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January 18, 2025

Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting (#788)

This episode is more of a debate than my usual interviews. I hope you enjoy the extra spice, and if you like it, please let me know at @tferriss on X. This is a sharp contrast with the Dr. Becky Kennedy episode, and I encourage you to listen to both.

Aaron Stupple (@astupple) is a board-certified internal medicine physician. He focuses on reviving the non-coercive parenting movement derived from the philosophy of Popper and Deutsch called Taking Children Seriously. His book, The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents, gives practical examples of this freedom-maximizing approach to parenting, gleaned from his experience as a father of five.

Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the co-founder of AngelList. He has invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega-successes, such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Opendoor, Postmates, and Wish.

Please enjoy!

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Want to hear the episode with David Deutsch and Naval? Listen to our conversation here in which we discussed dispelling common misconceptions about science, the four strands and the benefits of understanding them, how quantum computing arose from trying to test a multiverse theory, what a good explanation looks like, how conjecture and criticism can give us a basis for optimism, AI vs. AGI, Taking Children Seriously, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Aaron Stupple:

Website | Twitter

Connect with Naval Ravikant:

Website | Twitter | Airchat

The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents by Aaron Stupple and Logan Chipkin | Amazon Advancing Critical Rationalism | Conjecture Institute A New View of Children | Taking Children Seriously Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #784 David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant — The Fabric of Reality, The Importance of Disobedience, The Inevitability of Artificial General Intelligence, Finding Good Problems, Redefining Wealth, Foundations of True Knowledge, Harnessing Optimism, Quantum Computing, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #662 Epistemology | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy What Is Feminism? | International Women’s Development Agency The Lindy Effect | ModelThinkers Orajel Kids Paw Patrol Anti-Cavity Fluoride Toothpaste | Amazon The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik , Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl | Amazon How Experience Changes Brain Plasticity (Neuroplasticity) | Verywell Mind Your Fat Cells Never Disappear — Making Future Weight Gain More Likely | Discover Magazine Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood by A.S. Neill and Albert Lamb | Amazon Lord of the Flies by William Golding | Amazon Objectified | Prime Video Strategic Design & Innovation Consulting Firm | Smart Design Make Your Mark | Frog Design UNO | Amazon Pokémon Assorted Cards | Amazon The Convoluted History of the Double-Helix | Royal Society The Four Humors, Explained | Patrick Kelly What Are Newton’s Laws of Motion? | Space Einstein’s Law of Motion | ProofWiki Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferriss | Amazon Unschooling vs. Homeschooling — What’s the Difference? | Unschooling Mom2Mom AGI (with David Deutsch) | Reason Is Fun #1 Is Cyberbullying More Detrimental than Face-to-Face Bullying? | Applied Social Psychology | Penn State Swedish Fish | Amazon 5-hour Energy Shots | Amazon Caffeine-Free Diet Coke | Amazon La Vida Mas Fina | Corona Elon Musk: Starship Will ‘Protect the Light of Consciousness’ | Popular Mechanics Weighing the Pros and Cons of Organized Sports for Kids | Piedmont The Health Benefits of Ice Skating | Oxford City Leisure Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope | Prime Video A Community Built for Learners | St. Paul’s School 12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time — The Only Post You’ll Ever Need | Tim Ferriss 13 Tips and Tricks to Become Better at Math | One Education Good Writing in a Bad Place: How One Incarcerated Writer Feeds His Craft | Literary Hub Educate to Indoctrinate: Education Systems Were First Designed to Suppress Dissent | UCSD In What Countries is Homeschooling Illegal and Legal? | How Do I Homeschool Radiohead Public Library The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris | Amazon Catan Base Game | Amazon Self-Driving Cars Explained | 1440 Daily Body Electric | NPR What to Bring to the Emergency Room | SignatureCare ER Aaron Stupple’s Dementia Thread | Twitter The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch | Amazon The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — And Its Implications by David Deutsch | Amazon Apple iPad | Amazon Doomscrolling Dangers | Harvard Health Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep — How to Improve Sleep, How Sleep Ties Into Alzheimer’s Disease and Weight Gain, and How Medications (Ambien, Trazodone, etc.), Caffeine, THC/CBD, Psychedelics, Exercise, Smart Drugs, Fasting, and More Affect Sleep | The Tim Ferriss Show #650 Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #654 Sugar: Does it Really Cause Hyperactivity? | EatRight.org Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookies | Amazon Inside TikTok’s Dangerously Addictive Algorithm | Online Journalism Awards Pavlov’s Dog Experiment: For Whom the Bell Tolls | United 4 Social Change Rick Rubin: “I Have No Technical Ability. And I Know Nothing About Music.” | 60 Minutes Cocolemon — We Are Lemon! | YouTube CoComelon — Nursery Rhymes | YouTube Elon Musk Streams His ”Totally Not Boosted” ‘Path of Exile 2’ Character, Proves He Has No Idea What He’s Doing | Vice Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Symptoms and Causes | Mayo Clinic Breastfeeding vs. Formula Feeding Information | Mount Sinai Is the Food Pyramid Obsolete? | NPR Herd Immunity and COVID-19: What You Need to Know | Mayo Clinic New Pentagon Report on Ufos Includes Hundreds of New Incidents but No Evidence of Aliens | AP NewsSHOW NOTES[00:08:40] Who is Aaron, and what makes him qualified to dispense parenting advice?[00:13:44] Taking Children Seriously (TCS) and The Sovereign Child philosophies.[00:17:49] The David Deutsch influence on these tenets.[00:22:57] Supporting evidence and long-term case studies.[00:27:17] Ways Naval and Aaron have incorporated these philosophies into their own parenting.[00:31:13] How rules work while parenting for freedom-maximizing.[00:37:42] Why building knowledge beats coercion.[00:43:41] Non-negotiables.[00:46:35] Is this method of parenting only accessible to the educated elite?[00:50:05] Handling sibling conflict.[00:54:41] How do freedom-maximized kids adapt to an adulthood of endless societal rules?[00:58:55] When kids present counter-accountability.[01:00:41] One tool does not fix all.[01:03:52] Putting mistakes to good use.[01:08:00] Homeschooling, unschooling, and socialization challenges.[01:15:56] Building resilience.[01:20:23] Coping with food and drink cravings.[01:25:54] Avoiding the terminology of confirmation bias.[01:31:37] Sports.[01:35:09] Organically cultivating interests.[01:38:11] The pros and cons of traditional schooling.[01:47:24] Parental disagreements and avoiding hypocrisy.[01:57:18] Four categories of harm that come from rules.[02:00:38] The benefits of optional constraints.[02:05:32] Body Electric.[02:07:03] Things you should know before visiting the emergency room.[02:13:18] A hierarchy of knowledge and lessons learned from this conversation.[02:17:19] Tactics for addressing sibling (and spousal) conflict.[02:19:47] Tactics to foster learning.[02:22:54] The best baby (and adult) sitter.[02:26:07] Parenting into the teen years.[02:27:54] Tactics for forming good sleep habits.[02:31:20] Tactics for encouraging good eating habits.[02:37:34] Tactics for freedom-maximizing.[02:42:56] Tactics for minimizing screen and social media obsession.[02:55:29] Too cool for rules.[03:00:14] All information is subject to challenge.[03:03:10] Happiness and creativity cannot be forced.MORE AARON STUPPLE QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I think rules give kids a reason to present a false persona to their parents. … It’s a disaster for their own self-confidence. I think it’s a disaster for the parents because kids are entering into this kind of dark contraband world where they’re keeping their parents in the dark.”
— Aaron Stupple

“I want to preserve interests. A kid that’s interested in something, that is absolutely precious and I want to cultivate that. I want to pour fuel on that fire.”
— Aaron Stupple

“Once a problem gets solved to the kid’s own understanding, it’s solved for the rest of their life.”
— Aaron Stupple

“Resilience comes from passion. It comes from an interest. When someone is just absolutely obsessed with some problem, they have the fortitude, the stick-to-it-iveness. Nothing approaches the stick-to-it-iveness of somebody who is just hell-bent on achieving something, building something, creating something.”
— Aaron Stupple

“The typical way of looking at parenting is the question of what do you allow and what do you disallow? … What my wife and I do is we step away from that question altogether and instead view problems as they arise and try to find solutions to those problems rather than appealing to rules.”
— Aaron Stupple

“Every time you force your child to do something, you inevitably set yourself up as an adversary to your kid. … If broccoli is really important, then it’s really important that broccoli is not confused by what your [parental] expectations are.”
— Aaron Stupple

“I think there’s a huge middle ground to relaxing rules. And one easy thing people can do right now is just say that instead of enforcing a rule, we think about it for 60 seconds. Just spend 60 seconds and think ‘Is there some solution to this that gets around this problem?'”
— Aaron Stupple

PEOPLE MENTIONEDDr. Becky Kennedy David Deutsch Karl Popper Sarah Fitz-Claridge Molly Ferriss Bryan Johnson Jordan Peterson Isaac Newton Albert Einstein Willy Wonka Lulie Tanett Elon Musk Osho Jalal al-Din Rumi Jorge Luis Borges Judith Rich Harris Klaus Teuber The Wright Brothers William Shakespeare William Butler Yeats Rick Rubin Abraham Lincoln Donald Trump Joe Biden

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Published on January 18, 2025 08:26

January 13, 2025

MY FIRST BOOK IN 7 YEARS (AND SOME BIG EXPERIMENTS)

“My tardiness in answering your letter was not due to press of business. Do not listen to that sort of excuse; I am at liberty, and so is anyone else who wishes to be at liberty. No man is at the mercy of affairs. He gets entangled in them of his own accord, and then flatters himself that being busy is a proof of happiness.”
— Seneca

“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
— Anaïs Nin

For me, 2025 will be a year of shipping new things. There’s lots in the hopper.

Today, I’m pleased to announce my first book in more than seven years.

It’s been in the works for a long time and is currently 500+ pages. This time around, I’ll be doing things very differently.

The book, tentatively titled THE NO BOOK, is a blueprint for how to get everything you want by saying no to everything you don’t. Don’t let the title mislead you; it’s probably the most life-affirming book I’ve ever written.

