares a lot about your vertical. For example, a Thomson Reuters if you’re doing legal or accounting or things that are kind of related to that. I mean, I think actually one thing that doesn’t happen enough is merger of competitors, particularly private companies where you can do that because ultimately if your primary vector is winning and you’re neck and neck with somebody and you’re competing on every deal and you’re destroying pricing for each other, maybe it’s better to just merge. That actually was X.com and PayPal in the ’90s. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel were running different companies and they merged because they said, “Were there two people doing this? Why fight?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or Uber, Lyft way back in the day. That might not have been a merger. It might have been an acquisition.

Elad Gil: Yeah. And the rumor is that that almost happened and then the Uber side walked away from it, but all the money that Uber spent on fighting Lyft for all those years maybe would’ve been better spent just buying them. Maybe not, I don’t know the exact math on it. But often, it actually does make sense to say, “You know what? We’ll just stop fighting it out and we’ll just combine and just go win.” Because if the primary purpose is to win the market, you’re already fighting all these big incumbents that already exist anyhow, so why make it even harder?

Tim Ferriss: As you know, and we talk about this a lot, but we’ll talk about you with your investing hat on. But before you even put that, let’s call it full-time investing hat on, you had a lot in your background that may or may not have helped you. And I’m curious, if you look at your biology background, the math background, do you think any of those things or other elements materially contributed to how you think about investing that has given you an advantage in, I suppose there are different stages to winning deals, but sometimes they’re not crowded, but let’s just talk about the selection, the selection process.

Elad Gil: The math stuff helped me, I think, in two ways. One is it’s helped me with certain aspects of technical or algorithmic CS and understanding it, and sometimes it’s useful in the context of how certain things work in AI or things like that or just fluency of numbers and data and I don’t have to call it nerd language or something. And I did the math degree, honestly, just for fun. I think that’s actually the thing that was helpful. I only did an undergrad degree in math, so I didn’t go that far with it, but I did the very abstract pure math stuff. And I think that was a good forcing function of how to really think logically step by step about things because roughly the way that at least I learned how to do proofs was you do the logical sequence, but then sometimes you do these intuitive leaps and then go back and try and prove it to yourself, or flesh out the reasoning behind that intuitively. And I think sometimes investing is a little bit like that.

Tim Ferriss: When did you first have the inkling that you could be good at investing? And that could be investing writ large, it could be maybe within the context of our conversations, startups and angel investing. When did you first go, “Huh, yeah, maybe I could be good at this”? Was there a moment or a deal or anything like that that comes to mind?

Elad Gil: Not really. I’m really hard on myself so even now I second guess myself a lot. Somebody was telling me that the two people that always beat themselves up the most in hindsight is me and this one other person who’s another well-known founder/investor. And so I don’t think there’s a single moment where I’m like, “Wow, this makes sense for me to do.” I think it just organically kept going because I was getting into some very strong companies, and then that allowed me to continue what I’m doing. Yeah, I wish I had a moment like that.

Tim Ferriss: Goddammit, you need to revise your genesis story like every good founder.

Elad Gil: Yeah, ever since I was seven, I’ve been thinking about investing in technology.

Tim Ferriss: So getting into those deals, what allowed you to get into those deals? Because some people have an informational advantage and they put themselves in a position to have an informational advantage. And I think that had I not — I don’t want this to be a leading question, but it’s like had I not moved to Silicon Valley when I did, 2000, and then subsequently stayed there, moved to San Francisco specifically, nothing that I was able to do in angel investing would’ve been possible. But there’s more to your story because a lot of people moved there with hopes of startup riches in whatever capacity. Not saying that that’s why you moved there, but what was it that allowed you to get into those deals? There are certain things that come to mind based on our prior conversations, but I’ll just leave it at that. Why were you able to get into or select those deals?

Elad Gil: Yeah. I think there’s what happened early and what happens now, and I think those two things are different. I think to your point, the single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry. Move to wherever that thing is, and all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything’s remote is all BS. And you see that for every industry, not just tech.

If you wanted to get into the movie business, people wouldn’t say, “Hey, you can write a film script from anywhere, you can digitally score it from anywhere, you can edit it from anywhere, you can film it anywhere, go to Dallas and join their burgeoning film scene.”

They’d say, “Go to Hollywood.”

And if you want to do something in finance, and you’re like, “Well, you could raise money from anywhere and come up with trading strategies and a hedge fund strategy from anywhere and you could do it from anywhere.”

People would say, “Hey, go to whatever.” Seattle, they’d be like, “Go to New York or go to X, Y, Z financial center.”

So the same is true for tech. And Shreyan on my team has been performing this sort of unicorn analysis of where is all the private market cap aggregating for technology. And traditionally, about half of it’s been the US and then half of that has been the Bay Area. But with AI, 91 percent of private technology market cap is the Bay Area, 91 percent of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one 10 by 10 area. If you want to do stuff in AI, you should probably be in the Bay Area. Probably the secondary place is New York, and then after that, it just drops off a cliff, and really it’s the Bay Area. If you want to do defense tech, you probably should be in Southern California, close to where SpaceX and Anduril are, and Irvine, Orange County, et cetera, or El Segundo. There’s a lot of startups there. If you want to do FinTech and crypto, maybe it’s New York.

But the reality is these are very strong clusters. To your point, number one, is I was just in the right location. I was in the right networks and a default was, I was running a startup myself. I was at Google for many years, and then I left to start a company. People just started coming to me for advice. The way I ended up investing in Airbnb is I was helping them when there were eight people or something, raise their Series A, and introduced them to a bunch of people and help with some of the strategy there in very light ways. They would’ve done it without me. They said, “Hey, at the end of it, do you want to invest a little bit?” I said, “Great, that sounds wonderful.” This was very organic.

Or the way I invested in Stripe is I had sold an infrastructure, early API company to Twitter. When Twitter was, say, 90 people or so, and I sent an email to Patrick, the CEO of Stripe, just saying, “Hey, I’ve heard great things about you and I really like what Stripe is doing and I would use it for my own startup. I sold this API company myself. Do you want to just talk about this stuff?” I went on a couple walks and then a week or two later he texted me and he’s like, “Hey, we’re doing a round. Do you want to invest?” The first few things that I did were very organic where the founders were like, “I want you on board.”

I didn’t think, “Oh, I should be an investor and I’m going to chase things.” I just really liked talking to smart people and I liked working on certain business problems, and I love technology and it’s translation to the world. I was just a nerd and I met other nerds and we hit it off. It’s the early story for me.

Tim Ferriss: But it just struck me that I’m sure people have heard, or I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. It just struck me that it goes the other way around too. It’s like, if you offer a bunch of advice, oftentimes you get to give money. If you try to give money, you might get solicited for advice.

Elad Gil: Yeah, good point.

Tim Ferriss: When did you write the High Growth Handbook? When was that published?

Elad Gil: It’s a while ago now. It’s probably seven-ish years ago, something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Seven years ago. All right. Yeah, we’re going to come back to that in a minute because you were in the right place geographically speaking. You were in the center of the switchboard. Like you said, some of these initial standout investments came about very organically. What I’d be curious to hear, because you also said yourself not too long ago that there’s what I did then, there’s what I did now. There’s also what you did in between along the way. I’m wondering, for instance, if you would still stand by this, this is from that first round interview I was mentioning.

“As a general rule, when I make investments, it’s market first and the strength of the team second,” and there’s more to it. But would you still agree with that?

Elad Gil: 90 percent, yes. Every once in a while you meet somebody exceptional and you just back them or something maybe so early. I led the first round of Perplexity, the very, very first round. The way that came about was Aravind, the CEO, I think he pinged me on LinkedIn, literally. This was when nobody was doing anything in AI and he was an OpenAI engineer or a researcher. He’s like, “Hey, I’m at OpenAI,” which nobody cares about at the time, “I’m thinking of doing something in AI. I heard that you’re talking about this stuff and nobody else is talking about it. Can we meet up?”

We just started meeting every two weeks and brainstorming, and then that led to investing in that. That was a people first thing where he was just so good. Every time we talk, he’d show up a week later with a thing that we discussed built. Who does that?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a good sign.

Elad Gil: It’s so good. Or, the way I ended up investing in Anduril. Google shuts down Maven, which was their defense project. I think, “Well, if the incumbents are going to do it, what a great place for startups to play.” Because there’s been a long history of the Silicon Valley and the defense industry. That’s HP and that’s a lot of the early brands. I was just looking for something or somebody to work on this area and it was very unpopular at the time. I ran into, I think it was Trae Stephens, who’s one of the co-founders of Anduril, who’s also at Founders Fund, at some blunch or something else. Again, right city to be in.

He said, “Oh, I’m working on this new defense thing.” I said, “Amazing. Let’s talk about it.” It was very just looking, sometimes just looking for these things too in a market and sometimes it’s people. Anduril was looking for a market and then finding amazing people. Perplexity was in between where it was like I was looking at everything in AI, because I thought it was going to be incredibly important, but not very many people were. Then I just ran across an exceptional individual, and that’s when I funded OpenAI. That’s when I funded Harvey, which is the early legal — I funded a lot of really early stuff because they were the only people doing anything in this market that I thought would be really important.

Tim Ferriss: Let me come back to a few things you said. You mentioned the Perplexity founder, or later the founder who said you’re talking about this stuff or heard or read or found you talking about this stuff, where was that? Was that post on your blog? Was it somewhere else? How did he actually find you talking about anything?

Elad Gil: Yeah, I think he pinged me in part because I was involved with a bunch of the prior wave of technology companies, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Square, a bunch of stuff like that. I think at that point I was already known as a founder and investor. But then on top of that, I was trolling AI researchers and just asking them about what’s going on because it was so interesting. There was a bunch of art that was being done with these things called GANs at the time, these generative adversarial networks.

I was playing around with that. I tried to hire engineers to build me effectively what’s Midj ourney, because I just thought it’d be really cool to make it easy to make AI art.

Tim Ferriss: Let me pause for a second because this is my second question and it’s a good time. When you mentioned AI, I thought it would be incredibly important. What were the indicators of that? What was the smoke in the distance where you’re like, “Oh, that’s an interesting direction.”

Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there was two or three things. AI was one of those things that people have always talked about. When I was doing my math degree, I took a lot of theoretical CS classes and there were the early neural network classes and things like that and the math behind it. There’s always this promise of building these artificial intelligences of different forms. One could argue Google was a first AI first company. Back then it was called machine learning and it was different technology basis in some sense. I think 2012 was when AlexNet came out and there’s this proof that you can start scaling things and have really interesting characteristics in terms of how AI systems work.

Then, 2017 is when Google, a team at Google invented the transformer architecture, which everything is based on now, or roughly everything. For example, if you look at GPT for ChatGPT, the T stands for transformer. Around 2020-ish I think was when GPT-3 came out, and that was such a big step from GPT-2. It still wasn’t good enough to really do stuff with, but you’re like, oh, shit, the scaling law papers are out. The step function and capabilities was huge. You suddenly have a generalizable model available via an API that anybody can ping. Just extrapolate that out to the next step and this is going to be really important.

It’s basically looking at that capability step and playing around with the technology, and then reading the scaling law papers, or just in general, the scaling law seem to work for everything. You’re like, wow, this is going to be really, really important, so let me start getting involved with it.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think you would have or could have done that without a mathematics background? I’m guessing there were probably some other folks, but that leads me to the question of, how are you finding and ingesting that? Was it the talk of the town? It was in a sense within your social circles and the networks that you’re a part of, it was a open discussion, so you were engaged with it. Or, are you ingesting vast quantities of information from different fields and this happened to be something that really caught your attention?

Elad Gil: I guess it’s three things. I’ve always ingested a lot of information from a lot of different fields just because I like learning about stuff. I was always this mix of math and biology and anime and art and other things. It was always a mix. Then it was something that my friends were talking about, but it was a bit more toy-like, “Oh, this is cool and look at what came out.” But most people didn’t then extrapolate. It’s like early crypto or Bitcoin, everybody was talking about it, but very few people bought it. I think that was part of it. Then third, honestly, I just thought it was really neat stuff that I kept playing around with.

This is back to the GAN stuff and the art where these different models would come out and you could mess around with them. One of the things that’s really underdiscussed in terms of the importance of it relative to this wave of foundation models and AI and everything else is, the way AI or machine learning used to work is your team at a company or wherever else would go and there’d be what’s known as an MLOps team. An operations team whose whole thing was helping you set up all the data and the pipelines and everything to train a model. You train a model that was accustomed to your use case and what you were trying to accomplish.

Then you had to build a bunch of internal services to interact with that model. It was a huge pain to get to the point where you had a working ML system up and running in production. Then suddenly, you have a thing where you just do an API call. With a line of code or a few lines of code, anybody anywhere in the world can ping it, but not just that, it’s generalizable. It’s not just specialized to one use case, like spell correction or whatever. You can use it for anything and it has all of the internet embedded in it in some sense, in terms of the knowledge base. It can start having these advanced reasoning capabilities. But one of the most important things is, hey, you can get it with a couple lines of code.

You don’t have to go and build an MLOps team. You don’t have to host it. You don’t have to interact with it. You don’t have to do all this extra stuff. It just works. That’s really important.

Tim Ferriss: It’s huge. Yeah, it’s hard to overstate.

I have a million questions for you. The problem with this is the embarrassment of riches of directions that we could go. I am using, in my team, Claude Code and assorted tools for all sorts of stuff right now. One of them, it just so happens, overlaps with an area of great skill for you and experience, which is angel investing. This is the first time where I feel really enabled to do, and there is some manual effort involved, as you might imagine, but to go back and do an analysis of 20 years of angel investing to try to do any number of things. I suspect that a lot of what interests me is not particularly useful, like doing some counter-factuals.

What if I had held each of these for three years, for five years, for whatever? That’s like just Opus Dei, whipping myself in the back for the most part. But in doing an analysis like that, there are certain things that immediately come to mind for me that might be of interest. I want to hear what you would do if you would even do this. Part of it is, frankly, just curiosity. Are the stories I tell myself about this true or not? I’m interested, like who made certain introductions? Are there certain people who just took me there, basically people in hospice care, and shipped them over as a last ditch effort? Are there people who actually sent me good stuff consistently, et cetera?

There are a million and one ways I could try to interrogate the data and enrich it. We’re doing a pretty good job of enriching it, Claude and other tools. OpenAI is very good at this. What are some of the more interesting questions or lines of examination you think looking back, like whatever it is, in my case, it’s about roughly 20 years of stuff.

Elad Gil: Yeah. The weird thing I’ve been doing is uploading pictures of founders and asking the models to predict if they’d be good founders.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Elad Gil: Because if you think about it, we do this all the time when we meet people. We quickly try to create an assessment of that person, their personality and what they’re like. There’s all these micro features. Do you have crow’s feet by your eyes which suggests that your smiles are genuine? What does that imply about the sense of humor you have? Or, have you furrowed your brow over time and what does that mean? There’s all these micro features. When you meet people, you actually can get a pretty quick impression of them pretty fast. It doesn’t mean it’s correct, right? But we actually do this really fast as people.

I have this whole set of prompts that I’ve been messing around with just for fun around, can you extrapolate a person’s personality based off of a few images? Therefore, can you be predictive about their behavior in any way? I think that’s fun, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re finding any signal there or not? TBD?

Elad Gil: Yeah, it actually works pretty well. I’ve been doing weird shirt, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right, practice smiling people.

Elad Gil: Yeah, yeah. No, but I think it’s interesting because we do this all the time where we read people and that’s part of the prompt. It’s like you’re a very good cold reader of people based on micro features and et cetera, spell it out. Then based on that, not only you give me your interpretation of this person, but explain the specific micro features for each thing that you’re stating about the person, and it will break it down for you. It’s amazing. Imagine what this technology is. It’s crazy. Again, I’m not saying it’s fully accurate and I’m not saying it’ll be predictive, but it’s done pretty well in terms of nailing people.

It’s even done things like, “Oh, this person probably has this type of sense of humor.” Or, “This person probably holds themselves back in most social settings and then chimes in with a witty wry thing that nobody expects or whatever.” It’s very specific.

Tim Ferriss: Very specific.

Elad Gil: Yeah. It’s amazing. I’ve been doing stuff like that, which may not be your question, but I’ve been finding it really fun.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s related in the sense that, and I’m sure I’m missing some steps, but I love angel investing and the dose makes the poison, so there’s usually a case to be made when I get to a certain threshold. I’m like, “Okay, this isn’t fun anymore.” I love dark chocolate too, but I don’t want just to be force-fed dark chocolate all day. I’ve talked about this, but I really do enjoy the learning and the sport of it, frankly, and interacting with some very, very smart people. Not all of them work out as far as founders of companies, but ultimately, I’m trying to figure out how to separate signal from noise.

Also, it’s fun to try to use anything, but in this case investing, to sharpen your own thinking and to stress test your own beliefs and the assumptions that undergird some of your predictions, things like that. I’m just wondering if you’ve ever done a retrospective analysis of your startup investing or if you’re like, “No, more Marc Andreessen style, only forward.”

Elad Gil: Yeah. Early on when I was first starting to invest, I would have this long grid of things by which I would score each company, and then I’d go back and see if it was correct. It was roughly correct. I think the hard part is there’s a lot of randomness in outcomes. There’s the company that sells for a few billion dollars that you thought was dead or whatever it is, right?

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Elad Gil: How do you score things like that? It’s like, well, right now we’re in this really weird market moment where trillions of dollars of market cap are all chasing the same prize. They’re going to do all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t happen normally. It’s really hard to account for that kind of thing relative to all this. I’m much more in the Marc Andreessen camp of, I think very little about the past. I think close to zero about my own past, I just am like, “Let’s keep going.” Maybe that’s bad and there should be dramatically more self-reflection.

I try to self-reflect in the moment, but I don’t try to re-extrapolate and examine my entire life and decisions. If anything, most of the decisions have been ones where I’m really upset with myself for not being more aggressive on something. In other words, I’ve invested in the company, but I should have tried even harder to invest more even if I tried really, really hard because there’s a handful of companies that really matter, and that’s all that matters as an investor. Obviously, as a person, I enjoy getting involved with different companies and different founders and helping them whether the thing works or not, or I think the technology’s interesting or whatever.

But the realities from a returns perspective, there’s a very clear power law that people talk about and it’s true. I remember a friend of mine did this analysis, I think it may have been Yuri Milner or someone where it’s like, look at all the companies from, I don’t remember the exact dates, 2000 or 2004 until today in technology. It was something like a hundred companies drove like 90 something percent of all the returns and 10 companies total drove 80 percent of all returns over a two decade period in technology. If you weren’t in that 10 companies, you were a bad investor. Once you start dealing with these power laws and these outsize outcomes and all of that, how can you rate that?

It’s basically, did you hit one of 10 things or not? That’s really the rating. That’s probably the correct rating for investment.

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to try to focus on some early-ish decisions on this podcast, right? Because like you said, they’re the earlier decisions. There’s how you did things then, there are how you’re doing things now, which isn’t to say that one is better than the other, but certainly what you do in the past tends to inform what you’re able to do and what you do in the present. What I’m curious about, and we won’t spend a ton of time on this, but it might be interesting to folks, is to discuss when you moved from purely doing angel investing yourself to involving other investors in your deals, right?

There are multiple ways to do this, but the reason I want to ask this is because you did a number of SPVs, I’ll explain what that is, special purpose vehicle, but for folks, you might be familiar with venture capital firm. They have funds and they raise, let’s just call it $100 million for a fund. It can be more or less, of course. Then they invest in a bunch of different companies and then you see who wins, who lose, and then if there are profits, like I guess conventionally, let’s just use the textbook example, the venture capital firm takes 20 percent of the upside and then the LPs, the investors get 80 percent.

The venture capital firm takes a management fee to keep the lights on, although it usually does a lot more than keep the lights on. With the SPVs, you’re investing in, let’s just say, for simplicity, a single company, right? There are advantages to that in simplicity, for somebody who’s putting together, the SPV, but you also have a lot of reputational risk, because if you have a fund, you have a couple of losers. Your investors don’t automatically go to zero, but if you have an SPV and it goes to zero, that could really hurt you reputationally.

When I look at some of your early SPVs, which I think included, certainly, a number of name brands like Instacart and so on, how did you choose which companies to do the SPVs with? Because that seems like a very important set of decisions to lay the groundwork for creating optionality for what you do after that.

Elad Gil: Yeah. I think to your point, I’ve always been terrified of losing other people’s money. I’m fine if I lose my own money. It’s my decision. I’m an adult. It’s okay, but I’ve always been — people giving money are adults or institutions, et cetera, to invest on their behalf. But similarly there, I was just terrified of ever losing money for people. I’ve tried over time to be judicious behind the SPVs that I did early on and the focus was on things that I thought would really be outsized companies. That was, to your point, Instacart, it was early Stripe, it was Coinbase, it was a couple things like that that were amongst my very first SPVs.

The emphasis was very much on, do I think this can be a massive thing? Also, do I think there’s enough downside protection in some sense that even if it didn’t work as well as I thought it would still be a good outcome for people. Yeah, I try to do that very diligently. It’s interesting because a lot of people ping me for help as they think about becoming investors or they’re scouts for a fund, which means basically they’re given a small amount of money by a venture capital fund. Sequoia famously has this program, they give people money and then those people invest money on their behalf. Some of the scouts that I’ve talked to basically treat it like free money or an option.

They’re just like, “Oh, just throw out a bunch of stuff, maybe something works.” I’ve pointed out to them, “Hey, if you actually want to become a professional investor at some point, this is your track record.” A, you’re a fiduciary in some sense, and maybe I’ll be more careful from that perspective, but B, this will establish your track record, and do you want to have a good one or a bad one? How do you think about that? Again, sometimes people just get lucky and they hit the one thing out of a hundred, but that more than returns everything and they look great. But it’s hard to be consistently good at this stuff or consistently hit great companies.

Tim Ferriss: All right. I want to double click on a few things you said and maybe you could walk us through a pseudonymous example. It doesn’t need to be a named company, but when you’re talking about setting your track record, you did an excellent job of that before you then went on later to raise funds and so on. I would love you to perhaps explain some of the things you do in diligence or how you weight things differently and also how you think about the capped minimum downside. I’m not sure that’s the exact wording that you used in selecting those deals, because you could have selected any number of deals on a due diligence level. What’s the kind of stuff that you focus on maybe more than others and what are the things you pay less attention to than others?

Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between early and late things. On the early side, to the point earlier, I tend to spend a lot more time on the market than most early stage investors. Most early stage investors say, “I just care about the team and how good are they?” But I’ve seen great teams crushed by terrible markets and I’ve seen reasonably crappy teams do very well. At this point, I think the market is more important, although I think obviously great teams can find their way if they decide to shift around a bit. I index a lot on market early and that may be customer calls, that maybe is trying to understand, do I think something could be big?

It could just be some intuition around, “Hey, defense is really important. Nobody’s doing defense. Let me find a defense company.” I tend to index a lot on that. Relatedly, I’ve tended to avoid science projects. There are some people who get really distracted by, “Wow, this is really cool. It’s quantum and it’s this and it’s that.” I’ve largely avoided those things. Sometimes I miss things that were really good, but often that was the right call. I actually think SPAC saved the hard tech and science-based investing industry because if you look at what happened basically at the market peak, a bunch of SPACs took a bunch of companies public that would not have been able to raise money in private markets later.

They gave them enough money to keep going, but more importantly, they returned a bunch of money to these hard tech funds and that saved them from going under. It gave them all the returns. It was basically the SPAC era. Chamath basically saved hard tech. I mean that seriously, not tongue-in-cheek. I largely avoided that kind of class of companies. I’m not saying I was smart. I would’ve made money off of it. I just thought there was all capitalization issues and science risk and market risk and other things to them. For later stage stuff, the hard part often is everything on paper gets modeled out for a late stage company as a two to three X from that investment point.

Because all the funds that are driving the rounds underwrite against some IRR clock, 25 percent IRR, whatever it is. They all come up with these models and then the models all say all these companies are basically going to two to three X. The art there or the science there, whatever you want to call it is, is that a 0.5 X company? Is it going to drop in value or is that a 10X? How do you know it’s a 10X versus a two to three X versus a 0.5? That’s the harder part of growth investing. There’s a subset of things that you’re like, this thing will just keep going and here’s why.

But often it’s not mathematical. Often that’s just like some market dynamic or some key core insight or some market share question. People tend to make that stuff really complicated and they have these really complicated multi-page models and 50-page memos and all the rest. Often these things boil down to one single question. What is the one thing I need to believe about this company that makes me think it’s going to continue to be really big? If it’s three things, it’s too complicated, it’s probably not going to work. If it’s no things, then it doesn’t make much sense. Usually, there’s one or two things that are really the core insights you need to understand the outcome for something.

Tim Ferriss: Can you give an example of one of those beliefs for any company that comes to mind?

Elad Gil: Yeah, I’ll give you two or three of them. I mean, Coinbase, part of it was just, hey, this is an index on crypto and crypto will keep growing. Because if Coinbase trades every main cryptocurrency and they take a cut of every transaction and they have enough volume, they’ve effectively bought a basket of every cryptocurrency by investing in Coinbase. That was the premise there. Stripe, they’re an index on e-commerce and e-commerce will keep growing. Back then, now it’s much more complex and there’s all sorts of great drivers of its performance. Anduril was, hey, machine vision and drones are going to be important, AI and drones are going to be important for defense.

Tim Ferriss: That’s it.

Elad Gil: I mean, it was more complicated than that. I’m just saying.

Tim Ferriss: Right, right. Well, that was it for the belief, the core belief.

Elad Gil: There was cost-plus model versus hardware margin. Anduril actually had four or five things that were important there, that were kind of like a checklist for a defense tech company. But for a lot of the other ones, it was like e-commerce is good.

Tim Ferriss: This is probably too inside baseball, but what were the stages of the companies that you mentioned when you created the SPVs? Roughly. Yeah.

Elad Gil: Stripe. Well, I first invested in Stripe when it was eight people, and then I kept following on. And I ran out of my own money, frankly, and that’s when I started doing SPVs. So I think I did my first SPV in Stripe around the Series C-ish, somewhere around there, something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Got it. And were the others more or less similar-ish, Instacart, et cetera?

Elad Gil: It was probably roughly in that ballpark, C, D, that range. I didn’t have funds and everything else, and I was putting as much as I could personally into these things, both earlier, but honestly, I just kept going when I could.

Tim Ferriss: When you’re looking at trying to determine if something is a 0.5X or a 10X, in addition to the core belief, what are other layers of due diligence that you bring to bear on trying to ascertain that, where something falls on that spectrum?

Elad Gil: Oh, I mean, I do enormous due diligence. So meet with the CFO multiple times, walk through all the financials, walk through the financial model, walk through customers, call customers, look at executive team. It’s a bunch of stuff. My fund is the only one I know that actually does cash reconciliations, where we’ll go through and do a cash audit to look at cash flows for later stage things. So I do enormous diligence, because I want to make sure I’m not doing something inappropriate. But the flip side of it is, most of it just collapses into what’s the one thing. So when I work with a company, I actually try to be very fast and straightforward on the diligence in terms of saying, let’s just talk about, A, we need to just make sure financials are correct and there’s the basics, but let’s collapse it down into one or two core questions that help us understand if this thing will keep going. Not, here’s 30 pages of questions that don’t matter, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Elad Gil: Which is what a lot of people, they’re like, hey, we need to know the secondary cohort on this fucking thing that’s like a tiny product, that who cares. They just waste time. They waste the finder’s time, the team’s time. And I try very, very hard not to do that. As a former entrepreneur myself, I know how precious the time is and I know how annoying those questions are.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I was actually going to, at one point, ask you about this, but we don’t need to spend too much time on it. You have a post, this is from a while back, 2011, listing questions a VC will ask a startup. You omitted some of the questions, like the one that you just mentioned, but I am curious if any of these questions or additional questions come to mind when you are talking to founders, could be early stage or later stage, that you actually apply yourself. And I know it’s from 2011, so I’m not expecting you to remember the post itself.

Elad Gil: Yeah. I haven’t looked at that post in a really long time. I’m actually writing another book now that is sort of the zero to one startup phase, and it gets into some questions like that. I think the reality is venture capital has changed dramatically since I wrote that post, because in 2011, the venture capital funds were largely doing seeds through Series D, E maybe, and then companies would go public. And this whole 20-year private company thing didn’t exist. And so a lot of — do you know why there’s a four-year vest on stock?

Tim Ferriss: No. Why is that? I can kind of guess now that we’re talking about IPOs, but go ahead. Why?

Elad Gil: Yeah. In the 1970s, they came up with a four-year vest on stock options for employees because companies would go public within four years. And so then you’re done. Literally, right? And so it was like a four-year clock usually. And then when Google took six years to go public, everybody’s like, oh my gosh, it took them so long to go public, six years. They just sat on their hands. Do you know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elad Gil: Literally, people would say that. And so what happened is venture capital used to be very early stage, and then what we now call growth investing was public market investing. That was the stuff that people in the public markets would do after four or five years of a company’s life. And so public markets used to be involved very early. And then as Sarbanes-Oxley came out and companies decided they didn’t want to go public and there was more private capital available, the timeline until going public stretched out. And so suddenly venture capital firms were doing all the growth investing that used to be public market investing. And in 2011, that really wasn’t happening much. It was kind of Yuri Milner from DST and a few other folks, but it wasn’t that much of an industry. And so the nature of venture capital shifted radically over the last 15 years. And that means that those questions that I listed there didn’t include what I’d consider more growth-centric questions because there wasn’t a lot of growth investing in venture. Venture —

Tim Ferriss: What would be examples of growth-centric questions?

Elad Gil: Honestly, it would overlap with some of the earlier stages, but it would be much more — by the time you hit a very late stage, it’s very financially driven. And so often what, at least I and my team look at is, what is just the core business and how do we extrapolate that going? And then what are these ancillary things that the company’s doing that are almost like options in the future that may or may not come through? And so usually we base our investment on that core. Can they just keep doing the thing they’re doing forever? Because most companies mainly get big off of one thing. At least for the first decade. There’s very few companies that have multiple things that all work.

Usually it’s one thing, and then 10 years later you maybe come up with a second thing that really works, like Google Cloud for Google, although obviously there’s YouTube and there’s a bunch of other stuff, and Waymo and all these interesting things now. But it took a while. For a long time it was just search, search and ads. But then sometimes there are these extra things that are potential really interesting drivers on a business. That SpaceX was launch and then it became satellite, right, it became Starlink.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, man. Starlink, what a thing. It’s too bad I have so much tree cover here, I can’t use it anywhere I spend time. But let’s turn to the High Growth Handbook for a second. So that was, let’s just call it seven-ish years ago. It is an outstanding book, people should really check it out. I mean, especially if you’re playing in the venture back game. What’s the subtitle? The subtitle is, Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People. There’s a lot of good advice in this book. I wanted to ask you if there’s anything in this book that you wish startup founders, the book was intended for, would pay more attention to? Or if there’s anything that you would add or expand to the book?

Elad Gil: Yeah. So when I wrote the book, I had an outline for it that was two, three times the length of the actual book in terms of chapter. So there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t write about, sales and marketing and growth and a bunch of other stuff. But the book was basically written as a tactical guide, it wasn’t meant to be read it from start to finish. There’s a bunch of interviews with different people who are, I think, amongst the best practitioners in the world at those areas. But fundamentally, it was meant to be more like, you’re suddenly involved with the M&A, jump to the chapter and read that, and then put it aside until something else comes up around hiring that you need to look at or whatever. And so it really is meant to be a handbook or guide or companion to a founder versus, hey, I’m just going to read it start to finish. And there’ll be some pithy quotes in it or whatever.

Or one concept over 500 pages. I try to avoid stuff like that. So it’s very tactical, it’s very tangible, it’s very specific. And this new book that I’m working on is basically the zero to one version of that. It’s like, how do you hire your first five employees as a startup? Somebody tries to buy you, what do you do? How do you raise your first round of funding? It’s that kind of stuff. So it’s kind of like the zero to one tactical guide.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you about one specific section. I think this is chapter two, this is on boards. And if this is getting too in the weeds, tell me, we can hop to something else. But I am curious if you could talk about — there are two things. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation, and if you want to revise these, that’s fine too. But there are two things —

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — I’d love to hear you talk about, just because this is something that founders I’ve been involved with bump up against constantly. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation and then write a board member job spec. And then specifically for independence maybe, I’d love to hear you maybe just elaborate. But could you speak to either or both of those a bit? And if you want to take it a different direction, I mean, it’s really just boards writ large.

Elad Gil: Yeah. So I think when founders pull together boards, often the early boards are investors because the investors ask for a board seat as part of it or as part of the investment. And sometimes the founders want somebody on board who’s really committed to the company and will help out extra. And to some extent when somebody takes a board seat, it really means, or it should mean that they’re all in to help you, right, versus you can have lots and lots of investors but have very few board members. Reid Hoffman has this thing, which is a board member at its best is a co-founder that you wouldn’t be able to hire otherwise. And so you bring them onto your board and it’s somebody that you want to spend more time with on specific issues related to the company. Fundamentally, your board should be able to help with different areas of the company.

It could be strategic direction, it could be closing candidates, it could be product areas, it could be customer intros, it could be a variety of things. And usually, you want to think of your board members as a portfolio of people. It’s going to change between an early stage company and a late stage in a public one, you’ll need different types of people over time usually. But most companies are very reactive on their board versus proactive. And so, they tend to end up with a couple investors and then they add somebody from an industry seat and they don’t really think through who they want and why. And if your co-founder is kind of like your spouse, your work spouse, your work husband or your work wife, your board members are like your in laws. You have to see them at Thanksgiving and you have to chat with them all the time.

And so, hopefully you have somebody you want to see all the time and who’s helpful and wonderful. And the bad version is like, ugh, it’s the father-in-law or mother-in-law who’s always berating you or whatever. And so you kind of need to find the right person. And it’s for many, many years, right, you end up sometimes with people on your board for a decade, and if they’re an investor, you can’t get rid of them. You literally can’t fire this person, because they have a contractual ability to be on your board because of the investment. So that’s why it’s really important to figure out the right person, and that’s back to valuation.

Sometimes founders will take a better price from a worse person because it’s a better price. And our mutual friend, Naval, has this great quote that “valuation is temporary, but control is forever.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elad Gil: Very Naval, right?

Tim Ferriss: Very Naval.

Elad Gil: And I think that’s very true. And so if you’re choosing a board member and part of that is a control thing, right, people who control the board can in some cases fire the CEO, you really want to choose the right people. And maybe take a worse price for somebody who’s really going to be helpful and they’re minimally non-destructive, and hope you get to have around for 10 years.

Tim Ferriss: Any other books or resources for people who, outside of the High Growth Handbook, who specifically want to learn about boards, recruiting, incentivizing the co-founders that you couldn’t hire to join the board, et cetera, et cetera? Any particular approach you would take there if they wanted to get more conversant?

Elad Gil: I don’t have anything super useful there. I think the best thing is to call other founders, other people who’ve added people to their board, and see how they approached it. I do think writing up a job spec, you write a job spec for everything else in your company, why wouldn’t you write one for a board member? So it’s good to write that up and say, what am I actually looking for and why? And what am I optimizing for? So there’s a common view of that. You can use search firms, you can ask people, you can target people that you know. If you have angel investors, getting to know them is a great way to see if you want to add one of them eventually to your board. That’s what we did at Color, we eventually added Sue Wagner, who was a co-founder of BlackRock onto our board.

Her other board seats were Apple, BlackRock, and Swiss Re when she joined our board. But I just got to know her through just, she invested and we just started working together, and really enjoyed her feedback and insights. And so we added her to the board there. So it’s kind of like that, you kind of want to maybe get to know some people.

Tim Ferriss: Next, I want to come to our — we were joking earlier about the, in some case, sort of revisionist history genesis stories.

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m looking at, this is from 2018, this is a while back, this is on Y Combinator’s blog and you’re being interviewed about the High Growth Handbook. But the sort of end of this piece that I’m looking at says, “These stories are never told. People always say, ‘Oh, these things just grow organically and isn’t it amazing.'” But almost every company that ended up tens of billions or hundreds of billions in markcap did this, which is taking an aggressive approach to distribution, whether that’s sort of Google and the Firefox story, or Facebook running ads against people’s names in Europe. I just wanted to hear you tell some of these stories, because it is the stuff that kind of conveniently that gets left out of TED Talks later. Do you know what I mean?

Elad Gil: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, actually the origin stories for founders is always like, “Ever since Sarah was three years old, she dreamed of starting an accounting software firm.” Come on. You know what I mean?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Elad Gil: It’s so ridiculous. And so a lot of the stories that are told about founders are very revisionist and they make it the life’s passion of this — sometimes it really is. But you’re like, no, when they were five they did not collect things and then that turned into Pinterest 30 years later or whatever, they always dreamed of building AGI when they were four, and that’s why Sam started OpenAI or whatever. So I think a lot of these things are very kind of ridiculous in terms of how they’re written later.nd I think the product really, really matters and I think sometimes great product just wins. And the reason great product just wins is it opens up a form of distribution that didn’t exist before or people will buy it despite the lack of distribution or relationships for a company.

And the flip side of it is that the companies that are really good have an enormously good product engine, and then they have an amazing distribution engine. And sometimes that distribution engine is built into the product, that’s like Cursor or Windsurf just distributing through product like growth where developers just find it and start using it and it helps them. And so they tell other developers and it spreads word of mouth. But often there’s very aggressive sales, marketing, other components to it. And so for example, when I was at Google, they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which at the time was real money, on distributing search. And they had this little thing called the toolbar that would fit into a browser, because right now browsers, with Chrome, you type in words or whatever, and then it instantly searches it. Back then, the main browsers were Netscape and Internet Explorer, et cetera, and the browser bar thing didn’t exist.

And they had this little client app that you’d install and they paid basically every company on the internet to cross download it. In other words, you’re installing Adobe, you’d be installing some malware detector thing, and it would always download the toolbar because they got paid to distribute it. So very aggressive distribution tactics. And to your point, Facebook buying ads against people’s names in Europe —

Tim Ferriss: Can you explain that? What are they doing? Yeah. What was their end game?

Elad Gil: Yeah. They were basically trying to create network liquidity in markets where they were earlier behind. And so they would basically buy ads of literally a person’s name. And one of the most common queries is people searching themselves, and so you’d be like, oh, let me look up Tim Ferriss on Google, or whatever. And there’d be a Facebook ad saying, “Hey, Tim Ferriss on Facebook.” And you’d click and you’d land on a signup flow for Facebook. This was years ago. This was TikTok and ByteDance, right, it was basically, they spent billions of dollars distributing TikTok so they could build enough of a network to train AI algorithms to start telling people what to do and also to get content creators on it.

Tim Ferriss: Where did they spend that money on distribution in this case of, say, TikTok?

Elad Gil: My sense is, it’s ads again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elad Gil: But you kind of see this over and over again. I mean, for enterprise, Snowflake spent billions of dollars on salespeople and compensation and channel partnerships. So again, distribution is really important. And every once in a while you see a company that actually wins, not because of product, but because they’re just better at sales and marketing and distribution. And often that’s a bummer for technologists such as myself, because you’re like, the best product should always win. And sometimes it does, but sometimes it’s just who was early and developed a brand, or who got ahead on distribution.

Tim Ferriss: I’m looking at a piece in front of me, this is from a while ago, but it’s you discussing long-held dogma that ends up being unviable. So for instance, the common held belief after PayPal’s sale to eBay that fraud will kill you in the payment space. And I’m wondering how you orient yourself as an investor to stress test those types of dogma.

Elad Gil: It’s really hard because you often end up, you start off with some set of beliefs, you think something’s interesting and maybe you invest in it, maybe you start a company in it, and then it turns out the thing you think is really interesting turns out to be really hard and you get killed. And then five years later, a company comes up that actually does it and wins. And the question is, why? Why did the things suddenly work when it didn’t before? Or there’s 10 attempts to do X, and then suddenly is it the technology got good enough? It could be a regulatory change, it could be a market shift, it could be whatever. An example of that may be Harvey and legal, where selling to law firms traditionally has been awful. And Harvey’s not much broader than that, they also have very strong enterprise adoption and lots of different people using them in different ways. But the dogma was always like, building stuff for law firms is crappy as a business and you should never do it.

But what AI did is it shifted things from selling tools to selling work product, or selling units of labor. That’s really the shift in generative AI. We’re going from seats and we’re going from software and SaaS and we’re moving into a world where we’re selling human labor equivalents. We’re selling work hours or labor hours, or whatever you want to call it. It’s of cognition. And so, Harvey is effectively helping really augment lawyers in different ways. And part of that’s a knowledge corpus, but a lot of it is this tooling that really helps lawyers achieve the goals that they have in different ways, in a collaborative manner in some cases. And so it’s just a fundamentally different type of product from what people were selling before. And so it opened up the market in a way that the market wasn’t open before. There’s actually a broader conversation around, is the world market limited or founder limited in terms of entrepreneurial success?

The Y Combinator school of thought is that we just don’t have enough founders. And if we had 10 times as many founders, we’d have 10 times as many big companies. And there’s an alternate school of thought, which is how many markets are actually open in any given moment in time. And those are the ones where you can build big companies. Because if the market isn’t open to innovation or change or whatever or is undergoing a shift, you can’t really build anything there anyhow, so why do it? And the striking thing about AI is it’s opened up tons and tons of markets that were closed for a long time, and it’s opened it up because of capabilities, but it’s also opened it up because every CEO is asking themselves, what’s my AI story? And so there’s way more openness to try things than I’ve ever seen in my life. And so we have this odd moment in time where things are massively available for founders to do new things.

And if you’re an AI company and you’re not seeing explosive growth quickly, something’s fundamentally broken, because the markets are so open that you can suddenly grow at a rate that you’ve never grown before. There’s always been cases of companies that just go like this. But again, you look at the ramps of OpenAI and Anthropic and it’s the fastest ramps to tens of billions ever. It’s like percentages of GDP, it’s like crazy.

Tim Ferriss: So if we come back to your comment of not necessarily market first and strength of team second all the time, but like you said, you 90 percent agree with that. And if you have an excellent team in a terrible market, that’s going to be a difficult one to execute. How do you determine what is a good versus great market? Or just, what is a great market? What do you look for? And the example you gave, I might be overreading this, but when you said, that when Google shut down, I think it was Maven, and then that’s an interesting kind of event-based approach as an input to investing. Because you’re like, okay, if they’re not going to build it, that suddenly creates a playing field for startups to play in that space. So could you speak to more of how you determine or look for great markets?

Elad Gil: Yeah. I mean, there’s a few different ways to think about it. One is, some people take the framework of, why now? What’s shifted now that makes this suddenly an interesting market? Because people have been trying to do things for a long time in every market. And so that may be a regulatory shift. Samsara, the fleet management company benefited from the fact that suddenly there’s regulation around needing end cap monitoring of drivers. So you had suddenly cameras watching people so they don’t fall asleep while they’re driving trucks on the road. So that was their entry point to then start building out a suite of software, but it was a regulatory shift. Sometimes there’s technology shifts, like what’s happening in AI.