It details the exact strategies, philosophies, word-for-word scripts, tech, and more that I and others use to create focus, calm, and meaning in a world of overwhelming noise.

THE NO BOOK contains all of the best tricks and tools that I’ve collected over the last 15 years, in addition to those of world-class performers. Lots of my friends make cameos, and I’m sharing details that I’ve kept closely guarded until now. If you’ve wanted to know how my life and business work with only three full-time employees, this will show you.

What else is different about this book?

– Though I drafted the bones years ago, I brought in a close friend as a co-writer and co-experimenter. This is my first time ever collaborating on a book, and it’s been an amazing and hilarious adventure. I’m thrilled with the results, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

– Unlike my last five books, we’re going to first release this one serially, one chapter or a handful of chapters at a time.

– We will also create a community for early readers, who will be able to read and experiment together, support one another, and provide us with feedback on the book. We want people to change their lives with this book, and for that, reading isn’t enough. It must be applied, and we feel that the community, combined with serial release, will help produce real action with real results.

– The plan may change. In keeping with the theme of the book, if the community or serial release turn into more headache than fun, or more emergency brake than accelerator, we’ll renegotiate and try something else.

– To read THE NO BOOK first and get other exclusives, you just need to subscribe to my free 5-Bullet Friday newsletter. That’s where the magic will happen. It’s easy to unsubscribe anytime.

***

Now, I don’t want to give too many spoilers, and the exact timeline will be announced soon, but I won’t leave you without a sample.

Two chapters are coming up tout de suite.

But first, what of that collaborator?

Well, he made an appearance in The 4-Hour Body when I force-fed him into gaining muscle, but he’s better known as the ten-time New York Times best-selling author of The Game, The Dirt, Emergency, and others. He’s written liner notes for Nirvana and received hate mail from Phil Collins. He did a decade-long tour of duty at The New York Times, wrote cover stories for Rolling Stone, and almost got killed by an ax-wielding polyamorous lunatic in The Truth. He and I even have the same haircut.

Most relevant here, he busted my balls for not finishing this book sooner, and that’s how we ended up here.

So why don’t I let him tell the story in his words?

INTRODUCTION
By Neil Strauss

The goal of life is to make good decisions.

And decisions are the simplest thing in the world. They just consist of a single choice between two words: yes or no.

Through this binary choice, much like the way a computer builds digital worlds out of 0s and 1s, we create our destiny.

These two options, however, are not created equal. There is just a tiny sliver of the world that we have the time to experience. So, we are called to filter through the nearly infinite spectrum of all that is available to us… and say no to almost everything. The more we can say no to the things that don’t serve us, the more we are living our purpose.

And I am failing at my life purpose.

I say yes to fucking everything.

This is why I decided to help write this book. Not just to help you but to help me reclaim my life.

When I was trying to decide what to share in this introduction, I called Tim for his thoughts.

“Can you think of a recent example where you said yes to something you shouldn’t have?” he asked.

My ex-wife was sitting next to me and it took her 1.5 seconds to come up with an example: “Janet’s costume party tonight.”

We all probably have a Janet in our lives. She is so pushy and persistent, in the kindest and most enthusiastic way, that I have trouble saying no to her. To her, a yes is a legally binding agreement. A maybe is a yes. And a no is the beginning of a guilt trip that ends when you fold and say maybe—which she then takes to mean yes, making it a legally binding agreement.

“So just cancel,” Tim wisely suggested.

“I can’t,” I replied unwisely.

“See?” Ingrid gloated. “I rest my case.”

Her case was indeed rested. On my guilty conscience.

I grew up in a home where saying no wasn’t an option. A no would get you a stern lecture, a long grounding, or worst of all, a withdrawal of love. So as an adult, I became existentially terrified that every no would come with some sort of blowback, such as losing a friendship, an opportunity, or someone’s good will. And now I give my time—and my life—away, sometimes to people who have been publicly shitty to me. They call this trauma bonding. It’s my specialty.

Not like Tim.

Tim is the master of no. As I write this in mid-October 2023, his text messages have an auto-response that reads:

I’m traveling overseas until Nov 7. If your text is urgent, please reach out to someone on my team. Otherwise, please resend your text after Nov 7 if it still applies. Since catching up would be impossible, I’ll be deleting all messages upon my return and starting from scratch. Thank you.

Deleting three weeks worth of messages! That is boss-level no.

It’s basically saying: The message you sent me is your priority, not automatically mine.

It’s a screaming yes to life.

It is truly an act of courage to not worry about how every single person who receives that text is going to react to being deleted. And this is just a small, everyday example of Tim’s time mastery. Here’s how incredible Tim is at saying no at a world-record level:

Five years ago, he called to tell me he was writing a book on how to say no. He wanted me to contribute an essay to it.

I didn’t have time to help out. So of course I shut it down with these four words: “Yes, I’ll do it!”

I didn’t want Tim to be mad at me or stop asking me to contribute to his books or abandon me as a friend and talk shit about me to Naval Ravikant.

Afterward, I spent a week writing a chapter for his project, and grumbling about how I should be spending the time working on my own book. After all, people pleasers like me live in constant resentment. We blame other people’s requests for our bad decisions.

I finished the essay and sent it to Tim, as did many others. Tim sent some follow-up questions, just to take up more of our time and make sure we regretted our decision, then he did something incredible:

He said no… to the whole book!

He has so thoroughly mastered the art that he actually said no to the book on no. And then went on to return the largest book advance he’d ever been given.

Wow, that was an impressive act of self-preservation. While it may take you five days to read a book, it can take him three years to write and research it. That’s three years of his life he gained back with a single no.

There was just one problem: I needed the book. As did so many others. It’s a war zone out here. Our devices and apps, even some of our home appliances, are constantly studying us, determining how to focus more of our attention on their business models. Under the guise of helping us, they drown us in inboxes, notifications, and alerts, synced to phones, tablets, watches, even our cars. And if you don’t respond to the Janets of the world within fifteen minutes, you get the inevitable “Are you okay?” or “Are you upset at me?” message. Or even worse, the insidious “???”

Whether the challenge is the phone, other people, or our own compulsions, most of us need help saying no to what doesn’t matter and drains our life energy. So, I reached out and told Tim that if he didn’t want to finish the book, I would.

On the condition that he could cancel the whole endeavor anytime he liked with one no, he eventually sent me a 72,000-word Scrivener file of his notes, thoughts, writings, and collected information. I then set about organizing it into a book that would help myself and others live a more meaningful, connected, purpose-driven life by following the path of no.

But simply dispensing rejections isn’t the goal. You need amazing things worth defending. The path of no is also the path of selective yesses. This book is a guide to finding the critical few among the trivial many.

It’s about finding the big yesses in our lives. Just a few. These may be people, partners, projects, places, and passions—yesses so incredibly fulfilling that they enable us to say no to everything else. In fact, you only have to get a few big yesses right to live a deeply successful and joyful life.

The book that follows was put together by the two of us from Tim’s notes and experiences; further discussions and research; lots of hilarious video calls; and contributions from other gurus of no, some of whom actually said no to us. We have included their rejections in the book as templates. Unless otherwise stated, every chapter and first-person anecdote that follows is from Tim’s perspective.

Hopefully by the end of this guide, we can all learn that there is a highway to happiness. And the borders that keep us on it, that prevent us from straying into the abyss of meaninglessness, are paved with the word no.

TORSCHLUSSPANIK
By Tim Ferriss

I first realized I had a problem when everything was going right for me.

The day was May 2, 2007, just after 5:30 p.m. in New York, when I received a phone call I’ll never forget. My editor at Random House wanted to inform me that my debut book, The 4-Hour Workweek, had hit The New York Times bestseller list.

As her words sunk in, I staggered backward and collapsed against the wall in shock, gratitude, and relief. Overnight, I was transformed from a guy begging people to answer his emails to someone on the other side. All kinds of requests and offers poured in. Speaking gigs, interviews, consulting, partnerships, brand deals—it was a tsunami.

Flattered, unprepared, and afraid this might be my only 15 minutes of fame, I said “yes” to nearly everything, especially anything six, nine, or twelve months off in the distance. My calendar seemed like pristine water, clear as crystal for a brief lull. Then I had to pay the piper.

Rarely in the same place for more than a week, I felt more like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman than a jet-setting rock star. My assistants and I were getting hammered with hundreds, then thousands, of emails per day. 90% of the time, I had no idea how people got my private email addresses. We were drowning.

The irony was that my systems worked great. It was pure operator error.

In the deluge, I had slipped from a mindset of JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) and following my own priorities, to a mindset of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and reactively grasping at shiny objects and shiny people. I was succumbing to what the Germans call Torschlusspanik: literally, “door-closing panic.”

The term comes from the time of walled medieval cities, when the gates would close at night—and any resident left outside would be forced to fend for themselves. Getting through those doors often meant survival.

In survival mode, I panicked. I stopped following my own rules. Once I made the first exception, the game was lost. It was death by a thousand paper cuts.

So, what the hell happened? Why didn’t I see it coming?

These habits are formed early and embed themselves deeply. I come from a family full of lovely and conflict-avoidant folks. This isn’t true for everyone in the extended clan, but it’s enough for my default to be people-pleasing. Or, more accurately, people-fearing—a distinction we’ll dive into later.

Before the publication of my book, with little inbound, the effects of people-pleasing were negligible. I came up with wild plans, went out hunting for opportunities, cold-emailed people to pitch ideas, and knocked things off my to-do list. After the success of the book, with 1000x more inbound, the effects of people-pleasing were catastrophic. The underlying fear and guilt came out in full force and wreaked havoc. I was being emailed and called by a Genghis Khan army of versions of myself (surprise, bitch!), and I didn’t have a playbook. Saying yes to other people’s priorities made mine vanish like sand through my fingers.

It took a while to unwind and figure out that I was doing it all wrong.

Twelve months later, I had stemmed a good portion of the blood loss. It was only possible because I had found a big YES that allowed me to focus and say no to at least 50% of the noise:

Startups.

I used the book’s popularity with technologists to begin investing in and advising startups, and I soon moved to San Francisco to be in the center of the action. The timing was good, and I had incredible luck (Shopify, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Alibaba, and more).