And the crazy thing about the AI shift is, the foundation models instantly plugged into a massive set of markets, which is basically all enterprise data and information and email and just all white collar work was suddenly available to AI, because it was the perfect for that. It also plugged into code, which is a type of white collar work. So it’s just suddenly it just inserts into language and language is used everywhere in enterprises as well as in consumer, and so there’s just a massive market to tap into and transform, or set of markets. Robotics is a little bit different from that because even if you had the world’s best robotic model, the sub-markets that already have robotic hardware are quite small, on a relative basis. And so you don’t have that instant runway that you would with language, unless you come up with something new there. That’s kind of an aside. But I think robotics is really interesting and it’ll be important, it’s more just that nuance of what’s the instant thing you plug into commercially.

And then there’s regulatory shifts, there’s technology shifts, there’s incumbency or company shifts, competitive shifts. A company may blow itself up, it may get bought by a competitor. One company I’m excited about on the security side is called Infisical, and they’re basically competing in part with Hashi. Hashi got bought by IBM. Anytime you get bought by IBM, you slow down a lot usually. So suddenly it creates more opportunity for a startup. So I just feel like there are these different things that can change in a given moment in time. It could be the market’s growing really fast, it’s Coinbase and crypto, you just have suddenly this adoption and proliferation of token types. So there’s lots and lots and lots of different markets that are interesting. The commonality is usually like, is it also big?

Is there a big enough TAM? And there’s two types of TAMs. There’s fake TAM.

Tim Ferriss: So just for people listening, who might not have it, total addressable market.

Elad Gil: Yeah, total addressable market. So what’s a market you’re in? And sometimes people come up with these fake markets. They’re like, oh, well, we are facilitating global e-commerce and global e-commerce, I’m making up the number, is $30 billion a year, and so it’s, I mean $30 trillion a year, and so we’re in a $30 trillion a year market. And if we get just a 10th of a percent of that, it’s 300 billion of revenue. And you’re like, that’s not your market. Your market is like, you built this little optimization engine for SMB websites or whatever, that’s not a $30 trillion market. And so really it’s kind of defining the market. There’s a really famous example of this, where defining your market changes how you think about it. And so that was Coca-Cola. So Coke and Pepsi were roughly neck and neck in terms of market share for decades.

And then one of the Coke CEOs said, “Hey, maybe we should be thinking about our share as share of liquids sold, like drinks, not share of soda.” And so we just went from 50 percent market share to 0.5 percent, and that’s why they bought Dasani and that’s why they entered all these other markets. Because they said our definition of our market is wrong, we’re not in the soda pop business, we’re in the drinks business. And so I think also sometimes reconceptualizing what you’re doing can really help change your scope of ambition or how you think about what you’re doing or —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you were trying to spot along the lines of, the fraud will kill you in the payment space, any dogma in the AI world, the sphere of AI, anything hop to mind where you think, eh, maybe that’s not true now? Or maybe in two years it’ll be completely untrue, but people will have latched onto this belief as one of the, thou shalt not or thou shall commandment.

Elad Gil: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s some things that have circulated in the past around what’s the ROI on the CapEx spend of the, and will it ever be paid back? I think that stuff is probably off. But yeah, I think fundamentally there are moments in time where it’s very smart to be contrarian, and there’s moments in time where being consensus is the smartest possible thing you can do. And I think right now we’re in a moment in time where being consensus is very right. And you can really overthink it, and what’s a contrarian thing? We should go do a bunch of hardware stuff because blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, maybe just buy more AI. You know what I mean? I think people make these things way too complicated.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, true. In every aspect of life, probably. What for you then has gone on the — let’s just say you were mentoring, this is somebody you really care about, right? We can make up an avatar, whatever, like nephew of one of your best friends or son of one of your best friends or daughter who’s really smart, got an engineering degree, came out of MIT, has a couple of hits in angel investing and they’re like, all right, I think I’m going to raise a fund. But they don’t have the access necessarily that you do to AI, let’s just say. Are there any things categorically you would say would be on the do not invest list because they’re likely to be annihilated or consumed or replicated by AI?

Elad Gil: I think the reality is that when people start off as investors, a lot of the times the reason they have early stage funds is because you can always get access at the earliest stages of companies if you just start helping people. I mean, that’s what I did accidentally, but the reality is I’ve seen it over and over. You follow in with the right group of people, because the smartest people all self-aggregate together, and you just start helping people out and they just ask if you want to invest and you start investing and suddenly you have a great track record and you raise bigger funds, and then you go later stage because that same cohort has grown up and they’ve started doing later stuff and then suddenly you can get access to everything else. That’s kind of the traditional venture story and it has been, I think, for decades in some sense. So I think that’s still very tenable and you can still do it for AI and you can do it for anything. I don’t think you have to go off and do energy investing or something.

Tim Ferriss: You have mentioned in the past a key learning, maybe that’s an overstatement, but you can correct me, from Vinod Khosla. And I think the wording is along the lines of, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy.

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Could you speak to that?

Elad Gil: There’s sort of two or three versions of this. Version one is, you do something that’s really weird and it starts off looking like a toy and then it turns out to be really important. And that would be Instagram or Twitter or some of these more social products, where the initial use case is very different from how it’s used today and it kind of evolved as a product and how people perceive it and use it. And so that’s one version of it, and that’s usually more consumer centric. Another version of that would be SpaceX and Starlink, where they started off with launch and getting things up into space and they realized, hey, they have a cost advantage for satellites. And then they built out the Starlink network, which is now a major driver of their business. And so what they did expanded a lot and kind of shifted in terms of, their market entry was space launch, their disruption is Starlink, in some sense. So I do think there’s lots of examples like that over time.

Tim Ferriss: Coming back to information and just consumption, how do you consume most of your information? What would the pie chart break down to, in terms of if he listens to podcasts versus books versus X versus white papers versus something else?

Elad Gil: Yeah, I think a lot of what I’ve done is collapsed into three things. It’s X, it’s reading some technical papers/journals. In some cases, if it’s more of the biology side, although I don’t do biology investing, I just like it. But papers, although the papers in the AI industry have really dropped off given the competitive nature of everything now. And then talking to people. And so I found that 20 minutes with somebody really smart on a topic gives me more information and insights and leads on what to go read about than doing some exhaustive search. Actually, the fourth thing is now using models to do research for me. So that could be OpenAI, that could be Claude, that could be Perplexity, that could be Gemini. And for each of them, I actually use different things or I do different things with each of them.

Tim Ferriss: What do you do with the different models?

Elad Gil: I’ll just give you one example versus go through every single one of them. But —

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Elad Gil: — Gemini, I actually feel like if I’m looking up more activities, like, “Hey, I’m planning a trip somewhere.” I actually feel like the Google Corpus and all the stuff they built over time is quite useful for travel tips of certain types. And so that’d be a Gemini-specific thing. That doesn’t mean the other models can’t do it well. It’s more just like I’ve tended to get more accurate rankings of things that way. And I’ll ask for breakdowns and rankings across multiple dimensions and all this stuff for scoring of things. I did a deep dive on a few different areas of ADHD and ASD.

Tim Ferriss: What’s ASD?

Elad Gil: Oh, I’m sorry. It’s autism spectrum.

Tim Ferriss: I see. I got it.

Elad Gil: So basically, if you look at autism, it went from — I’m going to misquote the numbers, so I should look this up later. But I think it’s something like one in a few thousand of the population was diagnosed with autism 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and now it’s like 3 percent. So you’re like, well, what is that? Is that a change in older parents having more kids? Which it turns out that’s not the driver. Is it some shift in the environment? It turns out it’s just diagnostic criteria shifted. And then there’s a lot of incentives to actually diagnose people in the schools. That’s roughly the summary of why we have so many kids that are classified as either having attention deficit where there’s also a financial incentive for doctors to do it because they can prescribe drugs versus autism, but both have gone up dramatically in terms of diagnoses. And it’s unclear to me that more people actually have it. It’s just diagnosed dramatically more broadly.

Tim Ferriss: Which model were you investigating that with?

Elad Gil: Usually when I do things like that, I use two or three models at once and then I ask for primary literature and then ask for summary charts. And I actually have this whole breakdown of stuff that I asked for it to output so that I can go back and double check the data and then read through the literature and everything else. And there’s really interesting things that came out of the autism one in particular, because it turned out maternal age actually has a bigger impact than paternal age in some of the studies. And people always talk about paternal age. And then you’re like, “Why are people only talking about paternal age? Is there a societal incentive for that? Is it a political belief system? Why is that the point of emphasis?” Which I thought was really [inaudible], right? So there’s other things that kind of come out of that in terms of questions, in terms of the why of things.

Tim Ferriss: Why were you looking into that specifically?

Elad Gil: I thought it was interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.

Elad Gil: “Seems like it’s gone up a lot. Let me try and understand why.” And so I started looking into it. I was also talking to a friend of mine who is in her sort of mid to late 30s, and she was dating a guy who was in his late 40s, early 50s, and she brought up, oh, she was worried about autism and what would happen with them if they had kids and all this stuff. And so then I did this deep dive as part of that too. And the takeaway was, I can’t remember exactly what it was. It was like, I’m making it up, so please don’t quote me on this. I can look it up later, but it was like there’s a 10 percent increase for every 5 to 10 years incremental paternal and maternal age.

And again, maternal was actually a little bit stronger in some of the data sets. And the thing is though, if you believe that it’s 1 in 5,000 or one in whatever in the population, that 10 percent, 20 percent difference doesn’t matter from a population frequency perspective. This diagnostic criteria went way up.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s true for a lot of diagnoses.

Elad Gil: A lot of stuff, but societally we’re told, “Oh, it’s the age of the parents that’s driving all these autism rates up.” And you’re like, “No, it’s all these incentives.” And then you look at some of the school systems, it was like 60 percent of all the autism diagnoses, and I think it was the state of New Jersey or something, were not actually based on any clinical criteria. It was a teacher randomly saying this person has autism.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Terrible.

Elad Gil: And so you start digging into these things and you’re like, wow, this is super interesting. And these models are really valuable and helpful for that. So I’ve been doing a lot of back to your question of where do I get information? Part of it has been these deep dives with models into questions that I just find interesting where I ask them to aggregate clinical trial data or aggregate different types of information and then give me the primary sources and then give me summaries and double check things. And so I have a whole series of prompts around that to also clean data and check it. And so it’s really fun. And then I always set it up in multiple models and just see what they each come up with.

Tim Ferriss: When you talk to people, and this may be too much of a kind of amorphous topic for us to dive into in a meaningful way, but let’s just say you find somebody you want to talk to for 20 minutes, right? How do you typically find those people? I suspect there are a lot of ways, but are you finding them on X versus finding them in a technical paper versus finding them somewhere else just to get an idea? And then when you get on the phone with such a person, are there repeating trains of questioning or certain ways that you like to approach it?

Elad Gil: Oh, I think there’s three different types of things. One is, “Hey, I’m doing a deep dive in an area just because I think it’s interesting or maybe it’s relevant to an area I want to invest in.” Often, honestly, just is interesting. And then I’ll try to quickly triangulate who are the smartest people on the thing and that may be technical papers that may just be asking each person I talk to who’s really smart. There’s one form of that which is, hey, it’s very informational and I’m trying to do a deep dive on something. I mean, I worked with some of the early AI researchers at Google. That’s how I knew Noam Shazeer who started Character and then went back to Google and that’s how I’ve met a bunch of other folks. But some of the people I just met, just interesting paper, let me look them up, or, “Hey, everybody says this person’s really smart. Let me talk to them.” That’s one form.

A second form is I do think really smart people tend to aggregate. And so if you’re just hanging out with smart people who keep meeting other smart people, and people who are polymathic tend to hang out with people who are polymathic and people who are — it’s kind of like attracts like for all sorts of things. So that’s sort of a second set. Those are probably the two main things. I mean, sometimes people also just refer people over to me. They’ll say, “Hey, I think you two would like chatting.” There’s a separate thing, which is there’s people that I go back to recurrently, which is more like, I think this is one of the smartest people about where AI is heading and let me talk to them all the time.

Or there’s one of the smartest people about longevity. Like Kristen, the CEO of BioAge, I call sometimes about random longevity-related things because she knows so much about every topic in it. She’s very thoughtful. She’s very willing to question her own assumptions. It’s very just truth seeking in a way that people aren’t. And people always use that term and say, but she really is just like, “What’s correct? Let me just figure it out.” She’s like a PhD and postdoc in bioinformatics and aging and all. She’s super legit. And so that’s an example of somebody that I’ll call for longevity stuff. And so I just have certain people I’ll call for certain topics.

Tim Ferriss: So you have literacy in biologies. It’s kind of quaint how I went to the first Quantified Self meetup in whenever it was, 2008 or something with 12 people sitting around in Kevin Kelly’s house talking about measuring things with Excel spreadsheets. The world has changed, right? So there are armies of tens of thousands of self-described biohackers and so on, talking about longevity. There’s a lot of nonsense. For yourself personally, where have you landed in terms of interventions or thinking about interventions for yourself?

Elad Gil: Oh, I haven’t done a ton. It feels like a lot collapses into sleep well, exercise a lot, et cetera. There’s a handful of things that kind of matter, eat well. And so I’ve kind of collapsed some of that stuff. I think there’s one or two things that maybe you can take that are helpful. And then there’s some things I always thought it’d be fun to experiment with that I haven’t done yet.

Tim Ferriss: Like what?

Elad Gil: I thought it’d be cool to try a rapamycin pulse or something. So stuff like that. But the reality is that I’m kind of waiting for the real drugs to come out and then maybe I’d use those. Some of the ones that I actually think will really impinge on longevity or certain systems like we were talking earlier about how as you age, the muscle that holds the lens of your eye weakens, and that’s part of the reason that your ability to focus gets screwed up. And so there should be eyedrops for that. There’s a bunch of stuff around neurosensory aging that I’d love to fund a startup. There’s a bunch of stuff around the cosmetics of aging that I’ve long been talking about trying to fund. I actually funded a clinical trial at Stanford to work on that, for example, because I think it’s very underinvested in. And peptides to me is basically that. I think a lot of the people are taking peptides as certain forms of health, but also certain forms of cosmetic applications like 5-HKCU and melatonin and all these things are basically cosmetic in nature.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you mentioned a handful of things that seem helpful to take. Are those just the vitamin D or are we talking about other things? What are more on that shortlist?

Elad Gil: Vitamin D and creatine.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Got it.

Elad Gil: If you want to a lift.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elad Gil: I don’t know. What’s on your list? I mean, you’ve thought about this so much more than I have. What are you taking or what are you thinking about or —

Tim Ferriss: I’m much more conservative than I think people would expect. I played around with a lot of things in my earlier days and a lot of it is very, I would say, capped risk. If you’re experimenting as I was with first generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitors in 2008 or 2009, very unpleasant to wear. And I wasn’t aware of any non-type one diabetics using them at the time, but I wasn’t using much in terms of, let’s just say, questionable gene therapy flying to other countries to use something like a follistatin, not to throw it under the bus, but I feel like the general heuristic of no biological free lunch, I recognize it’s very simplistic, but it’s pretty helpful. At least it will aid you in avoiding a lot of pitfalls. So I mean, there are things I’m experimenting with. Different forms of ketone esters and salts, for instance, I think some could be very, very interesting for cerebral vasculature.

And since I have Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, et cetera, in my family, including for people who are APOE3, so there are certainly many other risk factors. I’m paying a lot of attention to that side of things. Obicetrapib, I think, is one to keep an eye on that’s not yet ready for prime time, but rapamycin’s interesting. I do think rapamycin is interesting with a lot of asterisks because you can screw yourself up if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you’re playing with any immunosuppressant, I mean, you just have to be very careful. But looking at combining that, for instance, one of the experiments that I might do is — and I would have a cleaner read of signal if I only did one intervention, but real life is different from waiting for science sometimes.

So possibly combining a Norwegian four by four interval training with rapamycin pulsing to look at volumetric changes, if any, in the hippocampus and other areas. I think that’s a pretty interesting hypothesis worth testing, but otherwise it’s basic-basic, right? It’s creatine, it’s the vitamin D is look, if you have methylation issues or you’re taking medication as I am like omeprazole, which can inhibit magnesium absorption and other things, you want to keep an eye on that, but not too fancy. I think urolithin A is pretty interesting. The data keeps mounting on that. So I do have a key and interest in mitochondrial health. So if there are things, which could also include regular intermittent fasting and occasional three to seven day fasting, which could be a fast mimicking diet most recently for me based on the input from Dr. Dominic D’Agostino. Trying to foster autophagy and mitophagy with some regularity, not all the time.

Elad Gil: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not trying to optimize for that all the time.

Elad Gil: One thing I’ve been wondering, so if you look at a computer and often the key to fixing your laptop or the key to fixing any system is you just fucking reboot it, right? You reload the system and it just works magically and there’s a bunch of crap that kind of can — is there a equivalent of that? Is it like going under for anesthesia? There’s some nerve freezing thing that some people have been doing recently.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t know. It sounds scary. Oh, maybe stellate ganglion block?

Elad Gil: Yeah, that’s it. The stellate ganglion block.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, the rebooting — oh, man, I’m letting out an exhale because there are some interesting options for very specific use cases, right?

It makes sense conceptually. I mean, you’re more qualified to speak to this, but I would say just spending a lot of time around neuroscientists, and I spend a lot of my time in terms of information intake, reading or doing my best. Fortunately with AI tools, it’s become a lot easier, not just getting a synopsis, but actually using it to help you learn concepts that you can kind of layer in some rational sequence. But I read a lot of neuroscience stuff and a lot of optical stuff, there’s actually a surprising amount of — I mean, there’s maybe not so surprising, like very strong intersection there. So if you’re looking at PBM and photobiomodulation through the eyes, I mean, you can do it transcranially as well. I would give a note of caution for that for folks.

But the reboot side, I would say, for instance, and people who have experienced this to a lesser extent with GLP-1 agonists, if they take it for weight loss, maybe they stop smoking or they cut back on drinking, or they have these kind of system-wide decreases or increases in impulse control, right?

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: For someone who’s, say, an opiate addict, I think that ibogaine, which, in the future may take the form of an active metabolite or something like that, in flood dosing, at least that seems pretty necessary at this point, relatively high doses. Under medical supervision, because you can have fatal cardiac events, co-administration of magnesium seems to help, but it’s dangerous stuff. People should be careful. You can, and there are lots of people historically who deserve a lot of credit for this, like Howard Lotsof and his wife, but opioid addicts can go through flood dosing of ibogaine and come out and they’re basically given a window with which they won’t experience withdrawal symptoms, physical withdrawal symptoms.

And I think there’re probably applications to other things with ibogaine or pharmacological interventions like ibogaine. I mean, some of the craziest stuff, honestly, related to that molecule is the — and I’m skeptical of this simple description, but sort of reversal and brain age. So it changes in the brain based on MRIs, Nolan Williams, rest in peace, and his lab looked at this pretty closely pre and post dosing of ibogaine for veterans with traumatic brain injury. And some of that might be due to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor, right? People might be familiar with like BDNF.

So ibogaine is one interesting option. Anesthesia, I’ve become a lot more cautious with general anesthesia. I just had surgery yesterday and I opted for local anesthesia, which in this case was not a big deal because it was just, you can see it, like had something cut out of my head, but coming back to the — and I’m going to riff for a second here, but the autism spectrum disorder and ADHD example you were unpacking where you talked about the incentives, they might be in perverse incentives to diagnose, well, I mean, not to quote Munger, but it’s like, follow the money, right?

And a lot of people are put under general who really don’t need to be put under general, but it adds a very, very, very huge line item to the tab. And there are people who go under anesthesia and wake up and do not retain the same ability to recall memories and so on. Their personalities become in some way destabilized. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of anesthesia is very poorly understood, really poorly. We know it works, but it’s very poorly understood. And I don’t think a lot of people realize, because why would they, unless they’ve just spending a lot of time looking into this. There are lots of medications that are incredibly well-known, commonly prescribed, for which the mechanisms of action are really poorly understood if they’re understood at all.

We know based on studies, they appear to be well tolerated, like side effects profiles include A through Z, and it certainly seems to exert this effect or have an impact on biomarker X, but we don’t actually fucking know how it works. And there’s just a lot of stuff that falls into that bucket. And so I am cautious with a lot of it, but to come back to your question, I went off on a bit of a TED Talk. The most interesting reboot that I’ve seen, and I don’t want to really water it down to the dopaminergic system because there’s a lot more to it, but ibogaine, I think more so than ibogaine itself shows what is possible. And I don’t know if that’s limited to drugs, right? I am very bullish and they’re going to be fuck-ups. There are going to be some sidebars that don’t look so good, but brain stimulation, I think is, and bioelectric medicine, broadly speaking, is one of the great next frontiers, certainly in treating what we might consider psychiatric disorders, but also for performance enhancement.

And we’re at a point kind of looking for those external why now answers, right? There are actually some really good answers to why now for this as a field. And I think people will be experimenting a lot with this, but without the use of pills and potions and IVs and actually non-invasive brain stimulation, maybe some invasive in the case of implants. So that’s a long answer, but yeah, that’s somewhat I’m thinking about and tracking.

And I mean, some of this stuff we’ll see, but I think a lot of this stuff could be outpatient procedure. You walk in, you’re in there for an hour or two, and then you’re out. So we’ll see. Let me ask just a couple of last questions, and then if there’s anything else we want to bat around, we can bat it around, but I appreciate the time.