One afternoon, I found myself in the office of a CEO and friend. His company would later become one of the fastest-growing startups in history. That day, he was calm as usual, despite the chaos and noise of Market Street a few floors below. Once we’d caught up on the latest developments, the conversation meandered into productivity systems, and I asked how he thought about managing email. He spun his laptop around on his desk to show me his Gmail account. Once my eyes adjusted, I stood there slack-jawed, fixated on one thing:

84,000+ unread email.

Smiling at my shock, he said, “Inbox zero is a fallacy.”

Completely unfazed, he went on to explain a few policies he had. He ignored 99% of what came in. For much of what remained, his answer was a short, “Not up my alley. Thanks.”

If 10 different but appealing people asked him to grab dinner, he would invite those 10 people to a group dinner and kill many birds with one stone.

If he wanted to preserve political capital but decrease contact with certain people, he’d do the “slow fade”: He might first reply to them in 5 days, then 10 days, and then 20 days. “They will stop asking,” he noted.

Clearly, there were levels to filtering, and then there were levels to filtering. I took a photograph of his 84,000 unread count as a reminder.

Right after that meeting, I created a digital swipe file called “polite declines” in Evernote, a product made by another startup I advised. Starting that week in 2009, if anyone said no in a way that struck me as elegant or clever, I saved it. If a rejection somehow made me feel good, I saved it. If someone had great policies on their contact form, I saved it. If I came across a trick, tool, or philosophical reset for saying no—whether over a meal, via email, or at the airport—I saved it.

This book contains the highlights from that swipe file.

It’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to implement the advice here, but I’ve found rules, systems, and tools that make life a lot easier. Of course, these strategies apply to dealing with other people, including strangers, loose ties, and family. But they also apply to managing ourselves, especially those glitches in our mental operating system that act against our best interests.

I’ve also found ways to idiot-proof things and bring the lifeboat closer, such that when you do slip into overcommitting (it’ll happen), it’s one step to recovery instead of ten.

This book was originally written like my other books (i.e., Tim tests everything, writes about what works, then publishes), until I called Neil to see how a rewrite was coming on a rough draft.

“Hey, Tim, I’m in Copenhagen,” he screamed over a cacophony of background noise. “I’m at this conference I agreed to speak at, but now I’m hosting the whole thing, and it’s been taking up all my time.”

“That’s not good. I hope they’re paying you well.”

“They’re not paying me anything.” He paused and sighed. “And you’re not going to believe this, but I told the guy running the conference he could stay at my house when he’s in LA next month.”

“You what?! Has this book been working for you at all?”

He stammered a response, and we both came to realize that for a die-hard people pleaser, information and templates aren’t enough. As my friend Derek Sivers puts it, “If more information were the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

So, we rebuilt the book from the ground up as a daily, step-by-step experience with readings, exercises, and a complete plan that is relentlessly action-focused.

The first test subject was Neil. As he went through these exercises and steps, he added his own experiences, notes, and struggles. Afterward, seeing the eventual transformation, it’s clear that if you do the work, this book really, really works. The book is designed to meet you where you are on your no journey and take you further than you think possible.

And unlike most self-help programs, there is no set of one-size-fits-all rules. Through these readings and exercises, you will pick up a toolkit that is uniquely your own, tailored to your specific goals, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. Some chapters won’t be for you, but some will be especially for you.

The No Book is a Trojan Horse for becoming better at decision-making writ large. Decision-making is your life.

Everything from a job offer to a marriage proposal is a yes to one thing and a no to hundreds of thousands of other opportunities. It’s easy—the universal default—to get pulled into the quicksand of half-hearted yesses and promiscuous overcommitment, ending up stressed and reactive, wondering where your time has gone.

The No Book re-examines how we navigate our finite path. It will help you build a benevolent phalanx—a protective wall of troops—that guard your goals, your relationships, and more, making everything more easeful.

As you get deeper into this book, you’ll begin to realize that how you handle no mirrors how you handle almost everything in life. Dramatically changing your nos will dramatically change your life.

If Neil can fix his Copenhagen debacle and do a 180—which he did—the sky is the limit.

So let’s start building you some wings.

###

Want to read more for free? Just sign up for 5-Bullet Friday . Tons coming soon.

The post MY FIRST BOOK IN 7 YEARS (AND SOME BIG EXPERIMENTS) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on January 13, 2025 14:37

January 9, 2025

Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown (#786)

“I think all of us are prisoners to the way our mind currently works, and we’re prisoners until we become observers to it.”
— Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown) is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. He is also a speaker, host of The Greg McKeown Podcast, and founder of The Essentialism Academy, with students from 96 countries. 200,000 people receive his weekly 1-Minute Wednesday newsletter, and he recently released The Essentialism Planner: A 90-Day Guide to Accomplishing More by Doing Less.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and Wealthfront high-yield cash account.

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

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#786: Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown

This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.).

Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered.

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 4 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. Plus, it automatically tracks your sleep time, snoring, sleep stages, and HRV, all with high precision. For example, their heart rate tracking is at an incredible 99% accuracy.

Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable Base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame to add custom positions for the best sleeping experience. Plus, it automatically reduces your snoring when detected. Add it easily to any bed.

And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra for a limited time! Click here to claim this deal and unlock your full potential through optimal sleep.

This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.00% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account through its network of partner banks. That’s nearly ten times more interest than a savings account at a bank, according to FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.00% APY interest on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when new clients open an account today, they can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

Tim Ferriss receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage, LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage. See full disclosures here.

Want to hear the last time Greg McKeown was on the podcast? Listen to our walk and talk conversation here where we discussed Greg’s system for effortless execution of daily tasks, poetic mysticism and matchmaking introspection, Maslow’s forgotten pinnacle of self-transcendence, why self-actualization is an insufficient foundation for meaningful relationships, the benefits of treating social media as an option rather than an obligation, blocking time for top priorities, why AI is a good servant but a poor master, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Greg McKeown:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

“I think all of us are prisoners to the way our mind currently works, and we’re prisoners until we become observers to it.”
— Greg McKeown

“That process of screaming into the page, of letting it all out, separating ourselves from that discombobulating internal state, is extremely powerful because it helps us to go from prisoner to observer. And then from observer, I think once we start observing, we are better able to become a creator, so I think that’s the shift.”

— Greg McKeown

“Changing the ratio of consumption to creation is one self-evident shift that I think a lot of people would benefit in.”

— Greg McKeown

“Insecure overachievers can endlessly complicate any task to an infinite degree. … If you don’t know what done looks like, you cannot be done.”

— Greg McKeown

“Radical gratitude is expressing thanks for things you’re not thankful for, because that’s what gratitude actually is.”

— Greg McKeown

“Essentialism, in one word, would be ‘focus.’ Effortless, in one word, would be ‘simplification.'”

— Greg McKeown

“Essentialism is figuring out what the right thing is to do, and Effortless is to do it in the right way.”

— Greg McKeown

“One of the principles in Effortless is the courage to be rubbish and doing it in a shorter period of time.”

— Greg McKeown

“I think most addictions really are, at the core, to avoid the experience of being alive. And that’s because it’s so painful to be alive.”

— Greg McKeown

“We live in a time where it’s so easy to have what I would describe as counterfeit agility. So you’re moving fast, life feels fast, life is fast, and you’re taking messages, you’re sending messages, and you’re doing things, but actually, they don’t add up to a lot of progress toward what matters.”

— Greg McKeown

“What I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization. … The most important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done, which is really strange.”

— Greg McKeown

“Courage is a virtue, but courage always feels terrible. It is an awful feeling. It’s not like you imagine when you see other people being courageous.”

— Greg McKeown

“If you think about the future as only a perfect, best-case scenario, you are setting yourself up for really frustrating, stressful, poor execution.”

— Greg McKeown

PEOPLE MENTIONEDSam Bridgstock David Allen Carl Rogers Sigmund Freud Scrooge McDuck Anna McKeown Rob Dyrdek Warren Buffett John D. Rockefeller Joseph Tainter Michael Phelps Bob Bowman Trung T. Phan Jerry Seinfeld Ichiro Suzuki Viktor Frankl Eve McKeown C.S. Lewis Chris Bosh Erik Newton

The post Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown (#786) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on January 09, 2025 03:47

January 3, 2025

The Random Show — 2025 Predictions (AI, Aliens, BTC, and More), New Year’s Resolutions and Strategies, Smart Fitness, The Spinal Engine, New Apps, and Much More (#785)

This time, we have a very special episode I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose. We cover 2025 predictions, AI, Bitcoin, aliens, fitness goals, and much, much more.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Ramp easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and more; Our Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals’; and Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#785: The Random Show — 2025 Predictions (AI, Aliens, BTC, and More), New Year’s Resolutions and Strategies, Smart Fitness, The Spinal Engine, New Apps, and Much More

This episode is brought to you by Ramp! Ramp is corporate card- and spend-management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp has already saved more than 25,000 customers—including other podcast sponsors like Shopify and Eight Sleep—more than 10 million hours and more than $1 billion through better financial management of their corporate spending.

With Ramp, you’re able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting, allowing you to close your books 8x faster on average. Your employees will no longer need to spend hours submitting expense reports. In less than 15 minutes, you can get started issuing virtual and physical cards and making payments, whether you have 5 employees or 5,000. Businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% on total card spending and related expenses in the first year. And now, you can get $250 when you join Ramp. Just go to ramp.com/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by Our Place’s Titanium Always Pan® Pro. Many nonstick pans can release harmful “forever chemicals”—PFAS—into your food, your home, and, ultimately, your body. Teflon is a prime example—it *is* the forever chemical that most companies are still using. Exposure to PFAS has been linked to major health issues like gut microbiome disruption, testosterone dysregulation, and more, which have been correlated to chronic disease in the long term. This is why I use the Titanium Always Pan Pro from today’s sponsor, Our Place. It’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating. This means zero “forever chemicals” and a durability that will last a lifetime. That’s right—no degradation over time like traditional nonstick pans.

This pan combines the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product. It’s tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy-duty scrubbing—even metal utensils—without losing any of its non-stick properties. Go to FromOurPlace.com/Tim and use code TIM to get 10% off sitewide.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required.

Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim .

Want to hear the last time KevKev and I did a Random Show? Listen to our conversation here in which we discussed Kevin’s Jess Mascetti tattoo, vampire facials, publishing strategies, romance versus radical planning, hasty oral hygiene, the mysteries of mimetic contagion, Kevin’s AI-powered investment advisor experiment, Dena Dubal’s Alzheimer’s treatment breakthrough, how small expectations for a medium turned large, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Kevin Rose:

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Threads | Bluesky

The post The Random Show — 2025 Predictions (AI, Aliens, BTC, and More), New Year’s Resolutions and Strategies, Smart Fitness, The Spinal Engine, New Apps, and Much More (#785) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on January 03, 2025 02:24

December 27, 2024

Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More (#784)

“This feels hard because it is hard, not because I’m doing something wrong.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

Dr. Becky Kennedy (@DrBeckyAtGoodInside) is the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting movement that disrupts conventional parenting practices by empowering parents to become sturdy, confident leaders and raise sturdy, confident kids. Good Inside currently has members across more than 100 countries and millions of followers across social media platforms, including nearly 3M followers on Instagram alone. Good Inside released a mobile app that serves as a “24/7 parenting coach,” offering personalized, age-based support and an AI Chatbot trained on Dr. Becky’s entire library of content.

Dr. Becky is also behind the #1 New York Times bestselling book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, a chart-topping podcast, a TED talk with nearly 4 million views on the power of repair, and an upcoming children’s book, That’s My Truck! A Good Inside Story About Hitting.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, Wealthfront high-yield cash account, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#784: Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More

This episode is brought to you by GiveWell.org! For over ten years, GiveWell.org has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. GiveWell spends over 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed charities they’ve found. In total, more than 100,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible.

This year, support the charities that save and improve lives most, with GiveWell. Any of my listeners who become new GiveWell donors will have their first donation matched up to $100 when you go to GiveWell.org and select “PODCAST” and “Tim Ferriss” at checkout.

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.

This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.25% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account through its network of partner banks. That’s nearly nine times more interest than a savings account at a bank, according to FDIC.gov as of Septebmer 27, 2024. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.25% APY interest on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when new clients open an account today, they can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

Tim Ferriss receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage, LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage. See full disclosures here.

Want to hear another podccast episode that focuses on education and the intricacies of parenting? Listen to my conversation with New York Times bestselling author Jessica Lahey in which we discussed confidence vs. competence when trying to foster a child’s self-esteem, why instilling hope in a child is so crucial to their lifelong well-being, books and activities that keep Jessica aligned along the path of hope and optimism, advice for parents who get the dreaded phone call that their child has been caught up in non-ideal behavior, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Dr. Becky Kennedy:

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy | Amazon That’s My Truck!: A Good Inside Story About Hitting by Dr. Becky Kennedy and Joanie Stone | Amazon Parenting Podcast | Good Inside 24/7 Parenting Support | Good Inside App Becky Kennedy: The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy | TED Talk Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin | Amazon The Scariest Navy SEAL Imaginable…And What He Taught Me | The Tim Ferriss Show #107 Everyone Yells at Their Kids. How Do You Repair the Moment? | Today Dr. Becky on Activating Curiosity | Instagram Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth | Amazon Dr Becky Kennedy: It’s Not Your Job to Make Your Kid Happy | Lewis Howes Why Your Teen Needs a Sturdy Leader, Per Dr. Becky | Motherly Dr. Becky Kennedy Wants to Help Parents Land the Plane | The New Yorker The Profile Dossier: Becky Kennedy, The Parenting Guru Offering Practical Solutions | The Profile Don’t Shoot the Dog: The Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor | Amazon The How and What of “The Most Generous Interpretation” Method | First Things First Dr. Becky Kennedy Is Instagram’s Favorite Parenting Guru | Romper Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks | Amazon Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values by Marshall B. Rosenberg | Amazon Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts | The Tim Ferriss Show #492 Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. | Amazon No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. | Amazon Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live) by Eve Rodsky | Amazon Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed | Amazon What Grandparents Need to Know About Popular Parenting Methods | More Than Grand Eating Disorders: Six Types and Their Symptoms | Healthline Dr. Becky Kennedy: Wire Your Children for Resilience | Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown Hanna | Prime Video The Bourne Identity | Prime Video Emotional Dysregulation | Cleveland Clinic The Exorcist | Prime Video The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. | Amazon Jiro Dreams of Sushi | Prime VideoSHOW NOTES[00:06:49] The power of repair.[00:09:44] “It’s never your fault when I yell at you.”[00:13:49] What does it mean to be a “good” parent?[00:15:26] Activating curiosity over judgment.[00:18:27] Alternatives to saying “Good job” as a confidence builder.[00:23:16] Making kids happy vs. building capability.[00:26:44] A pilot metaphor for sturdy leadership.[00:31:56] Role confusion.[00:34:30] Defining boundaries.[00:38:44] How parenting becomes a two-way mirror for growth.[00:43:46] The MGI (Most Generous Interpretation) approach.[00:46:29] Biggest challenges in parenting.[00:50:29] Recommended reading for someone with kids in their life.[00:55:49] Advisable prerequisites for singles who aim to build a family.[00:59:55] Setting boundaries with grandparents and dealing with different parenting styles.[01:05:18] Handling frustration when a child is pushing your buttons.[01:13:35] Lessons learned from working with eating disorders.[01:17:03] Managing troublemaker behavior.[01:21:14] Bad influence intervention.[01:26:28] Cultivating resilience in “deeply feeling” kids (DFKs).[01:32:35] The trials and errors that birthed Good Inside.[01:36:30] “Our words are not our wishes. Our words are our fears.”[01:43:44] Billboard messages and mantras.[01:51:37] Fan-favorite scripts on saying no, boundaries, and repair.[01:54:52] The tennis court metaphor for boundaries.[01:59:22] Resources and parting thoughts.MORE DR. BECKY KENNEDY QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Parenting doesn’t come naturally. The only thing that comes naturally is how you were parented. … It would be like a doctor saying, ‘I didn’t go to medical school. I have surgical instinct.'”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“What scares you does not scare me. … What a sturdy leader really does is they say to you, ‘I see what’s happening for you. I see your feelings as real and your feelings don’t overwhelm me.'”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“This feels hard because it is hard, not because I’m doing something wrong.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“Parenting doesn’t come naturally. The only thing that comes naturally is how you were parented.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“We were never meant to parent on instinct alone.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“When we’re completely out of control and overwhelmed and we scream things out in that state, our words are not our wishes. Our words are our fears.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“Do not deprive my child of finding their capability. Do not steal it. Do not steal their capability. A kid doesn’t feel capable when they do something easy.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“Kids develop capability after watching themselves survive something that was really difficult and just get through it.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“Our body has this remarkable way to act out conflict if we don’t kind of understand it and resolve it.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

“The most under-utilized strategy in parenting, and this sounds like a joke, but I do want to name it to make it official, is doing nothing.”
— Dr. Becky Kennedy

PEOPLE MENTIONEDJocko Willink Angela Duckworth Karen Pryor Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger Eve Rodsky Cheryl Strayed Richard Schwartz Gay Hendricks Katie Hendricks Oscar Wilde Abraham Lincoln Eric Bana Jason Bourne Jiro Ono

The post Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More (#784) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on December 27, 2024 02:04

December 18, 2024

The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited – How to Get Uncommon Results by Doing the Opposite, Aiming with Precision, and Aiming for the Unrealistic (#783)

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This time around, we have a bit of a different format, featuring the book that started it all, The 4-Hour Workweek, which was published in 2007. It’s crazy to think that the 20th anniversary is around the corner.

Readers and listeners often ask me what I would change or update, but in my mind, an equally interesting question is: what wouldn’t I change? What stands the test of time and hasn’t lost any potency?

This episode features three chapters from the audiobook of The 4-Hour Workweek that are time-tested. They represent tools and frameworks that have changed my life and that I still use today. The chapters are narrated by the great voice actor Ray Porter.

The 4-Hour Workweek is written in four sections, each corresponding to a letter in the acronym DEAL, which stands for Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. The chapters you’ll hear are from the section “D is for Definition.” If you want to craft your best life and your ideal lifestyle, these chapters should help. If you want to maximize your per-hour output, whether it’s four, 40, or 100 hours per week, Definition is the also the most important first step.

If you are interested in checking out the rest of the audiobook, which is produced and copyrighted by Blackstone Publishing, you can find it on Audible, Apple, Google, Spotify, Downpour.com, or wherever you find your favorite audiobooks.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic broad spectrum 24-strain probiotic + prebiotic, Helix Sleep premium mattresses, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

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

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#783: The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited – How to Get Uncommon Results by Doing the Opposite, Aiming with Precision, and Aiming for the Unrealistic (#783)

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2024 by Forbes, Fortune, and Wired magazines and many others. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 20% off all mattress orders at HelixSleep.com/Tim.

Want to hear another podcast episode that features The 4-Hour Workweek? Check out this episode, in which Cal Newport interviews me for an article he ended up writing for The New Yorker titled “Revisiting ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’: How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval.”