Tim Ferriss: Elad of five years from now is looking back at Elad of today. Are there any beliefs, positions, could be related to AI or otherwise, that you think are more likely than others to be wrong?

Elad Gil: That’s a good question. I think there’s all sorts of things I’m going to get wrong, and I think we’re living through a period of big change, which means big uncertainty. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the things I think are going to happen don’t or happen even more so or whatever it may be. And that’s part of the fun of it in terms of if we had a perfectly predictive future, it’d be very boring because we’d know exactly what’s coming and it’d be awful. And this ties into notions of free will and all sorts of other things. So I’m sure there’s a lot. I think there’s a separate question of just one exercise I’ve been going through recently is, and I’ve never done this before, a lot of what you do in life, it’s back to the John Lennon quote life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

For the first time, I’m actually thinking, what’s my 10-year plan across a few different dimensions of life? And the basic question is, I won’t get it right. I can try and have a plan for 10 years. Of course, it’s not going to be what I think, but it’s more, does it change the scope of ambition that you have? Does it change how you think about life? And so I’ve been trying to think in those terms, what do I want to do over the next decade? And then what does that mean in terms of the near term what I do in order to get there in 10 years?

And so I think that’s been very eye-opening for me in terms of shifting some of my mindset around what I should be trying or not trying to do. Now, the AGI people will say, “Well, in two years we have AGI, so it doesn’t matter where your plans are.” But I find that to be a very defeatist view of the world. It’s like, I’m going to give up because of those versus saying, “Great, I’m going to have this plan and I can adjust it as needed.” But through this time of change, there’ll be some really interesting things maybe to do in the world.

Tim Ferriss: Elad, do you have anything else you’d like to say, comments, requests for the audience, things to point people to anything at all before we wind to a close? People can find you on X @eladgil, eladgil.com, certainly the Substack blog, blog.eladgil.com, and elsewhere. We’ll link to everything in the show notes, but anything else that you’d like to add?

Elad Gil: Yeah, wonderful to chat with you as always. I really enjoy it, so thanks for having me on.Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man. Always a pleasure. And to everybody listening or watching, we will link to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself, thanks for tuning in.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More (#863) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More (#863)

2026-04-30 06:20:04

Elad Gil (@eladgil) is CEO of Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm, holding company, and operating company working on the world’s most advanced technologies. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies, including AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe. He was previously VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and started mobile at Google. He was the founder and CEO of Mixerlabs and Color. Elad is the author of the bestseller High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by:

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

Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much 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 Elad Gil:

Website | X | Substack | No Priors Podcast

Books

High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People by Elad Gil
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Podcasts

No Priors with Elad Gil & Sarah Guo

Essays & Relevant Reading

Random Thoughts While Gazing at the Misty AI Frontier by Elad Gil | Elad Blog
Things I Don’t Know About AI by Elad Gil | Elad Blog
AI Platforms, Markets, & Open Source by Elad Gil | Elad Blog
Future Founders, Here’s How to Spot and Build in Nonobvious Markets | First Round
Elad Gil on the Future of AI | McKinsey
Elad Gil Says AI Will Hit 1% of US GDP By 2026 and Founders Should Exit Now | Forbes
Elad Gil Shares Advice from the High Growth Handbook, a Guide to Scaling Startups | Y Combinator
SpaceX Is Working with Cursor and Has an Option to Buy the Startup for $60 Billion | TechCrunch
Scale AI Founder Alexandr Wang Confirms Departure for Meta as Part of $14.3 Billion Deal | CNBC
What Drives Progress in AI? Trends in Compute. | MIT FutureTech
The AI Memory Supercycle: HBM, Supply Constraints, and the Data Center Buildout Through 2026 | Introl
Inside the AI Bottleneck: CoWoS, HBM, and 2–3nm Capacity Constraints Through 2027 | Fusion Worldwide
The Dotcom Bubble Burst (2000) | International Banker
What Happened When Uber Tried to Buy Lyft? | Uproxx
Inside Harvey: How a First-Year Legal Associate Built One of Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startups | TechCrunch
xAI’s Move to Buy Cursor Shows the Promise and the Risks for AI Application Startups | Newcomer
Samsara Now 100% Compliant with the FMCSA’s ELD Mandate | Samsara
IBM Moves Deeper into Hybrid Cloud Management with $6.4B HashiCorp Acquisition | TechCrunch
What Does Sarbanes-Oxley Mean for Companies That Want to Go Public? | Inc.
TikTok’s Billion-Dollar Secret That Wasn’t: ByteDance’s Aggressive User Acquisition Strategy | Mobile Dev Memo
Rapamycin for Longevity: The Pros, the Cons, and Future Perspectives | Frontiers in Aging
Effect of Urolithin A Supplementation on Muscle Endurance and Mitochondrial Health in Older Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial | JAMA Network Open
Magnesium–Ibogaine Therapy in Veterans with Traumatic Brain Injuries | Nature Medicine

Concepts & Topics

People

Companies, Organizations, & Institutions

Tools & Products

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:02:21] What’s the “AI personal IPO” that just quietly happened across Silicon Valley?
[00:05:28] Tens to hundreds of millions per researcher: What top AI pay packages actually look like.
[00:06:44] The compute ceiling: Why Korean memory fabs are the unlikely bottleneck throttling every AI lab on earth.
[00:11:11] From zero to $30B run rate: The fastest revenue ramps in the history of capitalism.
[00:17:24] The dot-com survival rate was one in 100. Buckle up, AI founders.
[00:20:35] Your value-maximizing window: Why the next 12–18 months may be as good as it gets.
[00:21:32] Durable advantage — and why the AI market is an oligopoly (for now).
[00:24:12] Exit options for AI founders: labs, hyperscalers, vertical players, and the underrated merger of equals.
[00:28:11] Math, biology, and intuitive leaps: Elad’s pre-investing background.
[00:29:42] Elad’s revisionist genesis story.
[00:30:50] Go where the cluster is: 91% of global AI private market cap lives in a 10×10 mile square.
[00:33:20] The accidental investor: Patrick Collison walks, Airbnb intros, and deals that just happened.
[00:34:37] Want money? Ask for advice. Want advice? Ask for money.
[00:35:00] The High Growth Handbook: Tactical guide, not bedtime reading.
[00:35:41] Market first, team second — with a Perplexity-and-Anduril asterisk.
[00:37:43] Smoke in the distance: AlexNet and the transformative GPT-3 moment.
[00:45:15] AI cold-reading: Feeding photos to the model and getting eerily accurate personality reads.
[00:48:56] Has Elad ever done a retrospective on his own investing?
[00:52:13] Power laws are terrifying: 10 companies, 80% of returns, two decades.
[00:55:53] Avoiding science projects, and how SPACs accidentally saved hard tech investing.
[00:59:20] The one-belief framework: Coinbase = crypto index. Stripe = e-commerce index. That’s the whole memo.
[01:00:54] Due diligence theater vs. the one question that actually matters.
[01:02:13] The four-year vest is a relic: How venture capital ate growth investing.
[01:07:16] Boards as in-laws: You can’t fire them, so choose wisely.
[01:09:47] “Valuation is temporary. Control is forever.” — Naval Ravikant, as quoted by Elad, as relayed to you.
[01:11:30] How great companies actually grew: toolbars, name-targeted ads, and billions in distribution spend.
[01:15:36] Selling software vs. selling labor hours: The real shift generative AI made.
[01:18:40] Spotting a great market: regulatory shifts, technology shifts, and Hashi getting bought by IBM.
[01:21:28] Fake TAM, real TAM, and the Coke CEO who realized he wasn’t in the soda business.
[01:22:47] Right now, consensus is just correct. Save the contrarianism for later.
[01:25:15] Market entry vs. market disruption: SpaceX launched rockets, then disrupted the internet.
[01:26:16] How Elad learns: X, papers, 20-minute calls with the right people — and four AI models running in parallel.
[01:27:15] Deep dive: ADHD, autism, and why diagnostic rates soared without more people actually having it.
[01:33:40] Longevity for realists: sleep, creatine, and maybe rapamycin when the real drugs arrive.
[01:40:30] Ibogaine, anesthesia, and the next frontier of bioelectric medicine.
[01:45:15] Elad’s first-ever 10-year plan — and why making one changes everything.
[01:46:53] Parting thoughts.

ELAD GIL QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“There are moments in time where being contrarian is the smartest possible thing you can do. And I think right now we’re in a moment in time where being consensus is very right.”

— Elad Gil

“We’re in one of the most important technology races of all times. The faster that we get to better and better AI, the more economic value will effectively show up. And, therefore, people are really willing to pay in an outsized way for the handful of people who are the world’s best at this thing.”

— Elad Gil

“What happened recently is because of the Meta offers and then all the other major tech companies having to match offers for their best researchers, somewhere between 50 and a few hundred people effectively had an IPO, but as a class of people. It wasn’t like they were at one company. They were spread across Silicon Valley, but all of their pay packages suddenly went up dramatically and they experienced the equivalent of an IPO, and that’s really unusual. It’s kind of the personal IPO.

— Elad Gil

“For every company, there’s a value maximizing moment where they hit their peak, and it’s usually a window. Usually six, 12 months where what you’re doing is important enough, you’re scaling enough, everything’s working before some headwind hits you.”

— Elad Gil

“The single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry. Move to wherever that thing is. And all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything’s remote is all BS. With AI, 91 percent of private technology market cap is the Bay Area. Ninety-one percent of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one 10 by 10 area.”

— Elad Gil

“The striking thing about AI is it’s opened up tons and tons of markets that were closed for a long time. And it’s opened it up because of capabilities, but it’s also opened it up because every CEO is asking themselves, ‘What’s my AI story?’ And so there’s way more openness to try things than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

— Elad Gil

“Often these things boil down to one single question: What is the one thing I need to believe about this company that makes me think it’s going to continue to be really big? Usually, it’s one thing. If it’s three things, it’s too complicated. It’s probably not going to work. If it’s no things, then it doesn’t make much sense.”

— Elad Gil

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Want to hear more from Naval Ravikant — the investor Elad Gil quotes on why valuation is temporary but control is forever? Listen to my follow-up conversation with AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, in which we discussed happiness and how to reduce anxiety, crypto stablecoins and crypto strategy, what Naval would teach in school, the philosophy behind his most popular tweet, and much more.

The post Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More (#863) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How to Keep Your Brain Sharp: A Practical Playbook Beyond the Basics

2026-04-25 02:46:08

A concept illustration of a brain in blue and purple light with a bright white light shining on it from above.

The following is a guest post from Dr. Tommy Wood (@drtommywood), associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on brain health.

In this blog post, Tommy covers:

Why B vitamins and Omega-3s work as a pair (not independently) to slow brain aging, plus the lab numbers to use as goals
Air pollution, water contaminants, PFAS, and microplastics—what the evidence actually says, plus a few simple “set it and forget it” fixes
The key role of oral health and products that are easy to integrate
The 20-year study behind processing speed training, and why Super Mario and StarCraft aren’t just for kids
Why sensory loss and accumulated illness may be stealth drivers of cognitive decline, and why the shingles vaccine keeps showing up in dementia research
Why sleep remains one of the clearest modifiable risk factors for dementia, plus lesser-known strategies involving glycine, light therapy, and hemoglobin testing
And much more

Tommy’s new book is The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.

Enter Tommy…

“The era of preventive neurology has arrived.” —The American Academy of Neurology, 2023.¹

Over the past 5–10 years, there has been a notable shift in how we think about cognitive decline and dementia, from a predestined inevitability to something that we might be able to prevent at both the individual and population levels. Current estimates suggest that at least 45% of dementia cases may be preventable, though there are many scientists in the field who feel this is a conservative underestimate. That 45% comes from the most recent iteration of the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, which looked at the effects of 14 modifiable dementia risk factors—low education, hearing and vision loss, high LDL cholesterol, brain trauma, physical inactivity, diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, excessive alcohol, social isolation, depression, and air pollution.² Other studies suggest that more than 70% of dementia may be preventable when including risk factors not considered in the Lancet analysis,³ with at least half of preventable cases seeming to be related to modifiable factors in our lifestyles and the environment. This means that we may have significant capacity to modify our individual risk of cognitive decline.

In this article, I’ll cover some lesser-known and emerging modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia. The big rocks of lifestyle will always be critical, but several additional interventions are increasingly worth looking at, due to their relatively low effort and big potential for long-term impact on brain health. For each intervention, I’ll include low-lift strategies you can consider adding to your brain-health toolkit to minimize the risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

The B Vitamin and Omega-3 Connection

One notable factor missing from the Lancet report that garnered both formal academic commentaries and mainstream media was nutrient status—specifically, homocysteine-lowering B vitamins (mainly B12 and folate [B9] but also B6 and riboflavin [B2]) and Omega-3 fatty acids.^8,9 One reason for the omission may be that it’s hard to isolate the benefits of these nutrients individually. Unlike an individual risk factor like smoking, there is less evidence for B vitamins and Omega-3s individually because they’re both required to see benefit.

The first study to find this interaction was VITACOG, which randomized participants with elevated homocysteine to a B vitamin supplement containing B12, folic acid, and B6.¹⁰ This resulted in slowed brain atrophy and cognitive decline. In particular, this benefit was only seen in participants who had adequate Omega-3 status.¹¹ Since then, multiple randomized trials have found the same—either that the benefit of B vitamins depends on Omega-3 status or that the benefit of Omega-3 supplementation depends on having adequate B vitamins status (i.e., not having high homocysteine).^12,13 Though I think it’s probably an overestimate, one meta-analysis even suggested that Omega-3 intake and homocysteine levels each contributed more than 20% of modifiable dementia risk.¹⁴

In studies of homocysteine lowering with B vitamins, the most benefit is seen when keeping homocysteine under 13 μmol/L, but a variety of other lines of evidence suggest that less than 10–11 μmol/L is probably better.¹⁵ Studies examining the relationship between Omega-3 status and risk of cognitive decline or dementia suggest that we should aim for an Omega-3 Index (percentage of Omega-3 fats in red blood cells) of at least 5%, with lowest risk in those above 8%.^16-18 If you’re not sure if you would benefit from additional intake or a supplement, most primary care physicians will measure homocysteine and potentially Omega-3 status as well. OmegaQuant offers an at-home Omega-3 Index test. The at-home DRIfT test includes Omega-3 Index as well as homocysteine, HbA1c, and Vitamin D.

Strategies to get adequate B vitamins and Omega-3s

Test plasma homocysteine (serum is acceptable but can show falsely elevated levels if not processed properly) and supplement if needed. If homocysteine is elevated (above 11 μmol/L), consider the doses used in VITACOG—800 mcg folic acid (or 1,360 dietary folate equivalents, DFE) and 500 mcg B12. Some studies lowering homocysteine with B vitamins have also included around 20 mg of B6 and 1–2 mg of riboflavin per day. Omega-3 status can be improved through regular seafood consumption, though supplementation can be worthwhile in those who don’t. Aiming to average 2–4 grams of long-chain Omega-3s (a combination of EPA and DHA) per day is a good target. Good options for homocysteine-lowering B vitamin supplements include Thorne Methyl-Guard (2 capsules/day), Pure Encapsulations MethylAssist (1 capsule/day), and Designs for Health Homocysteine Supreme (1 capsule/day). For Omega-3s, I generally recommend Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega 2X, Parasol Omega-3, or Momentous Omega-3.

The Toxins in Your Air, Water, and Food

It often feels like our world is becoming increasingly toxic… in many ways. But even if we only focus on environmental exposures and dementia risk, there are a few important modifiable factors that come to mind.

Air quality
Included as a modifiable risk factor on the Lancet Commission’s list, several recent studies have found that air pollution from roads, local industrial activity, or wildfires can increase the risk of dementia.¹⁹ Inhaling tiny particles, nitrogen oxides, and ozone that are released into the air can trigger inflammation and oxidative stress as well as physiological stress.²⁰ While it can be impossible to escape the air around you without completely and permanently relocating, a measured approach would include wearing a mask when you’re outside on very smoky days—for instance, during wildfire season (an N95 mask will filter out the 2.5-micron particles thought to be particularly problematic).

It’s also important to recognize that the air inside can often be several times worse than the air outdoors.²¹A high-leverage intervention could therefore be to get an air purifier for spaces where you spend a lot of time. For example, a recent study in healthy adults found that an indoor HEPA air filter significantly reduced blood pressure—another well-known risk factor for dementia.²² Though there is wide variety in these devices, with some being able to filter more than others, if you live in an area with a lot of air pollution, anything is probably better than nothing.

Finally, in another interesting twist for ways that risk factors may interact, a recent study from the University of Washington also found that the effect of air pollution on dementia risk was attenuated in those who had good B vitamin intake, potentially because B vitamins counteract the increase in homocysteine that can result from air pollution exposure.²³This wasn’t a randomized trial, but it’s another good reason to focus on getting enough B vitamins.

[NOTE FROM TIM: James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, travels with a portable CO₂ monitor called an Aranet4 and has been recording levels in hotels for years. What he’s found is alarming: many hotels—especially the expensive, LEED-certified “green” ones—have sealed their windows shut to save on heating and cooling costs. They therefore recirculate stale air from other rooms. He’s recorded CO₂ levels as high as 2,800 parts per million in these hotels. For reference, outdoor air is often around 425 ppm, and cognitive test scores can drop significantly once you hit 1,500 ppm. His practical fix: have yourself or your assistant call ahead and ask if the hotel has windows that open, even a few inches, and make that a criterion for booking. I now do this whenever possible.]

Water quality
Though the municipal water supply is very safe, depending on the region and your local plumbing, there are several possible contaminants that can potentially affect your health. It would be difficult to cover an exhaustive list, but lead and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”) are two good examples. Lead exposure is associated with an increased risk of dementia,²⁴ and though exposure has decreased with the banning of lead in gasoline, there are still millions of lead pipes that supply water in certain areas of the United States.²⁵

The risk from PFAS has only been appreciated more recently, but early evidence suggests you can commonly find them in food packaging, nonstick cookware (especially if old or damaged), and drinking water. These forever chemicals can accumulate in the brain, potentially increasing your risk of metabolic disease and dementia.^26,27 As with air filters, there are many different options for water filters on the market, but even the basic versions can remove the majority of heavy metals and PFAS in the water, which can add up to a lot of benefit over time.

Microplastics
These tiny particles shed from plastic containers, tubes, and pipes and can end up in what we eat and drink. One recent study that took social media by storm suggested that we consume, on average, a credit card’s worth of microplastics per week.²⁸ However, another group reanalyzed the data and suggested the true amount might be less than 0.0001% of that.²⁹ Several studies have also supposedly found microplastics throughout the body, including in blood vessels and the brain.³⁰ One study even suggested that microplastic levels were much higher in the brains of people who had dementia than those who didn’t.³¹ However, we don’t yet know if microplastics play a role in the development of dementia. For instance, vascular disease is seen in most cases of dementia, resulting in slow or inadequate blood flow to the brain. This probably makes it more likely that any microplastics in the blood will eventually lodge themselves in the brain. So microplastic accumulation in the brain may well be a consequence, rather than a cause, of dementia.

We also don’t know if these studies are even measuring microplastics in the first place. To measure microplastics in the brain, tissue samples are heated up to high temperatures through a process called pyrolysis. A mass spectrometer is then used to measure the amount and type of plastic compounds such as polyethylene. The problem is that polyethylene is just a simple string of carbons and hydrogens. Fats are also a simple string of carbons and hydrogens and can look like polyethylene once heated up through pyrolysis. As a result, there’s debate as to whether pyrolysis is a valid method for looking at microplastics in the body, where high amounts of fat will always be present.^32,33

With that said, even if the estimates of microplastic exposure and accumulation in the body are exaggerated, this is not a problem we should ignore. Many components of plastics, such as bisphenols and phthalates, have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children and heart disease in adults.^34,35We can dramatically reduce exposure to (micro)plastics by drinking (filtered) tap water instead of plastic bottled water, using wooden or metal cooking and eating utensils, storing and microwaving food in glass containers, and increasing intake of fresh foods that have not been stored in plastic. While many microplastics are probably eliminated by the body naturally, one very interesting study suggested that anthocyanins from fruits and vegetables might help counteract some of the negative effects of plastics on health.³⁶ Another study in mice found that β-glucan—a fiber found in oats and mushrooms—might decrease absorption of PFAS.^37,38 Though this work was done in animal and test-tube studies, and there are currently no trials in humans yet, the recommendation is simply to eat more fiber and berries. This can also provide other brain benefits because there are a vast number of human studies showing that berry intake can improve cognitive function in both the short and long term.³⁹

Set-and-forget strategies to reduce environmental exposures

For air filters, the blood pressure study I mention used the HealthMate. Jaspr units come highly recommended, as do most of the Blueair models (tailored to the size of the room). The Coway Airmega is a good budget option. Consider checking your local water quality online (EPA, EWG) and then start using a water filter if needed. This could be either a jug that you can place in the fridge (e.g., all-rounders like Epic, ClearlyFiltered, and Brita Elite or Cyclopure, specifically for PFAS) or under-sink reverse osmosis devices that filter water on its way to the tap.

Oral Health as Brain Health

If you haven’t seen your dentist for a while, now might be a good time. Don’t get me wrong: the irony of a Brit writing about the importance of dental health is not lost on me. But there is an ever-increasing amount of research suggesting that oral health can directly impact brain health. Periodontal disease, as it is more formally known, can start as inflammation of the gums (gingivitis) that can eventually affect the underlying ligaments and bone (periodontitis). Periodontal disease is caused by an imbalance of the microbiome in the mouth, which leads to the overgrowth of certain bacterial species like Porphyromonas gingivalis and Streptococcus mutans. This imbalance of bacteria can cause tooth decay and local inflammation that provides a route for bacteria in the mouth to enter the body.