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss | Amazon How to Lose 30 Pounds in 24 Hours: The Definitive Guide to Cutting Weight | Tim Ferriss 1999 Sanshou Nationals Finals Finish | Instagram Richard Douglas Fosbury | Olympics The Physics of the Fosbury Flop | Stanford University George Does the Opposite | Seinfeld Always Be Closing: Y Combinator and The Art of the Pitch | Tim Ferriss The Weekend Retirement Test Drive: Groundhog Day and the Rest of Your Life | Tim Ferriss How to Take a Mini-Retirement: Tips and Tricks | Tim Ferriss Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year | The Tim Ferriss Show #221 Your Body Knows the Difference Between Good Stress and Bad Stress: Do You? | Mayo Clinic News Network How to Succeed in High-Stress Situations | The Tim Ferriss Show #319 Florianopolis Surf Vacation | Nexus Surf (Via The Internet Archive)Why Tim Ferriss Sold His Muse | Inc.com The Favorite Stoic Exercises of Tim Ferriss, Arianna Huffington, Robert Greene, and More | Daily Stoic How to Prioritize Your Life and Make Time for What Matters | The Tim Ferriss Show #304 Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month | Tim Ferriss Why Bigger Goals = Less Competition | Tim Ferriss Tim Ferriss’ Princeton Challenge. Can You Do It? | r/Manprovement Postcard from Warren Buffett | The Real Josh (Via The Internet Archive)Seven Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose | Mark Manson What Screams “Midlife Crisis?” | r/AskReddit How to Get George Bush or the CEO of Google on the Phone | Tim Ferriss Fail Better by Adam Gottesfeld | Princeton Alumni Weekly Ideal Lifestyle Costing (with Dreamlining Tools) | Tim FerrissSHOW NOTES[00:00] Intro (D is for definition).[00:05:43] Beating the game, not playing the game.[00:10:11] Challenging the status quo vs. being stupid.[00:11:48] Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance.[00:13:40] Interest and energy are cyclical.[00:15:06] Less is not laziness.[00:16:24] The timing is never right.[00:17:24] Ask for forgiveness, not permission.[00:18:01] Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.[00:18:57] Things in excess become their opposite.[00:20:02] Money alone is not the solution.[00:21:24] Relative income is more important than absolute income.[00:24:13] Distress is bad, eustress is good.[00:25:59] Questions and actions.[00:27:45] Dodging bullets: fear-setting and escaping paralysis.[00:32:51] The power of pessimism: defining the nightmare.[00:36:59] Conquering fear = defining fear.[00:39:55] Uncovering fear disguised as optimism.[00:42:00] Someone call the Maître d’.[00:45:02] Questions and actions.[00:49:45] System reset: Being unreasonable and unambiguous.[00:53:13] Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.[00:55:41] What do you want? A better question, first of all.[00:57:41] Adult-onset ADD: adventure deficit disorder.[00:59:44] The fat man in the red BMW convertible.[01:01:21] Correcting course: get unrealistic.[01:02:28] How to get George Bush or the CEO of Google on the phone.[01:08:41] Questions and actions and dreamlining calculations.PEOPLE MENTIONEDRay Porter Herbert Bayard Swope Oscar Wilde Dick Fosbury Donald Trump Joan Rivers Yoda Hans Keeling Benjamin Disraeli Seneca the Younger Yvon Chouinard James Dean Jean Cocteau Jean-Marc Hachey Mark Twain Lewis Carroll George Bernard Shaw Jennifer Lopez William J. Clinton J.D. Salinger Santa Claus Douglas Price Adam Gottesfeld Ryan Marrinan Randy Komisar Eric Schmidt Ed Zschau George H.W. Bush Taisen Deshimaru Samuel Beckett Nathan Kaplan Sharpe James Al Sharpton Viktor Frankl Michael Ellsberg

The post The 4-Hour Workweek Revisited – How to Get Uncommon Results by Doing the Opposite, Aiming with Precision, and Aiming for the Unrealistic (#783) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on December 18, 2024 19:32

December 12, 2024

Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI,” Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More (#782)

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he pioneered the parallel computers that are the basis for the processors used for AI and most high-performance computer chips. He has more than 400 issued patents, covering parallel computers; disk arrays; cancer diagnostics and treatment; various electronic, optical, and mechanical devices; and the pinch-to-zoom display interface. He is a co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the designer of its 10,000-year mechanical clock.

Danny has founded multiple companies, but his only regular job was as the first Disney Fellow at Disney Imagineering. He has published scientific papers in Science, Nature, Modern Biology, and International Journal of Theoretical Physics and written extensively on technology for Newsweek, Wired, and Scientific American. He is the author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work and Connection Machine. He is now a founding partner with Applied Invention, working on new ideas in cybersecurity, medicine, and agriculture.

Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is the founding executive editor of WIRED magazine, the former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, and a bestselling author of books on technology and culture, including Excellent Advice for Living; The Inevitable; What Technology Wants; and Vanishing Asia, his three-volume photo-book set that captures West, Central, and East Asia. Kevin is the author of the popular essay “1000 True Fans.” Subscribe to Kevin’s newsletter, Recomendo, at recomendo.com. Every edition features 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

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

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. 'AI', Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More

Want to hear the last time Kevin Kelly was on this show? Listen to our conversation here in which we discussed Kevin’s long bet against the human population, resurrecting extinct species, active optimism vs. passive optimism, Kevin’s $20 time machine, the “dumbsmarten” future of AI, tips for traveling with children, the joys of being a tourist in one’s own town, sabbaticals, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Danny Hillis:

Applied Invention

Connect with Kevin Kelly:

Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

A Multidisciplinary Innovation Company | Applied Invention Six Brief Personal Recommendations of Cool Stuff | Recomendo Interview of Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of WIRED, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World? | The Tim Ferriss Show #25, #26, & #27 Stewart Brand – The Polymath of Polymaths | The Tim Ferriss Show #281 Sierra Diablo Mountain Range | 10,000-Year Clock Natra Mogen Clamp | eBay W. Daniel Hillis: Becoming a Disney Fellow | Web of Stories Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing | NVIDIA Moore’s Law | Intel Sun Microsystems | Wikipedia Five Facts You May Not Know About Disney and Dali’s Lost Project ‘Destino’ | Park West Gallery Disney Online | Disney Wiki How to Do a Tombstone Rubbing | ThoughtCo.The Steve Jobs Effect: Why We Need Visionary Founders and Professional Leaders (Who Are a Little of Both) | Inc.Thinking Machines Corporation | Wikipedia What Is Parallel Computing? | IBM Danny Hillis: The Biological Connection (Excerpt from Out of Their Minds) | NYU Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior or, The Songs of Eden | The Long Now Amdahl’s Law: Understanding the Basics | Splunk A New Identity-Aware Network Security Layer | ZPR Island by Aldous Huxley | Amazon Ocean’s Eleven (2001) | Prime Video Logo History | Logo Foundation W. Daniel Hillis: Programming Slot Machine | Web of Stories Tinkertoy Computer | Computer History Museum A Modern, Open-Source Smalltalk Programming System | Squeak How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space | Quanta Magazine Quantum Electrodynamics | Fermilab Comprehensive Cancer Information | National Cancer Institute Danny Hillis: Understanding Cancer Through Proteomics | TED Talk David Agus: A New Strategy in the War on Cancer | TED Talk Talking with Walt Disney | The Disney Connection Life on the Pond | Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust Permaculture: You’ve Heard of It, But What the Heck Is It? | Modern Farmer TL;DR Shorts: Dr. Danny Hillis on the Automated Future of Research | Digital Science The Alliance for Learning Innovation | ALI The Big AI Research DARPA Is Funding This Year | Defense One Dr. William Hillis: Man on a Mission | Baylor College of Arts & Sciences W. Daniel Hillis: My Father Was a Doctor | Web of Stories The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron | Amazon The Pros and Cons of Homeschooling | Parents The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines | Inc.The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement | Journal of Design and Science The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis | Science Talk Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World by Kevin Kelly | Amazon Fostering Long-Term Thinking | The Long Now Foundation The Big Picture | WIRED What is a Neural Network? | IBM The History of Artificial Intelligence: Complete AI Timeline | TechTarget W. Daniel Hillis: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence | Web of Stories Here’s Why We Don’t Understand What Electricity Is | Ribbon Farm Plants of the Gods — Dr. Mark Plotkin on Ayahuasca, Shamanic Knowledge, the Curse and Blessing of Coca, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #508 Mantis Shrimp | Great Barrier Reef Foundation Artificial Intelligence Concerns: Is Skynet or The Matrix Possible? | Ontario Society of Professional Engineers Duck And Cover (1951) | Nuclear Vault Smallpox and the Story of Vaccination | Science Museum 1950s: Explore a Decade in LGBTQ+ History | Pride & Progress Danny Hillis: Should We Create a Solar Shade to Cool the Earth? | TED Talk By 2060 the Total Population of Humans on Earth Will Be Less than It Is Today. | Long Bets Star Trek: The Original Series | Prime Video Smartphone History: A Complete Timeline | Textline Seven Ways the Internet Has Changed the World (for Better and for Worse) | Race Communications Babble: A Real “Cone of Silence” | Lifehacker The Jetsons | Prime Video Herman Miller Babble | The BE Collection Alzheimer’s Treatments: What’s on the Horizon? | Mayo Clinic Theranos: A Fallen Unicorn | Investopedia Danny Hillis: Breakthrough Tools for Neuroscience | BrainMind Summit W. Daniel Hillis: Seeing the Future Emerging from Dreams | Web of Stories W. Daniel Hillis: My ‘Pinch-to-Zoom’ Invention | Web of Stories Pinch-to-Zoom: Apple Versus Samsung | Canadian Intellectual Property Blog What Is a Patent in Simple Terms? | Investopedia On the 20th Anniversary, An Oral History of the Web’s First Banner Ads | Internet History Podcast Daniel Hillis Inventions, Patents, and Patent Applications | Justia Patents Search How Claude Shannon Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine W. Daniel Hillis: Why I Don’t Believe In Cause and Effect | Web of Stories Quantum Computing: Definition, How It’s Used, and Example | Investopedia The Pattern on the Stone by W. Daniel Hillis | Amazon W. Daniel Hillis: Francis Crick and Consciousness | Web of Stories Something That Goes Beyond Ourselves | Edge Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show #674 The “Long Tail” of Research Impact Is Engendered by Innovative Dissemination Tools and Meaningful Community Engagement | LSE The Clock of the Long Now | The Long Now Foundation Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Prime VideoSHOW NOTES[07:56] How Danny and Kevin first met through Stewart Brand.[09:58] The funniest person who ever opened Danny’s interview box of unusual objects.[14:01] Danny’s transition to Disney as a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Imagineering.[19:12] The contrast between engineering and artistic approaches to problem-solving.[28:56] The development of parallel computing and founding Thinking Machines.[37:15] The three criteria by which projects are chosen at Applied Invention.[40:36] Zero-trust packet routing (ZPR) and the future of cybersecurity.[46:46] Learning by “hanging out” with experts like Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Feynman.[59:20] Danny’s work in biotechnology and cancer research with David Agus.[01:07:44] Staying sustainable with systems-oriented thinking in agriculture — as nature intended.[01:16:10] Danny’s superpower.[01:17:48] Homeschooling, education on the move, and the influence of Mrs. Wilner.[01:22:00] The failure of Thinking Machines and other regrets/surprises.[01:26:00] The “Entanglement” that blurs natural and technological boundaries.[01:30:54] The current state of AI versus true intelligence.[01:34:34] How AI may help humanity better understand its place on the intelligence spectrum.[01:39:42] What the future looks like to a short-term pessimist/long-term optimist.[01:50:50] The cone of silence we never heard from again.[01:53:10] Debugging dementia and other diseases.[01:58:05] The MRI alternative Danny’s tackling.[02:00:51] We don’t we have a freezer version of the consumer microwave oven?[02:01:23] Danny’s place in pinch-to-zoom iPhone innovation history.[02:04:51] The pros and cons of patents for inventors and society.[02:08:01] Inventors Danny finds inspiring.[02:10:04] Danny’s cause-and-effect heresy.[02:14:47] Quantum computing and its implications.[02:18:34] The scientific pursuit of understanding consciousness.[02:23:00] The question Danny asks himself before investing time in a project.[02:25:26] Danny’s 10,000-year billboard.[02:29:49] Parting thoughts.MORE DANNY HILLIS QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“What the inventor does is actually a very small piece of it. What society does is it creates these preconditions for invention. And once those preconditions are in place, then it’s just a matter of putting together the puzzle pieces and making it work.”
— Danny Hillis