More than twenty years ago, P. gingivalis was found in arterial atherosclerotic plaques known to cause heart attacks and strokes.⁴⁰ And since then, researchers have collected reasonably strong evidence to suggest that poor oral health plays a direct role in the risk of heart disease—either because of bacteria invading the arteries after they enter the bloodstream or through an increase in chronic inflammation.⁴¹ More recently, P. gingivalis has also been found inside amyloid plaques in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.⁴² As amyloid can have antimicrobial effects,⁴³ it’s believed that one reason for it to accumulate in the brain is as an immune response to the presence of bacteria and viruses that are causing local inflammation. In line with this, though the results of individual studies are inconsistent, meta-analyses suggest that those who have periodontal disease are at an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, while treatment of gum disease is associated with decreased risk.^44-47

One recent study using data from the NHANES database in the United States found that those with worse oral health were more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s later in life.⁴⁸ The study also measured the amounts of antibodies against oral bacteria like P. gingivalis. Higher levels of antibodies that fight bacteria from the mouth were associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that those with an invasion or infection by those bacteria were more likely to experience cognitive decline. Therefore, staying on top of oral hygiene likely has both direct and indirect benefits to brain health, while also being easy to do and low risk.

Strategies to improve oral health

If you don’t already, brush your teeth every day (ideally, at least two minutes twice a day) and find a way to clear out stuff that accumulates between your teeth and near your gums (floss, water flossers, or interdental toothbrushes). See your dentist or dental hygienist at least a couple of times a year and treat any periodontal disease promptly. In the case of periodontitis specifically, you could consider chewing xylitol gums (2–3 grams of xylitol, 2–3 times per day) or using a xylitol mouthwash, such as TheraBreath or ACT. Most xylitol gum studies use Epic, but I like Kaigum as well.

Cognitive Training That Actually Works

In my book The Stimulated Mind, I make the case that the way we use our brains dictates how they function. The way we respond to cognitive stimuli is then determined by the modifiable factors associated with cognitive function, many of which are mentioned above. Though there is a vast amount of evidence for the benefit of education and stimulating work, hobbies, and activities in terms of better cognitive function and lower dementia risk,⁴⁹ we also have some very recent evidence that cognitive training may contribute as well.

The largest, and probably still the best, study of brain training was the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study. Started nearly 30 years ago, ACTIVE randomized 2,800 participants aged 65 or older to a control group or one of three brain-training groups: processing speed, reasoning, or memory. Memory training involved learning tools like mnemonics to memorize lists of words. Reasoning training involved searching for patterns in sequences of numbers or letters. Processing-speed training involved identifying an object on a computer screen that was flashed up at increasingly brief intervals, as well as having to divide attention between two search tasks. Participants did ten training sessions of around sixty minutes over five to six weeks, followed by brief booster sessions at one year and three years. Five years later, all three training groups had experienced less decline in quality of life compared to the control group, with the largest benefit in the processing speed group.^50-52

The ability to process information within milliseconds is critical to everything from decision-making to memory and performing complex skills like driving or playing a sport. Processing speed tends to decline with age, with one analysis of more than one million people suggesting that a significant decline in processing speed begins at around 60.⁵³ However, I would argue that at least part of this is because we tend to stop doing activities that require us to rapidly process information, because ACTIVE found that processing speed in older adults can be improved through training. Most important for our purposes here, a very recent 20-year follow-up of the ACTIVE study found that those who did processing speed training, including the booster sessions, had a significantly lower risk of dementia compared to the control group.⁵⁴

An updated version of the processing speed task used in ACTIVE—“Double Decision,” in which participants identify a central object while also locating a peripheral target under increasingly brief and demanding conditions—is included in the brain training platform BrainHQ.⁵⁵ BrainHQ offers exercises (free and paid tiers are available) targeting memory, attention, processing speed, people skills, navigation, and related cognitive abilities and was designed by a team of neuroscientists led by Dr. Michael Merzenich, co-inventor of the multi-channel cochlear implant. Another study using Double Decision found that processing speed training improved certain aspects of acetylcholine signaling in the anterior cingulate cortex, which plays a critical role in attention, decision-making, and impulse control.⁵⁶ This may be one way that processing speed training translated to improved cognitive outcomes in ACTIVE.

Though ACTIVE gives us some good evidence for the potential benefit of a specific type of dedicated cognitive training, it’s likely that similar benefits can be found in a range of activities that stimulate our ability to rapidly process information. For example, playing musical instruments, dancing, and sports with a coordinative component have all been linked with improvements in brain structure and function, as well as a lower dementia risk.⁴⁹ One of my favorite recent studies, called “Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks,” looked at the influence of creative arts such as dance, visual art (drawing, painting), and music on the brain.⁵⁷ They found that those with greater expertise in one of these skills had younger-looking brains based on improved connectivity in networks that are susceptible to the aging process. The most important network was the fronto-parietal network, involved in attention and decision-making. This suggests that learning and gaining expertise in complex skills can help to maintain brain functions that otherwise tend to decline with time.

One final activity that overlaps with both creative skills and brain training is video games, which can require navigating a large and complex world and solving problems, quickly reacting to the environment, and careful strategic planning. The creative arts study included a randomized trial where participants were trained to play StarCraft II, which resulted in benefits to brain networks that paralleled those seen with creative skills. This is just the latest in a long string of evidence that playing video games—especially in those who were previously non-gamers—can promote certain aspects of cognitive function.

In one classic study, researchers had adults aged sixty to eighty play solitaire, Angry Birds, or Super Mario 3D World for thirty minutes every day for four weeks.⁵⁸ At the end of the intervention, adults in the Super Mario group showed better improvements in a test of hippocampus function, which was similar to results they had previously seen in undergraduate students.⁵⁹ Other groups have shown that playing Super Mario increases the gray matter in the hippocampus of older adults and can improve feelings of well-being and working memory in individuals with depression.^60,61 Importantly, Super Mario doesn’t have a monopoly on cognitive training, and it’s probably the complex immersive nature of the game that is most important, because other games, like Minecraft and various action video games, have been found to be beneficial in a similar way.^62,63

Strategies to stimulate and train your brain

Dancing, martial arts, music, brain training, video games, etc.—it probably matters less what you pick, so choose a creative art, physical activity, or complex skill that requires focused attention and rapid information processing. The goal is to progressively challenge your cognitive muscles and then maintain practice to keep those skills and networks sharp.

Protect What You Have: Hearing, Vision, and Illness Prevention

If cognitive stimulus is a primary driver of cognitive function, it makes sense that we should do whatever we can to avoid the loss of that stimulus. For example, multiple studies have found that people who lose their hearing or eyesight with age tend to be at an increased risk of dementia—especially those who are at higher risk due to other reasons, such as chronic medical conditions.^64-67 Not only does sensory loss result in a loss of inputs to the brain, but people who lose a sense are also less likely to engage with the world in ways that they used to. As a result, they may be more likely to stay at home and perform fewer activities, decreasing stimulus indirectly. Both hearing and vision loss were included on the Lancet Commission’s list of modifiable risk factors, and this risk does appear to be reversible—for instance, if somebody gets hearing aids for hearing loss or surgery if they’re losing their sight due to cataracts.^64-67

A more insidious loss of stimulus and function comes from the accumulation of periods where we’re unable to experience our normal physical and cognitive stimuli. An analysis from the Adult Changes in Thought study—where adults over sixty-five had their cognitive function assessed at regular intervals for several years—found that cognitive decline rapidly accelerated when a participant was hospitalized between assessments. And the more severe the illness, the more severe the decline.⁶⁸ Similar results were seen in the Rush Memory and Aging Project.⁶⁹ Outside of older adults, there are studies that show even just two weeks of forced bed rest in otherwise healthy people can significantly impair cognitive function due to the loss of critical inputs from physical activity and other cognitive stimuli.⁷⁰ And within a few weeks of an extended period of inactivity, processing speed also starts to decline.⁷¹

It stands to reason, then, that we should do what we can to minimize the likelihood of significant illness as we get older. There are many ways to do this, including physical activity that both improves immune function and makes us less frail and susceptible to falls, but vaccines—especially the shingles vaccine—may be a critical addition to this toolkit.

Shingles (herpes zoster) is caused by reactivation of the chickenpox virus, which can lie dormant for decades in the spinal nerves of people who were previously infected. When immune function drops—during periods of extended stress, for example—the virus can pop back up and cause a painful rash in the area of skin associated with the nerve where the virus was hiding. Since immune system function decreases with aging, shingles is more common in older adults, which is why a shingles vaccination is now recommended for anyone over the age of fifty.

A fascinating recent study looked at the effect of the shingles vaccine on dementia risk.^72,73 In 2013 the National Health Service in Wales rolled out a shingles vaccine program based on date of birth. If you were born before September 1, 1933, your chance of getting the vaccine was essentially zero percent, but almost 50 percent of the people born between September 2, 1933, and September 1, 1934, got the vaccine. As you might expect, there was a sudden decrease in shingles diagnoses in those eligible for the vaccine. There was also a sudden drop in dementia diagnoses. Part of the benefit came from preventing or minimizing shingles reactivations, but the authors suggested that there might be a broader benefit of the vaccine for inflammation and the immune system. The same team used a similar approach to study data from when the shingles vaccine was implemented in Australia in 2016 and found the same association with lower dementia rates.⁷⁴ Similar studies have also now been done in the US and Canada, with similar results.^75,76

While we wait for more definitive studies, I think current data give us something to apply practically. We know that it’s impossible to completely avoid viral infections, and it could be counterproductive to try. At the same time, as we get older, we are increasingly susceptible to viral infections that have the potential to knock us back for long periods, or worse. If we think about all the accumulated illness we might experience over decades, each time losing a little fitness and a little muscle mass and a little cognitive function, it’s going to add up. As a result, we may end up thinking that we’re just succumbing to the inevitable process of aging, when in fact it’s the accumulated total effect of periods when our bodies weren’t able to receive (and respond to) physical and cognitive inputs. This makes illness and injury prevention a critical part of long-term brain health.

Strategies to keep what you’ve got

Consider hearing aids and visual aids/interventions as soon as you need them, as these have been associated with lower dementia risk. An increasing body of evidence also suggests that it would be prudent to take advantage of vaccinations and early treatments for viral infections like flu and shingles to minimize the time spent out of action, which then also appears to translate to a lower risk of cognitive decline and dementia.^75-79

Sleep: The Missing Factor

Perhaps the clearest omission from the Lancet report was poor sleep as a risk factor for dementia, which is fairly well established at this point.^4-6 However, I’m also pretty sure most people have accepted the idea that sleep is critical for cognitive function and physical health.⁷

Therefore, I won’t belabor the usual recommendations:⁸⁰ keep your bedroom cool and dark, get morning light and dim the lights in the evening to anchor your circadian rhythm, take a warm shower/bath before bed, use a sleep mask, consider a magnesium supplement, and spend enough time in bed (obvious, but still the most common problem I see in people not getting enough sleep). Ventilation and air quality can also matter for sleep because CO₂ levels climb quickly in a closed room, particularly when multiple people are sleeping in the same room, and elevated CO₂ degrades deep sleep.^81-83 In addition to these basics, a handful of lesser-known strategies deserve more attention and may be worth considering:

The practical implementation for those who can’t spend 30 minutes outside in the morning: light boxes or glasses. Use a light therapy box for 20–30 minutes early in the day (aim for one with at least 10,000 lux like a Verilux). If you’re travelling or don’t want a new light fixture, try AYO glasses, which are used by a number of professional athletes who regularly deal with jet lag and have been found to helpi mprove sleep in both submariners and healthy adults.^84,85
Glycine. 3 grams of the amino acid glycine taken before bed may decrease sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) and improve sleep efficiency (the amount of time spent asleep), primarily by accelerating the decrease in body temperature that facilitates the onset of sleep.^86,87Glycine is available from Pure Encapsulations and Thorne, but if you take magnesium before bed, then 400 mg of magnesium as bisglycinate will also provide close to 3 grams of glycine. (Note: The 400 mg is just the magnesium; more than 85% of magnesium bisglycinate is glycine, so the glycine attached to the magnesium adds a few grams.)
Serine. Another amino acid with circadian effects, studies show that 3 grams of L-serine taken 30 minutes before bed can make melatonin rise earlier. This is useful for helping to set a new bed time when dealing with jet lag, and can also prevent a circadian shift caused by social jet lag (e.g., staying up late on weekends).^88,89 Sources include Double Wood and Now Foods.
Theanine. Two recent systematic reviews found that around 200 mg of L-theanine taken prior to bed may improve sleep, particularly measures of sleep quality.^90,91 L-theanine is available from Thorne, Pure Encapsulations, and Momentous.
Hemoglobin testing. While you’re getting your homocysteine checked by your doctor, get a CBC and iron panel to check iron status and hemoglobin levels. Anemia (hemoglobin below 12 grams/dL in women or below 13 grams/dL in men) is associated with an increased risk of dementia,⁹² and is often caused by low iron but can also be due to B vitamin deficiencies or chronic inflammatory health conditions. Symptoms like fatigue and changes in cognitive function in perimenopause are also commonly related to low iron.⁹³ On the other hand, if hemoglobin is high (more than 15 grams/dL in women or 17 grams/dL in men), one of the most common causes is obstructive sleep apnea, which has also been linked with higher dementia risk but this can be mitigated with treatments like CPAP.^94-97

***

If the majority of dementia cases truly are preventable, a sensible approach would be to tackle our own individual risk factors and stack the deck in our favor.

By building on the big lifestyle rocks with these simple and targeted interventions, we can improve multiple aspects of physical health while maximizing our chances of staying sharp for decades to come.

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The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862)

2026-04-24 12:55:29

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Cathy Lanier. Cathy is the chief security officer for the National Football League (NFL), supervising all operations and activities of the NFL Security Department. Prior to her work at the NFL, Cathy served as chief of police with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, becoming the first female police chief of the nation’s capital, the first commanding officer of Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism for D.C. Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force.

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Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure

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

Tim Ferriss: Cathy, it is so lovely to see you, and thanks for making the time. Really nice to see you again.

Cathy Lanier: Glad to finally connect. It was nice to see you, too, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: And I was going back and forth on where to start this, and I think I’m just going to follow the tried and true and begin at the beginning here. And maybe we should start with Tuxedo and just give people sort of a snapshot of where you grew up, how you grew up, all those dreams of being in law enforcement. I’m partially kidding, of course, because I know a little bit of the backstory. But can you tell people about the beginning?

Cathy Lanier: It’s important, I think, for context about the choices I made in my life. Like everybody on this planet, the way you’re raised, your family, your environment has so much influence on the way you do things as an adult. So my parents married right after high school, first boyfriend, girlfriend. So right after high school, my father was a firefighter, went in the fire department. My mother was a secretary. She went to work for the federal government. Back in the ’50s, being married at 18 was perfectly normal. So they got married, bought a home, started having children. They had three kids. I’m the youngest of the three. After I was born, I think they realized that a secretary and a firefighter salary does not exactly cover childcare for three kids. So they couldn’t afford the childcare for three kids for both of them to work, so my mother took a leave of absence from work. She did eventually go back, but she took a 10-year leave of absence after I was born.

And then when I was two, my mother took us to my grandparents for the weekend, and when we came home, my father was gone, and left my mom with three kids and no income, literally, because she was not working at the time. So life changed pretty dramatically for us then. Again, I was two. I don’t remember a lot of detail early on. But I do remember as a child growing up over that next 10 years while mom was home with us, really just a wonderful childhood. My mother was always there. She helped with homework and she would take me to soccer practice and basketball practice and majorette practice. She was always with us and she was just a wonderful, loving, caring mom. And we didn’t have a lot. We lived on $350 a month. My father eventually paid child support. We had a lot of support from the church and from friends and family. But it was a fun childhood for me. I mean, my mom was with me, and I think she provided a lot of stability for my brothers and I.

And then when I was getting ready to go from — back then, this was back before middle school, so you went elementary school, junior high school, high school. So in sixth grade, you leave elementary school and you go to junior high school. So I was 12 years old, 13 years old, becoming a teenager. We were going to a new school. I was going to seventh grade. My mother went back to work. I was the youngest at the time at 13. She felt like we were old enough to be latchkey kids and come home and let us in, be home for a couple hours every day until she got home from work. So she went back to work in her same role working for her same boss that she left 10 years earlier, which is pretty amazing.

Tim Ferriss: That is amazing.

Cathy Lanier: In fact, that whole 10-year period while my mother was off, also important is how it frames my context of things, is during that 10 years when my mom was home, I remember her sitting in front of the TV and taking shorthand to the television. She would get our favorite records and she would write down in shorthand all the words. And then she would sit at the table and type them all up and give us the words so we could sing along with our songs. And I thought it was just Mom doing fun things for us, but it was her keeping her skills. My mom, when she went back to work after a 10-year break in service, she still took shorthand at 96 words a minute and still could type over 100 words a minute. So just a wonderful example of work ethic for us. She knew she needed to go back to work and wanted to go back to work as soon as possible and she wanted to be on her game.

So I mean, great childhood. But when I was moving to junior high school, my mom went back to work, so I kind of lost that guardian, that best friend at a critical time, right? I’m becoming a teenager, we were going to a new school. They were busing back in those days, so I was being bused into a really tough neighborhood in Washington, DC. So that’s where everything started —

Tim Ferriss: From Maryland to Washington, DC.

Cathy Lanier: From Maryland.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: Right on the border of DC.

Tim Ferriss: Can I pause you for one second?

Cathy Lanier: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: I’m just trying to put myself, which is impossible for me to do, of course, in your mom’s shoes, right? You guys returned to the house, no car, dad’s gone, three kids. Have you spoken to her or do you have any best guesses as to the other things that helped her hold everything together in terms of resilience or support or anything else? I mean, I suppose that necessity is the mother of invention on some level, but have you ever spoken to her about that?

Cathy Lanier: I did. And it’s funny, my mother was very passive, sweet, just kind of a very quiet, internal person, and in my entire life, I never saw my mother cry. Never. Never. I mean, under any circumstances. I’m sure she did, but I never really saw my mother cry. And my grandmother was completely the opposite. My mom was an only child. Her mother was like a pistol, like hardcore — so my grandmother was very helpful, but my mother was a rock. I mean, she took care of us. When I tell people now, we lived on food stamps, welfare, the church brought us baskets of food for the holidays, but we didn’t have a car for many years. We finally got a car. It didn’t have heat. It used to break down every time we went out in it. The hot water spigot in our bathroom used to squirt scalding hot water over you if you weren’t careful because it needed a washer, and there was nobody to come and fix that washer.

But we had a wonderful childhood. My mother was just solid. She loved her kids, and she was a beautiful, beautiful woman. And I always ask her why she didn’t ever date, and she’s like, “My kids were my life, and I didn’t want anybody around my children that didn’t think of them as the same priority that I thought of them.” So I think her resilience was really just steady for her family. I think her family was her motivation, and nothing was going to disrupt her commitment there.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the singular focus. So I interrupted you. You were saying —

Cathy Lanier: That’s okay.

Tim Ferriss: — there’s this transition point, you’re busing in to Washington, DC, and you’ve sort of lost your guardian in a sense at that point. So if you wouldn’t mind picking up there.

Cathy Lanier: So, again, we were being bused into a neighborhood. The idea at the time was to racially integrate neighborhoods. I lived in a very small industrial neighborhood, like an industrial park, right on the border of Washington, DC. Literally, there was a train that ran right behind my house in the backyard. On the other side of that train tracks was Washington, DC. We were on the Maryland side. So they were busing us to a school on the border of Northeast Washington to racially integrate the schools.

So each day when our bus would pick us up and take us to school, when our bus would pull up in front of the school — everything in most big cities, I would say, but in Washington for sure, is very neighborhood-based. So when our bus would pull up in front of the school and we would get out as the Maryland kids coming to the school, as soon as we’d get off the bus, we’d get jumped. Every day there was a fight. It was a terrible change. All the way through school, I was in the talented and gifted program, straight-A student, loved school, and now I’m being bused into a school where the kids that we were going to school with hated us. It was very racially charged. It was agonizing to go to school because you had to fight just to get from the bus to the classroom.

So my mom would go — her bus would — it’s funny now. It wasn’t funny then. But her bus would pick her up on the corner at 7:00 in the morning, and my bus would pick me up on the other corner at 7:15. So we’d both go out to the bus stop together in the morning, and she would wait for her bus, I’d wait for my bus. She’d get on her bus and she’d ride by me, and I’d wave, and then one of my older friends who had a car would come and pick me up and we would go skip school for the day. I at least would skip the first half. I would skip the first few periods so I didn’t have to go through that agonizing fight every morning.

Tim Ferriss: Entry, rough entry. Mm-hmm.

Cathy Lanier: So I went from a talented and gifted student with straight As to failing literally every subject the first quarter of seventh grade. I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging 19 days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school. My mother didn’t know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at 6:00 p.m., we were all sitting around pretending to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was so chronically truant that I was failing all of my major subjects.

So meanwhile, while I’m skipping school, I’m hanging out with the wrong people, much older crowd, friends of my older brother and just an older crowd and just getting in trouble. And I fall in love with a much older boyfriend at the time, think I’m in love, and we want to get married and run away and get married. And so by the time I was in the ninth grade, I’m 14 years old, found myself pregnant. My boyfriend at the time had given me a diamond ring. We were engaged, we’re going to get married, so we run away. He was 26 at the time. I was 14. My mother, when she finds out, was going to have him arrested. She was going to put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, “Well, we’ve got this. We’re going to get married and we’re going to have the baby and everything’s going to be great.” The mind of a 14-year-old. Obviously things didn’t work out that way.

Interestingly, I went to my father who had been out of the picture most of my life and asked for him to sign for me to get married. Because of my age, one of my parents had to legally sign over my legal guardianship to my husband. So they literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad, thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for, because once he signed over my guardianship, he —

Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.

Cathy Lanier: — paid $100 less a month in child support. So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We got married the day after my 15th birthday. I was eight months pregnant at the time.

So I guess fast-forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was back at home. My mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn’t approve of me going to school. So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED. And she would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type on the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand, and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. I got a job as a secretary when I was 16, so started working as secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening in a bar. Also lied about my age to work in a bar. That was the only option up in the area where I was working. So for the next several years, I worked two jobs as a secretary and a waitress.

And my motivation really was my son. It was kind of a significant moment for me, and I’ve had a few in my life. When my son was born, I had never babysat before, I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know anything about babies or children. And when he was born, he was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my bed in my bedroom. And I’d wake up in the morning, and he’d be awake and he’d just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Not crying, nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this —

Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: Yeah, about three weeks into this experiment, I’m looking at him one morning, and it just dawns on me for the first time that I’m a parent and that that helpless little baby was completely reliant on me. And my mother always stressed the importance of education and work to us, and here I was, my husband didn’t allow me to go to school, I would never be able to get a job, and I’m looking at this poor little innocent baby and I’m thinking his whole life depends on me, and what am I going to be able to provide with a ninth grade education? Not much. So that was a aha moment.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to resist the temptation to ask 300 questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we’ll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious for you, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes at that young age, when you — and we don’t need to get into the details unless you’d like to share, but when you separated from your then-husband, when that happened, what did you think was going to become of you? What did you envision your path would be at that point? I have to imagine that it would have just been incredibly challenging. I don’t know. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I read that when you were a young girl, you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: And then flash-forward, you go through this entire tumultuous experience and you land back at home. Where did you think your life was headed? Where did you think you were headed at that point?

Cathy Lanier: Well, I knew that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world, and that’s take care of my son. And when I first moved back home, I got my GED, but I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. It was 16, almost 17. I had to wait till I was 16 and nine months to take the test to get the GED. Interestingly, you needed 255 to pass the test. I got 256. I passed it by one point.

Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about —

Cathy Lanier: There’s another little footnote of my life.

Tim Ferriss: — these Sliding Door moments. Holy cow, right? Okay.

Cathy Lanier: So I knew that my mother had always stressed the importance of education and work, so I knew I had to go back to school, and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance, and I knew if I was going to do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn’t do that, I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, “This is not my path. This can’t be my path.”

And so when I got my job as a secretary, they offered tuition reimbursement to go to college, so I started at community college. I just started taking one class a semester, and that’s where it started, one class a semester. And they reimbursed me for it.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, for people who don’t have context, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was, God, it has to be, what, more than a year ago now, I’m sure. Time flies. But it’s been a long while. And I just remember thinking to myself, “God, I hope someday that we can have this conversation on the podcast,” so I want to thank you again for doing it.

How do you then go from there — what is the connective tissue, sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement? What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction?

Cathy Lanier: So to be fair, my family’s a public service family. My father was a firefighter. My oldest brother had become a firefighter right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer. I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class a semester working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I was still living in the same crappy neighborhood, but I wanted my son in a good school.

And I saw an ad — I was 23 years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Metropolitan Police Department; they were hiring. And what caught my attention — it’s a full page ad in the Post. Half of the page said tuition reimbursement. I’m like, “Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I’m paying for one class a semester. Going to take me 30 years to get a degree.”

So I went with a friend, and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early 1990. 500 murders a year. DC was known as the murder capital of the world at the time. So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test, and I came out — I want to say I came out like 60 out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back in the early ’90s. Washington DC was about 89% African American.

So I mean, I felt the same drive my mother felt taking care of us is that I have a son that needs me, he needs me to provide for him, and the only way I’m going to do this is get a good job, government job, not a bad option, and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metropolitan Police in 1990, started walking a footbeat. My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy, I went to work and didn’t come home for five days. It was great.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, we’re going to double-click on that and come right back to Mount Pleasant, but before we do, I want to know what the entrance exam or qualification exam was like, right? Because you mentioned the GED, and just by the skin of your teeth getting in, passing the hurdle. And then it sounds like you’ve, not a very technical term, but kind of crushed the examination that you took that ultimately placed you at 60 out of a thousand. What was that test like?

Cathy Lanier: So remember, now when I started taking classes at Prince George’s Community College, my goal was to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an attorney. I started out wanting to be a secretary like my mom. Then once I got into the workplace, I realized I wanted bigger, better things, so I wanted to be an attorney. So I was taking political science, philosophy, a lot of those kind of courses, getting all my generals out of the way at community college. So by the time I got to the Metropolitan Police Department at 23, I had three years of college courses. But the exam for entry into policing, now back in those days, they only required a high school diploma or an equivalent. You didn’t need college.

So the entry exam was a lot of things that you would expect for law enforcement. You do a lot of multiple choice questions. You have to be able to read and comprehend well, so reading comprehension was a big part of it. You have to do some basic math, so you have to understand math. But there was a lot of problem-solving type questions. So they flash a photo in front of you and then they say — there’s a photo inside of a department store, and then, okay, you’ve just walked into this department store and there’s been a robbery. What is it you noticed in that quick three seconds you had to look at that photo? What do you remember? What time was it on the clock? What color was the lady’s shoes that was standing at the register? So there was reading comprehension, math, problem-solving, and then a good bit of, are you paying attention? Do you have the detail to pay attention to do the things that you need to do as a police officer, much of which you learn as a cop.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. But it seems like you had either developed or innately possessed — and maybe I’m reaching, but I mean, maybe not. I mean, was there anything in that test that highlighted, for lack of a better descriptor, superpowers, strengths of yours, that came into full fruition later where you’re like, “Okay, if I look at the recipe, some of the ingredients of the recipe that ultimately contributed to my success,” were any of them sort of revealed in that test in any way or not really?

Cathy Lanier: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I won’t — okay.

Cathy Lanier: Actually, great question. Actually, it’s a very good question. I don’t get a lot of interviews to ask the types of question you’re asking. I think it’s an excellent question. So I would say the two things that have helped me in that exam and that have helped me most of my law enforcement career, my grandmother instilled in me — she spent a lot of time with us growing up as well — two things, problem-solving being a big part of that. You never make excuses. When bad things happen, don’t make excuses. You put yourself in that position. You found yourself here. It is nobody else’s fault but yours. I’m not an excuse person. I don’t make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation, I did something to get myself here and I’m going to get myself out. And that was the way she taught us. You get yourself in, you get yourself out. And the other thing she taught me was, she’s like, “You’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You better be damned for doing.” So you act. You always act. You don’t let your circumstances dictate for you. You act and you take action and you do. You don’t wait for somebody else to do for you.

And those things were really part of that problem-solving exercise when you’re coming on the police department, and it’s certainly your problem-solving exercise every day you’re on the police department. It certainly was for the next 27 years for me. Look, you can’t avoid consequences. There’s consequences for everything that happens. Every decision you make has consequences. You can’t avoid consequences. But you can choose what you do after those things happen.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I imagine you’ve probably not met him, but I interviewed someone named Jocko Willink, who’s a former Navy SEAL commander, many years ago. It was the first time he ever did a public interview. And he wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And I feel like your grandmother and what she instilled in you is in a nutshell exactly the type of high-agency thinking that Jocko talks about. It’s the same thing. Wow.

Cathy Lanier: My grandma would say there’s two types of people in the world, excuse people and people who are accountable, and I’m going to be the accountable.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Mount Pleasant. For people who don’t have the historical context, what were the Mount Pleasant riots? And you said right before I asked about the test, you said it was great. And if that is actually not a sarcastic statement, but a real statement of how you felt, I want to know why that was the case. But let’s start with just a little bit of history for people who aren’t familiar, I certainly wasn’t, with the Mount Pleasant riots.

Cathy Lanier: Well, when I said it was great, in terms of being a rookie right out of the academy and understanding what you’ve got yourself into, it was, “Here’s what you’ve got yourself into. You went to work today and you’re not going home for five days.”

So the night before my first day out of the academy, there was a pair of police officers walking a foot patrol in our patrol district. They tried to place a gentleman under arrest for drinking in public. He was a Latino male, didn’t speak English. We had a big problem in our city back in those days. We had very few people on the department that spoke Spanish. We had a huge Latino population. There was a big gap in our community. So it’s really difficult to do any kind of effective policing if you’re not communicating with the people in the community, and we were not. So when this officer was trying to place this person under arrest, during the handcuffing the subject, after one handcuff was on, he turned around, pulled a knife on the officer, and the officer shot, so he was shot with one handcuff on. So the partner of the officer shot, rolled him over, put the other handcuff on, took the knife away, called paramedics. All’s the people saw was a handcuffed person who had been shot. So the Latino community in that neighborhood immediately began gathering on the street, large crowd. This all happened around 11:30 at night so by the time I got into the station for 5:30 roll call, I show up at 5:30 in the morning, the riot had broken out around 1:00 a.m. They had burned several police cars. There was stores that were looted and on fire. There was a big, big deal down in Mount Pleasant. So when I got to work my first day, I walked into the station, said, “Hi, I’m Cathy Lanier. I’m the new rookie from the academy.” And they threw me a gas mask and they told me to go out and get in the van. And he said, “Hop over the counter, go out the back door and get in that van.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I hopped over the counter and went and got in that van.

I was sitting with 15 other cops with gas masks on and big riot sticks. And they took us down and they dumped us off on the corner of Mount Pleasant Park Road and it was fully engulfed in fires and looting. And people were throwing bottles and bricks and stones at us. We had little helmets they had given us as we were hopping out of the van. And I didn’t have a radio because rookies weren’t allowed to have radios at the time. I had not been trained how to use the radio. So my partner had the radio. So my lifeline was on my partner, but we stood there online and literally got pelted with bricks and bottles. And I mean, over the course of five days, it was trial by fire for sure. But it was a big learning experience for me because I understood the frustration.

I understood the frustration. That whole community in Mount Pleasant were all Latino. They didn’t speak English. The cops didn’t speak to them very well. I mean, nobody could really communicate with — but the cops were pushing people around and there was no way to try and get the story straight and really no effort to get the story straight, to understand the frustration. So it was a big learning experience for me as I worked my way up the ranks to understand how important inclusion is in the community. If you’re a police officer and you are not embedding yourself in that community and understanding who the people are in that community and what their needs are and how to communicate, you’re really not going to be successful.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to, I imagine, revisit that at some point because it seems to be a consistent thread through a lot of the work that you’ve done, but I want to spend a little bit more time on Mount Pleasant. I am curious, I suppose, yet again, what that maybe showed you about yourself or just highlighted about you constitutionally or personality wise, right? Because I would imagine some people could get dropped in that environment after they just signed up, they’re like, “Hey, I’m just here for tuition reimbursement. Holy shit, I’m getting hit with bricks. This is not exactly what I thought my first day was going to be,” and they’re out. I have to imagine that there are some people who would be closer to that.

Maybe they didn’t quit, but they were probably closer to that end of the spectrum. And do you thrive in particular in intense environments? I wonder, right? Because in my case, constitutionally out of the box, little things, especially interpersonal things, bother me that are trivial, frankly. I get all wound up about very stupid things, but in crisis situations, the car accident in front of me, some guy’s got his leg blown apart or whatever. I actually do really very well in those environments. I don’t know why that is. I really have no idea, but was there anything that you noticed about yourself in that type of environment, in those types of circumstances?

Cathy Lanier: I think the thing for me that I thrive on is as we’re dropped out down there and they’re giving us the riot sticks and the helmets and the gas mask and they’re shooting canisters of gas into the crowd and knowing what started this and how this all blew up, I’m thinking to myself, we’re not going about this the right way. I was a rookie. I know nothing about policing other than what I was taught in the academy so by no means did I think I was smarter than the guy making the command decisions, right? But I’m just looking at it from my perspective and going, “This is just not the right way to do this. We’re not going to win here. This is not a win situation. This should be done differently.” And I just always felt like from the minute I hit the ground, watching [inaudible] analyze the way that we were doing things and thinking, why are we doing this this way?

There’s a better way to do these things. And so that’s the way I felt in Mount Pleasant. My first day on the job, really hard to explain, I just felt like there’s a problem to be solved here and we’re not going about it in a problem solving manner. We’re going about it with brute force. Brute force doesn’t always work. And so it intrigued me and every day after that, once the riots were over, I started walking a foot beat in the city. Every single day I went to work, I got to problem solve. For six, seven, eight times a day, calls for service, 911 calls, you respond to people who are in crisis, people who need help and you get to try and help think through that, help solve the problem. And that’s what I enjoyed doing. It’s frustrating when you’re at the bottom of the totem pole and you’re the line officer. You’re in a chain of command, you can’t make certain decisions. But I did feel like every single day I went to work, I made a difference in someone’s life, no matter how small.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And this was around, tell me if I’m getting this wrong, but around 1990 or early ’90s?

Cathy Lanier: 1990.

Tim Ferriss: 1990.

Cathy Lanier: Yep. 1990.

Tim Ferriss: And you were working your way up the ranks. When did you first, and we’ll certainly talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of that timeframe in some respects, but when did your first real mentor show up? I have different names from doing homework in front of me. I’ve got, if I’m saying it correctly, Sonya Proctor, I’ve got Charles Ramsey, who might show up a little bit later. I’m not sure exactly on the chronology, but were there any critical figures in the first few years who were helpful to you? Or was it really just executing, getting the job done, delivering and working your way up? I’m wondering when your first mentor of sorts or — I don’t want to say guardian, it might not be the right word — but influential figure showed up in policing.

Cathy Lanier: So I was an officer and I loved my job. Once I worked my way up, I was foot patrol the first several months. And then I went to motorcycle school and I got trained to ride a motor and then I was on a motorcycle. I wanted to be mobile so I could get around and I love the adrenaline, 911 calls, getting out there, being first on the scene. And then I got moved up a little bit more in seniority and I was in a patrol car. And I used to get on the radio and I’m like, “All right, Dispatcher, I’m in service. Stack me up. Give me all the calls you got pending that’s been sitting there waiting. I’ll take them off.” So I had a lieutenant who, he was like a SWAT team commander guy who got promoted to lieutenant and they sent him out to patrol, which is like a slap in the face to a SWAT guy, right?

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Cathy Lanier: They hate the call stuff. But he had come to my district and he called me in his office one day. He’s like, “I hear you on the radio out there.” He’s like, “You’re really humping.” I was like, “Yeah, I love this job. This is great. It’s fun.” And he’s like, “You’re coming up on three years, you’re going to be eligible for sergeant. You should take that sergeant’s test.” And I was like, “Why’d I want to do that? I like my job. I like what I’m doing. If I take a sergeant test I’m going to get moved somewhere,” he’s like, “No, no, you need to take the sergeant’s test.” I’m like, “Well, why would I want to do that?” And he’s like, “Well, you want to make more money, right?”

And I’m like, “That’s a good point.” And he said, “And once you start taking these promotional exams, it gives you more opportunities to influence the things. I hear you, you’re trying to change some things, why don’t you take that exam?” So he pushed me pretty hard. And when the test announcement came out, he said, “Come on, I’m going to give you a ride. Let’s go pick up your books. You have an eight-month window to study.” He’s like, “Let’s go pick up your books.” So I was like, “All right.” I was a little intimidated. I’m like, okay. So I took that sergeant’s test. I was eligible for sergeant at three years. I took the first sergeants to test. There was 890 people that were eligible that we took the test altogether.

After the written exam, you go to an assessment phase where you do a bunch of oral interviews and exercises and paper exercises. And I ended up coming out number 13 out of 890 for that. So I got promoted right away, a very young sergeant, 26 years old, three years on the job. I had a master patrol officer working for me that had more years on the job than I was old. He had 26 years on the job, I was 26 years old. So that was the first mentor. And he had remained a mentor for me for most of my career.

Tim Ferriss: What was his name?

Cathy Lanier: Donny Exum.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, man, these stories are so critical because whenever — I mean, people are self-made in many respects and at the same time, you just have to wonder sometimes, right? If you didn’t have these intervening figures, nothing like your experience, but I had a pretty miserable public school experience when I was growing up and ultimately hadn’t even thought of private school. And there was one math teacher who was basically like, “You need to get the hell out of here.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, out of here to where?” And he just kept harping on me. And then there was one other person who chimed in. Then I had two people and I was like, “Oh, okay, maybe I should take a look at this.” And it was just like, if that had not happened, who knows? It’s just a lot of question marks.

Cathy Lanier: Critical. Those mentors are critical.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What does a sergeant do? I’m embarrassed to admit that I have no idea. What does a sergeant do?

Cathy Lanier: So this is one of the things that police departments do right. Now that I’m in the private sector, I wish the private sector had a similar structure. So once you make sergeant, you start as a first line supervisor. So they’ll give you eight people, eight to 10 people that you’re responsible for. So you’re the squad sergeant. You have a squad that’s assigned to you, those eight to 10 people, they report to you. So I’m responsible for making sure when we pop at a roll call and we hit the street that my squad of eight is doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re clearing their calls, they’re taking reports like they’re supposed to. If they get in a situation where they don’t know what to do, they go over the radio call for me, I go down and help them work through that situation and I help teach them how to manage these situations.

So you’re first line supervision, you’re right there every day on the street with the 911 responders and you’re helping them manage those calls and you’re helping them manage how to solve those problems. You’re signing arrest paperwork. If you make an arrest, “Wait a minute, let me look at all of the probable cause you have here before we put this person in handcuffs.” Or if you’ve got the person in handcuffs when I get on the scene, “Let’s review what you got here before we take somebody to jail. Let’s make sure we’ve met the DC code, we know that you’ve got a legitimate arrest here.” So you start managing a small group and then the next level is manager. Then you become a lieutenant and then they give you like 40 people to manage and you start making little bigger decisions. Now you’re scheduling, you’re assigning, you’re working through warrants and things like that. So it’s a very gradual progression.

Tim Ferriss: In that timeframe, early 90s or just 90s, I suppose, writ large, what was it like being a woman in the police force?

Cathy Lanier: It was a really tough environment when I first got there. There were a few days in the very beginning when I was an officer that — the good thing about the officer, when I got there, the department was 85 probably percent African American. The city was largely 89% African American. So largely African American, certainly very few white females. It was very few females. So I would think we were about 11% women on the department of 5,000, 5,200, I think, when I came on, the size of our department. So very few women, very few white women, little bit — this was a very — it’s hard to think back to 1990. Sexual harassment was commonplace. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared about it. It wasn’t an issue. It happened every day and you work through it. I grew up with two older brothers, so I knew how to navigate it a little bit.

Listen, my brothers gave me advice on how to deal with some of this. The good thing is as an officer, you very quickly establish yourself. And I established myself as an officer early on as a worker. I came to work, I did my job. I don’t need anybody to do me any favors. You don’t need to look out for me. I don’t need a partner. I can ride by myself, I’m good. Once I made sergeant though, the harassment got worse. I mean, I had a lieutenant that was really, really sexually harassing. I mean, not just me, but several women, physical harassment. I mean, getting you on a midnight shift in a sergeant’s office and closing the door and putting hands on you and things like that. And I remember saying to my boyfriend at the time, I was like, “You know what? I got real thick skin. I can take all kinds of comments. I don’t mind any of that stuff, but I’m not going to let people put their hands on me. That’s just not going to happen.” So the harassment was pretty intense. It was a really tough environment.

Tim Ferriss: So what happened?

Cathy Lanier: So had a lieutenant, when I made sergeant, I was sent over to Southeast Washington. I was patrolling in Southeast. I had really a good squad. I worked nights, permanent nights. So I had a lieutenant that was harassing me and some other women, but me pretty intensely, calling me on the radio, forcing me to drive him around, putting me in his cruiser with them, making me drive him around, just not letting me do my job. Constant harassment, calling me on the radio, bringing me to the office, making me drive him somewhere, things like that. And so I finally, after several times of asking him to leave me alone, I finally filed a sexual harassment complaint. He had put his hands on me several times. So I filed a complaint, and I remember going down to the EEO office and filing this complaint, and they asked me to write a list of anybody who had ever — well, first of all, before I went down, my partner, one of my fellow sergeants, who was a Black male officer, said to me one day, we were out riding together.

The lieutenant had called me in and my partner said to me, the other sergeant said, “How long are you going to let this keep going on before you do something about it?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “I hope you’re writing this stuff down. I hope you’re going to say something to somebody because this can’t go on like this.” So the first, again, a man, not a woman, another male police officer basically said to me, “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, nobody else is going to stand up for you.” And so when he said that, it clicked. He’s trying to say either you’re going to allow this to keep happening or you don’t want it to happen and you do something about it. So after that conversation, I filed this complaint, I list all the people who had witnessed because my harasser made no effort to hide it.

He made horrible comments and grabbed women in front of others all the time. So I listed 17 different witnesses and they did the investigation. And literally I left the EEO office, I went to court, I had court that day and I was in court 20 minutes after I left the EEO office from filing my complaint, my harasser, the lieutenant, texted me on my beeper, we had beepers back then and said, “I know what you’re doing and you’re not going to get away with this.” So it was supposed to be confidential, but within 20 minutes of leaving the office, the person who was doing my investigation called him and told him that I had made a complaint.