“I’ve also developed the ability to search out the people who really know the thing and hang out with them … It’s not that I know things other people don’t, but maybe I know a different combination of things that other people do know and I’m kind of willing to learn the things I don’t know and have a technique of doing it by just hanging out with people who are smarter than I am.”
— Danny Hillis

“Intelligence is a very complicated multifactored thing like life. It’s not just one thing. At the beginnings of AI, we thought the things that were hard for us to do were the intelligence … As it turns out … the hard part was the stuff that we were so good at, we didn’t even notice — like recognizing a face, jumping to a conclusion, having an intuition about something.”
— Danny Hillis

“It’s much harder to imagine solutions to problems than it is to imagine problems.”
— Danny Hillis

“Maybe I’ve kept a superpower that kids have … They’re not afraid to go in and see something new and strange and start playing with it.”
— Danny Hillis

“I try to ask the question, ‘Will this make a difference over how much time and how long will that difference matter?’ If it makes a lot of difference after I’m dead, I’d rather do that.”
— Danny Hillis

“I read enough papers that I have questions, because you’re wasting the time of a Marvin Minsky or a Richard Feynman if you don’t ask them something that makes them think. So I would say most of my learning was from the people, not the papers. But I always do homework beforehand to see where the interesting questions are.”
— Danny Hillis

“Great teachers … see where you are and they stretch you to someplace you can get to.”
— Danny Hillis

“A lot of people’s use of computers is now, they kind of know the magic incantations that cause this library to do that, but they don’t really know all the things that are going on underneath that that make it work. And so it’s becoming more like nature. Nature, we used to kind of know, ‘Well, here’s the magic incantations we use for making beer. We don’t know really why this makes good beer, this makes bad beer, or this makes champagne, but we know when we do this, it does that,’ and that’s kind of becoming our relationship with computers. So I think that what’s happening … the distinction between the natural and the artificial is becoming entangled … it may just kind of go away because there almost is no pure nature and there almost is no pure technology that we fully understand.”
— Danny Hillis

“I have a granddaughter [who] can sit and talk to an electrician as if she knows what electricity is, just by using the right words and saying phrases that she’s heard before and so on. And she can kind of fake it pretty well, but she has no idea what she’s talking about. And that’s mostly where AI is right at this moment.”
— Danny Hillis

“It may be easier to actually make intelligence than to understand intelligence.”
— Danny Hillis

“I think humans, as we know them today, are kind of halfway between monkeys and what we’re going to become. … We’re in this transitional phase. We’ve still got a lot of monkey in us, and I’m really excited by that thing that we’re going to become.”
— Danny Hillis

“In general, I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.”
— Danny Hillis

“Much better to be a peasant today than to be a king a couple of centuries ago in terms of your health, food that you ate, how you spend your time … your comfort, everything.”
— Danny Hillis

“I don’t believe in cause and effect.”
— Danny Hillis

“An idea has a lot more sticking power than any physical thing you could build.”
— Danny Hillis

PEOPLE MENTIONEDStewart Brand Walt Disney Robin Williams Bran Ferren Marvin Minsky Jerome Wiesner Salvador Dalí Frank Wells Steve Jobs Andy Hertzfeld Marc Andreessen Seymour Cray Cormac McCarthy Aldous Huxley Richard P. Feynman Murray Gell-Mann John McCarthy Groucho Marx Seymour Papert David B. Agus John Doerr Al Gore Bill Berkman Cosimo de’ Medici Dr. William Hillis Mrs. Wilner Jeff Bezos Gian-Carlo Rota Nikola Tesla Thomas Edison Michael Faraday Humphry Davy Isaac Newton Barack Obama Brian Behlendorf Claude Shannon Bill Gates Bigfoot Indiana Jones Derek Sivers

The post Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI,” Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More (#782) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on December 12, 2024 06:41

December 5, 2024

David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Manger (#781)

Illustration via 99designs

David Whyte (davidwhyte.com) is the author of twelve books of poetry and five books of prose, including his latest, Consolations II, which further explores what David calls “the conversational nature of reality.”

David holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural-history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalayas. He is the recipient of two honorary degrees: from Neumann University in Pennsylvania and Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia.

David grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire and now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
He has also hosted a live online series, Three Sundays, every other month since 2020.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

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Want to hear another episode with a poet? Listen to my conversation with award-winning writer Mary Karr, in which we discuss curiosity and presence as a solution to fear, the role spirituality plays in maintaining her sobriety as a former atheist, coping with and expressing the aftermath of trauma, what she wished she’d known about therapy when she was younger, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with David Whyte:

Consolations II by David Whyte | Amazon Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte | Amazon Other Books by David Whyte | Amazon Three Sundays | David Whyte Zen Master Henry Shukman — 20 Minutes of Calm, Plus the Strange and Powerful World of Koans | The Tim Ferriss Show #560 Henry Shukman — Zen, Tools for Awakening, Ayahuasca vs. Meditation, Intro to Koans, and Using Wounds as the Doorway | The Tim Ferriss Show #531 Show Me the Ink: A Reflection on Zen’s Inka Shomei | James Ford Sanbo Kyodan | Wikipedia About the Wordsworth Trust | Wordsworth Grasmere Old Bookbinders | Crafty Belle Group TLS | Times Literary Supplement Waking Up with Sam Harris App Unordinary Santa Fe 2024 | David Whyte David Whyte: The Vulnerable Choice of Breaking Our Hearts Open | Point of Relation Podcast Trekking Annapurna: Everything You Need to Know | Much Better Adventures The Eight Buddhist Hells | Linfamy The Sound of Music | Prime Video All You Need to Know About Marsyangdi River | Nature Lovers Treks & Tours Coleridge’s Distinction between Primary Imagination, Secondary Imagination, and Fancy | Romantic Era David Whyte: Everything Is an Invitation | Sounds True On Horizons, Barriers, and Meditation | David Whyte Poet David Whyte’s Questions That Have No Right to Go Away | Oprah’s Lifeclass What Is Dharma Combat? | Jason Quinn Zen What Is a Zen Koan? History and Interpretation of Koans | Being Zen Meditation Training Program | The Way Ideas for Modern Living: Regret | The Guardian An Excerpt from “Time” by David Whyte | Instagram Email Newsletter by Tim Ferriss | 5-Bullet Friday Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte | The On Being Project Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake | Project Gutenberg Towards the Heart’s Frontier: An Interview with David Whyte | Napkin Poetry Review All the Beautiful Questions That David Whyte Asked Me | Life Curator About the Galápagos Islands | Galápagos Travel Center King Lear by William Shakespeare | Amazon Tan-y-Garth Bach (Cottage) | Geograph Britain and Ireland The Carneddau | An Illustrated Guide to Snowdonia National Park The William Blake Archive Seeing Angels | Seven Miles of Steel Thistles We Become the Places We Love, with David Whyte | Meditative Story Excerpt from Tan-y-Garth (Elegy for Michael) by David Whyte | Facebook What Is Iambic Pentameter? An Explanation & Examples | No Sweat Shakespeare The Ancient Greek Chorus in Historical Context | National Theatre Zen | David Whyte Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on the Courage and the Necessity of Crises | The Marginalian Timothy Ferriss | The DO Lectures How to Pronounce Llwybr Cyhoeddus | HowToPronounce.com The History of the Welsh Language | Visit Wales Vipassana Meditation Zazen: Just Sitting, Going Nowhere | Lion’s Roar The Blue Cliff Record | Amazon Poetry from the Gathering (Opening Night) — David Whyte | The On Being Project The Bell and the Blackbird by David Whyte | All Poetry The Hills of Tuscany | David Whyte Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Translated by Robert Bly) | AmazonSHOW NOTES[00:06:25] Connecting with Henry Shukman.[00:10:32] Low times in the High Himalayas and a yak manger awakening.[00:15:17] The place from where David writes good poetry.[00:17:22] Invitational speech.[00:21:55] Catching up with the curve of one’s transformation.[00:27:58] A revolutionary moment reflecting on parameters and regret.[00:37:41] “Everything Is Waiting for You.”[00:40:54] The secret code to life and the agreed insanity of so-called adults.[00:46:47] Being found by the world in greater and greater ways.[00:48:52] Asking beautiful questions.[00:58:13] “Tan-y-Garth.”[01:02:09] Memorizing poetry.[01:08:28] “Zen.”[01:22:55] Courage.[01:24:15] How living in a trailer on the side of a Welsh mountain helped David develop as a writer.[01:31:14] Irish koans, French doors, and Tibetan bells.[01:38:30] Poetry as consolation.[01:42:03] The best place to hold a poem.[01:43:07] “Time.”[02:00:01] Writing and reading good poetry.[02:04:52] Parting thoughts.MORE DAVID WHYTE QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Poetry is not some abstracted art. It’s how human beings speak when they’re trying to create language against which there are no defenses. This has to be heard and it has to be heard in the spirit in which it is being conveyed, and the language has to be invitational to that particular person.”
— David Whyte