Tim Ferriss: Gross.

Cathy Lanier: So I had to go back to work in that environment, one of the most violent areas of Washington DC. From that day forward, he prohibited me from partnering with anybody. He refused to allow me to ride with anybody else. He continued the harassment. He came into my office the next day, shut the door and said, “Look, I know that what you’re doing. You need to back down. You need to withdraw this complaint. You’re not going to win.” Anyway, long story short, they sustained the complaint. So the investigation, all the witnesses I listed, they were all men. I didn’t think any of them would tell the truth. Nobody wants to go against a higher ranking person, and every single one of them told the truth. They all wrote down what they saw. They all not only talked about what they saw him doing to me, but what they saw him doing to other women.

And I was just shocked. I always say to women, you don’t realize when you’re in these scenarios, decent men that observe these things going on, they don’t like it either. They don’t like it either. And those other men that I was working with, they didn’t like it either. And some of them, this guy had harassed their girlfriends or their wives, you know what I mean? So that really made an impression on me, that so many of the men that I work with stood up and did the right thing there. When it was time for him to be disciplined for this, when we got to trial board, I walk into trial board for the discipline to come down and they told me they had to drop the whole case and throw it out. And I’m like, “Why? What happened?” And they said, “Well, we missed the 90 days. In the District of Columbia, you have to bring discipline within 90 days of the day that you knew or should have known about the misconduct.” They sat on this investigation till day 91 and then turned it in.

So literally after all of that, they threw the case out and they said, “Well, we’ll just transfer you. Where do you want to be transferred to?” And I was like, “I don’t want to be transferred. I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t transfer me. Transfer him. I didn’t do anything.” He later had several other complaints come forward and eventually was terminated for a severe case with multiple other subordinates later on.

But I will tell you this, now everything above the rank of captain in the police department is appointed. You civil service exam for sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. After captain, it’s appointed by the chief of police. You’re an appointed rank and you’re also at will so you can get appointed to inspector or commander, but you also can get demoted with no cause either.

So I remember one of my mentors, another mentor, a lieutenant, there was a captain and a lieutenant that were both good mentors to me there. The captain of the two mentors I had there pulled me aside after this complaint and said, “You did the right thing. He’s been harassing women here for years and somebody needed to stand up so you did the right thing.” He said, “But just know you’ll never make it past the rank of captain.” Because that lieutenant was very well-connected at the time to the chief of police, so very friendly with the chief of police that whole administration. So I said, “That’s fine. That’s fine.” I wasn’t thinking long-term longevity and promotion.

Tim Ferriss: So that actually ties into what I was going to ask you because it strikes me as an incredibly brave thing to do. I imagine not everyone in your situation would’ve done that. I mean, in fact, they didn’t. I mean, I imagine there’s a lot of fear around, there could be a lot of fear around the political or job, professional repercussions of voicing something like that, especially during a period when that was not common.

Cathy Lanier: Well, remember, my driver in life, Tim, if you think about this, and harassers work this way, my goal in life is to take care of my son. I’m a single mom and after he knew I made a complaint, he was threatening my job. He was really making it very difficult for me to come to work. It was terrifying to come to work. And I was fighting for my job, I can’t lose my job. I have a son to take care of and I’m not going to lose my job because somebody wants to be a bully. And that’s the motivation. It was terrible. I was sick to my stomach every day. I was going in the bathroom and throwing up. I mean, when I got to work and just every time I heard his voice on the radio, it was terrible for me, but I also couldn’t afford to lose my job. I was not going to let somebody force me out of my goal. And I had a son to take care of, so I couldn’t afford that. I was going to fight until I knew that I was safe.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it’s a focusing, forcing function, right? I mean, having that singular priority. So it seems like, I mean, the predictions about you never rising above the rank of, what was it, captain?

Cathy Lanier: Captain.

Tim Ferriss: Seems like that fellow wasn’t exactly the Nostradamus of predicting the future. So could you walk us through how things progressed and why were you able to continue to excel? Did his prediction just turn out to be completely false.

Cathy Lanier: I think it would have been accurate. I tell you what, the stars aligned for me. So I took sergeant test at three years. I was eligible for lieutenant at five. I took the lieutenant’s test at five years. I came in number one on that test. I took the captain’s test, seven years, I came in number three on that test. So I got promoted bang, bang, bang, three years, five years, seven years. I was a captain in seven years. I would have never gone past the rank of captain in that current administration. And then Marion Barry gets arrested, our mayor, Marion Barry is taken out and replaced by the control board. The control board comes in 1998. I’m a captain at the time. Marion Barry is now taken out of play. The control board takes over. They bring in Chuck Ramsey, an outsider who knows nobody in the department.

He doesn’t know anybody. He’s got no clique. He’s got no boys. Everybody’s fresh. So he comes in as I’m a lieutenant just making captain, takes over the police department as a complete outsider and is doing his assessment of what officials, what command level officials he wanted to have on his team. And he appointed me from the rank of captain to be an inspector to take over major narcotics branch with less than eight years on the job. I was 29, I think.

Tim Ferriss: All right. Then Chuck makes his appearance. Right. Okay. Charles Ramsey.

Cathy Lanier: He’s the next big mentor.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. Okay. So just for honestly, my personal curiosity, because I really know nothing about how police structures work. What is a captain doing? And then what does an inspector do, if you don’t mind?

Cathy Lanier: So again, this is where I think the police department gets right. You spend three years as a patrol officer, you make sergeant, you study really hard, you take the test, you make sergeant, you go through some schools. After you make sergeant, you manage a small group, then you make lieutenant two years later, you go through the exam process, you go through some schools after that, and then you manage a platoon of 40. When I was a lieutenant, I had narcotics officers, I had detectives, and I had patrol.

Tim Ferriss: How are those 40 people determined? Is it based on neighborhood or some type of geographic area?

Cathy Lanier: So at that time, it’s done differently and over the course of the years, it’s changed, but at that time it was geographically. So I had a patrol district, and of that patrol district, I had one third of that patrol district, and I managed every resource for that part of the district. So all three shifts. I had day work, midnights, evening shift, all three shifts. Those officers are split across those three shifts, and they covered all the policing. So not just the 911 responders, the guys in uniform going to 911 calls, but also your narcotics officers and your detectives that follow up and investigate crimes.

Tim Ferriss: This is lieutenant.

Cathy Lanier: That’s lieutenant.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So lieutenant, is that the first time where you’re getting the decathlete’s exposure to all of these different things?

Cathy Lanier: Yes. And you’re also getting exposure to administration. So part of that promotional exam is studying administration. You have to learn administration. So if there are municipal regulations that need to be changed, and I’m managing a large part of the portion of the District of Columbia, I see a municipal regulation needs to be changed, I need to know the process to petition to change that municipal regulation. How do I go about changing that law? Because I’m seeing firsthand the impact it’s having in our neighborhoods, so police administration starts to become more and more important there. I also now can start influencing policy. I can influence policy for my little piece of the world. I decide what my drug enforcement tactics are going to be. I decide how we’re going to work in terms of doing warrant service and things like that. So that’s where you first start to get a better understanding of influencing how policing actually is carried out.

Tim Ferriss: Not to minimize the prior steps, but it sounds like the lieutenant role is a very dense learning opportunity based on the description.

Cathy Lanier: And I think the best role, the best rank on the police department for me was lieutenant. I was able to still go out on the street, support my troops, back up my sergeants, have fun policing and do the policing that I enjoyed, but I also had the ability to change the environment for them, help them, and also influence how we were policing our community.

After captain, it gets — the captain is more — you’re strapped to your desk a lot more.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say more behind the desk.

Cathy Lanier: You’re reviewing bad arrests, that a sergeant didn’t do the right thing and review the paperwork. Now you’ve got a bad arrest that’s got to be detention journaled. So you’ve got to review and make that decision. You’ve got to set things up at the courts. You’ve got to look at all the disciplinary investigations that come in. Officers getting disciplined for things. You’ve got to make decisions about that. You sit on trial boards. Who’s going to get disciplined? Who’s going to get terminated? It’s very administrative. You’re helping the commander make decisions, community meetings, deployment decisions, and it’s not as much fun.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I know a few people in law enforcement, but mostly military, former military guys. And I mean, very similar. Some of these guys, they just love being in the field and they’re like, “I got promoted.” It’s like, “I just don’t know how I feel about it.” There’s very mixed excuses.

Cathy Lanier: Well, here’s the big key. When I went to go change my uniform, so you go to property division, when you get promoted, you walk off the stage, you get your birds or whatever you’re getting, your clusters or whatever for your new rank. You go to the property division, you get your new rank insignia. When I made captain and I went over to property division to get my new rank insignia, they said, “Turn in your handcuffs.”

And I was like, “What? Turn in my handcuffs? What are you talking about?”

“Well, you don’t need those anymore.”

I’m like, “You’re not taking my handcuffs. I’m going to keep my handcuffs. Right here. Right here.”

I kept my gun belt. I kept my gun belt, my handcuffs, my extra magazines, all those things that the administrative captains used to turn in. I’m like, “No, I’m keeping this stuff.”

Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Chuck. And because I’m so unfamiliar with the internal workings, it’s hard for me to pick the next sort of flashpoint, maybe a seminal moment for you. I mean, there’s a lot to pick from. I’m not sure how to put them in order, not that they have to be in order, but maybe tell me if there’s something that we just talked about before this. But you mentioned Chuck, pushing you to take tough assignments. Is special operations division, is that a sensible place to hop to next? Or what do you think? Are we skipping some important steps in between?

Cathy Lanier: When Chuck came in and he initially put me in charge, I’d only been a captain, I want to say four or five months, and he kind of did a clean out at the top. A lot of that old boy network that was there when he got there, they were all people that were long past retirement. So he pushed a lot of the command staff out. So that made him push people up pretty young in their career. So he pushed me up to be the commander of major narcotics branch as an inspector, like I said, just under eight years on. So I was very young and I had a major role —

Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. I’m trying to do the math. How old were you then at that point?

Cathy Lanier: So I want to say I was 30-ish, 30, 31. I made the narcotics branch.

Tim Ferriss: Man, that’s amazing. That is a lot of responsibility. Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: And so, I went to major narcotics branch. I was there for — so I had major narcotics branch and vehicular homicide. So I managed all the vehicular homicide investigative units there for just under two years. And then he promoted me again to commander. And I took over a patrol district, the fourth district where Mount Pleasant sits. The patrol district I started in, I went back now and I was the commander of that patrol district. It was the largest residential area in the city of Washington. So I took over that district. I ran that for two years, and then Chuck got a way. He called me down to his office and he says, “I’m thinking I’m going to send you to SOD.” It was 9/11 happens. The Friday after 9/11, he says, “I think I’m going to send you to special operations division.”

I was like, “You know what? I love being the district commander. I love working in 4D. My goal was to retire as the commander of 4D. Thanks, but I really like where I am.”

And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” And then two days later, a teletype came out transferring me to SOD. So it wasn’t really asking me. He’s like, “Oh, okay.”

Tim Ferriss: He’s like, “That’s a great story. Thank you for that.”

Cathy Lanier: Yeah, funny. Right. “Glad to hear it.”

So I took over special ops. Now, special operations division had never had a woman in charge. So that in itself was a little intimidating. But the one thing that when you talk about mentors, and I know you probably have experienced this like many others, is what a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don’t have. Chuck recognized that I didn’t have the confidence. I was intimidated by this SOD thing. I was like, yeah, no. Never had a woman in charge. It’s a predominantly male. I always say the most testosterone in the police departments in SOD. It’s the bomb squad, the SWAT team, Harbor, the Marine Unit, the helicopter unit, aviation, horse-mounted unit, K-9, civil disturbance unit, the presidential protection unit. So it’s like nine or 10 different units, your high-end stuff. So anyway, he recognized that I was intimidated by that. And he’s like, “Mm-mm, you’re going to go and you’re going to do it.”

He sent me off to a bunch of schools. I went to EOD schools, bombing schools, so I learned how to manage a bomb squad. I learned how to manage a SWAT team and the people there were great. That was my best assignment in my entire career. I spent six years there after 9/11, recreating our special operations division and turning it into a Homeland Security and counterterrorism unit.

Tim Ferriss: What made it so good for you, that particular role?

Cathy Lanier: Well, it was the most complex role I’d ever held. Most of the units I managed, I had to manage three or four different type of specialties. I had to manage nine different specialties, and they were highly special. These were highly trying — sniper teams on the SWAT teams, negotiations unit, the bomb squad. We were just after 9/11 and we were trying to evolve our department from a pre 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol to a post 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol. We got caught flatfooted on 9/11 and we should not have been. We didn’t have the skills, training, equipment, and things that we should have had. I always say Timothy McVeigh was, that Oklahoma City bombing was the wake-up call. That’s when we should have started changing the way we train and prepare our police officers, but we didn’t.

And then there’s the first World Trade Center bombing. That was another wake-up call. We didn’t respond to that. It was not until 9/11 that the nation’s police departments and the largest cities really realized that we have to be prepared for this type of asymmetric threat that we’re now facing. So when Chuck put me in charge of SOD, he said, “I want you to create the homeland security capabilities that we need, not just in SOD, but across the whole department.”

So he gave me a blank check to create a brand new police philosophy in the Metropolitan Police Department. So we created the Homeland Security Counterterrorism Bureau. We created CBR&E. My first year, we got $17 million in funding to buy level A suits to send our people down to Anniston, Alabama. I went down to Anniston, Alabama. I trained in Sarin and VX, live Sarin and VX gas. We were trained to do rescues in hot zones. We went down to Nevada and trained on rad environments, radiological environments. We trained with — I was one of the few people that was fortunate enough to train with Ken Alibek and Bill Patrick, two bioweapons scientists, one from Russia and one from the US, taught my bioweapons class, how to respond to biological threats, anthrax, right? We had anthrax in Washington, DC. These are all things that I was on the front end of creating, and I got to go through all of that training and all of that experience with my whole team. And the Metropolitan Police Department, when we were finished that six years of evolution, was a completely different place.

Tim Ferriss: This is a good time to, I think, come back to something I kind of promised to listeners that we would revisit, and it goes all the way back. We’re not going to go all the way back to Mount Pleasant, but when you were first day on the job, five days, and you’re looking at it, and you’re thinking to yourself, “We’re not doing this the right way. We can’t even communicate with these community members. Furthermore, we’re not even trying to set the message straight.”

And then if we flash forward, I have notes that are a bit scattered here, but I have notes on embracing technology. So this is from governing.com. I want to give credit where credit is due. So this relates to looking for new ways to connect the community to the police, in the case of the police. So the creation of an anonymous text tip line, cleverly named 50 411. Am I saying that the right way?

Cathy Lanier: Give the 5-0, the 411, right?

Tim Ferriss: The 5-0. I’m such an idiot.

Cathy Lanier: We are the 5-0, like the cop, you know, they used to call us the 5-0 back in the old days and 411, you know 411.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So in 2008, it received 292 tips. By the end of 2011, that number jumped to 1200.

Cathy Lanier: 1200. Yeah. We got up to about 2800.

Tim Ferriss: 2800. Right. And there are many examples of how that ended up being valuable. And then there’s a whole separate topic, which is maybe related but different, which is cultivating sources, right? So like developing sources, getting to know people, and this is quoting from the same piece, but you treat people with respect, you establish relationships. And God, I’m trying to think of some of these examples that I read about separately, but this seems to all probably feed into a lot of what you were doing in that overhaul later, right?

Cathy Lanier: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m just wondering if you have any other examples of sort of cultivating a access to helpful information, right? Not just drowning in noise. I’m wondering how you even thought about that. Because I imagine one of the challenges at that time, probably even still today, but especially post 9/11 in the wake of that, that there’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. If you want more information or tips, there’s probably going to be an overwhelming amount depending on how you solicit and how you search for it. So how did you think of separating signal from noise?

Cathy Lanier: So for me, it was pretty simple and it does go back to Mount Pleasant. Again, pretty intuitive on your part not having been in policing. So when I became the chief of police, a couple of commitments I made to myself and to the community was that we had a tendency to place higher value on some neighborhoods and some crimes than others. And our job is to protect all of the community and every crime should be equally important to us. If we’re not preventing crimes, we’re not being successful, making arrests. We used to publish our arrest stats every year and go, “Oh, look, we made 50,000 arrests last year. Look how successful we are.”

Well, that’s 50,000 times. We didn’t do our job because we didn’t prevent those crimes from happening. So to me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department. Now, I don’t have a stat that can tell you what I prevented, but the goal should be to try and prevent. So for me, what was very clear is, so when I first took over as chief, I promised I was going to go on the scene of every single homicide. Why? Because I wanted people in the communities to know it didn’t matter what neighborhood you lived in or what the circumstances of that homicide was, that homicide’s just as important to us as every other homicide. So homicide in Georgetown, in the very expensive, wealthy neighborhood, if there was a homicide there, it would get news coverage for weeks and police were all over it. And almost always those crimes would be closed. But if there was a homicide in a public housing project, it got little to no news coverage. Three people shot last night in Southeast.

That was it. That’s all you hear. And nothing about those people or what happened with those crimes. And they very rarely got closed. So I put an emphasis on trying to cultivate those relationships in the community. And it was clear to me two things. People didn’t trust us, they didn’t trust the police, and we didn’t close these homicides, because witnesses wouldn’t come forward. They wouldn’t come forward, because they didn’t trust us. And so, we had to change that. So I had a great example. I was out, we did a crime initiative during the summer called All Hands on Deck. So I was out on all hands on deck. I’m walking through a public housing complex and there’s two middle-aged women sitting on a wall outside in the summer. They’re drinking. They got open containers of alcohol, which is illegal. They could have been — in the old days when I was policing, we would just walk over and handcuff them, lock them up, take them to the station.

That’s open container alcohol. So I go over and I sit down, start talking to them. There had been a series of shootings in this complex and I said, “Hey.”

She’s like, “I don’t know why you guys are here. You don’t care about us.”

Kind of giving me the lip. And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll tell you what, here’s my business card. My cell phone number’s on here.” First of all, they had no idea it was a chief. I’m just the cop. They don’t watch the local news. They don’t know that I’m the chief. “Here’s my business card. If you have any information and you want to talk to me about anything that’s going on here, and tell me who’s out here shooting in the middle of the night, hit these kids that are on the tennis court, on the basketball court, please let me know.”

And when I walk over to the two ladies, they kind of take their beer and stick it behind the wall. I was like, “You know you’re not supposed to be drinking out here, but I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”

So I give them my business card. I give them that respect. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Talk to them with a little respect. I give them my business card, my cell phone number’s on there. About two weeks later, I get a call at one o’clock in the morning, and it was a woman’s voice. Don’t know if it was those women, can’t prove it, don’t know to this day. But I get a call about one o’clock in the morning. There was a shooting in that neighborhood, and the woman’s voice said to me, “Tell your officers that the gun is behind the white Escalade.”

And I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

She says, “On Cloud Street…” She gave me the address on Cloud Street. She said, “There’s a white Escalade. The gun is there.”

So I turn on my police radio half asleep, switch to the sixth district where that address is, and sure enough, they’re working a shooting. And I went over the radio, I said, “Cruiser one, who’s the on scene official? Have him call me.” He calls me and I said, “Look, I just got a tip from somebody that there’s a gun involved in this case and this is where the gun is.”

Sure enough, that’s where the gun was. They recovered that gun. From that recovery of that gun, they were able to start working this case and actually get information. So I always tie that back to, I strongly believe that the fact that I walked over to those women, I showed them a little respect. I sat on the wall with them. I didn’t lock them up for the open container of alcohol. They weren’t hurting anybody. I sat and chatted with them. I gave them my cell number and said, “Look, I want to help, but if you don’t give me information, I can’t help.”

So that’s the philosophy that I wanted all of my cops to have. That’s the way I wanted all of us to lease our communities. I wanted people to see that you give me information, you’ll see results. You tell me who’s involved in shooting up the neighborhood. We’ll go after them. We will make arrests. So we started doing, instead of just putting posters up when a homicide occurred, when we made an arrest for the homicide, we went back and put posters up saying the case is closed. Reverse canvas. Instead of just telling you when something bad happens, we’re going to tell you when we close it. So now people know that we’ve taken that person off the street and those little things matter.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Matter a lot. I want to please confirm or deny this, but I am in the course of speaking with you and certainly in the course of doing homework for this conversation, impressed with your attention to detail, which comes back also to my signal versus noise, because I am dazzled by your ability to manage all of these details. And tell me if this is a complete dead end, but it seems like you demonstrated this really, really early on. And we’ll come back to where we were in the timeline, but this is how you had a job at 16 as a secretary at a commercial real estate firm. Am I getting that right? And you handled —

Cathy Lanier: That’s Eisinger Kilbane.

Tim Ferriss: You handled tenant billing, right?

Cathy Lanier: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it seems like you’ve practiced this or just had this ability that you’ve honed over time. Thousands of pieces of correspondence come through the police department every day, but you’re also talking about learning, I think at that job to never let anything that’s got your name on it be imperfect. And it’s just like, how come —

Cathy Lanier: Sound familiar, Tim?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, yes, there’s that also. My incredibly helpful slash —

Cathy Lanier: OCD?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brain damage too, saying OCD. But as you have a job that increases in scope upon scope, upon scope, upon scope, and how do you build systems that help you to keep track of these things, right? Because not everyone is going to have necessarily your eye for detail or capacity to remember the details in that photograph that flash for a fraction of time that you then need to recall. So it seems like ultimately, and I am cheating a little bit, because when you sent and we asked for some notes in advance of this conversation, I’ll just read one thing here, because —

Cathy Lanier: I don’t remember now, so you’re going to get me on this.

Tim Ferriss: Great. Yeah, no, it’s good. It just says, “No hacks for me. I try to focus on systems or strategies that will hold up over time.”

And I’m wondering, for instance, whether it’s in your current role or where we left off in terms of your timeline, as you’re soliciting information from the community and they’re offering more, because you’re showing not just the announcement of the bad thing, but that you actually took action related to their help that closed cases, et cetera, et cetera. How do you ensure that the department or the organization that you’re a part of is equipped to digest that? And I’m not sure that’s an easy question to answer, but I’ll just leave it there.

Cathy Lanier: No, it’s not an easy question to answer, but I would say this — I pushed technology very, very hard once I became the chief. When I took over as a chief, we had Teletubby pagers. We didn’t even have cell phones, and I wanted everybody to have smartphones. The early smartphones, the first one we got was a Trio. We had Palm Pilots and Trios, right? If you remember that far back.

Tim Ferriss: Sure, I do.

Cathy Lanier: And then we pushed putting computers in the cars and we pushed the technology, gunshot detection technology, cameras, integrating those gunshot detection technology cameras, all those things together. I really wanted technology to be those systems, right? Taking all this great technology that’s coming out, make us more effective and more efficient as police officers. Instead of spending three hours handwriting an accident report, we could pull up on the scene of an accident report, have a iPad or a laptop in the cruiser that GPS drops the intersection on a police report and all’s I got to do is plink a little car down there and my police report now takes 10 minutes instead of two hours.

So I brought all this technology, the systems that made us better, it made us more effective. And I relied a lot on people. I mean, everything I did, I learned from the people that work for me and the people in the community. I made it a point to go out and talk to people and listen. Everything I learned about fighting crime that was effective, I got it from walking around the community and giving my cell phone number out, listening to what people had to say. Because if you listen to people, they will tell you what to do.

And my officers, my detectives, my sergeants, my lieutenants, those guys, when I did my strategic planning sessions, I would bring in from all of those groups and brainstorm with them. What are the things we need? How can we do better? What do you need that you don’t have? What are the crime trends that you’re seeing? But when I witnessed this evolution of technology and crime, and we had to get our police department to adjust to meet that evolution. We hire cops for a 25-year career. And when this technological crime evolution was happening, we had detectives that didn’t know how to manage a crime scene with seven different cameras they had to download to get video of the crime scene. They didn’t know how to mobily, forensically dump a phone. You arrest a guy who just did some armed robberies. And the biggest case, and I’m sure in your research, you saw this Thomas Maslin case.

There was a case that really kind of set this in stone for me. There’s this poor gentleman who was robbed for his cell phone one night, he’s beaten with a baseball bat. They crush his skull, they take his phone. Those same suspects, we find Mr. Maslin the next day with his skull crushed, barely alive, no cell phone. We don’t know where his cell phone is. He’s in the hospital. Well, what we don’t know is that same night right after they robbed him, that same group of kids went to Adams Morgan, another neighborhood, and they robbed three more people and they were arrested. And when they were arrested, they had multiple cell phones on them. They were robbing people for their cell phones, because they were going to go and turn those phones in and make money. And all those cell phones were recovered as evidence and put on the books, but nobody knew that Thomas Maslin’s phone was in that books, because we didn’t have anybody that had the digital forensic skill to dump those phones and figure out whose phones they were.

And when we finally did figure that out months later, I said, “This is never going to happen again. We need to have people that are trained to have that skill. And if we can’t train our detectives to do it or they don’t have the bandwidth to do it, then we’re going to hire civilians to do it, but we’re going to have that skill and we’re going to have it out on the street daily.”

And so we did. We hired criminal research specialists, we hired some other civilians for digital forensics. And so, we went through this evolution and it is building systems that will endure over time and policing was not designed that way. So we had to really change the way we do policing. And now police departments are doing much better at keeping pace with technology.

Tim Ferriss: Before we get to maybe the differences between your experience in law enforcement and everything that preceded the NFL and the NFL, could you just give people an idea of the scope of your responsibilities at the NFL? What are you responsible for?

Cathy Lanier: Everything related to security. So executive protection, I set the standards for physical security and cybersecurity at the stadiums. So all of the stadiums, the 30 stadiums across the US and our international stadiums, a little bit of variation on the international, but across all the US stadiums, we set the requirements for security that they have to meet. So once we set that standard, we update it annually. We do the audits and red teaming and we make sure that they are meeting those standards. So physical security, cybersecurity, both. We also have investigative responsibilities. So violations of the personal conduct policy. Those are all investigations that are done by my team. We have game integrity, so management of the game integrity program. So making sure that we are maintaining the integrity of this game. There’s a lot involved in that.

If it’s got anything to do with security, it falls on us. Individually, the league office has full responsibility for Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, Combine, Draft, and all the international series games. So when I say we have nine international games this year, the reason scheduling this is so hard, each one of those international games, I will take a team out and advance at least two trips, if not three. And we’ve got nine international games this year. And I’m also working on, we plan Super Bowl about 18 months out in advance ’cause that’s 10 days of events over 20 some venues and then Draft. So Draft, I’m leaving for Pittsburgh on Sunday to go manage the Draft for the next seven or eight days. So special events, tentpole events, that’s a big, big part of it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So tons of free time.

Cathy Lanier: Tons of free time. 170 days on the road last year.

Tim Ferriss: Oh my Lordy. So red teaming is a really critical concept that I want people to understand. Some folks may recognize it within the context of say tech, given the types of people that I’ve interviewed before in terms of paying people to try to break into your systems, let’s just say, or to take down your service or to fill in the blank, but they’re on your side. And I wonder where red teaming, I should know this, comes from. It’s probably from hiring people —

Cathy Lanier: Military.

Tim Ferriss: Military —

Cathy Lanier: Military.

Tim Ferriss: — pretending to be the Soviets, right. Probably.

Cathy Lanier: It’s the military. I mean, it was a military concept initially. And think about it this way. You’ve got to look at it a little differently. I think on the tech side, it is a little different, but I think of red teaming as we set a standard, like, we think use of magnetometers to screen for weapons. We think use of a perimeter to make sure everybody goes through screening. All these standards we put in place of security. I can go and audit you and you have all those standards in place, but what a red team operation does is it’s quality assurance. Are those standards working? Did I tell you to do something that didn’t necessarily work? So it tells you if the standards that you were using are effective or not. It may be that you put them in place, but you didn’t execute them properly, so they’re not effective.

So if you’re not properly doing secondary screening, it’s not that the magnetometers didn’t work, it’s that your guard didn’t respond properly to an alert. So it’s a quality assurance. It’s a quality assurance test to see if the standards that you are employing or you’re requiring are being used properly and are they effective? That’s the key. It’s not a gotcha. It’s like, is what we’re doing effective? And if it’s not effective, how can we make it effective?

Tim Ferriss: How are your responsibilities or your job with the NFL most different from what you did beforehand? I’m just imagining there might be new constraints on what you can or can’t do, even though you’re coordinating with federal, state and local law entities. I mean, just imagining what that entails with 32 clubs makes my head spin. But how is it most different from what you did before?

Cathy Lanier: I’d say it’s most different in terms of its diversity. So I thought coming from 27 years in the nation’s capital, managing SOD, I managed every large event protest, demonstration. We had about 2,300 a year that I was responsible for when I was there. So I thought, and then presidential inaugurations, I was like, “This is easy. I can come to the NFL, this Super Bowl thing’s going to be nothing. This is going to be a walk in the park.” And the diversity here is, the complexity here is so much more. It’s so much more complex and the diversity. So I’m not only setting up the equivalent of a presidential inauguration that I did every four years before, every year it’s Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is more complex. It’s spread over 10 days, over 26 venues, and it moves every year. So it’s in a different place.

So I’ve got to build all those relationships. I’ve got to learn all those new venues. I’ve got to figure out security in a completely different climate. And in Minneapolis, it was 25 below zero. Guess what? Some technology doesn’t work in that 25 below zero. Some of the things that we do in Arizona’s not going to work in Minneapolis. And then now with international, we try and go and implement our full suite of security standards in Madrid and Sao Paulo and Australia and Munich. But when we get there, 20% of what we do is going to have to be adapted to the local environment. There’s laws and regulations and things that are different in different countries. Things that we do here, you can’t do there. Things they do there, we can’t do here. So the complexity of what I do now is far more complicated and it’s far more diverse than what I used to do.

Tim Ferriss: And by diverse, you just mean constantly shifting, like you mentioned, these different locations with —

Cathy Lanier: There’s no template. I can’t say, “Hey, it’s inauguration. This is what we do for the inauguration.” The ball sites are all the same. We do the same things. We know what to do with the inauguration. This is, every time it’s like you just take the old plan and throw it away, start all over. Pretty much, not completely, but pretty much.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no shortage of learning —

Cathy Lanier: You don’t want to start with any assumptions. No assumptions, that’s for sure.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to shift gears just a little bit. I’m wondering if, are there any books that you recommend or resources? This doesn’t have to be within the context of the NFL, but when I imagine you get approached by people who are hoping to learn from you in one way or another, or you are just mentoring people, whether that was in policing or within the NFL or in other contexts, are there any books that you recommend frequently to other people? It doesn’t need to be nonfiction, could be anything.

Cathy Lanier: So I’d say my favorite book of all times, and I made it mandatory reading for my command staff when I took over as the chief, which was a hoot because nobody ever made our command staff read anything before. And I also did a book club. I also used this book and did a book club with the community, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell. One of my all time favorite reads, because it forces you to understand that no matter what your challenge and no matter what your problem is, it goes back to problem solving. Whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve, there is a tipping point. You just have to know what that tipping point is. And I love that book. I’ve read it three times, I think. It’s a great book, so that’s one of my favorites. It just makes you think differently.

Tim Ferriss: What did you hope people reading it would take away to apply? How might that change how they act on the job or think and then therefore act on the job?

Cathy Lanier: Well, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, what your profession is. If you read The Tipping Point, the key point is that you can turn around any situation, you can solve any problem if you’re paying close enough attention to the details that you can hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point to turn around high levels of violence in a community? What is the tipping point to turn around whatever your problem is?

I would also say Blink. Blink is another one that I only read because I liked Malcolm Gladwell, but Blink, for people in high-paced professions, Blink is one that helps you really evaluate how you make decisions, how you rely on your instinct and your experience and how much that matters. So those are two of my favorites. And then the only thing I read, Tim, is stuff about my job. I read work stuff, so nothing really fun.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let me come back to the — I suppose this all relates, everything relates to making decisions, but especially performing under extreme and sustained pressure. And I would imagine that, of course, part of the hiring process for a lot of the people who report to you, let’s just say, or within your organization, you’re already vetting for people who can operate at a high level with sustained pressure, where they also have to be very good at improvising when conditions change and so on. But if you were teaching a class to, could be high school students, college students on sort of resilience and handling pressure, right, some people buckle and sometimes you learn by buckling and then you figure out how to approach it next time. What would you tell them about making decisions under pressure and acting under pressure as opposed to becoming paralyzed? How would you even begin to talk to them about that?

Cathy Lanier: I would say it’s — I don’t care who you are. It’s not 100% instinct, right. It is, your body’s going to react in a crisis to what it knows. So if it’s a situation where you have trained for it or you’ve thought about it or you’ve prepared for it, in your mind, you’ve walked through it, you’re going to be in a lot better position than if it’s something that’s never crossed your mind. This is where kind of preparedness crosses that line. And this is why we try and encourage people to be prepared. Know when you walk into a building, what are the two different ways you can get out, not just the way you came in. Is there other ways you can get out of this building? Right. So everybody’s going to freeze initially. I think to a certain extent, if you have no experience, nothing in your brain that your brain can go back to have you act.

But in terms of being in a workplace or a professional environment and making decisions as a leader, if you have the knowledge that you need, you’ve done your homework, you’ve read everything that there is to read, you’ve got your education, you’ve got experience, decision making becomes easy. Each time you go up at a different level of rank, as a sergeant, when I first made sergeant, making decisions was a little tough at first because I was still pretty inexperienced myself. So my job was to be more well-read, understand the DC code a little better than the patrol officer, know what case law says. So if I didn’t read that stuff and I didn’t study, I would be uncomfortable making decisions and I would hesitate to make decisions. We had a lot of people that don’t like to make decisions. But the more you read, the more you learn, the more you invest in your knowledge, the easier it is to make decisions.

To me, decisions now with all of the years I’m in 36 years in this business, and now again, I have two master’s degrees, I’ve studied, I’ve got all this experience, decisions for me like boom, boom, boom, boom. So it comes with experience. It comes with investment of time. It comes with preparing yourself to be able to make a decision. And of course people will throw things at me that I’ve never experienced before, but because I have all those other things to rely on, I can make a decision and I feel good about it.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I have to imagine also, this is true in a lot of contexts outside of security or law enforcement. Certainly applies to military, but it kind of applies everywhere, which is making decisions in the face of incomplete information. And so I’m wondering what you have learned about that, making decisions, biasing towards action when you have incomplete information. How do you think about that?

Cathy Lanier: It happens. It happens a lot, especially in first responder communities and military. Like you said, it happens a lot. You’re not always going to have a complete picture. Again, I think your comfort level with being able to make those decisions is going to fall back on, are you qualified to make that decision? If you feel qualified to make the decision, sometimes I got to make decisions without all the information. There’s two things that go along with that. One is, do the best you can based on what you know at the time, but know a decision has to be made. And then if you make the wrong decision, undo it, change it, fix it. Don’t just stick with it because you’ve got to be the boss. And this is what I said. Admit you’re wrong. Change course, go another direction. That’s where people get tripped up, right.

When I’m making a decision and I don’t have full information, I’m thinking to myself as I’m making this decision, “I can either go this way or I can go that way. If I go this way, what can go wrong? If I go this way, what can go wrong?” Okay, now I’m going to go this way. If one of those things goes wrong, consequence thinking, right. “If one of those things goes wrong, what’s my course of action then?” So if I’m making a decision with incomplete information, as I’m making that decision and giving that command, I’m thinking about how I’m going to deal with the collateral damage if that was the wrong decision ’cause that’s next. You make a bad decision, you can’t just go, “Oh shoot. Wow, darn.”

Tim Ferriss: Tough look. Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: You’ve got to — right, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. What are you going to do about it now? How are you going to fix it?

Tim Ferriss: So just a few more questions and then let you get back to your very busy day. If you could put, this is metaphorically speaking, like a message on a billboard or have a reminder on your desk that everybody sees when they come in. It could be a quote, could be a mantra, could be anything. If you could put it on a billboard for millions of people to see, what might that be? I mean, is there anything that comes to mind? Could be someone else’s quote, could be something that you try to live your life by, could be something you want everybody who’s within your organization to be reminded of, or it could be something else entirely. Does anything come to mind?

Cathy Lanier: I mean, I tell people all the time, bad things happen to everybody. Bad things happen to everybody. And a lot of times it’s we do it to ourself. We make bad decisions, bad things happen to us because of ourselves. Bad things happen to everybody. It’s not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you; it’s what you do after that. So it’s easy to have some tragedy or some terrible thing happen to you and sit around and feel sorry for yourself or become a victim or let it define you. It’s your attitude and your effort that you put into how you recover. So it’s not what happens to you. It’s not the bad thing.

It’s how you handle those things that really matter in life because you can have one of two attitudes every time something bad happens, which attitude are you going to pick? For me, it’s going to be, I wish that never had happened. I wish I’d never made that decision. I wish that had never happened, but you know what, I’m going to fix it. I’m going to not let it define me. I’m not going to let it take me down.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Cathy, I mean, I think that’s a pretty strong way to land this plane. I’m so —

Cathy Lanier: You have the coolest job, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: It’s so fun.

Cathy Lanier: I can’t imagine how much you get to learn talking to so many people and you must have an encyclopedia in your brain.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the best job. And it didn’t come from some big long-term plan. It was kind of zigging and zagging with, frankly, I mean, tying into what you said, some really — in retrospect, with the information I had at the time, there were good decisions about various things, starting books, but made some terrible decisions on deadlines where there were kind of suicide missions and ultimately just adapted and tried to make the best of a sequence of, I would say, in retrospect, kind of poor decisions led to one of the best decisions, which I never thought would become this. And here we are. And thanks for —

Cathy Lanier: Good for you.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for being willing to do the dance and play some improv jazz in this conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to say or add, suggest to people, request of people, anything at all before we wind to a close?

Cathy Lanier: No, just was a fascinating couple of hours with you. I’m an avid follower and really enjoyed my time here, so thank you for including me.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, definitely. Cathy, thank you so much. I hope we get to see each other at some point. Who knows? Might get to your neck of the world. Probably will, actually.

Cathy Lanier: Please let me know if you do. New York or DC, look me up.

Tim Ferriss: I’m in both. So I’ll keep you posted. Thank you again for the time.

Cathy Lanier: Okay. All right.Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening, we’ll have show notes, links to everything that we talked about at tim.blog/podcast as per usual. Just search for Cathy and you will find this episode. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.

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

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862)

2026-04-24 05:21:33

Cathy Lanier serves as the chief security officer (CSO) for the National Football League (NFL). As the league’s CSO, she supervises all operations and activities of the NFL Security Department—overseeing coordination with the league office and all 32 clubs and working with federal, state, and local law entities to ensure the security of the NFL’s venues, fans, players, staff, and infrastructure.

Prior to her work at the NFL, Cathy served as chief of police with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) from 2007 to 2016, becoming the first female police chief of the nation’s capital, the first commanding officer of Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism for D.C. Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force. Her innovative strategies were credited with reducing violent crime in Washington by 21 percent from 2007 to 2015, while the city’s population grew by 15 percent.

Cathy is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s Drug Unit Commanders Academy. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in management from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in national security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

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

Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Cathy Lanier:

Books

Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It by Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

People

Companies, Institutions, & Organizations

Center for Domestic Preparedness (FEMA)
FBI National Academy (FBI)
Johns Hopkins University (JHU)
Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPDC)
National Football League (NFL)
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS)
Nevada National Security Site (NNSS)
Prince George’s Community College (PGCC)
Promark Partners
US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

Events & Cases

Tools, Technologies, & Chemical/Biological Agents Referenced

Palm Treo
PalmPilot
Sarin
Text the Police: 50411 | Metropolitan Police Department of DC
VX (Nerve Agent)

Concepts

Timestamps

[00:00] Start.
[01:38] Cathy Lanier: from Tuxedo to the top.
[03:22] Dad vanishes; Mom holds the line (and takes shorthand to the TV).
[08:08] Bused into DC: straight-A student turns chronic truant.
[10:37] Married at 15, signed over for $100 off child support.
[12:54] The baby-in-the-crib wake-up call.
[16:37] GED by a single point; secretary by day, waitress by night.
[20:18] The Washington Post ad that changed everything.
[20:39] 1990 MPD: into the crack cocaine wars.
[23:46] Grandma’s gospel: no excuses, damned for doing.
[26:23] Mount Pleasant riots: trial by brick, and a better-way epiphany.
[33:23] Donny Exum’s nudge — and sergeant at 26.
[38:56] Being a woman on the ’90s force: harassment and the 90-day dodge.
[49:38] Marion Barry exits, Chuck Ramsey enters.
[51:08] Lieutenant: the sweet spot. Captain: the desk (but keep the cuffs).
[56:58] 9/11 and the surprise transfer to Special Ops.
[58:07] Mentors lend confidence — and a counterterrorism bureau built from scratch.
[1:00:14] Live Sarin, VX, and training with bioweapons legends.
[1:02:22] Text the 50, get the 411: the tip line gambit.
[1:03:36] Cultivating sources: the white Escalade payoff.
[1:09:02] Attention to detail: OCD as a superpower.
[1:10:43] Teletubby pagers to smartphones — and the Thomas Maslin reckoning.
[1:15:14] NFL security: the scope of “everything.”
[1:17:10] Red teaming, explained.
[1:18:53] NFL vs. MPD: diversity and complexity that goes to 11.
[1:21:24] The book club: The Tipping Point and Blink.
[1:23:32] Decisions under pressure — and with incomplete information.
[1:28:34] Billboard wisdom: it’s not what happens; it’s what you do.
[1:30:08] Parting thoughts.

CATHY LANIER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“You’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You better be damned for doing.”

— Cathy Lanier

“I’m not an excuse person. I don’t make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation, I did something to get myself here and I’m going to get myself out.”

— Cathy Lanier

“What a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don’t have.”

— Cathy Lanier

“To me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department.”

— Cathy Lanier

“Effective communication, both verbal and written, is critical for professional success. And it is a skill that develops over time, the listening part of it more importantly than the communicating part.”

— Cathy Lanier

“Bad things happen to everybody. It’s not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you; it’s what you do after that.”

— Cathy Lanier

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Want to hear another episode with the author whose books became required reading for Cathy’s command staff? Listen to my conversation with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, in which we discussed the ideas behind The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, creative “recipes” for storytelling, his years at The Washington Post, lessons from Revisionist History, taking and organizing notes, the advantages of disadvantages, flaws that turned into strengths, writing in noisy public places, and much more.

The post Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies (#861)

2026-04-17 02:12:09

Welcome to another episode featuring a 4-Hour Workweek case study—a conversation with someone who has read the book, applied it, and built a life and a businesses I never could have imagined. In this episode, we have Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion. We cover geoarbitrage, testing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and—the chapter almost everyone skips—Filling the Void.

Full introduction

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