“Poetry is the secret code to staying alive, to staying present, to staying visionary.”
— David Whyte

“All of us spend so much time trying to find a path where we won’t have our heart broken. And really, the only way you can find a path where your heart won’t break is by not caring.”
— David Whyte

“You are really only courageous about what you’re heartfelt about.”
— David Whyte

“Time is not slipping through our fingers. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time.”
— David Whyte

“Every conversation, as its foundation, has an invitation in it. When the invitation stops, the conversation really stops.”
— David Whyte

“Poetry’s been such a good friend to me. I’ve gone through seven years of grieving in seven months because poetry has allowed me to take each step along the way, in such a powerful, invitational way.”
— David Whyte

“The beautiful thing about a horizon is that it’s got something over it, that’s the definition, and that what’s over it is the unknown that’s inviting you. “
— David Whyte

“Sometimes your life breaks down and you hit present reality with such velocity that you break apart on impact. And this is a time honored way of transformation, but it’s very hard on us to go through it that way. There’s another way of doing it, which is to stay up with the edge of your own seasonal maturation, and that occurs below this invisible line inside you.”
— David Whyte

PEOPLE MENTIONEDHenry Shukman Ryoun Yamada Roshi William Wordsworth Sam Harris Marco Polo Samuel Taylor Coleridge John Keats Buddha Oscar Wilde Walter de La Mare Ted Hughes Thom Gunn William Blake William Shakespeare Antonio Machado Rainer Maria Rilke William Butler Yeats Seamus Heaney David Attenborough Humphrey Bogart Mary Oliver Hafez Robert Bly Emily Dickinson

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Published on December 05, 2024 06:54

November 28, 2024

Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) (#780)

Cyan Banister (@cyantist) is a general partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on early and new investments. Cyan was an early investor in Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Flexport, and Affirm and has invested in more than 100 companies. Prior to that, she was at Founders Fund, a top-tier fund in San Francisco. Subscribe to Cyan’s Substack at uglyduckling.substack.com.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating; Wealthfront high-yield cash account; and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

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This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is a financial services platform that offers services to help you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.25% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account through its network of partner banks. That’s nearly nine times more interest than a savings account at a bank, according to FDIC.gov as of Septebmer 27, 2024. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.25% APY interest on your short-term cash until you’re ready to invest. And when new clients open an account today, they can get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

Tim Ferriss receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage, LLC for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of Wealthfront Brokerage. See full disclosures here.

Want to hear another podcast episode with a world-class investor? Have a listen to my most recent conversation with Oaktree Capital Management’s co-founder Howard Marks, in which we discussed navigating unprecedented uncertainties, crowded versus uncrowded opportunities, the state of the American economy, finding higher-signal sources of information, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Cyan Banister:

Twitter

The Ugly Duckling by Cyan Banister | Substack Early Stage Investing for the Long-Term | Long Journey Ventures What Happened to the Future? | Founders Fund Cyan: The Enlightenment of an Iconoclast | Cloud Valley Navajo Nation | Visit Arizona Flagstaff | Visit Arizona Science and Technology on a Mission | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory I Swear to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. So Help Me God. | The Ugly Duckling Happy Tastes Good | Dairy Queen What is a Ward of the State in Arizona? | JacksonWhite Law Joyriding with the Gutter Punks | The Ugly Duckling Best Food for When You’re Homeless and Can’t Cook? | r/Mealprep Searching for Family and Home with Cuddles | The Ugly Duckling Commune Life | The Ugly Duckling Hitchhiking with Jesus | The Ugly Duckling The War of Intentions and Beliefs | Spencer Chang Cash for Fashion | Buffalo Exchange The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac | Amazon Crass | Rough Trade Publishing Eastside Records: An Oral History of Tempe’s Legendary Record Store | Phoenix New Times Internet Relay Chat (IRC) | Wikipedia The UNIX System | UNIX.org Cases | Harvard Business Publishing Education The Story of Uber | Investopedia Take a Look at Uber’s First Pitch Deck from 2008 | Vox New York’s Yellow Taxi Medallion Crisis, Explained | Documented The Career of Uber’s First Employee and CEO Was Launched by One Tweet | Business Insider About | The Lobby Conference Red Swoosh | Wikipedia Open Angel Forum | Wikipedia A Short History of Napster | Lifewire Behind the 12-Year-Old Wii Sports Hoax That Briefly Fooled the Internet | Ars Technica Pokémon GO | Niantic, Inc.A Worldwide Territory Control AR Game | Ingress PokéStop | Pokémon GO Wiki Build, Lead, Invest | AngelList Water with True Fruit Flavor | Hint Water Ai-First Service. Catered To Humans. | Zendesk Safety for Every Situation | Flock Safety GameCrush | Wikipedia Interactive Livestreaming | Twitch MySpace — What Went Wrong: ‘The Site Was a Massive Spaghetti-Ball Mess’ | The Guardian Activist Investor: Definition, Role, Biggest Players | Investopedia Icahn: The Restless Billionaire | Prime Video This Game Show App Was an Overnight Sensation, and Crashed Just as Fast | CNN Business Game of Thrones | HBO Game of Thrones: Do Lannisters Always Pay Their Debts? | Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange Promoting Solutions for Future Generations | Greenpeace International Be Not Afraid | Hereticon Transforming Defense Capabilities with Advanced Technology | Anduril “Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic.” | CCCB LAB Chatham House Rule | Chatham House International Affairs Think Tank Why Did OnlyFans Work When Zivity Did Not? A Thread. | Cyan Banister, Twitter General Magic | Wikipedia General Magic (Documentary) | Prime Video Tony Fadell — On Building the iPod, iPhone, Nest, and a Life of Curiosity | The Tim Ferriss Show #403 Collectable Vintage Playboys | Elizabeth’s Bookshop SuicideGirls | Wikipedia Cyan Banister: Adults Only Startups Deserve Respect Too | Forbes I Did It, with a Boy. | The Ugly Duckling The Taj Mahal Story | Taj Mahal The Magic Glasses by Frank Harris | Amazon My Life & Loves by Frank Harris | Amazon Different Types of Plaid: A Guide to Plaid Pattern Names | Hello Sewing When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet | The New York Times A Dice Experiment | Cyan Banister, Twitter Decision Fatigue | The Decision Lab Open to the Public 365 Days a Year! | Pioneertown The World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game | Dungeons & Dragons Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness | The Tim Ferriss Show #405 Random by Penn Jillette | Amazon The Illusion of Free Will | Sam Harris 7-in-1 Spinner DND Dice Set | Amazon The Cult of Crowley | Tidal Magazine What is Magic? Aleister Crowley Explains | Faena Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley | Amazon Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman | Amazon Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky | Amazon Groundhog Day | Prime Video Caddyshack | Prime Video What About Bob? | Prime Video The Man Who Knew Too Little | Prime Video Broken Flowers | Prime Video The Razor’s Edge | Prime Video The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham | Amazon Ghostbusters II | Prime Video The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man | Prime Video The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man | Gravitas Ventures It Just Doesn’t Matter (Clip) | The Bill Murray Stories What Exactly Is a Kundalini Awakening? | Yoga Journal American Beauty | Prime Video What Is Dural Venous Sinus Thrombosis (DVST)? | Healthline Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts | The Tim Ferriss Show #492 Tibetan Monks Throat-Singing | Wilderness Films India Telluride Bluegrass Festival | Planet Bluegrass Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery | The Tim Ferriss Show #201 Parable of the Horse, Carriage, and Driver | The Church of Conscious Harmony Eternal Recurrence: What Did Nietzsche Really Mean? | Philosophy Break The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera | Amazon Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson by G.I. Gurdjieff | Amazon Frosted Toasted Oat Cereal & Marshmallows | Lucky Charms Boston Celtics | NBA Golden State Warriors | NBA In The Air Tonight (Official Music Video) | Phil Collins Boston’s Best Sightseeing Tour | Boston Duck Tours The Most Ribbetting Architecture in Boston | Universal HubSHOW NOTES[00:06:16] Early life and education as a white minority on a Navajo reservation.[00:11:18] Strained family dynamics and a cycle of neglect.[00:18:20] The intervention of Officer Pratt and becoming a ward of the state at 15.[00:22:46] Crusty punk survival strategies and life on the streets.[00:32:02] The positive influence of Cyan’s “second” mother.[00:34:17] Crass, Chris Collins, and computers.[00:38:03] An unorthodox path to angel investment beginning with Uber.[00:48:13] Niantic/Pokemon GO.[00:56:27] How stalking Garrett Langley led to a Flock Security investment.[01:00:07] GameCrush, activist investors, and lessons learned.[01:07:00] Sales lessons from the street.[01:10:08] A mindful approach to questioning narratives.[01:15:35] The pre-OnlyFans story of Zivity.[01:24:44] Views on sex and relationships.[01:28:47] Magic glasses, esoteric rabbit holes, and rolling the dice.[01:44:02] How Aleister Crowley and Bill Murray paved a path to ex-atheism.[02:02:21] Cyan’s billboard.[02:04:41] Enduring a stroke and its aftermath.[02:08:31] Meditation, throat-singing, and philosophy.[02:17:50] The Boston spiritual experience and duck boat baptism.[02:40:53] A book in the works, the Ugly Duckling Substack, and parting thoughts.MORE CYAN BANISTER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I’ve always felt like an outsider no matter where I am, and I think that’s been wonderful and incredible for my career. You can certainly look at that and have kind of a victim mindset about it, but I took the opposite path, which was, this is what makes me special, is that I don’t fit in wherever I am.”

— Cyan Banister

“Once you’re homeless, you can never be un-homeless. It’s really strange. Every time I walk around at a conference or anything, I see all the waste. I see, if I were a homeless person, I could come and I could have this, no matter where I’m at.”

— Cyan Banister

“You have to face something very ugly, which is yourself. You have to look inside and see who and what you really are, and then you have to love yourself even when you don’t like what you see.”

— Cyan Banister

“When people used to say practice self-love, I thought it meant go eat bonbons and go see a good movie and smoke a joint. That was self-love. But it wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I was like, ‘This whole self-love thing is jive. It’s just not working out.’ But I didn’t realize that self-love is learning how to give yourself unconditional love. And the best way I’ve learned how to give yourself unconditional love is imagine yourself as a ball of light, and then take that ball of light and visualize it outside of your body and cradle it like it’s a baby. Now, when you look at that baby, would you hurt that baby?”

— Cyan Banister

“My purpose is very simple, which is to spread joy, to lift other people up around me, and to do my best in my own way to end poverty. Now, I’m not responsible for ending poverty. I think we’re all responsible.”

— Cyan Banister

“When you start realizing, ‘Oh, I’m in a school, and all of these hard knocks in life are just lessons,’ you think about them very differently.”

— Cyan Banister

“We’re just a hair away from being crazy, every one of us.”

— Cyan Banister

“We apply a lot of our own perception to everything that everyone says around us. We make up stories that are fiction, and a lot of what people suffer with today are these stories, these narratives that we tell ourselves and one another, and I’ve just always felt like that something that someone said right now, it’s not a hard no. You know when you hear a hard no. I know the difference between an objection and I just have a rebuttal for it versus a hard no, and until it’s a hard no, there’s wiggle room to get something done. And so I’ve just always felt this, and it’s interesting that you ho[m]ed in on it, but it’s definitely been a guiding principle in my life, which is don’t give up. Just try different approaches. Maybe you didn’t ask the right way, or maybe you didn’t give the right incentives, or maybe it was Monday and they’re in a bad mood.”

— Cyan Banister

“My life has only been improved by taking myself out of the decision making process, because I am the hindrance.”

— Cyan Banister

“We’re all in Earth school, and we inhabit human bodies, but we’re nothing but an energy force inside of them. And that life force does not dissipate, and it doesn’t go nowhere. It goes somewhere.”

— Cyan Banister

“You’re just sleepwalking through life. And the moment you take the reins and you become the narrator of your own story, and sometimes the captain, then that’s when it’s a transformational change.”

— Cyan Banister

PEOPLE MENTIONEDTim Draper Mike Pratt Jack Kerouac Chris Collins Ryan Graves Travis Kalanick Jason Calacanis Scott Banister John Hanke Lucas Nealan Keith Rabois Garrett Langley John Luttig Carl Icahn Brian Singerman Palmer Luckey Mike Solana Tony Fadell Hugh Hefner Aleister Crowley Frank Harris Steve Jobs Mark Zuckerberg George Gurdjieff Penn Jillette Richard M. Nixon Timothy Leary Sam Harris Jesus Walt Whitman Harry Potter P.D. Ouspensky Bill Murray W. Somerset Maugham SpongeBob SquarePants Kevin Spacey Friedrich Nietzsche Milan Kundera Beelzebub Phil Collins Gabby Giffords Linus Torvalds Albert Einstein

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Published on November 28, 2024 11:40

November 22, 2024

My 2024 Holiday Gift Guide!

This blog post is a very special holiday edition of 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter!

This edition highlights 12 things I love, all of which make great holiday gifts.

I dislike shopping, but I do love finding the perfect gift. Finding that gift, though, gets harder with time. Those damn adults seem to have everything. So… If you’re having trouble thinking up great options, here are some goodies that deliver.

I also reached out to some of my favorite companies to get special deals for subscribers. I use all of these products on a daily or weekly basis, depending on the season and activity. Literally everything I mention lives in my home. Each sponsored bullet is indicated with a star at the end of it, just like this sentence.*

Stay warm and enjoy!

Comfy slip-ons I wear all winter long
Glerups. In the colder months, I wear Glerups indoors practically 100% of the time. I love them. You can see me sporting them in this photo.

Electric kettle I’m using for tea, coffee, and all good, warm things
Corvo EKG Electric Kettle from Fellow. I’ve tried a lot of electric kettles for tea and coffee over the decades, and this is my favorite. From the description: “The electric kettle that does it all, precision engineered to meet all your hot water needs. Exact temperature control, 1200 watts for a quick heat time, and a world of features for ultimate control.”

One pan I use for nearly everything
Titanium Always Pan Pro. Many nonstick pans can release harmful “forever chemicals”—PFAS—into your food, your home, and, ultimately, your body. Teflon is a prime example; it is the forever chemical that most companies are still using. Exposure to PFAS has been linked to major health issues like gut microbiome disruption, testosterone dysregulation, and more, which have been correlated to chronic disease in the long term. This is why I use the Titanium Always Pan Pro from Our Place. It’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating. This means zero “forever chemicals” and durability that will last a lifetime. There is no degradation over time like traditional nonstick pans. Now through December 3rd, Our Place is having their biggest sale of the year, with up to 40% off sitewide. Plus, they are offering 5-Bullet Friday subscribers an additional 10% off their Titanium Always Pan Pro. Go to FromOurPlace.com/Tim and use code SAVE10TIM to claim this special offer.*

Headlamp for dark winter hikes
PEAX Backcountry Duo. Weighing in at just 4.8 ounces with battery and described by one customer as “hands down the best on the market,” PEAX touts this as “the brightest, most durable … headlamp ever designed.” Breakthrough lumen output, armored in a machined aluminum housing; 3600 mAh rechargeable battery with run times up to 69 hours; and 180-degree adjustability so you never have to worry about putting your headlamp on upside down. It also comes with a red-light mode. If it’s sold out, you can get notified when it’s back in stock here.

Supplement bundle I co-created for mind and body
Momentous Performance Stack. During the holiday season, I’m prone to colds, and I also exercise a lot to keep the gray-day sadness away. For these reasons and more, I’m doubling down on the essentials that support my mental and physical fitness: whey protein isolate, creatine, and magnesium threonate. I take all three daily, and sourcing matters. Momentous sources only top-quality ingredients, like Creapure®, and every product is NSF and Informed Sport Certified, meeting the highest standard in third-party-tested supplements. I teamed up with Momentous to conveniently bundle my three essentials into what I call my performance stack. Each product was specifically chosen to support mental performance, physical performance, and quality sleep. For a limited time, subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday get early access to their Black Friday sale, including 25% off sitewide, plus a free gift of 5 nights of their best-selling Sleep packs with orders of $75+. Click here through November 24th to take advantage of this exclusive holiday offer, or simply use code TIM at checkout.*

Tool that is still saving my lower back
PSO-RITE. If you have low-back pain, there’s a good chance your psoas muscle is involved. This was recommended by multiple people in this Twitter thread on self-release, and I use it right before bed. If the mid-back is your issue, try out the Nayoya acupressure mat or, if not in stock, one of its imitators. The Nayoya mat was introduced to me by Cirque du Soleil phenom Andrii Bondarenko. For a bonus tool, consider the Body Back Buddy, which I always have in my suitcase.

What I’ll be doing with family this holiday season
Wentworth Puzzles. Here is what Hugh Jackman said in our conversation on the podcast (and my team has been raving about the quality of their puzzles ever since): “I love the company Wentworth. There are a few other puzzle companies, but Wentworth—there’s some technology—when you put the piece in, it’s like squeezing a pimple. It’s the best.”

Sleep technology I’m using
Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra. Several years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 4 Ultra. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech, and sleep at your perfect temperature. The Pod 4 Ultra also automatically tracks your sleep time, sleep stages, HRV, and heart rate. And with the all-new adjustable base that fits between your mattress and frame, you can adjust your mattress for the ultimate sleeping position. If it detects snoring, it will automatically elevate your head to a better position. Many of my listeners in colder climates enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save between $400 and $600 on the Pod 4 Ultra by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. This special offer is valid until December 14th.*

Fiction book that’s perfect for the holidays
The Bear by Andrew Krivak. Thank you to CK and TS for recommending this parable. I ended up devouring it over 3–4 evenings. The prose is gorgeous—the author has been a National Book Award in Fiction finalist—and it’ll take around 20 pages for your brain to get accustomed to its unusual weaving. I’ve pared down the description on purpose, but here’s a taste: “In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. … The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape…” The less you know about the book in advance, the better the reading experience. Go in as blind as possible, and you’ll likely finish this book in less than a week.

What I’m using when hiking with Molly
Springer Dog Water Bottle. On hikes, my dear Molly pup gets parched. I bring water on hikes, but it’s always been at least 50% for naught. I pour it in my cupped hands and lose nearly all of it. Or if I use a collapsible bowl, she’ll drink a few sips and waste the rest. The Springer travel water bottle solves all of these problems. There are many other companies that make similar products, and I’m sure some are great, but this model was gifted to me and delivers. I have the Growler (44 oz) in Sky Blue.

Tea I’m enjoying daily
Pique. Pique’s fermented pu’er teas have become an essential part of my morning routine. You know how matcha is the entire ground-up leaf? They do the same with other varieties of tea and focus on purity and ease-of-use. I drink both their black and green pu’er almost every morning, and I take packets with me when I travel. Their extraction technology maximally preserves antioxidants, so you reap the health benefits with zero prep, brewing, or waiting required. Pique’s teas are highly concentrated in polyphenol antioxidants compared to most teas, and their products are triple toxin screened and sourced from some of the world’s most biodiverse areas. Pique is offering their biggest deal ever—a 20% off sitewide discount on my favorite subscriptions (which saves you more per serving) with code TIM20—only available until November 29th, 11:59 p.m. PST.*

New microphones I am testing for in-person recordings
RØDE’s Wireless GO II. It’s not a proper holiday gift guide without some gadgetry. “The Wireless GO II is an ultra-compact and extremely versatile dual channel wireless microphone system ideal for filmmaking, interviewing, reporting, and social content creation.” This is a new test for avoiding the cabling and hassle of normal lavalier mics.

And there you go! 12 of my favorite things that make great holiday gifts. I love them all and hope you do too.

Have a wonderful weekend and wonderful holiday season, everyone!

Much love to you and yours,

Tim

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Published on November 22, 2024 13:31